A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  23

  Valentine’s Day, 1972

  Valentine’s Day – 1972

  When the phone call came

  to hurry with fresh clothing

  I sensed that this was not

  a night for garments and

  felt fear; I found you

  legs dangling, on the side of

  your bed, wearing a childish nightie

  I’d made for you one Mother’s Day.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Darling,’

  you said, taking my desperate hand

  in your chill fingers which

  death had reached already, your

  tender eyes dull and distended

  in their gaze. And so I made

  you comfortable with pillows,

  caressing the cold hands, reading

  – sometimes aloud – the Brennan

  you so loved: this being

  the night for journeying.

  When, on the midnight stroke,

  the heart valves closed you shut

  with a shocking sigh, I had to tell them.

  Stunned, we sat around you drinking tea

  then kissed your white-cold face

  and closed the door.

  A man in a flat black suit

  who used to be a bus driver

  came in answer to our call

  offering ‘Condolences!’ as if

  they were the Compliments

  of the Season.

  Down the cold morning stairs

  he carried your bird-frail shell

  strapped on an unlikely pallet

  to a waiting unmarked van.

  But then and now – through all

  my grieving years – I’ve found

  his oily greeting inappropriate.

  – Dymphna Stella Rees

  So I wrote one Valentine’s Day. Time and again, especially on the anniversary, I relive that hot February evening in 1972. But it took many years before I could bear to dig into the soft tissue of my sadness to articulate the details of that night and my part in its drama.

  My mother had been ailing for less than a week, the doctor coming every day. Although he hadn’t said it in so many words, she had bronchopneumonia. Because of her spinal curvature, her lungs were tightly constricted. They were tucked away inside her pelvis with all her other soft organs. So there would be a struggle to beat it, despite the heavy doses of antibiotics. His way of saying it to her was: ‘It’s a shame we can’t hang you from the ceiling by the ankles and give your chest a chance to drain.’

  At the time I lived with my own family in a rural area northwest of Sydney, about fifty kilometres from my parents’ home at Balmoral Beach. During my mother’s brief illness, I drove to see her most days in the few hours I could find minding for my smaller children while the elder two were at school.

  My mother had some prescience of doom – as I did. In the few days beforehand, she had been discussing with me and my father some rearrangements for a dentist’s appointment and theatre tickets for that week. She said, ‘Les, cancel the dentist. As for the theatre: I won’t be going. Why don’t you take Thelma?’ (Thelma was the widow of Les’s old ABC colleague and friend, Max Afford.)

  My father, however, was battling a heavy summer cold and was preoccupied with that. Although concerned about Coralie’s current illness, he seemed to have not confronted the seriousness of its progression.

  It was a steamy humid Sydney February day. I had been to see her the day before. My father rang me in the afternoon to say that she was not eating anything. When I came the following day, could I bring some little treats to tempt her appetite, please?

  Some hours later, I had just fed my children and was getting them ready for bed when my father rang again, this time with some urgency in his voice. Could I come straight away and bring some clean nighties? She seemed to be very hot and damp. My friend Margaret Molt came immediately through the dark bush to mind the children. David and I took off into the night, my stomach already tight with apprehension.

  I wished my husband would drive faster, such was my sense of urgency on the long hour’s journey. When we got there, my mother looked up at me, her large grey eyes seeming to swim in her face. ‘I’m glad you’re here, darling. You’ll be moral support for Les.’ My father was pottering about in his dressing-gown, obviously relieved we were there. I bathed my mother’s face and hands and helped her into a clean light cotton nightie. Then I rang the doctor’s home number. His teenage son answered the phone and said his father was out but he would give him the message.

  I settled my mother back on her pillows and soon she was drifting in and out of sleep. Looking in and seeing me sitting beside her and that all was quiet, my father went off to bed in the room next door. He was obviously exhausted. I sat quietly reading from a volume of Christopher Brennan’s collected poetry, which my mother had beside the bed. The Wanderer series was a favourite of hers and mine. These verses spoke to the moment:

  I know I am

  the wanderer of the ways of all the worlds,

  to whom the sunshine and the rain are one

  and one to stay or hasten, because he knows

  no ending of the way, no home, no goal,

  and phantom night and the grey day alike

  withhold the heart where all my dreams and days

  might faint in soft fire and delicious death:

  and saying this to myself as a simple thing

  I feel a peace fall in the heart of the winds

  and a clear dusk settle, somewhere, far in me.

  About 10.30 pm my mother opened her eyes and looked at me with a dreamy gaze.

  ‘Is there anything I can get you, Mum?’

  ‘No, darling,’ she murmured softly. ‘Everything’s just perfect.’ She closed her eyes.

  I reached over and took off her glasses to make her more comfortable. Towards midnight her quiet breathing became more irregular. When her heart stopped with a shudder, I had to wake my father.

  As in most people’s life journey, I have climbed a few mountains. I look back at sharing in my mother’s death as an immense experience: both a privilege and a challenge. It was an inexpressibly beautiful gift to sit with my mother as she journeyed towards her earthly end, to share in her confidence and grace, to learn that dying is not always harsh and terrible but can be a serene experience, a graceful passing between realms. My mother’s faith allowed her to cope with excruciating physical deterioration without self-pity. For so long, her courage had been a shining example.

  In all this I was truly blessed. But to have to waken my father from sleep and tell him that she had died, his life’s companion, his friend and collaborator, his Great Love, the woman with whom he had shared almost every day for over forty years – this was unquestionably the hardest task I have ever had to face.

  I went into his room and tried to rouse him from sleep. Strangely, I called him by a term I had not used since childhood.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, she’s gone.’

  ‘What? What are you saying?’ When I spoke the words, the dismay on his face was terrible. ‘She’s gone? But I didn’t realise she was so sick. If I’d known I wouldn’t have gone to bed and left her.’

  The doctor never did ring back. His son had forgotten to give him the message. It didn’t matter. Nothing could have been achieved by taking her off in an ambulance to struggle to the end in some alien hospital ward. She died in her own bed, in her own dignified way, assured by the presence of those she loved.

  24

  Sheer Gallantry of Spirit

  At the time my mother died, she had battled an insidious incurable disease for more than half her lifetime. Ankylosing spondylitis primarily affects the spine, but it can also affect other joints and organs. It is one of the autoimmune diseases where the
immune system attacks the body’s own tissue. It is also an inflammatory disease. Beginning at the base of the backbone, the vertebrae become inflamed and, in severe cases like my mother’s, go on to create new bone so the spine becomes fused and immobile. The associated pain is then reduced but other problems escalate as the body loses its ability to remain upright. The weight of the head causes the upper body to fall forward, creating a stooped position, which in turn affects the space and movement of the internal organs. It also causes the eyes and facial features to be tilted downwards, which can make swallowing, sitting, walking and sleeping all difficult. Breathing issues can result from the chest’s inability to expand.

  Ankylosing spondylitis is hard to diagnose, even today. In the first half of the twentieth century there was little known about it, little recognition of autoimmune diseases or of genetic markers that can assist in their diagnosis. Now it is generally diagnosed in the sufferer’s second or third decade, though it might be active in a less severe form for many years before. From her twenty-first year, when she was working as editor of The Dawn, Coralie recorded in her letters and diaries how she was forever plagued by what was commonly called ‘rheumatism’, ‘lumbago’ or ‘neuralgia’, or she was just plain ‘tired’. Doubtless the inflammatory process was taking hold. Chronic pain brings its own form of exhaustion and the inflammatory process its own inexplicable malaise.

  Ankylosing spondylitis is now treated with a range of drugs and strengthening exercises but when my mother was diagnosed in the 1940s the recommended treatment was intensive radiation of the lower spine to stop the progress of the disease. For a woman of childbearing years this had the effect of also irradiating her reproductive organs and bringing on premature menopause. Other less radical treatments included basking in front of an infra-red lamp wearing sunglasses, applications of heat by hot water bottles followed by various anti-inflammatory unguents, and the indignity of colonic irrigation.

  My mother consulted doctors and specialists: diagnosticians, physicians, rheumatologists and orthopaedic surgeons – in Sydney, New York and London. When they could offer no effective treatment, she tried homeopaths, naturopaths, cleansing diets and health farms. None of these options, traditional or alternative, had much effect because, in truth, by the time her disease was diagnosed her spinal vertebrae were on their way to becoming completely calcified, thus depriving her of skeletal support. Her body gradually diminished in height as it caved in on itself, reducing her by the end of her life to not much more than half her full adult height.

  Writing of my mother’s illness has caused me to anguish whether I gave her sufficient support. Certainly I was of little assistance as a sulky introspective teenager, when the first changes occurred. I remember my mother taking me shopping in town; I was bouncing along beside her, no doubt excited about something she had bought me.

  ‘I love going to town,’ I enthused. ‘Don’t you, Mum?’

  My mother replied in a strained voice: ‘No, I don’t. All I can see most of the time is the footpath.’

  In my twenties I was more sensitive but also consumed with my own new life of marriage and motherhood. My mother and I talked frequently by phone, which she called ‘the bed-to-bed hotline’ (it was the sixties!), and David and I would visit my parents at weekends or they would come and stay with us, much to the delight of our four small children. So it was not that we didn’t have opportunity to speak frankly, rather that she rarely referred to her increasing difficulties.

  My mother made few concessions to the changes in her body. When she needed a stick to walk with, she had one made, disguised as a stylish umbrella. She had always dressed with careful elegance and loved natural fabrics – ravishing silks, polished cottons and finely woven wool – and so when ready-made clothes no longer fitted her shape, she found a creative dressmaker who could design and make her clothes, sensitive to the contours of her body. She had her fine blonde hair coiffed by a hairdresser who could adapt washing methods appropriately, as she could not lean back in a chair. Challenges were not an issue so much as an opportunity for creative thinking.

  As time went on and her disability became more severe, my father took an increasing share of domestic responsibilities. Observing the progress of the disease, he decided to retire from his ABC career of thirty years at the age of sixty. Publicly he gave the reason as wanting to address himself full-time to writing, but he privately admitted that he wanted to have more time with his Coral to enjoy the interests they had always shared: the literary life, the arts, travel and family – now with their clutch of seven grandchildren. My mother immortalised them as ‘The Seven Little Shoe-Buttons’ in her book, What Happened After, published just months after her death.

  The last six years of Coral and Les’s life together were rich with their day-to-day companionship and the excitement of moving into the first home they ever owned, a modest apartment situated right on Sydney’s Balmoral Beach, looking out over the shining waters of Middle Harbour towards the bulk of North Head. They were also productive years for their writing collaboration. In 1970 People of the Big Sky Country, a collection of their best separate pieces of travel writing about remote parts of Australia and the characters they met, came out in a glossy large-format edition, lavishly illustrated by some of my father’s best photography. It was a great success, selling 50,000 copies. They were also still writing radio documentaries together for broadcast on the ABC.

  My father was at this time president of the Sydney Centre of International PEN, a worldwide writers’ organisation with a strong interest in the humanitarian concerns of people caught in oppressive regimes, restrained from speaking or writing freely. So there were plenty of occasions to get together with their literary friends, for worthwhile work as well as social enjoyment. They wrote, travelled, visited and entertained, and even bought their first ever new car, a Holden station wagon of such untold luxury my mother dubbed it ‘the Silver Mink’. Just months before her death, they drove across Australia to Perth for reunions with my eighty-three-year-old grandmother Sylvia, their siblings and a bevy of lifelong friends, my indomitable mother taking the wheel across the Nullarbor, balancing on a pile of cushions so she was high enough to see through the windscreen.

  On 17 February 1972 The Sydney Morning Herald, a paper they had both written for, proclaimed:

  AUSTRALIAN WRITER DIES

  Coralie Rees, the Australian writer, died at her home at Balmoral Beach on Monday, aged 63. Mrs Rees and her husband, Leslie Rees, a former drama editor for the ABC, formed one of the best known Australian literary partnerships.

  She was born in Perth and met her husband while they were attending the University of Western Australia. Later they went on travelling scholarships to London where they were married. In addition to travel books, Mrs Rees wrote poetry including Silent His Wings, children’s plays, short stories and radio and journalistic features. She is survived by her husband and two daughters.

  Tributes flowed, obituaries were published and an avalanche of letters to my father arrived at Balmoral. People who had known Coralie Clarke Rees throughout her life and those who had known her briefly all expressed admiration for qualities that I had more or less taken for granted. I had been a small child when she first became afflicted with AS and was barely thirty when her life came to an end.

  Nancy Robson, who later became Australia’s First Lady as Lady Anne Kerr, was one of my mother’s closest female friends. At the time of my mother’s death she wrote:

  What all those who loved her are remembering is the flowering of her spirit, the rich and positive personality – to friends and family an unfailing source of warmth and radiance, of strength, of help that was infinitely practical yet given with boundless love.

  When, as a beautiful and still young woman, Coralie was attacked by an illness the full implications of which she faced from the very beginning and without self-pity, she displayed moral and physical heroism in surmounting – in
what can only be called disregarding – her physical condition, so that her personality remained unflawed and her activity as generous, diverse and fruitful as before.

  The West Australian, a newspaper to which my mother had contributed for some years as London correspondent, ran an obituary by EW Irwin entitled ‘A Woman of Quality’:

  She typified the best of her generation, the one that grew up in Australia between the wars, an era which, whatever its tragedies, saw Australian writing come of age, and a notable advance in the emancipation of women – matters that were among her primary concerns. […]

  In her early travels off the beaten track she proved her physical courage, but when still a beautiful young woman she was attacked by an illness that demanded courage of a different kind. The illness severely crippled her body but not her spirit for she met the challenge with outward serenity and her life remained zestful and her personality unflawed to the end.

  Tom Inglis Moore, writer himself and one of Australia’s eminent literary scholars, published his tribute in The Australian Author:

  Coralie was an exceptionally fine personality, as rich in courage, sympathy and understanding as in intelligence, humour and zest for life. Staunch and generous in friendship, she inspired affection and admiration in a large circle of friends. In her later years she triumphed over physical disability and suffering through sheer gallantry of spirit.

  Some people, in personal letters of sorrow to my father, remarked upon his constant care for his Coralie – one ‘for the way he helped to make her disability quite inconspicuous’, another for ‘looking after her with such love and understanding’. Leslie did not see it this way, not at all. To him, they were partners in life, in work, in family, in interests, neither one being to a more or lesser degree dependent on the other.

  Dymphna Cusack remembered:

  I shall always see Coralie as she was the first night we met over 35 years ago. Lovely – she was a true beauty – gay, gracious.