The Dressmaker's Daughter
Read The Dressmaker's Daughter Online
Authors: Kate Llewellyn
To Lynn Collins – through thick and thin
CHAPTER SEVEN The Night my Mother Turned Black
CHAPTER EIGHT The Fighting Temeraire
CHAPTER TWELVE On Being German
CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Morning Star
CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Captain’s Hat
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Clever Lunatics
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Chicken Farms
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Gawler – 1950s
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Miss Manns’ Business College
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Washing Up
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT First Kiss
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Gawler District Hospital
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE The Royal Adelaide Hospital
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO How to Kill a Person
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Richard Dutton Llewellyn
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE A Hot Summer Day in 1960
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Shopkeepers
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN The Name ‘Hugh’
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Learning to Write
CHAPTER FORTY Llewellyn Galleries
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Words and What They Mean
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO What We Ate Then and Other Matters
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE The Adelaide Parklands
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR The Vietnam War
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE The Violinist
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Leftover Life to Kill – 1974
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE Hospitality
CHAPTER FIFTY Books About Books
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO Adelaide Writers’ Week
Hope is a charming maiden but slips through the fingers, recollection is a beautiful old woman but of no use at the instant, repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires. For it is only of the new one grows tired. Of the old, one never tires. When one possesses that, one is happy…Life is a repetition and this is the beauty of life.
Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Repetition’ (
Gjentagelsen
)
HE
D
RESSMAKER’S
D
AUGHTER
INTRODUCTIONI was the dressmaker’s daughter
Our dialogue was fabric, colour,
Embroidery, scissors and pins.
Above all, cut and style.
(And these last two
Are what I care about in other matters today.)
The silent sound of the cloth
Falling around my feet.
A bodice shaped with pins was pulled
Over my head as a scaffold.
I spent my childhood in the sea
Or standing on a table – ‘A sway back!’
She said proudly.
Once I swore a tablecloth as a skirt
To school and before that,
Curtains. I was never ashamed
The colours clung like flowers.
I was summer, autumn, spring
Never winter. ‘See,’ she’d say,
‘A pocket.’ (By cutting cloth to a map
Like Australia.
Then inserting flagpoles of pins
On the beaches.)
‘You can never match blue!’
Bodice, baste, peplum,
Flare, dart, placket, gusset, yoke.
Air suddenly swept round my legs
Armpits grew cool
As the cold silver blades clipped
And my shoulder appeared.
There are no scars, no snick of flesh,
Nothing bled.
Sculptured and transformed, the tenderness
Fell like rain.
No-one interrupted the lavish pageant
The geometry of adornment.
O
ur mother died laughing. Her youngest child, Peter, sat watching her. She seemed to find something hilarious in the room that he could not fathom. When he left her, she was still chuckling. As he drove home through the park, his huge, wide hands gripping the wheel, he sobbed and laughed. Because, he said, ‘I was terribly sad and yet it was funny because she thought it was so amusing.’
Now, telling me this years afterwards, his hands grip the steering wheel as he drives towards the town where we were born.
Our mother had kidney failure. She was ninety-three and was ready to die. She had said, ‘I have worn out. But I am finding that it is hard to die.’
Sometimes, death can be as difficult to accomplish as birth. After my mother had laboured for three days for my birth, Doctor Wibberley told my father that he could probably save her but it was not likely that the child would be born alive.
Peter and I have returned like old salmon to the place where we were reared. We now return once, twice, or thrice a year. It is an old enchantment, a mysterious pull of the blood. The hospital where our mother gave birth to us lies to the north of this old hotel, which was once run by my godmother, Isabelle Player, and her husband, Les. Both face the sea and it is the sound of the sea that now fills this front room that opens with French windows on to the long balcony that skirts the hotel. The sound is what the child first hears as its mother’s blood sweeps and ebbs through the womb.
The light comes slowly, easing away the darkness as water does a stain. Grey clouds lie among the silver sky. Sombre, sublime, almost monotonous with a hint of melancholy, the sky offers nothing but reality and a new day.
The dark grey sea lies rumpled like a swagman’s blanket. There is almost no colour in the dawn except a wisp or two of pale pink and yellow to the south. (I had hoped for something magnificent.) On the horizon, Tumby Island seems to float, and in its shelter two boats flap in the beat of the swell.
This horizon, which is the first I saw when my eyes could see further, holds the bay back from the sky.
Behind the bay, the town stretches back only three or four streets. Then the grey, pink and purple swamp begins, and after that the dry paddocks. It is in these paddocks that the wealth has always lain. Millions of tons of wheat have been harvested and sent off in great brown ketches tied up at the two jetties.
The morning star hangs above us as Peter cooks eggs and bacon on a table in front of the hotel. ‘Too early for seagulls,’ he says, looking up as the light grows. When I look up again, the star has gone. The buildings grow from dark silhouettes surrounded by silver into verandas, roofs, doors and windows. Then we can read the scarlet sign with ‘ELDERS’ written in white on it, above our father’s first office.
We are up because Peter is going fishing and because I wanted to see the dawn. King George whiting are biting out behind Tumby Island, so my brother has taken his rods and packed his cold roast-lamb lunch to go on a charter boat to fish all day.
Now the last silver light of dusk fades; now the pale, silent street on the beach’s edge exudes the warmth of day and its lights coming on frame the horizon as footlights do a stage.
In the moonlight, Peter is cleaning fish at a table built from railway sleepers, which stands in the grass beside the beach. The whoosh of sea goes on and small waves break
gently on the sand. A single fish scale hangs like a sequin from his hat’s brim, catching the light while one by one the gleaming fish are cleaned and washed in the seawater collected in his bucket. Birds have gathered. A brown mollyhawk, a great ocean gull with its hooked yellow beak and a dozen seagulls join them. None seem hungry.
On this beach, our father cleaned his fish sixty years ago. There was such bounty that sometimes the fish that were not King George whiting were thrown back. The fish were brought home in a washing basket. There was no refrigeration. When we had more than we could use, our mother cooked the fish and sent it out next day with our father to the farmers and their wives who were his clients.
She would laugh to see us now. The man cleaning his catch and his sister sitting on a high, rusty table, her legs dangling, surrounded by birds and the everlasting sea.
Tumby Bay
I
t is December 1941 and there are six of us in the kitchen. The new baby, Peter, is in his pram being rocked by our father while our mother stirs apricot jam on the top of the wood fire. The apricots have been sent to her by her mother, who lives in Angaston in the Barossa Valley where they are abundant at this time of the year. Edna, one of my mother’s red-haired sisters, has come to visit and brought them with her. She has gone out to set her rabbit traps and we are left alone with the apricots and the heat.
When my mother was a girl, she and her sisters used to have fruit fights with quinces. ‘One day you girls will want for fruit!’ yelled Granny. In my mother’s case, my grandmother was proved right because we lived on the edge of a desert with very little rain and the only fruit that grew was a scarlet sour native called quandong.
In fact, our mother did not have much fruit for years after she left her mother’s house in 1935. Her sewing
machine was lashed to the side of her new husband’s Buick for the drive up around the top of Spencer Gulf, and then south down Eyre Peninsula to Tumby Bay.
‘Sit on him!’ advised Granny when my father unwittingly tied the sewing machine onto the car upside-down and the cotton reels fell out of the drawers. (There was much mirth about this advice in later years, not least because my father almost always did exactly what was expected of him. And he did it with good grace because he had a mild and generous nature.)
The new house to which they were heading was one the stock-and-station company for which he was working had provided. The car also belonged to the firm and it was his new appointment to open the first branch of Elder Smith and Company that had allowed our father to propose marriage to our mother in a small park in Angaston in 1934.
‘You can kiss me, Brink!’ she had said and he did. The reason she said this, she explained to me, was because he was very shy and until his proposal had not kissed her. Her name was Tommy Shemmeld and his was Ron Brinkworth. He was thirty-one and she was thirty-two. Her real name was Ivy Marjorie Shemmeld. Tommy became my mother’s name within the family and then later everywhere when she had her hair shaved off when she was about seven. Unlike her five older sisters, who had various shades of wavy red hair, hers was dark brown
– ‘Straight as a yard of pump water!’ Granny would say – and she had her father’s dark brown eyes, too. I was told that her hair was cut off during a heat wave to keep her cool. But if that were so, why not Edna’s and Nora’s and Ruby’s and Eva’s and Olive’s? When he saw his little girl with her naked head, her father said: ‘Oh, you look like a little boy! We’ll call you Tommy!’ Even eighty-five years later she was still Tommy.
While our mother stirs the apricot jam with a long, flat, wooden implement, my father rocks the baby. My other brothers, Tucker and Bill, go on eating the breakfast of boiled eggs and toast that our father made for us. Our mother cannot leave the boiling jam; it must be stirred continually to prevent the jam from sticking and burning on the base of the pot.
Baby Peter is being rocked because he is in pain from an abscess that he got from what was probably a staphylococcal infection in the hospital when he was born. This child was my parents’ fourth in five years and it seems to me now that they must have been bewildered by their prolific fertility. (Our mother is in pain, too, because she has the same infection in her breasts.) I think they, especially our mother, were at their wits’ end. In fact, their close friends Eileen and Greg Burden, who were unable to conceive and who had been married for years, had offered to take this baby and rear him as their own. But in the end our mother could not do it.
Some words must have been spoken, perhaps by Doctor Wibberley, the only doctor in the town and the only doctor between Tumby Bay and Port Lincoln, which was twenty-five miles south, because Peter was their last baby.
Day after day it was forty degrees. We had one rainwater tank on that first house and that water was to last us all summer. Outside in the hot air, dust rose from the white road that ran along in front of the beach. White daisy bushes grew and blew in salty air and, behind them, tamarisk trees waved with their fronds of pale pink blossom. To the south of the house, which was at the end of the small town, rose white dunes clad only in grey fronds of a wiry plant that held the sand hills in place. Stretched out to the far horizon, a wide pale bay seemed held down by two jetties like two fingers on a blue piano. Above the bay, an inverted saucer of pale blue with a few white clouds held the whole world in place.
There were no angles except where the jetties joined the beach. Everything was curved and everything was bright. The light went on all day and the sun bore down, peeling our noses, bleaching our hair and, when we played in the sea in our bathers, turning the tops of our shoulders red. My brothers seldom wore shoes and everybody learnt to swim without being taught. One day we could dog-paddle and the next we could swim.
We always looked out towards the sea. It was as if we were all hypnotised by the east. As though a spell had been cast on us and we were forbidden from looking behind us, like Orpheus. The inland lay behind us to the west and we never ventured there except when our father called on his farmer clients in small nearby towns – Coffin Bay, Streaky Bay or Cummins. We acted as though there was nothing inland. As though there was this great yawn of emptiness, this gaping nothingness, threatening, empty and arid, holding nothing but danger or boredom.
But, like Orpheus, my brothers and I did finally look behind us and once we looked we could not stop. It was not for forty years that Bill, my middle brother, took me ten thousand kilometres inland over deserts and I discovered their intensity – the paradox that the inland holds. There is a tension in the horizon, the huge skies, the aura, the place from which prophets have come. But we cared nothing for this when we were younger and only thought of the east, the sea and the city that lay across that space. We saw the dawn rise on the sea but not the red sunsets.
Across the bay in front of our first house lay Spencer Gulf; then Yorke Peninsula, with its foot shaped like Italy; then St Vincent’s Gulf. The land rose, and on the eastern shore of St Vincent’s Gulf was Adelaide, the State’s capital, where our father’s parents lived. When we visited
our grandparents or had to have our eyes tested or to visit some specialist for our health, we flew from Port Lincoln airport south of Tumby Bay, directly across these two gulfs and the Yorke Peninsula, on which, in about its middle, lay Minlaton, the town of which we had not yet heard but where our father would be sent by Elder Smith and where we would live for three years.
The names of these towns on Eyre Peninsula were given by Matthew Flinders when he sailed in
The Investigator,
charting the southern coast in 1802. He named Port Lincoln after his home county, Lincolnshire, in Ireland, and he named Tumby Bay after Tumby Island, a parish in Lincolnshire.
Port Lincoln was the town where we sometimes were driven to buy red apples. ‘Let’s go to Lincoln to buy some shinies!’ I would say when the thought struck me. Shinies were red Jonathan apples that had been polished by the fruiterer and, living as we did with so little fruit, they seemed as glamorous as cherries to me.
My mother in her white felt hat would buy a pound or two of the apples and we would eat them on the long drive home. ‘One day I will plant fruit trees,’ she would say, ‘and you children will sit beneath them and eat the fruit while the juice runs down your arms.’ It took another dozen or so years, but that is what she did. And the strange thing is that when that farm was sold the orchard she had planted in the front garden was dug up and the land was made into lawn,
which, when I saw it, left me thunderstruck. How easily we destroy somebody’s accomplished dream.
Our mother loved Tumby Bay and, perhaps as a consequence, so did we. When her sisters had heard that she was leaving the Barossa Valley with its vines and orchards to live with her husband on the edge of what they thought of as a desert, they told her she would hate it. But she loved it. She loved the daisy bushes that grew by the beach. She loved the people and their hospitality. She became friends with the owners of the hotel, the Players, whom we called Aunty Billie and Uncle Les. She played tennis on the courts in front of the beach beside the hotel with our father and the Players, and Les would yell things like: ‘Bloody hell, Tommy! Don’t expect me to get that back!’ in the course of their games. Our mother blushed to hear Les swear, and told me that she was worried about who would hear him as the courts were in the centre of town opposite the Ritz Café, which also still stands on the edge of the beach.
Across the road from the hotel lay the new office that our father was sent to open and there it still stands. Once, about thirty years after we had left Tumby Bay, I went back and bought a piece of raddle there. Pieces of raddle always rolled around on the floor of our car, where a sheep often lay mute and bound on the back seat or in the boot. Raddle is a kind of blue or maroon red chalk formed into thick sticks and is used to mark the back of a
sheep to designate to whom it belongs or sometimes to indicate it is for sale. Not that I had a sheep at the time; I bought it simply as a memento and then for years it lay in a drawer until I threw it out.
While a sweet frugality permeated everything our parents did, we were, nonetheless among the better off in the town. Some farmers were able to send their children to boarding school in Adelaide but most people had just struggled out of the Depression. We were among the lucky ones because none of the men in our family, on either side, had ever been out of work, as far as I know, and that was very uncommon.
It was our parents’ burning ambition to buy a farm and for this purpose, and in common with most people at that time, they saved money ferociously. Our father had no wish to spend all his days being a stock-and-station agent assisting farmers to make a living and to buy more land. He wanted land himself. My brothers were imbued with this longing for land too, to various degrees, and Tucker proved to have the longing like a virus. To this day, in his late sixties he is still buying cattle stations.
Were we enchanted? Was it all a fable of our mother’s making? Why did she love our father to such a degree? Were we the only happy family in the country? I can’t say, but, for whatever reason, there we were, we four children, fighting merrily among ourselves but blessed with this strange enchanted felicity within the home. It formed us all.
Our mother sewed. She was a dressmaker before she married and while she never worked for money again after her marriage, she sewed almost daily. Once, when somebody left a pair of grey tweed trousers in our father’s yacht, she seized on them, intending to make an overcoat for Tucker, her eldest son, who was about six. Because cloth was rationed during the war, it was precious. Our father would not let her have the trousers for months while he tried to discover the owner. But in the end she got them and Tucker got his little coat. Double-breasted.
Here, now, is my brother Peter making apricot jam in two big batches. It is 28 December 2006, and we are at his home at Brighton, near Adelaide. Last night I watched him cut and stone the fruit that he picked from the big tree in his back garden, which he has netted to keep the birds away.
I watched him meticulously weigh the fruit on old scales, kilo by kilo, using apricot stones laid on the granite bench to number the kilos. Not knowing what the stones were for, I swept them away with a dish cloth into the bin when he was not looking. Patiently, because he has a mild nature like our father had, he went to the bin and lifted them out.
‘You don’t need too much sugar,’ he said. ‘Only use two-thirds sugar to the amount of fruit. Too much sugar and you lose the flavour of the apricots. See, I’ve got nine
kilos of apricots here and I’m only going to use six of sugar.’
He left two big pots of fruit and sugar to macerate overnight and he has now brought them out to his barbecue, which has two gas burners, on the back veranda. I see the pots begin to boil and ask, ‘Aren’t you going to use any water?’ Turning to me as he stirs with a huge wooden spoon, he says, ‘You don’t use water in jam! Water makes it go mouldy. The only jam you use water in is quince and it is a bugger because it always goes mouldy!’
Then, seeing two thermometers hanging from the side of both pots, I ask what temperature he is trying to get the jam to reach. ‘You need to get it to 105 or 110 degrees quickly. But it’s almost impossible to get it to that very fast. You see, the quicker it boils to that heat, which is the setting point, the better the colour.’
After what seems to me an unusually short time, a saucer of the jam laid out on the table beside us shows it has set. The heat is turned off and the pots are lifted into the kitchen where the jars Peter has sterilised in the oven are sitting. As he fills each jar, he puts, as our mother did, a dessert spoon into each jar to prevent it from breaking with the hot jam. His thumb or forefinger touches the inside of each jar and so unknowingly he spoils the sterilised condition of the jars. But I say nothing because I do not want to interrupt or seem a
critical older sister. Also, I can see he knows much more about jam-making than I do, even though I have been making it for fifty years. I know, too, that his jam doesn’t spoil and is famous for its flavour. In fact, when I gave a big jar of Peter’s apricot jam to my friend Peri, she gave part of it in a smaller jar to her daughter, Justin, who took it to a café where she had breakfast every Saturday morning. It was left there as their weekly treat and became a thing they talked about because they thought it was so good. I have told Peter this story and he is quietly pleased.
Day after day as the heat continued and the evening sea breeze cooled us, my brother went on making the jam until he had over fifty jars standing on the kitchen bench. Then he lifted the jars up into a set of glass-fronted cupboards lit from within, which he had had specially made. There it sits, a memorial to our mother, to our childhood and to all those who make apricot jam at Christmas in the heat among the crying children.