by Meg Stewart
The McCuaigs moved into a new flat at Thompsons Bay and we spent an afternoon visiting them. After we left we drove down to the beach and sat looking at the water, then we went for tea with Mum in the flat at Botany Street.
Grandma was dead by then but Kathleen had kept up the tradition of despatching Yass Christmas cakes to all the family. She used Grandma’s recipe and sent a cake to each of her sisters in the convent and one always arrived at Botany Street for Mum. I had already eaten a fair share over Christmas, but I could never say no to Grandma’s cake. This Sunday night was no exception, but about three in the morning I woke up feeling dreadful.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ I thought. ‘I shouldn’t have eaten the Christmas cake.’
For an hour I lay there feeling ill and blaming the cake. Pain started round my back. It wasn’t the cake; the baby was coming.
Doug shot upstairs and called the car he had booked. I made my way down the two flights of stairs, which I didn’t much appreciate, but I managed it.
The driver set off in a tearing hurry. I think he was terrified the birth was going to happen in his nice clean car. In fact, the baby wasn’t born until three in the afternoon. Doug kept telling him to slow down, the driver would relax for a second, then his foot would be on the accelerator again.
As we raced up Oxford Street to Crown Street, the sun was just coming up. I saw the most beautiful dawn sky, with pink and orange splitting open the blue darkness. Later the morning turned grey and it drizzled.
I remember the time going slowly by, lying in a big room by myself, watching the clock. I had to tell the nurses every time I felt a contraction. The pain got worse and I heard a terrible sound. What on earth could that be? I wondered. It was my own groaning, I realised. I was groaning involuntarily.
The pain increased. My memories of the birth are hazy. The baby didn’t have enough oxygen.
‘Keep up, keep up,’ I could hear them saying, urging me to breathe in on an oxygen mask.
I saw the baby born, and seconds after that I blacked out. Things were different from modern hospitals. The doctor called in to see me about five o’clock when I was back in the ward.
‘Haven’t they brought her in to you yet?’ he said. They hadn’t. I didn’t know where the baby was, but she wasn’t with me. Shortly afterwards, I saw the baby properly for the first time.
The baby was a girl, a big baby and long. She weighed almost eleven pounds. Still, I had weighed more than that myself when I was born; Mum always said that’s why she hadn’t had any more children.
This baby had wide open, staring eyes and lots of hair. As soon as you see your baby, you really forget about the pain beforehand. Margaret Mary Elizabeth she was officially named, but straight off we started calling her Meg, the Scottish diminutive for Margaret.
Norman sent me and Doug separate brief congratulatory notes pointing out the aesthetic advantages of having a girl, girls being both nice to look at and also to draw. Later he despatched a card he’d done to celebrate the event; it showed a grey tabby cat with large yellow eyes holding a white dancing kitten up with her front paws.
Bringing the baby back to the studio didn’t go as smoothly as I had envisaged. The baby squawked as visitors crowded in to congratulate us. I was trying to entertain them, making endless cups of tea, preparing meals and also feeding the baby. It was too much. The baby screamed louder than ever and lost weight.
I retreated to a Karitane nursing home for two weeks. The baby calmed down, she only screamed so incessantly before because I wasn’t feeding her enough. After acclimatising to the baby in a peaceful environment, I could at least handle her with ease when I came back to the studio and the flow of visitors had abated.
Baby care in the studio had its ups and downs, particularly those two flights of stairs. Another problem was the bathroom which we shared with Isa Lorrimer, the smiling, pretty ballet teacher who was now married to an American. Isa’s new husband was extra keen on hot showers. Every time he had a shower, the gas went off in the studio. The studio was filled with the smell of gas, and the gas refrigerator, which had taken such effort to get up the stairs and in which I kept the baby’s milk, was turned off. Doug and I thought we were all going to be gassed. But then Doug wrote to the gas company who came and blew the pipes for us, so we were saved.
A gas strike was the next event. I was feeding the baby with a milk supplement as well as my own milk. The supplementary milk had to be heated. Our only cooking arrangement was the little gas stove. I spent several days boiling milk in a saucepan on the bars of the electric radiator.
Living right in the centre of the city in a flat, I felt I should take the baby out somewhere every day. Sometimes we walked up to Hyde Park to look at the fountain; other days we walked to the rose garden in front of the Art Gallery of New South Wales; sometimes we wandered around the Botanical Gardens. I would stealthily conceal a few stolen blooms in the stroller, coming back through the gates. Sometimes we would linger behind the Conservatorium to watch the cat lady at feeding times, or stop for a chat with Mrs Royston and Mrs Bultitude in Macquarie Place.
We caught the ferry over to Kirribilli or the zoo where we inspected the baby wombats, the ocelots and my special cat friend with long pointed ears. At first I thought this animal was a lynx, but then the name on the cage was changed to ‘caracal’. I often drew his face and elegant ears and used to take him little parcels of food as a treat. The black panther was another favourite of ours. I used to entice him to walk up and down the cage in step with us. We tried doing it with the lion. He tolerated a few lengths, then lunged at us. We left him alone after that.
On the Kirribilli ferry one day, we met Dattilo-Rubbo. Signor Rubbo was delighted with the baby. He put her on his knee and bounced her about. As he was leaving the ferry, Rubbo handed her back. ‘Well, Margaret,’ he said, ‘you have painted many pictures but this is your masterpiece.’
A fat old cat used to sun itself in the afternoons outside the wine bar on the way to the Quay; we christened him ‘Wineshop Pussy’. I would fashion a paper mouse for him out of the sticky brown paper I used for sealing up the backs of picture frames, paint a face, attach some whiskers and a tail and add a long piece of string so we could drag it in front of his nose. Wineshop Pussy would lazily deign to put out a paw as the mouse went by and perhaps even pounce if he was feeling especially skittish or showing off. It was hard to say who enjoyed these games most; Meg, me or Wineshop Pussy. Wineshop Pussy always kept the mouse as a present when we left.
We would walk up to Victor’s in King Street and eat oysters by the dozen, which we both adored, or bring them back to the studio so Doug could share.
Beatrice McCaughey would drop in, bringing the most exquisite baby dresses, smocked and shirred Liberty prints in blues and pinks. Really, the time flew. The time a young baby has to be looked after is very short compared with the rest of a life span.
Painting was restricted in the first couple of years, but I still drew. Every day in the studio I drew, even if it was only for fifteen minutes. If I drew for fifteen minutes at least I felt I had done my five finger exercises. Fifteen minutes is nothing; you spend that long reading the newspaper in the morning.
Although having a child meant I stopped painting, it didn’t mean that my powers of observation were impaired. On our expeditions to the gardens or out on the ferry, I could still look at things and think about how I would paint them. Time to reflect and observe is valuable. Too many people go on painting without ever stopping to look properly at what they’re painting.
I learned to draw from memory. If I don’t have a sketch book with me, I memorise things; if you look hard at something you’ll find as soon as you’re home you’ll be able to jot it down on paper. You can train your mind to remember like this; it was one of the things I learned while baby minding.
I rarely went over to the musty underground corridors of the Bulletin, with the huge rolls of dirty cream paper that blocked the passageway and the cubbyhole
offices, desks stacked high with books, but Doug brought Bulletin visitors over to the studio. Nancy Keesing, Rosemary Dobson or David Campbell, handsome as ever and out of uniform now, would arrive for a cup of tea in the afternoon and end up staying for dinner.
One evening David dashed in with a suitcase and proceeded to change into tails to wear to a wedding. He’d forgotten to bring a belt and we had to lend him an old tie of Doug’s to hold up his trousers. All the time he was getting dressed he was talking away to Doug about poetry.
Norman did a pencil drawing of David on another of his visits. Meg intently watched the whole proceedings with David, then insisted on having her own portrait done. Norman obliged and she sat perfectly still until the drawing was finished. A very solemn little person she looked.
The only sadness during this period was when I miscarried and lost another baby. I had started to collect baby clothes, but then I was in hospital for a few days and it was all over. Too soon it seemed my daughter was five and catching the ferry at the Quay every morning over to the Loreto Convent at Kirribilli, and I was back painting again. I had a second show up at Brisbane – the Moreton Galleries this time – at the end of her first year at school, just before we moved out of the studio.
We liked living in the studio, but we wanted fresh air and a garden. Buying a house after the war wasn’t easy. It was hard to get a housing loan from the bank and impossible to arrange any finance on the old house which we would have preferred, so we settled for a new red brick L-shaped one at St Ives.
The blocks were big and cheap at St Ives. During the war there had been an army camp on our land and before that an Italian orange orchard. By 1953 when we arrived, any fruit trees were well and truly gone and paspalum was rampant.
But St Ives was still nicely rural, which suited us. Horses came and ate out of the front garden, and it was so close to the bush, we were practically in it. We backed onto Ku-ring-gai Chase with its valleys of sandstone and wildflowers, and the northern beaches weren’t too far away either.
Most of the roads weren’t tarred. The kids rode billycarts down the hill to the dairy at the bottom of Killeaton Street and went exploring the creek that made its way through the bush to Bobbin Head. The gas wasn’t on, or the sewerage. We got used to the sight of the pan man, sprinting down the side of the house with an empty container, back up the garden path with the full pan precariously balanced on one shoulder.
No shopping centre; there were only a few shops strung along Mona Vale Road: Maio’s fruit shop, a delicatessen, Gillott’s garage next door to the post office. Further up on the other side were Steward’s the butcher and Ekas the chemist.
Packing up the studio, I made a huge pile of discarded drawings and paintings for the city council to take away. As well as a few other oddments, my big mirror joined the heap, which was a wrench, but I thought it was too heavy to shift. Doug told the men at the Bulletin to take what they liked from the paintings. About three or four of them went through my throwout collection. It diminished rapidly. They were like ants raiding a pantry and carrying off the crumbs in triumph.
Our new home was no dream house. Except for the relentlessly cheerful, sky-blue back door, all the woodwork was bright canary yellow, never my favourite colour. We moved in on a hundred-degree December scorcher. The sun beat mercilessly down on the yellow paint. The inside walls were painted with calcimine, a cream that fought with the paintings we hung up. Paintings look well on grey or white walls, not cream ones. Every mark showed up on the calcimine like a blemish, and remained indelibly there till we could repaint the house.
Phil Dorter from the Bulletin gave us a ginger kitten that we christened Goldie. But sadly Goldie caught cat’s flu and died. Then a pregnant black stray, sensing the presence of a confirmed cat lover, leapt over the high rear paling fence and sidled ingratiatingly up to the back verandah, resolutely presenting herself for adoption. Our feline family had begun.
Phil and his wife Phyllis also helped us mattock up the paspalum in the back yard; neither Doug nor I was very handy with a mattock. We released the wild lemon tree grown from a pip planted in a tub on the studio windowsill, watched it burgeon after years of potbound existence into life that gave us crops of wild lemons for thirty years.
Doug rolled about slabs of sandstone to make twisting garden paths. He crouched over the stone with chisel and hammer and mixed up cement, looking like a weird insect creature in dark glasses and a handkerchief across his mouth to protect him from the dust.
The garden didn’t happen overnight, but gradually paspalum did give way to lawn and the leafy greenness of shrubs and tall trees. The trees brought flocks of birds.
Gums and citrus flowered next to camellias, magnolias, hibiscus, white and mauve buddleias. To soften the sharp lines of the square front porch where we liked to sit at night, we grew a billowing purple lassiandra. I cried the day it was split in two and uprooted by a wild wind.
I had a blue-tongue lizard as a pet. He first appeared with a wound across his back; it looked as if he had been hit by a spade. The wound eventually healed, but it left a lump. My blue-tongue lived in one of the numerous rubble drains left over from the Italian orchard. Every day I fed him pieces of meat and a saucer of milk.
‘You’ve got two blue-tongues,’ someone announced one day. I went out and sure enough there were two lizards; a mate had arrived. I never knew which was male or female, but after a while there were six little blue-tongues running round the garden and six little mouths and stomachs to be filled with pieces of meat and milk.
Early in the year after we moved to St Ives, Doug was awarded a UNESCO travelling scholarship. Even though we had outlaid almost all our money on the house, he decided the three of us should go. At last I would have the trip to Paris I had dreamed of in my student and studio days.
The city was not so romantic as I had imagined. Paris in the summer of 1954 was gripped by drought, the Seine had dried up and its banks of caked mud were covered in stinking dead fish. We spent dusty afternoons threading our way through dog droppings on the pavements of Montmartre. The Cross was much prettier, I thought. The much-touted Moulin Rouge seemed tame, too. We had seen better at the Tivoli.
The Louvre, however, was not a disappointment, nor was the Impressionists’ Gallery, which left me overwhelmed. And there was the unforgettable spectacle of an outdoor Passion play performed on the steps of Notre Dame.
We saturated ourselves with galleries, not just in Paris, but also in Italy. Naples was full of Madonnas and not very good religious paintings, but Titian’s portrait of Pope Paul III really shone out; also the Greek marbles in the museum. In Rome, where we seemed to continually be jumping out of the way of motor bikes driven at full throttle, I saw Correggio’s lovely nude Danae, which has such soft modelling around the breasts and belly. I loved the Botticellis in the Uffizi and the Dutch flower painting. In Amsterdam I saw more of the full rich Dutch still lifes and flower pieces I had so long admired. In London there were the Wallace Collection, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate, not to mention the fascinating basement full of dinosaurs and mammoths in the Natural History Museum. As I became more seasoned, each gallery visit I picked out one painting and stood in front of it. One painting was enough to savour at a time.
Our eight months of galleries were haunted by the tortured, wound-ridden figure of the martyr Saint Sebastian. From the moment we set foot in Naples, right through Italy and France, we saw him; sometimes only a few arrows were stuck through his sacred skin, other times blades pierced every inch of his anatomy. I thought when we arrived in England, we would escape the harried Sebastian. But no, the first painting we saw in the National Gallery showed Saint Sebastian larger than ever.
I wanted to explore the places my ancestors had come from so towards the end of our travels, we took a ship to Dublin. Tyrone Guthrie, the famous man of the theatre whom we met in London because he had produced Fire on the Snow for the BBC, recommended that we stay at Colonel FitzSimon’s manor in the Wic
klow hills outside Dublin.
Colonel FitzSimon treated us more like honoured visitors than paying guests. We had a week of complete rest, enjoying the quiet green countryside. I painted grey stone barns and the grey stone walls around the fields.
I could hardly believe I was finally in the ‘Emerald Isle’. The countryside was like a beautiful park, with none of the hoardings that were hoisted across Europe; the ruined abbeys and castles about the country made it look as though we had stepped back in time.
After a week at Colonel FitzSimon’s we hired a car and set off for Kerry to find Mum’s people, the O’Dwyers of Sneem. Sneem was actually two tiny villages, joined by an arched grey stone bridge. The word sneem means ‘a bridge across’ in Gaelic. Sneem had no electricity or gas. A gaggle of geese lived on a patch of grass near the bridge. The local priest and a group of boys were leaning over the wall of the bridge and watching the water. We thought they were just idling, but when we spoke to them, the priest told us they were watching a great salmon.
‘The boys will have him, the boys will have him,’ he said with lilting repetition. The boys had their salmon and the priest caught a white sea trout for his breakfast.
We booked into a small hotel run by Mrs Fitzgerald and found a Mary Allsworth whose maiden name had been O’Dwyer; she and her brother Michael turned out to be my grandfather’s second cousins.
Michael O’Dwyer showed us the house in which my grandfather was born. For some generations it had been the family house but now it was deserted, a low, grey stone farmhouse, very old and starting to crumble, with a granite floor like all the houses around Sneem and a central fireplace for warmth and cooking. Austere lives they led.
