Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  As a child I had never realised how important the opening of Parliament, the ball at Government House and the many other splendid occasions were to Mum. After she died, I found carbon copies of the collection she called her ‘Sister Anne’ letters in the davenport desk she had bequeathed to me. (Mum and Eve wrote to each other as ‘Dear Sister Anne’, for reasons long forgotten.) There is a breathless, fairytale quality to these letters. In the last letter, Mum wrote: ‘I can’t help regretting that it is all over, it was a wonderful, wonderful time. I have put away all my good clothes with the sad feeling of “When ever again will there be quite such an occasion?” ’

  Anxious to maintain her own public profile, Mum sent copies of her books to the Queen. She received a formal letter of acknowledgement from Buckingham Palace and stuffed it into a drawer as she had done with the clipping announcing my birth.

  The next royal visit was in 1963, but Mum and Dad were not involved in quite the same capacity. Dad’s political career had already peaked a decade earlier when he was attorney-general from 1950 to 1952. They didn’t attend the same number of functions in Melbourne as they had during the royal visit in March 1954. But Mum must have attended at least one reception before we returned to Towong Hill, for the story goes that one of Harry’s schoolfriends, who saw her before she left the house, wolf-whistled Mum one evening as she processed slowly down the stairs at 49, splendid in a magnificent evening dress. Both Granny and Mum were slightly surprised and embarrassed, and the next day Mum said it was ‘not the done thing’ to wolf-whistle a schoolfriend’s mother. Years later the wolf-whistler became a prominent political figure, so he was already making his mark when he came to stay for the weekend at 49.

  Rather like her wild Leonie character in Black Cockatoos Mean Snow, Mum loved wonderful parties and beautiful clothes. Her descriptions of the official occasions, such as the dedication of the Shrine by his Royal Highness Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in 1934, which she had attended with Granny and Grandfather, and of the royal visits formed a glamorous backdrop to our quiet visits to Melbourne. I could never imagine having any role to play in royal visits, let alone wearing glamorous clothes for them. I was too tomboyish and I couldn’t really picture myself ever growing up.

  Granny also had some glittering evening dresses she’d worn for royal visits and other important occasions in Melbourne. They were all kept in moth-proof plastic bags and the overflow from her wardrobe filled the wardrobe in the room in which I slept. I liked to unzip the gowns from their bags, and once Mum caught me taking one off the hanger to hold it against myself so I could twirl around a bit in the mirror. The next time I made sure I wasn’t caught, and I had hours of fun in an imaginary world of balls in the presence of royalty as Mum and Granny had done. Granny and 49 seemed to belong to a glamorous era that reached its zenith before I was born. I found it difficult to reconcile the splendid clothes hanging in the wardrobes and what I had heard and read about the magnificent occasions with the image of Mum in her khaki shorts or bib-and-brace overalls at Towong Hill. I think Mum found the contradictions both amusing and inspiring, and I feel that if I’d asked her about them she might have laughed, and remarked that life was all the richer for them.

  I was disappointed with the Queen’s 1963 visit. We went to Melbourne for the couple of functions to which Mum and Dad had been invited. A little later when the Queen visited the Snowy Mountains Authority I would have loved the sense of occasion and excitement of welcoming her at the ‘site set aside for school children at Khancoban’.2 I would also have enjoyed being on the street with masses of others waving flags in Melbourne. Instead, Mum took us to see the royal couple pass along the road from Corryong to Khancoban. From my perch on the gate near Khancoban Station I was so busy trying to take photographs with a Box Brownie that I didn’t see the Queen or the Duke of Edinburgh as they passed. Worse yet, when the print came back it was too blurred to see any more than a silhouette of the royal couple and their car.

  9

  Where There Are Roses There Are Usually Thorns

  The vacant land beside 49 was overgrown with blackberries and other weeds. Eventually a block of creamy-coloured brick flats was built there. Just after workmen had laid concrete on the next-door drive, Harry and I imprinted our sandalled feet into the grey, damp mass. ‘I’ll take the razor strop to you kids,’ Mrs D, Granny’s grumpy old housekeeper, threatened before we could cause more damage by walking concrete onto the rug in the front hall. Mrs D was the fierce live tiger at 49, her grating voice thick with the tobacco she smoked in her room. Our footmarks remained on the neighbouring drive for decades. Despite her cross words at the time, Mum always looked for our footprints whenever she returned to 49.

  Not long after the footprint episode, Granny gave me a little quilted-plastic purse with a few coins in it. She must have given Harry some money too because she took both of us to Mrs Clifford’s stationery and toy shop in Toorak Road to see what we could buy; it was the first time I had ever handled money. We then walked along to Chevy Chase milk bar and Granny bought us vanilla ice-cream in cardboard cups with little wooden spoons. She loved ice-cream but she didn’t like being seen eating in public, so she hailed a taxi to take us and our delicious dripping dixies back up the hill.

  It was from Granny’s house that I was taken to the City Baths and my first swimming lessons. Miss Scott at the Baths had a secret weapon, a type of fishing rod that was really a thin pole and a line with a canvas belt on the end. After putting the belt around my chest and getting me into the water, she held me so I didn’t sink and I paddled for all I was worth. The white-tiled, chlorine-strong pools were the first I had ever seen. Miss Scott was a swimming instructor who inspired confidence – one of the first people outside the family to have done that for me.

  Granny’s bathing towels were rough like the sandpaper from Dad’s workshop back at Towong Hill. Once the towels had sand from the beach ingrained in them, they were even harder. In summer, Mum and whoever she had employed as a temporary nanny took us swimming at Elwood. I remember one occasion when Uncle Edward, who was visiting, came with us. He wore a blue towelling dressing-gown in the car to go to the beach and to stop wet sand sticking to the seats on the way home afterwards. The beach at Elwood was always chilly in the early mornings, and the sand was hard. Out in Port Phillip Bay were the silhouettes of container ships waiting to come into port, and beyond them a thin humpy line, which Mum and Uncle Edward said were probably the ridges of the You Yangs near Geelong. At the beach, Mum wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She said that when I was about eighteen months old I had walked into the sea, fully clothed, and refused to come out when I was called. It must have been among my earliest bids for freedom, though it would have lasted only as long as it took the first adult to wade in and pull me out of the water.

  One day Indi or Harry used one of Granny’s Federation wooden beds as a trampoline and broke it. At the time Granny was visiting Eve and her family in Kenya, and Mum dreaded having to break the news when Granny returned a few days later by ship. As I was not involved in the bouncing, I can’t remember if anyone got into trouble. Granny was usually surprisingly tolerant when one of us had been very naughty, but there was no guarantee. She had outbreaks of crossness.

  If Granny hadn’t married when she was only eighteen, and if she had been born later when it was easier for young women to pursue careers, she could have been a fabulous garden designer. At 49 she created a beautiful garden for her family, with hydrangeas, camellias and azaleas. She was always concerned that her boisterous grandchildren might damage her carefully nurtured treasures. In the middle of the front lawn there was a crabapple tree whose trunk had been scarred by masses of climbing feet. The verandah posts and wrought-iron railings provided challenging ascents for the more athletic who didn’t mind getting covered with soot on the way up, or into trouble afterwards.

  With her long arms and legs, Mum would have had all the attributes necessary to be a prestigious verandah-post climber when
she was young. Just as she let her imagination go while she was climbing trees, she made up stories as she shinnied up and down the verandah posts. Decades later, with a family of her own, she recognised the potential dangers just as her parents had years before and spent her time trying to dissuade us from doing the same thing. Despite Granny and Mrs D’s efforts to ensure we didn’t even look as if we would venture up a verandah post, I did of course, and I imagine most of Granny’s other grandchildren did too. But I rarely saw much of our cousins as 49 was too small for more than one family to stay there at a time.

  Sometimes Granny tried to explain to Mum that her writing was coming into conflict with her family and that her children needed her too. Other times Granny simply stepped in sedately and lovingly if Mum was absent. When we were in Melbourne and Mum was busy with publishers or research, it was often Granny who was there with us. I remember her as perfection personified, yet, as with many childhood memories, I wonder now if it is realistic.

  According to a letter from Barbara Ramsay, the Chauvel family’s former nanny, who had returned to her native Scotland to live, Granny had her failings as a mother too. Nanny (as her fond former protégés called her) didn’t think Granny recognised Uncle Edward’s abilities and insisted he go into the army rather than pursue an academic career for which, in Nanny’s view, he might have been better suited. Part of the problem might have been that Nanny was fonder of Grandfather than she was of Granny, but there is nobody left now who would remember.

  Granny reminded me of the soft, silky roses that grew in her garden during the summer. But where there are roses, there are usually thorns. Granny’s sister Dora, our great-aunt, was beautiful in an inhibited and icy way, with her carefully permed white hair, designer clothes, elaborately beautiful hats and immaculately made-up face. During the Second World War, Dora upset Mum by suggesting she should take more responsibility for Granny and Grandfather as Granny had had pneumonia in the early months of the war and Grandfather was in his late seventies and becoming frail. Dora didn’t mince her words. She told Mum that she owed her mother something. Dora continued to tell Mum that, and more, almost until she died. Aunt Dora was right, but Mum didn’t like criticism and, from as early as I can remember, Mum was saying she’d had enough of Aunt Dora’s pointed suggestions.

  If Granny represented the gentle side of femininity, Aunt Dora was a different and pricklier role model. One Melbourne Cup day my brother John and I were playing in the garden at 49. John had made mud pies in egg boxes and was ironing them flat with a toy iron. Just as some elderly, well-dressed ladies, one of whom we thought was Aunt Dora, were walking up Murphy Street towards Domain Road on their way back from the Cup, John stowed a couple of egg boxes full of ‘pies’ under his arm and climbed the tree nearest the fence. As the ladies in their hats walked beneath, John launched one of his squelchy little missiles and scored a remarkably effective hit – only it wasn’t Aunt Dora. But everyone seemed to know each other then and consequences soon followed.

  John as muddy missile launcher would have been temporarily blackballed from the family circle had it not been for the fact that he’d been attempting something others might have wanted to do for a long time. Although Mum could not openly admit it, she had more than a little admiration for John’s audacity. Aunt Dora and Mum were opposites who did not attract. Aunt Dora was critical of Mum for ‘using’ Granny. Granny really enjoyed time with our family, but Aunt Dora had a point: Granny provided a home in Melbourne, family support and inspiration, and Mum made good use of them all.

  Whenever Aunt Dora came to 49 the atmosphere there changed. I stopped what I was doing and watched and listened uneasily. Not surprisingly for one who didn’t have children of her own, Aunt Dora didn’t appear to like young people, particularly great-nieces and great-nephews from the country. Nevertheless she took an interest in Indi as she grew up as she was pretty, vivacious and a possible future social asset. Indi had far firmer career ideas, however! Dad wickedly maintained that Dora was too selfish to have children, despite the fact that her husband, Uncle Harry, would have loved a family. Even though the repartee that bounced back and forth between them was often superficially insulting, Dad secretly admired Dora, and she seemed to fancy him too.

  Whatever her reputation in the family, Aunt Dora was a remarkable woman with a formidable wit and good business sense. She was renowned for her ability to make money on the stock exchange; apparently her stockbroker would dive for cover if he could before she appeared. Capital growth and her income must have helped her to buy her antiques and maintain her wardrobe – and to acquire an elaborate new hat for her friend after the mud pie incident.

  ‘Aunt Dora’s male friends ranged in age from nineteen to ninety, and there was always one available to escort her to cocktail parties at Government House or to the theatre or ballet,’ Mum said. If, except for the royal visit, Granny led a relatively quiet social life after Grandfather’s death in 1945, Aunt Dora made up for it as the merry widow after her own husband died.

  Once, when Aunt Dora didn’t have a cook, Mrs D cooked her Sunday lunch at 49. The courses were covered with lids and loaded onto trays in the boot of the taxi Granny called, then Granny, Harry and I took it around to Aunt Dora’s nearby flat. By the time we had carried it upstairs and the table was laid with Aunt Dora’s gleaming silver, the lunch was almost cold. Aunt Dora might have been unwell, but I don’t think so. She could be a first-class prima donna. Harry and I reckoned that if she thought Mum had Granny running around after her, Aunt Dora treated her younger sister in much the same way, only a lot worse!

  I reckoned Aunt Dora must have been the focus of envy for many wives in Melbourne. She was undoubtedly a domineering part of Mum’s life, but she was such a powerful and scary presence that Mum never dared to write about her; Granny wouldn’t have liked it and Aunt Dora would have certainly had a hissy fit. It was a pity as Aunt Dora was just the person to provide Mum with some wonderful character studies and inspiration for her novels.

  Perhaps Aunt Dora was not really the ogre we thought she was. When she died, she left Mum some Kings pattern silver cutlery. Mum gave it to me as a wedding present, and every time we use it I think of Aunt Dora and the colour she added to our lives in Melbourne. From her top-floor flat on the corner of Walsh Street and Domain Road she had an excellent bird’s-eye view of Melbourne society’s many comings and goings.

  10

  A Naughty Blue Leopard with a Great Big Smile

  As well as taking us to Melbourne for important occasions like royal visits, Mum regularly made the trip with us to see Granny, for Indi and Harry’s exeat weekends once they were both at boarding school, and to do the family clothes shopping. Harry’s Geelong Grammar school uniform came from Buckley & Nunn next to Myer in Bourke Street, while Indi’s Toorak College uniform came from Ball & Welch in Flinders Street. Some of our everyday clothing came from Myer, and occasionally Mum found our smart clothes at Georges in Collins Street, where she also got her own. Mum said she could get it all done quicker without the children, so Granny looked after John and me at 49 while Mum went shopping. Also, she sometimes met friends at the Alexandra Club where children under ten years of age were not permitted. If she wasn’t sure whether garments would fit us or not, she brought them back for us to try at 49, but otherwise she arranged for them to be sent to Towong Hill. I hated having very little say in the clothes that were bought for me.

  Despite Granny’s calm kindness and the occasional ice-cream and outing, the only game she played with us was patience, preferring her detective stories to most other things, so I was often lonely and bored. The toy cupboard in the nursery held only Mum’s and Aunt Eve’s old toys, including the toy iron John used to flatten his mud pies into shapes. Sometimes when Mum returned from the city we walked around to Acland Street to visit the Hay family. Once when Harry and Peter Hay were out in the garden throwing a hammer to each other, one of them didn’t manage to catch it and it shattered a pane in the window by the Hays’ sof
a. Probably concerned about some sort of repeat incident, the Hays didn’t come to see us at 49. Mrs D would have scared the bravest hammer thrower and I felt almost as isolated there as I was at Towong Hill. It would have been great if friends had been able to come and see us, but 49 wasn’t a place for running riot.

  Although the Stokes family was older, they kindly invited us to swim in their pool at their house in Heyington Place in Toorak. Once someone tried to teach me to ride their penny farthing bicycle on the tennis court; my legs were too short and I was so spectacularly unsuccessful that I thought the contraption was some kind of joke. But an afternoon with the Stokes gave me a feeling of freedom and fun beyond the confines of 49.

  Indi, Harry, John and I were the only grandchildren who did correspondence schooling once we reached school age. Although Mum engaged a temporary governess/child-minder, Miss Montgomery (we called her Gomery), during at least one of our trips to Melbourne, I didn’t do any schoolwork there. One afternoon Miss Montgomery took John and me by train out to her house in the suburbs, a little cottage with pretty leadlights by the front door, tucked away behind a high, cream-coloured wooden fence. After that journey Miss Montgomery gave me a history book on Melbourne, probably because I asked so many questions and wanted to know the story behind the things I saw.

  Some other visitors to 49 were the possums that made noises like metal coathangers rattling in the wardrobe. I was convinced they actually were in the wardrobe and just waiting for Mum to turn out the light before they would come pouring out onto the bedroom floor. In my dreams, possums climbed the bedposts too. Granny didn’t like sharing her house with possums and from time to time she set traps. Once the traps were full she loaded them and their inmates into a taxi and drove them over to Fitzroy Gardens where she released them. By that evening either the original possums were back, or the message had gone out that there were vacancies at 49 Murphy Street and others had rushed to fill the space.