Aunts Up the Cross (5 page)

Death was always present, cosily accepted, in my life. The fairy tales I was told were the true and wonderfully stirring accounts of dead relations and how they had met their ends. The walls of the house were hung with their portraits and, indeed, so obscure was the relationship sometimes that I wonder if death alone was not sufficient reason for winning a place in my grandmother’s life. The books I read had all belonged to her only son, my dead Uncle Ken, killed at Gallipoli, and his mournful, beautiful, twice life-size portrait hung above my head. His swords and caps and Oxford mufflers still hung in the hall. His books were all by dead authors—the life cycle of the comic serial with which my children live was unknown to me.

Uncle Ken didn’t even die in action in the ordinary way. He was shipped back to England following a shrapnel wound; developed pneumonia and, one day, while my mother and grandmother were visiting him in the hospital, he asked for some bread and sugar—took one bite and died, leaving the imprint of his teeth in the sugar. My grandmother told me this sad story so many times, so graphically, that I could almost feel the gritting of the sugar on my own teeth, and certainly the thought of pneumonia always carries with it the association of that apparently fatal bite. I longed to ask her if Uncle Ken had had time to swallow it, but by this stage of the story, tears would be flowing freely down her face and I felt it somehow to be an unfitting and callous query. Our other favourite reading, which usually took place in her bedroom, were Uncle Ken’s letters from Oxford, which she kept in a large trunk under her bed. One or two of these, never less than twenty pages long, were hauled out every day and read to me. She was determined that in some way I would absorb something of my uncle’s thoughts and experiences. In addition to the trunk under the bed, a huge old edition of
Webster’s Dictionary
sat on her bedside table from which she read two pages every night.

So my childhood life was sharply defined and varied in my memory by the geography of the house. My grandmother’s drawing-room where the china cabinet offered up its riches at one end and the book shelves at the other is most vivid in my mind. I found it both comforting and stimulating, and spent many hours curled up on the sofa steadily reading through my dead uncle’s books. They were mostly books he had acquired at Oxford, and I suppose they reflected the undergraduate tastes of 1910–14: they passed indelibly into my child’s mind and it never occurred to me to ask for anything lighter or more suitable for a five to twelve year old. I digested all of George Meredith, most of Thomas Hardy (inexplicably, at twelve, my favourite was
The Dynasts
), Ibsen, Charles Lamb, Maeterlinck (in French), a series of ‘Lives of the Master Musicians’ (Beethoven’s was more thrilling to me than any schoolgirl romance—I still picture him perpetually roaring on a mountain top) and, for poets, Keats, Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Browning. Self-involvement was utter in
The Mill on the Floss.
Maggie Tulliver was my heroine; I longed to have her thick, dark locks and fierce, lively eye, and I longed for a brother such as Tom. I was not lonely, but the closeness of relationship of the Tulliver family seemed to me such a satisfying and enriching condition compared to my store of second cousins, great-aunts and great-uncles, and the shadowy company of the dead. To satisfy my fantasies, when I was eight I wrote a book, neatly written and copiously illustrated, entitled ‘My Relations’. I made gallant attempts to disguise the few and distant ones that I had under false names, but Aunt Juliet is there, to the life: ‘She means well but she doesn’t mean much’, and the four maiden great-aunts concentrated into one—‘I have an aunt whose single-blessedness has soured her to the world.’

Occasionally my grandmother invaded my privacy and then she would read aloud to me something she considered suitable for a small child, as a change from the letters and the dictionary. It was usually
Brer Rabbit
or
The Houseboat on the Styx.
Sometimes it was Pepys’ diary and, when on my seventh birthday I was given a dog, a snapping little ginger Pomeranian, I called him Samuel Pepys in honour of my then favourite author.

Pepys was the only childhood pet I had, apart from a fierce galah in a cage. I think we tired of the galah fairly quickly (unless he tired of us and escaped) when my father failed in all attempts to teach him to imitate the bald parrot who lived on the Victoria–New South Wales border, in Albury railway station. He had two raucous calls in his repertoire, as one alighted from the train: ‘Give me one more feather and I’ll fly’ and ‘Stand back! I’m an eagle.’ The galah, never to be dignified with a name, outstared my father, and stuck to his own contemptuous squawk.

These sayings, along with those of Samuel Pepys, permeated my childhood, jumbled up, the bird’s cries merging with Pepys’ admonitions to Mrs Pepys. No extra resonance was afforded them or the tunes and advertising slogans of the day—all of them became the stuff of vocabulary.

‘I like Aeroplane Jelly’ floated behind the little aeroplanes on banners as they patrolled the beaches. ‘I like Aeroplane Jelly; Aeroplane Jelly for me. I like it for breakfast: I like it for tea. Aeroplane Jelly for me’ floated out of the radio; on entering a country town by road, we were greeted by a large banner strung from telegraph pole to pole: ‘Welcome to Leura—a good Rexona town’; on departure, a ‘Farewell’ replaced the welcome.

My grandmother’s bedroom, where I lay listening to her stories, was the centre of a more active and gregarious life. Her dining-room was always a sinister room, redolent of Juliet’s widowhood and thoughts of Uncle Harry, into which I seldom ventured. The cupboard under the stairs had a tiny window and loads of treasures, but here Rosa Toomey, the cook, hung up her hat and coat and left her small suitcase crammed with her life’s savings in pound notes which she brought to work every day; and so I had the obscure feeling of being in forbidden territory. Halfway up the stairs, Juliet’s room was given over entirely to Juliet’s material comfort and possessions. Dozens of dresses hung under their organdie covers, and tray after tray slid out of the lowboy and the tallboy packed with gloves, and scarves and underwear, all in their heliotrope organdie bags. The whole house was stuffed with the haphazard acquisitions of the Victorian and Edwardian middle-class family. In the dark hall, one bumped into corners of substantial carved camphor chests: inlaid brass ornaments, trays, huge vases and gongs gleamed from every corner. ‘Cloisonne ware’ was a favourite lamp base: every glass surface, however utilitarian, was heavily cut. I harboured the vague idea that glass was really called ‘cut glass’, except when used in window panes. The dressing-tables of my grandmother and Aunt Juliet were a riot of silver angels and cherubs entwined and garlanded around pots and jars and pin-trays, and frolicking round the tops of cut-glass scent bottles. On the walls hung perfectly hideous paintings—brightly coloured sunsets and coy, long-haired ladies simpering naked on the seashore—and an occasional etching of some quite uninspiring building. Stored away in drawers and in the camphor chests were mounds of beautiful lace, Irish crochet jackets and delicate shawl collars, salvaged from nightdresses and blouses and former glories; silver reticules, and discarded jet fringes.

Upstairs in my parents’ domain, although I had my own small bedroom there, life was so packed with people and incident that no corner of it remains privately mine in my memory. The life of our part of the house revolved around the telephone—a wind-up contraption with an operator at the other end—constantly ringing for the doctor, and the snores of my father trumpeting away through the noise. The hall at the top of the stairs was large enough for a table, and a few chairs, the telephone, another flight of stairs leading to the servants’ rooms, and a window opening into the kitchen which faced the top of the stairs. This window had no possible use as ventilation or light entry, as there was another perfectly adequate window in the kitchen opening onto the outside world, so my mother must have had it knocked in the wall for freer social intercourse. Whoever was working in the kitchen could see who was coming up the stairs and vice versa. The bottom two or three rows of stairs leading to the maids’ rooms were usually occupied as chairs by visitors who could call through the kitchen window to my mother, invariably making or drinking tea. Later, she went even further and ripped the kitchen door off its hinges as well. She did it herself, which was a feat of some strength. Next to the kitchen was the sole, over-worked bathroom, strategically placed bang in the middle of this continually crowded hall. When I was very small I remember there being a key to the bathroom door, for I had one hated nannie who locked me in the bathroom as punishment. But at some period it was lost, for never after was there a key. This created a situation in which any visit to our bathroom involved a feeling of insecurity and necessitated a constant state of alertness.

As may be surmised, ours was a house in which the feeling of being ‘lived in’ flourished to the exclusion of all else. I suppose it must have been fairly shabby but one didn’t notice this amid the crush of people, the cigarette smoke, and the constant preparation or eating of food. My mother smoked nearly 100 cigarettes per day—there was not a piece of furniture that had not been scarred by her butts—and, not in the least house-proud, all her enormous energy and creativeness was focused on her kitchen. She never cooked until the war, and then when we were reduced to Rosa, increasingly cranky and growing older, and one maid, she attacked the business of cooking with gusto and joy. She was a natural chef—inventive and lavish. She was indifferent to her own comfort; the sofa would, and often did, do as well as her bed. She and my father shared a large dressing-room which was always littered with his clothes, and the only place in the house to which she could retire in an attempt at privacy was the unlockable bathroom. ‘My idea of luxury,’ she would say, ‘is to be allowed to go to the lavatory by myself.’ This seldom happened, as my grandmother hated to be shut out, and thought it was an unnatural and unfilial act.

There was nothing in the house forbidden to me. I was allowed to choose my own wallpaper and paint my own bedroom. One year, when I was about nine, I chose a bright, sick pink, and the next year an even brighter hospital green. Halfway round the skirting board, with only the fronts done of my chest of drawers and wardrobe, I would tire, and the painter would be called in to finish the job, but not until I had painted the lavatory seat in the year’s favourite shade.

These twin themes dominating the house, of death and lack of privacy, merged and culminated in the unhappy event of my mother killing the plumber. At one end of the upper hall was the back door, normally left open for sun and air. One summer morning the servants were busy elsewhere, the house was for once empty, and my mother emerged naked from her dressing-room
en route
to take a bath. At that moment the plumber (he was a new one) came up the back stairs and met her on the landing. He promptly had a heart attack from which he never recovered. My mother always felt that the fact that death was not instantaneous detracted from the impact of her nudity and the dramatic possibilities of the story.

Although I was a solitary child in a house full of adults, the house was undeniably always full, and this variety of characters I knew intimately at an early age was a rich fund of entertainment. I remember Tony McGill, our starting-price bookmaker, who ate a pound of raw tripe every morning for breakfast. At the same meal, he was also apt to whip out his not inconsiderable male member, of which he was inordinately proud, and display it on a plate. Perhaps my father had embellished this story, perhaps Tony had boasted of having done it only once, but it made our own family breakfast appear a dull event to me.

Thursday was ‘settling’ day. Every Thursday night, Tony McGill came round to finalise the previous Saturday’s betting. Tony had a special line in patter, which he had learnt from the then famous Fitzpatrick Travelogues. Something about the rich, resonant tones of Mr Fitzpatrick’s voice and his choice of exotic sounding places impressed Tony. As he left with the week’s takings he would wave to assembled company and call out in his ringing bookmaker’s voice, ‘Farewell to Calabadad, Land of Mysterious Women!’