Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  ‘What do you do now?’ he called out to me, still at the telegraph. ‘Is Christmas. For your children?’ I told him I owned a house in this port, up on the slopes of Mount Wellington, and had made decorations ready to put up when we reached home, and we had a plum pudding I’d made on the ship. We were ready and had a turkey cooked for our own small celebration. By this time I had received the order ‘Finished with Engines’, and now rung it down with the double swing of the bell to denote to the engineer that we were indeed now free. The engineer acknowledged it and I too was then relieved of any duties.

  By now both the children had been lifted across to the Norwegian ship and were being feted by the men with games and toys. ‘You come’ said Torsten, the Captain, and I stepped across the railing of the deck and he steadied me as I jumped down to his deck, and he said, ‘Is our Christmas Night!’ ‘Is ours too’ I said.

  Few in that little city could have had such a Christmas Eve. Before they left their northern port, the men’s wives and children had filled big, ship’s laundry bags with gifts for Christmas as well as a vast amount of decorations and lights that lit the upper deck as well as the men’s decks below. Cathy was still very young and soon dozed off and a young steward was sent off to fix up the Captain’s bunk for her. When I followed I could hardly see her for the gifts each man had crept in and showered on her sleepy little figure. ‘Goodnights, goodnights’ she was murmuring, trying very hard to stay awake and be polite.

  I had no compunction in accepting their hospitality, instead, I knew the coming on board of little children had brought a softness to their evening. Photographs of wives and pale-haired children were taken from pockets and shown to me while each of us tried to make ourselves understood. From where I was seated I couldn’t see Michael but could hear him often imitating the men’s ‘Skol!’. And then the box of hymn books the wives had sent for this occasion were opened up and the whole crew sang – including my son, whose voice I heard singing clearly, although he knew not one word of Norwegian. My God. He’s been drinking, I thought. ‘Skol!’ between hymns. ‘Skol!’ It was certainly time to go home. Boxes of food were packed for us, aquavit, puddings, sweets, boxes of Anton Berg chocolate, sides of smoked salmon and foods I’d not known before. Our ship’s agent had brought my car to the pier as was usual when we reached port, and now it was stuffed full of booty, the children wrapped in rugs and curled up on the front seat beside me, and off we went, climbing up the side of Mount Wellington in the sharp, clean air of beautiful mountain nights.

  * * *

  Old Captain Hans Christian Pedersen liked me, as an old man likes a laughing young woman. Vilhelm Pedersen had done his time at sea as a boy under Hans Christian, who was one of the pioneer Antarctic and Arctic ship’s captains. In one Antarctic year Vilhelm and Hans Christian both had their ships tied up in the port of Hobart, only a few berths away from each other. We must visit for aquavit. ‘Com!’ shouted Hans Christian down the phone. We wandered along the summer waterfront. ‘Com!’ Hans Christian bellowed from the deck at our tardiness, the sun of a Tasmanian January seducing our footsteps. ‘Are stuck?’ ‘No, not stuck’ we shouted, ‘just going slow.’ ‘Com!’ The laughter along the waterside at this square-bodied man anxious to throw his arms around his friends pleased all.

  Once inside his cabin it was ‘Skol!’ followed with a beer, an aquavit followed the beer and an aquavit followed that, and so on; talk, laughter, frequent translating – and when that was too slow and the words too fast my hands were held by the great old man. To be in their company was to be in a rare world where both had seen death, both lived within a toughness no landsman would be expected to accept.

  Both these men had been at sea since they were thirteen years of age. The older man looked on Vilhelm as he would a son, and Vilhelm looked at Hans Christian as he would a father. ‘Ah, Vilhelm! You good?’ ‘Yah Captain, I keep very well.’ Man, mate, master, they had climbed the ranks to the top. ‘There is many man’ Hans Christian said that day in his cabin, ‘but only one captain, eh Vilhelm?’ ‘Yah! You are Captain here’ Vilhelm said, ‘but you come to my ship you ask permit of me for you to come aboard. Eh?’ There was ship’s talk and icy wastelands’ talk. ‘You bring back ice for your whisky?’ Hans Christian shouted, laughing. Yes, Vilhelm had done that.

  That season, as usual, he had done two trips down and back from Hobart to Antarctica. On the second voyage, in narrow waters among the ice, the ship’s bow had swung and jammed into a berg, ‘a blutty big growler’. In the attempt to free their ship a huge lump of ice broke off and lay over the bow and there it had stayed until the ship sailed back into Hobart two weeks later. It caused great interest in a town that had seen Antarctic ships coming and going since early last century, but never before had the ships brought ice back to Hobart. And that was not the only novelty: that trip Vilhelm had brought back Emperor penguins to take to the zoo in Denmark.

  Vilhelm mothered these birds with the help of one of the young hands until they reached their new home. They had come from the perpetual ice of the south up to Hobart in summer. For as long as the ship was tied up in Hobart crowds came down twice a day to see Vilhelm let the big birds with golden crests out on deck and there he and the lad hosed them down for half an hour, fed them, then hosed them again before herding them back into the forward hold. There was much beak-snapping and pretence of attacks, and things were lively – it all made for a good side-show. But Vilhelm got them safely to his homeland and sent me a photo of the local mayor and brass band welcoming the first penguins to come to that part of the northern hemisphere. ‘They was still trying to bite me, even at the last! After all I did do for them!’

  I was amazed to witness the free manner in which the ladies of Hobart boarded the Antarctic ships – it always reminded me of the stories of the lovely bronze girls who swam out to entertain the crews of the sailing ships that stood off-shore from the Pacific islands. One season, Vilhelm and I, accompanied by the ship’s first mate, came on board for a drink after a formal official dinner ashore, and as we walked along the lower deck I heard giggling, murmuring, sighs, thumps – but neither Danes commented. It was January, warm, and the cabin doors were open. The reason why I didn’t at first understand what was going on was that I had seen the small cabins in daylight and knew they were each fitted out with four bunks and, because of the need to utilise every bit of space in these ships, there were kit-bags and God knows what crammed in, leaving scarcely space for the voyagers to put a foot down. Would a woman …? In evening clothes … ? But ‘love’ conquers all, we are told – including the gentlewomen of Hobart who organised the annual welcome for the expedition. They were now giving them a good send-off. But eight in a cabin? Phew!

  I never understood women. Men are more likely to be honest, some brutally forthright, straight to the point. I didn’t approve of this mass love-fest, so I tried to mind my own business. But drinking with the mate and Vilhelm I felt I’d lost something of the easy companionship we’d had, and this could be replaced with another thing entirely if I was not careful. I left, and they said ‘Why?’ When they saw me off the ship into a taxi they were upset, afraid they had lost my friendship. Next day we lunched together and things were back in place with us and the mate was telling his funny stories while he twisted his red beard round his fingers to keep the great bushy mass from ‘swallowing in my mouth’ as he put it. Hans Christian would have understood: ‘The richer they is they more blutty ranty [bloody randy] they is’.

  All that I understood was that no matter what I did or said I was always open and frank about it and never hid a thing. Life would have been easier for me had I not done so, but I am as I am.

  * * *

  Russell Drysdale, Tas to friends, was a delight, a man stalwart in friendship. When I first cut loose from the oppression of convention in the 1950s and ran off to the little trading tramps, Tas had encouraged me. He too loved the small ships. ‘Public opinion’ he quoted Dean Inge, ‘is vulgar and opinionated, attacking
anyone who is not content to be the average man or woman.’

  ‘It was a memorable time’ Dominic Serventy wrote of the summer when he and Russell Drysdale and two more of us camped on Babel, Cat and Storehouse Islands in Bass Strait. Three of us had come to assist Dom to catch and band short-tailed shearwaters (mutton birds) and gannets on these uninhabited islands. Dom had been coming annually for many years and I had known him when I worked on the ships and we had transported him to these isolated places.

  ‘Patsy, this is Tas,’ Dom introduced me to the big artist. For the rest of our summer we lived hard, often dirty, with little water to drink and less to wash in, sustained mostly by ‘tea and tin’, as Tas called it. He would merrily wave the tin-opener, calling ‘Who’ll cook tonight?’

  We slept in sleeping bags on the earthen floor of deserted huts, or out on the rookeries to observe the birds. We worked long and hard. It could have been awful. Yet when the sun was dappling the sea surrounding us with daytime moonbeams, Tas would suddenly stop work and shout ‘Down with the cathedrals! Out with the monks!’ and he and Dom would go hurtling off across the burrow-riddled rookery playing Cromwell. ‘Monasteries! Abbeys! Away with them!’ Running down the stony peak of lovely Babel with his long crooklike stick, Tas would shriek ‘Begone!’ and Dom sooled him on. ‘Patsy! You’re Ludlow in Ireland! Remember Connemara!’ Across the white sand of the beach to the rotted remains of a long derelict shed. Whack! Whack! ‘It is the Lord’s work!’

  Nights were spent in what Dom called ‘disputatious friendship’. We argued about everything under the sun until we fell asleep for the few hours Dom permitted before we were off again. Tas would grumble and mooch along like a wombat until suddenly, ‘There goes a monk! After him!’ and he’d be away again, laughing.

  He filled his pockets with pebbles he was constantly picking up, feathers, grasses; he’d sift sand between his fingers, staring at it as though it were the first day of creation and this the result. He didn’t ask one to pose for him, instead you’d look up from where you were resting and he’d be making a rough sketch of you. Once, when he saw me hold a bird aloft so it could get the lift of wind necessary for it to become airborne, he asked me to repeat the action in daylight and he sketched that.

  Gannets are big birds, quick as a snake, with razor-sharp bills, and they make a dangerous foe. When one snapped too narrowly at Tas’s arm, he abruptly snapped back:

  I once knew a gannet outrageous

  Whose temper was something contagious

  When bit on the head

  His adversary said

  You’d make a damned saint litigious.

  One night Dom, Tas and I went off to band a few adult mutton birds. These can only be found at night when they come back to the burrows to feed their young. For every step we took I believe we fell over twice with our legs knee-deep in burrows. Tas dropped the torch, I dropped my protective gloves and scrabbled round in what we knew was snake-riddled sand and Dom was impatiently rattling his Monel bands like a Mother Superior with the convent keys.

  It was all insanity, what with Tas finding the torch and sending imaginary morse code to Persons of Importance, and me wanting the light shone in my retrieved gloves In Case Anything Has Crawled Inside. Soon we were all laughing and I was squealing every time I grabbed a bird and it nipped into my wrist and arm, and Tas was throwing the beam of the torch to the sky like a searchlight – ‘Down! Planes! Are they ours?’

  Then suddenly we realised there was a stranger standing with us. A fisherman anchored off the island had seen lights flashing and ‘unearthly noise’ and come ashore to investigate. He’d had bad luck, lost a whole catch of crayfish (‘went bad in still waters’) and if he couldn’t fill up before he ran out of fuel he wouldn’t be able to meet his payments on the boat. He would be finished. I said I’d come with him the following day and help him pull pots. That night, in lantern light, Tas carved a cuttlefish. He elongated tiki-like hair flowing down the side of the pumice material, carved in maritime symbols and things of the sea. ‘Take this to him when you go,’ Tas gave it to me. ‘He must throw it into the sea when he casts his cray pots.’

  I should have liked to have kept it. I looked at it all the time we were rowing out to the fishing boat. So beautiful a thing to sacrifice to a wanton, capricious sea. But the fisherman cast it into the water when he shot his pots. That evening, when we went back near the continental shelf we all had to lend a hand when he hauled in his pots. They were laden, all of them, with big crays.

  * * *

  Men do things to pleasure a woman, and to please. Abraham, a negro cab driver at Oxford, Mississippi, where I travelled every second year to be with William Faulkner aficionados, always thought of ways to make me laugh. Years ago, on my first trip, when James Cleaver was making his run to gain entrance to southern universities, Abraham met me at the airport. I got into his cab. ‘Yassum?’ he queried, asking for my destination. He met me again when I travelled there recently. ‘Yassum?’ he said. I told him I thought he no longer spoke in that way. ‘Ah don’t,’ he replied. ‘Ah just did it to make youall smile again.’

  Men are a joy to work with, real mates. I like them all but am sorry for some who have an inability to ride with the blessed waves of change: men of my age, who were boys in the hard, manhood-destroying years of the depression, and were swept up in the following war. Men who missed out when opportunity came for women and men to understand one another.

  Post-war changes have polarised many men of this age group. Intellectually they know, and accept, the changes in relationships between the sexes, but emotionally they are stuck in the ‘keep-em barefoot and pregnant’ past. They get only half a woman, and they, of all men, deserve the whole article. It was easier for women who grew through the same era. My generation of women had so much further to leap to fulfilment and had to make such a stupendous effort that we just up and flew.

  In many ways we left men of our age group behind us, earthbound. I like men. They have been good to me. Mostly. The same as women have been. I find there is little difference between the two except for that little that makes all the difference. Men have no monopoly on the joyous cry ‘Vive la difference!’

  Things Turn Up

  IN JANUARY 1960 I WAS appointed Adult Education Officer in Hobart and the children and I moved into a city for the first time, to a beautiful big apartment with four bedrooms, a spacious drawing room, a study, large hallways and kitchen with the biggest range I had ever seen. (In those days I was noted as being a fine cook. Ah, how times change.) The children took to city living as if born to it. I began to get more ‘mainland’ requests for me to write for Sydney-based magazines. Although I had trained the children to be as self-reliant as young teenagers could be, they were at that stage when they could no longer take time off from school. I thought I would have to delay my flight into serious writing for many years but, as always, I was lucky.

  A French friend, at a United Nations meeting (you never know where things turn up!), told me of an aunt who had just migrated from Belgium and was very unhappy. ‘There is nothing for her to do at my house and she’s been used to cooking and minding her grandchildren and bossing young people around. She is unhappy.’ I arranged for the lady to come for an interview at 5.30 pm when I would be home from the office, but she got there early and when I arrived I found her on the carpet playing cards with the kids in front of a big fire. I knew then she’d fit in well and she did.

  Within a week Madame Meiders was settled into my home. I hoped she would teach the children French and, as she had no word of English, that they might teach her Australian. But she was the one who picked up the language from the children – they felt they’d had enough French at school. Even so, when I was travelling she wrote her weekly letters to me in French and, since I had none of her language and could not understand, particularly when she wrote of things medical, Michael would translate the more arcane sentences on another page for me.

  Along with Madame Meiders came d
arling little dancing Miss Lamprill, fresh from Tahiti where she had been a missionary for many years. She, like Madame Meiders, wanted independence and, as I had a spare room, this little fairy-like lady danced into our lives as well as being a companion to Madame. Miss Lamprill had no missionary rectitude. ‘How could anyone living in Tahiti not know all there is about sex?’

  My house was always a joyous one. When the ladies retired I struck lucky again and beautiful little Ruby Ho from Hong Kong settled in – for eight years. Later there came a Malaysian girl, and there were always Asian boys cooking in our kitchen and feeding us meals fit for a king.

  Adult education was a new concept in those days and I was lucky to be working with, and for, a gentle man, John Thorpe – peerless company in the organisation, as well as socially. When he had taken on this new post, adult education courses consisted of cake decorating, dressmaking, and talks, etc. In a short time we were enrolling hundreds of men and women in courses from photogrammetry, aerial photography, ancient history, physics, speed reading, painting, literature – scores of subjects. To begin a course we had to have ten students and at first we had to go out after them, but within a year we were swamped and many new subjects were being suggested to us.

  Apart from lecturers from the University of Hobart we recruited many men and women who had varied talents – such as fly tying. This was a very popular study among the fishermen of the State but when I first had the subject suggested to me I thought it was a ‘leg pull’.

  For me, Hobart had one drawback only – I became a chronic asthmatic, but even that didn’t deter me as I had to spend much time in bed and here I began writing in earnest. Hear The Train Blow was launched in Hobart at the headquarters of Adult Education. I had often been rushed to hospital with sirens screaming and I had made use of my rehabilitation periods. As well, the Adult Education Board gave me leave during the slack periods and this enabled me to investigate many outlets of folklore. Kylie Tennant had encouraged me to write Hear The Train Blow. I had read her books, of course, and once, during my time at sea, I had read the newspapers after we had tied up in port and found she would be at a conference in Hobart that night. ‘Quick!’ I said to the agent who always brought my car to the wharf, ‘I’ve got to get up the mountain!’ and off I went up Mount Wellington to the chalet where the conference was being held. I rushed in: ‘Where is she?’ ‘Have you an invitation?’ ‘No.’ Upstairs I ran and into the conference room. ‘Kylie Tennant!’ ‘Patsy Adam-Smith!’ We’d never met but each knew each other as well as if we’d grown up together.