Free Autobiography of My Mother by Meg Stewart Page B

when she started working for Grandma; I think this was at Grandma’s Randwick residence. Shortly afterwards she came to The House at Yass. She would have been in her early twenties when I first knew her. Annie did a tremendous amount, I don’t know how she got through it all. She was a maid of all work, or, rather, a slave. Linda and Lizzie were meant to help her, which meant that they flicked a feather duster around and arranged flowers. Annie did the real work.
    Every morning at six, she got up and lit the old black fuel stove in the kitchen. She put the big black kettles on to boil so she could make morning tea and she filled the fountain, the large drum with the small tap in front that kept hot water on the stove during the day. She took a cup of tea in to my grandmother before carrying a tray of cups and saucers round to the various other residents of The House. She didn’t just make a cup of tea; with it were very thin slices of bread and butter.
    Then she cooked breakfast, which also had to be carriedon trays from the kitchen along the verandah to the dining room. After breakfast the table had to be cleared and the washing up done.
    The bedrooms were next. Annie emptied the chamber pots into a bucket and filled the china water jugs that stood on the marble-topped stands.
    The rest of her day consisted of dusting and sweeping, bringing in the wood, cooking dinner in the middle of the day, washing up, running messages, making a cake for afternoon tea, going to the butcher’s, getting tea, washing up again. Visitors helped with the washing up and children ran messages for her.
    Every night, she scrubbed the wooden tables in the kitchen; once a week she whitewashed the hearth. Once a week, too, she did the ironing with flat irons kept on the stove.
    When she had washed up after tea, Annie went down the street to visit friends, but was back at The House by ten to make supper. Then she read or sewed until past midnight. She boasted that she never went to bed one day and got up the next like other people; she always went to bed on the same day as she got up.
    Annie referred to Grandma, the aunts or the rest of the family as ‘them’. She and I spent a deal of our time in the kitchen criticising ‘them’.
    We also gossiped about the town. Annie knew every piece of news or snippet of scandal around. She finished off every story with the injunction, ‘But don’t tell them ’.
    Despite the criticism, Annie was devoted to the family and in awe of most of ‘them’. She was particularly devoted to my grandmother and Kathleen; Kathleen used to say Annie had replaced their own little sister, Annie, who died ofdiphtheria. Annie didn’t like the aunts so much, because they tried to put her down.
    Annie had odd tastes in food. ‘I haven’t eaten a vegetable in my life,’ she used to say proudly. ‘Only tomatoes.’ This was true; she didn’t eat green vegetables, but she loved fruit of any kind. She ate no meat except chicken off the breast. Annie’s diet for nearly eighty years consisted of bread and butter, tea, cake and lollies, mainly chocolate. She was very healthy. Only once did she spend a day in bed, after she had been to the dentist to have all her teeth out. The next day she was up and back at work.
    Dad’s brother, Uncle Barney, a doctor, sometimes lived at The House. Barney had been lecturing in medicine at Sydney University and demonstrating anatomy to the students until a widowed lady became enamoured of him and pursued him voraciously, even going to his lectures. Eventually he gave in and their engagement was announced.
    His impending marriage, however, was too much for Barney; he had a nervous breakdown which left him mildly dotty, though not objectionable in any way. He spent a lot of time with the Aborigines at ‘the blacks’ camp’ where he was very popular. He sat around talking to the Aborigines all day, wrote out