by Meg Stewart
Although she was clever, Mollie didn’t win a scholarship to university. She would have liked to go, but higher education cost money we couldn’t afford. She won a teacher’s scholarship, but she didn’t want to be a teacher so she took a job in the Taxation Department.
Mollie was making her debut at the Catholic ball at the Palais Royal and was determined to have a night to remember. She spent weeks working out the design of her frock, which she had specially made. There were little handmade white satin roses around the neckline and on the shoulder straps; the sleeves consisted of more straps sewn with the same roses.
The great day arrived but when Mollie went to clock off from work at the regular time of a quarter to five, the boss informed her she had to work back. They had been working overtime in her section, but Mollie was convinced that the boss knew about her debut. He was making them work overtime deliberately because he was jealous, Mollie fumed. She tried to get off at a quarter to six, but he wouldn’t let her go. Mollie was frantic. It was Friday night and we were sitting around the dining room table in the flat living every nuance of the drama with her. Mollie was on the phone every five minutes.
‘Nark, he’s doing it out of nark,’ she repeated hysterically.
Mum laid out her dress on the bed and had everything ready for her. At half past six, Mollie and her colleagues were meant to collect their tea money and have a meal break. The boss told them they had to come back afterwards.
‘I’m going out tonight,’ Mollie pleaded. ‘Can’t I go home now? I’m going to a ball; I’ll never be ready in time.’
‘No,’ the boss replied. ‘I can’t make exceptions for anyone.’ Mollie was furious now, as well as desperate. She picked up her tea money and came home. By the time she arrived at the flat the tears had set in. Mum had to bathe her face, wash her eyes, get her into the coming out frock, help with her hair. It was nine o’clock before Mollie left for the ball. We heaved sighs of relief and went to bed exhausted.
Mollie and I went to the Hackett’s wonderfully extravagant, never-to-be-forgotten New Year’s Eve party. French champagne was flowing; nothing but the best for the Hacketts. We were quite unused to such style. The waiters kept topping up our glasses.
Suddenly I noticed Mollie had vanished without a word. Noel and I went looking for her. We found her out on the lawn not exactly unconscious, just lying face upwards gazing at the stars, the two Pomeranians licking her face. She normally drank very little and the champagne and excitement had been too much for her.
She came to and we slipped off home. Mollie was a long time recovering from what she felt was a terrible disgrace.
Dad was still in Yass with Grandma. Hopeless with money, he continually disappointed Mum. She wanted her own house but there was no way Dad would ever be able to provide it on Grandma’s wages.
By some miracle Dad had managed to save some money that first year after I left school and Mum was hoping that at last he might put a deposit on a house. But Dad decided pianolas were the thing. He would invest his money in them and make his fortune. He bought up a whole stockpile, planning to sell them door to door on time payment. Mum looked stricken when she heard about the pianolas. Dad gave us one for the flat. The last thing in the world Mum wanted was a pianola.
It drove her mad. Dad would come in, sit himself down and pedal with vigour. The keys flew, music churned out. A wide selection of hymns came with the pianola, as well as popular tunes. ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ was Dad’s favourite. The flat resounded with ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ whenever Dad was in town.
The pianolas sold all right; the trouble was that, as the Depression was beginning, no one made payments on them. They were a financial disaster.
This was heartbreaking for my mother; her dream of her own house receded even further. The rest of us, though, were happy enough in Botany Street.
Mum’s other dream was to go to Russia. Back when we had been staying at the Coogee boarding house, the Villa Taormina, a man named Jim Quinn was lodging there. He was a builder and a member of the Communist Party, which we didn’t know at the time, who left a vast fortune to the party in his will.
Every time I met Jim Quinn, he would say, ‘How’s your art going?’
‘Very well,’ I answered dutifully.
‘Ah,’ he would intone, ‘art is a weapon.’
He lived a solitary life and became very attached to us during our stay at the Villa Taormina, particularly to Mum. His endless talk of Russia, I think, inspired her with this wish to travel there.
Our cleaning lady in Botany Street was Russian too, which might have fuelled Mum’s fantasies. This woman had been a dresser with the Russian Ballet before the Revolution and her husband was a strong man in the circus. They had walked across Siberia to Vladivostok to escape from Russia and come to Australia.
Until she was a very old lady, Mum talked about going to Russia one day. But she never did.
Mollie was born on Melbourne Cup Day. She loved racing and she loved horses. Being so close to the racecourse, Randwick was full of racing stables, and Botany Street was in the midst of them. Jerry Carey lived two doors up. O’Connor’s were three or four doors away; T. J. Jamieson, a New Zealand trainer, was also nearby, and Jack King’s big stables were at the end of the street opposite where the entrance to the University of New South Wales is now.
When we first moved to Randwick, I used to pick bunches of boronia and other wildflowers on the university site, which was a big paddock. I think the wildflowers thrived on the sandy soil. Soon they started quarrying. The quarry left a huge pit which, to our horror, became a tip. The smell of garbage used to waft up the street to the flats, but the hole was filled and they turned it into a small golf links. None of the locals could believe that the university was to be built over the old tip; they said the university would sink into the quarry. But it seems to have survived.
Irish old-style racehorse trainers, the Paytens, lived on the corner of the block and opposite the Paytens lived another trainer, Jim ‘The Grafter’ Kingsley. Grafter Kingsley weighed over twenty stone and used to ride down Botany Street in a tiny sulky drawn by a very small horse. From the back, the sulky almost touched the ground under the strain of the Grafter’s immense weight.
George Lambert and Grafter Kingsley lived within a few hundred yards of each other. It fascinated me that two such different worlds were so close, yet they couldn’t have been further apart.
Mollie lived for the races. For days before the big spring and autumn meetings we heard of nothing else. The phone rang hot with tips for her. You could always rely on Mollie for a sure tip at Randwick. ‘That horse can’t lose’, ‘That horse will lose all right’, ‘That horse can only come last’, ‘That horse is a surefire winner’; I can’t tell you how often I heard those phrases.
I took it all with a grain of salt, but Mollie was deadly serious about her predictions. She would be positive her horse was going to win and, if by some mischance it lost, she had every excuse off pat.
At Easter, down at Inglis’s stables, they held the yearling parade. The yearlings were led round the yards with great pomp and ceremony. Dad used to come up from Yass to spend Easter Sunday with us and he and Mollie never missed a yearling parade.
Mum’s younger sister, Aileen, also used to stay with us at Easter. Aileen was a champion rider who came up from Murrumburrah for the high jump events at the Royal Easter Show. She used to share my room and I remember her waking up once at about four in the morning.
‘Listen to the horses’ hooves!’ she said excitedly. The racehorses were setting out for their early morning training gallops. We were accustomed to the noise and slept through it but Aileen, being a visitor, was awakened instantly. She jumped out of bed and stared through the window. She couldn’t understand why we weren’t up watching them, too.
The racing atmosphere in Randwick was contagious; even Mum, who was not a gambler, sometimes had a bet on. She would often dress up on a Saturday afternoon and walk round to the races with Mollie.
Every Saturday afternoon, a mixed crowd gathered on the hill, mostly down-and-outs, old soaks, a few children and teenagers. Bets were in twopences and threepences, but a smart bookie could still make ten shillings on a race. If he was overextended or couldn’t make his payment, he just used to disappear, so as soon as a race was over everyone would make a circle around the bookmaker to ensure he didn’t run away.
The Little Sisters of the Poor were familiar figures in Randwick on race days. Since most of the trainers were Irish Catholics, they virtually supported these nuns, whose order, many years later, cared for both Bea Miles and Dulcie Deamer before they died.
The trainers were Irish, Catholic and highly superstitious. A trainer had put his hat on ready to take his horse to the track, when a Chinese man who went round selling fruit and vegetables from a cart came by and wished him luck.
The trainer’s horse won the Summer Cup that afternoon and the trainer said ‘the Chinaman’ had brought him luck. He arranged to have him call before every big race and wish him luck after he had put his hat on.
The back of our flats adjoined Jerry Carey’s stables. His apprentices came from the country; often they had just arrived in the city. They were boys of twelve and thirteen, small for their ages. Because they took the boys so young, the trainers were responsible for their welfare. Stable boys led a strictly disciplined life.
One night we heard screams followed by the sound of someone being sick. The lights in the stables went on, a boy’s sobbing was heard.
‘Will I die, Mrs Carey? Will I die, Mrs Carey?’ he whimpered. It was surreal. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right. One of the older boys took him to a party and got him drunk, that’s all,’ another voice shouted over the fence. Next thing we heard was Jerry’s voice booming out to the older boy, ‘Now pack your bags and go!’
King bought himself a punching bag, the sort you hit as if you are boxing with someone. King wanted to build himself up, and pounded away at the bag on the first morning he got it. That evening Jerry Carey came round to the flats.
‘Mr Coen, I’m sorry to tell you this,’ he said. ‘The horses were nearly driven crazy with the noise this morning, so if you don’t mind you’ll have to stop using that punching bag.’ Jerry said it nicely, but sounded as if he meant it; King didn’t use the punching bag again.
One of the Careys’ horses took a fancy to a cat I had, and horse and cat became inseparable. The cat still came home to me for dinner, as well as filling up on extra tidbits at the stables, but that was all I saw of my cat after it met the Careys’ horse.
At Danny Lewis’s stable, they bought a milking goat for the children. The goat and a horse fell in love. The goat did everything with the horse except accompany it onto the track.
That was racing Randwick. It was quite unique.
My brother Jack loved everything electrical. In Jack’s bedroom, we had to pick our way through red wires, blue wires, half-made wirelesses, crystal sets and ‘cats’ whiskers’, a name that always intrigued me. I don’t know how Mum ever fought her way across the room to make his bed. Jack never made his own bed. Even the floor underneath the bed was covered with paraphernalia. Jack’s bedroom was his workroom. When he managed to hear a strain of music or a few words on a wireless he was making, he emerged, wildly excited, and dragged us in to listen to his new set. Jack not only made wirelesses that worked, he sold them too, which impressed us no end. At one stage he worked in the radio department of David Jones. The radios sold fastest when Nellie Melba was on, according to him. He used to deliver them by hansom cab.
Giving us electrical shocks was part of Jack’s home experiments. He would drop a penny into a basin and run an electric current through the water. We had to line up holding hands, then he made one of us try to pick the penny up. The resulting shock was quite something; the current ran through all of us. One person only had to touch the water; you couldn’t get anywhere near the penny. The family tolerated Jack’s shocks in much the same way as they put up with my wanting to be an artist.
Jack enjoyed fiddling with anything electrical. Joy’s husband Bill from upstairs, the dancing instructor at the Palais Royal, used to get home at about one o’clock on a Saturday night and he often brought a group of friends back with him. A dozen or so people would party on upstairs almost until daybreak. Mum got tired of the racket. She said she wasn’t feeling well; perhaps she was just fed up with the sound of other people’s parties. She was never a party person and anyway, the dancing on the floor above our bedrooms was very noisy.
One Saturday night, Mum said to Jack, ‘Go upstairs and fix them.’ Jack disappeared outside and disconnected their fuse box. The flat upstairs was plunged into darkness. We could hear the expressions of surprise and dismay that ensued and the guests departed rapidly. Mum slept soundly. On the Sunday morning, Bill came downstairs very apologetically to ask Mum if Jack would be so kind as to have a look at their fuse box.
Jack, who could keep a poker face, said he would be delighted. He went upstairs, restored their box to order and accepted their thanks without the slightest twitch of a smile. Party nights did decline a little after that.
King and particularly Jack had a bad time of it in the Depression. People couldn’t afford to be too choosy about where they worked. Jack was sacked from various places as they closed down; that’s why he ended up working for himself, making wirelesses. In the bank, King was at least secure.
One day King bought a motor bike with a sidecar. We woke up and there on the front lawn was this dreadful, decrepit machine. He hadn’t said a word about it to anyone except Jack. The bike wasn’t secondhand, but about twentieth hand; King paid £15 for it and Jack chipped in so he could have a share. I don’t know how they even lifted it inside the front gate.
It took King weeks of tinkering to get it going. Amber and I used to drive around Bondi beach during the day like princesses in the chauffeur-driven Rolls, then after tea Jack or King would come around to the Hacketts with this old bike. We would pile in, about six of us squashed into the sidecar, and go for a bone-rattling drive around Randwick before we went home.
King had a girlfriend, Mary Frost, who used to go everywhere with us. She was like one of the family already. We thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world, with her black hair and eyes and complexion the colour of pink carnations.
The bike needed a run. King decided one long weekend he would take Mary to Goulburn to visit some relatives of hers. Mary, rugged up with blankets, scarf and hat, was installed in the sidecar and they set off. Goulburn was quite a distance away. A begoggled King concentrated on the road and the bike, while Mary bumped along beside him for hours. Just before Goulburn, King turned to say something to his passenger. To his horror Mary was gone. There was no sidecar, no Mary, nothing.
The sidecar had dropped off along the road about ten miles back, King discovered, and Mary had been left sitting by herself on the roadside. King wondered if Mary would ever forgive him, but she did. Soon afterwards they announced their engagement.
Life had its ups and downs. Some cousins had a weekend house at Cronulla, which they let us have at Christmas and for weekends through the year. Usually about twelve of us stayed there, mostly King and Mollie’s friends. Mum made it a condition that we did the work, otherwise she said the holiday only meant extra chores for her.
On one occasion eight of us, four boys and four girls, including Mary Frost, rented a boat. The boys took it in turns to row, as we made our way across the glassy flat sea to Point Hacking. A sudden southerly blew up and on the way back the boat seemed to stand on its head every time it went over a wave. It would drop down again before going up and over the next wave. We were terrified. Mollie was weeping, Mary and I were in the back of the boat saying rosaries out loud i
n between exhorting the boys to row harder. We were going to drown, this was the end, I thought.
Mollie started calling on St Jude, patron saint of the impossible. St Jude came good. The boat finally seesawed into Cronulla and safety. Mary and I said another rosary in gratitude.
The bank suddenly transferred King up to Bundaberg. He wasn’t exactly overjoyed; we had just scraped together enough to buy a new gramophone for the flat. Music was very important in our house.
‘Just my luck to be moved away when we get the new gramophone,’ he groaned.
After a few months, he came down for a weekend. Like everyone else, King hated the dentist but he had a bad toothache, and wanted to see our family dentist in Randwick, Clarrie Hughes. Unfortunately, Clarrie couldn’t see him until Monday morning.
Saturday night King tramped around the house, unable to keep still because of the pain in his tooth. Then he disappeared onto the back verandah. Mum went to see what had happened. She was shocked to find a huge tooth covered in blood. King had used an old pair of rusty forceps to pull the tooth out himself. He tore his jaw to pieces in the process and Clarrie spent hours patching it up on Monday morning.
I don’t like the dentist myself. As a child in Yass, I was climbing on some rafters my mother had declared out of bounds when I fell and broke my tooth. Because I was so frightened of the dentist, I didn’t tell her about the tooth. Instead I tried to keep my mouth closed and I developed a dreadful, lopsided smile that stayed with me long after the damage to my tooth had been rectified.
King came down again the next year. He and Mary Frost were married and Mary went back with him to Bundaberg. Our family was splitting up again.
About this time, I received my first proposal of marriage. A heavily built and swarthy Greek Orthodox priest used to come calling on his flock down Botany Street. Mum always asked him in for a cup of tea. There was something contrary in Mum’s nature; she never asked the Catholic priest in.
Mum liked the Greek priest. She said she felt sorry for him having to go round on foot in such hot weather collecting for the church. She used to make him a cup of tea and a sandwich and give him a shilling for the church, for which the Greek priest was suitably grateful.
