The Dressmaker's Daughter (16 page)

There are dozens of such letters that Richard smuggled out of Northfield in a shoebox when he left (nothing was supposed to be taken out of the infectious diseases hospital). Years later, I found our son, Hugh, with his friend Tony laughing and reading these to each other in our shed, where they had found them. I took a pile of these letters and threw them into the incinerator in the back garden. But somehow another box or two of letters survived.

Around this time, I had applied for a nursing job with an ophthalmologist, Doctor Max Moore, who had rooms in a building on the corner of North Terrace and King William Street. However, there was a problem for me when applying for jobs. I had been told that I would not be given a recommendation from the hospital because of a farewell party. After my final exams, and a few days before I had left the hospital, my friend Mary, who had
graduated a few months earlier and who now lived above the nurses’ rooms on sisters’ floors, invited me to come to her room when I came off duty at eight o’clock. When I walked in, I saw about eight of my friends, who called out, ‘Surprise!’ And that was how the farewell party began. After about nine o’clock, we decided it would be wiser to move downstairs to my room because the noise of the party might draw the attention of one of the sisters. I can remember somebody calling out in the corridor as we walked down: ‘The champagne’s gone but there’s sherry left.’

My room had a bucket of flowers that Richard had sent me (we had no vases), and there were ball dresses laid out on the bed because I was packing to leave. Amid this scene of suitcases lying open, underwear and chaos, the party went on. As my friends were leaving, they told me they would return the next day to help clean up the room. They put the empty bottles in my wardrobe to keep them hidden, just in case a sister might find them. I lay down among the spilt flowers, the overflowing ashtrays and spillage and went to sleep.

The next morning, after being on duty for an hour or two, I went back to the nurses’ home at the breakfast break. Joanie was rooming a few doors down from me and I asked her if I could lie on her bed until we all met at lunchtime and had time to clean up my room. She agreed and asked me for the key to my room so she could
see what sort of state it was in. She returned, gave me the key and we went back on duty.

An hour or so later, the ward sister told me that Matron had rung and wanted to see me at once in her office. I walked over and from behind her desk Matron said, ‘Nurse, Sister Sawtell tells me that the cleaner has drawn her attention to the state of your room. Wine bottles were found in your wardrobe and, as you know, it is forbidden to bring alcohol into the nurses’ home.’ (It seems that Joanie had opened the door, taken a look around the room and forgotten to lock the door when she left.) I said that I had not brought the alcohol into my room and then in response to Matron asking if it had not been me, then who was it, I said that I wasn’t prepared to tell her that. (I thought there was no point landing us all in trouble, just before we were about to leave the hospital.) With that, Matron said that she had only one response and that was to say that I would leave the hospital without a recommendation. After four years, I’d be leaving with a pass, but no reference.

However, something must have softened because when I blithely applied to Doctor Max Moore and went to the interview, wearing a chocolate-brown suit and an orange felt hat with a pleat in the brim, he did not ask me for a reference. I found out later that he had simply rung Matron and she had given me one. The luck of it was that I hadn’t thought ahead of what I would say if Doctor
Moore had asked me to provide references. I got the job, which meant that I could be free on weekends when Richard came out from Northfield Hospital on his trips home and we could be together. If I had worked in a hospital, I would not have had every weekend off.

There was a small operating theatre within these rooms of Doctor Moore’s and here he operated, mainly on children, adjusting their strabismus, their squinting eyes or flushing out the blocked tear ducts of babies. Their shoes sat side by side outside the door of the theatre and it was there I learnt the eloquence of shoes.

The two other nursing sisters and I tested the eyes of the patients for their field of vision and prepared them by taking oral history of their complaint before they went in, usually after a wait of an hour or more, to see Doctor Moore in his white coat with his serene and reassuring manner. He had taken up water-skiing as a hobby with his family when it first became popular. His other hobby was target-shooting. I seldom saw him flustered but one day he had good cause to be because I had packed a sterile silver box of his instruments for him to perform a cataract operation on a patient in a large private hospital where he did all his cataract work. I had given him a needle more like a darning needle when he needed something as fine as a tiny hook. The patient was anaesthetised, the box was open; Doctor Moore, scrubbed and ready, looked into the box and saw his challenge rise up before him. To his credit,
he did the operation and there were no repercussions for the eye, but he sighed when he asked who had packed that surgical box.

I still lived what was in many ways a child-like existence, calling my parents ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’, visiting Richard out at Northfield on weekends or staying with him when he came home for a weekend. The tone and handwriting of my letters to him is infantile and it is hard to know if it was the voice of unmarried girls in their early twenties at that time or if I was an exception.

Adelaide, 12th July

Dear Richard,

I’m having lunch by the Torrens today. It’s so lovely. The seagulls are everywhere, especially where there’s someone with food. Every now and then a pair of black swans takes off from the water. Just then a swan came up and put its head in my lap. The grass is so green it makes the water look green. It’s very pleasant and every now and then big drops of rain plop down, but the sun dries them up.

Doctor Moore has marked a map for Tucker who is going to shoot crocodiles at Darwin soon, as he’s just come back and knows all the roads and lurks. Tucker is so excited. Tonight he is taking Patsie and me to see
The Eddy Duchin Story.

I forgot to tell you what has come to me in the last few days. I know now, Richard; I will marry you whenever you wish.

The swans and seagulls are making a lot of noise a bit further down as people are feeding them and they are flocking.

I am going back to work now. St Peters’ spires send their regards and I send my love.

Jilly

When Richard arrived in an ambulance at his parents’ home in Wattle Street, Fullarton, he lay in a single bed in the front living room with the mallee-root fire blazing beside him.

Richard’s Aunty Mollie Dutton, who lived next door, came in to join us. The plan was that Mollie would help her sister Gwen, Richard’s mother, take care of him for the rest of his life.

Before dinner, the family assembled by the fire and had drinks of brandy and dry ginger with little bacon biscuits. It was a combination that I found delicious. Lizzie, the live-in helper whom the family had inherited with the house when Richard’s grandmother died, was in the kitchen keeping the fire for the woodstove going and basting the roast and vegetables. When dinner was ready, Lizzie hit a brass gong with a small drumstick and Richard’s mother led us down the hall to the dining
room. Richard had a tray brought in to him with the food cut up so that he could eat it. He had some movement in his right hand and was already developing what were called ‘trick movements’, which meant that he could use both hands by lifting his left hand with his right and placing it where he was able to use the fingers of that hand. He had no movement in his legs or body but could move his head. It was an immense piece of good fortune that he had got back the use of his diaphragm, which meant he could breathe unaided and had the use of his right hand and some of his left. Sometimes people who had polio were left with movement of a foot and none of a hand. This luck meant Richard could eat and drink unaided, shave and clean his teeth. Immense things and immense liberties.

After dinner, Lizzie, Mrs Llewellyn and I washed up at the tiny sink in the old kitchen. We went back to Richard and the family played cards for an hour or two. Then everybody but I went to bed (Richard already being in bed). After three or four of these weekends, I had a bright idea. I put on my pink celanese nightdress under my lilac woollen dress and held it up with a safety pin or two so that it was not apparent. When the family left, I stood up, took out the pins, lifted the dress from my head and down fell the hem of the nightdress, ready for bed. What Richard thought, I do not know, but he seemed astonished, though not displeased. I lifted the covers on
his single bed and slipped in beside him. Then I turned off the lamp and we lay kissing while the fire licked the room with shadows.

This slipping into Richard’s bed at his family home became a ritual and I went on doing it until we were married, by which time I had learnt that it was not normal protocol for girls to keep their nightdresses on in such situations.

D
oes everybody feel, when they look back on their wedding day, that they were under some sort of spell? Like a Bunraku puppet, I went to my wedding dressed in white with my father beside me. My mother waited in the church with my brothers and their wives, and Richard sat in his chair before the altar, prepared for his commitment. Somewhere, the puppeteer dressed in black crawled along, pulling the strings as I walked down the aisle with my father. For some reason I had the conviction that I should acknowledge people as I passed them. It seemed callous to walk past without doing so. This behaviour had struck me outside the church when my father and I had got out of the car. I began at once to introduce my friends one by one to my father until, exasperated, he tugged me away and side by side we entered the church. Progress up the aisle was slow because I kept halting, nodding and smiling at whomever
I knew. Some I did not know because they were friends of Richard’s family, and, if it were not for that, the progress would have been slower still.

Knowing that this marriage had many critics, including Richard’s Aunty Mollie – the nurse who declined to attend – and my anxious and distressed parents, I took it into my head to announce all my vows more loudly than was usual in wedding ceremonies. The light streamed down through a stained-glass window on my left as I said, ‘In sickness and in health’ and ‘For better or for worse’, emphasising my confidence and trying to allay the negativity I knew was in the mind of many in the congregation.

The reception was at home on my parents’ farm. But how to get Richard out of the church and into the car to drive away without people seeing him being lifted by his father or his brother was a problem. We left by a side door and I stood watching while Richard was put into the car. The well-laid plan was disrupted by some people coming around to stare. I glared back at them furiously. And yet how could they know that we did not want this part of the day’s events to be seen? I had relied on the fact that they might be sensitive enough to stay outside the front of the church where we would be driven round, wave to them, and meet them back inside my parents’ home.

My mother was too upset to buy a new frock for my wedding, so wore a dark blue, floral, silk, shirt-waisted dress she already owned. When the guests came in the
front door, she said she could not face forming a welcoming line, so they drifted in and mingled around until they found friends and sat down at one of the tables set in a T-shape in the living room.

Out in the garden, surrounded by the fruit trees my mother had planted, Richard and I had drinks with his school friends and my nursing friends. It was 110 degrees and people were drinking beer. Morrie (Richard’s father) and my father sat on the front railing of the garden in their shirts and braces, discussing, I suppose, our chances. Or maybe it was the price of wheat and wool. There is a photograph in my album of them sitting there yarning, looking out on to the road with their backs to the party. I have always found that photograph eloquent. What were they thinking? They must have known the risks and feared the consequences of what Richard and I had just done.

I was happy. I had achieved what I wanted, in spite of my mother’s efforts. She had rung the jeweller and protested to him that he should not sell us the ring when we became engaged, so desperate she was to save me from myself. But she might as well have tried to stop a waterfall. And in my hubris, determination and cruelty, I merely laughed and thought it amusing that she should pit herself against me and do such a wild thing. That square-emerald-and-diamond ring had gone on my finger and I was triumphant. Now a wide gold band was beside it.

W
e were driven by Richard’s parents from our honeymoon at the sea to the small shop on King William Street, Hyde Park, that was to be our home. It comprised an old-fashioned lending library and a drycleaning agency. The European man who sold us the business was a tailor and Richard accepted his offer to make him a suit. Having a suit that could be easily put on and taken off Richard was a boon to us both. The struggle to get a normal jacket on was almost impossible because his arms could not be lifted high or wide enough to fit into the sleeves.

The shop had two rooms behind it – a kitchen with a tiny bathroom attached and a living room. We put the wardrobe next to the stove and made an alcove there for our bed. My mother was appalled. But she said nothing at the time and only later explained that she found it very difficult to visit us there. But to us it was a palace. Home
at last and there we played at man and wife, I in my pink slub linen playsuit and Richard in his suit.

People dropped off their drycleaning on their way to work and Richard wrote out a docket. They threw their garments into a large box that I had decorated with wallpaper. Later it was to become our son’s playpen for the times of the day when I needed to be wrapping the cleaned clothes because I had nowhere else to put him to stop him running out on the road. Standing on the soiled clothes, he peered over the top of the box while people talked to him and I thought that they must be enchanted with this amazingly beautiful child.

The bus stopped right outside our door, so there was usually somebody waiting there who chatted to Richard sitting inside behind the counter with his tray on his lap. Some had no idea that he was paralysed. They saw a young man sitting upright and it was easy for them to imagine he was simply resting from something like a football injury. ‘Don’t get up,’ a woman might say, heaving her cleaning through the door, ‘I’ll just drop it in the box. Keep the docket.’ And Richard would say when told not to get up, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’ The fact that he could not, in fact, sit up if it weren’t for the high back of the chair that propped him did not occur to some, until perhaps gradually they began to notice that his beautiful, elegant hands were somewhat distorted and then maybe they noticed he never moved.

Above all, we meant to be normal. It was a huge thing in our minds that we should be accepted as normal. Richard and I made what plans we could. What amazes me is that everything seemed possible and we never doubted that we could marry and have a life together, just the same as all our other friends. And for many years we did. We had businesses, children, holidays and a normal life. Normal was what I longed for us to be and with might and main we tried. Being a young person in a wheelchair was a very rare thing. Medicine had not been able to save many people who had spinal injuries, and those who lived were often kept in hospitals for the aged. We were young and on the street and determined.

Richard would have nothing to do with others who belonged to a club formed for polio victims. Perhaps he felt he may be tainted. Yet years later he worked with the disabled and became Adviser to Premier John Bannon on Affairs of the Disabled.

This struggle to be accepted and to appear normal took effort and we never wavered from this. It had, I see now, effects on both our children that, while I see no way out of the dilemma, still fill me with sorrow and regret. They did not understand their father’s paralysis. There were no examples for them to see of other children in this sort of family and, as a result, our daughter formed the conviction that her father could really move but was just pretending not to. She formed the plan that she would get
hold of a box of matches and burn down the house, which would force him to get up and finally show that he was not paralysed at all but had only been foxing. None of this was known to us, and, if we had known, perhaps we may have been able to talk to her and show her the truth. Yet children need their protective ideas and I don’t know if we would have helped her. I don’t know what we could have done to help either child but I wish we had done something.