Five Ways to Remember: Haunted House

Somewhere just down from King’s the chemist, was an empty house which should have been haunted, but was not.  It was cracked and all the cracks weren’t just the hairline things you see in the footling little walls people build these days.  These cracks had the nobility and the vigour of the Mississippi River network.  From the front gate which had even then long since been locked into rusted immobility, it was never used, seeing that there was no fence attached to it and one really did not have to open the gate to an estate which was not inhabited, anyway.

From the locked gate, locked so irrevocably that even St. Peter could not have opened it against the sole remaining erstwhile staunchness of the fence its opposite style member had parted with the things in it. It spread the non-fence demarcated by chick weed and pee-the-bed.

Am I still alive in Paddington?  I have lost the contact.  The stream of sub-consciousness is receding from awareness. – I am not remembering – I am not helping my childhood or my sons.  If I put it down, it is out of my system, – the agonies, fixed – classified, not to be endured again, exhibits.  That much of the effort sucked from the memory – one less thing in the bucket.

What in that crazed house must be written down and commented upon from the memory of our blood?  Windows awry, concrete cornucopias adrift from the brave façade.

Sunflowers growing through the gasbox and behind the windows a suggestion of life becomes sometimes the grey sun drapes were not so fixed as there had been a week before.  In the garden the long johns wart bent and withered in its maturity: the paspalum only just held its own with the buffalo because Glenmore road was kind in buffalo and greeted it.  It grew in such great clusters as only a motormower salesman could envisage.  Not that it was in any danger then, for the only pair of hand shears within blocks was regularly borrowed for the necessary training of the tiny lawns at Waverley Cemetery, wherewith monstrous regularity, our neighbours made their abode.

I’ve had this house – It hasn’t come to life—I have started off to say something and it has died in my throat. I don’t like that house now – It is not amusing, and if I think of it, I feel pretty near like it looked.  Some other day we will both go down to Glenmore Road and throw a stone at its memory.

[W.E. Pidgeon c.1971]

Five Ways to Remember: Grandma’s Funeral

Wep’s maternal grandmother, Isabella Garrick White, nee McRitchie (1853-1924), c.1916

[19 September 1924]

WHITE .—The Relatives and Friends of Mr. JOHN WHITE, Master Builder, are kindly invited to attend the Funeral of his late beloved WIFE, Isabella Garrick, which will leave her late residence, “Trelawny”, Gurner-street, Paddington, THIS FRIDAY, at 3 p.m., for the Church of England Cemetery, Waverley.
CHARLES KINSELA, Funeral Director,
‘Phone, Padd. 694., 143 Oxford-street. Sydney.

WHITE.—The Relatives and Friends of Mr. and Mrs. JOHN A. WHITE, EDWARD C. WHITE, HARRY F. WHITE, Mrs. T. J. PIDGEON, Mr. and Mrs. S. E. PATERSON are kindly invited to attend the Funeral of their late beloved MOTHER,- Isabella Garrick Whlte, which will leave her late residence, Trelawny, Gurner street, Paddington, THIS FRIDAY, at 3 p.m., for Church of England Cemetery, Waverley.

WHITE.—The Relatives and Friends of Mr. D. MCRITCHIE, Mr. ROBERT MCRITCHIE, Mrs. R. THEW, Mrs. F. CROWE, Mrs. J. MCRITCHIE, Mr. and Mrs. McLEAN, Mr. and Mrs. E. CARR. Mr. and Mrs. CAMEREAUX, Mr. ROBERT MACKEY, and Mr. JAMES MACKEY are kindly invited to attend the Funeral of their late beloved SISTER and AUNT, Isabella Garrick White, which will leave her late residence, Trelawny, Gurner-street, Paddington, THIS FRIDAY, at 3 p.m., for the Church of England Cemetery, Waverley.

Family Notices (1924, September 19). The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), p. 7. Retrieved February 6, 2023, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article16160237

WHITE.— September 18, 1924, at her late residence, “Trelawny,” Gurner Street, Paddington. Isabella Garrlck, dearly beloved wife of John White, and mother of William, Frederick, Thlrza, John, Edward, Harry, Percy, Isabella, and Blanche, aged 71 years.

Family Notices (1924, September 19). The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW : 1883 – 1930), p. 6. Retrieved February 6, 2023, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article245208210

Grandma was dead.  It must have been in the morning sometime in December [sic] because I was given some money to go to the pantomime down at Tivoli. What the pantomime was about, or its name and its impact on me remains securely forgotten, rotting away in some remote and atrophied cell of the brain.

Amy Rochelle could have been the Principal Boy. Principal boys were always girls anyway and Amy Rochelle boarded with us once.  So maybe a little boy was sent off to see the big girl boy he knew while the family went about the duties attendant to the proper care of the dead.

Funerals were always a big occasion in those days. Uncles, aunts, cousins, even down to the fourth remove would congregate at “Trelawny” while the men went off to do the right thing at Waverley Cemetery, the women busied themselves in the preparation of sandwiches, tea, fruit cake and the inevitable port wine to refresh the returning mourners.

Glasses of the ale too were served under the dancing shadows of the grape vine trellis to the convivial grievers.

All those garrulous relatives, complete strangers flushed out of obscurity by death mingled in monetary bonhomie and parted till death again did them join.  I suppose there were extra trams on these great days – no one had a car.

It was 1924 when “Trelawny” first housed a motor vehicle.

Uncle Sep, a devastatingly handsome and successful dentist had married Aunty Bella.  They lived at “Trelawny” and looked after Grandpa White.

Somewhere along the line, the old dray, the buggy and the mad town (carriage) had been sold to more rural folk.  The old carriage house was taken over by the Dodge.  Uncle Sep’s friends had successfully updated and hard-sold him into switching from trams to a car.  I was appointed car-washer and mechanic. Like all young boys, I knew more about cars than it is possible to know.  I was constantly tuning the engine from perfection to imperfection. If anything was right I’d fix it.

L-R: Bill’s mother Thirza Pidgeon (nee White), Bill Pidgeon (in car), Sep Paterson (Bill’s dentist uncle), Ted Paterson and his mother, Isabella Rose (nee White) and possibly Sep’s brother with Sep’s 1924 Dodge Brothers Four Door Tourer car

Still we used to go so far as Windsor or Katoomba at speeds of up to 45 mph and have picnics on the running board  safe from bull ants and other bushland horrors.

I learnt to drive it like a kangarooish motion. All very safe for the streets were as vast and “unencumbered” as the only hazards on the Nullabor Plain.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

[In 1925, Wep was employed as a Cadet Newspaper Artist for the Evening News and Sunday News, after his dentist Uncle Sep “armed with forceps and needles ‘intimidated’ his patient”, editor of the paper, Marmion Dart.]

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