Snapshot: Aunt Gloria, from Suez to Centre Court

I wish I could remember what had made us smile. This photograph, which sums up my relationship with my aunt Gloria, is a window on to family Christmases past – to which she always brought generosity and energy, and a festive jumper.

I do know that it was taken more than a quarter of a century ago, on Christmas Day 1990. My shirt gives it away: silk, designer, my pride and joy, snapped up in Bloomingdale’s when I was breathless with excitement on my first visit to New York earlier in the year.

Gloria loved to travel and always encouraged me, my brother and sister to ask questions, explore new places and seize the chance of different experiences. With her, we went camping in France and the Scottish Highlands, sought out castles, windmills and stately homes, and trekked to the sights of London. It was Gloria who took me to my first Wimbledon, in 1975, where we cheered Virginia Wade into the quarter-finals from standing room on Centre Court, having risen in the small hours to queue.

When we were children, she drove us into the West End to see the Christmas lights on Regent Street – a moment of heart-stopping excitement. I doubt even the congestion charge would have deterred her.

As a young teacher, for a while she lived a charmed life in Egypt, full of sightseeing and dancing (including one memorable evening with President Tito of Yugoslavia, in town with his entourage). The joy of that time, which came to an abrupt end – via an alarming period of house arrest – with the Suez crisis, never left her. Three subsequent decades in the rough and tumble of education in the London borough of Hackney failed to drum it out of her.

When she died in 2008, we discovered a decade of letters between her and my mother, Laura, contrasting her adventures abroad with the concerns of 1950s domestic life back home: a suitcase of social history, which we later turned into a book. The aunt-shaped gap she left in all our Christmases and family events seems to grow, rather than diminish, with the years. As the photograph suggests, Gloria’s glass was always half full – and that, at least, I can remember.
Piers Ford

Playlist: A satirical festive earworm from the 60s

Merry Christmas You Suckers by Paddy Roberts

“Merry Christmas you suckers / You miserable men / That old festive season is with you again / You’ll be spending your money on cartloads of junk / And from here to New Year you’ll be drunk as a skunk”

When we were growing up, we (me and my three older sisters) were spoilt each Christmas. My mum and dad’s parents were both alive so, on Christmas Day we had dinner with my mum’s parents and that was followed by Christmas tea with our other granny and grandad.

This meant that, as is the tradition in Germany, we had our own Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. This included putting up and decorating the tree (no long lead-in for us) adorned with lighted candles clipped to the branches. It was a real tree, so the fire hazard was equally real but, hey, it was the early 60s and a Christmas tradition.

Another Christmas tradition was playing a 45rpm vinyl record while we decorated the tree. Playing it once was never enough. Merry Christmas, You Suckers by Paddy Roberts was released in 1962 but much of the content (apart from the reference to waiting for the nuclear blast, perhaps) is as relevant today as it was more than five decades ago. It summed up our family attitude to Christmas (or did the record come first?) but, above all, I have fond memories of my dad laughing heartily each time he heard it (then whistling the tune until Boxing Day). I think this is the reason I liked it so much.
Chris Lee

We love to eat: Hilda’s Christmas pudding

Ingredients

85g (3oz) cooking fat
3 tbsp self-raising flour
1.5 cups breadcrumbs
85g (3oz) sugar
225g (8oz) mixed fruit
1 tsp mixed spice
½ tsp ground nutmeg
1 apple (finely grated)
1 carrot (finely grated)
1 potato (finely grated)
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
3 tbsp warmed milk

Rub the cooking fat into the flour until it is like breadcrumbs. Mix in the breadcrumbs, sugar, mixed fruit, mixed spice, ground nutmeg, apple, carrot and potato. Stir in the lemon juice. Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda into the warmed milk and stir this into the main mixture. Stir well and put in a basin, cover with greaseproof paper and steam for two and a half hours.

“This is a wartime recipe, but one my family prefers to the rich traditional kind,” stated my mother, Hilda Gladstone, in her contribution to the Cumbria-Westmorland WI cookbook published in 1978.

My sisters, cousins and nieces make this recipe every Christmas to keep the family tradition alive.

Sadly, Hilda died in her 80th year in 1996. However, many of her descendants, family and friends gathered in Cumbria in September 2016 for a weekend to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday. In pride of place on the first evening was a Christmas pudding that I made to Hilda’s recipe, accompanied by lashings of Cumberland rum butter (in a Gladstone pottery sugar bowl, of course), cream and custard.

For the Cumberland rum butter, melt 225g (8oz) butter with 340g (12oz) soft brown sugar and add a teaspoon of ground nutmeg. Pour in half a wine glass of rum and mix well until it starts to thicken. Pour into an attractive old china bowl.

On the Sunday afternoon, a garden party saw 45 people tucking into my elder sister’s scones with homemade raspberry and blackcurrant jams, my younger sister’s thumb-hole tarts and Hilda’s “chocolate stuff” (tiffin), my Bakewell tarts and Victoria sponges, my cousin’s “nutty slack” (origin unsure, but contains cornflakes and nuts!) and other such specialities from Hilda’s farm table, WI cookbooks and the Be-Ro home-baking book.

Also on show during the weekend were many of Hilda’s exquisite examples of canvas work and rugs (all her own designs) plus string (baler twine) mats and craftwork. Each of these had been given as heirlooms, but only after they had been exhibited in WI competitions at various local shows.
Joy Gladstone

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