Aunty Heath

I don’t have a photo of Aunty heath, in fact I can barely remember her properly. She was a friend of the lady who owned our flat, and she was only ever called Aunty Heath – although I guess she actually was Mrs Heath. She was very small, and very round, and very smiley. She always wore a brown velvet dress which came to the ground – whether it was because she had become smaller in old age or whether it had always been that long I don’t know,, and as a child I didn’t even think about it; the long velvet dress was what she wore.

There is no way I can ever find out who she was; I think she must have died because she stopped visiting and I have looked at some records of deaths and found three elderly ladies  who died around that time with the surname Heath, Emily, Bertha and Mary. There were others who died a little outside what I consider a possible time frame, Christabel, Eleanora, and Minnie.

I hadn’t thought about Aunty Heath for a very long time, but as I was writing my new novel, provisionally called ‘The Lost House’, I had an old lady who needed a name, and suddenly Aunty Heath popped into my head. I don’t think I have ever used the name of a person I actually know in a story before – I’ve had characters with the first name of people I know, because like most of us, I’ve known a lot of people in my life. However, the Aunty Heath in my story doesn’t look like the dear old lady I knew; Aunty Heath in my story is a lively old soul, mentally active despite her nine decades, and she has a mystery for my character Thomas to solve; who leaves white lilies on the grave of her long-lost love who died in the second world war.

I daresay I shall find out much more about my imaginary Aunty Heath, even though the dear old original will remain a mystery!