In his latest “Kindness” column, ANTONIO DI DIO explains the unspoken intricacies of the International Conspiracy of the Ladies!

IT was a hot and busy summer evening. Kids seemed to be buzzing in the street in a pre-Christmas swarm, bikes and legs everywhere; cricket on TV. 

Even mass would be interesting, all the good festive stuff and no brimstone. Then a strange knock at the door followed by Mrs D framed in the evening sun towering over us. Mum answered the door and told me to run off and help papa while she and Mrs D talked.

Mrs D’s perennial huge smile was missing. Usually her laugh was a watermelon of teeth that made you feel safe and happy. Her family stretched across what seemed to me the only family in the whole world that had more cousins than ours. 

Our cousins were all back in Italy and we were just the three of us now back in Australia, but Mrs D had a million Reggies and Alberts and Nevilles and Charlenes spread across the district, all, it seemed to me, running the place. When Macksville played Nambucca in three grades on a Sunday, God help any of her nephews who tackled their relative in front of her. They’d been around longer than mum and dad. Sixty thousand years longer, give or take.

I asked dad for the story. “Well,” he said fearfully, “it’s the ladies”. 

What, said I, is “the ladies”? 

“Well, remember how your uncle Rocco went off in 1936 to fight in the Spanish Civil War and your Aunty Rosa called him a big stupido?” 

Thirty years before I was born, papa but, yes, I follow you. It’s because he chose the wrong side? 

“No,” said dad, gently. “It’s because he went at all, against your aunty’s wishes.”

But papa! I’m confused here – didn’t nonno go to Abyssinia in 1936 to fight for the glory of Italy?

“Well, son, not exactly. He went to fight because the crops failed and there were 13 bambini and four more when his sister died and he needed the money.” 

What’s the difference I asked? 

“The difference is that nonna and all the ladies gave him permission to go. They did not want your Uncle Rocco to go to Spain. That’s why he was a big stupido.” 

But listen papa, I’m a man of 13 now and I reckon the Spanish Civil War was a more noble cause than the dumb colonial excursion nonno went on! 

“Yes, my son, it was, but the ladies knew something important. They knew that we were too poor to afford moral causes. It was no different to him buying a big car he could not afford. Rocco went off to be Hemingway and when he came back your aunty had bambini and no husband working. He was a big stupido.”

Okay, I said, but what about the ladies? Why is Mrs D at the front door talking to mamma? 

“Well, son,” he said, “I think that maybe Mrs D maybe needs your mama’s help for the Christmas, for all the bambini. Or maybe she’s come to give mamma help for our Christmas, I don’t understand these things. I’m not sure; she never tells me anything.” 

Why’s that papa? He was a little sheepish: “I think maybe I’m a big stupido as well. When your mamma and the ladies make the decisions about these things it’s better for us not to know anything because…” Because why, papa? 

“Because we always say everything wrong. The ladies, they know what to say.”

What do I know? Not much. But I know that every kid in the street seemed to have something nice to wake up to that Christmas, even if I failed yet again to secure a Dragons jumper. 

I know that everybody was happy. I know that for years Mrs D and mum would smile respectfully at each other at the shops without necessarily being bosom buddies and I know that even in the wonderful Aussie family I married into that between my three brothers-in-law and I we have the combined emotional intelligence of a bag of kitty litter. 

I know that my gigantic, loud, poor family back home suffered centuries of oppression and humiliation and responded with humour and grim will, aided by their beliefs and their spirit of place, connection to the land, and their families. And those families were, without exception, run by women. Blessed with a deep understanding of what bound and strengthened families, and using the most powerful weapons this world had ever known – shame, praise, guilt, belonging, love, a well-placed kick, a carefully guided kiss, an eyebrow that could kill a child at 50 paces and an inherited wisdom that kept their families safe in famine and war. Through bad times and worse. Rather similar to Mrs D’s people. 

I once asked mum: “How come you always rescue dad from his dumb ideas and then convince him your solution was his idea?” 

“Because I love him”, she’d say. “He can’t help being a big stupido.” Watching our little town over years it became apparent that a loosely associated cabal of mighty women ruled it, without anybody much ever noticing. I love that, but I love it even more that in our brave, newer world they don’t have to hide the fact. 

Mrs D is no longer with us but I’d be unsurprised if her spirit watches over us all, cajoling, haranguing, laughing. Thanks for being so nice to us all when we were kids. We need you back, but the women you left behind seem to be pretty awesome, too.

Antonio Di Dio is a busy GP in Canberra who longs to live three doors down from Kogarah Oval, specifically 1956-66 inclusive, although turning up to the Raiders every year has its moments. There are more of his “Kindness” columns at citynews.com.au