HAPPINESS IS…

Icould hear the clicking of Aunt Lois’s false teeth above the noise of the café. She had eaten every cake from the threetiered stand in front of us and was looking at something behind my right shoulder, absent-mindedly tapping her upper against her lower set. Her bouclé jacket was too tight; the material straining between the button-holes to form the shape of the mouth from Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’. The rest of her was as unlike the figure in the painting as it was possible to be; Aunt Lois had always been both contented, and fat. It was through looking at her I learned the importance of controlling my weight.

“She likes her food, don’t begrudge it to her,” my mother said, when I complained about having to watch her eat.

In the café, I became aware that my aunt was sighing, eyes still staring into the room behind me. I did not look round. Already the sight of her unnatural pearly teeth sinking into her éclair, then my éclair, into her fondant fancy, then my fondant fancy, had made me feel slightly sick.

Aunt Lois had never married – “couldn’t lift her head out of the trough for long enough to make conversation,” my father said. But she had a talent, a mysterious talent, for numbers, particularly those with pound signs in front of them. She had started with a job in the City, doing something too dull to be discussed. Then a bigger job, then, strangely, it seemed she owned the firm. She was now as rich as she was fat, and the family had stopped patronising her and started trying to make her happy.

“Easy,” said my father. “Take her out to tea.” And here I was, watching her and thinking: if I didn’t care about being thin, I could take pleasure in eating, have at least three hits of joy in every 24 hours. If only I never had to look in a mirror.

Aunt Lois’s eyes were still fixed on something I could not see. Maybe, I thought, she was looking at the food on someone else’s plate. Something unique and exquisite even now being put into someone else’s mouth and making her salivate.

I looked round. There was nothing to see except more tables, the same cakes. “What were you looking at?” I asked. “Not looking at, dear, thinking about. I was thinking about my rhodohypoxis.”

All I knew about Aunt Lois was that she worked with figures and loved food. I attempted to fit this unfamiliar word into one of these two categories. “Does it taste nice?” I asked. She smiled and swiped her napkin over the cake crumbs clinging to her knobbly jacket.

“No,” she said. “You don’t eat it, you care for it, nurture it, and if you’re lucky, it rewards you with flowers. When it flowers, it is beautiful. And beauty is like food, it makes me happy.” As she wrote down the name of this unfamiliar plant for me, she added, “and I believe in being happy.” I looked up rhodohypoxis. She was right, it is beautiful. I looked Aunt Lois up, too, and found she was as well known to total strangers, for her expertise in alpine plants, as she was to us, for her love of food.

I think I have more to learn from my fat but contented Aunt Lois. I may have been looking in the wrong direction. Putting the wrong things on the scales.

Anne Youngson, 70, spent her working life in the motor industry, but was always interested in literature. She has an MA in creative writing, is studying for a PhD, and her debut novel Meet Me at

the Museum (Doubleday), is published this month. Her simple pleasure is raspberries; growing, picking and eating them.