Aunts Up the Cross (12 page)

‘In fact,’ she said, ‘he’s not a producer’s…’ remembering, not quite in the nick of time, her audience, ‘…boot hole!’

This extraordinary epithet would have gone unnoticed had not my father opened one eye to correct her. ‘Arse lace you mean, dear.’

My father derived great amusement out of the US troops with whom he came, through me, in contact. They were perfect tease material, and he was, above all, a tease. On the whole, they were in and out of our lives so fast that he had some difficulty in distinguishing one from the other; however, I did manage, in the rush, to become engaged to two of them, and he had, perforce, to establish the identity of these two who might conceivably have become his sons-in-law. The first was a strapping young airman, with flashing teeth, who rejoiced in the unforgettably splendid name of Joshua H. Barnes, the Fifth. His home town was Paris, Kentucky, and my father’s tease was of a subversive nature, being directed at me rather than at Josh. He solemnly told all visitors, ‘You know Robin’s fiancé never had boots on till he joined the Army.’

After Josh, came Torbert H. Macdonald. Torbert was in PT boats, much more sophisticated, and visited Sydney often enough to become firm friends with my father. He had played football for Harvard—my father had played football for Melbourne University—and this formed the basis of their endless wrangles. Together they went to matches played under Australian Rules, my father explaining the rules and Torbert proclaiming the superiority of the American game. This argument always ended by my father snorting, ‘American football! Why, you wear so much padding that when you fall down the umpire has to shoot you!’

Torbert fell into the tease mould in every way, even to getting himself heavily decorated while on PT patrol, including a Purple Heart for having got his ankle caught in a mooring rope. On the leave following this injury, my father evolved his own decoration for Torbert. He had a medal made for him, a large round plaque on which was engraved a mosquito in full flight, poised above the number 106. The medal was bright yellow and was called the Malarial Medal. On the back the citation read, ‘For having reached the temperature of 106 degrees during an attack of Malaria and survived’.

He found the British Navy, when they arrived, more difficult to tease, but easier to shock: this amused him just as much. I was getting on splendidly with a Lieutenant Commander in aircraft carriers until the day my father produced one of his medical books and handed it around, open at a photograph of a diseased male organ.

‘Have you ever seen Robin’s Aunt Bertie?’ he said. ‘Here’s a picture of her. She’s downstairs now if you’d care to see her; you’ll recognise her by this, except that she’s got a hat on now.’

The photograph was, I regret to say, almost a speaking likeness, if one half-closed one’s eyes, of my dear Aunt Bertie. She was the one of my grandmother’s married sisters with whom we had remained on the most friendly terms, a splendidly robust old character, but she did possess a most unfortunate nose. My friendship, however, with the naval officer petered out.

I have, in an old album, a photograph taken during the war, and under it I have written in explanation of the strange assortment of faces staring at the camera, ‘Errol’s Farewell’. It is a large group photograph, ten of us arranged in varying attitudes of admiration and motley collection of garments around a grinning photograph on an easel. Lying in the foreground is my mother, looking exceedingly alarmed and grasping a large hambone in one hand. Other friends have put on hats and dresses which they had found at random in her cupboards; my father is in his Ronald Colman outfit; a sailor friend is dressed as a woman and I have on his sailor suit; and, clutching his arm, is the maid Phyllis, stuffed with pillows and daubed with paint. I cannot remember any directing thought behind our dressing-up for this photograph. I can only remember that we hired the photographer for a fee of three guineas from a local newspaper and that he remained stunned by disbelief and alcohol far into the night. We wanted it as a farewell present for Errol, the friend after whom our cat was named, who was on the eve of departure to India. It was a sort of peace-offering, for my father had recently been responsible for Errol’s spending some hours in the custody of the Security Police.

Some years earlier, Errol had had some portraits taken, and had given us one: he was a gay and pleasant-looking man, but in black-and-white looked like an easter egg on which a grin and glasses had been painted. We had put it away in a drawer, and, in a war-time clean out, I had happened upon this fatuous face. Errol was now drafted from his peace-time occupation in shipping, and had a highly secret job on Garden Island, Sydney’s central naval dockyard. We knew this job had something to do with shipping movements: apart from that, we knew only the personal anecdotes about his colleagues with which Errol occasionally entertained us. He appeared to be waging a weekly vendetta with a spinster of uncertain age, a Miss Harrison, who was the Admiral’s secretary, and almost every Sunday he had some fresh tale to add to demonstrate Miss Harrison’s eccentricity. After some weeks, the lady started telephoning my father, in his capacity as Port Medical Officer, and pestering him with requests and suggestions for the use of the girls on her naval secretarial staff in his dockside medical posts. Her attentions became so persistent and so odd that he began to suspect a plan between Errol and the lady to tease him. ‘I believe she’s a perfectly ordinary and sane woman,’ he said. ‘She must be to hold down her job. Errol’s put her up to this.’

The photograph provided him with what he thought was the perfect opportunity for a counter-tease. He typed on a slip of paper—‘WARNING. WHEN THE JAPS COME TAKE YOUR ORDERS FROM THIS MAN’—and with this pasted beneath the grinning face, he posted it off to the unknown Miss Harrison.

Miss Harrison was the Admiral’s secretary all right: she had been perfectly serious in her telephone calls to my father; she was no friend of Errol’s; she had no sense of humour, or, after contemplating that bland smile above the incongruous message, no sense of the ridiculous. She scurried straight off to the Security Office and turned over the evidence to them. Poor Errol was called up and asked if he had had some photographs taken recently, to whom he had given them, and on failing to remember, was asked about his Germanic middle name and his frequent pre-war travelling on behalf of his shipping company. They released him by nightfall, but his dossier went into Security files.

Not long afterwards he was transferred, and my father, who had confessed, had ‘our’ photograph mounted as a farewell gesture.

His other war-time prank, of equal magnitude, remained undetected. He poisoned, in a mild but discomforting way, a girl called Libby, with whom I shared a flat. The flat was my first venture into freedom, and Libby and I were both allowed to live in it, provided we lived with each other. Libby’s father was a country doctor, and we were working in the same US Army office. We also ate all our meals, including breakfast, at my family’s house, and our ‘freedom’ did not even involve washing our own clothes. All the more irritating chores of domestic life were still taken care of for us by my mother.

One night I was awakened by desperate groans. Libby, in her nightdress, was lurching about the room in which we both slept, bumping, albeit gently, into the furniture, and clutching her abdomen. Every now and then she gave a tiny shriek, grabbed a cushion from a chair, dropped it on the floor, and carefully fell on it. There she kicked and rolled and jerked, shrieking and groaning and frightening me to distraction. I soothed her as best I could and, having thrust myself into some clothes, ran the three blocks to my father. He got up, dressed, and came back with me. Libby had made herself reasonably comfortable on her pillows and smiled wanly up at him. I paced the bathroom while he examined her and gave her an injection—expecting an emergency appendix at least. Libby had a ‘grumbling’ appendix: this heightened our sense of gravity. It seemed, however, that all that ailed Libby was a severe pain of perfectly natural origin, and for which she must have, by experience, been well prepared. After that, Libby’s monthly pains got first me, and then my father, out of bed on two more occasions: the second time he arrived to find her calmly asleep in my bed.

On the third and last time, he gave her, instead of an injection, some pills. The following morning was a beautiful, bright Sunday. Our usual party, including a fully recovered Libby, were setting out for the beach when my father drew Libby aside and advised her to stay quietly at home helping my mother with the lunch. After all, she had had, he pointed out, a disturbed night. We spent a blissfully peaceful morning which seemed surprisingly more so because of the absence of Libby’s undeniably whining voice.

Around one o’clock my father stretched luxuriously on the hot sand. ‘We’d better get home to your poor mother. I imagine she’s had a busy morning with Libby.’

Of course he had done something outrageous. Even without the tone in his voice and the gleam in his eye there was something anticipatory in his very stretch. Pressed, he admitted it: Libby’s pills had been the strongest dose of laxative he had felt could safely be given. She was unable to go to the office for two days: she never got my father out of bed again, and I don’t think she ever suspected what he had done.

During the war it was almost impossible to find anyone to do house repairs, and so our house gradually began to fall apart. The roof was totally inadequate, and at each tropical storm we ran with basins and buckets from the kitchen to catch the drips, which steadily grew into torrents. My father once solved the problem of a bulging and waterlogged patch by drilling a hole through it. The water obligingly channelled itself through this in a single jet, directly above the middle of my mother’s bed. She once set off down the stairs for a gala premiere, suitably bejewelled, skirts held high over the soggy floorboards, with umbrella aloft. This was during a storm of such tropical fury that Amy’s black legs and arms whirled between bucket and window—bailing—and my mother swore her face turned white with fright that night.

Maramanah, during the 1940s, was the first landmark in our lives to go. One night I was awakened by my mother jigging with excitement, to the noise of fire engines clanging down our street.

‘Quick! Get out of bed,’ she commanded. ‘Maramanah’s on fire—let’s go and watch.’

Down the street we pelted: she always loved a good fire anyway, and as she rarely went to bed, the fact that it was two in the morning was no deterrent to her enjoyment. Indeed, it was an exceptionally bright blaze: the towers and turrets and iron-laced balconies showed up beautifully, and my mother was only disappointed that there was no sign of the aunts being lowered by ropes. We went back in the morning to view the damage, and for the first time, I was allowed inside the blackened rooms in which I had wandered so many times in imagination, accompanied by my grandmother’s ghosts.

I had such a vivid picture of some of the rooms that it was a dreadful disappointment to see them, so banal, and so empty. I could not, for one moment, suppose that all my ten aunts had slept in one enormous bed, and yet I could not erase from my mind the picture of them all, under an acre of blanket, which my grandmother had undoubtedly planted there. She had, I swear, told me that there was a ‘bed’ leader, who commanded, at intervals throughout the night, ‘Turn!’, and turn they did, in unison, so that they should not be breathing germs down each other’s throats. Perhaps, I now wonder, was it the four unmarried ones who huddled thus for company, while their sisters lay in germ-filled and connubial imprecision in nearby rooms? But why? There was ample space in the house, and ample money, for separate beds. I do not know: the bed drill sticks, unchallenged in my memory, along with the green apples and the balloon, as family legend.

I expected, too, to feel at least the aura of my great-grandfather’s benevolent personality as I had had it so often described to me. He had seemed such a genial and loving man in such satisfyingly concrete ways that I wanted some evidence of his presence to embrace me. Two of my grandmother’s anecdotes about him had endeared him to me—once when my mother was a small girl and was scolded by her nurse for standing under a garden hose in her new red shoes, he bundled the sobbing child into his carriage and they went shopping for an identical pair.

‘There you are,’ he said, ‘one pair is specially to wear under the hose if you feel so inclined.’

I daresay it wasn’t the best way to train a child, but it must have been one of the nicest possible childhood recollections for my mother. And, as his children grew older, his remedy for any tears was to send to the cellar for a bottle of champagne to cheer them up.

After the fire, the aunts never went back. They settled in an apartment nearby, and one night six families of ‘squatters’ moved into Maramanah with mattresses, babies and primus stoves, and there they stayed until finally ejected by the local council. The council then managed to coax the old ladies to sell the site, and it is now a fairly handsome park and children’s playground.