The Dressmaker's Daughter (2 page)

‘
W
here’s your straw, Jill?’ my parents would say. Being too young to speak, in answer I would obligingly pat my head and my parents would smile to the person to whom they were illustrating this trick.

I was called by my second name, Jill, being named for my aunt Kathleen who had died in childbirth six months before I was born. (She was my father’s brother Uncle Doug’s, wife.) Kathleen Jill went more rhythmically than the reverse. In my thirties, I said to my mother, ‘When Uncle Doug dies, I’m going to change my name to Katherine.’ She said, ‘You don’t need to wait. He won’t know or care. Change it now,’ and I did.

My hair was a disappointment. It was straight and white. In an era when curls were de rigueur, straightness was unsatisfactory. But there were remedies galore. Curly Pet was a fluid sold in a bottle and my mother used it copiously on my hair, setting it into curls by twisting strands around her fingers and patting them down onto
my scalp. (It was advertised as being able to encourage straight hair, not only to turn into curls that hour but to actually grow to be naturally curly.) My mother waited until it dried and then combed it out. It was probably sugary water but it did the trick for a few hours, and straight became curly and therefore pretty.

Remember you’re a doll. Don’t say you’re anything else!

When I grew too much hair for Curly Pet to control, curling rags were used. Wet hair was combed into hanks and each hank was rolled into an oblong piece of cloth that was then curled upwards and the ends tied. The cloth was from a torn-up sheet. It was always white, never anything else. The whole head was covered in these little knots and then the child went to bed. How you can sleep on these tight lumps, I don’t know, except that sleep comes swiftly and deeply to children. Witness them falling asleep while being carried over the shoulder of a parent, their head hanging down over the parent’s shoulder blade. And all the other positions in which children fall asleep. As I grew older, my mother slowly gave up hope of my ever growing curls and began to plait my hair. Curls and curling rags were kept for special occasions.

Plaits were one of the joys of my childhood. Standing each morning at the kitchen table while my mother braided my hair into two plaits, I had the marvellous feeling of being cosseted.

As each plait was finished, my mother took a roll of green or saxe blue taffeta ribbon and looped the plait up under itself, tying it with a bow. (It takes one-and-a-half yards to make two equal ribbons for plaits. I know because I was sent to buy ribbons from the drapery shop in the main street.) I had my mother’s full attention. No brother had plaits.

To get curls, women who had straight hair as my mother did, had permanent waves done. Walking past the hairdresser’s shop, we inhaled a deep, swift stench of chemicals that were used to break the shaft of the hair and to bend it into curls and waves. When I went in to meet my mother on one of the days she was having a perm, the smell was even stronger. It permeated the whole shop but nobody seemed to notice, or at least they didn’t mention it.

Deep butterfly waves of my mother’s brown hair covered her head. This hair matched the green frock she had made for herself with silver bugle beads embroidered on the front shoulders.

I have a framed photograph of my mother holding my middle brother, Billy, in his christening robe. She is wearing the green frock and her hair is newly permed.

Billy was our father’s favourite child and Tucker was our mother’s. (Tucker had her nature and looked like her, too. The rest of us were fair like our father.) Peter and I were not at all upset by this favouritism, perhaps because it was not fully expressed. It was just something that was
said in the family and we all felt it was true. But, as far as I know, we held no grudges.

Our father sometimes recited this rhyme to me in a meaningful way:

There was a little girl

Who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead,

And when she was good

She was very, very good

And when she was bad

She was horrid.

And when he was pleased with me, he would expand on the name my family used for me, Dooley (which Tucker first called me when he was learning to say ‘Jill’), and call me ‘Dooley Pegs, Lolly Legs, Pickled Eggs’, which became my nickname.

‘A girl is more trouble than three boys put together!’ my mother would say. And I never felt that was wrong. I knew it was right. I was troublesome. I bit.

‘Oh, keep the baby away from her!’ my mother would cry when a friend brought her baby in a pram to afternoon tea. ‘Oh, but she loves the baby. You can see that!’ the baby’s mother would say. ‘Oh, you fool; that’s when she bites!’ There would be a terrible howl from the baby and my mother would be proved right.

One day, in desperation, my mother took a dirty old collar that belonged to our dog Funny Face and said to me, ‘Only dogs bite.’ With that, she put the collar around my neck and chained me up to the clothesline. No doubt I then howled like a dog.

It did the trick. I never bit again. I know this because I remember my mother telling friends this story for years afterwards. I may not have been curly, but I did, for a while, become a pet.

I
n common with women of her time, my mother had girls who helped her rear her children. They were not called nannies; they had no name – neither maids, housekeepers nor cleaners. They were called by their names: Gertie, Jane and Mary. These were the Swiggs sisters. One by one as they left to marry, another sister came to work for my mother. Paid a few shillings a week, they came after my father left for work and left once they had bathed us and put us to bed. The fact that we went to bed at five o’clock probably had something to do with the time they had to leave to go home to their parents.

It has always been difficult to convince people that, until I was twelve, my brothers and I went to bed at five o’clock. I imagine it was to make a peaceful evening for our mother to sit with our father, to have their tea in peace and, after washing up, to spend time together talking and listening to the wireless.

Of course, this early hour for sleeping meant we were early risers. One by one we’d arrive in our parents’ bedroom and climb into bed with them. By the time I got there, there was no room left so I would lie across the bottom of the bed beside my father’s brown checked woollen dressing-gown with its tasselled silken cord. My parents never complained about the disturbance, accepting, I suppose, this as the price of peaceful evenings.

In the afternoon, my mother had a rest and one of the girls would take us to visit her mother, Mrs Swiggs.

Mary has since told me she would put Tucker, the baby at the time, in the big wicker pram, and sit me on a board placed across the front of it. As we grew older and could walk further and our two younger brothers were born, Billy and Peter took over the pram, and Tucker and I walked beside them.

The Swiggs’s home was across the swamp on the edge of town. The swamp was a mysterious place – vast, empty, slimy, with purple and pink swamp plants. Slightly repellent, full of sky and space and a vague smell of rot, salt and otherness.

The back step of the house where we entered had a board propped on the step so the mud below could be avoided. Even this seemed exciting, different and sensible in a romantic way. To me, Mrs Swiggs was practical. I had no words for these feelings but she embodied a calm,
heroic life, greeting us easily and sending us off to one of her rooms to play.

One particularly thrilling room of the house had hundreds of magazines in it. Perhaps they were
The Women’s Weekly.
Coloured photographs of Hollywood starlets, as they were called, were on the cover and inside on the pages. There I first learnt of Lana Turner, Myrna Loy, Arlene Dahl, Cyd Charisse, Esther Williams, Deanna Durbin, Fred Astaire…These names and faces I knew long before I ever saw a film. There was no cinema in the town but occasionally there would be a film night held at the town hall. (There it was that I was taken to see a film called
The Night Has Eyes.
People sank into mud and disappeared. For weeks I woke screaming. A later helper and her boyfriend had taken me to see the film. Mud. The swamp was eerie enough without having to pass over it thinking of falling from the path and sinking forever into its depths. Mud held the fear of filth in it and for a child of somebody who was so scrupulous that she had potty-trained me, she said, by three months of age, mud was potent in a way that combined death and shame.)

In a bedroom with a cast-iron single bed was a set of wooden blocks, painted to form parts of a Georgian house. Doors, walls, windows and steps. We played with these blocks for hours, building the house and knocking it down.

In a small shed beside the house, there was a fishing net hung across the ceiling and inside the net were
hundreds of cardboard boxes. On wet days, one of the girls would climb up on a chair and take down some of the boxes for us to play with. What the boxes were kept for I don’t know, but to us they were exotic and marvellous things to play with.

Mrs Swiggs was a tinsmith; she could solder, make water tanks, guttering and small watering cans for us to play with. She was of medium height, probably about fifty when we first met her, or even younger, with her hair pinned back in a grey bun. It may be that her hair turned grey over the years and that I remember her this way because I was twelve when we paid the last visit to her house. She wore a floral cotton apron over a dark dress, stockings and laced-up shoes. In these clothes she built huge tanks, helped her husband, Alfred, move tons of mallee roots onto his truck and made strong tea in a big pot beside the stove, which burnt all day.

Mr Swiggs was also a tank maker and had a mallee-root business. He sold the wood around the town from the back of his truck, which was kept in a large shed, often surrounded by mud, behind the house. A man of few words, he sipped his tea from a saucer to cool it in the morning when he was in a hurry to go to work. When he did this, Mrs Swiggs would give him a dark look and say, ‘Not in front of the children, Albert!’ But could it have been morning? What were we doing there if the family was having breakfast? Was Mrs Swiggs taking care of me
and perhaps one of my brothers because our mother was giving birth? Was it the school holidays and we were visiting because our mother wanted to have the house to herself for a few hours? More probably I think it may have been that I had been ill with croup or one of those endless bronchial infections I had, and may not have been well enough to go to school, but well enough to be taken to visit Mrs Swiggs or even, perhaps, to stay overnight with her.

In the front of the house, Mrs Swiggs had a garden. It was unlike any other garden I had seen, having purple statice as its main plant. This was because the salty, swampy ground probably meant that only certain plants would grow there. There was a straight path to the front door and garden beds on either side filled with statice and other annuals, stocks and Iceland poppies. The statice leaned over, torn at by the wind that howled around the house month after month. In summer, where it was over forty degrees sometimes for two weeks straight, the statice survived, dry and slanting away from the wind, as indestructible as Mrs Swiggs herself.

The name ‘Mrs Swiggs’ held a certain magic for my mother, and consequently we too loved to say it. She provided a safe consolation to us all, a sweet calm, an acceptance of us and a total disregard of how inconvenient we may have been, visiting day after day, year after year.

W
hen I was five, my parents took me to a pram workshop somewhere in the city. They had ordered a doll’s pram for me but it was not yet ready. Then and there, when I first heard that I was to have a pram but that we would have to wait for it to be finished, I howled. I have a sharp memory of being held by my father. I was wearing a pale blue woollen overcoat my mother had made, and was kicking with little white leather boots in his arms. Suddenly the feeling grew on me that I was behaving appallingly and yet I couldn’t stop. My curls were set with Curly Pet and I was as close an imitation of Shirley Temple as my mother’s genius for dressing-up could contrive.

On Christmas morning, when the pram arrived, I pushed my doll in it, alone down the esplanade. White daisy bushes blew in the wind; the chain hanging between the posts of Mrs Schramm’s cream-coloured brick fence was unmoved by the breeze. The doll was dressed in a
Liberty voile frock with matching pants that my mother had made. The lining of the pram’s cover was the same voile beneath a cream knitted blanket. The whole effect was one of entrancing beauty.

This memory is my first of being entirely and rhapsodically happy. The bay, the sky, the chain fence, the white gravel road, the cream wicker pram with its pale pink leather lining smoothly gliding with the doll inside, and the freedom to be walking alone with my present gave me a whiff of what it means to be completely happy.

This pram proved to be useful in other ways. When Peter was born, five years after me, I was given the task of taking him for a walk in my doll’s pram around the block while my parents washed the breakfast dishes. Two children fewer in the house meant more peace, so it became my daily job to walk my baby brother.

In a time when most families recycled and made themselves almost everything that they needed, prams were lent to neighbours and to friends when they weren’t being used. When I was older and no longer played with my doll’s pram but kept it in serene isolation like a throne in my bedroom, it was borrowed for a child who I thought would not take care of it. There was nothing I could do about this and it may just have been a prejudice from selfishness but I was concerned. The pram was returned after a year or two but it was not the same. However, it resumed its dignified place in my pink
bedroom and remained there, isolated and untouched, until my parents tried to buy a farm.

Because the deposit for the farm was a little more than they had saved, the pram was sold for ten pounds. I could not believe it. Sell the pram! You might as well sell the kitchen table. I thought the pram was mine forever.

Years later, my mother explained to me why she had sold the pram and I understood. But at the time I had no comprehension of the great need for money and was simply astonished that this could come about.

When one of the Swiggs girls pushed one or two of my brothers over the swamp to visit their mother, she used our big cream wicker pram, a larger version of my own.

Eventually this vehicle was passed on to a family who were expecting a baby. I think my mother would have seen its passing with relief. It meant she was not expecting to have any more babies and that she and her husband had finally found a contraceptive method that worked.

Once, when my father had a new young assistant in his office, we met his wife, our first English war bride. Mrs Dick Smith had come out to a hot dry place full of astonishing frugality. My mother said Mrs Dick Smith, as she was always called, threw out her silk stockings when they laddered. (She was meant to mend them.) She wore them when she scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees and so they laddered.

Mrs Dick Smith had a beautiful navy blue English pram. There was no end of amazement when she threw the pram out on a rubbish tip. My mother never got over it. Poor woman, what was she to do? How could she know local mores? Her name was Sheila and she had chocolate in the house. Once when I was visiting my friend Josie, her daughter, we began to eat the chocolate. I ate far too much and Mrs Dick Smith found out. She didn’t say much, but looked sadly at me, more in sorrow than in rage, and I learnt the price of greed.