by Alice Pung
But this is not surprising when we look back at the history and culture of what bells have done, or made people do, for better or for worse. Although Shakespeare’s Macbeth contemplates regicide, it is finally a bell that compels him to commit the deed: ‘the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell.’
In 1612 a tailor named Robert Dow left an odd annual endowment to the Church of St Sepulchre in London – a fitting name for its long relationship with the nearby Newgate Prison. After his death, Dow wanted to ensure that the condemned knew their punishment and got a proper admonition before they headed to the gallows. So he specified that the bellman of the church should ring the bell on the eve of every execution day, and to ring it again as the cart carrying the condemned left Newgate for the Tyburn gallows the following morning. On the midnight before the executions, the sextant walked solemnly through the passageway between the church and the prison, and stood outside the cells of the condemned. There, he rang the bell twelve times and recited a warning prayer. I wonder whether this was what Poe meant when he writes of ‘the people – ah, the people – They that dwell up in the steeple / all alone / and who tolling, tolling, tolling / In that muffled monotone, / Feel a glory in so rolling / On the human heart a stone.’
Bells are now rung in churches, monasteries, abbeys, temples and synagogues on the day of execution for American death-row prisoners, but for a different reason. The seventeenth-century English poet John Donne perhaps had a clear and enlightened idea of how interconnected human beings were when he penned the lines: ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’
Nine years ago, a Dominican nun named Dorothy Briggs started the ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ campaign as ‘a reminder to all who hear them that all of us are diminished by continuing acts of state-sponsored murder’. The campaign will continue until the death penalty is abolished in America.
For America – unlike Europe, with its dark medieval history of bells foreshadowing doom – the bell is a symbol of hope and progress. Its most famous is the Liberty Bell, cast in 1752 with a quote from the Bible inscribed on it: ‘Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof. Lev. XXV X.’
The Liberty Bell gained iconic importance when the abolitionists adopted it as their symbol, since the following lines of Leviticus 25:10 include the directive: ‘and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family’.
When I returned to Australia, I learnt that we too had our own world-famous bell. Once the holding camp for Japanese and Italian prisoners of war during World War II, the NSW town of Cowra is now home to the bronze World Peace Bell, one of only seven in the world. The 103 member states of the United Nations gifted coins from their own countries, which were then melted down and cast into the bell. It is rung to commemorate World Peace Day on the third Tuesday of every September.
There is something eternal about an instrument that only plays a single note. But never underestimate the power of that one note. When the largest swinging bell ever cast by the United States in the nineteenth century chimed in the steeple of Saint Francis De Sales Church in Cincinnati for the first time, it took six men to swing the clapper. The resultant E-flat shattered nearby windows. The clapper was never used again: today, the bell is rung only with a small hammer tapping its rim.
Yoke, crown, head, shoulder, waist, lip, mouth, bead line. And finally, the clapper. Who knew that the terminology used to describe such an ordinary and ancient – but not archaic – object could be so poetic and sensuous? Who knew a bell could holler so loudly? Cry so plaintively? Induce a person to paroxysms of tears, or press a fingertip upon the bruise of their basest fears? Bells are rung at weddings and sounded at funerals. In that singular note, they speak of the passage of time, of beginnings and endings, the order of society, a people’s struggle for freedom and independence, a faith’s emblem of human enlightenment, a person’s quest for sanity, hope and liberty. And ultimately, they also stop people from being run over by trains when they are too busy listening to their mobile ringtones.
Yoke, crown, head, shoulder, waist, lip, mouth, bead lines of sweat. This could also describe the parts of the maiden as she disappeared into the flames, so important was that casting of the bell to the ancient Chinese.
HAIR APPARENT
Mr Abe Lourie is eighty-one, and tells me that he is in perfect health. Every morning he walks up two flights of stairs to open his store. The lift has been broken for quite some time and yet customers continue to come up, because for half a century he has helped fill a lack in people’s lives. Stacked from floor to ceiling with over a thousand heads of real and synthetic hair, Creative Wigs is one of those places that reminds you of a time before the merged business – a time of the butcher, the baker and the wigmaker.
Though Mr Lourie does not make the wigs he sells, he talks about hairpieces with a reverence otherwise reserved for miraculous modern drugs, paracetamol and gentle herbal balms to alleviate persistent aches. Mr Lourie used to be a pharmacist fifty years ago, on the corner of Swanston and Bourke streets. ‘Around that time, exciting people were beginning to arrive in Melbourne,’ he says. ‘Entertainers used to come down from the Southern Cross Hotel.’ His business changed forever when a Hong Kong supplier came into his pharmacy with two human-hair samples. One was a ponytail and the other was a black hair-switch. Mr Lourie put them in the window and by the end of the week they were gone.
‘Look at this,’ he exclaims, as he shows me a bobbed synthetic wig with a handmade monofilament front. ‘This is the difference between an ordinary wig and a good one.’ I see that the hair is handwoven, four strands at a time, through the transparent lace mesh at the front of the wig. When I put my hand beneath the wig, the mesh between the hair is invisible, showing only skin. Exactly like scalp. A person wearing one of these wigs could part their hair on any side of their head.
Mr Lourie’s daughter, Diane, is attending to a woman sitting in front of the mirror in the middle of the showroom, offering her wigs of different lengths. Nestled between the wings of her new hair, the lady’s expression is one of quiet astonishment – she cannot believe this is fake hair. ‘My real hair never looked so good,’ the lady jokes to me. Diane helps her part it in the direction she prefers; it feels more like being at the hairdresser than in a warehouse.
‘Although we are generally a wholesaler, every day we will have about four or five people come in who are undergoing chemotherapy treatment,’ Diane tells me later. ‘People who’ve never worn wigs before tend to ask for human hair, but a human-hair wig needs to be taken to a hairdresser to be cut and permed. So I advise them to get synthetic wigs, which already come styled and are much easier to manage.’
Each wig has a different name, labelled on the hundreds of cardboard boxes stacked neatly around the store – Felicity, Shilo, Tatum, Miranda, Angelica, Ryan, Leah – like little folded personalities in hibernation. Sylvia, Mr Lourie’s longest-serving employee, has been working at the store for more than three decades. She shows me a box of tiny wigs for children with cancer and alopecia. ‘Usually the kids come in with their mums and dads. Girls come in more often than boys, because losing their hair affects them more.’
There are also ringmaster moustaches and Salvador Dalí moustaches, mutton chops for the sides of the face, toupees to be pinned onto thinning hair and even chest hair made of human hair hand-sewn into a lace mesh, to be adhered with liquid adhesive.
‘Who would buy chest hair?’ I ask.
‘People in the movie business,’ Mr Lourie replies.
Over the years, hair from his store has graced the heads and bodies of the casts of Lord of the Rings, Braveheart, Moulin Rouge! and The Matrix, as well as the Australian productions of musicals such as Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera.
‘I never thought this jo
b would get so interesting,’ Sylvia says. ‘Back in the ’80s, Jon Bon Jovi came with his crew and all their girlfriends. They wanted to visit Brighton Beach and so needed disguises. We gave them big moustaches and caps with hair hanging down the back.’ Pictures of celebrities adorn the place but they are stuck on the walls more like thank-you cards than advertisements. Many are signed, and Mr Lourie points one out to me. ‘Vivien St James,’ he says with sincere affection, ‘was a great lady.’ Mr Lourie then tells me about meeting her when she was a shy young man who came into a wig shop for the first time. The original Les Girls and Danny La Rue, BABBA and Björn Again have also been regular visitors.
Yet this is not a place of hyperbole. There is none of the ‘you-look-fabulous-darling!’ flamboyancy of the glass-windowed salons and wig stores of the suburbs. Mr Lourie has a chemist’s care in labelling and shelving his stock, and the gaze of a doctor with an untarnished history of accurate diagnoses. When not tending to customers, the Louries keep busy doing other things, such as filling wig orders for hospitals.
‘Sometimes,’ Diane tells me, ‘we will get Jewish ladies coming in for sheitels, though not that often. Some of them will have no problem sitting in front of Dad to be fitted for a wig.’ And who wouldn’t feel at ease here, in this quiet upper-storey warehouse in front of a man who takes as much attentive care with his transformative stock of human relief as the pharmacist he was trained to be?
The cabinet next to Mr Lourie’s desk is stacked with photographs of his grandchildren, one of whom works with him in the store. ‘I have no intention of retiring,’ he finally tells me, ‘because there is no one in Australia who knows more about wigs than I do.’
When I leave, Sylvia is adjusting a wig to fit the size of the wearer’s head – cutting out tufts of hair and sewing it with a needle and thread.
ALLY OF THE DOLLS
She was found beneath the floorboards of an old house in Geelong, and appeared to have been through a fire. Her body had disintegrated, but her head was still intact. She was from England, and probably came into existence sometime between 1908 and 1925 – though Barb, who discovered her, cannot be sure. She still has a faint bloom on her face, even though she is not alive.
‘That’s her original blush,’ Barb tells me, ‘painted on before the porcelain was glazed and fired in the kiln. These Diamond Pottery bisque-head dolls can also survive a century of being immersed in water, and their faces would still look the same.’ Barb points to the eyes: ‘Those are also original – they were found sunken in the back of her skull, because of the heat from the fire.’ I look at the aquarium starbursts in the doll’s irises. Her upper and lower eyelashes make them look like splay-legged insects.
Barb and her husband, Bob, run the Little Doll House Museum in Port Fairy, on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. All the figures on display are from Barb’s own collection; her twenty-two years of rescuing and adopting have resulted in an orphanage for more than 1300 dolls, whose lives span three centuries.
There is a Zen koan that asks the impossible question: what was your original face before your parents were born? There is something special about making an object in the image of ourselves. A dear friend of mine, who was born in London during the Blitz, told me the story of her first ‘doll’: a small postcard of Rodin’s The Kiss that she found when she was four. She was so awed by the beauty of something she could not yet explain that she made a matchbox bed for her naked marbled friends, and begged her mum for a scrap of material to keep them warm.
When I enter the museum, there are only a few other visitors, even though the $2 entry fee is waived for children on weekends: an old woman named Yvonne, who has brought in her doll for valuation, and a mother with her two small daughters.
‘Do you want to see something really, really old?’ Barb asks the girls.
‘This doll used to be my grandmother’s,’ Yvonne explains, letting the six-year-old pat her family heirloom’s flaxen head. Doll shops arouse feelings of familial feminine kinship – after all, dolls are mostly made in the image of women, children and babies. Ken is never as popular as Barbie.
Barb carefully inspects the beautiful doll, peering into its eternally bewildered eyes. She values it at $450. ‘Wow,’ gasps one of the girls.
‘I’m not going to sell it, dear,’ Yvonne says. ‘I’m going to pass it down to my granddaughter.’
‘Make sure you take a photograph of your doll, and write on the back of it how you got her, whom she was from and when she got a change of clothes,’ Barb advises. ‘A doll carries with it the family history.’
Barb was once a window dresser in Melbourne, and the dolls are arranged like panels of artwork, behind glass cabinets. Some are like impressionist paintings rendered in three dimensions, with Renoir faces, while others are simply Gauguin: primitive, raw and weird. There is a French boudoir doll with long blue eyes and an exotic heart-shaped face that reminds me of William Morris’s women.
The specimens in the Australian-doll cabinet are practical princesses that double as tea cosies and toilet-roll covers. There are also kewpie dolls – prizes from long-ago shows – and Aussie icons: Plucka Duck, Kylie Mole, Con the Fruiterer, Ozzie Ostrich. There is the Irwin family, with Bindi in wholesome khaki, snuggled up against a koala.
And then there are the celebrity dolls: Michael Jackson and Macaulay Culkin in the same cabinet, Macaulay with hands adhered to face in Home Alone pose, a disturbingly precocious caricature of Munch’s The Scream. An elegant Jackie Kennedy stands tall among skanky Little Britain dolls that expectorate obscenities when you pull a string on their backs. ‘Thank God they are behind glass,’ the girls’ mother comments.
The oldest doll, from 1850, has a wax face covering a papier-mâché skull. Her arms are made entirely of leather; it looks as if she’s wearing kidskin gloves. ‘Someone’s grandmother gave it to them in their will. The old lady had looked after it all her life, and the granddaughter did not want it – she had it sitting in the trunk of her car. It could have melted!’ Barb tells us in horror. She has been to countless expos and antique shops and country fairs to rescue dolls. And there are some strange ones, not least the so-called Mongoloid doll, whose red-amber eyes, mean arched brows and pursed persimmon lips are terrifying. All the other celluloid dolls in the cabinet, with their innocuous water-blue or beetle-brown eyes, seem to look away or stare ahead.
Barb tells me about these dolls, made between the 1880s and 1950s. She cradles one from the 1920s that is wearing a hand-crocheted outfit. His nose was bitten by a child, and his fingers, too. He is highly flammable, which is why they stopped producing his infant brethren, and Barb handles him like a real baby. ‘These were called feather dolls. Feel how light he is.’ As she passes him to me, she mentions that she never had such a doll when she was young, which is why she takes good care of them now.
Nearby, there is a Princess Diana doll wearing an exact replica of the famous wedding dress, which won its creator first prize at the Melbourne Doll Show.
‘When we were growing up, it was our dream to have a bride doll,’ the mother tells her two girls.
‘I suppose that’s not every girl’s dream now,’ Barb remarks.
‘No, they prefer these,’ I joke, pointing to some scantily clad Bratz dolls.
‘They have mean faces,’ the older girl says. ‘I don’t like them.’
‘They look like the types of girls you wouldn’t want to be friends with at school,’ their mum says.
At the Barbie-doll cabinet, we see Barbie as Scarlett O’Hara; as a fairy from The Lord of the Rings, flirting with Legolas; and as Lucille Ball, winking at an Elvis on the same shelf. ‘Now, a real Barbie collector would never take these dolls out of their boxes,’ Barb says, ‘because once a doll is out of its packaging, it immediately loses its value. It’s like driving an expensive sports car out of the dealer’s garage, I suppose.’ Barbie’s body was pilfered from Lilli, a small swimsuited doll from Germany, originally made to amuse men. A co-founder of Mattel brought L
illi to America, renamed her and mass-marketed the doll to little girls. It is said that around the world, three Barbies are sold every second.
Before I leave, I buy a little child doll for $3. On the tag is a note: ‘Some hair problems.’ In the 1970s, an owner took to her with a pair of scissors. I think she looks better with the straw-blond mop hacked back, anyway. I fall in love with her the moment I set eyes on her red dress and spotted pinafore. She is kneeling, as if in prayer, curved feet resting against her bottom. Her lips are fluted for a reverent kiss, and her hands are raised. Save for her pose, she looks like the girl in Rodin’s Eternal Idol made plastic, without her lover.
LOOKING SHEEPISH
‘Sheep’s placenta for the face is all the rage among Chinese women,’ my father said. All his mainland-Chinese friends told him that this was the perfect gift for me to give when I went to Beijing: lanolin oil containing adventurous admixtures of animal innards. So Dad scoured the Chinese newspapers, looking at the ads of shops that cater to overseas travellers. We drove to a place with signs outside in both Chinese and English, and a giant gilt sheep painted on the window.
This was definitely not a tacky knick-knack shop where you could buy ten koalas for two dollars. It was white-lit, like a swanky hotel’s bathroom, and the shelves were stacked with bottles and vials and small boxes with gold-font and glossy veneers. These were gifts you give the people overseas with whom you want to be friends. Friends help you when you’re in trouble, and the gifts ensure that you remain their friend and not a bothersome foreigner.
‘Ni hao,’ said the mainland-Chinese owner when we entered. ‘What are you looking for?’ Dad told her, and showed her a newspaper clipping. She led us down the centre aisle, where the lanolin skincare products were sold in pallets of six and eight. The natural oily coating of sheep’s wool, lanolin is widely used as a base in cosmetics: it is one of the key ingredients in Oil of Olay, which was invented by a South African chemist (indeed, the product’s name is a play on ‘lanolin’). Lanolin oil might be ‘a gift from nature’, as the packaging suggested, but the thought of rubbing the afterbirth of an animal on your face was still disturbing.