The Dressmaker's Daughter (3 page)

T
he wind was filling the sails of the yachts in the bay as we sat at our desks. Miss Howard stands in front of us. Three grades in one room. One of the boys, the week’s fire monitor, has piled mallee roots onto the fire burning in a corner near the teacher’s table.

Miss Howard wears spectacles, a grey pleated skirt and a hand-knitted jumper of grey and white squares. She is small and her speckled grey hair is curved into a roll on the nape of her neck. It is her task to teach us all to read, write and do arithmetic. She is also to teach us to sing
doh re mi fa soh la ti doh
up and down the scale, as well as to draw gum leaves, glasses of water and oranges. We are also to learn the major rivers of India and China. There is never any mention of the rivers of Australia.

It is 1943 and we are at war with Germany and Japan. Our fathers have dug air-raid shelters in our backyards and roofed them over with old sheets of galvanised iron so they are level with the cabbage seedlings.

Some of our fathers and uncles have gone to war. My father has not gone and I believe it is because he has too many children and that my mother could not manage without him, she loves him so much.

On this table here beside me as I write now is a photograph of thirty-nine children with Miss Howard, who is standing at the back by the row of the tallest boys. In the front, beside my brother Tucker – who is staring at the camera with his piercing gaze, sitting cross-legged, in a row of younger boys – is a small blackboard with ‘Tumby Bay H.P. School 1943, Grades I, II, III’ written on it. Two of the boys in front, and probably several others in the back, are not wearing shoes.

After the photograph was taken, we moved on to our recess time, playing on the asphalt yard.

Because it was winter, we probably played marbles, or hopscotch or went on the swings. Or simply chased each other round and round the yard.

At lunchtime, my brother and I sit on a bench built in a circle around a big peppertree’s trunk and I take from my brown leather satchel the sandwiches our mother has made and wrapped in greaseproof paper. One by one I hand out the sandwiches of cold hogget and cauliflower pickle, or Vegemite, or apricot jam, or sliced tomato, or boiled egg with chopped lettuce. Then I unwrap my own and we eat.

We played longer games, such as Red Rover All Over, after we had eaten. In all these team games, much
depended on being chosen. But who chose the leader? They simply seemed to rise from the group as naturally as a wave on the shore. What made them believe they should be the leader? I never wondered this at the time but simply accepted the chance of being chosen and not being left to the shame of being the last selected.

My best friend, Heather Poole, who stands in the same row as me in the photograph, and I probably perform our latest trick, which is to hang upside down from the monkey bars. Our skirts flap over our faces, my plaits hanging down, and our matching bloomers with handkerchiefs tucked into the elastic of the leg are there for all to see. We loved this game but I could never drag myself up onto the bar, so had to fall off into the sand below.

There was another game Tucker and I played at home with our two younger brothers, who were not yet old enough to come to school. This was called ‘Sheep’. We used our mother’s washing pegs and lined them up, side by side, to form yards or paddocks. Into these paddocks we put the stones of quandong fruit left over from the pies our mother made when the ship
The Moonta
did not arrive in time to provide us with our weekly supply of fruit. These stones resemble Chinese Checkers stones and they were the sheep in our game. I had just learnt to sew and had made small bags filled with wheat. I had enjoyed tying up the corners at the top with a twist at each end as real wheat bags had. The boys’ toy trucks were loaded
with bags of wheat and sheep, and gates were opened and closed by moving a peg horizontally along the carpet. We played this game obsessively in all seasons. Our piles of sheep and pegs grew and the space of our paddocks had no limit. Down the hall we went and out on to the veranda. Only the fall of night and our five o’clock bedtime made us stop. There was a glorious sense of limitless space that marked us all. If we had had time, we could have taken our stations and paddocks out the front gate, across the road and down to the beach. Only the sea would have stopped us.

I believe it is as a consequence of this game that our family has always had a problem with space and boundaries. We have never known when something is sufficient. Huge houses, enormous kitchens, vast sheds, animals and land. I stay exempt from these but have my own obsessions.

Looking at this photograph now of our Tumby Bay school group, I realise that my brother Tucker would have been beginning to have his lifelong difficulty (of which we know nothing at this stage, nor will we for forty years or more) with dyslexia. He cannot be taught the difference between ‘b’ and ‘d’. The world of literature is a battlefield to him. His happiness lies with animals. Already our destinies are formed.

Tucker, a few years later, has a teacher, Mr M, who, in a frenzy of frustration at trying to teach him to read, utters
a sentence that galvanises the child. Years later, at Tucker’s daughter’s wedding, I asked my brother, as we queued at a buffet, plate in hand, why he had bought so many cattle stations. This was because I had read in
The Australian
newspaper that he was the twelfth largest land owner in Australia and, as they put it, he did it from a standing start. It had come as a shock to me. (Secrecy runs in the family; it runs like a rat’s tail of ash through a piece of Morbier cheese.) I knew he was always buying land but I had not thought much about it.

He said, ‘It’s a joke, really.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, do you remember that teacher we had, old M?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s a joke because he wouldn’t remember what he said and, what’s more, he’s dead.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said: “You’ll end up sweeping the streets, Brinkworth,” and that’s why I’ve done it. Ridiculous, really, don’t you think?’

At bedtime, our father reads to us, usually the same book –
Eb and Flo,
the story of two black Americans and their children. When I am ill with croup, our father reads to me in the night, over and over, while the fumes of a cream flannel soaked in water, vinegar and methylated
spirits calms the loud whoop coming from my throat until I turn over and say, ‘That’s enough, Daddy,’ and go to sleep.

Miss Howard has an eager reader in me. What I do not know, and what Miss Howard fails to tell me, is that books have themes and meaning. I simply love to read. Perhaps because at home we were read, in the main, one book, over and over, and the sensuous pleasure of reading satisfied me, I never understood that you read one book, closed it and then began another. I thought that reading was like swimming. You did not say, if you had swum in the sea or one pool, that you had swum in it and therefore you would not swim in it again. No, you swam there over and over, just as I thought you read over and over.

Years later I read
The Tree of Man,
just looping back straight from the end to the start, until somebody told me about themes and ideas behind books. This, I think, is why I had always read for style and not for plot. What’s style? Style is the way you wear your hat. What’s style in a book? It’s the way the writer sees the world and puts it into sentences. By then I was enrolled in an Adult Matriculation School and I needed to smarten up and grasp the idea of literature. It was a revelation to me when a student, called Ralph, said one day, after I’d said I didn’t understand how to write English essays: ‘You know, books have themes and are about ideas.’ A bombshell. No more re-reading. A loss and a gain.

In that red-brick school room, Miss Howard is out the front teaching the Grade Ones ‘a-for-apple, b-for-bat’ from the school primer titled
Tom and Kathleen.

School, this other Eden, began with an apple. Miss Howard sets the Grade Ones to copying letters from the alphabet and sets the Grade Twos to tracing the Brahmaputra and the Ganges from a map onto a piece of tracing paper. Then they must trace the map into their exercise book. We all do a lot of tracing. To this day I like tracing the pattern of sentences by using other words with the original sentence’s rhythms and tone. Great writers are best to use for this: Dickens, Graham Greene and Nabokov for example.

Behind me sits Gresham Ebbs, a very blond boy who loves to put caterpillars down his shirt. It is said his mother baths him at lunchtime, but whatever the truth in that, he is an extremely clean child. He takes a caterpillar from his shirt during class and tries to drop it onto my neck. In the schoolyard he chases me with a caterpillar squirming in his hand. Revulsion and terror have a curious effect on me in that they turn the back of my legs completely rigid. I have to stop running, but continue screaming. I am not afraid of snakes but caterpillars frighten me. One of the world’s deadliest snakes lives in our sand dunes: the death adder. But we have never seen one and not much is made of the danger by our parents.

We Grade Threes are taking dictation. We must write and spell all the words correctly. Then, when we have finished writing what Miss Howard reads out to us slowly, we take it out to her and she corrects it in our lined exercise books. Hearing a word spelt correctly by the girl in front of me, I cheat by sauntering back to my desk, rubbing out the word I have written, correcting it and then slowly ambling out again to the queue. This cheating has haunted me and I would like to tell Miss Howard what I did.

She boarded in the little town, taught hundreds of children to read and write and to polka round the maypole. There were hundreds like her throughout the country. Nobody thought it hard or astonishing or even worthy of comment that she should teach three classes in one room, and so many children at that. No-one said she was overworked or that we were badly educated. It was normal, and there were no complaints. Neither was there praise.

Miss Howard gave me the gift of reading.

B
efore her marriage, my mother had earned her living by dressmaking. She understood fabric, beading, embroidery, stitches of all kinds, colour, smocking, godets, basting, bodices, French seams and fashion. And she had a tremendous feeling for colour. Her favourite colour combination (in those days it was common for women to ask each other, and ask their children too, what their favourite colour combination was) was brown and green. ‘Go to nature,’ she would say. ‘Nature never gets it wrong. Look at a plum tree – those burgundies, pinks, browns and purples. See how lovely they are.’

‘Never dye your hair. You have been given hair that matches your skin and eyes.’

All our clothes were made at home. My dresses and my three brothers’ short pants, shirts, jumpers and socks, and even our singlets, which were knitted after we went to bed, as my parents sat together in the gathering dark.

‘Stand still. You’ve got a sway back and I can’t get this
hem straight if you keep moving.’ I was standing on the kitchen table wearing a frock basted together with pins, some parts of it sewn, other parts about to be.

The feel of the cold steel of her scissors clipping around my armpit felt dangerous and lovely. ‘Never take too much from the arm. You can’t put it back. It’s a big mistake to do anything but take a little bit at a time. Badly fitted sleeves are terrible.’ The cloth fell in slivers around my socks.

When we had our annual holidays in the city, my mother would take me to films to see the costumes. ‘Oh, look at the way the back is tucked!’ she’d say. ‘Look at the darts. See how the waist is cut.’ The back or the front of the frock made no difference to us; we were equally interested in the way it was made. I knew nothing of plot or dialogue; these matters passed by in a whirl of fabric, cut, style, colour and the way the star’s hair was dressed. ‘Look, a four-strand plait!’ ‘Oh, what gorgeous hair! Look at that red. Isn’t that beautiful?’ My mother loved red hair above all else. She tried to buy me a doll with red hair, but instead gave me a black-haired one, because it was cheaper.

When there was a ball on in the town, my mother would lend one of her ball gowns to a local girl. The girl, who had red hair and whose name I forget, Irene perhaps, came to the house to dress and to be powdered by my mother. I
must have woken because I found them with a big powder puff, which they were applying to the girl’s shoulders, my mother saying, ‘It is important to pay attention to the shoulders and neck as well as the face.’ The thick red hair had been plaited and coiled up on top of her head and fastened there with an abundance of pins. Like a doll.

After they had bought a small farm, my parents were poorer than they had ever been. At this time I was twelve and growing tall, which meant my clothes no longer fitted. Taking a tablecloth made of brushed cotton in a dark green tartan, my mother made a flared skirt for me. She found some olive green wool, possibly bought cheaply because it was a very unpopular colour, and knitted a beautiful jumper with a small collar with pompom ties made from the same wool. I wore this outfit for a year or two and it bridged that time in a girl’s life when she is neither woman nor child. There were no teenagers. The term had been invented by that time, and I had seen it in my friend Rosemary’s American magazines, but nobody we knew spoke of teenagers nor did I know that I was one until then.

Clothes were very important to my mother and, as a consequence, to me. They were a sign that we fitted in, that we were not poor, that we were respectable.

I remember being sent off alone to a fancy-dress party in the local hall one afternoon. I was about seven and my
mother had hurriedly made a costume for me. As she tied the bow at the back of my waist, she said, ‘Now, remember, you are a doll. Don’t say you’re anything else.’

‘Doll!’ I thought, surprised. I’d never been a doll before and I hadn’t heard of anybody being a doll, either. Impressed by her urgent admonishment, I went into the hall and said, ‘I am a doll.’

All my life I have been a doll. Dressing up for every event. Even, I see now, for my husband’s funeral. Joanie, my daughter’s godmother, told me later that our friend Toni had asked, ‘What did Jilly wear to Richard’s funeral?’

When the school inspector visited us in Grade Two, as I sat in class I saw his eyes take in my costume. He was impressed. (I knew that because he immediately asked me a question.) It was a pinafore dress with a pattern of apricot fruits on a green and cream background, with saxe blue frills that went over the shoulder and a tie of the same blue material at the back. Beneath this was a white short-sleeved blouse. There were matching blue taffeta ribbons on my plaits. Whether or not the inspector actually did relish this I cannot say, but what he could not have known was that my dress was made from some kitchen curtains.

What it means to be clothed by your mother is something basic and profound. In some ways it is a form of breastfeeding. The complete attention the child gets when its mother is sewing, fitting or measuring provokes
a feeling of deep trust. It is a form of cosseting that gives comfort and creates a serene feeling.

When my daughter was about fifteen, I saw that she needed a jumper. I had not knitted for my children since they were infants, but on that day I took out the knitting bag, found a pattern and some needles, and went out and bought deep-rose-coloured wool. When my daughter saw what I was doing, she began to laugh and knelt at my feet as I knitted, laughing with astonishment and joy. I was surprised and saw that my knitting comforted her. I wished I had done it before because it brought her so much pleasure. That jumper is still here, folded in the wardrobe, with a moth-hole or two in the front.

Was my daughter my doll? Perhaps. Only she can say. But I was my mother’s doll in many ways and it did me nothing but good.