by Biff Ward
Her bad patches by this time consisted of fearful imaginings and relentless talk about them, all of it directed at Dad. We went there one more time—again, she stayed inside brooding. Maybe we would have gone more often if she had been free of whatever it was she scratched and worried at.
The Austin brought home another truth, something we’d lived with for a long time but now could not escape. Wherever we went, to be seated behind Dad meant seeing him stare at women. Every time we passed a female walking in the same direction; young, old, wide, slim, he would turn his head as we passed her and watch, peer, ogle. If a woman was coming towards us he would stare fixedly and, if she passed some measure of his own devising, swivel to watch her walk away. While we calibrated his every move from behind him, it was the feeling that emanated from him, the intensity of his concentration, that I hated the most.
I sat behind him and prayed. I’ll believe in you God, if just this once, you make him not turn his head.
The Albert Schweitzer-inspired missionary drives of the early 1950s had recruited me to Sunday School, so I was being very serious with God. He could send me a sign. Over and over I tried but still Dad never missed. What, I wonder, was Mum’s perception, even through all her muzzy thinking, of what he was doing? What did she feel as he ogled other women?
That first year we had the Austin, there were trips on the weekends, excuses for enjoying the car. We visited a Party home on the outskirts of Sydney, we went on picnics, we explored Newport and beaches further north.
On the way home from school one day, I met Sister Mary, the deaconess of my Anglican church. Elizabeth, you haven’t been coming to Sunday School, she said.
I can’t, Sister Mary, I explained. We have a car now and I have to go on picnics.
Well, Elizabeth, she said, speaking slowly and distinctly. You need to remember that ‘joy’ stands for Jesus first, Others second and Yourself last.
We were standing on the Queen St footpath under a deep-shade tree and I looked at her, wondering how she could imagine that I, a nine-year-old girl, could stay behind while my family went out for the day. What was wrong with her? It was the last straw. My period of prayer and devotion was over. I gave up appealing to my maybe-God to stop Dad’s swivelling head and tried to look away instead.
Suddenly, we were to leave Sydney because Dad had won a scholarship to do a PhD in Canberra. In the early 1950s, most people had never heard of such a thing.
In the months before we left Sydney, family friends with Adelaide connections had a new baby who died. Dad told us they were coming to visit because of Alison dying. They want to be with people who’ve had the same thing happen to them, he said.
I stood about, eager to hear talk of Alison. It was already part of our family folklore that, as a baby, I watched people. Like a little old man, Dad had said. Mum had agreed, saying, You always followed people with your eyes.
So I watched and waited. But they hardly spoke at all. Glenda coughed on a cake crumb and dabbed at her tears and then there was more silence. In a letter to his parents, Dad tells them that he went to the funeral of the baby and that When it was over, John wanted to come with me to Alison’s grave nearby.
That is the only indication I have that he ever visited the grave. It may also be a sign that it was still mostly men who attended funerals, a relic from the previous century. Perhaps Mum had nothing to do with Alison’s funeral, perhaps she never in her life saw the grave of her own baby.
Soon after that visit, Dad left in the Austin to find us a house in Canberra. When he came back, he shook his head. There was nothing.
In letters to his parents at this time, he outlined the pressures of trying to find somewhere for us to live at the same time as starting his research, getting to know his supervisor and meeting new people. He never forgot this period: after he became an academic in Armidale in 1957, he was extraordinarily generous to newcomers, often providing bed, meals, car and connections that might help them get their feet on the ground.
The university in Canberra was going to provide us with a flat but it was months away so Dad was trying to find a home in the meantime. Mum started one of her ‘compulsions’. She was at him night and day. We had to move now, we must. We could not wait, with her eyes going beady and impenetrable.
So Dad caved in and made a complex arrangement with a family of strangers—we were to swap houses, furniture and all. We would live in each other’s houses for several months until our permanent home was available. Except that Mum couldn’t wait even a couple of weeks until the other family was ready for the swap. Had to do it now. This week. Next weekend. She looked as though she would really unhinge, so Dad extracted an agreement from the matriarch of the other family that Mum and Mark and I could move in and live with her and her grown-up family until they were ready to go to Sydney. Dad would continue to stay at Havelock House where he had a single room.
The drive to Canberra took all day, hours and hours of bush, the road winding between two green walls. We stopped by the roadside for lunch, sandwiches Dad made where all the fillings were cut precisely to cover every skerrick of bread. We arrived on a Sunday night and we filled the living room of this other family, the four of us among their sofa and armchairs. I was given a bed on a closed-in porch. Next morning, Monday, we started school on the other side of town because it was near the flat we were due to occupy later.
Four days later, on Thursday afternoon, as I came out of my fifth grade classroom looking about for Mark, I saw Dad. Parents did not enter schools in those days except for truly extraordinary reasons. All the kids were watching to see who the strange man was. He raised his arm and tried to smile. We moved towards each other. Mark appeared from his fourth grade room and Dad gathered us to him.
We have to go back to Sydney, he said.
We stared at him.
I’m sorry, darlings. He took our hands, one on each side.
When? I asked, as we moved off. I liked this new school.
Now, he said. Right now.
The weirdness, the unpredictable was back, had in fact followed us here. It had to be something Mum had done. Sure enough, there in the tiny car, Mum was squashed into the back seat with all our belongings stacked up beside her and around her. Her eyes had the look that meant she was obsessing about things we couldn’t see, and that she could barely see us.
I want you two to sit beside me, Dad said. He couldn’t even look at her.
It meant we were sharing a bucket seat. There were no seat belts then, nothing except the gear-stick to constrain our wriggling as we settled into this new arrangement. We drove the curves out of Canberra in silence. We chugged past the lapping waves of Lake George in silence. We stopped at the Paragon Café in Goulburn for tea: mixed grill, salad and chips. Dad tried to cheer us with a shared banana sundae for dessert but we ate that in silence too.
When we returned to the car, it was the same, Mum in the back corner, the three of us in the front. Dad rummaged in his kitbag and pulled out some papers. Hold these, he said to me.
As we got going, jumpers and scarves pulled tight, he pointed to the top page. Read me the lines there, he said, and I’ll teach you to sing them. I want you to sing them to me.
Dad did not sing. Not anything. We wondered what was happening. Could this journey get any stranger?
The underside of the dashboard was open, so we could hold a page there where light fell down on our knees and read by leaning forward and peering. It was our first sight of the ballads that would consume Dad’s life for years to come. ‘Click Go the Shears’. ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. ‘Wallaby Stew’. ‘Botany Bay’. Like most people, we had never heard these songs before. Dad was researching Australian ballads for his PhD and had found a tiny coterie of people who were also collecting them. Later that same year, he would go on trips with a tape recorder and visit custodians of songs in far-flung corners of the eastern states.
I looked down and read out a line. Dad and Mark repeated it. I read the next. Eventually, w
e did whole stanzas. Then freeform, with me only filling in when Dad went blank. When we had the words pretty straight, he would intone what he thought was the tune. We chorused back in our best singalong voices, filling the car with these ballads, filling the space he created for the three of us with the light from the dash glowing from the page up to our faces.
I like Toorali-oorrali-addity, I said. Can we sing that again?
Yes, let’s, he laughed. Singing Toorali-oorrali-addity . . .
Mark said, I like the shearers’ one, so we shuffled papers and struck up, for the sixth time, Click go the shears, boys, click, click, click . . .
As the miles droned on, Mark fell asleep on my shoulder, Dad kept his eyes on the road and there was not a sound from the back seat. I kept looking through the papers on my knees, going over and over the words so that next time I would know them by heart.
We arrived home after midnight. Even though Mum was agitated, Dad went back to Canberra on the weekend and at school on Monday Mrs Bushell sneered, So you don’t know whether you’re moving or not, Elizabeth?
I didn’t know what we were doing. That night the dream of being laughed at in the playground was back and I woke up snuffling.
Dad came home every second weekend. When Mum started up about how we had to move now, now, go back with him this very day, we must—he became harsh.
Shut up, he said, his voice fraying. For God’s sake, stop your rattling.
Finally, there came a Saturday morning when we found him in the bed and he grinned at us and said, We’ve got a house! We’re moving next week.
At breakfast, when I was putting the milk away, he said, No more ice-chest, no more leaks. We’ll have a fridge in Canberra.
Truly? I felt as though I’d been promised sweets.
Next time the ice-man came, I followed him at a trot down the side path and asked if I could have a look in the back of the van.
Sure, he said, grabbing the next block and running off.
Dark grey metal encased the little storeroom on wheels. Ceiling, walls and floor were shiny wet and smelled of fresh pennies. The ice bricks were stacked tightly at the dark end with a few loose near the door. I breathed in deeply. I don’t remember any other goodbyes.
Again we drove through the trees all day but this time a lorry with all our clothes and furniture was behind us. We would not be going back.
Mum spoke occasionally, always imagining things going wrong. Did you ask how much it is? Will the people really be gone? Does the truck know where to come?
Whatever she said, he answered cold and sharp, I’ve already told you!
No matter how I tried to ignore it, half of me was waiting, knowing she would ask the same questions five minutes later, questions which even we knew were skew-whiff the first time she asked them. And when she did, he really blew up—shouted at her and pounded the steering wheel. Bit by bit, we came to call these exchanges ‘the fighting’ and, no longer hidden by the closed door, it spilled into our daily lives and became ordinary.
More and more, it looked as though he had to do everything.
That first day back at the Canberra school, I almost ran into the grounds. No one made jokes about me coming and going. There were boys and girls in the same class, the uniform was easy-come and there were bike racks, rows of them, filled with bicycles of every colour. My teacher had a stoop and kind crinkly eyes. After a week, he said my writing was so good that he wanted me to create a chart for the class, each letter in upper and lower case for them to copy. With the first stroke of my pen, he expunged the malodorous Mrs Bushell.
Our new house had two bikes in the shed, both a dirty green, one for a man, one a ladies’ bike.
Can we ride them? we pleaded.
They aren’t ours, demurred Dad.
A week later, he told us he’d talked to the owner and bought them for three pounds each.
We hardly got off them for a year. They were so old—the green faded to a eucalypt grey and very unfashionable shapes—that from the first day, Mark called his ‘my crate’. The main fork of mine disintegrated with rust and was welded back together in a warty gnarl of metal. We bought puncture kits with our pocket money and I was given a basket to hang off the handlebars for my birthday.
We hadn’t been there long when Dad held a party, bigger than any Sydney party I could remember. I liked going to sleep to the sound of his parties, the voices full of camaraderie, the lefties gathering in their tribe for a night within the pall of McCarthyism. Those nights, too, were reprieves for us because it meant our home was not pulsating with the tension between Mum and Dad.
This was his first Canberra party, yet he already seemed to know lots of people. They poured in the door, shouting, Hello! Good on you!
It was the day the Rosenbergs were executed—19 June 1953—and the party was a wake. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were members of the American Communist Party and they had been found guilty of passing information about making an atom bomb to the USSR. There was worldwide uproar about the executions, from those opposed to capital punishment on any grounds to the huge raft of people who believed the Rosenbergs were innocent, that they’d been framed amid the Cold War hysteria of the time.
It now appears, from documents that have come to light way after, that Julius probably was guilty as charged, though Ethel almost certainly was not. All the other accused were merely gaoled for varying lengths of time. Whatever the truth, on that bitter Canberra night, Dad and his friends believed both that the Rosenbergs were innocent and that capital punishment was obscene. In the morning, there was a spray of red wine across the pristine wall in the entrance way, dried the colour and viscosity of blood. I was transfixed, realising there had been wildness in the night.
It was not until we were grown up that we heard more. The Rosenbergs were mentioned at an after-dinner table and Dad said, We did what we could.
What do you mean? Mark asked.
We had a wake—at our place. At that Moore St house.
That was a big party, I said. I remember it.
Yes, it was. We made a wreath, he said, from things in the garden.
I pictured the crew-cut cotoneaster hedge, the pencil pine near the drive and the straggly winter bushes in the backyard. I couldn’t picture Dad threading twigs and leaves but clearly others had these skills.
At one in the morning, he went on, Ron Heiser and I took it to the American Embassy.
Truly? We were all attention, picturing ratty-tatty Ron and his out-of-control drinking.
Yes. We drove right up to the steps of the Embassy and Ron got out . . . Dad started to chuckle.
What? What? we cried.
Well, you know Ron. I thought he was just going to put it there, the wreath and the card, and they’d find it in the morning—but he rang the bell! He rang the bloody bell! he exploded with the laugh of incredulity.
He didn’t!
Yes. I was hissing at him: ‘Come on, Ron! Get in the car! Get in the bloody car!’ But he just stood there and rang and rang the bell until lights came on and he could hear people pounding down the stairs inside. Then he ran.
We were all in the moment, hooting and exclaiming.
I drove out of there on two wheels! he finished.
Everyone was laughing, especially Mark and me, picturing the mighty little Austin with its raggle-tailed bits.
What did the card say? I asked, as we subsided.
Forever in memory of the Rosenbergs, from the people of Australia.
I told this story at his eightieth birthday bash in a Chinese restaurant in Armidale to an audience of a hundred people, including the Country Party-voting chemist and accountant who had become his friends over the years. Even though it’s the only instance we know of where he did such a thing, I told the story to honour the Rosenbergs and also to claim the seed of political activism which flowered in many of his descendants.
Not long after the party, we moved to The Flats, the university flats near Manuka which had been bought by the Austr
alian National University to house the influx of married PhD students, part of the post-war commitment to education. All the students were men, most had served in World War Two and they were now trying to create a career with children in tow. Mark and I were the eldest of a gang of twelve which included toddlers. The fathers were doing their research and the mothers stayed at home or had very small jobs.
The kitchen window of each flat looked out onto a central courtyard. Sometimes we heard grown-up shouts or sobs or guffaws floating from a window. There were sixteen flats in all and two communal woodlots where sometimes in the late afternoon a gaggle of the men would take turns with an axe. Sometimes the women would gather too and kids would circle the adults who were, for once, outside.
There were also some previous occupants: a bus-driver, an alcoholic journalist, some public servants. Every time a flat became vacant, a new family would move in with a PhD dad. Of the original cohort, I remember especially four—us, the Smiths where Bernard was doing a PhD about Australian art, the Heisers where Ron was in economics, and the Praeds where Max researched in psychology and had four, later five, children. The dads were all left-wing, irreverent towards authority and, if not actively kind, certainly not scary to children.
When Ron’s drinking got the better of him, Dad and Bernard helped the ambulance men manoeuvre the stretcher down the box-like concrete stairwell. When my mother’s solitude was too obvious, Kate Smith brought over a basket of mending and they sat on the front steps in the sunshine with their needles and cotton and cups of tea. If this happened on a weekend, the gang of kids would fling a concert together by raiding the dress-ups and announcing ourselves to this captive audience, the two sewing women. They would pause to watch us, smiling the while, and then clap. Mum would murmur something like, Lovely, darling. Very clever.
