She is, in effect, a younger version of Aunt Augusta.Īfter tangling with the Turkish police and successfully hiding from them Aunt Augusta's contraband gold ingot, the aunt and nephew duo are deported from Turkey back to England. She is also no great respecter of the law, being involved in complicated scams and smuggling and being extremely good at outwitting the police of various countries – in which her nephew becomes her willing accomplice.Īdding to Henry's departure from his middle class mindset is his contact with Tooley, a young American female hippie who takes a liking to him, gets him to smoke marijuana with her and shares with him her own life story, her estrangement from her father who is a CIA operative, her complicated love life, and especially her concern that she may be pregnant. He finds her to be amoral, contemptuous of conventional morality, having had numerous lovers and speaking forthrightly of having been a courtesan and prostitute in France and Italy. Their voyages take them from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express and as the journey unfolds, so do the stories of Aunt Augusta, painting the picture of a woman for whom love has been the defining feature of her life. This prediction inevitably becomes true as Henry is pulled further and further into his aunt's lifestyle, and delves deeper into her past. Here a psychic foreshadows that he will have many travels in the near future. He travels first with her to Brighton, where he meets one of his aunt's old acquaintances, and gains an insight into one of her many past lives. Henry finds himself drawn into Aunt Augusta's world of travel, adventure, romance and absence of bigotry. On their first meeting, Augusta tells Henry that his mother was not truly his mother, and we learn that Henry's father has been dead for more than 40 years.Īs they leave the funeral, Henry goes to Augusta's house and meets her lover Wordsworth – a man from Sierra Leone, who is deeply and passionately in love with her despite her being 75 years old. Despite having little in common, they form a bond. His life suddenly changes when he meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over 50 years at his mother's funeral. The main choice he could still make is either to remain a bachelor or marry Miss Keene, who likes tatting and who might become his boring and respectable suburban wife. The novel's narrator is Henry Pulling, a conventional and uncharming bank manager who has taken early retirement in a suburban home, and who has little to look for except for tending the dahlias in his garden, reading in the complete works of Walter Scott left by his father, and some bickering with the ultra-conservative retired major living next door. Aunt Augusta pulls Henry away from his quiet suburban existence into a world of adventure, crime and the highly unconventional details of her past. The novel follows the travels of Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, and his eccentric Aunt Augusta as they find their way across Europe, and eventually even further afield. Travels with My Aunt (1969) is a novel written by English author Graham Greene.
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