At school sitting down to my books in the evening had been the happy occupation which capped the day, but now I was too weary to enjoy the work. I might have been lifted out of it by the interest of my work, but I was finding most of it dull or disappointing or both.
The French Department insisted that one speak with a near-Parisian accent before settling down to studying French literature. I had no mimetic faculty, could not make the required sounds, and the two-thirds of my week’s French classes which were conversation exercises were a constant humiliation. No amount of drilling could convert what I had taken in from Mrs. Fisher’s Belgian accent into Parisian sounds. In philosophy, I could do the logic exercises, but I didn’t really care whether an argument contained a syllogism with an undistributed middle clause or not. The meaning of what I read or heard was perfectly clear to me, but this painstaking analysis of language seemed dull. I had looked forward to reading Plato and studying Greek philosophy, but the hours spent on the Euthyphro were not spent dealing with what it meant and how that fitted into the Greek view of life, but on analysis of every word, comma, and phrase. In English we read Chaucer and studied phonetics. I wasn’t interested in Middle English. I was champing at the bit to read T. S. Eliot and to study Shakespeare’s tragedies, but these were nowhere in sight. Only history lived up to my expectation, but one didn’t do anything in first-year history but attend lectures of two or three hundred students until toward the end of the term when the term’s essay was assigned. I raced through the assigned books, many of which I had read before, loving every moment of them, but there was not enough history to make up for the boredom of those hours trying to make French r sounds, fussing over the punctuation of the translation of the Euthyphro, or converting Chaucer to phonetic script. German, being at 9:00 a.m., quickly fell by the wayside. To get to the University in time for the classes, I would have had to rise at five o’clock to finish my household tasks and make the train journey in time.
I lasted to the middle of the year before using my mother’s increasing ill health as an excuse to escape from the daily ordeal of having no friends and no place where I felt I belonged. I told my mother truthfully that I was bored with most of the academic work and couldn’t imagine how I would ever use what I was learning. I knew she agreed with this. Once I began to attend the University, her attitude to my studies became more ambiguous. She had a romantic picture of what university study would be like. All her frustration at not having completed high school was loaded into her questions. Each day she asked me hungrily what I was learning, hoping to live out her own thwarted longing for education through me. When all I could tell her was an account of classes in logic or phonetics, she would make some derisive comment and remind herself and me that at my age she had already been working and supporting herself for many years. If ever I mentioned needing more pocket money than train fares and change for lunch, she would raise her eyebrows, remind me of the same information, and change the subject.
I came to the decision to drop out of the University just as Barry announced that he was leaving Coorain for good. He was not going to make the land his calling in life. Coorain was too lonely. Instead, he would use his spanking-new Auster aircraft as the basis for launching a country air charter service. He settled on the pleasant country town of Narromine in the central western part of New South Wales for his base, and opened his business, combining his charter services with teaching flying at the local flying club. He was happy from the moment he began. He was more than a competent bush pilot. He was an inspired one. He throve on landing in out-of-the-way places to whisk sick people away to the hospital. His physical endurance and courage earned him admiration and considerable réclame during a season of dangerous floods when he was always ahead of the flood waters saving households or carrying needed medical supplies. Every country town and its outlying regions needed such services desperately. Barry delivered them with courage and daring combined with quiet and efficient concern for the safety of others. Other bush pilots might be lackadaisical about their aircraft and its maintenance, but Barry reminded me of my father in the way his plane and everything associated with it was lovingly cared for. He had made his own place in life, was sought after for skills everyone valued, and his circle of friends grew with the passage of each week.
My mother, nonplussed at this turn of events, oscillated between admiration of Barry for defying her and complaint that he was using her gift for purposes other than hers. To me she complained of her worries about who would take care of Coorain for her in the future. It was a sacred trust, she said, our last link to my father and our once happy family life there. I embraced this responsibility energetically, seeing it as a comfort to my ailing mother, whose complaints were now numerous. She had an inflamed gallbladder and gallstones. She developed high blood pressure. Her thyroid gland became enlarged and she was diagnosed as being slightly hyperthyroid. These conditions were susceptible to medical management had she been content to accept a consistent pattern of medical care. However, she went from one doctor to another, in search of one whose manner she liked, only to rage against the follies of the medical profession, and to abandon one program of medication after another. High blood pressure and a hyperthyroid condition, she decided, required a totally predictable life with no distractions, no deviations from her schedule, and no emotional pressures of any kind. This meant that any attempt to oppose her will produced dramatic results. A disagreement raised her blood pressure, bothered her thyroid condition, or triggered a gallbladder attack. No matter the hour of the affront, it left her sleepless. She would emerge white-faced from her room the next morning, every line in her body an accusation for causing her such discomfort.
When I went out to Coorain to be on hand for the shearing that year, I relished my chance to be alone on the journey. It was comfortable to be working there, once again tracing familiar patterns over the contours of the land. After my unsatisfactory studies, the practicality of simple physical labor delighted me. I could see for myself why Barry had left. The house at Coorain, always simple, now lacked my mother’s touch. It wasn’t polished like a new pin. The garden was gone. A lot of the machinery was wearing out. Because my mother was oblivious to the passage of time, and too thrifty to invest in much comfort for her employees, it had been a negotiation worthy of the Congress of Vienna to get her to agree to replace the 1940 Ford utility with a new one.
Working for Geoff was a constant test of whether my life in the city had made me soft. I kept up the pace he set, but when I got back to Sydney I was eight pounds lighter. I presented no threat of replacement to the Coghlans, and received their warm hospitality and affection, but I could see that Coorain would be a heartbreakingly lonely place for any young person to work.
On the train journey back I came to my decision. I would not go on being financially dependent on my mother, listening to her undertone of contempt for people who didn’t earn their own living. I would find a job, save some money, and gain some independence. Finding a job in the expanding Australian economy of the 1950s was simply a matter of reading the newspapers. The daily Help Wanted or Positions Vacant advertisements (segregated by sex) were many pages long. They read “Help Wanted—Men” or “Help Wanted—Women,” regularly listing lower wage rates for the same job when the employee was a woman. To me the difference was part of life, like the weather. The week I returned to Sydney I scanned the women’s column of Positions Vacant in the morning paper and decided to claim, falsely, that I could type, so that I could apply for a job as a receptionist for a medical practice in the nearby suburb of Castle Hill. I was accepted, and began to work the next week for two partners who shared a sprawling medical practice in a group of suburbs on the northwestern fringe of the city of Sydney.
During the next eighteen months a series of heavy burdens slid from my shoulders. The work was undemanding in its routines, but endlessly interesting in its human details. I learned that once a person dressed in a white starched coat, however unqualified, chances amon
g those seeking medical advice, the mantle of authority descends, and his or her advice is sought about all manner of human predicaments. I had scarcely sat down at my desk in the outer office of the surgery than the first talkative patients arrived and began to volunteer all sorts of startling information about their intimate lives. My shyness was irrelevant to people who needed to talk about themselves and their problems. Listening and making soothing sounds, I saw the uncertainties and worries behind people’s appearances, and realized that my troubles in life were modest in relation to the human predicaments which people paraded before me daily. I was an all-purpose medical records clerk, receptionist, appointments secretary, and occasional practical nurse when a child needed stitching up, or emergency procedures were necessary for someone brought in with injuries needing immediate attention. The complexity of the human drama each day was gripping. When times were quiet I read my way swiftly through my employers’ medical texts. When the office was busy I received a more concentrated education. It was not simply about the ailments which brought each patient to the doctor’s office, but about the social context surrounding each patient and his or her family. I saw the usual range of neurotic suffering which wanders through the door of a general practitioner’s office. Seeing the terminally ill coming regularly for their visits to the surgery, their courage and laughter carried me past my fear of the dying. I began to be able to distinguish the telephone voice of the alcoholic complainer from the quiet dismissive voice of the man or woman who was disguising fear of illness with false heartiness. I came to know and like the young mothers, stuck at home, trying to cope with the newest baby and the five-year-old who had just fallen out of a tree. My employers were good physicians who showed humor and sensitivity in their dealings with their patients. I liked seeing them at work, and enjoyed laughing with them over the follies of the day or the sheer lunacy of some of the daily life situations we learned about. It was like being thrust inside the mind of a gifted novelist. Thenceforth I looked at people, myself included, with more compassion and more distance.
My mother’s respect for the fact that I was earning my own living was palpable. A year after her injury some strength returned to her broken right wrist. She became more active, her moods improved, and patches of sunshine broke through our stormy domestic scene. She was almost childishly delighted when I bought tickets for the ballet or the theater and took her out for an evening’s entertainment. Besides planning diversions for my mother, I spent my early earnings on attending an evening school where one could learn how to make the best of one’s appearance. The school sent me to a hairdresser who knew how to cut my kind of hair, a task completed with transforming effect. Armed with new knowledge about diet I steadfastly refused to eat much of my mother’s daily fare of meat and potatoes. More pounds joined those run off in hard labor at Coorain and a new shape emerged to accompany my well-coiffed head. Able to ignore my mother’s critical oversight, I bought the kind of clothes I thought suitable, and won grudging approval from her even as she exclaimed over my spendthrift ways. I didn’t care. I knew my appearance was beginning to approximate the glossy fashion magazines I studied so assiduously. I was painstakingly constructing an acceptable public self.
This was easier to do as my mother’s refrain of criticism diminished. Our happiest times came on the weekends when we ranged far and wide about the city and its environs, looking for rare plants, nurseries with desirable strong stock, books about the propagation of plants. We shared a genuine obsession with growing things, and could spend hours happily pondering whether a yellow or a pale orange rose would complete the color composition we were planning for some corner of the garden. In springtime the results were breathtaking. Yellow daffodils and deep blue iris marked the meandering edge of the front garden. Behind them were pink and white azaleas backed by white and yellow jasmine, white mock orange, and graceful blue buddleia. In a sheltered corner were seven different species of scented daphne, their perfumes competing with the heady onslaught of port wine magnolia and ginger plant. One could hear the hum of the bees on sunny spring afternoons as they drowsed homewards through the air fragrant with the pungent smell of lemon-scented gums and the heavier perfumes of daphne, magnolia, and ginger.
My evenings were no longer spent exclusively at home. One of my older brother’s friends, for whom I had nurtured hopeless romantic feelings since my early teens, suddenly reappeared in our life and began to squire me around. He was handsome, happy-go-lucky, and good-natured, a combination ideally suited to provide for relatively painless first love. It suited my pride that he was older than most of my Abbotsleigh friends’ companions. I felt that at last I was traveling at a heady speed toward adulthood, dressed to kill and ready for adventure. My mother observed my comings and goings warily, but I was too elated to notice her watchful and guarded behavior.
Within twelve months the routine of the medical practice had begun to pall. My bank account contained what looked to me like large resources, and provided she stayed within her iron routine, my mother’s health was robust. Her most recent arguments with the manager of Coorain had been resolved, and there was adequate help on the place. As my mind began to turn to finding more stimulating work, I regretted my foolishness in giving up my scholarship and dropping out of the University. My mother surprised me by urging me to return. She could easily afford to pay my fees. Furthermore, she acknowledged that she’d been giving me a miserably small allowance in my first student year. We worked out what would be a comfortable allowance for food, clothes, books, and travel. I could scarcely believe this happy state of affairs, nor my good luck when a kindly official in the Department of Education reinstated my scholarship for my readmission to the University of Sydney in the late summer of 1954.
This time I took a leisurely three subjects: a comfortable nine hours of lectures in history, English, and psychology. I knew my way around, and now accustomed to talking to strangers, I could chatter easily with whomever I sat next to in lectures. Within a matter of weeks, coming brazenly late to a class I met Toni, a young woman of striking beauty and elfin charm, a latecomer also seated in the back row in a history lecture. We took to one another, and began one of the intense undergraduate friendships through which young people learn about themselves by discovering the inner life and feelings of friends. Toni was dark-haired with dazzling cornflower blue eyes. Her cultivated voice and her talent for self-mockery fascinated me. She seemed to take nothing seriously, to laugh at life, and to look upon her parents’ generation as denizens of a world to be tolerated but not taken seriously. She and her brother, who studied economics, became regular companions. They came from a country family, had attended schools like mine, and shared my questions about whether I belonged to Australia’s bush culture or to its urban professional classes. They were cheerful hedonists who took it for granted that one should enjoy one’s university life, paying only the modicum of attention to studying which was necessary to “get through” each year’s annual examinations. Once approached in this fashion, university life could indeed be wonderfully leisurely. There was only one annual examination at the end of the year, attendance at lectures was not compulsory, and the written assignments for each term were not onerous.
Before I knew it I was skipping lectures on fine days to walk in Centennial Park, dashing off to the one remaining vaudeville theater in Sydney for the afternoon matinée to learn the music hall songs of the thirties, setting out for the zoo on the whim of the moment for a ride on the elephants, or simply spending long afternoons talking, talking, talking. Our conversations were not intellectual, but focused on our parents, our families, our uncertainties and insecurities, our feelings about being Australian, our puzzlement about what to do in life. Toni was in the midst of romantic turmoil, hopelessly in love with a suitor disapproved of by her family. We talked the year away, our conversations interrupted only by vacations. I began to emulate Toni’s bon mots, her talent for telling funny stories, and her casual but stylish dress.
It was
perfectly easy for me to keep up with my courses by reading at home in the evenings or on weekends. My essay assignments were occasionally daunting, such as the required essay in first-year English language on the origins of the fused participle, but these too could be crammed into systematic work on weekends without affecting the pleasures of the week. From Toni and her brother I learned the art of enjoying life, of stopping to savor the joys of the moment, and of letting the cares of tomorrow wait. In my mother’s eyes, I was staggering under a burden of academic work, since I fell to with a vengeance when at home and scarcely lifted my head from my books. She was unaware of how I spent my daytime hours, and impressed by the longer and longer hours I seemed to need to put in at the Library.
My new way of life might have gone undetected for years, but at the end of my first year, during the annual examination study period, I fell into the classic undergraduate scrape. My mother had chosen the weeks of November and early December to visit Coorain, taking with her a woman friend her own age. Her friend was widowed, with a daughter close in age to me, so it was arranged that the two daughters would live together in our house while the two mothers made their trip to the bush. My mother was scarcely out the front door before I invited Toni to join me so that we could study together. Various and sundry other friends came for meals, overnight stays, parties, conviviality. I quickly became too engaged in cooking, cleaning, and the general duties of a hostess to notice that my new arrangements were grating on the nerves of my authorized guest, who departed after a week to stay with other friends. News of her new arrangements filtered through to Coorain, so that the day before my first history examination I learned that my mother was returning early to investigate. The comic scene of the mice playing while the cat traveled was interrupted, requiring feverish cleaning and tidying on my part to erase all signs of visitors before meeting my mother’s train which arrived at 6:30 a.m. the following morning. I went to meet her feeling like a political prisoner, conscious of no real wrongdoing, but nonetheless headed for the gallows. The storm would descend and I could do nothing to avert it.
The Road from Coorain Page 17
