Autobiography of My Mother (32 page)

Our eight months of galleries were haunted by the tortured, wound-ridden figure of the martyr Saint Sebastian. From the moment we set foot in Naples, right through Italy and France, we saw him; sometimes only a few arrows were stuck through his sacred skin, other times blades pierced every inch of his anatomy. I thought when we arrived in England, we would escape the harried Sebastian. But no, the first painting we saw in the National Gallery showed Saint Sebastian larger than ever.

I wanted to explore the places my ancestors had come from so towards the end of our travels, we took a ship to Dublin. Tyrone Guthrie, the famous man of the theatre whom we met in London because he had produced
Fire on the Snow
for the BBC, recommended that we stay at Colonel FitzSimon's manor in the Wicklow hills outside Dublin.

Colonel FitzSimon treated us more like honoured visitors than paying guests. We had a week of complete rest, enjoying the quiet green countryside. I painted grey stone barns and the grey stone walls around the fields.

I could hardly believe I was finally in the ‘Emerald Isle'. The countryside was like a beautiful park, with none of the hoardings that were hoisted across Europe; the ruined abbeys and castles about the country made it look as though we had stepped back in time.

After a week at Colonel FitzSimon's we hired a car and set off for Kerry to find Mum's people, the O'Dwyers of Sneem. Sneem was actually two tiny villages, joined by an arched grey stone bridge. The word
sneem
means ‘a bridge across' in Gaelic. Sneem had no electricity or gas. A gaggle of geese lived on a patch of grass near the bridge. The local priest and a group of boys were leaning over the wall of the bridge and watching the water. We thought they were just idling,
but when we spoke to them, the priest told us they were watching a great salmon.

‘The boys will have him, the boys will have him,' he said with lilting repetition. The boys had their salmon and the priest caught a white sea trout for his breakfast.

We booked into a small hotel run by Mrs Fitzgerald and found a Mary Allsworth whose maiden name had been O'Dwyer; she and her brother Michael turned out to be my grandfather's second cousins.

Michael O'Dwyer showed us the house in which my grandfather was born. For some generations it had been the family house but now it was deserted, a low, grey stone farmhouse, very old and starting to crumble, with a granite floor like all the houses around Sneem and a central fireplace for warmth and cooking. Austere lives they led.

Michael O'Dwyer had his own farm; mostly stones and heather, with a few black Kerry cattle. Ireland was still a poor country. He invited us to afternoon tea. For the occasion he wore his best clothes and hat. Ceremoniously he prepared our afternoon tea, toast and bacon grilled over the open peat fire.

In return we invited him to dinner at Mrs Fitzgerald's. He impressed Doug with his infinite capacity for glassfuls of neat whiskey followed by porter. They seemed to have no visible effect on him. Sneem was surrounded by the blue hills of Kerry, dotted with old grey houses, which I painted. A few kilometres away on the coast was Kenmare where the Irish left in their thousands for the New World. Straight into sailing ships they went, paying £10 for passage money, their belongings wrapped in a handkerchief. Big handkerchiefs they must have been.

Strangely, the low-lying hills and little white villages of Kerry reminded me of the country between Bowning and
Cootamundra in New South Wales; I could see why the Irish fitted so easily into that part of Australia.

We spent a week in Kerry before heading north again through Limerick and Galway to look for the Coens in Tuam.

Tuam was only a day's drive from Kerry. At the crossroads in the centre of the town was a Celtic cross erected in the eleventh century. We arrived at about six o'clock in the evening, drove up the main street and parked outside a food shop. I had thought Tuam would be a small village, but it was quite a size, about as large as Goulburn. I had no idea where or how we were going to locate the Coens.

I sent Doug to ask at the hotel if anyone knew of any Coens living thereabouts while I walked along the main street for about a quarter of a mile, then turned off down a side street. None of the shops was open, but eventually I came across a chemist who was still trading. I went in and asked him if he knew any Coens. He paused for a moment and thought.

‘I used to have a Mary Coen work for me,' he answered. ‘She's married now to a man called Dempsey and lives in the High Street.'

This was the main street from which I had come so I retraced my steps and looked for the Dempseys' house number that the chemist had given me. We had parked our car outside her very house; Mrs Dempsey lived behind the food shop. I rang the doorbell.

The brown-haired woman who answered was Mary Dempsey née Coen. She could hardly speak for excitement when I explained who we were. There and then she invited us to dinner.

The Coens, she told us, actually lived a few miles outside Tuam in a village spelled ‘Cloonemore' but pronounced
more like ‘Curramore'. This was the place my father had written about in his honeymoon diary. After dinner Mary Dempsey drove us out to Cloonemore to meet a snowy-haired old man, my father's cousin, who had a farm there with a trout stream running through it.

The excitement at this reunion was even more intense. We were overwhelmed with Coens of all ages and sizes; some brown-haired, some red-haired. Sadly we could only spend one night with them, for we had to leave early the next morning to catch the boat to Glasgow.

Our trip abroad was nearly over. Going back to Ireland and meeting my family had been wonderful. I understood where I had come from and felt very close to Michael O'Dwyer and all those Coens. But I missed our raw new home, the space and light of Australia.

‘'Ow are you, mate?' Sitting on the back steps the day after we arrived back, the laconic pan man paused in mid-dash and flashed a smile at us. This was the best welcome I could have had; I knew I was really back in Australia.

Our feline family had grown. The black stray, christened Mrs Tiddles by the English couple who had rented the house in our absence, had produced kittens and they had kept us one, a tabby with an M-shaped marking on his forehead. In true British fashion, the couple called the kitten Monte. I affectionately dubbed him Monte Bello. Two Italian brothers who were building a house on the block of land next door were also fond of cats. One morning, Monte and I were inspecting the work in progress.

‘And how is Bella Vista?' they tenderly greeted Monte Bello.

More and more cats arrived. Mrs Tiddles and Monte Bello were joined by Mrs Tiddles's snow-white kitten
Snowball. Then there was the fragile Mink who arrived a kitten waif on the front doorstep, another stray, a battered old tom called Dusty who was followed by the one-eyed reprobate Black Jack and his two daughters, Wild and Tame. The Tonkinese Fang was a Paddington pedigree who retired to salubrious St Ives and had a playmate named Ginger. Ginger belonged to someone else but he loved Fang so desperately he deserted his own perfectly pleasant home for ours and refused ever to go back.

The last arrivals were a family of four, a mother and three kittens, wild to the point of being feral. Patiently we caught them in a possum trap borrowed from a neighbour and took them to be desexed. The vet shook his head doubtfully. We might tame the kittens, he said, never the mother. But having secured a home for her offspring, the mother cat quietly dropped dead under a bush in the garden.

The three matching kittens looked like shadows of each other. Spotty, Princess and Buffy knew a good thing when they were on it and they have succumbed without hesitation to the comforts of home. Daily they escort me around the garden, weaving about my feet so they almost trip me, delighted at being alive and being pets (and also at being fed).

Our L-shaped brick bungalow was cramped when we first moved in but we managed. If he was at home, Doug wrote in the bedroom and would lock himself in immediately after breakfast. I would scurry around frantically beforehand to get the room in order; after breakfast I had to move like lightning to beat him in. Once ensconced, he remained there, intermittently clacking on the typewriter until lunchtime, while I painted in the lounge room.

On Tuesday mornings I gave art lessons. Eight to ten
women crowded into the lounge room with their easels and drew for the morning. One pupil, Pat Betar, provided a series of mouth-watering cakes for morning tea. My pupils started trying to outdo each other's culinary skills. Tuesday mornings became more a cake class than a painting lesson. Pat Betar still makes me a wonderful Christmas pudding every year. I enjoyed those classes and made a lot of dear friends.

Things soon became much more spacious at St Ives. After a few years we built on a long room at the front of the house with large windows looking out on the garden. This became my studio. One half of it, at least; the other half served as a new lounge room. There was much more room for painting class now and, more importantly, my painting area could be left undisturbed. The rest of the household, as well as any visitors who arrived, were under strict instructions not to venture there. Doug or Meg could bring me a cup of tea but that was it.

Eventually Doug also had his own work room overlooking the garden, so we were safely separated in working hours. It was here many years later he finished his last book, a diary of the garden. He was quite sick with emphysema at the time – how sick we didn't realise – and found using the keys on the typewriter he'd had for years too much of an effort. Instead he wrote the garden diary by hand. But that is jumping ahead.

Living at St Ives meant we had fewer informal callers than in the
Bulletin
studio days. We relied on a smaller circle of close friends: Rosemary Dobson and her husband Alec Bolton who lived nearby at Gordon, Beatrice Davis, Ken Slessor,
solemn in his bow tie, with the slightest twinkle hidden in his pale blue eyes. We spent long, happy evenings with Nancy Keesing and her husband Mark Hertzberg. There was the occasional flying visit from the ever-handsome, ever-charming, ever-outrageous David Campbell.

Perhaps our most memorable dinner party was the John Betjeman night.

Norman Williams, the British Council representative in Australia who had become a friend, invited us to a reception for the English poet John Betjeman. Betjeman was supposed to be mad about insects, so I went down to the garden and dug out an extremely glossy, beautiful centipede as a present for him.

The centipede was put in a jar wrapped up in fancy paper. I tied a ribbon round the neck in a bow, like a proper present, and handed him the jar at the reception. Betjeman was delighted with his present. The size of the centipede astonished him; I think it quite terrified him.

Betjeman had a big wide smile and an effusive, warm personality. He won over everyone at the reception, including Doug, particularly since he had carefully read a few of Doug's works.

Going home in the car, Doug groaned. ‘God, what have I done?' he said.

‘What
have
you done?' I asked.

‘Invited Betjeman to dinner,' he replied.

I nearly groaned myself. Our house wasn't suited for entertaining on a grand scale.

‘Betjeman wants to meet R. D. FitzGerald and Ken Slessor,' Doug announced as if that settled it. There were to be no doubts about the dinner.

I had a week's grace. Nancy and Mark were coming;
about ten people in all. I started desperately casting my mind over menus. What on earth would I cook?

It was summer and I knew the night would be hot. By some saving grace, the meal suddenly came to me. Avocados filled with trout for the entree (avocados were still a rarity then), chicken in aspic for the main course, with a special potato salad recipe I had learned as a child in Yass, for which mashed potatoes are moulded and chilled until they can be sliced like a cake. For dessert, I filled a pawpaw with cut-up pineapple pieces and the pineapple halves with strawberries Romanoff.

The dessert evolved from two sources. The recipe for the strawberries came from a book called
The Garrulous Gourmet
by William Wallace Irwin, who was an American food writer in Paris in the 1940s. The
macédoine
of fruit was inspired by another book,
Those Rich and Great Ones
. This was written in the 1930s by the famous French chef Henri Charpentier. Henri cooked for the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and the Prince of Wales in both Paris and the south of France, before opening a restaurant in New York. The combination of the two recipes looked suitably tropical and exotic, I felt.

There was no way I could fit everyone around our small cedar table. Nancy lent me some extra chairs and small side tables so we sat around the room, each at our own table.

The night was hot, the cicadas were drumming, the food was set out and ready. The guests had arrived, all except the guest of honour. We waited and waited. Doubt drifted into the house with the night-sweet perfume of the purple buddleia. Betjeman wasn't coming, we suspected in our hearts.