Stories from Rosebud.
My grandparents retired to Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula. They bought a little cottage near the bay.When my sister and brother and I were little we would go down to Rosebud almost every weekend so that we could see our grandparents and my dad could cut the grass and do some general maintenance as was expected of a good son.
My grandad would cook a huge Sunday roast with yorkshire pudding and soft, roast potatoes that had a gorgeous fatty crust, over done beans and I think some carrots. He made it all on an ancient Kooka stove. My siblings loved it, I only ate the potatoes. Stewed home grown fruit for desert, I remember the taste still and the texture of furry apricot skin in heavy sugar syrup with plump fruit underneath.
My grandma was confined to a daybed after a stroke. I never saw my grandmother walk. She was like a queen, laid up in the living room in a wicker day bed, covered in hand knitted and crocheted blankets. She was a muted, multi coloured fixture of the room with a whirl of light grey hair who gave us each a 20 cent piece to go to the corner shop to get an icy-pole.
We were never given many details about Grandma, just that she had a stroke, this mysterious thing that stopped her from walking. Her presence filled the room so that if you were in it, you just kind of had to be an appendix to her, not an individual. This was not because she had a huge personality, but because she was centre stage and there was no denying it. So we three kids would do our polite and stiff hello’s and have a brief chat (as was required by good grandchildren) and then escape outside in to the boring Rosebud day.
How did we spend those long days after we had been to the shop, eaten and had a brief chat with the grandparents? Invariably, my sister and brother plucked a ripe lemon off the tree and played “catchy with a lemon” (that was the game de jour). “Lets go outside and play catchy with a lemon” someone would wearily suggest. A utilitarian name. I was never good at catchy with a lemon, so after making a bit of an effort, I was usually sidelined and left to fend off my own boredom. The television was no help, as it seemed there were only old movies set in ancient Rome staring Tony Curtis (in a Toga), on or old Elvis movies, nothing at all interesting. Or wrestling, which my grandad loved.
In hindsight, the place had a lot of charm. A huge back yard, full of burgeoning fruit trees, a vegetable garden where I would pull albino, unready carrots with wonder out of the soil, an old granny flat, so musty and mouldy that we were discouraged to enter. If only I’d had an adult perspective of time and not needed to be constantly stimulated or entertained, it would have been a lovely place to visit. Instead, it was like a waiting room with a few little reprieves throughout the day, which were still solidly coloured by the heaviness of Greater Rosebud.
The thick smell of ripening peaches and nectarines harvested from the garden’s fruit trees always permeated the house, as did the plump roses that sat in bowls in every room. It seemed that the fruit was always splitting ripe and the flowers just ever so slightly past their best, so the smell was pungent and if you stayed too long, sickly sweet. Most of the giant peaches were incomparably delicious, but often the stone would split open to reveal a white delicate web with a foetus-like grub curled up waiting in the centre.
In the afternoon in Summer, Grandad would listen to the cricket on the crackling radio and forgot about his visiting family as he sat and smoked and listened to the droning voice of the cricket commentator. We would flop around the house, itching to be somewhere else. Sometimes we would go down to the bay. But a more boring beach could not be imagined. The water stayed the same depth for miles it seemed and you had to plough through a thick wall of sea-weed before the water cleared and you could swim. There were no waves and mostly no sound. A silent, still, smelly, seaweedy beach. My mum didn’t help matters. It was obvious that she was there under duress too. She was a surf beach girl and the waves enlivened her, made her hair wild and curly and her movements girlish. But the bay didn’t interest her all that much.
Rosebud reeked of retirement. No kids outside and if there ever were any, they all looked a bit strange; not like the usual kids that raced around in our neighbourhood. These looked lonely and needy and unkempt, like kids from a different era. Everyone else was old, but you never actually saw them, just imagined them all being old in their respective houses with their fruit and flowers and all of this added to the quiet, seriousness of the place. Even when the sun was shining, the stillness was disconcerting and not conducive to frivolity.
I often wondered why there was such sombreness connected to any dealings with my grandparents. I never heard them laugh, and seldom saw them smile. There was no lightness, no fast movements. They could only concede to give us a few minutes of their time in conversation, and then the silence would descend again. My dad made attempts at being jolly and would place a spring in his voice and keep the chat breezy. My grandparents answered well enough and took interest, but didn’t spring back and bounce off him like they should have done. Grandad and Grandma weren’t negative or nasty or disinterested, they were just...themselves and that happened to be contentedly serious.
My father talked about how noble his father’s generation was. People of few words, strong, stoic, dependable. I think my dad thought that ‘modern’, younger generations, his included, just weren’t made of the same stuff. He always listened with baited breath to any old world war 1 veterans and commented about how these people even sounded different, used different pronunciations and inflections. Dad had the older generation firmly up on a pedestal. Whereas I wanted an American ‘Waltons’ style grandparent; one that talked to you, tucked you into bed, indulged you, laughed with you, probably lived with you and had a special relationship that was enriching and meaningful. I wanted a grandparent that would give you sage advice just at the perfect moment and spin yarns about their childhood that brought the past alive. But that was not my experience and I felt cheated.
Probably many adults in Australia would have had that same experience, I know my husband did, also having emotionally distant grandparents. These were people who emerged from Georgian, war time frugality, who lived through the depression and had to do much girding of loins. All subsequent generations haven’t had it tough like that and I guess it would indeed change the perspective of a generation. The way I see it, is that the post war generation were allowed to have fun, laugh and enjoy their lives again. Eat real, not powdered eggs and the older adults who had lived through the suffering were rendered unable to reenter that mindset. War had made them more constrained, resilient perhaps, and aware of the reality of hardship.
My other grandparents (from Geelong) were a different lot altogether. They played instruments, sang, laughed, whistled, played with model train sets, owned a silly Hammond organ with a Calypso and Cha-Cha beats. Nanna collected Kewpie dolls and Poppa missed out on serving in the war because he worked in a critical area here and couldn’t be spared even though he was in the army reserves. Poppa built a speed boat and named it after my mum and could pick up any instrument and play it as if it were a natural extension of his body. My mum and her sister were both musically talented and my mum became a concert violinist. This was a very different family. These grandparents always embraced me in a big bear hug when we arrived and cried when we left after a visit. But we saw them much less frequently than the Rosebud grandparents.
I really preferred my mum’s batty, bright and emotive parents, I saw dad’s ones far more frequently. But I loved them all. The four of them are gone now and I think of them and remember them fondly. My parents both have reverberations of them that are becoming more pronounced in their old age. My parents are very different grandparents to our children than their parents were to me. My dad stands on the coffee table and sings Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald songs, reads books, cuddles and tells them stories of his boyhood. He espouses words of wisdom (as he sees it) to them in a sombre voice. He goes walking with them and asks about their lives. He helps whenever I need it and smiles and laughs a lot.
When I go to Rosebud now, I find it lovely. The bay is cleaner, but still so still, like a big blue swimming pool, serene and warm. I love the slightly pongy smell on the breeze and the little painted beach boxes. I love the fact that it is not Sorrento or Portsea or even Dromana.
My parents still own the house in Rosebud, but they rent it out. I know though, that if I walked in through the front door, that Grandad’s house would smell exactly how I remembered it. The floorboards steeped in peaches, roasts, roses, retirement, cigarettes the salty beachy air and the memories of my childhood.
