Aunts Up the Cross Read online

  It is the laughter I remember and miss most poignantly. The rows and the laughter were daily doses on which we thrived: frequently the laughter arose out of the rows, or out of the tears which followed them. I remember seeing my mother in tears one day following an outburst of my father’s and, puzzled by this constant drama in our lives, I asked her why she stood it. It seemed to me a one-sided persecution, as he never cried, and the kitchen drawer full of bills and the house full of interfering old ladies would never have occurred to me as a provocation.

  ‘Well,’ she sobbed, ‘I couldn’t live with the bastard if he didn’t make me laugh so much.’

  I think it was the clash and mingling of the Irish and Jewish temperaments which produced this climate of high dramatic comedy. The fact that the doors were open and everybody joined in was pure Australian.

  CHAPTER 8

  Although my father appeared in the role of resigned provider to a household of permanent guests, I think his enjoyment of their continual company equalled, in his much quieter way, my mother’s. At least he could escape, and frequently did—not far, to be sure, for to reach his bed he had to undress in one room and make his way in striped pyjamas through the crowded sitting-room to the verandah where he slept. But he had no inhibitions about doing this and the evening’s conversation continued to the accompaniment of his ferocious snores. He became, at this time, quite an established ‘club man’ and keen billiards player. His championship status ended on the day he shot himself; ever after, he found it painful and difficult to bend the affected knee into the prescribed position.

  Actually his first two adventures with firearms weren’t too serious: only on the third occasion was any bodily damage done. The pistol was of very small, very smart Spanish manufacture—just large enough to lie in the palm of his hand, and affording a more comforting and solid feel than the thin jingle of key rings or the like with which some men fidget. He first came to carry one of these on the advice of the police, who were concerned over his lone night calls into the underworld areas of dock and slum land. Sydney had during the thirties a crime wave of serious proportions, terrorised by a gang of slashers known as the Razor Gang, and it was against the possibility of attack by these assailants that the gun was bought. On his first day home with his new toy, my father indulged in a little quiet target practice in the surgery, but beyond a ricocheting bullet which gouged some plaster out of the surgery wall, splintered a glass case full of instruments and bounced harmlessly out into the light area, no untoward incidents occurred. Secure in the assumption that he now knew when it was liable to go off, and when it was not, he took the gun out with him at night for as long as the situation lasted, and occasionally fondled it by day as it lay in his desk drawer. When war broke out, all licences to own firearms were reviewed: my father took his pistol up to No. 3 Police Station where, over a cup of tea with the Station boys, he missed the sergeant’s leg by inches.

  On the afternoon he finally shot himself, my mother was upstairs and as usual entertaining some friends to tea. It was a humid, somnolent day, enervating; and the patient who was sitting by my father’s desk cataloguing her woes was one of his regular and more boring hypochondriacs, whose long list of ailments needed no further response than an occasional murmur of sympathy. While making these reassuring noises, he idly fingered the pistol in the middle drawer of his desk, lying in its accustomed nest of old papers, tobacco pouches, and pipe cleaners. As usual it was loaded and, as usual, my father hadn’t quite got the hang of it.

  ‘I get these terrifying palpitations, Doctor—sometimes when I lie down I think I’m going to choke. And then, suddenly, I’ll get a feeling of something awful about to happen—it’s my nerves, I suppose. Don’t you think I should have something to calm my nerves?’

  ‘Mmmm,’ said my father, and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet made a deafening report, in the doubly confined space of the drawer, and of the consulting room. The initial impact of the drawer bottom probably lightened the blow, which nevertheless neatly blew off part of my father’s kneecap. The patient swooned—my father cursed and bellowed—the nurse ran in, first to mop up the blood and call an ambulance into which she assisted my father; then, to revive the patient and put her in a taxi. Upstairs my mother’s guests exclaimed at the noise, but my mother assured them, ‘Don’t worry. The doctor’s probably shot himself.’

  It was not until some hours later that she learnt that her husband was in hospital, where he stayed for two weeks, the central figure of a good deal of amused attention.

  Later that night, I opened the door to two plainclothes policemen.

  ‘Miss Eakin,’ they said, ‘you can tell that father of yours that if he doesn’t learn to use that gun properly soon, we’re going to take it away from him.’

  While he was in hospital, the patient who had witnessed the accident recovered sufficiently to ring him for further professional advice. In fact, the hospital switchboard operators were pestered by the wretched woman, and finally agreed to ask the doctor for his opinion. The sister on duty came one day, ‘Mrs So-and-so is on the telephone. She says to tell you she has that sinking feeling again, and please, what should she do?’

  ‘Tell her,’ said my father, ‘to strike out for the shore.’

  CHAPTER 9

  When I was thirteen, the tottering finances of the one remaining Miss Cheriton finally collapsed and Doone terminated its brief but illustrious ten years’ existence. It had, as a school, made its mark: it had panache—it was smart—it provided good educational facilities, and its older pupils of the finishing school level had become locally renowned for their looks. The Doone girls, in the Sydney of that day, was a collective term conjuring up an image of youthful, well-educated beauty gathered for the picking under one roof and the eager and not too strict chaperonage of ‘Cherry’. They frisked through amateur theatricals and the Arts, Government House dances, ADCs, and the last of Cherry’s money.

  When the end came, I was enrolled in the most exclusive and expensive boarding-school in the state, Frensham. My memories of Frensham are all pleasant ones: experiences to shock and distress me may have occurred during those significant adolescent years, although by now, I was fairly shockproof, but I cannot recall them. My time at Frensham was one of deepening and happy expectancy of the future. Situated eighty miles from Sydney, the school buildings had grown gradually and were scattered through acres of beautiful mountain bushland. The mistresses, in those days, had all travelled out from England and with them they brought English educational ideas and principles, tempered and tailored to the Australian life and the Australian material on which they had to work. I doubt if many of them had had experience of the Australian father, and nothing to equip them for their encounters with mine. On the whole, however, I managed to preserve the illusion of a suitably paternal figure in my background, at the risk, on one occasion, of severe punishment.

  The occasion was a school concert—not an official affair, but one produced entirely by the girls, which was traditionally known as a ‘Scratch’ concert. My musical background has produced no stirring of talent in me. Although listening to music is one of my greatest joys, I can play no instrument, nor recognise by ear one note, and if ever I am obliged to sing, nothing will emerge from my willing throat but a painfully unmelodious dirge. I cannot remember what paucity of numbers—it cannot have been talent—caused me to be chosen as one of a chorus of four or five girls to chant the Volga Boat Song. I suppose some long-suppressed wish to be recognised as not entirely unmusical led me, foolishly, to disclose the fact in my weekly letter home. The Saturday morning of the concert, I was in a state of happy and fairly confident tension. As we were a country school, served by a small local telephone exchange, telegrams were telephoned through by the operator to the Mistress on Duty, who was, on this day, the most elderly, fussily eccentric and hysterically inclined member of the staff. She sent for me at 10 a.m.: the operator had telephoned through a telegram addressed to me, for which Miss L
ivingstone demanded adequate explanation. Written in Miss Livingstone’s elegant and flowing script, it read: ‘Knock ’Em Rotten, Kid. Bing Crosby.’

  Only my father could have sent it, and those that followed at half-hourly intervals throughout the day. I prayed, as I floundered for explanation and Miss Livingstone’s hysteria mounted, that each one would be the last. But there seemed no end to my father’s flow of invention that day. As each fresh summons to her room came, I listened to Miss Livingstone calling for first my form mistress, and then my house mistress and as she read out the latest horror, I watched the telephone with apprehension waiting for its next shrill attack. ‘With you in Spirit’ signed ‘Nellie Melba’ and, tersely, ‘I hate you. Grace Moore.’ From Australia’s leading theatrical firm, J. C. Williamson’s, came the entreaty, ‘Is £150 a week enough?’

  ‘Who is this man? I demand to know,’ shrieked Miss Livingstone, waving at me the message ‘We WANT you. MGM.’ When I failed to answer this too, the council of my three inquisitors decided that the time had come to report the matter to the headmistress. The girl on the exchange had by now entered into the spirit of my father’s intentions and was giggling so uncontrollably that she had even greater difficulty than usual in transmitting the messages to Miss Livingstone, who was, under the most sedate of circumstances, in a fairly advanced condition of deafness. This further indignity to the school was reported to Miss West, along with the sheaf of offensive messages. As I refused, professedly through ignorance, to divulge the name of the sender, Miss West sighed, ‘Very well—as you will not tell us whom you believe to be sending these frivolous and insulting messages, there is only one course you leave open to me. I am very sorry to have to do this, but I am afraid I shall be obliged to turn this entire matter over to your father and he must deal with you as he sees best.’

  I escaped with no sterner punishment than being deprived of my only chance of musical performance, and without having ‘owned up’. Neither did my father.

  CHAPTER 10

  A large percentage of the girls were country bred, for Australians are not entirely conditioned to the boarding-school idea, and the majority of children who live in the cities attend day school. So many of the fathers were graziers—sheep and cattle breeders. I spent several of my school holidays with a particular friend whose father owned a sheep station, and who, like most country folk, came to Sydney only for the Easter Agricultural Show, the ram sales, and the two major social events of the Sydney calendar—the spring and autumn race meetings. He was a delightful man, tough, wry, and unpretentious, with a typically Australian humour and a typically Australian capacity for alcohol. One race day my mother met him, dressed in his city best, leaning against the entrance of the Members Stand of the Australian Jockey Club, the exclusive institution of which he was a member, hacking away at his upper dentures with a pen knife.

  ‘Bloody things don’t fit,’ he complained. ‘New this morning. Suppose I’ll get ’em whittled down to shape before the last race.’

  When the bush folk aren’t racing in the cities they have their own local meetings—the Picnic Races, and a rollicking picnic they are, for the whole boisterous, drunken, hilarious week. The horses are either local nags, mounted by their owners, or they travel from country town to town, within a limited radius. The tracks are the best available field: the bookies are, on the whole, so crooked that it’s wise to watch the race with one eye and your bookie with the other in case he beats a hasty retreat. The Picnic refers officially to the luncheon hampers brought by the spectators. Graziers for miles around are full up with house guests for their local Race Week; cocktail parties are held nightly at stations within a hundred mile radius, and it all culminates in the Picnic Race Ball, in somebody’s wool shed. The local pub is always bursting with stretchers in the corridors and whisky and milk tends to be mixed with the standard Australian breakfast of steak and eggs.

  The Australian homestead, for the most part, is a comfortable bungalow surrounded on all sides by a wide, covered, and wire-netted verandah, well stocked with liquor, occasionally air-conditioned, and usually lacking in any domestic staff beyond the wife of one of the men, who might condescend to come in mornings and do the ‘rough’. Now, the grazier gets around in a Jeep or his private plane: when I was a child we rode from place to place, and horses were for use. We didn’t think of getting dressed up to ‘go riding’.

  Summer holidays I stayed with a friend whose family had a boat at Palm Beach or, some years, we rented a house ourselves. For the six or seven weeks over Christmas, most of our friends moved down the coast, twenty-five miles or so, to one of the glorious palm-fringed northern beaches—Palm Beach, Whale Beach, Newport, Collaroy. At our seaside cottage one Christmas, the house party was kept awake for two nights by the deafening snores of a guest who left on the third day, profuse in thanks and apologies that he had driven the other occupant of his bedroom onto the verandah. Polite and indulgent laughter followed him down the path. When the last farewell had been waved at his vanishing motor car, my mother asked my father: ‘Who was that, darling? A nice man, I thought.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said my father crossly. ‘Never seen him before in my life. Thought he was a friend of yours.’

  At this particular house, my mother’s hospitality had far outstripped the physical facilities of what was intended as a small family holiday cottage. A tent was erected in the back garden for myself and my friends: my mother usually spent the night on a swing hammock on the front porch, surrounded by those guests, laid out on divans and stretchers, whom she had been unable to squeeze into bedrooms. The liquor bill for the first month was so astronomical and my father’s nights so disturbed that on this occasion he rebelled and one morning stormed up to town, snapping at my mother that, in future, she could have her ‘bloody shooting box’ to herself.

  When I, in my teens, began to have an active and independent social life of my own I found that the life of our household struck some of my young escorts as unusual. One was reported to me as having said, ‘Nice girl, Robin Eakin, but it’s a funny thing—it doesn’t matter what time of night you take her home, there always seems to be a strange man having a bath in that house.’ Another bewildered young man, whom I had not thought to introduce to my father, made enquiries around town as to the identity of the big man in striped pyjamas who wandered about the house. This didn’t bother me: what really plagued my adolescence was the nightly tussle of trying to round the bend in the stairs and the short stretch of corridor to the front door without having my beau of the evening waylaid by my grandmother and great-aunt. Every night they hovered at their bedroom door at the foot of the stairs and so finely judged was their timing that invariably their two heads popped round the door and hailed me just as I reached the angle of stair and hall. Neither affection nor good manners would have halted me, even had it meant, as it frequently did, pushing one or both of them aside; but they were cunning enough to direct their attentions on to the young man who, blushing furiously, must give full account of his antecedents, occupation and, if feasible, intentions.

  Even more shaming to me were their frequent sorties into Sydney’s night-life. Now the city abounds in restaurants and nightclubs, but then there were only two really smart ones, Romano’s and Prince’s, and it was in one of these two that I spent almost every evening. At least once a week, Nana and Juliet rose from their beds, dressed as for a ball, reserved a floor table and sat watching me dance round the floor with my embarrassed escort. The head waiters adored them, for they ate prodigiously, drank quantities of champagne, and the society photographers flocked to take their picture. This would appear next day, to my rage and chagrin, beaming over the champagne bucket from the society pages, captioned ‘Robin Eakin’s grandmother and great-aunt’.

  We, in our teens, led a more sophisticated life than English or European adolescents: freer, and at the same time, simpler. We lived in or on the sea all summer, danced half the night, and raced our parents’ cars up and down the per
ilous coastal roads. These were the years just before the war and we were conscious of nothing but the sun, and the sea, and the wide, warm, free country spilling its splendours about us.

  CHAPTER 11

  When war came to Sydney I had the measles. I remember Nana woke me up to announce the news and insisted on cracking a bottle of champagne by my bedside—not in celebration, but as her means of greeting any crisis. My mother found her natural element. Although Sydney was a front-line Pacific base for supply and recreational purposes, the only real danger that threatened the thousands of US servicemen who spent part of their war fighting the Battle of Sydney was that of overfeeding by my mother. She gladly filled the emotional vacuum left by their American ‘moms’, but this was as nothing compared to the zest with which she shovelled food into the stomachs of the troops. Almost nightly I lost an admirer to the attractions of our kitchen. Eventually she took to feeding whole squadrons stationed in New Guinea as one base-returning pilot after another went back laden with hampers for those of her ‘boys’ already back in the jungle. My father, too, played his part with relish. He was made Chief Medical Officer for the Port of Sydney, and supervised the supply, staffing and training of a chain of underground medical posts around the docks. His working kit was a tin helmet and boiler suit, and although the biggest size available, its fly and stomach buttons refused to meet, and so he went repeatedly to action stations in a seemingly suitable state of emergency. The alert blast on the air-raid sirens was the signal for action stations for our entire household. I, too, had a tin helmet and drove a mobile canteen, passing out hot coffee and sandwiches to air-raid wardens on duty. My father and I left the house for our posts and my mother quickly pushed the two old ladies out of their beds and shepherded them to the small, dark storeroom under the stairs which we called the Black Hole. This manoeuvre, too, had its precision drill. There was just room in the Hole for one complete old lady, and the front—slimmer—half of another one. And so Nana and Juliet took it turn and turn about: five minutes exposure to the expected bombardment of the one billowing, bed-robed behind which could not be squeezed under cover—and then—panting, pulling and manipulating, my mother turned them about. Whenever, in France, I see plump pink poulets-de-Bresse being turned on a spit, my mind dwells not on the feast ahead of me, but on the memory of Nana and Juliet being turned in the Hole. Not one bomb was ever dropped on Sydney, but the air-raid drill gave considerable zest to the old ladies’ nocturnal hours.