The Mothers

by Rod Jones

  Dad never had much to say. He’d been in New Guinea during the war, and Anna felt that the Haven sent him back there, somehow, that it brought out an emptiness in him and made his thoughts dry up.

  Her parents didn’t see the real Haven; they only saw Sundays. They wouldn’t know about girls crying in the night, Anna lying awake hour after hour, her thoughts caught on a merry-go-round of worrying. They wouldn’t know what the girls talked about in the bluestone lane as it was coming on dark, with the tobacco smoke and the smell of cooking in all the kitchens of all the houses in Fitzroy.

  One Sunday, Mum brought in a piece she had cut out from the Sun, announcing Neil’s engagement. It was another blow, another betrayal. Anna’s last hope for Neil faded. There would be no one coming to the Haven to rescue her.

  Anna didn’t know the girl. It might have been someone who worked at his firm in the city. Or someone else. She must have been a ‘good girl’, who hadn’t fallen into misfortune. Or maybe she had, and he couldn’t get out of it this time. Anyway, he was going to marry her.

  Mum was looking at Anna, trying not to say his name. There were some things that could not be said.

  Anna handed back the clipping without a word, determined not to reveal the fact that she had harboured secret hopes. Mum carefully folded the piece of paper and returned it to her handbag.

  Mum and Dad would only stay for a while. Like prisoners, the girls here learned to be numb. Anna could tell that it hurt her parents to see her going numb, too. You’re a little girl, you’re safe in your childhood, you think it will never change. Then one day something happens and you realise that life is foreign to the world of feelings. Your own puny existence doesn’t matter much to the great world.

  Anna knew that Mum and Dad loved her, but she felt bad she had brought all this on them, and in a way it was a relief when they went home, though the emptiness stabbed deeper for a minute. The only thing she had left, the only thing she was sure of, was her baby.

  New girls arrived, wrapped in blankets and overcoats. Some of them arrived alone at the Haven, each carrying her own case. Others came with their mum or dad, or both of them. More than one girl told Anna a story similar to her own: of a mother giving her daughter sleeping pills without her knowing, and the girl waking up in the car outside.

  They had been uprooted from their normal routines and family homes, their brothers and sisters, their boyfriends (those who stuck by them, though they were not allowed to visit, wrote letters), their own interests, their personal possessions. Quite a few girls were from Tasmania. Some of them had arrived by plane at Essendon aerodrome. Others came from towns Anna had never heard of before. Jerilderie. Taree. Narbethong. They were driven to Melbourne by their families, so that no one in their district would know.

  Some of the girls, rich ones from big farms and sheep stations, had never done a stroke of work in their lives. It was a new experience for them to have to scrub the floors, or work all day in the heat of the hospital laundry.

  Every day, every hour, brought another test to be passed. Even on Saturdays when they were allowed to go to the shops in the city, there could be no more than two in a group. The local citizens didn’t want to see a gang of them walking along the footpath, bellies bulging, laughing and raucous, unrepentant. If they went in pairs they caused less staring. The Baby Factory, people called the place. There had been complaints to the administration from homeowners in the area about the girls ‘walking the streets in their state’. Pregnant unmarried women should not be seen in public, at least no more than necessary, so if they were in the streets on Saturdays, it meant that Matron was failing in her duty.

  The girls gave each other nicknames. Anna was The Mouse because she never said boo. Leanne was Blacky. Elizabeth, a tall girl, was Stalky. Lorraine was Dish-mop because of her unruly corkscrew curls. Lorraine liked all kinds of pranks, and if ever there was a squealing laugh to bring Matron running, it was Lorraine’s. She was one of those girls always out of favour with figures in authority. Anna imagined Lorraine at school, always in trouble with the teachers. She was seventeen, though she looked older. Her greatest pleasure was smoking, which was frowned on at the Haven. Smoking was a vice, an abomination against God, an example of intemperance. Anna didn’t smoke, but for the company she went out with Lorraine and Leanne and the others to the back lane when they had finished work for the day.

  To get to the lane they had to go through the courtyard, past Matron’s green door with the little flap that opened. Matron turned a blind eye to these unofficial smokos—without them the girls might have gone mad. They had to work twelve hours a day, from six until six, with only an hour’s rest at half past one, and these stolen half-hours in the back lane were a release from the drudgery. Inside the Haven, they were unsmiling ghosts. In the bluestone lane with a packet of Turf, for half an hour the girls came back to life. Springtime in Melbourne, not yet dark. Raucous voices and the smell of tobacco. Lorraine and Leanne always offered Anna a smoke, but Anna always refused.

  Some of them were real chatterboxes, like Stalky, who told Anna she had owned a horse in Box Hill, and when her parents had found out she was pregnant, her father had walked down to the paddock where the horse was kept and, without saying anything, shot it with his .303 rifle. Stalky had heard the sound from her bedroom, a single shot, sudden, puzzling, followed a few seconds later by a second shot.

  She told the story without emotion, the way people talk when something still hurts too much.

  The ‘Knocked-up Club’ the girls called themselves, and there was a kind of hating themselves as well as laughing at themselves in that. When the girls sat together in the lane at six o’clock, it was the one clean half-hour in a dirty day. Pearl was a tough nut. She despised that belly of hers and cursed it and called it names—the hump, the bump, the lump. But maybe she was one of those girls who didn’t like herself to begin with, Anna wondered, and there must have been a reason for that.

  ‘You gonna keep the bub?’ Pearl asked.

  Leanne turned her head with interest.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Anna said. ‘My mum said she’s going to stick by me.’

  She was surprised to hear the vehemence in her own voice. After all, she was just stating something that Mum had told her. But Anna really needed to believe those words: she could not bear to think of the consequences otherwise.

  ‘When it first happened,’ Pearl said, ‘when I told him I was late, we were going to get married, Charley and me. We even went to look at a little place for rent near my mum’s in Newport. We were in love, me and Charley. But now he’s with my best friend, Colleen. She’d better watch out, when I get out of here. Anyway, he’ll probably put her in the family way as well. He must have potted me the first time we done it. My dream was me and Charley. Now he’s with Colleen.’

  Once, Anna, too, had dreams. A wedding in white. Buying a house with Neil, buying the furniture she’d like. They used to plan their future together. Now she would have to find a house to rent for herself and her baby, once she had found a job and they had moved out of Mum and Dad’s.

  ‘Me and Charley, we used to talk about buying a block. He said he knew where some land was going cheap, and we used to talk about the kind of house we’d build, and what we would see out of our window, lying in bed together on the weekend. Now he’s probably telling it all to Colleen.’

  ‘I saw the Crows arrive before,’ Leanne said. They were finis
hing breakfast on Sunday morning, semolina porridge as usual, its texture like fish scales. A jug of bluish milk. There was lukewarm tea in the pot.

  The Salvo women were dressed in black, with black bonnets. The Salvos in uniform only came on Sundays.

  ‘I’ve had a gutful of those prayers of theirs,’ Leanne said. ‘I’d nail the Crows to a cross if I had half a chance.’

  Once, Anna might have objected to this kind of violent talk; now she went along with it. She hated the Salvos, too.

  After chapel, there was a rest period while they waited for their midday meal. In their room, the girls talked and shared sweets and magazines. They weren’t allowed to have a wireless or to play records. The Women’s Weekly was full of pictures of the new Queen, photos of coaches and crowns, news about preparations for the coronation. Anna always said she ‘read the print off the pages’ of the Women’s Weekly. It came out on Wednesdays, price 9d. Anna waited eagerly for Mum to bring it to her on Sundays. She enjoyed the Fireside Reading, the short stories, and the Social Jottings. She asked Mum to bring her the old issues, too, a year’s worth—she knew Mum kept them in the bottom of the linen press, to save the knitting patterns and recipes.

  The Women’s Weekly took Anna away from the Haven. Through its pages she stepped into another life, the life she might have lived: a married woman, a mother, a housewife. She stared sightlessly, disappearing into the lost world she might have had. In the pages of the magazine, she allowed herself to remember feelings she had had to kill off—her dreams of a future with Neil. She spent hours staring at the advertisements for Jantzen bathers, Actil sheets, Hoovers, and she allowed herself to inhabit an ideal world quite different from her days at the Haven.

  She kept her magazines in a pile under her bed, and often flicked through the pages of old issues in spare moments. There was a picture of a baby with blond curly hair, playing with a bubble pipe, on the cover of an issue from earlier that year. In July, there had been The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, complete in one issue. But the topic Anna always returned to was the Queen.

  Even before her accession to the throne back in February, Anna had liked looking at pictures of Princess Elizabeth in military uniform on horseback. There had been photos of her with yellow roses, wearing a tiara, on her birthday in April. In June, there had been photos of Prince Charles. The cover in September had a new portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

  ‘When did you first do it with Noel?’ Pearl asked.

  ‘Neil,’ Anna corrected her.

  ‘With Neil, then. Did you let him put it in right away?’

  Anna didn’t like to talk about sex in the rough way the other girls did.

  ‘Did it feel nice?’ Pearl asked.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Anna said. But the way it had come out sounded silly. It wasn’t something that should be talked about. Not because it was wrong or vulgar, though she supposed it was, but because Anna had been hurt so much in these months since, and to revive those memories made the wound raw again. She couldn’t talk about it because those days and nights at Cockatoo were hidden away inside her. As long as she kept her secrets and never talked about them, that life continued to exist in the place where she dreamed.

  Pearl was still recounting her adventures with Charley, adventures he was no doubt repeating with Colleen, but Anna had stopped listening. She was safe with her own thoughts. She felt Neil’s body close to her, the feelings he had given her. The way he used to drive his car fast on the corners of the dirt roads up at Cockatoo, smiling and turning his head to her when he made her squeal. He liked to make her laugh, too. The way he grabbed her waist, which she liked, because he was tall, broad-shouldered and strong from playing football. Neil had been special. She would not have him compared with Charley. He was not just another boy who wanted to feel her tits.

  Now Anna supposed Neil loved this girl he was marrying. But she was certain he had loved her, too, once. That kind of thing couldn’t just go away, could it?

  Her memories of weekends and holidays at Cockatoo were too precious to give away to the other girls in idle talk. Sometimes she would find herself visiting Neil again in her mind—Neil as he had been, not Neil as he was now, not the Neil who was engaged to another girl.

  Anna had met Neil in 1951, when the Glass family bought the farm opposite at Cockatoo. Don, the youngest son, worked for his dad. When Anna’s family was there, Don would come over and see them in the evenings. May, the sister, worked hard, had never married, ran poultry and grew vegetables. Neil, the middle child, was pursuing his studies and working in the city. He used to come home for weekends and holidays. They all became good friends.

  Then, suddenly, at Easter the following year, it had begun.

  Anna had arrived at the shack by herself on Thursday afternoon, to get the place ready. Since the wages had been paid early that week due to the holidays, the staff at the pay office were given the afternoon off. At lunchtime, she used her staff pass to take the train from Flinders Street to Ferntree Gully, where she changed to the narrow-gauge train to Cockatoo. Dad and Robert had to work all day; they would drive up with Mum the following morning. Neil had already driven up from Melbourne and, seeing the light on at the shack in the evening, walked over to say hello.

  She knew something was different about him. Neil was, as usual, smiling and friendly, but there was a teasing look in his eyes, the look of someone who had a secret. For the first time, Anna felt self-conscious in his company. They had been talking about Easter, the funny names. ‘What’s good about Good Friday?’ Anna joked.

  ‘And what does Maundy Thursday mean?’

  ‘I know it’s today. Thursday was when Jesus had the Last Supper and washed his disciples’ feet.’

  ‘You can wash my feet, if you like,’ Neil said, his usual smile, that teasing look.

  She pretended to fetch the enamel basin, picked up the soap, Neil laughing at her. Somehow, they had ended up in each other’s arms.

  After that, every weekend in April and May, they were inseparable. When she was with Neil, Anna did not feel it was dirty because she was convinced of their destiny together. They would get married, they were part of a greater moral purpose. She traced the contours of his arms and shoulders, the muscles of his back, and she felt herself go weak with need for him.

  Mum did not understand that, of course. She had guessed that Anna and Neil were having sex and, one Saturday afternoon at Cockatoo, when Dad and Robert were out in the paddock, Mum had sat Anna down and tried to talk some sense into her. ‘Wait until you’re married,’ she implored. ‘There’ll be plenty of time later.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ Anna stopped herself from saying anything more.

  ‘I always thought you were a good girl.’

  They were sitting in the tiny lounge room of the cottage. Anna remained in her place near the wood stove. Mum went through the doorway into the skillion kitchen. ‘It isn’t that I like having to say these things to you,’ Mum said from the kitchen. ‘We never talk any more. Not the way we used to. Remember the way we used to laugh so hard we cried?’

  Anna had felt a lurching sob pass through her body. She was fond of those lost, innocent times, too.

  ‘Now you hardly say a word. I don’t know what’s got into you.’

  ‘Nothing’s got into me,’ said Anna dully.

  ‘It’s that boy who’s changed you. It’s Neil Glass, with his big id
eas about himself. His accounting firm in the city, his triumphs on the football field. I don’t blame you for falling for him, but just be careful, that’s all.’

  ‘We are careful.’ There, it was out. Anna hoped that would be the end of it. Even as she said it, she knew it was a lie.

  ‘I’ll tell you something. You don’t want Dad to find out that boy is not treating you right!’

  Anna felt her face burning from sitting next to the stove. She got up, and started towards the front door and the verandah.

  ‘Don’t just walk away when I’m talking to you.’

  ‘I can still hear you, Mum,’ she said in an exasperated, singsong voice. The last thing she wanted was a row.

  ‘And don’t take that tone with me, either.’

  ‘What else can I do?’ Anna asked her mother. She felt suddenly hopeless.

  ‘Will you do something for me and Dad?’

  ‘If it’s not seeing Neil, the answer is no.’

  ‘My heart will break if that boy does anything to hurt you.’

  Anna felt bad that she had disappointed her mum. She had put that ‘little talk’ with Mum out of her mind. The hard thing for Anna to admit now was that Mum had been right.

  And yet…Anna couldn’t stop those memories returning. She would feel like her old self for a while, then Neil’s face would appear before her and her head would fill with a powerful whooshing sound like the beating of wings. She could not tell anyone about it. They would say she was mad.

  It was as though she and Neil, on those cold weekends in April and May, had been engaged in some grand noble enterprise. There was a purity in their love that others would not have seen. They had made their promises to each other. Neil had said he would not let her down.