Aunts Up the Cross

by Robin Dalton

  ‘I like Aeroplane Jelly’ floated behind the little aeroplanes on banners as they patrolled the beaches. ‘I like Aeroplane Jelly; Aeroplane Jelly for me. I like it for breakfast: I like it for tea. Aeroplane Jelly for me’ floated out of the radio; on entering a country town by road, we were greeted by a large banner strung from telegraph pole to pole: ‘Welcome to Leura—a good Rexona town’; on departure, a ‘Farewell’ replaced the welcome.

  My grandmother’s bedroom, where I lay listening to her stories, was the centre of a more active and gregarious life. Her dining-room was always a sinister room, redolent of Juliet’s widowhood and thoughts of Uncle Harry, into which I seldom ventured. The cupboard under the stairs had a tiny window and loads of treasures, but here Rosa Toomey, the cook, hung up her hat and coat and left her small suitcase crammed with her life’s savings in pound notes which she brought to work every day; and so I had the obscure feeling of being in forbidden territory. Halfway up the stairs, Juliet’s room was given over entirely to Juliet’s material comfort and possessions. Dozens of dresses hung under their organdie covers, and tray after tray slid out of the lowboy and the tallboy packed with gloves, and scarves and underwear, all in their heliotrope organdie bags. The whole house was stuffed with the haphazard acquisitions of the Victorian and Edwardian middle-class family. In the dark hall, one bumped into corners of substantial carved camphor chests: inlaid brass ornaments, trays, huge vases and gongs gleamed from every corner. ‘Cloisonne ware’ was a favourite lamp base: every glass surface, however utilitarian, was heavily cut. I harboured the vague idea that glass was really called ‘cut glass’, except when used in window panes. The dressing-tables of my grandmother and Aunt Juliet were a riot of silver angels and cherubs entwined and garlanded around pots and jars and pin-trays, and frolicking round the tops of cut-glass scent bottles. On the walls hung perfectly hideous paintings—brightly coloured sunsets and coy, long-haired ladies simpering naked on the seashore—and an occasional etching of some quite uninspiring building. Stored away in drawers and in the camphor chests were mounds of beautiful lace, Irish crochet jackets and delicate shawl collars, salvaged from nightdresses and blouses and former glories; silver reticules, and discarded jet fringes.

  Upstairs in my parents’ domain, although I had my own small bedroom there, life was so packed with people and incident that no corner of it remains privately mine in my memory. The life of our part of the house revolved around the telephone—a wind-up contraption with an operator at the other end—constantly ringing for the doctor, and the snores of my father trumpeting away through the noise. The hall at the top of the stairs was large enough for a table, and a few chairs, the telephone, another flight of stairs leading to the servants’ rooms, and a window opening into the kitchen which faced the top of the stairs. This window had no possible use as ventilation or light entry, as there was another perfectly adequate window in the kitchen opening onto the outside world, so my mother must have had it knocked in the wall for freer social intercourse. Whoever was working in the kitchen could see who was coming up the stairs and vice versa. The bottom two or three rows of stairs leading to the maids’ rooms were usually occupied as chairs by visitors who could call through the kitchen window to my mother, invariably making or drinking tea. Later, she went even further and ripped the kitchen door off its hinges as well. She did it herself, which was a feat of some strength. Next to the kitchen was the sole, over-worked bathroom, strategically placed bang in the middle of this continually crowded hall. When I was very small I remember there being a key to the bathroom door, for I had one hated nannie who locked me in the bathroom as punishment. But at some period it was lost, for never after was there a key. This created a situation in which any visit to our bathroom involved a feeling of insecurity and necessitated a constant state of alertness.

  As may be surmised, ours was a house in which the feeling of being ‘lived in’ flourished to the exclusion of all else. I suppose it must have been fairly shabby but one didn’t notice this amid the crush of people, the cigarette smoke, and the constant preparation or eating of food. My mother smoked nearly 100 cigarettes per day—there was not a piece of furniture that had not been scarred by her butts—and, not in the least house-proud, all her enormous energy and creativeness was focused on her kitchen. She never cooked until the war, and then when we were reduced to Rosa, increasingly cranky and growing older, and one maid, she attacked the business of cooking with gusto and joy. She was a natural chef—inventive and lavish. She was indifferent to her own comfort; the sofa would, and often did, do as well as her bed. She and my father shared a large dressing-room which was always littered with his clothes, and the only place in the house to which she could retire in an attempt at privacy was the unlockable bathroom. ‘My idea of luxury,’ she would say, ‘is to be allowed to go to the lavatory by myself.’ This seldom happened, as my grandmother hated to be shut out, and thought it was an unnatural and unfilial act.

  There was nothing in the house forbidden to me. I was allowed to choose my own wallpaper and paint my own bedroom. One year, when I was about nine, I chose a bright, sick pink, and the next year an even brighter hospital green. Halfway round the skirting board, with only the fronts done of my chest of drawers and wardrobe, I would tire, and the painter would be called in to finish the job, but not until I had painted the lavatory seat in the year’s favourite shade.

  These twin themes dominating the house, of death and lack of privacy, merged and culminated in the unhappy event of my mother killing the plumber. At one end of the upper hall was the back door, normally left open for sun and air. One summer morning the servants were busy elsewhere, the house was for once empty, and my mother emerged naked from her dressing-room en route to take a bath. At that moment the plumber (he was a new one) came up the back stairs and met her on the landing. He promptly had a heart attack from which he never recovered. My mother always felt that the fact that death was not instantaneous detracted from the impact of her nudity and the dramatic possibilities of the story.

  Although I was a solitary child in a house full of adults, the house was undeniably always full, and this variety of characters I knew intimately at an early age was a rich fund of entertainment. I remember Tony McGill, our starting-price bookmaker, who ate a pound of raw tripe every morning for breakfast. At the same meal, he was also apt to whip out his not inconsiderable male member, of which he was inordinately proud, and display it on a plate. Perhaps my father had embellished this story, perhaps Tony had boasted of having done it only once, but it made our own family breakfast appear a dull event to me.

  Thursday was ‘settling’ day. Every Thursday night, Tony McGill came round to finalise the previous Saturday’s betting. Tony had a special line in patter, which he had learnt from the then famous Fitzpatrick Travelogues. Something about the rich, resonant tones of Mr Fitzpatrick’s voice and his choice of exotic sounding places impressed Tony. As he left with the week’s takings he would wave to assembled company and call out in his ringing bookmaker’s voice, ‘Farewell to Calabadad, Land of Mysterious Women!’

  Occasionally, if his visit was later than usual, my mother asked him to stay to dinner, but even in such an easygoing household as ours this was a risky move and apt to create tension. Flushed with whisky and bent on entertaining the party, Tony would go through his repertoire of Fitzpatrickisms and once having exhausted these, would feel that something more spectacular was expected of him. Another regular visitor was a genteel and aged governess of my mother’s, Sally Thornton, who one night had the misfortune to sit next to Tony, casting around for fresh topics. When all else failed, his own body never ceased to fascinate him. He leapt to his feet, pushed back his chair and, whipping his shirt out of his trousers, thrust his bare and hairy chest close to Sally’s face.

  ‘How’s that?’ he roared. ‘Go on—have a feel—as hard as a rock and in the pink of condition.’

  Sally leant across this offering and addressed herself, quivering with gentility, to Tony
’s other neighbour. ‘Don’t you feel, Mr Blackman,’ she said, ‘that Gilbert and Sullivan were antipathetic?’

  Poor Tony could never understand the rebuff.

  As frequent a visitor as Tony was Siddie Jacobs, a dim-witted car park attendant to whom my father would lend five pounds to be repaid at the rate of sixpence a week over the years. He was once caught chasing little girls and my father guaranteed his good behaviour to the police. Siddie was about five feet high. He lisped badly and wore a long, white coat flapping around his ankles. When my father felt particularly mischievous he would say to Siddie on his visits to the surgery, ‘Go upstairs, Sid, and say hello to Mrs Eakin. She’s not doing anything.’

  As my mother invariably was doing something and, once up, Siddie was not easy to get down, this was not a popular move.

  There was always a current ‘lame dog’ of my mother’s in the house. There was the girl behind the cash desk at the butcher’s shop opposite who suffered from a painful and recalcitrant boil on her behind. It was too far for her to travel to her home each day for the prescribed treatment and so she came at lunch-time and sat patiently in a bowl of boiling water and boracic on our bathroom floor while my mother served her delicious luncheons on a tray.

  More disrupting were the resident visitors. During really full periods, my mother sometimes never slept in a bed for weeks at a stretch. One fruity-voiced gentleman my parents met on a cruise lived with us for two years before disappearing with all the whisky and leaving behind a pile of unpaid bills. Shortly after his departure, my mother came home with a loathsome Viennese from her bridge club: I was turned out of my bedroom for him, and was incensed still further by the large framed photograph of himself kept on my bureau and the coronets embroidered on his underpants. It took nine months for us to convince my mother that, despite his excellence at the bridge table, he must go.

  Not all our house guests, eating or sleeping, were mistakes. One English theatrical producer whom my father invited to dinner remained in close harmony and affection—nightly—for seventeen years. Next to racing, the dominant influence in our lives was the theatre. The theatre in Sydney lapsed into a very barren field after the war, compared to the richness with which it flourished when I was a child. There were only two legitimate theatres (one of them boringly inaccessible—too far by public transport and too difficult to park by one’s own) compared to the many of my youth. Now there is a vigorous stirring of Australian playwrights, and a crop of small playhouses and theatre clubs, but still the best of Australian talent leaves home. But forty or fifty years ago, we had Her Majesty’s, the Criterion, the Theatre Royal, the Tivoli—we had whole visiting companies from England and America and opera companies from Italy—and my father had them all as patients. He was the official theatre doctor to all the companies, and so a great deal of my time was spent behind the wings, chasing through the corridors and dressing-rooms, while he was attending one of the company.

  There was no discernible link between bridge games, death and drama; nevertheless, memories of one fade inevitably into memories of the other.

  My mother’s influence embedded in me the belief that to play bad bridge was worse than boring; it bordered on a sin. It seemed easier never to learn. The bridge table would be set and ready by 11.30 a.m.—the bridge cloths, green baize or velour, bordered in gold-flecked brocade ribbon; the score pads with their four-cornered symbols of diamonds, hearts, clubs and spades; the freshly sharpened pencils still smelling of wood shavings; and the cook of the day busily cutting sandwiches in the kitchen. The players all wore hats, and even though these honorary ‘aunts’ bore no relationship other than parental friends, they were never addressed solely by their Christian names. At teatime I was allowed in to gaze at them, and once earned my mother’s proud glance by a long, appraising look at one.

  ‘Aunt Marjorie’s very pretty, isn’t she, Mummie.’

  My mother, preening herself on her enchanting child, agreed.

  ‘But I don’t think much of the other two. Wherever did you get them from?’

  The bridge table was a regular backdrop for these social comments, the supply of ‘aunts’ abundant. I once asked a new ‘aunt’ if she could remove her hat, the better to see her face, then let out a horrified cry to my mother, ‘Oh no! Ask her to put it on again!’

  I asked one lady sipping her tea if I could carefully watch her drink.

  ‘Yes, darling, but why?’

  ‘Because my daddy says you drink like a fish.’

  My mother’s bridge games were almost sacred events—to fall out without due warning an unforgivably inconsiderate act, the more so if my father were the messenger.

  He came home one night and announced to my mother that he had just been called to see a friend of hers, but that ‘she didn’t know much about it’.

  My mother was a little shocked. ‘Do you mean she was drunk?’

  ‘Worse than that,’ said my father. ‘Dead.’

  This really shocked her. ‘She can’t be dead—I’m playing bridge with her tomorrow.’

  ‘Not tomorrow, dear.’

  So, for me, death seemed the suitably dramatic end to any conversation, bringing with it no discomforting strangeness.

  When there were no more family deaths to give colour to our days, my father’s patients could always be relied upon.

  They were all part of our lives, in those days of close family doctor and patient relationships. There were the Pierce boys, a family of rugged fishermen and keen amateur yachtsmen, whose favourite family joke was that my father had circumcised one of the younger boys ‘crooked’. Twice a week my father drove to the fish market in the early morning and came home with a car load of fresh Pierce fish, a sack of oysters which I was taught to open at a very early age, and two or three live lobsters romping around in the back of the car and waving their antennae through the windows at startled passers-by. Every morning my father visited a rich and elderly bachelor friend to check his far from robust but nevertheless relatively stable health, except on the rare occasions when his housekeeper would telephone. ‘Mr Cheek says, would the doctor mind not calling this morning as he is not feeling very well.’

  We all mourned when one of his old ladies died, for she whiled away the last of her senile and bed-ridden days composing couplets to be recited at the doctor’s visit. These fitted the ailment of the day. When her nightdress was lifted to bare her abdomen, she shrilled:

  ‘Pull down my shirt,

  I’m Fanny the Flirt.’

  and for an abscessed breast brought forth:

  ‘Isn’t it a pity—

  That I’ve got a titty.’

  On mornings when I was not at school I frequently accompanied my father on his rounds, sometimes visiting the patient and sometimes waiting in the car outside. If he left me in a doubtful slum area, he always admonished me, ‘Now, if anyone speaks to you, just make a noise like a five-year-old girl’ or whatever age was appropriate at the time. When he emerged he would sometimes tell me about the case. I remember some of our family intimates only through their ailments which, if they were startling enough, my father could not resist recounting. Thus, one plump and coyly coquettish lady was embedded in my consciousness since a tick had ‘crawled up her’. My father felt her charms were forever damned because, as he put it, ‘when I got to the poor brute, it had died’.

  Actually, for me, all Sydney was an extension of the security of the house. My days never had an even tenor, but always an assured one, and certain events brought their certain flavour.

  Was there ever a threat to this security, I now wonder? Financial threat may have been there but never to be taken seriously. In the 1930s so-called ‘society’ women thought little of popping into the pawn shops with their jewellery. This particularly appealed to my mother, whose fiscal week was ruled by Saturday’s betting results. Many a Thursday morning on Tony McGill’s settling day she would borrow Juliet’s sapphire and diamond ring (now on my finger) or one of her diamond, ruby and emerald but
terflies, ostensibly to wear to a party, but in reality to appease Tony that night. After a few days, Juliet would become both curious and querulous and, dependent on the race results, my mother would either fling back her jewellery or plead another party.

  In our urban life, my consciousness of the Depression was an awareness of a wicked man called Jack Lang, bent, it seemed, on ruining all our lives. I do remember a sense of apprehension, almost fearful, attached to this man. But my only experience of actual financial concern was the occasion on which my parents made a pact to give up smoking—in order to pay for my school fees.

  The pact lasted a week. My mother gave in first. This did not appear to affect my education and the school fees were never mentioned again.

  Darker moments have been pushed away, into another dimension. Every now and then, a sound, a smell, a chink of light or darkness breaks the happy carapace of memory. Sitting downstairs in a two-up, two-down Surry Hills tenement I watched my father disappear up the narrow stairs with his worn, brown leather ‘doctor’s’ bag, while from upstairs came screams—neither cries nor shouts, but piercing, wrenching, beseeching screams. When he came down again, the screams would have stopped. Someone else came with him—an elderly man or woman, talking in low voices. I knew that the screams came from a woman upstairs who had cancer. I knew that my father had, out of his leather bag, stopped the screams. I do not remember how I knew this, how my father had seen fit to introduce me to reality but all my life I have remembered—screams, cancer, horror, fear. It did not have the remote and curious connection of Uncle Ken’s pneumonia and the bread and sugar. This death (for surely the woman was dying) belonged to the real world, more affecting—not one’s uncle from my fairy tale (albeit sometimes a Grimm’s fairy tale) world—but a creature in extremis.

  Nevertheless the flavour of illness was an exciting one, not only the patients’ illnesses, but my own. Then my mother swamped me with presents: I lay in feverish anticipation every time she left the house for she never went out, even for half an hour, without returning with armfuls of treasures. When my appendix came out a whole room of the hospital was hung by my mother in pink brocade, and every day a new lace or satin pillow cover arrived with a pillow spray of flowers in the appropriate colours, to pin beside my face.