Aunts Up the Cross

by Robin Dalton

  My tonsils and adenoids came out in my father’s surgery, suitably draped in sterile sheets, and I, aged four, was attended by three doctors. I am told that I sat up on the table as the anaesthetic wore off and lisped at them: ‘You three damned doctors get to hell out of here.’

  No recollections of luxury attend the occasion on which I swallowed a shilling: that was my mother’s adventure. I was standing in a queue at the greengrocer’s waiting to buy an ice-cream and, undecided as to flavour, was tapping my teeth reflectively with the shilling. In a flash it was gone: I flew home, thoroughly alarmed. The radiologist was a gambling crony of my mother’s—as they waited for the X-ray of my innards to be developed, my mother laid bets with him on whether heads or tails would show. The shilling emerged side on.

  Once I woke at night to an unfamiliar sound. Not the easy, raucous street sounds, but voices—measured and urgent—from the drawing-room. My grandmother’s and my father’s voices raised, but, astoundingly, mingled: no interpreter between them, and a lower voice, my grandfather’s. The voices rose and fell but were definitely angry—a collective, barely controlled anger, quite different to the familiar sound of exasperation. When I had climbed out of bed and gone to investigate, the conference had broken up, my father pushing past, running down the stairs, my mother in her nightdress running after him. I knew he was leaving. She half fell down the stairs, her breasts escaping the nightdress, throwing herself at his legs and calling, ‘Jim, Jim’, before I was led back to bed by Nana. It seemed a long time later when my father came and sat by my bed to tell me he was going away. I cried, and clutched and begged. He promised he would not go. And for the first and only time I saw my father cry. To me it was a victory—but a victory that haunts me.

  Soon after, my mother went to Melbourne for some weeks with Aunt Juliet. I now wonder whether this was a trial separation. For I remember a sense of something like shame—or dread?—attached to her absence. Children at school seemed to be aware of it, and wonderful presents, mostly jewellery, arrived for me every week. Also, about this time there was a visiting Englishman, called Geoff Seedley, high in the Heinz hierarchy, who gave me a string of seed pearls, to whom my father referred as ‘your mother’s fifty-seventh variety’. So, I expect that whatever drama may have erupted in their private lives was dissolved in laughter.

  CHAPTER 4

  About twice a week my father took me to see his mother. Grannie Richardson was a more remote figure than any in my mother’s family. She had come to Australia as a young bride and when asked about my father’s birth, was apt to say that the keel was laid in Ulster, but the ship launched in Australia. She had married twice and so earned the addition of the surname by which I always referred to her. This must also have denoted some extra mark of respect, for as I called my other grandmother ‘Nana’, there was no danger of confusion. Grannie Richardson was very beautiful, possessed of a wry humour, a cutting tongue, and a far less volatile temperament than those of my mother’s side of the family among whom I lived. When she, who had little money, won first prize in the State Lottery—the then considerable sum of £5000—she did not tell her husband until the following day for fear of the possibility that he would keep her up all night talking about it. A further six months of weekly ticket-buying with no additional profit incurred her disgust with the whole affair and the belief that it was in some way ‘crooked’. Her first husband, my grandfather, died when my father was four. I have one photograph of him, and my father only ever told me one incident in his life—that single-handed and bare-fisted he fought, and presumably vanquished, for he lived to tell the tale, two of Ned Kelly’s gang. Grannie Richardson, twice widowed in her fifties, ended her days in a small apartment near our house, glued to the wireless and immersed in a passion which, though born late in life, burned fiercely—she bet on the horses.

  Even more than most Australians, I was brought up in an atmosphere where gambling in all forms, but especially horse-racing, was an important and integral part of our lives. Saturday evenings were the high spot of the week, for then Nana’s drawing-room was full of racing friends of my grandfather’s and from early morning when I was allowed to pick my winner with a pin from the newspaper, until late at night, Saturdays were given over to racing talk. I once dreamt correctly a 20 to 1 winner: for three subsequent Friday nights I was sent to bed early with a glass of hot milk and a copy of the Form Guide under my pillow—but it was an isolated occasion and try as I would my importance as an oracle faded. Everyone who came in close contact with our household participated in this pursuit—friends, family, tradespeople, servants, and animals. Timmy Eakin, our talking budgerigar, whose first words were ‘Doctor Eakin’s surgery’, soon added ‘Thursday’s Sporting Papers!’ in the raucous call of the newsboy to his repertoire, and it was long accepted that Saturday night’s dinner would be a very bleak and scrappy affair if Rosa Toomey, the cook, had had a ‘bad day’.

  Rosa was the doyenne of a succession of servants, all of startlingly eccentric character. Did our household attract these individuals, I wonder, or did it mould them to its own shape? Rosa Toomey came to my grandmother before my mother’s marriage and remained for thirty-five years. Somewhere in the past, one presumed, was a Mr Toomey, for there was certainly a product of their union, but he was never mentioned, and Rosa’s daughter and subsequent grandchildren were shadowy figures in her life which centred upon our house. As Rosa grew older her taciturnity increased and her appearance became ever stranger. When well over seventy, her hair was dyed regularly but not thoroughly, so that patches of silvery white and yellow-ochre showed with a clarity and reckless abandon through the reddish magenta of her choice. This mottling of hue may have been her hair’s protesting reaction to the permanent waving to which it was subjected, at seven shillings and sixpence a time—once a month. Her devotion and loyalty to every member of my family was intense. She never, however, accepted Great-aunt Juliet as anything but an interloper and resented, verbally and loudly, her presence.

  ‘Interfering old busybody,’ she would mutter, flicking the duster viciously over the pile of bric-à-brac on the overcrowded dressing-table, while Juliet supervised operations from her pile of lace pillows. Aunt Juliet’s readily summoned deafness came conveniently to the fore during these battles.

  ‘What did you say, Mrs Toomey?’ (Juliet never called her Rosa.)

  ‘Silly old cow!’ Rosa bellowed back, shunting the broom between Juliet’s feet.

  But, deafness, real or assumed, being the most unanswerable of weapons, Rosa never emerged victorious from these encounters. And, as if in final surrender, she wept at Aunt Juliet’s funeral.

  I remember all our other servants with such vividness that it is hard to believe in the relative shortness of their stay with us—a duration necessitated by their numbers and variety in a span of twenty-five years. However briefly they remained, their personal dramas became a family concern. Amy was coloured, from one of the Pacific Islands, and we all listened in sympathy as she paced the flat roof, occasionally howling like a dog, every full moon.

  Lily was eighteen, exceedingly pretty and unmistakably pregnant. One of eleven children, her already overburdened parents asked my father to intervene on behalf of her sailor suitor, father of the baby, who having agreed willingly to marry her, was mystified by her contemptuous refusal. To my father’s enquiry of the reason for her reluctance, Lily answered: ‘Because he’s too short and he can’t dance.’

  And marry him she would not, so one more baby was added to her mother’s brood.

  Bina’s only eccentricity was her insistence on wearing her starched white apron back to front: to keep it clean. She was certainly partial to a drink or two, but this passed without comment until she disappeared one weekend and was found in the adjacent Kings Cross cinema when the cleaners opened it on Monday morning. She had slipped happily between the seats at the late Saturday night showing.

  When I was three I had as nurse the manservant of a friend of my father’s, a judge on
furlough from the Solomon Islands, who, having brought O’Kenny to Sydney with him, was at a loss how to occupy him. O’Kenny and I were happy in each other’s company, but his authority came to an end when my parents discovered how we spent our days. I lay on my back under my father’s car, catching on my tongue any stray drops of water or oil which fell from the running board while O’Kenny kept watch. Of this gentle creature I remember only two very large, bare, patient, coal-black feet.

  Dougherty and Merle, who sounded like a music hall turn, were in fact mother and daughter of Irish extraction. Mr Dougherty had deserted Dougherty early in their married life and she suffered Merle ever after in a spirit of atonement for her mistake. We suffered her for the excellence of Dougherty’s sweeping and polishing, for she was a vacant-minded and adenoidal girl who spent most of her day scurrying out of the way of her mother’s vituperative tongue.

  However, she won her permanent place in the honours list of family favourites by her impromptu greeting on the morning she found my parents sleeping on the floor. They shared, at the time, a large but shaky bed whose spring framework fitted imperfectly on the base. From time to time the inner part of the bed would go crashing to the floor, one side tilting crazily in the air. On this occasion, they had come home late from a party and it hardly seemed worth the trouble to haul it back to base. They settled down for the night as best they could on that part of the bed which rested levelly on the floor. Merle’s startled cry awoke them over the tea-tray in the morning: ‘Ooow! Whatever have yous two been up to?’

  Nancy was in all practical ways the perfect servant. She was also rather alarmingly unbalanced, but this sober fact did not strike me until she came to work for me and my husband years after she had left my mother’s house. There, she was tolerated for her eccentricities but joyously appreciated for what was an undeniably keen, albeit macabre, sense of fun. There, too, her pathologically intense likes and dislikes were encouraged by my father for the amusement he derived from their manifestations. One more than normally frequent dropper-in at meal times would sit, empty plate in front of her, while Nancy ostentatiously served to the right and left, muttering in prim, clipped Scottish accents as she passed behind her chair, ‘Greedy bitch!’ No amount of scolding by my mother would force Nancy to desist and so, on the nights of the poor woman’s visits, my mother herself served at table. Nancy had come out to Australia and to us from the most rigorously trained English households and she shed her inhibitions in our house with joy and determination. Her behaviour remained ever meticulous: it was the cruder forms of speech which gave her particular delight. Passages and stairways rang with Nancy’s clear, pure voice pealing out the monosyllabic obscenities she seemed just to have learnt.

  ‘Ha, ha, ha—now isn’t that a funny wee word,’ we heard over the hum of the Hoover in appreciation of her newest acquisition.

  I have to admit that in all probability she learnt them in our house—if not from a member of the family, then from one of the tradesmen or various hangers-on or droppers-in for whom there was always a kettle boiling on the stove in readiness for a cup of tea. Four years after I had gone to live in England my mother died suddenly and I flew out to Australia to comfort my father. Nancy had long since gone home and a plump motherly Australian called Dulcie was in her place. I met Dulcie in tears one day.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Dalton,’ she wailed, ‘that little bird just gave me such a turn! I could have sworn, dear, darling Mrs Eakin was still alive and in this room. As clear as anything, that little bird just said, “Oh, shit!”’

  CHAPTER 5

  Just as some pervasive spirit of unconventionality seemed to grip all our servants, so, too, were our domestic livestock a memorable collection. My earliest recollection was of a large and rather fierce Australian galah. These are pure white cockatoos, with flaming pink crests, and ours hopped up and down in his cage, screeching angrily, and never succeeding in endearing himself to anyone. Samuel Pepys was the only dog I was ever allowed: for the four short years of his life, we never succeeded in house-training him, and we never broke him of his preference for my grandmother’s hall carpet on which to deposit his mess. This caused furious rows, and when Pepys was finally run over, it was generally agreed that we could not risk a successor taking over his bad habits. So from then on, the house was invaded by a trio of exceedingly unusual cats. It had been my intention to have one cat, but shortly after acquiring a kitten named Roger (after one of the family friends), two more homeless kittens appeared in swift succession—one named Errol, after another friend, and the third Kiska, quite simply meaning ‘cat’ in Russian. These three castrated males quickly developed a most complex game, involving perfect timing and teamwork, with which they amused or startled any six o’clock guests, according to whether or not they were regular visitors. They lay low for a couple of hours before six, gathering strength no doubt for their performance, and then with an instinct for time never more than ten minutes out either way, they would come hurtling down the hall, claws and paws scratching on the parquet floor and—first Roger, then Errol, then Kiska—tear twice round the sitting-room floor, beneath and between feet, at furious pace, and finally launch themselves in formation on the window curtains. Straight up one side of the curtains they shot, across the pelmet, and straight down the other side. Round the room once more, and out.

  Unhappily, they were too decorative and frivolous a trio to be any check on the rats which were our next companions. The back door of our house led onto a dirty cul-de-sac, littered with garbage and the decaying fences of older houses than ours. Next door was the back entrance of a restaurant of always suspect cleanliness, and of obviously unsanitary antiquity. I suppose the rats had lived a life of luxury there for years for, when it was suddenly demolished, the indignation and deprivation shone transparently out of their furious eyes as they glared at us in the dark. They literally swarmed into our house, to the extent that I awoke one night to find one perched, fixing me with baffled and reproachful stare, on the end of my bed. This happening finally prodded my father into action: hitherto he had tended to regard the visitors with indulgent amusement and to the female complaints around him was apt to reply, with something like nostalgia, that he’d been accustomed to rats dropping onto his sleeping face when he was in the Navy. But now he turned our problem over to a firm of pest and rodent exterminators called Fletcher & Hawks and, in exchange for a substantial cheque, settled back in preparation for peace.

  Various representatives of Fletcher & Hawks appeared, dived into manholes, cracks and crevasses, flirted with the rats, and disappeared again. The rats’ eyes grew angrier and more reproachful, but they rallied and it seemed that their ranks closed into something more like formation tactics. Various key personnel took up permanent posts around the house, so that one could almost be certain of meeting a particular rat at a particular time and place. My father passed this information on to Fletcher & Hawks; more money changed hands, and more white-coated men appeared. More rats also appeared, and the din around our dustbins at night was now impossible to ignore. One had to walk down a narrow passageway past the dustbins in order to reach the garage, so that this became an occasion for apologetic explanation whenever a guest was winded in passing by a disturbed rat. Short of asking the Fletcher & Hawks staff to come and live with us awhile to observe our condition, my father, by now exasperated, could get neither satisfaction nor his money back, and now in possession of a handsome fee, they were inclined to by-pass his letters as hysterical exaggeration.

  He composed what proved to be his final letter with some care and enjoyment. Presuming that there were indeed a Mr Fletcher and a Mr Hawks, he addressed his letter to them personally and, after setting out in detail the lengths to which he had gone to provoke satisfactory action, and the remuneration they had received for their services, he asked that their efforts be redoubled. But, he added, it would be with some sense of loss that he would witness the passing from his life of his now two most familiar companions: one, an active and industr
ious rat who lived in the floor boards under his desk, and whose chirpings and burrowings accompanied his working hours and lightened the clinical quiet of his surgery; the other, a large and friendly rat who nightly lay in wait behind the dustbin lid, and as he walked to his car, came hurtling forth in response to the merest flicking of his fingers and to whom he hoped he might still have time to teach a few tricks. In view of their long association and of the way these two had flourished under their patronage and care, he had taken the liberty of naming them respectively, Fletcher and Hawks. By these names were these two mildly notorious rodents becoming known to the inhabitants of the ‘Cross’ and to his large circle of patients.

  The following week Mr Fletcher and Mr Hawks arrived in person, and within a few days the ranks of the rats dwindled and faltered, and soon they had all disappeared.

  CHAPTER 6

  My grandfather was a quiet and saintly man, whose presence in this matriarchal house was nevertheless some restraining influence on the family dramas. He and I had an especially close relationship: I called him ‘Sammie’ and he treated me as his friend and equal. From the time I could walk, I accompanied him on his early morning swim, which performed the triple function of getting me out of the house, teaching me to swim, and establishing an affinity with my grandfather and his family.

  Every morning at 6 a.m. we walked through the empty streets and the grimy park, known as the Domain, where tramps were just stirring under their newspapers, to the fenced-in enclosure at the harbour’s edge, the Domain Baths. The Baths were in the same tongue of the harbour as the docks and I shudder to think of the oil and refuse in which I must have wallowed and flourished. Until I was four we went to the Men’s Baths, and when I was nearly two I graduated from Sammie’s back to a sturdy dog-paddle of my own. The men swam naked, so that at four it was decided that I was too old to share their morning freedom and my grandfather dropped me off alone at the Ladies’ Baths next door. We went every morning, summer and winter, in rain or sun; and, walking home, Sammie and I would play the Shakespeare Game. Every day I had to say one reasonably well-known line from one of Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets, and Sammie took up the quotation from there, reciting until I told him to stop.