The Dressmaker's Daughter (8 page)

W
e were still at war with the Germans and the Japanese and I had a new friend called Anne McNally. She had two younger sisters, one who was called Marie. The McNallys were our neighbours and the children’s father was away at war. His name, I later found out, was Captain Nobby McNally. I can remember Mrs McNally’s weary courage rearing those children alone, and I remember linoleum. Everybody had linoleum, so why I think of it in relation to this family I don’t know. But linoleum and the McNallys go together in my mind.

The girls had a marvellous and beautiful thing. They owned an illustrated children’s book that I found enchanting. It had watercolours on every page, painted in a style that deeply appealed to me. One day, they fatally lent it to me. In a sort of trance of desire to possess these pictures, I took my mother’s scissors and cut them out. They fell on the table silently and I went on as if possessed
until almost all the pictures had been removed. Then I saw what I had done and realised the consequences. How was I to give the book back and explain what I had done? Days went past and when asked for the book I shilly-shallied and said that I had forgotten to bring it. But the day came when there could be no more procrastination and I had to take back the book and show the family what I had done. Amazingly, I was not punished. Perhaps Mrs McNally was so committed a Catholic that she forgave me at once. But they must have been sad and, if asked, I would have had no explanation for my obsession and what I had done. I had shattered beauty. And had desecrated what was not mine. I did not know why I had done it. There was nothing left but shards. The pictures were worth nothing on their own; they gave me no pleasure. I think it was a way of consuming the beauty, of taking it into myself, that had been my impulse. Perhaps it was jealousy.

I remember that Mr McNally came home on leave. His hat lay on the kitchen table upside down and I was electrified to see, when Anne and I were alone in the room, that he had written inside on the band: ‘Like hell it’s yours. It belongs to Captain N McNally.’ This struck me as immense originality and audacity. I was fascinated that somebody could write such a thing – that they could think of such a way of claiming their hat.

Was this note a practice, a code, dreamt up for its combination of warning and bonhomie by soldiers in
some distant tent, or on a ship lying in the Suez Canal? Or did Captain Nobby dream it up himself? I could never decide if it was the wit of Anne’s father that had made him print out the warning inside his hat or whether his fellow soldiers all did it.

The other fact about Captain McNally that intrigued me was that he ate two boiled eggs for breakfast daily and, as his wife took them from the pot, he cracked each one immediately, not to begin eating it at that moment, but, as he explained when I asked, to stop the eggs cooking past the time he found them perfectly done. After he had slightly cracked the top of each egg, he removed the top of one, inserted the teaspoon and began eating, confident that the second egg would not be overcooking in its shell.

To avoid the two pitfalls that self-revelation holds, exhibitionism and apology, is a challenge, especially because I am sorry that I destroyed the book that belonged to those children and especially since they had a father at war and I had mine at home. And, as I have said, I believed I had my father at home because our mother would not be able to live without him there. But Mrs McNally had to do without her husband.

Regret is like a ruined piano. The music it makes is from a sound unlike anything else. It is of unrivalled heartbreaking sadness. The nobility of history seems to sing through these old wrecks.

H
ow to make a wreath. Take some straw and, bending it into a circle as you go, bind it with florists’ wire until you have formed a complete circle of the width you desire. Now bind this wreath with a bandage of white crepe paper until it is completely covered. Let no straw poke out. Into this bound white wreath (which looks not unlike, and not inappropriately, an ancient swaddled body ready for burial) insert flowers and leaves that you have bound with the same wire onto small sticks. It is the sticks that you insert into the circle, arranging the foliage in a pleasing way. Leaves are usually placed on the outer side of the wreath and flowers in a circular pattern on the inside. You can, if you wish, mix up the flowers and place them at random, arranging the colours attractively.

When the wreath is finished, take a mouthful of water and spray it over the flowers, continuing this process until they are all moist. This is to make the wreath last. (Some
years after I was taught to make wreaths by my mother, water-spray bottles came into existence and the old way of spraying went out of fashion.)

There were no florists in Tumby Bay, nor were there any for miles around. But while my mother lived there, there was nobody who she heard had died who went without a wreath at their funeral. Even Sloper Bennett, who died a pauper without any known relatives, had a wreath – Sloper Bennett who had exposed himself to Heather and me as we walked back to school after lunch at our house. But my mother didn’t know that. In fact, he had the best wreath of all because it was very hot weather. There were no flowers available other than sunflowers. My mother made a huge cross of sunflowers to cover the coffin. Necessity being, as she often said, the mother of invention, she had been forced to make something original.

Shortbread meant funerals. A child may have drowned in a dam, or a husband may have been killed when the tractor rolled on him, or a gun may have discharged as he climbed through a fence. ‘I’ll make that woman some shortbread,’ my mother would say, tying on her apron as she spoke. Whooping cough, diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, pneumonia, any of these things may have been the cause of death. I never heard of anyone dying of
cancer. No doubt they did, but it wasn’t mentioned to me. Whatever the cause and whoever it was that they had lost, the woman of the family had shortbread sent for the funeral.

(Years later, after my father died, my mother stopped making shortbread. She said she couldn’t do it any more because he had always rolled out the dough for her. Although she could actually roll the extremely stiff dough herself, and had done so when he was at work, she was reminded of him when she made it. ‘I can still see his big hands rolling it out,’ she said.)

When there was a funeral of somebody he knew in the town, my father would put on his best suit, place the shortbread in the boot of the car and take it with him. If nobody they knew was going, my mother got my father to drive out to the farm or to the house where the bereaved lived and leave the shortbread there. One way or another, they got shortbread.

‘A little help is worth a ton of sympathy’ was my mother’s mantra. This was what my mother was acting on when she tied on the apron. I know because one day I asked her why she was doing it.

In our family, women did not usually go to funerals. It may be that women from other families went to funerals, but, for some reason, ours did not. It was thought that they may not be able to bear it. Breaking down was feared. Neither my mother nor I went to my father’s
funeral. In my case, I had given birth to my daughter three days before, but if, perhaps, it had been expected that I would attend, the funeral could have been delayed a few days until I was strong enough to leave hospital.

I think now that it would have been better for me if I had gone to my father’s funeral. ‘The problem with Jill,’ my brother Peter said to our mother, after I had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and been in a respirator for some days, ‘is that she doesn’t believe Dad died. She didn’t go to his funeral and she didn’t see him dead, so she thinks he’s still alive.’

Nothing I have ever written has been so hotly disputed than those words ‘women did not usually go to funerals’. I meant women from Protestant families. The outcry surprised me. Those who come from families where the women went to funerals cannot countenance that my family did not have that habit and that it was not normal practice among friends of my family.

But I have memories of photographs in newspapers of funerals of famous people where there is a sea of men’s grey felt hats surrounding a church door with a floral tongue of a coffin emerging from it. No women. And in her book
Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia,
Professor Pat Jalland writes of a young woman, Violet Barling, who lost her husband in the Black Friday fires in Victoria in 1939, and says that she did not attend her husband’s funeral because ‘Women didn’t go to
funerals in those times’. When I contacted Pat Jalland to ask her more about women and funerals, she said: ‘Some Protestant denominations held strictly to women not attending funerals.’ And she also said, ‘It was commonly believed that women might find it more difficult to restrain their emotions.’

Author Carmel Bird has pointed out to me that in Robert Drewe’s book
Shark Net
he wrote that only men went to his mother’s funeral. This was in Perth and Violet Barling was a Victorian, so it cannot be that not having women attend funerals was only a local tradition in our South Australian community.

In fact, my friend Laurel Mallard from New South Wales remembers that women in her family did not go to funerals, either. She told me: ‘Menfolk wouldn’t let their women go because they were shielding them from the distress.’ Then she added, ‘When my father-in-law died, his son, Raymond, would not let his mother go to the funeral because it would be too upsetting for her.’

Historically it is true that women have been prominent at funerals, being chief mourners at times, even being hired to perform rites of mourning: wailing, covering their hair in ash, ululating, dancing. Many cultures have included women and even made them prominent in the mourning ritual. But this was not our way.

No, my mother stuck to her wreath-making and her shortbread-baking and held her tongue.

After my father’s death, a message arrived for me from my mother, along with half-a-dozen vases of flowers left over from her floral exhibits at the Royal Adelaide Show, to the maternity hospital where I was lying with my three-day-old baby. ‘Don’t think about the funeral. Just keep thinking about your baby.’ I tried as best I could to take her advice. Naturally, she did not go to her husband’s funeral but waited at home for her sons to return.

‘You should have seen your brothers’ faces when they came home from Dad’s funeral,’ she said to me afterwards.

I think the greatest margin of beauty and grace lies in the incongruous – in the sharply contrasting. For instance, a gardener with a missing front tooth who has fallen in love with tree peonies. His ardour as he shows his rows and rows of flowers, lifting their nodding, lavish blooms and reciting their names: ‘Amber Moon, Red Dragon, Aurora Flare…’ Or the Kurdish woman in the midst of war who has made her child exquisite embroidered red felt shoes. Or the face of the man without legs who lies in a gutter in Entebbe in Uganda as he smiles up at me and thanks me, without irony, like the gentleman he is. Or the old woman, lying slowly dying, in a foetal position in hospital, who, when I am introduced to her as I am taken for the first time around the ward, says, ‘Welcome, Sister. I hope you enjoy your time among us. You will find we are a happy group.’

So, naturally, I appreciate my mother’s grace in making that gigantic cross of sunflowers for the coffin that held the body of the poor lonely wretch who spent his days exposing himself to little girls who never said.

M
y brothers and I fought ferociously, never more than on Christmas morning. My mother’s cry of ‘Won’t you children ever stop fighting?’ echoed through our childhood.

The only brother I didn’t fight was Peter. The five years that separated us proved too much for animosity. Also, he always had a more benign – a sweeter – nature than the rest of us and in this he was more like our father, who was the mildest of men.

‘Everything in moderation’ was our father’s motto and he quoted it often to us. I, his daughter, had a nature that was the complete opposite of his motto.

Our father sang every day. He sang old music-hall songs. Some songs were from the operetta
The Chocolate Soldier
and others from the musical comedy
The Maid of the Mountains.
He sang Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’ – ‘An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay.’ He sang a stuttering popular song, ‘K-K-K-Katy’,
that was on the radio, until Peter began to stammer and our mother made him stop singing that particular one. To me, my father sang, ‘I’ll take you home again, Kathleen, to where the fields are cool and green…’

On Christmas morning, our father sang ‘Away in a Manger’ and other carols. Accompanying his singing were the sounds of our fighting. My brothers were given pieces of wood, hammers, nails and saws. I was given a doll. The combination of the boys’ gifts was fatal for a girl’s doll. My doll never lasted until lunchtime. Its head was smashed in by a hammer. I longed to retaliate but never had the strength the boys carried so easily to punch and destroy. Sometimes I think this was the beginning of my masochism, which increasingly I suspect I have developed.

Between tears and fury, I learnt over the years how to mend a doll’s head. This was done by lifting the celluloid head, stretching it up from the shoulders and inserting a pencil into the hole where the elastic joined the head to the doll’s body. By pushing the pencil up into the dent, it could be slowly raised until it was more or less smoothed out. I sometimes wonder if neurosurgeons don’t use a similar technique.

By lunchtime on Christmas Day, exhausted by tears and fighting, even wounded in some cases, we lined up for a hot roast chicken with thyme-flavoured bread stuffing and baked vegetables. Then there was boiled
plum pudding, which had been cooked five hours in a cloth in a pot of boiling water. Custard and cream were served with this.

After lunch, we went to the beach. But because of the belief that people who swam shortly after a meal drowned, we were not allowed into the water for half an hour after we had eaten. So we played on the sand with our buckets and threw sand at each other, and I would continue screaming, ‘Look what Tucker has done to me!’

Tucker has an incredibly long memory. Like an elephant, we would say. Sometimes, long after some event, he would suddenly lash out at one of us when we weren’t looking and strike with a tremendous blow. When I asked why he did that, he would remind me that some days earlier I had done something that he had not liked. He had just been biding his time.

As we fought, our parents sat on the sand under a canvas awning and our mother sewed. On very hot days they would enter the water wearing woollen bathing costumes. Our father’s bathers were maroon and had a moth-hole high up on one buttock. These were never replaced and neither was our mother’s black one-piece. They had these bathers until they died.

Our mother swam with a languid ease, as she did everything else when her husband was around. It may have been natural to her, or it may have been that his presence meant she felt she should never look urgent or
vigorous. She opened and shut a car door with the same leisurely movement.

Sometimes we shared Christmas with our aunt and uncle. Eva and Ken Brinkworth lived on their farm outside Port Lincoln. Their daughter Fay was about my age. Fay had Down’s syndrome and as she sat serenely on the sand after lunch, we fought, hurling the sand around her. Our mother cried, ‘Won’t you children ever stop fighting?’

By dusk we were bathed; the sand had been removed from our bodies; we had eaten cold meats, beetroot, hot mashed potatoes and a finely sliced lettuce salad with a mashed boiled egg dressing; and we’d been put to bed to dream of revenge.