by Joy Dettman
She thanked God when the little sports car pulled up out front and the boy driver stepped over the gate and inside. Willingly she gave way to him and got her back to the wall, held her breath until the baby was delivered, held it until she saw her granddaughter draw her own first breath, until she heard her cry, then Gertrude ran from the room to cry.
The delivery fast and easy, the babe pronounced healthy and of a good size, the doctor took morning tea in Norman’s kitchen, took one more glance at mother and child, accepted his fee and departed, leaving Amber beaming and holding her living baby girl.
‘Leonora April,’ she said, accepting her mother’s kiss, allowing her to kiss her granddaughter.
‘A beautiful name for a beautiful baby, darlin’.’
‘She is beautiful, isn’t she? She’s got a dimple in her chin.’
‘She’s the living, breathing image of you when you were first born.’
‘Thank God for that much,’ Amber said, and she laughed.
Norman came to listen, to watch her laughter. It had been too long. He wasn’t aware of why she laughed. Gertrude knew. She sat with Amber for an hour that morning, watching happiness exude from her girl’s every pore, laughing with her, drinking tea beside her bed, and praising the wonder of that little girl.
So much happiness in Norman’s house that day and that night. Jenny left in Elsie’s care, Cecelia with Maisy. Gertrude slept in her granddaughter’s bed, and the joy of being awakened by that newborn cry, the ecstasy of watching her at the breast.
For two days there was happiness in Norman’s house. For two days tiny Leonora April sucked, cried, soiled. Then her cry weakened and she stopped sucking.
Vern and Gertrude drove mother and babe to the hospital, where on the fourth day tiny Leonora April died.
Amber screaming then, screaming, smashing, hitting out at that young doctor who had told her her baby was healthy, slapping at white-clad nurses and cursing, cursing God and her mother, Norman and his mother.
They calmed her with their potions and told Norman he should take her home. She refused to go home, so they moved her to the boarding house room booked for two weeks from the nineteenth. It was close to the hospital and to that young doctor’s care. Far better she stay there until the babe was buried. Far better the house be cleared of baby things before she returned.
Cecelia would ever remember the few brief days of Leonora April, her wail, her napkins. She’d remember that coffin too and Leonora lying in it, dressed in a gown of satin and lace and looking like a china doll in a box. She’d remember one of the church ladies lifting her to kiss her baby sister goodbye. She’d kissed her cheek, expecting it to feel like the face of her china doll. It was more like kissing cold bread dough.
She’d remember Amber’s face on the day Vern Hooper brought her home from Willama. It had the look of white bread dough. Leonora’s eyes had been closed. Amber’s were open, but they may as well have been closed. She couldn’t see where she was going. Didn’t know where she was. Gertrude led her by her hand. She put her into the bed.
And Cecelia wanted to be seen. She hit the blind-eyed stranger, yelled at her until those eyes saw her, until those arms opened, then she threw herself into them, hugging her, holding her forever. Never, never would she forget the blissful relief of being back in Mummy’s arms.
Later, there was the long train journey with Norman and Amber, the chuga-chuga-chug of the train and no talking. Then Uncle Charles and Aunty Jane meeting them at a station that wasn’t anything like Norman’s station. And Cousin Reginald driving a green car that took them to a house made of bricks, and Aunty Jane taking them to a bedroom with only one bed in it where she was going to sleep with her mother.
Then no more Norman or Jenny or Leonora April. No more keys and no more school either. She’d won the war! She wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but she’d won!
AN AGREEABLE CHILD
On the Sunday following his trip to the city, Norman made the long walk down to Gertrude’s property and that evening he carried Jenny home. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do, but his house was empty and he didn’t know how to live in an empty house. It took some time to become accustomed to single parenthood, but Jenny was an agreeable child, content with little — which was as well. He had little to give. She accompanied him to the station each day, where she sat content for hours, colouring newspapers with her crayons, building towers from boxes and chuckling when they fell down.
He had never taken a comb to a child’s hair. Now he found he must. Her hair, her colouring, had surprised him, and each morning when he brushed her wilful curls he was surprised anew. He had taken into his house the infant of a woman of foreign appearance, dark of eye and hair. He had expected a dark-headed child, but somewhere in Jennifer’s genealogy lurked an antecedent with sapphire blue eyes and ringlets of gold. She was a beautiful thing, a gem chanced upon.
To love and be loved in return is every man’s right. Norman was unlovable. Surely he had loved his wife, though by the second week of her absence, he was not missing her. She had accused him of putting a stranger’s child before his own had he dared to show an interest in that golden mite. Now he sat at night, her fairy weight on his lap. He found himself spinning foolish rhymes so he might hear her chuckle.
There was an old man from Willama, who wore only half a pyjama . . .
And the near unbearable pleasure of her lisping conversation at the meal table.
‘I don like dat meat, Duddy.’
‘Why don’t you like that meat?’
‘’Cause dat’s fwom baah lambs, Duddy.’
She liked sausages. She loved potatoes, fried, mashed or roasted. They cooked their meal together, Jenny sitting on the table while Norman made his preparations. Within a month of Amber’s leaving, Norman’s life had become . . . easy. His house had become a home. Newspapers piled up in corners. Clearing a table of condiments between meals was time poorly spent. A parlour was a fine place to toss laundry brought in from the clothes line, and a very fine place to play hidey.
Norman was a man of many faults. He knew each one. His mother first, then Amber, had listed them often. As a husband and father he had struggled, but he’d had no example to follow. His own father had died before his birth, so each step taken down that convoluted road of marriage and fatherhood had found him negotiating unknown terrain. His mother had considered infants to be incontinent, godless little animals, until trained to be otherwise. She had stated many times that it was the woman’s responsibility to train them, as she had trained him — trained him with her disappointment, her disapproval, her denial. With those tools at her easy disposal, she could have trained a rampaging rhinoceros to sit up and beg for a Bible.
Norman’s first book had been a Bible. From infancy, he had been carried to church each Sunday. From infancy, he had prayed with his mother every night. At her knee he had learnt that those of the Church of England faith were God’s chosen people, that Catholics were thieves and liars, Jews must be punished forever for the murder of Jesus Christ, and that the remainder of mankind, Chinese, blacks and others, were so far removed from God that Norman could ignore their existence in the sure and certain knowledge that once he got to heaven he’d be free of them — and perhaps free of the Catholics and the Jews. However, even as a callow lump of a boy, Norman had visualised a segregated heaven, much like the cemetery where each Sunday he’d been taken to visit his father. All religions were catered for in that cemetery, though well separated. Norman had enjoyed his cemetery visits. He had ongoing memories of his father’s solid headstone.
He had no ongoing memories of home, or school. He and his mother, left near destitute by the death of his father, had become the collective responsibility of the family. For the first sixteen years of his life, Norman and his mother hopped from Duckworth to Duckworth, from grandparent to uncle, uncle to aunt, an endless circle of train journeys through city and country, to beach and to mallee, the billeting relative seemingly happier when loading
that well-travelled luggage back onto the train than when unloading it.
Had he not been a reader, Norman’s disjointed education may have suffered for his many moves. His religious training had been ongoing. Uncle Charles, the parson, friend and mentor, father figure of his childhood, had primed him to follow his lead into the ministry. Then he’d wed and bred his own son to follow him, Cousin Reginald. Norman was twelve when first introduced to the screaming Reginald. He’d taken an instant dislike to the squalling infant who’d ousted him from his uncle’s affection.
In hindsight, there were few Duckworths he had not disliked. Uncle Ollie owned a hardware store in Collingwood, and behind his counter, as a twelve-year-old, Norman had learnt to add and subtract with lightning speed. He’d feared Uncle Ollie, who had been determined to get his pound of flesh out of Norman if not from his sister.
The maiden aunts, Lizzie and Bertha, Norman had adored. They’d shared their small topsy-turvy dwelling in Coburg with five silky terriers. He’d learnt much in that house, had been allowed to iron his own linen, to stitch on a button. The aunts had taught him to crochet colourful woollen squares, which they then stitched together to form warm blankets for the dogs. He’d spent a few fine months in Coburg. His mother had spent those same months in her room. She’d developed an allergic reaction to dogs, though only indoor dogs.
His Bendigo uncle had owned umpteen border collies. His mother enjoyed Bendigo and had carried Norman there annually. He’d learnt to ride a horse in Bendigo, to dig a post hole, hammer a nail, use a saw. In Portsea, Norman had learnt to shave with a cutthroat razor — perhaps his bachelor uncle had hoped his hand might slip.
His varied education, his variety of lifestyles, had given Norman good survival skills but denied him the ability to sustain long-term relationships. Six weeks at his grandparents’ house during the Christmas season had been long term. Then Grandfather Duckworth died and Grandmother moved in with Uncle Charles and Aunt Jane, which meant there was no room at that inn for Norman and his mother. Then the Bendigo uncle sold his property and bought land in central New South Wales — of course visitors would be very welcome, but sadly the school was fifteen miles away.
At fifteen, Norman and his mother spent five months at Box Hill, in the house of the Duckworth black sheep, Uncle Bertie. He drank. Forever more, mother and son would remember those months as eternal — intolerably eternal for Cecelia, but those same five months with his three rowdy cousins had been the best of Norman’s life. They’d taught him to play poker and to wag. Had he known it was to be his last year of schooling, he may have played less poker, wagged less. His examination results that year convinced Charles and the relatives collectively that he was not ministerial material, and thus further expenditure on his education was not warranted.
An uncle by marriage, a bigwig in the railways, secured for him a position at a suburban station, which spelled the end of the Morrisons’ nomadic lifestyle. The family collectively found them a pleasant flat. They furnished it, bits and pieces donated from each house. Someone donated a framed photograph of his father, dusty but intact. The family, collectively, agreed to pay the rent until Norman’s earning capacity was such that he might support his mother, then mother and son were moved in. No doubt a collective sigh of relief was expelled that day.
Not so by Norman’s mother. She was accustomed to better than a small second-floor flat. For sixteen years she’d lived as a guest in one house or another, where sisters swept floors or paid domestics to do it. She had never shopped for groceries, knew nothing about cuts of meat or the soiling of her hands in peeling filthy potatoes. She was distressed. She wanted to go . . . home.
The two survived in embryonic squalor until Norman’s earlier domestic training at the hands of his maiden aunts came to the fore. He bought a broom. He swept the kitchen floor. There was little to sweep. He washed and ironed his work shirt, fried bacon and eggs, progressed to chops and potatoes.
During the second month, he began to revel in his release from relative-hopping, to rejoice in awakening each morning in the same bed, in that same small room, knowing immediately where he was because his father hung on the wall to the right of his bed. He celebrated his leaving of that flat each work-day morning, his arrival home to it each night, delighting in the ritual of placing his own key in his own front door.
If not for his mother, Norman’s solid reliability, his methodical habits, may have carried him far in the railway department. By the age of twenty-eight he was employed in one of the city offices. His wage now adequate, he paid the rent and careful shopping allowed him and his mother to live well enough. Then he met Sarah, a girl employed by the railways for her typewriting skills. In time he made the mistake of bringing her home.
His mother had not been fond of the common people. At their first meeting, she labelled Sarah common. ‘If you have so little respect for me and for your dead father’s name to attach yourself to the daughter of a common butcher, then it is time for me to die,’ she’d said, and she’d taken to her bed to do it.
After a month or two, the family became concerned for their sister’s wellbeing. Given another month, the railway bigwig found a vacant position in Woody Creek, a three-bedroom house supplied. The application was made. Norman got the job.
The town surprised him, as did the residence. It shared a fence with the post office. The station was sixty-odd yards from the back door, the police station a similar distance from his front door, and the C of E church not much further away.
His mother was not impressed, but she had room to move, and by that stage of her life she had required considerable space to move in. Also, Norman would now be spending his working days within earshot.
‘Norman!’
‘Norman!’
‘Norman!’
On their first Sunday in Woody Creek, he walked her to church where they were introduced to the congregation. He’d heard Amber’s laughter, then sighted her, and who would not have sighted that pretty, laughing girl. Twice more he sighted her at church before Maisy and George Macdonald made the introductions.
His mother, always intrusive, asked what her father did.
‘He’s a doctor,’ Amber said.
Some time passed before the Morrisons became aware that Amber had barely known her father, that she lived in a two-roomed hut two miles from town, that her mother wore trousers and was rumoured to be on with Vern Hooper, but by then Norman was obsessed and determined to wed her.
For two years he had pursued her doggedly, had defied his mother for love of Amber. And he had won her. But what had he won?
She confused him, confounded him, and since his mother’s death she had threatened time and time again to leave him and take Cecelia with her, her threat initially chilling his very soul. Now? Now, when she had perhaps left him, he was . . .
‘Happy,’ he said. ‘Are we happy, Jenny-wren?’
She nodded adamantly.
‘How happy are we?’
‘Dat big,’ she replied, her tiny arms spread wide.
‘My word we are,’ he said. ‘What shall we cook for dinner tonight?’
‘Gwanny eggs.’
‘And where do Granny’s eggs come from?’
‘Fwom da chook.’
‘My word they do.’
Amber had not penned a line in the weeks she’d been away. Charles wrote regularly of appointments, of doctors, of the weather. June came in bitterly cold, according to Charles. Jenny and Norman were not feeling the cold.
In late June, Charles wrote again, this time of an English doctor, a specialist in the problems of the female, who would be visiting Melbourne through July and with whom an appointment had been secured for Amber.
. . . on Thursday 21 July. I suggest your wife and daughter spend the first half of the month with you, then return to us . . .
Norman scanned the rest, then fetched his equipment to reply.
My dear Charles,
Rather than suffer the long journey home, only to retur
n for the July appointment, I suggest my wife remain in your care.
Please find cheque enclosed.
Sincerely, Norman.
Charles was appreciative of the cheque. He replied the following week, expressing a genuine concern for his nephew’s situation. He agreed that Amber’s visit might be extended, but added:
. . . I cannot but stress the importance of a child’s early education, nephew. Your aunt also wishes me to convey her concerns regarding Cecelia’s interrupted schooling . . .
Cecelia’s interrupted education concerned Norman. He wrote two replies but shredded both. That night he lay in bed mentally planning a trip to the city so he might bring his daughter home. Come morning, he placed that plan on ice. He would make the trip in July with Jenny. He would be at his wife’s side at her specialist appointment, and if she was pronounced well, then he would bring both wife and daughter home.
Or would he?
For the first time in years, he was not awakening each morning with an acid stomach. The last time he could recall eating a fried egg for breakfast had been at his Box Hill cousins’ home, but Jenny loved eggs so he fried eggs.
The tranquillity of his breakfast table, the laughter at night while they cooked and ate their evening meal, and later, Jenny sleeping on his lap while he read his newspaper amid the dishes. Had any man ever known such perfect peace?
In late July, he received a letter from the specialist suggesting there was much still unknown regarding the incompatibility of husband and wife, suggesting that for his wife’s mental wellbeing Norman might in future consider the use of a prophylactic during intercourse. He enclosed the address of a city establishment where Norman might procure such items. He also enclosed his bill.
Charles wrote suggesting Amber’s recovery was something of a miracle, that her visit might now be safely brought to a close.
Norman didn’t reply, though he knew he must make some move to retrieve his family. But surely if Amber was well enough to attend the theatre with Reginald, as Charles had stated in his letter, then certainly she was well enough to get herself and daughter home. When she was ready. Far better the decision to return be made by her than to force her home unready.
