Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  Even though I thought I was a reasonable swimmer, when I arrived at school I found I hit the water like a whale compared to some of the slimline torpedoes in Speedos. The heats for the swimming sports were held between the jetties on the pier in nearby Davies Bay. The wooden jetties were slippery from being submerged and the barnacles were hard on the soles of our feet. Except for occasional swims at Elwood when we were staying with Granny and on my trip to Bondi Beach in Sydney, I had not swum very much in the sea and found it difficult to proceed in a straight line through the waves. I was lucky to finish the heats let alone to qualify for some races.

  Nor had I learned to play rounders, baseball or basketball. I had made the useful discovery during the holiday I spent in Sydney before I went to boarding school that I couldn’t throw anything with any accuracy or distance, and my ability wasn’t improving much with practice. The winter after I started at Toorak College I also discovered I couldn’t hit a hockey ball very far or very fast, and I was so unfit that I couldn’t run for more than a few minutes. When I too often got cold and bored playing in the right-back position, I moved to right-halfback. I had to run more there, but it was more exciting.

  Being able to ski wasn’t any help when it came to learning about games. There was a brick practice wall nicely tucked away below the tennis courts and on the edge of the Wilderness, the bushland within the school grounds. I could practise there in some peace and, with the help of tennis lessons with Mr Guiney and later Mr Fox, ultimately was able to hold my own and enjoy tennis.

  I spent time sewing. Mum had taught me to hand sew and embroider a little, and I learned how to use the Singer treadle machines that were lined up around the walls in the old weatherboard school hall affectionately known as The Elephant. Mrs Roberts showed me that it wasn’t difficult to set the machine correctly and to untangle threads, and eventually I made myself skirts and even dresses for my last two school dances. Dad had brought me back a small transistor radio from a trip he made to Japan in 1965 and in the afternoons after school and on weekends I took it everywhere.

  When Mum realised that I had been lonely and unhappy at boarding school, she proved to be too fierce an ally too late, and wasn’t sufficiently discreet about to whom she expressed her concern. She told me how much she had hated boarding school and that she never expected any of her children to enjoy it, so when I was unhappy in the first two or three years it was like a self-fulfilling prophesy to her. Inevitably, time improved my situation and, although I still found the rigid routine difficult, I began to find friends and settle down. There was some steel developing in my personality and I wanted to break out of what seemed to be a generational cycle of being unhappy and underperforming at school. Turning things around took time.

  I became a swot. With a bit of effort I found I could retain the basic maths, English, science skills and French vocabulary I needed. With a bit more work I began to realise I could be an average and sometimes a slightly better than average student. At home I thought I was capable only of reading and learning a little history, but at school I discovered that science, and in particular biology, was fascinating. I still lacked the maths skills necessary to do chemistry and physics. While I didn’t have Indi’s artistic talent I could draw and enjoyed art and craft. The art hut where Mrs Paxton Petty ran a relaxed but inspiring empire was a world of its own, cut off from the main school buildings by two large playing fields. I never learned to read music accurately, but I loved listening. I didn’t sing at first because Mum said I was tone deaf and people who were tone deaf sounded awful. Eventually, when I tried, I loved singing.

  Having eventually gained some control over my academic life, when I was in fourth form I thought I might be able to regulate my appetite and lose weight from my sturdy thighs so I would look better in bathers, and slender and elegant in sports shorts on the playing fields and tennis courts. It seemed some girls dieted successfully, but for me it did not go as planned. I lost weight from almost every area of my body except for my legs and my progress in class and on the sports field began to flag. When a member of staff intimated there might be a problem, Mum rushed down with the most delicious collection of cakes I had ever seen for a picnic afternoon tea. She didn’t eat anything and I was supposed to eat much more than I was able. It was an overreaction by Mum, and during the next school holidays, and for many subsequent holidays and visits, at almost every meal Mum’s eyes were on my plate. If she thought I wasn’t eating enough she shook her head and sighed. I dreaded the scrutiny.

  Mum was not interested in food and cooking: she ate grapefruit and dried biscuits mixed with wheat hearts and honey for breakfast, some salad or leftover cooked vegetables baked with breadcrumbs on top for lunch, and some meat and vegetables in the evening. She expected her family to eat ‘normally’ – meaning plenty of meat and vegetables. Sometimes when she offered me more of the dish we were eating I snapped back. In September 1969 Mum wrote to Granny saying, ‘Honor was just her old, sweet self this time and it was very nice indeed,’ implying that I wasn’t always like that. And indeed I wasn’t. On reflection, Mum and I were finding it hard to get on. I couldn’t understand her attitude to food, I resented her scrutiny, struggled with some of the meals at home and the quantities that Mum thought necessary for me to eat.

  At meals Mum and Dad taunted each other. Dad teased and Mum got hurt and fought back. My intestines seemed to leap and knot themselves and my appetite evaporated. It was a vicious circle, and dieting had made it worse. Just as I knew years ago after falling at Mum’s bedroom door that I was being a nuisance, now I knew I was causing her anxiety on top of her having too much to do when she was trying to write. I longed for the relationship we’d had when she was writing Silver Brumbies of the South and Silver Brumby Kingdom.

  At about the time Silver Brumbies of the South was published I suggested she might write a story about a dingo pup. She started Jinki: Dingo of the Snows, but for me the little dingo pup never had the charismatic appeal of Thowra or Baringa. Jinki reminded me of the Australian terrier called Winkle that Mum had bought for the family and that came to assume an importance in Mum’s life that I don’t think any of her family attained. Instead of bringing the closeness I craved, Jinki simply meant that Mum retreated more into her writing. Feeling hurt about being a nuisance and also guilty about not liking Jinki, I taunted her, accusing her of being taken up with ‘chapter six, line two’ and not having enough time for her family. Dad was quick to pick up my line and teased her even more. The following year, 1969, it was the same while she wrote Light Horse to Damascus. Mum retreated more into her shell, the tension increased and I felt even guiltier.

  Mum and I were similar in some ways, but we were not doing each other any good. Both of us were inhibited and sensitive to criticism from the other. Both of us wanted to do well – Mum wanted continued success with her writing, while I was striving to achieve the simplest things at school and hoping for some parental approval. It seemed to me that Mum was very critical and quick to point out my flaws and to pick up on my mistakes. I began to experience stomach pains and gastric upsets, but neither the local doctor nor the school doctor could ascertain the cause. Mum had always suffered from tummy aches; during 1945 particularly she had had gastric attacks. She had suffered for far longer than I had – she just got on with it. Although she expected me to do so too, I knew she was worried about it. So was I, and suspected that stress didn’t help and on some occasions even caused the cramps.

  If she had been able to attend more school events and functions we might have had an easier relationship. There would have been more opportunities to see Mum and Dad if I had been sent to school in Melbourne – not that they were there together very often – and I would have been closer to Granny. Toorak College was about an hour out of Melbourne and I was out on a limb. Perhaps there wasn’t sufficient time among the other things Mum had to do on each of her visits to Melbourne to drive down to Toorak College as well. And, love her as I did, when I was a teenager she wa
s the sort of mother who embarrassed her kids. I knew that she was a bit of a rebel and liked to be different, and she wasn’t fashion-conscious like many of the other mothers. What I didn’t realise was that on the rare occasions she came to our swimming sports, a tennis match or speech day, it was not easy for her. She was shy, self-conscious and often sat alone as she knew few other parents. Also she was older than most of them. If she had known how I felt she would have been mortified, so I didn’t say much. Guessing reasonably accurately what I was thinking from the little I did say, she said I was being mean, and I ended up feeling bad.

  Once I was selected for the team to swim at the Southern Districts Swimming Sports at the Olympic Pool in Melbourne. As we were boarding the bus to return to school, the driver said to me, ‘You are Honor from the Upper Murray!’ He was smiling, obviously pleased to see me. I knew instantly he was the man who about six or seven years earlier had threatened to catch me and put me over his knee. Embarrassment at my memory overcame me. If I could have made myself invisible or fled, I would have done so.

  During the 1968 Easter holidays, Indi made me a white empire-line Swiss voile dress for my confirmation. Her boyfriend Rick was staying and he sat reading while she fitted and pinned the dress. Both sniggered a bit, probably at my embarrassment, or my figure, or both, or simply because I was the kid sister. While I was delighted with the dress, I was relieved when the fittings were finished. Indi sewed beautifully and when the day came I had that wonderful feeling that I looked my best.

  I hadn’t attended many Confirmation classes as they clashed with tennis lessons, or I contrived that they did. Nor did I learn the things I was supposed to learn, although I wasn’t entirely alone. As if to make up for deficiencies in my religious education, my brother John sent me his own humorous version of the Ten Commandments. Mum, Granny and Indi came to the Confirmation service at St James the Less, the simple white church in Mt Eliza where the Anglican boarders attended early church on Sundays. I emerged from being confirmed no more knowledgeable than I had been, but the Bible and prayer book that Mum, Dad and Granny gave me have travelled with me throughout my life.

  Except for mentions of the flood and fires, even the Bible stories Mum had read to us seemed so far removed from Towong Hill that I hadn’t really listened to very many of them. Neither I nor my siblings had been to Sunday School nor even to church very much, so I didn’t know any of the hymns we were expected to practise in our music lessons. I am not sure that the idea that we would then sing them better in school assemblies worked, and some more inspired teaching wouldn’t have been amiss. All the same, I eventually began to enjoy them and they formed the foundations of my growing love of choral music. Senior boarder and prefect Libby Harper read from poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko at evening prayers and thanks to her I started looking enthusiastically to modern authors outside the school curriculum and Mum’s recommendations for my reading. I was building my own reading world.

  The staff at Toorak College tried their best to ensure I was happy and in many ways I am sure I benefited from the certainty of boarding house regime. For one term, when I was about fifteen, I was put into a small dorm with two others on the ground floor near the sick bay and next door to Sister’s bedroom. The bathroom we shared with the girls in sick bay had no shower, and one evening after tennis one of us – possibly me – ran a bath and forgot about it. We met the water flowing down the corridor where it was already seeping under Sister’s door. Strangely, she had not come out to complain about the water so we knocked. When she shouted ‘Come in!’ we opened the door and found her sitting on her bed in fits of laughter. We reckoned she was a bit inebriated because it made the story better. She was quite a good sort, as indeed were most members of the staff – even those I thought were battleaxes.

  33

  A Bid for Freedom

  Soon after John went to boarding school in February 1967, aged about eleven, Mum set off to ski in Sun Valley, Idaho, and Zurs in Austria. It seemed strange that she hardly waited to see how John had settled in. Glamorgan in Toorak, a preparatory school for Geelong Grammar, was close enough to South Yarra for Granny to keep a close eye on him. To me it felt as if Mum couldn’t wait to get away from our family and its problems in this her first bid for freedom. Mum’s absence felt like a catalyst for more unwanted change. I became watchful, reading Mum’s letters more carefully than ever for signs of other travel plans and absences.

  Skiing at Thredbo the winter before, Mum had torn her Achilles tendon and I couldn’t understand why she would want to take that risk again less than a year later. Instead, while in Sun Valley, she broke her leg. Surely it was not worth it, I thought. I’d just learned what a lemming was and the description seemed to fit Mum perfectly. While I knew she was also catching up with friends, some of whom she had not seen since before the war, and there would be many years’ worth of news to discuss, none of my school friends’ mothers seemed to go off alone on overseas ski trips. The contrast between Mum and other mothers was hard to understand.

  Granny kept in touch with us all by letter and telephone while Mum was away. She also wrote to Mum at length, giving her our family news. One day Granny came down to Toorak College and took me out to lunch with friends of Aunt Eve who were visiting from South Africa. The next day I came out in measles and spent the following two weeks in bed in sick bay.

  Although I was older and well settled at school by then, I found Mum’s next trip to Austria and England in 1970 equally difficult to accept, and the anxiety that she mightn’t return lingered at the back of my mind. I knew Dad had threatened to refuse to sign her passport application so I knew he didn’t like her going either. I don’t know why he eventually agreed to sign; I thought they must have struck a private bargain of some sort. But he was loyal and never said anything critical about her trips in my hearing. Outside the family Mum made light of her injuries, stressing the importance of her exercise routine to keep going. Anyone who saw her in bathers would have known how bent her right leg was in comparison with her left leg and that it was also shorter. Some of her friends made a point of telling me how marvellous she was – ‘She just keeps going!’ For a while I felt obliged to agree, though I thought it was remarkable rather than marvellous. That said, she wrote regularly during those two trips and her letters were among the best I ever received from her. So, true to form, I said little or nothing at all.

  The 1970 trip was particularly notable for the extraordinary amounts of snow that Mum saw and described in a postcard she wrote to me in April from Lech, Austria: ‘Apparently 1916–1917 was like this, otherwise nothing like it till way back in 1847.’ The following day she wrote: ‘This has been quite a week – the whole of Europe under blizzard and snow – terrible – and yet quite an experience.’ Three weeks earlier she had described how she had been taken to see ‘the biggest avalanche any of them [Zurs ski school instructors] have ever known’. It had ‘huge trees in it and the wind it made knocked out trees on the other side of the valley’. I could feel her excitement in all that she saw. It was manna for Mum, who seemed to be on a perpetual quest for adventure.

  The 1970 trip was not just for skiing. Mum also went to St Anton to meet Rudi Matt, with whom she had skied briefly in 1938 before she broke her leg for the first time. In a letter she wrote of her concern about recognising him and her admiration for his achievements in making films of the local wildlife. She saw Uncle Ian, her eldest brother, and Aunt Jean in London where they were visiting their two daughters and their families. In London Mum also met Dorothy Tomlinson from Hutchinson Publishing Company and Paul Langridge from Curtis Brown, her agents, thus making that leg of her trip a professional one.

  I never understood why some of the money Mum spent on the 1967 and 1970 trips was not used to visit Ian and Jean at their home near Durban in South Africa, or Eve and her family who were living in what was then Rhodesia. Given Mum’s interest in Grandfather’s campaigns, life and achievements, I felt she might have combined visiting family with see
ing some of the Boer War battlefields where Grandfather and the Queensland Mounted Infantry had fought. It would have meant that in the mid 1970s when she began her research for Light Horse: The Story of Australia’s Mounted Troops she would already have had first-hand knowledge. But like all of us, Mum had her foibles. There was sometimes a conflict of interest between her near-obsessive love of skiing, her desire to see friends, her writing and her family.

  Mum was away in Easter 1970 when John was ill with suspected appendicitis. Dad insisted that he should eat something and sent me to scramble some eggs for him, but I knew that if he ate it, he would be ill. Either Harry or I saw to it that most of the scrambled eggs were scraped off the plate onto some paper in a drawer so that Dad was satisfied and John didn’t become any sicker than he was already.

  Mum regretted the timing of her trip with John being ill, and she missed everyone very much. Each letter contained instructions about where to write to her next and expressions of gratitude for the mail she received. She often wrote that she hoped we would be able to travel together after I left school at the end of the following year in December 1971. After some of the difficulties in my early teenage years, it seemed a new and positive note was creeping into our relationship.

  34

  A Love of Freedom

  Journeys to and from school at the beginning and end of each term were hugely exciting. That magnetic pull of the home on the hill high above the meandering Murray River with the magnificent view of the Alps lasted right through my school career and well beyond into my later life.

  There were a number of us from Toorak College and other schools who travelled by train on the Albury line from Melbourne. After the school taxi had delivered us and our cases to Spencer Street railway station (now Southern Cross station), we were free as birds until our parents met us at our destination – unless Dad happened to be on the same train. On one occasion, after being denied scrambled eggs on the Spirit of Progress, he acquired some eccentric fame by bringing the incident to the attention of Parliament, as if the existence or otherwise of scrambled eggs were an issue of major importance. Famous or infamous, he was a good sport and wisely sat working on parliamentary correspondence in another carriage well away from the noise and mischief of us teenagers. We hitched up our skirts, and anyone lucky enough to have some make-up might have put some on. There were reunions with old friends, romances blossomed and I didn’t see much of Dad until we arrived at Wangaratta or Wodonga where he left his car.