Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  Norman rushed out to meet or rather greet us. I had the immediate sensation of someone tremendously alive. Blue, blue eyes blazed above the fine aquiline nose. He was like quicksilver, constantly moving, with an extraordinary lightness about him. He walked almost like a dancer, his feet hardly seeming to touch the ground. His extreme lightness gave the impression of a much smaller man than he actually was; Norman, in fact, was quite tall. His enthusiastic welcome that became so familiar to me over the years we found astonishing on that first visit and we were swept along as inevitably as the tide.

  Later, Phyllis and I sat for him. Norman did a watercolour head of each of us. I was fascinated by Norman’s watercolours; I had seen people using watercolour at the Royal Art, but not as he did. Norman used tubes of watercolour paint instead of little pans. He squeezed the paint out onto small white saucers before touching the paper with it. When he started to paint, the floods of pure colour plus the perfect control held me spellbound.

  Norman showed me how to put a wash down. I had already bought some watercolours for myself because they were cheaper than oil paints and canvas, but no one had shown me how to use them.

  ‘Margaret,’ he instructed as we were leaving, ‘you do some watercolours. The next time you come up, bring them with you and I’ll see what your work’s like.’

  I had gone to see Norman expecting to learn about black and white; I came away determined to become a watercolourist.

  After two days in Norman’s company, coming into work and colouring carpets on Monday morning was certainly coming back to earth with a thump.

  On our second visit to Springwood, we arrived on a Friday night and stayed until Monday morning, which was even more of a treat. A crowd of us went with Norman and Rose to a charity dance in Springwood on the Friday night. Norman had done the backdrop for the dance stage, an enormous oil painting of Pierrot and Columbine under moonlight. The painting seemed to cast a spell that lasted the weekend.

  I felt very weak at the knees when I produced my feeble paintings, but Norman told me what was good about them, where I had gone wrong, and above all encouraged me to keep on with watercolour. A student can go to art school for ages, but if someone takes an interest in you, as Norman did in me, it makes such a difference. In those two short visits, he ensured I was seduced by watercolour for a lifetime.

  On my second visit, too, Norman gave me a copy of his novel Redheap, which I read and loved. The furore in the press about Redheap was just beginning. It was such a harmless novel about country life in a country town; the agitation it caused amazed me. I wrote to Norman telling him I thought the book was ‘spiffing’. But the papers were full of complaints that the characters were based on real people and the book was eventually banned on the grounds it contained passages that were obscene. I think the ‘wowsers’, as Norman called them, just felt bound to object to anything he did. I cut out and kept everything in the papers to do with the novel. Reading the clippings again now, all the flurry seems so silly.

  I read and reread it at home, laughing to myself all the time. Because one of the central characters was married to the head milliner in his family’s shop, I thought my mother might enjoy it too. I told her how funny the book was but also warned her to be prepared for Mr Lindsay’s frankness. Meanwhile I kept reading it over and laughing out loud. Finally she could stand it no more and begged me to tell her some of the ‘hot bits’.

  By now I had also changed jobs again. The carpet colouring for Phyllis had continued week after week. But eventually the supply petered out and so did my job. Not that I minded. I had seen enough carpets.

  Dick Hore the commercial artist once more intervened in my life. He suggested I go along to Celebrity Pictures, where they wanted an artist to do black and white illustration.

  Celebrity Pictures’ Pitt Street office was totally strange. In the office, a row of white-gloved girls sat running film through their fingers between two spools. They were film examiners. If there was any catch in the film, they had to stop, cut it out, rejoin the film and wind on.

  Celebrity Pictures was an agency for British films. When a film arrived here from overseas, the accompanying publicity had to be changed. This was my job. I might do a black and white or a wash drawing of an actress for an ad in newspapers or alter the lettering under an advertisement to fit the Australian season.

  I came in hopefully at nine every morning and stayed until five, but there was very little work to do.

  Celebrity Pictures were slowly going broke, which hardly helped. They were run by an Englishman, Mr West, a kindly man without much business sense. However, he gave me a tiny room with a desk so I could work on my own things while I was waiting for commissions. I wasn’t given a weekly wage, only paid for whatever work I did, but it was the Depression and any money was better than none. At home, inspired by my visit to Springwood, I occupied what spare time I had doing watercolours of nudes and cats, with a great many more of the latter, I’m afraid.

  Despite the business slackness, Celebrity Pictures was the most entertaining place I ever worked.

  Maureen, the girl on the switch, wrote novels. She had the room next to mine and sometimes business was so slack that the phone wouldn’t ring all morning. Maureen was unperturbed. She busily filled notebook after notebook with wildly romantic prose. Barely sixteen, almost illiterate, Maureen had a head crammed with ludicrous characters and highly improbable situations. Would the lady of the manor succumb to the charms of the handsome villain and be ruined? Will the purer-than-pure young wife of the alcoholic spendthrift discover his infidelities? Dare the prim and proper spinster run away with the mysterious stranger in town? What is hidden in the spinster’s past?

  Maureen used to lend me her novels to read and they cheered my periods of idleness and unemployment no end. When she wasn’t writing, Maureen regaled us with stories about her family, whose extraordinary goings-on almost equalled her imaginary tales. The sex-mad cousin made good listening. The whole office knew about him. He was sixteen, too, and had interfered with everybody in the family – everybody, Maureen darkly hinted, males and females – until he was sent off to gaol.

  ‘He’ll be coming out soon, interfering with all the girls again,’ she concluded with relish; the prospect seemed to delight rather than worry her.

  Maureen’s family was poor. She was supporting the lot of them by working at the switch, and was the only one who managed to hang onto a job; she could see that fading away, too, with the demise of Celebrity Pictures.

  Two sisters, also victims of the Depression, worked at Celebrity Pictures. The older girl was employed as a senior typist, then, when she was sacked because they couldn’t afford to pay a senior’s wages, her fourteen-year-old sister Muriel came on as a junior. Muriel was paid £1 a week and they both lived on that. Their mother had died when the girls were still at school. The girls brought a friend home from school for the holidays. Their father fell instantly in love and married her. The sisters were disgusted and didn’t want to have anything more to do with the father and they left home immediately to struggle on together as best they could. Muriel was plump with golden curls, and really did look very young. She was one of those baby-faced women who would probably look young at sixty.

  Celebrity Pictures obtained an agency for American films, which was cause for jubilation. Things might look up financially now, we hoped. An American was coming out to take charge of the business and smarten up the office. He was given a welcoming party on the day he arrived, and it rapidly developed into a real Australian beer-swill. Inhibitions flew away as freely as the beer flowed in. Muriel’s sister had come from home to join the celebration. As the evening progressed, she grew as loquacious as Maureen from the switch. In hushed tones that rang round the room, Muriel’s sister revealed that Muriel wasn’t fourteen. She giggled then whispered solemnly that Muriel was actually twenty-four.

  Next day, no one higher up appeared to remember the sister’s revelation. Perhaps they were too busy with the America
n’s antics to be concerned with Muriel’s masquerade and none of us was going to dob her in. Muriel remained fourteen as long as I worked at Celebrity Pictures.

  Before the new boss arrived there was great rivalry among the girls about who was to be his secretary. The immaculate Miss Jones, always so neat and tidy, won the sought-after position. But Miss Jones soon ceased to be the envy of the typists’ pool. The new American boss had a health problem. He suffered from catarrh. From the first day he hawked incessantly and spat onto the new carpet which had been laid in his honour. Miss Jones and Mr West, himself a fastidious man, watched in horror as the new boss rubbed phlegm into the carpet with the heel of his boot.

  By the end of the week, Miss Jones would have given her new job to anyone who wanted it. Gradually Mr West and Miss Jones resigned themselves to the new regime, which fortunately didn’t last too long. The American was despatched to spit on fresh carpets.

  As well as entertaining us, Maureen kept tabs on the whole staff. She told us there was a skeleton in the cupboard of the nice-looking young man who came from the wealthy family in Randwick. He had a freak in his family; a fat girl, as big as those you see in sideshows. When the young man married the office hummed with speculation about his wife. But even Maureen was unable to fathom any information.

  Only a few weeks after the wedding, the young man took to the bottle. A couple more weeks went by, then one Friday his wife came in to collect his pay. There was nothing unusual in that – lots of wives did – but in front of our mesmerised eyes stood an enormous figure. The fat girl in the family wasn’t his cousin or his sister: she was his wife. His drinking worsened and the nice young man lost his job. Mercifully, perhaps, the marriage didn’t last long afterwards, Maureen somehow found out later.

  Casimir, a Russian boy whom we called Cas, also worked with us in the office. Like Mum’s cleaning lady, his mother had escaped the Revolution by walking across Siberia to Vladivostok. She had had a tribe of little children with her, one of whom was Casimir.

  Cas used to bring pots of face cream to work and try to sell them to us girls. He said the cream was very special; the recipe had been given to his mother by a lady-in-waiting to the Czarina. All the women at the Russian court, including the Czarina herself, had used this very same cream. The wonder cream didn’t cost very much. We bought up and waited in high hopes for the miracles it was going to perform.

  One Friday, Casimir’s mother appeared to collect his pay. She was as wide as she was tall. Her complexion was swarthy, and long hairs sprouted from little lumps in her face. The women in the office took one look and felt sick, especially Miss Jones, unlucky again. She had treated herself to a lavish supply of Casimir’s cream.

  No more orders were taken for the Czarina’s beauty cream.

  When Cas was eventually retrenched he refused to leave, continuing to arrive punctually every morning and staying to the end of the day as if nothing had happened and he was still being paid.

  ‘I just want to work,’ Cas pleaded. ‘I will help the firm out by working unpaid.’

  It was pathetic. He was so desperate for work, so anxious to please that he practically lay down on the floor for people to walk over him. Occasionally they found him some office work; the rest of the time he followed us round like a shadow. We understood, though. Spending all day every day at home with his dumpy Russian mother would have been a daunting prospect for the strongest soul.

  I found out that Hilda Townsend, a friend from the Royal Art classes, was working for a signwriter on the floor below Celebrity Pictures, which also made my days there more bearable. Slight, with curly dark hair and hazel eyes, Hilda was passionately devoted to being an artist. ‘When this Depression is over,’ we consoled each other, ‘one day we will really be artists, with our own studios, doing nothing except painting.’

  ‘I wish I lived in Paris,’ I confessed in a diary I had started a few months after my twenty-first birthday, inspired by a fountain pen my father had given me for my birthday. Paris was the city for artists, we all felt.

  Also working for the signwriter was a tall, handsome man whose burning ambition was to win the Archibald Prize. Hilda and I thought it was sad because he had a young family and was making very little money; his chance of having any time for painting was slim. Once he came into the office and showed us a large parcel of beautiful red parrot fish he had bought cheap at the markets.

  ‘I ought to be painting these, not eating them,’ he said wistfully. ‘What a still life they would make!’

  An offer of work in Brisbane came through for him. He packed up his family and shifted to Queensland, his art career abandoned. The price of the times.

  In an effort to counteract the lack of artistic atmosphere at Celebrity Pictures, and perhaps help us on our way to Paris, my friend Dora Jarret and I started taking French lessons. These were select conversational classes conducted by a plump French woman called Madame Henri, who also taught at the Conservatorium. The conversational classes were held at Madame Henri’s home at Neutral Bay. Dora and I used to take the ferry over in the evening for our lessons. Sitting outside on the ferry, looking at the sky and the dark, mysterious water was a romantic start to the evening.

  Dora herself lived at Neutral Bay, in a tiny flat off her mother’s house, and we had dinner with her mother before making our way to Madame Henri’s. Madame Henri’s home was right by the harbour’s edge and you could see all the lights of the city twinkling magically across the water. So our French lesson did provide a lift to life.

  I managed the black and white drawings at Celebrity Pictures when there were any, but lettering had to be done with the advertisements. Spelling was my downfall. I would toil away, finish the job, then discover I had misspelt a word; of course I then had to redo the whole thing. Advertisements became an ordeal. I have never been a good speller and it’s very easy to misspell a word when you’re hand lettering, because you’re absorbed in each letter, not the spelling of the word.

  A publicity man who worked for Celebrity Pictures on commission handed one of his outside assignments on to me; a label for a lemon cheese bottle. The makers wanted a drawing of lemons and lettering underneath. I designed a label, drew some nice lemons, did the lettering right, but made one spelling mistake.

  The publicity man came raging into my room. The label would have to be scrapped, he shouted. My design was useless; he would have to get somebody to design a new label. I offered to alter the label, but he wouldn’t have that. It would have to be redone.

  A week or so later Maureen, who was always poking her nose into everything round the office, saw the label I had designed on his desk, printed up. He had altered my design himself, then gone ahead with the printing. More infuriating, he never paid me. If I could earn five guineas for a commercial art job in those days, I thought I was made. To miss out on any payment was disaster.

  Oddly, however, lettering led to my next source of employment, if not of income. A commercial art school opened down from the Royal Art in Pitt Street and the Royal Art recommended me to teach lettering and rough drawing. Spelling aside, lettering wasn’t my forte, anyway, but still I took the job.

  Rough drawing was right; no battles with the antique, no subtleties of life class studies. It was strictly commercial art, meaning that the pupils learned as little as possible while the man who ran the school made as much as possible. Twenty-five shillings a week I was paid for teaching two afternoon and two evening classes. The first couple of weeks I was duly paid each Friday, then four weeks went by without payment.

  The school depended on a continuing cycle of enrolments. Pupils were joining all the time. As soon as a new pupil paid up, my employer would disappear for a couple of hours, reappearing later with a red face and smelling of whisky. He would blunder round the school for half an hour, then stagger off home, leaving me to run his art school. The fees were drunk as rapidly as they came in. Pupils stayed a while, then drifted off disillusioned as new victims signed on.

  Teac
hing was impossible. I either kept starting the classes again for the new ones, so the others were bored, or kept going and the new students were left in the dark.

  After another month without wages, I tackled my employer. A few days later he presented me with £5 and I subsided. After three months, a brochure appeared which referred to me as ‘our talented master’. I thought this very funny and so did the girls at Celebrity Pictures. Every time I put my head in the door, they chorused, ‘How is our talented master today?’ Another month passed without salary. I pleaded for some remuneration.

  ‘I don’t think I should give you any more money. You don’t seem very interested in your work,’ my employer replied. No money was forthcoming, and our talented master dug in her heels. A friend gave me some legal aid and I sued my employer in the Court of Petty Debts and secured another £5 from him before leaving the school.

  The next excitement was the artist Harvey asking if he could paint my portrait. I was very flattered. Like Arthur Murch and the rest of us, Harvey was very short of money and he was hoping to win the Archibald Prize with the portrait.

  Another artist, Miriam Moxham, lent him her studio in Margaret Street to work on the portrait. Miriam was older than the rest of us and lived with her family at Roseville, but she said it was impossible to do any work at home, so kept a studio in town. Miriam’s studio was in an old building next to Pfahlert’s Hotel and overlooking Wynyard Park. Because the building was condemned the rent was cheap. It was full of artists; J. S. Watkins, Dorrit Black, Joe Holloway’s Sketch Club, Myra Cocks and my friend Hilda from the Royal Art all had studios there. A studio meant a bare room, an easel, a few chairs, perhaps a gas ring and kettle, maybe some matting on the floor; they were strictly rooms for painting.