Loose ends

After she died nearly sixteen months ago, Mum left behind very few loose ends. Helen made a lifetime’s habit of throwing things away, and although it fell to Nick and Simon, mostly, to dispose of the contents of her house, when the time came to do that ghastly job it was reasonably straightforward. Yet anyone who has dealt with the estate of an elderly parent will know that matters small and large continue to crop up for many months, extending some considerable distance beyond the canonical executor’s year: the melancholy card or telephone call from a distant but affectionate country cousin who for some reason flew under the radar screen; Dad’s apparently missing Pacific campaign medals that eventually turned up in the bottom drawer of an old desk, raising the further question as to what on earth to do with them; a dry cleaners’ docket carefully tucked into Mum’s purse, behind her driver’s licence—still current but somehow overlooked. Last week we discovered that docket. It relates to two good quality woolen blankets, part of the last spring clean, which, only a matter of days before she died, Mum took up to the dry cleaner near the corner of High Street and Glenferrie Road. It must have taken some considerable physical effort, and that she carried on so heroically with such humdrum domestic chores is entirely characteristic of her sterling, undaunted personality. Anyhow, we decided we should probably inquire about the blankets, knowing that, having been unclaimed for so long, in all probability they would in all likelihood have been disposed of.

Mairse rang The Elegant Dry Cleaners (9509 3718), and to our amazement the proprietor still had them. Her name is Janine, and, it turns out that after Mum failed to collect them promptly, as was her habit, Janine sensed that something must have happened to her. Mum was a good customer for many years, businesslike and formal and well-organized. There was no small talk. There are dry cleaners that are nearer and cheaper, but they don’t do as good a job. Mum definitely preferred The Elegant Dry Cleaners. At the time, Janine started ringing selected Trumbles in the telephone directory, and even contacted Telstra, who declined to make further inquiries, but hers is a busy concern, the weeks sped by, and the matter drifted, as such matters do. Still, she held onto Mum’s blankets. Last Tuesday I went to collect and pay for them, and Janine leaped from behind the counter, gave me a hug, told me the whole story, decried the unhelpfulness of Telstra, and asked me to convey her condolences to the rest of the family. She fetched the blankets from somewhere distant, and told me how to peel the plastic off so as to protect them from the layer of sixteen months’ accumulation of dust, a good deal of which ended up down the front of her red sweater. Presently they’ll go to Metung, and replace a couple of the ancient, sixty, seventy, eighty year-old stained monstrosities in the middle bedroom. These days we hear a lot about customer loyalty, as if the concept is an exciting invention of the modern retail trade, but with Mum it was ingrained, just as for all those years and years she bought meat from nobody other than Mr. Matthewson the butcher. But what you don’t hear quite as much about is the corresponding loyalty the good customer earns from her hard-working local dry cleaners. I thanked Janine, and shook her hand. This felt strangely final, especially because only a few days earlier, the previous Sunday, after the 8 o’clock service, we deposited Mum’s ashes not fifty paces away, under a fine cherry tree in the Memorial Garden at St. George’s in Glenferrie Road. Final, yes, but what more could I do, except to commend to anyone who is prepared to listen the outstanding worth of The Elegant Dry Cleaners of 1274, High Street, Armadale?

The Market

A stray recollection about Melbourne this morning has brought into vivid focus for me a curious aspect of daily life in the United States of America. Here, people distinguish between “markets”—meaning those virtual rock pools left behind by the vast ebb and flow of capital; the surging tides of the national, indeed the global economy, and the mighty forces of demand and supply, as in “the stock market” or “the commodities market,” for example—and “farmer’s markets,” where mainly in the big cities some people buy their fruit and vegetables, without necessarily ever having seen a real farmer. At home, “the market” means both, on the very reasonable principle, I suppose, that the same gigantic forces that are discernible in one are essentially an amplification of what happens where you buy your carrots. In other words, the American idea of “the farmer’s market” strikes we Australians as distinctly precious, especially at first. Years ago, just after I arrived in New York City, someone commended to me with breathless enthusiasm the farmer’s market in Union Square, for which I duly searched and searched before realizing at length that that was all there was—a sort of wilting, rather small gypsy encampment. In our part of Melbourne “the market” meant the Prahran Market, which, compared with Union Square’s, is simply enormous—a lofty hangar built of cast- and corrugated-iron, attached down one side to a fussy Victorian brick-and-stucco façade on Commercial Road with clock-tower and turrets. When I knew it, the paved interior was divided into aisle upon seemingly endless aisle of boxy stalls piled high with fresh fruit and vegetables; densely crowded with Chinese market gardeners, Greek and Italian greengrocers, tattooed egg-sellers, and hefty fruiterers clattering barrows laden with melons, pineapples, cases of Riverina oranges, etc., all crying specials at the top of their lungs, and, incidentally, using only rudimentary mechanical hanging scales, razor-sharp mental arithmetic, and no cash registers at all. On market days they juggled thousands and thousands of shoppers in a single morning, and did so with amazing efficiency—before repairing to the local pubs in the early afternoon. As a very little boy, I used to go with Mum to the market, riding inside her shapely upright wicker basket on wheels—only vacating it most reluctantly when the iceberg lettuces, red onions, string beans, cabbage, granny smiths, and hands of bananas piled up over my knees. I’m pretty sure that Hamish did exactly the same thing before me, and from him therefore I inherited a special privilege accorded only to a very few of Mr. Mathewson’s best customers. Mr. Mathewson was our butcher. For years and years, Mum’s loyalty to Mr. Mathewson was rock-solid. The butchers, poulterers, and fishmongers occupied a more satisfactorily enclosed avenue of shops adjacent to the market proper, extending at right angles to Commercial Road. Each shop had a cool room behind, a huge timber chopping block on which apron-wearing apprentices noisily demolished whole carcasses before your very eyes, and a shallow, refrigerated stand or icebox at the front brimming with sausages, livers, kidneys, hearts, ox tongues, hams, legs and shoulders of lamb, forequarter slabs of beef, and trays piled high with stewing steak. Entering from the Commercial Road end, Mr. Mathewson’s shop was the second on the left. Along with the vast quantity of meat with which he kept us supplied every week for several decades, sometimes several times a week, Mr. Mathewson took the trouble—first for Hamish, then for me personally—to assemble a sort of amuse bouche consisting of one or two little pork sausages, a miniature piece of steak, maybe a kidney, or a lamb chop (those meltingly little ones), and roll them into my very own brown-paper packet tied with string. He wrote my name on it with a thick wax-pencil—ANGUS—and added the flourish of a lightning-quick sketch of a big black rat with a long tail, and huge whiskers. I’m not sure Mum approved of the rat, but the gesture was one of characteristic kindness and good cheer. Today he’d probably be arrested. Anyhow, he gave it to me, me, and I had at least some of the contents for my dinner, with peas and buttery mashed potato. Now I seem to recall that somewhere along the line one of Mr. Mathewson’s apprentices, or maybe even one of his sons (possibly both), became a celebrated star of the Victorian Football League, the forerunner, of course, of what eventually turned into the A.F.L. I must ask Simon, because he will know. Of course, these days children in big American cities are far more likely to collide with what they laughingly call a “market analyst” or a telemarketer than a proper butcher, or a genuine farmer.

Melbourne

Here are fifty things I remembered about Melbourne with much fondness upon waking up this morning. They are not necessarily listed in any order, and a fair number of the people and places have now either vanished into thin air, or are threatened:

(1) Exploring the Royal Botanic Gardens, especially sitting under the Norfolk pine on the Hopetoun lawn, and having a picnic by the Nymphaea lilies; watching the lazy eels shuttling under the bridge across the shallow channel that joins the ornamental and central lakes, and dodging raucous colonies of bats hard by the Rose pavilion. (2) Eating Peking Duck at The Flower Drum in Market Lane, a special treat. (3) Browsing in the Arts Bookshop in High Street, Armadale—Elly and Gila, where, I wonder, have you gone, and how do I manage without you?! (4) Strolling with Nick on the St. Kilda pier. (5) Inspecting the Jewish cake shops in Acland Street—and afterwards eating more sensibly at Scheherezade, a few doors down: especially their matzoh ball soup and wiener schnitzel; obeying also the peremptory orders issued to customers by that Polish dominatrix in the remarkable boots. (6) Going with Fiona and Mark to the annual Cup Week cocktail party in the garden of the Melbourne Club, a party unlike any other—another special treat. (7) Seeing double features with Sally at the Astor Theatre at 1, Chapel Street, St Kilda. (8) Sitting and reading the leather-bound copies of old newspapers in the otherwise deserted parliamentary library behind the Queen’s Hall. (9) Gazing out at the lights of the city from my bedroom window at Government House. (10) Doing The Times crossword puzzle at the kitchen table with Mum (and achieving only mixed results). (11) Visiting the English pictures at the National Gallery of Victoria. (12) Frolicking with Lucy in Albert Park, and discussing tensile structures and archi matters generally. (13) Having a hot bath, etc., in Porter Street. (14) Shopping at Georges, then going with Helen to the old Regency Room for tea and chicken sandwiches. (15) Having a quiet beer with Michael at the Prince of Wales in Fitzroy Street—yes, quiet. Imagine that! (16) Doing sixty laps of the Beaurepaire pool on a hot morning, true. (17) Running twice around the tan, also true. (18) Meeting Cynthia for coffee at Brunetti’s in Faraday Street, before it went global. (19) Meeting Adam for coffee at Pellegrini’s in Bourke Street. (20) Devouring at Christmas-time my fair share of Uncle Alec’s incomparable mince pies from Paterson’s Cakes in Chapel Street, Prahran. (21) Noticing the neon sign for Skipping Girl Vinegar in Victoria Street, Richmond. (22) Driving all the way along Alexandra Avenue, both directions. (23) Basking sniffily in feelings of effortless superiority whilst tottering past the McMansions in Grange, Albany, and Yar Orrong Roads, also Whernside Avenue. (24) Browsing in the geological survey map shop on the north side of Little Bourke Street between Queen and Elizabeth Streets. (25) Wandering through the delicatessen shed at the Queen Victoria Market, savoring the cheesy pickly savoury sausagey smells. (26) Being measured for a new suit by the distinguished Mr. Fred Earle (by appointment to Lord Casey, Sir Rohan Delacombe, etc., etc.) in his discreet rooms behind frosted glass in an upper floor of the run-down building on the corner of Swanston and Collins Streets, and then going with him to choose the cloth in an upstairs warehouse somewhere just around the corner in Flinders Lane. I still have it. (27) Watching old Sir Henry Bolte eating his lunch all by himself in the committee room of the Victoria Racing Club at Flemington on Cup Day, three years running. (28) Visiting the platypuses in their enclosure at the Royal Melbourne Zoological Garden in Parkville. (29) Witnessing Mum obey the man who used to perch with binoculars at the top of the covered observation tower behind the Prahran Market, directing motorists to parking spots through a megaphone, like so: “The little lady in the orange mini: third aisle over, five spots down.” (30) Poking around the hat shop underneath the Flinders Street Station. (31) Having a drink with Greg in the lounge bar at the old Southern Cross Hotel on the corner of Bourke and Exhibition Streets. (32) Being given a “spider” at Buckley’s after shopping there for a new school uniform, or else after an appointment with the dentist, Dr. Anthony Woodhouse, in the T. & G. Building. (33) Occupying the wooden seat right next to the forward door on the old green number 69 tram, and riding home from school in it along Balaclava, Kooyong, Dandenong, and Glenferrie Roads. (34) Getting my eyes checked by Dr. David Gale in Alcaston House at 2, Collins Street, on the west corner of Spring Street, overlooking the sexy bronze statue of General Gordon by Hamo Thornycroft. (35) Being taken by Aunt Anne to hear Dame Joan Sutherland in the role of Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello at the old Palais in St. Kilda. (36) Raiding the stationery room at Mallesons in the St. James Building at 121 William Street, while Dad dictated correspondence in his office on a quiet Sunday afternoon. (37) Observing Ben have a meltdown (caused by me) at the wheel of his little red MG somewhere in Lygon Street, near Argyle Place, with Sam in the back. (38) Being driven home by Debbie after Laurie Gardiner’s superb evening lectures in the winter of 1982. (39) Watching Pauline prune Granny’s roses in the front garden at 5 Myamyn Street. (40) Getting a small thrill from watching and listening when Mum challenged Mr. Mathewson the butcher over some point of quality, just the right balance of firmness and respect—traveling in both directions. (41) Laughing immoderately in South Yarra at Barbara’s story about what, at least for a while, she and Kevin thought they were going to have to do to obtain a Canadian visa. (42) Working for Hamish on the Maxine’s team in Fitzroy and Collingwood. (43) Writing dust-jacket blurbs for John Iremonger, John Currey, Alex Bertram, and Diana O’Neil at Melbourne University Press, as it was then known, and, with Wendy Sutherland at the Christmas party, getting to grips with the semi-colon—she is the best copy editor I ever had. (44) Sharing with Deborah the upstairs flat in Drummond Street. (45) Attending choral evensong in the chapel of Trinity College, Parkville. (46) Creating with Tim in 1985 the legend of Pat. (47) Learning with Mary from Mirjana at Ormond College the correct pronunciation of Zdravo. (48) Meeting King Maleatoa Tanumafili II of Western Samoa, and discovering His Majesty’s ingenious solution to the problem of being frightened of ghosts in the dead of night. (49) Seeing with pride Barrie’s astounding production of The Dybbuk in an old warehouse in Carlisle Street, Balaclava, a few doors up from the corner of St. Kilda Road. (50) Being daily irritated by The Age newspaper.