Aunts Up the Cross by Robin Dalton

Author:Robin Dalton [Dalton, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography: general
ISBN: 9781922253378
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2015-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

My grandfather was a quiet and saintly man, whose presence in this matriarchal house was nevertheless some restraining influence on the family dramas. He and I had an especially close relationship: I called him ‘Sammie’ and he treated me as his friend and equal. From the time I could walk, I accompanied him on his early morning swim, which performed the triple function of getting me out of the house, teaching me to swim, and establishing an affinity with my grandfather and his family.

Every morning at 6 a.m. we walked through the empty streets and the grimy park, known as the Domain, where tramps were just stirring under their newspapers, to the fenced-in enclosure at the harbour’s edge, the Domain Baths. The Baths were in the same tongue of the harbour as the docks and I shudder to think of the oil and refuse in which I must have wallowed and flourished. Until I was four we went to the Men’s Baths, and when I was nearly two I graduated from Sammie’s back to a sturdy dog-paddle of my own. The men swam naked, so that at four it was decided that I was too old to share their morning freedom and my grandfather dropped me off alone at the Ladies’ Baths next door. We went every morning, summer and winter, in rain or sun; and, walking home, Sammie and I would play the Shakespeare Game. Every day I had to say one reasonably well-known line from one of Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets, and Sammie took up the quotation from there, reciting until I told him to stop.

We walked to his mother’s house for breakfast—he had breakfasted with her every morning of his married life, and for me it was yet another household of which I felt myself to be an integral part. My great-grandmother was a wiry, bird-like, little creature, who died, almost on her feet (having just cooked the breakfast) at the age of ninety-nine. Aunt Emma and Uncle Charles and Harry lived with her. Harry was my grandfather’s youngest brother, and was never called ‘Uncle’ because he was ‘simple’ and about the same mental age as myself. He teased me all through breakfast and I loathed him. Uncle Charles suffered from terrible asthma and had never been able to do much, and Aunt Emma had never married, so my grandfather supported them all.

I think I was fond of my great-grandmother, although I felt the lack in Charles and Emma and Harry of the soft yet strident, rich and enveloping warmth of my grandmother’s environment. There I heard no wonderful stories, nor lay on lace pillows being tickled, nor was tempted hourly to some titbit of highly unsuitable and indigestible food. My great-grandmother was born in Australia and so her parents must have been some of the earliest settlers. I learnt nothing of her background, and everyone whom I might now ask is dead. What tales Nana’s imagination could have weaved from her material!

The house was a kindly, but silent one—in itself, to me, a strange and intimidating setting.

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