My Aunt Alice


In the furthest end of my grandmother's house stood a cupboard filled until the contents teetered with the past lives of my mum and my Aunt Alice. For many hours I would gaze at the carefully kept treasures, fiddling hardly at all. When I did touch with nimble small fingers, I was always careful to not disturb or break. Stored there by my grandmother, who we called Nain, these were exotic beyond measure for me.

Nain's old house, nestled at foot of the Vumba mountains, was a place of concrete floors, spiders and ubiquitous snakes. A place where my mother and her sister had grown up, played, cried and loved. We are a family of story tellers and I knew early on about the strange and interesting women who had come before me. Tales of fairies, earthquakes, illness, the death of a much-loved brother and grand adventures in a family bus called Emily.

The depths of the cupboard told the tale in a tangible way, its darkest corners holding secrets and glimpses of personalities that I longed to be close to. Hats, card games, mechano, photographs and clothes ' all ordinary enough. Yet in that cupboard were some of the most astonishing small objects I have ever come across. The strange things belonged to my Aunt Alice.

A miniature bottle of Brut aftershave captured my attention for weeks. I carried the green glass everywhere with me and took surreptitious sniffs. I sat in the frog-infested bathroom putting miniscule drops in the tub, not realizing that the scent would, forever more, create an immediate weakness in the knees for any man wearing it.

Then there were the small vials of chicken blood. Dried out, mostly, but chicken blood nonetheless. Mildly frightening but extremely exciting. What did she do with it? Why did she want it? How did she get it? My gorgeous aunt with long flowing hair, gentle but firm voice and the most marvelous hips God ever gave a woman, was a secret witch. Or perhaps it was a way of preserving the lifeblood of an animal. I never asked. It seemed too dark a secret to ever broach verbally.

Most marvelous of all, a testament of true love and childhood shamanism, was her collection in an old Lion matchbox of her father's toenail clippings. A surprising find and one that told a story of adoration. Over the years of my life I have done the same thing ' teeth from loved ones, hair, items of clothing. Somehow by keeping these things safe and treasured, it keeps the one I love closer to me. To touch my child's first milk tooth fills me with such love, brings me so much closer to the person and let's me feel like by treasuring the things that have been a part of them I can keep them safe.

My Aunt Alice has raffia sandals. I don't think she wears them anymore. She has two grown up sons and lives in a house in the English countryside, very far from the wild Africa the family grew up in. I bet money that somewhere in that house are secrets, special things, stored away. The mind that would delight in collecting toenails, chicken blood and men's cologne is a thread in the fabric of the universe and that gives me great comfort.

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