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.’
Into her talk, too, came her favourite literary characters: Peggotty, from David Copperfield, was as well known to me as one of the household; my mother’s boundless optimism in the face of imminent, though small, financial doom was always dubbed ‘Micawberism’. I thought this, and her other favourite, ‘Malapropism’, were probably to be found in the huge dictionary by her bed. But they had faces and characteristics for me—Peggotty, Mr Micawber and Mrs Malaprop were shadowy but permanent members of the family.
While she talked, Aunt Juliet tickled me for hours on end. The tickling is a family vice, the taste for which was passed on to me by my mother, but in the years since I have never found such an untiring and uncomplaining tickler as Aunt Juliet. On hot, sticky summer nights when I could not sleep, or had the toothache, Aunt Juliet sat by my bedside playing the ‘game’. This was a geographical tour of my person: ‘Quickly—England!’ I would say when one foot sole—perhaps Italy—had become numb and tired of sensation, and Aunt Juliet’s nimble fingers must go racing to the back of my neck. Only on one point did she insist as we changed countries every night—my bottom was Germany.
I had my own game with Aunt Juliet’s person. This was the privilege and doubtful pleasure of being allowed to put my finger in the ‘hole’. The hole was indeed a hole, of dark and mysterious depths, in the soft fat folds of her upper thigh. One day she and Uncle Harry were driving in one of the earlier motor cars to catch the Newcastle ferry. There was a collision with a horse and cart. The horse, cart, man, woman and child occupants and the car—Harry and Juliet, swathed in duster coats and motoring veils—sailed into the Hawkesbury River. Only Harry and Juliet were recovered, and whatever injury Juliet suffered had left the ‘hole’ as reminder.
My relationship with my other two married great-aunts was never as close as it was with Aunt Juliet. I only remember once visiting Aunt Juliet’s house in Newcastle before, when I was four, she came to live with us, but relics of her life there were scattered about the house. In my grandmother’s silver cupboard a shelf was taken up with Aunt Juliet’s silver menu holders and a stack of old menu cards. Aunt Juliet’s married life had consisted largely of arranging flowers, writing her menus, and waking up Uncle Harry in the night to tickle her back. Uncle Harry was never known to protest at this indignity, and one wonders if any other marital rights were afforded him, as Aunt Juliet protested loudly and often that she had always been too frightened to have children.
A housekeeper, Doris, had been brought out from England by Juliet, trailing hinted-at glories of ducal households behind her. Doris, unaccountably, quietly, and eventually gave birth to a nameless child whose presence was explained by Aunt Juliet as the result of a day trip by Doris to Sydney. An aura of threatening and shadowy holocaust hung in my mind forever after about the train—known as the Newcastle Flyer—solid and encased in brass, mahogany, engraved glass and reclining seats, for surely it had played its part in Doris’s downfall? The child was seldom mentioned. Aunt Juliet sailed blithely above the situation, resorting only once to indignation when Doris’s name was billed before hers at the reading of Uncle Harry’s will to the tune of thirty shillings a week for life.
Of the other two, Aunt Flo was pretty, pretentious and nearly as silly as Juliet: she didn’t enter our lives as much as Aunt Bertie who, of all the sisters, was the only one resembling my grandmother in bigness of heart and spirit and in the forcefulness of her personality. Like all the sisters, she was large and fat and soft and, at the age when I first remember her, dressed only in black. When I think of her it is largely in connection with the food I had to eat in her house. Highly spiced cakes and brown cinnamon biscuits, Jewish fried fish, and a wonderful milky pea soup called ‘peas and clice’. Aunt Bertie was always cooking or playing the piano: she would break off in the middle of a song to take something out of the oven, and I was allowed to strum on the piano and pop the hot biscuits into my mouth.
It was in Aunt Bertie’s house that I absorbed the only atmosphere and customs of Judaism which I ever remember seeing. My grandparents seemed to have given up their religion, or at least the outward show of it, at the same time as their daughter and, except for the crisp squares of Matzo bread which arrived at every Passover but more for enjoyment than necessity, I don’t remember any rituals or religious taboos. There certainly remained a half humorous superstition, which was never taken very seriously. My grandmother, an old lady whose normal outlook was panoramic in its tolerance, regarded these remnants of prejudice of hers much as one might regard an unsightly but long-accepted physical defect. She did not like the idea of baptism, so that when I was finally christened a Presbyterian at the age of four, I was sent to a Vaudeville show of very doubtful propriety with the cook immediately afterwards to take my mind off the ceremony and prevent me telling my grandmother about it with any degree of coherence. Despite the urgings and promptings of the cook, I would not, however, forget the main event—‘the funny man in the black coat who threw water on me’. Her dislike of the Catholic religion was firmly planted: when I married a Catholic and she was forced to write about it in her letters to me she would never write the word, but denote its place on the page with a large black cross. But the dietary rules of Judaism had long since lost the battle with her appetite and love of good food.
But sometimes on Friday nights I was invited to the evening meal at Aunt Bertie’s: her children and grandchildren gathered round the table and Uncle John sat at the head with a small, round, black skullcap on his head, intoning a Hebraic chant which was to me wonderfully theatrical and exciting. Aunt Bertie had two sons: Cedric had married within the Faith and joined his father in wearing the black skullcap and bringing up his children in traditional Jewish fashion; Colyn had not, and had joined my mother in the shadows of family approval. At his occasional appearances at the Friday night gatherings, Colyn put a white napkin on his head instead; this reduced my cousin, Adrienne, and myself to fits of giggles for which we were invariably told to leave the room.
Aunt Bertie lived in a house just along the street from the most permanent of the Doone establishments, and it was this proximity which fostered my friendship with her. It was easy to slip over the fence and dash along to Aunt Bertie’s for ten minutes—running back with pockets full of cookies for my playmates who were keeping watch.
The Doone girls were a socially favoured and exclusive little band. The Governor’s daughter was my best friend and in exchange for afternoon teas at Government House after school, I regularly beat her to pulp in the school yard. We all felt it to be a particularly English failing that her nose bled on these occasions, but poor Rosemary struggled bravely to shed her pretty accent and her frailties. She was also to be pitied because she was brought and fetched from school by the Vice-Regal car and chauffeur, while we were free to wander home at will across the streets and harbourside parks and up the steep stone steps from the water’s edge to Kings Cross, and neighbouring Elizabeth Bay, where my walking companions lived. My mother was never nervous: the walk was a long one, so it seems Sydney was a safe and friendly place in which to grow up.
It was also a tight little world. Far from being a free and classless society in a new and vigorous culture, it was the concentrated quintessence of a snobbery and class-consciousness brought from the old. Our parents and our grandparents were friends: we met no-one at school outside this circle and, inside the circle, allowances were made for its members. Because my mother was of this world, it never occurred to me that her Jewishness might have been a cause for apartness and that there existed in the world outside Sydney an anti-Jewish prejudice. I think this must have been because a few Jews in Sydney had established themselves early in the social hierarchy. I am sure it never occurred to my mother, or to her second cousins, the Levys, that theirs could have been a life of social ostracism. Australian Roman Catholics were not so lucky. I knew very few, except our cook, and one dear family friend. They were usually one’s servants, invariably Irish and politically left wing, therefore posing a threat to our secure world.
However, although my school life and family friends followed an established Australian pattern, the life within the walls of our house certainly did not.