When I was a youngster we used to visit my grandmother often. Dad's mother. It never occurred to me we were also visiting my grandfather. Grandmother was "Marmie". She was, by all appearances, the Queen of our family. At least, she was the Queen when her older sisters were not visiting, for they were even brighter stars. Marmie would always meet us at the door, kiss us and offer us each a Bex. She lived on Bex. We would go into the kitchen where the central feature was a red laminex table and lots of red and chrome chairs. Things were always shiny and there were always people sitting around the table. There would be Sister Wilson from next door, Mrs McKewan from the other side, a travelling salesman or two. Perhaps the postman, my Aunti Mollie and others as well. Marmie would go to the large Arga coal fired stove with some fresh cups and ladle out some more broth so we could join the others at the table. There was always a lot of laughter. The conversations were always witty biting stories about an unfortunate cousin or niece or nephew or husband they all knew. I came to know the rest of my father's family through these funny charactertures.

Occasionally my grandfather would join the group. The room would hush.  He would courteously nod to everyone and say something like "Margie, did I hear the teapot rattle?" She would pour him a cuppa and he would stand there, both hands wrapped around the warm cup. A short time later he would step out of the kitchen and the laughter would rev back up.

Grandad used to be in his study nearly all the time when he was at home. I used to sneak in there sometimes when he was out. I loved that room. There was a big wooden leather topped desk and a leather swivel chair. Behind where he sat, there was a fireplace and in winter it burned coal, so there was always that wintery smell and warmth in the room. Around the walls there were tall book cases of dark timber, filled with dark heavy books. Above the fireplace, between more book cases, there was a large scottish landscape painting in a tarnished guilded frame. Grandad smoked a pipe and on his desk there was a tray always full of pipes, each stuffed with burned stale tobacco. The aroma of the room was just beautiful. Not until recently did I know more than that about both of them. They were certainly the odd couple.

Grandad's mum and dad had divorced in 1901 when he was 5, one of the first divorces in the new federation. His dad remained an artist and dreamer. His mum ran off with a gambler. She soon took her gambler off the pool tables and set him to work in a tailor shop. After winning the contracts to supply woollen uniforms to a number of countries preparing for war, she became fabulously wealthy. She told everyone grand dad was dead.

Grandad and Marmie had begun courting illicitly when Marmie was 12 and grandad was about 15, soon after his dad died.

Grandad, it turned out, had his mum's tenacity and his dad's artistic mind. He won a scholarship to Sydney University when he was 14. In those days you needed more than a scholarship and he had no means. He joined the railways. After his father's death, in need of somewhere to live, he answered an advertisement for a lodger. It had been placed by Marmie's mother. During the months that followed, a lonely isolated boy fell in love with a bright animated child in a rollicking working class scottish home. Marmie's dad perceived the danger and sent her to stay with relatives in the far north of the country. Grandad tracked her down through his railway network. She was moved again and again. Again and again he would appear. And so at length, though both were still so young, they were permitted to marry. They raised four children.

Because they were so different, as time went on, there were struggles. One of things I do not forget is my aged grandmother coming to the table where he was having lunch, her blouse loosely buttoned, her hair messy and her face sad. Shortly afterwards everything would be fine again. She never understood his love of learning and for her it was a barrier she could not pass. When he died she had all the symbols of the barrier destroyed or removed as if with fury. I think he never saw the barrier was there, he only saw her. For him though, the gaity was something he could not be part of.

They lived a long time together, being their own natures, with a yawning gulf in the middle, just by Doin' What Comes Natur'lly.

 
© Bog O'Mullet  2010

When I was a kid, it was a long time ago, we lived in a little house next to a dirt street. It had a neat little fence out the front and a gate that opened to a concrete path. The path went by a lavender hedge with a dry spot under it where Dusty, the border collie with a bad temper, slept. After the lavender hedge, the path led to three brick steps that went up to a little porch that you stood on while you waited for someone to open the door

The door was a different colour every few years. Choosing the colour was a big family decision. It involved looking at lots of colour cards from the hardware store near the station and lots of discussion. One year my idea got chosen. It was for dark turquoise with two white stripes, one on each side. That was very radical because all the other doors in our street were uni-colour. But I was the oldest kid and that carried my idea with a bit more weight, I suppose.

Next, after the door colour was chosen, we had to decide what colour to do the window frames and the guttering beneath the eaves. There were always several points of view about if they should match the door or be different. The year my door colour was chosen it was agreed they should be different: battle ship grey. I guess my door was already a bit radical and they felt grey guttering would leaden the effect a bit. I don't remember if I was happy about that or not. Probably I didn't care because the exciting thing was to imagine how our little house would look in its new colours. I imagined for hours.

Another thing about those times that I remember was that locking up meant closing the door with a key. There were 15 different keys and you could buy them at the hardware store just by quoting the number. Ours was E5. Mr and Mrs Neat and Tidy, (that's what my Aunty Peg always called them) who lived next door, had E10 and Mrs Murphy, who lived a few doors up had E9. I don't know why anyone bothered except, like changing the colour every few years, having a key was a kind of protocol that meant you were nice people.

In those days too, any time my mum found she was short of something she would send me next door with a message: "Please Mrs Neat and Tidy, my mum said can you please lend her half a cup of sugar?" and as I put out my hand with the cup, Mrs Neat and Tidy would take it and I would follow her into her tidy kitchen and look at her round refridgerator while she put some sugar in the cup. Her fridge was a round cylinder and when you opened the curved door you could spin the shelves around on a central axle. It was really neat because ours was just like a big cupboard, white and nothing fancy. Next day when I knocked on Mrs Neat and Tidy's door (it was a white one with a round port hole type window with frosted glass) I would hold out my hand with the cup half full of sugar and say: "My mum says to say Thankyou". Mrs Neat and Tidy would take the cup and I would follow her into her kitchen and she would pour the sugar from the cup into her big sugar jar. Then, while I looked at her fridge some more, she would wash the cup and dry it and then give it back to me and I would follow her back to the door and she would say something nice like "Please tell your mother, I hope she is well."

In those days too, there were no flushing toilets. My dad used to talk about that sometimes in ways that seemed confused. Sometimes he would say, "When the sewer comes" the value of our house would be a lot more. Sometimes he would say "When the sewer comes" the taxes would be a lot more. It just depended if he was feeling optimistic or not. Anyway, every Tuesday morning, about 6:00, I could hear the side gate open and I knew that the "dunny man" was there. He was the man who used to come to pick up the can in the little garden shed and give us a new one. The new ones always smelt of fennel and they were shiny and black and it was good to be the first one to use it. Sometimes there would be a heavy week and I used to wonder if the can would overflow before the dunny man arrived. It never did. I don't know why. I figured there must be something in nature that slowed people down when the can was getting full. But it did get pretty full sometimes and I used to wonder how the dunny man could get that big can up on his shoulder without spilling it on him. Once I lost my Corgi Holden Taxi in the dunny can. It just fell in out of my pocket as I was pulling up my pants. The dunny was nearly full so I couldn't even see it in there and I sort of hoped the dunny man would just spill it out that Tuesday when he picked up the can. I thought I'd just leave it where it lay until the ants and the rain had made it clean again. Anyway, he didn't so I wished at the wishing well in the Botanical Gardens for a new one and it came. That's how I discovered fairies are real. I gave some talks on it at "Show and Tell" in class. Some of the kids giggled when I told them that story - but not the girls, they would just sit there, their legs crossed and their jaws dropped. But when I pulled my new Holden taxi out my pocket and showed them, that shut the boys up too. They would sit there too and their jaws dropped even lower than the girls. I got to be a bit of an expert on fairies after that.

Actually, there's a twist in that story that I didn't tell yet, but maybe I should because its kind of honest. When I went to the Botanical Gardens with my mum, to wish at the wishing well, I designed a kind of trick to flush out the truth about fairies. Although it was a Holden taxi that had dropped into the dunny, I wished for a Humber Super Snipe utility. I did this because I knew there wasn't one. Corgi didn't make one. Nor did Dinky - who also made the toy cars that I collected. I figured, if fairies are Real they will get it right and turn my wish into a Holden taxi because they would KNOW what I really needed. If they weren't real then nothing would happen because the wish would just get stuck and it wouldn't go anywhere. First, of course, I laid my plan out with mum to see if it was a good idea because I trusted her not to tell the fairies. (you have to trust someone and mum had always been reliable). Anyway the plan worked and that's how I got to feel so expert.

After that, I started a little business and for 6pence I'd take the other kids on a tour of the places in our garden where fairies hung out. They all said the tour was great value. There were always lots of customers, but after a while it got to be a kind of problem because the business started to get in the way of the games I liked to play just on my own in my private imagined world, so I had to close it down

© Bog O'Mullet  2006