Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  Mum emptied and sorted the mailbag and discussed sheep and cattle and local news with ‘Father’ Knight, their voices rumbling and mumbling in the back corridor near the Weasel Hole. Mr and Mrs Knight were one of Mum’s few sources of local news. Since the end of the war, Dad’s return and the arrival of us children, Mum had all but lost her role in matters relating to stock management. During the war she had delivered lambs, footrotted sheep, learned to shear and turned her hand to any job that needed doing. At that time Towong Hill still ran sheep as well as cattle and it was also a thoroughbred horse stud. The work was tough, but Mum loved it and the active outdoor life it involved. Dad rapidly became absorbed in politics when he returned from the war and left the management of the pastoral operations to Mr Knight, who had been appointed after the previous manager, Mr Herbert, died in 1947. As Mr Knight had not worked with Mum during the war, he was largely unaware of just how much the involvement with the property meant to her. He may well have assumed that now she had children, Mum was completely absorbed in her family, but this was not the case, at least not entirely. Yearning for an escape from domesticity and small children, she either misunderstood or failed to accept the normal expectations of her situation, though perhaps she hoped that the new manager would include the owner’s wife in decisions when the owner himself was absent.

  ‘I’ve met a very strange Catholic priest in Corryong!’ someone heard a visitor to the district remark. The priest was not a priest at all but Father Knight, who was ‘Father’ only because he was his daughter Pat’s father! A tall, imposing, silver-haired First World War veteran who had served at Gallipoli and in Palestine, Father Knight’s time as manager at Towong Hill was distinguished by his wicked sense of humour and his great character. When he came up to the homestead from the nearby manager’s cottage on mail days to collect the business and his family’s personal mail there would be a mumble of sotto voce voices – the jokes were not for the kids – and then a roar of laughter before Father Knight went on his way and Mum returned to the front hall with her mail under her arm.

  With the mail came the welcome distraction of letters and magazines with interesting pictures of birds, animals, buildings and heads of state. These bore testimony to Mum and Dad’s far-flung family members, friendships from Dad’s years of travel while he was at Cambridge and studying in London, and their travels together before the war. Some of their American friends kindly sent us picture books from which I learned a bit about the Grand Canyon and what the skyline of New York was like; I mightn’t have been able to do sums but I was a voracious reader. Otherwise, most of the mail was for Dad, but there were also letters for Mum from Curtis Brown, her literary agents, and Hutchinson the publishers, both of whom were later to open Australian offices in Sydney and Melbourne respectively. There was fan mail too.

  As well as some of our readers and lessons, Mum’s desk was often laden with lists, letters, accounts, diaries, notebooks, research notes and manuscripts. One of the three telephones in the house also sat on her desk. There, Mum first compiled and then phoned through the store order for our groceries. A van from Corryong delivered them and Mum would disappear to the kitchen at the back of the house to help and to supervise the cook unpacking and storing the groceries.

  Shopping was not always so straightforward. The delivery of an order from the local chemist set the scene for one misunderstanding. Mum had requested the powdered laxative senna and was both amused and surprised when powdered henna arrived instead. The consequences of ingesting henna instead of senna might have been fairly dramatic, but fortunately she spotted the error before it was too late and the henna was returned to the chemist. It left those of us who knew the story chuckling. Mum could tell stories and laugh at herself, but I had to be careful. It was many years before I could tease her about the powdered henna and the effect it might have had on her insides.

  Mum often said she had too much to do, and this was true. She would come into the front hall shaking her head with frustration and cursing something or someone under her breath. She seldom seemed to relax and was always pushing herself hard. There wasn’t enough time for the things she wanted to do herself, like writing and skiing, let alone running a big house and home-educating her family. I suspect the less time she gave me, the more I demanded and the more impatient she became. Until she died she always believed she could have done it all with some more help, and if there had been fewer problems with the family and with the running of Towong Hill.

  ‘But you said you didn’t want to go to the local school,’ Mum remonstrated with me years later. It was all too late when eventually Mum suggested I might go to primary school for a year before I went to boarding school. By then I didn’t want to go as I knew I would be the only one in grade five who had never been to school before. If we passed the local school when the kids were in the playground I longed to join the games, but I didn’t tell Mum in case she actually sent me there. The eventual realisation that I was only putting off the evil hour until I went to boarding school at the age of eleven was the stuff of nightmares. Mum blamed me again for not trying harder to learn arithmetic and told me I was not very good with people. Dad simply didn’t know how scared, inadequate and unprepared I was feeling. I didn’t tell him because I didn’t know him well enough and didn’t think he would understand.

  Indi was already at boarding school by the time I began Crappy Days. I knew Harry hadn’t liked the correspondence classes, but he had started in grade three at the local school by the time I began my first home lessons, so it felt like I was forging a lonely path. As the youngest, John did better in the help stakes, or so it seemed to me, although he probably felt he needed more supervision too.

  ‘I tried to employ a governess but none of you wanted one,’ Mum explained ruefully. I couldn’t remember ever having been asked if I wanted a governess, and I don’t know if my siblings were asked either. I never really knew what had taken place and Mum wasn’t about to say any more.

  ‘All I wanted and needed was a bit more help and attention from you,’ I answered.

  Mum’s reply was hurt silence, then she remarked, ‘You just don’t know how hard I worked.’ She knew what I was thinking and didn’t want to admit that she really shouldn’t have expected to be able to write and to teach us at the same time. Inevitably, something would suffer.

  I didn’t make similar demands of Dad – the role of fathers was totally different then. If I had asked him about school work he might have made decisions without further consulting me, and the outcome might have been less to my liking.

  While she was very critical of others, Mum didn’t take criticism well herself. With that combination it was almost impossible to have an honest, open discussion with her as there was always the risk of hurting her and thus damaging our relationship. Once someone criticised her, she never forgot it, harbouring the hurt and mentioning it again years later when others had long forgotten what it had all been about. Her memory was an extraordinary mental filing system in which she could access memories of good and bad deeds at a moment’s notice.

  In March 1978, Mum wrote telling me that she had just read Daphne du Maurier’s 1977 autobiography Growing Pains: The Shaping of a Writer. She remarked, ‘I hope she writes the next bit – in fact how she managed to be a successful author, and write a great number of books, and produce three children and not drive everyone else mad – or maybe she did, but I think her husband survived!’ Was Mum tacitly acknowledging that an author-mother – someone like herself – might drive her children mad as well as everyone else? Did Mum realise that while she may not have written quite so many books as du Maurier, certainly I – and possibly my sister and brothers as well – wished she was less preoccupied and had more time for us collectively and individually? Had she done so we might all have got to know each other better and enjoyed each other’s company more.

  Despite Mum’s efforts to make history, nature study and English interesting and enjoyable, it became clear that her input wasn’t go
ing to be enough to bring me up to scratch. I became aware that at least one humiliating letter had arrived from Miss B, the correspondence teacher at Crappy Days, underlining my unsatisfactory progress and suggesting that the top private schools in Melbourne may not accept me. It was a bitter blow. Even though very occasionally I had imaginary friends, I craved real friends of my own age. I lived in a very silent private world.

  Many years later, while collecting and sorting out manuscripts after Mum died, I found between the pages of a manuscript of Silver Brumbies of the South (the book dedicated to me) a carbon copy of a letter from Mum to Miss B. In it Mum admitted that she had not apportioned her time equally between John and me and realised that I had not had the help and encouragement I badly needed. Ultimately, even if Mum never said as much to me, at least I knew she had been aware she’d let me down. This was one of those moments when I wondered if my quest to better understand my childhood with Mum was going to bring more pain. I kept most of her letters but I burned this one, although that didn’t erase it from my memory.

  In old age she reluctantly admitted that in many ways home education had disadvantaged her children and we would have flourished more with some professional teaching. Making some friends locally would also have helped. Since Dad was the local MP many people knew who we were, but we didn’t know them.

  After I went to boarding school and John was sent to the local primary school, the front hall became a family gathering place during the school holidays. In summer it was one of the coolest rooms in the house and in winter, when Mum lit the coke stove in the fireplace, it was the warmest. Thankfully Mum had evicted the vestiges of Crappy Days lessons, stuffing them into drawers and cupboards, and replaced them with a record player.

  Mum had a collection of Austrian and Swiss folk tunes and she also liked classical and sixties music. She liked Simon and Garfunkel and didn’t object to Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond or the Bee Gees. From what she read about their lifestyle, she was a bit uncertain about the Beatles, but she couldn’t resist them and sometimes I heard her humming their tunes. She had a wonderful ear for music and occasionally played Austrian folk or skiing songs on her piano accordion. Some of our best times in the front hall were when we were talking together and listening to the record player. My memories are filled with Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sounds of Silence’; throughout my early childhood there had been a lot of silence, although my chats with silence had nothing to do with subways and tenement halls. While I didn’t understand what these were, I knew without asking anyone that the song was about loneliness, and that cities could be lonely too.

  Mum often welcomed me home from boarding school with a book she had ordered from Margarita Webber’s bookshop in Melbourne. I particularly enjoyed Joan Phipson’s It Happened One Summer and a number of Ruth Park’s books. Mum believed that a good story gave children an opportunity to explore lives and cultures beyond the one they knew, as well as their own inner world. She was quite right, but if I felt that the legacy of Crappy Days schoolwork had been buried, I was very wrong.

  12

  So Many Stories

  Upstairs and to my room I took the books Mum had ordered for me – and, when she let me, carbon-copy chapters of her current manuscript. I was delighted with the little library that she was building up for me – the books were windows into new worlds. First published in 1958 when I was five, by 1959 The Silver Brumby was my bedtime story. By then Mum was working on the manuscript of Silver Brumby’s Daughter and it soon became my next bedtime story. For a while I had trouble moving beyond books about horses. Famous show jumper Pat Smyth’s books about her heroine, Jill, became favourites, though perhaps because Mum hadn’t written them and they were set far away in England, they didn’t have quite the same grip on my imagination as The Silver Brumby and Silver Brumby’s Daughter. I dreamed about Thowra and Storm and Kunama and Tambo, and I was forever wondering if somewhere in the Upper Murray someone had lost a beautiful white mare like Golden.

  Sometimes, if she had been away in Melbourne and hadn’t taken us kids with her, Mum brought home a new white china horse for me to add to the collection that had begun as decorations on my fifth birthday cake. Later Mum gave me a large bay, who became Mirri from The Silver Brumby, and a small bay who was Storm as a foal. Granny gave me a small collection of toy chestnut ponies to play Yarraman’s herd. I never had a grey horse so a rather mean-looking, greenish-grey horse became the Brolga, Thowra’s fearsome adversary in The Silver Brumby. On the floor in my room I discovered that I could while away many hours, safe from passers-by knocking my fragile toy horses flying.

  I built the Dead Horse Gap and the Cascades huts out of building blocks and stringy bark. Stones I had collected from banks of streams and moss I had picked off rocks delineated the mountains. The Secret Valley was a crevice between two big, long grey stones. I didn’t have any mounted stockmen to set up the scene of a proper brumby hunt, but I had yards that I constructed out of toy farmyard fences, and railings made from sticks. Apart from the greys, I had almost the complete brumby herd. Then, when Mum started writing Silver Brumbies of the South and Silver Brumby Whirlwind, the china horses had to play a variety of characters.

  In addition to reading the books Mum gave me, and the chapters she read from her own manuscripts as bedtime stories, I spent hours composing my own stories and acting them out with my china herd. Sometimes the smudgy carbon copy of one of Mum’s chapters lay on the floor beside me as I arranged the scenes to replicate the part of the story we’d just read. I felt very responsible, as Mum had emphasised that I had to be extremely careful of the manuscript. I was always thrilled to think that I was the first to hear the stories. It felt as if we had a special closeness.

  One morning Mrs G, who cleaned the upstairs part of the house, came to my room and exclaimed that it was disgracefully untidy. Trying to explain the imaginary world I had constructed, I grumpily realised that all she was interested in was cleaning the floor with the roller broom, the forerunner of a vacuum cleaner, and I had to dash to rescue my treasures before she knocked them flying. Cleaning seemed a waste of time as everything would just get dusty again, and if Mum wasn’t that interested in housework, why should Mrs G be? It hadn’t dawned on me that I was making a difficult job even harder for her. The next time Mum went to Melbourne she returned with some toy farm fencing that must have meant more clutter for Mrs G. I can’t remember her lasting very long.

  Before I was born, my room had been my paternal grandparents’ bedroom. Until I was about nine or ten, I didn’t understand why Granny and Granddaddy M had even shared a bedroom as I couldn’t remember Mum and Dad ever having done so.

  ‘I always liked a lighter bedroom,’ Mum explained. ‘And Granny and Grandfather M’s room always seemed so dark. I don’t like the heavy Victorian furniture. Really, it is in very bad taste.’ The furniture was dark, but I couldn’t see why it was ‘in bad taste’. I didn’t really understand what the term was supposed to mean, nor was I interested.

  When Granny M’s name was mentioned there was that same prickly tension as when someone spoke of Aunt Hon, so there must have been more to it than just the number of ‘n’s in my name that had upset Mum so much. It was the beginning of my career as a minor sleuth, and I sensed the possibility of exciting and interesting discoveries about the past. I only had to wait as long as it took for me to become a fluent reader and able to decipher old-fashioned, swirling handwriting.

  One wet day when I was poking around among old papers in Granny M’s chest of drawers, I found a short note to Mum in Granny M’s clear hand. In the quickest glance I saw Granny M had congratulated Mum on her engagement to Dad, adding she thought it was time Dad settled down. That was enough. While Granny M was doing the right thing, I knew instantly Mum would have thought that the mention of Dad’s ‘settling down’ was the issue that mattered most to his mother, and that Mum would have perceived a slight that she wouldn’t have forgotten. It was the sort of comment that Granny M might have made to
anyone, but if Granny M had written something more personal, perhaps saying that Mum would make a good wife for Dad and a charming daughter-in-law too, it would have been better from Mum’s point of view.

  But there was more to it. In Dad’s photographs, Granny M was always well dressed in practical, yet feminine, good-quality clothes. I already knew that she was a strong woman who looked directly at the camera. In an era when women were supposed to fit into their husband’s family rather than the other way round, Granny M would have expected Mum to fit in with her standards and way of life.

  Mum’s eldest brother, Ian, had suggested to Mum and Dad that they might spend their honeymoon in late 1935 and early 1936 in India, where he was serving with the Duke of Connaught’s Own Lancers. It would have made sense, as neither Uncle Ian nor Uncle Edward, who was also serving in India, could afford to return to Melbourne for Mum and Dad’s wedding. Mum loved her brothers dearly and she would have enjoyed the riding and hunting enormously, plus she would have been able to see for herself the exotically exciting life that her brothers described in their letters home. It would have been the adventure of a lifetime.

  Dad had planned originally that they would go to the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany for their honeymoon. There was no suggestion in the family that either Mum or Dad seriously considered Ian’s invitation, and yet it was such a pity they didn’t. They couldn’t have known that it would be their only opportunity. After the war, Ian and his wife, Jean, and two daughters ultimately settled in South Africa. Also, it was not entirely Mum and Dad’s decision as to where they should spend their honeymoon.

  Granny M dissuaded Dad from his plan to take Mum to the Olympics and a motoring holiday in New Zealand was booked. Mum said she hated motoring but she couldn’t remember any discussion about it. It was simple. Dad and his mother decided without consulting Mum much, if at all. Understandably, by the time Mum arrived to live at Towong Hill after they were married, she wanted a say in things. One of her first decisions was to not move into Granddaddy and Granny M’s bedroom. When Mum and Dad married, Granny M was living mostly in Sydney, only returning to Towong Hill on necessary occasions. After they returned from their honeymoon she settled in Sydney permanently. In making her choice, Mum threw a die in a way that rippled down the decades. That room would help to mould some of my earliest years.