Yes, it was worth a follow-up. But odd.

Everything about it is odd.

—

Lawyer says Aunt Kat has died. Or the woman we knew as Aunt Kat, anyway. Not really a blood-relative, more an old family friend since forever who we’d called Aunt Kat because, well, that’s what kids do.

To kids stuck at boarding-school, too far away to go back home at half-term, a place away from school with a friendly farmer’s wife is a real-lifesaver. That was Aunt Kat, for us. She was always fun, full of weird tales about ‘when the world was different’. Mother warned us not to believe a word she said, that her stories were mostly a mess of fibs and falsehoods, but what the heck, it was fun anyway.

Her husband, Uncle George, he wasn’t much fun at all, he was often as surly as hell, perhaps because much of the time he would work on the farm only at night. Yeah, weird, I know, but everything’s weird and new when you’re kids, so we didn’t think about it much. As long as we kept out of his way, it was all fine, and they let us loose to play around the place pretty much any way that we liked.

But that was, what, fifty years ago? We’d kept sort-of in touch in a loose way ever since – chatty letters and weird postcards from Aunt Kat to each of us from time to time, Christmas cards and so on, and a letter of condolence we sent to her when Uncle George had died a few years back. But we couldn’t really say we knew them as such. Not now.

Yet they knew us, it seemed. Remembered us, anyway. Remembered us enough to include us in their will.

Better go find out what this is all about.