My mother loved flowers passionately and as we had no garden her passion found expression in arranging brimming bowls in every room. These she did exquisitely, with care and devotion, but was seldom allowed to indulge in her artistry alone. Once all the vases in the sitting-room had been filled with water and wire and the flowers freed from their wrapping, my grandmother would come in and take up her seat. On top of the chimney-piece was a deep, heavy earthenware trough, and this was always a challenge to my mother’s skill: the flowers had to be just the right length and just the right weight to balance in their wire cage. One day my grandmother was watching this intricate task and after my mother had placed each flower in its place she, talking the while, would skip forward and give the whole erection a tweak. Tight-lipped but restrained, my mother persevered, and my grandmother continued to pull a flower here and push a flower there each time she turned to the table for the next one. Finally when the whole pattern was almost complete, my grandmother pulled a flower just a shade too hard and slowly the wire cage tipped forward—the work of half an hour lying forlornly horizontal. ‘Aaaah!’ bellowed my mother, with a terrible cry of release: she grasped the heavy trough lightly at either end, and with all the force she could summon threw it intact to the ceiling. There was a splendid crash: a cascade of water, wire, flowers, pieces of pottery shot all over the room and my grandmother, seriously alarmed, went pale with fright.
‘Lyndall,’ she whispered, ‘I think you’ve gone mad!’
This was an unexpected bonus in weapons and my mother seized upon it. She whirled upon my grandmother, wild-eyed.
‘That’s it,’ she shrieked, ‘I am! I am!’
Battering on the wall with her fists, she raised her eyes to the dripping ceiling, ‘Mad! Mad! Mad!’
My grandmother scurried downstairs as fast as she could, and my mother was left to regain her composure and mop up the debris in peace.
Many of the rows were precipitated by Aunt Juliet. She was an extremely stupid woman, although, in a childish way, sometimes endearingly so. Uncle Harry had fallen through our floor a rich man, but had left his money so tied up by trusts that his silly widow had little opportunity to dissipate it, as she undoubtedly would have done. One of her few financial freedoms was a charge account at Sydney’s best department store, David Jones, which was paid monthly by the trustees. This was a recognised family preserve or, I should say, recognised by Aunt Juliet in moments of generosity or bribery and by my mother perpetually. When Aunt Juliet wished to make amends for some act of idiocy, she would tell my mother to go and buy herself something ‘on my account at David Jones’. On the other hand, whenever my mother wanted to buy something, usually for me, which she could not afford (and as the week’s housekeeping would invariably have been eaten up or gone into Tony McGill’s pocket, she could rarely afford it), she would say with a comforting and conspiratorial air, ‘Come along. We’ll put it on Aunt Juliet’s account, at David Jones.’ We had wonderful shopping sprees on Aunt Juliet’s account, and terrible rows each month when the bill came in. Quite often, my mother bought Aunt Juliet something even more expensive to pacify her: this went on the following month’s account, and so we had four clear weeks for the effect of the ‘gift’ to wear off. My mother’s attitude to money was delightful, but impractical. She had been brought up by my grandmother in the same way as I was, and by having repeated to her frequently the words of my great-grandfather who was reputed to have dinned into the ears of his twelve children, ‘Never worry about money. It’s only an attitude of mind, and the next best thing to being very rich is to think you’re very rich.’
As he was, in fact, very rich, this philosophy didn’t have such disastrous effects as it was to have on the lives of his descendants, who had managed in following his principles to get through most of his money. My grandmother was untiring in her efforts (in my mother’s case entirely successful) to teach disrespect and contempt for money. She carried this to the length of refusing to write the word, and later in her letters to me, usually enclosing a cheque, would refer to it as ‘Filthy L—’. It was, indeed, to her a dirty word.
In consequence, my mother, who was not very rich, was constantly in debt. She never really grasped the principle of accounting, but she did know that bills were almost invariably typewritten, and that a typewritten envelope was apt to contain a bill. So she evolved the happy plan of putting all typewritten envelopes unopened in the kitchen drawer. There they lay, piling up explosive potential until the day the drawer would no longer close and various apologetic little men would present themselves at my father’s door. He, poor man, invariably paid, and so there would be another unholy row. Many years of marriage never taught him the futility of trying to instil into his family his own thrifty and practical principles. We were hopelessly lost to my grandmother’s far gayer and pleasanter pattern for living.
My father’s only financial indulgence was in racing, and he was constantly working out a ‘system’. Very occasionally the system worked and my father smugly came home with bulging pockets. On these occasions my mother attempted to have him make up her own losings, with no success.
Once, after a fairly spectacular win and a firm refusal to my mother’s entreaties, he went off to Richard Hunt’s, Sydney’s best men’s shop, and bought himself several pairs of imported, expensive and superfluous woollen socks. My mother, on seeing the socks, was incensed.
‘Amy,’ she called to the maid, ‘Come here and catch me a moth!’
Apart from racing, I don’t know if there was anything peculiarly Australian about our home life. Perhaps the informality and wholehearted participation of all friends and attendants in our family affairs would have been impossible in a stricter culture. Sydney is a big city, but to some extent it still remains true that everybody knows their neighbour’s business, just as in a small country town anywhere in the world. I used to run away (certainly not because I was unhappy but for the fun of the journey) about once a month, but nobody worried. Usually I ended up in the greengrocer’s (Greek) at one end of the street, or in the tobacconist’s kiosk at the other, serving behind the counter. This was to me the ultimate adventure: all the shopkeepers in the Cross knew me and were quite willing to humour me, and my parents were fairly certain where to find me at bedtime. This was in an area quite as urban and crowded as present-day Knightsbridge, and so to a certain extent a spirit of frontier-day friendliness must have survived.
Everyone, of course, knew my father. His vast practice embraced all of the Cross and its inhabitants on the fringes of the underworld: the docks of Woolloomooloo; the slums of Surry Hills; and beyond them into the fashionable purlieus of the eastern suburbs. The traffic policeman on duty held up even the trams for him, and he was friend and counsellor to all the prostitutes of the Dirty Half Mile. He normally remained teetotal all year until my birthday three days before Christmas, when he drank, fairly solidly, until New Year’s Day. On Christmas Day he visited his poorest patients, taking them presents—a bottle of beer, wrapped in newspaper tied with a blue bow; a basket of a piece of soap, an orange and a bottle of eau-de-cologne with a pink bow—and stayed to chat and often have a drink with them. If it was beer, or gin or whisky (which he usually would have taken them) he would arrive home with a merry, tipsy chuckle and if it was a particularly revolting glass of cheap port and a wedge of rock-hard Christmas cake, he would surreptitiously deposit these in the earth of the pot plant usually gracing the ‘parlour’. Sometimes he brought home stories which had particularly amused him, and he loved the colourful vernacular of his slum patients—such as the usual East Sydney way of expressing righteous surprise at an unmarried pregnancy—‘I was only out with ’im once and ’e nicked it orf me.’ Sometimes stories of his own rejoinders reached us, such as his encounter at the fashionable and respectable ladies club, the Queens Club. At this stronghold of virtuous matrons a notice, redundant one would have thought, was posted on the board to the effect that males were not permitted above the first floor.
One morning at 7.30 a.m. my father was walking downstairs following an emergency visit to a patient on the second floor when he was greeted with horrified surprise by a member in dressing-gown and curlers.
‘Why, Doctor Eakin! Whatever are you doing here at this hour?’
‘Sssh,’ said my father. ‘I overslept!’
His red doctor’s light burned above our front door all night and the doorbell rang through the nights almost as often as the telephone. One particularly busy night—a baby having been delivered, the wounds of a gang fight stitched up, and the usual drunk dispatched home—my father fell into bed about 3 a.m., saying he would not be disturbed again for any emergency. Within ten minutes the doorbell rang. He cursed and snorted and turned over: nobody answered it and it went on pealing shrilly into the night. Whoever was ringing it was more determined than my father: eventually he was goaded out from under the bedclothes. He stuck his head out of his window directly over the front door and bellowed a string of curses at his tormentor. It was Joe, the hot dog man from the mobile all-night stand on the corner. Joe was a small, timid man, but he stood his ground and when my father’s invective had ceased, he blurted apologetically.
‘I’m awful sorry, doctor, but your house is on fire.’
Actually it was the chimney of the house next door but the sparks were sufficient to get us all from our beds and my mother up on to the roof with the firemen who were then called. Joe came in for a cup of tea and it all ended as a hilarious tea party.
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.