Old Saltie Read online

  “Mrs. Simpson … loved by this community … sadly missed”

  Mrs. Simpson? He doesn’t even know the deceased well enough to use her first name? He is only a young man and he does try hard - but Hector would have cracked some pun by now about the new minister being really trying … or maybe resuscitated one of his old “ready to abdicate a throne for a Mrs. Simpson” jokes.

  Nobody seems to laugh much these days; certainly not as much as she and Hector used to. That smell is stronger now, of tobacco and engine grease and Hector. But that’s impossible; she must be imagining the smell of tobacco, just because she is thinking so much about Hector. Dear Hector, how she misses him, especially at times like this, when they could hold a whole laughing silent conversation in just one quick glance.

  Bugger. She is daydreaming again, she’d better catch up; the coffin is already leaving the church with a crocodile of mourners filing past her. Where did she put her handbag: she must hurry or she will miss her lift.

  But moving towards the funeral procession is like wading through deep water, going against the flow. Hector always said to go with the flow, it’s easier.

  It’s certainly much easier to stay here, to turn and smile a warm greeting to the one waiting there for her on the bridge of multi-coloured light streaming through the stained glass window in their own private world of rainbows, like he’d always waited for her, waiting with smiling eyes and a joke to take her home:

  “Thought I’d better come to meet you, love, else or you’d daydream off and miss your own funeral.”

  Hope

  Hope gets me out of bed every morning to face another day.

  Hope smiles at strangers, in the hope of finding a new friend.

  Hope challenges sporting champions into new arenas.

  Hope is the foundation for every business plan, the centre of every negotiation, and the driving force of every charity.

  Hope is the basis for every human endeavour. Hope is the mainstay of the gambler. Hope is the opiate offered by churches.

  Hope makes the dog associate with humans, in hopes of a pat instead of a kick. Hope brings the alley cat out from the safety of the shadows, hoping for more than just the smell of food. Hope keeps the battered wife prisoner, the hope of what could be, what should be, instead of what is.

  Hope walked with people into the ghettos and concentration camps and gas chambers. Hope that we can make a difference is what makes our world liveable. Hope is the forerunner of love.

  Hope gets me out of bed every morning to face another day.

  A different can of worms

  What was this – this indescribable mess the pretty waitress had put on front of me? I peered at her suspiciously, then again at my plate, then back to her. If I wasn’t ten thousand miles away from my cousins, I would suspect that they had managed to play yet another practical joke on me, even in a public ristorante on the wharves, as this place appeared to be.

  I picked up my fork to lift a corner of the stinking, pale, worm casings on my plate. Yes, that was bread under the mess, but a pale, nasty, unhealthy bread sliced thin with no crust that they had burned somehow to try to make it more crunchy and edible. My mama was right. We should never have left home.

  Mama had spent the entire boat trip wailing about being cast out into an enemy’s country so we would all die in a foreign land. Her forecasted deaths in the foreign land were many, ranging from soldiers with guns waiting for us on the wharf; to starvation in a gutter; to numerous horrible diseases waiting for the unwary in this vast land so far from home; to being speared by a native or jumped on and stomped to death by a huge rodent. The only constant to her constant wailings was our immediate and painful deaths in this new land.

  My poppa tried to reassure her, but his reassurances were as depressing as her litany of possible deaths. Poppa reminded us all that post war Europe offered little to poor families like us; that the immigration people promised us work and the chance to get land of our own where we could grow food; that my little brother and me would have a chance for a new life, a better life, in this place called Australia even if it did have huge rodents that hopped on their back legs. Then he played his trump card: he reminded us all again that I spoke English, and I could translate for the family.

  Everyone looked at me then, with hope on every face, and although I smiled on the outside on the inside I suffered one of mama’s promised deaths. Only I knew how little of the new language I understood. A clever trick to impress my teasing big cousins had backfired on me to make me, at 12 years old, the official family interpreter and one of the trump cards in poppa’s decision to move us all to this new land.

  This whole boat trip was a nightmare. I had to get away, to find myself, to find more about this new land, to test my knowledge and my survival skills. I escaped from the ship as soon as it docked and went exploring on my own to find a ristorante on the wharf, as every wharf in Napoli had its own ristorante, and saw to my intense delight a word on the menu I recognized. Spaghetti. This country knew spaghetti!

  Suddenly I felt that I would be able to help my family settle, even with my limited knowledge of English, if this new land also ate spaghetti. It couldn’t be that bad. I checked my pocket carefully to make sure the money was still safe and I hadn’t had my pocket picked as had happened on my first visit to the Napoli wharves, and carefully asked and paid for a spaghetti to celebrate arriving safely in this new land, our new home. I planned how I would tell my family of my first big adventure, to encourage them into adventures of their own.

  And this is what she served me. I sniffed the malodorous mess. It didn’t smell of meat, or tomatoes, or garlic, or even parsley. There was no parmesan. It smelled of … tins.

  Did they can spaghetti? Is this what happened if they tried to import spaghetti? Is this what would happen to my family, us human imports? Would we turn into some horrid mess, called by a recognizable name, but not of use to anyone?

  “What’s wrong”, asked the waitress, seeing my distress.

  “Is this spaghetti?” I questioned hesitantly.

  “Of course it is”, she replied. “I opened the can myself.”

  I leaned back, horrified. It was canned. This new country didn’t even make spaghetti.

  “What’s wrong with it?” demanded the waitress again, this time to the room, to my intense embarrassment.

  She collected responses: shrugs from the couple closest to us, a giggle from the woman by the door, assorted sneers from other customers. One big man stood up and walked over. He was nice looking and dressed well, but I was frightened. What was going to happen? I had tried to be polite, even after being served their horrid spaghetti. All my mama’s warnings reverberated in my head.

  He asked if I were Italian, and it was only after I said “Si” that I realized he had spoken in my own language. He turned to the waitress and said in English, “This Australian spaghetti from a tin is nothing like real spaghetti”.

  He spoke slowly so I could understand and then turned to speak directly to me: “You need to go to a place called Carlton. It has cafes with real spaghetti, with real spaghetti sauces to choose from. It even has pizza and gelati”.

  I beamed at him. “Grazia. Grazia. Carlton I will go to. Mille grazia.”

  Still smiling, I thanked the waitress inwardly rejoicing that I could handle this new country, that my first adventure was a success.

  As I left, I heard the man say to the waitress “Would you like to try real spaghetti? I would be honoured to take you to dinner tonight in Carlton.”

  I paused to listen, hoping that the man would be rewarded for his kindness.

  “Don’t mind if I do”, flirted the waitress, as she examined the canned spaghetti again as if to see what was wrong.

  If she was going to try real Italian spaghetti that night, she’d soon find out. I just hoped she would like real spaghetti more than I liked her canned worms.

  A different tune

  I never knew my father, not until after
he died and I read his diary.

  I knew the public figure of course (You can always trust Harry) the whole nation knew they could trust Harry, even without that ubiquitous advertising campaign of the 1950’s, and I knew my mother’s perception (Your father is always so damned Honourable), especially when she wanted something with which Dad didn’t agree like her campaign for another, more expensive, fur coat in the 1970’s when everybody except Mother knew that fur was better worn by animals, but it wasn’t until today that I realized that I never really knew Harry Montford, the real man behind the public face.

  Thanks to that advertising campaign, everyone who lived in England during the 1950’s knows that Harry Montford started life in a quiet English village in 1910. He did well at the village school and probably would have followed his father into the village smithy looking after the Squire’s horses, but his life changed completely when the Squire’s lady acquired a new toy, one of the noisy, new-fangled, farting motor vehicles that Harry’s father hated so much. Harry, however, loved motor engines with a passion that lasted his entire life.

  When the Squire’s motor broke down yet again, this time outside the smithy, Harry charmed the Squire’s lady into allowing him to fiddle with the recalcitrant engine and not only get it to start but moreover, to stay running. From there the Squire and his childless lady took an interest in the laughing village lad, paid for his ongoing education and then apprenticed him to a trade where he would learn about the new motor cars.

  From then on, as every Englishman knows, Harry Montford wrote the book on motor engines and their care. He came back home to his village with his new trade and his new skills, and instead of becoming chauffeur to the Squire as expected by the village, by 1934 with the Squire’s help Harry had converted the old smithy into one of the new motor garages that sold gasoline, and that were popping up all over the country to service the many motors now on the road.

  Popping up like damned mushrooms, Harry’s father grumbled, but his face shone with pride even as his voice grumbled and the local pub was well acquainted with every one of Harry’s triumphs until the old man died in 1968, just before he reached his century.

  I remember my grandfather as an old, old, man, the striding giant strength of the village blacksmith wizened by age into a fireside seat, talking of the horses he had cared for when he was the smith, and sometimes old gossip in the village, but mostly of his son Harry and Harry’s achievements. He was like an eagle that woke up one morning to discover his chick had morphed into a Blackhawk helicopter. He didn’t understand how he and his loyal wife could breed such a mechanical marvel, but he was proud of it anyway.

  The village garage grew and grew as word spread of Harry’s undoubted skill with motors, and Harry took on staff: first his best mate George from school to help serve the customers, then a couple of European emigrant families who helped in the garage until they could establish themselves in their own trades.

  In the meantime Harry acquired the garage in the next village and took on apprentices, until by the 1950’s Montfords Mechanics chain of garages sprawled across the British Isles. It became an honour for an English schoolboy to be accepted as an apprentice by Montfords Mechanics and Harry became a British institution, trusted, respected, even loved to the point of becoming a national figure.

  Holiday camp comedians always could get an affectionate laugh by dressing themselves in a boiler suit and wandering on stage holding a spanner, with Harry’s characteristic shamble and his daydreaming air of looking as though he were in some other world, listening to God knows what, and having to be brought back physically to this time and this place. If you managed to get his attention you were always charmed by Harry; his laughing eyes and his cheerful insouciance which focused to a sharp intelligence only when he fixed his faulty machines.

  I always wondered if Dad lived in his other world to escape from Mother’s ceaseless chatter. Like his best mate George, Dad had met Mother at the village school. She followed Harry and George everywhere. When they were children, the village expected pretty Rose to marry handsome George, but when Dad returned to the village and hired Uncle George to work for him, there was no contest. Mother fixed her large blue eyes on Dad, and the deal was sealed.

  George married Mother’s younger sister a year later and I think by then he realized that he got the better deal. My Aunty Vi was almost as pretty as Rose and she adored George. Vi quietly made a home for George and their twins to fill with laughter and love and their friends, while my mother Rose chattered her way through life, always slightly behind the conversation, always getting the story slightly wrong, always wanting the latest and the best status symbol.

  Despite the very real frustration her family often felt because of her chattering, Mother loved us to the best of her ability and was proud of her clever husband and her family, even if she understood none of us. Mother died in 1990, but by that time Dad was well set in his ways and continued to drift through life, only coming to life when he could work on a motor or talk to someone he loved.

  When I was a very young woman I remember how surprised I was when I found him in our kitchen one day in the 1960’s, taking the Mixmaster apart. Dad was alive, really alive, the way he was at work and rarely at home, with eyes blazing and focused on getting that motor to work properly for Cook, no matter how small it was or how insignificant. Mother, of course, would have just bought a new Mixmaster, or rather instructed Cook to buy one.

  Despite their differences Harry and Rose were happy together and created a loving home for me and for my brothers and sisters. I was the baby; Dad said I arrived in time to celebrate the end of the War in 1945, but I grew up with older brothers and sisters because our family started back just before the war started, when Dad and Mother were still living in the house behind the garage.

  Dad was one of the few English at that time who heard first-hand about Hitler’s plans for Europe from listening to the stories told by his European workers, and when he heard about the Kindertransport being organised to save children he immediately offered to take a child into his home.

  One of our best-loved family stories is about how Dad and his two workers went together to the railway station at our nearest town in 1938 to collect one child each. Dad’s workers each collected their allotted child safely but Dad went to the station to collect one child and came home with three, a boy for him, a girl for Rose, and another boy who was so small that everyone expected that he wouldn’t survive his first English winter.

  Although it wasn’t officially acknowledged, everyone knew that the good-looking children and the strong children were chosen first from the Kindertransport, because people preferred pretty children or children well-grown enough to be useful in the fields or in the house. Dad took the little children no-body else wanted, and said he got the pick of the litter.

  Unusually for the time Dad did not try to anglicize his new family; he said they were born Jewish and if the religion was strong enough to predate Christianity who was he to try to change God’s plan. The children remained Jewish even though he and Mother were staunchly Anglican. The old vicar found a Rabbi in a town relatively close to our village so that helped enormously with the children’s religious education, and they were invited to celebrate Jewish holy days with the two refugee families Dad had sponsored.

  Dad could only extend sanctuary to two families because his business at that time was so small; I think his only regret in later years was that his garage wasn’t big enough at that time to offer sanctuary to more distressed families as Europe disintegrated.

  One of Mother’s continuing grumbles over the years was that she wasn’t allowed to talk at all when Dad met with the pompous government officials from the regional Manpower office in 1936 when they came to inspect the garage as a workplace. Dad threatened her with dire consequences if she said anything or did anything other than to pour tea and to smile, as Dad charmed the soulless British bureaucrats into agreeing that he really needed an Austrian pharmacist and a Polish bri
ck-maker along with their wives, three small children and one mother-in-law who wore only black and spoke only Yiddish, to help him run his garage in an English village.

  Granddad told me that Harry deliberately used the good will he had accrued with his neighbours to make a home for his new workers, so our village really was a haven offering a welcome that was unusual in those times in the insular English countryside. Granddad whispered to me that a German died in the village in 1934 and even though it was an accidental death and never spoken about again except for Granddad, the collective guilt felt by the village worked well for the immigrants who became my father’s so-called essential workers.

  By 1937 Dad’s two imported families were happy in that small part of England that we called home and settled in well, adding the yeast of a sophisticated Europe to the placid dough of an English village society. In time, even the black clad mother-in-law learned enough words of English to sing along to the words to Jerusalem and unbent enough to show the Institute ladies how to prepare feather-light biscuits to her recipes that are now a jealously guarded village tradition. Biscuits made from these secret recipes are always a guaranteed sure seller at our village’s fund-raising fetes.