The Dressmaker's Daughter (4 page)

M
y mother said that the event of the year in Tumby Bay during the war was the Red Cross Ball.

For one of these balls, my mother turned me into a fairy. She made wings edged with tinsel and gave me a wand she had made with a star on the end.

I was taken to the ball by friends of my parents. After I had gone, a neighbour, May Carr, whose husband was away at the war, called in and asked my mother to dress as an Aboriginal woman and come to the ball with her. The person who had planned to go as May’s partner was ill. ‘May begged me,’ my mother wrote in her autobiography, ‘and said no-one would know us. I said, “Well, if I can blacken Billy, my baby, I will go.” I woke him up and started to blacken his face and hands with shoe polish. He cried and I put him back to bed. [There must have been nobody at home for my mother to have insisted on taking Billy.] I put on a long coat, pulled a hat
over my eyes and wore sandshoes. May then came back dressed as an Aboriginal man – she had a dead lizard on a string.

‘I am terrified of lizards…I said, “May, I won’t go if you take that lizard.” She said, “Look, it’s dead and I won’t let it get anywhere near you.” So I gave in. I still felt awful and didn’t want to go. I said to May, “Wait a minute.” I ran down to the fowl house and grabbed a couple of Rhode Island chooks. I felt like a thieving gypsy. I put them into a bag, cut a hole and pulled their heads out and threw them over my shoulder.

‘When we got to the hall, I didn’t want to go in. May said, “Come on, no-one will know us,” so I went in. I sat on the floor fondling the hens’ heads. I had to do something with my hands as I felt nervous. In the parade I accidentally trod on the dead lizard. I got such a fright I screamed and jumped into the air. Everyone shrieked with laughter, thinking it was an act. I noticed people nearly falling off their seats laughing.

‘We were awarded the-most-humorous-couple prize.

‘Mrs Wibberley [our doctor’s wife] was a judge and had presented Jill with her prize and told Jill that the black woman was her mother. Jill cried and cried. She thought I was black for life. Mrs Wibberley laughed until she nearly cried. I have an upturned nose and when blackened it looked so funny she told me she has never seen anything so funny.

‘I grabbed my prize and ran all the way home and forgot about May. I got into a bath…I wanted to be clean when they brought Jill home. It was days before I got all the black off and Jill would point at a bit and start to cry again.

‘Well, it made many people laugh but I was not too popular with Jill or Brink.’

And where was Brink, my father, during all these high jinks? There is no word on that.

And where was Tucker, their other baby? Were Billy and he left at home for this quick trip to the ball? There is nobody left to ask and it doesn’t matter.

I remember seeing my mother leaping around to avoid the lizard being dragged on a string as the contestants paraded in a circle around the hall. It could not be my mother and yet they said that it was.

O
n hot days we went in the late afternoon to the beach to wait for our father and Tucker to sail home. While Bill and I swam and played in our woollen bathers, Peter, the baby, remained with our mother on the sand and learnt to crawl. Salt-white daisy bushes lined the bay. Two jetties stretched out to sea and, while we played, our mother scanned the horizon for the little yacht.

Finally, when we had come in from the water and were either fighting or making sandcastles and building moats around them, filling these with water from buckets of seawater, we were told to sit and to try to see if we could find the yacht coming home. Other yachts were returning too, but the one we looked for had a small red dot on it, visible from a long way away. It was the red beret our brother wore and the yacht stood out among
the others as ours, ours alone, holding our father and our brother. Our mother would call, ‘Look! There they are. I can see Tucker’s beret.’

We would sometimes walk down one of the jetties to wait for them to row in with the dinghy after the boat had been left swaying at anchor a little way out in the bay. When the dinghy was tied to the jetty, a washing basket of fish, if it had been a good haul, would be lifted up the steps onto the jetty and our father and our small intense, quiet brother would follow. Together we’d walk back to the beach where Peter and our mother waited. Unpacking tomato sandwiches from greaseproof paper, our mother passed them round as we sat in a semicircle trying not to drop them in the sand. I can only remember having tomato sandwiches on these hot evenings, never any other kind. It may have been that it was the height of the tomato season and we’d had a good crop, or just that they seemed the most delicious food to take to the beach. White bread, butter and tomato with salt and pepper and a little bit of sand.

When we had finished our meal, the fish, which was mainly King George whiting and tommy ruffs, was loaded into the boot of the car, parked on the esplanade. We’d drive home, have the sand rinsed off our feet and be put to bed while our parents sat in the peace, talking over whatever it was that parents talked about.

Although it was years before I saw a reproduction of it, and years after that when I saw the painting itself, Turner’s ‘The Fighting Temeraire’, Britain’s most loved painting, reminds me of the red dot of my brother’s beret that we searched for on the sea’s horizon.

Y
allunda Flat is a district that lies a short journey inland from Tumby Bay. There my family visited their friends the Puckridges. Mr Puckridge was the manager of a famous sheep station owned by a wealthy bachelor, Mr Mortlock, who also owned Martindale Hall near Clare, north of Adelaide. Many years later, to everybody’s astonishment, Mr Mortlock married his secretary. When he died, Mrs Mortlock gave Martindale Hall to the University of Adelaide and I stayed there once on a camp held by the Department of English with my married lecturer boyfriend, thereby sullying a story of nobility.

Mrs Puckridge was my mother’s closest friend. They met when my mother arrived in Tumby Bay as a recent bride. Mr Puckridge was my father’s client and, being a stock-and-station agent, he often needed to visit the station to inspect sheep and to discuss business.

Sometimes we were invited out to the station to have lunch with the Puckridges. There is a photograph of us four
children with an old hand-driven lawnmower, and a screen of trees behind. Peter, the smallest, is sitting on the lawnmower and we are ranged by size along the handle. The boys are wearing overalls with white short-sleeved shirts. I am wearing a white blouse and what may be shorts. All these clothes were, of course, made by our mother. Our white hair reflects the sun like salt pans. The lawn beneath our feet added to the air of luxury and opulence that always seemed to me to be the essence of the station with its huge cool house, Mrs Puckridge within, waving away the flies, and Mr Puckridge at the head of the dining table. There must have been a well or a bore because the lawn and the exotic tree and the whole air of green fecundity was a contrast and a delight to me. I loved going to Yallunda Flat to visit the Puckridges.

We always had roast mutton for lunch. The sheep was killed from what was called ‘the ration paddock’. Because it was wartime, there was a feeling that every sheep had to be accounted for and only sheep in the ration paddock could be killed for the family to eat. It may be that I just got that idea from the name ‘the ration paddock’ and that it was simply normal practice to keep sheep separately for the family. It is anchored in my mind because my mother showed her newness to country habits by making a remark about the paddock that made people laugh. It stays in the mind when somebody laughs, even gently, at your mother, even if she laughs happily, too. Sometimes
she recounted the story of her naïve remark, so she could not have been too unhappy about it. In fact, I think she enjoyed the joke – which I can’t remember – because it showed her naïvety, and perhaps her youth.

Mrs Puckridge and Mrs Secker were my mother’s chief advisers in all matters of child-rearing. One day my father came home from work to find my mother biting off the fingernails of one of their babies. My father, astounded, asked what she was doing. My mother said that she was doing it because Mrs Secker had told her that if you did that your child would not be a thief. My father said, ‘If Mrs Secker told you to throw one of your children down a well, you would do it!’

Another time my mother surprised my father was when he arrived home to find the backyard covered in what he thought were tents. He asked why they had been pitched there. ‘Oh, they’re not tents; they’re sheeting!’ he was told. ‘I’ve bought calico and I’m going to make sheets. It needs to be bleached in the sun before I start.’ His innocent question made his wife laugh and she would tell the story years later as an illustration of how he had been reared sheltered from the facts of existence when every penny counted and where the domestic had a thousand tricks to extend the life of every artefact.

In fact, calico sheets are very strong and last a long time. They are pleasant to sleep between because they are slightly thicker and to me, at least, give a feeling of safety.
That may be because I grew up sleeping in them and all my childhood I felt safe.

The Puckridges had a beautiful only child called Ida, who was several years older than me and known for her contralto voice. At every concert in Tumby Bay – fundraisers for the Red Cross and the war effort – Ida sang her songs. She sang ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ and others that Kathleen Ferrier made her own.

I was up there on stage after Ida sang, reciting my little poems taught to me by my elocution teacher: ‘The Dove’ and ‘Daddy and Babsy’.

‘Lifting the dying dove in her arms she…The dove laid its head in her arms and died.’

I used the greatest pathos I could muster to add to the sentimentality of these poems. They went down well. Those who thought them pathetic held their tongues and the applause rose as I bowed holding my skirt out to each side in a curtsy.

During interval at these concerts, people walked down the aisles with cans, asking for donations for each performer’s act on behalf of the war effort. The donation was a form of voting. The performer who received the largest amount of money in the cans with their name on them won a prize. My mother always took a can around for Ida. This may be the source of the saying ‘carrying a can for a person’.

It would not have done for a parent to carry a can for their own child. That would have seemed boastful. So it never occurred to me that there was anything unusual in my mother trying to get the most votes possible for Ida, more votes for Ida than for me.

This ancient courtesy has caused trouble for me because I never thought, with this example before me, that it was proper to praise my children or to call attention to them. When they gained an American stepmother, who had been reared in a society that I think must have held the opposite view, and whose praise knew no bounds, it was undoubtedly pleasant to them and a great contrast to their own mother’s reticence.

Naturally, I can tell a child I love them and even that I think they are wonderful or beautiful. But the daily practice of praise eludes me, even though I have given it a shot. Something sticks in my throat.

Sometimes we would go blackberrying at Yallunda Flat. We gathered the berries from enormous bushes that grew along the side of the road. My father would hurl a stepladder into the middle of the blackberry bush and climb up with a can in hand. This struck me as the height of invention and was one more illustration of his cleverness. He’d pass down the full can and one of us would hand him up an empty can. We gathered the berries that hung lower down on the bushes. When we
had taken all we could find or had room enough for in our containers, we’d drive home. We ate the blackberries with cream because in those days we rarely had ice-cream, except in cones from a shop. We did, though, have custard. In her lifetime, our mother must have made enough custard to fill a ten-thousand-gallon water tank. The rest of the berries were made into blackberry jam, which we also ate with cream.

Our childhood was filled with fighting, cream and custard.

T
here was a matter that our family never spoke of but it was one that affected the women deeply. And that matter was that our father’s mother, Isabel, had been unhinged by the First World War. Her husband had taken a camera to war. He went to Gallipoli as a captain. Many years later, at the Australian War Memorial, I was shown some of his photographs. The curator said that it was unusual to take a camera to war at that time. There, too, are Nanna Brinkworth’s pleading letters in her large, elegant hand.

No. 80, 1st Avenue,

St. Peters, Nov. 20th, 1917.

Base Records, Melbourne.

Dear Sir,

You wrote me on Oct. 31st stating my husband Major T.A. Siekmann, 9th Light Horse, 3rd L.H. Brigade, Egypt, was wounded. Have you any word
on any 9th Light Horse arriving in Hospital? I have done all I can to locate my husband and failed. The Red Cross sent a cable to their office in Cairo, reply paid, and not having received a reply, they are to understand that so far they have not been successful in tracing him.

I am left to suppose his name has got onto the wrong list. Can you help to ascertain if this is so?

I also find some of my friends have had private cables from their sons from the 9th Regiment saying they have arrived at the Ismalia Hospital.

I do beg of you to find out what is wrong and send me a wire to be paid on delivery.

Trusting to you to get me further news.

Yours truly,

Isabel Siekmann

I might add I have spent three pounds, five shillings, on cables with no result.

Grandfather Thomas Anglesey Siekmann enlisted on 18 March 1914. He had continuous service in the field until April 1918. Along the way, he had become Colonel T.A. Brinkworth, replacing his German name with his mother’s maiden name.

(Their daughter-in-law Beck, who is now over a hundred years old, remembers her father discussing with another man that we were at war. He was worried, she
says, because their name was Beckmann, which has German connotations.)

This letter from my grandmother searching for her husband was not the first she wrote. Earlier she had received a message that he had been evacuated sick from 11th Light Horse at Gallipoli in October 1915. He was, it says, transferred to 9th Light Horse in January 1916.

She declares in a letter dated 7 November 1915:

I have had a cable saying my husband Capt. T.A. Siekmann of C. Squadron, 11th Regiment, 4th Light Horse Brigade is sick and would be grateful if you can give me any particulars. My husband was sent from S.A. and joined the Queenslanders.

Knowing her husband was missing began, I think, to loosen her mind.

After the war, Grandfather gave talks to groups of people about his experiences, showing his photographic slides from the war. There is a letter in the war memorial from him reporting on the interest that people showed in his talks and how successful they were.

Nanna Brinkworth would have nothing to do with memorialising the war and when Grandfather went to march on Anzac Day she called it showing off. Yet he never ceased being at heart a military man and it was the
cause of trouble between them. He bowed to her wishes in all things except this. (I have never met a man who wasn’t terrified of his wife.)

Beck remembers that when Grandfather brought a friend home to have a cup of tea after an Anzac march, Nanna hid in the shed, rather than make the tea. This has been a scandal in the family ever since we heard of it. But now, reading those harrowing letters of my grandmother’s to the Australian Imperial Force when her husband was missing, I can see why she may have later hated all mention of the war. I think, alone at home with their two sons – Doug and my father, Ron, who were playing up and wanting to leave school – and half mad with worry, she may have had a sort of nervous breakdown.

In 1927 my grandfather lost his General Service medal. A Military Court of Enquiry was needed to have a replacement made. This proved to be a serious problem. There are six pages of documents in the file, not including his initial letter relating to the loss of this medal.

The Court of Enquiry recorded:

Lieut. Colonel T.A. Brinkworth, V.D., Unattached List, being called, stated –

During the Camp of Continuous Training, 1927, I was acting C.O. of the 3rd. Light Horse Regiment.

On Sunday 3rd. April, 1927, a ceremonial parade was held, on which medals were worn.

My medals were fastened to a bar which pinned on to my jacket. At the time the medals seemed securely fastened to the bar. Immediately after the parade I noticed that the General Service Medal had come apart and was missing from the bar.

An immediate search was made by me and several members of the regiment but no trace of the medal could be found. The loss was notified in both regimental and District Routine Orders.

T.A. Brinkworth Lieut. Colonel.

Although a new medal was supplied, for which Grandfather paid eight shillings and nine pence, he might have saved himself the trouble. Upon his death of throat cancer in 1943, Nanna threw out all his medals and, the day after the funeral, Beck watched her brushing down his clothes and uniforms ready to sell to Trims, the Adelaide second-hand clothing dealers. His swagger stick was overlooked and now his great-grandson Hugh, who went to Duntroon and collects books on military history, has it. Recently I laughed after a phone call from Hugh, because, as an afterthought, he had shouted, ‘Where’s his sword?’ I only wish I knew.

Fortunately Grandfather had given the war memorial all the photographs he had taken during the war, so they were saved from either the bin or Trims. I have copies of the photos from the archives, some of which are of
Turkish prisoners of war, and also his photographs of tented camps in the desert that look like medieval jousting carnivals. There is also a photograph of a soldier having his head shaved. He is standing beside an unsaddled horse, which is held by another soldier. This hair-shaving, I assume, was to get rid of vermin. It is now a famous picture and is used in many histories.

I do beg of you…

That phrase that our tormented grandmother used goes over and over in my mind.

Beck was my grandparents’ third daughter-in-law, even though they had only two sons. Doug, my father’s elder brother, married Kathleen Snelling in 1934. At Yorketown, where they had moved from Adelaide when Doug joined Goldsborough Mort & Co., a stock-and-station company, she gave birth on 13 September 1935. Nineteen days later, in spite of Doug giving blood for a transfusion for his wife, Kathleen was dead. She had septicaemia brought on, it was said, by faulty hygienic practices at the hospital.

The widower brought the baby, Rob, home to Adelaide to be cared for by some relatives – a young couple who had children. After several months, it was decided that Rob should be given to Nanna to rear. There is a photograph in an album of Nanna with white hair
combed up into a high bun, sitting knees apart with the baby across them. She is looking down at him. She was about fifty-five, I think.

The decision was made to take Rob from the young family and to give him to his grandmother to rear. The baby was moved into the main bedroom and Grandfather moved out. From then on, the child was the ruling motive of Nanna’s life.

It can be a particular tragedy for a woman when, having reared her children, she must begin again with her grandchild. After Doug married Beck in 1943, due to a housing shortage they had to live with Nanna and Grandfather. For twenty years, Beck was never allowed to help rear the child who was eight years old when she married his father, nor did her mother-in-law give her, in all those twenty years, a key to the front door.

Beck and Grandfather, whom we called Gugga Brinkworth (probably because that is what Rob called him when learning to speak), were ushered out of the main life of the household and spent their evenings listening to the radio turned down softly, so as not to disturb Nanna or Rob.

Life became a living hell for Beck. As only those in the confines of a domestic nightmare can understand or believe, she endured those years. Nanna was tormented with jealousy, even before this. For instance, when she and her sister, Ethel, went to India as young women to
stay with relatives, they met Will Kelly. Nanna said she expected Will Kelly to propose to her. Instead, he proposed to Ethel and she accepted.

A long time after Nanna died, one day I said to Beck that I admired her for her strength in enduring the cruelty and mockery she had borne. ‘Oh,’ she said, drawing herself up in her chair and straightening her back, ‘it’s very refining.’ Then, after expressing astonishment that I knew anything about it, she said, ‘I always felt that Nanna was Doug’s mother and without her I would not have him. And I knew he loved his mother, so I never retaliated. When I had to leave there once, because I got so ill from it all, I had some snapdragon seedlings in a punnet and, before I left, I planted them in the garden. I didn’t want to put them in the bin and waste them. Then I left.’

On another occasion, Beck said, ‘When I used to ride my bike down Anglo Avenue [where they lived], I would begin dry-retching.’

When Beck gave birth to my cousin Anne, Nanna said, ‘She’ll never rear her.’ The way these things are etched into family history!

I knew about Nanna’s hatred of Beck because, when I had holidays with her, she would tell me for hours what a terrible woman my aunt was. I remember sitting on a bench munching a delicious currant yeast bun and hearing of Beck’s latest misbehaviour or of her bad
character. Even then I knew this wasn’t right and that Nanna simply hated Beck. I didn’t exactly think that Nanna was mad; I simply knew that what she was saying was not true. I didn’t argue; I just munched on. This went on for days and days in various situations. I think it was a relief to my grandmother to have somebody to whom to pour out this venom and to vent her pent-up spleen. As far as I can tell, it had not the slightest effect on me; I didn’t love Nanna any less, nor did I love Beck any differently. I just absorbed it. But I never forgot it.

Her sons loved her and called her Moth. My father and his brother never defended their wives to their mother, no matter what the attack.

I do beg of you…