Looking back: A portrait of a matriarch

My aunt died suddenly at the weekend. She died alone at her flat in Ealing. Her death was very unexpected, and she never really had time to enjoy her retirement (she used to work for the BBC).

This is a picture of my aunt as a baby, held by my great-grandmother. I thought very hard before putting up this photograph, and after a while I may take it down again. It seems a very personal image to put up for anyone to look at, and yet some form of memorial seems necessary.

I remember meeting my great-grandmother when I was a small child (aged about five). I am the youngest, by a big gap, of an extensive generation of cousins, and my great-grandmother was the oldest person in the family (born in the nineteenth-century, making her a Victorian). She originally came from Hampshire, and I remember we talked about a "lost" Roman city near to where she was born (in the New Forest), so I suppose I was interested in archaeology even at the age of five.

My great-grandmother is wearing the South Seas pearls that caused so much trouble after my mother died in 2003 (basically we couldn't find them, and my sister wouldn't accept they had gone - it's possible they are still hidden in the house somewhere, but realistically I think they were lost long ago). This picture is a portrait of a matriarch - my great-grandmother was head of the family for most of the twentieth-century, living into her eighties. She made a religion of respectability, and used to go to church three times every Sunday.

In many ways my great-grandmother created the world I live in now - claustrophobic, inward-looking, focussed on the house and the family. Now so many of the family have gone, and there is only my brother and myself staying on in the family home, I ask myself: does our way of life represent valid continuity with the past, or has it become just meaningless (and obsessive) ritual? Keeping things going has become an end in itself (and one that absorbs a great deal of money).

There is another aspect to my great-grandmother that I only learned about recently. I always knew that my family came from very humble origins, made some money just after the Second World War, and had coasted ever since on that modest margin of wealth (now almost all gone). What I didn't know was that when she was very young, before she got married, my great-grandmother worked as a maid at a big country house in Hampshire - her start in life was very hard and humble, especially compared to how comfortable things later became.