So This Is Life

by Anne Manne

  As the silence ticked on, I had an idea. I wrestled for a moment or two over the ethics of fibbing, against the disappointment I was causing this old, now frail, woman. Who was I to deny her happiness in what might well be one of her last moments on this wretched earth? I thought of the stucco around our house, with pebbles stuck in it. Once upon a time it was mortar. More or less. Surely it was not stretching the truth too much to describe it as brick? To give such pleasure to an old lady?

  ‘Well, Nan’, I said slowly, ‘it is … sort of … brick’.

  At this she relaxed visibly, and without further ado, gave the union her blessing.

  One day, just after my mother had come to stay for her eighty-fourth birthday, we were telling my daughter about Nan and The Principles of Life over a cup of tea at the kitchen table. All the long-held tension in my mother in relation to Nan seemed to have dissolved. We laughed at their tussles over the Spanish Civil War, Nan’s novels, the wild driving and her faith in the felicity of life bestowed by A Lovely Brick Home.

  Then my mother said quietly, with an air of hard-won justice, that she thought Nan maybe had a point about having a white contrast with a coloured woollen jumper. Surprised to hear this late-in-life capitulation to one of Nan’s core principles, I looked at her. She made a rueful gesture. I realised she was wearing a sweater with a crisp, white collar.

  There was, around the turn of the century, a fashion for botanical names. My great aunts were called Daisy, Lily and Ivy, and my grandfather William, after the flower Sweet William. He married my grandmother, Olive, thus preserving the horticultural purity of their names. The great aunts, all unmarried, lived in a formerly grand but now decaying two-storey house, built at the height of the family fortune made during the gold rush. It was situated on top of a hill, overlooking the townspeople. This lofty position expressed quite precisely their relation to the town. Rumour had it that the aunts’ unmarried state was because the few socially acceptable beaus had met their end at Gallipoli.

  The house was a peculiar mixture of former wealth and present penury, an odd combination of the shabby and the grand, as were their lives. The fortune, from not the first but the second gold rush of deep-seam mining, had transformed Scottish builders into the late colonial gentry. With extraordinary rapidity, it had also transformed my great aunts’ sense of themselves. I cannot help but notice, now and then, the truth of Freud’s observation that the chances flung one’s way by Lady Luck are usually interpreted to signify things about oneself, a kind of verdict. The rich seem rarely able to transcend a peculiar complaisance, a certain self-congratulatory air, even with inherited wealth, while the poor are more likely to feel somehow ashamed of themselves, as if their lack of worldly resources is God’s judgement upon them. We are mostly aware, of course, of the effects of poverty on the human spirit, but are perhaps less alert to the distortions of character resulting from good fortune.

  Yet if there was snobbery, it was softened by the fact that they were too graceful to let it be seen much, so it was rarely resented by others, combined as it was with a quite perfect courtesy. The aunts received us each week following the Sunday lunch (a roasted joint or bird, cooked by my grandmother, and using the second-best cutlery and linen) for afternoon tea. We walked over the road from my grandmother’s house, and made our way across the old cobblestones of their backyard, past the peeling, yellow paintwork of the old stable. From this stable, once a week, emerged, not a phaeton and four glossy carriage horses, but an immaculate 1930 cream Buick, which would creak its way gently down the hill to the local Presbyterian church. Ivy was the chauffeur, driving with leather kid gloves clutching the wheel; Daisy the passenger. The only other destinations were golf, for Ivy, or, in the far distant past, an annual holiday at Erskine House at Lorne, a grand old hotel, where they played tennis and croquet. (And once, Ivy was inveigled into carrying horse feed to our paddock. I remember guiltily observing a rough chaff bag with long whiskers of yellow grain spilling into maroon leather seats. My guilt was probably misplaced for the horses had escaped and in the drama that followed Ivy was quite skittish with excitement—I have the feeling it was the most interesting thing to have happened to her in decades.)

  In a long, dark drawing room cluttered with fading Victoriana, Great Aunt Daisy would hold court. We children squirmed, sighing, our bare summer skin sticking to the faded tapestry of the old chaise longue or the delicate but alarmingly rickety ladies gossip chairs, beneath a huge and daunting painting of King Charles on his way down the river to be beheaded. I would survey longingly an ancient mahogany bookcase holding leather bibles, copies of Shakespeare, novels like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, bound volumes of English poetry, and Daisy’s 1903 school prize for English essay writing. There were tall narrow windows with heavy velvet drapes with lace inserts from which clouds of dust exploded, if a restless child happened to bump against them, then floated downward in stray sunbeams, as we listened for the umpteenth time to the story of Great Aunt Daisy’s triumph at the 1913 Governor’s Ball. (I once made a dreadful faux pas of commenting, when shown a photo of Daisy at the ball, not on her beauty, but on her beautiful dress. It was an appalling blunder whose offence was only softened by the fact that it could be told over and over, on subsequent Sunday visits, as a story about the follies of the young, for our uncertain pleasure.)

  Outside in the hall, if we could escape, one could hear the muffled rise and fall of Daisy’s voice (she had got as far as the Picnic Races of 1939) and survey the polished mahogany banister curving away upstairs into forbidden territory, which, I felt sure, held interesting secrets. Occasionally we would be escorted upstairs, to follow a corridor of closed doors to the collapsing balcony, held aloft by the iron lacework, with firm instructions, always disobeyed, not to play on the collapsing south end. There we looked down over the town, kicked off sandals to feel the breaths of warm air on bare skin, while keeping one ear cocked for the promising rumble and tinkle which indicated that Great Aunt Ivy was wheeling the trolley carrying afternoon tea (cakes and biscuits baked either by my grandmother or the neighbours and thin lime cordial). And there, above and beyond everything, high on our balcony, in the peculiar alliance that usually warring children form in solidarity against the boredom inflicted by adult rituals, we whinged.

  Yet that sense of boredom, for me, was not really the truth of it. Some kinds of boredom are such that they become, well, exquisite. But it was more than that. There was something else which meant that the normal childish sensations of boredom, of time stretching out longer and longer with less and less to fill the spaces, were transcended by a kind of radical interest. Interest in what, you may ask, impatient for scandal, action, adventure, what happened in their lives. I can answer with great certainty—nothing. Absolutely nothing happened. But it was precisely this stillness and quietude that interested me so deeply, all the ‘never-saids’ of their existence. What had happened to them? What were their stories? These three old women, once so beautiful, vivacious and formidable, just whispers of past loves now lost, all the disappointments and grief hidden, so stoically endured but never spoken of.

  So the boredom of those interminable Sunday afternoons, in a sense was mere surface, the deeper truth was that of radical interest. I was immediately alert to, half-exasperated, half-respectful, repelled by and yet attracted to this staid and perfect order, wanting to somehow penetrate the surface of that stillness, to open its secrets.

  There was in the great aunts’ house an atmosphere of Victorian times, a nineteenth-century respectability which established a long, ineradicable tap root of primness—being sticklers for old-fashioned courtesy, for example—in the family. None of us have ever, whatever our sojourns in bohemia, quite thrown it off. Yet the aunts also had style and grace. Not long after we arrived, they took us for a picnic, unfurling a huge tartan rug onto the rough bush grass underneath spindly paperbark gums. Then they unpacked a magnificent wicker basket, producing a tablecloth, white linen napkins, treats of impossibly daint
y cakes and sandwiches, and poured tea from an ornate silver pot.

  The grace is best seen when I visited Ivy in her last years, when she was suffering from Alzheimer’s in the local hospital for the aged. My mother announced (loudly, for Ivy was by then very deaf) that Anne and Robert had come to visit. Ivy inclined her head graciously and swept forward, hand outstretched, ‘Anne Robinson? How lovely to meet you! Is it your first visit to these parts?’ Memory had failed but courtesy had not.

  Their Scottish pride was something of a handicap as the fortune dwindled and dwindled. Some of the last few resources were put, on Daisy’s determination, into a slender stipend for my mother, a gifted student, to attend Melbourne University when the burning of the family farm threatened to prevent it. They survived, rather as Henry Handel Richardson describes the Irish sisters in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, stick-thin, wearing old woollen tweed skirts, rattling about in a huge, old house. It was generally agreed, invisibly, that when they could no longer afford domestic service, either my grandmother or neighbours would cook and bake for them. It was taken for granted, accepted as if a part of nature, that they could not really learn now to fend for themselves. Biscuit and cake tins were, as a consequence, always full. In winter soups and stews appeared as if by magic. When Meals on Wheels arrived it was as if it was just a continuation of domestic service. For the rest of the housework, reflecting a division of labour, which often occurs in all-female households, the strongest and most dominant personality, Daisy, did little domestic work. It fell to the shyest, Ivy, after Lily died, to do the work that most wives do. Ivy did, however, have her vengeance. As Daisy grew deafer, Ivy grew more talkative. Possessed of a subversive wit, when Daisy held court, Ivy would drop delicately ironic remarks at Daisy’s expense, just below her hearing level. The ensuing laughter Daisy bore with a dignified, if mortified, silence.

  Gradually all remaining properties were sold and eventually even the old family home was put on the market. The man who bought the old Buick, was, by all accounts, trembling with disbelief at his luck—a 1930 Buick in perfect order, only a few thousand on the clock, being sold for the proverbial song. His hands were shaking so much he could hardly write the cheque. The aunts moved into a smaller Edwardian house, and lived on the proceeds of the sale of the ‘Old Home’. Yet even that could not last forever, and the aunts’ stubborn refusal to apply for the pension—a mixture of the hauteur of former wealth and Scottish pride—meant it likely they would end on the charity of my grandmother.

  They were saved, however, by the former prime minister, Mr Menzies. My great aunts, like my grandmother, set a lot of store by Mr Menzies and his opinions. In a fanfare of publicity, he took the old age pension. And so, laughing it off as a mere trifle, much as Richard Mahony’s sisters laughed off the little gifts which kept starvation from their door as ‘some foolishness of Richard’s’, the aunts laughed over the unexpected respectability given to the old age pension. For if Mr Menzies could take the pension, so too, would they.

  Silence had descended. The ceiling fan whirred overhead. I was standing in front of the class spelling out loud, from memory, our weekly list. ‘Now’, said the teacher, in a mean tone, ‘since you seem so clever, we will try something different’. He held up a new chart. ‘Look at it for a few moments, then we’ll see how many you can remember. In the correct order, please.’

  Everyone was watching, waiting. I began spelling again, without looking, my back to the list, in the correct order. My classmates cheered.

  The teacher frowned, dissatisfied, as if something had gone wrong with his plan. He leaned back on ancient hips.

  ‘You may sit down.’

  When I looked up again from copying the words into my exercise book, he was looking at me, still frowning, tapping his long, polished, brown pointer stick against the grey trousers encasing a thin leg.

  We called him ‘Old Emu’. He was my Grade 5 and 6 teacher. He had small horn-rimmed spectacles behind which gleamed narrowed eyes, hungry for Grammatical Errors of Any Kind. He didn’t care about content, only form. He had hips which squeaked like rusty hinges, just before he crept up behind a child and pounced with a kind of ecstasy: ‘Aha, an error’. As a child, I always felt those creaky hips were closely related to his pedantry. He was very tall, and the top of his body swivelled on those ancient, creaky hinges, going forward and back, like a bird of prey. His neck was long and thin, sitting oddly on his shoulders, like an emu’s neck, with the same propensity to jerk back and forward as he walked. He had an emu’s skin, too, gnarled and scaly, full of whorls and strange crevices. He had a peculiar expression, a grin which had frozen long ago into a grimace. That odd grimace seemed to intensify when he looked at me. His eye was every bit as sharp as that of an emu, glinting in the sun; when he was angry his nose would get pointy, like a dangerous beak.

  I had come to Old Emu’s class after my last blissful year at a two-teacher rural school, then on the town’s outskirts. My previous teacher, Mr R, I had absolutely loved. In turn I had basked in his affection. He had liked my liveliness and we had got along famously all year. One day Mr R had written the words ‘Aborigine’ and ‘assimilation’ on the board. He pointed out that it was a very strange thing that people jeered at Aborigines for the colour of their skin, calling them ‘Boongs’, ‘Abos’ and ‘Darkies’, when they themselves lay on beaches and on the lawn at country swimming pools to look tanned and dark skinned. You could hear the curl of scorn in his voice. The class was silent, drinking this in.

  I was highly, highly interested. Mr R was not just the first teacher—but also the first man—I had ever met who had a natural moral authority. When I reported this conversation to my mother, she agreed wholeheartedly with Mr R, but wondered if he might get sacked for telling us his views. I told everyone the next day that we ought to tell no one what he had said, lest our beloved Mr R be sacked. Everyone agreed, for the whole grade loved him.

  The little rural school was in a huge, flat paddock, covered in tall bulrushes, with a creek which carved a deep canyon at the back. It was here that, all too briefly, I was leader of a bulrush gang. We would creep through long tunnels made in the reeds and launch guerrilla attacks on one another. My mother was forever shaking her head over the state of my legs as a consequence, sitting in front of me at the kitchen table, picking out hundreds of tiny bulrush spikes which had stuck in my skin. My knees looked like a pincushion.

  Now, all that had changed. From that rural idyll, we joined the much larger main school, a formidable stone building with high windows from Victorian times, flanked by the railway on one side and an old red brick Anglican church on the other. On the asphalt playground dotted with peppercorn trees, our shiny school shoes squeaked like thousands had done before us. Every morning we stood ‘at ease’, and listened to our headmaster’s sonorous voice giving dreary speeches about respecting authority. Then the bell rang and he commanded us to stand to attention, which meant clicking our heels together very tightly and standing straight, teachers jabbing angry fingers into the backs of straggledy children, while we sang the national anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’. Then, in pairs, swinging our arms like little soldiers we marched inside to the beat of the school drum.

  Things had not got off to a good start with Old Emu. It did not help that early in the year he returned to our room in time to see me mimicking his distinctive walk and drawl to the delight of the class. It did not help that the shelves at the back of that central Victorian schoolroom were full of British children’s stories like Billy Bunter’s School Days, packed with delicious pranks like putting drawing pins on teachers’ seats and sawing off the legs of their chairs. The drawing pins escapade saw me demoted for a day to the lower grade. A day of heckling and jeering, however, didn’t really do much to bend my will to his, and even six cuts with the strap, delivered by our one-armed headmaster (he had lost an arm in World War II) had no effect.

  It did not help that my head was full of these English children’s adventure stories, with
smugglers, robbers, secrets, hidden crypts, mysterious keys opening tunnels and brave children solving mysteries and finding treasures. It did not help that Old Emu got wind of the fact that I convinced the whole class that the portly Anglican vicar, who led us in religious services at the church next door, whose scarlet waistcoat could scarcely stretch around his ample middle, was at the centre of an iniquitous smuggling ring. This, despite us being hundreds of kilometres from the nearest seaport. My only evidence was a large key and a mysterious stone door leading from a narrow passageway beside the church that I had discovered while escaping the grounds at lunchtime to investigate, a fact unhappily discovered by a teacher leaving school early for a dental appointment. Otherwise, it must be said, the opportunities in that inland country town for unmasking smugglers, as my heroes and heroines did so routinely, proved all too few.

  Yet it always seemed to me, that there was much more to the battle between us. It had to do with me being a girl. I got along well with most teachers, loving some of them; who in return liked my spunkiness. But Old Emu was different. For him I violated the Idea of Girl. If Mr R was a man of the future, an open-hearted egalitarian, Old Emu inhabited the past, a different era. A girl was meant to have a certain shape, a certain demeanour, even a certain kind of handwriting, in which the self-effacing qualities of modesty, conscientiousness, quietness, neatness and obedience would prepare her for being the Little Woman in the background, while Man was to flourish in the foreground. These were the attributes that would prepare a girl for secretarial or nursing duties—she must be just bright enough to put her energies usefully behind a man, on behalf of a man, beneath a man, but not more, for a life of service and wifehood in a patriarchal world. To have the kind of temperament, intelligence or defiant will that challenged male dominance and required equality, was to be a freak of nature. Girls were not meant to answer back or have ideas of their own, or to be too clever, and, above all, not to be wilful or naughty. However badly behaved, noisy or disruptive boys were, that was part of the order of things. The boys mucked around at least as much as I did, but I never observed an attempt to break them. For two long years I felt as if I were a small wrinkle in the universe that Old Emu wanted to smooth out.