Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  When I was about five, Mum gave me a shady spot between a large hydrangea and the house so that I could have a garden of my own. The soil was rich, moist and dark, and I was very proud when I grew a small hydrangea from a cutting. Columbines grew close by and I gathered and sowed their seeds. In spring I had violets and blue irises. On the other side of the path and beneath Dad’s office window there was a square bed devoted entirely to lily of the valley.

  Dad seemed to be away a lot when the House was sitting and at other political functions. When he was at home, I often heard his voice on the telephone or the clink of the mail bag key on the lock of the bag as either Mum or Dad opened it. Dad always seemed to be writing to or talking to people I didn’t know about things that were not part of the world I knew. Otherwise he was in the workshop. Sometimes he cut out animal shapes on a fretsaw, painted them and made them into toys.

  In the mid and late 1950s, Mum took some of our happier family photographs in the top garden. Indi was probably the most athletic of us and Dad had made her some wooden hurdles. Mum photographed her leaping over them, and other pictures show Harry and me pedalling our little cars on the path round the circular lawn. The excellent quality of the colour makes these photographs look as if they were taken recently, but the clothes we are wearing tell another story. In winter we dressed in homemade corduroy bib-and-brace overalls and hand-knitted sweaters while in summer we wore bib-and-brace shorts over cotton shirts or blouses.

  After the outbreak of the Second World War, lack of staff meant the lower garden had become an exciting wilderness. Tucked away among tall European trees and lilacs was an overgrown badminton court that had been used before the First World War during some grand house parties. ‘Women played in flowing calf-length white dresses and the men wore white flannel trousers,’ Dad explained once when we were yarning together about the old days. ‘Some of those friends and relatives were injured and some bought it and didn’t return from the war,’ Dad added wistfully, as if he was mourning the passing of an era as well as people like his cousin Malcolm Chisholm, whom he remembered so fondly. The badminton court was like a forgotten memorial to friends who had vanished from our parents’ lives.

  ‘Don’t go near the well beside the orange trees in the lower garden. There are S-E-R-P-E-N-T-S,’ Harry said, purposefully and emphatically to make me shiver. In springtime the lower garden was filled with lilacs and irises that penetrated the sea of weeds and long grass. In summer it was full of crackly dry sticks, branches and grass. A tap dripped above the well; Harry and I thought that snakes drank from it and then hid between the stones in the wall of the well beneath. The oranges looked beautiful but they were dry and full of pith as nobody had watered them very much for years. It was as if the paddocks were gradually encroaching on a cultivated oasis and killing off the fruit trees and any remaining garden plants.

  In spring and summer Dad – probably with help from Mum and perhaps Indi or Harry – would drive a mob of sheep into the lower garden to eat down the grass before it dried out and became a fire risk. As children it was our job to help Dad move the sheep between the lower garden, once it was eaten down, and the other small adjoining paddocks. Dad had divided the area into a number of zones, and during his spare time he made and painted wooden gates for the zones in his workshop. It was as if he was indulging himself in hobby farming on a large pastoral concern. Just as Mum lived like a guest in her own home, surrounded by her parents-in-law’s possessions, in his way Dad too seemed to be slightly overawed by his inheritance. It was as if he had never managed to reconcile his political interests with his responsibilities on the property. The manager dealt with the day-to-day duties, worked with and supervised the jobs done by the station hands, kept the books and paid the accounts for the property of more than 4000 acres.

  As a child I saw virtually nothing of the daily management. Dad and his manager seemed to make the major decisions without necessarily discussing them with Mum. Later I learned that a firm of trustees had always run Dad’s financial affairs. Meanwhile, as a small child, I knew little about my parents’ lives beyond the boundaries of the house and garden at Towong Hill. When Parliament was sitting or Dad had other political commitments, Mum was left to move the sheep as well as look after and educate us children, also to run the house and to fit in writing when she could.

  ‘Don’t touch the oleander – it’s poisonous enough to kill a horse,’ Dad warned me every time I went with him to the lower garden to move sheep. Dad could be counted on to warn of any danger. He didn’t like the tree of heaven either and regretted planting it, but he didn’t say why. Was it, I wondered, because the flowers on the male plant are supposed to be evil-smelling when crushed? The tree is rather attractive, with large ash-patterned leaves and fruits that form like bunches of keys, each one twisted like a propeller. Perhaps the fact that the tree spread rapidly was the explanation for Dad’s feelings – he thought it was a weed.

  While the garden around the house was shrinking, our play world moved beyond its confines and out the back to the workshop if Dad was there. We also had a series of cubbyhouses high up in Indi’s secret tree where, if one or other of us was in trouble, we could climb beyond the reach of Mum and Dad for brief respite. I can’t remember why Dad was so incensed the time he tried to climb up behind Harry and me. We slithered down the other side of the tree, moving much faster than Dad, still on the way up. Sirius, the 1950s short-wheelbase Land Rover, was parked beneath the tree. Harry could drive and was game for anything, so we jumped in and set off down the hill towards the milking shed. I had not closed the passenger door properly and there were no seatbelts, so when Harry turned the corner near the cowshed in the direction of the pumping lagoon, the door swung open and I fell out. Although we were not going very fast, I was a bit too shaken to laugh straightaway. If Dad was still incandescent with rage when eventually we returned to the house, I can’t remember that either – Harry was so often in the hot seat. Perhaps Dad’s anger subsided as quickly as it had flared.

  When I was about seven or eight, a man whom Mum and Dad employed as a gardener and to milk the cows threatened to catch me and put me over his knee. I can’t remember exactly what I had done; I might have been cheeky or up to mischief. Revulsion rushed up to my throat before I knew whether he was joking or serious and my legs were already carrying me as fast as I could run down the hill. Just before the cattle grid leading to the horse paddock, I fell, cutting and grazing my knee. My screams must have brought Mum running. She took me to the upstairs bathroom and gently cleaned the gravel and sand from the wound, dabbing it with gentian violet. ‘It doesn’t sting so badly as iodine,’ she explained as I winced. Beneath the sticking plaster, a deep, dirty purple patch seeped out. Later, when Mum took the plaster off, a similar dirty-coloured scab formed.

  I don’t think I ever said anything to Mum about why I had been so desperately running away. The threat might have been a joke and if it wasn’t I was probably getting my just deserts for being rude or too familiar. I can’t really remember the events leading up to it. But suddenly I must have grown up a bit as something in me realised the sinister potential of the situation. I was terrified of the new knowledge that had dawned on me, whether the odd-job man wished me ill or not. I couldn’t talk about it with Mum, or anyone.

  15

  Paradise for her Daughter

  ‘Granny and her luggage and plants take up more space than the mail and parcels for the whole district!’ Harry whispered to me when Mum took us to meet Granny from the service car (the bus to and from the train in Albury) in Corryong. We sniggered quietly, not wanting Granny to hear in case she gave us her pained look, her dignified white eyebrows arched and her mouth down at the corners with slight disappointment. The long-suffering driver hauled an exotic collection of large, creamy leather suitcases covered with P&O shipping labels from the bus while we helped with some of the lighter packages and plants.

  I knew from an early age that Granny Chauvel was a wonderful anchor
in my life. At Towong Hill she was the same quiet, dignified figure that she was in her own home in Melbourne and her routine remained much the same: if she wasn’t gardening, she played cards or read detective stories. She always had a pack or two of cards in her handbag and she taught me to play racing demon. Sometimes she intervened to make peace between us children or interceded with Mum on behalf of one or other of us, though more frequently she interceded with Dad when he got cross about the mess in the house. Granny M had run a very tidy and highly organised house, and that was how Dad would have liked it to stay. Generally, for a mercurial person, Dad was fairly patient, but on occasions he flared.

  Granny Chauvel started planning the Towong Hill garden in 1937, and her garden diary with some of her drawings and plans still exists. While Mum and Dad were away from late 1937 until autumn 1939 in the Americas and Europe, Granny and Grandfather Chauvel visited and gardened at Towong Hill. As Granny M died the year I was born, I never heard what she thought about Granny replanting some of the garden she had nurtured. Perhaps it was just as well she lived over five hundred kilometres away in Sydney! I have studied Granny’s plans and notes and it looks to me as if she was trying to create a paradise for her beloved elder daughter in a bid to ensure that she would feel content and at home when she and Dad returned. Some thirty years later, out of sheer love for her family and of gardening, Granny was still returning regularly to Towong Hill to continue her efforts to create and maintain that paradise. Mum didn’t entirely share Granny’s enthusiasm – the extra work looking after the plants when Granny left meant less writing time – but she was grateful all the same.

  John and I had some ducks that roamed free in the garden during the daytime, hoovering up worms and other duck delicacies. Inevitably they left their very liquid multicoloured droppings on the lawn and garden paths, so walking barefoot or sitting on the lawn could be hazardous for the unwary. We were never concerned for Granny, though, as she never walked barefoot and preferred to sit in a chair rather than on the grass.

  The day Granny stepped on a nest of very rotten duck eggs concealed under the thick foliage of an agapanthus, Mum was horrified. Granny was cross because Mum wouldn’t let her into the house until she had been hosed down. Granny didn’t say any more about it, but Mum pressed John and me on the need to be more accountable about the eggs. I don’t remember Mum’s exact words but she was trying hard not to laugh too. She knew she couldn’t laugh openly in case we didn’t smarten up our act and something worse and even less dignified happened to Granny. ‘I didn’t like having to hose down my mother,’ I once heard Mum telling someone on the phone. It was partially my fault so I felt guilty, but it was also funny and I started giggling like a mad jelly as I eavesdropped on Mum describing the incident.

  Our ducks were not the only hazard in the garden. There was an ever-present risk that the goats that Dad had bought to help keep the grass down would get out of their adjoining paddock and wreak havoc, eating the precious plants that Granny was cosseting in the garden.

  The goats had already disgraced themselves long before the incident with the duck eggs. From the washing line in the backyard, the grey and white and more personable of the two goats pulled the top of Mum’s two-piece bathing suit, a forerunner and more modest version of a bikini, and was munching it steadily. In her rage, Mum hauled the purple bikini bra out of the goat’s gullet. Cursing and swearing, she swiped its rump with the bra, leaving a purple streak on the goat’s backside. Mum could really let rip in great style when provoked. Granny, who was sitting with us, looked mildly shocked. If she was relieved that it was only Mum’s bikini that had been chewed, she didn’t show it. Mum would really have been in the costly poo if it had been Granny’s foundation garments!

  Except for clothing for state visits and sporting requirements, Mum seldom spent much money on clothes. She had splashed out, however, on that purple two-piece and it was her fashion statement for the summer – only to be sabotaged by the goat.

  16

  Crucifix in the Pudding

  Christmas was all the better if Granny was at Towong Hill. It would take her all afternoon on Christmas Eve to decorate the tree: she shut the dining room door so it would be a surprise for us all when we came down to breakfast on Christmas morning. One Christmas Dad played the part and took at least two of us down to the stables to collect hay and a bucket of water for Father Christmas’s reindeers, though I can’t recall remembering to leave any food or drink for Father Christmas. It was always Father Christmas – never Santa or Santa Claus – at Towong Hill. Santa Claus was Germanic and the Second World War was still too recent in family memory for anyone to readily adopt a German name for a beloved figure.

  Our early Christmases were quite formal, the day occasionally beginning with a church service in Corryong. Later we would visit Dot and Jack Salter (who worked for us as a stockman) and sit with them in the shade on the verandah of their cottage, near the station stables and cattle yards. Dad and Mum enjoyed peacefully yarning about the old days with Dot and Jack and their family.

  It was May Lloyd, Dot’s mother, who said, ‘Keep smiling, Mrs Mitchell,’ after Singapore fell in February 1942 and Dad was listed as missing. May and her husband, George, would have known just how awful Mum felt. Their son, Dot’s brother Frank, was killed on Crete, bravely refusing to surrender to the Germans in September 1941. It was over a year before his family heard the news, by which time May had already died; perhaps, fearing the worst, she died of a broken heart. Mum must have missed the brave May, and she and Dad may well have felt guilty about their relative good fortune. Dad and Mum named pine plantations in memory of Frank and also of Jack Herbert, son of Mr and Mrs Herbert (Mr Herbert managed Towong Hill until late 1946 or early 1947), who served as an officer in the RAF and was killed while training in England.

  Dot was at least the second if not the third generation of her family to work at Towong Hill or earlier at Bringenbrong. Her parents, May and George, had worked at Towong Hill and had lived in the same cottage as Dot and Jack then did. Jack Salter, Dot’s husband, had been working at Towong Hill since the 1930s, and had stuck Aunt Eve’s head under a tap to stop her hair catching fire during the 1939 bushfires. Jack loved good stories and told them with a terrific sense of drama. Dot took a wonderfully kind interest in our family, and she grew magnificent roses that both Mum and Granny admired very much. Dot and Jack’s weatherboard cottage was cream with a red galvanised iron roof. It was one of those little houses that looked like it had two eyes and a nose – the eyes being the two windows on either side of the nose that was the door. Their cottage reminded Mum of the yarns she had shared there and was a symbol of the Australian country life she loved.

  By the time of my earliest memories, there was another family living in a newer cottage near the stud stables. At first all I knew about them was that the mother said she would cut their tongues out if any of the children swore. Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Knight and their daughter, Pat (my godmother), lived in the manager’s cottage between the stud stables and the homestead. At the homestead there was a cook, who sometimes lived in the servants’ quarters at the back of the main house. In the cottage close to the homestead there lived a married couple, the wife cleaning and her husband milking the cows, looking after the chooks and doing some gardening. At Christmas time the Knight family was invited to our house (‘the homestead’) for drinks or an evening meal.

  For some years Mum and Dad clung to tradition, so Christmas dinner was roast turkey followed by Christmas pudding. Mum and Granny slipped silver coins into the pudding before they served it. Dad called brandy ‘gut rot’ – he hadn’t touched alcohol since the war – so none was poured over the pudding and there was no brandy butter. Granny always had an eye for something different and, just for a change, one Christmas she brought a packet of trinkets for the pudding. Even at her most mischievous Granny could not have foreseen what was going to happen.

  Dad did not miss a trick. He saw how the little piles of coins and t
rinkets were growing on the sides of everyone else’s plates and, counting his, he found that he had missed out. ‘Poor old Dad always gets the rough end of the stick!’ he grumbled from his end of the table. ‘Your poor old man has only got a threepenny piece and the rest of you have got at least that and a trinket as well!’ All eyes fell on Dad’s plate. Sure enough, there was just one lonely silver coin.

  ‘You should have got more than that, old Dad,’ one of us said. ‘Mum stuck at least a trinket and a coin into every slice! What has happened to your trinket?’

  ‘Anyway, Dad,’ Harry said, ‘there was a cross amongst the trinkets and nobody else has got it.’

  ‘He’s swallowed it!’ some of the younger members of the family hooted.

  ‘No, I didn’t!’ Dad said, trying to maintain some dignity. But everyone else had made up their minds about the whereabouts of the crucifix, and he probably knew that the incident would become part of the family story. I don’t think Granny ever brought trinkets for the Christmas pudding again.

  17

  Pushing the Boundaries

  In the years before I went to boarding school, riding was the highlight of the chilly winter days if Mum was not taking us skiing at Thredbo. I rode Toby, a naughty skewbald pony, and I felt a nice sense of achievement when eventually Mum let me off the leading rein. Inevitably I had a few falls when my pony shied at a rabbit or a quail whirring out of the tussocks on the river flats, but Mum made me get straight back on. One May afternoon I found I couldn’t remount – I’d broken my right arm. It mended quickly and shortly after the plaster was removed I ceased to notice any pain or weakness.