Aunts Up the Cross (2 page)

Aunts Up the Cross
is all over in fewer than 150 pages. A fan’s foreword should show the same regard for brevity, so I will back out with one last unreliable memory before her reliable ones begin. I think it was while we were walking along the esplanade of the Côte des Basques (by which I mean we could equally have been in the drawing-room of her holiday-home maisonette, but I would rather you heard waves in the background) that I upbraided her for having written no more than this one perfect book. She fobbed me off with another drink—all right, it
was
the drawing-room—and politely neglected to state the obvious, which was that she had written something so sensitive to its own past, and so responsive to its own present, that it contained its own future. All the books she might have written later were already in it. What she was too modest even to think was that all the books the rest of us wrote later are in it too.

Clive James, London, December 1996

My great-aunts, half of whom I never met in their lifetime, have sustained me throughout mine. In childhood with laughter, in adulthood with the recollections that gave birth to this book. Although only supporting characters in the fabric of those recollections, without them the singular nature of my family structure might have lacked the resonance that propelled me into recording it. So the four single aunts who never spoke to me during their lives are here still chattering on, and would not take kindly to the fact that they are doing so through the medium of this little memoir. In fact, they would hate it.

I came to record them and the rest of the family because of my husband’s death at thirty-three while undergoing one of the first open-heart operations. A doctor, he had published one book under a pseudonym and was at the time halfway through an autobiographical novel based on our marriage. ‘If I die having this operation,’ he said, ‘will you finish the book?’ This seemed logical to me, and easy, so I made the promise.

After his death I fled wintry England with my two small children, fourteen months and three years, to a calm haven in Italy. I failed to finish Emmet’s book but managed to write a diary for my children should I, too, die young. This is that diary.

It sat, yellowing in a drawer and forgotten, for seven years. One night, by then an established literary agent in London, I was at a cocktail party sharing a drink with publisher Anthony Blond. ‘Why do you never send me anything?’ he asked.

Mellowed by champagne, searching my mind for an unencumbered manuscript, I told him I didn’t have any books. ‘All I can think of is a fragment, which could be a play, I think, written by a dotty woman I went to school with.’

Anthony drove me home, demanded the pages before he left and after finding them and handing them over, I forgot them.

Two days later Anthony rang. ‘Where is this woman? She’s got to finish this book.’ Panic set in. ‘Oh, Anthony. She’ll never do that. She’ll never write another word. She’s Australian. She’s mad.’ We argued for some minutes, Anthony accusing me of odd behaviour for a literary agent, and finally announcing his intention to publish it as it stood—stands still today—hedging his bets with large margins, illustrations and thick paper, hopefully giving it the illusion of substance; I protesting that he couldn’t possibly publish 22,000 words as a book.

Eventually, I gave in and signed a deal over a delightful lunch in the garden of his office. Anthony asked me at last for the name of this untraceable, intractable, mad woman. I confessed. I became a reluctant Blond author. I changed no identities, not thinking a copy would ever reach Australia, in my mind carelessly consigning it to the equivalent of a publisher’s bottom drawer.

I am happy, though, that it was a success for Anthony—it remained in print for a respectable time—did not, I hope, offend too many people, except for the remaining aunts, and that I managed to hide under my maiden name, Robin Eakin, so that all the wonderful writers who seemed to value my opinions as their agent would never see me exposed.

Fifteen years passed. I began, with some timidity, to confess to a very few people that I had written a book. Safely out of print, my exposure could not be too widespread.

Among my clients was the dramatist Ben Travers, then in his nineties—three plays running in the West End of London, and still standing on his head for Michael Parkinson in TV interviews—a companion in laughter at our weekly dinners. He asked me about my Australian childhood. I gave him the old book, and he became its devotee. Many London publishers were vying for his autobiography, which I was urging him to write. He reluctantly agreed to do so on one condition—that whoever published his book must also re-issue mine.

I did not mention, nor consider, this when extracting bids from publishers for Ben’s book and when the best bid came in from Jeffrey Symmons of WH Allen, Ben and I were taken to a clinching and celebratory lunch by Jeffrey. When we rose from the table at its jolly close, flushed with wine and achievement, Ben clutched my hand. ‘You’ve told him the condition?’

Jeffrey’s glow diminished somewhat. ‘Condition?’ he asked nervously. As Ben disclosed it, his glow disappeared entirely. Poor Jeffrey, desperately embarrassed and in the kindest tone he could muster, said, ‘Robin, I didn’t know
you
had written a book.’ He saw the Travers manuscript drifting away from him; or encumbered by a nasty adjunct.

But, miraculously, it appeared that
Aunts
had been Jeffrey’s snatched bedside reading for some years. Glow back, we all three strolled back to the WH Allen offices for a conference with the marketing manager—Jeffrey now with not one, but two prospective authors. I was asked if I thought the book would have any sales potential in Australia. I had been sent, in addition to a steady trickle of ‘fan’ letters over the intervening years since publication, a copy of an advertisement from an Australian newspaper placed by one Max Harris, seemingly the proprietor of a chain of bookshops, proudly announcing a coup. He had unearthed fifty copies of
Aunts Up the Cross
—one copy per person only; first come, first served. This appeared ample proof of demand.

The marketing manager was delighted. Max Harris was not only known to him but was something of a literary guru in Australia and his endorsement would influence the number of copies printed. A letter was dispatched asking him for this. Ben was sent home to write a preface to the new edition, and I to update it in minor details.

Two weeks later came the reply from Max Harris: ‘
Aunts Up the Cross
was a good little book in its day but no one would buy a copy now.’ Apologies and embarrassment from Jeffrey; indignation from Ben; a shrug of shoulders from me; and abandonment of publication from the marketing division.

A year or so passed before a chance encounter uncovered a nest of misunderstandings. Max Harris, as literary advisor to Macmillan in England, had been chasing me for possible publication by Macmillan. His letters were never received. Kisses were exchanged and misunderstandings healed, and
Aunts
was published for the second time by Macmillan, who enjoyed as much success as Blond had and who swore the book would never fall from its back list.

It did. A few years passed. I was approached by Penguin, who rescued it from oblivion and sold it successfully until I asked for a reversion of rights as a film of the book appeared to be hovering in the background. In the background the film remained.

So now, for the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication, I have slipped happily into the company of Text authors.

Robin Dalton, 2015

For Lisa and Seamus

My great-aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling fairly fast in the wrong direction. It was Aunt Juliet’s habit, in addition to confusing the simpler rules of road safety, to wear dark glasses outdoors, winter and summer. This, being winter, probably contributed to the surprise advent of the bus. I think she wore the spectacles for the same reason that she often wore my mother’s black osprey and jet hat and old silver fox jacket in bed. This was an alarming sight for visitors who, not finding other evidence of eccentricity in Aunt Juliet, felt the strain of accepting her get-up as normal. The hat and the foxes and the spectacles were all part of a behaviour pattern which I can only attribute to a strongly developed magpie instinct. Aunt Juliet was both rich and foolishly generous, but she was untiring in her efforts to gather and hold fast to her person crumbs from poorer tables. She bullied my mother for years for the hat and the cape and, although my mother was attached to both, Aunt Juliet wore her out in the end. The dark glasses she had found, in the street. She was also particularly attached to her diseased and removed appendix, which reposed in a nest of gall-stones in a small spirit bottle on the second shelf of the china cabinet in my grandmother’s drawing-room. Until the appendix joined the Crown Derby and Wedgwood and Chelsea, I loved, as a child, to play with the china farmyard animals on the bottom shelf, but I could never go happily to the cabinet after Aunt Juliet’s operation.

Aunt Juliet never seemed unusual to me: she fitted perfectly into the framework of the family. Her untimely end might have been dramatic in a family more given over to quieter leave-takings. But, in ours, it just seemed natural. My mother always told me that we virtually killed Uncle Harry, Aunt Juliet’s husband. He was visiting us from the country, where he and Aunt Juliet lived, when he fell through our dining-room floor and broke his neck. The dining-room was on the ground floor, but the foundations of the house allowed for a good six-foot drop and when we discovered white ant in the floor and the builders took it up, nobody thought to tell Uncle Harry not to go into the dining-room. Great-uncle Spot fell off a ladder when changing a light bulb, and Great-uncle Luke tipped over backwards in his office chair. I don’t know what their injuries were, but to my childish mind I remember that effect pretty soon followed cause and they died. In addition to Spot and Luke, there had been ten girls in my grandmother’s family, of whom she was the eldest—but one, named Eva, died as a child from eating green apples, and an older sister, Jan, from blowing up a balloon. These were the tales told me by my grandmother and I accepted them.

Life in her family was richly and robustly lived: so it always seemed to my fascinated ears—and I would reflect with envy on those twelve busy lives humming away under a communal roof. But it was not only the attraction of family life for my solitary childhood that invested my grandmother’s family with fantasy and glamour. Looking back from the midst of my own ordinary adult life, it seems to me that a vein of quite extraordinary eventfulness enlivened the everyday existence of my mother’s and father’s lives and the lives of all my numerous great-aunts and -uncles and grandparents.

My great-grandfather was a Polish Jew, descended from generations of distinguished and learned rabbis. After the partition of Poland, he escaped military conscription in the Russian Army by swimming the Vistula on the eve of his fifteenth birthday. The story was vivid enough in its details as told to me by my grandmother up to this point. I could visualise the moonlight glinting on the dark water—hear the cries of the sentries on the banks—feel the panic of my great-grandfather when his companion swimming beside him in the dark was shot by the sentries and drowned. From the moment he climbed out safe on the Austrian bank, either her interest or mine must have waned, for I can recall nothing of his subsequent flight across Europe to England; of his meeting there at what must have been a much later date with my great-grandmother; or of the means by which he appeared many years later as a prosperous advertising executive and property owner in Australia. My grandmother was a young girl at the time of the family’s move to Australia, but she seemed never to have been conscious of a time when they were not rich; and so the flight from Poland cannot have been entirely unsubsidised. The Australia she came to at the age of twelve was a country where fortunes were to be made out of land. Most of my great-grandfather’s contemporaries settled in the bush and laid the foundations of sheep and cattle empires. My great-grandfather started in billboard advertising and his hoardings stretched in an unbroken line of posters on either side of his mile drive from his house to his office. The space thus acquired for display was the nucleus of a small kingdom in property.

The house in which they lived, Maramanah, was a sprawling, grey, turreted and balconied edifice. The five of the twelve children who survived and married brought home their own growing families to the house and to their now widowed father, and the impressions I formed of life there were emphasised by family group photographs taken in the ballroom, with the background of drapes and aspidistra; of the family orchestra—my grandmother, regal and beautiful in grey satin and pearls, straddling a harp, and Aunt Juliet, hair
en pompadour
, her pretty mouth pursed round a flute. Each child started the piano at four, the violin at seven, and a third instrument at twelve. Melba was known to sing at their musical evenings, and any visiting or resident musician of note would spend a great deal of their time in Sydney at Maramanah.