Brownie

We go the whole way back, my bear and I.

His name is “Brownie,” though I’m not sure why:

The threads are dappled grey, not brown, with which

Aunt Anne designed and made him, stitch by stitch,

Before my birth, love’s labor unremitting:

She never shone more brightly than when knitting.

I miss her still, my thrilling, clever aunt,

Her many skills she never wished to vaunt:

The semaphore she learned and trained to guide

Our ships past Rottnest Island, served with pride

In wartime—Russia was our ally then;

Her letters, and the sharpness of her pen,

But funny too; she taught me how to swim.

Her work was therapy, not mind but limb,

A physio, and “farmer’s wife” as well,

Admittedly far better in that shell

Than Uncle Henry handled sheep or cattle,

Through flood and drought with courage she did battle;

Like Mum, she built in winter massive fires,

Dispatched whole trees, killed snakes with fencing wires.

In town from time to time Aunt Anne would see

A play or concert, kindly taking me:

That’s how aged six or seven at the Palais

I saw Nureyev leap in my first ballet!

To Paris and l’Étoile she took me straight,

And climbed the arc, then let me stay up late.

Though shy, dear Brownie knows these things by heart,

Reminds me, too, how well she learned the art

Of complex origami from Japan.

How lucky that our smashing lives began,

My bear and me, not part of any plan,

But soon enough to know and love Aunt Anne!

The Palais

This morning I re-discovered my very earliest appearance in print, this small clipping proudly tucked down near the bottom of the second page of my first scrapbook.

Towards the end of 1974 my eldest brother Nick, who at that date was writing for Lot’s Wife, the student newspaper at Monash University, kindly delegated to me the task of furnishing a theatrical notice of the opening night performance in the old Palais Theatre in St. Kilda of the A. V. Alexandrov Soviet Army Twice Red-Bannered and Red-Starred Song and Dance Ensemble. No doubt this heavily subsidized event was a direct consequence of well-meaning but fruitless cultural diplomacy in the last years of the Whitlam government, but the two complimentary press tickets passed along by Nick’s editor at length allowed me to accompany Aunt Anne, and to take advantage of the pair of powerful agricultural binoculars which she always took along with her to the theater. I recall I wore school uniform, and was thrilled to be allowed to stay up so late. With consummate professionalism I returned my notice to Nick first thing the following morning, and it was duly published a week later:

Our intrepid reviewer Angus Trumble (age ten) went to the premiere of the Soviet Army Song and Dance Band at the Palais last week and writes... “By ten to eight twenty-four people were in the lounge. I thought it was a very bad night for an opening. By the time of the start forty-nine people had assembled in the lounge. I thought that there was too much of the same sort of singing. In the first half of the show there was ballet which was a bit long and loud. Altogether I thought it was most enjoyable, but I don’t recommend children of my age coming.”

This now strikes me as the model of concision, a quality has through intervening decades all but disappeared from my prose style. However, I am pleased to see that the habit of at least trying to isolate the telling detail was already firmly established. (The “lounge,” incidentally, was the equivalent of the dress circle.) My point about it being a very bad night for an opening was, upon much reflection now, almost certainly Aunt Anne’s, but I am still most grateful for it. However, the mixed assessment in conclusion was obviously colored by that genetically encoded predisposition from which Trumbles appear to suffer in every generation, namely a deep reluctance to give offense, to rock boats, or, at the very least, amply to make provision of any and all benefits of the doubt. Regrettably, to be honest, I have no recollection of any particular enjoyment of that long, martial entertainment 38 years ago.

Now I wonder which of those other forty-eight audience members was a covert representative of the federal government’s counterespionage service, sent to keep a watchful eye on everyone else, on both sides of the footlights. Alas, it was definitely not my late cousin and godmother Janet.

Old Girls' Day

In 1970 Aunt Anne took a creative writing course in Geelong, and her working notebook contains much of interest (marked simply “A. Hall”). Among the longest essays is the following account of Old Girls’ Day at the Church of England Girls’ Grammar School (The Hermitage) in Geelong, long since subsumed into the octopus of Geelong Grammar School. The account is surprisingly unguarded, and before posting it I really wondered whether I should make a better effort to protect the identity of the dramatis personae. Actually, I think Aunt Anne substituted made up names; she certainly did elsewhere. However, upon much reflection I realized that by now Aunt Anne would have been nearly ninety years old, and the headmistress she says she hated, the rotund clergyman, and the outgoing President with the tombstone teeth must surely now be dead and buried. In America the practice of going to school reunions is firmly entrenched, but Aunt Anne here reinforces my own conviction that it is far wiser never to go back:

There we all stand in the sunshine, in our best clothes, looking warily round, thinking how our contemporaries have aged. We all get light-headed and a bit giggly on two small glasses of medium-dry sherry. My friend June and I are looking for the treasurer. She has gone in through the front door. At the doorstep we both hesitate. Girls are not permitted to use the front door, and the prohibition is still alive in our minds after thirty years. With a sense of bravado we step boldly in. Here in the hall, how often have I stood, seething with fear and a sense of injustice, waiting to “be seen” by the headmistress. The injustice still rankles. Children are very fair, and will take any punishment they deem just. How I hated that woman—partly because she could reduce me to tears of rage within five minutes, after which she would graciously forgive me, and I would be unable to defend myself, or reject the forgiveness. On now to the dining room, and a fairly meagre lunch of chicken pieces hidden in limp lettuce. We drink the health of The Queen, and cigarettes suddenly send clouds of blue smoke up to the high dark ceiling. Next we rise for “The School,” and the thick, sweet fruit cup is hastily passed round to the improvident who emptied their glasses for The Queen. The Chaplain responds for the school. A rotund, kindly little man, making coy little jokes. He refers to a past headmistress. “A headmistress,” he says, “from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.”

      “How does he know?” asks June, under the polite murmur of accord.

      “The mind boggles,” I reply, and we sit there sniggering like fifth formers, watched with gentle indulgence by the real sixth formers at our table—the newest old girls. Age has not wearied our enjoyment of our wit—nor improved it. Now the move to the Assembly Room for the Meeting. We snatch the opportunity to visit our old sleeping quarters. They have wire grills on the windows now—to keep the girls in, or the boys out? we wonder. We obviously didn’t have the same appeal. There was no need to protect us—or the boys. There is that plain, pasty-faced little girl with the red hair, grown into a plain, pasty-faced middle-aged woman with the red hair, and a hard green hat—Pat something. And there’s Judy. Put two long plaits over her ears, and thirty years have hardly altered her. Our mothers are in a group of their own contemporaries. One or two with sticks, but by and large a surprisingly alert and active lot. One senses the same reaction, towards oneself, of last year’s students, back to flaunt their trendy clothes and engagement rings in front of their friends, still imprisoned in their hideous uniforms.

      A list of the Old Girls who have died during the year is read out, for the most part from the older group, and one felt sorrow but no resentment. But one name recalled a darling little round-faced child from the “Prep.” I remember her telling me she always gave the tram conductor a penny and kept the halfpenny. “He thinks I haven’t got any more,” she explained. And I looked at her guileless little face and enormous trusting brown eyes and admired her from the bottom of my un-enterprising heart.

      The headmistress reads her report. She holds herself carefully erect. Her voice carefully enunciates the dry facts. Almost, it seems, she is afraid she will drop her aitches if she relaxes. Then the President—a good old girl, and enthusiastic old girl—but not much of a recommendation for the education her parents paid heavily for her to receive. I would like, she begins, to thank the headmistress very very much for her very interesting report. I’m sure we were all very interested indeed. During the year, she continues, it was my very very great privilege to be present at a very pleasant gathering of Old Girls in Ballarat. We were very disappointed that my own very dear headmistress—she bares her tombstone teeth, first deprecatingly at the present incumbent, and then warmly into the crowd, where her spirit remains crouched at the feet of the head-before-last—was unable to honour us with her presence. I would like, she commences her peroration, to say how very very honoured I have been to be your President, and how very very much I have enjoyed working for our dear Old School. I would very much like to thank (and she lists innumerable people, all of whom have helped her very much). And I would like to extend a very very warm welcome to the incoming President; I’m sure we’re all very grateful to her for taking on the task, and I’m sure you will all give her very much enthusiasm and support. And I’d like to thank you all very very much for all the enthusiasm and support you’ve given me in the two years I’ve been so very privileged to be your representative and work for our very dear Old School. With another flash at us all of her highly polished graveyard she subsides in her chair.

      The piano crashes into our exhausted silence, waking those who have managed to nod off. Om pom-pom, Om pom, To School-fellows near us or distant…We all bellow out the rousing circular waltz with its ridiculous words—leaving the high bits to the young, remembering our singing mistress’s despairing efforts to make us sing it as though it meant something. It never did, it never will, but I expect I’ll be able to sing it right through (except the high bits) till the day I die.

 That last point was certainly true.

Bellbird

The cast of Bellbird

Last night I dreamed about Bellbird. There is a good reason for this, because when she and Ernie were staying with me some weeks ago, Nell and I reminisced about Australian television, and Bellbird cropped up. These days I suppose one would describe Bellbird as a soap, and although it had some of the qualities of a soap, there was an innocent Australian-ness about the rural locality, many of the characters, and the opening theme and credits, which you may sample here, that was anti-soap. I especially like that sprig of gum-leaves dangled in front of the camera in that closing view over the town. Unlike the soaps of today, Bellbird occupied a convenient position as an appealingly bite-sized, fifteen-minute chunk of advertisement-free television drama that went to air immediately before the seven o’clock ABC national news, each and every night from Monday to Thursday. (In this instance ABC stood for Australian Broadcasting Commission.) Alas, the ABC was so poor that they had to wipe and re-use most of the tapes, so future historians of Australian television will be hamstrung. Practically nothing of Bellbird survives. However, I was also reminded that everyone who ever pursued, or attempted to pursue, a career on stage or screen in Australia in the ten years from 1967 to 1977 had a walk-on role in Bellbird, including some who might not now include it in their curriculums vitae. I do not remember more than a few of the permanent fixtures, but of these Jim “The Colonel” Emerson (Carl Bleazby), of course, and his glamorous young wife Maggie (Gabrielle Hartley); the local motor mechanic Joe Turner (Terry Norris) and his wife Olive (Moira Charleton); police constable Des Davies (Dennis Miller) and his wife Fiona (Gerda Nicolson); the mean stock and station agent Mr. Quinney (Maurie Fields), and, towards the end of the run, that rather sinister, scowling ne’er-do-well Andy (Michael Carman). Jim Bacon (Peter Aanensen) started off as the town policeman, however when his wife Marge (Carmel Milhouse) won the lottery he retired from the force and they bought the local pub, and remained en poste until the very end. Much of the action took place in the front bar, under the watchful eyes of Marge and Jim. Anyhow, in my dream, which was as brief as it was vivid, Marge leaned over the counter and confided to me that she was terribly concerned about Aunt Anne’s chemo.

Travels with my Aunt

Aunt Anne abroad V

With characteristic discretion Aunt Anne left us few clues as to her true feelings about the various companions with whom she traveled south. With some pride she hung onto a tiny snapshot of a skiing trophy she won at Saint-Cergue in the Jura, but we know little else about Daphne, Margot, Pat, Nipper, Colleen, Liz, Cynthia, and Diana, or indeed David and André, other than that they had a lot of fun. By their arrangement in the album, the photographs outline an itinerary brimming with internal logic, and there are occasional flashes of insight to be found among Anne’s spare notations on the reverse. Here, for example, she writes simply: “Me knitting David a face washer (!) on the Route Napoléon near Grenoble.”

But Nipper (above) is invariably just “Nipper”;

David simply “David”;

groups identified, as in this boating shot at Cassis, as “Nipper, Me, Mr. and Mrs. Roland,” the first person pronoun satisfactorily capitalized.

As far as I can tell (apart from carefully noting the identity of Margaret Cilento, another Australian artist who coincided with the party on the Riviera) this was Anne’s only nod to celebrity: “Mr. Roland, and back view of Margaret Olley [in hat],” although I am not quite sure how well-known Miss Olley was at this date. She is, of course, still going, more or less strong.

In a telling variation, however, Anne only very occasionally names André. Her only note on the reverse of this photograph is “Aix, Les Beaux again.”

What a very handsome young man he was.

Aunt Anne abroad IV (further South, and back again)

In Florence, the party made friends with some slightly overenthusiastic young ciceroni, who naturally brought them to see the Duomo (over Anne’s shoulder), the Campanile farther distant, and the Baptistery in the background, as well as other famous sights. “Unfortunately my friend Lauro wasn’t with us. He looks even worse. This is Guido and Ferdinando.”

The weather improved, however, and again we find André, Nipper, and Anne at the Piazzale Michelangelo. David took this one.

The mood becomes ever more playful. “André and me having Good Clean Fun when the car boiled outside Ravenna. David looking on. Just after this I got the whole contents of the jug. Very Funny for all.”

“Cynthia, Liz and me having lunch [on the Via Appia Antica] near the Catacombs of S. Sebastian.”

Capri must have been relatively unspoiled, even then. Here is Anne, or, as she put it, “Me in a cart, Capri.”

All tourists went swimming in the famous Blue Grotto. “Cynthia, Me, Liz, Margot, taken by Umberto the boatman at Capri.”

And here is Umberto himself.

On the way back to England by way of the Riviera, the party went on another boat trip to see the Calanques at Cassis, not far from Marseilles. Left to right, André, Margaret Cilento [the artist; daughter of Sir Raphael and Lady Cilento, and older sister of the actress Diane Cilento], Boatman, and Nipper.

They continued up through Provence, visiting Avignon, Orange, the Pont de Gard near Remoulins, Le Castellet in the Var, and on to Paris. At a certain point there is a newcomer to the party. Here he is, on the far left, with an unidentified companion; Anne in the center; David, looking as usual slightly lugubrious; and Nipper on the far right. Tucked behind this photo, effectively hidden from view, was another one that slipped out when I turned the page:

It is the same, handsome young man, sitting on a window-sill, sunning himself, and reading a book. He looks up, turns his head slightly, but Anne wrote nothing at all on the back. Who was he?

Aunt Anne abroad III (South)

In the autumn of the first or possibly the second year she spent in England, Aunt Anne went with her Australian girlfriends on a long trip by car through France, across the Pyrenees into Spain, and back again; up into the Swiss alps for skiing at Saint-Cergue in the Jura, Lucerne, and La Cure in the Franche-Comté, and thence across into Italy via Como, Bellagio, Lago Maggiore, Milan, Verona, Venice, Ravenna, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Monte Cassino, Naples, Sorrento, Capri, and back again via Termoli in the Molise on the Adriatic coast. This is “Jenny Linden [right], Nipper [middle] and me [left] polishing the car in the yard at Ardura,” in northern Spain. (Note the hearty piano accordion.) As well as reflecting the far better climate, the photographs begin to radiate a new sense of fun, as well as of relaxation, even languor.

Among the party of at least six, two traveling companions jostle for prominence in the photographs, “André” and “David.” Here, for example, is “Picnic lunch. André [left], David [middle] and Gypsy Rose Lee [as Anne describes herself] with the car in the background,” and a faint reflection in the beautifully polished rear door of Nipper, who took the shot.

Here is “David looking Rather Arty, with Florence in the background, taken from the Piazzale Michelangelo.”

And here is André at Les Baux-de-Provence in the Bouches-du-Rhône, near Aix,

and again, with Nipper in the middle and Anne on the right, never more relaxed or radiant. Note the elegant rear-buckling belt, and brilliant figure.

Crossing the frontier between Switzerland and Italy a few miles northwest of Como involved the usual flirtation with Italian customs, and a cheerful detachment of “alpini.”

Anne wrote on the back of this one: “This is us fraternizing like mad with the Italian customs at a place called Maslianico. The top of my head just visible behind the gent leaning negligently on the bonnet.”

Anne again: “Piazza del Dante or something, Verona. [in fact the Piazza dei Signori, with the last few bays of the Loggia del Consiglio, and the famous statue of Dante Alighieri in the background on the left]. André, Nipper, and me, and one of the locals seems to have got in too. N.B. the new sandals. (This outfit is my Scala Theatre (Milan) opera-going one, with all the diamond tiaras and furs.”

Aunt Anne abroad II (North)

For several years Aunt Anne settled in Britain and traveled widely, at first throughout England, Wales, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Ireland, and, in between, extracting every ounce of enjoyment she could from post-war London.

Here she is, for example, witnessing the departure from Buckingham Palace of the King’s procession en route for Horse Guards Parade and the annual ceremony of the Trooping of the Colour, which took place on June 9, 1949. “King in carriage,” she noted on the back, “Liz [Princess Elizabeth] on far side and [the Duke of] Gloucester this side. Unfortunately out of focus, but there you are. Can’t have everything.”

At first Anne shared with friends a flat in this pretty old house (above), which was at 28 Belsize Park in Camden, NW3.

From there she moved to 67 Lansdowne Road, NW11 (above): “1st floor, our flat; window above porch = kitchen; 3-in-1 window = living room; next one along = bathroom.” From these convenient flats she went with friends to see ski-jumping on Hampstead Heath, or Marquis III jumping the double bank at White City.

Anne’s country excursions began tentatively, and were mostly to relatively convenient destinations such as Dover, Oxford and Cambridge, for punting with friends on the Cam (above); to the New Forest and Beaulieu; to Devon (Dartmoor), and Cornwall; to Yarmouth in Norfolk; to Shrewsbury and Chester,

as well a blustery outing to Whipsnade Zoo, where she was not at all impressed by the lions, hippos, and giraffes, who seemed especially miserable earning their keep in the heart of Bedfordshire.

But soon, together with her friend Nipper Strachan (in the overalls), Anne went to Ireland and stayed in Co. Cork with the very hospitable Mr. and Mrs. Mayow. I suspect Mrs. Mayow was an old friend of Granny’s from her London years immediately before and during World War I. Certainly, Anne benefited from the hospitality of others of Granny’s English friends, such as “Mr. and Mrs. Barry,” “Mr. and Mrs. Roland,” “Mr. and Mrs. Johnstone,” and “Mrs. Marker.” Here are Nipper, Mr. and Mrs. Mayow having scratch tea in the garden;

venturing into Cork with Mrs. Mayow, for shopping and lunch;

setting off for an al fresco Irish picnic, accompanied by Mrs. Mayow’s pet lamb, which was called “Tiny Wee”;

and afterwards doing their best to pretend that stony Irish beaches were for young Australian women a viable alternative to the deserted sandy ones they left behind. From this convenient home base near Cork, Anne and Nipper went to Kenmare House, Tom Heely’s Pass, Glengariff, Killarney, Blarney Castle, and further afield to the Vale of Avoca, Co. Wicklow. Another journey north took the friends to Scotland and the western isles: specifically Mull and Iona; then to Ben Lomond, and farther north to contemplate the atrocities of Glen Coe. They also made a visit to Wales, specifically to Llangollen, Corwen, and Bettwys y Coed, but eventually their plans became more ambitious. They visited Denmark, and evidently planned a long journey south.