My Aunt Lynda moved to Australia in January, 1974. She corresponded with my mother - her older sister - for a little while, but silence eventually fell. I would have been eight-years old when she moved, and although I remember Lynda, it was a long time ago and the details are a bit sketchy. I remember Eddie, her husband, whose name turned out to have been extrapolated from Edwin rather than Edward, which would be at least one reason why more recent Google searches never seemed to come back with anything. I remember the block of flats in Leamington Spa where they lived, possibly because it was the first block of flats I ever entered, what with my being a rural lad and everything. The climb to the eighth floor stuck in my memory, and weirdly I remember it as a peculiarly circular activity in which we went up one flight of steps, then down the next one back to the beginning, over and over as though it were some sort of ritual undertaking designed to unlock the upper floors of the building. 'We're just going up and down again,' I kept trying to tell my parents. Realistically, I'm almost certainly remembering a dream about the ascent, which at least indicates how significant it seemed to me at the time. Big cities full of tower blocks, urban architecture and concrete were places I only ever saw on Doctor Who on the telly, usually subject to invasion by beings from other worlds.
I also remembered Dawn - Eddie and Lynda's daughter, my cousin - who would have been about three by the time they boarded the boat at Southampton; or at least I remembered her in the sense of remembering that she existed.
Decades flapped past and we all began to wonder what had become of this Australian branch of the family, but Google searches came back with nothing. Then in 2017, my wife got on the case, having run out of her own ancestors, or at least hit a wall back in sixteenth century Bermondsey - which was itself an eye opener given my own more recent association with south-east London. Bess, by agency of one of those genealogy websites, discovered that Eddie had been Edwin rather than Edward, that his surname had been Brown - a detail which the rest of us had somehow mislaid - and that, if this was the same guy, the trail led to Lynda and Dawn, both still resident in Australia. So emails were exchanged, and yes - it was them, after all this time. They had similarly been looking for us, on and off, but never found anything.
One year later, and I'm back in England visiting my mother. I'm here for three weeks, and my visit has been timed to coincide with Dawn and her family coming to England. I try to get back to see my folks once a year, and I knew Dawn was planning a trip so it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Dawn's trip lasts two months and seems to involve whizzing around half of northern Europe while they're up this way - even bits of Iceland and Norway. I suppose, if you're going all the way to the other hemisphere, you may as well try to see as much of it as you can.
So we've exchanged emails and we seem to get on fine, but I'm still a little nervous about the meeting, not least that it will take place at my mother's house, because they've hired a car so it's easier for them to drive over to see me from their current hotel, which is somewhere in the Cotswolds. I've met plenty of Australians, and only ever one Australian I didn't like - although he seems to have been the exception which proved the rule - and they probably number in my top ten favourite nationalities, possibly top five; and yet still I have this image of my mother - who generally doesn't do crowds - besieged by gregarious Aussies laughing and chucking tinnies to one another across the couch.
Thankfully and obviously, such ludicrous fears are unfounded. Dawn is with Darren, her husband, and son, Sean. They file into the front room and occupy the sofa as though entering a stately home.
There's a distinct familial resemblance between Dawn and my mother, her aunt; which is, I suppose, consistent with how my mother and Lynda have grown to resemble each other quite closely in recent years, which is surprising given how different they were as children. Dawn seems an outgoing, happy presence, someone whose company warms the room.
We talk about the sort of things you always talk about when you haven't seen someone for forty-five years, and my mother appears quietly delighted by the meeting. This is a relief, because I felt a bit awkward as the intermediary introducing people who may as well be strangers to her home. We talk about the family, and what little we can remember of it, and we talk about England and America and Australia. Darren is a miner, so he's interested in the old mines they've visited in Wales. He works at an open cast mine and I get the impression that it's one of those jobs involving huge, strange looking bits of digging equipment, like the trucking equivalent of the attractions at Jurassic Park. He seems a nice bloke and very much reminds me of my friend Glenn, quiet but with an endless supply of one-liners and with a face accustomed to grinning.
Darren is driving, so we drive to Kenilworth which is a couple of miles down the road. We spend most of the morning plodding around Kenilworth Castle on the grounds of it being there, and that Dawn was almost certainly wheeled around the place in a stroller back in the seventies. They seem to like it, as do I, because it's always good to see a place through the eyes of someone who doesn't know it so well as you do. All the same, given how much the three of them are packing in on this tour of the northern hemisphere, I'm surprised they're not beginning to suffer castle-burn. They've already seen Sudeley Castle, and I suspect it may not have been the first.
After the castle, we drive up to the Mews, as the cul-de-sac is named, to look at the house where our grandparents lived, and where Dawn herself supposedly lived for a couple of months.
'It's that one,' I say, pointing at number thirteen.
We look at the house.
Dawn had been wondering if the memories might come flooding back, which they haven't, but never mind. We drive on, around a couple of corners and end up on Rouncil Lane.
'I think that's where your mother went to school,' I say as we pass Kenilworth Sixth Form, emphasis on I think because this is only a vague impression I have, probably based on the fact of it being a school in Kenilworth. I wouldn't like to claim I'm anything special as a tour guide.
They drop me back off in Coventry and we say goodbye until what we all hope will be a next time. It was short and a bit of a whirlwind, but I'm really glad we managed to work out the dates; and once again I take pleasure from the fact that we're all still alive.
...and thanks to Dawn for the photographs!
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