The Dressmaker's Daughter (10 page)

S
hortly after we moved to Minlaton, I made a new friend at school. Her name was Rosemary Riddle, a quiet, dreamy girl with blonde plaits paler than my own had then become. Rosemary had a way of sitting at her desk and looking sideways, while her head faced forward, that I found entrancing. I began to copy this contemplative, still way of sitting, this way of being quiet that I had never had.

Rosemary had an American mother who wore a leather jacket with a tiger’s head stencilled in yellow on the back. It was a sensation. The effect on the inhabitants of the town was much the same as if she had been leading a live tiger on a chain down the street. Nobody had seen anything like it. I think it was her college jacket because, unlike almost anybody else in the town, apart from the doctor and the lawyer, Mrs Riddle had been to university. This gave her an air of mystery and strangeness to us all.

Her husband, Mr Riddle, had inherited a garage and mechanic’s shop, where he worked in his navy overalls. He had met his wife at a world scout jamboree. In America, girls could be scouts, it seemed. To me, the romance of this added to their glamour. From time to time, the Riddles went to America to see Mrs Riddle’s parents and sometimes they went overseas to attend other scout jamborees.

In addition to Rosemary, the Riddles had two younger daughters, Hildegard and Eleeta. The girls slept in a trio of bunk beds in a back room of the house.

Mrs Riddle was a friend of my mother’s and sometimes had me stay overnight. When I stayed, I was given a bunk and one of the girls must have slept elsewhere.

Oklahoma!,
the musical, had been made into a vinyl record and Mrs Riddle had brought it home with her from overseas. These songs gave the house even more allure, even more glamour. While my family did have a record player, a gramophone, which we wound with its handle, our records were left over from our parents’ courting days.
Oh For the Wings of a Dove,
which was playing in our house, is the only record I can remember – a far cry from ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’!’ from
Oklahoma!
or the album
Annie Get Your Gun
playing at the Riddles.

The Riddles did something else extraordinary: they went camping and they went bushwalking with packs on
their backs. Nobody in our family had ever taken a walk, as far as I knew, for the simple pleasure of it. They walked to meet each other, to fetch things or to give messages. The rest of the time, when they were not sleeping, my family worked. It is still, in fact, much the same. I have never known one of my brothers to take a walk. They never play golf. They cannot see anything in it. They think the concept is bizarre.

When my mother told me that the Riddles went bushwalking, she said, ‘Well, you know, they are clever lunatics. That’s the sort of thing that clever lunatics do.’ I was amazed and asked what a clever lunatic was. ‘It is what the Riddles are. Clever but with no sense, you see.’ It was almost a term of affection; I can see that now. Afterwards, I sometimes heard my parents refer to other people by that name. They were really only people who were, I think, better educated than my parents. As Mrs Riddle most certainly was.

When I was about thirteen, Mrs Riddle took Rosemary to America to meet her mother. I was electrified with the wish to go with them. I prayed and prayed. ‘God, please let me go with Rosemary to America.’ I was surprised when I realised that I would not be going, as I had absolute faith that my prayers would be answered.

When Rosemary and her mother went to a Civil War museum, Rosemary told me they had visited a school there. Rosemary had sat down at a desk and, I imagine, done her
sideways look, sitting very still, as she always was when this dreamy look came upon her. After a while, she had stood up to go and a visitor was shocked; she had thought Rosemary was made of wax, a statue dressed to represent a child of the era. There was something very old-fashioned about her – that demeanour and her long, fair plaits.

After three months away, Rosemary came back to school. We had a passion for cutting out and sticking things from magazines into scrapbooks. Sitting at Mrs Riddle’s kitchen table in a glassed-in nook, we used
McCall
magazines and American teen magazines to cut out what we fancied. I cut out a picture of a teenager (having just learnt the term ‘teenager’, which was new to Australia and perhaps not that old in America) wearing an engagement ring. Below, I printed a notice, ‘Don’t let this happen to you!’

Rosemary and I sent off to Johnson & Johnson for booklets that the magazines advertised would educate the reader in menstruation and how to deal with it. For some reason, I found it perfectly dignified and useful to read about menstruation in a booklet, yet I thought it deeply distasteful to have my mother discuss anything about it. I had been told the basic facts and that had been a boon, but whenever my mother later brought up the subject again, I recoiled as though she had brought in a snake writhing on a stick. Menstruation in my mother’s terms was ‘being unwell’. I hated this term. I couldn’t see why
we were unwell and the phrase also had the burden of suggesting invalidism and of being completely unmodern.

Mrs Riddle, on the other hand, could do no wrong. Once, on discovering that I had never tasted baked ham, which it seemed was a feasting treat in her family, Mrs Riddle baked a ham for me to share with them. However, she forgot something and it was very salty.

I don’t know what could have gone wrong, as to bake a leg of ham, one only has to put it into the oven with the skin removed and a mixture of brown sugar and French mustard spread over it. Then a few dried figs or apricots that have been softened in a little wine are fixed on with toothpicks and the baking continues until it is warmed through. It is already cooked when it is bought. Perhaps it had been baked a long time as if the meat had not already been cooked. That would account for its extreme saltiness. Ham was a luxury, so it was a serious waste and Mrs Riddle berated herself, but I thought it was wonderful that she had made it at all and had done it for me to share with her family.

I was mad on the Riddles. They were the shining stars to me among an atmosphere as dull as the barley with which the town was surrounded. The Riddle family was my first taste of the exotic and a fine taste it had.

There were other clever lunatics in my parents’ lives, but none, I believe, were ever so clever as the Riddles. Mrs Riddle also worked as a volunteer for a mysterious
group in the town, a charity called Toc H. My parents belonged to nothing.

When we were leaving Minlaton to live on a farm with a hatchery at Gawler, the town, as was the practice at the time, gave a farewell party and took up a collection to buy a gift. Mrs Riddle was involved. My parents had already said that they did not want a party because they had not contributed to the life of the town. They did not go, although I think the party was held. A black shiny tray with a silvery steel fence around the edge was brought to our house as a gift from the people of the town. My parents accepted it through the veil of their embarrassment. I think that they felt somewhat trapped by the gift, as nobody had listened to them. But the people meant it well and it was accepted. It sat for years on our black traymobile, holding upside-down coloured wine glasses. One of my brothers now has it.

B
y 1951, our parents had saved enough money from my father’s salary at Elder Smith to buy a small chicken hatchery at Jamestown, about two hundred kilometres north of Adelaide. They hired a young man called Bernie, a graduate of Roseworthy Agricultural College, to manage it.

Within a few months, it became clear that Bernie had little idea of how to make a hatchery profitable. Our father made several anxious trips north to the hatchery and came home more worried than ever.

A profit, however, was almost certain to be made on the day of the Jamestown Show. Hundreds of chickens were hatched to be sold as day-old chickens in boxes of fifty or a hundred. But then the show was cancelled due to inclement weather. This meant there were all those chickens and no facilities to rear them at the hatchery, and no sales to be had. Father drove north once again and came home with the car laden with boxes of chirping
yellow chickens. Our parents rigged up heating lights in the shed and set about trying to salvage their crop. They did it, but it was a lesson in the vagaries of chicken farming that they had not experienced. Sheep and cattle were what our father had dealt in. We had always had some fowls in a pen in the backyard wherever we lived, but it was the scale of the hatchery and the amount of my parents’ investment that made every detail crucially important.

A month or so later, my father went up to the hatchery and found it in a state of tremendous neglect. He, the mildest of men, was in a rage. He sacked Bernie, put the farm up for sale and came home, having faced the fact that farming with managers was not going to work. He then gave notice to Elder Smith. He had worked for them since he had left school thirty years before. It was a risk he had not wanted to take. With four children and a wife, the salary had been critical and now he was to have none. Another hatchery with an old stone house and some acres of land was bought at auction. It was at Gawler, a town about an hour’s drive north of Adelaide. The land backed on to the railway line and was near a small railway station.

Our mother was driven there with my brothers while I stayed on at Minlaton to cook for my father while he finished his time at his work. I was in my element, making Irish stew and all his favourite dishes. (Why I
didn’t take the opportunity to make that dish of mashed potato and chopped raw onion he liked, I don’t know. I suppose I had simply forgotten it after the mess I had made with hair in the crystal dish years earlier.) I stayed on at high school until the day we locked the house and drove to Gawler in the small buckboard he had bought on giving up the firm’s car.

Alone with her three sons on the farm for a month or so, my mother slept with a pepperpot under her pillow. At that time there was both a housing shortage and a lot of new immigrants from the Baltic States who were billeted in great Nissen huts near Gawler. Tall men came knocking on the back door of the farm. They frightened our mother because they stepped immediately into the kitchen without being invited. She found out later that it was because they came from cold countries and it was their practice to step in, rather than linger outside, so that the warm air would not escape the house. When she found this out, she was triumphant; she loved the explanation and the practical common sense of it, and the fact that it allayed her fear.

The men were looking for somewhere to live. Our mother explained that there was no room on the farm. They pointed out that there were several stone sheds. ‘But you can’t live in a shed!’

‘Yes, we can. It will be better than where we are. My wife is having a baby.’

So two families moved into our two stone sheds. Olga and Eva helped our mother in the house. ‘You can say what you like about Balts,’ she would say, ‘but they are very clean people!’ Perhaps cleanliness was next to godliness to her, but, whatever the reason, those women and our mother became friends for life. When the women had their babies, our mother held the child in her arms, cradled in a shawl of ours. I developed the idea that she held these babies as some sort of superstition – that, in holding them, she would be prevented from having any more of her own.

Months earlier, when my father and I arrived at our farm, Lyncroft, my mother asked me if I had left the house at Minlaton clean. I said that I had. She asked more piercingly, ‘Did you clean the bath?’ I said that I had not. ‘Oh what will those people think of me?’ she said. Upset, she went on for some time about what that ring around the bath would signify and that she could not understand how I could have left the bath unscrubbed. It simply hadn’t entered my mind. What can you do but shrug? But that bath remains in my memory abandoned and unclean, a record of shame to our family. (However, bath-cleaning has also had a beneficial effect on my life. In the Eighties when the publishers Sam and Nick Hudson read my manuscript of
The Waterlily,
the managing director of their company said that later, when she was cleaning the bath, she
couldn’t stop thinking about the manuscript. She felt it was addictive, and so they would like to publish it.)

From office work and driving a car long distances to see his farmer clients and occasionally helping to yard and count sheep (he did this by standing at a gate where he counted with his hand coming up and down, cutting the air with the edge of his palm in a beat to the running of the sheep through the narrow race), our father moved to farm-labouring. He had been born with something wrong with his heart. It may be that the sudden exercise, which he had not had since he had given up playing basketball and tennis as a young man, helped his heart, or it may be that it strained it irreparably.

Those fourteen years until 1965, when our parents retired, were a time when my mother and father both flourished and wore out. The poultry farm and hatchery in that grim and, to us, alien landscape finally began to make money. It made enough to help both the youngest and the eldest sons, Peter and Tucker, buy land. Bill, having been in the air force, had come home and it was he, the least likely farmer, who inherited Lyncroft. He and his wife, Jan, ran it when our parents later retired to a nearby new housing area of the usual raw banality.

G
awler. The very word is mournful. I was enrolled at the high school there in the middle of first term.

Mr M, the head teacher in charge of my brothers at a tiny primary school called Gawler Blocks, had complete influence over my parents. They would have flung us over fences if he had advised it. And in some ways that is what happened to three of us.

Instead of diagnosing Tucker with his learning disability, he kept him on in Grade Five for three years. Never able to teach him anything, it did not occur to Mr M to inquire about what might ail his pupil.

He advised our parents to send Bill, the cleverest of us, to Thebarton Technical High School and, in doing so, damned him.

And I was to be enrolled in a commercial course at high school. It did not occur to Mr M that I had no interest in book-keeping, nor had I any preparation for it. The subject was as mysterious to me as the Rosetta Stone
to the archaeologists when they first laid eyes on it. To decide where to put a figure in one of the two columns it could go, I recited a nursery rhyme. ‘Eener deener, let him go, catch a nigger by his toe.’ By putting my pen in one column and then the other to the rhythm of this, I calculated that by the law of chance I should get fifty per cent correct. Wrong. I got twenty per cent. Failure. I had never failed before. Red and black, debit and credit, they meant nothing and a stubborn bafflement came over me.

Nobody had time to explain these things to me. Neither did it strike anyone that Bill should not waste his time learning how to make things when he was clever and could be learning how to think. Peter was too young to be badly affected, so went on under Mr M’s care where he learnt to add and to spell and to draw and to dance to the tune of the wind-up gramophone when all the children learnt a set of medieval dances in the schoolyard. These classes were called ‘Rhythm’. I cannot imagine Tucker doing Rhythm. It would be like asking a bull to dance.

Riding my bike to school from our farm, I passed three poplar trees. In my memory, they are always yellow. They stood one beside the other, and as I rode towards them they were three, then two, then one, and then, as I passed, they separated again, reforming as I watched, looking back over my shoulder.

The trees were talking to each other, nodding in agreement. Sometimes the wind scandalised them. Then,
on another day, they grew calm and stood like golden birds, tall, immobile, with their wings folded.

We were asked to write a poem for English homework. I wrote about the poplars and this strange kinetic effect. The principal, who was also the English teacher, said, ‘You are a poet, Jill, aren’t you?’ Was I? I didn’t know, and for the next twenty-seven years or so I wrote no more poems.

At high school I met Dinah E and she became my best friend. She lived almost next door to the school. Her mother smoked. Her father owned a car salesroom and garage, all new and full of glass and long American cars. He had a moustache and, like my father, was called Ron. Mrs E was kind to me; her suave, gently mocking air was not unlike my father’s mother and did not faze me. I liked her ways, and I loved her glamour. Dark and thin, her only exercise was crossing her legs. I never saw her walk any further than to the car parked at the back door, or to the dining room from the kitchen, or to her bedroom. She emerged from the car at the end of a trip to the shops (only metres down the main street) to buy food, entered the back door, sat down at the kitchen table, crossed her legs and lit a Craven A. What was for dinner? I don’t know, but something appeared – a casserole, a tuna mornay; something modern emerged from the oven. Mrs E put it on the table, sat down and lit up again. I was entranced.

Mrs E had a friend called Glad whose husband ran a hotel. Glad took an hour to put on her makeup, Dinah said. Once Dinah saw her without her makeup and didn’t recognise her. Together, Mrs E and Glad sat in the kitchen smoking and talking as Dinah and I sat in the front room practising – did we but know it – being like them, and playing Eartha Kitt records while talking about boys.
Just an Old Fashioned Girl
– we played that for hours as we smoked Mrs E’s Craven A’s. Years later, I felt so guilty about the hundreds of cigarettes that I had smoked in that house that I took a carton of them to Dinah’s mother. She held no grudge, I found, about those cigarettes. In fact, it seemed that she had forgotten how many she had given us.

There was an eerie coldness in Dinah’s mother. The marriage was painful; even I could see it. Mr E’s sad look: his pleading, mild demeanour. The bedroom must have been hell. Something in his wife was like a glacier’s abyss: you felt it when he entered a room where she was sitting. She raised an eyebrow, blew smoke towards the ceiling and asked him if he had brought home the vinyl recording that Sally, their younger daughter, had asked him to buy when she had rung him at work. He had, but he got no credit for it. Not a kiss, not a hug. A shrug or a nod was more like it.

With his friend Jack, who was married to Glad, Mr E liked going to the trotting horse races, which was called
‘going to the trots’. He went often, but was not, as far as I ever heard, a dangerous gambler. Sometimes he and Jack went to dog-racing, too. Mrs E went almost nowhere with her husband. When the Inter-Dominion trotting racing was on in New Zealand, Dinah, who was fifteen, accompanied her father because her mother wouldn’t go.

Once, I saw Mrs E do a small dance step and hum a little tune on the way to her car because she was going to see Ralph Jamon. He had a grocery in the main street and was one of Mr E’s friends. Mrs E found Ralph Jamon delightful. What she didn’t know was that he found the red-haired Sally delightful.

One night when her parents were out, Sally was visited by Ralph Jamon. He told her that he would drive her down to the shop, where she could choose any of the lingerie sold there (at that time, grocers also sold nightgowns and underwear) if she would go to bed with him. She played for time for a while, and then agreed to accompany him. As she followed him to go out of the front door, she slammed it behind him and locked it. Her parents were never told. She told Dinah who told me. Mr E continued to go to the trotting meetings in the town with Ralph Jamon, and Mrs E continued to flirt with him in her handsome, mocking way.

Later, because of what he had tried to do to Sally, Dinah and I laughed when we heard that Ralph Jamon had sat smoking on his lavatory, thrown the butt of his
cigarette into the bowl, and it had exploded. His wife had cleaned the lavatory with kerosene. He had deep cuts to his buttocks, spent days in hospital, and cursed as he told the tale.

Mrs E and Gladys sometimes went to the city to shop for the day. They came home with hat boxes and sometimes an evening frock for a ball or an afternoon frock embroidered on the bodice. Boxes of shoes wrapped in tissue paper lay about the bedroom.

Dinah was the elder of the sisters. They had red hair – Sally’s the colour of a Japanese maple’s dark red leaves and Dinah’s a dark honey colour. Dinah and I had hit it off immediately. Scornful like her mother, she laughed at things that I thought were pitiful and this, I think, was a family trait. Somebody on crutches amused them. It came from some sort of defensiveness. Or some sort of stance I did not understand. Yet with it, she, like her mother, was kind. For instance, Dinah’s mother made me very thin tomato sandwiches when they were the only thing I could eat when I was ill. Mrs E also often picked violets for me or bought bunches of them because she knew I loved them. Yet in a fit of contrariness one day years later, I told her I had never really liked violets. Why would I say a thing like that? Because it sounds smart? Pure destructiveness. She took it well; calm as a lake in summer, there was no hint that she minded at all. But she must have thought of all those bunches she had given me.
Did I want to humiliate her? I must have. When I remember the moment, it was just an idle barb; something that came to my mind, light as a zephyr. The lazy, cruel mischievousness of it.

When Dinah was sixteen, she had a debutante party that cost a fortune. The Mt Osmond Country Club was hired and a dress was made with a bodice covered in hand-embroidered white sequins. The skirt was a froth of tulle.

A day or two before the party, I was in the car with the E family. At a place on the road to Mt Osmond in the Adelaide Hills known as the Hairpin Bend, which has since been straightened out somewhat, there was an old house surrounded by huge camellia trees. The car stopped and Sally, Dinah and I got out. We had been asked to go into the house and inquire if the owner would sell us camellias to decorate the dance hall for the party.

I said to the woman who answered the door, ‘Our family is waiting in the car.’ Immediately I was shocked at what I had said. A betrayal of my family. I explained it to myself as a hasty way to explain our needs. But it was more than that. I wanted to be the third daughter. I wanted a mother who smoked and was not out of doors most of the day, watering fowls, gathering eggs, feeding chooks, chopping the heads off any who seemed to have the beginnings of an eye disease that plagued the whole flock. Our father said that a chook couldn’t blink when
our mother was around but that its head would be off within minutes.

We were sold the camellias and Mrs E decorated the dance hall. During the party, a day or two later, Mrs E, speaking to another woman, referred to us as ‘the young ones’. I was struck. Halted in my tracks. The realisation came to me that while Dinah and I were young now, one day we would not be. It was the first time that it had ever occurred to me. I didn’t go as far as thinking that one day we would actually be ‘the old ones’, as we are now, but older seemed amazing. Not to be young. How peculiar. A shaft to the heart.

Dinah was missing for half an hour during the dancing. She came in smeared and glassy.

I asked where she had been.

‘With that Christopher Green. He’s the sort who puts his tongue down your throat when he kisses you.’

‘What?’ How peculiar. We went in to supper. Our dance cards were full. (Designed in the colours chosen for the decorations, and the colours of the frock of the girl whose party it was, these were small cards that hung on a cord around a wrist. They had a small pencil tied to them and in these were listed the dances by number. Boys asked for a dance and, if you agreed, you pencilled in their name at the number of the dance you had decided upon.)

Driven home to Gawler with the E family, the city lay glittering before us on the plain. A car full of camellias;
Dinah’s bodice of cream sequins, some gleaming, stitched as if dropped onto her skirt; the knowledge that this would not last – we would not be young forever; and Mrs E humming a tune the band had played. Boys who put their tongue down your throat when kissing; my betrayal of my family; the whole shocking, glamorous, perfidious, disgusting, beautiful world.

The band, the boys, the clothes – the glorious business of a coming-out party. At about one in the morning, Mr E dropped me off at our farmhouse. I took off my blue silk halterneck frock and lay down.