Aunts Up the Cross (6 page)

Occasionally, if his visit was later than usual, my mother asked him to stay to dinner, but even in such an easygoing household as ours this was a risky move and apt to create tension. Flushed with whisky and bent on entertaining the party, Tony would go through his repertoire of Fitzpatrickisms and once having exhausted these, would feel that something more spectacular was expected of him. Another regular visitor was a genteel and aged governess of my mother’s, Sally Thornton, who one night had the misfortune to sit next to Tony, casting around for fresh topics. When all else failed, his own body never ceased to fascinate him. He leapt to his feet, pushed back his chair and, whipping his shirt out of his trousers, thrust his bare and hairy chest close to Sally’s face.

‘How’s that?’ he roared. ‘Go on—have a feel—as hard as a rock and in the pink of condition.’

Sally leant across this offering and addressed herself, quivering with gentility, to Tony’s other neighbour. ‘Don’t you feel, Mr Blackman,’ she said, ‘that Gilbert and Sullivan were antipathetic?’

Poor Tony could never understand the rebuff.

As frequent a visitor as Tony was Siddie Jacobs, a dim-witted car park attendant to whom my father would lend five pounds to be repaid at the rate of sixpence a week over the years. He was once caught chasing little girls and my father guaranteed his good behaviour to the police. Siddie was about five feet high. He lisped badly and wore a long, white coat flapping around his ankles. When my father felt particularly mischievous he would say to Siddie on his visits to the surgery, ‘Go upstairs, Sid, and say hello to Mrs Eakin. She’s not doing anything.’

As my mother invariably was doing something and, once up, Siddie was not easy to get down, this was not a popular move.

There was always a current ‘lame dog’ of my mother’s in the house. There was the girl behind the cash desk at the butcher’s shop opposite who suffered from a painful and recalcitrant boil on her behind. It was too far for her to travel to her home each day for the prescribed treatment and so she came at lunch-time and sat patiently in a bowl of boiling water and boracic on our bathroom floor while my mother served her delicious luncheons on a tray.

More disrupting were the resident visitors. During really full periods, my mother sometimes never slept in a bed for weeks at a stretch. One fruity-voiced gentleman my parents met on a cruise lived with us for two years before disappearing with all the whisky and leaving behind a pile of unpaid bills. Shortly after his departure, my mother came home with a loathsome Viennese from her bridge club: I was turned out of my bedroom for him, and was incensed still further by the large framed photograph of himself kept on my bureau and the coronets embroidered on his underpants. It took nine months for us to convince my mother that, despite his excellence at the bridge table, he must go.

Not all our house guests, eating or sleeping, were mistakes. One English theatrical producer whom my father invited to dinner remained in close harmony and affection—nightly—for seventeen years. Next to racing, the dominant influence in our lives was the theatre. The theatre in Sydney lapsed into a very barren field after the war, compared to the richness with which it flourished when I was a child. There were only two legitimate theatres (one of them boringly inaccessible—too far by public transport and too difficult to park by one’s own) compared to the many of my youth. Now there is a vigorous stirring of Australian playwrights, and a crop of small playhouses and theatre clubs, but still the best of Australian talent leaves home. But forty or fifty years ago, we had Her Majesty’s, the Criterion, the Theatre Royal, the Tivoli—we had whole visiting companies from England and America and opera companies from Italy—and my father had them all as patients. He was the official theatre doctor to all the companies, and so a great deal of my time was spent behind the wings, chasing through the corridors and dressing-rooms, while he was attending one of the company.

There was no discernible link between bridge games, death and drama; nevertheless, memories of one fade inevitably into memories of the other.

My mother’s influence embedded in me the belief that to play bad bridge was worse than boring; it bordered on a sin. It seemed easier never to learn. The bridge table would be set and ready by 11.30 a.m.—the bridge cloths, green baize or velour, bordered in gold-flecked brocade ribbon; the score pads with their four-cornered symbols of diamonds, hearts, clubs and spades; the freshly sharpened pencils still smelling of wood shavings; and the cook of the day busily cutting sandwiches in the kitchen. The players all wore hats, and even though these honorary ‘aunts’ bore no relationship other than parental friends, they were never addressed solely by their Christian names. At teatime I was allowed in to gaze at them, and once earned my mother’s proud glance by a long, appraising look at one.

‘Aunt Marjorie’s very pretty, isn’t she, Mummie.’

My mother, preening herself on her enchanting child, agreed.

‘But I don’t think much of the other two. Wherever did you get them from?’

The bridge table was a regular backdrop for these social comments, the supply of ‘aunts’ abundant. I once asked a new ‘aunt’ if she could remove her hat, the better to see her face, then let out a horrified cry to my mother, ‘Oh no! Ask her to put it on again!’

I asked one lady sipping her tea if I could carefully watch her drink.

‘Yes, darling, but why?’

‘Because my daddy says you drink like a fish.’

My mother’s bridge games were almost sacred events—to fall out without due warning an unforgivably inconsiderate act, the more so if my father were the messenger.

He came home one night and announced to my mother that he had just been called to see a friend of hers, but that ‘she didn’t know much about it’.

My mother was a little shocked. ‘Do you mean she was
drunk?’

‘Worse than that,’ said my father. ‘Dead.’

This really shocked her. ‘She can’t be dead—I’m playing bridge with her tomorrow.’

‘Not tomorrow, dear.’

So, for me, death seemed the suitably dramatic end to any conversation, bringing with it no discomforting strangeness.

When there were no more family deaths to give colour to our days, my father’s patients could always be relied upon.

They were all part of our lives, in those days of close family doctor and patient relationships. There were the Pierce boys, a family of rugged fishermen and keen amateur yachtsmen, whose favourite family joke was that my father had circumcised one of the younger boys ‘crooked’. Twice a week my father drove to the fish market in the early morning and came home with a car load of fresh Pierce fish, a sack of oysters which I was taught to open at a very early age, and two or three live lobsters romping around in the back of the car and waving their antennae through the windows at startled passers-by. Every morning my father visited a rich and elderly bachelor friend to check his far from robust but nevertheless relatively stable health, except on the rare occasions when his housekeeper would telephone. ‘Mr Cheek says, would the doctor mind not calling this morning as he is not feeling very well.’

We all mourned when one of his old ladies died, for she whiled away the last of her senile and bed-ridden days composing couplets to be recited at the doctor’s visit. These fitted the ailment of the day. When her nightdress was lifted to bare her abdomen, she shrilled:

‘Pull down my shirt,

I’m Fanny the Flirt.’

and for an abscessed breast brought forth:

‘Isn’t it a pity—

That I’ve got a titty.’

On mornings when I was not at school I frequently accompanied my father on his rounds, sometimes visiting the patient and sometimes waiting in the car outside. If he left me in a doubtful slum area, he always admonished me, ‘Now, if anyone speaks to you, just make a noise like a five-year-old girl’ or whatever age was appropriate at the time. When he emerged he would sometimes tell me about the case. I remember some of our family intimates only through their ailments which, if they were startling enough, my father could not resist recounting. Thus, one plump and coyly coquettish lady was embedded in my consciousness since a tick had ‘crawled up her’. My father felt her charms were forever damned because, as he put it, ‘when I got to the poor brute, it had died’.

Actually, for me, all Sydney was an extension of the security of the house. My days never had an even tenor, but always an assured one, and certain events brought their certain flavour.

Was there ever a threat to this security, I now wonder? Financial threat may have been there but never to be taken seriously. In the 1930s so-called ‘society’ women thought little of popping into the pawn shops with their jewellery. This particularly appealed to my mother, whose fiscal week was ruled by Saturday’s betting results. Many a Thursday morning on Tony McGill’s settling day she would borrow Juliet’s sapphire and diamond ring (now on my finger) or one of her diamond, ruby and emerald butterflies, ostensibly to wear to a party, but in reality to appease Tony that night. After a few days, Juliet would become both curious and querulous and, dependent on the race results, my mother would either fling back her jewellery or plead another party.

In our urban life, my consciousness of the Depression was an awareness of a wicked man called Jack Lang, bent, it seemed, on ruining all our lives. I do remember a sense of apprehension, almost fearful, attached to this man. But my only experience of actual financial concern was the occasion on which my parents made a pact to give up smoking—in order to pay for my school fees.

The pact lasted a week. My mother gave in first. This did not appear to affect my education and the school fees were never mentioned again.

Darker moments have been pushed away, into another dimension. Every now and then, a sound, a smell, a chink of light or darkness breaks the happy carapace of memory. Sitting downstairs in a two-up, two-down Surry Hills tenement I watched my father disappear up the narrow stairs with his worn, brown leather ‘doctor’s’ bag, while from upstairs came screams—neither cries nor shouts, but piercing, wrenching, beseeching screams. When he came down again, the screams would have stopped. Someone else came with him—an elderly man or woman, talking in low voices. I knew that the screams came from a woman upstairs who had cancer. I knew that my father had, out of his leather bag, stopped the screams. I do not remember how I knew this, how my father had seen fit to introduce me to reality but all my life I have remembered—screams, cancer, horror, fear. It did not have the remote and curious connection of Uncle Ken’s pneumonia and the bread and sugar. This death (for surely the woman was dying) belonged to the real world, more affecting—not one’s uncle from my fairy tale (albeit sometimes a Grimm’s fairy tale) world—but a creature
in extremis.

Nevertheless the flavour of illness was an exciting one, not only the patients’ illnesses, but my own. Then my mother swamped me with presents: I lay in feverish anticipation every time she left the house for she never went out, even for half an hour, without returning with armfuls of treasures. When my appendix came out a whole room of the hospital was hung by my mother in pink brocade, and every day a new lace or satin pillow cover arrived with a pillow spray of flowers in the appropriate colours, to pin beside my face.

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.

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.