Autobiography of My Mother (7 page)

Lizzie liked arranging flowers. Everywhere in the house, particularly on the sideboard dressers, Lizzie filled vases with little mixed bunches of flowers. I would have liked to help her, but she insisted on arranging the flowers herself, taking half the day to do it. That was Lizzie's contribution to the housework.

I feel I ought to pay special tribute to Annie. She worked very hard for very little money, loved my grandmother and the family and thought The House was her home.

Annie's mother died when she was little. Her father kept the two boys but put Annie and her two sisters in an orphanage run by nuns. Although he married again, he left his daughters there. Grandma, who always knew all the nuns, got Annie from this convent.

Annie and I were fast friends before I came to live at Grandma's. When I broke my wrist, she came to see me with a threepenny bag of halfpenny lollies. It contained a jelly mouse
dipped in chocolate and covered in hundreds and thousands, a crocodile made of tough pale lemon marshmallow, and a liquorice stick. Annie loved sweets as much as I did. It was the beginning of a great bond between us. Together we sneaked lumps of sugar, almonds and fancy biscuits. Annie would save me the cake dish after she made the cake for afternoon tea. When I came to live at The House I adopted Annie, in a way. I had no idea I was going to live with my grandmother for so long. I never stopped missing my mother and loved getting her letters, but Annie became my new, everlasting friend.

I particularly missed my mother at night in my small, den-like room. As soon as I was in bed and Annie took the candle away, the nightmares began. Strange faces appeared and wouldn't stay still; the eyes grew bigger and rolled in their sockets, lips swelled back from the teeth, enveloping the whole face and noses grew longer and longer. I would scream out and Annie would come and comfort me.

I spent a great deal of time with Annie in the kitchen. She sang as she did the dishes and I used to dry up for her. Annie had a large repertoire of sad songs.

I wept through this song about the widowed father and his child; I relished the pathos of every line.

‘Just for the sake of society, baby was left all alone,' another of Annie's songs began. Baby played with matches while the careless parents danced the night away at a ball and house and baby were burnt to a cinder.

Annie had jet-black, woolly hair of which she was very proud. The mass of tight curls was her crowning glory; if you pulled one out it snapped back into place.

Annie's real name was Hannah Harriet Allmon, which everyone pronounced ‘Allman'. We used to tease her by calling her 'Annah 'Arriet Hallman, at which she laughed as much as we did. A favourite joke was to ask Annie what her name was. ‘Allmon,' she would say. ‘All man and no woman,' and would go into peals of laughter.

Annie cared for anyone who was sick in The House. When I had whooping cough and I coughed all night, I was banished from the rest of the house to sleep by Annie's side. She stayed up looking after me and giving me medicine.

Annie was seventeen when she started working for Grandma; I think this was at Grandma's Randwick residence. Shortly afterwards she came to The House at Yass. She would have been in her early twenties when I first knew her. Annie did a tremendous amount, I don't know how she got through it all. She was a maid of all work, or, rather, a slave. Linda and Lizzie were meant to help her, which meant that they flicked a feather duster around and arranged flowers. Annie did the real work.

Every morning at six, she got up and lit the old black fuel stove in the kitchen. She put the big black kettles on to boil so she could make morning tea and she filled the fountain, the large drum with the small tap in front that kept hot water on the stove during the day. She took a cup of tea in to my grandmother before carrying a tray of cups and saucers round to the various other residents of The House. She didn't just make a cup of tea; with it were very thin slices of bread and butter.

Then she cooked breakfast, which also had to be carried
on trays from the kitchen along the verandah to the dining room. After breakfast the table had to be cleared and the washing up done.

The bedrooms were next. Annie emptied the chamber pots into a bucket and filled the china water jugs that stood on the marble-topped stands.

The rest of her day consisted of dusting and sweeping, bringing in the wood, cooking dinner in the middle of the day, washing up, running messages, making a cake for afternoon tea, going to the butcher's, getting tea, washing up again. Visitors helped with the washing up and children ran messages for her.

Every night, she scrubbed the wooden tables in the kitchen; once a week she whitewashed the hearth. Once a week, too, she did the ironing with flat irons kept on the stove.

When she had washed up after tea, Annie went down the street to visit friends, but was back at The House by ten to make supper. Then she read or sewed until past midnight. She boasted that she never went to bed one day and got up the next like other people; she always went to bed on the same day as she got up.

Annie referred to Grandma, the aunts or the rest of the family as ‘them'. She and I spent a deal of our time in the kitchen criticising ‘them'.

We also gossiped about the town. Annie knew every piece of news or snippet of scandal around. She finished off every story with the injunction, ‘But don't tell
them
'.

Despite the criticism, Annie was devoted to the family and in awe of most of ‘them'. She was particularly devoted to my grandmother and Kathleen; Kathleen used to say Annie had replaced their own little sister, Annie, who died of
diphtheria. Annie didn't like the aunts so much, because they tried to put her down.

Annie had odd tastes in food. ‘I haven't eaten a vegetable in my life,' she used to say proudly. ‘Only tomatoes.' This was true; she didn't eat green vegetables, but she loved fruit of any kind. She ate no meat except chicken off the breast. Annie's diet for nearly eighty years consisted of bread and butter, tea, cake and lollies, mainly chocolate. She was very healthy. Only once did she spend a day in bed, after she had been to the dentist to have all her teeth out. The next day she was up and back at work.

Dad's brother, Uncle Barney, a doctor, sometimes lived at The House. Barney had been lecturing in medicine at Sydney University and demonstrating anatomy to the students until a widowed lady became enamoured of him and pursued him voraciously, even going to his lectures. Eventually he gave in and their engagement was announced.

His impending marriage, however, was too much for Barney; he had a nervous breakdown which left him mildly dotty, though not objectionable in any way. He spent a lot of time with the Aborigines at ‘the blacks' camp' where he was very popular. He sat around talking to the Aborigines all day, wrote out prescriptions for any pills they needed. He was always an excellent diagnostician.

Barney proposed to Annie while he was getting over his breakdown. He rushed into her bedroom and asked her to marry him, but Annie refused.

‘We're not in the same station, Doctor Coen,' she said.

Barney was also fond of gardening; he had a vegetable garden at the back of The House. We had a favourite family story about the time my mother visited Barney and found him in his garden, fanning the lettuces to keep them cool.

As soon as I arrived at The House, Barney grabbed me and took me right down the back yard past the grapevine.

‘What does two and two make?' Barney stared earnestly into my face. Barney had asked everyone in town this question. ‘Four,' I answered, as they all did.

‘Wrong,' said Barney, ‘you've forgotten the Blessed Virgin. Two and two and the Blessed Virgin makes five.' No one ever gave Barney the answer he wanted.

Barney dragged Paddy Maguire out of Mass to ask him if he could see the Blessed Virgin in a bush at the back of the church. Paddy Maguire drank too much and he stuttered.

‘You might see her, B-B-B-Barney,' Paddy stuttered, ‘b-bb-but I never will.'

When the priest said Mass, Barney would get up and join him at the altar so they said Mass together. Barney's antics became too much for Yass and he was sent down to a hospital in Sydney where he eventually recovered.

However, although he was quite well again, Barney didn't wish to leave the hospital. He stayed on and spent the rest of his life caring for patients at the asylum.

Religion entered very much into life at The House. The rosary was said every evening and grace before and after meals. The nuns were always in and out of the house because the convent was so near. Grandma went to Mass every morning at six, winter and summer, until old age prevented her.

Sundays meant Mass in the morning and Benediction in the evening. Like the convent, the church was only a short distance from The House. Everyone dressed up for Mass. Going to church was the social event of the week, not just for
the Catholics, either. Yass was full of people setting out for church on Sunday mornings.

We filled a whole pew beside Grandma, majestic in her best Sunday black dress embroidered with jet beads.

The first thing I remember about Mass was the tinkling of the bell at the consecration.

‘Dinner's ready,' I announced.

They also handed round a silver plate filled with coins. I had to part with my copper penny and grabbed up a handful of silver coins in return.

Sunday dinner was the meal of the week at Grandma's, roast fowl and boiling bacon followed by trifle. After a meal like that, particularly in the summer heat, there wasn't much to do except sleep. The uncles and aunts, lulled by the drone of blowflies buzzing against the windows, dozed in the deep drawing room chairs or retired to their bedrooms. In winter they nodded off in front of the drawing room fire.

After helping Annie with the dishes, if I wasn't stealing biscuits with Pauline I would pore over the pictures in one of the big books kept on the circular drawing room table. A compendium of art masterpieces of the world called
Famous Paintings
was the best. It had a red cover with an artist's palette in gold embossed on the front, beautiful coloured reproductions and had been given to Grandma by Dad's brother Frank in 1912 (many, many years later I managed to inherit it myself). I never tired of looking at Millet's
The Angelus
, which showed two farmers praying in a field; Watts'
Hope
, a portrait of a blind girl seated on a sphere, straining to hear the last notes from a broken lyre; or the rounded nude figures in Ruben's
The Judgement of Paris
, as well as many others.

Benediction was at seven. I liked Benediction, especially the smell of the incense and the music.

The family rosary was recited every night after tea. Grandma wouldn't let anyone out of the house until it had been said. When my father came out of the army and was living at The House, he was forever trying to escape up to the Soldiers' Club without saying the rosary.

‘King,' Grandma would say, ‘We're going to say the rosary now.'

Everyone had to join in; Annie was called from the kitchen. They knelt down in the drawing room and buried their heads in the chairs. When I was little I disgraced myself by climbing onto the hump of Grandma's back while the rosary was in progress.

Grandma never mentioned Grandfather Coen. Perhaps it was such a shock to her that he had died so young, but she never alluded to him in any way except at rosary.

Grandma said an extra prayer before and after the rosary itself. In these prayers she referred to someone as ‘your servant Michael'; this was my grandfather. I had a vision of God up in heaven being waited on by Michael Coen, who had the job of servant.

The Mercy nuns at Yass and the priests all fussed over Grandma because of her daughters being in the convent. She also had two sisters who were nuns. Priests often visited The House for a meal, or dropped in for a game of cards after tea. The Sacred Heart being a closed order, Trix and Evangelista were not allowed out, but Ina and Mollie in the Convent of Mercy used to come back to Yass every school holidays and stay with the nuns in the Yass convent. Most of their days were spent with us at The House, which added to the permeating religious atmosphere.