About 10 years ago (maybe more actually) I went to my Uncle Bert's funeral. I had not managed to get to Auntie Bea's when she passed away a year or two before. They were a very interesting pair and we held them a bit in awe when they came to visit us in Scotland when we were children. Us with our broad Scots accents and hill billy ways and they seemed so posh and sophisticated with their English accents and his huge cigars. They lived in Birmingham in Mosley Road, in a beautiful big house that was full of nooks and crannies and huge staircases, and downstairs basements and all sorts. The house had (it seemed to me) lots of entrances - I was only there once when I was about 7/8 and it stuck in my memory.
He was a brilliant engineer and worked for a huge car manufacturing company and she was an occupational health nurse as I recall. He had huge hairy eyebrows and was always very kind and interested to know about you.
Our cousins Robin, Betty, Cynthia and Rosemary were all older than us so we didn't know them very well and they just seemed so other worldly.
Anyway, when I was at Uncle Bert's funeral which was in Earlston in the Scottish Borders where they had retired, I was struck by a lovely gesture which his family had done and that was to stick lots of photos of their mum and dad over the years, all around the pub walls (where we were having the wake). What really struck me was that there were lots and lots of pictures of Bea and Bert out on the hills walking.
I love walking and at that time no one else in my family had ever seemed interested - certainly not when we were young. There they were, Auntie Bea (my blood relative as she was my mum's sister) and Uncle Bert - the hill walkers.
Some thing I never knew and sadly never shared with them.
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