Aunts Up the Cross

by Robin Dalton

  At home I was educated by my grandmother, who talked and talked. Her talk was directed at me, relentlessly. It was not conversation: no response was required. How I squirmed and sighed with resignation at those oft-repeated maxims with which she sought to increase my daily store of wisdom, and with what little shocks of recognition do I realise their truth as instances along the paths of later life have caused me to stumble over one. When she disapproved of one of my companions it was, ‘If you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas.’ When I protested against the futility of doing something for a lost cause, she protested, ‘Every little helps, as the old lady said when she spat into the sea.’ When I kicked against the unreasonability of some of her taboos she told me, ‘Reason always means what someone else has got to say,’ And, most frequent of all, was her rejoinder to my complaints against her ‘nagging’—‘Never mind! If I throw enough mud, some of it is bound to stick.’ What fascinated, though mystified, me most, however, was, ‘A stitch in time saves nine, as the mother of eight said as she sewed up the front of her husband’s pyjamas.’

  Into her talk, too, came her favourite literary characters: Peggotty, from David Copperfield, was as well known to me as one of the household; my mother’s boundless optimism in the face of imminent, though small, financial doom was always dubbed ‘Micawberism’. I thought this, and her other favourite, ‘Malapropism’, were probably to be found in the huge dictionary by her bed. But they had faces and characteristics for me—Peggotty, Mr Micawber and Mrs Malaprop were shadowy but permanent members of the family.

  While she talked, Aunt Juliet tickled me for hours on end. The tickling is a family vice, the taste for which was passed on to me by my mother, but in the years since I have never found such an untiring and uncomplaining tickler as Aunt Juliet. On hot, sticky summer nights when I could not sleep, or had the toothache, Aunt Juliet sat by my bedside playing the ‘game’. This was a geographical tour of my person: ‘Quickly—England!’ I would say when one foot sole—perhaps Italy—had become numb and tired of sensation, and Aunt Juliet’s nimble fingers must go racing to the back of my neck. Only on one point did she insist as we changed countries every night—my bottom was Germany.

  I had my own game with Aunt Juliet’s person. This was the privilege and doubtful pleasure of being allowed to put my finger in the ‘hole’. The hole was indeed a hole, of dark and mysterious depths, in the soft fat folds of her upper thigh. One day she and Uncle Harry were driving in one of the earlier motor cars to catch the Newcastle ferry. There was a collision with a horse and cart. The horse, cart, man, woman and child occupants and the car—Harry and Juliet, swathed in duster coats and motoring veils—sailed into the Hawkesbury River. Only Harry and Juliet were recovered, and whatever injury Juliet suffered had left the ‘hole’ as reminder.

  My relationship with my other two married great-aunts was never as close as it was with Aunt Juliet. I only remember once visiting Aunt Juliet’s house in Newcastle before, when I was four, she came to live with us, but relics of her life there were scattered about the house. In my grandmother’s silver cupboard a shelf was taken up with Aunt Juliet’s silver menu holders and a stack of old menu cards. Aunt Juliet’s married life had consisted largely of arranging flowers, writing her menus, and waking up Uncle Harry in the night to tickle her back. Uncle Harry was never known to protest at this indignity, and one wonders if any other marital rights were afforded him, as Aunt Juliet protested loudly and often that she had always been too frightened to have children.

  A housekeeper, Doris, had been brought out from England by Juliet, trailing hinted-at glories of ducal households behind her. Doris, unaccountably, quietly, and eventually gave birth to a nameless child whose presence was explained by Aunt Juliet as the result of a day trip by Doris to Sydney. An aura of threatening and shadowy holocaust hung in my mind forever after about the train—known as the Newcastle Flyer—solid and encased in brass, mahogany, engraved glass and reclining seats, for surely it had played its part in Doris’s downfall? The child was seldom mentioned. Aunt Juliet sailed blithely above the situation, resorting only once to indignation when Doris’s name was billed before hers at the reading of Uncle Harry’s will to the tune of thirty shillings a week for life.

  Of the other two, Aunt Flo was pretty, pretentious and nearly as silly as Juliet: she didn’t enter our lives as much as Aunt Bertie who, of all the sisters, was the only one resembling my grandmother in bigness of heart and spirit and in the forcefulness of her personality. Like all the sisters, she was large and fat and soft and, at the age when I first remember her, dressed only in black. When I think of her it is largely in connection with the food I had to eat in her house. Highly spiced cakes and brown cinnamon biscuits, Jewish fried fish, and a wonderful milky pea soup called ‘peas and clice’. Aunt Bertie was always cooking or playing the piano: she would break off in the middle of a song to take something out of the oven, and I was allowed to strum on the piano and pop the hot biscuits into my mouth.

  It was in Aunt Bertie’s house that I absorbed the only atmosphere and customs of Judaism which I ever remember seeing. My grandparents seemed to have given up their religion, or at least the outward show of it, at the same time as their daughter and, except for the crisp squares of Matzo bread which arrived at every Passover but more for enjoyment than necessity, I don’t remember any rituals or religious taboos. There certainly remained a half humorous superstition, which was never taken very seriously. My grandmother, an old lady whose normal outlook was panoramic in its tolerance, regarded these remnants of prejudice of hers much as one might regard an unsightly but long-accepted physical defect. She did not like the idea of baptism, so that when I was finally christened a Presbyterian at the age of four, I was sent to a Vaudeville show of very doubtful propriety with the cook immediately afterwards to take my mind off the ceremony and prevent me telling my grandmother about it with any degree of coherence. Despite the urgings and promptings of the cook, I would not, however, forget the main event—‘the funny man in the black coat who threw water on me’. Her dislike of the Catholic religion was firmly planted: when I married a Catholic and she was forced to write about it in her letters to me she would never write the word, but denote its place on the page with a large black cross. But the dietary rules of Judaism had long since lost the battle with her appetite and love of good food.

  But sometimes on Friday nights I was invited to the evening meal at Aunt Bertie’s: her children and grandchildren gathered round the table and Uncle John sat at the head with a small, round, black skullcap on his head, intoning a Hebraic chant which was to me wonderfully theatrical and exciting. Aunt Bertie had two sons: Cedric had married within the Faith and joined his father in wearing the black skullcap and bringing up his children in traditional Jewish fashion; Colyn had not, and had joined my mother in the shadows of family approval. At his occasional appearances at the Friday night gatherings, Colyn put a white napkin on his head instead; this reduced my cousin, Adrienne, and myself to fits of giggles for which we were invariably told to leave the room.

  Aunt Bertie lived in a house just along the street from the most permanent of the Doone establishments, and it was this proximity which fostered my friendship with her. It was easy to slip over the fence and dash along to Aunt Bertie’s for ten minutes—running back with pockets full of cookies for my playmates who were keeping watch.

  The Doone girls were a socially favoured and exclusive little band. The Governor’s daughter was my best friend and in exchange for afternoon teas at Government House after school, I regularly beat her to pulp in the school yard. We all felt it to be a particularly English failing that her nose bled on these occasions, but poor Rosemary struggled bravely to shed her pretty accent and her frailties. She was also to be pitied because she was brought and fetched from school by the Vice-Regal car and chauffeur, while we were free to wander home at will across the streets and harbourside parks and up the steep stone steps from the water’s edge to Kings Cross, and neigh
bouring Elizabeth Bay, where my walking companions lived. My mother was never nervous: the walk was a long one, so it seems Sydney was a safe and friendly place in which to grow up.

  It was also a tight little world. Far from being a free and classless society in a new and vigorous culture, it was the concentrated quintessence of a snobbery and class-consciousness brought from the old. Our parents and our grandparents were friends: we met no-one at school outside this circle and, inside the circle, allowances were made for its members. Because my mother was of this world, it never occurred to me that her Jewishness might have been a cause for apartness and that there existed in the world outside Sydney an anti-Jewish prejudice. I think this must have been because a few Jews in Sydney had established themselves early in the social hierarchy. I am sure it never occurred to my mother, or to her second cousins, the Levys, that theirs could have been a life of social ostracism. Australian Roman Catholics were not so lucky. I knew very few, except our cook, and one dear family friend. They were usually one’s servants, invariably Irish and politically left wing, therefore posing a threat to our secure world.

  However, although my school life and family friends followed an established Australian pattern, the life within the walls of our house certainly did not.

  CHAPTER 3

  Our house was the only private residence in Kings Cross, the city’s ‘European’ quarter—the ‘Montmartre’ of Sydney, people called it, with flattery and nostalgia. Actually, it was fairly hideous; like all of urban Sydney being a dusty hodgepodge of low-built buildings, all in need of a coat of paint—the upper halves flats and residential rooms and the lower halves shops, offices and cinemas. Between the two, cutting off the dirty stucco and dingy brickwork from the glaring neon signs, were the ubiquitous iron or concrete awnings, the most characteristic features of Sydney’s dim architecture.

  Maramanah stood at the end of Darlinghurst Road, our street, only two blocks away, but already on the corner of a far smarter one, which led down to the harbour’s edge. At the other end, Darlinghurst Road joined a smaller, steeper and dustier street known, because of the preponderance of pimps and prostitutes among its inhabitants, as the Dirty Half Mile—or sometimes, but never by my grandmother, as Douche Can Alley. My grandmother referred to the girls as ‘Soiled Doves’.

  In front of our house was the only tree in the Cross, a broad and dusty-leaved plane-tree and, together with the house, it formed a small oasis of incongruous suburbia amid the glare and noise of the flashing signs, the foreign voices, the juke boxes and the cinema crowds. As a child, I drifted to sleep at the front of the house, immune to the noise ten feet below my window, although the voices, some of them familiar from greetings exchanged at my father’s surgery door, drifted through my dreams, now remembered with the clarity of nursery rhymes. I particularly liked one of the standard approaches of the prostitutes to their customers: ‘Thirty bob—strip to the earrings.’ It had the familiar ring of the bookies’ voices calling out their odds.

  The house itself was really very small, I now realise, for the life it contained. It was a wonderful child’s house, full of dark corners, hidden cupboards, unnecessary doors, delicious shiny, rounded banisters, and two of those areas of waste space but endless possibility, the ‘light areas’. There was both a flat roof, for laundry and sun-bathing and dolls’ houses, and a sloping tiled one over the front half of the house for perilous climbs. There was a sheer drop of about sixty feet to be bridged when leaping to the fire escape of the block of flats next door with the odious little red-haired boy who lived in them, and there was, surprisingly enough, no supervision or restriction on these activities. It can only be that my father was busy, my mother playing bridge, and the current servants about their own business during these danger-fraught forays, for I can certainly remember no admonitions or warnings except my grandmother’s with which I fought a bitter and unceasing war, sure of paternal backing for any amount of defiance.

  Nevertheless, when these battles were over and I had climbed down from roof, drainpipe or banister, it was always to her drawing-room I went for the private, secret place, which a child needs away from adult household life. It was a long, low, dark, cool room, whose windows looked out onto the feet of passers-by, and like everything else touched by my grandmother and Juliet in their seemingly constant and shared state of bereavement, its colour scheme was in varying shades of what they called ‘heliotrope’. They both started wearing this as half-mourning very early in their death-bespattered lives. My grandmother carried it into her furnishings with a certain amount of relief in the way of pale background chintzes and a grey cushion here and there. Juliet’s bedroom was, on the contrary, a stretch of unbroken purple. Her heavy mahogany furniture, combined with this funereal grandeur, did indeed give added weight to the mausoleum-like effect created by the many photographs of the departed.

  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 com
pany 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.