The routine of baby needs began to feel more normal after a time for May, and Shirley was a bonny baby, smiling and giggling hilariously on everyone’s knee at any new adult that came in the kitchen. She grew curly, dark, untameable hair, and was petite and elfishly merry as she tottered around the shadowy house. Banging on the tea table with her chubby hands, she was as content to sit on the thread bare skirts of her sisters’ as when she was ensconced in folds of stuffy suitcoats, or ankle length georgette pleats, around a cup of tea and adult conversation, as long as she was allowed to slurp voraciously on scraps of bread and dripping, or toast and jam. Her sisters would fight over her, like they did alternatively between things of little or real value, but she never seemed to have a favourite between them. Sometimes when the shouting grew too loud, she joined in her mother’s screaming by bellowing protest herself at their slamming doors.
Her favourite, though, was her father’s older brother Uncle Tom when he came through the front door on Sunday afternoons, whistling her name and singing while he sauntered up the hall. She ran to his arms and wouldn’t let him put her down until her father called the whole thing off by requesting Tom’s solitary presence in his library for a shot or three of whisky. May would take Shirley on her hip out to Tom’s dodge parked outside the house in Griffith Street, and chat for a time to his wife Lillian. She was a ‘lady’ and preferred to sit patiently in the car during Tom’s visits, as Richmond existed as part of a swirling, unpresentable lower-class legion that, for her, it was unconscionable to interact with. However, the baby needed to be presented, and Shirley batted on the flimsy window while May discussed the weather and arrangements for Easter or Christmas picnics with Lil, offering her a cup of tea while she waited. A faint smell of lavender and leather drifted out into the Richmond streets; a gloved hand clasped Shirley’s little paw, and the rustle of heavy linen punctuated the polite conversation, while the baby giggled inappropriately at Lillian’s sternly drawn eyebrows, and the prominent mole on her pointed chin jiggling underneath her thin, red-painted lips when she spoke.
May promised to go back in and check on Tom’s progress with Arthur, and left Auntie Lillian to her silent wait, rigidly resting on the thick brown leather seats. On hot days, Tom avoided visiting, however during Winter, she used a rug to keep warm. From the library, the unnatural sound of a convivial conversation would emanate, punctuated by Tom’s jolly laugh. As Shirley grew older, she would wait on the front step for Uncle Tom to appear, and when he did, he would throw her over his shoulder amidst her screams of delight, tickling her senseless. Lillian would turn her head lightly at the hilarity, and then look down at her gloves in her lap. Her father would stumble out behind Tom, leering and blinking in the afternoon sunlight. He refused to brush his hair on Sunday, or wear a starched collar, so he looked loutish next to Tom’s polished shoes, double breasted suit and shiny hat. Still, Tom’s eye’s twinkled with a casual mischief that Shirley’s fathers did not, dulled as they were with an afternoon of whisky. The car rattled away in a burst of noise, smoke and shiny mechanical splendour, tossing Lillian momentarily forward in her seat as she held firmly on to her hat. Occasionally young children in the street would chase it all the way to Bridge Road.
The house always seemed empty after Tom left.
Eventually, Shirley became hard to manage, as there was little for a two-year-old to do in the house and garden. Their dog, a black Cocker Spaniel, would follow Shirley around the yard when she was little, and they would sit together while Shirley sang and rolled her ball around the garden, or clattered through the back veranda banging on an old cart and a throwing a small, raggedy doll in a box with a cloth as a blanket. Her older sisters by now were often out. Eileen had a job at the Rosella factory, and Lorna spent a lot of time with girlfriends, hanging around the church halls after school before getting her first job at the Elastic Webbing factory. When they were home on the weekend, they had lost interest in amusing Shirley, although she followed them around faithfully. They tickled her and pulled her on to their knee when she became tired at the end of the day. Lorna often bathed her when they had a bath on Saturday evening, and as a little one she would jump around in the bath playing with the soap, and splashing, while Lorna sang her favourite songs to her, ‘Yes sir, that’s my baby’ and ‘I wanna be loved by you.’
At home alone, when the girls were out, May felt completely stifled inside the house, unable to go shopping in the city for long at all until the child started complaining. It became so bad that sometimes on a Friday, after Arthur had given her the housekeeping, she would travel all the way to Carnegie to see her mother-in-law Sarah, so that she could leave Shirley for an hour or two there. She hurriedly caught the tram to Spring Street to have a cup of tea at Sutton’s tearoom, before a quick window shop in Collins Street. At other times, on long Winter days, May would leave the child with some morsels of food to distract her, withdrawing to her room and locking the door. Shirley would clatter for a while, cry a little and eventually sit on the floor in her bedroom and go to sleep, the walls of the house closing in silence around her. A door would eventually open despairingly – and floorboards would creak to life as the vegetables for tea called plaintively to be peeled in time for dinner. Dinner, at least, was always a hearty meal.
Memoirs and Memories 