Aunts Up the Cross (11 page)

It also gave my father the idea of trying to frighten Aunt Juliet to death, as neither nature nor the Japanese seemed likely to finish her off for a great many years, and I was then her main beneficiary when the end came. I doubt whether his intentions were serious, for he had no real animosity towards her; but the carrying out of his plan amused him.

At the time, our chief resident guest was my particular acquisition: a young, beautiful, and high-spirited Russian boy, Nicki Ivangin. Nicki was a dancer, a member of Colonel de Basil’s Monte Carlo Ballet Company and, at nineteen, had been washed up on our doorstep by war, a broken leg, and the precipitous departure of the Company while he was still encased in plaster. I, hopelessly in love, brought him home one day, and my father took delight in embellishing Nicki’s English with Australian phrases. Nicki’s stock answer to any opinion soon became, ‘D’you reckon?’ He was an appreciative and encouraging audience to my father and entered with glee into rehearsals for the terrorising of Juliet.

Her room was built at the bend of the stairway linking ground floor to first, and opposite her bedroom door was a small window leading on to a narrow shaft, called, in those days—for it seems since to have vanished from modern houses—a ‘light area’. My father and Nicki, practising when Juliet was out of the house, perfected a deafening series of explosions by dropping electric light bulbs down the light area from the roof. My father was to start dropping and the first bang was the signal for Nicki to charge, suitably dressed and yelling, into Juliet’s bedroom. In the tin helmet, heavy Oriental make-up around his Slav eyes, a 1914-vintage Sam Browne of my uncle’s, and brandishing an old naval sword of my father’s, he looked macabre enough for the job. It didn’t kill Aunt Juliet, but it scared her half out of her already feeble wits. And it took days to clean the splinters of ground light bulbs from the area.

As the war went on, food and clothing became comparatively scarce, even in Australia. There was no actual shortage, but certain foodstuffs were rationed, and all clothing. My parents accepted these restrictions as a challenge to their ingenuity in obtaining them. My mother’s attentions and ministrations to all the tradespeople and shopkeepers in our vicinity, always intense, became positively overwhelming. Children’s birthdays were remembered, jobs found for adolescent and ageing members of the various Greek and Italian families, partnerships entered into for the buying of joint lottery tickets, free medical attention from my father, with which she had always been prolific, was practically forced on reasonably healthy adults. The occasional fillet steak with which these attentions were rewarded was forgotten as the end in my mother’s whole-hearted absorption and enjoyment in the means: she appreciated the affection and dependence of her small colony of suppliers more than we did the fruits of her efforts.

Our current maid, Phyllis, was a tough and sly little character who rapidly did less and less housework and more and more of the duties of a bookmaking clerk for my mother. She knew all the jockeys and racing tipsters and was deeply involved in the war-time black market.

My mother quickly discovered this potential source of supply and substituted a telephone for the broom in Phyllis’ hand. My mother did the sweeping while Phyllis ferreted out racing form and Lucky Strikes. She, like all our servants, developed a passionate attachment to my mother, and a detached and impersonal hatred of the unknown aunts, whom she hounded from a distance whenever the opportunity presented. The poor old ladies received a telephone call from Phyllis one day.

‘This is the Parcels Office at Central Railway Station. There’s a crate of eggs addressed to you here waiting to be picked up.’

A crate of eggs was an extraordinary windfall—Litter, Titter, Fritter and Anus clustered round the telephone in amazement.

‘Good heavens,’ said Anus, the youngest and most aggressive, ‘where on earth have they come from?’

‘From a hen’s arsehole, of course,’ said Phyllis, and hung up.

My father’s concern was solely with the clothing of his own person and he soon stumbled on the simplest way of achieving this. Each young man whom I brought home for dinner or a drink was immediately asked to which branch of the services he was attached—those on combat duty being rejected out of hand, and those in the Services of Supply being retained on the end of a reasonably civil conversational string on their chances of having a connection with the Quartermaster’s Office. But if they were foolish enough to come right out with the statement that they were in the QM’s Department, then my father pounced. Placing a proprietary hand on my shoulder and pushing the whisky decanter towards the victim, he would deem the hook sufficiently baited to announce, ‘I’m very short of underpants.’ For some time after the Americans had gone home and left us to the much less affluent British Navy, and even after the war had ended, my father’s cupboards looked like an overflow from a PX store. Other girls in war-time Sydney dripped with orchids and were fed regularly on champagne and caviar. I had to make do with roses and sparkling burgundy, as supplying father loomed large on the budget of many of my escorts.

In addition to the countless young men who were fresh fodder for either his teasing or his shock tactics, my father delighted in any suitably unsophisticated female friends I was able to provide. A positive windfall to him was the fact that my two most intimate friends were virgin soil—one a young refugee from New Guinea whose family had been trapped by the Japanese and the other a Dutch ballet dancer evacuated on the last boat out of Java—both exceptionally pretty and therefore offering many more opportunities for exploitation. Pauline had been educated by nuns and had won points for good behaviour by a system of pin pricks on a board which, when added up, earned the children the doubtful privilege of ‘adopting’ an orphaned native baby. ‘Ten pricks get you a black baby,’ she told my father. This was good for endless parties. He waited until Pauline was suitably surrounded by as many respectable matrons as could be gathered, before prompting, ‘Tell them how you get a black baby, Pauline, how you have to have had ten pricks.’

Edmeé, the Dutch ballet dancer, learnt most of her English from my father. He carefully coached her in polite cocktail party conversation before her first visit to Government House.

‘Now just say to any young man you are introduced to: “I hear there are a lot of trouser snakes around here.” That will get the ball rolling.’ Most of his adages sounded particularly weird, if not positively fetching, in Edmeé’s heavily accented vowels.

When the Americans set up a permanent base in Sydney, I became the secretary of the Commanding Officer of the Ordnance Department. At the Ammunition Depot some miles out of Sydney where we worked for a time, there were frequent opportunities to procure off-ration foodstuffs. Cream and eggs could be bought from surrounding farmers, and plentiful chickens. Our go-between was an old porter who moved the ammunition boxes between the storage sheds when he wasn’t conducting a one-man farmers’ market among the personnel. Fred came sidling up to me one day.

‘Interested in buying a pig, miss?’

‘A pig! Alive or dead?’

‘Well,’ said Fred, ‘it’s alive now, but I’ve got a Major over in Transportation who says he’ll take half, and if I can settle for the other half, the farmer says he’ll kill one next full moon.’

The killing at full moon was no tribal ritual, but as local consumption of bacon was prohibited and all war-time pigs reared for overseas bacon export, it was impossible to break the law so openly in daylight. I knew the thought of buying a whole (or half) pig would instantly appeal to my mother, so I telephoned her while Fred waited.

‘How big?’ she wanted to know, and ‘How much?’

Fred thought about sixty pounds and about a fiver. My mother was thrilled: she got the butcher to agree to house her half of the pig in his freezer and she managed to off-load several pounds of pork in advance to some of her friends. After that she settled down to planning a series of pork parties and the packing of an unprecedented number of hampers for her troops. A positive fever of expectancy gripped our office as pig-killing day drew near. Fred occasionally gave me bulletins on the animal’s health: I had had to take my boss into my confidence because of transportation difficulties and he had kindly promised to drive me and the pig back to town in his staff car on the day. Two days before the appointed night, the Major in Transportation pulled out of his half of the deal. Fred came to me in distress: but by now I knew my mother was sure to see little difference between half a pig and a whole pig, so we became sole owners.

Pig-killing night was fine and clear. The next morning, Fred was gleefully conspiratorial.

‘Oh, a lovely pig you’ve got there, miss. He’s over in the bushes behind Transportation. A fine 120-pound pig. But you’d better get him out quick before the MPs come around.’

No city-bred person who has never bought a pig can possibly visualise the difference between an expected sixty-pounder and the solid reality of a 120-pound pig. There he lay—stretched in pink and unlovely grandeur, stark among the bushes. He had wispy grey hair, long enough to plait. He was obviously, prior to death, a very old pig. There was no time for recriminations: there was no question of my being able to get him out quick without considerable help. My understanding boss detailed two staff sergeants and a lorry to help me; they managed to manipulate the stiff and hideous beast into the back of a truck, cover it with a tarpaulin and drive it, and myself, into town. We got the truck as close as possible to our back door, for there was now no question of delivering this naked corpse direct to the busy butcher’s shop in broad daylight, as had been planned with half his lighter predecessor. The sergeants got him through the back door, dumped him on my grandmother’s hall carpet, and left.

My grandmother felt her Jewish background should cause her to register a rueful protest at her carpet being made the repository for a dead pig, and all afternoon she harassed us as, sweating, my mother and I hacked the creature into transportable pieces with surgical instruments and wrapped them, dripping with blood, in newspaper. When we had made several trips across the road with the pieces, the butcher shook his head sadly and told us that this ancient animal was good for nothing except bacon, and that he’d be willing to pay my mother two or three pounds for it to turn into bacon. The following morning I had to hand over fourteen pounds to Fred.

The shortage of alcohol, too, was a spur to invention. My father concocted a sort of house drink, which had an innocuous taste and a quite spectacular effect. He made it in a huge china punch-bowl, big enough to take a couple of bottles at a time without splashing, or the boredom of measuring, and though its basic ingredient was rum, its component parts varied according to what happened to be available. But whatever the ingredients, the name remained the same, a name to become famous throughout the South West Pacific—‘Bunsby Gaze’.

The original Bunsby Gaze was a racehorse of no particular merit, but whose form my father had been following and in whose performance he had had reason to be disappointed. The first time he mixed the drink he decided that its taste and colour was to be imaginatively compared to the taste of horse’s urine—not a very good horse—in fact, Bunsby Gaze. Long after the horse had ceased to race, Bunsby Gazes were still being remembered with nostalgia in the New Guinea jungles.

Sundays became, through the slow building up of habit and war-time commitments, our chief ‘at home’ day. There were never less than twelve for Sunday lunch and usually twenty or thirty for Sunday supper. My father and I and the hard resident core went to the beach every Sunday morning, while my mother prepared her enormous meals. By evening, the Bunsby Gazes were flowing and when my father thought his audience was in a sufficiently receptive mood he did his imitation. This was of Ronald Colman. It involved no speech or action: the characterisation was simply in my father’s concept of the unfortunate man whom he had seen on the screen only once and who appeared to him to have, for a screen idol, extremely short legs. He also found him singularly lacking in facial expression. He stuck a burnt match moustache on his face and, hat and overcoat on, he took up his position kneeling behind the curtains (with which my mother was gradually replacing the doors in as many rooms as she could get her hands on). I then announced the act, pulled the curtains, and there knelt my father on Ronald Colman’s short legs, glaring at the audience with a fierce and fixed expression. After one minute he turned and hobbled away. This regularly reduced people who had seen it week after week to tears of laughter, so he saw no reason why he should vary the act. After he shot himself, he could no longer get down on his knees, so that was the end of Ronald Colman.

Perhaps because I was an only child and a precocious one, there was no distinction made between the generations in our household. My parents’ friends were my friends, and my friends became, equally, friends of my parents. All topics were discussed in front of me, and only in the presence of an overwhelming majority of young people did my mother strive to be conscious of some division in age groups. One evening she was discussing, with a contemporary, a newly arrived theatrical producer on the Sydney scene. Four or five of my young friends were listening and my father was stretched, eyes closed, in his corner chair. The man was, thought my mother, a bad producer.