Sin

My mother, born in 1892, was one of eleven children (five boys and six girls). Four of the sisters never married, in some cases having lost their fiances in the Great War. They were Isabel, Lucy, Mary and Maggie, and they all lived together higgledypiggledy behind, above and around the dairy which two of the brothers, William and Bartle, had founded in New Brighton. Also living with my four maiden aunts was William's relict, Mary, known as "Little Mary" to distinguish her from "Sister Mary".
I first met them in Summer 1945, when I went with my morher and father to spend two weeks' holiday with them. We couldn't have gone earlier because of the war. I was fascinated by the bomb damage and the sea defences and the other traces of the conflict, and really took very little notice of my four maiden aunts. In successive summer visits, I became much more aware of them, and of the fact that they lived in what we later learned to call a "time warp". For them, life had stopped in 1919: it marked for them the end of hopes of marriage and the death of their youngest sibling, John, from the flu epidemic.
They had a wireless set on a table under the window in the living room, but it was covered with a cloth. The cloth was removed and the wireless switched on once a week, at seven in the evening every Sunday so that they could listen to the religious service on the Home Service. Then, at seven thirty, the wireless was switched off and covered up for another seven days. To listen to it at other times would have been sinful, Sister Mary explained to me.
When I say that she explained to "me", I should perhaps say that she explained to "him". The whole family came from a village on the moors north of Lancaster, where Grandfather France ran the Temperance Hotel, and my mother, Mabel, played the harmonium for him in the Methodist Chapel, on Sundays and high days. They all spoke a version of English that was as far removed from the milltown Lancastrian of Gracie Fields as the Dr Finlay burr of the Highlands is removed from Glaswegian. One manifestation of this purring language was that I was always addressed in the third person "Would he like another glass of milk?" "Has he finished his tea yet?" and so on. When I went to Liverpool U to do a postgraduate course, I visited them after an absence of maybe six years. This time I was regarded as grown up, because I was for the first time addressed as "you": "You look well, Jack" , "Would you like a cup of tea?". It was a curious reversal of the Spanish and Italian custom where the third person (Usted, Lei) is the polite form, whereas the direct second person (tu) is used with children.
Dressed in the style of the twenties, speaking their soft Quernmore dialect and observing a myriad rituals, they were for me something lovable, special, angelic almost. It was only later when I visited them as an adult that I became aware of the undercurrents. The eldest, Isabel, the matriarch of the clan, was implacable in castigating sin. She was particularly sharp with the youngest, Maggie, who was always obliged to sit at a side table, never permitted to eat with the others. What Maggie's sin had been I have no idea, but this was her penance. And it turned out that "Little Mary" was a fierce fundamentalist, going off every Sunday in her black widow's weeds, black bible in her black-gloved hand, to harangue sinners and threaten them with a fire-and-brimstone eternity for their wickedness. She it was who insisted that the wireless should be covered and silent for all but thirty minutes in every week. Even Isabel, the matriarch, deferred to Little Mary, it seemed, at least in theological matters.
I was fortunate, in that they all seemed to like me and believe me incapable of anything more sinful than childish misdemeanours such as taking a biscuit without asking first. I can remember, though, when I said I wanted to go on my own to ride the ferry from New Brighton to Liverpool, being warned to keep away from Liverpool girls because they were "dirty". At fourteen, I was fascinated by the idea, and couldn't wait to find myself a dirty Liverpool girl. As sin goes, that would have beaten the forbidden pleasure of a clandestine tune-in to the wireless on a weekday.

They are long gone now. I hope they are in Heaven, because if my lovely maiden aunts don't qualify, then there's no hope for old scrotes like me.