More words and memories

 

My dear friend Denise, who lives in delightful Lennox Head, was inspired to share her favourite multi-use word with us all. It’s “up”. Here is her list plus a few extras …

You can go up, lift up (a box), lift up (your eyes), look up (a word), look up (to the sky), hold up (as in robbery), hold up (as in hold up as an example), check up (on something), (have a) check up, set up (a system), stand up (to someone), shore up (support), tie up (shoe laces), cheer up, fold up, dry up, shut up, bring up (in conversation), bring up (your children) and bring up (vomit).

Let me know your favourite multi-use words so we can all share.

And now to memories, specifically memories of holidays.

Each time I hear a news report about Myanmar, I flash back in my mind to the single night I spent in Burma, as it was then, when I was 16. I’ve mentioned before that my parents took my brother and I on a major holiday abroad at that time. Burma was our overnight stop on the way back to Sydney. We stayed in an hotel which I think had been some European’s palatial mansion. It had circular steps to the upper floors and ceiling fans, which I called punkah fans, lazily rotating. After dinner, I took a stroll outside in the warm dark evening toward the low wall which bounded the property. I heard a low murmur and to my surprise, the adjoining wall which bounded the property next door, was being used by a dozen or so Buddhist monks who were just sitting there and quietly talking. I was told later that the next door property was the Buddhist equivalent of a monastery – a lamasery perhaps. It was quite spooky.

Another clear memory was an evening in Rome when our parents took us to the Hostaria dell’Orso. Housed in a 14^th Century building it had a bar on the ground floor, magnificent restaurant on the next floor up and a nightclub on the third floor. When I checked recently, I found it is still operating just as it had been all those decades ago and for some hundreds of years before that.

Also on that trip, history really smacked me in the face when we visited the site of Mycenae in Greece. Because I was an ancient history nut, my parents had let me choose where outside Athens we would go in our few days in Greece. Mycenae, in Greek legend, was the home of King Agamemnon who would initiate the decade long Trojan War to capture the beauteous Helen (who had run off with Paris of Troy) and return her to her husband, Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. The site of Mycenae had been partly excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, who also excavated at Troy. He found, among many other objects, a beautiful golden mask which is called (incorrectly it is now thought), the mask of Agamemnon.

On the day we visited there were no other tourists; this was the early ‘60s and mass tourism was in the future. The guide who had accompanied us to Mycenae from Athens introduced us to a very, very old man who told us, through translation, that he had been a six-year-old child when Schliemann dug at Mycenae. His father was one of Schliemann’s helpers and the old man remembered meeting him. What a thrill! It was like shaking the hand of history.

Holidays in Australia were much more modest. The very earliest, not remembered by my brother and I but told to us by our parents, was a holiday in Bondi when we were living in Paramatta. From this holiday came the Great Tick Talking Point. Apparently I had a tick somewhere on my scalp. How my parents knew this is a mystery but when the tick was removed (by whom unknown), they kept it in an old Benson and Hedges tin and used to show it to their friends. Imagine! They’d been through the Blitz (my mother) and years of fighting with the British Army (my father) and experienced all the other depredations of war but they found a burrowing insect from their daughter's scalp to be marvellous.

The first holiday I remember was Jervis Bay. In what was then and still is a naval base, there was a large building surplus to the navy’s requirements which was turned into a holiday boarding house and was where the English Jews went for holidays. There were white beaches and green lawns and my brother managed to break his arm on one of these holidays which of course makes it memorable. A few years ago, the spouse and I were on a south coast driving holiday and took advantage of the navy’s generosity in allowing visitors to the base, provided they stayed in their cars. I was absolutely overcome when we drove around a bend and there was the building and the huge green sward in front, just as I’d remembered it.

As a child I also went to the Blue Mountains and stayed in the Hydro Majestic. Majestic is just how I remember it, with what seemed to me to be huge rooms with apparently outsized furniture. Returning in my late teenage, I realised the rooms and the furniture were all conventionally sized; it was just that I must have been very small.

Finally, my family, and many other English and Australian Jewish families, settled for a decade or so to have summer holidays at Surfers Paradise. Quite small and not well developed, Surfers was a cosy holiday destination with only one restaurant I recall: the Zuider Zee. We stayed in a very modest boarding house close to the sand and I recall my brother and cousin running around in the sun while I sat under a tree with my book. In teenage, however, I eventually ventured to the sand and have pictures to prove it. This was at the very beginning of “rock ‘n roll” and I remember a broadcast system which blasted Rock around the Clock across the beach.

Now, of course, I live in a holiday. Maybe I should book a week in Balmain!

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Groucho Marx, when excluded from a beach club on racial (read antisemitic) grounds: “Since my daughter is only half Jewish, could she go in the water up to her knees?”