ACT TWO
SCENE TEN: THE RADICALISM OF ITS TIME
Berry cemetery. There are two seashell-covered graves on stage. GEORGE MCDOWELL stands next to them, dressed in a dark suit with brown shoes and an elaborate mayoral chain.
EDITH, JANICE and FRED enter.
EDITH: George. This is my brother Frederick and his friend Miss Linnett.
JANICE: Janice.
EDITH: This is George McDowell who is the local mayor and who gave the eulogy at our fatherâs funeral.
GEORGE: Call me T. George. Everyone does.
FRED: Like T. rex.
GEORGE: Whatâs that?
FRED: Nothing. A dinosaur fossil. Please go on, George.
GEORGE: T. George.
Beat.
You will see they are in the Old Section. They shouldnât be there but there was nowhere else.
EDITH: No rationalist section.
GEORGE: No. And there werenât a lot of epitaphs that the mason could do. Your father chose âAt restâlifeâs journey oâerâ for your mother so we did that for your father too. He had wanted a longer statement but it wouldnât fit and the mason thought it might be controversial.
FRED: And we canât have that in the Berry cemetery.
GEORGE: I couldnât find an order of service to be held for relatives visiting a burial site so long after the burial.
EDITH: It never crossed my mind that there would be.
GEORGE: So I worked one up myself.
EDITH looks at JANICE.
JANICE: Letâs have a glass of wine before we begin.
JANICE goes to a picnic basket and pours wine for all of them.
GEORGE takes a small felt-covered box and places it next to the graves. He looks up at the sky.
GEORGE: We have assembled to bid a kind and solemn farewell to our dear friends and mother and father of Edith Alison Campbell Berry and Frederick David Campbell Berry.
Cecelia Gladys Thomas, a rationalist and reform organiser was born on 17 March 1880 at Albury, New South Wales. Her father was a sheriffâs officer and her mother was the great-granddaughter of Governor King. As a young woman she visited the prisons with her father. The family moved to Melbourne and she studied Charles Darwin, Thomas Paine and Edward Bellamy with a tutor at home. She attempted an elopement with the tutor at the age of fifteen which did not last more than a month or so âŠ
EDITH: What? [Laughing] Iâve never heard this. Did you know this?
FRED: [also suppressing laughter] No.
GEORGE: You are not worried by this information? You shouldnât be. It is a rather poetic act of passion, I wouldâve thought, for a young person. Romeo and Juliet.
EDITH: Depends on the age of the tutor.
FRED now laughs out loud.
GEORGE frowns but continues.
GEORGE: She had a fine contralto voice and she performed with the Metropolitan Lieder âŠ
He struggles.
EDITH & FRED: [in unison] Liedertafel.
GEORGE: She told me that to pay for her musical training she started a poultry farm at Deepdene, building the poultry sheds from scrap timber. By 1900 she was a poultry expert as well as a teacher of singing and voice production.
EDITH and FRED are still laughing and now JANICE joins them.
As you both remember, your mother refused to wear a wedding ring on the grounds that it symbolised servitude to a spo...