Aunts Up the Cross Read Online Free Page A

struggle. A badly cut knee meant for me hours of bandaging, strapping, and applying of painful unguents by my grandmother; to be followed by equally fierce stripping off of all coverings by my father. This two-sided treatment would be repeated until my leg eventually healed despite it. What conflicts and neuroses were thus born in me I do not know; in retrospective reflection I enjoyed it enormously, was continuously stimulated, and my own children’s lives, kept to routine and order at great inconvenience to myself, seem incomparably duller.
    At the age of three I was sent to school, to a very superior establishment started by the Misses Cheriton, two middle-aged spinster sisters who had been private governesses and had acquired some sophistication but no business acumen. We moved school fairly frequently—I now suspect pursued by creditors—to a succession of charming houses, all renamed ‘Doone’ on our arrival, where it seems to me we lived on strawberries and cream and acquired an astonishingly liberal education for the Australia of the twenties. It is to them that I owe the fact that I saw Pavlova dance the Swan: we four and five year olds were bundled off to a matinée, and some dim memory of the magic remains.
    I was dressed in the height of (French) fashion from birth. I particularly remember the tissue-wrapped red winter coat arriving from Paris which I, aged four, hated wearing because it was so beautiful and therefore different from all the other children. Around its collar and hem were appliquéd daisies, cut out of the same material, and I was made, until I rebelled, to wear it to school.
    At home I was educated by my grandmother, who talked and talked. Her talk was directed at me, relentlessly. It was not conversation: no response was required. How I squirmed and sighed with resignation at those oft-repeated maxims with which she sought to increase my daily store of wisdom, and with what little shocks of recognition do I realise their truth as instances along the paths of later life have caused me to stumble over one. When she disapproved of one of my companions it was, ‘If you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas.’ When I protested against the futility of doing something for a lost cause, she protested, ‘Every little helps, as the old lady said when she spat into the sea.’ When I kicked against the unreasonability of some of her taboos she told me, ‘Reason always means what someone else has got to say,’ And, most frequent of all, was her rejoinder to my complaints against her ‘nagging’—‘Never mind! If I throw enough mud, some of it is bound to stick.’ What fascinated, though mystified, me most, however, was, ‘A stitch in time saves nine, as the mother of eight said as she sewed up the front of her husband’s pyjamas.’
    Into her talk, too, came her favourite literary characters: Peggotty, from
David Copperfield
, was as well known to me as one of the household; my mother’s boundless optimism in the face of imminent, though small, financial doom was always dubbed ‘Micawberism’. I thought this, and her other favourite, ‘Malapropism’, were probably to be found in the huge dictionary by her bed. But they had faces and characteristics for me—Peggotty, Mr Micawber and Mrs Malaprop were shadowy but permanent members of the family.
    While she talked, Aunt Juliet tickled me for hours on end. The tickling is a family vice, the taste for which was passed on to me by my mother, but in the years since I have never found such an untiring and uncomplaining tickler as Aunt Juliet. On hot, sticky summer nights when I could not sleep, or had the toothache, Aunt Juliet sat by my bedside playing the ‘game’. This was a geographical tour of my person: ‘Quickly—England!’ I would say when one foot sole—perhaps Italy—had become numb and tired of sensation, and Aunt Juliet’s nimble fingers must go racing to the back of my neck. Only on one point did she insist as we