... from the previous blogpost ... 21 Februarry 2016

A few years ago I sat with Aunt Betty in her sunroom at the front of her bungalow in Bridge of Allan, with a view over to Stirling war memorial. 

She was wonderful at telling stories, captivating. She talked about three of her father’s sisters, Maggie, Mamie and Susie who lived together in the early 1930s in a Victorian second floor flat in Montpelier Park in the Bruntsfield area of South Edinburgh. I was surprised to hear her mention a second floor flat because a grissly tale in family history had come down to my sister and I about a second floor flat in McDonald Road (off Leith Walk) in North Edinburgh.  

Aunt Betty started by saying, she knew something was wrong when, one Sunday morning she ran down stairs to get the Sunday Post – she would have been in her mid to late teens. She said that every Sunday she would collect the Sunday Post from the letter box and read it a bit then deliver it up to her parents’ room. This particular Sunday, the Sunday Post was not in the letterbox. She was also aware that there was a lot of adult conversation going on and she and my dad were not sure what it was about. She realised later the incident must have been reported in the Sunday Post and the adults didn’t want the children to read it.

I said to Aunt Betty, ‘Aunt Susie fell out the window’.

She was surprised that I knew, but put me right – it was not Susie but Mamie. I told her that the tale had passed down to my sister and me that Aunt Susan had fallen out a second storey window in McDonald Road. I told her that I had often wondered why I was named after an Aunty who had met with such an end and indeed wondered if it contributed to my vertigo! Aunt Betty laughed and said, ‘No no no, Aunt Susie died a very respectable death.’

She told me that the three sisters had lived together and in her early thirties Aunt Susan, known as Susie, had taken ill with leukaemia. Her sisters had nursed her throughout and she was particularly close to Mamie. Susie died in her early thirties.

I’m not sure how long after that - death certificates would tell us – Aunt Mamie fell from the second floor window and died. The circumstances around her fall were not made clear at the time.

Aunt Betty finished by whispering, ‘I always wondered if Maggie pushed her!’