Goodbye Girlie
Page 1
Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.
The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Patsy Adam-Smith was one of Australia’s best-known and best-loved authors. Awarded the OBE in 1980 for services to literature and the Order of Australia in 1994 for services to recording oral history, she was the author of thirty books, all of which have topped or appeared on bestseller lists.
Among her most popular books were Hear the Train Blow (the story of her childhood), The Shearers, Australian Women at War, Heart of Exile, There Was a Ship, Outback Heroes and The Anzacs, which was joint winner of The Age Book of the Year Award in 1978. Prisoners of War received the prestigious triennial Order of Australia Association Book Prize in 1993.
HOUSE of BOOKS
PASTY
ADAM-SMITH
Goodbye Girlie
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Penguin Books Australia, in 1994
Copyright © Patsy Adam-Smith 1994
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 74331 574 3 (pbk)
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Contents
The Dancing Years
The Last Christmas
The Duchess and Kathleen
Goodbye Girlie
Them and Us
Ginger
My Mate
That May Morning
You Make Your Bed
The Argonauts
Down to the Sea in Ships
Alastair
The Sins of the Flesh
The Sweetest Thing
Things Turn Up
The Road to Samarkand
The Flowers in the Cannon’s Mouth
A Country Funeral
Our Conundrum
Acknowledgements
My children, Michael and Cathy, have come all the way with me, and their children, Rosie and Daniel, have brought me joy of the generations. I have been, still am, blessed by great friends, men and women, including those who encouraged me while writing this book: Albert McPherson, Greg Reinhart, Beverley Dunn, Dianne Ellis, Maureen Sheehan, Noreen Megay, and Jeremy Hammond, the physician-heart specialist who made it possible for me to go on. I was pleased to once again have Lee White’s professional expertise as editor.
The Dancing Years
THERE WERE MANY RAILWAY PLATFORMS in my life, but the most joyous day I had was when I stood on the platform in the tiny country town as the train carrying away my parents gathered momentum. At last they stopped waving because we couldn’t see one another in the distance and I jumped on my bicycle and pedalled pell-mell back to the little room that was to be mine alone in the baker’s house. And there I took my corsets off.
Early in 1941 Dad was ordered under the Manpower Act During Time of War to move south as flying ganger on a single rail track into the Gippsland hills where timber was being transported out to build army barracks in the city. ‘But I’ve got a music exam coming up!’ I wailed – carefully, so as not to arouse suspicion in Mum. ‘I suppose I’ll have to give up music.’ Mum wasn’t a person to leave others to make up their own minds to do anything, but she could be trapped into thinking she did it all by herself. Within half a day I’d got it all fixed. Mr and Mrs Forrest, the baker and his wife, good Catholic church-goers of course (I planned this campaign thoroughly), would let me board in their house at the Penshurst town bakery. I could have my piano moved into their ‘front’ room to enable me to practise for the future exam.
And so I escaped across the moat to freedom. I stood on the platform, waving goodbye. Yes, I’d be a good girl for Mrs Forrest, yes, I’d go to church and yes, I’d have a bath every Saturday and always wear stockings. Back at my new abode, I took off my dress and began to rid myself of my armoury.
It had begun one day while my Mother was making a new dress for me. She noticed for the first time that my bosoms had begun to develop and my hips and abdomen to show signs of shapeliness. She set about right away to rid me of these dangerous attractions. First came the binder. My Mother had made this from a strip of very firm calico and it was bound round what she saw as my wickedly burgeoning teenage breasts, and joined by big hooks and eyes down the left side of the upper part of my body. Then she began on the corsets. These corsets had once belonged to Mum herself. She was almost twice my weight, and they had to be cut down to my size. When reconstructed, this masterpiece would have two walls, laced herring-bone style down the back, boned, with vertical whale-boned ribs the whole way around. The frontispiece could have withstood the attack of a battering ram of a medieval soldier. It was divided into an inner wall – nearest the skin, hooked on the left side from top to bottom – and an outer wall. The outer wall was the main defensive abutment: great big iron eye-holed hard loops which closed the gap by framing the loops over truly fearsome bollards that a ship could have tied up to. Because of the whalebone stays, Mum hadn’t been able to cut the vertical length down to my size, so the top of this massive construction pushed up under my growing breasts and cut and hacked at me all day, while the bottom of the invention reached half-way down my thighs causing me no end of difficulty when I went to the toilet. The whole creaked like a sailing ship at sea, whether I moved or stood still.
I can honestly record that this fortress my Mother had erected single-handedly was never broached in the ten months I was obliged to wear it. Once, at a dance, a boy’s hand slipped tentatively below my waist and when his fingers came in contact with the castle wall he whipped his arm back as if he had been bitten by a dog.
It was the war that got those corsets off me. I dug a hole out the back of the bakery and buried them. I have wondered if, in distant years, some archaeologist was to dig up Mum’s invention, would it end up in a museum and would folks believe all girls in the 1940s were dressed in this strange way?
With that weight off me, I set off into the dancing years. The couple with whom I was to board were middle-aged, late to marry, and they had a little boy aged three years and another on the way. They were busy enough and didn’t trouble me at all.
Freedom is the sweetest thing and I ran headlong into it. The same day that my parents left, I wrote to a shop in Hamilton to order a pair of navy-blue flat-heeled ‘Wattle Derby’ walking shoes, plus a pair of navy-blue medium-heeled court
s that I’d seen advertised. Perhaps not exciting choices, but a change from my many-soled school shoes. Until now I had not been permitted to handle the money I earned – none of it, and sometimes it had been more than my father could earn in a week, what with my commercial enterprises of teaching piano to four children, serving and doing the bookwork at the bakery, as well as working nights at the newsagents during Christmas, Easter, etc. and playing piano in the New Mayfair Dance Band. The money, like the odd sums my sister, Kathleen, earned, was always handed directly to Mum. This I did not mind, it was what other young girls did in those days.
It never occurred to me to claim these monies for myself. Mum made all my clothes, mended my shoes. Dad was only good with boots. ‘He should have stayed in the navy,’ Mum said one day in a rare moment of wit. She did repairs around the house, leaving the heavier jobs to Dad. Dad always tried and usually failed. Once, near Christmas, he put up a shelf in the kitchen for the ingredients of Mum’s Christmas cake and pudding. Mum was not overly grateful at the sight and walked past this slab of wood warily as if it might leap off the wall and hit her. The next night we were walking down the railway track in the clear hot air and we heard a terrific crash back at the house. Without missing a step Mum said evenly ‘Your father’s shelf.’ Yes, it had gone, raisins mixed up with eggs, flour with everything else across the floor.
Dad didn’t mention the navy much, but Kathleen and I got a bit of slang from him, always well-timed on his part. ‘All shipshape and Bristol fashion’ he’d say if Mum had us dressed up. ‘Oh, very tiddly,’ he’d say – nice and neat, or ‘very pusser’, otherwise. He woke us every morning of our young lives with the chant ‘Heave ho! Heave ho! Heave ho! Lash up and stow. Lash up and stow!’ And in our wee house we girls could always hear Mum’s exasperated drawing-in of breath.
I cared for the bookwork of the bakery business as well as the shop part. Two bakers were in the actual baking area behind the living quarters, and I had my own little room – not that I was in the little room for any length of time. I had started work there after leaving the butcher shop. Next door to the butcher shop had been a haberdashery shop, with long counters, bolts of cloth, and all the trimmings needed for the home-made dresses of those days. By now, with money being so tight for so long during the years of the depression, very few women entered the shop. But I often went in and the owner rolled out bolts of cloth and described the material and how it was made and where, took down collars and ribbons that would match, and buttons too. In retrospect, I realise two things about this man and his shop: he had so very few customers my visits gave him the opportunity to fling a bolt of material across the counter and see its quality and comment on it, things he had done all his working life. The second was that the shop was soon to disappear. Indeed, it disappeared the day after he gave me the dress length of navy-blue crepe plus a white pique collar and crystal buttons to go down the front of the classic frock I would make, all for twelve shillings and sixpence. The shop burned down, and it didn’t matter any more that no one came into his shop and he had moved away from the ruins and like others at that time, we heard of him no more.
* * *
It was the dancing years. There were great tunes and even greater words to sing to. Even in such a small town as Penshurst where the majority were poor, there was a dance at least once a week in the Mechanics Institute hall, an orchestra played, and crowds of people came along. There was even a debutantes’ ball in which I took my place, although I was too young to be with such a group. Dad thought I may not get the chance again to wear a long dress and told Mum he thought I should make my debut. And, he was quite right, the days of long dresses, balls and such like would be swept away during the six years when so many of the young men were away at the war.
The dancing years were matched by the great songs of that time. We danced to ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady’, swinging apart from our partners, joining again in the Pride of Erin; we slow-waltzed, fox-trotted, and did the quick step. We danced to the Tennessee Waltz and it was not only because it was a good tune that the boys went across the hall to the partner they had selected. In some mysterious manner we all managed to get the partner we wanted. We began very slowly: ‘I was dancing that night to the Tennessee Waltz’, the bodies swayed and got closer and closer. Our mothers must have near ruined their eyes trying to see what was happening; but that’s what the dance was – a very slow, most seductive pattern of movement. Nothing that is danced today comes anywhere near a slow waltz to the tune of the Tennessee Waltz.
And yet, we were perfectly safe, no matter what it was we were being kept safe for. It was a valuable opportunity for us young ones, with body very close to body, sweeping to the side, back a little, forward again, at all times in contact with your partner’s body, and I’ve always wondered if perhaps it was a very good way to get to know men generally. Sometimes, if the partner you had hoped to get wasn’t at the dance that night, you’d be dancing with someone else and you didn’t get this incredibly seductive experience; but when you did it was quite surprising. You wouldn’t be going home with that person, and you mightn’t see him again, but you had experienced something that probably warned us or more probably, delighted us – that there were some wonderful things ahead of us in time to come. And I think the ‘in time’ part is the thing I remember of the most value; when dancing, you knew you had all the time in the world, you weren’t going to be rushed off somewhere before you were ready.
There was a Highland Schottische which was fast and furious. We’d get more than a glow. The men would have a white handkerchief in case their hand sweated on the back of your dress, the music would be going at an enormous speed and getting faster and faster, and people whom we considered very old would leave the floor because they couldn’t keep up, and the big thing was that you and your partner would be the last to give up – and even then, not to give up until the orchestra did. There was the Lancers which, of course, is a very old dance but it lived on until the war years. It was a wild dance; there were four men and their partners in each set, all controlled by a Master of Ceremonies. Nearly everyone was on the floor. The MC would call ‘Gentlemen, salute your partners!’ and the man would bow to the woman and she would curtsy to him and then we were off. You didn’t stop moving, it was fast. One movement that was constantly repeated was the swinging. The skill of this was to go round and round as fast as possible, faster than anyone in the hall if you could, but never, as an old gentleman once said to me, ‘never lose your feet’. And that was the skill of it. Sometimes there’d be great squeals of delight, a boy had swung his girl right off her feet, but the skill was to go faster and still keep your feet. It was a ballroom dance, not a square dance.
The Waltz of the Cotillions was a most graceful thing. I can’t imagine anyone doing this dance today but it was a waltz which was done while one was moving around all the time to other partners in the foursome. To see the whole floor of dancers doing this set piece was quite elegant. When the music was coming to the end, you curtsied, the men bowed, took your arm, and took you back to your seat.
Near the end of the night a ‘medley’ was called which had many various dances with no break between. There was a wild Keel Row. The girls did a heel-toe action with their partner, going faster and faster, then there was the Three Hop Polka and the band would keep that going until there was scarcely a person left on the floor because it was so fast. Those who had become weary and stood back, now stepped forward when the music changed pace because it would be the last dance of the night – a waltz to the tune of ‘Good Night Sweetheart’ (‘all my dreams are for you’), and the lights would be low and my Mother’s eyes would be everywhere to see where I was – like every other mother in the small hall.
One night we were just finishing the dancing, the music was playing and we were singing ‘Goodnight sweetheart, ’til we meet tomorrow, goodnight sweetheart, goodnight’, and just as those words were hanging in the air, we realised there were huge rumblings out in the street and
, oddly, a clarinet playing. We raced outside and there was the army going by. Well, not exactly the army, but it was the Light Horse on the way to train in Hamilton. They had trucks and had stopped to check the horses. When we rushed out the officers tried to keep the uniformed men in check – and we tried to get close to them (as close as your mother would let you). Somehow we found out they were going to be bivouacked in Hamilton and the camp would have an open day the following afternoon. It would be exciting to see these long rows of tents, and then the long rows of horses being watered, and women coming around with baskets of fruit. I knew in advance I’d be the only girl to arrive with Father, Mother, grown-up sister and her two babies.
It seemed that suddenly we were remembering ‘Oh, yes, that’s right, the war is on’. It had been a phoney war until that time, but here were men training and ready and outfitted to go to war. That night I recall many of us walked back into the hall and when we came out again we were much quieter.
At daybreak we heard the rumble of men moving and they went right down the main street, very slowly, and everyone was out to watch them. The clarinet player threw an artificial flower to me. I was probably thrilled by it then but didn’t think any more of it until years later when men were being brought in to our hospital after returning from the Middle East or from the islands to the north. I always wondered if that man came back. The memory of him laughing and playing the clarinet out on the street stayed with me. There was no more to the story than that, but it did somehow let me know that men went to war and that life was going to be very different from now on. With Dad’s transfer to Gippsland, like many a family in wartime we were split up for the first time, and forever.
The Last Christmas