Aunts Up the Cross Read Online Free Page B

changed countries every night—my bottom was Germany.
    I had my own game with Aunt Juliet’s person. This was the privilege and doubtful pleasure of being allowed to put my finger in the ‘hole’. The hole was indeed a hole, of dark and mysterious depths, in the soft fat folds of her upper thigh. One day she and Uncle Harry were driving in one of the earlier motor cars to catch the Newcastle ferry. There was a collision with a horse and cart. The horse, cart, man, woman and child occupants and the car—Harry and Juliet, swathed in duster coats and motoring veils—sailed into the Hawkesbury River. Only Harry and Juliet were recovered, and whatever injury Juliet suffered had left the ‘hole’ as reminder.
    My relationship with my other two married great-aunts was never as close as it was with Aunt Juliet. I only remember once visiting Aunt Juliet’s house in Newcastle before, when I was four, she came to live with us, but relics of her life there were scattered about the house. In my grandmother’s silver cupboard a shelf was taken up with Aunt Juliet’s silver menu holders and a stack of old menu cards. Aunt Juliet’s married life had consisted largely of arranging flowers, writing her menus, and waking up Uncle Harry in the night to tickle her back. Uncle Harry was never known to protest at this indignity, and one wonders if any other marital rights were afforded him, as Aunt Juliet protested loudly and often that she had always been too frightened to have children.
    A housekeeper, Doris, had been brought out from England by Juliet, trailing hinted-at glories of ducal households behind her. Doris, unaccountably, quietly, and eventually gave birth to a nameless child whose presence was explained by Aunt Juliet as the result of a day trip by Doris to Sydney. An aura of threatening and shadowy holocaust hung in my mind forever after about the train—known as the
Newcastle Flyer
—solid and encased in brass, mahogany, engraved glass and reclining seats, for surely it had played its part in Doris’s downfall? The child was seldom mentioned. Aunt Juliet sailed blithely above the situation, resorting only once to indignation when Doris’s name was billed before hers at the reading of Uncle Harry’s will to the tune of thirty shillings a week for life.
    Of the other two, Aunt Flo was pretty, pretentious and nearly as silly as Juliet: she didn’t enter our lives as much as Aunt Bertie who, of all the sisters, was the only one resembling my grandmother in bigness of heart and spirit and in the forcefulness of her personality. Like all the sisters, she was large and fat and soft and, at the age when I first remember her, dressed only in black. When I think of her it is largely in connection with the food I had to eat in her house. Highly spiced cakes and brown cinnamon biscuits, Jewish fried fish, and a wonderful milky pea soup called ‘peas and clice’. Aunt Bertie was always cooking or playing the piano: she would break off in the middle of a song to take something out of the oven, and I was allowed to strum on the piano and pop the hot biscuits into my mouth.
    It was in Aunt Bertie’s house that I absorbed the only atmosphere and customs of Judaism which I ever remember seeing. My grandparents seemed to have given up their religion, or at least the outward show of it, at the same time as their daughter and, except for the crisp squares of Matzo bread which arrived at every Passover but more for enjoyment than necessity, I don’t remember any rituals or religious taboos. There certainly remained a half humorous superstition, which was never taken very seriously. My grandmother, an old lady whose normal outlook was panoramic in its tolerance, regarded these remnants of prejudice of hers much as one might regard an unsightly but long-accepted physical defect. She did not like the idea of baptism, so that when I was finally christened a Presbyterian at the age of four, I was sent to a Vaudeville show of very doubtful