The Good Boy (28 page)

On one occasion in the 1930s, my father drove Rupert into the city and started looking for a spot to park the car. They were in Flinders Street, and Rupert directed Dad to park alongside a cast-iron post about three feet high near the tram stop at the corner of Russell Street. When Dad demurred, Rupert assured him that it would be alright, and produced a length of plaited leather from his pocket. He explained that few people realised that the iron post in question was an old hitching-post, the removal of which had been overlooked by the Melbourne City Council, and that the by-law allowing any person to hitch his horse or
vehicle
to a Council hitching-post had not been repealed. I don't think my father did actually park there! There are endless stories about Rupert's eccentricities, many of them readily accessible in the official records of the Victorian courts and of both Victorian and Federal parliaments. Despite or perhaps because of his genius, Rupert died a poor, frustrated and lonely man. What genetic inheritance do I share with him, I sometimes wonder?

My mother was the first of seven children born to Will and his wife. Next came Bill, Nell, and Frank, all three born in Dunolly, to where my grandfather moved his grocery business in 1901, and then Leo, Ray and Bert, all born in Hamilton. After the birth of Ray my grandmother developed acute rheumatism, and although the family was by then prosperous enough to employ full-time help in the house, my mother quite quickly learned how to take charge of things (and of her younger brothers and sister) and ‘ask Athen' seemed to become the solution to most domestic problems. My mother remembered living in Dunolly as a child, in a large verandahed weatherboard house opposite the station. The house was still there when we visited Dunolly together in 1984 but had been demolished when I went back alone ten years later. It had been, I think, a ‘railway house', the house in which Peter and Nora had lived. When my grandparents moved to Hamilton in 1907 it was bought by the Catholic church and became the convent of Mary McKillop's Josephite nuns who had arrived to open a primary school for the local children.

A year or so after the move, my grandparents in Hamilton received a small parcel from the nuns in Dunolly: it contained my grandmother's very beautiful opal and diamond engagement ring which had been lost while my mother had been wearing it and playing in the garden. The nuns had found the ring in the back garden under the edge of a timber piano-case. My grandfather had had the piano delivered and unpacked for my grandmother's use when they had moved to Dunolly and he had decided to leave it there for the nuns and to buy a new one on arriving in Hamilton. My mother remembered wearing her mother's ring (and shoes and hat and feather boa) while playing near the piano-case one day and also remembered the tears when she realised she had lost the ring. My grandfather had stoically bought a replacement ring, this time a single sapphire set in gold (opals are often said to be unlucky), so that is how my grandmother happened to have two engagement rings!

The new home in Hamilton was a large and comfortable one, with a big garden and enough land to run a horse and cow, chooks, dogs and cats. A large brass handbell (of the type frequently used before electric wall-mounted bells came into fashion in schools and railway stations to summon children to class or passengers to trains) was used to call the Millane children in from their games at mealtimes, and the ‘Millane bell' fairly reliably indicated meal times in that part of Hamilton for many years. I came across it many years later in a cupboard in my grandparents' house and enjoyed ringing it loudly and at random, startling the neighbours, until I was told to desist. As a bribe/concession I was told that I could give it a good ring
only
to announce a successful visit to the toilet and a good bowel movement: ‘constipation ruins the nation', was one of my grandmother's maxims, and she took the opportunity to put the old bell back into use in the interests of my good health.

I grew up with endless stories of the high jinx of the Millanes in Hamilton. Big families certainly used to seem to be pretty happy ones. The children all went to the local convent for primary schooling and, as there was then no Catholic secondary school in Hamilton, they went to boarding schools in Ballarat for further study (St Patrick's College for the boys and the Loreto Abbey Mary's Mount for the girls). Money became a little tight at one stage, so Leo and Ray went to the government high school in Hamilton, with Bert taking up the challenge of boarding school when he was of age and the money was once again there to pay the fees. As boarders at Mary's Mount, my mother and aunt were taught, among other things, conversational French, German and Italian, sketching, needlework, music and how to be accomplished young ladies. My mother loved her time at Mary's Mount, and had many fond memories of the nuns and other girls. My aunt, on the other hand, was more circumspect when the subject came up, and had reservations about the academic standards maintained there. Always more cynical than my mother, she once observed to me that ‘entering the convent' was one of the very few career paths open in those days to women ambitious enough to become
the person in charge
of a business or organisation. Her remark modified my attitude towards Reverend Mothers whom I thenceforth began to look at more as successful career women and pioneer feminists than as especially devout and experienced educators of young gels!

At St Pat's, which my mother's brothers attended, the main interest, other than study, was football … or was it the other way around? My father had been a student at St Pat's a few years earlier, played lots of sport, was in the First Eighteen and the First Eight (football and rowing), made it to university and through medical school, and seems to have emerged a whole and happy person despite the rough and tumble of a Dr Arnold type of education at St Pat's. Perhaps the Catholic version of
mens sana in corpore sano
⁵⁵
was a little gentler than that of the traditional English public school. At all events, Dad, Bill, Frank and Bert actually
liked
St Pat's, and Ray and Leo liked Hamilton High, so all my grandparents were fortunate in the education of their children.

The Millanes often spent the summer school holidays in Portland, Great-Grandma Fanny and Great-Auntie Mill often accompanying them. A house near the beach would be rented for a month and the family, the maid and Beauty, the Friesian cow, would all be loaded onto the mixed passengers/goods train in Hamilton for the trip to the coast. ‘Why on earth take the cow?' I would ask (they all enjoyed re-telling this story). ‘How else could a big family be sure of a reliable supply of fresh milk in a small town, before the days of dairies and refrigeration and home-delivered milk bottles?' they would all laugh. My mother laughed a little less, as she apparently was the only one really good at milking and so had the job, morning and evening, even on holidays.

Another story the family liked to relate about the Hamilton days concerned a second large Catholic family living nearby, the E. J. Whites. (I sometimes got the impression that in Hamilton the easily out-numbered Catholics lived near one another for protection from the stone-throwing and name-calling of the more numerous and more prosperous Protestants.) The Whites, however, were themselves wealthy graziers, with a beautiful grazing property, ‘Mingawalla', some miles out of town, as well as their home in Gray Street; they were very nice people, and very proper, Mr White being for many years an MLC
⁵⁶
in the State parliament. The two sets of parents got on well, and the White children and the Millane children played and scrapped and played again endlessly. One day Mr and Mrs White were having dinner at my grandparents' house, with the younger Millanes scrubbed and polished and on their best behaviour around the table, Miss Millane (my mother) and Miss Nellie (my aunt) probably having laid down a few basic rules of etiquette learned at Mary's Mount. The meal was proceeding happily when the dining room door flew open and in rushed the ten-year-old White son, holding up a blood-splattered handful of teeth. ‘Look what your Tommy did to our Eddy!' he cried. Eddy was his younger brother and Tommy was my grandfather's horse. The story somehow seemed to get funnier each time it was told, at least to the Millanes, and apparently Mr and Mrs White quickly realised that the incident was not a declaration of war or the end of a friendship. Eddy had been teasing Tommy in the stable and was then foolish enough to pass behind him, allowing the horse a well-placed kick to Eddy's jaw. Fortunately they were milk teeth and about to come out anyway, and Eddy was comforted by his mother and advised by his father against further such foolishness.

Yet another story was about the young curates who, to get away occasionally from the strict supervision of the Dean, would pay a social call on the Millanes (and other parishioners too, of course). Before the advent of radio, cinema and television, such social calls often involved more than polite conversation: tennis or croquet on the lawn were popular at the Millanes during the day, and after dark card games such as whist and euchre, charades and musical evenings were played. My grandfather had a good voice and enjoyed singing while his wife played the piano. All the children played some musical instrument or other and visitors, such as the curates, would also join in. One young priest, newly arrived as a curate in Hamilton, turned out to have an unusual party trick to contribute: he could hypnotise people. I loved to hear the story of him hypnotising one of the other visitors, a teenage chap who, once under, was passed a large white onion which Reverend Father said was a nice red apple … and the young chap tucked in and ate the lot! My grandfather had not been present that evening and did not, however, approve of this little episode: there were no repeat performances at the Millanes.

On finishing school at Mary's Mount, my mother joined the family business, working in the office and accounts section in the SMS department store. After only a short while there, she announced that she wanted to go to Melbourne and to train as a nurse at St Vincent's Hospital. At first her parents said no, being unwilling to allow their elder daughter to go so far from home and to live and work in the big city. Their resistance was in time worn down (my aunt said that my mother sniffed and sobbed heartbreakingly for weeks on end at her job in the accounts office, eventually wearing down her father's opposition,) so my mother went off to St V's and completed the two-year nursing registration course. In those days student nurses were not paid, although they in fact constituted a large part of the workforce of the hospitals. They did, however ‘live in' and received bed and board in lieu of wages. My mother said that the student nurses had to pay for their uniforms and bed linen and had to bring their own cutlery. A rather nice EPNS tablespoon with the italicised initials ‘AM' on it, the last surviving piece from my mother's student days, had a place of honour in our cutlery drawer when I was a teenager. On obtaining her nurse's registration certificate, my mother was offered a full-time position at St V's, with a salary of £6 per month, plus bed and board, but she was very happy. After subsequently completing her midwifery certificate, she was transferred to work in Mount St Evin's, the private part of the hospital, and then went on to do ‘specialling' or one-on-one nursing of very ill or very rich patients. She protested when the nuns sent her to ‘special' Mrs John Wren, wife of the famous and controversial Catholic businessman, referred to in Frank Hardy's
Power Without Glory
, at the Wren mansion in Kew. There was an influenza epidemic raging in Melbourne at the time and my mother thought she could be of more use in the hospital than in a private home nursing an old but not really sick lady. My mother said one day to Mrs Wren that her husband was a very generous benefactor to the church, to which the old lady rather succinctly replied: ‘He gets credit for more than he gives'.