Starting the Auntie Audrey Archive

Steve writes: Kate and I went to Auntie Audrey's house on 30 and 31 October 2013 a few months after she died in July. Kate had already been there a couple of times, but it was my first time. The house was dirty in some ways, but it had been abandoned for a while and there were no dirty plates, just old food in the cupboards.

When you read her logs, record books and scrapbooks, you realise that Auntie Audrey was exclusively concerned with a limited number of events in her day. Yet once you start to list them, you see that even an obsessive life has a large number of constants.

She notes the minute she wakes up, which is usually around 6 am, and then describes how she slept - in the later entries, this is rarely good. She normally comments that it is the 8th day, (this we have not been able to explain). She usually takes a Bath (with a capital letter) and then decides whether to go out shopping or not. This depends on whether supplies are sufficient to get her through the day. If she is at home, her activities are writing, letters or recording her life. We found three, maybe four calendars for 2013 in which the same daily information is recorded, down to the last letter. There are also uncracked number codes written around the edge, again identical on each copy.

There are four types of book which are helpfully labelled on the front cover Accounts Book, Log Book (which is a diary), Record Book (daily itemisation of copious correspondence) and Scrapbook along with her name: ‘AJ Amiss (Miss)’. From the 1990s, we have followed the evolution of the recording system, through undifferentiated scrapbooks to the later separate records which continue until 10 July 2013.

The date format evolved until it always recorded a range of between 2 and 4 days, for example, 6/7/8 July 2013, normally with the actual date underlined. I saw the same type of date recorded in my last birthday card from Auntie Audrey which I received after she died. That card was listed in the final Record Book in which she records all of the letters she sends, their contents paraphrased, and the exact details of the envelopes and stamps. This goes back years. I was surprised that relatively few of the letters she must have received in reply seem to have been kept.

The scrapbooks over the years contained photo prints (frequently 100s from a visit to Regents Park Zoo); news clippings; ads (she went through car dealer and estate agent phases); letters; receipts and found objects (a cigarette butt discovered under a chair in 1999). In the last few years, the scrapbooks specialised in packaging from food Auntie Audrey had bought and eaten (the receipts recorded separately in the Accounts Books). She arranged the pages meticulously, always with attention to the aesthetic design, in particular the Scrapbooks of packaging. The designs were annotated with comments such as ‘Intense Colour’ or references to artworks or similar names they reminded her of. Here, the comments would continue with streams of word association linking celebrities, artists, politicians, people she knew from the distant past in Sunderland and ideas and concepts with reminiscent names.

Many of her speculations sought to explain apparent coincidences and linked people and events in a stream of consciousness (Robert Louis Stevenson - Adlai Stephenson - Steve Davis - a whole stream of Davises, and finally a Davis she knew whom she suspected of organising a drugs ring). She spoke often of ‘a breakthrough’ when she suddenly identified an aspect of the ‘conspiracy’ - she used that word. In a photo of two TV actors, she identified one as an entirely different celebrity and the other one as a woman from her youth. This seemed to confirm a hidden truth she already knew about.

She had other preoccupations concerning her illness and how she had been treated, often talking about her medication and how it had been preceded in the late fifties by electric shocks. She seemed to be concerned about both over- and under-medication and blamed specific individuals, and the police in general, for her mistreatment. She collected numerous newspaper articles about cases she saw as related. A lot of her correspondence went to groups who support mental patients’ rights; she wrote unceasingly on the same topics to MPs, local politicians, friends, newspapers. Her Record Book noted the number of pages in each of these letters (eight seems to have been about average), and there were several each day, all described at length.