Technically she was no relation,  “Auntie Elsie”, but my Godmother.   She lived in a 17th Century farm-house in Ladymead,  in the county of Somerset on the Bristol channel in the west of England.

Uneven great chunks of flagstone, probably quarried slate from the wilds of nearby Exmoor, lined the floor of her enormous country kitchen.   The table, which had rested on that floor for hundreds of years was, no doubt, oak from the forests that still covered Elizabethan England…  it’s surface rubbed smooth by the beefy fore-arms of generations of  farmers wives.

Bunches of dried herbs and ham hocks in net bags hung on hooks from the low ceiling.  Polished copper pots rested on iron hooks by the fireplace, the fireplace bordered right and left with settles cushioned for comfort by Elsie’s hand- embroidered chair pads.

She hardly ever left her house or her exquisite little garden filled with scarlet runner beans and bee-loud bergamot and babies breath.   Only, as a Godmother, was she required  occasionally  to pry herself loose from her paradise and attend a Family Function.

One such rare visit I remember, although the reason for her visit is lost beyond the far horizon  of my memory.

Auntie Elsie was a dowdy dresser.  Her couturial pretensions ran to dun-colored twin sets and tweed skirts with the usual balloon like shaping in the bum area peculiar to a tweed wool skirt sat upon many times.  No ministration from a damp cloth and a hot iron ever succeeded in shrinking down that distinctive bulge no matter how earnest an application was  devoutly pursued.    Yet this was England in the 1940′s.  Practically everyone was dowdy on the island in those days.

Elsie was scheduled to arrive at our house by taxi from the railway station early in the afternoon.    Another aunt…”Auntie Greta”…waited with my mother in the kitchen of our small house.   Greta, the antithesis of Elsie, was tall and impressively “endowed” with her enormous breast laced tightly into a triple layer cloth and rubber brassiere and her torso corralled and stiff in a whalebone corset.   It was generally agreed that Greta was “A fine figure of a woman”.  She was, certainly, a formidable and forthright woman.

Soon after one o’clock there was a timid little scrabbling knock on the back door and Elsie had arrived.  She stood smiling her sweet smile, both hands clutching the handles of a cloth overnight bag.  Auntie Greta was immediately on the job…..

“Into the bath, Else…before you do anything…leave your bag outside…”  Greta grabbed Auntie Elsie’s arm and man-handled her through the kitchen and up the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor.    My mother was nonplussed.  “What?…what’s the matter, Greta?…Elsie’s just got here…she’s got to have a cup of tea…put her feet up…Elsie?….”

“No”  Auntie Greta was adamant. “She’s always got a flea…and we’ve got to get it before it gets loose in the house…we can’t have that…I’m just going to shake her down…I’ll get it…if she’s got one this time.”   Waiting at the bottom of the stairs, my mother and I, we heard the faucets being yanked open and the loud swishing of the water filling the tub overhead.

“Don’t use too much water”  my mother called.  “We’re only allowed five inches, you know”   Tut-tutting under her breath, my mother said quietly, “I’m going to make another pot of tea…poor little Elsie’s going to need it…”   She went back to the kitchen as I crept up the stairs to get a better look at what was going on up there.   “Climb in, dear…it’s warm enough”  I heard Greta say.

Peering round the edge of the half-open door,  I saw the side of Elsie’s naked body standing in the bath-tub.  She held her arms tightly against her breast, her clenched fists together under her chin.   Auntie Greta was furiously shaking  clothes out over the water, huffing and expostulating.   “Swish the water over yourself, Else….come on, dear, give me a hand …it won’t take long…here, shake out your knickers…you hold them…shake…that’s right…”

I had seen enough.  I returned to my mother in the kitchen.  Without speaking, our eyes met.  With a small smile my mother looked up at the kitchen ceiling with the universally familiar “Lord..whatever next”  expression.

We waited by the tea-cups and the filled tea-pot for the two women to join us.   They soon arrived,     Expecting Auntie Elsie to be cowed and embarrassed she was, I saw immediately, quite at ease..chatting away excitedly about her train ride from Somerset.  “Is Auntie actually  used to it.. this bath business?” I remember thinking.

Pulex irritans, the human flea.  It does exist although not, I would have thought, too commonly in these times.   Cats have cat fleas, dogs have dog fleas and so on and so on.  Elizabethan neck ruffs, I had read somewhere, were worn for the purpose of catching the fleas commonly infesting humans in bygone times…  the aristocracy, that is, during Elizabethan times.   Flea infested. ruff-deprived peasants, I guess, simply suffered and scratched.

And so, as goes memory and the curious and multifarious triggers that the mind contains, every time that the word flea might occasionally surface in a conversation, the written word, or a visit with an animal to the vet’s, there stand little Auntie Elsie shivering in the bath-tub.