Housewife Superstar!: Advice (and Much More) from a Nonagenarian Domestic Goddess - Softcover

Wood, Danielle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865478899 ISBN 13: 9780865478893

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

Synopsis

The life, advice, and many marriages of a ninety-something Tasmanian domestic goddess, the real-life humor inspiration for television's Dame Edna


Marjorie Bligh is the ninety-five-year-old Martha Stewart you didn't know you were missing. Does your goldfish have constipation? Feed it Epsom salts. Have you run out of blush? Cut a beet in half and slap it on your cheeks. Are there possums in your ceiling? Housewife Superstar will tell you how to get them out. Famous for never wasting a thing, Marjorie crochets her bedspreads from plastic bags and used panty hose, and protects the plants in her garden with bras. In 1958, upon entering the food and craft contests at her town show, she won in seventy-eight categories; the next year she won in seventy-two but was denied the trophy by jealous rivals.
Once divorced and twice widowed, Marjorie is, according to her colossal fan Barry Humphries (of TV comedy Dame Edna fame), "no slouch in the matrimonial department." Her first husband, Cliff, was loving but turned brutal. Her second marriage, to preacher and schoolteacher Adrian, was punctuated by endless love notes, breakfasts in bed, and territorial fights with his adult daughters. She snagged her third husband, Eric―a bus driver―with promises of fruitcake and flirtatious glances in his rearview mirror. Marjorie designed two homes and a museum devoted to her creations, worked for half a century as a journalist and columnist, and raised two sons, all while building a devoted following. Danielle Wood's Housewife Superstar is an illuminating look at a treasure.

About this title

About the Author:

Danielle Wood was born in Tasmania in 1972. Her first novel, The Alphabet of Light and Dark, won the 2002 Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was short-listed for the 2004 Commonwealth Writer's Prize in the Best First Book category.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

I
 
Marjorie Pearsall
 
 
 
MARJORIE Pearsall was born on April 14 of 1917, the same year that John F. Kennedy, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Vera Lynn and Ella Fitzgerald came into the world. In that year cinema screens were filled with Theda Bara’s Cleopatra eyes and Charlie Chaplin’s moustached face, and gramophones were spinning out popular wartime songs like ‘Over There’ and ‘You’re in the Army Now’. In the skies over Europe the Red Baron shot down twenty-one Allied planes in the month of Marjorie’s birth. Though the conflict raging in Europe was far from her birthplace in rural Tasmania, two hundred miles from the southern coast of mainland Australia, Marjorie was not exempt from its impact. She was christened Marjorie Alfreda Willis Pearsall, her middle names a tribute to her uncles Alfred and William, who were away fighting on the battlefields of France. Of the two, only Alfred would return.
The township of Ross, where Marjorie was born, is a cluster of sandstone Georgian buildings on the edge of the Macquarie River, in the midst of the unprepossessing sheep country of the Tasmanian midlands. Today Highway 1 skirts the boundary of the historic township, and a short detour is required if you want to stop to hunt for antiques or admire the convict stonemasonry of Ross’s famous bridge. But when Marjorie was born both the highway and the railway still bisected the town, and Ross was yet to become comfortably picturesque; in 1917 the town’s past as a centre for the containment and deployment of convict labourers must not have seemed so distant. During Marjorie’s childhood the town may have possessed a quiet beauty, but it’s not hard to imagine the wide and sparsely populated streets as drab, particularly in the depths of a frosty winter.
Marjorie’s parents lived on Waterloo Street, which still marks the eastern border of the neatly gridded town. Her father, Oscar William Pearsall, was the ploughman at the nearby property ‘Bloomfield’, where he had met her mother, Emma Beatrice Martin, when she was employed in the homestead as a domestic. Both Oscar and Emma had firmly colonial roots: among Oscar’s forebears were settlers who arrived in the colony in 1804 with Lieutenant Governor David Collins’ founding party, while Emma’s grandfather Henry Nailer was a convict transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1844 for larceny.
Emma and Oscar tied the knot in St John’s Church of England, Ross, in August 1910; and their employers, the Bennetts, bought for them the house on Waterloo Street, on the understanding that the Pearsalls would in time repay the debt. Made from locally quarried sandstone, the building had four rooms: two bedrooms, a ‘front room’ and a large kitchen. It was a neat house, with an iron-laced veranda and tidy picket fence fronting the street. Out the back was a four-acre allotment, bordered in turn by farmland plains and scrub. The young couple didn’t have the luxury of a home to themselves: out of necessity, Emma’s brothers Alfred and Harry shared the small dwelling. In 1912 the household increased by one with the birth of Oscar and Emma’s first child, Doreen Elizabeth. Marjorie arrived five years later, followed in 1919 by Beatrice Ruby.
*   *   *
The first major event to shape Marjorie’s childhood was the death of her father, in 1920. He died of tuberculosis in a Hobart hospital, leaving Emma to provide for her three girls—aged eight, three and one—on a small government allowance. She was also responsible for her brother Harry, who had a mild disability that was said to be the result of ‘being dropped as a baby’.
My mother was a gentle, loving, kind woman with good principles and believed in discipline. She encouraged me to write, collect, be thrifty, to sew, knit, crochet, cook, and to work in the home and garden, and to honour God. I do miss her greatly, as a mother is the best friend anyone can have. I cannot remember my father, I was too young, but Mother loved this little verse – “My house is small, no mansion for a millionaire, but there is room for love, and there is room for friends, that’s all I care”.
My Mother
A million lovely memories are what she left to me,
A bumper book of pictures which I flick through and see,
Her smiling face throughout the years, the twinkle in her eye,
The fun that we always had as years were passing by,
Every Sunday was a special day with church and Sunday School,
Inviting some one into tea, but, always The Golden Rule,
The dining-room all warm and cosy, and garden gay and bright –
The hours beneath the fruit trees, the shadow and sunlight,
Oh! It was fun, how proud I am that I had such a mother,
Who cared about her family and also her dear brother.
As children, we were not allowed to express our feelings to Mother or our teacher, we were not allowed to answer back even if we were in the right, and if we dropped a log of wood on our foot, we couldn’t say “damn”, it was swearing. We had to be “seen and not heard”, and were not to speak when grown-ups were speaking. How times have changed! We were not allowed to answer the door when there was a knock and sex was never mentioned, but today they say it is essential and we all know the results. When we were asked to do a job, we did it immediately. Now it is “Wait a minute”. Discipline isn’t practised these days. Children tell their parents what they want to eat, wear, where they want to go, and are allowed to sit up late at night. They answer the telephone when you ring the parents, which wastes time and money for the caller. Both parents in many cases have to work to cater for their children’s expensive tastes, as they must have everything – from crazy looking bicycles to transistor radios. We received a present twice a year, but children today demand them anytime, and they frown if someone doesn’t give them an expensive gift. Nothing given in these times is appreciated as children receive too much, too often. I’ve rarely been given expensive gifts, and anyhow I would rather earn my own, then there is no repercussion when there is an argument. Today there are several cars to the one home, in many homes the diet consists of take-aways, pies, pasties, Coke and from a tin, and sport seems to have replaced the learning of the three R’s.
Emma, strict and loving, firm and fragile, was now the dominant figure in Marjorie’s life. She kept her girls primly dressed and socially isolated, restricting them from playing with other children after school and on weekends. Emma was frugal, inclined to illness and resistant to change. She regarded her new electricity supply (connected in 1927, according to Marjorie) with suspicion, and during the only holiday she took in her life—all the way to Hobart, eighty-five miles away—she became miserably homesick. Marjorie’s recollections paint her as elaborately superstitious, always on the lookout for omens of ill fortune:
New shoes weren’t allowed on the table; the lid off the teapot brought visitors; spilling sugar was joy, salt was sorrow, unless you threw some over your left shoulder; if a picture fell off a wall, a relative was going to die, and it was bad luck to hang a picture over a doorway. Hanging a calendar before New Year’s Day brought bad luck all year; walking under a ladder was bad luck; also passing someone on the stairs. Knives crossed, you were going to have an argument. The 13th, Friday and the colour green were also bad luck according to Mum. If she put a garment on inside out … she wouldn’t turn it the right way out, it would stop there until she undressed at night; and if she was going out, and got a few yards away from the front gate, then realised she had forgotten something she wouldn’t turn back to get it—bad luck if you did. Don’t put up an umbrella or bring wattle in the house or it brings bad luck; so [does] transplanting parsley … You must put a cross on your shoe with spittle on your finger if you saw a white horse. Eating in the lavatory was feeding the devil, and if your left ear was burning someone was saying something bad about you, the right ear was something good. An itchy hand meant you were going to receive money and if you turned your money over when there was a new moon it would double the amount.
Emma claimed that a banging back gate was the harbinger of her husband’s death. She said she heard the gate slam three times on the morning of the day he died in Hobart, but when she went outside to investigate no one was there.
Chest Cold (old remedy)
Moisten a square of brown paper in warm vinegar, sprinkle very thickly with black pepper, lay it on the chest, and bandage with flannel. Let it remain on several hours, as it will not raise a blister like mustard does.
Cough Stopper
My mother stopped our coughing at night, by roasting an onion before an open fire (leave skin on), turning it often. Then, with two forks, the centre was pulled out, topped with homemade butter and served.
Freckle Lotion
Equal parts honey, lemon juice and Eau de Cologne.
Following Oscar’s death the large garden at the rear of the Waterloo Street house became the key to the family’s survival. It contained a vegetable patch and orchard, as well as accommodation for various animals. The produce from the garden was not only enough for the household’s needs: there was a surplus that could be sold. Marjorie and her sisters worked hard. Their chores included picking and delivering buckets of fruit, and delivering butter as well as the rabbits, hares, kangaroos and wallabies that their Uncle Alf snared in the nearby bush. Wash day—an epic of bucket-carrying, boiling and scrubbing—was an all-day event.
The kitchen of the Waterloo Street home was the centre of activity. Here, a pine-topped table served for dining, ironing, mixing cakes, cutting out frocks, washing up; and for Emma’s assorted industries, including making jams, pickles, sauces, candles, bread, butter. The white flagstones of the kitchen floor were cleaned with pipeclay, and the pine dresser, kitchen table and toilet seat scrubbed with sandsoap. The silver, pots and pans were cleaned with ashes, and knives were cleaned by pushing their blades into the earth in the garden. Emma, Doreen and Marjorie spent evenings industriously: sewing clothes by hand, knitting stockings and embroidering.
Bleeding Cuts
Olden day method was to stop it bleeding with some white pepper put in cut.
Croup (old recipe)
One dessertspoonful methylated spirit, two dessertspoonfuls of vinegar, three dessertspoonfuls water. Saturate a strip of flannel in this and wrap around the throat, covering with a dry strip. Gives instant relief; or,
Wrap the child in a blanket, hold to a closed window, then throw the window up suddenly, and the spasm will be relieved; or, take the child, well wrapped up, for a car ride. Hold its head to a half open window and allow the night air to rush past its face (Dr R. M. Webster’s cure), or,
Put feet in a bag of cut-up onions, tie around the ankles and leave on feet all night in bed.
Pimples
Mix 3 tablespoons treacle with 2 teaspoons sulphur and take 1 teaspoon after each meal.
Sore (that won’t heal)
Get some young blue gum leaves, dip them in boiling water. When leaves are limp, put as hot as possible on the sore, wrap it up and when the leaves are dry, put another lot on. It heals in no time.
Warts Cure
Put banana skin on them, white side down, and leave for several days, or until they go away; or,
Warts disappear in 3 months if you rub them with castor oil before going to bed, or daub them with kerosene every day, or with a slice of garlic, or with 1 tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda dissolved in 2 tablespoons of water. Another hint is to melt a small piece of washing soda in vinegar and daub warts several times a day. I had them as a child and my mother told me to lick them on awakening and one morning they weren’t there.
Diphtheria
Light sulphur and let patient inhale the fumes. The fungus will shrink and die. Taken from a very old reliable book.
Marjorie writes that ‘there were no luxuries in our house’, yet this is not exactly true. In Emma’s household, the girls had all the basics as well as the means for the occasional treat. There were gifts for birthdays and at Christmas, although rarely at other times, and sweets were allowed on Fridays. Not all chores were unpaid—if the girls did a good day’s weeding or sowing, they were rewarded with sixpence to spend on cheesecakes or Chelsea buns at the bakery.
Sunday school and services at St John’s punctuated the family’s week, and the Sunday school anniversary and annual picnic marked out their year. Emma and her girls also attended anniversaries and special services at the local Methodist church, so ‘church, church and more church’ constituted the Pearsalls’ limited social life. Marjorie and her sisters each received a new dress (sewn by the local dressmaker) on the Sunday school anniversary, whereupon the old dress was let down and worn to school.
School in Marjorie’s time was writing on slates, chanting times tables and reciting the alphabet, backwards as well as forwards. For the girls there was also knitting, crocheting and learning to use a treadle sewing machine. Marjorie was eager to please, and she would take apples, pears and other fruits to school for her adored teacher, Miss Johnson. Little Marjorie was heartbroken when Miss Johnson rebuffed her bounty, telling her not to bring any more fruit—the cupboard was full.
KEROSENE SOAP No. 1
7 lbs. salt-free fat, 7 quarts water, 1 lb. caustic soda, ½ lb. resin, 2 small packets Lux, 2 small packets of washing powder, 2 tablespoons borax, ½ cup kerosene.
Put all ingredients into a kerosene tin, except kerosene, and bring to the boil, taking care it does not boil over. Stir until thick (about 1 hour). Add kerosene about 10 minutes before taking off fire. It will boil up quickly when kerosene is added, so be careful and stir well.
While Marjorie’s family sometimes struggled to make ends meet, others in the district suffered acute poverty. Marjorie recalls children walking quite a distance to school without shoes or boots, and another child who didn’t have bloomers to wear under her school dress. Door-to-door beggars were part of the social fabric and, although the Pearsalls received their own charity from the landed gentry (after Oscar’s death, food and clothing parcels came from the Bennetts of Bloomfield), Emma felt it was her station to give to the less fortunate. When one beggar came to the door asking for food, Emma told him she had nothing but the meat cooking in her pot. He said that would do, and she protested that she had nothing to wrap it in. That didn’t matter, he said, so she hooked the meat out with a carving fork and brought it to the door. He opened his flannel shirt and tucked the scalding-hot meat inside it against his skin, and went on his way.
A local man, Micky Clark, became something of a regular charity case at the Pearsall household. He had been living with his sister Sarah but, after she died, he began calling in to Emma’s for afternoon tea, then for tea. After a time he became bolder still, and would ask for soap and a towel on his arrival. Marjorie writes: ‘we found out that he had no money for food, wood or soap, because, besides drinking, he gave it to a priest to get Sarah out of Purgatory. At one stage he told Mum [that Sarah’s] legs were out, another time her arms, and so it went on.’
On one occasion Micky arrived to find Marjorie sitting on the front step knitting. She said that her mother wasn’t home, but he pushed past her into the house. In a rush o...

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0865478899
• ISBN 13: 9780865478893
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224