Aunty Laura

The Day of the First Prawn Cocktail

Back in the 1980s the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend had a last page feature titled something like, ‘My Sunday’… I wanted to write about our Sundays with Aunty Laura, but she wouldn’t let me…

“I don’t want publicity,” she said.

I’m glad she changed her mind when a community newspaper wanted to run an article about her turning 100. It’s the only photo I have of her as remember her.

Laura Heydon was an intelligent, witty, strong, independent woman who never maerried but was never lonely. People wh give of themslves never are. She once mentioned that she had a beau when she was a young teacher but he was killed in World War One.

Laura was a fabulous lunch companion and a formidable Scrabble opponent, even after her 100^th year. I don’t recall ever beating her. Her vocabulary was broad and impressive and she had lots of little Scrabble ‘tactics’. For example, she was never caught holding the ‘j’. There was always a rogue ‘o’ hovering around the board and a ‘jo’ is a Scottish sweet heart. My three-toed sloth, the ‘ai’, just didn’t cut it.

Often, we would play Scrabble after lunch out – some days we would just visit Laura and she would whip up an array of sandwiches on fresh white bread, crust off, with tasty fillings like tomato & capers and Vegemite & walnut.

For many years she played contract bridge, until she ran out of partners. She didn’t move into a retirement village until her centenary approached, and her birthday was celebrated at the Roseville Golf Club, where she had been a member since the 1940s.

She taught at Roseville Primary School for 18 years and lived within walking distance of the golf course for 23 years after her retirement in 1944.

Even in the nursing home, Laura was fighting fit and totally ‘with it’. We would pick her up for lunch, where she would kick off with a gin and tonic, share a bottle of wine and amuse us with stories, opinions and humour.

“You won’t believe the game they have for the other inmates in this place,” she said, after relocating to the retirement village. “They are given cards and buttons and someone calls out numbers. If that number is on your card, you cover it with your button and the first person to cover all their numbers shouts out ‘Bingo’ and wins a prize. Then everyone else applauds as if some iota of skill was involved!”

Laura lived life by the motto that ‘Life is too short for tepid food or tepid people’. And she’d often have a wee joke up her sleeve, always clean but clever…

A man was released from jail after serving a long sentence and it wasn’t easy assimilating back into the real world. Even remembering little things like which night was ‘bin night’…

One morning, there was a knock at the door. It was a council worker.

“Where’s your bin?” he asked.

“I bin in jail,” was the reply.

“No, no, no, no, no, where’s your wheelie bin?”

“I told you, I bin in jail!”

She also loved gardening and crosswords, and was an avid reader. When her eyesight started to go, she would order in big print books and read them with a magnifying glass. The book she was reading when she turned 100 was John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America. It documents Steinbeck’s 1960 road trip around the United States with his poodle, Charley, as his companion. Not a lot in common with the bingo players.

When our family took holidays at Cronulla, we would make the trip into the city and go over the bridge to visit Auntie Laura. When I was aged 7, she was aged 70. My mother would say before every visit…

“We really have to go you know, because it could be the last time…”

After all, Laura had chalked up her allocated Biblical three score years and ten and was on ‘borrowed time’, especially as she had to get by with only one kidney!

Laura first taught in Glen Innes and later on Sydney’s north shore – at schools in Crows Nest, Neutral Bay, Lindfield and Roseville. Interestingly, she also taught at a one-teacher school in Pallamallawa, east of Moree – the same school my Annie went for her ‘practice teaching’ some sixty years later. In Laura’s youth the only career paths for girls were teaching or nursing. Although I think she may have worked in a glove shop when she was asked to retire early from teaching for health reasons – that missing kidney. She would have been in her mid-50’s by then and well and truly past her use-by-date in the education department’s opinion!

I was either 11 or 12, in my first year at boarding school when Auntie Laura arranged to meet me for lunch. In the city. How could I say no?

After all, you know, it could be the last time…

We arranged the day and the time. The venue was the restaurant on the Seventh Floor of David Jones’ men’s store in Elizabeth Street, opposite Hyde Park. It was considered the poshest restaurant in town. Not that there were too many restaurants in 1966. There were a couple of Cahill’s restaurants that had exotic cuisine like Chicken Maryland and Carpetbag Steak on the menu… there were some Greek café establishments… and Chinatown.

But David Jones and The Australia Hotel had the city fine dining scene cornered. The David Jones one was so good it was known as The Great Restaurant since the 1930s. In 1954, a State Banquet was held there in honour of the visiting monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

The menu was extensive. There was a wine list. There was starch in the tablecloths, starch in the rich sauces and starch in the bow-tied, polished-shoed waiters. It was an occasion!

Laura caught the train to alight at St James station, across the road from DJ’s and I caught a bus bound for Circular Quay and hopped off at DJ’s. I didn’t know what to expect. We met on the corner of Elizabeth and Market Streets and took the lift to the restaurant. The lift came with a ‘driver’ so even that was special. I was dressed in my school suit and Laura looked smart. Old, but smart. Wearing something like a tailored twin set… clip on earrings… pearls… lipstick. She always wore lipstick. Even after notching up her century, she would apply her lippy at the end of a meal before heading to the street.

“Just putting on my lure,” she would say.

I guess the first lunch date with Laura was more out of duty than a desire for food or conversation. How soon she turned my attitude around. She was warm, wise, witty and unlike any old relative I had ever met. I always looked forward to seeing her.

I think she insisted I try the prawn cocktail at our first lunch. I’d never eaten prawns before. Fish and chips, salted and wrapped in newspaper, was the closest I had been to seafood. The next lunch was “try the oysters” … Wow. Even today it is hard to ignore the prawns and oysters on a menu and they are a ‘must’ for part of our Christmas lunch.

When Annie and I married, I introduced her to Auntie Laura and we went for lunch. When we lived in Lilyfield and Newport it became quite a regular event. It was always somewhere close to where she lived, like the Greengate Hotel in Killara or the Black Stump in Lindfield. Even though we always picked up the bill, Laura liked to have control of choosing the wine. She introduced us to Hardy’s Siegersdorf Riesling, a fine dry, fruity drop from South Australia.

Politically, Laura was conservative. She was a paid-up member of the Liberal Party. She once remarked, “I’d never vote for him, but I’d love to have Bob Hawke join us for lunch. He is such a loveable larrikin.”

When we lived in Newport, around 1992, we received a card from Laura in the post. Her handwriting was unmistakeable. We were late 30’s, Laura approaching 101. Inside the card was a cheque for a thousand dollars and a note saying, “Thank you for the wonderful lunches.”

No time for tepid food, no time for tepid people.

Lunches with Laura are some of Annie’s and my cherished memories.

It didn’t take a lot of soul-searching to find the name ‘Laura’ for our daughter.

And coincidentally, one of our Laura’s favourite entrees is a retro prawn cocktail. She fell in love with it at a Port Vila restaurant called l’Houstalet where the menu hasn’t changed in over forty years.

It is a pretty simple dish… crispy iceberg lettuce, cooked peeled prawns and a seafood sauce. For the sauce, tomato sauce, cream, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, salt and ground pepper and a dash of Tabasco.

Simple, but not tepid at all… Another Auntie Laura joke…

The circus came to town and a little boy was curious and went to the park where the Big Top was being erected. There he saw several elephants, tethered and grazing. One was standing on three legs. Whenever the fourth leg touched the ground, the elephant would recoil and give a little whimper. The pain was obvious and the little boy went to investigate. In the foot was a large thorn. The boy pulled it out, and the elephant was able to stand on four legs again.

Many years later, the same circus came to town. The little boy had grown into a teenager. He decided to go to the circus using the pocket money he had saved. He only had enough saved to pay for a seat in the bleacher seats, way, way up in the back row. He could see one empty seat down in the front row and looked down on it with envy.

The much-anticipated elephant act came into the main ring and one elephant looked up into the bleacher seats and left the ring. She climbed all the way up to where the teenage boy was sitting and let out a roar. She then slipped her trunk around the boy, carried him all the way back down the stairs and then repeatedly slammed his head into the cement.

It was a different elephant.