When I went to Melbourne and stayed with her as a fourteen year old girl on my first holiday alone, I knew that Aunty Nancy was notorious, but I didn't know what she had done. I think I imagined that a sexual scandal had forced her move to live in Melbourne long before I was born.
Nancy had recently retired from her job in a liquor store. She had pretensions about her position in the world, her intelligence and her superiority.She was lonely and enjoyed my company, but wouldn't admit to either of these things. She took me to visit her friends on a couple of evenings, and we sat and played cards and they served me cakes and themselves sherry.
It is only now, after I know about Nancy's past, that I am intrigued that all of these people we visited in their solid houses and apartments in Melbourne suburbs like Balwyn, were Europeans, migrants from after the war.They all had thick accents and some of them were undoubtedly, now that I recall, Jewish.
I don't know what her interests were, or what these friends had in common with her. Perhaps they had been her customers in the liquor store.She talked incessantly about the luxury cruise liner she had travelled on last year with her friend P-B-. This was 1973, and he was a minor television personality who was anathema to teenagers. He was a pathetic talentless man, but also effeminate, and I wished that Aunty Nancy would stop talking about him as if he was special and maybe even her boyfriend, because I didn't believe the last part and didn't care about the first part.
What was it like for her to have been forced to leave Perth, her home town, because she was notorious? And to begin living in Melbourne, a city swarming with Jews? Did she change her mind about them and accept her own Jewish heritage? It is hard to know because she never spoke of these matters, even after she returned to live in Perth in 1979.
And we laughed at one malapropism and then we couldn't stop. Laughed ourselves hysterical, and out of our inheritance. The honesty of our youth: she was a silly old duck, too full of herself, nothing in her for our sympathy to work. Who cares; we laughed once, and then the laughter took over, bubbling up in our bellies.A disgrace for the real adults. She wrote us out of her will.
If I could do it again, I probably would not have laughed as hard. Not for the money, but to show some mark of respect. These were not times when respect was my priority.
When I first published a story that contained her name, a man phoned me to suggest that perhaps she was less culpable as a fascist than I was expressing it.It was likely more a matter for her of love, or lust.
She had worked for Bullock before she joined the Post Office, and she 'kept company'with him from June 1940. From August 1940 she worked at the Mount Lawley Post Office. Before this, in April, she had left her husband of two years,Reginald Norman Moss, because he was having a love affair and he wouldn't keep her financially. It was claimed that he was a drinker.
She lived at these addresses:
64 Pearse Street Cottesloe (in 1942)
Manly Flats Flat One, 69 Terrace Drive, City. (She moved there on Saturday March 7, 1942.)
