Aunts Up the Cross (8 page)

The following week Mr Fletcher and Mr Hawks arrived in person, and within a few days the ranks of the rats dwindled and faltered, and soon they had all disappeared.

My grandfather was a quiet and saintly man, whose presence in this matriarchal house was nevertheless some restraining influence on the family dramas. He and I had an especially close relationship: I called him ‘Sammie’ and he treated me as his friend and equal. From the time I could walk, I accompanied him on his early morning swim, which performed the triple function of getting me out of the house, teaching me to swim, and establishing an affinity with my grandfather and his family.

Every morning at 6 a.m. we walked through the empty streets and the grimy park, known as the Domain, where tramps were just stirring under their newspapers, to the fenced-in enclosure at the harbour’s edge, the Domain Baths. The Baths were in the same tongue of the harbour as the docks and I shudder to think of the oil and refuse in which I must have wallowed and flourished. Until I was four we went to the Men’s Baths, and when I was nearly two I graduated from Sammie’s back to a sturdy dog-paddle of my own. The men swam naked, so that at four it was decided that I was too old to share their morning freedom and my grandfather dropped me off alone at the Ladies’ Baths next door. We went every morning, summer and winter, in rain or sun; and, walking home, Sammie and I would play the Shakespeare Game. Every day I had to say one reasonably well-known line from one of Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets, and Sammie took up the quotation from there, reciting until I told him to stop.

We walked to his mother’s house for breakfast—he had breakfasted with her every morning of his married life, and for me it was yet another household of which I felt myself to be an integral part. My great-grandmother was a wiry, bird-like, little creature, who died, almost on her feet (having just cooked the breakfast) at the age of ninety-nine. Aunt Emma and Uncle Charles and Harry lived with her. Harry was my grandfather’s youngest brother, and was never called ‘Uncle’ because he was ‘simple’ and about the same mental age as myself. He teased me all through breakfast and I loathed him. Uncle Charles suffered from terrible asthma and had never been able to do much, and Aunt Emma had never married, so my grandfather supported them all.

I think I was fond of my great-grandmother, although I felt the lack in Charles and Emma and Harry of the soft yet strident, rich and enveloping warmth of my grandmother’s environment. There I heard no wonderful stories, nor lay on lace pillows being tickled, nor was tempted hourly to some titbit of highly unsuitable and indigestible food. My great-grandmother was born in Australia and so her parents must have been some of the earliest settlers. I learnt nothing of her background, and everyone whom I might now ask is dead. What tales Nana’s imagination could have weaved from her material!

The house was a kindly, but silent one—in itself, to me, a strange and intimidating setting. I expect I resented this what, to one brought up in my grandmother’s aura, must have appeared a perplexing chill. My grandmother and Juliet were a gushing fount of loudly expressed affection and solace. Whatever the ill, be it physical, mental or emotional, there was on hand a quickly proffered remedy—a laugh to heal a wound, a cheque to fill a financial chasm, the two words ‘Never mind’ the most oft-repeated and often heeded ones of my childhood. Charles, in adulthood recognised as the gentlest and dearest of creatures, seemed a crabby and alien soul to my small, spoilt and affection-pampered self.

Once I was very ill with gastro-enteritis (brought on, one now wonders, by Nana’s unholy feasts). On my first visit to Great Grannie after the crisis had passed, I sat, wan and thin, staring ahead—my eyes, said my great-grandmother, ‘like those of a little angel huge in her dear, thin, little face’. Great Grannie wondered if, close to death as I had been, some intimations of immortality lingered about my thoughts; so ethereal, she said, was my expression.

‘Tell me, darling, what are you thinking?’

‘Well,’ lisped the little angel, ‘I’ve got a mouthful of thpit and I wath just wondering which one of you three old things to give it to.’

I was ten when Great Grannie died and Sammie and I no longer had our early mornings together. Instead of the Ladies’ Baths I went to the surf at Bondi Beach with my father and Sammie breakfasted at home.

After his death (peaceful and abrupt), no masculine voice was raised to prevent the family dramas, which now raged unabated. My father’s voice was raised only too frequently to my mother, but this was unhappily no remedy, as he had access to only one side of the contestants, and nobody now existed, as had my grandfather, to stop Juliet egging my grandmother on. Out of loyalty to my mother and in deference to her husband’s wishes, my grandmother had never again spoken to her sisters since my mother’s marriage, but she still loved her family dearly and as soon as my grandfather was dead, Juliet tried to heal the breach. I, who had never heard them spoken of except in terms of derision, now began to hear their virtues and talents extolled. Nana now paid an occasional visit to them, and on her return regaled me with delightfully irrelevant details of their lives.

‘They are four wonderful women,’ she said. ‘They never do any visiting excepting to specialists—and an occasional X-ray man.’

As always, physical handicaps came into the picture and from them I started to form incongruous pictures of my octogenarian great-aunts. After one visit she informed me: ‘One sister has an intestinal rupture on the heart side, of late development. She is a great swimmer and always dives off the board with a double somersault. That is the only way the doctors think she might have developed it.’

I struggled to accept the likelihood of this story for, although I could not suddenly feel affection or affinity with these unknown relations, I was intrigued at the possibility of having a great-aunt who could perform such a feat.

About this time, their beloved brother, Spot, who had also never married, became seriously ill. All the sisters were growing more frail, and especially Netta, the heroine of the high dive. Netta’s special self-imposed task was preparing the one solid food that Spot was taking, which was generally supposed to be his last relinquished carnal pleasure: bread and butter cut wafer-thin—thin, as was the family boast, as only Netta could cut it. Every day Netta dragged herself down to the kitchen, sliced the bread ever thinner and thinner, and sat by Spot’s bedside feeding him the morsels. One day, the stairs up and down to the kitchen proved too much for Netta—poor Spot had to go without his treat, as no-one else could be trusted to match Netta’s lightness of touch. My grandmother was sitting by his bed when he beckoned her close and hissed in her ear.

‘Dora—Dora—would you do something for me?’

‘Of course, Spot darling, what would you like?’

‘Oh, Dora, if only I could have a really
thick
piece of bread and butter I think I would feel better!’

Now that the two old ladies, my grandmother and great-aunt, were alone, Juliet still retained her purple bedroom, but she slept downstairs in my grandmother’s bedroom. There they lay, twin-bedded and, in Juliet’s case, as often as not, befurred, receiving friends and seldom, as they grew older, rising. They slept for long periods of the day, and at night they awoke and flourished. No food was too rich or too highly spiced for their digestions and throughout the night my mother ran up and down the stairs from her kitchen to their bedroom preparing whatever dish they fancied. About dawn, the two old ladies, refreshed and replete, would drop into a deep sleep and my mother would crawl upstairs, exhausted, to her bed. Often during the night a wordy battle would have raged; this tired my mother and stimulated Nana and Juliet. But my mother never learnt to ignore them in the mornings, and could never resist going down for their breakfast order which, whatever their gastronomic indulgences of the previous night, was invariably hearty. One morning Aunt Juliet, still smarting from some insult of the night’s fray, sulked and reluctantly joined in her hunger strike by my grandmother, refused breakfast for them both. My mother was determined to rise above such pettiness: upstairs in our kitchen I watched her slamming butter on toast, eggs on bacon, marmalade in its silver dish, coffee and milk in Juliet’s heavy Victorian silver jugs, muttering with irritation as she manipulated the lot onto the massive silver tray and angled her way with it down the twisting narrow stairs.

‘Here’s your breakfast, girls,’ she called from the door, with an attempt at gaiety.

‘I told you, Lyndall,’ snapped Juliet, while rising, nevertheless and settling herself expectantly on her pillows, ‘that we didn’t want any breakfast.’

‘Well,’ said my mother, ‘in that case, you bloody well needn’t
have
any breakfast!’ and, marching to the window, with one mighty heave, she hurled the loaded tray out into the street.

My mother suffered agonies of remorse from these outbreaks but, what with lack of sleep, lack of privacy, and constant provocation, her nerves could never weather another encounter for long. Of course, I missed a great deal of the fun when I was at school and so the few occasions when my mother literally let fly were to me gloriously explosive highlights in a situation continually smouldering with tension.

My mother loved flowers passionately and as we had no garden her passion found expression in arranging brimming bowls in every room. These she did exquisitely, with care and devotion, but was seldom allowed to indulge in her artistry alone. Once all the vases in the sitting-room had been filled with water and wire and the flowers freed from their wrapping, my grandmother would come in and take up her seat. On top of the chimney-piece was a deep, heavy earthenware trough, and this was always a challenge to my mother’s skill: the flowers had to be just the right length and just the right weight to balance in their wire cage. One day my grandmother was watching this intricate task and after my mother had placed each flower in its place she, talking the while, would skip forward and give the whole erection a tweak. Tight-lipped but restrained, my mother persevered, and my grandmother continued to pull a flower here and push a flower there each time she turned to the table for the next one. Finally when the whole pattern was almost complete, my grandmother pulled a flower just a shade too hard and slowly the wire cage tipped forward—the work of half an hour lying forlornly horizontal. ‘Aaaah!’ bellowed my mother, with a terrible cry of release: she grasped the heavy trough lightly at either end, and with all the force she could summon threw it intact to the ceiling. There was a splendid crash: a cascade of water, wire, flowers, pieces of pottery shot all over the room and my grandmother, seriously alarmed, went pale with fright.

‘Lyndall,’ she whispered, ‘I think you’ve gone mad!’

This was an unexpected bonus in weapons and my mother seized upon it. She whirled upon my grandmother, wild-eyed.

‘That’s it,’ she shrieked, ‘I am! I am!’

Battering on the wall with her fists, she raised her eyes to the dripping ceiling, ‘Mad! Mad! Mad!’

My grandmother scurried downstairs as fast as she could, and my mother was left to regain her composure and mop up the debris in peace.

Many of the rows were precipitated by Aunt Juliet. She was an extremely stupid woman, although, in a childish way, sometimes endearingly so. Uncle Harry had fallen through our floor a rich man, but had left his money so tied up by trusts that his silly widow had little opportunity to dissipate it, as she undoubtedly would have done. One of her few financial freedoms was a charge account at Sydney’s best department store, David Jones, which was paid monthly by the trustees. This was a recognised family preserve or, I should say, recognised by Aunt Juliet in moments of generosity or bribery and by my mother perpetually. When Aunt Juliet wished to make amends for some act of idiocy, she would tell my mother to go and buy herself something ‘on my account at David Jones’. On the other hand, whenever my mother wanted to buy something, usually for me, which she could not afford (and as the week’s housekeeping would invariably have been eaten up or gone into Tony McGill’s pocket, she could rarely afford it), she would say with a comforting and conspiratorial air, ‘Come along. We’ll put it on Aunt Juliet’s account, at David Jones.’ We had wonderful shopping sprees on Aunt Juliet’s account, and terrible rows each month when the bill came in. Quite often, my mother bought Aunt Juliet something even more expensive to pacify her: this went on the following month’s account, and so we had four clear weeks for the effect of the ‘gift’ to wear off. My mother’s attitude to money was delightful, but impractical. She had been brought up by my grandmother in the same way as I was, and by having repeated to her frequently the words of my great-grandfather who was reputed to have dinned into the ears of his twelve children, ‘Never worry about money. It’s only an attitude of mind, and the next best thing to being very rich is to think you’re very rich.’

As he was, in fact, very rich, this philosophy didn’t have such disastrous effects as it was to have on the lives of his descendants, who had managed in following his principles to get through most of his money. My grandmother was untiring in her efforts (in my mother’s case entirely successful) to teach disrespect and contempt for money. She carried this to the length of refusing to write the word, and later in her letters to me, usually enclosing a cheque, would refer to it as ‘Filthy L—’. It was, indeed, to her a dirty word.