When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family Who Never Spoke. Catherine Simpson

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      I saved a page of doodles I discovered with the words ‘My name is Nina, and I am brilliant and I must not forget it’ written on, surrounded by trees and hearts, shoes and cats. I framed it and hung it on my daughter, Nina’s, wall.

      Although many items had been removed in the weeks after Tricia died, there were still plenty of things dangling in the wardrobe. I saved clothes that would never fit me and would never be worn again even if they did but that I remembered Tricia wearing, including the twenty-year-old bridesmaid’s dress she wore at my wedding. We saved a flowery skirt that I turned into a cushion, a dress I turned into a jumper and a jumper I turned into a hat. We saved broken beads to be made into Christmas decorations. We saved her piano certificates. We saved her swimming badges, from 50 metres to bronze lifesaving, which were still attached to her red stripy swimsuit. Going to ‘the baths’ at Lancaster had been a big deal. The first time we went I must have been about seven and expected it to be one big claw-foot bath like we had at home. I wore a swimsuit with polystyrene floats fitted round the waist – a costume rejected by Tricia. I gazed, fascinated, at the sign NO RUNNING, PUSHING, SHOUTING, DUCKING, PETTING, BOMBING, SMOKING with its helpful cartoon illustrations and I clung to the side as Tricia set off on tiptoe, splashing across the shallow end seemingly unconcerned by water lapping at her nostrils. It was similar to the only time we went ice skating. Then I’d gripped the safety rail while Tricia’s game spirit was spotted by a stranger – a middle-aged woman – who led her around the rink. By the end of a torturous hour for me they glided serenely back, side by side with crossed hands, like something off a Victorian Christmas card. Tricia was always braver than me.

      Some things were easy to burn: the piles of medication in blister packs, which went straight on the bonfire, as did stacks of appointment letters from the mental-health services. We burned her last packet of fags – the pack of ten with the four missing that we found on the bathroom floor – but by then I regretted we hadn’t put these with her in the coffin. Tobacco had been a good friend to Tricia.

      Many things were hard to burn; for instance her socks. Cello cried as he emptied her sock drawer onto the bonfire and watched Dad stopping the balled-up socks from rolling out of the flames with his big stick.

      Sometimes we got cavalier. I tossed a toilet bag into the fire without checking carefully enough what was inside, only to discover too late that it contained aerosols and sealed tubes that exploded and sent my father diving for cover behind the giant bamboo.

      During the weekends of clearing, the flames burned bright throughout Saturday afternoon and if they began to flag Dad would douse them in diesel and they’d soon be ten feet high again. The bonfire would still be smouldering on Sunday morning which meant we could continue; sofas, mattresses, damp quilts and bedspreads, all the velvet curtains, carpets, lino, on they went.

      It felt cleansing and became addictive; you’d find your eyes scanning a room for flammable materials. A battered screen! Dried-flower arrangements! More wool! Let’s drag them out and burn them!

      Once the rooms were empty we started pulling off wallpaper that hung loose and damp in places – great lengths of woodchip painted in shiny turquoise and mauve that came away bringing layers of plaster with it. We’d bang the flaking plaster with a brush until it all fell and we had at last got back to a sound surface. We wrenched off sheets of plasterboard that had been used to box in original features in the 1970s, to reveal wallpaper from the 1950s with hand-painted roses and lily of the valley.

      To watch dusty, neglected, largely unloved items set alight, burn, smoulder and turn to ashes felt right. It also felt very warm and, despite it being summer when we did the clearing, the heat on my face was comforting and gazing into the heart of a fire consuming my family history was mesmerizing.

      As a seven-year-old, I had watched the disposal of my Great-Great-Aunt Alice’s things and been fascinated by the dismantling of a life, fascinated to see someone’s life story being taken apart into its bits and pieces and each one being held up to the light, valued in some way, then kept or discarded.

      There were legends about Great-Great-Aunt Alice: she was a suffragette; she founded her own bus company between Manchester and Blackpool; she was a ‘man-hater’ who married a much younger man only to pay for him to go to Australia and never come back. It was said she was so tight with money she reused old stamps. She was a hoarder whose bungalow was only navigable via narrow corridors between the piles of junk. She nearly killed herself by keeping warm with an electric fire placed on the bed because there was nowhere else to put it and which then set the bedding alight; and, as recalled by one uncle, ‘she had a dirty parrot who shit everywhere’.

      But you only heard these legends if you asked, because Great-Great-Aunt Alice had no children and so when she died she began to fade fast into history.