Autobiography of My Mother (11 page)

My desk was another problem. It probably was untidy for not only did I decorate my books but I collected anything and everything: beetles, moths, lizards, alive and dead and one in a jar of methylated spirits. Much of my collection was housed in my desk.

One year we had a fancy dress parade for Reverend Mother's feast day. I made a costume by sewing the contents of my collection to my frock and went as ‘my desk'. I don't think the Mistress-General approved, but the girls gave ‘my desk' first prize. Mother Woodlock, who was then the Mistress-General, had to present the prize, which she did with barely concealed disdain. Years later at an old girls' reunion she had the grace to laugh about it, but she wasn't laughing at the time.

I collected things at home, too. At Randwick I had a collection of Hairy Moll caterpillars. They were the decorative, not the stinging kind of caterpillar and I could handle them easily. I divided a strip of the side garden into areas of grass about a foot square, put pegs in the ground and ran cotton around the pegs like fencing to make stockades, in which the caterpillars could live.

I had about twelve of them. The trouble was they used to wander off. I spent a lot of time looking for and recapturing caterpillars. A few liked being in the stockade, however; they were quite happy to stay put, eating grass.

They were very feminine-looking, and I named them all after actresses. Louise Lovely was especially pretty, with long grey hair (I called it fur) and red and blue spots. Mabel Normand and Lillian Gish were another pair. Because I was boarding, I saw them only at weekends. A pity, I felt, as I was very fond of them. It's fortunate, I guess, that the caterpillar collection didn't end up in my desk too.

Strange pets have always appealed to me, like my tortoise who was so small I had to cut up his worms for him, which wasn't very pleasant. He lived in my bedroom at Randwick. He used to get into the toe of my slipper at night to keep warm, and in the morning I would see him climbing out of the slipper and making his way across the room with a funny lopsided walk.

There was one other person at school who loved animals: the German countess. She was an old nun, too old to teach. She spent her days wandering around the grounds and in and out of the classrooms. She used to collect all the dead flies off the windowsills.

One winter, to our delight, the Countess was spied tenderly placing the dead flies on the stove. She was trying to warm them back to life – our own St Francis.

At about the time I won the fancy dress competition, I was very taken with those schoolgirls' stories in which they had midnight feasts. I was filled with a burning ambition to have my own midnight feast, but there was little chance of this at Kincoppal. Dormitory discipline was stringently kept.

I had a great friend at school called Eugenia Devlin. Genie was tall and blonde, very bright and independent. We put on a play,
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
, and Genie was the piper in a wonderful pied costume which I admired. Genie was also an avid reader. We both loved Dickens, unusual for schoolgirls. We liked the more schoolgirlish novels of Mary Grant Bruce, too; the country settings appealed to me. Together we pored over any novel with a school setting. Genie's bright blue eyes lit up wickedly as we read aloud every detail of midnight feasts. We decided to have our own nocturnal banquet.

The feast was planned for a Monday night. Genie was to bring the lollies, I was to bring the cakes. At Kings Cross on the way to school, I bought six assorted cakes in fancy shapes with different coloured icings.

When we arrived at school on Monday mornings, the beds were already made up. We just unpacked our suitcases, put our nightdresses and clean things away in the chest of drawers, then went downstairs. I unmade my bed, put the cakes in flatly under the sheets and blankets and carefully made the bed up on top of them.

After tea that night, I was told that the Mistress-General, Mother Woodlock, wanted to see me in her office. On the desk in front of her she had a plate of the heavy yellow cake, made with lard, that was served at school tea.

She looked at me across the plate of cake. ‘Don't you get enough to eat here?' she began.

I didn't know what she meant. It hadn't dawned on me that they could have found my cakes, because I had hidden them so well, I thought.

‘So you have to provide yourself with cake to eat in the night, do you?'

My heart sank. I had never reckoned on the nuns re-checking the beds in the mornings after the girls had put their things away. Mother Woodlock wanted to know who else was involved. They obviously hadn't discovered Genie's sweets. She kept on asking, but I wouldn't say. I just stood there, crying.

Mother Woodlock realised that her questioning wasn't achieving much. She pointed to the two slices of cake on the plate.

‘You have to eat this for supper every night because you don't get enough to eat at tea time,' she said.

I took one bite. The cake stuck in my throat and I couldn't get it down; I was choking with tears as well. Mother Woodlock sat there implacably as I slowly forced down mouthful after mouthful. About two-thirds was all I could eat.

‘Why did you do this?' Mother Woodlock pressed again.

I didn't answer. Mother Woodlock was an American. She must have known what a midnight feast was. I stared down at the remaining cake. She was still trying to find out who else was involved but I wasn't going to talk so, with a last wry lift of her eyebrows, she released me.

Desperate to warn Genie, I shot off. I had to tell her to get rid of the sweets, but I couldn't let them see me doing it. Somehow I managed to convey the vital message.

I ate two slices of that wretched cake every night for the rest of the week. By the end of the week, I was able to get it down quite quickly, although I always found the first mouthful hideous.

Besides Genie and Alice Bolger whom I had met on the first day, my other good friend at school was Amber Hackett, who also lived at Randwick. Small, blonde and dainty, Amber
arrived at school on Monday mornings in a chauffeur-driven white Rolls Royce. Her father was a wealthy bookmaker. Amber had a brother named Noel and, when I didn't go to Yass, the three of us spent the holidays together at Randwick. As I became more friendly with Amber, I was also driven home on Friday afternoons in the back of the Rolls. Very posh.

One Friday afternoon Amber's mother picked us both up and took us into town to go shopping at David Jones. In those days we didn't have modern methods of disposable sanitary protection. We had to use strips of ordinary towel, which we took home at the end of the week to wash out. The chauffeur went off on some business of his own while we were shopping and when we came back we discovered that Amber's beautiful leather overnight bag had disappeared from the car. Someone had stolen it.

Mrs Hackett, Amber and I couldn't stop laughing, because the thief was in for a surprise. The expensive little suitcase contained nothing but soiled towels.

I remember three English sisters at school, with clear blue eyes, blonde hair and the fairest, palest skin imaginable. They were not allowed to expose their skin to the sun and never appeared outside without gloves and hats lined with red veiling that hung down over their faces. For their entire time at school they were veiled like this, by their mother's special request. Their skin stayed flawless.

The Eton crop caused a sensation when it appeared at Kincoppal. This was the time of Colleen Moore in the Hollywood film
Flaming Youth
. Colleen Moore was tall and sparkling. She danced the Charleston and she wore her hair cut very short, just like a man's. Every teenager the world over had to see
Flaming Youth
or bust. Mum was away on a
holiday, Auntie Lizzie was looking after us. The film was showing at Randwick. Dared we ask Auntie Lizzie to take us?

We braved it and Auntie Lizzie agreed. She sat back grimly throughout the film, if not disapproving, obviously unimpressed. It was a very mild sort of picture, really, despite all the fuss. Lizzie said afterwards she could not for the life of her see what was so wonderful about it. We loved it.

A girl arrived at school with the new short haircut. The nuns were aghast. By eleven in the morning the girl had received the message that the Reverend Mother wanted to see her. Why had she cut her hair like this? Reverend Mother wanted to know. What had possessed her? The girl was stunned. She blurted out that her mother had cut her hair; she had had nothing to do with it. The nuns rang her mother who said that girls everywhere were cutting their hair short now. Reverend Mother digested this. The Eton crop could stay, it was decided, but it was a near thing.

‘She needs to watch over a tendency towards the grotesque which takes away from her a spirit of refinement,' was another comment on my school reports. About the same time as the midnight feast misadventure, I adopted a pseudonym. I fancied myself as a wit and wrote funny stories. I wanted to start a school newspaper. The nuns frowned on the idea, but I painstakingly made up a few copies at home and secretly distributed them.

‘The Grey Ape of Clarendon' was the name I used for this venture. Clarendon was the name of the flats in Botany Street; where the Grey Ape came from I don't know.

When Noel Hackett went to boarding school at Riverview, he wrote me some schoolboy love letters, more to keep face with the other boys, I suspected, than out of passion. Perhaps he was lonely.

Dutifully I answered his letters and included some of the Grey Ape's literary efforts to lighten them up. I also promised Noel a comic opera, but it was never written and I still have a letter from Noel saying how disappointed he was that the Grey Ape hadn't come to light with it.

Like all schoolgirls, I had crushes which ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. To look and love was enough, and all my lovers were equally unobtainable. There was Lord Byron, dark-haired, white-faced and passionate, every schoolgirl's ideal romantic hero. Rudolph Valentino, who deserves a chapter to himself, was my other great love. Women the world over were mad about him and we were no exception at Kincoppal.

One of the prefects, a clever, meek and mild girl who never put a foot wrong, became his most ardent devotee. She turned her bedroom at home into a shrine, lit two candles in front of his photographs and had fresh flowers arranged around it. If his name was mentioned, she went into a trance. ‘Oh, Rudi,' she would sigh, rolling ecstatic eyes.

In the school holidays, my sister Mollie and her best friend Lila Logan went to see Rudi in
The Sheik
at a cinema in town.
The Sheik
was the story of the divine Sheik Ahmed, who spirits a young English woman away to his desert tent. At first the young woman rejects the Sheik's passionate advances, but after an encounter with desert bandits she happily submits to his embraces.
The Sheik
won Lila immediately. She became another absolute Rudi devotee. She spent the entire holidays
at the cinema. The first session started at eleven in the morning. Lila would be there and stay until the last session ended at eleven at night.

The Sheik
was a silent movie. But before each session a man dressed as the Sheik came out on stage to entertain the audience.

‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar', he used to sing, and ‘Less Than The Dust', (two love poems by a woman who used the pseudonym Laurence Hope).

Lila lapped it up; we all did. It was our favourite song. While the boys and men professed only scorn for ‘the green dago' (so-called because his pale skin looked sallow and sallow skin can appear green), they still to a man grew side levers just like Rudi's.

The woman who lived in the flat above us at Randwick was named Joy. She was a healthy blonde with a beautiful complexion and long hair and she looked like a Venus by Rubens. She must have weighed about fifteen stone. Valentino's co-star in the sequel to
The Sheik
was the Austrian actress Vilma Bánky. She was as blonde as Joy, but there the resemblance stopped, for Vilma Bánky was as
slight as Joy was full of figure. Joy, however, saw herself as a facsimile of the Sheik's petite object of desire.

If the prefect at school had a shrine to Valentino, Joy had a temple. She made a pair of Turkish trousers and a little sequinned top (why the Sheik's wife should wear Turkish clothing was a mystery known only to Joy). She draped the lounge room like the inside of a tent, put cushions on the floor and bought incense.

After she had done the housework every day, Joy lit the incense, lay back on the cushions in her Turkish attire and read the Edith Maude Hull novels of
The Sheik
which she had bought. It was her idea of sheer bliss.