Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  Later Mum and Granny talked in hushed tones. I did not hear or understand much that they said, but I absorbed enough to know that neither understood what had happened nor really wanted to know. Harry had got away with it and I learned my first lesson about male privilege in our family hierarchy. The word sexism hadn’t been coined then or, if it had, it hadn’t crossed the threshold at Towong Hill. Granny accepted the old-fashioned hierarchy unquestioningly and she expected others – including me – to do so too. But after this incident I felt let down, though childhood memories of irritation with Harry are tempered by the vision of him breaking the ice on the horse trough and collecting the gleaming pieces for us to look at.

  Dad was the local member of parliament for the state seat of Benambra for my entire childhood. In my first memories of him he was already a dyed-in-the-wool Country Party man – by the time I was born he had been a member for seven years and had already served as attorney-general and solicitor-general. Politics was in Granny M’s family blood, her uncle Sir George Dibbs having served as premier of New South Wales three times towards the end of the nineteenth century. Dad was a gregarious man and, while he enjoyed the cut and thrust of politics, Granny M was undoubtedly the driving force behind him. He was often away and I didn’t really know him well. It was Mum who was at home with us and she was the parent whom I knew best, or at least so I thought. She is much more present in my memories than Dad; that is not to say that Dad didn’t have a role, for he certainly did.

  In my next early childhood memory I am playing on a polished parquet floor, concealed behind an open door leading from the Bachelor’s Room, where Granny slept when she was with us, onto the front verandah at Towong Hill. A gutter or downpipe was leaking and water was splashing in a sad rhythm in a puddle on the path just beyond the verandah. A little further away, the branches of the deodar tree on the other side of the path were drooping, trickling big tears of water onto the garden. Thick white clouds hung low over the mountains on the other side of the valley, cutting the house off from the rest of the world. When I think of isolation, this is the memory that springs into my mind.

  The house was quiet. Mum was writing at her desk. Granny was gently nodding off to sleep over her book after lunch. Nobody knew I had crept past Granny’s suitcases and hidden myself away. I had become absorbed in my own world of wooden farm animals, stables and farmyard. I was imagining a time when I would be old enough to go to the stables alone, saddle up a pony and gallop off across the paddocks. Indi’s faithful toy hound, a whisky-coloured, long-legged terrier on wheels, stood guard close by; there was no danger of her reclaiming him as the holidays were over and she had returned to boarding school at Toorak College near Melbourne.

  Suddenly a creeping feeling told me I was no longer alone. I looked up to find Dad towering above me. I hadn’t heard him coming, nor did I know how long he’d been there. It is one of my earliest memories of him, a good-looking, imposing, lean figure in a dark suit, with olive skin and black hair like mine, only his was short and slicked back. If he had said anything as he approached, I hadn’t heard him, and I can’t remember there being a hug or a kiss. I hadn’t heard him if he’d said hello. After a moment he simply turned and walked away. He might have had other things on his mind or perhaps he didn’t want to interrupt me when I was playing happily. If I was a bit scared of Mum when she got cross, I was terrified of Dad.

  I had once seen him chasing Harry down the drive. Harry was crying. ‘The boss is chasing Harry with a big stick,’ said Jack Reiners, who worked for the family and lived at Towong, and had been trying to eat a piece of crumbly sponge cake someone had given him for morning tea. Cake flew everywhere but, kind man that he was, he wanted someone to know Harry was in trouble. Playing in Granny M’s room, I pondered that I too might have done something Dad didn’t like; it was my first glimpse of fear and, however much I tried, I couldn’t return to my safe, imaginary world in my toy stables.

  Dad scared me because he was a big man with a loud voice and a quick temper, and he could make my big brother cry. I’d seen so little of him that he was almost a stranger. I don’t know how old I was when I first realised that he had been an enthusiastic and highly accomplished skier, but I don’t think I had an inkling then that he had won international events in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. It was tall, slim Mum in her utilitarian khaki overall in winter, or khaki shorts with a blouse tucked under a military-looking webbing belt in summer to whom I warmed more.

  Scared as I might have been of Dad, I learned soon enough he wasn’t always so intimidating and that he loved animals. ‘I wish I could squeeze into Chikko’s house too!’ I pleaded to Dad when I was about five as he helped me spread some sacking to make the box comfortable for the little black cat who, quite by chance, had come to live with us. My whining pleas might have driven my older siblings mad but they seemed to work with Dad.

  ‘It might take her a little while to get used to her new home,’ Dad replied gently. I knew, of course, that there was no chance of a chubby child like me fitting into the box, but Dad had a way of bringing me around to seeing sense without being mean.

  I had wanted a cat for a long time but Mum said we already had enough with the twin white cats, Tam and Oooey, who belonged to Indi and Harry respectively. One rainy evening I heard desperate mewing coming from the backyard. Thinking that one of the white cats might have been injured and in some sort of trouble, I went to look as we all loved Tam and Oooey dearly. In the damp, wintry twilight I could just see the silhouette of a black cat hopping slowly and painfully on three legs along the back verandah. Its left front paw was hanging at a strange angle and the fur had been torn revealing blood-covered red flesh, as if it had been cruelly crushed.

  ‘Poor little thing! I think she might have been caught in a rabbit trap,’ Dad suggested as he took her gently in his arms and carried her into the kitchen where there was more light. He talked to her softly as he inspected her paw.

  ‘She might have been dumped,’ Mum reckoned, but dumping did not explain why her paw was mangled unless it had been run over by a car or she had been caught in a trap between the dirt road that ran past the mailbox and our homestead. Dad took her to the vet and when he brought her home again she smelt of strange disinfectant, and her coat was dusty and rough. She was in pain and shook with fear as Dad and I stroked her coat. The vet had to amputate her paw, something that hitherto I had thought only happened to soldiers who had been badly wounded during the war that finished before I was born; now I knew it could happen to animals and people who were injured in accidents.

  At Towong Hill we were cocooned from the real world. The high mountain peaks with their billowing blue-grey skirts of bush stretched down towards the Murray Valley and another long finger of bush extended behind us from Mt Elliott. Beyond the green of the Murray Valley there seemed to be layer after layer of blue hills fading into the distance well beyond my imagination. The nearest town, Corryong, was thirteen kilometres away. Although there were visitors at the homestead, there seemed to be days and sometimes weeks when we didn’t see anybody who lived beyond the boundaries of Towong Hill. In the 1950s there was no television, and radio reception depended on the state of Dad’s aerials, which were stretched between the house and nearby trees. Even so, reception was often distorted by a roar of static, and in any case I didn’t understand the things I heard on the radio. Chikko entered my world before I could read the papers or had even begun to immerse myself properly in the imaginary world of fairytales and fiction.

  Indi and Harry having their own cats had made me a bit jealous and sulky. I assumed and was determined that Chikko would be mine as I was next in line – seniority seemed to underpin most things then. It felt to me that everything from toys to cats and ponies belonged to Indi and Harry, and I badly wanted Chikko for myself. Scared as I might have been about losing her to another sibling, I had to learn not to strangle the little cat and to share her – John also loved cats and didn’t have his own until later. Chikk
o had black fur and I had black hair so we seemed to go together, or so I reasoned. Dad suggested her name because chico meant ‘small’ in Spanish and, although that was soon to change, to begin with she was a little cat.

  ‘She is too old to house-train,’ Mum said firmly. Standing with her back to me, washing up at the kitchen sink, there was something tense in the way she was shaking her head that told me she really and truly didn’t want another cat. It wasn’t that she disliked Chikko; she just didn’t want any more work. But I wasn’t giving Chikko up for anything. ‘She will have to be an outside cat,’ Mum said. But more often than not it was Mum who cleaned up any messes Chikko made; I had seen and smelt cat mess and knew it was a nasty business.

  The white cats, who had been at Towong Hill since they were kittens, were house-trained and so they were welcome inside. On cold days they spent a good deal of time curled up and purring in great comfort in front of the stove or a kerosene radiator. I wanted a cat that could sleep on the foot of my bed so she would purr me to sleep. Dad came up with a compromise, making Chikko a house out of a wooden fruit box and some sacking on the ‘outhouse verandah’. It was only a partial solution, and I decided that if she couldn’t share my bed, I wanted to share hers. Dad set me straight.

  Despite her ambivalent welcome, Chikko soon found her place in the family hierarchy. She was not strictly a member of the inner circle of the family since she wasn’t allowed in the house, but I think that worried me more than her. She seldom came to the front garden and remained a backyard cat. Thorny roses over trellises enclosed two sides of the backyard while the back verandah of the main house and a verandah of the outhouse where the fuel was stored enclosed the other two sides. Chikko was safe enough there, although there was only a concrete path and stony ground and no soft grass on which she could lie in the sun. She seemed to settle in and, despite her injured paw, she grew very sleek. Her rear end became disproportionately large because her hind legs had to compensate for her missing front paw. The family rather meanly but accurately suggested her figure was beginning to resemble my own dumpy silhouette! Chikko appeared not to notice the injustices in either the human or the feline worlds. Nor did she notice the able-bodied white cats coming and going. Fortunately she never went missing, which she might have done if it hadn’t been for her absent paw. After all, she was a stray cat whose circumstances had changed. Even if she was never the close friend I longed for, she was a friend all the same, and Dad was very fond of her too.

  When I was about six or seven I began to notice a softer, gentler and friendlier side of Dad, and at the same time I felt a corresponding tension in Mum. Dad sometimes annoyed Mum by bringing Chikko into the kitchen to sit on his lap where he settled in his cane chair in front of the Aga, though in deference to Mum’s concern about cat poo Dad always put Chikko outside the kitchen door again afterwards. Mostly Dad tried not to annoy Mum, but sometimes I saw a mischievous gleam in his eye and I knew he was teasing her.

  There was a sad day when Dr (later Sir James) Darling, headmaster of Geelong Grammar, and Mr Glover, a master, came to stay for the funeral of a local boy who had tragically drowned while a student at the school’s Timbertop campus. Bravely I carried Chikko through the house to the sitting room where they were having tea with Mum and Dad. The distressed headmaster and schoolmaster stroked her, calling her ‘the broken cat’. The combination of a dead boy and a broken cat was too much for me – I flew out of the room before I sobbed.

  Chikko taught me a lot. Some of her lessons didn’t occur to me until long after my little black friend had gone and I started to write about my childhood.

  6

  Each Item Had a Story

  One of our early journeys to Melbourne to visit Granny Chauvel was not without incident. The family car, an olive-green Hudson, had a flat tyre on a dirt road in the Keelangie bush before we even reached the old town of Tallangatta. Mum and my godmother, Pat Knight, our manager’s daughter, bent over in the dust behind the car as they wrestled with the wheel, trying to replace the flat tyre with the spare. With little traffic on the road between Corryong and Tallangatta, no help came and Mum and Pat had to brave the dust and the rickety jack and change it themselves. It was probably just as well that it was dust and not rain, but only Mum and Pat could have said which was worse. Only four or five years old, I sat in the shade on the side of the road crumbling gum leaves to release the scent of the bush. Harry wandered around making engine noises, scuffing the gravel and creating pretend roads for his Dinky cars.

  Although I didn’t hear every word, as they were getting back into the car Mum was saying something about changing a tyre while on her honeymoon in New Zealand. Mum and Dad couldn’t get the spare wheel to stay on so they wrapped long strands of grass around the bolts and screwed the nuts on top, in the hope the extra packing between the nuts and bolts would help hold the wheel in place. There was a long dark crack in the back seat of the Hudson and I was always scared it would open up further and eat me up, or that I would fall through it into dusty darkness and oblivion. Worse still, I was now scared that the wheel was going to fall off and Mum and Pat were going to have to use grass to make the wheel nuts stay on. The grass beside the road was very dry and wouldn’t have kept the nuts on any wheel.

  It was not a good way to begin a long journey to Melbourne. We stopped at a garage in Wodonga – we didn’t call them service stations then – to fill the car with petrol. In the 1950s, eucalyptus trees lined the narrow, single-carriageway Hume Highway, often forming a tunnel over the road. To me, Melbourne was a sprawling, noisy mass of houses lying somewhere a long way away at the end of that tunnel and near the sea.

  Dad didn’t come to see us often or to stay when we were at Granny Chauvel’s and he is not part of my memories there. He was not with us on those long journeys. Invariably he was busy with political meetings and was seldom, if ever, around to help change a wheel or to deal with other mechanical issues. Pat seemed to take each flat tyre or similar inconvenience in her stride and with great humour. Her eyes twinkled over her high cheekbones when she laughed, something she managed to do when Mum found it too hard or was too tired.

  Granny’s place at 49 Murphy Street, South Yarra, was a Victorian house dating from the end of the nineteenth century. It was a substantial five-bedroom Hawthorn-brick home with a flourishing garden in the front and a smaller one behind, a separate brown-painted galvanised-iron woodshed, a garden shed and an incinerator at the rear. The Chauvel family moved there in the autumn of 1922, almost three years after returning from England following the end of the First World War. Grandfather had been welcomed as a hero when he arrived in Melbourne to take up his appointment as Inspector-General of the Australian Military Forces. In 1914 he had been posted to the Dominions Section of the Imperial Staff in London, and he and Granny and their first three children – Ian, Edward and Mum – were on board the Ulysses, a British steam passenger ship, en route to England when war broke out. During the war he rose from his command of the 1st Light Horse Brigade at Quinn’s Post, Gallipoli, to Australia’s first Corps Commander when he took over the Desert Mounted Corps in 1917.

  The battles of Romani, Magdhaba and Beersheba were household names when I was a child staying with Granny at number 49. Grandfather died in 1945, before I was born, so my only visual memory of him was the rather stern figure in uniform that George Lambert painted. As a child I was told that Grandfather was ‘famous’, but I didn’t know why. Granny showed me where Gallipoli, Egypt and Beersheba were in her atlas, but I still couldn’t understand why he was ‘fighting’. It seemed that while Grandfather had become famous for fighting, I only got into trouble for it. Grandfather was clearly part of that unfair world where grown-ups could do what they liked and children (we weren’t really called ‘kids’ then) couldn’t. Perhaps if Granny had explained that he was ‘serving in the war’ rather than ‘fighting’ it might have made more sense to me. It wasn’t until I went to boarding school aged eleven that a kind teacher helped me find
the location of the more obscure battlefields and explained that high-ranking officers like Grandfather planned battles in their headquarters and had a lot of administrative work to do. Only just beginning to understand Grandfather’s role in the First World War, I didn’t ask about it at home. It seemed as if it was something I was supposed to know and I didn’t want to reveal my lack of understanding.

  Initially my grandparents rented the house at number 49 from Violet and Colin Templeton, who had become close family friends and lived next door. It was Mr and Mrs Templeton who advised the Chauvels to send first Mum and then Eve to St Catherine’s School. Colin Templeton’s sister Flora had joined forces with the indomitable headmistress Miss Ruth Langley shortly after Miss Langley had moved St Catherine’s from Castlemaine to Toorak.

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Murphy Street felt as if it belonged more to a country town than a capital city. Residents knew and acknowledged each other in the street, albeit somewhat formally by today’s standards. Each morning the milkman’s horse clippety-clopped up and down the row of houses with the milk bottles rattling and clinking in his wooden cart. Granny and her contemporaries still spoke about mail and news from ‘home’, meaning England and Scotland.

  The floor of the porch at 49 was tiled in a similar pattern to the russet and cream designs in Melbourne’s St Paul’s Cathedral, though simpler of course, and the long, narrow windows on either side of the front door were filled with an opaque stained glass. It was a mysterious house, ripe with damp, dusty smells and dark corners that seemed to invite exploration. There were locked doors so rarely opened that cobwebs grew in the keyholes; I knew because I peeped in them all.