Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  What happened on the honeymoon was rape. In those days it was quite a frequent occurrence. Exasperated by refusals to be let touch, have a feel — even look — the new husband finally resorted to forcible possession. He never equated what he did with rape, an act he continued to deplore. A wife was a legal belonging and had taken solemn vows to yield up her body. In 1932 whatever money a wife had passed automatically to him unless some other provision had been made; she couldn’t borrow money in her own name, or, if unmarried, obtain a mortgage.

  That was Laurie’s world. The seeds of her hatred of Jim were sown; so was her horror of the sexual act.

  To add to Laurie’s woes, Jim was an inveterate miser. He put her to work as a house cleaner in North Queensland, collected her pay himself, and gave her a tiny allowance of the sort she had to itemize down to the price of anything she bought. Before he gave her the next instaliment, she had to produce proof that she had no money left — and God help her if she spent foolishly. Her cleaning job included her accommodation; Jim had begun to cut sugar cane and lived in barracks, so he pocketed almost every penny they earned.

  With logic on her side for once, Laurie quit Queensland to go home to Nanna and the brothers.

  Jim visited from time to time, apparently paying Laurie an allowance that didn’t demand receipts; the brothers must have said something. She was down in mood and eating very little; when, nearly five years after her marriage, she learned that she was pregnant, she ate even less.

  I was born on June 1st, 1937, a runt who weighed less than five pounds. For the first three months of my life I starved because the milkless Laurie insisted on breast-feeding me; she had read in some magazine that babies had to be breast-fed, and that was that. Nanna told her she didn’t have any milk, but Laurie turned a deaf ear. Luckily the local midwife was more aggressive, and threatened to have Laurie declared an unfit mother unless she put me on a bottle. From then on, I thrived. Whether because of the milk fiasco or because I was a girl, Laurie conceived a dislike of me.

  Nearly as thin as a concentration camp victim and still anorexic, Laurie went into a second pregnancy. Carl was born on September 23rd, 1938, almost sixteen months after me. He too weighed less than five pounds, but went straight on to a bottle, and thrived from the beginning.

  Laurie didn’t like pain, so I’ve wondered if she starved herself to have small babies, thus making childbirth easier. If she did, it didn’t work. Carl and I were both very long labors with forceps deliveries. My theory is that Laurie made labor worse by fighting against it rather than going with it, but I don’t know. With Laurie, that is my perpetual plaint: I don’t know.

  She was never loath to tell me that all she ever wanted was a baby boy with hair so blond it was white, the bluest of blue eyes, and tiny little ears set close to his head. In Carl she got it all, even the ears. By sheer willpower, I am utterly convinced; even God would not have dared gainsay her. Deeming me a failed attempt, she had vowed to do it once more, and get it right. After that, no more sex. Laurie had exactly what she wanted at last.

  We received our names in the oddest way. Though both are ethnic, ethnicity didn’t enter into it. It was war to the teeth as usual when I was born; Jim wanted to call me Margaretta, while Laurie wanted Patricia. Neither would bend. Finally Nanna produced a book of names and suggested that I be called by the first name that meant “female.” That was Colleen, the Erse for girl. When Carl was born, the same duel flourished anew; Jim wanted Robert, Laurie wanted Dallas. So Nanna produced the book of names. Carl is Swedish for “male”.

  There were two critical illnesses that I know of.

  The first took place when I was about four, a pneumonia (statistically the great killer before antibiotics) that saw Nanna spreading gooey, dark grey poultices on Laurie’s chest and back. I was old enough to understand that she was dying, a strange, horrible notion all tangled up with whispers, threats about making noise, trying to find a corner to hide in. Jim wasn’t there. But she recovered.

  The second was mysterious, and occurred when I was about six. As best I can reconstruct events, Laurie was in Sydney at the time, though we weren’t living there; something extremely unusual must have transpired to cause Laurie to journey to the big city without her children. After surgical removal of her reproductive organs in toto, she hovered on the brink of death for weeks. Nanna took Carl and me to Sydney and we stayed at the People’s Palace, a hostelry for the impoverished not far from the main rail station. Jim was there; I have memories of him and Nanna conversing in hushed voices, and of an effigy in a bed in a dimly lit room, not a ward.

  When Laurie told me about menstruation it was gruffly, her tone unemotional: once a month all women bled for several days, she said. Nanna hadn’t breathed a word about it to her, so when her own menses appeared, she thought she was dying. A nun at her school had explained. Therefore, growled Laurie to me, she had sworn that if she had a daughter, that daughter would know in advance about the bleeding. I was eleven: two years were to go by before my turn came.

  Then she tacked on a curious sequel. Her own periods, she said, had been such a torment that she had known something was wrong, and sought a gynaecologist. As our region didn’t have one, she set off to Sydney, where she couldn’t find one either. Eventually someone gave her the name of a gynaecologist in practice five miles from Liverpool rail station.

  In 1943 Liverpool was the very outermost of all Sydney’s suburbs, famous chiefly for its massive army camp: this latter function helped me fathom the mystery later on, as it happened. Liverpool’s streets were not tar-sealed, nor was Liverpool yet sewered. And, said Laurie, she had no money, so she walked from the train station. The gynaecologist saw her and said she had fibroids, but made no arrangements. So she started to walk back to the train station down the dirt road, five miles in blistering heat for a second time. Halfway there she haemorrhaged.

  Why she bothered telling me all this I have absolutely no idea; it was a classic Laurie lie. Even knowing that much, I had no answer until years after I left home. The incident had been long buried far below consciousness when something occurred to trigger recollection. Suddenly the lie made sense. Even in 1943 (the worst year of World War II for Australians) one didn’t find a Sydney gynaecologist at the end of five miles of dirt road in Liverpool. What one found was a gigantic army camp — and an abortionist. Laurie was seeking an abortion.

  Poor wretched woman! As if I were present, I could see a stunned Laurie realizing she was pregnant, and vowing to be rid of this unwanted child. Being Laurie, she shifted heaven and earth to find an abortionist, and did — exactly where one would have lurked. It was a shocking crime in 1943. In Laurie’s world of puritanical hellfire, everything that ever happened to her afterward was retribution.

  What Jim thought, I have no way of guessing beyond the little giveaways a mostly absent father betrayed. He was not Catholic and he was certainly a miser, but somehow I cannot see him as the deus ex machina of Laurie’s abortion. That smacks of Laurie, of her mad dashes onto the rocks of her own follies. Poor husband material though he was, he would not have left her to take that walk alone and without a penny beyond the £5 an abortion would have cost. No, it was Laurie.

  I wonder what that third child might have been like?

  Thanks to Laurie’s idiocies, Carl and I had terrible illnesses as children.

  When I was three and Carl two, Laurie decided she was moving to Sydney and living on what Jim sent her from Queensland. The only house she could afford to rent was in a Sydney slum suburb; she justified it by declaring that it was on a tram line and very near a shopping centre. The place oozed filth. At night Carl and I were smothered in huge cockroaches. If a cockroach appears in my house to this day, I move out. That is not an exaggeration. I have a pathological dread of cockroaches. There were rats too, but they confined their perambulations to the floor, maybe why I have never minded rats.

  The Sydney sojourn didn’t last long. The Phoney War was becoming the real War with a veng
eance, most of the brothers had enlisted and gone to fight Rommel in North Africa; Nanna needed company. Jim didn’t enlist. None of the men was obliged to join up as they worked on the land, but the brothers were fiercely patriotic; Jim was a dedicated Communist — but that belongs to his story, also in this collection.

  Laurie returned to Nanna with a mortally ill son. Carl had contracted several critical diseases at one and the same moment, including rheumatic fever and gastroenteritis. Though he shook them off, his health was never robust as a child, and his first growth spurt didn’t happen until his eighteenth year. That awful house was to blame, with its rats and cockroaches; had he been exposed to that kind of environment earlier he might have developed the antibodies to cope, but he was a rural child from a dry and healthy place.

  When we were respectively eight and seven years old, Laurie decided to end Jim’s carefree bachelor existence in the sugar cane, and dragged us off to North Queensland, where we remained for about two years. Odd though it may sound, I have no idea where we lived, apart from the fact that Laurie eked out her stipend from Jim by working as a cleaner. A boarding house seems right, as one of my strongest impressions about childhood is that we were terrified of making a noise, getting underfoot, “making a nuisance” of ourselves.

  Carl had an appalling bout of chicken pox; he even had the ulcers inside his throat. Another close shave for Laurie.

  There had been something wrong with my skin since birth; it broke down into weeping vesicles called dermatitis, but in 1945 no one knew how to treat it. I kept telling Laurie that the dermatitis was due to soap; her response was to call me a dirty pig of a girl and make sure I scrubbed harder. And yes, of course it was soap! It wouldn’t have been Laurie were it any other substance. Luckily when I entered my teens I had a little more privacy for my ablutions, and managed to avoid the soap for most of the time. That entailed wetting the cake; Laurie always checked. But this is about Laurie, not about me, so I do have a purpose in recounting the tale of my dermatitis.

  The place in North Queensland where we lived was on the same latitude south of the Equator as Belize is north — 17°. That’s the real tropics, not some pallid imitation. It was permanently humid, and the rainfall was literally 300 inches a year — 7.7 metres. No one carried an umbrella or wore a mackintosh; the clouds open like a waterfall, one is drenched, the rain stops, and ten minutes later the clothes are dry again. However, the rain was fairly seasonal monsoon: November to March, summer.

  Though thanks to Auntie Mary and the priest the family had quit the Catholic Church decades before, Carl and I were sent to Catholic schools because Laurie believed they gave children a better education. Schools in the plural.

  The particular Catholic School I had been attending in New South Wales owned a very fancy uniform, utterly unsuited for heat of any kind: I wore a black serge tunic with narrow box pleats, a long-sleeved shirt with collar and tie, long socks, a serge wool blazer, and a black velour hat with the school band. Carl’s school saw him wearing a black serge suit, long-sleeved shirt with collar and tie, and a grey felt hat.

  North Queensland disgusted Laurie. Not only was she in a menial job, but she had no way to show these tropical yokels how socially superior she was. I have vague memories of Jim’s having a cousin of some kind where we were, and of staying with the cousin and his family when we first arrived. We were not there long, so it’s pounds to peanuts that Laurie snooped and we were asked to leave, after which the boarding house. For certainly Laurie knew people in our town on a better basis than if her only contact was through cleaning. And she was determined to cock a snook at them, demonstrate how top-class she and her children actually were. Her solution was to send Carl and me to the little state school we attended — it was the only school in forty miles — wearing our school uniforms.

  When we duly appeared clad in our uniforms we created a sensation — but not of the kind Laurie envisioned. The local yokels laughed themselves sick. Not that Laurie saw or heard them. As usual, she was in her own world. Luckily it was a mixed school, so I could protect Carl — no one messed with him!

  We walked two miles to school along a blood-red dirt road, the air filled with the stench of molasses from the sugar mill on the bend of a wide, treacherous river, its currents tugging at masses of dark green weed, its water teeming with gigantic salt-water crocodiles, the vast mountains dense with jungle as a backdrop. It was so humid! Never having known humidity, we western N.S.W. children were utterly miserable.

  The backs of my legs from buttocks to knees had broken down into dermatitis. I couldn’t bear the weight of that heavy tunic banging against them, so I walked holding the tunic out off my legs with both hands, kicking my suitcase of books ahead of me. Just recovering from the chicken pox and hardly owning the strength to carry his own case, Carl couldn’t carry mine as well. A softer person than I, he wept.

  The toilets at the school were vile. Boys were segregated from girls, but that was the only nicety. A board affair with holes in it had been constructed to fit standard sized drums beneath it, drums that caught the faecal matter and urine. The height meant children had to scramble up and sit; there was no way to avoid contact with those filthy boards if one were eight years old. Looking into a “honey can” (as it was known) was to look into a stinking, lumpy brown liquid seething with fat white worms. I will never forget it, especially the worms.

  My dermatitis became badly infected, but Laurie, having no experience of the tropics, thought it would “clear up”. While, it seems, I was cooking septicaemia. The headmaster caught me holding my heavy tunic off the back of my legs, looked at them, and took my temperature. A wild drive later and I was in the hospital, where I was to remain for six months, one of the first civilian patients in Australia to have injections of penicillin, the new wonder drug. Strangely, I don’t remember being gravely ill. My memories are of wonderful peace and quiet, of hugely high ceilings clattering with revolving fans, of friendly faces. It was always bliss to escape from the turmoil of Laurie’s world, disorganized almost to chaos.

  I recount these incidents to illustrate Laurie’s incredible obstinacy. Once she took an idea into her head, nothing could shift it, even when any fool could see that, for instance, she was endangering her children’s lives. I shrink from calling that stupidity, but, looking back, it’s hard to find a kinder word. Yet it wasn’t a dumbly brutish stupidity; in many ways Laurie was as quick as the next one. As a neuroscientist, I wonder about unopened neural pathways in her brain, of a checkerboard cerebrum whose fundamental nuclei were as likely to retard her thought processes as to sharpen them. Her emotions were so strong that they impaired her ability to reason; in my own life I have known many others with this same handicap. A boots-and-all mentality that fills me with sorrow for the missed opportunities, the tragedies that a little thinking out would have averted.

  She was not a merciful mother, for all she was capable of great mercy toward those she didn’t know well. Family members dwelled in a different house from all other people.

  A great many of the appalling mistakes she made as a mother have to be laid at the door of a genuine confusion; if she had no idea what to do, she did nothing, on the theory that whatever the problem was would eventually go away of its own accord.

  At seven years of age I was hospitalized for some months in a Sydney isolation hospital; I went in an ordinarily sized little girl, and came out overweight. I was never again to be an ordinary size.

  Laurie hated, hated, hated having a fat daughter. My life became a passing parade of diets. Until I left home for good at seventeen, I was always on a diet. The weight was yet one more reason to dislike me, particularly because I was muscular rather than jelly-obese, and had inherited Jim’s height. Laurie was a physical shrimp who yearned for presence, and size endows anyone with a certain amount of presence.

  All her love was lavished upon Carl, though the outcome contradicts Freud: I pitied him, and he envied me. Why on earth would any child hunger to be the centre o
f a parent’s universe? The constriction! The suffocation! I used to see it every day. Poor Carl couldn’t blink without Laurie’s pouncing — why did he do that, what was the meaning of this? She tied him with every trick at her command, and she had thousands of tricks. How he envied me my emancipation from her!

  We were not alike in temperament, which makes something of a puzzle out of our enormously close bond. Unless, as I tend to think, Carl and I had joined each other at the hip in an effort to survive Laurie. His character was gentle, sympathetic, understanding of human frailty, and a little puritanical; his patience was so etched into his spirit that, as he put it, he obtained more pleasure from spending two weeks teaching a mentally retarded child to tie their shoelaces than he did from teaching a class of geniuses. His ambition was always to be a teacher of mentally retarded children. His prose style was far better than mine and his love of history equally great, but he had no scientific or mathematical streak. Like me, he drew and painted well, but unlike me, he was a born athlete. If I had to find one word to describe him, it would be “perfect”.

  So he became adept at escaping from Laurie’s gyrations by using her own tools against her.

  We moved to Sydney in 1949, into a big brick semi-detached house a five-minute walk from the beach; Laurie’s brothers bought it, though it was put in Jim’s name. A gift to Carl.

  We had a phone now that sat in an alcove halfway down the very long front hall; the door between the hall and the living room was always closed. If the phone rang — always for Jim or Carl or me — there would be Laurie’s shadow flickering under the door as she strained mightily to hear. Telling her not to listen was wasted breath. We couldn’t keep our papers or notes or letters safe from her; she would find them and read them, and knew so little shame that if she found an uncomplimentary reference to herself, she would fly at the culprit like a virago, accusing whoever of lying about her. She poked and pried into everything.