Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  We three went to Melbourne and stayed with Phyllis, my army mate, but I was bowled over in a way that startled me because I could usually fight my way out of anything.

  After a public debacle, noted for its bitterness and hate and financial arguments, we met again only once. He had married for the third time (not including his six unwed years with me). I no longer lived in Tasmania but was there on a promotion tour for one of my books when he sent a courier to ask if we could meet. My schedules were too tight. Then he phoned, but I was still unable to meet. I didn’t know if I wanted us to meet again. I learned he was now in the prestigious government post he had always wanted, and I was happy for him. At 3 am the hotel desk duty clerk phoned my room and asked if I would take a call. We talked of the halcyon days and he asked for news of my children. ‘They remember you with love and warmth.’ ‘Tell them I still love them, always will,’ he said. I asked if his present wife had children and he said yes, and I asked if he was happy in his marriage and again, he said yes. And then, God knows how it happened, he was in my room. He had driven through the night from the east coast and was in my hotel when he phoned me. And he wept. And I wept, but we both knew we now had other lives to live and the meeting hadn’t been planned for anything more than Auld Lang Syne. It was a cup of kindness and a grip of the hands across many miles, many labours, many kisses. ‘How we worked!’ he said. ‘How we played, but how we fought!’ I said.

  That night, when I saw him for the last time, he surprised me by asking ‘Why didn’t you marry me?’ I laughed, I thought of it as a joke, after all this time it had fallen very lightly on my ears. But he said, ‘I never thought it was funny, the only thing that seemed funny to me was that you didn’t marry me after all the turmoil was over.’

  ‘We paid enough for it’ I said.

  * * *

  And troubles never come in singles. I was being pestered by my children’s father who wanted the divorce finalised quickly so he could remarry immediately. I’d never thought of divorce. The vows I had made were meant by me to be irrevocable. I never thought of them, they just were. I had sworn an oath, a vow, in front of a man of God or of goodness, and ‘in the presence of’ my friends and relatives. How could I then say no, I did not promise those things. I had promised, I wished now I hadn’t, but the deed was done. I had lost any faith I had some time past, and because of that religion had nothing to do with my obstinacy: I had promised everyone I knew at that time that I would do this thing and so how could I go back on that? I still cannot believe I could break the only oath I made in my life.

  So I said no, I wouldn’t take part in a divorce and no, I wouldn’t agree to give up my share of the house in Ulverstone that my money and my parents’ money had been used for, and no, I would not have anyone else play my piano. And he got a lawyer and this man told me I had no choice: ‘Your children’ he said. I was told in the court I would not be allowed to keep my children. ‘Their grandparents [his parents] are now in residence in the house you claim in part and they will bring up the children. The court will decide what access you may or may not have.’ That was an evil thing to say. Those two old people were doddery, they could not look after themselves. But I was terrified because, for the first time in my life, I was aware that there was someone who could rob me of my strength and dignity and in doing that steal my children from me. Did I not leave the marital home? Yes, but… Did you or did you not? And so it went on.

  Those were the worst days of my life. And when they had nearly crushed me they said he had come down to Hobart ‘with his solicitor’ and we could ‘come to terms’! I had been told to get a solicitor, and he told me to sign. ‘What? Sign what?’ ‘That you will forego any claim to the house and land and any monies you claim are yours.’ And? ‘In return, you may keep your children.’ I only wanted the children and told them so, but I also shouted that I could provide all things for the children, including greater love and greater financial security, than could this man who was selling them. Selling That was stupid of me. It reflected on the solicitors who, unknown to me, had of course made a deal. They both now shouted at me – all this was going on while we four were out on Murray Street in Hobart. They were indignant, they would ‘not allow such scurrilous things to be said of men of the law …’ My solicitor apologised profusely ‘for my client’.

  And we started again. They exchanged manilla folders, I signed that of the man whereby I would not claim my rights to the house etc. and he signed mine saying he would not claim the children – and that stated precisely what I had been told: in other words, he did sell his children. And I was unsure that such an act was legal. So the rolling of the eyes and apologies from one lawyer to another about this dreadful woman client began again, and my children’s father entered the remarkable exhibition and began grimacing at me – still outside in the street – at which his own solicitor came down in high dudgeon and abused him, telling him to neither speak nor ‘poke faces’ at me or he, the solicitor, would retire from the case.

  It would be nice for me to be able to say I conducted myself well. I certainly didn’t ‘poke faces’ but I knew nothing, had never before spoken to a solicitor except for one brief discussion on this matter. I only wanted the children – and I knew their father didn’t care. He would get the house and land and the money my parents had put into the house. His lawyer said he would ‘wish to have access’, the father said ‘Certainly’ and got his military bearing underway, and it was all over. And despite that earlier protestation that he must have the children, he never from that day onward came to see them or asked for them to be brought to him, or learned if they were alive or dead.

  I went back to sea. The crew knew all about it. The newspapers had loved it. A woman on a ship! Running the radio! On an all-male ship! The deck hands loved it. They were all for me, and offered to ‘snotter’ anyone who stood in my way. The Captain and the engineer took a truck up to my old home in Ulverstone and we got my piano and learned that although the old couple were living in my house, their son was living in a hotel in Brisbane, not in Tasmania. So I learned a lot about the law being a cruel ass, but mostly I learned what a precarious position a woman was in and the foul usage of the law against her. I was furious. I had mixed happily with men all my life and never had cause to learn what a shameful thing had been done to keep women ‘in their place’. I’d always thought people used those words as a joke. I hadn’t known until now that there were laws that certainly would keep women ‘in their place’. But no matter what anger and frustration was in me I had to grin and bear it and get on with my work. That was a great thing about the sea – being a tough mistress it kept us too busy to waste time in tears and recriminations.

  The Sins of the Flesh

  I WAS THIRTY-TWO YEARS of age when I first used The Word. I had a happy home life, I had resolved the terrors of childhood, financially I was as comfortable as anyone bringing up two children can be. I had a pleasant home, great friends and social life, was a successful writer and, as well, I had a permanent professional position with some modicum of clout. I thought it was now time I exorcised the terror that remained from childhood. I walked down to the railway line, and going from sleeper to sleeper I tried to say ————, ————, but for the first two days I only got The Word as far as the front of my forehead, it was nowhere near my tongue. I tried it at home, but that was worse; there I couldn’t even get The Word into my head.

  Of course, I had heard The Word but not near so often as one would hear it nowadays, but I had certainly heard it and winced each time I did. But that was a long way from saying it. The day I got a whisper of it out, or thought I heard a whisper, I spun round and ran back along the side of the rail track and hid in a shed. Hid in a shed. I, a grown woman with two children. The day I actually said The Word aloud – not very loud but at least audible, I trembled, I actually shook, and the roar and the rush to my head made me giddy and I stumbled around until I eventually found my way home. I persevered, but it took time and didn’
t come easily until one day I made up my mind and practised, and when the postman blew his whistle I flew out to the gate and said ‘The stupid bastard has come early’. I don’t think I noted any reaction from the postie, but I know that when I got inside I felt wonderful: the sky hadn’t fallen in, the earth hadn’t trembled, I hadn’t dropped dead. And in time I added The Word to my vocabulary that had never been ‘nice’.

  A strange aura hangs around the term ‘bastard’, and it is almost as remarkable today as it was before the 1960s, the years when the supposed sexual freedom began. Children of unmarried mothers do not usually attract unpleasant attention today, yet a discussion of bastardry pre-dating this freedom does retain the stigmata it had back in time immemorial.

  The lexicon relating to bastardry is interesting. The Oxford Dictionary gives us a splendid history of The Word: bastard – illegitimate, one begotten and born out of wedlock, ‘a natural child’ (which begs the question ‘when is a child unnatural?’). Of King Henry VIII it is said that he ‘sent to bastardry his daughter Mary in favour of the Lady Elizabeth’. And there was ‘the bastardisation of the children of Edward IV’. The dictionary continues: ‘to declare or stigmatise as a bastard’, and ‘an illegitimate child by the civil or canon laws is legitimised by the subsequent marriage of his parents’.

  I’ve not discussed bastardry with any other bastard, the subject never interested me as much as it has interested others around me. It has always seemed to me that a bastard might be much more free to develop as one wishes instead of being moulded into what you see and what is expected of you by a ‘legitimate’ beginning. Lawrence of Arabia was ‘crucified’, as has been written, for being a bastard. But if he had not become the friend and adviser to King Feisal and had remained quietly in a backwater, he had a much better chance for a quiet life of anonymity – a sort of marking-time until death, a slow death that I imagine the great majority of bastards do choose rather than to go in fighting under almost unbeatable odds.

  In my childhood there were orphanages bulging with babies brought there direct from the maternity hospitals. Institutions were organised and oiled to run smoothly: in Grattan Street, near the Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, pregnant single girls could be housed safely out of sight until their nine months were up and then they would trundle across the road, give birth, sign the adoption order, or have the child placed in an asylum. She could go home as slim and single as she had been before and sometimes none but she knew. And the child? And the seventy-year-old child? What if she or he needs their original birth certificate?

  I had phoned and asked for my original birth certificate to be sent to me. All I wanted it for was to enable me to get dual citizenship as I was considering living in Ireland for some time for study and, as an author, I could live tax free under this duality.

  They replied ‘Dear Patricia’. Their condescension offended me. I receive many hundreds of letters annually from men and women I’ve never met, but like me they take no liberties until the ground rules are laid down. I hadn’t known that, since 1984, I was a genuine freak set apart from others, unable to be given my original birth certificate without having to walk on coals. The new laws mean that I am officially recorded by the jack-booted title of ‘an adopted person’. My birth record is not part of the normal population, I am separated from the friends and people I have loved for seventy years.

  Does this sobriquet apply to both of those whose seed and womb caused me to be born? And if so, are they listed somewhere in government files? And what are their titles? Are they listed as am I under a group separate from normal average humans? If I am recorded as ‘an adopted person’, ‘illegitimate’, are they too listed, exposed, as – what? ‘illegitimate parents’? The document the authorities use call them ‘birth parents’.

  I learned all this after reading eleven pages in startled shock. I had served my country for three years in wartime and my birth certificate was never questioned. But this was different. Hell! Half the army, navy and air force would have done a bolt had they been confronted with this document. ‘Before information or documents are given to applicants, they must attend an interview with an approved counsellor’ I am informed. Struth! I have to be interviewed! What sort of hoons are they, I’m thinking.

  I’d like not to go, but I can’t resist. It is so Dickensian. ‘There is an application fee of $75 of which payment is required at registration.’ I haven’t been upset about these things since I was a little girl.

  Only once was I annoyed by a young woman whose mother was a poor dumb cow of a woman who would have been an embarrassment to any family (well, after that outburst a reader may anticipate that I was rather cross about something). The daughter had said to me, ‘I’ve been lucky to have a real mother, haven’t I?’ To compare my vital, feisty, hugging, loving, whacking, snapping, cuddly mother with this poor thing of a woman unleashed my disdain and I’ve never been sorry for it. She never put mettle into her daughter as my mother put mettle into me, nor the courage, the lifeblood that she sent coursing through me to enable me to live to the fullness of my capacity. Before Mum’s death I told her of this encounter. She was shocked and angry with me: ‘That was cruel. I never thought you had cruelty in you! That girl couldn’t help having a poor sort of mother.’

  It came ‘out of the bag’ in Hear The Train Blow and my large family of aunts went rigid. When the book was published they all (minus Mum who would have made seven if she’d been invited) gathered at my Aunt Anastasia’s house and had their photograph taken in her front garden. My cousin Stephen told me much later that they had got a solicitor, but as far as he knew none of them had either seen or read the book. They’d merely heard that I’d written a book about the family so they assumed it would be very bad news. ‘No one would have known,’ I have been told. ‘You know, people would never guess.’ I didn’t let any cat out of any bag. If there was a cat it had been bagged by society and tradition and dropped over a wharfside for the contents to drown, as had unwanted kittens for centuries.

  I do not believe I am illegitimate, however, I believe that my ‘natural’ father and ‘natural’ mother were. Being born into bastardry today appears on the surface to occasion little remark and perhaps little or no disgrace. But to be born a bastard in the 1920s was to be a bleak outcast and few mentioned it though all showed it, either by over-acting in an attempt to show how very broadminded they were, or by suggesting ‘you just want to forget about it and no one will know’.

  It is not possible to tell today’s generation this story and expect them to understand, and yet only two generations have gone by since a father took his shotgun off the rack over the back door and said to his daughter, ‘Start walking. Down the paddock.’ The eighteen-year-old girl began to walk and the father followed. But quietly, sidling from tree to tree, the mother followed him and when he raised his gun she called his name, ‘John!’ And so I, the foetus, lived to tell the story. Kathleen, my foster sister, had learned this story from my Grandmother, the woman who had saved me yet hated me for being what I was – before I was born.

  ‘How wonderful! Are you really and truly a love child?’ has been said to me. Love child! ‘Jesus wept!’ as the saying goes – or did He too, weep? I have never read of His mother’s marriage, although in a European cathedral I once saw an ostentatious gold ring on the Virgin’s hand while she gazed in adoration at the little boy on her lap.

  And when I was growing up, what would I have done had I found myself ‘in the family way’, ‘up the duff, ‘cooking a scone in the oven’? I have always known what I would do. I would go to the sea. As a fifteen-year-old I had been down to the sea for a few days with an aunt and cousins. None of us could swim (we have a snapshot of the water mark on our bathing costumes to prove it), but I just wanted to sit on a tor at Black Rock and watch the water gently moving. The previous night I had heard through the bedroom wall the adults reading aloud from the newspaper of a baby found dead and wrapped in newspaper on a doorstep. If that girl had been me, I th
ought, I would go with the tide out to where no one would disturb me and my baby and the water would be lapping us to dreams. The babe would be in me, we’d be together. I could never have had a child out of marriage, never expose a child to the second-class status it was given in that period, never.

  In those pre-pill times many, perhaps most, unmarried women ‘gave their child away’ and it would be a fool who would criticise them for it, and a cruel, ignorant, arrogant fool at that. Had they kept the child they would have been branded, both the mother and the child, and often the child would grow carrying the stigma like a visible neon light. And where would they live? Women didn’t live away from the parental home until after the Second World War. Before that, the pattern was that one left one’s father’s home to go to one’s husband’s home. So, who would employ them? If she kept the child, there were no child-minding centres, no kindergartens in those days, no government handouts, no refuge centres. An adopted child – therefore a real child of a family, if the adoption was not mentioned – was almost as free as any other child, but an illegitimate child had little hope, social, economic or even religious.

  Sometimes I look at the parents of friends and I think ‘Hell! How would it be having them for parents?’ No thanks, I’m lucky. I got fixed up with someone I could relate with, even grow to look alike and think alike and love, so I have to believe miracles really do occur.

  It took a long time before I could utter The Word but once having it inscribed on my tongue I became most proficient. During the filming of my book, The Anzacs, I likened a man to a ‘rotten, stinking, mongrel, dingo, bastard’ and thought nothing of it – even if it sure did bowl the crew over!