Story for performance #540
webcast from Sydney at 08:00PM, 12 Dec 06
My maiden aunt Cecilia was a character: love her or loathe her, you could never ignore her. The last of nine children, the runt of the litter, she had more than a little of late pregnancy madness in her. Sickly as a child—of what exactly, no-one could remember—she would all too often acknowledge her survival with a cheery ‘Aren’t I great to be as good as I am?’. Her long-suffering nieces and nephews would roll their eyes in half-hearted regret that the mysterious virus had failed to see her off in the thirties. The reason it didn’t was clear enough: Aunt Cecilia possessed an extraordinarily strong will to live.
Where did it come from, this overpowering desire to be? If anything, her older siblings tended to the other extreme, being of the view that this world was not their home, they were just a-passing through!—that legendary Catholic fatalism which is proof against all kinds of calamity but which also pulls the shutters down too early. If they loved life at all, it was usually in the guise of their children, the desire to see them reared and married and producing grandchildren; life going on by proxy. Cecilia never married, though she was pretty enough—but maybe just that bit too off-the-wall for the average suitor.
But she knew something about the reality of marriage: for the last twenty years of her working life she had been housekeeper to a priest in the north of Ireland. He was a good man with a weakness for alcohol. Cecilia minded him with an affection that at times seemed stronger than most of her sisters’ dutiful marriages. When he ‘went on the beer’ she searched for him in hotel bars, and, on occasion, bailed him out of police custody. That he never missed a Sunday Mass was largely due to Cecilia’s ministry. When his liver finally gave out he left her well provided for, urging her from the deathbed to get the paintings out of the house before his blood relatives came to collect!
Before that she had been a doctor’s receptionist in a seaside town, about five miles from where I was brought up. My mother, never approved of her youngest sister, with her bright clothes stark against our dull wallpaper and her lurid gossip of the ‘goings-on’ of the area; her loud voice booming through our small terrace house surely pierced the thick walls to our neighbours. My mother did not encourage her visits, although she was her only relative for many miles. Eventually, we children became the virtual connection, as we took the bus to visit Cecilia in her seaside digs, filling her weekly ‘afternoon off’ with a litany of sunburn, cuts-and-bruises and, memorably, one near-drowning!
On her retirement, Cecilia returned to her home place in the country. In a strange re-working of the seaside visitations, I took to calling on her again. With my own children reared I was suddenly becoming interested in family history, that late-middle-age need to know who one is. By now Cecilia was the last of my mother’s siblings still alive, the repository of the family story. Except, of course, she wasn’t the least bit interested in what she called ‘all that old stuff’! The past wasn’t just a foreign country, it was as boring as a seaside town in winter and she had no intention of returning to it.
But I was persistent. And I soon learned that I could trick her into small scraps of revelation, just as long as I spaced these out with ‘present activity’—an excursion to the newest shopping mall or a discussion of the latest quack medicine; magnets for muscle pain quite literally attracted her attention and, abandoning the equivalent of the Physics Hippocratic oath, I played up to this. My reward was The Letters.
The Letters had been sent to my grandfather while he was head gardener to the local Big House, the landlords of the district. Dated between 1939 and 1940 and postmarked Davos in Switzerland, they were written by his employer who was dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium. They display a wonderful time-line, beginning with a peremptory ordering of the affairs of the estate, now in the charge of my grandfather, but progressing as the writer’s condition worsens to a warmth and concern for the people he will never see again. For the war is closing in around him, in the neutral island of Switzerland.
The Letters provide me with further spurs to know more about the assorted characters named in them. And reluctantly, my aunt supplies details of two families, her own and that of the Big House people, the servants and the masters, respectively. And what emerges is far removed from the stereotype of the powerful and the powerless; a seamlessness of country social norms and class. The power was only rarely exercised, most famously in the previous generation when the landlord’s response to his wife’s alcoholism was to forbid the operation of licensed premises within his territory, a ban that still holds today.
And it is from this reading of a dying man’s letters that I begin to understand my aunt’s love of life, her sense of her own special place in the world. Some five years prior to his departure for Davos, my grandfather’s employer had suffered the loss of his young wife. She seems to have been much involved in good works among the village poor. But she had a special affection for the young Cecilia. So when she died, her husband requested—perhaps even demanded—that Cecilia join the staff of the Big House with no duties other than in remembrance.
Cecilia died early this morning aged eighty-four. She may have been the runt of the litter, an embarrassment to her sisters and an irritation to her nieces and nephews but almost a lifetime ago she brought solace to a house in mourning and that was more than enough.