Part of the butcher’s tour was past my two great aunties’ houses on Lords Lane. They were two old widow women who lived in a pair of isolated semis both of whom had lost their husbands in the Great War. As a child I’d heard them described many a time as batting for the other side, but they’d been dead many a year before I realised that referred to them being suspected of being lesbians. Looking back I don’t think that was true. They were just a pair of lonely sisters who’d managed to find a man when they were young and were too old to find another after they lost them to Flanders’ fields. There was so great a shortage of men after the war the competition for them was fierce and they were ten maybe fifteen years too old by then. They treated me wonderfully and it was years before I realised I was the nearest they’d ever come to having a child of their own. It’s enough to make a grown man weep.
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