Perhaps the international turmoil and imminence of war in Europe was an attraction for them, rather than a deterrent. In St Anton, Mum and Dad found British people who had also chosen to ignore their government’s warning.
As one of Austria’s best resorts, St Anton was popular with both the upper echelons of the Nazis and well-to-do non-party members. Due to the slump in the tourist trade following the Anschluss, the local people of St Anton needed visitors and the business they brought. All the same, it must have been difficult for them to keep both sets of clientele happy. Mum and Dad had been welcomed with open arms but, like the largely anti-Nazi local community, they too had to walk the heady tightrope between Nazis and non-Nazis. They were lucky that the Nazis did not dream up some reason to prevent them leaving St Anton when they did. I don’t know how much they owed their safety, and perhaps their lives, to the local people in the village who so kindly looked after them.
In January 1940 Dad and Mum received a letter from a friend who signed himself enigmatically ‘A.C.’. It was written on headed notepaper from Middlesex School, Concord, Massachusetts. The letter recounts how, on 28 August 1939, A.C. headed for Germany where he ‘travelled the complete length of the Siegfried Line. The Germans were crowding the forts. The barbed wire was already up. Guns, troops and men were being rushed up to the fort.’ Even Dad must have known that it was time to leave when they did, but part of him probably would have liked to have stayed and travelled like A.C., right until the last moment before war was declared. They were back in Australia by then.
In family circles Mum and Dad alluded wistfully to their travels in the Americas and in Austria and often dined out on their stories and adventures. It was no secret that those days were the best in their lives. Their stories were thrilling but daunting, and even aged ten or eleven I was under no illusion that although the war had come and changed things, it was also us children who had helped spoil the fun.
Mum pointed out to me where Chile was on the map motifs decorating the curtains in her bedroom, but I had to find the other places she and Dad spoke about in the atlas and I couldn’t understand why I could see names like Innsbruck but not St Anton. My parents spoke of St Anton as if it was the centre of the world, which indeed it was for them and many other world-class skiers too. In addition to the geographical complexities, Mum and Dad had created a legacy of experience and achievement that would be hard to live up to.
32
Toorak College
Indi had the unenviable job of taking me to boarding school for the first time in early February 1965. I was eleven and about to go into grade 6. If I had been scared about being exposed among my peers and not knowing anybody at the local primary school, my fears were all the more paralysing as we drove between the brick gateposts and imposing black wrought-iron gates of Toorak College near Mt Eliza on the Mornington Peninsula. Not that I told Indi, but I was praying to God that Mum hadn’t mentioned to the school that she thought I was ‘concrete from the ears up’ and ‘un-teachable’. Above all I wanted to start with a clean slate but thought I was unlikely to have it; Mum didn’t always keep her opinions to herself and in all probability had already discussed her concerns with Indi and the school.
Indi had left school over a year earlier and seemed so grown-up and sophisticated in her elegant dark blue linen dress. The cheery, stooped, white-haired figure of Mrs Jones, one of the house-mistresses, met us at the top of the staircase leading to the junior boarding house. Mrs Jones recognised Indi, and I was very proud that she was my sister. I didn’t say very much; my limbs felt heavy and my actions robotic. Indi helped me to unpack and showed me where to put the pressed and folded piles of clothing on designated shelves and where to hang the starched uniforms.
Miss Maclean, or Clane-um as we called her behind her back, was the mistress in charge of the junior boarding house. Her room was in the corner between two wings. A long balcony with at least ten beds ran from the corridor opposite Miss Maclean’s door. Her hearing was exceptional and her room well-positioned to catch everything from the quietest whispers to the softest of scampering feet after lights out. She was unsmiling and formidable but a respected disciplinarian. On our first meeting she scared the wits out of me and she continued to do so for most of my first year.
My bed on the balcony was the second closest to Miss Maclean’s door. She might have put me there as I had never been to school before and was the most likely new girl to be homesick. Shada was in the bed closest to the dreaded door; I liked her because she, like me, had an unusual name and she also had pretty platinum blonde hair. She boarded because her parents were unhappily separated. In the other bed beside mine was the short, cheerful, bouncy Susie. She had been a boarder for a long time. Her dad lived close by and she boarded because her mum had died when she was very little.
Susie and Shada reminded me of the girl with bandaged eyes in St Andrew’s Hospital. Each of them told me I was lucky to have both parents still living together. Clearly both of them had more sadness in their lives than I had, so I reasoned I just needed to get on with life as they did. On my first evening at boarding school I felt anxious that things would change at home while I was away, that Mum and Dad would go their own ways more than ever, and that anxiety never left me entirely. In a way Mum did increasingly go her own way as her offspring became more independent.
Being so close to Miss Maclean’s door meant we didn’t talk as much as I would have liked. I was envious of the girls further along the balcony who were less likely to be heard if they whispered. Next to Shada’s bed was a fire escape and on the first night before I went to bed I looked at it and thought about trying the door and creeping down the steps. But where would I go when I reached the playing fields? Beyond the playing fields was the Wilderness, a bush-covered area of school property. It was very dark down there, and when I looked out of the window behind my bed it didn’t seem to be a friendly darkness. So I stayed in bed and listened to the breeze stirring the leaves of the Virginia creeper that covered the brickwork around the glassless windows. Far above on the school clock tower sounded the thwack, thwack of the lanyard hitting the flag mast.
I wondered what it was like for Harry who was just starting his year at Timbertop, the rural property in the Victorian Alps owned by Geelong Grammar. Mum said Timbertop was special because it was in the mountains and there was bushwalking and skiing. Next year he would go into Perry House, which had been designed by the same architect as Toorak College and looked just like our boarding house, except that it was built entirely of red brick while our building was clad in grey rendering, except for the cloisters.
I wasn’t sure how far away Timbertop was, but I tried to imagine what Harry was feeling being back at school, having started three years earlier. Maybe he was used to it by now and felt content, not lonely inside like me. I didn’t know and there was no reason why I would have – I was the kid sister. With three years dividing us, our relationship was by then often quite distant and Harry had scarcely spoken to me about Geelong Grammar or what he thought about Mum and Dad sending him away to boarding school. I knew he didn’t read as much or as accurately as I did, but it didn’t seem to have held him back like my inability to conquer maths had for me.
Within hours of first arriving at boarding school I knew that while I had sufficient uniform, I didn’t have enough clothes to wear in the evenings and at weekends. Having the right clothes seemed so important in the mid sixties, and if I was lucky enough to be invited by friends to spend weekends with them my clothing was embarrassingly inadequate. I had no trousers except for the navy blue uniform corduroys for boarders’ weekend wear; apparently Mum had been told by the school that that was all I would need. I needed at least one more pair, and some jodhpurs would have been good. A daygirl invited me riding and I really wanted to go but was embarrassed to admit I didn’t have any appropriate clothes.
Mum eventually handed some of Indi’s clothes on to me. As a few of the cotton dresses had no manufacturer’s labe
l stitched into them, I assume she’d had them made. She’d had a supply of cotton fabrics resourcefully stockpiled since the beginning of the war. Mostly they were pretty materials but at the time I thought they were hideously old-fashioned. Perhaps Patsy, Dot Salter’s daughter, had made them at much the same time she was making my bib-and-brace corduroy overalls and shorts and gabardine ski clothes. Years later in London, Steena Hay, whom I had known since I was a child, remarked that she had admired my red cotton blouse until she realised it was part of my sports uniform. I had two or three red school blouses for sport, but except for some dresses and skirts and sweaters to wear in the evenings, I didn’t have much else.
‘When I first went to St Catherine’s,’ Mum said, ‘I was teased about the unfashionable clothes Granny and Nanny made for me.’ Why, I wondered, did Mum let history repeat itself? I don’t know if Indi had ever asked the same question. I certainly didn’t, because I knew Mum would say, ‘The family allowance Dad gives me is not enough to clothe you kids.’ If I knew, Dad too must have known that she saved everything so she could ski and we could all go to Thredbo for the school holidays. I didn’t question it, as at the time I knew nothing different. On a couple of occasions, when I was about fourteen or fifteen, Indi kindly interceded with Mum and helped me buy some of the clothing I needed. She also came with me to shop for a long evening dress for my first school dance; except for the fact that it made me look more flat-chested than I would have wished, I was very pleased with it. I had invited Hugh Watson, who was very good-looking, and I knew that there would be no critical remarks at home as his parents were friends with Dad.
Much to my chagrin I rapidly discovered that there was little flexibility in the rather military-style routine governing boarding school life. I’d never imagined that before breakfast I would have to dress, make my bed, tidy my room and clean my shoes ready for inspection as we lined up in the cloisters – seniors on one side, middle school on the other and juniors on a shorter side of the quadrangle outside the junior common room. We stood in silence for Miss Hancock, the senior boarding house mistress, to call the roll and ensure everyone was clean and tidy.
Miss Hancock’s standards were second to none and she had all-seeing eyes. If I had untidy hair or uniform, my shoes were not clean enough or I had just accidentally pushed a fingernail through my stockings when I was dressing, I was sent back to do my hair or clean my shoes or change my stockings just like anyone else – only I seemed to be sent back with monotonous frequency. Mrs Hancock was quick to give a detention if you were late and she saw you running across the beautiful green lawn in the quadrangle. I couldn’t understand why we had to line up before every meal and were supposed to march in silence to the dining room where we stood by our chairs until grace had been said. Some girls seemed to find the routine discipline easy, but I hated it. And unless I was really hungry, I didn’t think the food was worth lining up for. Chocolate La Monge – or Yarra Mud as we called it – was like eating faintly chocolate-flavoured slime.
There was little privacy anywhere, except in the bathrooms. Even there, the partitions between the shower and the loo cubicles reached neither the floor nor the ceiling so one’s privacy could easily be disturbed. There was a junior and senior common room at each end of the cloisters where, on Sundays after lunch, we wrote our letters home. I could never think of anything to say except that the room smelled of stale food, mouldy fruit and used sports kits, so I naturally enough didn’t want a teacher to read my letter.
At the beginning boarding school was lonely, strange and scary. Those who had been there longer and knew the system sometimes teased and picked on new girls simply because they were vulnerable. Mum had always stressed that if you were nice to people, they were nice to you, but it didn’t really seem to work like that. Mum was unworldly but very determined that she wasn’t. The letters she wrote every week and sometimes even more often were short and supportive, almost every one rather like the one she’d written the week before.
About school life Dad advised, ‘Now, you watch other girls and see how they get on with each other. You can learn a lot by watching and remembering what others do and say in certain situations.’ I knew Dad was quite right, but it was hard to do what he said I should. I was so scared of being teased that sometimes I imagined it happening when it probably wasn’t. Before I arrived at Toorak College the only classroom I had ever seen was Harry’s grade 3 room at the Corryong primary school. I can’t recall ever having visited Indi while she was at school so I don’t think I had seen a dormitory.
I don’t know if Mum realised that, except for the daygirls arriving in kindergarten or the children beginning as boarders in grade 1 at Wardle House, I would be the only new girl who had never been to school before. It was lonely being the only one who had come from correspondence schooling, and for whom everything was new and strange. I now bitterly regretted not taking up Mum’s suggestion that I go to the local primary school for a year before heading to boarding school.
At the end of my first term when I received an F for maths, Miss D remarked, ‘You could do better than that. You could try.’
‘What is the point when I’m hopeless at maths?’ I replied.
‘Why do you think so?’ Miss D asked quietly.
‘Because Mum said so,’ I replied, and the story of how I couldn’t remember all my times tables or do long division came tumbling out.
In return for a promise that I would really try, at the beginning of the next term Miss D began to teach me some of the skills I needed and it was not long before I was called teacher’s pet. It was the gentle Miss D who persuaded me that I had the ability to learn and that, if I tried, I could do well. Learning to learn wasn’t a smooth process and while she didn’t manage to completely convince me about maths, at least I had begun to enjoy it. Confidence took longer, but in time a little began to develop and I was beginning to hold my own.
Miss D was much too good for us and soon, like her parents, she became a missionary. I was very sorry when a few years later we heard that she had died in South America.
Arithmetic was not my only weak subject initially. Knowing how whistling eagles built their nests or where I might find azure kingfishers was no use whatsoever when it came to nature study at school. Nor was my knowledge of some of the names of the mountains we could see from Towong Hill any use in geography lessons where we were learning about other countries. But I loved both subjects and was quick to catch up.
Although the children’s books Mum had written were a salvation during my early childhood at Towong Hill, ultimately I found their legacy a bit of a burden after I arrived at boarding school. Mum became busier and busier as a writer, and it seemed some teachers and peers alike expected me to have a fabulous imagination and to be a talented, well-practised storyteller and a good English student. I had read a lot in comparison to many of my contemporaries and I could tell a reasonable yarn, but my handwriting, spelling and grammar were dire and let me down badly. Before I went to school I was under the impression that, next to history, English was my best subject. I soon discovered that while Mum had put plenty of lines through my arithmetic, she hadn’t corrected much of my spelling or grammar. ‘I didn’t want to stifle your individuality,’ she later remarked. She could be exasperatingly inconsistent.
When Miss W in second form thumped my desk in frustration until the books and pens bounced over my mistakes, I found that, at least initially, individuality had a humiliating price. I simply had to learn the rules before I could begin to break them. Meanwhile, the thumping made me quake in my shoes. I soon dreaded grammar almost as much as maths lessons, with the result I learned almost nothing except how to survive a year in Miss W’s class.
I thought she got her just deserts when I heard some of the boarders in my form had put water in her petrol tank. She drove her Morris Minor out onto Old Mornington Road where it came to a spluttering stop. Clearly I was not the only one who thought she was a battleaxe, and she wasn’t the only battleaxe
either. In form 3 Mrs S spent a whole year teaching us English grammar. I found it deadly boring; she was humourless and she terrified me. Once again I learned next to nothing and spent time in prep teaching myself what she had tried to teach in class.
Other students who had read Kingfisher Feather and Winged Skis and realised the extent to which both books were based on our family knew too much about me, while I knew relatively little about them. Peers saw the discrepancy between me and the goody-two-shoes characters of the Dane twins in Kingfisher Feather and Barry Milton in Winged Skis. Most of my contemporaries knew my parents were distinguished skiers, but thank goodness none of them seemed to know about the dreaded ski pram. It was a pity that Silver Brumbies of the South, which Mum dedicated to me, was not published until 1965 after I had started boarding school. A desire to keep it quiet tempered my delight in seeing in print the book that I had spent so many happy hours reading and talking about with Mum. I wished too that I had been at home to share some of the pleasure of its publication with her.
The history I had taught myself from reading historical fiction bore little or no relation to the history our teachers taught us during our social studies lessons. At that time history was not taught as a separate subject at Toorak College. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the lessons, and old friends relate that the stories I told helped them to pass the history questions in exams. I can’t remember doing very much of that and I imagine that my knowledge of historical fiction may have distorted my grasp and interpretation of facts, but I was relieved to be able to cope with one subject and to be able to help those who had helped me in other ways.
Honor Auchinleck Page 23
