Swimming to the Moon

by Robert Drewe

  NAN’S COOKBOOK

  ‘A stew or soup boiled is a stew or soup spoiled.’ So says the maxim in my grandmother’s handwritten cookbook, a collection of her favourite recipes presented to her daughter at Essendon airport on my mother’s teary departure from the Ginger Fluff–loving Melbourne of 1949 for the sandy, Velvet Meringue–less wastes of Western Australia.

  As my mother boarded the plane to Perth (the oilskin-bound cookbook clutched to her chest as if it were the Bible) she sobbed, ‘It might as well be Africa.’ Despite twelve hours travelling and two refuelling stops, it wasn’t exactly. And any lingering bouts of homesickness would thereafter be regularly alleviated by Nan Watson’s Cookbook.

  At the furthest remove from Maggie Beer’s and Stephanie Alexander’s elegant books, Nan’s cookbook, spotted with ancient food stains, turned up last week in a dusty suitcase with a grandson’s old athletic togs – or what shreds the moths had left of them since their last outing, last century, in the mile event at the Inters at the WACA – and a pair of rusty running spikes that looked like tetanus waiting to happen.

  A time capsule in itself, Nan’s cookbook exudes familial love, a passion for comfort-cooking, and induces a hunger for sweetness. Forget her opening statement about stews and soups. Apart from a cursory mention of Polish Goulash, Sweetcorn Casserole, Tasty Rabbit, Christmas Ham, Italian Spaghetti (as opposed to Australian tinned spaghetti), French Steak and Savoury Tripe, there’s nothing about first courses or mains. Its contents highlight the biggest change in Australian eating habits since her heyday: the sad passing of desserts and cakes.

  It’s all about puddings and biscuits: shortbreads, meringues, sponges, pastries, truffles, tarts, soufflés, wafers, jellies and jams. Out of its pages spring words from yesteryear, like sago and tapioca and custard. Recipes abound for sweet treats called rolls, puffs, ices, drops, chews, fluffs, snows, lilies, ripples, bars, bubbles, seagulls and fingers. Yes, mothers used to make these things. When people ate sugar back then, it wasn’t included surreptitiously; they ate it knowingly – and relished it.

  Nan knew the recipes for fifty-four different puddings, forty-one cakes and thirty-five types of biscuits. What supermarket aisle can match that today? She was cognisant with such wide-ranging delicacies as Chinese Chew, Afghans, Jewish Cake, Gypsy Pudding, Canadian Cake, Belgian Cake, American Fudge Cake, Oriental Cake, Victoria Sandwich Cake, Cheswick Pudding, Armadale Soufflé and Norwegian Trifle.

  She could spirit up Illusions and Sponge Lilies and Ginger Fluffs and Orange Foam and Dream Bars. She made something called Biscuit Cake, and also Pudding Cake (and, for all I know, Cake Biscuits, Cake Pudding, Pudding Biscuits and Biscuit Pudding, as well.) She was also au fait with (please hold the innuendo, we’re talking about my grandmother) Overnight Cake and All-Night Pudding.

  Her family ate these delicacies all the time. So how come the family albums show they were all so thin? All those bony chests and buttocks in woollen bathers at the beach: skinny freckled boys and lean, brown Jantzen diving girls. Not an overweight person in sight.

  In the housewifely style of the day, Nan had copperplated my mother’s name on the inside cover: not Dorothy Drewe, or even Dorothy Watson, but Mrs R. B. Drewe, Western Australia. Emphasis on the Mrs. And she’d carefully separated each fountain-penned recipe with a ruled red line.

  Goodness knows when she found the time. Probably when my grandfather was at the bowling club. He was a country bank manager with the State Savings Bank of Victoria. Eight beers after bowls, and back home he’d animatedly discuss Anglican and Catholic ecumenical relations as they related to their marriage while waving the bank security pistol for emphasis. As evidenced by the three bullet holes in the kitchen ceiling.

  Nan Watson (nee Mary Bray) died, aged eighty-nine, in 1978, but her book vividly lives. It recalls memories of warm, neighbourly women. Women cheerful through adversity (Nan lost her brother, Major Frank Bray MC, at Arras, France, in 1918), generous with a joke and a hug, who got on with things and whistled ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ and ‘Mairzy Doats’ while they did the ironing. And, of course, the cooking.

  The sort of woman who produced lamingtons (my own favourite) for her grandchildren on every visit to Perth; who knew the recipes for five different types of lamingtons. And the sort who could make a soufflé under pistol fire.

  LEARNING TO READ

  I owe a great lifetime pleasure to Shell petrol. I must also thank Rosella tomato sauce, Ford Pills and Tarzan’s girlfriend Jane for their influence on my life.

  We all have a vivid memory of where we were when momentous events happened: assassinations and celebrity deaths. I have a clear recollection of the moment I learned to read: when I spotted the word shell on a giant yellow seashell outside the Seaview service station on Stirling Highway.

  As the garage-man put petrol in the family car, I realised I’d just moved from the World of Merely Gazing into the World of Reading. It seems like the Bronze Age now, but in those pre-computer, pre-iPhone and preiPad days I began as an enthusiastic random reader of bookless words.

  Once I’d cracked the shell code (yes, that is indeed a shell, and that arrangement of straight and wriggly lines represents it), shop signs and advertisements became important. I hungrily read every ad on the street, every grocery label and food packet in front of me.

  Bus and car travel, and especially train trips, became a sort of moving picture of funny words, jokes and slang, matched with witty or sentimental pictures.

  Smiling men pushing other men in the face, boys raiding orchards, flying red horses and contented fathers smoking pipes in armchairs suddenly existed as Don’t Argue – Hutton’s Bacon is Best, Cherry Ripe bars, Mobil Oil and Ford Pills.

  Before the primacy of teenagers, pipe-smoking fathers in armchairs were popular sales boosters. They sold dark chocolate, tobacco and alcohol as well as Ford Pills. (What a relief for serene, pipe-smoking Dad that thanks to Ford Pills he was constipated no longer.)

  Words were to be found everywhere. At the dinner table I proudly read aloud the label on the sauce bottle: ‘Made from fresh tomatoes. Pure and Wollysome!’ ‘Wholesome!’ the family laughed, and recalling them correcting me makes me feel six again.

  As for proper reading, sunburned state-school kids were expected to fathom books about hedgerows and primrose borders and merry japes in the Fourth Form at St Swithin’s.

  These strange English characters called fags, rotters, bounders and cads actually wore suits, ties and caps while playing. They consumed lashings of ginger pop and hampers of grub sent up to school in the roadster from Mater and Pater.

  We suburban kids would wonder why grown boys were allowed to thrash small ones, and why these bullied kids weren’t at home with Mum and Dad; moreover, why their being separated from their parents wasn’t the actual plot of the book instead of incidental to it.

  I presumed all books were about England. The triumvirate I read were Biggles, the Famous Five and the William books. Of course there was something very appealing in the Famous Five and William books: their young characters were in charge of their lives.

  But by high school there were no contemporary novels, English or otherwise. What’s now called young adult fiction didn’t exist. I read my last Enid Blyton on my twelfth birthday and felt childish to be doing so.

  I wonder how many boys stopped reading books forever because there was nothing to engage them? My own interest declined until, at thirteen, I was saved as a reader by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan books.

  It was Tarzan’s de facto Jane who returned me to the readers’ ranks. I refer specifically to a sentence in Tarzan of the Apes: ‘The lion’s savage claws had ripped her blouse, exposing her milk-white breast.’

  In my hunt for further appearances of the word ‘breast’, I began sneaking to my parents’ bedside tables and their bestsellers from the library: Peyton Place, The Agony and the Ecstasy and From Here to Eternity.

  After searching for breast mentions, I’d become absorbed in the s
urrounding narratives. Soon I’d stop skipping back and forth, settle down (keeping an ear open for parental footsteps) and finish the book.

  It was a small step from Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy to Ian Fleming, a bigger step to Ernest Hemingway, but once made, book-reading fell into place again. Hemingway led to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Graham Greene and William Faulkner.

  Suddenly bestsellers like The Agony and the Ecstasy looked silly. Based on Michelangelo’s life, it could be summed up in one dopey line of dialogue, when Pope Julius II shouts at Michelangelo, ‘You dare to dicker with your pontiff?’

  With the same clarity as when I’d cracked the code of the shell sign ten years before, it dawned on me that there was writing and writing. I was hooked again.

  BAD PRESENTS

  This is the biggest year I’ve ever experienced for significant family birthdays. Apart from an anniversary of my own that’s cause for sombre 3.00 a.m. reflection and many gin and tonics, we have a fortieth, two twenty-firsts, an eighteenth and a thirteenth birthday to celebrate. And a daughter’s wedding.

  The subject of not merely suitable, but excellent, presents therefore arises. What to give the three females and two males in question – and the married couple. A record token probably won’t cut it any more. Nor a home-made pottery coffee mug or one (or even two) of the neighbour’s newborn guinea-pigs.

  These decisions weigh on me. I understand what it’s like to receive gifts with no thought behind them or any understanding of the recipient’s wants or clothing size.

  I’m thinking here of the elderly female relative who gives me a tie every birthday, even though I haven’t worn one since 1997. And especially of the procession of short-sleeved ‘business’ shirts (in either S or XXL sizes but never my L) from an aunt every Christmas, shirts that even the thinnest or most obese suburban accountant wouldn’t deign to wear, despite their synthetic non-iron qualities and ample pockets for pen storage and presentation.

  But my favourite dull present, wondrous in its dreariness, was a gift from an ex-sister-in-law: a plastic bag in which to store other plastic bags. It was called a Hideaway, and it took my breath away that this nice woman who’d known me for umpteen years would have passed the shop counter displaying plastic bags for storing other plastic bags, stopped abruptly, and thought: ‘What a stroke of luck! He’d definitely welcome one of these.’

  I counted myself lucky, however, when a Perth friend mentioned some other questionable gift examples. There was the great-aunt who sent her a second-hand cake of soap and the country uncle who always sent relatives a scratchie lottery ticket. Not too bad an idea, except he scratched the tickets first, in case they’d won something.

  She also mentioned a kind and dotty old church deaconess who took in discarded toys and clothing for charitable redistribution. There were always some toys left that the poor had disdained. As a small child, my friend would be given a Christmas gift from the deaconess’s leftovers each year, and each time her mother would firmly instruct her to say, ‘Thank you, it’s just what I’ve always wanted.’

  This instruction was followed politely every year. Until the Christmas she unwrapped the present from the smiling old lady to find a one-armed, one-eyed doll. She said the required words, but they didn’t come easily.

  These days every suburban post office has become a gift shop. But we’ve all eyed their wares every time we stand in a post-office queue, and we know a post-office present ( just as we recognise an airport departure-lounge gift) when we see one. Don’t think we don’t know when it’s a last-minute impulse buy, purchased just before mailing your Christmas cards. So don’t give me another CD of Favourite Aussie Bush Ballads, thanks. (By the way, I already have the Much Loved Classics CD that came free with the Sunday paper, too.)

  Please excuse my testiness when I talk of presents. You’re dealing with someone whose adolescent gifts had a certainty to them. Every Christmas I asked for a pair of desert boots. Every Christmas I received a pair of Dunlop Bumpers instead. My father worked for Dunlop; Dunlop didn’t make desert boots; Dunlop made clumpy-looking Bumpers. Every Christmas Eve I went to sleep knowing the morning would bring the next size in Bumpers, and it did.

  Every Christmas morning when I saw the familiar yellow and black box, my heart sank. When I caught that first rubbery whiff, unwrapped the tissue paper and spied the new Bumpers huddled heel-to-toe inside, I could’ve cried. ‘Oh, good,’ I lied. ‘New Bumpers. Just what I wanted.’

  I couldn’t convince my parents that in the place (WA), climate (Mediterranean), fashion niche and age group the preferred casual footwear was the desert boot. I even tried the physical-terrain angle. ‘We live in the sand, after all,’ I whined.

  ‘Bumpers are good in the sand,’ my father said. ‘Look at those soles, like camels’ feet.’

  My family can relax. No one will be receiving Bumpers this year.

  SNODGRASS

  It was my father’s birthday the other day. He hasn’t been around to enjoy it for forty-two years, but memories of him often surface at this time of year, if not in daylight hours, then in night-time dreams.

  In the dreams he has a modest walk-on part, not the title role he preferred in real life. Resurrected, in our old Perth house, he’s much calmer too, though he’s still using the odd, tetchy expressions that mystified me as a child and were impossible to answer. (‘What do you think this is, Bush Week?’)

  When he impatiently oversaw my maths homework, I was ‘a bit slow on the uptake’. (‘What sort of drongo are you?’) ‘Between you, me and the gatepost’, he thought of Pat Dolan, our neighbour, as ‘a bit of an odd bod’ because he went to church a lot and pushed his children’s prams. Pat was ‘as slow as a wet week’, unlike his wife, Thelma, who, according to Dad, had ‘more front than Myer’s’. Mostly he referred to her, with a dismissive gesture in the direction of their house, as ‘Mrs Kerfoops over the road’.

  This language was confusing, especially if you were doing anything requiring effort (blowing up balloons, doing somersaults, trying to climb a tree). Then he’d warn, ‘You’ll bust your foofer valve.’

  For some reason, when Dad intended visiting the pub, he found it difficult to admit it. It was hardly a rare event, but as he went out the door, he’d announce he was ‘just going to see a man about a dog’. If pressed about his destination, a foofer valve looked in danger of bursting. Yes, he’d snap; he was indeed going to the ‘rubbidy’. For how long? As the door slammed behind him: ‘How long is a piece of string?’

  Usually he called me ‘Son’. But when feeling amiable, he’d call me ‘Snodgrass’. (After a swim at Cottesloe: ‘Do you want an ice-cream, Snodgrass?’) For someone regularly exasperated, often on the verge of busting his foofer valve, this seemed to represent affection: it sounded funny. He called me Snodgrass again in a dream the other night and the name stuck in my mind. Where did it come from? When I found myself calling my youngest son Snodgrass, I decided I’d better clear it up.

  Google says the family name Snodgrass originated in Ayrshire, Scotland, in the thirteenth century, where lands known as Snodgrasse or Snodgers were rented out in plots. Snodgrass family members started arriving in the American colonies in 1700. These days there is even a Snodgrass tartan.

  But where had Snodgrass captured Dad’s attention? Charles Dickens had a character in The Pickwick Papers called Augustus Snodgrass, and Mark Twain used another pen-name, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, in some travel stories. Unlikely sources though for my father’s expression. The master of comic verse, Ogden Nash, once published a poem in the Saturday Evening Post entitled ‘Are You a Snodgrass, Too?’ Maybe. Dad used to read the Post.

  Nash’s poem divides humanity into Swozzlers and Snodgrasses.

  Swozzlers are irked by the superior Snodgrasses’ intelligence and nobility,

  And they lose no opportunity of inflicting on them every kind of incivility.

  Swozzlers are ruthless egotists, messy eaters, sinister and vengeful, who start fashiona
ble diets and become politicians. Snodgrasses, however, are kind, handsome, intelligent and noble; people who eat their cereal neatly and pay their taxes. Swozzlers sell dubious waterfront land, and Snodgrasses get malaria when they try to build on them. Swozzlers start wars, and Snodgrasses die in them.

  Swozzlers bring tigers back alive and Snodgrasses get eaten by anacondas;

  Snodgrasses are depositors and Swozzlers are absconders.

  Swozzlers hold straight flushes and Snodgrasses hold four of a kind.

  Swozzlers step heavily on Snodgrasses’ shoes as soon as they are shined.

  Whatever achievements Snodgrasses achieve,

  Swozzlers always top them;

  Snodgrasses say, ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one,’

  And Swozzlers stop them.

  We could do with Ogden Nash today, if only for such rhymes as Why did the Lord give us agility / If not to evade responsibility? And, my favourite, If called by a panther/Don’t anther. Alas, he died in Baltimore in 1971, the same year as Dad, from a lactobacillus infection transmitted by improperly prepared coleslaw.

  DROPPING IN

  Remember when everyone used to throw open their verdant, much-watered front lawns and compulsory rose gardens to the admiring or critical gaze of strangers motoring slowly past on that peculiarly West Australian phenomenon, the Sunday Drive?

  In my childhood, domestic fashion spurned the front fence. The whole point of home ownership in the sandy, drought-ridden fifties and sixties was to embrace the street-lawn as your own property and provide the vista of a suburban oasis.

  It was considered admirable that your home provided a Sunday afternoon’s serious contemplation from people you didn’t know from Adam. (It had to be Sunday; the avid interest of Saturday or weekday drivers would have seemed quirky or criminal.) And if your buffalo or super-fine couch was greener and lusher than theirs, your double-brick frontage and Brisbane & Wunderlich tiles impressive enough to arouse a little envy from the motoring families, well, that was even better.