Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  And spare me, do, the smarmy titles. If you call me a love child I will call you a bastard.

  The ‘sins of the flesh’ were mighty in those days if the priests, and doubtless every other preacher of religion in every pulpit, were to be believed. ‘Eternal Damnation!’ was one of the things you contracted from this particular sin, followed by ‘Hell-fire Eternal!’ and exhortations to follow the example of the Virgin Mary who was the only ‘pure’ woman on earth. Over this I got what for from Mum when I asked how could Mary have a baby if Joseph wasn’t the father? ‘By jingoes,’ Dad said later, ‘you’d better watch your P’s and Q’s before you say anything like that again to your mother.’ By then it was all too late. I was about to lose faith for all time.

  It can hardly be said that I delved deeply into theological works. I had no conventional piety. But I can say that I had, without knowing it, a great intellectual ardour untrammelled by ‘the great believers’. My belief regarding religion, the hereafter (or not) remained my own. It is not a thing one must make public. As for Sin (writ large with capital letter), the bed seemed to be the cardinal sin when I was growing up. ‘The Church’ did not rail against the conditions of the poor, yet no priest in the country towns could have missed the sight of the holes in the soles of the altar boys’ shoes when they knelt. The congregation could more clearly see this and one Sunday I and my sister saw a boy, well-known in our town, in mental torture throughout the whole hour of the mass when a piece of cardboard that had been cut to hide the hole in his shoe escaped and slapped around like a flounder fish whenever he moved.

  Marion Tuohy had a friend, a milk-truck driver. In those days milk was left in big cans at the farmers’ gates and brought into each town’s factory for churning into butter. The young lads of our village discovered a relationship existed between the milk-truck driver and the ‘toffee-nosed’ Marion, whose father had a small grocery store which placed her in a superior position to almost everyone in our poor town.

  Bert, the milk-truck driver, was married with children. Marion was a virgin about to be married. Well, of course, she was a virgin. What else would a good Catholic girl be if not a virgin? And if we wanted final proof it was that we had been given details of her white wedding dress. Well! There you are! No one would get married in a white wedding dress or even announce the wedding to people if they were in sin, would they? (And there was really only one sin for girls in those days.) We never doubted it. At least, not until the night before the wedding when the boys of the town were threatened with a belting by Bert, the milk-truck driver, when he found them on the back of his milk-truck looking through the cab window while he and Marion were stretched out on the front seat of the cabin – a very comfortable, long, undivided leather seat, as anyone who was around in the 1930s will remember.

  Looking back, the odd thing is that the adults never appeared to ‘get wind of it’, but the story spread round all of us young ones, even to the details of Laurie Beatty’s shoe which was lost forever when he tripped jumping off the tray of the truck, and of Ben Baxter ‘getting a toe up the arse’ when the mad-as-a-bull Bert caught up with him.

  And there, next morning, Marion stood, a madonna in white, a virgin lifting her white veil, the symbol of purity. I was on the inside edge of the pew, near the aisle, Mum beside me. The organ roared out in triumph, the final vows and blessings had been given, and here she was, coming down from the altar. We all knew one another in that small town, and women were leaning over to kiss the bride as she was led down the aisle by her husband. I don’t recall having any sensation except disbelief that such a thing was happening until Mum leant past me and, with the back of her hand, wiped her lips clean, ready to kiss the blessed bride. ‘Don’t!’ I growled, not a screech, because I was too shocked. But Mum had got past me and kissed her. I wanted to scream out: ‘No, Mum! You’re too good for her. You shouldn’t kiss her! She should kneel to you!’

  I think it was Mum wiping her lips clean to kiss Marion that shot the light away from me. And it wasn’t Marion’s act that shocked me, but her lie.

  I’ve never regretted having spent my childhood a ‘Catholic’, even if only in a very intermittent way. On the contrary, it was one of the great motivators of my life. From our relatively few forays to mass (in comparison to other Catholics who lived in built-up areas) I gained an abiding love for classical music as opposed to the cowboy and popular songs of my home and era. Where else could a bush child from a poor family listen to Haydn and Bach for a full hour, learn the ancient Gregorian chants, listen to the Te Deum, the Agnus Dei, thrill to the men’s deep voices when they rolled out, like golden syrup, ‘Kyrie Eleison’, with the sopranos interrupting the last note with the entry of their ‘Christe Eleison’, and at Easter to take part in the Stabat Mater on Good Friday, that drama that excels most operas because you are crowded into the centre of the unfolding drama and turning your head and body to keep in step with the odyssey.

  This wealth was the legacy left me by a priest who probably coached me because it prevented him being bored out of his chasuble in the dreary bush town. I learned liturgical Latin, not only for something to fill the vacuum of my days when I was fifteen years’ old and already two years out of school, but because I loved it. And the priest began to teach me Latin ‘proper’.

  As well as the music, there were joyous, emotive, stirring, pretty things for a girl-child of the Australian bush, starved for anything that represented an attempt at beauty in those days. Mum bought for me a little, cheap, blue glass lamp with a candle inside to light at night when I knelt to pray, and there were pretty, glass rosary beads and ‘holy’ pictures. At New Year, the Saint Columba calendar arrived with reputable reproductions of great paintings for each month. When that was all you had, it was beautiful.

  Because it was the only language I had heard spoken, other than that of my own country, Latin flowed like the honey the wild bees made. Black Viney, who came to us often, used to climb the trees and, with a little axe, cut out the ‘sugar-bag’ and the honey would run up our bare arms as we’d eat it with our fingers, and our black hair blew into it and the odour was like a sensuous lesson in antiquity and mystery. I could never forget the Latin, Viney, or the honey of the wild bees; they were exotic, even if they had originated ten thousand miles apart.

  Very few of my years were spent as either a Catholic, or as a Christian, for that matter. Mum had been so often and so long away from a church in her remote bush childhood and bush roamings that she could have been a nothing, as she once wailed about me: ‘She is growing up a nothing!’ Dad was informed. ‘Oh well,’ said gentle Dad, ‘I don’t think she’ll go far wrong.’ Mum’s reply to any words of wisdom from Dad was always a loud explosion of air that could have come from any or all orifices of her body. She would boil. ‘Savages! That’s all! Savages! How could she learn anything in this godforsaken mulga but the behaviour of savages!’ And as likely as not, she would add, ‘I’ll apply for a transfer’. And she would, and all of us, kids, cats, cockatoos, parrots, Chu Chu (our Major Mitchell), cow, horse and dogs would be ‘off on the wallaby again’, without taking a moment to wonder if there would be a church within a bull’s roar of us – and mostly there wasn’t.

  But I went through all the hysteria that many young children were swept into through the undoubtedly well-meaning pounding into our yet-undeveloped brains of the fear of eternal fire awaiting us if we sinned. My earliest fear was of this fire. ‘Beginning at your toe-nails and slowly creeping … there will be no remission, no forgiveness, you will burn in hell-fire everlasting …’

  My sister was a part of the nightmare that came every night from what seems to be my fourth year. If I was four years of age, my sister was eleven, and remembers it well: ‘I used to put my head under the blankets so I couldn’t hear you,’ she laughingly says now. Each night I seemed to be awake, as opposed to waking up, I had flattened myself out with my back pressing on the wall above the single wooden plank that served for a mantelpiece above our fireplace.
I was walking across the mantelpiece in my long nightgown, the flames were flaring up to catch me from the fireplace below. My feet were slipping, I had my hand out, reaching for Kathleen’s hand, but she was always ahead of me, I was always reaching for her hand, but couldn’t catch it, crossing the mantelpiece, above the leaping fire. And I was whimpering and could hear faraway sounds of – I didn’t know what – and then I was beside Mum’s bed, screaming, and she would reach out to tuck me under the blankets beside her warm, plump body. ‘It’s alright. It’s alright.’ Night after night, until I was quite a big girl, until I could control it, until much later when I faced it for the evil thing it was. And it never came back. But then, I didn’t believe any more either.

  The Sweetest Thing

  IT IS SAID THAT THE ’fifties, the 1950s that is, was the dreariest decade in living memory. The smell of war was still palpable, reminding us of things we had to forget if we wanted to live, the economy had not got back on its feet, wages were still low, and an acceptance of drabness was etched on many faces. But not on mine. The ’fifties were the best times I knew and there was no grey time for me, not even low wages. If that decade had not swept me away my life would have been so very different I cannot envisage it, even to the point where I sometimes think I could not have survived it. Each decade of my seventy-odd years has been so good that the loyalty, tragedy, tears, shame, laughter, love, deceit, ecstasy, pain and the whole damned comedy/tragedy of life has made me glad my Grandfather lowered his rifle and left me my life. The old bugger!

  As for sin, in the 1950s it was spelt with capital letters and read BED, although you could hardly call the odd places lovers had to resort to in those days BED. ‘He’s gone to move a cow’ was a common joke, intimating that the area a cow had been lying on was at least warm and dry for the lovers. As were school shelter-sheds after night fell.

  ‘Bed’ was the cardinal sin when I was growing up. I eventually worked out in my mind that a bed wasn’t the same thing as what I knew as a bed. ‘Don’t you go to bed with anyone, ever!’ was an astounding warning to a young girl who knew, in that life of big families, that there was always someone going to bed with someone. Once there were five of us in the bed Kathleen and I shared all our young lives. It was an emergency – cousins and their parents tumbling off a train unexpectedly at 4 am – but it was a thing that any family from that era would remember. Until Kathleen married I had never slept in a bed alone.

  The 1960s were the best times one could have chosen to make a break. The coming of ‘the pill’ opened up opportunities for women that we had not had since Eve plucked the apple and was damned as a temptress for giving it to Adam – the ‘original sin’. None comment that Adam accepted the apple with alacrity, gobbled it down, and looked to Eve for more.

  For most women the period before the ’sixties was the period of the missionary position. Until then I had put up with sex like many other women did, it was no joy just dull thumps and grunts until you were released. Deep in their psyche men had been brought up to believe we women were temptresses who led them to sex, and in one sense this ricocheted on them. I am sure many of us girls were so obstinately ‘pure’ only because we were determined that boys wouldn’t be able to say ‘she asked for it’. The men were, in a way, as badly off as were the women, and we must admit that. Now women can say ‘No, I’m not afraid of sex, I just don’t like you.’ I am sorry AIDS has put a check on young girls today – I wish they could have the freedom that the pill gave to us women in the 1960s.

  In the 1960s and 1970s the solid citizens of Australian towns were disgusted, and then alarmed, at the ‘filthy’ language young people were beginning to use. ‘Four-letter words’ were being hinted at. ‘The most disgusting thing that has ever swept over our country’ a most respected leader said. ‘Four-letter words will be the downfall of the nation.’ The four-letter words, fuck and cunt, are words in common use today, and I don’t believe they have killed anyone. ‘It’s not a four-letter word that is obscene’ I wrote. ‘It’s a three-letter word.’ War.

  * * *

  Some women manage life without a lover. I don’t. I never try to manage without one except when I’m so engrossed in writing a book that no man in his right senses would stay with me – or has. And I wouldn’t want him, wouldn’t want the sort of lover who would want to live with me at such a time. He would be an awful fool. This has caused many a donnybrook, tantrum, even hurt, on both sides, but that’s how I am. It’s nothing to boast about but at least I’m honest about it. I know I’m hard to live with when I’m writing.

  I’ve loved my lovers with great sweetness, great fights, fun, gusto, laughter, danger, tough living, and sometimes living off the fat of the land in high places. Some are still friends although we may seldom see one another. But when we meet, whether it is in the southern hemisphere or the northern part of the globe, it is as sweet a thing as it was when we were declaring undying love to one another, even if dancing to a different tempo.

  One should never ask questions of an old lover who has been absent for many years from your life. It is the time you had together that was the sweetest thing, the needy, warm loving arms, the kisses, the sentences cut short by one another – ‘No! That was on the ferry going to Amsterdam!’ Another man, another place: ‘I remember you climbing up the rope ladder from the pilot boat that brought the mail, and you out from Hobart when we were on our way back to Denmark from Antarctica, and you laughing as the roll of the ship swung you from side to side …’ And I interrupt: ‘The decorum when I got on deck and was formally greeted by the crew, until you opened a door and said “Quick!” And we ran off like naughty schoolchildren up to your cabin.’ ‘And didn’t come out until the mate came knocking on the door. “The pilot is ready, captain, he’s waiting to return.” And we appeared, sombre, serious on deck and shook hands formally and you quietly said, in English, “Until next year”, and I said in Danish, uncaring if the crew heard, “Jag elsker dag”. And I climbed back down the swinging rope ladder and never looked back as the harbour master’s boat bucketed about all the way home to Hobart and you went north to Denmark.’

  But oh how we mourned each time the mooring lines were hauled aboard, with you on the ship and me on the shore, and sometimes a whole hemisphere about to divide us. Whether you sailed to the Antarctic or to the Arctic it made no difference, we mourned just the same even though the separation was for a shorter time down south in my realm. There was always a large number of people to see the polar ships depart each southern summer, and you were angry once with me and by the time I’d got back up to my eyrie on the high hill in Hobart there was a radio ham on my front doorstep with a message he had picked up as you sailed out past the Iron Pot. ‘I couldn’t see you. Don’t hide in a crowd again.’ And I never did stand ‘with the crowd’ again but always sought a spot distant from the mob so I could be seen by you until the ship disappeared.

  Back in the early ’fifties when I was first at sea I got to know the Arctic and Antarctic polar region men and the thrill of their adventures enthralled me. The first Antarctic ship I knew well was the Norsel (the Little Seal), a small Norwegian sealing ship turned into a polar vessel. Her captain, Torsten Torgerson from Tromso, up in the Arctic Circle, had been to sea since he was twelve years of age. When we met he was thirty-four – my own age. We became warm friends and remain so. We were the closest, dearest of friends but never lovers – we were too wise for that.

  Thirty years after our first meeting I was on an Arctic voyage which was to call into Tromso, in the far north of Norway. As I spoke no Norwegian I asked the ship’s radio operator to try to find Torsten and ask if we could meet. ‘Be tactful. I do not know the wife’, I warned. Within an hour the ship’s ‘sparks’ phoned my cabin. ‘He’s retired, but away helping a ship in trouble today. His wife says I’m not to let you go past Tromso without seeing him or her life won’t be worth living.’ Well, I knew the message wouldn’t be quite like that, but it was very warm.

  And there
they were waiting for me on the wharf at Tromso. Torsten stood there beside his Norwegian wife who was smiling with delight ‘Australie!’ she said, the extent of her English. I pushed through the other passengers and ran into their arms. The grandmother was waiting at their tiny house to begin cooking delights. A big low table was set with the finest needlework cloth, and I remembered one summer night in Hobart how Torsten had told me he had studied for years to pass his master’s ticket. ‘Me at one end of the table with my work and study, every night. Yes Patsy, every night I was home from the zee, and she, my wife, sewing at the other end of table to sell we was so poor.’ And so often apart. ‘We people at Tromso are much with great aloneness.’ My daughter and his daughter of the same age had written to one another.

  He remembered our first meeting. I was a full-time sailor by then and this night, as we were sailing up the Derwent River to our home port of Hobart, the Captain said he couldn’t recognise our berth. I signalled, but couldn’t understand the reply, except that our usual berth was not free. It was the apple season and the big overseas ships had come in and the port was jam-packed with ships.

  I was at the telegraph, not understanding the signal, and the Captain heard our victualler on the long pier calling ‘Go alongside! Antarctic!’ We were to tie up to the Norsel which was making its first run down to Antarctica. The small crew were on deck, delightedly tying us up to their side, pleased to be in the company of a ship like theirs, small and workmanlike and game for anything the sea sent. I had not yet been cleared to leave my post at the telegraph, and from there I could see and be seen by the crew of the Norsel. I had my children on board with me as it was Christmas holiday time, and they scampered to the ship’s side, trying to talk to the very foreign men. ‘Are you the Captain’s wife?’ the Norwegian Captain called to me. ‘Certainly not!’ I didn’t care much at all for our particular captain of that time, and didn’t care who knew it.