The Newspaper of Claremont Street: Elizabeth Jolley

“When people open their doors for their houses to be cleaned, they open themselves.”

The Newspaper or “weekly” is the nickname for a cleaning lady who works in so many houses in Claremont Street that she knows all of the gossip.  Apart from the lower-income flats, Weekly has worked in all the houses at some time or another. She’s a fixture, and like most fixtures, her habits and private life are all taken for granted by those who employ her.

When she went into the houses she saw what people were trying to do with their lives and she saw too what they did not try to do. Some things simply happened to them. The mess made by living did not bother her. People’s efforts to clear up their mess were touching, their dead flowers drooping in stained, treasured vases and crumbs left in the bread tin made her shake her head and feel sad, not because she had to throw away the flowers and clean out the tin. It was the picking of the flowers in the first place and the buying of the bread and bringing it home to eat, they were the symbols of their efforts to live. Weekly made great efforts herself and was not unaware of the efforts of others. She noticed everything there was to notice about people and their houses; she could not help it.

Weekly is a creature of habit, and she’s spent a lifetime of joyless toil cleaning houses while secretly gathering a nestegg. She dreams of owning a place in the country, a place of her own, with fruit trees, and that dream is so strong, it actually pains her to spend any money. She takes cast off clothes from her employers, lives rent-free in a sparsely furnished room exchange for cleaning services, and eats the most frugal diet possible. But it’s in cleaning, that “her mind found a freedom that might be quite unknown in any other kind of work.” 

Weekly cleans one house after another, and while she knows “which wives didn’t want their husbands to come home for lunch; she heard sons snarling at their mothers and ungrateful daughters banging bedroom doors,” she only carries the benign gossip and “never spoke of the things that really mattered.” She knows everything there is to know about the people on Claremont Street. She sees people age, become ill, marriages go wrong, children misbehave and disappoint their parents. She’s seen all sorts of domestic tragedies over the last thirty years. Nothing surprises her, and nothing will stop her cleaning. She’s a steamroller of domestic industry:

She was used to people being in bath towels or in bed at all hours of the day. The intimate things which she could not help perceiving did not interest her much. If at the time of cleaning, various sexual or alcoholic activities of the householders were in the way, she simply cleaned round them. She was acquainted with, and quite unmoved by, their experiments with drugs and had tidied up on one occasion, quite calmly after a murder. 

On one level, Weekly would seem to be the low person on the Claremont Street totem pole. The shop girls make fun of her, and to the people who employ her, Weekly isn’t so much a person as a machine. “Everyone tried to get as much work from her as possible,” and yet her middle-class employers don’t want to be seen ‘less generous’ than the others on the street, so they care about the opinions of their neighbours, and treat Weekly accordingly.

Elizabeth Jolley’s novella, The Newspaper of Claremont Street, at 116 pages, is tightly written and peppered with flashes from Weekly’s past. Off-kilter memories laced with dark comedy pop up unbidden, and Weekly pushes them back down. She’d rather not think the death of her mother (“she simply refused to understand that motor traffic could not always stop for the pedestrian“) or about Victor, the brother she loved so much that she would have slaved for him. Gradually we learn, well sort of, what happened to Victor and why Weekly is ashamed of her role in his betrayal.

Weekly’s relationship with Victor goes a long way to explaining her reluctant relationship with Nastasya, a Russian emigré who dreams of the glories of her pampered past and demands that Weekly step up to fill the empty roles of servant, caretaker, banker, nurse, and general dogsbody. It’s through the tortured relationship between Weekly and Nastasya we see how people fall into familiar relationship grooves, and also how those who want to be pampered need someone to slave.  With Nastasya hanging around Weekly’s neck, will she still move to the country?

There were a few passages which described the raw countryside, and show the magnificence of Australia:

Black cockatoos left the tree tops in twos and threes and then in their numbers and came swirling in ever widening circles, screaming and calling in their flight. The shallow ravine of trees and the endless stretches of trees and scrub on either side of the piece of land seemed full of these birds. Their heads were round and determined and black fringes edged their wings and, as they flew round and through the trees, they brought to the place a quality of strangeness, of something unknown, as if they had some other knowledge, something to do with another kind of life.

There’s a macabre twist to this tale that is signature Elizabeth Jolley. I tried reading The Newspaper of Claremont  a few years ago, but gave up after a few pages, so thanks to Gummie for encouraging me to try this novel again.

My favourite novel from this author is Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, a truly hilarious tale.

Note: unwanted kittens are drowned in one passage .