The Dressmaker's Daughter (7 page)

I am no longer bitter, more humbled by my folly and my grotesque need than anything else. How are the foolish to learn if not through pain?

M
y brothers and I were taken to all sorts of churches, with the exception of the Catholic church – or the Roman Catholic church as it was then called. Baptised in the Anglican Church, to which our father belonged, we went wherever Jane, Mary or Gertie Swiggs were teaching Sunday school.

As a result of this, I know hymns from the Methodists, the Baptists, the Church of England and the Church of Christ. We were, in fact, nothing if not catholic in our religious practice.

Dressed in our best clothes, we were collected by one of the Swiggs girls and walked to church every Sunday. My mother had a rest and I think that was possibly the idea behind this devotion. It was mainly to Sunday school that we went, rather than to the church service, although occasionally we arrived just as the service was ending. I can remember the local grocer standing in the pulpit some days, spitting in his fervour.

A farmer and his wife taught Sunday school, along with our girls. There were tables holding sand in which we placed small camels and men in djellabas. Mary, the crib, the baby Jesus, angels, Joseph, wise men in the form of three kings and palm trees we arranged around our deserts. I liked these games but can’t remember any suggestion that they had anything to do with God.

My brothers and I came home with printed homilies on cards dangling from silk cords, which we hung on the walls of our rooms. ‘He is faithful that promised.’ Or:

God gives the desolate a home to dwell in;

He leads the prisoners to prosperity,

But the rebellious dwell in a parched land.

Psalm 68.6

I was rebellious and we did indeed live in a parched land so that one must have struck a nerve.

Or,

‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord.

‘Though your sins are like scarlet,

They shall be as white as snow

Though they are red like crimson,

They shall become like wool.’

Isaiah l

We had never seen snow, although we had seen pictures of it in our books. We certainly had seen a mighty lot of wool. Often a sheep lay bound and mute on the back seat of our car on its way to becoming hogget for our dinners. And we saw wool aplenty when we watched the fleece flung high in the air like a carpet that failed to fly and fell instead onto the table in the wool shed. The bales in their hessian binding were piled up like great khaki bricks, ready to be built into a cathedral of wool. Children, we had heard, sometimes fell into the wool bin and were crushed by the machine as it bound the wool into a bale. They fell, too, into bins of wheat and died there. They died in dams on farms when they wandered away from their parents.

Crimson we saw as our father slit the sheep’s throat, the beautiful river rushing out of it.

Another white card hanging from its silver cord in our hallway read:

Ask, and it will be given you;

Seek, and you will find,

Knock, and it will be opened to you.

Matthew 7.7

One day in Sunday school, I was asked by a stout teacher in a navy floral dress what it was that I did to help my mother at home – this being, I suppose, to suggest good
works and kindness. I said, ‘I comb the fringe.’ A baffling reply to my questioner, who kept on asking the question as I went on answering the same way, over and over. Had Mary, Jane or Gertie been there they could have explained, but they were not.

The woman abandoned her questions but I remember her determination to find out what it was that I did and to have me explain it exactly. But I could not. During the next week, my mother was asked what I had meant and she explained to the teacher that what I was doing to help was combing the fringe of the carpet in the living room. I was straightening it with an old comb that was missing many teeth. This was my domestic work.

I did not help with the washing-up; my parents washed up together – her washing, him drying. They did not want interruption to this. He sang love songs to her. ‘Come, come, I love you only…’ He polished the glasses with the tea-towel and sang as he worked. Sometimes he put his arm around her and she said, ‘Don’t be silly, Brink.’ They made their bed together. They were having a love affair and we were interruptions.

Our family said grace at meals, but only on special occasions. Sunday’s roast dinner, birthdays, Christmas and when friends came over. Grace signalled special food and a special event. Our father said grace by bowing his head and saying, ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ We sat with bowed
heads and clasped our hands together. We did not hold hands around the table as Americans – and as my children, with their American stepmother – do. We clasped our own hands. When grace was over, we passed the gravy and began to eat. The baby in the high-chair had his food cut up and he began to eat with his little oval-handled spoon and silver pusher (an implement in the form of a rake, without tines but with a right-angled slab at the end of the handle used to push food onto the spoon) that we had all, in our turn, used.

The homilies from church that hung in our rooms seeped into my consciousness. The language became part of me. One day, when I was about ten, I was invited to go with a friend and her family to the pictures. My mother agreed that I could go. For some reason, when the evening came around, perhaps because she did not have the money or did not want to be disturbed by having to wait up for my return, my mother changed her mind. I was distraught. I lay on my bed sobbing and could not be stopped. My mother came into the bedroom and tried to calm me. I didn’t say anything but pointed to the hanging on the wall. ‘He is faithful that promised.’ My mother later told me it was a piercing moment. She didn’t relent; perhaps by that time it was too late.

B
ecause we four children were put to bed so early, we woke early. One by one we walked into our parents’ bedroom and climbed into their bed. I was almost always last. Draped in my father’s woollen dressing-gown, I lay across the foot of the bed, joining in the talk.

Sometimes, if there had been an electrical storm in the night, the dressing-gown would be draped over the big mirror of the dressing-table. This was done because it was my mother’s belief that lightning could strike a mirror. Perhaps my father did it to placate his wife, or perhaps because he too had heard the story and believed it.

Soon, our father, feeling, perhaps, driven from his bed, lifted his dressing-gown from me, pulled it on and left the room. He lit the fire in the kitchen stove by twisting old copies of
The Advertiser
into coils and laying them beneath shafts of thin wood called deal. On this he laid heavy pieces of wood, and, on top of those, once they were lit and had flared up brightly, he put a mallee root or two.
He filled the kettle and, taking up a small black tool with a hook on the end, lifted the lid of the stove. With the flames now licking through the hole on the stove, he placed the kettle directly onto the flames.

Walking outside with the teapot in hand, he emptied it onto the garden and lit his pipe. He stood for a minute or two, smoking, waiting for the kettle to boil. He never smoked indoors because my mother did not like the smell. (Unwittingly she probably saved me from worse attacks of asthma than I already had.) Neither did she like the smell of raw onions on his breath and, as a consequence, all recipes that included raw onions had them scalded with water until their smell was removed. Once, in a bid to get my father some of his favourite mashed potatoes laced with chopped raw onions, I made the dish as he liked it. For some reason, I put them into a crystal dish that stood on my parents’ dressing-table. When I triumphantly lifted the lid to serve the potatoes, I found that they were tangled in hair from a brush. They had to be thrown out. This memory has the quality of a dream to me and I wonder now writing it if it was a dream.

As my father moved about the house, he sang:

At seventeen, he falls in love quite madly with eyes of tender blue
At twenty-four, he gets it rather badly with eyes of a different hue
At thirty-five, you’ll find him flirting sadly with two or three or more
When he fancies he is past love, it is then he meets his last love
And he loves her as he’s never loved before…

(No song evokes to me more the romantic attitude men like my father had towards women.)

When the kettle boiled, our father made tea and took a cup into our mother, lying in bed surrounded by us. By this time, I had crept up from the foot of the bed into his place. With the tea, he took two thin slices of bread and butter, which she ate with the tea. Then she, too, rose, lashing on the thick hot corsets that she always wore. Perhaps they were not worn when an advanced pregnancy was upon her, but I can never remember our mother dressed without her corsets. As a result, touching her body was like embracing a pillar. Her skin was soft and tanned, and her body stiff with whalebone and its lacings. It seems to me that our mother didn’t actually like touching her children very much. Perhaps neither of our parents was touched much in childhood, but, for whatever reason, none of us were ever held, except to be lifted or carried. We were not stroked or kissed, as far as I can remember. We were read to, well fed and clothed, and we felt completely loved and safe. What we did not have, we did not miss.

Our father returned to the bedroom after he had drunk his tea, eaten his bread and butter, and put out his pipe. We lay and watched him dress, which he did modestly. He pulled his shirt over his head and made woofing,
barking, ghost-like sounds waving the partially empty arms around while keeping his head hidden inside the shirt. We screamed and pretended to be afraid and perhaps we were just a little bit.

At about this time of the day, unless it was a Sunday, one of the girls – Jane, Mary or Gertie – would arrive to begin work, dressing us and helping to make breakfast and then wash up.

When the fire had blazed up and then died down enough to have made good red coals, our father took a long wire toasting fork and, opening the front of the stove, made toast. The reflection of the coals and flames flickered on his bald and shining head and formed a star of pure light. The morning star.

Sometimes, when we had run out of breakfast cereal such as cornflakes, our father made a dish that we called ‘Milky Sop’. It was made by placing cubes of crustless white bread into small bowls. On top of this hot milk was poured from a saucepan. It was then sprinkled with white sugar and eaten hot. At other times we had eggs, or thick toast with jam and cream, or porridge, or our father’s favourite – Welsh rarebit. Our mother made this by soaking overnight, in milk, shavings of cheddar cheese, which she bought cheaply from the grocer because they were leftover pieces with rind that were too old to sell as fresh cheese and too oddly shaped. In the morning, this mixture was gently boiled until it thickened. Mustard was
stirred into it as it bubbled. It was served on buttered toast. Some recipes call for beer to be used as the soaking fluid but I never remember our mother doing so. We all thought it was delicious but our father liked it best of all. Usually there was not enough for everybody and we didn’t really care if he had it to himself. It was his treat and he had few.

Our mother made sandwiches for our school dinner, as it was called. They were wrapped in greaseproof paper and placed inside my satchel. Made from corned beef or cold roast hogget with homemade mustard pickles, or Kraft cheese with chutney or jam on them, or tomatoes from the garden, or sometimes, when we had run out of choices, homemade plum or apricot jam and butter, they were thickly cut. To this day, I have a liking for food wrapped in greaseproof paper.

Standing beside the kitchen table, I can remember the beautiful feeling of my hair being plaited by my mother. This brushing and attention in the hurly-burly of family life was a moment of pleasure. I had my mother’s full attention. The choice of ribbons was carefully made. Rolled up for smoothness each night, I brought them to her from my dressing-table. She told me what colour to bring, according to the colour of my frock. My pants matched the dress because they were made of the same material. Then I was given a handkerchief, which I tucked into the elastic of my bloomers, hefted up my leather
satchel across my shoulders and around my arms into a sort of harness and then my brothers and I set off on our walk to school.

At noon, my brothers and I met under a big peppertree in the schoolyard. There was a curious wooden seat built right around the tree and it was here we sat. I opened my satchel and handed out the sandwiches. Then we ate. We had water to drink from tin pannikins hanging on a cord from the water tank beside the school building. Mosquito larvae, which we called wrigglers, swam in the pannikin as we drank. We knew no other kind of water and had no real distaste for wrigglers. Very seldom did we have a piece of fruit. As a result of this, it was about twenty years before I developed a taste for fruit.

There is a contrasting memory alongside this one, though, that when we drove into the Barossa Valley to visit Granny Shemmeld, seeing the first apricot trees I would call out and beg our father to stop so we could rush out and pick the fruit. I had no understanding that fruit was privately owned and that we could not just go and eat it.

Our father came home from his office for lunch and sometimes I came home from school to eat, too. Perhaps it was according to the weather; if it was a very hot day, say over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (forty degrees Celsius), we were told to come home for lunch. It must have been on days like this that I brought my friend
Heather home and that is how we saw Sloper Bennett exposing himself. ‘Look, Heather, Sloper’s got a sleepy lizard hanging from his pants.’

Turgid hot air, viscous as soup surrounded us. Why was it only on those hot days that Sloper Bennett stood outside Mr Smith’s unused butcher shop? Was he airing himself?

The house had been made cool by having all the blinds pulled down and the doors closed. Not until about four o’clock, when the sea breeze came, did the house get opened up. Cool and dark as a cave, we’d be given water when we walked in.

‘Oh, here he comes!’ our mother would say, looking up from the washing-up with her hands in the water. This was her cry of joy when she saw our father walking down the street and coming in the front gate for lunch. Friends of hers laughed about this and told each other about her excitement – one of them must have been there and witnessed it one day. They found it amusing that she should be so happy to see her husband.