The Hopeless Romantic

It strikes me now how little I knew my Auntie Vi.

My father’s older sister lived with us for the first thirteen years of my life and was an ever-present in my childhood. But I never really knew her, despite her kindness to me, which I took for granted.

She and my dad had moved in to a new council house from their lifelong family home in the fifties and when my parents got married, spinster Violet…