Rebellious Daughters (3 page)

At the end of year exams, the psychiatry lecturer told us he would give us a copy of the exam paper so we could prepare our answers. Seven questions, five to be chosen. There were 21 of us, we divided each question into three parts and each one of us researched a thorough answer, then we went out to the Student Representative Council at uni and roneoed them all off, and there we were, with 21 detailed responses. We all did well.

A record I treasure is the group photo. There we are, out on the hockey field, lined up on chairs and benches
for posterity. Suddenly a bloke called Sep notices a ball by the fence. Hang on, he says, and rushes off to get it. He sits down in the middle of the front row, holding a big brown medicine ball. We are all smiling and laughing at Sep, so we look happy. I like to think of later archivists looking at that photo and wondering what on earth the ball has got to do with section 401. Nothing but Sep's fancy. Over which we were as usual united. We might have made a political decision not to be rebellious, but we weren't going to be wimps.

Virtuous and hard-working. I set up a precedent in the family. But my sister wasn't like that. She wasn't particularly academic, liked to play hockey, listen to the Top 40. My father couldn't stand pop music. When Brenda came home from school, my mother would let her listen to the radio, turned very low, but she had to turn it off the minute father came home. My sister thought this was horribly unfair and said so. Fierce battles followed. My mother always said it was because father and daughter were too much alike, stubborn, convinced of their own rightness. They survived these, unless my mother intervened. Sometimes she thought my father was being cruel, and mildly suggested a little more kindness.

My father loved my mother. Devotedly. He kissed her goodbye and hello on going to work and coming home. But this criticism enraged him and he wouldn't speak to
anyone for days. My mother learnt not to say anything, but didn't always manage it. I dearly wanted Brenda to go to my school, and talked her into it. It was a bad idea. Teachers made comparisons, they did not pay attention to the differences between us. She was not dutiful and scholarly. They made her hate school and she left after the Intermediate Certificate. Did a secretarial course and got a job in an office. Every Saturday morning she went shopping and bought clothes. Eventually she moved out of home.

Then she met Fred. He was a glamorous young man about town, an accountant. He used to go rally driving. He had an Austin-Healey sports car. I should say that Brenda was very beautiful, tall, slender, with smooth long dark hair as was the fashion then. She suited the role of the girl in the Austin-Healey. All her life Brenda looked stunning. She'd buy clothes at second-hand shops and in sales and wear them with such éclat, such panache. She died in 2014, a few months short of her 50th wedding anniversary, and her 71st birthday, beautiful to the end, adored by her husband, her two sons and their wives, her four grandchildren, her big sister. None of us will ever get over her death.

She and my father became very good friends, when she was no longer living at home. Fred decided to stop being an accountant and get a degree, he went to university in Newcastle, full-time, while Brenda worked
to support him. Rather unusually he didn't ditch her as soon as he got his education. They went to Canada for a bit, and then to the university in Wagga.

So, there is daughter number two. Daughter number three went to the same school and got along quite well academically. She went to university. By this time it was the ‘60s, and she took up with a lot of lively people, you'd probably call them alternative. Hippies, counterculture people. I'd left home to go to Canberra when she was 14, so I didn't know much about it. My mother told me a little, but Rosie would have made sure she didn't know a lot. She got her degree and went on to Teachers' College. She hated it, and her group didn't manage to contrive that weird single-minded acquiescence that ours did. She ditched it, and followed her boyfriend to Brisbane. What a horror that was. In those days, if you'd had a teachers' college scholarship, you had a bond to repay. (I had a bond too, I got out of mine by getting pregnant; apparently it was considered impolitic, given Australia's keen immigration program, to dissuade the native born from having children by insisting on the paying out of bonds. Mine was 1,000 pounds; our house cost 7,000 pounds.) By leaving, this daughter defaulted. My father was beside himself, especially as an uncle was joint guarantor. The principal hauled them in. He suggested that Rosie was expecting. (This was the same principal who in my time called an assembly
and announced that four girls had got pregnant in the last year and he held himself personally responsible for every one of them.) Remember it is the sixties, probably hard to conceive how shocking a pregnancy was out of wedlock. My father was enraged. And worried. Rosie was indignant, she wasn't.

The bond got paid back, Rosie went to Brisbane, lived with Athol who had a job at the University of Queensland; he was an economist. Rosie got work at UQP, and thus began her career as one of the Press's most beloved editors. She didn't admit she was living with Athol, and when my parents went on their
Women's Weekly
cruise, and the boat called in at Brisbane, Rosie rushed round the flat removing all evidence of him. She thought she deceived her father, wasn't so sure about her mother. My mother didn't say much but she was sharp. After a while they got married, and Rosie had the most beautiful twins, who grew to be tall goddessy girls with PhDs, who got married, separately, in Collette Dinnigan dresses. Then she had a son. Brenda, who'd been thinking of not having any children, fell in love with Rosie's and went ahead.

I've remarked that I was a good dutiful daughter, virtuous, dependable, hardly gave my parents a moment's worry. I've often regretted it. But Rosie, now, they were very much afeard at various moments that she was going to come to a bad end. So when she didn't
but transmogrified into a respectable and married young mother they were mightily relieved. In the early 70's she and her husband went on sabbatical to England, and while they were away Athol's father was killed, when his motor-cycle collided with a truck. Athol rushed home to look after his mother, and Rosie followed more slowly and with great difficulty, travelling with twin toddlers not being very much fun. Their house in Brisbane was rented out and anyway they wanted to be in Newcastle with Athol's mother, so Rosie lived with my parents. Athol finished his sabbatical in that city.

My father had not long retired and had lots of leisure, he had a lovely time with the little girls. They were at that brilliant age of beginning to talk and see the world. They sat on his lap, he played with them, read them stories, took them to the beach. He had never known my children or Brenda's quite so well, or his own, for that matter, he was at work and preoccupied. We did go and stay quite often, but that was often a bit hectic, everybody so looked forward to the visit but the invasion of four people could be hard work. But with Rosie and her girls everything was easy-going and comfortable, and I think it was one of the happiest times of his life. I often teased him about Rosie as the prodigal daughter; I was the good one who had never bothered them but Rosie, the troubled one, the lost one, got the fatted calf and the grateful welcome. My father, who understood
exactly the biblical reference, didn't like it much but agreed. So did Rosie, although she tended to disclaim it.

A few years later Rosie again spent quite a lot of time there, when father was ill, in hospital. I went up whenever I could, but I had a job, and so did Brenda, but Rosie brought her children down and lived with our mother and helped her through this difficult time.

When we all lived at home together we fought and had arguments and got into terrible furies with one another, (though I don't think I was as bad as sometimes claimed, for instance I don't think I ever ripped rollers out of anybody's hair), but once we all left home, for Canberra, Wagga, Brisbane, we got on very well and developed the most powerful love for one another. We spent hours a week on the phone, visited whenever we could. After she left UQP and became a freelance editor, Rosie worked on my books. She was the most wonderful editor. We had terrific arguments about commas (it's my job Marion to tell you these things, but you're the writer, you can ignore me if you want) but more drastic things were no problem. She trembled when she felt obliged to tell me that she thought I should lose the first chapter of
The Apricot Colonel
, but I looked at it and said mildly, yes, you're right. After my fierceness over punctuation she couldn't believe it was so simple.

And now I've lost Rosie too. She died in 2012, after some months of illness. She was 65. All the people she
had ever edited sent her loving and supportive messages, and her daughters made a fat scrapbook out of them. I cannot believe I have lost both my sisters. Both, and both younger than me, my little sisters, who were supposed to be there for my ever. It makes the world a cold and dreary place, sometimes. So many deaths, including my husband 17 years ago; the day before this anniversary I got a letter addressed to him, of which the first words were: Do you want to live another 15 to 25 years? It was an advertisement for krill-oil capsules. It helps to have a black sense of humour at these moments. And lucky I have now got my dear companion, who is a poet, as well as my son and my beautiful granddaughter. Judging by her stroppiness she is going to be a rebellious daughter; at seven she shows every sign of it. She thinks that I am a bit of a dill, she is very fond of me but I do need straightening out from time to time. Oh granny, she says, no, that's not right. It usually is, but I have trouble convincing her. She is a golden mini-goddess of a child, with a great quantity of completely blond hair, where on earth did that come from? Blue eyes, too, large and candid, when all the people around including her mother are dark-haired and brown-eyed. Her grandfather, my husband who died in 1998, had golden red hair and blue eyes, perhaps that is the inheritance.

Yesterday (a Tuesday late in November 2015) we went after school to a new café-bar-bookshop called
Muse that has lots of literary events. I'd heard that it has a large portrait of me hanging on a blank wall. You're so famous, granny, said Bianca. She thought the picture was beautiful, and so it is, wonderful washes of colour, though I see myself looking a bit anguished. It's by Leeanne Crisp. Bianca had a robust afternoon tea of cake, strawberries and ice-cream, with lemonade. Lot of sugar, remarked her father. She engaged in lengthy conversation with the bookshop man about the book she wants, called I think
The Day the Crayons Came Home
; she's told me a lot about this book. I love the way she engages in serious discussions with people without any self-doubt. She is proud of the fact that she reads books with chapters. She never walks anywhere, she always runs, which doubtless explains how she stays slim despite cake.

On the way home in the car she said to me, very firmly: Granny, this is true. (You know this means that it is very unlikely to be so.) If you put up Christmas decorations before December 1 then an elf kills a baby dolphin. Really? I said. I don't think elves kill baby dolphins. Yes, yes they do.

Afterwards I googled this, received wisdom is that it is a baby reindeer. Who'd have thought it?

When she gets home, daddy tells her the baby dolphins stuff is complete nonsense. She believes him. Daddy is perfect and always right, and she dotes on him.
(I've doted on him for 46 years but am aware of occasional flaws.) Sometimes he is obliged to tell her off, always saying she has done a bad thing, not that she is a bad girl. She pulls back, bursts into floods of tears, and has to rush in and cuddle him to comfort her for being reproved. An orgy of tearful hugs follows. I don't know what this will do for general rebelliousness. But it makes for a happy daughter.

Virtuous and hard-working, I describe myself. A dutiful daughter. And a prig with it. I agreed with my father about the badness of the Top 40, and reproached my sister for her interest. Now I am grateful to Brenda; what scraps and rags of fifties' popular music I am pleased to know came from that involuntary listening to her radio.
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. The twelfth of never. The itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini
. These give me a tiny credibility where popular culture is concerned.

I often think about my parents and my attitude toward them. I regarded them as a bit clueless, but gallant and brave, as innocents who had to be protected. A bit as Bianca regards me. I could know things but they mustn't. I think my son James often felt like that about me when he was young. Even now, as he moves through his forties, I discover odd things, because he lets them slip, about what he was up to then, what I was saved from.

There's another daughter in my life, mine, whom I haven't talked about. She died 11 years ago. I am writing a book about her, a memoir, called
Words for a Dead Daughter
, but who knows if that title will stick. That takes up all my thought about her. You might look back over my life as a landscape of loss, but that's actually not true. Much is lost now, but when I had it, it was marvellous, and that stays with me. The past is another country, but when I lived there I was very happy. As now I am.