The Good Boy (3 page)

James and Brigid had a large family, the fifth son, Daniel, marrying in 1893 Elizabeth Kenny, like him born in the colony to settlers from Ireland. They produced three children, two girls and then a son, James, who became my father. Three months after his son's birth, Daniel died as the result of a harvesting accident, leaving his 25-year-old widow with three children, a promising farm and a mortgage. When she had been just ten years old, Elizabeth had seen her own mother die and her father remarry in the following year. Elizabeth soon found herself in the role of nanny/nursemaid to her young stepbrothers and stepsisters, and in later life confided that Daniel's proposal of marriage had been readily accepted, as she had felt that she might as well be washing the nappies of her own babies as those of her stepmother. Although hers does not seem to have been a romantic marriage, Elizabeth became a sad and even bitter woman on her husband's death. Cousins who grew up with my father said, ‘Everyone was frightened of Auntie Lizzie'. I remember my grandmother as a tall, thin woman always dressed in black, of few words and never smiling; as a child I could never understand why our house seemed to be more serious and less gay when she was visiting.

On her husband's death, my grandmother leased and then sold the farm and moved in to Tatura, the nearby country town, to raise her children. When my father was fifteen she again decided on a move; the elder daughter, May, joined the Sisters of Mercy in the newly established local convent and my grandmother sold the Tatura house, moving with the younger daughter and son to Ballarat so that Dad could attend St Patrick's College as a day boy and complete secondary school. My father enjoyed his years at St Pat's and always spoke of the Brothers, who had taught him there, with great respect and affection. On completing his studies he joined the Victorian Public Service and once again my grandmother sold her house in the interest of her son's career, this time moving the little family to Melbourne and purchasing a house in an inner suburb so that it would be convenient for Dad to travel to his work in the city. Five years later he enrolled as a student in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Melbourne, with my grandmother continuing to provide financial support through the study years ahead.

After graduation, my father worked for a short time as a locum in suburban practices and then set up his own practice in Oakleigh, an outer working-class suburb. My grandmother sold her house and the proceeds were used to purchase a larger place on the city edge where the little family lived, my father running his surgery in the front rooms and my grandmother and aunt keeping house. My grandmother must have been very happy as her little family settled in to the new house, a brass plate at the front door announcing the rooms of ‘Dr J. E. Mulcahy'. Alas for her, within a few short years, my father met and married my mother and my grandmother's dreams had come crashing down. My grandmother and aunt moved to a new house in nearby Caulfield, but even the birth of three grandchildren did not reconcile her to the marriage or to her daughter-in-law. She rarely spoke to us children and almost never to my mother. From childhood my sister, brother and I were always aware of her aloofness and seeming disapproval. Once my father had died, at the age of 55, my grandmother sought no further contact with us. As her daughter Margaret had predeceased my father, a nephew stepped in to the breach and helped my grandmother to move to a retirement home where four years later, having lost all interest in life, she died. I visited her the day before death came and for once she smiled and faintly spoke my name.

I began life not under a cabbage but at home, in my parents' bed, where I was born. But before that happened my parents had to meet. My mother, Athen Millane, was a nurse and trained midwife and, along with a friend who had completed similar training in the same large Melbourne hospital, she had in 1927 opened ‘Mildon', a small private hospital in a nice old house in the comfortably middle-class Melbourne suburb of Caulfield. It was more a convalescent home than a hospital, there being no operating room or serious surgical equipment, and the biggest medical events of any week would have been the births of the many local children who were safely delivered in its midwifery unit. The new mothers would subsequently spend a few days in the care of the small staff of trained nurses, the local GPs calling in each day to check on the recovery of their ‘middy' cases and on the state of health of other patients booked in for overnight or for longer stays.
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These other patients would include people who had undergone surgery or treatment in one of the big fully-equipped metropolitan hospitals and who had been discharged after a few days to convalesce in a small private hospital, thereby making room for the admittance of more serious cases.

My father, Jim Mulcahy, was a young GP new to the area, and at Easter time of 1930 he accompanied a slightly older colleague to Mildon to meet the owner/managers, Sister Millane and Sister Donovan, and to decide whether he might in future refer cases to them. Fortunately my mother rather than her nursing colleague was on duty when my father was introduced. The meeting became a case of love at first sight and within a few months wedding plans were afoot.

My mother sold her share of Mildon to her business partner and set off for her parents' home in Hamilton, 300 kilometres northwest of Melbourne, to prepare for the wedding, set to take place on the day after Boxing Day. December 27 had been selected as the wedding date so as not to greatly inconvenience guests travelling from distant places such as Melbourne and having to absent themselves from work for several days.

Four of my mother's five brothers, my uncles Bill, Frank, Ray and Leo, were all working in Melbourne and they all travelled to Hamilton together for the wedding in Leo's newly acquired Essex. The car had not been ‘run in' and so had to travel at low speed. The fuel for the engine was fed by gravity rather than by a petrol pump, so climbing even modest gradients was something of a problem, with the petrol not keen on flowing uphill from the tank at the rear of the car to the engine in front. My uncles hit on the solution of reversing the car up the hills, with one of them walking in front and another walking behind to explain the situation to any other travellers on the road.

Having left Melbourne early in the morning of Christmas Day they had not arrived by sunset, and as darkness fell my grandfather set off walking down the Melbourne road swinging a hurricane lantern to guide ‘the boys' home. He met them at the foot of the hill at the edge of town and was puzzled to see them and their new-fangled motor car facing towards Melbourne rather than towards Hamilton. He was not impressed by Leo's contraption that had obliged his boys to travel so slowly, and often backwards, all the way from Melbourne!

The wedding went off without any other hitch and after the ceremony and reception my parents drove to Melbourne and sailed on the
Nairana
for a honeymoon in Tasmania. My mother was terribly seasick and so my father gave some thought to staying and setting up practice in Tasmania. But as he had already bought a house and started up his own practice in Melbourne, where his mother and sister lived and kept house for him, such a dramatic change of plans was not really practicable. So my mother returned, as she had gone over, on the
Nairana
, and was still seasick even after the ship had crossed Bass Strait, steamed up Port Phillip Bay and the Yarra River and had tied up at its berth at North Wharf behind what is now Southern Cross Station.

My father's decision to marry had come as quite a shock to his mother who apparently had believed that he would remain at home with her as the comfort of her old age. When he announced his intention of bringing his new wife home, my father persuaded his mother that she should move out and a house about to be built in a nearby suburb was selected for purchase. Building work progressed very slowly, however, and my grandmother and aunt were not able to move into their new home until nearly six months after my parents' wedding. As a result, the new daughter-in-law had to share house and husband with her mother-in-law. My grandmother seemed to always regard my mother as an interloper rather than as a daughter, and the six months spent together were very difficult. It was not until a little over two years after the wedding that the first child, my sister, was born and 21 months later, at the height of the Great Depression, I put in an appearance, the first son.

My mother once told me that I had barely stopped crying for the first six months of my life, and that a nurse friend had taken one look at me, had shaken her head sadly, and had declared, ‘You'll never rear him.' I can't remember why I cried so much and indeed, unlike many others, I have no precise memories at all of early childhood, just those of a warm and loving existence with my parents and older sister. I would like to think that, if I was a total pain for my family for the first six months of my life, I made up for it by being a source of uninterrupted joy thereafter but, alas, that did not prove to be the case.

My younger brother arrived when I was just on four years old. All three children were born at home and I recall being brought into my mother's room and seeing her lying quietly there in bed with a baby by her side. Some people remember being wheeled around in the pram; I only remember the pram as the one in which my sister and I took turns at wheeling our baby brother. Some people even claim to remember suckling and being weaned; I recall the day on which my brother, then about two years old and sitting on my mother's knee as we drove along in my father's Hudson, accidently dropped his dummy while waving it from the car window. ‘Gone,' he declared, philosophically accepting that that stage of life was over and, as far as I know, cheerfully accepting his subsequent meals of the meat and three veg type. He would sit in a high chair in the kitchen at meal times, enjoying his food rather than splattering it around and, on another occasion, he had a photograph taken which my parents framed and sat on the piano in the living room. Beside it were photographs of my sister and of me, but they were pale and sepia-toned while my baby brother was in glorious colour, a process just then being introduced. He was dressed in a skyblue outfit and seems to have been in his usual sunny mood. The laughing and smiling that may then have seemed to be the product of the skilful photographer's antics were, I now believe, the outward expression of my brother's sunny disposition and sound philosophy of life, a sort of ‘Take it as you find it', a ‘Make the most of it' and an ‘Always look on the bright side' attitude that has served him well. My sister and brother were both shown smiling or laughing at the camera, whereas I had a pensive, rather wan look … the typical problem middle child, I suppose.

Shortly before my fourth birthday I set off one day with our wonderful live-in maid, Vera, for a week's holiday on her parents' farm in south-western Victoria. I now realise that this arrangement had been made to get me out of the house while my baby brother was being born, as was my sister's holiday at the same time (in her case, on the farm of one of Dad's cousins near Tatura). Vera and I travelled by steam train and after four or five hours arrived at the tiny railway siding where we were met by her brother-in-law who, unlike most of the other small-scale farmers in the district, had a car. We were first of all driven to their place where Vera's sister had a grand meal ready for us and then we went on to her parents' farm, where they had a small dairy herd and grew a lot of potatoes. I slept on a bed behind a canvas blind on the front verandah of the little weatherboard farmhouse, discovering that a kitchen could also be a dining room, sitting room and playroom (the other three rooms in the house were all bedrooms), appreciating that a wood-fire stove could warm a whole family and their house as well as cooking the meals and providing hot water, and learning that candles and kerosene lamps were fun but not to be entrusted to children. Vera's father and her brother Jack worked the farm while her mother and sister Nance did the housework and the cooking, and looked after the men. Life on a farm was (and still largely is, I think) hard, with early morning rises and long days in the paddocks, and even at that tender age I learned from my holiday just how lucky I was to be the doctor's son in a comfortable home in Melbourne.

My father was the son and grandson of farmers and my mother was the daughter and granddaughter of country shopkeepers. Their marriage had come as something of a surprise to both families as they had each seemed to be engrossed in their professional careers, as doctor and nurse, and each had reached a relatively mature age … 35 for my father and 30 for my mother. It proved, however, to be a happy and successful marriage. One wet Sunday afternoon when my sister, brother and I were still primary school children, we persuaded our parents to write down the names of their first cousins: between them they produced over a hundred and, as most of them had, like them, married and produced children of their own, we children found that we had literally hundreds of first and second cousins. This is the earliest recollection I have of dabbling in family history and it was quite some time later that I realised that information about the lives of my cousins and of earlier generations of the family could be useful in understanding my own life. But at that early age I was neither philosopher nor historian and the opportunity of talking at length with my parents about their parents and grandparents, people who had actually known the family members who had travelled to Australia by sailing ship in the 1850s,
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was alas lost.

Many of my earliest memories of life involve my mother's parents and their home in Bendigo, where they settled in 1933 after my grandfather's retirement from business in Hamilton.
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Soon after we were born, we were taken up to Bendigo to be shown off to the proud grandparents (we were their first grandchildren) and each year thereafter we would all go up to Bendigo for the Easter holidays and the Bendigo Easter Fair. My grandparents' house always seemed big and eerie to me. It had been built in around 1870 as a church or more correctly ‘chapel' for the local Primitive Methodists. As a child I was always inclined to think that ‘Primitive Methodists' were some sort of wild or barbarian Methodists, perhaps from Fiji or Tonga or some other cannibal isle in the South Seas, whereas in fact they were simply a breakaway group in early nineteenth-century England striving to get back to the pure ideals of early Methodism. (Though the Primitive Methodists still exist as a fundamentalist sect in the USA, the congregation in Bendigo, originally made up largely of Cornishmen working in the surrounding gold mines, had faded away by the early 1900s.)