Aunt Anne again

You don’t often get someone else’s glimpse of your childhood self, but into her notebook I find that dear Aunt Anne recorded the following vignettes on March 6, 1970, when I was five and a half years old. I suspect that certain aspects of my character were already firmly in place, although the cheerful taste for giving orders seems to have been beaten out of me at Melbourne Grammar. Perhaps that is a good thing.

It is now more than twenty-two years since Aunt Anne died, but I still miss her. She was the paragon of aunts. Here she is in about 1951 in Venice riding in a gondola with two WRANS chums, Cynthia Stirling and Liz Moran (they trained together at Port Melbourne). Anne is in the middle, looking radiantly beautiful. By the time I first remember her, more than twenty years after this photograph was taken, she was still very handsome.

Strangely, I have absolutely no recollection of “George,” and I suspect that he is some sort of conflation of dear Edward Glover, who lived around the corner in Church Street, and maybe other children as well.

Angus is just five. He has started “real” school this term.

“Do you know what?” This is just a series of noises he uses to gain one’s attention, a sort of placing of a foot in the conversational door. He never waits to hear whether or not one does know. “I saw Uncle Fester at school yesterday.”

My knowledge of the Charles Addams cartoons is limited, but I gathered they had been animated [sic] and promoted to The Telly.

“How extraordinary,” I said. “I wonder what he was doing there.”

“I don’t know,” said Angus, losing interest. “He was dressed up as one of the masters.”

Angus has his friend George to play. George is a shrimp-sized creature, wearing a plastic crash helmet. His slightly ovine little face is only saved from total oblivion by the large pale ears on which the helmet rests. He is a perfect guest. Offered a ride on the despised tricycle, he accepts with such enthusiasm and enjoyment that Angus feels obliged to take it back and try it himself. George has the scooter. They have solved the problem of conversation by both talking at once—not actually simultaneously, more like a Bach fugue, each theme weaving in and out of the other.

“I’m going to ride my bike,” says Angus.

“We’re having roast beef for tea,” answers George, drifting after him.

“We’ll go right round the block,” says Angus, firmly.

“And I think it’s going to be ice cream for pudding,” counters George.

“We’ll have to be very careful, and not go on the road,” says Angus, never backward in showing leadership if that means giving orders. I think in a family of three much older brothers he doesn’t get much opportunity to order anyone around, and George is small enough and good-natured enough—or just plain self-centered enough—to permit it without argument, or not to notice.

“Or perhaps stewed apricots,” he continues, his eyes glazing at the thought, peering out from under the helmet like a mouse from its hole.

Peddling off down the footpath, Angus is still giving instructions.

“If anyone comes along, you have to pull right over to the fence and stop.”

“I think stewed apricots are the nicest thing in the world.”

When they returned they were still talking happily, and they moved inside to look over Angus’s toys. Confined by four walls, they suddenly multiplied. Four small feet couldn’t make that amount of noise. Self-conscious in the knowledge that they were overheard, their voices rose high and shrill, and the talk became correspondingly less elevated. They were reaching the point where mothers tend to lay about them on the grounds of “showing off” and “being silly.”

“Quieten down, or go outside,” says my sister with the authority of twenty years of son-raising behind her. It is years since I saw her surprised or irritated by anything a small boy can turn on. So it doesn’t surprise me now that their voices drop, and their feet are suddenly only two-apiece once more, and they work earnestly on the tired gray plasticine, working it into snakes and cakes; coiling the snakes to make mats, and making faces on the cakes with their fingernails.

Do children naturally decide what to do with plasticine, or do we teach them? Watching them I can feel again its slightly sticky cling under my palm as I rolled it out forty years ago, and remember the difficulty of getting the roll of even thickness. It tended to grow thicker under the arch of one’s palm, and taper at the sides. And as it grew longer under the rolling hand, one end would suddenly leap up like a real snake. Angus and George use the same method I used...

I get down on the floor and join in, the boys good-naturedly each giving me “a bit.” We sit there, rolling and pinching, minds drifting, but brought to sudden awareness as our fingers unconsciously figures for our pleasure and pride.

“Look, I’ve made a dog.”

“Here’s a cup and saucer.” Otherwise there is only silence and the sound of our breathing.

George’s mother comes to collect him. The spell is broken. Grown-up shrillnesses now.

“Thank you so much for having him.”

“We enjoyed it.”

Why don’t children tell parents not to show off? I suppose they think it’s just another injustice that parents can get away with “silly talk.”

I forgot to ask, but I do hope they had stewed apricots for tea.

Southern Light, Leaping Horses, and Cream

My only regret about living abroad is that I do not see nearly enough of my family. Here we are in 1965, surrounded by daisies near the dining room window at number 18 Denham Place. Nick is holding me, Simon is on the right, and Hamish is sitting on the top step.

The old house was demolished, and the pretty garden obliterated, in 1979, after their old friend Joe Palliser designed and built a new house for Mum and Dad on the site next door. In a way, that move was a tangible expression of changing circumstances, because by then all three of my brothers had left home, and I was still at school. 

I have many happy memories of the old house, including what must be my earliest: the sight through the wooden rails surrounding my cot of afternoon sunlight falling against the back of a pair of closed curtains in the front room. That room was for the time being, I think, an ad hoc nursery, and not Dad’s study where he liked to play old records, and potter around long after everyone else was asleep, which is how I remember it much later.

Those curtains were decorated with leaping black horses, and maybe a few small Chinese characters also, widely spaced against a buff-colored background, and I once had the startling experience of seeing an eerily similar design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to which clearly most if not all aesthetic roads eventually lead.

Mum is there, too. I think she must have come in to open the curtains, and get me up from my nap, but what stands out is that bright shaft of southern light slanting over the back of the curtains, and the leaping horses.

There was a curvacious verandah at the front of the house, with a glorious wisteria trained along it, and a creamy pink cammellia adjacent. I also remember hearing the clip-clop of real horses, the draught horses from Woodmason’s Dairy.

It seems somehow incredible that, in the late 1960s, the milk bottles were still delivered to us each morning by horse and cart, even though the cart was equipped with sensible rubber tyres, ingeniously cannibalized from some old motor vehicle.

They came up Denham Place from the direction of Russell Street, and whether or not the gentle incline provided some gastro-intestinal stimulus, almost always the pair of horses left behind plenteous lumps of sweet-smelling fibrous manure right opposite the front gate, which Mum collected with a spade and put on the garden.

Sometimes Mum used to take me for a walk down to Woodmason’s Dairy near the corner of Glenferrie and Malvern Roads, to pay a visit to the horses in their stalls.

Mum has never permitted herself many luxuries, but one thing she loves perhaps above all else, and has done since she was a little girl living at Raeshaw, the family property near Sale in East Gippsland, is pure cream.

More often than not there was still a suggestion of real cream that formed at the top of Woodmason’s bottles of milk, and on the cap, which was made from aluminium foil. To open the bottle, carefully you depressed the cap with your thumb, and peeled it back.

As a little boy I adored watching Mum sometimes lick the little dollop of cream off the inside of the cap of a milk bottle, wearing an expression of unalloyed pleasure, to which she added a little staccato shrug—as if to acknowledge some vague sense of self-indulgence, even naughtiness.

The rightness and simplicity of our upbringing makes me now want to shower Mum with lavish gifts of cream, but her wholly uncomplicated enjoyment of what is now often cast as a substance almost as unwholesome as tobacco is dangerous—even while, as Nick rightly points out, coffee now comes in “tall,” “grande,” “venti,” etc., where once it came in a “cup”—is, I think, firmly grounded in sparing consumption.