Aunts Up the Cross (3 page)

My mother always hated life at Maramanah, endlessly quarrelling with her younger aunts who were both jealous and unmarried. The four elder girls were either mellowed by marriage into softer moulds or were by nature easier to live with. Their husbands were all, in bearing and repute, substantial characters but, stationed as they were in innumerable family photographs amid the lace flounces of their joint spouses and sisters-in-law, they resembled so many currants on a richly iced cake. They had an air of being hired for the occasion and being suitably supplied with their frock coats, their stiff high collars and goatee beards as window-dressing for the undulating patterns of rounded arms, bosoms, and upswept curls of the ladies by whom they were outnumbered.

Sometimes they were pictured on bicycles, in stiff-fronted blouses, frilly pantaloons, buttoned boots, and boaters. Or with parasols, draped against the pillars of Maramanah’s front porch. Whatever the scene, the photographer was on hand to record it, and the family obviously took its pleasures
en masse
. When the children were born, they were dotted here and there holding a solitary rose in one hand and the hand of the nearest aunt or uncle in the other.

My grandmother insisted that all the male members of her family had been either rabbis or judges for generations past, and that anything to do with ‘trade’ was an unthinkable occupation. The girls did indeed seem to live up to this ideal in their choice of husbands, either by intent, accident, or influence. Aunt Bertie, next in age to my grandmother, married a judge of the High Court, a handsome and benign old man to whom Aunt Bertie always referred as ‘the Judge’. The Judge was, like all true Australians, addicted to horse-racing. As he could not telephone through his bets from the court room to his illegal starting-price bookmaker, he would slip off his wig, and out the back door of the law courts to his contact man on the corner to place his half sovereign under the
nom de plume
of ‘Mr John’. In addition to Aunt Bertie’s judge, there were Aunt Flo’s ‘Barley’, a barrister and brother to the Judge, and Aunt Juliet’s Harry, who was a solicitor. My grandfather was City Treasurer, smacking ignobly of money, but at least he didn’t sell things, nor did he make much.

Aunt Flo, Aunt Bertie, my grandmother and Uncle Luke produced a child or two apiece, and with this meagre supply of contemporaries my mother grew up in the big grey house—the children’s lives dominated by the musical evenings and inevitable wranglings of a complex network of aunts and uncles. The evenings took place in the ballroom: it had one round side, and a stage, aspidistra in pots, and chandeliers; it was the heart of the house. At night there was always a concert; by day there was always an aunt practising. They, the husbands, were also expected to participate in the concerts, but none of them was quite musical enough to be relied upon to come in on the right beat. The Toy Symphony was a particular disappointment to Spot who had triumphantly brought home an assortment of mechanical cuckoos and various birds for the husbands to manipulate, but no amount of rehearsals could bring them into synchronisation. I knew, too, that the entrance hall had a marble floor, for my mother had split her skull on it after sliding down the banisters and this was always held up to me as a horrid example. It had the effect of making me long for a marble hall. The house had originally been beautiful, and Georgian. Its turrets and towers and balconies had been added by my great-grandfather, as had later lavatories. In my mother’s childhood, space had stretched only to a boys’ and a girls’ lavatory, each one having a throne, and beside it a row of chamber pots so that after breakfast was a friendly time of communal squatting.

This tribal existence was disrupted by the death of my great-grandfather who, though dying quietly in my grandmother’s arms, managed to invest the act with the modicum of required family drama by doing it suddenly and on the chaise longue which is now in my own bedroom and which was always known in my childhood as ‘the couch my darling daddy died on’. My grandmother told me that he was reading
Uncle Vanya
when he died, but I never liked to enquire about this hitherto unmentioned uncle as she was always tearful telling me this tale and I thought that Uncle Vanya must have upset the family dreadfully and in all probability had caused my great-grandfather’s death.

After he died, the married children dispersed into houses of their own. My mother was thus freed from the constant company of her maiden aunts, and after she married my father she never spoke to them again. The official reason given was that she had married outside her religion, but I think old animosities had fastened on any excuse. My father was a Northern Irish Presbyterian raised by a stern but loving mother, to whom he broke the news in some trepidation that he wished to marry a Jewess.

‘Son,’ said my Irish grandmother, ‘I don’t care what colour she is as long as she isn’t a Catholic.’ (Years later, my own husband’s Catholic family did not speak to me, his Presbyterian wife, until our daughter was nearly a year old.)

The four maiden great-aunts whose acquaintance I was thus denied were a source of endless merriment in our family. In addition to their reputedly unlovable natures, their parents had given them the names Lilla, Mina, Netta, and Anys. These my father gleefully referred to as Litter, Titter, Fritter and Anus. My mother’s epithet for them became, at the time of the Palestinian troubles, the Stern Gang.

My parents’ courtship and meeting were rakish rather than romantic. My father was quite startlingly handsome, six feet four inches and, in the naval uniform he was wearing at the time he met my mother, a sight to turn heads and attract all eyes. She first saw him in a tram, rattling up William Street, I suppose she stared: he winked at her, and she, blushing guiltily, flounced off the tram. That night she was introduced to him at a dance at Government House. He then invited her to come and watch him dance in a charity pageant, in which six young blades and six young debutantes were taking part. My mother went: she sat in the front row. My father was drunk and had obviously not attended any of the rehearsals. While the other eleven were pointing their left feet, he was pointing his right, and again winking at my mother: when they turned to the left, he turned to the right. In addition, he had his satin knee breeches on back to front and the plume from his hat hung over one eye and he had to keep blowing it away in order to see.

Well, she married him, and eighteen years later, I was asked to appear in a tableau in a similar pageant in aid of the same charity, organised by the same society matron. She was a rather imposing lady, of theatrical background, who had married well into wealth and social position but who retained her old connection with the theatre by organising whatever charitable theatrical entertainment she could, and by attending every first night of the Sydney theatre in a series of coloured wigs. This multi-hued entrance invariably stole the show and my father described her as a ‘female ham who can’t be cured’. She had a formidable memory, however, and when I presented myself with my eleven young companions at her ornate Italianate villa for our first rehearsal, she admonished me sternly. ‘I hope, my child, that you will behave yourself better than your father did twenty years ago.’

After my parents’ marriage they, in their turn, went to live with my grandparents in a smaller house where they remained—my parents on the top floor and my grandparents on the ground floor—for thirty-five years. After the first year my father never spoke to my grandmother. This, too, I accepted as perfectly normal behaviour. He remained on friendly terms with my grandfather, and he even tolerated Aunt Juliet for whom, after Uncle Harry’s death, a special suite of rooms was built on what had been a flat roof halfway up the stairs, and which was known thereafter as the ‘mezzanine floor’—or, as photographs of dead relatives grew in number, the ‘mausoleum’. Aunt Juliet was frightened of him, but she would defiantly say, ‘Good morning, Jim’ if trapped on the stairs. When my father, who was a doctor, left the house on his rounds each morning my grandmother and great aunt would come scurrying up the stairs to my mother and there they would stay until they heard his key in the door downstairs. This arrangement suited me beautifully as a child: I was the focal point of two separate and complete loving households under the one roof, and what the one could not or would not provide for me in the way of attention or entertainment, the other could and did. Again, it was not until many years of contact with other humans had taught me that I learnt perhaps our family relationships were not usual: it was then I asked my father what had started his ancient battle with his mother-in-law.

‘I found early in my married life,’ he said, ‘that I could not take my trousers off without turning round and finding your grandmother watching me.’

My poor mother was the buffer between these two constantly warring factions. Warm hearted, impulsive and emotional, she suffered from the strain of keeping the peace whenever possible. Unfortunately she was seldom able to keep calm at the same time, and in no time at all she would be driven by my father to tears and by my grandmother to the limits of rage and exasperation. My grandmother interfered in every small detail of her daughter’s life, domestic as well as marital, and where she could not physically poke in a finger, she badgered with advice, criticism, and unsolicited opinions.

The most violent and constant of these criticisms revolved around my mother’s determination never to have me taught the piano. My grandmother considered this an uncivilised deprivation, one notch higher than being allowed to go out without gloves. My mother, I learnt much later in life, had been a brilliant pianist, playing duets with her adored, dead brother and I expect by banishing music forever after from her life, a raw wound was opened less frequently. What was, to me, ancient, mellowed history was, in reality, just four years past in her memory.

The wars between my father and grandmother, however, were silent but not necessarily impassive and, as my mother was the buffer, then I was the battlefield. Any injury to my small person was the signal for immediate action, and the strategies resorted to by both sides gave no thought to how ploughed the battlefield might become in the struggle. A badly cut knee meant for me hours of bandaging, strapping, and applying of painful unguents by my grandmother; to be followed by equally fierce stripping off of all coverings by my father. This two-sided treatment would be repeated until my leg eventually healed despite it. What conflicts and neuroses were thus born in me I do not know; in retrospective reflection I enjoyed it enormously, was continuously stimulated, and my own children’s lives, kept to routine and order at great inconvenience to myself, seem incomparably duller.

At the age of three I was sent to school, to a very superior establishment started by the Misses Cheriton, two middle-aged spinster sisters who had been private governesses and had acquired some sophistication but no business acumen. We moved school fairly frequently—I now suspect pursued by creditors—to a succession of charming houses, all renamed ‘Doone’ on our arrival, where it seems to me we lived on strawberries and cream and acquired an astonishingly liberal education for the Australia of the twenties. It is to them that I owe the fact that I saw Pavlova dance the Swan: we four and five year olds were bundled off to a matinée, and some dim memory of the magic remains.

I was dressed in the height of (French) fashion from birth. I particularly remember the tissue-wrapped red winter coat arriving from Paris which I, aged four, hated wearing because it was so beautiful and therefore different from all the other children. Around its collar and hem were appliquéd daisies, cut out of the same material, and I was made, until I rebelled, to wear it to school.

At home I was educated by my grandmother, who talked and talked. Her talk was directed at me, relentlessly. It was not conversation: no response was required. How I squirmed and sighed with resignation at those oft-repeated maxims with which she sought to increase my daily store of wisdom, and with what little shocks of recognition do I realise their truth as instances along the paths of later life have caused me to stumble over one. When she disapproved of one of my companions it was, ‘If you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas.’ When I protested against the futility of doing something for a lost cause, she protested, ‘Every little helps, as the old lady said when she spat into the sea.’ When I kicked against the unreasonability of some of her taboos she told me, ‘Reason always means what someone else has got to say,’ And, most frequent of all, was her rejoinder to my complaints against her ‘nagging’—‘Never mind! If I throw enough mud, some of it is bound to stick.’ What fascinated, though mystified, me most, however, was, ‘A stitch in time saves nine, as the mother of eight said as she sewed up the front of her husband’s pyjamas.’