by Biff Ward
Oh, he laughed, Marx and Engels. The Collected Works of Marx and Engels. And Lenin too.
We all laughed. Ridiculous.
But that year of 1954, it wasn’t so funny. Dad’s close friend from the Communist Party, Rupert Lockwood, had come to Canberra to appear at the Petrov Commission. He stayed with us and, as an eleven-year-old, all I remember of what was actually the outstanding historic event of the 1950s passing through our home, is that Dad said, You mustn’t tell anyone that Rupert is staying with us.
That was easy: we were used to secrets.
Having moved to Canberra, we were near Australia’s snowfields. When a cold snap brought falls as far north as the Brindabellas, visible from the streets of Canberra, Dad said, We’ll go and see it. We can drive . . .
He had seen snow once in his life: a young man’s trip from Geelong Grammar up to Mt Buffalo. Mum had never seen it, nor us, with grains of Sydney sandstone still gritting between our toes.
We bundled into our warmest clothes and headed west up the curving mountain road towards Mt Franklin. It was a day of particular tension in the front seat, Dad’s jaw clenched, a palisade between them. The car chugged upwards on the dirt road with its tiny tinny engine.
Who’ll see it first? he asked, trying to cheer the day for us. We already had gimlet eyes boring holes through the windscreen, willing the white stuff to appear.
What does it feel like? Mark asked.
Just water, he answered. It melts in your hand.
We came around a gradual curve into a small straight and, all in a second, Mum’s door flew open and she fell out of the car, out of sight, gone.
Dad’s stamp on the brake lurched the car to the left, his face surprised into disbelief, but his voice came out angry-sounding: Jesus! Margaret’s fallen out of the car.
Mark and I spun to look behind and there was Mum in her good grey overcoat, sitting crookedly in the middle of the wet dirt road. Before we could get beyond our shock, Dad was there with her and they were walking back to the car with his hand on her arm, steering her near her elbow, his extended forearm ensuring that there was a column of cold air between them. She eased back into the car and made some light remark to us, to our scared faces in the back, The door just opened . . . don’t worry. She gave a sheepish laugh.
The doors of the Austin were hinged at the back, the opposite of cars today, so if the door became loose the wind would fling it wide open very fast. They had a sticking point around the ninety-degree angle, so when both doors were open it looked from the front like a hippo with elephant ears. It’s astonishing that she didn’t get hit by the door, that when she fell she went out beyond the reach of that great flap of metal.
The whole incident took only a couple of minutes. We drove on quickly after Dad reached over to make sure her door was locked and commanded her not to lean on it anymore. I was wondering if she really fell or if she threw herself out of the car and I knew that Mark and Dad were wondering too. The way Dad shouted, Jesus! Margaret’s fallen out of the car, rang slightly false. The wording and even his tone were not quite right. It was almost as though he was not surprised. Maybe she’d threatened to do it when they were alone together in the night. Neither of those doors ever flew open on any other occasion.
We drove on in silence, the cold mountain air outlining our four bodies, each alone in the full car. It’s one of the memories that I forgot, completely forgot, until Mark reminded me long long after.
Oh, yes, I said, I remember. And at once she came into view, her spinning bottom just come to a stop, her good coat in the dirt, her body slightly twisted, her legs a tumble in front of her, her dazed face.
It’s embarrassing to write about because whether she fell or whether she jumped, there ought to have been some engagement with what had happened, there ought to have been some kind words, a gesture.
After that first taste of snow, as the summer came and I finished primary school, we had a beach holiday, the only one during our Canberra years. Dad couldn’t afford holiday houses but this was one we didn’t have to pay for. Friends who’d taken a job overseas were leaving their two oldest children in Australia, headed for boarding school—would we like to have these two weeks at Mossy Point if we took the boys with us? One from my class and one from Mark’s, friends of ours.
It took seven hours then to drive from Canberra to the ocean. A dirt road, a winding mountain track plummeting through tree ferns, two punts. We went down the day before the boys and arrived on dusk to find a house backing onto a creek. We could hear the surf through the banksias. The general store—the front room of someone’s house—was across the road. Dad went over and bought milk, butter, the staples we had not been able to bring in those pre-esky days. I pointed to a pink musk stick and we had one each.
Within an hour or two, Mum was accusing him of having an affair with the lady in the shop. Going on holiday, moving about, being out of routine in any way made her imaginings worse. And the thing about Mum’s accusations, her irrationalities, was that she held them with an intense, immovable passion so nothing else existed while one of them occupied her mind. Maybe it was because Dad was enjoying the salty tang breezing in the window, that he snapped so completely. He suddenly grabbed her and manhandled her into the bathroom which was on the verandah, so it had a lock on the outside.
You can come out when you stop being mad, he rasped.
It was a first for Mark and me: a new kind of scuffling violence on top of his abject despair. We stared in mute horror.
Next morning, dressed to drive to Bateman’s Bay to pick up the two boys, we begged to be allowed to look at the beach. We won’t get wet, promise! Just a look! He nodded and off we flew.
There was a huge curving bay with just us and some kestrels squealing overhead. We took off our shoes. My blue flowered skirt became spattered; we ran in and out, daring each other to go further. The waves weren’t very big but we let them knock us over anyway and fell squealing. We ran back to the house, dripping and exultant. We caught waves! we crowed.
Come on, dry clothes, Dad chuckled.
When I was dressed anew, Dad took me aside, walked me down to the back bedroom where the boys were to sleep. We sat on one of the beds.
Darling, I want to ask you to do something . . . but not if you don’t want to . . . He was tense. He’d never spoken to me with such earnestness before.
I watched him closely.
Mum is . . . well, you know how she is . . . he was looking intently at me, then at the floor.
Yes, I nodded.
Well, the boys . . . I don’t know what to tell them, what to say to them . . . about Mum.
More nodding from me.
I was wondering . . . do you think you could say something to them? Work out what to say?
Shortly after they arrived, I went back into that room and said to them, Mum’s a bit funny. Just don’t take any notice.
They each gave me a brief look and said, Okay.
We spent day after day on the beach of endless sky and wheeling birds. Dad was proud of his body surfing and on the back beach where the big waves were, he told us, Make your body like a board!
We bobbed in the water, trying to pick the right moment to get on a wave. He showed us by becoming very board-like himself and shooting right onto the sand. Then he held me till the exact moment the wave lifted and hoisted me forward, yelling, Arms out in front! Go!
I landed with my nose in the sand and couldn’t get to my feet fast enough to run back and be a board again.
We learnt to say, That’s got too much water! or, Get off, it’s a dumper!
He tried rock fishing: someone had told him what size line you needed to catch a groper and he brought one home, a fat blue fish. The next day, leaping back from a rogue wave, he slipped and gashed his thigh and jarred his ribs, maybe even broke something. Deciding to quieten down, he read On Our Selection in a shiny new edition, sitting on the front verandah in dappled sunlight, bursting into hoots of laughter and then grabb
ing his ribs, Oh, oh. God it hurts! with a grin.
Even seeing him read in a chair—as opposed to sitting at his desk—was a treat. Mum skulked inside all day. We pelted back to the beach.
In finding the words to alert the two brothers and appease Dad, I was repositioned in relation to my mother. I had become his helper.
From the letters to his parents around that time, a picture emerges: I don’t think she will ever be really right again, nor apparently does the doctor . . . She’s more or less capable of doing all the usual things a person does. But she remembers things that didn’t happen and forgets things that did many times daily. She gets obsessed about one thing at a time and doesn’t notice the others . . . Doesn’t listen or hear, or if she appears to, forgets all about it within a few minutes: which doesn’t prevent her from accusing me from time to time of ‘not telling her things’ etc. She’s chronically late for everything from meals to replies to a question and has not a normal sense of time.
What is most astounding is the usual pattern in Dad’s letters whereby he tells his parents of a mad-making interaction and then ends with some version of but she really is better than she has been for a long time. He looks for the good always. She’s no worse, by and large, perhaps better if anything. He’s optimistic and hopeful to a laughable degree.
SEVEN
Shorthand
In spite of Dad’s optimism, Mum’s state was coming to some kind of head.
The hall of the flat, where you came in through the only door, was the hub. On the left, the northern side, lay the living room, Mark’s tiny sliver of balcony-room and the main bedroom where winter sunlight shone in the windows. On the right, the southern side, lay the kitchen with its gloomy dining nook, the bathroom and my bedroom. They were in that dark hall when I first heard her say it: I did do it! I killed her.
I was in bed, nearly asleep. Some argument had started between them and she was following Dad to the toilet, which was why they were in the hall. She didn’t just say it, she shouted it. My heart stopped. Dad let out a terrible groan and slammed out the door and away into the night. I didn’t hear the car start which meant he’d gone to shudder and shake at someone else’s flat. He could have gone for a walk, a cleansing stamp, but it wasn’t his way. He liked to be with people. She went back to the kitchen, to her cigarettes and coffee. Silence.
She said it other times in those Canberra years, but never with the shocking force of that first time. Well, it was the first time for me. Maybe Dad had heard it many times by then. Maybe she said it when he went to the police station to take her home the time she gave herself up in Mosman.
Some days after that outburst, Dad came to my door to say goodnight.
Dad . . .? I said.
Yes, darling. He came towards me, sat on the bed.
How did Alison die? I whispered. I knew I’d been told, but what I’d heard Mum shout told me there was more to the story, just as I’d feared since I was four or five and had asked the question about how Alison drowned and his answer had left question marks hanging in the air.
He took a deep breath. And then he told me the old story, the story he’d decided to live with. She drowned. She drowned in her bath. That’s what happened, darling, he said, holding my hand. Mum fainted and Alison drowned.
I could see he was trying to make it all right for me, to scratch out those words he realised I’d heard. I nodded. I wanted him to stay but he kissed me goodnight and left the room.
In the 1940s and 1950s, there was only one phrase available to describe my mother’s state: a nervous breakdown. One heard this phrase: so and so had had a nervous breakdown people would say, always in hushed tones. Those two words, ‘break’ and ‘down’, strong and definitive in their own right, were not sufficient to describe what we lived with. Yet there were no other words. We were afloat without language.
Once I came upon him crying alone. I’d burst into the living room to ask him something and surprised him standing at the fireplace, his head on his steepled hands with his elbows propped on the mantelpiece. His shoulders were shaking. He straightened quickly, flicked the tears from his face and managed a lopsided smile. What is it, darling? he asked.
Before that, I’d only seen him cry twice. The first time was when he realised his brother-in-law, John Gooden, who was also a close friend from his youth, was going to die. John was married to Dad’s sister Claire and they had been in Britain after the war. John had nephritis, a congenital kidney disease which was killing him in his early thirties. They had come home so that John could see his family again.
I was only eight but I can still see John being lowered from the plane on an elevator platform at Mascot and put into an ambulance like an item on black and white Movietone News. I can still feel the tightness in Dad’s hand where it was squeezing mine. We followed the ambulance in a taxi—through the city, across the bridge to our house in Mosman.
The next morning, Dad took Mark and me up over the hill to our local shops to buy barley sugar. We bought two packets, a dozen long twists of boiled orange sweet and six tubes of barley sugar lozenges.
The doctor said this might really help, Dad explained.
I wondered if lollies could really help a grown-up. We were allowed to eat one each on the way home. Then no more, said Dad, John needs them.
They stayed a week, resting John for the final trip home to Adelaide. The doctor came every day to the big bed where John lay on Dad’s side. It was the last night that they were there that I saw Dad crying. The doctor had just left and we were all, except John, in the tiny dining room. Claire was telling Dad what the doctor had said and tears started rolling down his cheeks. They walked into each other’s arms and stood there, two adults crying. It wasn’t for long. Dad pulled away and scrubbed at his face and shook himself.
I had been watching from near the door. Hardly breathing. I thought only kids cried.
The second time I saw him cry was one night at tea time in Mosman, the four of us sitting around the table when I asked him, What was World War Two?
‘The war’ had been spoken of every day of my life it seemed. We had ration coupons for butter and meat and sugar until I was five or six.
Well, darling, he took a deep breath. It was a time when countries fought each other . . . when . . . He took another breath.
A war is a time when men decide to kill each other . . . he faltered. His voice was juddering to a stop. He started crying. His shoulders heaving, he looked at me and said, War is terrible. I can’t say any more.
He must have cried at other times but he kept them from me. Finding him crying this time at the mantelpiece is linked to that summer and autumn of 1955, the year I started high school, a season of looming disaster.
I was with them on the usual Saturday morning shopping round when we pulled into the BP petrol pumps on Canberra Avenue. Mum was saying, You have to. You have to stay home . . . I know it’s going to happen.
She’d been going on all morning about how someone was going to attack him. I was only half-listening, tired of it.
You’re mad, he said. It’s a delusion. I could hear his back teeth touching, feel the grinding in his jaw. He turned his head slowly, looking away to the right, waiting for the petrol man to come.
If it goes on, he said slowly, I’ll have to send you away. He’d spun around towards her, so the last words came out in a burst.
No, she whimpered.
He snapped the door open and was gone, round the back to the air-hose, to being busy. We were left, she and I, with his words coiling around the gear-stick, the thin black rod with the perfect ball on its head. I tried to think of her going away or being taken away. Would it mean an ambulance again? People watching? I was looking at her, her bent head right in front of me, her shoulders jiggling from her hands being rubbed hard and deep at each other. I was suddenly swept with rage. Especially with how she was sitting so bent and alone, so separate from us, from me.
Just don’t go, I ground out. Fix it so you don’
t go. I willed her to pull herself together.
She turned and gave me a quick look and a sad little smile. She mumbled and turned to stare out her window through the sticks of winter trees to where the Russian Embassy sat stolidly empty across the road.
On this one occasion, wanting to see some backbone in her had overridden my loyalty to Dad. I don’t know how she managed to batten her imaginings down, but she wasn’t taken away.
Another day, I was sitting on the concrete circle, a kind of manhole that pinpointed the middle of the courtyard, with Jan. Her family were not university people and she didn’t usually have anything to do with us but this day she winded me with a question.
What’s wrong with your mother?
Panic rose in me as I sat there with the thought ‘this means they talk about us’ roaring through my mind. I didn’t know what was wrong with her myself. Then as I opened my mouth and took a breath, I noticed how fast my brain was working to concoct a story that would shut her up, make her stop asking this appalling question.
She had an accident, I began. A car accident, I added, feeling relief wash through me. Yes, I thought, a car accident—no one judged a person for being damaged by a car.
Giving myself time to find some words, I said, You mustn’t tell anyone.
Oh, I won’t.
It affected her brain, I went on. There was damage.
I really had her attention.
She can’t help herself, I finished in a rush.
Really? I remember how her eyebrows rose up her forehead.
She went inside soon after. I didn’t imagine her mother would be so easily brought around but she never asked again. I had invented an acceptable story—a misfortune which could befall anyone, a story of bad luck striking, rather than an account of something inside my mother, something which could be construed as her fault, something which could reflect on all of us. Thus I learnt that when there are not adequate words, fiction will suffice.
