Gertie and awful men

The past is not all that far away, sometimes anyway. Suddenly this evening in the city still warm with October heat, I think of Gertie and James her pet corgi.
In a remote part of Wales,remote even in the late 40s and 50s, I accompanied my mother to visit a cousin I had never seen. I was about nine years old. Gertie was the daughter of my uncle John dead long before my birth and so Gertie who had never married, was about the age of my mother, perhaps even older, mother being the youngest of 17 children, all of them now long gone. We took a couple of buses which wound their way round the high hedged country roads. It was hot for August but finally we reached her two up and two down as we used to say, this with a door in the middle, open of course, and a white washed wall enclosing lovely red and yellow wallflowers.
"Come in Aunty dear". They hugged each other. I was introduced first to Gertie and then to James her beloved corgi. In the kitchen with a kettle boiling on the stove she said. "Let me make tea for you. You'd like that wouldn't you, Lionel bach?" "Yes, I would, thank you"
She turned to my mother and over a lunch of corned beef, boiled potatoes and sliced tomatoes, she told of her life with her mother and her stepfather, an awful man she said who sang loudly in chapel, was a prig and a hypocrite. I listened to all this as I ate my lunch. She reached the climax of the story by sitting back and declaring to mother, "Oh Auntie, aren't men awful?" and without missing a beat she added, "More potatoes, Lionel?". I said yes of course wondering ever after that simple meal of corned beef if men were really awful.
I think now she may have been right.