by Biff Ward
Yes, I nodded. I see.
And there were a few shops. The blacksmith. The bakery. It’s where Doris’s family lived.
Doris was the nursemaid who looked after Mum until she was three.
So it was where the working-class people lived? I suggested.
Yes, I suppose you could put it like that, she said. They went to the local school. Doris married Arnold. He lived in the cottage on our place. His parents had worked on our place too.
So, I ruminated, so when you became a nurse, you were able to talk with people like that, to help them?
Yes, she said. Yes. It was just so interesting.
Her place in the pecking order of this Adelaide hillside began when her great-grandfather, Joseph Ind, ‘took up’ land where the district of Campbelltown snuggles beside the Adelaide Hills. Joseph was a dab hand at growing vegetables—initially on the banks of the Torrens River where the Festival Theatre now stands. With the money he made, he walked along the river until he found the rich loamy frontage he wanted. It was 1839, two and a bit years after the whitefellas’ arrival.
He grew more veggies and then an orchard which took root and prospered. He and his son then built the first storey of a splendid house and named it Balmoral. On the edge of the block, in ‘the village’, Joseph later built a pub which he called the Paradise Bridge Hotel after his favourite watering hole back in Gloucestershire. The pub was so popular that ‘Paradise’ eventually replaced the official name for the area, thereby giving my mother her mythical childhood address: Balmoral, Paradise. There were stables and a barn out the back under huge peppercorn trees, with lawns and flower gardens sweeping down to a tennis court at the front. Within a generation, my Ind relatives had transmogrified from vegetable gardener to the squire and his good wife.
Mum’s father, William Henry, was the third Ind man in a row to own the property which by then had paid for a second storey to be added to the house and financed the children to attend private schools. William married Alice Hooper from Gumeracha. Mum always kept a photo of her mother Alice, an Edwardian angel dressed in layers of lace, in an oval gold frame on her dressing table.
When I took to questioning her in her seventies, she once said with great feeling, That year after Lib got married, I had Mother to myself.
I started: had Mother to myself?
She went on as though I wasn’t even there. All to myself. At last. Just the two of us. It was marvellous.
What did you do? I asked.
Oh . . . she looked down past her knee into memory-land. Made cakes. Had visitors. Just did things together.
I tried to picture a life like that.
Maybe her longing to have her mother to herself stemmed from her beginning. Her birth was the third, coming in quick succession after her brother Dave and sister Lib. Alice then languished in bed for nearly three years, enabled by the nursemaid, Doris, a young woman whom Mum adored. At that point, one of Alice’s unmarried sisters, Nip or Moll or Tuck, came to the house, marched up the stairs and said, This has gone on long enough, Alice! I am taking this stuff [the laudanum] and you are going to get out of bed.
And she did.
Alice died, aged sixty, not long after I was born. She was a keen committee member of the South Australian Red Cross and at their annual fundraising, while carrying a loaded silver tea-tray, she tripped on a guy rope and struck her head on a stout wooden tent peg. She died gradually, over two months, from slow bleeding in the brain.
When the accident happened, Mum took me at ten weeks old on a troop train from Sydney to Adelaide. Carrycots being an accessory of the future, she emptied her suitcase and put me to sleep in it, with the lid propped open with a stick, while the soldiers flirted with her.
When I asked more about that time, she told me she visited her mother every day. I took you with me, she said, and you lay on the bed and Mother would hold your hand.
She had tears in her eyes.
A photo emerged from the recesses of the Adelaide Ind family as I was writing this. It shows my mother with her siblings, Lib and Dave, and her father. There are three young children—Lib’s son on her lap, Dave’s eldest in his grandfather’s arms, and me on my mother’s lap. It was taken during those two months that Alice lay dying. No one knows whether it was taken before or after she died. What is most striking to me is that my mother is staring at the ground in a manner that is instantly recognisable to me. It’s the stare that she perfected later, a set to her face which meant she was completely gone from whatever was happening around her, off in her own world, inside her own imaginings. Or is she thinking of Alison, that she is missing from this family tableau?
She hardly ever spoke of her father. An Ind cousin has supplied me with a studio portrait of this grandfather I never knew. He looks severe, a buttoned-up little mouth and eyes you can’t read. He died two years after Alice. The only times my mother talked about him left me with an impression of bleakness, a dark taciturnity which she avoided.
Standing, my mother’s father, William Henry Ind, with Dave’s son Christopher; seated, my Aunt Lib and her son Richard, my Uncle Dave and my mother with me on her lap—in the garden at Balmoral
At school, she jumped a year and in her finals in 1931, topped the state in biology and English. At her private girls’ school, she came top in all her subjects: a bright, clever girl.
The only surviving documents written by my mother are a few short letters to Dad’s parents. But Dad’s second wife, Barb, told me she once saw some poetry Mum had written and she particularly recalled a line about Dad: ‘You pompous in the shower.’ It’s a tiny note that tells me she was wry and witty but that was early on, from the time I hardly remember.
She spoke mostly, in the Mosman years, about the thrill she got from art though she no longer drew or painted. My brother Mark, who became an artist, remembers an exercise book full of anatomical drawings she had done in her nursing days. Excellent, he told me. They were really good. Accurate and alive—they were a pleasure to look at. I remember a couple of watercolours, bright and peaceful, her paintings of the garden at Paradise. All long gone.
There was no Big House, no servants and no drawing after she married Dad. Not that she ever made this comparison—but then, she didn’t talk much at all. When she did speak of her youth, it was about her mother and her sister Lib. That’s where the love lay.
I have seen only a few small black and white photos of her as a young woman before they married. Her sister Lib gave them to me after Mum had died. There are three taken on what is clearly a bush outing on a cold day in the Adelaide Hills and in each of them she is huddled in on herself, holding what warmth she can, turned away from the camera. There’s another set where she’s wearing a summery dress with short sleeves. She is sitting in the back seat of a car and again she is looking away. They are pictures of a lone person, someone who is able to spurn the expected response, the eyes turned towards the camera. Maybe she didn’t even hear the photographer say, Here, Marg. Look over here.
That’s how it often was for us, her not hearing, not seeing what was going on around her.
When I was in first grade and Mark in kindergarten, she failed one day to meet us at the Infants’ School gates and we walked the mile home on our own. The kitchen door was wide open, so we came in calling. Silence. I moved from room to room through the whole house and back again to the kitchen. Our little silver coasters of sultanas and cheese bits were not in their normal place on the kitchen table.
My mother as a young woman, before she was married
I know it was one of the first times I felt the sense of doom which later became familiar. It’s a knowledge children have which has no words but is made up of the angles of light through a window, the quality of an absence, the rush of feelings with nowhere to go, a miniscule tightening of skin and lips.
She’s not here, I said.
I want an apple, said Mark.
Get one.
He walked through to the dining table and reached to t
he blue crystal bowl which had been a wedding present. He stood munching while I climbed up the shelves of the kitchen cupboard so I could reach the Lactogen tin at the top.
Here’s the sultanas, I said, swinging down with one hand while the other clutched the navy-blue and gold tin. We can eat them while we wait.
We played in the garden, slow motion play with stones and sieves in the dirt, our ears pricked for the sound of someone, anyone, coming up the side path. The sun was nearly behind the plane tree in Mrs Courteney’s yard when we heard steps. We ran to the corner that looked down the narrow strip of black between our house and Dorothy’s picket fence.
Dad. Dad. We ran to him.
She’s not here. Mum’s not here!
He bent over and squeezed us each to him, then put us down, straightened his shoulders and went inside. We followed him, our beacon. We followed him as he made a tour of the house, coming back to the dining-room sideboard where she kept her handbag. Still there. He sat heavily on one of the cream chairs with its leather seat of mottled green and black. He opened his arms so Mark sat on a knee and I leaned against his leg.
I have to go and find her, he said in a heavy voice. He looked from me to Mark. Will you go into Dorothy’s and wait for me there?
We nodded.
Dorothy had curly black hair and she smiled a lot. She was bathing her son, Little Mark, who was two. I could help with that.
It was dark when Dad came back. I heard him say ‘police station’ to Dorothy while we were trying to show Little Mark how to eat his bread and butter with his mouth closed. I saw Dad kiss Dorothy on her neck near her ear as we left.
Where was she? I asked as we went up Dorothy’s yard to the hole in the fence.
It’s okay, she’s back now. Don’t worry, he said.
When I was in bed, nearly asleep, their voices rose.
I had to do it! she shouted. I had to go there!
Giving yourself up to the police is mad. He was trying to control his voice, trying not to yell.
I should be in gaol, she said.
Oh, God, he groaned.
How had he known where to find her? What took him to the police station on Military Rd with its bricks the colour of dried blood? Maybe she’d done it before.
And what of Mark and me? What effect was her strangeness having on us?
On clear nights when one of them went to draw the curtains, I would say, No, leave them open.
When they left the room and I was in darkness in my narrow bed, I twisted my head to look out the window and up into the sky. The beam of my eye rose over the fence, the backyards, out beyond Mosman, beyond Sydney even, to a larger place where anything was possible and there I could search until I found the star that was mine. I stared at it until I had to blink, trying to believe that it was possible that somewhere there was a planet just like ours with a girl just like me, just exactly like me, lying in her bed which had the same sheets and bedcover as mine, staring at my world, yearning to find me in return.
In the dining room, with its two doors and one window, I had my special seat at the table, the one I had chosen because it was the best for seeing both the doors. The window was a slight problem because it was behind me, over my right shoulder, but I was not so worried about danger from that quarter. It was the doors I needed to keep in view. I never spoke of this practice. I could not have said what the danger was—but I know I never deviated from that position at the table. I can remember how I checked out the room each morning as I sat for breakfast, each night as I sat up to dinner: the door to the hall, that other door to the kitchen and a flick over my shoulder to the window. Yes, it was the safest spot in the room.
Later, when we lived in other places, I would choose the dining chair that most effectively had its back to the wall. My obsessive need to do this faded to a mere preference after I left home. It came back in full force decades later when I was in conversation one day with two Vietnam veterans. One mentioned being in a restaurant. Backs to the wall, he said, and they both laughed.
I was nodding in recognition when I realised it was not only from my knowledge of post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans but also because I had done that myself. I knew deep in my bones what he meant.
Another sign of what effect her strangeness was having on me was the night I first heard Hansel and Gretel. The Mosman house had a verandah at the front, half of which was closed in with sliding panels of pebbled glass, the other half open to the elements. From there we could see higgledy lines of houses on the opposite hillside, a patchwork of russet brick, red tiles and cream paintwork. Just beyond was Taronga Park Zoo where we knew the lions were fed at 5 p.m., because the prevailing south-easterlies carried the roarings for their slabs of meat straight to where we stood. Still further out in that direction lay North Head, home to an array of searchlights which had been used to scour the skies for Japanese aircraft sneaking up on Sydney during the war. They continued to operate for a few years after and once we saw a plane pinned in the intersection of two beams of light, an insect caught in a conflux of yellow on black, jerking southwards. We could stand there watching our very own light show. Sometimes, Mum was even with us, all four of us marvelling together.
Mark slept at the glassed-in end of the verandah through the seven summers of our living there. He moved inside and shared my room for the winter months.
That evening of Hansel and Gretel we were on the verandah, Dad and Mark and I, sitting in an old armchair while Dad read to us. We were curled in his lap while Mum made tea at the other end of the house.
When the wicked stepmother sent the children away, I began crying. Dad looked sharply at me and pulled me a little closer. He must have wondered what it meant, my tears at an old fairytale. The way the children were sent away and then tried to save themselves, Hansel through his clever dropping of pebbles and his less well thought-out dropping of crumbs, Gretel through tricking the witch into peering inside the oven and then pushing her in, perhaps alerted me to the fact that even good fathers were not always around when you needed them.
While the children’s ordeal was precipitated by a stepmother, some part of me sensed it could be your very own mother, the one who was down the hall in the kitchen of this very same house making dinner for us.
THREE
The Father
From as young as I can remember, I see Dad welcoming people in, offering tea or beer, looking jolly because friends have come.
The most excitement I recall in the Woolwich house was the night his brother John came in late 1945. In Dad’s family, there were four children—him, then his sisters Jean and Claire, and John who was born when Dad was twelve. John was wearing his sailor uniform that night—navy bell-bottom trousers with precise horizontal creases every six inches down the flared legs. It had a close-fitting navy top with a dramatic white collar falling to a deep square at the back. There was laughter and loud voices, love crackling in the air between these two men, my father and his young brother.
John joined the navy when he left school, just before the end of the war. On the day of final victory, the population of Adelaide gathered in the streets and John climbed the statue of a rearing horse ridden by an Australian soldier in Boer War regalia, stood astride the rump of that triumphal bronze in the midst of the crowd and raised his arm. Dad made it into a family story, a vignette to show what a charming larrikin young John was.
Having missed the combat, John was off to Japan to secure the Allied victory as part of the occupation forces. The Woolwich visit was to say farewell before his overseas adventure. It was the last time he and Dad saw each other.
In April 1946 John toppled over a banister, five storeys down to the lobby, in a Tokyo hotel. It appears he fell because the banisters were only two feet high to fit the stature of Japanese people and also he was drunk. Affected maybe by my three-year-old memory of men being happily noisy, I’ve always imagined he was in the midst of telling a joke and flung his arms too far on the punch line. Dad believes he went
to sit on the railing. His sister Jean pictures him going to lean with his hip or his hand and missing, falling through that gigantic space to the tiles below.
Dad carried John with him always. He often called Mark ‘John’ and he hung beside his desk a sketch of John drawn by a Japanese art student. He tacked the navy-blue felt pennant from HMAS Arunta next to the framed drawing. He placed them there each time we moved, so Mark and I, and later the children of Dad’s second family—Charlie, Oliver and Sal—grew up knowing what John had looked like and feeling how Dad kept him close.
John died a month before we moved to Mosman. As well as Alison’s death, both of Mum’s parents had died while they were at Woolwich, so they arrived in this new house garlanded with wreaths of death of which I was unaware.
A week after we moved to Mosman, Dad ends a Sunday letter to his parents with this vignette of our domesticity: Well, dear ones, it’s 4.10 and Margaret and the children are asleep. It’s time for me to go and cook the dinner. We’re having the weekly leg of lamb tonight.
His letters serve to corroborate key memories of mine and they also give me glimpses, from his perspective, of the life we lived as a family. This one tells me that he cooked from the beginning. He had grown up in boarding schools where his father was the Headmaster and the food was prepared by a team of employees in a distant basement kitchen. Then he’d taught at Geelong Grammar where, again, meals just appeared. He’d hardly been in a normal kitchen until he married Mum and yet here he was, a dab hand at roasts and pots of pea and ham soup, even hefty slabs of cake.
A gas-fired copper and concrete tubs ran along a whole wall of the kitchen and he helped with the washing, levering steaming sheets out of the copper to thud and slop into the tub where they were rinsed in cold water. He drew the line at cleaning—I don’t remember him ever wielding a broom or vacuuming.
If fun were involved, in among the domestic round, it was always Dad. On summer evenings, we sometimes heard a rustling in the tree outside the dining-room window.
