My Place (19 page)

The final straw came for me one morning when I put on a lovely new dress Mum had bought me from the second-hand shop, only to discover to sizeable holes burned in the material that was supposed to cover my left breast. When I stuck out my chest and angrily pointed out to Nan where the damage was, she just laughed and said, ‘That colour doesn't suit you anyway!'

And then, one evening, Mum returned from work cross and embarrassed.

‘Just look at my skirt.' I glanced down at Mum's skirt. There, just about in the centre of where her bottom would be, was a sizeable hole.

It was a blessing in disguise, really, because, the following afternoon, Mum went out and bought a twin tub washing machine and installed it in the laundry.

‘You're only to use the copper for boiling the dog's blanket in,' she told Nan crossly. ‘From now on, the clothes are washed in this machine. I won't have any more holes in my dresses.'

Nan was reluctant to use the machine. It ran off electricity and she feared that, combined with the water, she'd get electrocuted. Even when I explained to her that all the wires were covered up and that it was perfectly safe, she still refused to touch it. In desperation, Mum finally gave her an ultimatum: use the machine or give up smoking while she washed. Now giving up smoking for any length of time to Nan was like cutting off an arm or a leg. She agreed to have a go at the machine.

To our amazement, not only did new holes begin to appear in our clothes, but the old ones got larger as well. Mum was furious. She berated Nan for still using the copper, but, to our surprise, Nan maintained that she had been using the twin tub.

‘Well, show me what you do,' asked Mum suspiciously as she accompanied Nan to the laundry.

Ten minutes later, Mum returned and collapsed in giggles next to me on the lounge. Apparently, Nan had been using the machine, but the whole time it was chugging away, she stood over it to make sure nothing went wrong. Now and then, she would plunge in the stick she used to stir the copper with, retrieve different items of clothing, and closely inspect them to make sure they were clean. That was when the fatal ash fell.

The pink chip heater in our bathroom had been a thorn in my side for years. Jill, Bill and I had all pleaded with Mum to have a new hot-water system installed, but Mum was adamant that she
couldn't afford one. We knew this was just an excuse, because with Mum's florist business doing well, and the loan paid off, we were now better off than we'd ever been.

Great skill and ingenuity were required to maintain a consistent trickle of hot water from the shower, which was positioned over the bath. In fact, it was only possible by one of two methods. The first required teamwork. A leisurely soak could be enjoyed if someone else could be persuaded to man the heater and continually feed it with small woodchips and pieces of scrunchedup newspaper while you showered. The second method was more modest, but less convenient. Three buckets of woodchips were placed near the heater. As the water coming from the shower cooled, you leapt naked from the bath, taking care not to slip on the bare cement floor, threw a few handfuls of chips into the heater, and leapt back under again.

The issue finally came to a head one Saturday afternoon when a friend of mine asked if he could shower at our place before going out that evening. Coming from a wealthy Victorian family, for some reason he assumed that everyone's bathroom was the same. Funnily enough, we assumed the same thing, and so began to matter-of-factly explain the workings of our chip heater.

I watched as my friend's ready smile slowly changed to dismay, and then, just as readily, back to a lopsided grin.

‘Stop,' he cried. ‘Stop having me on!'

The culture shock Jeff experienced when he saw our heater was enough to send Mum running to the nearest gas appliance centre in shame.

I often found myself sandwiched between Nan's cantankerous nature and Mum's strange approach to home improvements, like the night I helped Mum remodel our lounge room.

From a bin of specials in a wallpaper shop, Mum had purchased eight rolls of chocolate-brown paisley print wallpaper. It wasn't nearly enough to cover all the walls, but Mum reasoned that it
was better to have one feature wall of paisley print than none at all. It would give our place a bit of class.

Having paid out for wallpaper, she wasn't about to pay out for glue, buckets, rollers or a ladder. Instead, she dragged out a large tin of glue from the laundry, which she mixed up in the bath. Our ladder was three pine crates piled on top of one another near the wall, and as for rollers, well, as Mum so succinctly pointed out, what were hands for?

I was given the dubious honour of running down the length of the hall that joined the bathroom to the lounge room with each length of soggy, gluey wallpaper. As I entered the lounge room, I had to make a frenzied leap onto the top of the pine crates and slap the wallpaper against the wall, aiming it as close as possible to the ceiling line. Mum's part in this was to hurriedly press the paper down as I held it. Once she'd patted the bottom part on, I pressed down the top part. Then I climbed down from the crates and the whole process started all over again.

By the time three panels were plastered to the wall, the whole hall was also plastered with glue and bits of paisley print that had torn off and I was beginning to feel distinctly sticky and generally doubtful about the whole thing. Unfortunately, Mum wasn't one to admit to failure. She urged me on with comments like, ‘It's beautiful, Sally, you're so clever with your hands,' and ‘We'll have the best house in the street after tonight!'

At one stage, Nan came in and, seeing us balancing on top of the crates completely obscured by the wallpaper, which had somehow flopped backwards over our heads, commented, ‘I'm livin' in a nut- house! You two are the silliest buggers I know.' Mum blew her top and Nan left, chuckling. She was always pleased when she upset someone.

By midnight, we'd finished the full length of the wall. There were still uneven pieces left over at either end, but we decided that they could wait until morning to be snipped off.

The following morning, Mum and I went in to admire our handiwork. Nan was already in the lounge room, pacing up and
down eyeing the wallpaper, with Curly close on her heels. He was giving it the occasional lick. I think he liked the glue.

‘Come on, Nan,' Mum coaxed, ‘it looks lovely, doesn't it?'

Nan smiled smugly, ‘Oooh yes … you've got one bit going one way and the next bit going the other. You are clever, Glad.' Then, she turned to Curly and said, ‘Come on boy, I'll give you your milk. You don't want to stay in here with these silly buggers.'

Nan was right, the pattern was all mixed up. Mum salvaged some pride by muttering, ‘We can say we did it that way deliberately.'

Mum continued her attempts at updating our house the following month, when Cyril came to stay.

Cyril was an elderly friend of mine whom I had met at church. Now we children were getting older, we often brought friends home to stay. Nan wasn't happy about the situation, but Mum felt that by welcoming our friends, she was helping us keep on the straight and narrow.

Cyril was an Englishman, and he prided himself on his ability to cope with the Australian climate. During the summer, when we relished cold showers, cool drinks, shady verandahs, and even the dog had an ice cube in his milk, Cyril would be out in the midday sun, clad only in baggy shorts and lace-up shoes. Nan's comments of ‘Come inside you silly man' and ‘Hmmph, thinks he's a blackfella' went unheard as Cyril busied himself with some particularly hot, sweaty task.

‘You know what they say,' I said to her. ‘Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.' I must've impressed her, because with a jerk, she pulled open the louvres and ordered Curly inside.

When Cyril had first arrived at our place, he'd only planned to stay overnight. He had no fixed abode, but resided anywhere he could find a friendly face and somewhere to park his van. However, the following morning, he regaled Mum and Nan with comments like, ‘I don't know where I'll go from here' and ‘I'm
worried about that knock in my back axle, I really shouldn't be driving around.' Battlers themselves, it would have been against their natures to do anything but offer him a temporary home.

Being a practical sort of man, Cyril assured Mum that it would take him no more than a few days to discover what was causing the knock in his back axle. Mum, a shrewd sort of woman, was mentally noting all the odd jobs around the house that needed a man's attention.

Mum's suggestion of putting a sliding flywire door in the gap in our enclosed back verandah was eagerly taken up.

Cyril hated spending money and Mum loved a bargain, so, in no time at all, a fourth-hand sliding door, profusely patchworked with bits of florist wire, and painted psychedelic blue with paint discarded at the local tip, was installed.

But a fly-free verandah had to be weighed against the difficulty we all experienced in actually getting in and out. The railings were slanted so the door would be self-closing, but the heavy jarrah frame made it a race against time to whip down the three back steps without guillotining an arm or a leg. Nan's bruises and Curly's whines bore testimony to Cyril's ingenuity gone wrong.

Cyril attempted to rectify his mistake by placing a stopper inside the railing, and a weight to one side of the door to slow it down. There was no thought of repositioning the railings, the basic principle was, after all, a good one. Finally, Nan came up with the best solution. She propped the door permanently open with two red bricks, and the flies returned.

Cyril's next project was the side gate. Mum had been warned continually by the local council to keep the dogs in the yard. She presented this problem to Cyril and he immediately set about producing the cheapest, most functional gate in the southern hemisphere.

For weeks, he haunted auctions, rubbish tips, junkyards and second-hand shops in search of materials. One night after tea, he unfolded a neat drawing of how he envisaged the gate would look. I peered over his shoulder at the sketch. It was large and fancy, in
a word, ostentatious, and Mum loved it. Nan failed to see how he could get something like that out of the heap of metal beds and wire bases he'd stockpiled in the yard.

For the next four days, Cyril cut, welded, heated, moulded and re-welded different pieces of metal. The final production was five foot wide and five and a half foot high, and it bore no resemblance to the original drawing. Cyril proudly told Mum that he had let his innate creativity flow, altering the design as he went along.

I stood eyeing the monster in awe. I suddenly and desperately wished he'd discover what was causing the knock in his back axle and leave before Mum could ask him to do anything else.

By the time Cyril finished the gate, his stay of two to three days had stretched into six weeks, and his search for the elusive knock had led to a complete dismantling of his van, which was strewn in various stages of disassembly down our drive. It was a mystery to us how he still managed to find some part of it to sleep in.

No sooner would one mechanical problem be solved than another would begin. Cyril's concern for his back axle passed to the exhaust system, the wheel bearings and, eventually, to the engine itself. We began to sense that it was going to be a lifetime job.

I'm happy to say that Mum bore the brunt of it. The words ‘Now you take my van …' were now a cue for the rest of the family to melt slowly away. Mum was the only one too polite to do so. Her punishment for such courtesy was long sessions with Cyril, during which he explained the intricacies of modern motor mechanics to Mum's mechanically feeble brain.

Nan, in particular, was getting fed up with him. Habits that had at first seemed humorous now became more and more irritating.

‘He's digging in for the winter,' she commented ominously to me one day.

Nan discovered that she had an intense dislike of classical music. Actually, she hadn't known what classical music was until
she met Cyril. Now, every morning, as though fired with a missionary zeal to educate, he roused us with loud bursts of ROM, POM, POM, POM! ROM, POM, POM, POM!

Nan decided that his passion must be curbed, especially before six in the morning.

Initially, she countered his attacks by turning up her transistor radio full blast. It failed to register against his stereophonic cassette with four speakers.

I suggested to Nan that she tackle Cyril directly and simply ask him to turn his music down. ‘He can only say no and I don't think that's likely, because he's on our territory, so it's only fair that he considers our wishes.'

‘You can't do that, Sally,' she said in a shocked voice. ‘You can't go asking people to do things.'

It seemed we were at an impasse. Situations such as these had been resolved in the past by Mum and Nan simply wearing their opposition down and thus avoiding confrontation, but, in Cyril, they'd met their match. So, for the next few weeks, the music continued louder than ever, and Nan's progressively more militant comments passed unnoticed.

I could see that, as far as Cyril was concerned, subtlety was a word he'd never discovered in his well-worn English dictionary, which was surprising, because he often looked up long, complicated words to include in his everyday language. This habit, rather than adding to the quality of his conversation, served merely to lengthen it.

Then, one afternoon, I watched with curiosity as Nan shuffled towards Cyril's semi-complete van. I knew she was a woman with a mission.

I listened as she gave Cyril a brief introduction into the mysteries of animal health. Then she mentioned Curly, her four-footed favourite. I glimpsed Cyril's sympathetic nod as she described Curly's hearing problem.

‘Well, these things happen as we get older, Nan, I'm going a bit deaf myself.'

Nan persevered, intimating that Curly was all right a few months ago. ‘Funny how it's come on all of a sudden. I'm worried about him, Cyril, if his ears don't get better soon, I'm afraid he won't hear the cars when they toot at him and he'll get run over.'