Honor Auchinleck

by Elyne Mitchell

  Another, Mrs G, was allegedly married to Tom, a former First World War digger. They too had a parrot they had reared themselves. It used to screech about wanting a ‘bloody drink’ and knew a few other choice swear words about old Tom and his plans to go to the pub. Mum was horrified when she discovered that Annabel Mackinnon and I had found out Mrs G and Tom were not married. We were all sorry when we heard that they had made plans to marry, but unfortunately Tom died before they could do so.

  Finally there was Mrs M from Corryong, whom we all loved dearly and who was still coming to us on special occasions when I left school. In the kitchen we’d all offer to top up her drink, not realising that other members of the family might already have done so; the evenings when she cooked were cheerful and highly amusing. Mum was beginning to make more friends locally and sometimes for special occasions or after a tennis party she invited people to stay on for a meal. Mrs M cooked Mum’s ‘short-cut’ casseroles, sticking firmly to the requirement that the ingredients should not include onions or garlic. If she was ever aware that the casseroles were known as Mrs Mitchell’s F…ing Fricassee in certain circles, she never let on. She held the Towong Hill record for high-speed washing-up and she could almost throw plates and glasses into the sink and seldom, if ever, chip, crack or break anything. She was a marvel with a great character and a heart of pure gold.

  Cooks might come and go but little really changed in a kitchen dating from the thirties and forties. It was like cooking in a museum and I felt the need to treat the prewar utensils with a special reverence. A school friend called in once at lunchtime; I suspect she wished she hadn’t as afterwards she told me she reckoned that the camembert Mum had offered her was at least six months old. The dried herbs and spices at the back of the store cupboards may even have been prewar and I don’t think they were ever used. Mum preferred to use fresh herbs, if she remembered she even had them. Although she had planted quite an extensive herb garden, often it became overgrown with weeds. Its cultivation depended on Mum’s varying levels of enthusiasm but, except in drought, it usually flourished, despite spells of being forgotten.

  Mum had never installed a dishwasher. She bought one – or at least someone did – but Mum changed her mind about it. Later she explained with remarkable logic that it wouldn’t save her work, reasoning that she would be left to fill and empty it by herself. Without one, at least the menfolk of the family dried and put away the dishes. By that stage the amount of domestic effort Mum was prepared to expend was very carefully calculated!

  Once there was no longer a cook, Mum worked and read at the kitchen table. The Aga kept her warm and she wrote while she waited for meals to cook. This method was not always successful: a baking tray full of roast vegetables was once left in the ‘top right’, the hottest oven, for two weeks, and it was only discovered when we couldn’t find the roasting dish. After some thought, Mum remembered that she had done a roast when she’d had a visitor a fortnight earlier. Presumably the conversation was so good that they hadn’t realised or were too polite to mention the lack of vegetables. When the dish was found she described the charred remains as charcoal apostles and rocked with laughter at her own irreverence.

  Mum didn’t like cooking but she hated ironing. Her scorch rate was high, perhaps simply because she didn’t iron very often. Upstairs above the kitchen in the linen room was a wardrobe containing her evening and cocktail dresses, suits, skirts and blouses. Many of the garments dated from the Queen’s visits in 1954 and 1963, but each garment was associated with at least one special occasion – and also a wonderful repertoire of stories. Whatever her attitude to ironing and other domestic tasks, Mum usually rose to special occasions and dressed immaculately for them, but one could never be certain – it depended on whether she wanted to attend the event or not. Mostly, but certainly not always, someone else did any necessary mending, alteration and ironing.

  For me, the saddest aspect of the linen room was the cupboard filled with unused wedding presents. Was everything Mum needed already at Towong Hill, I wondered? Why didn’t she want to use her and Dad’s own things rather than those of Winifred and Walter Edward? In many instances the presents still had cards in the boxes, and I don’t think Mum even knew what the deeper recesses of the cupboard held. If she opened the cupboard and saw a box she recognised she would tell me about the person who had given whatever was inside to them. If she didn’t recognise a box she might open it to find the card before beginning her stories. It was a cupboard that could have belonged to Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. If an early disappointment prevented Mum from making Towong Hill into her own home in a more conventional way, she never said so. Or was it that she found convention mostly an inconvenience to her as a writer? It was a strange domestic world to come home to. I had grown up in some ways at boarding school and now saw things from a slightly more worldly perspective.

  Towong Hill was certainly an entirely different world compared to friends’ homes I had visited while at school. It was difficult to offer a spur-of-the-moment invitation for a meal or to spend a night as Mum would say she hadn’t been given sufficient notice. It was hard to know what ‘sufficient notice’ meant – it varied according to Mum’s plans and whether anyone was going into Corryong and could collect groceries. It was different if Mum liked someone and wanted them to stay, but it was difficult to predict how she might react. That, too, depended on her writing workload.

  If Mum possessed the kitchen, she also oversaw and directed everything that was done in the garden; I couldn’t even deadhead the roses in case I cut the stem off at the wrong place. The bars of the golden cage were drawn in tightly. One afternoon I sat sullenly in the mottled shade of the deodar in the garden wondering what to do next while watching a couple of magpies circling overhead. Some kookaburras were on the chimney pots scanning the garden below for prey, and I felt sure they had a greater sense of purpose than I did. It seemed like I was sliding backwards, losing everything I had learned or gained at school, back down that dreaded long snake on a board of snakes and ladders. If, as people told me, I had so many more opportunities than other kids, why couldn’t I find any escape routes from the golden cage? In the distance dogs were barking and a stockwhip cracked – the men were bringing some cattle in around the bottom of the hill towards the aerodrome paddock and the stockyards. It was time to get off my backside.

  I asked Bill Gowing, who had recently taken over from Father Knight as manager, if there was something I could do to help. ‘Well, Honor, I don’t know,’ he said. His brows were knitted with thought, and he understood that the situation, through no fault of his, was unchanged from Father Knight’s reign: beyond mustering cattle (which Mum enjoyed immensely and always took part in if she could) it was difficult for Bill to include me in work on the property as even Dad was not involved. Bill’s wife, Annie, became a good friend and we spent many happy hours eating peanuts and sipping wine together on the verandah at their house. This was some consolation, and Annie’s conversation provided a new and often entertaining perspective on life beyond Towong Hill and Toorak College.

  At the homestead, both Mum and Dad in their separate interests needed help; they were determined to keep going, but they were not young any more. Mum, though, had never been keen to delegate any writing-related tasks and she wasn’t about to start now. Dad responded to my offers by giving me inconsequential tasks. When I complained he said it was ‘character building’, but I was certain I didn’t want my character built in that way.

  By the time I left school, Dad had moved into what had been the cook’s upstairs accommodation of two rooms and a bathroom at the back of the house. A staircase led down into the back corridor beside the Weasel Hole and a door linked Dad’s quarters with the upstairs corridor leading to the other bedrooms. In his new rooms he had more space for his growing assemblages of Dibbs and Mitchell family memorabilia and books. He was still the local member of parliament, but I could feel an increasing sense of nostalgia for the
past creeping into his life.

  Dad’s museum was a noisy corner. He had a brass bell at the top of his staircase and every time he passed the bell on the hour, he rang it the appropriate number of times as is done on naval vessels. Mostly he rang it late in the afternoon when he went upstairs for a bath and to read before dinner. It was strangely out of place in the Upper Murray, miles from the sea, yet for Dad the routine reminded him of a happy part of his childhood and of the stories of the sea that his mother told, or of aspects of their holidays spent at Graythwaite in North Sydney or in the subsequent Dibbs home in Point Piper. Behind the bell was a sepia photograph of the graceful steam yacht Ena, on which the Dibbs took family and friends out on the harbour on Saturday afternoons, before the First World War cruelly tore their family, and so many others, asunder.

  The memory of starvation in Changi still haunted Dad – perhaps it haunted him even more with passing years. He bought tins, biscuits and packets of rice and threw them into a room already filled with junk, books and papers. Sometimes mice nibbled holes in the packets. Mostly the food was not used unless he woke in the night and didn’t have the energy to go downstairs to the kitchen, though usually he’d hobble down, throw the kettle on the Aga stove and cut a huge hunk off a loaf of bread from the Corryong bakery. From upstairs in my bedroom I’d hear the kettle hitting the hob and the rattle of the bread bin. When I asked Dad why he kept food in the storeroom upstairs he reminded me that I didn’t know what it was like to starve and how lucky I was. He told me how, in his early days as a POW, ‘with our eight dollars of pay Uncle Ken and I managed to order twelve tins of fish at sixty-five cents and four coconuts at five cents. This would allow us two tins a week for the month with a tin not eaten and tucked away in the squirrel store against a rainy day.’ The storeroom upstairs had become his new squirrel store.

  Mum tried to take no notice of these and other eccentricities, but she didn’t like them. She shook her head in silent resignation when she heard him strike the hour on the bell. That was one thing, but playing Scottish music at full volume half a world away from Scotland with the bath running was quite another. Ever more frequently Dad would fall asleep and the bath would overflow and flood the kitchen. Once I found our manager, Bill, mopping up the floor to the strains of the bagpipes above blaring ‘Scotland Forever’, ‘Flower of Scotland’ and Dad’s other favourites. Bill had already been upstairs to turn off the taps and to attempt to rouse Dad. Meanwhile, Bill’s face carried a somewhat amazed look of resignation. Nothing was said then, but later the story was a source of some amusement.

  Dad had been old for as long as I could remember, but I didn’t realise that he was suddenly ageing more rapidly. Nor was he going to admit it. He was still very active in public life, and like most seasoned politicians he was a great self-publicist – he loved being in the public eye and his family was part of his publicity machine, whether any of us liked it or not. Dad couldn’t resist phoning through to the editor of the local newspaper any news he received of my doings. If I hadn’t been a shy young adult who wanted nothing more than to blend in with the crowd I might have threatened to write a story about a politician sleeping in an overflowing bath. But he didn’t have to call my bluff – I wouldn’t have dared.

  ‘People are interested in you,’ Dad told me, but I couldn’t understand it. Why should anyone be interested in me? It wasn’t as if I was brilliant or beautiful. I was gauche and grumpy and becoming even grumpier with the unwanted and sometimes inaccurate publicity. Dad wanted to be seen out and about with his family supporting him, but he was also a terrible old snob. If I talked to people in Corryong or around the electorate he was pleased, but it didn’t mean he would let me ask them to the house.

  When I went through a stage of telling Dad as little as possible about my comings and goings, he responded by finding out my news from others, so it was often put in the papers anyway. Either way I lost. It embarrassed Mum, as well, that Dad ‘blew his own trumpet’, but she, too, courted publicity on her own terms, mostly separately from Dad. Sometimes she spoke about one or two of us by name when being interviewed, but mostly she referred to us simply as ‘the children’, almost as if we were props in her show. Sometimes Indi’s artistic talent was mentioned, or that Harry was good with his hands and enjoyed hiking when he was at Timbertop, or that John liked building.

  Of my parents, it was Dad who was the most vocal. If there were a few moments’ silence during a meal, Dad would fill them with an unsolicited lecture on a remote point of history about which he had been reading. He took scant notice if someone wanted to talk about something else or simply preferred a little peace and quiet and time with their own thoughts. Dad had his captive audience around what he called ‘the pre-birth-control dining room table’ that could seat about eighteen when all the leaves were in use.

  In his book The Piddingtons, Russell Braddon describes Dad in Changi: ‘His grasp of other men’s subjects was phenomenal and was his hobby as a prisoner of war. He was a good talker, a good teacher, an interesting man.’2 Even then, some thirteen years before he died, to help cope with the difficulties of old age he was probably reverting to the strategy that helped him survive Changi. It was this grasp of ‘other men’s subjects’ and his apparent determination to know more about them than anyone else that annoyed his family to the extent that, on occasion, I thought he was the most irritating man I had ever met. Frequently he held forth quite loudly without thinking of putting in his hearing aids or even noting whether others wanted to talk about the same subject. With Harry away overseas and Indi working in Melbourne during the summer after I left school, Mum, John and I made a sparse and not altogether appreciative audience at mealtimes at the grand table in the dining room.

  Recently, after reading some of Dad’s medical notes, my husband, Mark, asked perceptively, ‘Don’t you think your father was scared that he would lose his memory again as he had done as a result of his car accident just before the fall of Singapore?’ I am sure Mark is right. As a result of that accident Dad had a suspected fractured skull and bad concussion. In May 1942, about three months later, Uncle Ken Burnside suggested that he could try recovering his memory by writing his autobiography. Throughout his remaining years as a POW, Dad wrote ‘Midway Peak’. He seemed to have such a good memory that I simply hadn’t realised just how hard he must have worked to retain it.

  That summer Mum reluctantly agreed that I could read her two adult novels, Flow River, Blow Wind (1953) and Black Cockatoos Mean Snow (1956). If the Brumby books had helped me understand Mum in an inspiring way, these novels I found interesting but distressing.

  Flow River, Blow Wind throws light on the concerns and difficulties experienced by two local families when their sons return from the war. Joseph and Sara’s marriage almost falls apart in the months after he is sent home early because he was injured in North Africa where he had been serving with the 9th Division. In the depth of his despair, Joseph finds himself thinking, ‘Something has broken, and I have fallen out of the picture.’3 On the other hand, Sara realises that Joseph may have felt they were all taking their work on the land far too seriously. Like Mum and Dad, each of Mum’s fictional characters fails to appreciate the wartime experiences of the other. Ultimately Sara and Joseph come together again, thus highlighting something that Mum and Dad apparently didn’t achieve, even though they both said on different occasions that they deeply wanted to rediscover their prewar happiness. It always seemed to me that their discord far outweighed their enjoyment in each other’s company. Perhaps things were better between them when I was away, but if this were so, I never knew.

  Mum’s second adult novel, Black Cockatoos Mean Snow, is a picture of family life – it could almost have been our family – on a fictional property, Willie Ploma, in the Upper Murray in the early 1950s. Just like the Mum of old, Leonie ‘was built to ride horses – and jodhpurs showed off her long slender legs’.4 The novel emphasises the frustrations that Mum herself had felt: ‘Now everything seemed to
conspire to hold them more and more – not just the children, but the labour position that was worse than ever.’5 I realised that Mum could easily have written something of her own frustrations into the character of Leonie, who is desperate to get away from her responsibilities and have fun. Even more unsettling was the fact that Mum had foretold the heavy snowfalls in 1956, the year that the book was published. Leonie perished in the snow, trying to escape her responsibilities and cross the mountains to join her brother. Had Mum wanted to escape that much in the years after she’d published Flow River, Blow Wind in 1953, the year I was born? Had she been unable to imagine a future with us all at Towong Hill? Mum always said that the screech of black cockatoos foretold bad weather coming, but even the title seemed a bad omen to me.

  The more I thought about the book, the sadder and more unsettling I found it. It confirmed to me that while Mum undoubtedly loved her children, she found them and running the house a terrible tie. In Black Cockatoos Mean Snow Leonie says, ‘I will not live here without both a cook and a nurse,’ – much the same thing Mum had told us over the years.6

  Mum also expressed some of her feelings through Michael, Leonie’s husband: ‘He would love to be in the mountains himself now: love to be unmarried: love to be without the responsibility of children.’7 Just as Michael thinks that the only way he can ‘redeem himself and the situation’ is through his painting, similarly Mum saw the only way to redeem herself was by writing and selling her books.

  I was even more disconcerted when I realised that I had been rather like Leonie’s youngest son, Roddy, who is fearful that his parents will not come home. Just as in Leonie and Michael’s household, there was a feeling of uncertainty at Towong Hill. Was Mum foretelling the fortunes of her own family in another way, I wondered? But, as ever, I didn’t dare ask her about her possible fears – or indeed mine. On one hand I regretted reading the book, yet in a strange way I was grateful that it confirmed some of my instincts about Mum.