Great Aunt
First rushes left her hungry for glamour
Desperate for excitement in a midlands town
Booming but dull
Heedless of darkly veiled threats of her undoing
Lou Lou ran away to London in 1913
To court ruination treading the boards
Her mother cried, was the talk of the street
But Louisa was bent on finding her fortune
Better dead than unknown
Better dead than a milliner’s apprentice
And the 17-year old shone with assumed star quality
She would kiss Valentino when he came along
She would prove them all wrong
But films weren’t quite ready for her yet
Glamour photographers tricked her
With the lure of cheap portfolios
Agents lied to her
And worse still, she flopped in
The few cameo stage roles that cane her way
In despair, she took up waitressing
And later, some say, entertaining men
While she amassed ever more extravagant costumes
Should the call chance to come
Spending long hours talking to herself in her looking glass
And lying to her family back home
About her West End success
One sister cane to fetch her back
And Lou Lou had a nervous attack
To see the grey industrial landscape once more
Then - when two brothers were killed in the war
Family distracted, she escaped back to the bright lights
Became an accomplished thief
The scourge of Bond Street
Enticed men to buy her suppers
Plying them with spirits
As she regaled them with thespian tall tales
A prelude to relieving them of their wallets
Once back in their hotel room
A young niece was dispatched, kept innocent of affairs
To visit and report back on Lou’s state
And much taken by her dapper aunt’s new hat
Was surprised to wake to an identical confection
On her pillow next morning
When an entire outfit had appeared in similar vein
The family thought fit to retrieve my cousin Mirrie
Lest another disgrace be scored of f the family tree
In the battered old familial bible
Lou continued her existence of guile and guises
From fashionable Mayfair rooms
Occasioned at intervals by visiting boys in blue
And once a short interlude in Holloway Women’s
Talkies came, pushing dreams away still further
And she took to the bottle to deaden the pain
She started to lose her nerve, her touch
Finally Lou lost her rooms, had to pawn her life
Return to her provincial roots
She spoke beautifully and still fooled some
But the department store was soon wise to her tricks
And the police regularly returned Lou to her aged mother
And large umbrella collection
With a friendly warning as curtains twitched
Her mother pleaded her daughters feeble condition
And when enough was enough
Had Lou dragged out screaming by four men in a van
Louisa died in the asylum three weeks later
And her mother sighed ‘Good riddance for that -
I told her shed come to a bad end with that acting business
But she wouldn’t listen’
My great aunt was fifty
Mother Jessop burned every trace of her
Page(s) 139-140
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