Travails with my Aunt

Leon the Huguenot receives graphic proof of shared genes between alpacas and homo sapiens.

I have been peripherally involved in raising alpacas for the last 3 to 4 years.  I do not think I'd consciously been aware of alpacas before that, but I have just realized why they seem so familiar.  It is because many of them look like my Aunt Florence.  Of course I have not given my aunt her real name since I feel a little guilty at recognizing the resemblance; Florence is near enough.

Those alpacas with thick facial hair, quite unlike Aunt Florence, instead resemble a former school friend of mine, John.  Come to think of it John had other characteristics of alpacas including occasional kicking and intermittent spitting.  Science tells us that we share 95% of our genes with alpacas.  Well, we don't actually share them.  I tend to keep my genes to myself.  I plucked the figure of 95% out of the air but, recalling John, I reckon he had 98% alpaca genes.  This might also explain his having to be shorn during the Christmas holidays.  He always used to brag about that.

Getting back to Florence and I would certainly like to go back to Florence.  It is a beautiful city and excellent for prolonged, thoughtful wandering.  No, I mean Aunt Florence.  She did not always look like an alpaca.

I have a crazed photograph of her when she was about 21; that is, the aged surface of the photograph is crazed, not my aunt.  She is standing in a Victorian conservatory dressed in fashionable clothing of the time.  The photograph is in sepia and she is carefully posed with her right knee resting on a chair seat and a right hand draped over the back of the chair.  There seems to be an aspidistra growing out of her head (that must have been surgically removed before I knew her).  She looks anxious but beautiful; not a single camelid characteristic there.  Those came later.

Aunt Florence, by the time I came to know her, was probably well into her 60s.  The first time I recall being aware of her in my vicinity I was being bathed by my mother in the kitchen sink.  I must have been around one or less at the time; a child has to be pretty small to be bathed in a kitchen sink.  Later I graduated to the laundry sink but I eschewed the wringer.  Fortunately, in adult life, I have adapted to the shower.

For some reason I had to go through this ritual of being bathed in front of Aunt Florence, her husband the Rev Clarence Samuel (again, a fictitious name to protect family sensitivities) and their young daughter, Cecily.  One has little choice about being bathed in front of relatives, including those of an ecclesiastical nature, but I remember they were laughing and I was laughing.  Everyone seemed happy.  I must have been quite a sight – a cooing cynosure. 

There is then a long gap, perhaps to three years, to the next memory.  Aunt Florence and her family would arrive on Christmas Day and spend the whole of that day with us.  Even at four or five I was aware of that Aunt Florence had a most unusual voice.  It was rather like a strained, hoarse piping sound.  It was a sound not unlike those emitted by certain camelids when they are anxious.  She wore glasses all the time and, if you can imagine an alpaca wearing glasses, you can visualise my Aunt Florence.  Yes, you've got it!  That’s her!

Despite her appearance and her voice she was a most kindly woman.  She radiated goodness and patience.  She needed both to tolerate her husband who was one of the more opinionated, self-centred, narcissistic men of his generation.  Perhaps these days he would pass as an average bloke.

The Rev Clarence Samuel was not in the least camelid.  He was quite vulpine in appearance.  He was a small, lightly built man who always dressed in a suit and waistcoat with a fob watch, standard issue clerical collar and hat.  He moved quickly and nervously -- consistent with his vulpine tendencies.  He had a pleasant, spontaneous vulpine laugh.  He spoke quickly and in short bursts.  I'm not sure whether his speech was vulpine.  My conversations with foxes have been lamentably limited.

He had a strong tendency to stutter in public and it was said that, during his sermons, Florence would sit in the front row of the congregation and prompt him repeatedly as he ground to a halt.  In private, he did not stutter noticeably.  I can hear his voice in my head (this is not a medical phenomenon -- I am not receiving treatment for it) but I cannot hear it saying anything in particular.  From all the years I knew him, I remember nothing of what he said; just his manner, voice and appearance.  I suppose that is all we remember about many of our relatives.

Along with the vulpine and the camelid we had the daughter, Cecily.  She was a strange combination of placidity and sudden, rapid movement.  The rapid movement she probably inherited from Clarence but the placidity was more than one would expect to come from Florence.  In truth she was drugged to the eyeballs for a neurological condition; the treatment for the condition at that stage was rather non-specific.  In appearance she resembled a female Charles Laughton but less corpulent and without his outstanding thespian abilities.  I cannot imagine her acting as King Lear but I could see her as Lucia di Lammermoor.  She could do the Mad Scene with little change to her persona.

Possibly as a result of the drugs she was on she played the piano in a nervous rush.  Everything from Bach through Mozart to Beethoven sounded the same.  Dynamic and expression markings were thrown to the wind; key signatures were trashed.  She played the piano like a frenzied automaton, albeit a gifted automaton. 

I realise that I had met the Samuel family even earlier than my kitchen-sink episode.  They were present at my christening when I was just a few weeks old.  I have no personal memory of that.  My parents and I lived in Adelaide and, at that stage, the Samuels lived in the small Barossa Valley town of Angaston still noted for its excellent wines.  The Rev Samuel was the Anglican minister of Angaston.  I was taken 120 Km by train to that town, to the delightful little church which is still there, to be christened by Clarence.

Since there were Anglican ministers aplenty available in Adelaide I do wonder, thinking back over all these years, whether Clarence gave my parents a special deal for the christening but that is probably a bit cynical.  Florence was my father's sister although it was hard to believe, looking at them, they were members of the same family.  No doubt there was a lot of affection between my father and Florence.  I find it hard to believe that he had the same affection for her husband Clarence.  I would hear Dad grumbling about him whenever the Samuels left.

I was of a depressive tendency as a child.  I remember Sundays were the worst.  In the Adelaide of that era nothing happened, either bad or good, on a Sunday.  Even ball games were not permitted in council facilities.  There were still signs banning ball games on Sundays at sporting reserves until the 1980s.  I can remember crying frequently late on Sundays because those days were so abysmally boring and futile. 

The arrival of Clarence and his family on Christmas Days was almost as bad as a Sunday.  But, for a child, having any visitor is exciting.  So for me the arrival of the Samuel family just before lunch on Christmas day would evoke a strange combination of intense boredom and wild excitement such as I've experienced with nobody else.  Even the Samuels gave a child a chance to show off.

The Rev Clarence would say a lengthy grace before lunch.  For the rest of the year, unbeknown to him, we would never say grace, probably much to our detriment.  Clarence would go on and on in his vulpine way and I was never quite sure what he was talking about.  We all uttered "amen" at the end but what were we expressing agreement to?

Once he had finished grace much of the conversation would be dominated by the hoarse flutings of Florence and the strange, almost furtive utterances of Cecily.  Even though Cecily seemed indescribably old and her parents elderly beyond all that is natural, Cecily would still address Clarence as "father".  It would be “father” this and “father” that.  Heavens knows what she said to him or about him; I remember nothing of it.

Interestingly, when I was about 9, I had a small portable reel to reel tape recorder.  I set that going during one of those Christmas lunches to record all that transpired.  The Samuels had no idea what the device was.  They were just getting used to the telephone and the radio.  Afterwards, I played it back and, despite the impression of continual conversation on all sides during lunch, all that could be heard on the tape was the clinking of cutlery on plate.  So clinking and clattering is all that is left to posterity.

One of my last memories of the Samuels arriving, the Christmas before my father died, relates to a brief exchange between me and Aunt Florence.  I had suddenly realised that, now 10 years old, I was taller than all of them and I found that astonishing.  Had they suddenly become much smaller?  Were they wasting away into decrepitude?

I said proudly, naively, and without understanding alternative interpretations of what I was saying: "I can look down on you now!"  Aunt Florence immediately responded: "I hope you will never look down on us" and gave me a satisfied camelid smile.  I felt somewhat uneasy but they all chuckled at this brilliant verbal thrust.

With that they said their goodbyes.  They never came to Christmas lunch again.  My father died three months before the next Christmas and it became clear he was the only reason they ever came.

There was a strange episode when I was about 13.  The Rev Clarence took me on an extensive trip by public transport around Adelaide talking to me about man things.  Probably he felt some obligation since my father had died.  I have no idea what he told me; again only his manner, voice and appearance are retained.  He cannot have touched upon explicit sexual matters since, at 13, they would have been branded as with fire on my consciousness.  Why did he take me on this trip?  There was a reason but here is not the place for that.

I next saw Aunt Florence and Cecily in the Samuel home.  Clarence was gabbling excitedly in the background.  A further memory is of Aunt Florence and Cecily sitting on a bed in a nursing home.  Clarence was no longer.  Finally there is Cecily lying in her bed in a nursing home where she may remain to this day, well into her 90s.  Aunt Florence was no longer.  Such is life.

While the Rev Clarence’s vulpine kin are getting the 1080 treatment (sodium monofluoroacetate) in our region, each year brings more Aunt Florences.  I look into each alpaca’s eyes (except those who resemble John) and expect, any moment, to hear those old, hoarse fluting tones.  But my attempt to commune is foiled.  The animal does her business on the common pile and strides purposefully away.  I anxiously call “Florence?” and a gob of green spittle streaks towards me.  I walk sadly back to the house.