My Place

by Sally Morgan

  ‘You’re horrible, Sally,’ Jill whispered after Mum had left. ‘Every Sunday, they ask me why you won’t come to Sunday School. What am I s’posed to say? I can’t keep telling them you’re sick.’

  ‘Aw, I don’t care what you say. It’s none of their business.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with you, you just don’t care what other people think. You’re the only kid in Sunday School who doesn’t get a book at the end of the year because you haven’t gone enough. You make me ’shamed.’

  ‘Aw, shut up and go to sleep,’ I muttered as I rolled the other way. I knew I’d hurt her feelings, I could hear her sniffling under the rugs. It was years before I learnt what compromise meant.

  When Mum wasn’t praying for the benefit of my health and wellbeing, she was taking me to the doctor. I used to feel very frustrated with my weak body. If I could have, I would have disowned it.

  During one visit the doctor told Mum, ‘You’re living in the worst possible place for this child. Isn’t there any way you can move? She won’t get any better unless you do.’ I looked hopefully at Mum, I’d always wanted to travel. Mum just shook her head and said, ‘I have to stay where I am.’

  She was quite cynical about his advice. On the way home, she said, ‘I’m a widow with five kids, where does he think I can move to?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ I said confidently, ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘I pray you will,’ she sighed. And pray she did. I never saw her praying, but I knew if there were a competition, Mum would be the best prayer in the neighbourhood.

  Almost a year to the day after Dad died, I contracted rheumatic fever. Many times on the way to school, I had to stop and hold my chest until the pain had passed. Mum rushed me to the local doctor twice, but he maintained that I was merely suffering from growing pains. I had no idea that getting taller could be such agony.

  Night-times were the worst, I curled myself up into a tight little ball and willed the pain to go away. I hurt too much to cry. Nan tried to help me as much as she could. I could tell by the look on her face and the sympathetic noises she made that she was worried about me. She admonished me for sleeping in such a peculiar position and then, gently, she straightened out my arms and legs, encouraging me to sleep more normally.

  She spent hours wrapping wet towels and torn-off strips of sheeting around my limbs, all the time reassuring me that the pain would soon disappear. I remember a couple of nights, when I was particularly bad, she just ran her hands slowly down the full length of my body, not touching me, but saying, ‘You’ll be all right, I won’t let anything happen to you.’

  As soon as the bandages and towels had dried, she slowly unwound them and then went and wet them again. ‘You’re very hot, Sally,’ she said, ‘it’s not good for a child to be that hot.’ By the time I finally fell asleep, I felt as stiff as a cardboard doll. When I awoke the following morning, the pain had generally gone, but not for long. I learnt a valuable lesson from being that sick, I learnt I was strong inside. I had to be to survive. My illness eventually subsided without any medical treatment.

  Nan had many beliefs to do with health that she passed on to us. For one thing, she was obsessed with healthy bowels. So was Mum, but whether this was because of Nan’s influence or because she’d reached the same beliefs herself from her lengthy sessions in the toilet was hard to tell.

  Nan worried about people who stayed in the toilet too long. If Mum took longer than ten minutes, Nan manifested her concern by knocking on the toilet door and calling, ‘Glad … are you in there?’ Mum invariably replied, ‘Of course I am, you stupid old woman.’

  ‘Now don’t get nasty with me, Glad,’ Nan responded. ‘You always get nasty with me when you’re in the toilet. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think’s going to happen to me in here?’

  ‘You could faint, Glad. I’ll never forget old Mrs Caulfield, she fainted in the toilet. It was hours before her daughter found her. You’re lucky you’ve got someone to check on you, Glad. Glad … are you still in there?’

  By this time, Mum was so annoyed that she flushed the toilet violently and emerged, ready to berate Nan. Nan’s sense of timing was perfect; when she heard the chain being pulled, she walked quickly to her room and locked herself in.

  I later realised that the time Mum spent in the toilet was her only chance for peace and quiet. With five children in the house, where else could she go?

  Both Mum and Nan convinced us that a lot of illness was caused by constipation. We were quite happy to go along with their views in theory, but when their obsession began to extend to us in the form of regular doses of castor oil, Laxettes and what we crudely termed ‘glycerine sticks’, we balked. Our co-operation became more and more difficult to obtain, and Mum finally decided that the hassle in first discovering our separate hiding places and then literally dragging us from them wasn’t worth the satisfaction she got when we all lined up for the toilet.

  In a sense, Mum and Nan weren’t health fanatics so much as sickness fanatics. They took great pleasure in reading of the discovery of diseases with unknown causes. They were particularly interested in tropical medicine, reasoning that as Australia was in cooee of the equator, anything could come wafting down.

  While Mum and Nan’s interest in exotic diseases may have added a little excitement to their daily grind, it added only fear to ours. Our views concerning common childhood illnesses were a trifle unbalanced. We were convinced that leprosy and the bubonic plague abounded in our piece of suburbia, and when we caught measles and chickenpox, we wondered what they would lead to. Illness was a great mystery to us, we didn’t know what caused it or how to cure it, and Nan’s gloomy hints added nothing to our already tenuous sense of security.

  It was Nan who first brought out the sceptic in me. I was suspicious of outsiders, especially those in authority. Nan convinced me that most people were untrustworthy, especially doctors. For years, she had been talking about the Old Cures, the ones they used in the early days. I knew the Old Cures were the best.

  One of Nan’s great cure-alls was pepper. Any gashes were stuffed full with pepper and then tightly bound with strips torn from an old, white sheet. She also believed that eating a tin of beetroot would replace the blood you lost. While we exhibited various higgledy-piggledy scars on our arms and legs, the result of wounds stitched at Hollywood Repatriation Hospital, Nan had none. Her skin always healed soft and whole.

  But there were two of Nan’s health measures that I found difficult to accept. The first concerned Enos. She regularly dosed herself with Enos because she was convinced it helped oxygenate the blood. ‘You try it, Sally,’ she said to me one day. ‘It makes your blood clean and your head clear.’ I did take a mouthful, but, to me, the taste was so foul I immediately spat it out.

  The second measure involved kerosene. Nan maintained it was wonderful for removing aches and pains and for generally keeping your body in tiptop condition. When I was suffering from rheumatic fever, Nan begged me to let her rub my arms and legs with it. I steadfastly refused, I hated the smell. Nan was so conscientious about her twice-daily kerosene rubs we feared, that, combined with her chain-smoking, a sudden blaze might one day be the cause of her death.

  Nan’s interest in health was not restricted to the human population.

  One hot Saturday afternoon, when I was stretched out on an itchy blue towel, soaking up the sun, it slowly dawned on my numbed senses that Nan’s restless movements around the yard had ceased. Curiosity overcame lethargy, and, peering under my sweaty armpit, I took a quick glance around to see where she was.

  I observed her, standing very still, close to the smallest gum tree in our backyard. Using the back of her knuckles, she tapped on the trunk twice, and then once with her stick. Then, she inclined her head towards the trunk as though listening for something. After a lengthy pause, she seemed satisfied, and, giving the earth a quick prod with her stick, she moved on to the paperbark f
urther down.

  ‘Nan,’ I called out, ‘what on earth are you doing?’

  She started in surprise. I had been quiet for so long it was obvious she’d forgotten I was there. She waved her stick at me in a threatening manner and said crossly, ‘I’m not doing anything, you go back to sleep!’

  ‘Come on, Nan, I saw you tapping on that tree, what were you doing?’

  She jabbed her stick in the sand, turned to me and said, ‘You can’t be trusted any more, Sally. I can’t walk round my own backyard without one of you kids spying on me.’

  ‘You know I wasn’t spying. I just happened to see what you were doing, that’s all. Now, are you going to tell me or not?’

  She could see I wasn’t going to give up without a fight, so she said quickly, ‘All right, I was just checking on them to make sure they were all right, that’s all. Now, no more questions, I got work to do!’

  ‘Okay,’ I sighed as I burrowed my head down into my towel once again.

  I hadn’t comprehended her answer at all. What on earth did she mean, making sure they were all right? I puzzled over her words for a few seconds and then dismissed them. There was so much about Nan I didn’t understand.

  Getting ahead

  Mum was offered a job as a cleaner at our school at the beginning of the year I started Grade Six. The hours were perfect, because they fitted in with the two other part-time jobs she was doing. But she didn’t accept the job straightaway. First, she got us all together and asked if we would mind her taking it.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about, Mum?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to take the job if you children would mind. I thought you might worry about what your friends would think.’

  Without hesitation I replied, ‘We wouldn’t mind, Mum, we’d really like it because we’d see more of you.’

  Mum smiled at me. She knew how naive I was, that I didn’t realise being a school cleaner carried with it very little status.

  We helped after school, wiping down the boards, emptying the bins and sweeping the floors. I enjoyed the boards the most, mainly because it gave me access to the chalk. Before wiping them down, I would scrawl rude comments about school across the whole length of the board. It gave me a great sense of power.

  With more money coming in, Mum took to indulging us whenever she could. This indulgence took the form of unlimited lollies and fruit, rather than new clothes, toys or books. She’d managed to take us all to the Royal Show the year before, and this year she told us that, because of her new job, we would really do it in style.

  Like the year before, our first port of call at the show was our uncle’s stall. He ran one of the amusement centres in sideshow alley, and we thought it was such a magical place. While we looked at the machines, Mum chattered on to Uncle, discussing one triviality after another. Even when Uncle excused himself on the pretext of fixing one of his money-grabbing machines, Mum followed, mentioning the weather or some person they both knew but whom she hadn’t seen for years. Eventually, Uncle fished out five ten bob notes and told us all to run along. Mum could be boring when it suited her.

  We bought show bags crammed with Smarties, Cherry Ripes, Samboy potato chips and Violet Crumble bars, we weren’t interested in the educational ones. Mum insisted on buying Nan a Mills and Ware suitcase filled with biscuits. Nan loved it. She ate all the biscuits and then used the suitcase to store things in.

  One of our show bags had a large packet of marshmallows in it and Mum came up with the super idea of toasting them over the fire. Just like the Famous Five. We were all terribly excited about this, we loved anything new.

  While Mum stoked up the fire, we all gathered sticks from the garden. I cleaned down my stick as best I could and then hurriedly shoved a marshmallow on the end and placed it close to the coals. It immediately smoked and went black. Everyone laughed. Jill insisted on having a turn then, but the same thing happened. Finally, Mum squeezed between us, her stick adorned with blobs of pink and white, one marshmallow for each of us.

  We waited patiently. Mum’ll be able to do it, we thought. She can do anything when she sets her mind to it. Seconds passed. We all leapt up in fright when she let out a sudden shriek.

  ‘Arrgh! Stupid bloody thing!’ Dropping her stick, she jumped up, holding her hand. The bottom pink marshmallow, being closest to the coals, had melted quicker than the others and slid down the short length of remaining stick and onto her hand. It was hot and sticky, and clung as Mum tried to remove it by stretching it from one hand to the other.

  We all choked. It was a compromise between coughing and laughing. Mum’s pantomime had us in stitches, but the stick she’d dropped had fallen into the fire, and the remaining marshmallows were smoking vigorously. Carefully, I reached over and flicked her stick from the fire with my own. It lay on the floorboards, blackened and sticky. Mum retreated to the kitchen, she needed a knife to scrape the marshmallow off.

  Fifteen minuter later, she returned with a tray laden with tea, toast and jam, and sardines. Soon, we were all laughing and joking as we normally did on a Sunday night.

  For Nan, Mum’s extra job meant she had more work to do around the house, but it also meant a twice-yearly bottle of brandy and a reasonable amount to bet on the TAB. Sometimes Nan let us pick a horse, too, and she would get the lady next door to put a bet on for us as well. We had a rule in our house when it came to backing horses: never back the same horse as Nan, they never came in. Before any of us picked out our horses, we asked Nan which ones she fancied. It narrowed the field down considerably.

  Besides the TAB, Nan loved lottery tickets. Both she and Mum were convinced that, one day, our family would come into a lot of money. It was a poor-man’s dream, but we believed it. The dream became such a reality in my mind that I often thought, well, it doesn’t matter if I don’t get a job when I’m grown up, we’ll probably have won the lotteries by then. Billy thought the same, Jill was the only one among us who seemed keen to work at anything.

  Having more money also meant that Nan could really indulge in chain-smoking. In fact, she took to smoking so consistently that the front of her hair changed colour. While the rest of her frizzy mop was a light grey, the front was nicotine yellow. When we pointed it out to her, she was quite pleased. ‘It’s better than hair dye,’ she chuckled as she looked in the mirror, ‘now if only I could get it to go round the back as well …’

  We came to consider Nan’s cigarettes as an extension of her anatomy. She had mastered the skill of being able to talk and smoke at the same time. It seemed it didn’t matter what Nan did, her cigarette would remain glued to the corner of her mouth as securely as that part of her lip.

  And she had the longest ash in the neighbourhood. I always waited expectantly for it to fall off. I was sure that with one more puff, it would disintegrate and burn yet another hole in her cardigan. Four puffs later, it was still there. While smoking, and the cough she was developing with it, were now an integral part of her personality, there were two important occasions when she didn’t smoke.

  The first was at night when she was in bed. For a long time, one of her greatest pleasures had been to lie in bed and enjoy a leisurely puff. However, one night she’d set fire to her mattress, and Mum, seeing the smoke, had rushed in and thrown a kettle of water over her. Nan hated getting wet, so she gave up her night-time fag.

  The other occasion was during summer when the dry bush surrounding the swamp would ignite into a raging bushfire. She never smoked while the fire was still burning. She felt it added to the heat.

  Bushfires were a real threat to our house in those days. As billowing clouds of black smoke engulfed the neighbourhood, the firemen came knocking at each door with the message, ‘Look luv, if the wind doesn’t change soon, you’ll have to evacuate.’

  Nan always responded with, ‘We’re not leavin’, this is the only home we got.’ If the men tried to argue with her, she pointed to her garden hose and said, ‘You’re not the only ones with water, you know.�
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  Their usual response to that was to try and explain to Nan how easily the flames could leap from roof to roof. Nan countered this by giving them a tour of our yard just to show them how many hoses she had. For some reason, six strategically placed garden hoses meant little to the firemen. ‘Listen, luv,’ they reasoned, ‘if that wind doesn’t change, the flames’ll be in next door’s and then they’ll be in your place and you’ll all go up in smoke. You got five kids here too, can’t someone have them for the day?’

  ‘We got no one,’ Nan would reply grumpily. ‘Anyway, they’re all right, I’ve wet them down.’ It was true, we were dripping wet. Any hint of a fire in the swamp and Nan would line us all up and squirt us down with the hose. Then it was the chooks’, cats’, dogs’ and budgies’ turn.

  Sometimes, Mum thought Nan’s precautions were a little premature. ‘God, Nan, have you wet them down already?’ she’d complain. ‘No one’s even called the Fire Brigade yet!’ Nan always narrowed her eyes and looked at Mum as though she couldn’t believe how stupid she was. When Mum turned to go inside, she’d squirt her with the hose.

  Nan kept great stores of men’s handkerchiefs in case of fire. She would wet them and then plaster them over our heads and faces. It made it easier to breathe when the ash rained down.

  Fortunately for us, the wind did always change, and somehow we survived the heat and the ash and the billowing smoke. It was only when the fire in the swamp was completely out that Nan would relax and light up another cigarette.

  Grade Six in primary school wasn’t a bad year for me. Jill and I were often taken off normal classwork to help paint and design special things for the school. Also, I liked my teacher. He was firm, but very kind, and he got on well with Mum. He’d broken his nose as a child, so he was an unusual-looking man. I was impressed with the way he joked about his nose and never let its odd shape worry him. He always used to point out to the accident-prone ones in our class how they would end up if they didn’t stop doing silly things.