by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
Anyway this book (can’t remember what it was) was on the table. My father picked it up and said, I don’t think you should read this. I don’t think this is a fit book for you to read. He knew because he’d already read it, he was a very keen reader. All right, I said, I’ll take it back. A good girl, you see, obedient. But here’s the morally tricky bit. I didn’t let on that I had already finished it. My father was right, it was rather a nasty book, not really a suitable thing for me to read at all, I knew that. I have often wondered if he was surprised by my acquiescence, but if he guessed what was going on he didn’t say. That book was unpleasant, with some very weird sex scenes, but I don’t think it did me any harm. I put it out of mind. I was robust; the delicate ones were my parents, I often felt they had to be spared the knowledge of difficult things, like the fact that their innocent daughter had read this book.
My father might have been surprised that I didn’t argue my right to read it. I often did have energetic conversations. Not because I defied him but because I disagreed with things he said. I remember one night at dinner a vigorous argument about modern art. I was studying art at school, very much my father’s doing. The school had put me into the Latin stream but he wrote flowery (and very Latinate) letters to the headmistress saying how important it was that I study art because I was good at drawing. The school fought back but he won. I regret the Latin but loved the art. The streaming was art and geography, or Latin and history, and yes, the former was certainly thought to be less intellectual. The art teacher, Jean McGilchrist, wasn’t having that. Her art involved history, language, philosophy; there was a practical side, painting, drawing, but what mattered was the ideas. She cultivated me. I was an ardent modernist in my youth and took it for granted that I would one day live in a Mies van der Rohe-style house with Bauhaus furniture. Ha, that didn’t happen. The argument at dinner was about Picasso. Miss McGilchrist taught us to look at paintings, gave us a technique and a vocabulary to understand them, and I wanted to make my father see what I did in Picasso. But he couldn’t, he liked art to be a recognisable picture of some obvious reality, a Constable, or a Gainsborough, whose beauty was clear to the most ignorant eye. I said that Picasso could paint like that if he wanted to, but that had been done so thoroughly in the past that he was keen to do something different. I got a book and showed him some paintings. No, he said, I’ll never see it, that, that’s an abortion.
I was stunned by that. You didn’t ever use that word in our house. Even the word pregnant was going a bit far. But what really shut me up was the realisation of how strongly my father felt about these things, so strongly that he was prepared to use a word like that to a 15-year-old. Seeing how thoroughly I had lost, I stopped arguing. I know there were other fierce arguments, but that one has stuck in my head for 60 years, my father’s vehement faint stumbling over an unsayable word.
I sometimes see myself as a kind of John the Baptist figure where my sisters were concerned, the one who came before, who paved the way. Consider the bicycle. My high school was a long way away, it took more than half an hour to walk there. You could catch two buses, but it was a dreary long way round. A bicycle would solve all my problems, and I would not have to carry my large Globite school port full of books. My father wasn’t keen. I talked and talked, nagged and nagged, probably. I felt I was close to persuading him, when my friend Louise riding to school got the front wheel of her bike caught in the tramline and tumbled over the handlebars. She broke her two front teeth.
All my work was undone. I never did get a bike. But my sister Brenda, three years younger, began the same routine and almost immediately father gave in. How unfair this was. I never ever learned really, though when I came to Canberra as a student I did one day borrow someone’s bike to ride to the swimming pool, which considering I’d never done it before was a rather dangerous enterprise.
Other times my relentless persuasion worked better. When I was in fourth year, as they called it, fifth year being when you did the Leaving Certificate, the school took us on an excursion to Sydney to visit the university. This was Newcastle Girls’ High, a selective school of clever girls and clever teachers. We got shown the beautiful old sandstone buildings, the science labs, the Union, the lawns. I fell in love with it. I wanted it. My father did not really believe in what he called ‘higher education for girls’. We’d get married and it would be all wasted.
Of course I knew the answer to that claim. The desirability of the educated mother, etcetera. For over a year I argued. He’d suffered through the depression when Thelma died and, at the beginning of it, he threw in his decent job and ran away up north, full of grief. Discovered how hard jobs were to get. I explained that if I had a degree, I would always be employable. And what if I never got married? Since he wouldn’t have a telephone in the house, it was extremely likely that I never would. Three daughters, no telephone, he’d be lumbered with us forever. I’d have to earn my own living.
The bike didn’t work, but the university did. Not Sydney, alas, money didn’t run to that. But Newcastle University was just starting, so I could live at home. Part of the point was not to live at home, but I didn’t say that. I know he never regretted that I talked him into it. In later years he used to boast how many degrees there were in the family, including his three sons-in-law. This was embarrassing, but it made him proud.
After four years of university degree I did a Dip -Ed. We had to go to Teachers’ College to do that. DipEds always hated Teachers’ College. It was repressive and childish and deadly dull. You weren’t allowed to wear trousers. But our year decided to be good. We would co-operate, see where that got us. I can’t now work out how we decided these things as a body, but we did. Each year had to do a play, usually some strange anachronistic one-act drawing room comedy. The English teacher gave us a book of these to choose from. No, we said, we are going to do Medea. (These decisions seemed to come as some sort of divine inspiration.) And we did. I wanted to be Medea, but that role went to a girl with a huge head of red hair. I was the leader of the chorus, a fine meaty role, and I was considered to be very good with the words. We had floating muslin costumes that we dyed various brilliant colours. It was a great success.
We were good about sport. I got a tennis umpire’s certificate. Our reward was that we could choose whatever sport we wanted. Golf, we said, in that curious one-voiced way. The teachers blanched a bit, but said okay. They didn’t really honour it, we only got to go twice. And classes were still very boring. I read a book under the desk, a novel. There were two mantras for the teachers of teachers, the first: You can’t possibly teach until you’ve done the method subject, in my case English and history. The other: A graduate can teach anything. The contradictions didn’t occur to us. We weren’t supposed to have any other jobs; the scholarships were generous and all our time was for course work. I was tutoring in the English department at the university, and instead of objecting they would mutter sotto voce to distinguished visitors: One of our girls is tutoring at the university. Hypocritical, I thought.
At the end of year exams, the psychiatry lecturer told us he would give us a copy of the exam paper so we could prepare our answers. Seven questions, five to be chosen. There were 21 of us, we divided each question into three parts and each one of us researched a thorough answer, then we went out to the Student Representative Council at uni and roneoed them all off, and there we were, with 21 detailed responses. We all did well.
A record I treasure is the group photo. There we are, out on the hockey field, lined up on chairs and benches for posterity. Suddenly a bloke called Sep notices a ball by the fence. Hang on, he says, and rushes off to get it. He sits down in the middle of the front row, holding a big brown medicine ball. We are all smiling and laughing at Sep, so we look happy. I like to think of later archivists looking at that photo and wondering what on earth the ball has got to do with section 401. Nothing but Sep’s fancy. Over which we were as usual united. We might have made a political decision not to be rebellious, but we w
eren’t going to be wimps.
Virtuous and hard-working. I set up a precedent in the family. But my sister wasn’t like that. She wasn’t particularly academic, liked to play hockey, listen to the Top 40. My father couldn’t stand pop music. When Brenda came home from school, my mother would let her listen to the radio, turned very low, but she had to turn it off the minute father came home. My sister thought this was horribly unfair and said so. Fierce battles followed. My mother always said it was because father and daughter were too much alike, stubborn, convinced of their own rightness. They survived these, unless my mother intervened. Sometimes she thought my father was being cruel, and mildly suggested a little more kindness.
My father loved my mother. Devotedly. He kissed her goodbye and hello on going to work and coming home. But this criticism enraged him and he wouldn’t speak to anyone for days. My mother learnt not to say anything, but didn’t always manage it. I dearly wanted Brenda to go to my school, and talked her into it. It was a bad idea. Teachers made comparisons, they did not pay attention to the differences between us. She was not dutiful and scholarly. They made her hate school and she left after the Intermediate Certificate. Did a secretarial course and got a job in an office. Every Saturday morning she went shopping and bought clothes. Eventually she moved out of home.
Then she met Fred. He was a glamorous young man about town, an accountant. He used to go rally driving. He had an Austin-Healey sports car. I should say that Brenda was very beautiful, tall, slender, with smooth long dark hair as was the fashion then. She suited the role of the girl in the Austin-Healey. All her life Brenda looked stunning. She’d buy clothes at second-hand shops and in sales and wear them with such éclat, such panache. She died in 2014, a few months short of her 50th wedding anniversary, and her 71st birthday, beautiful to the end, adored by her husband, her two sons and their wives, her four grandchildren, her big sister. None of us will ever get over her death.
She and my father became very good friends, when she was no longer living at home. Fred decided to stop being an accountant and get a degree, he went to university in Newcastle, full-time, while Brenda worked to support him. Rather unusually he didn’t ditch her as soon as he got his education. They went to Canada for a bit, and then to the university in Wagga.
So, there is daughter number two. Daughter number three went to the same school and got along quite well academically. She went to university. By this time it was the ‘60s, and she took up with a lot of lively people, you’d probably call them alternative. Hippies, counterculture people. I’d left home to go to Canberra when she was 14, so I didn’t know much about it. My mother told me a little, but Rosie would have made sure she didn’t know a lot. She got her degree and went on to Teachers’ College. She hated it, and her group didn’t manage to contrive that weird single-minded acquiescence that ours did. She ditched it, and followed her boyfriend to Brisbane. What a horror that was. In those days, if you’d had a teachers’ college scholarship, you had a bond to repay. (I had a bond too, I got out of mine by getting pregnant; apparently it was considered impolitic, given Australia’s keen immigration program, to dissuade the native born from having children by insisting on the paying out of bonds. Mine was 1,000 pounds; our house cost 7,000 pounds.) By leaving, this daughter defaulted. My father was beside himself, especially as an uncle was joint guarantor. The principal hauled them in. He suggested that Rosie was expecting. (This was the same principal who in my time called an assembly and announced that four girls had got pregnant in the last year and he held himself personally responsible for every one of them.) Remember it is the sixties, probably hard to conceive how shocking a pregnancy was out of wedlock. My father was enraged. And worried. Rosie was indignant, she wasn’t.
The bond got paid back, Rosie went to Brisbane, lived with Athol who had a job at the University of Queensland; he was an economist. Rosie got work at UQP, and thus began her career as one of the Press’s most beloved editors. She didn’t admit she was living with Athol, and when my parents went on their Women’s Weekly cruise, and the boat called in at Brisbane, Rosie rushed round the flat removing all evidence of him. She thought she deceived her father, wasn’t so sure about her mother. My mother didn’t say much but she was sharp. After a while they got married, and Rosie had the most beautiful twins, who grew to be tall goddessy girls with PhDs, who got married, separately, in Collette Dinnigan dresses. Then she had a son. Brenda, who’d been thinking of not having any children, fell in love with Rosie’s and went ahead.
I’ve remarked that I was a good dutiful daughter, virtuous, dependable, hardly gave my parents a moment’s worry. I’ve often regretted it. But Rosie, now, they were very much afeard at various moments that she was going to come to a bad end. So when she didn’t but transmogrified into a respectable and married young mother they were mightily relieved. In the early 70’s she and her husband went on sabbatical to England, and while they were away Athol’s father was killed, when his motor-cycle collided with a truck. Athol rushed home to look after his mother, and Rosie followed more slowly and with great difficulty, travelling with twin toddlers not being very much fun. Their house in Brisbane was rented out and anyway they wanted to be in Newcastle with Athol’s mother, so Rosie lived with my parents. Athol finished his sabbatical in that city.
My father had not long retired and had lots of leisure, he had a lovely time with the little girls. They were at that brilliant age of beginning to talk and see the world. They sat on his lap, he played with them, read them stories, took them to the beach. He had never known my children or Brenda’s quite so well, or his own, for that matter, he was at work and preoccupied. We did go and stay quite often, but that was often a bit hectic, everybody so looked forward to the visit but the invasion of four people could be hard work. But with Rosie and her girls everything was easy-going and comfortable, and I think it was one of the happiest times of his life. I often teased him about Rosie as the prodigal daughter; I was the good one who had never bothered them but Rosie, the troubled one, the lost one, got the fatted calf and the grateful welcome. My father, who understood exactly the biblical reference, didn’t like it much but agreed. So did Rosie, although she tended to disclaim it.
A few years later Rosie again spent quite a lot of time there, when father was ill, in hospital. I went up whenever I could, but I had a job, and so did Brenda, but Rosie brought her children down and lived with our mother and helped her through this difficult time.
When we all lived at home together we fought and had arguments and got into terrible furies with one another, (though I don’t think I was as bad as sometimes claimed, for instance I don’t think I ever ripped rollers out of anybody’s hair), but once we all left home, for Canberra, Wagga, Brisbane, we got on very well and developed the most powerful love for one another. We spent hours a week on the phone, visited whenever we could. After she left UQP and became a freelance editor, Rosie worked on my books. She was the most wonderful editor. We had terrific arguments about commas (it’s my job Marion to tell you these things, but you’re the writer, you can ignore me if you want) but more drastic things were no problem. She trembled when she felt obliged to tell me that she thought I should lose the first chapter of The Apricot Colonel, but I looked at it and said mildly, yes, you’re right. After my fierceness over punctuation she couldn’t believe it was so simple.
And now I’ve lost Rosie too. She died in 2012, after some months of illness. She was 65. All the people she had ever edited sent her loving and supportive messages, and her daughters made a fat scrapbook out of them. I cannot believe I have lost both my sisters. Both, and both younger than me, my little sisters, who were supposed to be there for my ever. It makes the world a cold and dreary place, sometimes. So many deaths, including my husband 17 years ago; the day before this anniversary I got a letter addressed to him, of which the first words were: Do you want to live another 15 to 25 years? It was an advertisement for krill-oil capsules. It helps to have a black sense of humour at these moments. And luc
ky I have now got my dear companion, who is a poet, as well as my son and my beautiful granddaughter. Judging by her stroppiness she is going to be a rebellious daughter; at seven she shows every sign of it. She thinks that I am a bit of a dill, she is very fond of me but I do need straightening out from time to time. Oh granny, she says, no, that’s not right. It usually is, but I have trouble convincing her. She is a golden mini-goddess of a child, with a great quantity of completely blond hair, where on earth did that come from? Blue eyes, too, large and candid, when all the people around including her mother are dark-haired and brown-eyed. Her grandfather, my husband who died in 1998, had golden red hair and blue eyes, perhaps that is the inheritance.
Yesterday (a Tuesday late in November 2015) we went after school to a new café-bar-bookshop called Muse that has lots of literary events. I’d heard that it has a large portrait of me hanging on a blank wall. You’re so famous, granny, said Bianca. She thought the picture was beautiful, and so it is, wonderful washes of colour, though I see myself looking a bit anguished. It’s by Leeanne Crisp. Bianca had a robust afternoon tea of cake, strawberries and ice-cream, with lemonade. Lot of sugar, remarked her father. She engaged in lengthy conversation with the bookshop man about the book she wants, called I think The Day the Crayons Came Home; she’s told me a lot about this book. I love the way she engages in serious discussions with people without any self-doubt. She is proud of the fact that she reads books with chapters. She never walks anywhere, she always runs, which doubtless explains how she stays slim despite cake.
On the way home in the car she said to me, very firmly: Granny, this is true. (You know this means that it is very unlikely to be so.) If you put up Christmas decorations before December 1 then an elf kills a baby dolphin. Really? I said. I don’t think elves kill baby dolphins. Yes, yes they do.
Afterwards I googled this, received wisdom is that it is a baby reindeer. Who’d have thought it?
