No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  THE SCOTTISH ‘BEAN CLUB’

  We all have turning points in our lives, and some of us have several. They’re not necessarily the most important events, but they change you – or at least part of you – from being one person to being another. I guess my first was my sister’s birth, the next realising that with Dad losing his job our circumstances were changed. The death of my baby brother Charles meant leaving one stage of my childhood behind.

  But going to live in Scotland with small children and no family support marked the first time I had real responsibility for other human beings on my own. Twelve thousand kilometres away from my mother, I was free to question her rules and opinions and make decisions based on what I thought and I knew. It was not an easy few years, but I was exhilarated by the challenge. I discovered I could cope very well, and found a sense of purpose in helping Leigh study for his degree. And no matter how cold and uncomfortable it got, I knew we would eventually be returning home to the warmth and comfort of Brisbane.

  We went to Scotland as part of Leigh’s career plan, common to all young would-be medical specialists of the time. We were still living in the era when everything from overseas was considered better than at home, so young surgeons and physicians went to Edinburgh or London for their specialised training.

  The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh had been established in 1505 as one of the first such institutions in the world. It had produced such famous alumni as Joseph Lister, the father of antiseptic surgery. In our day, young medical hopefuls came from all over the world and it was a real melting pot of Asians, Africans, Australians and Canadians. Perhaps even more important than the fellowships they gained were the friendships they would not otherwise have made, from all over the English-speaking world. Edinburgh was also a very beautiful and cultured city, with its gracious and elegant New Town architecture and the annual Edinburgh Festival, which included everything from opera and ballet to country dancing in the gardens of Princes Street.

  We arrived in Scotland in time for New Year’s Eve 1966 and went to a hotel on the edge of the Bruntsfield Links close to the city centre. The hotel was a large and daunting pile and the weather was typically cold and grey. Daylight hours are short during an Edinburgh winter. My early memories are of being colder than I had ever been before in my life and the smell of wet disposable nappies. The nappies were thick pads impossible to dispose of. I had bought them for the flight over, which turned out to be an adventure in itself, though not in a good way.

  At nine months Damien was a wriggling crawler and was filthy by the time we got on the plane after a two-hour stopover in Sydney. We had given both children some medicine to knock them out for the trip, but had obviously miscalculated the dose and given them too much, and they were both hyperactive. The bassinet for Damien was not fixed to the front but swung hammock-like overhead so all the other passengers were treated to legs and arms waving and then the baby falling out. At one stage I asked the hostess to heat a bottle for me and she took it between her manicured fingertips as though it was contaminated.

  We had never travelled with children before and during our three years in Edinburgh and holidays in Europe we never did again, with the exception of a driving trip to Ireland to see Dad’s relatives. In those days nobody travelled for pleasure with small children; ours were looked after by friends, and we in turn minded their children when needed.

  Our first priority in Edinburgh was to find somewhere to live. We were living on our savings and as many medical students took several attempts to pass the fellowship exams we had no idea how long we would be staying. (Luckily, Leigh cleverly passed the first time he sat, literally a few weeks before Eloise was born.) So I set off by bus while Leigh stayed in the hotel with the kids, and I found a flat that I thought we could afford in Pitt Street, Leith. Leith is now a very upmarket part of Edinburgh, but it wasn’t then. Our first-floor flat in a grey stone tenement was one of the few that had a bath. For Alice, a 10-year-old girl who lived down the street, a special treat was being allowed to have a bath with our kids. I have no idea what her mother thought, but they were a relaxed lot in Pitt Street where the babies were put out in their prams in the street early in the mornings to watch the passing parade, and mothers came and went for a gossip and a chat. The flat was above a grocery shop which gave me my first taste of the convenience of inner-city living.

  I had come from Australia pregnant with Eloise and with medical benefits so I was referred to a private consultant in Edinburgh. Dr Loudon had rooms in an elegant house in one of the very elegant streets in the New Town. The consultation was more like a conversation and I don’t remember anything as crass as being weighed. I do remember him asking me if I would mind going to the Eastern General for the birth. I had no idea why I should mind but later discovered it was considered quite rough, and not like the Simpson or the Western General, but he was trying to make it more popular. It turned out to be fine. I had a private room and other women would wander in, assuming I was lonely. Of course with little ones at home it was blissful to be alone. I could almost relate to the Brisbane friend with eleven children who told me, ‘It’s so wonderful going to the Mater Mothers’ every year for a holiday!’

  Eloise was born at 7.30 one night and we gave her the middle name Margaret after the patron saint of Scotland and my mother’s second name. The next morning a nurse came in with the baby and a bottle. I said, ‘You can take that bottle away. I’ll be breastfeeding her.’ The nurse almost dropped the baby and five minutes later came back with the matron who said, ‘What’s this I hear? You’re feeding her yourself?’ followed soon after by Dr Loudon, ‘What’s this nonsense?’

  I realised it was easier for the hospital to manage rows of mothers in the nursery with bottles, but I stuck to my guns. At the Mater Mothers in Brisbane, breastfeeding was almost obligatory. For days afterwards, young nurses would arrive in my room to study the phenomenon of a mother breastfeeding, one who actually knew what she was doing.

  In his early days of study Leigh had one half-day off from the university and while he was looking after the children during their afternoon nap I would wander around Edinburgh and soak up its grey architecture and bloody history. In the evenings while he was studying and the kids were asleep I went out to the theatre, the opera and ballet and my cultural spirit really blossomed. One of my great finds was a small theatre in Leith that showed live plays. It was next door to a laundromat so I would pop my washing in the machine before the curtain went up and collect it at interval.

  Life in Pitt Street, Leith, was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Much of it was lived in the street. Ten-year-old Alice was fascinated by Damien. I wrote home:

  I don’t know where she comes from but she appears about every second afternoon to take Damien for a walk, which is very nice for me. The kids here seem to just wander around. The street is full of three and four year olds all day long, plus big lorries, and at the first ray of sunshine every house has a pram in front of it. Gladys next door leaves her 18-month-old in his pram on the other side of the street all day long so he can watch the children play. I’ve taken my children out and he’s yelling, and come back an hour later and he’s still yelling.

  Last night I took Nicola to the doctor at six, and told Alice she could walk with us to the bus stop, and the next thing she’s on the bus too. I was frantic about her mother worrying but she assured me she never did and when Alice came round today she said her mother hadn’t even noticed. I was really frightened Alice would be stopped coming as folding nappies is her greatest treat!

  Gladys next door filled me in on the rules and customs of the street. One of the unwritten rules was that in each tenement building the residents took turns to wash the stone staircase between floors. Gladys told me when my turn was and I got out there on my hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush. When I finally finished they told me it wasn’t good enough. In a rare show of courage I emptied the bucket and flung it away with the brush, and that was
the end of my community service in Pitt Street.

  Leigh passed his primary exams and joined the Department of Surgical Neurology at the Western General, so we felt we could move up from Pitt Street. Through the university accommodation section we found a detached bungalow at Craiglockhart, on the way to the airport and not far from the zoo. The owner was a lady minister in the Free Church of Scotland (the Wee Frees) who showered us with kindness and baby clothes. But this bliss was not to last. When the local priest came to visit we were told that this was the first time a Roman Catholic priest had been seen in our street. I’d never experienced that kind of bigotry before. The house had a lovely garden tended by the landlady’s father, who didn’t seem to mind Catholics, the children could run around in it and we bought a little mini-van.

  It was a happy summer but as winter approached we were told our lease would not be renewed, and we were on the move again. Unfortunately the minister asked for her baby clothes to be returned, which was indeed unfortunate because they were by no means in the same condition they had been when she lent them. We moved to Colinton, not far from where Robert Louis Stevenson grew up and wrote his verse, this time a two-storey detached house, and there we stayed for two years.

  At first our social life took place at the houses of various professors (‘… we were the only people under 40’, I wrote home) and the parties were of the sherry-five-to-seven variety. And that’s exactly what they meant. Used as I was to the Atkinsons’ cocktail parties which would go on into the night with lots to eat and drink, when the first such invitation came I hired a babysitter and had the better of my two maternity frocks dry-cleaned in expectation of a proper night out. At the professorial home, a grand stone affair, there was only sherry and not even a peanut in sight. At the stroke of seven, I happened to be standing next to the professor who turned to me and said, ‘So good of you to come,’ and out we went into the Edinburgh night. But once we settled and had been there a year or two, we had a busy social life and I was writing home, ‘I’ve just counted up and in the last fortnight we’ve been out nine nights and I’ve been out eight times during the day.’

  In suburban Colinton we had joined a ‘bean club’ for babysitters. No money changed hands, but every member was given five beans and when you needed a babysitter you rang around and paid the sitter with a bean. I think the fee was two beans after midnight but as we were all young mums we were rarely out late. The host member always left supper for the sitter and I came to appreciate those who gave you really good ones. As all the families in the club were young and usually away from their own families, we also had dinner parties at each other’s houses. When we went to Ireland for a week Anna Taylor, a great New Zealand friend, took in eight-month-old Eloise, who sat up by herself for the first time in Anna’s house.

  I think it’s difficult for Australian mothers, given our climate, to understand what it’s like to be confined indoors during a British winter. I had the wooden playpen set up in our small living room and sometimes to get time to myself I would put myself inside it with a book and let the children roam happily through the house. It was in Edinburgh that I felt the first stirrings of resentment as I struggled through Scottish winters warming a house, cooking, cleaning and caring for small children with a husband who often had to be absent and living in the hospital. I started to think, for the first time, that it was unfair that men got to have a family at the same time as a chosen career but that for women it seemed to be either/or. Growing up in an all-girls’ school, I had never felt disadvantaged being female. Oh, there were things that boys did, like playing football, and that girls did, like having babies, but these were delightfully hormonal differences.

  Many women, and I envy them greatly, get enormous satisfaction from housework and cooking. I did enjoy making cakes and scones, and I did knit jumpers and make clothes on the old sewing machine in the house and felt a real sense of achievement from this, but the novelty wore off. Later I was to realise it made more sense for me to do what I was competent at and let someone else do what I was not. This was a good lesson for management.

  In Edinburgh I continued to write as a freelance journalist for British and Australian publications. Being able to work was very important to me – it was a necessary contribution to my self-worth. It was also a chance to have an income of my own, however small, as we didn’t have a joint bank account even in Brisbane. The income paid for the babysitters. And it was a chance to get out and meet people, to understand Edinburgh.

  I wrote on subjects as varied as British prams (for the Courier-Mail) medical developments in Scotland for the London-based Medical News-Tribune, and the Australian Immigration Office. I also interviewed Maggie Smith on the set of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for the Women’s Weekly. Daytime babysitters were sometimes a problem and I remember interviewing a bemused car dealer in his showroom for the Edinburgh Tatler magazine with the three children playing under my feet, and his. I did most of my work for the Tatler and the car dealer provided just one of many advertorials, paid advertisements disguised as stories.

  I didn’t have much respect for the Tatler’s journalistic quality but it had surprising social cachet and got me into interesting places. The best was a week-long trip to Germany to cover fashion. For a young mother with three small children it was an offer too good to refuse, professional considerations aside. I can’t even remember who moved in to mind the family; I think a nurse from the hospital or Leigh’s sister Edwina who was living in London. I went to Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and through the Black Forest to Düsseldorf, attending the Igedo fashion fair. I was wonderfully looked after and wrote a story that filled five pages of the magazine when I got back.

  Once, in some mad flight of fancy, I caught the train to Glasgow to audition for a newsreader job with the BBC. They later told me I hadn’t got the job because I didn’t have a west of Scotland accent, this being the days before ethnic diversity. How I ever thought I was going to do it I can’t imagine, it can only have been the temptation of a day out in Glasgow for the audition that compelled me to try.

  Leigh and I travelled a lot and I made my first visit to Paris. I wrote to my sister Louella afterwards:

  I can’t believe that something I’d looked forward to so much could not only have lived up to expectations but exceeded them. Everything about it was beautiful … the streets, the buildings, the atmosphere, the people.

  Like my first sight of London, it was the shock of familiarity, of everything you’ve read about and seen in movies for years suddenly being real. This was also the summer of 1968 and student rebellion was at its height, which gave an added frisson of unfamiliarity to the Paris trip.

  We went to Scandinavia, taking our little mini-van by ferry from Newcastle to Stavanger in Norway. The first night, in full moonlight, we slept in the back of the car in an apple orchard close to Hardangerfjord. Another night we parked on a deserted Swedish beach, flat countryside all around and rain pelting down with us snug in our sleeping bags. We went to Gothenburg and saw Fiddler on the Roof in Swedish, and to Copenhagen where we saw the Tivoli Gardens. Through the local tourist office we booked into a private house, our first experience of bed and breakfast accommodation.

  All this I wrote home in my weekly letters, the familiar blue aerograms in the days long before email and the internet. Phoning home was expensive and complicated. You had to book a call and around Christmas it was especially difficult. I would always have my conversation planned beforehand so as not to waste any minutes. I once rang Mum for her birthday and she spent several expensive seconds being surprised. Most of the letters were about the children and their doings, about bringing two-year-old Nicola home from town in her first taxi, a huge black London cab, which she had loved so much that she refused to leave it, and the driver had to haul her out; about Damien at eighteen months having me bailed up in a corner with a toasting fork; about Eloise being such a great talker that a bus driver said, ‘Och the wee blether, was she vaccinated with a gramophone needle?’<
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  When you have small children you develop all sorts of coping mechanisms. One of mine was asking for help on public transport. I’d stand at the bus stop, baby on hip and one on either hand. When the bus came, I’d say to the person standing next to me, ‘Would you mind lifting a child on?’ Stunned or bemused they may have been, but they always did. There were no thoughts of stranger danger then.

  By the end of 1969, our three years were up and we made plans to come home. Leigh did a quick trip to the US in December while I packed up the house. In the New Year we sailed from Southampton on the Angelina Lauro. I had wanted to come back by ship because I thought it would be an adventure, which it was, though not quite what I’d thought. I wanted to relive my childhood sailing adventures, as well as having the migrant experience of coming to Australia, and I thought it might be my last sea voyage for some time.

  The Angelina Lauro was an Italian ship with a lot of ‘ten pound Pom’ British migrants. It called at Naples and then Genoa to pick up Italian migrants, and somewhere along the way Yugoslavs, who were Serbs and Croats. As the voyage got underway, they all fell into their national stereotypes. The Poms whinged, the Italians flirted, the Yugoslavs fought each other. There were always a couple of Yugoslavs in the ship’s brig or jail and a few irate husbands complaining about the Italians. We had a couple of Yorkshire miners on our table who complained about the food, the wine which was free and the service which was given by waiters who spoke little English. The irony was that while they were having an almost free passage, our family was paying full fare and we were loving the pasta and free wine.