by Neil, Linda;
‘I feel as if everything that has happened is my fault and that something I did in my past has ruined my life.’
‘Oh Lord, I fear I am not long for this world. Please watch over me and deliver me safely into your kingdom.’
‘Is it something I did? It must have been something I did. It must have been something I did. Something I did … something I did … I did something?’
‘Bad dreams. Always bad dreams. I do not sleep. Always bad dreams.’
She spends her days investigating her past for clues as to why her life has taken the turn it has. She develops what her psychiatrist refers to as a ‘morbid preoccupation with self-blame’. I don’t find this state either aberrant or difficult to understand.
Unable to even contemplate a live-in relationship, I disengage from Byron and his offer of love and support soon after I move into his house. Unsure where to live and whom to love, I revert to familiar habits. I begin to swim in the mornings and walk in the evenings, just like Dad had done years before, to handle my exhausted emotions and the self-blame that now begins to overwhelm me too.
* * *
Sometime before he died, Dad wrote what turned out to be his last letter to Mum. It was typical of Dad’s style that he didn’t leave this letter out for her to find and hadn’t even written her name on the envelope. He had left it in a drawer, thinking probably it would be found by accident, as it was by Cathie weeks after his funeral.
Cathie: I found it among some writing material in one of the drawers of the old dressing table in the back bedroom. It was a love letter a couple of pages long, written in Dad’s beautiful, lyrical handwriting, and it was asking the same things he always asked: for Mum to have an affair of the heart with him. I gave it to Mum straight away. I never asked her for it back to read or grilled her about details. I guess I felt it was between the two of them and left it at that.
I can’t say if Dad intended Mum to find it or not, whether it was a work-in-progress, or if he had intended to give it to her personally, but the letter created, at the same time, great joy and grief. I hope Mum kept it with her to read over again when she felt alone during the years after he was gone.
‘I’m lost without my swim,’ my father wrote to Cathie in 1982, eleven years before he died. ‘I’ll migrate I guess, one day, to Mediterranean lands for warm waters, or take, as I did one day recently, to long walks, a little lunch in my pouch, no money in my pocket, under the warm winter sun. Take care always. Love Ben.’
A MAVERICK IN THE LOUNGE ROOM
Sunday, 23rd May, 1.30 pm, Joan Neil’s residence, 34 Warren St, St Lucia. Topic: My Principles of Teaching Singing to Beginners up to Two Years trained: The first lesson Appraisal and Where do we go from here? Discussion will include Posture, Breathing, Basic Psychology; Demonstrated Exercises for the Vocal Parts (jaw, tongue, lips, and soft palate), Common Vocal Faults, Focus and English Diction. Please bring a plate of ‘interesting food’ for celebratory 6th Anniversary High Tea.
Joan Neil, Music Teachers’ Association of Queensland Newsletter
At the end of 2000, Mum’s old friend and teaching colleague, Lyndsey Parker, contacted me about nominating Mum for a special award from the national board of the Music Teachers’ Association. Many in Mum’s old teaching network lost touch with her after her illness took hold. Mum contracting Parkinson’s disease shocked them enough, but only the staunchest of her friends could cope with witnessing the psychotic side-effects of her medication. There was discomfort, dismay and fear. Perhaps her friends sensed that someone they had known and admired had passed on and that someone unfamiliar had taken her place. If Mum felt their absence she rarely mentioned it. Along with the disappointment she might have felt, she was also embarrassed and withdrawn, content to suffer her degeneration in private.
Joan: In some ways I think it was harder for my teaching colleagues and my students. They saw the progress in big leaps. When you live with it daily you just see the changes from moment to moment. Take my face, for instance. For me or for anyone around me every day it wasn’t that my face suddenly grew rigid overnight. It happened slowly. You got to notice all the little changes and you gradually got used to it. But when someone didn’t see me for weeks or months, when they visited they suddenly had to confront me with my face all seized up with that blank expression. I could see the shock in their eyes. Their pity. And sometimes fear. And then … often … I would never see them again.
Lyndsey asked me to write up a special report that listed all Mum’s achievements as a teacher, board member and lobbyist for the teaching of all types of music. ‘You’d be able to put it together much better than I could,’ she told me, encouragingly. ‘And of course, as her daughter, you’d know about all the things she did.’
I didn’t really know much at all and was forced to ask her friends and my sisters for information. Marjorie Anderson was one of Mum’s most loyal friends, who stayed in regular contact with us while Mum’s health worsened. At the beginning of 2001 she agreed to meet me to share her memories. We got together in a sunny corridor of the Westminster. Marjorie told me that Mum started the Queensland branch of the Singing Teachers subgroup of the Music Teachers’ Association. Peering at me over the top of glasses similar to those my mother first wore when, after years of sight-reading and playing thousands of accompaniments for student recitals and exams, her eyesight began to fail, Marjorie remembered those early days:
The national group didn’t exist when Joan first arranged an informal meeting of singing teachers in her house at Warren Street. Your mother’s idea was that we get together on a regular basis to share ideas and offer support to each other as teachers of singing. Your mother was very generous and, if you don’t mind me saying, ahead of her time. Nowadays everything is well organised but in those days we were all on our own scattered across the city, beavering away in our little music rooms, if that. Your mother heard about an organisation in America dedicated to just this sort of thing. Of course, there was nothing like that here so Joan got the idea to start one up months before the national group convened.
Marjorie was insecure about committing her memories to tape so spoke from notes she had prepared earlier. Just like Mum would have done, I thought, or hundreds of other diligent, hard-working women like her trying to do their best. Afraid, though, that their best might not be good enough. The story unfolded gradually over several cups of tea from the hospital café and as Marjorie spoke to me, I slowly began to realise that the story of the evolution of the Music Teachers’ Association from its early days in Mum’s lounge room was as much a part of her history as it was my mother’s, and that these women created that bit of history around our old family piano.
Finally, as Marjorie took off her glasses and carefully put down her notes she began to reminisce more freely:
I took the minutes of the first meeting actually, which took place on 23 March 1978 in her lounge room. In her address to the group your mother set out her agenda of wanting to create an inclusive and supportive network which did not just include classical music teachers, but which embraced all styles of music, from musical comedy, jazz to pop and rock’n’roll. And your mother offered your place anytime we needed to meet. When the national group formed the next year we didn’t want to give the impression that we were in any way opposed to it so we amalgamated fairly quickly into the national organisation. But before that for a few months it was just us and your mother in her lounge room at Warren Street. She really started the ball rolling.
Lyndsey Parker contacts me again in October 2003. I have forgotten her wish to have Mum recognised for her work in the Music Teachers’ Association. Despite the slow progress – the national board only meets once or twice a year – there are a couple of sympathetic members now who know first-hand how much Mum did for music teaching in Queensland. Lyndsey tells me:
Your mother was a real dynamo. As far as I’m concerned one of the reasons why the universities an
d conservatoriums opened up their programs to include studies in jazz and popular music is because of the work people like her did at the ground level for all those years. Others may not agree, but we know what went on at the grass roots. She always believed that music should be for everybody, not just the privileged few. For a while she was our representative on the board of the university music department. They, of course, wanted to keep things exclusive. The old guard didn’t want to let the so called riff-raff in. Your mother wasn’t an aggressive lady. She was very pleasant about the whole thing. But she just kept plugging away until changes were made.
Mum tells me herself how much of an ordeal those early meetings at the university were for her:
I’d be so nervous my cheeks would turn bright red. I’d have this conversation with myself in my head: ‘Now, Joan, you’ve got to say something now or you’ll never be game to.’ I mean, there I was, this suburban music teacher, this mother from down the road, and there they were: Doctor This and Doctor That, and all these concert pianists and opera singers. It took me years to get over my sense of inferiority. Some of those university types were just snobs when it came to any music other than classical and opera. And they did vote me down the first time I brought it up. And the second. And I think the third time as well. But eventually, you know, if you keep plugging away, changes will happen. Still, I think they used to shudder when they saw me coming. Not her again, they were probably thinking, her and her wild ideas.
As well as the official things she accomplished, there are things I personally remember: that she failed twice in her attempt to gain her Licentiate and Fellowship in singing, prestigious awards from the Trinity College of Music in London; that she shared the news of these failures while cooking us our very favourite things – jam drops made with butter and strawberry conserve – as a special treat; that we never thought to comfort her, and that she did not cry; that she absorbed the disappointments of these setbacks and resat both exams until she passed.
When she finally received her Fellowship in the mail, she caught the bus into the city especially to see me where I was working at the Elizabeth Arden counter in Myer during the Christmas holidays. ‘I knew you’d be happy for me, Linda,’ she told me as I danced around her in the middle of the store’s cosmetics’ section to celebrate. ‘I had to tell someone.’
Lyndsey is disappointed when she rings me a month before Christmas to tell me that the citation has been delayed again. Even with the support of board members who knew Mum personally, other members feel she has not achieved enough at ‘an official level’ to warrant special attention. She has never taught in a conservatorium or a university, shepherded any nationally or internationally well-known students, or networked with overseas teachers or professors. She has done all her work in our lounge room, or, when it was finally built, in the music room under the house. Working without the support of any accredited organisation, a maverick in our lounge room, Mum’s grassroots endeavours are still not deemed worthy of any special note or commendation.
EXULTATE JUBILATE
During the second half of 2003, Mum’s intense nightly dreams continue; her disorientation worsens and the nurses at the hostel now openly refer to her ‘dementia’. A month before Christmas, Mum’s nurse, Heavenly, rings me to tell me Mum has now become incontinent. There has been an altercation about her wearing incontinence pads in her underwear.
I put them in her pants and she takes them straight out, Heavenly complains. Then she tells me not to treat her like a baby.
I wonder if Heavenly is, or will be, true to her name. Did you discuss it with her beforehand? I ask wearily.
No. But it makes sense, doesn’t it, that she wears the pads?
She sounds as tired as I am. We are two tired women discussing underpants and pads over the phone.
You’ll have to get her at least a dozen pairs of new underpants, she tells me, because she’s ruined most of her old ones.
I’m too worn out to ask her to speak more respectfully about the state of my mother’s underpants. Please don’t force Mum to wear the pads if she doesn’t want to, I say. I’ll have a chat with her about it. But you’ve got to understand this is a big thing, this loss of control. It might take her some time to get used to it.
I don’t know why, but suddenly I recall that I studied Othello in my last year at school. I remember also how I found a book called Shakespeare and his Critics in Dad’s library under the house. How amazed I was to read, as I pored over the fading pages of the book, that Shakespeare had been the subject of so much disdain and critical abuse. I remember in particular one critic from the eighteenth century, referring to the ‘Laws of Tragedy’, and, I suppose, to the Greeks and to Aristotle, had dismissed the entire play because Othello’s final jealous murderous act was prompted by such a seemingly trivial accessory as Desdemona’s handkerchief.
‘How could a tragedy of such grand proportion’, the critic wrote, ‘rest on this womanly accruement; this trivial piece of linen and lace? Perhaps we should rename it “The Tragedy of the Handkerchief”?’ To an eighteenth-century thinker, I suppose women’s things seemed too insignificant for tragedy. Now the issue of Mum’s underpants and her growing incontinence seems a kind of turning point as well, one that also rests on these trivial womanly ‘accruements’, these cotton undergarments that surely in the grand scheme of things could not be considered tragic.
After speaking to Heavenly, I drive down to Mum’s retirement home to see for myself the state of her underpants. On my way to Mum’s room, Desley, the hostel’s occupational therapist, calls me into her office. She looks harried as she shows me a pile of screwed-up music on her desk: Your mother has accused me of stealing this, Desley tells me defensively. But I’ve just rescued it from the rubbish bin, where I believe your mother has thrown it. Fortunately, I found it in time. But I thought I’d let you know the situation in case she tells you I’ve taken it.
She is a large, eager-to-please woman who works up a slight sweat as she tries to smooth out the crumpled sheets. The rest of the yellowing music is lying in shreds in an old cardboard box. She is matter-of-fact as she continues: Her playing has deteriorated a lot during the last weeks, she tells me, and I don’t like myself for noticing – or thinking that I notice – a slight tone of triumph in her voice, as if the loss of Mum’s competence on the piano means she is now less likely to make any ‘ruckus in the common room’ and upset the other residents who would have to witness Mum’s disintegration on a daily basis. Sometimes she tears up the music in disgust, she continues more kindly. You can take it with you if you like. Keep it safe for her.
I look through the music. There is an old copy of Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate, Bach’s Ave Maria and ‘Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen’ from La Boheme. There are the old light opera tunes which she used to sing as a girl: ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring One Day’, ‘Be My Love’ and ‘One Day When We Were Young’. There is a whole Schirmer album of Schubert Lieder as well as abridged albums of music from Paint Your Wagon and The King and I. There are also excerpts from The Well Tempered Clavier and The Art of the Fugue, as well as sheet music of ‘Jalousie’, ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Purple Moon’.
I don’t care that Desley sees me cry as I carefully smooth out and reorder what’s left of Mum’s favourite music. I know this was no random selection, but a conscious effort to destroy the remains of her once splendid collection of song. And because Shakespeare is already on my mind I think of one of Dad’s favourite lines from The Tempest, delivered by the magician Prospero when he is about to give up his practice of magic.
I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.
Perhaps no one would think an old woman screwing up her music and consigning it to the rubbish because she couldn’t play anymore was comparable to a grand Magi on a fabulous i
sland. Perhaps if I try to connect these two seemingly disparate beings, another critic, like the eighteenth-century writer who blasted Shakespeare for his vulgarity, might blast me too. But Prospero is only a figure in a play after all. Mum might never be called a great artist like Shakespeare – she was only a singing mother of five kids teaching music in the suburbs – but just like him, I imagine, she does understand what he was talking about as she prepares to leave her life’s work, abjure her own rough magic, and tear up all her favourite words and music.
PARKINSON’S SUCKS!
Mum was chopping carrots for our evening meal when she found out that she’d become a Singing Associate of the Trinity College of Music in London. We oohed and aahed at the splendid news, but none of us offered to take over cutting the carrots for her. Mum never made a big deal of her achievements; she was always thinking of the next challenge, which at that moment was cooking a meal of meat and three vegies for her husband and kids. I like to think now that she celebrated her success by the way she started singing while she chopped the carrots. She didn’t suddenly burst into song though, not as she sometimes did for our amusement, or just for the fun of it, chasing us around the kitchen with a broom, or singing operettas while she stirred the mince on the stove. That night she sang discreetly, as if her satisfaction was private and deep.
It had stormed during the day – one of those Queensland electrical storms that make the sky look ill. It had recovered, but from where I was sitting at the table I could see through the kitchen window the still greenish sky framing Mum in the kind of deeply textured landscape that I’d seen in the old movies that she loved. It was a lot to take in, what was going on inside and outside the kitchen – the backdrop, the cast of children wriggling around her, the domestic soundtrack swelling gently beneath her. She looked like the star of her own musical and I felt like one of those Hollywood kids hanging around the set of a film that I wouldn’t realise till much later was one of those timeless classics that your own kids might be able to watch with you over and over on Saturday afternoon reruns.
