Autobiography of My Mother (5 page)

Nicky lived with his mother opposite the Catholic church. One night Nicky's pony got out and went across the road. He was a clever pony, as well as wicked. He opened the presbytery gate and ate the priest's garden. Everyone in town knew about that when it happened. Nicky was one of their favourite characters.

The park in North Yass was full of pine trees. We used to gather fallen pine cones and eat the sweet nuts out of them.

Down by the river was a garden belonging to John, the ‘Chinaman'. John supplied fresh vegetables for the town, bringing them around in a cart. When one of our cats had kittens, Mum did a deal with him.

‘Do you want a cat, John?' Mum asked innocently.

John was delighted; he loved cats. Mum handed him a basket, inside which she had packed the cat and her kittens.

John came back the next day, ecstatic. On the way home, he told us, the cat had had kittens. He had six cats now, instead of the one he thought he had. John was overwhelmed with happiness. In gratitude he brought a giant watermelon up to Rossi Street.

The pitiful collection of tin shanties where the Aborigines lived was down on the river, too. The Yass Aborigines, who were very tall and fine-featured, used to work around town. My grandmother had a gardener named Caesar, a very tall old man who tended her persimmon trees.

Mrs Nelson, another Aboriginal, was in demand by everyone to do washing. I remember my grandmother talking about Mrs Nelson's kitchen. ‘It is only a tin shanty,' Grandma used to say, ‘but Mrs Nelson has it so nice. She has a beautiful lace cloth over the table, she makes you a cup of tea and cooks you a cake as good as anyone's in town.'

The queen of the blacks was called Julia. She often appeared at our kitchen door dressed in an amazing array of cast-off finery from the whites; a brightly patterned silk coat, a hat bedecked with artificial roses, a feather boa.

Julia was immensely old, upright, regal and very black, though a rumour persisted round the town that her father had been a white man of God, a minister.

A great fuss was made when Julia paid us a visit. Afternoon tea would be served in the kitchen with one of the best cups and a slice of cake. Then for a silver coin – sixpence for children, a shilling for adults – Julia would tell fortunes. She told the most exciting fortunes, full of romantic promise and exotic places: ‘A tall, dark, handsome stranger will come, you will visit faraway lands.'

A couple of shy Aboriginal children sometimes accompanied Julia. She would proudly introduce them as her daughter's child or her son's son and ask if we had any old clothing for them. Julia must have had many grandchildren, because the same child rarely came with her twice.

Three miles out of town the river ran through a gorge, at the end of which it took a bend. This was called Hatton's Corner and fossils were found there, seashells millions of years old. An artist who did pastel sketches was a familiar town character who haunted Hatton's Corner.

Miles Franklin lived nearby at Brindabella. They used to talk about her and about her book
My Brilliant Career
a great deal when I was young, because Brindabella is so close to Yass.

I loved books. I could read before I was five. I liked books I could weep over; I pored over
The Little Mermaid
, the saddest story by Hans Christian Andersen. But
Thumbelina
was my favourite and I longed to find a tiny friend for myself.

The boys had the
Boys' Own Paper
, and my sister had copies of the
Girls' Own Annual
. We also had the works of Australian balladists such as ‘Banjo' Paterson in our bookshelf, as well as a good selection of Dickens. I read
David Copperfield
and
Oliver Twist
. I agonised over poor Oliver; the illustrations of the fierce Fagin in the condemned cell were the most terrible things in the world to me.

My father never read to us, but he recited, rehearsing for his theatricals. My mother sang us songs like, ‘I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now?', ‘I'm the Girl from Gay Paree', and ‘I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard'; music hall songs she had learned on their honeymoon.

A rhyme was dinned into us at night about a little boy who wouldn't say his prayers.

It worked. I was never brave enough not to say my prayers at night. Every hour through the night, the town clock chimed and could be heard everywhere. I never minded the clock chiming; I thought it was rather nice.

Suddenly things changed. The war had begun. At Grandma's, beautiful fruit cakes were sewn into hessian bags, to be sent to the boys at the front. We prayed every night that the war in Germany would stop; that God would end the war and look after the little children in France and Belgium. We had heard terrible stories about what happened to children in war. Then my father was crying, sobbing out loud over and over again. ‘He's dead – Frank. My brother's been killed!'

Frank was the golden boy of the Coen family. He'd had a promising career as a barrister before he enlisted and was keen to enter politics (he'd already been a Liberal candidate
for the Senate in the Federal election of 1914). On the ship going over to Egypt, he had written a letter home to Grandma saying that when the barber on board was cutting his hair he had carefully snipped a curl from his forehead and given it to him in an envelope to send home to his mother. The curl was enclosed with the letter.

In a letter from the trenches at Gallipoli, he thanked Grandma for two parcels which had just arrived. He was happy as a sand-boy, smoking the first of the cigarettes she'd sent, he wrote, and very pleased with the socks and scarf that were in the other parcel. It was four months since he had changed his socks or any of his clothes, he continued. Through his field glasses he could see Australian and Turkish dead lying side by side a few hundred yards away and a shrapnel shell had just burst near his dug-out, knocking earth on to the letter he was writing.

But Frank survived Gallipoli and was moved on to France. There, in July 1916, he was killed at Pozières. Nothing was the same for us in Rossi Street after that. Mum was pale and sad. Dad was soon dressed in khaki, the end of his moustache waxed and pointed. He was to vanish out of my life for the next few years.

Before he married Mum, Dad had been a lieutenant in a volunteer regiment. After the war started, following in his father's footsteps he was elected Mayor of Yass and as such led the official celebrations to welcome the ‘Kangaroos', a much-publicised recruiting march that went from Wagga Wagga to Sydney. But now Dad, too, was in the permanent army.

He failed to be passed for overseas service because of an eyesight problem and some heart trouble, and instead was stationed at Holsworthy, near Sydney, guarding German
internees or prisoners of war. Dad took charge of entertainment at the camp and organising theatricals. There was plenty of time for rehearsals, scenery painting and making costumes. Dad probably enjoyed himself thoroughly, producing the programs with the prisoners.

My mother was left alone in Yass with four children and Grandma, whom she still didn't like any better. Our big, empty playroom was full of women sitting at wheels, spinning raw fleece into skeins while others knitted up socks with the wool.

Christmas came. One gift each was all we had; no one could afford toys with a war going on. But even if there were no toys, there were still plenty of flowers. Mary Roche from Normanton asked me over to pick violets. Mary Roche was a novelist who had written a book, a love story called
Roses
, under the name of Mollie Bawn. Normanton was a huge, rambling house at the end of town, with endless violet beds.

‘Pick as many as you like and pick a bunch for me,' she said.

A whole afternoon with nothing to do except pick violets! I was in heaven.

Later, Mrs Grace, a round, comfortable-looking woman, said she would take me to play with her daughter Kathy, to stay with them out in the bush.

Ten miles in a buggy seemed to take forever. ‘Are we nearly there?' I kept asking. ‘Is this it?'

‘Not yet; soon,' I was told again and again. At last we turned into a gateway and drove up to the house. Kathy, who had rosy cheeks and long brown plaits, came running out to meet me.

‘Come and eat walnuts,' she said.

I followed her to a shed. We climbed a steep ladder into a loft where there were bags and bags of fresh walnuts.

‘Eat as many as you like,' Kathy smiled at me and I smiled back.

We ate until we could eat no more.

Kathy and I were to sleep together in a room at the end of a long verandah. It felt strange and unfamiliar. When Mrs Grace took the candle away, I missed my mother in the darkness. A terrible moaning and groaning started up.

‘Kathy, wake up! It's the ghost of Cuckoo Singh!' Perhaps he had escaped from the asylum and followed me. Frantically I shook the peacefully sleeping Kathy.

‘Don't be silly,' she said. ‘It's only the dingoes.' Kathy went back to sleep immediately but it was ages before I could close my eyes.

Next day, dingoes and Cuckoo Singh forgotten, I cheered up and fed a pet lamb from a bottle. Then a sheep was going to be killed, Kathy told me; obediently I trailed along after her. There was the poor sheep. A man held back its head with one hand, while his other held a knife at its throat.

I started to run home. The Graces picked me up in the buggy and took me back into town. I was very glad to be back inside the pisé walls of the house at Rossi Street and never went out to the Graces' again.

My mother was determined to leave Yass and get back to Sydney. Apart from the problem of Grandma, she hated the Yass climate and suffered from the snobbery of the town. The Catholics felt that the Protestants, particularly the Anglicans, looked down on them. Equally strong, though it didn't affect my mother, was the social discrimination between the various Protestant groups. The Wesleyans and Methodists were at the bottom of the ladder.

For the Catholics with whom my mother could have
socialised, card playing was the favourite activity, but my mother wouldn't play cards so she didn't fit in. No one in her family played cards; Mum said her father had made her promise never to do so.

The other snobbery was about people ‘in trade', as the shopkeepers were called. Graziers, doctors and lawyers headed the desirable list in Yass. People who worked in the bank were just acceptable and shop owners certainly less so.

My mother did have two women friends in Yass. Neither was a Catholic and both were very independent women. They were Mary Yeo (called Pol Yeo by her friends), and Kit English, the doctor's daughter. Mary Yeo was a local historian who also had an interest in archaeology and geology. She was supposedly the first person in Yass to learn typing and shorthand, and she opened a school in Rossi Street where she taught these. Kit English studied insects. A species of blowfly she discovered was named after her.

My mother enjoyed the company of both these women, I think, because she would have liked a freer, more adventurous life herself. I always remember her talking about the importance of the Married Women's Property Act. This was the Act that stopped a husband automatically taking any monies belonging to his wife. The injustice of her own mother having to hand over her wedding present money to Michael O'Dwyer, who spent it so rapidly, remained strongly in her mind.

All this time, too, my mother was sick. The malaise of which she complained to Doctor English was a stomach tumour that remained undiagnosed until 1918. Finally Mum went up to Sydney for an operation at Lewisham hospital. After this she became well again. But ill health added to her dissatisfaction with life in Yass.

The war was almost over, but Dad was still away with the army at Holsworthy. Mum couldn't stand being alone in the big house by herself any more. Mollie and King were at boarding school, Jack and I were the only company she had. She wanted to be near my father. So, without consulting anyone, she decided to leave Yass forever. She never came back to live there.

Mum took Jack to Sydney with her. I was left with Grandma. For the next few years I remained in the pisé house next to the store with the short, formidable figure in black and a collection of female relatives.

Grandma had a cockatoo that said, ‘A piece of toast, please.' Cocky had tea and toast for breakfast every morning, which won me immediately.

The House was full of women. There was Grandma, who thought she was Queen Victoria; her stumpy figure really did look like Victoria's. Her daughters, Trix, Ina and Evangelista had gone off to the convent, but Mollie and Kathleen, who had just left school, were still at The House and so were Grandma's two sisters Linda (Belinda) and Lizzie. There was also Annie who did all the work.

The aunts, as Linda and Lizzie were known, were short and not very good-looking. They were the most close-mouthed and secretive couple. Linda was a retired schoolmistress; with her knowing eye and beaky nose she reminded me of a cockatoo. Lizzie had lived with Grandma as her housekeeper since the death of my grandfather.

Mollie by this stage had admitted that she too intended to enter the convent. She was older than Trix, who was already a nun, and had wanted to enter for a long time, but wasn't brave enough to tell Grandma. Grandma was growing a bit
upset about all her daughters becoming nuns. Mollie had beautiful long brown hair, so long she could sit on it. I thought it was terrible that it would soon be cut off in the convent.

Mollie loved music and playing the piano. She used to sing to me:

It was so sad. I cried and cried.

‘Margaret,' Mollie used to chide, ‘I won't play for you any more because it makes you cry.'

‘But I like crying,' I assured her.

On the day she left, Mollie gave me a gold medal she had won for her music. It had an Irish harp on one side and an Irish wolfhound on the other.

In Mollie's bedroom was a portrait of a saintly lady, her hands joined in prayer, smiling sweetly against a stained glass window, a November lily, the symbol of purity, growing up beside her. I asked permission to copy this painting and the request was granted. I made a careful copy in pencil which was much admired by Grandma and the aunts. They even framed it.

‘You're quite the little artist,' they said.

I was convinced that this was what I wanted to be, an artist. I also copied or tried to copy a framed drawing of the nursery rhyme, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock', with the mouse running up the clock.

Grandma, Linda and Lizzie all wore wigs. Nobody told me they were wigs, but you would have had to be blind not
to spot that their hair wasn't their own. I don't know if they were bald or just had very fine hair; the three of them were redhaired, and redheads sometimes do go bald early. Grandma had a surprisingly youthful face and her wig was a rich red. She never wore a white ‘transformation'. At ninety-three her hair was still as brilliant as ever. Perhaps because she ran a business, Grandma was determined not to show her age. Auntie Lizzie had a little white through her wig, but Linda kept hers deep red until she was eighty.

Before she went away to boarding school, my sister Mollie had a terrible fight with a girl at the Yass school.

‘Your grandmother wears a wig,' the girl sang out in the playground.

Mollie was stung. She didn't even know what a wig was (they were always called ‘transformations' in front of us), but she knew she had been insulted.

‘She doesn't wear a wig,' Mollie said. ‘She does
not
wear a wig!'

‘Oh, yes, she does! Everybody knows that,' the girl retorted.

They were so secretive, these Victorians; I never saw a wig hanging up. They wore quite fetching mobcaps to bed, caps with lace edging and ribbon threaded through.

Grandma used to get up at half past five, summer and winter. She would go down to the icy outside bathroom wearing a towel draped over her head, hanging to her shoulders like a sheik's headdress, to have what I can only presume was a cold bath.

Curious though I was, I couldn't manage to catch her with the wig off. I used to cross-question Annie about it, but she would only go off into peals of silent laughter at the mention of Grandma's wig.

The aunts disliked each other. There was great jealousy
about rival plots in the garden. Lizzie grew chrysanthemums but Linda fancied delicate plants that wouldn't flower in the Yass climate. She had a passion for tiny rockery plants called geums. If Linda appeared in the garden while Lizzie was watering her chrysanthemums, the hose was accidentally on purpose turned on Linda and a shrill series of short screams ensued.

Linda picked on Lizzie. Linda picked on everyone. She was perpetually the reproving schoolmarm. Among other things, she didn't care for the cats that hung about under three large tanks behind the kitchen.

At the back of the store were bins of chaff and cattle feed. The grain was kept in a shed where I loved playing, climbing over hay piled twenty feet high.

Mice were a problem because they chewed through the bags of chaff to make their nests so Harry Smith, who was in charge of this side of the business, used to encourage stray cats. They came round the back of the house, where Annie surreptitiously fed them with scraps sneaked from the fowls' tin.

I loved cats. I begged Annie to give me a saucer of milk for them. ‘Don't let Linda catch you,' Annie warned me. But Linda saw me pouring the milk into an old saucer. Linda spoke very precisely, as if she were still addressing a class of school children.

‘Margaret, you are not allowed to feed the cats or give them milk. Your grandmother does not want to encourage cats,' she said. ‘We have to eat off that saucer.'

‘We'll never eat off this one,' I retorted.

I picked up the saucer and threw it against the brick wall at the side of the house, where it smashed instantly. It's a wonder I didn't throw it at Auntie Linda, I was so angry.

Annie's anxious face was peeking out the kitchen window. She was delighted but didn't dare show it.

‘Your grandmother shall hear of this,' Linda stormed off. Linda never liked me and I never liked Linda. I never heard anything from Grandma about the smashed saucer.

Grandma's brother Luke Trainor, who was general manager of the store, also lived at The House. There were always visitors such as Uncle Barney or Dad's other brother Joe, or various relatives of Grandma's. Like Mum, Uncle Luke's wife Kit couldn't stand Yass, or more likely Grandma, and lived in Sydney. Pauline, their daughter, who was devoted to her father, often came to stay at The House. Pauline and I would rush into each other's arms when she arrived; half an hour later we would have to be forcibly separated because we were fighting so violently.

Pauline had long, pale golden hair and glasses. She was supposed to be very religious and she did eventually become a nun.

Pauline came up with a new idea for self-denial. ‘If you have a piece of cake or some lollies,' she said, ‘you should plant it in the garden for the angels to eat.' This apparently kept them going. We fed the angels for a couple of days. The important thing was not to look back, Pauline told me, because angels didn't like to be seen.

I had just dutifully buried a piece of my cake under the Isabella grapevine down the back yard and gone off when something inspired me to return. I found the angel halfway through my cake; it was Pauline. In the course of the fight that followed, I knocked her glasses off, so I was the one who ended up in trouble.

Pauline and I adored the shop, and spent a lot of time in there on Sunday afternoons. The door from The House to
the shop was left open and we would disappear into the grocery department. We liked the biscuit section best. We knew we weren't allowed to eat them, but we couldn't resist the lure of their sweetness. We opened the different tins. Arnott's Iced VoVos were our favourites; we crept in, filled our pockets with biscuits, then sneaked out again.

One Sunday, Pauline felt daring. Having seen a tin of Iced VoVos on the top shelf, she climbed up a ladder to reach them. She was stretching out her hand to the tin when she dislodged the whole shelf. Tin after tin came down on her as she fell off the ladder in fright.

Uncle Luke was in the office catching up on some work and heard the clatter. He read us a lecture about stealing biscuits, then let us go. But it was the end of our Sunday afternoon expeditions into the shop.

Much later, I spent weekends in Sydney with Pauline and her mother at Waverley. Auntie Kit was full of complaints. She said Pauline was in the habit of bringing home old men whom she found in the street for a cup of tea. She would discover Pauline in the kitchen giving tea and biscuits to any old derelict because he reminded her of her father, who was still living in the country.

The last time I stayed a weekend with Pauline at Waverley, I woke up on the Saturday morning to find her opening all the drawers of a big cedar chest of drawers. I asked her what she was doing.

‘I pray every night that God will give me a baby brother or sister.' She was looking for a baby brother or sister in the chest of drawers.

Pauline became a nurse, then a nursing sister and eventually a nun. She ended up working in an old men's home, where she was very much beloved by the elderly
patients. They undoubtedly all reminded her of Daddy.

Mrs Reid, a friend of Annie's, gave me a kitten for a present. I was overjoyed, but I wasn't game enough to take it without asking Grandma first. My throat went dry as I tried to stammer out my request.

‘Yes,' came the gruff reply. Grandma had said yes! I could keep the kitten. And what a patient kitten it turned out to be. I dressed it in doll's clothes; its bed was a wooden box with minute sheets and blankets. I took the kitten to school to show Sister Dominic, who usually endured any sort of nonsense from me. Sister Dominic took one look at the kitten dressed in a doll's nightshirt and exploded.

‘Take that cat home immediately,' she ordered. Crestfallen, I obeyed.

I discovered I loved mice as well as cats. At the bottom of an old concrete tub, so deep I had to climb into it, I found a shivering, drenched mouse. I rescued it and installed it in a house, a box lined with cotton wool with a few holes for it to breathe through. The mouse soon recovered and its fur grew glossy. I thought I had a pet mouse for life, but three days later it gnawed its way out of the box and escaped. I was disgusted.

The box came from a thrilling room at the shop that held all kinds of delightful boxes; boxes for shirts and corsets, boxes filled with the empty spools from silk ribbons. Any sort of box you wanted could be found in that room. I was allowed free run of the box room, so I had a constant supply of beautiful boxes.

Grandma's shop, an old-fashioned country store, sold anything and everything. It had a millinery department with a milliner to make up women's hats, a men's department with men's clothes, a boots and shoes department, and a
drapery department, as well as the fully stocked grocery section.

The room above the shop that had been turned into a dormitory for the Coen boys when they were growing up was now full of disused stock; another place I liked investigating.

Pauline and I loved playing games among Harry West's bags of wheat and chaff in the shed at the back of the store. He was always yelling at us to get down, because he was frightened the bags might fall on us. The bags had a lovely smell of wheat.

There were still plenty of mice in the store, despite Harry's stray cats. This mice plague led to another mouse story (not as pleasant as the previous one).

I had been reading about making garments out of skin and I decided to make something out of mouse skins. I asked Harry to save me some mice. Harry gave me a few dead ones, which I proceeded to skin with some sort of sharp instrument – an awful job. I pinned the skins to a piece of wood, intending to cure them and make myself a pair of nice mouse-skin gloves.

About halfway through the third mouse, I suddenly felt sick; I couldn't go on with the skinning. I showed Annie the hapless victims and she was alarmed in case I caught some disease from handling mice. In the end she laughed and told me to bury the lot of them. I gave the mice a proper funeral. The mangled bodies were placed in the inevitable box from the box room lined with cotton wool, which I took down to the garden. I made a grave with flowers on it and said a few prayers over the box before I covered it with earth.

The grain shed also housed the phaeton, a horse-drawn carriage with seats facing each other. I felt very rich and proud, going for rides in the family phaeton.

My first sight of Canberra was from the phaeton. Grandma took a party of us – the aunts, Annie and me – to see how the new city was growing. The forty-odd-mile drive took us most of the morning. Canberra wasn't much – a few suburbs had been named – but even so, it was easy to get lost. We seemed to spend hours driving round Canberra in circles.

The House was fascinating. A narrow verandah with iron lace faced onto the street; the front door was just inside this verandah. Our friends could come into the house at any hour, for the front door was never locked, except when Annie placed the key inside at about twelve o'clock each night. The rest of the time, the key was in the door.