by Biff Ward
Her delusions dogged our days—so-and-so must definitely not come to dinner even though already invited or Mark had to go to a new doctor because his eczema was a sign that he had a brain disease or the endless fantasms about people who were dangerous.
Dad would shout, You’ve got a compulsion about this, and gradually he turned it into a verb, a way to describe what she did to him day and night. So then he’d say, You’re compulsing again!
His other epithets: You’ve got head noises, You’re rattling or, vintage Dad, Loud, bouncing balls! were ugly, even brutal. She couldn’t help how she was but her behaviour was mad-making. I can see now that he had a broken heart as well, yet because she was still there, still in his life and his bed, there was never an end to it, never a moment to shut a door and say, It’s over. It’s finished.
I have asked friends from my Canberra school days what they remember of my parents. Always, to describe Mum, they use words like quiet, remote, disengaged. And they say Dad was rude to her, or strange in some way that they never saw in any other house. One said, you were too—sort of dismissive of her.
Indeed I was.
We lived in a heaving sea of madness and sadness.
EIGHT
The Tower
One day Dad burst in the door and called to us: Come and see!
There on the kitchen table was his thesis, the labour that had taken over three years to arrive in the form of this giant red doorstop of a book. He was beaming. He stroked the cover and its gold letters.
Oooh, we said. It’s big.
Yes, bloody big, he whooped.
We opened it, we peeked inside. I recognised some bits that I’d read when I was helping him to type.
You should see Ron’s, though, he said, it’s tiny. He showed how small—a paperback size—by comparison.
Why? I asked. How can that be?
It’s mostly equations, said Dad. I don’t understand anything in it but apparently it proves mathematically that capitalism is stuffed!
Oooh, I looked suitably impressed.
Then it was back to the block on the table. There’s six of them, he said, and proceeded to tell us where they would go. Examiners. Library. This one he would keep forever.
He was being invited to write and speak on his research, a process which had started early and was unheard of for a PhD student in those days. Yet he had failed to get a university job and was teaching geography and history at the local high school. He had also started turning the thesis into a book. He spent hours at his desk with a red pen crossing out, adding in, creating a map of arrows and loops and boxes across every page in that mighty tome.
We started to hear of ‘UNSW’, said like that in letters, and ‘Baxter’ or more redolently, ‘that bastard Baxter’, when he was talking with his friends. Although I was woolly on the detail, I knew that he’d applied for a history lectureship at the University of NSW, that the panel had unanimously selected him and that then the Council, particularly the Vice-Chancellor, Philip Baxter, had refused to endorse the recommendation. Normally, this was a rubber-stamp process.
Max Hartwell, the Professor of History, who had chaired the selection panel, was so appalled by what had happened that he told Dad about the ‘security report’ that Baxter had invoked. Dad had to hold the knowledge in absolute confidence because Max needed to secure a job somewhere else. Max would not and Dad could not go public with what they knew.
I’ve been blackballed, he told us. The bloody secret police are up to their tricks again.
Meanwhile, classes of thirteen-year-olds continued to fill his days. We were vaguely aware of the disappointment and drama around his work, but our days went on the same—frosty mornings, our bikes and friends. We stayed outside as much as we could, away from Mum with her glazed eyes and even from Dad and his frustrations.
I went to Girl Guides on Tuesday evenings. After the meeting, my friend Footey would ride the three blocks in the dark with me before she turned off through Forrest to her home in Deakin.
One night we stood at the corner where we were parting, feet on the ground on either side of our bikes, still talking. The streets were wide and empty except for the odd car a block down on Canberra Ave and an occasional cyclist. One such came towards us from the direction of Capital Hill, which in those days was a wonderland of rocky outcrops and hidden gullies with a canopy of Canberra eucalypts. At the foot of that bushy hill where the back end of Parliament House now sits there were several long fibro huts where the men from Europe, the immigrants who built much of central Canberra, lived in male-only loneliness. This one riding towards us out of the dark slowed and said, Hello.
We went silent, as sensible girls did. He saw how nubile we were and then he spoke in a sudden rush and reached for us, tried to grab an arm or touch a face. In sublime co-ordination, Footey and I spun our bikes towards my place and shot down the hill, along Canberra Ave, flew across the courtyard and flung our bikes onto the wall under our kitchen window, as Mr Europe, who had followed us, reined and disappeared into the night. Gabbling and yelling, we leapt up the four steps to the door of our flat. Dad raced outside—no sign of him, of course.
Dad then took us into the living room and asked questions while we calmed down. He would drive Footey home and she could pick up her bike tomorrow. I would go too, just for the drive. When we went to leave, the door was stuck. The door we had so recently crashed through would not budge. Mum came out of the kitchen, agitated and smoking furiously. I just fixed it in case he came back, she mumbled.
What? What have you done?
It’s only a spoon, she said. She bent to the floor and we all stared as she pulled out a teaspoon she had wedged under the door.
Dear God, Dad moaned, as he flung it open.
We all missed the significance of the teaspoon that night, the beginning of a phenomenon that was to bedevil our days for years to come.
Dad was still applying for university jobs while the academic rumour mill churned with tales of his blackballing by the University of NSW. Between fears of more ASIO reports and what appears to have been some professional jealousy, he kept being knocked back. Fay Anderson, who has written about the politics of academic freedom in this period, refers to Dad as one (there were only two) ‘who did not submit’ to the fears generated by the rigorous activities of ASIO.
When Keith Hancock, then the grand old man of Australian history, was appointed Professor at ANU, Dad was hopeful of a lectureship. When it became clear that Hancock was not going to support him, Dad wrote about his disappointment to Manning Clark, saying of Hancock, I hope he falls dead which is a better fate than being married to an insane wife as I understand he is.
I only saw this ugly sentence recently. When I recovered from the shock of it, what startled is the second sentiment. He thinks being dead would be better than living with a mentally ill wife. What I hear in this grinding sentence is his own pain and despair. It has spilled out into that grey area where the personal (the letter to Manning) and the professional (his relationship with Hancock and his desperation to get a fitting job) overlap.
Through all this, Mum sat in the dark little kitchen and smoked. She also chafed her hands and picked at her scalp, creating sores. At night especially, she fretted at Dad about her fears; we often went to sleep with his shouts at her to stop winging down the hall to us in our beds.
When he had spent over a year in the classroom, a telegram arrived: History lectureship at New England University. I don’t think any of us had ever before registered that there was a place called Armidale, high up on the mountain range like Canberra, but four hundred miles further north. Three weeks later, we were on the road. Straight up the highway would be boring, Dad said, so out came the old Shell map. His finger tracked north along the coast to Kempsey and then veered left alongside the Macleay River.
The Plymouth had given way to a boxy Vauxhall—a car none of us ever cared about. We reached Kempsey in the dark and went into the town’s fish and chip shop, the acme o
f desirable cuisine for children in 1957. As the man was wrapping our tea, Dad started, then put out his hand to the newspaper curving around the steaming chips.
Tribune, he said, looking quizzically at the fishmonger.
Yeah . . . the man stood still, uncertain.
Good, said Dad, smiling.
Yes, the man relaxed. Yes.
They settled in to chat about people they knew in The Party, and whether there were other Communist worthies hiding out in sleepy Kempsey, while Mark and I longed to eat and Mum rubbed her hands ferociously.
Old Mrs Gray’s sister is here, Dad said, as we made for the car. Mrs Gray was one of the Party people in Cremorne—she had a music-box we salivated over.
We’ll drop in and see if we can stay there, said Dad.
He drove a few blocks and we sat outside the fibro house finishing the chips, sucking the salt from every crevice of our fingers. Mrs Gray’s sister invited us in and made cups of tea for the grown-ups. Conversation was minimal and after a while, Dad said, We better get on the road, then.
Yes, said Mrs Gray’s sister.
We slept on our ground-sheets beside the car, frogs and crickets our lullaby. In the morning, Dad urged us to walk across the road and pick a few cobs of corn from a paddock for our breakfast. The road took us up and up to a mountain plateau and we cruised the long straight stretch into the eastern side of Armidale in the mid-afternoon. That was when we realised we had come to live in a country town.
It was 1 April when we started at the high school. I remember so precisely because at recess, when the girls from my class boasted that they had a new girl, the others said, You can’t fool us.
No, really, they said, here she is.
Five days later, the Friday of that first week, the whole school had to sit on an oval in icy wind to welcome the governor-general, one of those interminable British militarists who used to grace that office. I remember the event only because that was when I made friends with Prue and Rae. We turned our backs against the blast and talked ourselves warm and I knew that I would be okay in this new town.
We lived briefly in a house with rooms you could twirl about in. Three months later, supported by a loan from the university, Dad bought the ivy-clad edifice of stone and brick that was reputed to have been a Cobb & Co staging post eighty years before. In fact, it had been the home of the Armidale soft-drink purveyors for generations.
All our lives, Dad had talked wistfully of the glory of owning our own house because then, and only then, could we plant fruit trees. His childhood in Adelaide and Queensland—and perhaps his visits to Mum’s family orchard—had left him with a vision of cornucopia: fruit in your very own backyard. There was already a giant walnut tree and Dad planted apples and plums and peaches. They survived but did not flourish. He wasn’t really a gardener, Mum only tended the flowers and neither of them thought of finding out how to help a new fruit tree grow. So eventually we had our little orchard but a succulent paradise it was not.
The front door of the house opened to a stately hall. On one side lay the Front Room, more than twice the size of any other room we’d lived in, resplendent with bay window. It even had a custom-made blue carpet with an edging of cream flowers nudging into every angle and alcove. Dad’s desk was put in one corner. Next came the three bedrooms with their high ceilings, marble fireplaces and single-sash windows rendering them cavernous and dark.
The hall ended at the dining room, a strange walk-through area with five doors: bathroom, kitchen and the tiny dark hole of a room we called the Pantry. Used to store tools, suitcases, photos, bottled fruit and grog supplies, it always smelt of leather and furniture polish: an aromatic, comforting brown place with its tiny square window looking onto the green backyard. The kitchen had a slow combustion stove that became the central focus of daily life through all our winters there. The wood was kept in the tin baby bath where Alison had died, the blue paint now so vestigial that no one else would know it had ever been there.
On the right side of the dining room, the fifth door led to the triumph, an enormous verandah along the eastern side, its beauty utterly marred by a half-wall of fibro topped with louvres. It was, nevertheless, my favourite place because it could quickly be made light and airy and had two doors to the outside, liminal gateways to the garden and sky.
The straight thoroughfares of the Armidale streets gave the town a facade of order with its rows of stone or brick villas and timber cottages. I rode along these streets looking at the house fronts and wondered what went on in each one of them. Wondered if it was like what went on in our house. Wondered if in even one of these other houses, it was like ours.
When I visited friends’ homes some of them did have sad corners too, funny tight places on the parents’ faces. As I got to know Prue, for example, I stayed overnight, sharing her bed in the tiny wooden house down a lane where she lived with her mother and two sisters. Her father had died in the backyard when she was nine and it seemed to me that a black column swayed under the tree where it happened, an area that we didn’t have to avoid consciously because no one played outside at their house.
My father, she told me, was always threatening to kill himself.
I was riveted to hear secrets, real secrets, being shared so openly.
One night, she went on, my mother said to him, ‘Go and do it then.’ And he went outside and shot himself under that tree.
I must have told her that my mother had tried too, but the conclusiveness of her story and her staccato delivery largely silenced me. And her mother: what was that like, to say ‘Go and do it then’?
Like me, Dad made new friends quickly. We started to hear him mention the Hughes, Phyl and Bill, who was the state MP for New England, a Country Party stronghold.
Ever since Dorothy, our bosomy widowed neighbour in Mosman, and then the woman with brown eyes in Adelaide, I had developed antennae that told me when Dad was ‘doing it’ with another woman or wanting to. In Canberra, there had been ‘my second wife’ from Melbourne, then an American researcher, regular mentions of other women in a tone I learnt to recognise and always his watching, ogling, trying it on. I understood there was much more that I didn’t see. Clearly this Phyl was the next one.
She wasn’t beautiful in any conventional sense. She was tall and slim, her long legs paused at odd angles like a colt and her eyes were a startling blue in her tanned, sun-lover’s face. She laughed loudly and talked like a box of birds. Dad usually disparaged people who talked a lot—‘rattling his jawbone’ or ‘fanning the air’—but with Phyl he was mesmerised. Her role as the local member’s wife gave her licence and she flew about the town touching down here or there like a dragonfly, drawing all eyes, her warm words and laughter enveloping everyone they touched. Then she was up and off again, leaving uncertain smiles in her darting wake.
Maybe it was the sense of fun that emanated from her that drew Dad. He himself could sometimes act like a kid, in spite of the sadness at home. I remember the night we gathered by the front gate and waited for Sputnik. All evening he’d talked about it: we must get outside in plenty of time—just after 9 p.m. we would be able to see it: 4 October 1957.
Watch to the south-west, he said. That way, pointing over the oval across the road. When it appeared, a white dot moving across the black sky, we all shouted and jumped about, Dad most of all.
The Russians have done it! he enthused. They’ve beaten the Yanks for once.
But the important event in those first months at Beardy St, the one we almost missed because it seemed so insignificant at the beginning, was the day Mum came in from the garden and said she’d hurt her hand while pruning a rosebush. She smothered it in lanoline, her preferred emollient for any condition involving the skin.
Initially, we said, Oh, dear, as one does.
Next day, she had a glove on the hand and said it had developed a rash. We questioned her claim, But you can’t get a rash from a scratch!
Yes, you can, she insisted.
You can�
��t. You get a scratch, not a rash.
It’s a rash, she said, with her eerie intensity.
Within a week, she said it had spread and she had gloves on both hands and was doing the lanoline-slather all over both of them three or four times a day.
So when the gloves stayed on for weeks and weeks, we drifted into silence. We spoke up again when the—what to call it?—gouging began.
I came upon her in the kitchen, sitting at her usual place. The coffee and cigarette were there but they were laid aside, steaming and smouldering in front of her while she was digging at the palm of one hand with the pointy ends of a pair of nail scissors.
What are you doing? I squeaked.
There’s a thorn in there, she said, swapping the scissors for tweezers.
What? That was weeks ago . . .
It’s a thorn, she repeated, not pausing even to look at me.
Next time I saw her hands, she was scraping around her nails with the scissors, removing hard bits of skin, digging about until blood came.
What are you doing now? I wailed.
Just tidying up, she mumbled, pulling her glove back on. It’s this rash . . .
There’s no rash! I yelled. You don’t have a rash.
Yes, I do.
She was implacable. Dad and Mark had similar encounters. Once, we all appealed to her at the same moment, circled round her, but she smiled her inscrutable best. Her eyes stopped registering us and we gave up. We let her be.
Over time, she developed a kit—a small towel with her lanoline and implements rolled up in it. She no longer rubbed at her hands, she worked on them. She remade them as damp hidden creatures that needed her constant ministrations. Now when she sat alone at the kitchen table, she did not stare out the window so much as stare inwards to herself, to what was inside her, through her hands. From then on, we only saw her hands, her bare hands, if we happened upon her gouging at herself. She added razorblades to her kit, which she used for paring off the hardened flesh around her nails. From my inadvertent sightings, I know she also used the razorblade to shave the nails themselves, pare them almost back to the cuticles until they bore no resemblance to normal nails. I learnt to look away the moment I realised she was at it.
