Aunts Up the Cross Read Online Free

in a tableau in a similar pageant in aid of the same charity, organised by the same society matron. She was a rather imposing lady, of theatrical background, who had married well into wealth and social position but who retained her old connection with the theatre by organising whatever charitable theatrical entertainment she could, and by attending every first night of the Sydney theatre in a series of coloured wigs. This multi-hued entrance invariably stole the show and my father described her as a ‘female ham who can’t be cured’. She had a formidable memory, however, and when I presented myself with my eleven young companions at her ornate Italianate villa for our first rehearsal, she admonished me sternly. ‘I hope, my child, that you will behave yourself better than your father did twenty years ago.’
    After my parents’ marriage they, in their turn, went to live with my grandparents in a smaller house where they remained—my parents on the top floor and my grandparents on the ground floor—for thirty-five years. After the first year my father never spoke to my grandmother. This, too, I accepted as perfectly normal behaviour. He remained on friendly terms with my grandfather, and he even tolerated Aunt Juliet for whom, after Uncle Harry’s death, a special suite of rooms was built on what had been a flat roof halfway up the stairs, and which was known thereafter as the ‘mezzanine floor’—or, as photographs of dead relatives grew in number, the ‘mausoleum’. Aunt Juliet was frightened of him, but she would defiantly say, ‘Good morning, Jim’ if trapped on the stairs. When my father, who was a doctor, left the house on his rounds each morning my grandmother and great aunt would come scurrying up the stairs to my mother and there they would stay until they heard his key in the door downstairs. This arrangement suited me beautifully as a child: I was the focal point of two separate and complete loving households under the one roof, and what the one could not or would not provide for me in the way of attention or entertainment, the other could and did. Again, it was not until many years of contact with other humans had taught me that I learnt perhaps our family relationships were not usual: it was then I asked my father what had started his ancient battle with his mother-in-law.

    ‘I found early in my married life,’ he said, ‘that I could not take my trousers off without turning round and finding your grandmother watching me.’
    My poor mother was the buffer between these two constantly warring factions. Warm hearted, impulsive and emotional, she suffered from the strain of keeping the peace whenever possible. Unfortunately she was seldom able to keep calm at the same time, and in no time at all she would be driven by my father to tears and by my grandmother to the limits of rage and exasperation. My grandmother interfered in every small detail of her daughter’s life, domestic as well as marital, and where she could not physically poke in a finger, she badgered with advice, criticism, and unsolicited opinions.
    The most violent and constant of these criticisms revolved around my mother’s determination never to have me taught the piano. My grandmother considered this an uncivilised deprivation, one notch higher than being allowed to go out without gloves. My mother, I learnt much later in life, had been a brilliant pianist, playing duets with her adored, dead brother and I expect by banishing music forever after from her life, a raw wound was opened less frequently. What was, to me, ancient, mellowed history was, in reality, just four years past in her memory.
    The wars between my father and grandmother, however, were silent but not necessarily impassive and, as my mother was the buffer, then I was the battlefield. Any injury to my small person was the signal for immediate action, and the strategies resorted to by both sides gave no thought to how ploughed the battlefield might become in the