by Mary Moody
A coma. That’s what we have been told to expect. A point at which Margaret can no longer get out of bed and walk. She will curl up and entirely shut out the rest of the world.
I don’t know how I will feel when that day comes.
33
When Margaret and I were reunited in 2002, our most intense conversations revolved around our relationships with our late father, Theo. From my sister’s perspective, her problems with him were the motivating force that drove her from our family home and kept her from making contact with us for nearly fifty years. My anger with him was not as intense, but I also disdained his lifestyle and behaviour.
These days, however, I sometimes feel I have judged my father harshly. On the surface it may not appear so. He was indeed a hard-drinking, self-absorbed man who was unfaithful to his wife and had an explosive temper that led to domestic violence. He smoked and gambled and frittered away ever pound he ever earned, leaving his family financially insecure and emotionally drained.
However, as I approach sixty, there are aspects of my father’s character that I can finally appreciate. The fact that he killed himself at the age of sixty-two is a telling key to his personality, and one that I think I at last understand.
Dad simply did not want to grow old. He had abused his body with alcohol and tobacco and he looked ravaged. Indeed, looking back at the few family photographs we have of him – like me, he took all the photos and was therefore seldom in them – I can see that from the age of forty he looked much, much older than his years. I have one photo of him in his late fifties, and in it he looks considerably older and more weather-beaten than David does now, even though he is about to turn seventy.
At the first sign of disruptive physical illness – he had a hiatus hernia, not so easy to repair surgically in those days as it is now – my father made the decision that he did not wish to continue living. As I’ve also described, I believe he suffered from undiagnosed manic depression or bipolar disorder. Combined with the fact that he and my mother were in the midst of a messy and dramatic marriage break-up, these were no doubt the major factors that led to his death. He used alcohol and sleeping pills and didn’t leave a note.
Although he grew up in the slums of Melbourne, his mother recognised that her third son was bright and talented, and managed to get him into Melbourne High School, where he attained sufficiently good marks to land a job as a copy boy and then later a cadet journalist on the Melbourne Herald. Not bad for a boy from Fitzroy.
Like many outstanding journalists of the era he was proudly ‘self-educated’, in the sense that he was a voracious reader and acquired a broad general knowledge and a love of literature by burying himself in books. In his early twenties he met and fell in love with the beautiful Veronica, who came from a much more comfortably-off family. Theo wanted to travel and managed to get a job as a steward on an ocean liner bound for London. He no doubt had his eyes on Fleet Street. Veronica joined him after a few months and they hastily married. My half-brother, Jon, was born four months later, so it would seem that Veronica only discovered her pregnancy after Theo had left Australia, and fled the family home to be with him overseas. Needless to say, her parents did not approve of the union.
My father was politicised by the Great Depression, and joined the Communist Party, as many creative and intellectual people did at the time. Unlike most of them, however, he remained a member until the day he died. I have a photograph of him taking part in the massive hunger marches that took place in London in the late twenties and early thirties as unemployed workers from all over Britain converged on the capital to draw attention to their plight. Sometimes, when I was a kid, he used to let me feel the bump on his skull where he’d been bashed by a bobby’s truncheon during one of these demonstrations.
He never made it to Fleet Street. After a year in London, the young couple returned to Melbourne where Dad got a job on the Sun News-Pictorial. My sister, Margaret, was born during this period. Theo was earning four pounds a week when he was poached by Sir Frank Packer to work as a reporter on the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. His new wage was seven pounds, which was quite a princely sum in those days.
It was 1940 when the family moved to Sydney and Sir Frank organised an apartment for them in Double Bay. Life looked rosy but there were problems in the marriage. Later that same year Veronica committed suicide. This devastated our father, and my mother maintained that he never fully recovered from the shock of his young first wife’s death. Nobody will ever know the exact circumstances leading up to her tragic decision, but my mother suggested in conversations with me during the years she lived with us at Leura that Theo had been womanising, and carried a huge burden of guilt.
My father was a driven man, but not particularly ambitious. His work promotions came as a result of his natural talent for journalism and his strong work ethic. In spite of his alcoholism, which became chronic during the period when they lived in America, he never missed work or failed to meet a deadline. His articles and columns were spare and beautifully written and he was a stickler for correct grammar and fact checking. I grew up in a house where the news was the most important focus of every day. Every newspaper was read and dissected from the front page to the sports section, and heaven help anybody who spoke or made a noise at seven o’clock when the evening news was broadcast on ABC radio. That half-hour was sacred.
Politics was a constant topic of discussion in our home, and our father inculcated us with his left-wing views and his philosophy of life. He was passionately anti-religion and I was banned from Sunday school, which worried me for many years. I remember begging to be allowed to join a Christian girls’ fellowship (the Girls’ Friendly Society) and he told me they were a bunch of lesbians. I went to school and said I was not allowed to be a member of the group because they were lesbians, and I couldn’t fathom why I was ordered outside to stand in the corridor. A note was sent home and I remember Dad laughing with delight at my naïvety.
He was not an affectionate or demonstrative man but we respected him and, I believe, tried to please him. He wasn’t easily able to offer praise, but he was considerate in funny ways. Some of the attitudes he adhered to rigidly have stayed with me all my life. Never be late (I’m always early). Never keep anyone waiting. Always have the correct change. Always offer your seat to others on public transport. Always allow others to go ahead of you in lines or queues. Always wear well-polished shoes (he cleaned our school shoes with spit and polish every Sunday night). Always meet your deadline!
My father could be utterly charming when he wanted to, especially around women. He was greatly admired by many of the men and women he worked with over the years, who had never witnessed his dark side, such as his temper and the violence he directed towards our mother. He never once raised a hand to me, but he did have a couple of wild fistfights with Dan when my brother reached his teens and became disobedient. I suspect it was Dan who threw the first punch.
My father never read to me or held me on his lap, but I loved the way he smelled (aftershave, I guess) and I looked forward to him coming home every night even though I knew it might be another evening of arguments and hostility. I used to hang out of my bedroom window and watch for him walking up from the tram stop at the bottom of the road. He always had a loaf of fresh bread under his arm and a flagon of claret. Dad had a great sense of humour and was very witty and interesting to talk to. He didn’t talk to me all that often (his head was always in a book and his hand was always around a glass of red) but when he did I found our conversations thrilling. He made me laugh, he teased me and taught me not to take myself too seriously. He also loved to introduce us to us risqué poems and songs, which used to drive our mother crazy. In the conservative 1950s, Dad was singing us ditties about priests with huge testicles and about Oscar Wilde’s sexual proclivities.
He didn’t play with us but he took us fishing at Balmoral Beach wharf if we were prepared to get up before dawn to join him. I loved it. We caught leatherjacket and tailor and took them
home where Mum would fry them up for breakfast. When I was a teenager he inherited some money after the death of his remarkable mother and he bought a yacht, which he moored in Mosman Bay. We went sailing together – Jon, Dan, Dad and me – and this was the closest I ever felt to him.
Dad was highly respected as a journalist. After the war he rose through the ranks to become the editor of the Sunday Telegraph. He wrote book reviews every week, and got the paper out on time in spite of meddling from Sir Frank, who often arrived at the Telegraph offices late on Saturday night, drunk and cranky if he had lost money at the races, to try to get our father to change the front-page story. Dad would stand up to him and Sir Frank obviously thought very highly of him, although he had no idea that his editor was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (Mosman Branch!).
When I joined Australian Consolidated Press as a copy girl in 1968 I was stampeded by people who just wanted to tell me how much they loved and respected my father. From the editor of the Women’s Weekly, Esme Fenston, down, they considered him to have been the brightest, best and kindest journalist ever to have worked for that organisation (no wonder I had little difficulty getting a job). Even to this day, in the course of my own work, I meet veteran women journalists who remember my dad and have nothing but good things to say about him.
He left the Packer organisation in the 1960s to work as the editor of the Waterside Workers’ newspaper for two years while the regular editor was on sabbatical in Moscow (where else?). He took a massive drop in salary to do this job, and no doubt alienated himself permanently from his former employers. For him it was a strong political statement: he was frustrated with the double life he had led for so many years, a dedicated closet leftie who was editor of an ostensibly conservative tabloid newspaper. After this job ended he was editor of the Mosman Daily, again on a much lower salary than he had earned in his prime; this was the beginning of his physical and mental decline.
Although I felt a sense of relief when he died because of the terrible pain he was causing our mother, I now admit I loved him dearly despite his selfish and at times irrational ways. That’s pretty normal, I guess. I know that Margaret expressed no such tenderness for him at all. Yet Ken has told me that after she heard of Theo’s death through a handful of friends in Australia with whom she was still in touch, he found her lying on her bed and crying. It’s so very sad.
I look like my dad. I have his wiry red hair, square jaw and pale, freckled skin. I have his smile, his eyes and also his wicked sense of humour. I’m driven to achieve, just as he was, and have also inherited his strong work ethic. I have many of his failings, including being an addictive personality with a penchant for wine and a wild streak sexually that has caused problems in my marriage. I don’t have his quick temper and I’m not prone to violence, although I did once punch David very hard during the period when our relationship was floundering. I don’t know who was more shocked and horrified – David or me.
I suspect I have inherited some of my father’s charm and his ability to work well with others. His talent for writing? It’s hard to know because I was brought up with a pen in my hand and writing is as natural to me as walking. We were all big readers, and this inevitably hones writing skills, and Dad was particular about correcting us if we made a mistake – as was our mother – so we certainly had training from a very early age. I’m a stickler for putting commas in the right places, and using the correct form of the superlative.
I see some of my father’s strengths and weaknesses in my own children, and I’m aware that it’s impossible to avoid his genes, both good and bad. I have reached an age and a stage in my life where I am prepared to admit to myself that I am indeed very much like the man of whom I have been so critical and judgemental in the past. I don’t necessarily like this fact, but it’s impossible to resile from it.
34
Somewhere, around the age of fifty-one and a half, I lost myself. I simply ceased being me.
Well that’s not entirely true. My name remained the same and I still had the same husband, the same four adult children, the same six grandchildren and the same house in the Blue Mountains where I had lived for twenty-five years.
But the me that I had known, and more importantly the me that my family had known for the last thirty years, had transformed into somebody else.
My friends noticed. Many commented. My family looked at me curiously; they were baffled and bemused. The happy-go-lucky, easygoing me became a sharpish, more critical woman. Introspective, self-absorbed and fragile. The woman who had always allowed the rough and tumble of life to wash over her suddenly became hypersensitive, reactive, restless and easily ruffled.
What was going on here? I shed weight, abandoned my straw-hat, rose-pruning image from my days on Gardening Australia and morphed into a strawberry blonde in high heels, fishnet tights and figure-hugging clothes. I discarded habits of a lifetime. The world news on the pages of the morning newspaper suddenly seemed unutterably dull, and I rarely read past the headlines. My lifelong passion for reading novels – one or two a week – vanished. I no longer had the concentration required. My love of classical music, instilled from childhood, was replaced by a passion for popular CDs. Plaintive, wailing songs that allowed me to further wallow in self-obsession.
Of course, it’s not uncommon for women (and men) to hit a point in their lives when they need to stop and take stock. Need to analyse the past and ponder the future. For men, this stage has traditionally described as the ‘midlife crisis’, often culminating in the first wife being abandoned for a new, younger partner and maybe even a second family. For women the crisis is generally medically described, by the dreaded ‘m-word’ . . . menopause. For many women entering their sixth decade, it’s an intense period of hormonal change that, unfortunately, often coincides with their mate’s own problems. It’s a recipe for marital disaster.
My case was fairly typical. I suffered the classic symptoms of needing to come to terms with the next stage of my life. My children had grown and left home, my parents were both dead and my husband was absorbed in his career, as he had been for our entire partnership. I needed to set a new direction; to find new challenges. I was indeed lost and more than a little frightened. But I was also excited and energised by the prospect of what might lie ahead for me.
Looking back with the smattering of wisdom I’ve gained over the past seven years, I realise what I was really looking for was passion. My life had been punctuated by periods of intense and passionate existence. My love of nature as a wild child growing free at the beach; the heartfelt political fervour of my teens; my first loves, powerful and transforming; the exquisite pleasure of my pregnancies and births; the joys and laughter of motherhood; the unexpected delight of a successful career; and the deep rewards of caring for an ageing parent.
I couldn’t abide the idea that from now on everything in my life would gradually wind down. My career would fill the gap left by the children no longer at home; my grandchildren would fill the gap left by a partner no longer hungry for my body; the care of my garden would fill the gap of a daily routine devoid of spontaneity or surprises. I knew in my heart that it was not enough. That I craved excitement and adventure and that I wasn’t about to let go without a putting up a fight. No doubt this probably has something to do with growing up as a baby boomer, a generation that particularly valued youth – its excitements, its hedonism, and its idealism.
My story is not very different from many women of my age. We have placed high expectations on ourselves in the belief that we could have it all. Career, relationships, children, travel, financial security and good health. In many ways we have had it all and now we find it difficult – if not impossible – to just let go. To surrender to ageing and, eventually, to death.
Yet we have no choice. We can have plastic surgery and work frenetically at the gym and even take human growth hormones to trick our bodies into thinking we are thirty-five, but at the end of the day we have to face the fact that our lives are g
radually slowing down. This is not to say we can’t still have fun, but we should also be looking for more than that. For understanding, for meaning and for a more deeply satisfying existence.
Looking back at those ‘lost’ years, I realise that despite the pain they contained, they were a vital part of my evolution as an older woman. I’m not for a moment suggesting that every woman should break out, fly to a foreign land and take a lover. It’s a perilous adventure and one that can easily lead to disaster. Yet for me it was a reaction to a life spent working hard and putting the needs of others ahead of my own. It was my wild time, my lost youth, my compensation for not having explored my sexuality in my teens before I met David.
I also recognise that the woman I became during those rocky years was still me, it was just a different version of me that I hadn’t acknowledged before. We all have many sides to our nature, some of which we repress for obvious reasons. I know, for example, that I consciously tried to be a totally different sort of parent to my own parents and yet, ultimately, I have to acknowledge now that certain patterns of behaviour crept through and affected my parenting style. I know now that while the persona I chose to present to my family and friends, and to the wider world, was the responsible, hard-working and giving side of my character (I refuse to use the term self-sacrificing because it smacks of martyrdom), there is another, darker side to me that’s prepared to be selfish and self-indulgent. It’s still there, I just have it more under control these days.
My life has changed significantly over the past four years and this, quite naturally, has had an effect on my decisions and priorities. My sister’s decline into dementia, my grand-daughter’s profound disabilities, my children’s marriage breakdowns, my husband’s health problems and my own confrontation with a potentially fatal disease have brought me back to earth with a big thud. Of course, I could have chosen to ignore these problems within my family and continued to enjoy my newfound sense of freedom. Yet that option never occurred to me. My instinctive response was to rearrange my life so that I could be as involved and supportive as possible. This isn’t saintly, it’s just plain commonsense. For more than thirty years the main focus of my life has been the nurture of my family, so why would I abandon them just when they needed me the most? It’s not a change of heart; it’s just an acceptance that this is what’s essential for me at this period of my life.
