Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  I also designed two bookplates for Noel at some stage. One was extremely gruesome and Poe-like. It featured a dagger stuck in a skull, with a rat perched on top of the skull for extra effect. There was also a bottle of poison and two very ghoulish heads dripping with black liquid. ‘Ex Libris Horribilibus Noel Hackett’ was written on the bottom. (I don’t remember if the ‘horribilibus’ was part of the joke or just my bad spelling.) The other bookplate was more attractive. It had a modish eighteenth-century gentleman promenading with one of the Hackett’s white Pomeranians trotting at his heels.

  The Royal Art Society was two floors up a rickety staircase at Vickery’s Chambers, 76 Pitt Street on the Circular Quay side of Martin Place.

  Syd Long was my teacher two nights a week now; Rubbo still taught me the other two. Syd was easier to get on with. He didn’t seem to take teaching as seriously as Rubbo did. Small and quiet with grey hair, Syd was a bit grey all over but he had a pleasant, rather inquisitive expression and a gentle smile. He would stroll round the classroom, humming as he looked at our work.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Syd would say after he had inspected a drawing, then reach into his pocket and hand over a boiled lolly. Syd always had a bag of lollies in his pocket and he always hummed ‘In the Good Old Summertime’.

  Friends of my mother’s wanted to buy some of Syd’s etchings and they asked me to introduce them to him. I set up an appointment with Syd, took them along, did the introductions and left. That night at the class Syd handed me an envelope. Inside was a £5 note.

  ‘That’s your commission,’ he said. He had given me 25 per cent of the £20 worth of his etchings they had bought to take back to the country. I was surprised and delighted. Syd Long could do no wrong in my eyes after that.

  The Royal Art rented a whole floor of the building, consisting of two classrooms (one for the life class, one for the antique) and an office. A notice in the life room said, ‘Silence is requested while the model is posing’, which someone had changed so it read, ‘Silence is requested while the model is dozing’. We thought this was a great joke.

  Mr Oxnard-Smith, an elderly man with a drooping white moustache, presided over the office. On his desk were copies of a German magazine called Jugend, which had very stylish illustrations. On the wall hung a male nude, a pale, thin, ordinary-looking man, also with a drooping moustache but beautifully painted, by a Belgian artist, I think. It mysteriously disappeared in one of the Royal Art’s moves.

  George Finey was one of the first people I met at the Royal Art. A little timorous, I arrived to find George clad only in shorts and sandals prancing around on top of the long table in the secretary’s office where the board of directors held their meetings. George, with his false teeth on a plate pushed up the front of his mouth, was grimacing fearsomely as he pranced. It was the weirdest sight, a strange first meeting.

  Jack Mills, Bob Gunter, John Santry and Hilda Townsend were new friends for me at the Royal Art, and, of course, Alison’s best friend George Duncan.

  George Duncan was the guardian angel of the Royal Art. Big, blond, blue-eyed obliging George – if anything ever went amiss in the place, we said, ‘Let George do it.’ ‘Let George do it’ was the class catchword.

  George did meticulous academic drawings; it was a long time before he attempted any painting. He and Alison were absolutely devoted to art and to each other. Alison and Janna Bruce had come along with me to the Royal Art from Rubbo’s day class. When Rubbo’s son Sydney was interviewing us forty years later, Alison described how Rubbo had introduced her to George.

  ‘George, this is Alison. I want you to look after her,’ Rubbo said at class.

  ‘And,’ Alison concluded, ‘George has been looking after me ever since.’

  Arthur Murch was overseas on a travelling scholarship when I began at the Royal Art, but his drawings, including a typical rounded luminous pink nude, were hanging in the Royal Art office. I was impressed by the beauty of the work. Murch, when I did meet him, was blond and chubby like one of his own paintings. He spent much of his time away with the artist Harvey (his first name was Edmund but everyone just called him ‘Harvey’). After they returned from overseas the two of them worked at the Randwick sculpture studio of George Lambert. They also started a sketch club together in town, near the Haymarket, as far as I remember. Rah Fizelle was another artist who was overseas in my early days at the Royal Art. When Fizelle returned he had a studio in lower George Street with Grace Crowley, near Thea Proctor. Thea Proctor was much older than the rest of us and well established as an artist. She dressed as elegantly as she drew, and rarely mixed with students.

  A clattering on the dilapidated Royal Art stairs would announce the arrival of the Lindsay boys, Ray and Phil. Everyone waited with bated breath to see what would happen next; the Lindsay boys were supposed to be wild young men. They would tumble in, falling about, causing uproar. Phil was short with long fair hair. He wore an ancient green velvet coat that was far too long for him and it trailed on the floor. He was always tripping over it, or tripping over something else.

  Ray was tall and dark, quite different-looking from Phil, but also long-haired. The Lindsays wore long hair before anyone else. I don’t think they ever drew at the Royal Art, they just dropped in to collect their friends for another night on the town.

  Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday I went to the Royal Art. A short, blonde woman in a rabbity fur coat used to catch the same six o’clock tram from Randwick as I did. She had a swollen look about the eyes. I thought she might have a night job in the city. She did, but not what I imagined.

  The classes finished about nine or nine thirty. One night I was on my way to Elizabeth Street to catch the tram home with John Mills and a couple of the other boys when, fur coats flying, high heels clacking, suddenly a dozen women came running like gazelles down Martin Place. Among them I glimpsed the face of the woman I used to see on the tram. Following close on the women’s heels were the police. The women were prostitutes, the boys told me. King Street was their regular beat. Every so often the police felt obliged to chase them off.

  I met a girl called Rosalie Humphries at the Royal Art. Since my move into art circles, I had lost touch with my close friends from school such as Genie Devlin. I was longing for a friend with whom I could discuss books and literature. One night at class when we were discussing poetry Rosalie asked me if I had ever read Hassan by James Elroy Flecker. I hadn’t, so Rosalie lent me a copy. I had always liked poetry; at school I learned long poems like ‘The Ancient Mariner’ off by heart. Hassan enchanted me; the magic and mystery of the romantic verse play set in Baghdad with its hints of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley decadence and sadness. I loved the character of the carpet maker who wove borders of black for death around his patterns.

  Rosalie brought me in more books of modern poetry to read. Eagerly I devoured everything she lent me; we had long conversations about poetry and art. Rosalie learned fencing, which I envied because it seemed so romantic. I wished I could afford lessons myself. She had an old bomb of a car and quite often drove me home. We rattled our way out to Randwick, enthusing over books, swapping ideas, planning our careers.

  Rosalie invited me to a luncheon party at her parents’ home; her father was a doctor at Killara. The table was elegantly set, every place setting had a finger bowl and in each bowl Rosalie had put a scarlet poinsettia petal.

  The grilled racks of lamb were arranged in a circle on a serving plate. In the centre was a mound of mashed potato and around each cutlet was a little white paper frill. It was all just like Mrs Beeton’s cookery book, more stylish than our meals at home and quite different to the cheap snacks we snatched before the Royal Art classes.

  To my distress, a few weeks later Rosalie announced that she had accepted a physical culture teaching position in Tasmania because she wanted to get away from home. I was stricken. I missed our talks and the rides in her funny little car. Rosalie was a kindred soul, I thought.

  From Tasmania, Rosalie wrot
e saying that she was off to try her luck in England. A year passed before she came back to Sydney, but it was only a brief visit before she went back to England for good. I saw her off at Central station; she was catching the train to Melbourne and taking the boat from there.

  I remember walking back along the platform crying my eyes out because I thought I would never have such a good friend again. Rosalie had been my mentor.

  The classes at the Royal Art being mixed, I had my share of invitations and romances with the boys, but I was very wary of entanglement. I hadn’t gone to art school for a husband and I thought that if I married I wouldn’t be able to be an artist. Besides, art students didn’t have any money for grand nights out. Mollie was off every night of the week to dinner or the theatre. She would come home laden with corsages and boxes of chocolates. I used to sneak a few of the chocolates as a small consolation for my lack of rich admirers.

  John Mills was a special friend of mine among the boys at the Royal Art. He did a charcoal drawing of me, which I still have. If the model didn’t turn up at class, one of the students sat on the model’s throne and the rest of the class did a portrait of him or her instead.

  One night it was my turn and John gave me his drawing, the first time anyone had ever drawn me.

  John had a part-time job looking after a yacht and he took Bob Gunter and me out on the harbour with him. I’ll never forget it; the yacht was so quiet. I was caught up in the spell of the water as John dashed about changing ropes and we wended our way across the harbour with the wind.

  The Royal Art boys used to take me for a cup of coffee after classes to Mockbell’s in Castlereagh Street. Mockbell’s was a chain of coffee shops, the haunt of the literary and artistic. The men used to play chess at the long, marble-topped tables with filigreed iron legs and the waitresses wore black dresses. You could sit there for hours.

  Kitty and Joan Britten, two German girls who were models in the life class, were always at Mockbell’s. Artists used to draw at the tables, someone always had a sketch pad out. I loved looking at the Mockbell’s habitués but I never stayed long. If I was home late, I had such a deal of explaining to do to Mum that it wasn’t worth it.

  We had christened an ex-sailor who attended classes ‘Bloody Politeful’. Bloody Politeful was a misfit at the Royal Art. Painfully shy, he went bright red whenever he spoke. He was always inordinately polite except for occasional lapses into ripe seagoing language – hence the nickname. Bloody Politeful wanted desperately to be my friend. He was tired of the sea, he told me, and lonely. He had joined the art classes in the hope of meeting some nice girls.

  Bloody Politeful took to accompanying me to the tram after class. Next thing I knew, he arrived with a huge box of chocolates, not very nice chocolates either, and asked me if I would be his girl.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ I told him as gently as I could, ‘but it’s out of the question.’

  That was the end of the romance. I think he eventually drowned in the harbour.

  My next would-be consort was Luigi Nobili. He was an Italian nobleman, an artist who fled from Italy because he couldn’t bear the thought of being called up for Mussolini’s military service. Rubbo brought him down to the Royal Art and introduced him to the students. No one knew if Luigi was really an aristocrat or if the Nobili surname had people fooled. Anyway, Luigi took an immediate shine to me.

  Luigi was a stylish dresser. He wore tailored suits and silk shirts with his initials embroidered on them. Nothing ragged or bohemian about Luigi. He was a little shorter than me, which was a worry – at eighteen those things seem important.

  Luigi inveigled me up to his Rowe Street studio for a black coffee. Black coffee made in a percolator was very avant-garde and exotic, not to say decadent, in those days. He serenaded me on the mandola, an instrument that looked and sounded like the mandolin. After a few more visits to his studio, I decided to invite Luigi home to Randwick, to meet my family.

  Luigi was delighted and asked if we could stop off on the way at the famous Centennial Park he had heard so much about (not from me, after my Centennial Park experience with the married man).

  The Coogee tram went up the Anzac Parade side of the park. The tram stopped at a bushy part of the park where there were lots of native plants. It was also boggy. Luigi wanted to see the rose garden in the centre of the park. I guided him across the marsh until we came to a stream with only a plank for a bridge.

  ‘Don’t cross here, Luigi,’ I said apprehensively, glancing at the immaculate pale blue coat and trousers he was sporting that afternoon. But Luigi the gallant insisted on leading me across the plank. The inevitable happened. Luigi went head first into the narrow but surprisingly deep little stream and emerged covered in mud from head to toe.

  He was upset, not so much at the dunking, but he kept asking where he could have his suit cleaned. I suppressed my smiles. I found him a tap, cleaned him up as best I could and then we made our way to Botany Street.

  ‘Luigi had some bad luck,’ I said when we arrived. Luigi did look bedraggled, his clothes still damp and mudcaked. ‘He fell off a plank at Centennial Park.’

  My rotten, unfeeling family laughed their heads off; almost the final straw in an afternoon of calamities. However, Luigi forgave my family’s barbarities; he survived the expedition and our courtship continued.

  Among the paintings hanging on the walls of his studio was a landscape of a lavish Italian garden, with red spots strategically positioned over it. Luigi told me he had been in love with a beautiful young girl in Italy. She had been the love of his life, but her parents had arranged for her to marry a man twice her age. The painting hanging on the wall in Sydney depicted the grounds of the flash hotel where the couple had honeymooned.

  During the honeymoon, Luigi and the girl had met secretly in the shrubbery of this garden and the red dots marked the sites of their assignations. A most romantic tale, I thought.

  Luigi was finding it difficult to earn a living as an artist in Australia. He decided that the answer to his financial problems was to open a country art school in Goulburn. He packed his bags, took up his easel and a stack of his canvasses and headed off to make his fortune. Out of sight, out of mind, I’m afraid. As soon as Luigi departed, I forgot about him. But when I was at Yass for the holidays, I remembered that he was toiling away in nearby Goulburn and wrote to him.

  Annie used to collect all the mail for The House in the morning from the Yass post office. Grandma would distribute it while we were sitting round the table at dinner time.

  ‘I think this one must be for you, Margaret,’ Grandma said, handing me a letter – we were both Margaret Coen and that’s why she had thought it was for her. The letter was from Luigi; as I read I nearly died.

  Dear Margaret, So it is because you are amongst the blacks and the old people that you think of your friend Luigi …

  Had Grandma read any further than the ‘Dear Margaret’? I never found out but I prayed she hadn’t. What could she have thought? The letter went on to say that I must come and visit him in Goulburn, but my love affair with Luigi Nobili was over. Luigi had vanquished any romantic notions I had of him with this thoughtless introduction.

  The story of Jim Leape, a student at the Royal Art, was much sadder. He was about my age and did very skilful pen and ink drawings. One Friday night as I was catching the tram, he asked if he could come home with me. We caught the Randwick tram and he showed me a book he had made of Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, filled with his own drawings of the cursed seaman and the unlucky bird. After we alighted, he wanted to walk down to Botany Street with me.

  ‘I like walking,’ he said when I hesitated, thinking it was too far out of his way.

  The further we walked, the more passionate his declarations became. He made no physical advances, just verbal declarations of his infatuation. I knew we liked each other, but I had no idea his feelings about me were so strong.

  At the flats we said goodnight. Jim Leape said he woul
d see me on Monday and set off into the darkness. From Botany Street, he was going to walk to Coogee, where he lived.

  At the Royal Art the following week, someone asked me for two shillings.

  ‘What for?’ I asked.

  ‘For a wreath,’ Percy Norton told me.

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘Jim Leape.’

  I was stunned. Jim Leape had died of a heart attack at the weekend. I found out later that he was only sixteen and that rheumatic fever as a child had weakened his heart. His death troubled me for a long time afterwards; I couldn’t help but wonder if our long walk had had anything to do with his death.

  At the end of my first year out of school, I went as usual to Yass for my holidays. I stayed on after Christmas and frittered away the time until the end of January. Then my father came into my room holding a letter.

  ‘Your mother wants you back in Sydney,’ he said. ‘Jack Flanagan has come out from America.’

  Frantic with excitement, I packed my bags and was on the next train back to Sydney. My idol, Jack Flanagan the artist, the American success story, here! I couldn’t wait to meet him.

  Jack Flanagan was tall, fair, blue-eyed, good-looking and a stylish dresser; I remember him always in a grey suit. He was only thirty-two, a great dancer and very recently divorced, which added enormously to his sex appeal in the 1920s. Women were mad about him.

  In Sydney for an exhibition of his work at Rubery Bennett’s gallery in King Street, he was staying at the Hotel Australia on the corner of Rowe and Castlereagh streets. The Hotel Australia was the place to stay in those days.

  Jack invited me to have dinner with him there. I was thrilled beyond measure just to be in his company. He introduced me to a cocktail called the Clover Club, which he said everyone drank with dinner in New York.