My Mother met Dad when Mrs Gay said ‘Mr Smith’s sailor son is come home. You go down and ask him if he’d sell me one of his lettuces.’ And so, 21-year-old Mum went down, Grandfather sold her the lettuce and suggested to his sailor son that he should carry it back to the Gay’s house. Thus began the loving relationship that lasted for sixty-four years.
In 1918 when my parents were discussing marriage they decided on the Presbyterian church for the ceremony as Adam Smith was a Scottish Presbyterian. But Mr and Mrs Gay were opposed to it. ‘Birdie,’ they said. ‘Your parents, isolated back in the wilderness where priests rarely could venture, still tried to teach you the faith of their fathers. You might well have regrets if you go into this lightly.’ And so they wed in a Catholic church, but down at Nar Nar Goon, well away from their own area. Religious bigotry in all Christian religions at that time was disgusting. This pure young couple could not marry in front of a Catholic altar because my Father was not a Catholic. They were wed in the sideroom of the church where the vestments and accoutrements of the service were kept and where dusters and Brasso were stored in a cupboard. The only time the bride appeared in the church was as she walked out after the marriage service. With them were my Grandmother and Aunt Anastasia who came as witness.
The wedding took place in 1919 and by 1921 Mum was away, writing to Dad, and this time she mentions Mickie, the 2-year-old red-headed orphan they had recently acquired. Her christened name was Kathleen Rita, but she was most often known as ‘Mick’, or ‘Red-haired Micky’. Dad’s letters to Mum on her visits down to Grandmother Adams are as loving but not as cheeky as those of his bachelor days. He writes of having ridden his horse 12 miles to the football. From boyhood, Dad had been a good rider. He ends the letter with forty-two crosses, one kiss for every day she will be away.
In 1931 in the heart of the depression he wrote from Waaia: ‘You have no idea the heat it was here today. The sweat simply rolled out of me at work.’ Still during the depression:
Thorntons are being sold up here on the 11th March – They have a terrible lot of big, heavy horses and everybody reckons they will go for nothing as nobody about has got any money.
My pay is hardly worth drawing now and next pay, we are informed, will be worse. [It was cut to £2/17/6.] Tea has gone up a penny ha’penny. [And by now, there were Kathleen and me to be supported.]
Dad asked for the following letter to be burned, but as Mum did not do so neither will I. All the frustration, sadness and pain of his life since 1917 was in this letter:
Waaia
22.5.32
My own Darling Wife
Just a scribble to let you see that I am still capable of expressing on paper just a very small portion of my very deepest love that exists within me for you dear girl. Sometimes my actions may appear to you as though I care nothing, indeed my sweetheart that is when I feel most although at times I am very cruel and remark things that I know cuts you to the heart but remember dearest they cut me deeply to say them but that is a thing that I am going to try and cut out but the way that you over-look them is still further proof of the great love that exists within you for me. Although I myself love do not need any proof as far as that is concerned. I can honestly say that from our first meeting you have always been uppermost in my thoughts and will be till death doth part. You are still capable of bringing a tinge of jealousy within me. You to me dear girl is just like what petrol is to a motor car, without the petrol the car is useless. Well now dearest Birdie, how precious that name is to me – I must close. With all my love to you dear child. I am Your very sincerest husband, Albert xxxxxxxxx
(Would you please burn this when finished.)
The night before she died my Mother said to me, ‘What would I have done without you?’ She spoke firmly as she had used to do. ‘The life, the everything. Part of me to the end.’ I was embarrassed – or whatever it is we experience when we cannot reply. So I put my hands under the bedclothes and rubbed her old legs and stroked her tummy with the flat of my hand and she went to sleep.
It was like her to wind up affairs, even affairs of the heart. Few mothers and daughters have had the rapport we had.
During the depression, Mum booked up bills in every town we went to, and if she had had a car she would have had overdue accounts from one end of the State to the other. Only once was pressure put on her and that was at the grocery shop in Penshurst, and then it was only a hint that no more could go on the slate until her £18 account was erased. Shopkeepers were generous in that time but they, too, had bills to pay and were down on their uppers, as were we all. This in no way inhibited Mum. She had a family to keep and that meant keeping them well.
A navvy in Dad’s gang had a small farm and Mum suggested to Dad that he ask Jack for a loan. Dad was embarrassed, but he had to do it. He later told Mum, ‘Jack said if two poor buggers that staggered back from the war can’t stick together, who can?’ In time Mum always paid her bill, but she was like the dairy farmers she had descended from, and always believed they needed to buy yet another cow and the bank could wait. What was a bank for if it wasn’t to lend money? That was Mum’s principle.
Near the final years she had moved down from the country to the War Widows’ Hostel near my house and for the first time in ninety-three years she lived in the city. But it was hard. Apart from me there was no one she could converse with – talk, yes, but there was no one her age who could talk about events all those years back, into another century and its warp. She was better than most elderly ladies; there are few (none that I have known) who can converse, tell a history, an anecdote or sing a song of long ago as she could do, with all the warmth of joy or tears.
We buried Mum with Dad, in the paddock among the hills where four generations of us have been buried, in a little graveyard with a caretaker who has known three generations of us. He told me he always cared for our graves, ‘She was a wonderful woman’. It seemed strange to hear that from a grave digger.
A country girl did as I had asked and created a whole art form – not a wreath, but a coffin-cover the length of the box, 15 inches high, and including every flower, wattle, eucalypt bush and tree twigs from plants grown in Gippsland. She had even gone to find the rare little bush orchid, and knew which would be open by the day they were needed. ‘I picked them at daylight with the dew still on them.’ Boughs of gum nuts trailed over the sides of the box which my son and five of her many nephews and grandsons carried to the grave. It wasn’t dramatic so much as being a complete farewell, there was time for tears, prayers, time for reunions, and the meeting of new babies and then, back to the cars and off up the narrow road into the little town of Drouin where the women who had known her had prepared food and drink and talk flowed and often her name was spoken. ‘God her temper was vicious.’ ‘But she was the one of the family I really loved.’ ‘She was a giver.’
There were ninety-five red roses piled around her grave. At the service, the young priest said, ‘Any who wish to take communion in the sacred spirit of which it is intended are welcome to the altar.’ I moved to all Mum’s children around the various pews. ‘Come on!’ John, Albert and their children, Kathleen and Adrian and Robert, and my own family. ‘I don’t think I’m allowed,’ Kathleen said. ‘No, no. We’re not,’ said Adrian. ‘Are you?’ ‘I’m giving out the permits,’ I said. The poor young priest was breaking bread into little pieces to get round us all. I think the whole congregation fronted. It took a long time to get done.
I don’t know what the others thought of that act of communion, but to me it was not only a way of continuing to walk with Mum in the way she would have loved, it was also a mark of respect for what she had independently believed and followed for over ninety years while often living in a wilderness. Before the Catholic church made its sweeping changes in the 1960s she couldn’t read the Latin mass but had to follow the English translation. But she believed. I knew the Latin but I didn’t relate to belief, only to beauty, and I knew Mum had lots of that.
Bef
ore the service I had asked the young priest to do something for me and he did it well. He read aloud from the altar of the injury my father suffered in 1917, while away at the war. Dad not only could never make babies, he could not have sex, he could only give love, and this my Mother had never told a living soul. I learnt it from his naval discharge documents. That passionate woman (who had seven sisters who each bore more than six children) and the passionate man who had lived with her and loved her for sixty-odd years, sharing the same bed, had been unable to fulfil their urgent needs. And she had shouted rage and vitriol and we girls heard through the thin walls and wondered that he never replied, but not once did he do this.
The pain of these star-crossed lovers touched all of us and many wept in the church. Cousins came up and said, ‘I never knew. I couldn’t understand.’ ‘She gave each of us a wristlet watch for our sixteenth birthday,’ the boys remembered. ‘She was cuddly and generous and then her tongue was so bitterly cruel and it bewildered all of us.’ Many spoke of her violent rages and that night I wrote it all down, I didn’t want to forget any of it for it evened up the harsh, cruel times our family had survived. Once I had come home from school when she was at work at the rail station at Monomeith and our cat was in the yard, squealing, and something was flapping round its backside, and with some odd terror I ran up to the station and yelled for Mum to come. Full of concern for me she ran down thinking a snake had got the cat, and then she saw the kitten being dragged along, only half out of the birth opening, unable to get out. She went mad: ‘Get away, get away, this is what you wanted to see, isn’t it?’ I was backing off, it was a sight that was horrendous and I truly didn’t understand what was happening. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay and watch, that’s what you want, oh yes, you’ll like this thing, won’t you. Oh yes, look, look! Female cats have babies.’
I ran around the back and huddled in the little wash house. There I planned the most absurd thing for a small girl who never had pocket money – I huddled thinking, trying to work out how many years it would take to pay back the money she had spent on food for me in the nine years I had already lived. And my brain, which had not handled money, worked out that it would take three years. But I would do it. I was sure. And then I would disappear.
Of course, I didn’t. Mum came looking for me, took me in her arms and carried me back to the station. And after the last train came and went, she took me, still in her plump arms, down to the house and consoled me. ‘You shouldn’t have seen that’ she said, knowing that it had shocked me as much as it had done her. I never knew what happened to the cat or the kitten. Probably Dad handled it when he got home and found Mum sitting in front of the stove with me in her plump, homely arms, singing softly and rocking me.
All this I thought of while I spread a handful of soil over her grave. And then, that night on our way back to the city, we detoured to drop a flower on the stone monument at Longwarry where the names of her two brothers – ‘lost’ at Lone Pine, Gallipoli, in 1915 – were recorded. This was the warp and weft of our family life.
Our Conundrum
WE WERE A DANCING FAMILY and danced right to the end. At family gatherings, Kathleen comes to me and she leads. Our kin-folk stand back for us to do one ‘turn of the floor’ before they join in.
Our parties were laughing, dancing, feasting times with kids dancing with adults, and calls of ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please change your partners!’ We sat down to great dinners and followed that later in the evening when we had supper. We ‘put up’ gorgeous decorations. There were Golden Weddings and Diamond Weddings for Birdie and Albert, and we hired halls and the same dance band – Nortons – we’d danced to all our days.
I try not to bewilder people by explaining my family. It is not difficult for me: ‘My sister, whose parents were not mine, had two brothers, neither of them mine, and two sons who were sort of my nephews and later became sort of my brothers.’ I knew that my Mother had never been pregnant and our Father had had no children. My Father’s mother wrote of me as her ‘dear littel frend Jean’ not as her dear little grand daughter. However, my maternal Grandmother, even though she was indeed entitled to that title, wished I had never been born and knew that my Grandfather, her husband, intended to shoot me as I was being carried in the womb.
It was clear to all of us in the family, and few families could have knitted so well. We each loved one another and still do. And in particular, each of us still revere Mum who, when it became necessary, became mother to boys who had been her grandsons and thus changed me to sister from aunt. We had lived as the happiest family that could be made, and we were never backward at making fun out of the whole damned thing that life is.
My ‘Christian’ or given names were Patricia Jean but my family and old friends have always called me Jean. Almost everyone else outside the family has called me something else. When I joined up during the war, the first time I walked into a ward the Matron said, ‘Girls, here is the new nurse – what’s your name?’ I looked up at her, she looked down on me – God! Matron had spoken to me! ‘Patricia Jean Adam-Smith’ I mumbled in what was meant to be a smart military manner, and she said, ‘Pat’.
And there it was. I was Pat. It remained Pat until my daughter was born, and her first spoken word was ‘Patsy’. And so I have remained (with minor detours such as ‘Mrs Pat’ when I was at sea). There are still some who call me Jean or Jeanie, but they are thinning out with the years. I love hearing the old name from them, but I keep it just for them. It is a reminder of the bonny times of long ago and I have a fierce protective feel for the name I was first known by.
Until I began this book I hadn’t realised how many aliases I have carried. I got ‘Paddy the next best thing’ as a small child, at about the same time as Kathleen got ‘Mick’. Paddy the Next Best Thing was a book of the day and the young girl in it seemingly got into as much mischief as I did, so the joke was as corny as the period. The nickname was outgrown and had died away until it popped up years later in a book about Australian women biographers that had a section about me. The writer suggested it was a crude and cruel jibe at me because, you know, I was adopted, not a real daughter, therefore just a ‘next best thing’. As though those gentle parents could ever be so cruel.
It was such a misreading of my Father’s character that I felt shame that I had written a book about his love and yet could be so misinterpreted. I was very disturbed. Perhaps some man in that writer’s life could have tagged a little girl with such cruelty, but coming from my Father it was a laughing, loving sort of game that we indulged in during that period. It worried me also as an indication of how history can, and is, distorted by each generation.
One is afraid to use the slang of an earlier age in fear of what some smart-arse says (and what would they say about that word?). ‘Look me in the eye and say that.’ ‘Go on, say it to my face’; or, ‘I won’t take any more of your lip’; ‘Would you like a taste of the razor strap?’ (the common punishment of the day – a whack around the legs with that thick, long lump of leather). One spoke of ‘a poor old codger’ and maybe bamboozled him by giving him ‘a bit of scran’, but these expressions should not, perhaps, be exposed to folk who did not grow up with them or, worse still, make a guess at what an expression of another era meant at the time it was in use.
After my first two books were published, a publisher sent air tickets for me to fly to Adelaide to discuss my doing another book. This book was the first that let me know an author must fight for the right to a decent living. That day I fought and won, and never again did I let a publishing house get away with anything. I fought hard and argued and coaxed when it seemed a viable thing to do and, for all my books I have been given a decent deal. In return I have tried to deliver my manuscripts as close to the delivery date as I could (even if some got in by the skin of my teeth). But I did pay a penalty. From the day I refused to accept the rate that was offered I was considered ‘mean’, ‘hard as nails’, and to have ‘lost her loveliness’. (Oh God! Let’s lose it if
it means making men pay us the same as men get!)
Like all born writers, I know when one work is better than another, though the book may seem just as good to a reader. But a writer knows. You can see where and how you could have selected your words even more delicately, moved the drama of life to a section where it may have had more impact, clarity; you can see how you could have moulded the descriptive paragraphs that were necessary pieces of information or continuity, even if the reader may not care to leave the high alps for the plains of a book.
And that self-criticism can come after three drafts; one book of mine took nine drafts, the colour out of my hair, stole my social life for the many years of its gestation (as opposed to the six to twelve months a book usually takes for the hard slog before you begin to rewrite). You resurface after writing a book feeling like Rip Van Winkle because you’ve been cut off from the world, don’t answer your gate buzzer or messages on your answering machine. You resent your secretary or typist turning up even though they are part of your team. I once found myself writing a note to my housekeeper-cleaner, even though I was home when she was there. A writer would live in cardboard cartons in derelict warehouses if someone didn’t keep an eye on you and your dwelling and food cupboard. I wrote Folklore of the Australian Railwaymen on a diet of Weeties and powdered milk. The first edition sold out in four days so you can’t deny it was a great diet. And the empty Weeties packets doubled as filing cabinets on my big, billiard-table size working area.
At that time, my children were teenagers so I gave them money to buy food for themselves. They’d wander in of a morning and night, and I’d surface and we’d enjoy talking in front of the open fire and we always seemed happy with our life together. However, I do notice that even now, when they are both married and each has a child and homes of their own, that they never, not ever, when staying with me move a piece of paper, no matter how scrappy it looks, from the floor, the beds, the walls, the window frames or old cartons. Some of the notes are valuable, some valued by the donor or lender, some are ‘may-be’s’ or notes I write ‘in case of, and of course, there are the hundreds of diaries and letters sent to me from all over the world.
Goodbye Girlie Page 27
