Aunt Frances was six feet two inches tall. She was big boned and of spare build. She wore thick hand-knitted woollen jumpers, corduroy trousers and men’s size ten shoes. She had a long narrow face, kept her hair cropped short and rode a motorbike at a time when few women got further forward than the pillion.
She was my father’s older sister and lived by herself in the family home at the other side of town. Our parents went there only when absolutely necessary, and if we children were sent to her on a message we hoped that she wouldn’t be in, and if she were we always had an excuse ready as to why we could not stay. She never held a conversation with us. She wasn’t interested in our world and what we were doing. She would simply declaim to us:
‘Mon cher...’ followed by, what for we children was an endless and barely comprehensible spiel lauding France and all things French. Her monologues on the subject bored us so much that when I came to learn French language in school I had a serious psychological block.
Aunt Frances was two years older than my father and she was his only sibling. As he grew up she always wanted to join in his games with his friends. When she was in her early teens she announced one day to her parents that she held them entirely responsible for the fact that she was not a boy. They had no idea how to respond and didn’t. They saw it as just another of Frances’ little eccentricities and believed she would grow out of it. In her early adulthood she converted to Catholicism and must have been the most faithful and loyal Catholic in Ireland that never went to Mass.
From time to time Aunt Frances would explode into our house unannounced, and talk incessantly from the moment she entered until the moment she left, barely taking time to draw breath. That nobody was interested in what she said did not deter her as she talked on and on about Joan of Arc, whom we as children had never heard of. Somehow we knew instinctively that this Joan was not somebody who lived locally. Later my mother explained that she was not just talking about Joan of Arc, she was Joan of Arc. Aunt Frances was not only a Francophile. She was a fantasist.
Like most children, our parents often embarrassed us in front of our friends. These occasions of embarrassment were nothing compared with how Aunt Frances caused us to shrivel if friends were with us when she called. If we saw her coming we scattered. If she arrived suddenly and we were trapped, she would question us on our knowledge of France, and then proceed to lecture us on some topic; anything from the Revolution to French cooking.
Aunt Frances was highly intelligent, educated and well travelled. She had a degree in History and according to my mother spoke fluent French. She was a woman, who, if she had lived in the real world, would have been formidable.
When I was fourteen, to the relief of everybody in the family, long threatening came at last. Aunt Frances, after many false starts, finally moved to France. It was not by chance that she moved to the outskirts of Orleans where Joan of Arc had led the French to a notable victory.
Three or four times a year my father received a long epistle from her. These letters were a mixture of fantasy and reality, but all paid testimony to her contentment and her determination never to return to Ireland.
As the years passed her epistles contained less reference to Joan of Arc and more and more to Catherine de Medici. It was a slow transition but her fantasy finally underwent a complete metamorphosis. From her letters we gleaned that the attraction of Catherine was that she had been Queen of France, and the mother of three Kings of France and patron and protagonist of French cuisine. Furthermore she had been a significant influence in promoting the St. Bartholomew’s Eve massacre of the Huguenots. Though not herself an aggressive or violent person, Aunt Frances would have approved of this atrocity in the interest of upholding the One True Faith, to which, in theory, she subscribed. My father refrained from reminding her that Catherine was in fact Italian, but in the circumstances this may have conveniently allowed for her to accept her own foreign origin. He felt a duty to keep in touch with Aunt Frances, but he was careful to keep his letters to her as anodyne and uncontroversial as possible.
The whole family felt a certain relief that our fantasist aunt was determined never to return to live in Ireland. A few letters a year was a small price to pay for the peace of mind to know that she would not arrive unannounced and demand attention for the duration of an extended visit.
My father often left her epistles unopened for days until he had time to read them. One morning a letter arrived with a French postmark written in a strange hand. My father opened it immediately; it was from a neighbour of Aunt Frances to say that she had had a heart attack and was in hospital seriously ill. My father felt a family duty to go to see her. He made arrangements and left the following morning. By the time he arrived at the hospital his sister was dead. He made arrangements for her body to be returned to Ireland for burial.
When the coffin arrived he went down to the local undertaker to collect the papers that came with it. He thought he would have a last look at his sad fantasist sister. When the lid was removed there was the body of a man, in the full dress uniform of a French General, complete with medal ribbons and emblems of decorations. The French undertaker had somehow sent the wrong coffin. My father replaced the lid and decided on the instant not to breathe a word to anybody.
In the presence of her brother and his family and a few friends who had remembered Aunt Frances from earlier years, we buried the General with my grandparents in the family grave in the town’s public cemetery.
Aunt Frances in death could be said to have achieved her ultimate fantasy. To be buried in a French military cemetery with full military honours, a war hero of France.