Aunts Up the Cross

by Robin Dalton

  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

  Aunts Up the Cross

  For Lisa and Seamus

  CHAPTER 1

  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.

  My mother always hated life at Maramanah, endlessly quarrelling with her younger aunts who were both jealous and unmarried. The four elder girls were either mellowed by marriage into softer moulds or were by nature easier to live with. Their husbands were all, in bearing and repute, substantial characters but, stationed as they were in innumerable family photographs amid the lace flounces of their joint spouses and sisters-in-law, they resembled so many currants on a richly iced cake. They had an air of being hired for the occasion and being suitably supplied with their frock coats, their stiff high collars and goatee beards as window-dressing for the undulating patterns of rounded arms, bosoms, and upswept curls of the ladies by whom they were outnumbered.

  Sometimes they were pictured on bicycles, in stiff-fronted blouses, frilly pantaloons, buttoned boots, and boaters. Or with parasols, draped against the pillars of Maramanah’s front porch. Whatever the scene, the photographer was on hand to record it, and the family obviously took its pleasures en masse. When the children were born, they were dotted here and there holding a solitary rose in one hand and the hand of the nearest aunt or uncle in the other.

  My grandmother insisted that all the male members of her family had been either rabbis or judges for generations past, and that anything to do with ‘trade’ was an unthinkable occupation. The girls did indeed seem to live up to this ideal in their choice of husbands, either by intent, accident, or influence. Aunt Bertie, next in age to my grandmother, married a judge of the High Court, a handsome and benign old man to whom Aunt Bertie always referred as ‘the Judge’. The Judge was, like all true Australians
, addicted to horse-racing. As he could not telephone through his bets from the court room to his illegal starting-price bookmaker, he would slip off his wig, and out the back door of the law courts to his contact man on the corner to place his half sovereign under the nom de plume of ‘Mr John’. In addition to Aunt Bertie’s judge, there were Aunt Flo’s ‘Barley’, a barrister and brother to the Judge, and Aunt Juliet’s Harry, who was a solicitor. My grandfather was City Treasurer, smacking ignobly of money, but at least he didn’t sell things, nor did he make much.

  Aunt Flo, Aunt Bertie, my grandmother and Uncle Luke produced a child or two apiece, and with this meagre supply of contemporaries my mother grew up in the big grey house—the children’s lives dominated by the musical evenings and inevitable wranglings of a complex network of aunts and uncles. The evenings took place in the ballroom: it had one round side, and a stage, aspidistra in pots, and chandeliers; it was the heart of the house. At night there was always a concert; by day there was always an aunt practising. They, the husbands, were also expected to participate in the concerts, but none of them was quite musical enough to be relied upon to come in on the right beat. The Toy Symphony was a particular disappointment to Spot who had triumphantly brought home an assortment of mechanical cuckoos and various birds for the husbands to manipulate, but no amount of rehearsals could bring them into synchronisation. I knew, too, that the entrance hall had a marble floor, for my mother had split her skull on it after sliding down the banisters and this was always held up to me as a horrid example. It had the effect of making me long for a marble hall. The house had originally been beautiful, and Georgian. Its turrets and towers and balconies had been added by my great-grandfather, as had later lavatories. In my mother’s childhood, space had stretched only to a boys’ and a girls’ lavatory, each one having a throne, and beside it a row of chamber pots so that after breakfast was a friendly time of communal squatting.

  This tribal existence was disrupted by the death of my great-grandfather who, though dying quietly in my grandmother’s arms, managed to invest the act with the modicum of required family drama by doing it suddenly and on the chaise longue which is now in my own bedroom and which was always known in my childhood as ‘the couch my darling daddy died on’. My grandmother told me that he was reading Uncle Vanya when he died, but I never liked to enquire about this hitherto unmentioned uncle as she was always tearful telling me this tale and I thought that Uncle Vanya must have upset the family dreadfully and in all probability had caused my great-grandfather’s death.

  After he died, the married children dispersed into houses of their own. My mother was thus freed from the constant company of her maiden aunts, and after she married my father she never spoke to them again. The official reason given was that she had married outside her religion, but I think old animosities had fastened on any excuse. My father was a Northern Irish Presbyterian raised by a stern but loving mother, to whom he broke the news in some trepidation that he wished to marry a Jewess.

  ‘Son,’ said my Irish grandmother, ‘I don’t care what colour she is as long as she isn’t a Catholic.’ (Years later, my own husband’s Catholic family did not speak to me, his Presbyterian wife, until our daughter was nearly a year old.)

  CHAPTER 2

  The four maiden great-aunts whose acquaintance I was thus denied were a source of endless merriment in our family. In addition to their reputedly unlovable natures, their parents had given them the names Lilla, Mina, Netta, and Anys. These my father gleefully referred to as Litter, Titter, Fritter and Anus. My mother’s epithet for them became, at the time of the Palestinian troubles, the Stern Gang.

  My parents’ courtship and meeting were rakish rather than romantic. My father was quite startlingly handsome, six feet four inches and, in the naval uniform he was wearing at the time he met my mother, a sight to turn heads and attract all eyes. She first saw him in a tram, rattling up William Street, I suppose she stared: he winked at her, and she, blushing guiltily, flounced off the tram. That night she was introduced to him at a dance at Government House. He then invited her to come and watch him dance in a charity pageant, in which six young blades and six young debutantes were taking part. My mother went: she sat in the front row. My father was drunk and had obviously not attended any of the rehearsals. While the other eleven were pointing their left feet, he was pointing his right, and again winking at my mother: when they turned to the left, he turned to the right. In addition, he had his satin knee breeches on back to front and the plume from his hat hung over one eye and he had to keep blowing it away in order to see.

  Well, she married him, and eighteen years later, I was asked to appear in a tableau in a similar pageant in aid of the same charity, organised by the same society matron. She was a rather imposing lady, of theatrical background, who had married well into wealth and social position but who retained her old connection with the theatre by organising whatever charitable theatrical entertainment she could, and by attending every first night of the Sydney theatre in a series of coloured wigs. This multi-hued entrance invariably stole the show and my father described her as a ‘female ham who can’t be cured’. She had a formidable memory, however, and when I presented myself with my eleven young companions at her ornate Italianate villa for our first rehearsal, she admonished me sternly. ‘I hope, my child, that you will behave yourself better than your father did twenty years ago.’

  After my parents’ marriage they, in their turn, went to live with my grandparents in a smaller house where they remained—my parents on the top floor and my grandparents on the ground floor—for thirty-five years. After the first year my father never spoke to my grandmother. This, too, I accepted as perfectly normal behaviour. He remained on friendly terms with my grandfather, and he even tolerated Aunt Juliet for whom, after Uncle Harry’s death, a special suite of rooms was built on what had been a flat roof halfway up the stairs, and which was known thereafter as the ‘mezzanine floor’—or, as photographs of dead relatives grew in number, the ‘mausoleum’. Aunt Juliet was frightened of him, but she would defiantly say, ‘Good morning, Jim’ if trapped on the stairs. When my father, who was a doctor, left the house on his rounds each morning my grandmother and great aunt would come scurrying up the stairs to my mother and there they would stay until they heard his key in the door downstairs. This arrangement suited me beautifully as a child: I was the focal point of two separate and complete loving households under the one roof, and what the one could not or would not provide for me in the way of attention or entertainment, the other could and did. Again, it was not until many years of contact with other humans had taught me that I learnt perhaps our family relationships were not usual: it was then I asked my father what had started his ancient battle with his mother-in-law.

  ‘I found early in my married life,’ he said, ‘that I could not take my trousers off without turning round and finding your grandmother watching me.’

  My poor mother was the buffer between these two constantly warring factions. Warm hearted, impulsive and emotional, she suffered from the strain of keeping the peace whenever possible. Unfortunately she was seldom able to keep calm at the same time, and in no time at all she would be driven by my father to tears and by my grandmother to the limits of rage and exasperation. My grandmother interfered in every small detail of her daughter’s life, domestic as well as marital, and where she could not physically poke in a finger, she badgered with advice, criticism, and unsolicited opinions.

  The most violent and constant of these criticisms revolved around my mother’s determination never to have me taught the piano. My grandmother considered this an uncivilised deprivation, one notch higher than being allowed to go out without gloves. My mother, I learnt much later in life, had been a brilliant pianist, playing duets with her adored, dead brother and I expect by banishing music forever after from her life, a raw wound was opened less frequently. What was, to me, ancient, mellowed history was, in reality, just four years past in her memory.

  The wars betwe
en my father and grandmother, however, were silent but not necessarily impassive and, as my mother was the buffer, then I was the battlefield. Any injury to my small person was the signal for immediate action, and the strategies resorted to by both sides gave no thought to how ploughed the battlefield might become in the struggle. A badly cut knee meant for me hours of bandaging, strapping, and applying of painful unguents by my grandmother; to be followed by equally fierce stripping off of all coverings by my father. This two-sided treatment would be repeated until my leg eventually healed despite it. What conflicts and neuroses were thus born in me I do not know; in retrospective reflection I enjoyed it enormously, was continuously stimulated, and my own children’s lives, kept to routine and order at great inconvenience to myself, seem incomparably duller.

  At the age of three I was sent to school, to a very superior establishment started by the Misses Cheriton, two middle-aged spinster sisters who had been private governesses and had acquired some sophistication but no business acumen. We moved school fairly frequently—I now suspect pursued by creditors—to a succession of charming houses, all renamed ‘Doone’ on our arrival, where it seems to me we lived on strawberries and cream and acquired an astonishingly liberal education for the Australia of the twenties. It is to them that I owe the fact that I saw Pavlova dance the Swan: we four and five year olds were bundled off to a matinée, and some dim memory of the magic remains.

  I was dressed in the height of (French) fashion from birth. I particularly remember the tissue-wrapped red winter coat arriving from Paris which I, aged four, hated wearing because it was so beautiful and therefore different from all the other children. Around its collar and hem were appliquéd daisies, cut out of the same material, and I was made, until I rebelled, to wear it to school.