A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  Indeed, Coralie Clarke Rees had a swag of natural attributes – but a domestic goddess she was not, nor did she aspire to be. Domesticity had been dumped on her through marriage and motherhood and by her commitment to create a generous home for her children, partner and guests. She considered herself not a ‘cook’ but an ‘organiser’. She ordered all our food by phone and it was brought to the back door by the providors themselves. She charmed and conversed with the men as they made their deliveries. There was George Groves, who carried a splintery wooden packing case of fresh fruits and vegetables on his leather shoulder pad and then gently placed it on the kitchen table twice a week. My father would tease her about Groves, a darkly handsome if slightly sweaty man, inquiring at the dinner table, ‘Has Groves been again today? And what did you talk about this time?’ Then there was Horton, who had the small grocery shop on Ben Boyd Road opposite my school. Mr Horton, as I addressed him when slinking into his shop to buy a rainbow ball (two for a penny), took a phone order from my mother once a week and brought us everything from triangular blocks of cheese to Mudgee honey in a colourful tin, Schweppes lime cordial and a refill for the soda syphon. In later years, some grocers had a licence to sell alcohol so bottles of Penfolds dry sherry, Chateau Tanunda brandy, Dalwood Hermitage and Ben Ean moselle would be delivered as well, ready for the next dinner party. Every morning, milk would be placed on the back step by Bob Harris, the milkman, and the butcher, father of one of my schoolmates, would deliver the meat.

  My mother made sure everyone ate well and nutritiously. She could cook, however reluctantly, and on Sunday there might be a leg of lamb with roast vegetables – but it usually didn’t appear until one was ready to eat the legs of the chair as well. It was not unusual for lunch to be served at 3.00 pm. It seems that from the time she was first married, Coralie displayed a certain tardiness in getting meals to the table. By the time she had children, she had developed this tardiness into an art form. When we complained she would protest, ‘I started getting the meal ready – but I got sidetracked.’ The kitchen scraps and detritus were always wrapped in newspaper (plastic bags were an invention of the future) and one of my mother’s favourite ‘sidetracks’ was to find an interesting article she had missed reading in The Sydney Morning Herald just as she was about to wrap the rubbish in it. She would stop and pore over the piece, then carefully cut it out – to be kept, passed on or included in a letter. If you happened to enter the kitchen at this time to tactfully inquire when the meal might be ready, she would discuss the item with you. This practice endlessly delayed the passage of food to the table.

  Another of my mother’s characteristic reluctances was in making the bed. We were required to make our own as soon as we could. But my mother had a particular hesitancy about tidying up what she called ‘the CC’ (‘the connubial couch’). Yet she seemed to consider it a mandatory part of her responsibilities. One evening at about 6.00 pm we were chatting in her bedroom when she glanced at the clock: ‘Quick, darling, give us a hand to make the bed before Les gets home.’ More memorable still is the time my parents left for an overseas trip of ten months, firmly closing their bedroom door on the unmade bed.

  So much for domestic imperatives.

  Relief from housewife’s purgatory arrived in the person of Aunt Averil who moved over from Western Australia to be nearer her daughter. Ailsa lived, at the time, in a tiny artistic flat in the inner city. Averil’s contributions to our ménage had benefits all round, including for Megan and me. We were young teenagers at the time. For Averil was a domestic goddess, and not only in the kitchen. A talented dressmaker who could design and create anything from a beaded wedding gown to upholstery, bedspreads, cushions and curtains, she was also a stunning cook. After moving to Sydney, Averil needed to support herself financially and by then my mother could patently do with some help. So they established a mutually agreeable arrangement.

  Averil came at least two days a week, cooking up potfuls of glorious food. Her signature dishes were beef bourguignon, savoury rice and vegetable casserole. ‘Veg. cass.’ was a baked mixture of shredded cabbage, carrots, celery and onion with a cheese topping, which my parents introduced to dinner guests as ‘Russell Drysdale’ because the colours resembled one of his landscapes. And of course there was that Shellcove specialty, a meatloaf we called ‘Bungarra’ (an Aboriginal word for a type of goanna, as the meatloaf was vaguely shaped like a small perentie). Averil also briskly wielded the Electrolux, made our clothes, and whenever our parents were entertaining on a large scale, oversaw the catering. On such occasions I used to help her in the kitchen, making asparagus rolls with soft white bread, Jatz biscuits decorated with green and red cocktail onions on a bed of cream cheese, savoury eggs and tiny meatballs to go on a toothpick. Being shy, I was more comfortable working with my aunt in the kitchen than mingling with the guests. She taught me much, encouraging my already enthusiastic culinary skills. After we’d finished preparing the party food, I’d pour her a brandy and we’d perch on kitchen stools and talk while she smoked a cigarette.

  My parents were gregarious by nature and endlessly hospitable. When people were staying, my sister Megan had to shift out of her room and share mine, a regular relocation over which she simmered with resentment to the end of her days. Her bedroom was more private as it was off the lounge room and closer to the bathroom so it functioned well as the guest quarters. As well as the house guests and regular Friday night dinner parties, a new book published would be welcomed by a party with twenty or thirty people. Public book launches supported by publishers were unknown – writers provided any celebration for themselves and their supporters in their own homes. For these celebrations Averil’s catering was a necessary ingredient. My mother’s role was to ‘organise’ everything – ordering in luxurious food and drinks and setting out the lounge room in great style with boxes of cigarettes, china ashtrays strategically positioned and vases of blue hydrangeas from the garden, specially requested from the landlord. My sister and I were to meet the guests and hand round platters. As teenagers, we were also required to do the washing up in the cramped kitchen sink.

  I once revealed to my mother how much I admired her easeful knack of entertaining. She looked me in the eye and expounded her doctrine of hospitality: ‘This is the recipe for success: you bring together the people who should be brought together and in the right place, you provide them with the best food and drink you can afford – and after that, my darling, it’s up to the guests to make it happen.’

  My mother’s wisdom is something I have treasured over the years and passed on to other grateful recipients. She could deliver an aphorism with convincing power, her broadcaster’s deep voice and perfectly articulated diction making it stick in the mind so that when it is recalled, it is spoken in her voice. My sister and I enjoyed the benefits of her mandate, ‘Never economise on health or education.’ ‘All men are contra-suggestive’ had me puzzled for a while – I thought it had something to do with ‘contraceptive’: a word rarely heard before the pill reached our shores in the 1960s. (‘Birth control’ was the preferred term to refer to the various devices and unguents that were optimistically dedicated to that purpose.) My mother responded to a worried inquiry about her inherited illness with: ‘In our genetic inheritance, we get the good as well as the bad.’

  ~

  In my sixteenth year, my childhood innocence came to an abrupt close. I was thrust into a messy adult world but, because I was still regarded as a youngster, I was never told the awkward truths that lay behind all the tensions, the sadness of it. When I did find out, accidentally and through a third party, I felt deceived and found the reality shattering. But that was months after.

  On the night itself, the end of July 1956, cold and stormy, I relayed urgent messages by phone from Aunt Averil’s neighbour, asking my parents ‘to come straight away’ to their flat at Chatswood as Averil’s daughter Ailsa was ‘very ill’. My parents called a taxi and disappeared into the night.
Megan and I were left perplexed. At about midnight my parents arrived home with a silent Aunt Averil. My mother took me quietly into her bedroom and said: ‘Ailsa has died.’

  I was stunned, never having been confronted with death at such close quarters. Besides, I had no idea that Ailsa was ill. We hadn’t seen much of her in the last few years. I wasn’t sure why. But she was invited to dinner later that week to celebrate her birthday. The night of her death, my mother said I could sleep in her bed. I think she wanted the comfort of me, too, as my father was sleeping on the lounge to be near his sister in the night.

  A few days later, my parents told me I was to stay home from school and look after my aunt while they went to Ailsa’s funeral, which my father had arranged. Aunt Averil was adamant: she had avoided funerals all her life and was not going to break this practice with her own daughter’s. So I stayed with her, my heavy responsibility to confront the distraught grieving of a bereaved mother. My aunt wept inconsolably between endless cups of tea and cigarettes and I tried to do what I imagined was appropriate, though I had no idea what that was.

  Over the next few months, as strange and inexplicable as it might seem, a close bond developed between a grieving woman in her sixties and an oversensitive and self-absorbed teenager. We discovered a connection, a harmony, a friendship. She found in me a consolation, a protégée who could assuage her grief. I found in her a repository of surprises, a surreptitious peek at family ghosts long gone and glimpses into a world I would otherwise never have discovered. She also allowed me the odd cigarette.

  As our relationship grew in trust and affection, Averil began to call herself my ‘second mother’. I don’t know how my ‘first mother’ reacted to this – did she feel a little threatened by her sister-in-law’s poaching some of my filial loyalty, particularly as she was the one left with the difficult job of bringing me into line? I now wish I had told my mother she needn’t have worried; there was no contest. She was ‘my mum’ from the alpha to the omega. A generation younger than Averil, Coralie was expressive, open and frank. You knew where you stood. My aunt couldn’t have been more different. She had a tightly controlled mien, a dignified reticence as neat and stitched as her appearance, all suggesting smoky secretive pockets that would never be revealed, even to me.

  Averil was born in Queensland in 1891, the second child and only girl in the family. After her father was sacked from his teaching job in Queensland, the family moved to Tasmania to live with Harry’s parents.

  Her kind grandparents could not always protect Averil and her brothers from their father’s bursts of irrational anger, resulting from his alcoholism. It was many years before Averil would tell me how, on one occasion, her father had chased her wielding an axe. On another, he beat her savagely with a belt in front of the class he was teaching. The violence of their childhood was to leave irrevocable scars on all the children, including my father.

  For Averil, assaults from a drunken father were only the start of many hurdles. Though she was emerging as a twentieth-century woman, it was not surprising that her social values reflected the Victorian era from which she and her parents had come. She was unshakeably inhibited about all aspects of the body and its functions, ‘sex’ was a nasty word and she displayed a cagey cynicism about men and marriage. She alluded darkly to the miseries of childbirth but never mentioned the details, just warning me, ‘You’ll find out.’ Averil never went anywhere without her corsets – indeed, she told me her former husband had never seen her without them! (Did she wear them to bed?) When leaving the house, her formal attire included a hat, either a finely tailored suit she called ‘a costume’ or a skirt and twinset, hosiery, court shoes, pearl necklace and earrings, gloves and handbag. A summertime concession would be a coat of some light fabric over a frock. But the accessories didn’t change.

  Averil married the evening before the Anzacs landed on the beaches of Gallipoli: 24 April 1915. Like her mother, she made an unfortunate choice of husband, also falling for a musically gifted charmer. After having her daughter, Ailsa, Averil divorced her husband for ‘sowing his wild oats around town’, divorce being considered so shocking in the early 1920s that, even decades after, my father admonished us never to mention it. So, like her mother, she began the life of a single parent in times when the condition was considered shameful and there was not an inkling of social or financial support for women in such circumstances.

  Averil was deprived of a secondary education through her family situation. But after the breakdown of her marriage, she had to find a way of earning a living. She established a stylish dressmaking studio in the upmarket Bon Marché centre of Perth. Later, she managed the box office for the iconic His Majesty’s Theatre. Clearly an indomitable woman, Averil triumphed over many challenges in her life, the greatest losing her beloved daughter.

  When I was young, it seemed to me that my cousin Ailsa had it all: beauty, intelligence and artistic skills. What I didn’t understand was that her dreams and her stability had been shattered by two failed love affairs. Until it was explained to me in graphic terms by a medical woman who knew my aunt, I had no idea that Ailsa had for many years suffered a hopeless addiction to alcohol and that was what caused her death, just before her thirty-eighth birthday.

  17

  Patience Rewarded

  ‘Dad, Dad, I’ve found a boat.’ Bashing away at the Remington, my father paused. He was mid-sentence and none too pleased. I was fully aware that I had transgressed. It was one of the golden rules of our household that you did not interrupt the parent whose designated writing day it was – you should address your concerns to the other parent on domestic duties. However, I knew that my father was my best chance of success in this cause.

  ‘Dad, I’ve found a boat.’

  My father seemed tempted to hear more, then shook his head. ‘I’ve got to finish this chapter before dinner. We can discuss it later. Now,’ (in a cross voice) ‘clear out!’

  When we went for our usual walk in the late afternoon I put forward my proposal, listing all the arguments I could invent about how owning a boat would increase the quality of our lives. He listened but was noncommittal. Having grown up in poverty and lived through tough times, he was reluctant to part with a hard-earned penny for anything but the necessities of life.

  After school during the week I would skip down to the waterfront, pad along the swimming pool walls and across the splintery wooden ramps to Mr Morgan’s boatshed. On tiptoe I would peer through the cobwebbed window at the object of my dreams, lying face down on planks, its beams shrunken and warped, its paintwork cracked and crusty with neglect. Then on weekends I would continue my campaign.

  One miraculous day, out of the blue, my father asked: ‘Is that old rowing boat still for sale?’ My heart leapt. He then went to the box where my parents kept their private financial papers and took out a cheque book. He wrote in it, tore off the cheque and then showed me the cheque butt on which he had written ‘ONE BOAT’ and underneath that ‘25 POUNDS’.

  I was almost too excited to speak. Almost.

  ‘What shall we call it, Dad?’

  ‘I think we should call it PR.’

  ‘But what that does that stand for?’

  ‘Patience Rewarded,’ he said sternly.

  I beamed with gratitude.

  ‘Okay, you scallywag. Perhaps it should stand for Persistent Rees.’

  ~

  Our family home, a roomy three-bedroom flat, was perched on the steep side of Shellcove, a crenellated inlet that fits tightly between two narrow fingers of land jutting into the water, both culminating in rocky promontories covered with low scrub. The incline on which our block was built is so acute that there were three flats on the road side, but room for a fourth flat on the waterfront side, butted into the rocky slope behind it. That was Flat 1, which we called home. Below our windows, the garden fell away to the waterfront in a series of rocky terraces and ferny paths. You wound d
own through overhanging greenery until the final drop, by steep wooden ladder, to the saltwater pool and boatshed. From there you could step – or slip – into the deep cool shadowy water of Sydney Harbour. Whether it was frolicking in the saltwater pool, playing Perry-Race-Winkles with my friends (a slow game we invented where you line up the small shellfish in a row and wait for them to make their competitive progress along a rock), dangling my legs over the Kurraba ferry wharf while fishing in the school holidays or rowing my three-metre boat around the bays – the harbour was the centre of my world, making my childhood glow with light and with small adventures.

  We were not allowed to play in the front garden of our building. Our landlord, Mr Chapman, was a cranky Yorkshireman who lived in the flat above ours with his wife and her sister, two grey ladies who smiled at us but never spoke. He wore pince-nez and had a wired-up knee of which he was proud (the 1880s precursor to the knee replacement). When he wore long shorts you could see filaments of wire holding his kneecap in place under his pellucid skin. Chappie, as we called him, was a devout gardener. He manicured the sloping lawns and continuous displays of flowers – phlox, pansies, snapdragons, zinnias – in colour-coordinated tiers leading up to the street frontage. He did not like us to play in that garden. It was purely for display.

  Chappie made it clear that he did not approve of children, though he always remembered my birthday on Guy Fawkes Day. He would solemnly present me with a ten-shilling note and an unlabelled bottle of port – to reward my parents for their endurance, no doubt. When they bought an old piano for us to learn music, he made a rule we must not play it after 7.00 pm. He used to watch the time carefully. If it was five past seven and one of us was still practising our scales, he would thump on the floor above with his walking stick until we stopped.