Equality and warm beer

Relatives I hadn't seen in years came over on Sunday for a barbecue. We sat around the table reminiscing - my cousin Maureen, her husband Tony, Maureen's brother Brian and his wife Lee, my cousin Alan and his wife Carmel, my parents, Auntie Florrie, and Bill and the kids.

Someone opened a cold beer, sparking memories of Uncle Clyde.

Clyde was a distant in-law.

``He would ask if you wanted a beer and always got the bottle from the cupboard under the sink,'' Tony said. ``The beer was always hot and years old.''

Clyde was a little man, an invalid with a stingy wife. He had something wrong with his neck and his head was always turned to the side.

Clyde used to ride his bike with his head like that, my cousin Maureen said.

``When he died, the undertakers straightened his head before they put him in the coffin,'' she said. ``Everyone said it didn't look like Clyde.''

Whenever I visited, Clyde would be sitting in the kitchen cutting up squares of newspaper. I thought that was what he did all day while his wife Maggie went out to work.

He used to delegate the square cutting to me when I visited and Maggie would thread them on a piece of string to hang on a nail in the outside loo.

Everyone I knew used toilet paper but Maggie said that was a waste of good money.

Uncle Perc also used to serve up hot beer, my Dad said.

Perc had been the gardener, and his wife Lorna the housekeeper and cook, at a mansion near Ripponlea. Lorna was a formidable woman, a housekeeper in the old style.

Perc was my grandmother's brother and they grew up at Ripponlea, where their mother was the housekeeper. She was also the caretaker at the estate during the wealthy owners' long overseas travels.

When Perc and Lorna retired, they had to find somewhere to live and moved to a tiny cottage in Mornington. It was a hovel with a dirt floor when they moved in, but it was all they could afford after a lifetime of living in servants' quarters in other people's mansions.

Whenever we visited at Mornington, the women would sit inside and Perc would take the men outside. He would stand a few logs of wood on their ends and the men would sit and yarn.

If I was quiet I could slip out to the back yard with them and sit on a log and listen.

Perc was a great storyteller. The men would drink their hot beer and rock with laughter at his yarns as they perched on their rocking lumps of wood.

All men were equal in Perc's eyes. Millionaires and paupers, he treated them all the same.

Once when he was working at the mansion the leader of the Liberal Party, Robert Menzies, came to dinner. His host sent word down to Lorna and Perc in the kitchen that ``Mr Menzies'', later Sir Robert Menzies, had admired Perc's roses.

Uncle Perc ignored the hint.

A second message came down to Lorna.

``Mr Menzies would like a bunch of roses for his wife,'' Lorna was told.

To which Uncle Perc replied: ``If Mr Menzies wants roses for his wife, tell him to pick his own bloody roses.''

Auntie Lorna once showed me her diary from those days. She had kept a diary all her life.

She was scared they would lose their jobs over the incident with Mr Menzies and the roses but Uncle Perc would not bend. He was a Labor man and would never kowtow to a Liberal.

But the way Perc told the story, it was a great joke. My dad laughed so much he had tears streaming down his face every time.

Soon after the roses' incident Uncle Perc changed jobs. He became greenkeeper at a nearby lawn bowls club, where he ruled like an autocrat.

No-one, no matter how wealthy, was allowed on the rinks unless Perc said so.

He was a skilled gardener so he got away with it, until he grew too old to do the work.

And Lorna was such a great cook that she was kept on at the mansion even after her husband quit, or was fired, I never knew which.

After they retired, Lorna received a small retainer to look after the wealthy family's Mornington holiday home, which was a few blocks from her small cottage.

She took me to the holiday home one day and allowed me to dust the grand piano in the drawing room and proudly showed me the grand furniture and enormous living rooms.

Lorna had the place to herself most days. I think she liked to be there, dusting beautiful things, even if they weren't hers.

Perc preferred his own fireside.