Madeleine (8 page)

It wasn't all darkness in these teenage years. Des Moody's mother, M'Liss took Madeleine under her wing during the holidays at Cessnock, including her in picnics and other activities in the town. Sometimes, on a drive into the country, Des and Madeleine helped M'Liss collect cow manure for the garden and sat in the dicky-seat at the back of the Hillman, their hair streaming in the wind, on their way back to town. Sometimes they drove from Cessnock to nearby Lochinvar to see Madeleine's grandfather Frederick de Porte St John, who was running the town's Anglican church. After one holiday, Madeleine brought home a present for pregnant Val. Deep inside layers of tissue paper was a handmade, embroidered satin dressing-gown for the unborn baby. M'Liss had made it for Val, whom she had never met.
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During term, M'Liss, turned out in hat and gloves, met the girls in Sydney and treated them to a movie matinee and afternoon tea at the seventh floor restaurant at David Jones. They walked out of the lift of the department store to be met by two women dressed in black who directed them to their table overlooking Hyde Park.

Boarders were permitted to catch the tram to the city, to attend dental or hair appointments or to go to David Jones or Farmers—wherever their parents had an account—to replenish their uniforms. On some afternoons, Madeleine and Des walked over to Denman Chambers in Philip Street to visit Ted. Des felt warmly towards Ted but noted that ‘he did not pay much attention to the girls'.
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When school started again in 1956, Val offered her stepdaughters a choice—stay home and go to Queenwood School for Girls or continue at St Catherine's. Colette came home; Madeleine continued to board, but she began to resent Colette's improved relationship with Ted and Val. They ‘had this thing in the house as she started as a day girl and that made a huge difference because she was the sole daughter of the house'.
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Colette was an astute child. She saw what happened when Madeleine stood up to Ted and incurred his wrath, and she decided there was no more room for ‘screaming and yelling and hair tearing' at Number 9.
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Oliver St John was born on 31 July 1956, after a difficult pregnancy. Ted was thrilled to have a boy and gave him the St John family name of Oliver. In spite of herself and her mistrust of Val, Madeleine joined in the excitement.

Baby Oliver made his presence felt, screaming constantly. ‘I wish I had a nickel for every time I babysat that child and he screamed,' Madeleine said later.
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But both sisters loved the little boy. Colette shared her bedroom with him and changed his nappy in the mornings.
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However, Oliver drove Ted and Val to the edge. He was hard to settle at night and often woke at 3 or 4 a.m. and stayed awake.
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By the time he was two, his hyperactivity and disturbed patterns of behaviour indicated far deeper problems.

Madeleine was fond of Oliver, but years later she could see her half-brother only in terms of the father she so denigrated. In 2004, she said that Ted had seen Oliver ‘as a contribution to the family line and God took note of this and made sure that Oliver was not going to contribute anything whatsoever to the aggrandisement of my father's reputation or the family. Nice work, God.'
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Madeleine was doing well at school and wanted to matriculate well enough to get a Commonwealth scholarship and go to university. She decided to leave St Catherine's and move to Queenwood to improve her chances. She later described Violet Medway, the headmistress, as:

One of the classic, monumental girls' schools headmistresses. They were a brood, a breed apart, the headmistresses of the girls' schools of Sydney. They were the ones who devoted their lives to female education. None of them was married. The idea that you could be married and be a headmistress [was never entertained]. They were magnificent and Ms Medway was the greatest of them all.
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Madeleine saw herself as a painter and pianist, but Ms Medway peered down at Madeleine at one point during her entrance interview in 1957 and announced: ‘You know, dear, I think you might write.'
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The school was small and had superb views from the classrooms. In the summer, the girls filed down to the baths at the southern end of the beach at Balmoral or sauntered past the rotunda and across the little bridge to the tiny Rocky Point Island at the northern end.

Many of the girls had been at Queenwood since kindergarten. They socialised with each other at weekends, and their parents were friends. Madeleine was the new girl, from a different suburb. She was never disliked, but she was a little different with her red hair and pale skin and her bookish ways. In her first year at the school, she was an enthusiastic helper in the library, and she co-authored the notes for the end-of-year school magazine, listing some interesting additions to the library as
Gone
with the Wind
and
The Guns of Navarone.
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She was always writing, and her work was published in the magazine. In 1957, she wrote a piece about Mrs Thring's Azalea Garden—a landmark in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. ‘Azaleas! And even more azaleas! A profusion, a richness, an astronomical figure of azaleas!'
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A year later, competition for publication in the magazine was strong and Madeleine was one of only two students from her class whose work was chosen. Her piece ‘Shells' was highly imaginative and showed a love of wordplay. ‘So here I am, lying almost dazed on a beach with hair flying ragged-flaggedly, sand and heat mixing up with one another and enclosing me in the sea symphony which has spread over me from my finger-tips up…'
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If Madeleine was ‘desperately plain' in the eyes of some of her classmates,
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her view of them was equally blunt:

The main gang was gorgeous and if you weren't gorgeous you didn't belong to that gang and I was not gorgeous so I didn't belong. It was a small class with the gorgeous gang and the others, and so the others took me in. There was a thin one and a fat one and another thin one and me. One of the thin ones was Armenian, the other thin one was the daughter of refugees born in Australia, and the fat one was the daughter of Plymouth Brethren.
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Sue Manion, like Madeleine, started at Queenwood in her final years and the two were thrown together, partly because they were the outsiders and they studied advanced English. ‘She was just different,' Sue remembered. ‘She didn't try to be trendy like the rest of us did. She could have been beautiful but she was not interested in the girly stuff.'
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But the school was a positive space for Madeleine. As an adult, she said that Queenwood had been a ‘respite to me from my utterly Gothic family life'.
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Even so, she must have been lonely at times, not really fitting in at the school and drifting away from many of her childhood friends in Castlecrag. Her closer connections were with older women—her aunts and Pom—rather than her peers.

Madeleine's talent as a pianist saw her take the stage as the accompanist when the school choir performed at a schools' festival at the Sydney Town Hall. Ted paid for her music lessons at the Sydney Conservatorium. But the Con meant serious practice, three hours a day, and two afternoon lessons a week, and Madeleine was also busy with homework and spent long hours on the bus and trams getting to school. She felt the pressure, and she was becoming increasingly jealous of Colette. Years later she described her life at that time as a nightmare, noting that Colette had a ‘charmed existence' while she was ‘this fat girl that nobody loves, except Pom!'
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Ted was worried about Madeleine and he asked Florence, who was back in Australia for the first time since 1950, for advice. Florence was a social worker and she told Ted that Madeleine was still grieving for Sylvette and needed help. But she felt it was not what her brother wanted to hear.
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Ted had put the devastating events surrounding Sylvette and her depression behind him, and may well have found the idea of professional therapy for his daughter to be threatening.

Madeleine was miserable. There had also been a distressing scene in the St John household one Sunday morning when Ted asked Madeleine to go to church with him and she declined:

He went completely ballistic and he started beating me over the head. He had these great big fleshy hands and he was hitting me on the head, one after another. But hard. And he completely lost his rag and he was right off his trolley and he was shouting abuse at me and hitting me on the head. He was in a total rage. He wasn't a pretty sight. It was the first and only time that he actually did this thing. If he had been alone with me, he would have killed me…he would not have been able to stop…or at least I would have ended up with permanent brain damage. And Val managed to pull him off… After bashing me up…after beating me up to within an inch of my life, to an inch of what my stepmother could tolerate seeing him do, my father expressed the view that I should pull myself together, and get dressed and come to church, which I did and which I thereafter continued to do every Sunday.
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The incident was a major issue for Madeleine. Around 1990, she told Felicity Baker that: ‘Ted beat me up once. Every year I force myself to write out that memory, and I keep what I've written to compare my efforts, to measure how my control over the experience is improving.'
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Ted had been upset when he had seen Sylvette slap Madeleine two or three years earlier, but now he too was under considerable pressure with a new wife and baby and two daughters who were testing his emotional reserves. As a child, Ted had become accustomed to violent physical punishment at the vicarage where his father had routinely strapped the boys with a razor strop. In 1983, he told an interviewer that while he had sometimes smacked his sons, he had never hit his daughters.
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Most support for Madeleine in these years came from Pom and her husband Os Jarvis. They were a warm couple who provided a family atmosphere. The St Johns shared regular holidays with the Jarvises and other families at Avoca Beach. There were prawning trips and shared meals, and the children took off without the adults to the outdoor picture theatre in the evenings. Madeleine was the eldest of the group and she was its natural leader, even if her pale skin and love of books often kept her indoors. She was funny and imaginative during those summers. She ran charades and devised elaborate games and theatrical performances for the group.

Pom's daughter Jonette remembered these times as carefree, but Madeleine looked back through more jaundiced eyes. As an adult, she claimed the last time she went to Avoca before she left school in 1958 was ‘boring, dismal and dreadful'. Indeed, life generally with Ted and Val was a drag. ‘There are painful memories, but mostly it was odious and boring, one was never taken anywhere, one was never given any kind of treat. Perhaps one was taken to the ballet once a year very occasionally…'
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Things had been different with Sylvette, who had taken both little girls to ballet lessons in the city on Saturday mornings. ‘My mother was always [up] for an entertainment, for whatever was going on,' Madeleine said. ‘With my mother [the idea] was to have as much fun as possible and with [Val and Ted] it was to have as little fun as possible.' Madeleine felt her only contact with ‘normal family life was the time I spent with the Jarvis family'.
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Madeleine's anger increased when Val vetoed her French studies. Val had studied French at university, but if Madeleine thought she would be an ally in her bid to take advanced French for her Leaving exam in 1958, she was disappointed. Madeleine and Colette's French heritage had been ignored since Sylvette's death, but Ms Medway encouraged her student to study the language at a higher level. Val thought Madeleine already had too much on her plate. Madeleine sat the Alliance Française exam that year and attempted the higher level Leaving exam but, without the extra lessons she needed, she did poorly and she resented Val's intervention.

There were more black marks against Ted, too. Madeleine would go to Ted's chambers after her piano lesson and do her homework while she waited for him to come back from the courts or other meetings. Then they would drive home together. One afternoon, she was hunting for a pencil or eraser in a drawer in Ted's desk when she found the letter she had written to Sylvette in 1953 on her first day at St Catherine's, pouring out her sadness about leaving home. Now, years later, here was the letter. Madeleine was horrified. What was it doing in this drawer? Why did Ted have a letter that she had written to her mother? Madeleine ripped it into small pieces and threw it into a wastepaper basket.

Looking back, Madeleine said that it had only occurred to her years later to ask herself whether Sylvette had even seen the letter. If Ted had kept the letter from Sylvette, Madeleine said, ‘we have to assume he did not want her to know that she was missed, unless—to put a charitable interpretation on it—he wanted to spare her'.
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CHAPTER SIX
Sydney Uni and the Octopus Girls

Madeleine St John may not have been in the gorgeous gang at Queenwood but she landed on her feet at Sydney University. Too plump, too plain, too different at school, the seventeen-year-old Madeleine began to find her way in a student body that boasted some of the smartest talents of the time. She still carried the hurts of Sylvette's death and what she saw as Ted's rejection. But this was a time in her life when her talent and creativity helped her to shine.

Much of her stability in this period came from the group of girls who found each other early in first term in 1959 when they signed up to the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS). There were eight of them and soon they had a name, the Octopus, and a regular meeting spot in the cafe in Manning House.