Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  School bored her. She was never a good scholar at anything save reading; history, geography and arithmetic went unlearned. At fifteen she left, wanting to train as a nurse, but her father refused to let her. Laurie was a lady, and nursing was not a job for a lady. In fact, ladies didn’t have jobs. They stayed at home until they married. His refusal didn’t go down well, and Laurie was no doormat. In retaliation, she cut off her hair in a bob or shingle — very short indeed. Her father (I don’t know his first name) openly wept, but wouldn’t change his mind; Laurie stayed at home. Truth to tell — Laurie so often didn’t — the hair wasn’t cut over nursing, though it certainly was cut. Nanna confirmed the fact. From the few remarks Laurie made to me about her long hair, she hated it.

  Around the middle of the 1920s the men secured a longstanding agrarian job, and were to stay in it for many years. So they rented a house in the nearby town for Nanna and Laurie, better accommodation by far than station housing.

  Oh, this is boring stuff! I can only imagine how it irked the restless, adventurous spirit dwelling inside Laurie, hungry to travel, to see the world, to have money in her purse.

  She did have a feral intelligence, undisciplined and crafty, but it wasn’t allied to an ability to reason. By that, I mean that she never saw the consequences of her actions bearing down, even scant seconds away from impact. When they hit, she behaved as if they had nothing to do with her.

  As Laurie wasn’t beaten as a child, I can only think that she caught the habit of lying from the terror that went with witnessing her father take his belt to one of her brothers. No kind of lie was unknown to her, from the flat take-it-or-leave-it statement to the most tortuous tapestry of confabulations, but unfortunately she tended to forget her lies. Her husband, Jim, who never forgot anything, was adept at catching her out, and even I, as a small child, once asked her why she bothered to lie if she couldn’t keep her story straight. My legs smarted for a week. How dared I!

  The snooping must have started early too. Insatiable curiosity, I suppose, but when that curiosity gets one into shocking trouble, surely it’s time to stop? Not Laurie! If someone got a letter, Laurie would find a way to read it. If a bank book wasn’t carried on the person, Laurie would find it and blab the balance. If bills went unpaid, Laurie would be the first to know. A compulsive eavesdropper, she could sense the brewing of a private conversation miles away, and zoom! she’d be there hiding out of sight, ears straining.

  Twice at least her snooping led to hideous family ructions of the sort that never really heal, though Laurie always remained unshakably convinced that her conduct had been impeccable.

  Her eldest full brother, Jack, became engaged to be married to a woman from a different district; the family didn’t know Joyce, which was her name. So Joyce came to visit. Laurie’s father and Nanna were appalled to see a vulgar slattern with bad teeth and a beer drinker’s belly. A snooping Laurie found the letter Joyce was writing to her own family, and produced it triumphantly. There was a screaming row that didn’t end as Laurie had confidently expected it would, in Jack’s breaking off his engagement. No, Jack took Joyce’s part! Years were to elapse before the breach was patched up. Carl and I grew up ignorant of this brother’s existence, and never knew we had three male cousins.

  The second ruction was of a fairly similar nature, though it happened decades later, when we were living in Sydney and I was about fourteen years old. We had built Nanna a little room of her own on the back verandah and I had looked forward to having my own space — studying in that house was very difficult. But Nanna’s bed hadn’t grown cold before Laurie moved out of Jim’s bed and into my room. There was still powder in Jim’s magazine: he promptly produced a niece from Belfast, who was immigrating and needed a place to stay. Back to Jim’s bed went Laurie while Cousin May moved into Nanna’s bed.

  From what I remember, May was a nice girl who used to sit at the dressing-table and lay on makeup with a trowel, which I thought a pity; her skin was beautiful. The poor girl must have been reeling, straight off the boat and into a pot of Laurie’s venom. I was the hapless ham in the sandwich, though I am sure I didn’t take May’s side. By age fourteen, I knew better than to annoy Laurie. Therefore let this be a belated beg-pardon to May — little did she know.

  Of course Laurie snooped and found a half written letter from May to her family in Belfast. It was predictably full of unkind remarks about Laurie (and me, no doubt) — well-deserved remarks. The next thing, May was gone. To, I devoutly hope, a happier environment. The vacant bed wasn’t cold before Laurie was back in it; Jim had lost yet another battle in the war. As usual, I was collateral damage. I’d rather have shared with May than Laurie, but what I really yearned for was a room of my own. It’s no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.

  At some point in Laurie’s late teens, one brother died in a terrible accident, and not long after, another of the sons died tragically. Then when Laurie turned twenty-one, her father died.

  All dreams of an independent life and career were abandoned; Laurie had to stay home and help Nanna. It is probably to this period that Laurie’s little jobs belong. There seem to have been a number of them, usually as a receptionist or a clerk, but they never lasted much longer than a week. What I know was gleaned from remarks Laurie made to me during the years when she shared my room, remarks that revolved around unjust dismissals or employers who refused to pay her. One or two such incidents I might have believed, but Laurie recounted a dozen and more. My theory is that she didn’t perform her jobs well enough, and was fired. This was certainly true of the jobs she held during my teens, only one of which lasted for any length of time; it consisted of packaging goods in a mail order firm.

  Apart from Spence — long gone to a world of boxing and razor gangs in Sydney — and Jack — married to the execrable Joyce and living far away — Laurie seems to have been the only one who hankered for a wider, freer existence.

  She continued to cling to the dream of the spinster nurse, talked of its independent power, respectable income, opportunities to go anywhere in the world. Many and many’s the time Carl and I heard her perpetual lament: how a husband and children tie a woman down to a life of drudgery with no thanks, and of how she should have been a nurse.

  Yet Laurie behaved very strangely for someone who pictured herself a nurse.

  If either Carl or I said we felt sick on the stomach, she locked the nauseated one in the bathroom with a bowl until the vomiting was done; then, heaving and gagging, she covered the bowl with a cloth and rushed it to the outhouse. The only time I ever threw up on the floor, she gave me a bucket of sand, a dust pan to use as a scoop, and a bucket of soapy water with a rag in it. Then she left me to clean up the mess myself. I was five years old. She wasn’t being deliberately cruel; she simply couldn’t bear cleaning up bodily messes.

  The dream of becoming a nurse was just that: a dream. Laurie would not have lasted a single day on a ward, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, when nurses were slushies for the first two years of their three-year training period. In fact, I think it is possible that Laurie did start training as a nurse, only to quit because of the messes and the dragons of ward charge nurses.

  Most of Laurie’s lies were told to conceal her own shortcomings and make herself look really good. It makes no sense that a doting father would have refused to let Laurie go nursing, which was an eminently desirable career for a girl, including ladies. It does make sense, however, that having discovered how unlike her dreams the reality was, Laurie turned her dead father into the villain of the piece.

  And Nanna, you ask? What did Nanna have to say? Nanna said absolutely nothing to contradict even Laurie’s most outrageous lies. In the end I decided that Nanna had learned her lesson years before I was born, and let Laurie weave her own destruction. I do know that Nanna was extremely afraid of her. The poor old woman was doomed to spend the rest of her life with Laurie, and realized that the only way to survive was not to provoke Laurie in any way. I never remember
Nanna as anything but white-haired and wrinkled in the face, but I remember her with great affection. If Carl or I had done something sure to irritate Laurie, we went to Nanna for help; if we’d wet our pants or gotten dirty, we could go to Nanna sure that the wet pants or filthy clothing would be smuggled away and never mentioned. I loved Nanna, but it was never an intimate affection; Nanna didn’t hug or kiss or cuddle. To us as children, she was just there, another part of Laurie’s furniture.

  In her old age she fell down a grease pit in a garage and broke her pelvis. She never fully recovered. Maybe it isn’t wrong to say that as far as Laurie was concerned, Nanna had outlived her usefulness: I was seventeen, Carl sixteen when it happened. So her bachelor sons put her in a nursing home and visited her literally every day for years. Nanna loved being in the nursing home; she had her own room and an enviable stream of visitors. She was 101 when she died. I was in Connecticut.

  Laurie was a reader who devoured women’s magazines and many kinds of novels, particularly those that chronicled exotic events in exotic places. It was an era of sequels; Laurie would wait eagerly for the next one in a serles. Her reading habits were developed independently of the great bodice-rippers; I never remember her speaking of Ethel M. Dell or Elinor Glyn. An Australian writer named Thwaites was her favorite, but the books she read as a child stayed with her as long as she lived: Little Women, Seven Little Australians and East Lynne were spoken of constantly. A voracious reader when I was a child, I tried to get her interested in historical novels, but she scorned them as too full of men’s doings.

  Her bodily figure was the perfect one for her time: flat-chested, skinny, and good legs. Passionately fond of clothes, she lusted after a fur so hungrily that her brothers shot dozens of rabbits, tanned the best skins, and had a rabbit fur coat made for their sister. The only makeup she wore was a face powder famous in its day; her almost lipless mouth didn’t look enticing when lipsticked. I can still see her pounding away at her nose with a thin velvet puff; someone must have told her that if a nose was in the least bit shiny, it looked bigger. She hated her nose, large and bumpy. Perhaps significantly, her favorite colors were all the browns and beiges through to cream. Vibrant, vivid or delicate colors she detested. Into which intrudes one curious aberration: when Carl and I were toddlers, she dressed us in brilliant scarlet-red, an absolute no-no at that time. The hours I’ve wasted trying to figure that out!

  I haven’t said anything about her temper. It was bad but not hot — filthy-mean, Carl called it — the sort of bad temper people wake up in rather than due to the day’s events. So the day took on the hue of her bad temper, no matter how potentially good its events were. Grudges she held forever, blown up out of all proportion to the original offence, and she inflated tiny faults into major flaws.

  Carl was wonderful with her. No one else ever found the key to the door inside Laurie’s mind that shut away happiness, joy, gales of laughter. Once he grew into adolescence he stumbled upon the key, I suppose; once he had it in his grasp, he never let it go. He would sneak up behind Laurie and untie her apron strings whenever her mood was filthy-mean. She’d snap, bark, tie it up again. He’d untie it. This went on until she was ropeable, at which stage he would pull clownish, woebegone faces at her. Finally she would begin to laugh, grab the wooden spoon and chase him. Leading her dances all over the place, he’d go on laughing at her and pulling those faces, she by now breathless with laughter too, until her mood magically blossomed into real happiness. But he was the only one could ever do it.

  Irrational. Bad tempered. A compulsive liar. An incurable snoop. Ambitious. Vain. Grudge-cherishing. Self-important. Not very bright intellectually. Egocentric. Dictatorial in the extreme. They were the qualities she showed to her family.

  Ah, but she was different with outsiders, who universally thought her charming. The change was immediate; let someone other than a family member appear, and she was all over them in her anxiety to please, to have them think well of her. Laurie was the quintessential street angel and house devil, which made it quite impossible for Carl or me to convince people she was a monster. She must have known how thin the veneer was, however, for she never invited strangers or even the neighbors into her house, and Carl and I were forbidden to bring other kids home. That was a rule we dared not break. Of course it meant we were strictly forbidden to go to another kid’s house. Until Carl grew into a crack sportsman and I into a scholar in a library, our lives outside of school hours were spent friendless. The other boys and girls couldn’t work it out and we could offer no reason that satisfied them.

  Pray pardon the digression. Things don’t always belong in chronological order.

  One might say she wasn’t a nice person, yet Laurie must have had assets, character traits that were admirable and fine. Part of her trouble was that her hatreds and resentments drained her of the energy to be nice to those whom she knew too well and saw as anchors, as intolerable burdens: her family.

  Physically fearless, she was a natural athlete, a first-class tennis player who yearned to try golf. There’s a clue in that: instead of throwing heart and soul into what she did have, Laurie always wanted something she couldn’t have. It seems that if she had worked at it, she would have been a champion tennis player — but no, she wanted to be a golfer, economically out of her reach. Her brothers, who all lived their bachelor lives under her roof, didn’t help by calling women’s tennis the “hit and giggle club”.

  Sometimes she could think on her feet, save a person from peril just because she had no ability to pause and reason things out. She neither smoked cigarettes nor drank alcohol. Her addiction was to the “cuppa” — tea — which she drank strong enough to look black and without milk or sugar. She despised tea bags as weak apologies for the real thing.

  People had a habit of dying in her arms. These strange creatures do exist, and Laurie was one such. In that role she was perfect — tender, compassionate, exquisitely easing away the terror of a looming unknown. I do not exaggerate when I say that there were about a dozen women and men who died in Laurie’s arms, and they fared better than most of us do when comes the moment to die.

  She did have a sense of humor, strait-laced sexually and set at liberty only by those she considered funny — Carl and her youngest brother, Tom. And one could wind up on the right side of her occasionally for the oddest of reasons: if to champion me, for instance, meant unpleasantness and discomfort for someone she loathed, then Laurie the champion was there at my side.

  That Carl and I managed to stay at school wasn’t really due to our full scholarships. We were there because Laurie knew how much it irritated Jim to see his children still in school once they attained the age to leave. It would be delightful to think our brilliance pleased either parent, but the truth is far more complicated. No parent relishes being intellectually out-classed by the children.

  Laurie loved dogs and cats. As a child she had a pet pig named Midget that wore its trotters down finding her after the family moved. For Laurie’s sake I wish that story had had a happier ending, but it seems Midget ended up roast pork. I feel that a great deal of the mountain of love that must have been tamped down inside Laurie was expended on pet dogs and pet cats. Pet animals were no threat to her. I particularly remember a Persian cat named — what else? — Fluffy, as cerebrally stupid as bred animals are but an ideal lap cat. Laurie would spend her “sit-down” time combing Fluffy as it purred on her knees; she carefully collected every strand of its long hair for years, and when it died, she stuffed the hair into a specially made felt cushion that she wouldn’t be parted from.

  Back now to Laurie at the age of twenty-four, a spoiled young lady shut inside a cage and desperate to try her wings.

  That she elected marriage was inevitable. It represented the only escape from her cage. In Jim, she could congratulate herself that she had “caught” the local heart-throb, swooningly handsome and enviably tall. When it came to money he was no catch whatsoever, but by her mid-twenties Laurie had learned that the
rich young men of the district married rich young women. If Laurie had been beautiful … But, alas, she wasn’t.

  Though it is a pure guess, I believe the marriage foundered on the honeymoon, spent 1,500 miles from home in North Queensland. The abysmally ignorant Laurie discovered the phenomenon of sexual intercourse. Not only did she loathe it: she feared it. Nor was Jim the right man to put in time and effort in persuading his new wife that the act could be wonderful. All too often in 1932 (the year they were married) young women were so sheltered and sexually uneducated that the honeymoon became a horror story. There was no television; motion pictures held one fully clothed kiss; and a book was called “spicy” if the heroine palpitated with something called desire.

  The maturing flow of hormones is greatly helped by exposure to the hinterland of sex at least, a thousand-and-one modern aids to sexual readiness that we don’t even think of, yet that Laurie’s generation plain didn’t have. The modern person may object that Laurie was a country girl, inured to rutting animals, and with many brothers sure to talk. But it wasn’t like that. Laurie was never let go near rutting animals, while her brothers were so shy and sexually inhibited themselves that, except for Jack and Spence, they never had girlfriends, remaining lifelong bachelors. Sniff if you must, you skeptics, but I do assure you that was Laurie’s environment. She tried to bring me up in the same way, but I was a scholar not to be intimidated; with Carl she succeeded better, for he was naturally shy, a quiet person.

  Silent, dour Nanna seems to have been no help. She even neglected to tell Laurie about menstruation; why then would Nanna have broken the habits of a lifetime to tell Laurie what she was in for? Apparently she did not.