Read Online Autobiography of My Mother by Meg Stewart - Free Book Online

from silk ribbons. Any sort of box you wanted could be found in that room. I was allowed free run of the box room, so I had a constant supply of beautiful boxes.
    Grandma’s shop, an old-fashioned country store, sold anything and everything. It had a millinery department with a milliner to make up women’s hats, a men’s department with men’s clothes, a boots and shoes department, and adrapery department, as well as the fully stocked grocery section.
    The room above the shop that had been turned into a dormitory for the Coen boys when they were growing up was now full of disused stock; another place I liked investigating.
    Pauline and I loved playing games among Harry West’s bags of wheat and chaff in the shed at the back of the store. He was always yelling at us to get down, because he was frightened the bags might fall on us. The bags had a lovely smell of wheat.
    There were still plenty of mice in the store, despite Harry’s stray cats. This mice plague led to another mouse story (not as pleasant as the previous one).
    I had been reading about making garments out of skin and I decided to make something out of mouse skins. I asked Harry to save me some mice. Harry gave me a few dead ones, which I proceeded to skin with some sort of sharp instrument – an awful job. I pinned the skins to a piece of wood, intending to cure them and make myself a pair of nice mouse-skin gloves.
    About halfway through the third mouse, I suddenly felt sick; I couldn’t go on with the skinning. I showed Annie the hapless victims and she was alarmed in case I caught some disease from handling mice. In the end she laughed and told me to bury the lot of them. I gave the mice a proper funeral. The mangled bodies were placed in the inevitable box from the box room lined with cotton wool, which I took down to the garden. I made a grave with flowers on it and said a few prayers over the box before I covered it with earth.
    The grain shed also housed the phaeton, a horse-drawn carriage with seats facing each other. I felt very rich and proud, going for rides in the family phaeton.
    My first sight of Canberra was from the phaeton. Grandma took a party of us – the aunts, Annie and me – to see how the new city was growing. The forty-odd-mile drive took us most of the morning. Canberra wasn’t much – a few suburbs had been named – but even so, it was easy to get lost. We seemed to spend hours driving round Canberra in circles.

    The House was fascinating. A narrow verandah with iron lace faced onto the street; the front door was just inside this verandah. Our friends could come into the house at any hour, for the front door was never locked, except when Annie placed the key inside at about twelve o’clock each night. The rest of the time, the key was in the door.
    Through the front door was the hall, eight to ten feet wide, with a cedar hallstand. Grandma’s house was full of cedar furniture. The hallstand held walking sticks, Grandma’s ebony cane and men’s hats. These were mainly made of felt, though occasionally Dad or Uncle Luke wore a straw hat.
    The drawing room was off to the right of the hall. Past the drawing room door was a long cedar sofa covered with stiff, black horsehair. If visitors arrived at The House, instead of showing them into the drawing room, Annie would ask them to sit on the sofa while she fetched whomever they wanted to see. The hall was a kind of waiting room.
    Dad’s brother, Frank Coen, had been a champion rower for St John’s College at the University of Sydney, and his oars were hung up along the hall. Perched on top of the oars was a little doll, a mascot, ten inches high, dressed in a tartan skirt. It maddened me that I couldn’t have this doll, butFrank’s name was sacred and I knew there was no way I would ever be able to have it.
    The walls were painted white and there was linoleum covered with mats on the floor. Carpet wasn’t