by Biff Ward
He didn’t say she was mad, he simply struggled to stop her mad behaviour.
I stood in my doorway right beside them, despair engulfing every part of my body. Often he would tussle with her until she burst through the barrier he’d made. By then Dad would have catapulted out of his door to forestall her.
The locks on the windows need fixing, she might yell frantically and he’d yell, I refuse to listen to this! You’re bonkers!
Then he’d hustle her back to the kitchen with a final shouted command to stay there.
When it was over, I stared at the walls of my room. The house sighed back into the vibrating silence of our normal life, the sigh never fully expelled.
The three of us wanted to be away from her but none of us, on those evenings, could work out how to be together. If we did start to connect, she would usually appear, her compulsions ricocheting off the walls and sending us all scurrying back to our boltholes. Her gentle soul was now completely enshrouded by her fanatical imaginings.
When I asked one of Dad’s friends who was in Armidale for a year in that period what he remembered about our family, he told me Dad dropped in after dinner at their place a couple of times a week. He seemed to want to be out of the house and we were only a block away, Jack said. And when we visited your place, Russel was rude to your mother.
Yes, he was, I agreed.
My wife and I used to talk about it, he went on. She said once that Russel acted as if we understood. But we didn’t. We didn’t understand.
The accuracy of this description dazzled me.
Yes, I nodded. Yes, I can imagine that. When you live with it, you sort of assume others get it too.
He never took her anywhere. We used to wonder why he was so harsh towards her.
Yes.
My wife used to say that she thought your mother was sad.
Yes, I agreed. I think they both were. Very sad.
Another friend told me they felt uncomfortable. Russel would have us to dinner, he said, and your mother would bring in the food and he would ignore her.
Yes, I nodded, remembering just that.
She didn’t even sit at the table with us, he added.
All true. She didn’t sit at the table on those occasions because, I am sure, she preferred being in the kitchen with her thoughts. And Dad, what was really going on for him? Did he fear the grievous horrors of the minuet nights would spill into public purview? Is that why he turned his eyes away from her while they twinkled and flashed warmly at his guests? Was he scared that if he included her, she might start attacking him with deluded thoughts in front of others and then where would he be?
Even when there weren’t visitors, we hardly spoke to her. As her delusions grew, as she had almost no everyday conversation, we cut off from her, twig by twig. Our family tree grew its gnarled limbs around us and through us, in the imperceptible way trees do, so that we didn’t notice how weirdly shaped we all were.
If she chose not to eat with us, our shoulders might soften a little, our voices might entwine with phrases about our day. But even then, the tension never left. We knew that, sitting alone at the kitchen table ‘fixing’ her hands, she might snatch some words of ours and burst in on us, twisting them around and pumping them up as a reason why we couldn’t go to school next day or something equally ridiculous. That anything could come back and smash into us.
We became used to treating her with contempt, to discounting her, to enjoying life more when she was absent. We liked it when Dad had people over because her nagging delusions would cease. She rarely ran them at other people. Our fears could rest for the short time outsiders sat at our table.
In his letters to his mother and sister in this period he never, not once, ruminated about having any other options. He doesn’t mention long-term treatment as a possibility, let alone lay out the pros and cons. It’s clear that he never considered it, even though the situation gave him ulcers. His antacid lozenges were given the nickname of ‘toothpaste lollies’ and we only nicked one occasionally because we knew he needed them.
He was devoted, loyal, unquestioning in his sense of obligation to provide for her. From his time in the army Psych Unit and his passing understanding of mental illness and its treatments at that time, I incline to the belief that he could not bear to think of the state mental asylums with their shock treatments or lobotomies. So he ploughed on.
Meanwhile, she was crumpling by the day. She now wore the same dress for a week, even though it had obviously weathered encounters with food. She took her false teeth out around the house. Did she believe the teeth were poisoning her? When I asked in horrified tones why she didn’t have her teeth in, she said, Oh, they weren’t made properly. They don’t fit. She giggled to herself more often. And she still stared into space for much of the time.
And always her hands. What was it that she couldn’t leave alone?
Around the university there was no doubt much talk about how quiet she was, how rude he was towards her, how strange the whole set-up seemed. It was about to get a whole lot stranger.
The September school holidays of 1959 saw the usual chilly spring weather on the New England tableland. The Leaving exams were six or eight weeks away and I was studying for several hours a day. Dad went off to a conference in Melbourne. I’ll be gone for two weeks, darling, he said to me. I’m sure everything will be all right.
I was used to him being away: adult education trips all over northern NSW and then these bigger ones, conferences, seminars, meetings in distant cities. It was, though, unusual for him to say, I’m sure everything will be all right. It’s true that every other time things had been as ‘all right’ as was possible in our house. Even when Mark had his allergy attack and I despaired of helping him against her manic attention, it was ‘all right’ in the end.
Maybe Dad said that because he had a premonition, but even he could not have imagined what was coming.
The first morning, Mum was more urgently intense than ever as she told us that someone had been trying to break into the house in the night, so the teaspoons were going to be under the doors permanently.
You have to knock to get back in, she said.
The next day, there were nails as well as spoons in the doors and extra nails in the windows. The front door had four devices on top of its own Yale lock. And she started pacing all night, keeping watch, patrolling up and down the hall, out through the kitchen, back door to front door, mumbling to herself. By day she dozed on the sofa which she’d pulled close to the fire-box in the front room.
Two days later as I walked down the hall to see what she was up to, I glanced into their bedroom and saw the household hammer and tomahawk on the floor under her side of the bed, placed where she could reach them quickly. I felt their presence rise up from the gloom and land with a lurch in my stomach. She must have gone to the pantry and picked up Dad’s hammer with its smooth handle of old-gold wood and carried it down the hall, transferring it in that journey from a tool to a weapon. And she must also have gone to the kindling place outside the back door and taken the tomahawk down from where it hung behind a water pipe and carried it in here too.
That night, lying in my bed with my eyes scared open as she patrolled up and down the hall with the little axe in her hand, I lay in the dark, my gut a knot of ice. I tried to distract myself by thinking of my Fonz-like boyfriend or the next dress I would make but my stomach remained frozen while she kept passing my door. I did not sleep.
She also acquired a gun. She told us she’d bought it from the local junkshop—it was to make us safe if those people tried to break in again. The gun didn’t work, although I can’t remember how I knew that. It was the axe that concerned me, the axe in her hand and the hammer beside her bed were seared so deeply into my mind at the time that I can picture them to this day.
After several days and nights of this, I knew I must talk to someone. But who? Phyl was down the coast working on her amazing tan. On Saturday morning, dressed in my new yellow empire-line
dress, I rode to town to sashay up and down the two blocks of the main street with Rae and Prue, just as we did every Saturday morning. But this day, I knew I had to do something, I had to make it all change. My heart was pounding at the terrifying prospect of asking for help. I twice left Prue and Rae fingering fabric to go and stand on the post office corner looking up the hill to where Mr Willcock lived. He was my history teacher and his children were friends of ours. He played tennis and drank brandy with Dad and Phyl and I liked him. I longed to lay the story at his feet. I even took steps in that direction.
But what would I say? Would he understand our shorthand? And what if I did speak and he didn’t believe me? I was so lacking in words that my courage ebbed, insufficient to the task. The last time I turned back, I was filled with a breath-snaring weight of despair, a sluice of nameless knowledge that now things could only get worse.
When I arrived home, Mum announced that it had become too dangerous at our place and we were going to spend the night with the Warburtons.
The Warburtons? I wailed. What do you mean?
We’ll sleep there, she said, with one of her brief manic smiles and her eyes glinting. They’re quite happy about it.
But Hilary . . . I trailed off.
Hilary was in my class at school where we were friendly but not close. Would she tell people? The Warburtons were a university family, so maybe this humiliation would be happening inside the nameless club that we inhabited. At dinner that night, the Warburtons behaved as though it was normal for us to be there without Dad and to be staying the night. We were beyond embarrassment, Mark and I, completely cut off, our eyes like opaque saucers.
I slept on a thin mattress on the floor of Hilary’s room. Each night, I sank thankfully into sleep, secure at least that there were grown-ups out there, beyond the door of Hilary’s room, and they could worry about whatever Mum was doing in the night.
We stayed three nights, going home in the daytime. On the morning after the third night, a friend of the Warburtons, a man I barely knew, a lecturer in French perhaps, was driving me home. I don’t remember why I was on my own, but there I was, alone with this man. He was an adult who was in the circle of our disintegrating world, so I took the plunge and spoke.
I’m sorry about this . . . it’s hard . . .
Interrupting me, cutting me off, he said, too loudly, Oh, I’m sure it will be all right. Yes, yes—don’t worry.
It was just like the time I tried to talk to Uncle Dave.
I got out of his blue Holden fighting back tears. I banged to be let in and I pushed past Mum into my room and slammed the door. I tried to study. In the afternoon, I stood by the fire smelling her powder and her cigarettes and watched her sleep on the sofa, curled up like a child. I wanted to be anywhere but there.
The fourth night at the Warburtons I asked Elizabeth, the mother, if she could get me to a phone where I could ring long-distance. She took me with some alacrity to their garden flat where an old man lived and invited him in for a drink. Then they left me there, alone with the phone and the local telephone book. In 1959 long-distance was only used if someone had died, and probably not even then—you’d send a telegram.
I didn’t know where Dad was staying, only that he was in Melbourne. From friends of his I’d met who lived in Melbourne, I chose the Dows, Hume and Gwen, who were friendly to us kids when they visited. I rang the operator and said who I wanted. Suddenly, Gwen was there, saying, Hello?
I said who I was and started crying. I need Dad, I gulped. Do you know where he is?
No, I don’t, Biff, her kind voice said, but I’ll find him. I’ll find him for you.
The next afternoon, Mum told us we would be staying with someone else that night, friends of the Warburtons, the Smithsons. Like the man in the car, these were people I only vaguely knew. They were not friends of Dad’s. We had never been to their house. At least we knew the Warburtons, but clearly they had had enough.
We had been at the Smithsons for half an hour, the sun not quite set, the adults drinking sherry in a parody of the normal, when a firm knock sounded on the front door. Dad. It had taken him twenty-four hours, but here he was. I rushed across the room and fell on his big chest, my sobs shocking in the cocktail tableau. He squeezed me with his left arm, patted my shoulder with his right hand, and said, That’s enough.
He was hanging on to a modicum of decorum.
He whisked us out of that house and back down the hill to ours. He made many phone calls which all washed over me. Then he took Mark and me aside and told us we would be going back to the Warburtons. Tears spilled down our cheeks.
Just for the evening, he said quickly. The doctor is coming and maybe the police too. Mum is going to hospital, he finished.
We would come home afterwards and sleep in our own house.
It’s better if you’re not here, said Dad.
It was ten o’clock when Jim Warburton drove us back to our home. He parked across the road and all three of us stared. The front door was wide open with lights flaring down the hall but where yellow glow met the black of the garden, all was still and silent. There was no sign of Dad, no movement. It was as though the Marie Celeste had dropped into the Armidale night and floated there in front of us. We got out and began the long walk into the glittering maw of our home. Jim did a quick U-turn and vanished. As we came through the gate, Dad materialised from the foliage of the eighty-year-old wisteria vine where he’d been waiting for us, watching us come across the road. He put out his arms and gathered us into him, one each side, and we cried in unison with his heaving chest.
Then we turned and went inside, all in a huddle.
We sat at the kitchen table and had a cup of tea. He told us that the doctor had to sedate her with an injection and that the police were needed to help and then they put her in an ambulance that would take her to Newcastle. They would be driving for most of the night.
I knew, or believed, or imagined that these events occurred in the front room. I avoided going in there as much as possible afterwards.
Next day he told us he had to drive to Newcastle to take her some clothes and see the doctors. Did we want to come with him? I elected to go, Mark stayed with a friend. We left at four in the afternoon, stopped at the Greeks in Quirindi for tea. Dad had his bottle of red in brown paper and drank an abstemious cup of claret with his steak. At eleven, we stopped and slept in the car.
Next morning, he found the giant cream-brick hospital on the headland where I waited in the car for two hours. I tried to study as I watched the hospital. Dad looked crushed when he came back to the car. He said they were going to take her to a mental hospital by a lake: Morisset. It was the first time I heard the name.
An hour or so out of Newcastle on the drive home, he cleared his throat and said, Darling, there’s something I have to tell you.
I turned and looked at him. What else could I be told?
Mum has been telling the doctors that . . . he cleared his throat again. Telling them that I’ve been having an affair with Phyl Hughes.
I looked at him. I knew he was having an affair with Phyl and he must have been aware that I knew.
Well, he said, with more throat clearing, what I want you to know is that I’m not. I’m not having an affair with Phyl.
I looked at him and nodded. I could see that he was sweating at the effort of lying to me in this shameful way.
I felt sick. Even then I wondered why he told me. Presumably Mum had told the doctors he was involved with Phyl and the doctors wanted to know if it was true, maybe they even implied his behaviour could have exacerbated her condition and, in response, he had been driven to this lamentable lie. His guilt must have been so harrowing that he convinced himself that he must cover his tracks with me. Perhaps he just needed to speak of what had happened and what, unexpectedly, had turned out to be the hardest part for him. It wasn’t the lie or even its transparency that upset me—it was his abjectness, the way this had beaten him up, that I couldn’t bear.
I also hurt for Mum. No matter that I was relieved, even glad, she’d been taken away. No matter that she had delusions and frightened me. This part was true: he was in love with Phyl but Mum was disbelieved when she said so.
From the vantage point of now, I can see that Dad and I were both in shock, me traumatised from a week of living with my mother in a state of psychosis, he from forty-eight hours of having her committed. It’s a wonder far stranger things were not said.
We drove on in silence for a long while.
Later, he wanted to hear what parts of Julius Caesar I had committed to memory for the exams. We recited Shakespeare to each other, sometimes in tandem. We marvelled at the wonder of language while the sun sank to our left and the front seat was filled with our pleasure.
While Mum was away, Dad employed a cleaner once a week. Phyl appeared often with a casserole and had a quick drink and homemade pickled walnuts with Dad before going back to her own children. Her repertoire of casseroles numbered three—one included ham and bananas and another Vegemite—we loved them, unusual though they were. Her specialty was pavlova, which for us was beyond exotic.
There’s a letter Grannie wrote to Jean while Mum was away in which she tells her that Margaret is having shock treatment. He thinks he misses her most because he had to care for her, ‘look after her which filled some kind of need’ for him.
It goes on to say it would be nice if Jean could write to him because he gets lonely and depressed about the future . . . We cannot know of all he goes through.
Indeed, no. As for ‘some kind of need’ in him to be a carer, it doesn’t fit any other part of his life, it’s not a ‘pattern’ he had. I imagine he was noticing the emptiness where his ‘caring’ for Mum had been and his bit of psychologising about why he misses her is characteristic of him, he liked to work out the ‘why’ of anything that puzzled him. More tellingly, he wrote to Jean about the same time: . . . we get on very well here at home together. As far as I can tell, the children are both happier—which is a terrible thing to say—in the absence of the terrible scenes and tensions to which her illness inevitably and continuously gave rise.
