Born Iris Ann Fletcher of Cambrook Street, London, on 8th February 1928, Aunty Iris was the youngest of seven siblings: Amy, Ivy, Harry, Ted, Vi and Rosie who are all pre-deceased which made Aunty Iris, as she liked to point out, ‘The Last of The Mohicans’!
Her eldest sister Amy, who was 15 at the time of Aunty Iris’ birth, was her surrogate mother. Aunty Iris always used to say, “May must have hated my arrival because it meant she was lumbered with a baby when she should have been out enjoying herself!”
The opposite was true, of course, Amy doted on her new-born sister, as no doubt did all the others. The Fletchers were a very close-knit family. Often-talked-about annual family holidays were taken in Hastings which obviously made a favourable impression on Aunty Iris given her choice of relocation from London in later life.
Aunty Iris recalled a very happy childhood, she and her siblings got on well together. As a young girl she remembered how she and Rosie used to polish their elder brother Ted’s Boys’ Brigade uniform brass buttons.
As each sibling married and formed a family unit of their own they remained close. Harry married and moved next door! Aunty Iris vividly remembered her nephew Brian’s entry into the world. The walls of Cambrook Street must have been very thin!
The onset of WWII threatened to change things as the family were split up with Amy married and moved away, Ivy already in service, Harry and Ted soldiers, Vi in the Land Army and Rose and Aunty Iris evacuated separately. Though that didn’t last long in Aunty Iris’ case – she was as stubborn a child as she was an adult! She insisted on returning home and kicked up a stink until Nanny Fletcher was forced to go and collect her.
A story Aunty Iris used to tell of her formative years was one of a dispute with Grandad Fletcher; when she sat down at the family dining table with painted nails.
“You’ll not wear polish on your fingers at this table, young girl!” her father remonstrated.
Aunty Iris declared, “If I’m not allowed the nail polish then you won’t see me at the table at all.”
As usual, being the youngest, Aunty Iris got her own way.
In her early teens she went to work for John Lewis in London, where she made her way to the top of her profession from a buyer of furs to the Senior Manageress of the Department. It was while working for John Lewis that Aunty Iris met, fell in love with and subsequently married James Holland, from the Stores Department.
The wedding took place at Christchurch, on the Old Kent Road, in 1950 and their marriage was a loving and happy one.
Aunty Iris and Uncle Jim had a wide social group, partied often, loved Ballroom Dancing and were very widely travelled. Uncle Jim was the first in the family to own a motor car. He had learned to drive prior to the war, so when he enlisted he was put to work as an Army Driver. When he went to France with the British Expeditionary Force and they retreated to Dunkirk, Uncle Jim was not allowed to be evacuated from the beaches since he was a driver, presumably of ambulances. Consequently, he was captured and spent the rest of the war as a POW, returning to work at John Lewis afterwards.
He was always very astute with money. His upbringing and his training had led him to be very thrifty and budget-orientated, so if for example there wasn’t enough money in the ‘shoe budget’, he didn’t allow money to be transferred from another budget to purchase them. This attitude led to Aunty Iris and Uncle Jim’s first ever ‘bust up’.
As high earners, with no children of their own, they were good savers. However, when Aunty Iris wanted a new dress for work and Uncle Jim said, “There’s not enough money in the dress budget,” and refused her permission to buy one, Aunty Iris stomped back home to Nanny and Grandad…but she didn’t get any sympathy from her father, who said, “You made your own bed, go lie in it!” (In that sense, he got his own back for the nail polish fiasco!)
When Uncle Jim retired, Aunty Iris gave up work too and they moved from London to the bungalow in Hastings which they had bought as a holiday home some years earlier. Sadly, in later life, Uncle Jim suffered a debilitating stroke. Aunty Iris was always at his side, taking on the role of his primary carer until his death.
They had a marvellous life together. Aunty Iris was always immaculately turned out, wore fashionable clothes, jewellery and make-up and had her hair styled regularly. They flew to Europe and beyond, dined in the finest restaurants and had friends all over the country from their Ballroom Dancing days. Uncle Jim’s loss was a devastating blow.
Aunty Iris was fortunate to have good friends around her. Ken, who even after his own wife passed away, continued to take her shopping weekly; Tina, a long-time dancer friend and Audrey, the second wife of a dancing pair Aunty Iris and Uncle Jim had known, who continued to visit Aunty Iris regularly. Her sisters were a constant source of solace too. Aunty Iris was forever grateful to Vi who spent several weeks with her at her bungalow following Uncle Jim’s death, and later she spent more time together with Rose. The two of them had many coach holidays together, including several ‘Tinsel & Turkey’ Christmas breaks, and even travelled out to Australia to visit Harry who had emigrated many years earlier.
Iris’ nephew Tom was a keen fisherman and had several boats moored on Hastings Beach over the years. They would often meet up at Aunty Iris’ favourite Fish ‘n’ Chip shop on the front, ‘The Lifeboat Man’ where she enjoyed nothing more than a tasty piece of ‘huss’.
Tom would often drop by the bungalow with freshly caught fish for Aunty Iris. On one occasion he delivered some plaice, explaining that he hadn’t had time to fillet them, so she’d need to clean them herself. Aunty Iris told everyone that after Tom had left she laid a flatfish on a cold glass chopping board to prepare it and this immediately revived the supposedly ‘dead’ fish, causing it to flap along the worktop and dive into the sink. Extremely surprised and startled, Aunty Iris had to bash it several times with her rolling pin! Thereafter, whenever Tom dropped off fish she always asked: Are they dead?!
On family visits Aunty Iris always had a list of jobs to be done and stories to tell. On one occasion she said the TV had broken because she couldn’t change channels; she had already replaced the batteries in the remote control, but it still wouldn’t work. When asked to demonstrate what she’d been doing, it was evident that Aunty Iris was holding the controller round the wrong way!
On another occasion she complained that her electric recliner wouldn’t settle back properly on the floor. She pushed the button fervently and it went up but not completely down, it just graunched to a halt. On inspection it was discovered that the carpet sweeper had slipped down behind the chair and been chewed up by the chair’s mechanism causing the carpet to be singed! Needless to say, the chair never worked correctly again and the sweeper was consigned to the bin!
One Christmas when sharing cracker jokes Aunty Iris treated us to a joke of her own, which she laughed at even more than we did. It was a joke she repeated several times over the years and it always made her giggle. It was a joke about three rabbits called Foot, Foot-Foot and Foot-Foot-Foot who loved to play football. The long-winded joke has the teller repeating their names over and over again. During the match Foot, the youngest, is trampled and sadly dies. The punchline of the joke is that when challenged to a re-match Foot-Foot-Foot asks Foot-Foot, “Foot-Foot shall we play again?” Foot-Foot says, “Foot-Foot-Foot I don’t think that’s a good idea”. Foot-Foot-Foot responds, “Foot-Foot you’re probably right, we’ve already got one Foot in the grave!”
She always had a good sense of humour.
Like all the Fletchers, Aunty Iris suffered terribly with arthritis. She had carers to support her at the bungalow, but when it got to the point that she couldn’t remove the film from the top of a microwavable meal Aunty Iris decided to move into residential care. She chose to live at Whitegates in 2013 and was particularly delighted with the meals they offered. As everyone knows, food was the highlight of Aunty Iris’ later life.
As time went on Whitegates were not able to cater for Aunty Iris’ medical needs so eventually she moved to Hastings Court.
Good food, in-house entertainment and a hairdressers, regular friend and family visits and shopping trips, together with ‘Strictly’ and her favourite quiz shows on TV, meant that Aunty Iris was for the most part very content there.
Coronavirus hit worldwide and Hastings Court like everyone else went into ‘lockdown’. Sadly as Covid-19 took its toll, Aunty Iris was ever more isolated. Short visits by a single family member only, outside in a Summerhouse (meaning Aunty Iris being hoisted from bed to wheelchair and back again) behind a screen, wearing an apron gloves and facemask – which meant she wouldn’t be able to lip read - were not feasible. In any case, Aunty Iris insisted that we should all stay away for fear of infecting other family members. She was selfless to the end.
Aunty Iris was a real character, the last of her generation in our family. She was loved dearly and will be greatly missed by all.