PIECES: AUNTY KIT

Grandma Andrews was born a Laity.  There were six in the family (as far as I know), five sisters and a brother.  My grandma, Margaret, was the oldest, then came Kate, Gretta, Emily and Elizabeth, with Russell the youngest.  I don’t know whether Margaret had a nickname, or whether her family used a shortened form – as the eldest she may have been Cis; but Gretta was always known to us as Aunty Gret, Emily was always Aunty Em, and Elizabeth was Aunty Liz.  And Kate was always Aunty Kit - she said she hated the name Kate.  I refer to them all as aunt and uncle, but they were actually my great aunts and great uncle.

Aunty Gret’s married name was Abbott.  There were three sons, I think – one a garage proprietor (Ken), one a dairy farmer (Des), and one a bit of a con man (Norman) – who, among other things, defrauded his Aunty Kit by building a cottage for her at Ferntree Gully that proved to be so jerry-built that she couldn’t bear to live in it, and sold it in short time and moved to Bonbeach.  Aunty Gret had a strange mannerism:  from time to time, when not speaking, she made a grimace by pulling back her lips and exposing her teeth.  It wasn’t a glaring or hostile face, more a look of surprise; but the real surprise is that the habit passed to my aunt Kath Warren, an incessant smoker, who multiplied the effect by grimacing after every drawback.

Aunty Em married Frank Templeton, and had two daughters, Frieda and Joan.  Frank Templeton was also uncle to our friend Philip Templeton at Chinkapook, so in a way we are related to Philip!

Aunty Liz was a Mrs Edwards.  I don’t know her family details, except that there was a daughter or daughters who looked out for Aunty Kit in her later years at Bonbeach and beyond.  I do know that at some stage the Edwards were farmers, and held the square mile at Chinkapook next to the Andrews farm – the block where the famous “box tree” is located, still known as Edwards block.

Uncle Russell was fabled in the family as the man who painted the white lines on country roads.  Well not personally.  He worked for the Country Roads Board, and headed the team that travelled around the State touching up lines, and painting new ones after bitumen had been laid or replaced.  Part of the Russell Laity myth is that his team was able to cover the whole of Victoria, but that after he retired the task required several teams.  I remember only one of the Laity cousins, Arthur, who with his wife Edna ran a substantial chicken hatchery at Maiden Gully near Bendigo.  There is a horrific story about Edna.  One day she opened the wood stove – not the style of stove with a door that stretches across the whole front of the stove, but the style with a rectangular door and flange about 20 by 25 centimetres – and she tripped and fell with her face exactly in the opening.  I never saw her subsequently, but her face was said to have been “burnt off”.

Now to Aunty Kit.

Aunty Kit had been a redhead, but her hair was snow white when I knew her best in the 1950s.  She was trained as a nurse, and it was as a nurse that she served in the Middle East during the First World War.  (The only way for a female to be involved as a combatant in those days was as a nurse.)  The story goes that she had a lover, and that he died in the War.  Aunty Kit never married.  There was a framed photograph of a man in uniform on her sideboard.

I expect, but don’t know for sure, that Aunty Kit worked as a nurse after the War and in the 1920s, but I do recall that she later had the task of looking after her mother and was not then in the workforce.  There is a photograph of me as a baby being nursed by great grandma Laity who was in her late 90s at the time (1940), so if Aunty Kit “looked after” her mother until that time she could have been retired from nursing for a decade or more.  That is the sense of it that I have.  Was it simply the fate of a spinster daughter to cop the added responsibility for an aged parent, or was Aunty Kit happy enough to take on the responsibility?  The reward, if indeed Aunty Kit ever sought a reward, was that she was the sole beneficiary of her mother’s estate.  

I can’t be precise about where the Laitys hailed from, but I think it was at or near Quambatook (Pa Andrews and his family farmed at Quambatook), and I don’t know where grandma Laity spent her final years, but when I first knew Aunty Kit she had a one-room apartment at number 12 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne.  It was a crammed bolt-hole, and Aunty Kit had to journey down the hall to the lavatory and the bathroom.  This was a substantial two-storey building, purpose built, all fine – but the shared ablutions would never be tolerated today.  The building remains, but has long since been converted to offices.

Aunty Kit did not re-enter the workforce after her mother died, she lived off her share investments.  She talked a lot about her shares, proclaiming them all to be “blue chip” – Carlton & United Breweries, G.J. Coles, Myer Emporium, Herald & Weekly Times etc. – but she never actually discussed her financial situation, and I wonder whether she lived in quite modest circumstances.  She received some sort of veteran’s pension.

We saw a great deal of Aunty Kit after we moved to the shop at 294/296 Bridge Road Richmond in 1946.  She lived a short tram ride away, and – certainly in the early days - she used often to help out her niece and nephew (my aunt Kath and my father Gordon) preparing and cleaning behind the scenes.  She regarded Gordon as her “favourite nephew”, and was shattered when he died at 45 in 1960.

In 1951 I contracted rheumatic fever.  I had always been “throaty”, with numerous bouts of tonsillitis; and had had my tonsils removed during the time we lived in Prahran - just prior to the move to Richmond.  (The operation wasn’t entirely successful, by the way, and I had to have tonsil remnants removed in the 1970s, not so long after marrying Annie.)  The rheumatic fever developed from a case of pharyngitis – that throat again.  Rheumatic fever is so named because of the symptoms similar to rheumatism, but the principal concern with the disease is that it can lead to permanent damage to the heart……..sometimes quite permanent!

The pharyngitis was doubtless the result of a streptococcal infection.  I suppose that I was treated with antibiotics, although I can’t recall.  Today cortisone is central to the rheumatic fever treatment regime, but I fancy that in 1951 - having been discovered as recently as the late 1940s - it was not part of my treatment.  I expect that I was treated with aspirin, the then standard pain reliever for rheumatic pain.  My hands and other joints swelled up, and the pain was severe.  Aunty Kit to the rescue.  She visited every day, and applied an analgesic cream to my joints and wrapped them in bandages.  Despite the likelihood of her being out of practice by some 20 years, her ministrations were much appreciated by my parents, Gloria and Gordon, and by me.  She was a gruff and tough old thing, quite deaf and with a rasping voice, but I was part of her family.  Enough said.

The rheumatic swelling subsided, there was no heart damage, and I was out of bed in three weeks.  Not so when I had a second bout of rheumatic fever three years later.  A recurrence meant that the risk of heart damage was much greater, and I was sentenced to an extensive stretch of bed rest – I was absent from Melbourne High School for nearly six months of my Intermediate year (year 10) in 1954.  Treatment started with a couple of weeks in Epworth Hospital, for tests I suppose, then confinement to bed at home above the shop.  

At Epworth, I was in a four-bed balcony ward facing the east.  As a 14-year old (not feeling at all sick) I was subjected to a lot of friendly chiacking from the three men in the other beds.  Coincidentally, their surnames all started with “W”, so naturally they referred to me as Mr Wandrews.  I think they were all seriously unwell, and remember one of them being trolleyed off every morning to receive electric shock treatment. 

Through this experience I met George West, one of the most delightful of men.  Mr West had been an engineer with the Postmaster General’s Department (the forerunner of Australia Post and of Telstra), but had been forced to retire through ill health.  He had heart trouble, and it was that that put him into Epworth.  He was, I guess, in his early 60s.  He lived in Lennox Street Richmond with his partner Mrs Goldsmith.  This sort of domestic arrangement was not so common in 1954, and coupled with my then narrow Christian take on morality, it was somewhat scandalous.  But Mr West and Mrs Goldsmith were such a warm and welcoming couple that the prejudices of a priggish teenager were soon set aside.

 Mr West was a very keen amateur photographer, and when a few months later he heard that I had won the trip to the UK with the Sun Youth Travel contingent, he appointed himself my photographic adviser.  He was well-known at the York Camera Shop – long gone, but then located in a basement in Little Collins Street – and advised on the sort of camera I should buy (Voigtlander Vito II), the attachments I would need (rangefinder and light meter, which weren’t built into many cameras back then), and the type of film I should use.  I also learnt from him how to develop and print my own black and white photos, and it is no surprise that I still possess the developing tank and other equipment - although the chemicals have long since passed their use by date and (shock!) been thrown away. 

Mr West had built his own enlarger; and he had invented and made a machine not available anywhere.  If you wanted to have prints made from 35mm black and white negatives the processing companies would print the whole film - upwards of 36 photographs - at the one time.  This meant that if individual negatives were overexposed or underexposed, their relative darkness or lightness would be reproduced literally in the printed snaps.  Mr West had engineered an apparatus that enabled the film to be wound through a "black box”, so that each photo could be “read”, and the exposure time individually judged.  Then light was released through the negative and the print was made. It was a finely turned piece of equipment, and I wonder what happened to it.  If Mr West or Mrs Goldsmith had children from their respective marriages I never heard of it.

During my long months of bed rest Aunty Kit was continually on the scene.  Unlike the previous time, however, I had no rheumatic symptoms or pain at all, and there was no call for ointments and bandaging.  But, extraordinarily, some months after life returned to normal I developed swollen and “rheumatic” joints.  This was in the weeks before I was due to depart by steamer for the UK.  The doctor, who I think was as mystified as we were, thought that perhaps the swelling had been triggered by the typhoid and cholera shots and the smallpox vaccination, but he really didn’t know; still he prescribed some preparation – and Aunty Kit was back to her former bandaging routine.  This “recurrence” caused some consternation, and the thought that maybe I should be withdrawn from the Youth Travel tour.  But the swelling subsided, and the Tour was on.  In my suitcase I carried the ointment and some lengths of bandages just in case.  Three weeks later, as we were about to arrive in Marseilles, my feet swelled up.  By this time the contingent had about half-a-dozen lads with minor ailments, so instead of the bus tour of the region, the walking wounded just mooched around the heart of the city – the better end of the deal, I think.  After Marseilles, the swelling went down, and there has never been a recurrence.

And Aunty Kit never again had to call on her nursing skills.  But she remained a regular visitor to Bridge Road.  Over our years at the shop (1946 to 1961) she was a frequent guest for an evening meal, and very much part of our family.  She was an avid reader; and, even as a teenager, I was an unrepentant book buyer.  So each visit Aunty Kit would borrow a couple of my books, then return them next time, usually with a one-word critique written in pencil on a piece torn from the margin of the daily paper.  If you open a book that’s been on my shelf for more than 50 years you are likely to find a scrap of paper saying “interesting”, “not very realistic”, “didn’t like”, “good”, “boring”, “hard to believe”.

After East Melbourne, and the disastrous few months at Ferntree Gully, Aunty Kit bought a house in Bonbeach and lived there for many years.  Quite often I used to take Gloria for visits, with my younger sisters Kathy and Judy; and the three of them took the train on occasions too.  Kathy stayed for a week once, and had a miserable time – no television, the radio turned on only to hear news broadcasts, and Kathy’s cassette player not pleasing Aunty Kit at all.  Once I pruned her failing lemon tree, and thereafter never heard the end of how I’d butchered it.  The fact that it had been turned into the most prolific bearer in town was never mentioned. 

Aunty Kit was a guest at Annie and Gary’s wedding in 1969, but face to face communication more or less dried up after that.   Annie recalls visiting Bonbeach just once; and Gloria regretted that she had not remained in touch.  Aunty Kit  was allowed to drift out of our lives.  At the time of her death on 13 June, 1983, aged 96, she was in a nursing home. 

My recalling of the Aunty Kit story has brought home to me the error of allowing a busy life to interfere with important family obligations.

Gary Andrews

30 January, 2011