The French connection
Bunny de Saint-Ferjeux has come late to aristocracy,
writes Peter Craven.
BUNNY is a lady who has been through some changes. She was born
Marjorie Jones in the shadow of the Depression and it was only at
school, when she screwed up her nose like one, that she was
rechristened Bunny.
Then she married a Jewish doctor and took his name, Upfal. She
taught at Richmond Girls’ High, with a ferocious Marxist principal,
Mrs Waten, who believed that working girls should be brought up as
ladies so they could look the ruling class in the eye. Later, she
taught English and French at Methodist Ladies College to Nicola
Roxon and Cate Blanchett, among others.
She had four sons by her first husband, Max. David studied
history, then architecture. Jonathan is a doctor who wrote a famous
handbook of drugs. Toby has a thriving trade in manufacturing doors
in California. Danny is a plumber who has judged the Silver Dagger
Award for crime fiction, and is also in love with the sport of
kings, horse racing.
Bunny’s second husband Jacques (educated at the famous French
military academy Saint Cyr and from a family that can trace itself
back to 1096), a sometime high-school French teacher, inherited the
family title a few years ago, so Bunny is now a Countess. The woman
who used to vote for the most left-wing candidates in sight is now
la Comtesse de Saint-Ferjeux and wonderfully amused by the
fact.
Bunny has hazel eyes and an old-style cultivated Australian
voice. She cooks in the Elizabeth David manner, speaks good French
(it helps with the relatives) and often seems to look at the world
languorously or ironically. She also runs a French translation
service with her husband.
The house in which she has lived for decades in Hawthorn Road,
Caulfield, is full of books and elegant furniture in various stages
of repair.
Just at the moment Bunny is contemplating writing a letter to
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd “about the state of democracy in
Caulfield”.
“The wretched local council wants to put a reception centre, in
the nearby park, together with a cafe and ‘car access’. And this
building looks a bit like Crown Casino. All sorts of magnificent
trees will be cut down and it is all totally unnecessary. It’s the
largest park in the area and in fact the only one between here and
St Kilda.”
Bunny is a woman no councillor should try to stare down. She is
descended from a first settler, one John Moss, who in 1837 had a
chunk of land in Flinders Street, now long lost. “He came to Hobart
first, on a ship called the Boadicea, and complained so much that
he was described as a troublemaker and an atheist. The family story
is that they originally lived in tents.”
She describes her own family as “poor but honest”. Her father
lost out in the Depression %26#151; “the mortgage ended up being
called in and we had to live with relatives in Brighton”.
School was Firbank, where Bunny learned her French.
She says she wasn’t especially alarmed by the war. “I remember
we had a bomb shelter made by my father which rapidly filled with
water and my mother said, ‘We’re as likely to be drowned as
anything else’.”
The real excitement came in 1948 at Melbourne University, where
Bunny studied English, history and French. She was taught by the
great Kathleen Fitzpatrick. “She was an inspiring and lucid woman,”
Bunny says. “She made the whole subject of history very luminous
and realistic and relevant to life.”
She breaks for a moment from this recollection and says, “This
is very ordinary, isn’t it? It’s not bungy jumping.” Such neglected
excitements remind her of going on a Ferris wheel at the Prater in
Vienna, clutching a baby. “I knew my best moment had come.”
At university she acted in the Marlowe Dramatic Society %26#151;
small roles such as the maid in The Seagull, or in the
chorus of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. She loved
the university experience.
“It was freedom time. I was never home. I left university late
at night and got the last tram or told my parents I wouldn’t be
coming home. Of course, it was all safe back then. There were
attendants and little boys dressed up as porters whom one
knew.”
She was married in 1951 to Max Upfal, a Jewish doctor who was an
interrogator of Japanese soldiers during World War II.
“It was the attraction of the opposite, of the unknown,” Bunny
says. “Max’s mother was a tough, courageous woman and she got them
out of Hitler’s Europe. Few of the rest of the family survived.
“I must say of my own family there was no horror that I was
marrying a Jew. My mother was Presbyterian and her family were very
strict people of the book. I think hers might have been the only
house in Brighton back then where you would never hear an
anti-Semitic remark.”
Teaching school was different then. “Those were the days when if
you had a degree they just put you in front of a class.”
Bunny fell into the hands of the great Mrs Waten, the wife of
the famous social realist writer, Judah Waten.
“She believed passionately in gloves and stockings and hats for
the Greek girls of Richmond Girls High. She really wanted to run a
proper school. Richmond had started out as a kind of
domestic-science school but she ensured that a girl who wanted to
finish school could do so.
“She used to tell the story apropos of education of what her
father had taught her: ‘If need be my sons can dig ditches, but no
daughter of mine will ever be anybody’s servant’.”
When her first marriage ended, Bunny decided she needed a
permanent full-time job, so she saw Mr Woodgate, the principal of
MLC.
I asked Bunny if she hadn’t, in marrying her second husband
Jacques, headed for European exoticism again. “Well, you know, one
does the same thing with better results,” she says.
She likes her French in-laws. The military and Catholic code
they uphold, their sense of ceremony that has outlasted worldly
wealth.
She talks of Tante Beatrix, whom she and Jacques visited. “She
lived in the most beautiful home for retired nuns right in the
centre of Paris.” Soeur Marie-Jesus had at one point been the head
of the Presentation Sisters in France. And Bunny is clearly tickled
by the warmth of the reception she received from these French
toffs.
“The family really bit the bullet with Jacques marrying someone
of Protestant background who was also older than him. They’re very
pleasant company, not very intellectual. There’s no longer any
central chateau. They lost all the money they once had.
“But it’s like another world. We were there at a wedding a
couple of years ago. There was a candle in every window of the
bride’s chateau.
“They have always had lovely parties. Because Jacques is the
Count and is now older and the head of the family, I have to sit at
the host’s right hand when I’m with them.”
It seems a fine thing as well as a funny one that Bunny, in her
Indian summer, has had her heart gladdened and her life enchanted
by these French aristocrats.
This woman, whom I first heard sitting at her own nightly dinner
table, resting from the Greek girls and the breakdown of a stormy
marriage, as if there were always other things that mattered: good
food, good wine, good books. And the charming, whimsical talk that
apprehended it all and kept each thing in its place. I can’t think
of a better person to end up as a countess.
