by Anne Manne
If ‘Trust Mr Menzies’ was her central positive political principle, then ‘Never Trust the Japs’ was the central negative one. She had never forgiven them for World War II, which considering the suffering inflicted was neither unusual nor incomprehensible. Less comprehensible was that Nan believed that, even by the 1970s and 1980s, the Japs were still up to something.
One day when I was visiting her from university, a news item came on her newly acquired TV, showing bloodied crowds scattering away in terror after a bombing somewhere in the Middle East. Nan’s eyes narrowed and she said nastily, ‘That will be the Japs’.
‘Nan’, I remonstrated, deciding to take her political education in hand. ‘Nan, it is nothing to do with the Japanese. The war ended in 1945 for heaven’s sake.’
She looked at me sceptically. Then with a little shake of the head and a deprecating laugh, said: ‘You’re very clever, dear’.
It wasn’t a compliment.
It was a dismissal.
It was a thought along the lines Don Watson describes when he says the farming folk who were his clan in Gippsland, said of his Left turn in politics: ‘They should never have sent that boy to university’.
To be clever was to be like my mother and to go to university and begin voting Labor, and worse. It was to begin a downward spiral of philosophical free thought which disturbed the settled and sacred order of things, ending with free love, divorce, atheism and bloody revolution. In short, it could only end badly. To be clever meant to be doomed, like my mother, to losing forever a firm grasp on The Principles of Life.
If Nan had been my mother I would have found it impossible to forgive her politics. As her daughter I might have gone crazy. But not as a granddaughter. It is quite possible to see all of someone’s manifold faults and still love them. I loved Nan. I found her hilarious. It was not that I felt right was on her side. In the tension between them, I was more on my mother’s side. I was very much the loyal daughter. Often I would feel anguish or anger, over Nan’s tactlessness with Mum. But Nan was also sweet-natured, kind, loving in her own way, and, within her own narrow sphere, had a kind of virtue and a steely tenacity, a stoicism and real strength of character. Like so many women of her time, she possessed a will of pure steel beneath an apparently pliant exterior. As much as I didn’t like her many prejudices, I did like her wilfulness.
Grandchildren have a kind of distance on grandparents that their parents don’t. The jagged line of pride and shame, identification and repudiation is far enough removed to let disagreement pause at exasperation, able to be passed off as Nan is impossible, which admits truth, but does not dim affection. Nan convinced me of a central truth I learned growing up in the country: what passes for ‘ordinary’ is, in fact, pretty bizarre. I suppose it was to do with Kant’s line about never straightening the crooked timber of humanity.
To my grandmother, making a home of grace and order was tied inextricably to female identity. Goodness of character was not identical with, but was inseparable from how she ran her house. Housework, for her, was a social act—gaining her respect in the community—and it was also a moral one. Thus it is not surprising that the second core Principle of Life for Nan was ‘Never Get Caught Out’. She drew me aside when I was first married, to warn me of the dangers of being ‘Caught Out’. I thought it was going to be one of those dreadful moments when an elderly relative suddenly abandons all propriety and broaches a topic of unexpected delicacy, but it was not. She confessed that on one occasion, and only one, the superior relations had visited when her house was in a mess.
At the centre of my grandmother’s Empire Domestica was her linen cupboard. It was a work of art. Not only was there a place for everything and everything in its place, but each linen sheet, painstakingly collected for her glory box was washed, starched, scented and folded. There was a certain manner of folding, a strict procedure which had to be adhered to, so the wreaths of material would take up precisely the same space each time. A normally untidy person, whenever helping her with putting away the linen after ironing day, I always obeyed to the letter all her instructions as the piles of freshly laundered cloth were carefully reintegrated into the perfect order of that space. To violate that order would have seemed a sacrilege.
There was also a large array of purposes for obscure pieces of cloth, many now rendered obsolescent as a result of the remorseless advance of estapol and the decline of French polishing. There were lace doilies, often with the great aunts’ or her own embroidery, for teacups on polished wood, slightly larger ones for cake trays, throwover cloths and so on, some for ordinary use and some for best. There was the linen for daily family use, others for middling occasions such as card evenings with her women friends where there was considerable rivalry over the production of supper, and yet others for best, the special family celebrations when my great aunts would descend from the ‘Big House’ to visit. Indeed, there was a kind of hierarchy of cloth, so the selection of a particular item might represent an uncomfortable judgement on an unsuspecting visitor.
Nan’s days followed an obedience to ritual, common to the country women of her town—Baking Fridays, Washing Mondays, Ironing Tuesdays, so the linen cupboard was repacked each Tuesday. The linen cupboard existed inside a huge bathroom of which she was inordinately proud, and by an accident of architecture was at the absolute centre of the house. Even in later years when visiting, I could never resist the desire to open her linen cupboard and simply look.
My grandmother, having ‘married up’ into a family which was very wealthy as a result of the gold rush in Victoria, was always on her mettle to prove her worth—by housewifely virtue. I once made the mistake of asking her about her family in front of my great aunts—the sisters of my grandfather. She blushed with shame to recall the sturdy farming stock who were her people. Instantly regretting my error, I noticed a flash of scorn cross my Great Aunt Lily’s face. Only one generation of wealth separated my aunt from equally humble origins, but it was enough.
Although the great aunts felt superior to her, Nan was in fact the linchpin of the entire family. When my grandfather’s orchard burned down, including the family home, being uninsured meant financial ruin. The family fortune having long since dwindled, it was my grandmother who kept the family together by working as a cook. My grandfather simply collapsed, the early experience of privilege ill-preparing him for the blows that life can deal out. Their marriage by this time had congealed into a silent war. Our family myth has it that my grandfather spoke so little to my grandmother that he lost the power of speech. I think it must have been an early stroke which rendered him almost unintelligible, but such was our sense of their life together that we put it down to the bitter silence into which he had retreated. He seemed to me, as a child, an unforgiving and brooding presence, a dark figure on the edge of the almost entirely female world I grew up in.
My grandmother conducted a guerrilla war via her cooking. A brilliant cook, she punished my grandfather for his misdemeanours, imagined or real we could not tell, by the simple withdrawal of a favourite pudding. We could tell the state of their most intimate relation—truce, armistice, escalation or total war—by the simple observance of what arrived on the dinner table for dessert. All without a single word being spoken.
There was in the perfect predictability of Nan’s days both a deep comfort and an extraordinary limitedness. Comfort came from the fact that her housekeeping abilities meant her house was always a pleasure to be in, possessing the kind of ease and grace which comes from freedom from domestic chaos. The limitedness is best revealed by an incident when, finding myself in Melbourne without transport, and needing to rush to the aid of a family member in distress, I rang my grandmother to ask her whether she could visit them until I arrived. But it was Washday! I sensed the horror in her voice at the thought of disrupting this time-honoured ritual. Nothing could persuade her it was an emergency. Even as I spoke, my voice trailed away with the hopelessness of making her understand that here was a moment which
had lifted itself out of the quiet flow of everyday moments, and required action.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll come’, I said weakly.
‘That would be best, dear’, she replied, the relief in her voice palpable. So I borrowed a friend with a car and we drove 200 kilometres in a great hurry, so as to make sure she did not have to drive two. Interestingly, it seemed absolutely right that I did so.
Despite our differences, Nan was a deeply important presence in my life. A young woman said to me recently that she had not been blessed with the sitcom nan, with all the clichéd cookies and domesticity. Nan was close to what the young woman had in mind. It was this side of Nan that I found deeply comforting, while not having the slightest desire that my mother be like that, nor to ever emulate it myself. I loved staying with my grandmother. It was like floating back in time to a delicious infancy, the beds made for you in the morning with the chintz coverlets smoothed over, the meals appearing with perfect regularity, every physical need anticipated, the soft poached eggs with their yolks oozing into soggy white toast in the morning, the weak milk coffee every day at 11 a.m., the cake tins full of ginger fluff sponges and lemon slices, the compulsory naps. (Even when we were in our twenties and thirties!) The key was not to struggle, or attempt to reform or change anything, but to give up all autonomy, just for a few days. By the time you left it was hard to remember the notion of free will at all, so pleasant had submitting to hers become.
Once we drove down with Nan to Melbourne to shop, and parked the old station wagon at Spencer Street Railway Station opposite a busy Bourke Street. Nan immediately gathered us together, and would not let us proceed until she brought out the picnic basket. In full view of the bemused city commuters scurrying past, she spread a huge, brightly checked picnic rug on the bonnet, unpacked the fresh ham sandwiches and the cake tin bearing her famous lemon slice, and poured steaming tea from a thermos. My teenage sisters were completely humiliated, blushing scarlet and muttering, all their little hopes of concealing our provincialism and looking cool at some stylish city café dashed. One hissed savagely: ‘You’d think we lived in the time of bullock and dray! Nobody, but nobody has a picnic in a car park.’ Nan just handed her a sandwich. I was surprised by what they said, but interested in this view of things. Still a child, as yet oblivious of keeping up appearances, I was really enjoying my sandwich.
Nan had other eccentricities. She was the wildest driver I have ever travelled with. While my sister’s jibe about the bullock and dray was a trifle unfair, it was certainly true that she had never quite made the transition from the horse and buggy era, when the modest speed of the conveyance meant that erratic progress in a vehicle was significantly less consequential than with the motor car. My grandparents owned an old grey Austin Morris Minor, a little round bubble in shape, with dodgy gears and a dicey accelerator. Their drive had a tricky curve, guaranteeing an alarming, lurching exit as you shot out of the garage backwards at top speed, braked sharply, and then revved the Morris, ricocheting round the corner with full throttle before it could conk out. My mother maintains that my grandfather had once rounded this corner and, on seeing me, his least favourite grandchild, standing in the drive, had actually accelerated. My mother had to lunge and pluck me out of harm’s way. Pop just chugged fiercely onward without pause, eyes gleaming, on his way to the bowling club. I was sceptical that he was actually trying to mow me down, although I quite liked the drama of my mother’s suspicion. I think, more likely, he was hurtling around that corner, and the fact that I was frightened and had to jump out of the way was an unexpected bonus to the daily challenge of successfully circumventing the drive without the car stalling. My mother’s suspicion, and the fact that I actually had to think it over before concluding that the milder case was more plausible, tells you a lot about my grandfather and our relation to him.
When Nan was at the wheel the whole car trembled and shook. Her eyes, growing rheumy and watery, were still sharp enough to spot a snappy dress with a crisp, white collar in the window of the Valma Lee dress shop in the main street, so she often drove straight across to have a better look. Reasonable enough you might say, except for the small detail that the shop was on the opposite side of the road. Nan’s dimming eyesight and need for a better look necessitated her driving straight into oncoming traffic in the now rather busy provincial metropolis. Usually the screams from her terrified grandchild were enough to alert her to the problem, but not always. It was the same when she took us to look at her old place in Lockington. She would just drive across to the opposite side of the road, again defying all oncoming traffic—only this time it was a highway and the oncoming traffic was travelling at greater speed—all the while extolling the virtues of her lovely old home.
After the farm of her early married life, near Rochester, had been destroyed by fire, it was perhaps hardly surprising that the firmest of all Nan’s Principles of Life was ‘The Importance of a Lovely Brick Home’. No other type of building could be contemplated. I remember telling her about one of my wilder university share houses, which I shared, not with other university students, but with musicians. Compared to these housemates I led a pretty sedate life, trotting briskly to and from university each day, studying at least some of the time, while they slept until 3 p.m., exhausted after a wild night, lighting another joint, and then doing it all again.
I told Nan I was living in a house full of musicians. I omitted the small fact that they were 1970s musicians, with all that that implies. ‘Oh! Musicians!’ she said, brightening, nodding her little grey head with its blue-rinse perm admiringly. I knew she was thinking of gaily attired ladies and gentlemen gathered around a piano for a jolly sing-along of Gilbert and Sullivan arias, her favourites, just as she had done playing secondo in duets with my Great Auntie Gert (an excellent soprano) before World War I. It seemed mean to disabuse her of this appealing scenario, and as we admired the fictitious scene together, I managed briefly to suppress the thought of the actual, drug-addled creatures who lived in my two-storey terrace. Besides, I told myself, as I caught the train home, her level-headed granddaughter never imbibed, and I needed to protect her innocence.
What she was most impressed by, however, was that this run-down Fitzroy dive had iron lacework on the veranda, and was made of brick. This detail pleased her enormously. She gave me to understand that a lot else could be wrong with a life, so long as it occurred in a house made with solid materials.
Before my marriage I visited her. She was by then very old and frail, and about to leave the home where she had spent almost all of her adult life to live with my aunt in Queensland. Strangely enough, despite our radical difference of temper, outlook, values and everything else, I found myself actually wanting her approval or blessing in some way. I wanted to persuade her that my marriage was to the right man. As I launched into telling her about my husband-to-be I realised that I had prepared the case for the defence against a wily prosecutor. Dammit! I was going to leave that house with her approval, even if it took me all day. For just a brief moment in one afternoon, I felt what my mother must have felt all her life, trying to win her approval.
Early on in the discussion, however, she floored me. None of my prepared and rehearsed answers and potential defences of my beloved were relevant. She wasn’t much interested in my husband-to-be, his accomplishments, how we met or how he treated me, his many qualities, or even my happiness. She wasn’t interested in a Great Love or any other sort of love for that matter. After all, Married Love had not smiled upon her. It was like a truce with the Japanese. She heard what you were saying but never really believed in it. Love didn’t come into the conversation any more than it made an appearance in her own marriage.
She got straight to the point.
Was the house in which we were to live to begin our married life ‘A Lovely Brick Home’?
I was dumbstruck. My mouth stayed open quite a long time. I simply had not—but should have—anticipated this angle of attack.
‘Well, Nan …’ I
had to trail off.
I had to admit it was not brick. After that, all my extolling of my beloved’s virtues had no impact. Nothing would deflect her, even for an instant, from the main point. My line of argument petered out.
‘Not brick’, she repeated tremulously, as if speaking of the most terrible defeat.
She was sitting in one of the tapestry, pinch-buttoned Queen Anne chairs that my mother so hated as exemplifying and representing the Old World, positioned beneath the railway clock and next to the polished mahogany wireless. Her teacup trembled, making a small tinkling noise as she placed it carefully on the tray. Her now-frail body was almost swallowed up by the ominously big black cat she called Kitty but which her grandchildren had christened ‘The Slug’. (It was large, long and stuck stickily and limpet-like to her lap, only to get off to eat voraciously, and grow larger.)
‘Not brick’, she repeated sadly, shaking her head as if in disbelief.
Then we just sat there. We sat silently, while she grieved over the fate which had befallen her equal second-favourite grandchild (the favourite was blonde, and with curls!).
The old railway clock continued to tick, a steady, solemn rhythm which now sounded just a little mournful. The gas fire whirred in the grate. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. I could hear a locomotive hoot as it slid into the sidings at the nearby railway station.