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by Larissa Behrendt

  Carole was used to being flirted with and had become quite adept at dodging charming talk and overfriendly gestures in the three years she had been a member of the armed services. This time she felt flattered and enjoyed the attentions of this angelic, dark man with the shy, boyish grin. She sensed a softness in him and so agreed to meet him on Sunday afternoon and go to the matinee to watch the Cary Grant film she’d already seen three times.

  Carole should have been a boy, her father had once told her, as should her older sister, Margaret. With Carole, her father had been so sure that he had filled out the registration forms with “Carl Edmund Dyball” before he had seen her. He then had to return to shout abuse at the Registrar for the mistake the next day.

  Carole’s mother had all her faith in life squeezed out of her by her bullying husband, Reginald, whom she married when she fell pregnant to him. The marriage had never been a happy one for Ruth Dyball. In the early days of her union, after Margaret’s birth, she had attempted to run away from him, but without money, family support, or a skill — and with a child to look after—she had to return, defeated. It was a humiliation that hung between her and her husband for the remainder of her life. His taunting of her failure to escape, of her captivity, intensified her suffering. Her isolation and imprisonment would be mocked by her husband’s self-congratulatory smirks. She would distract herself with her housework, her children, her thirty-six cats and her Catholicism.

  Since Reginald was a butcher, it was never a problem to feed the children and the cats. He had settled them on a large plot of land on the outskirts of Fremantle. The house stood amongst vacant blocks and large open spaces, and this only heightened Ruth’s feelings of loneliness and isolation. As the years passed by, and her daughters grew up and left home, the neighbourhood built up. But, rather than feeling connected to its swelling population, she felt increasingly claustrophobic and trapped.

  Carole grew up living a double life. There were the times when it was daylight, during which she enjoyed the freedom of the wide fields where bark could be stripped and rocks overturned to reveal tiny creatures. There were the compliant cats in dolls’ dresses, whose ears she would peg together so she could put little hats on their heads and pretend that they were attending a tea party. With the cats, cows, chickens, goat, and the usual array of sick birds and ensnared bugs, Carole would make hospital beds and play doctor to real and imagined wounds and illnesses.

  Being interested in boys, Margaret disdained Carole’s play, but Carole didn’t need the companionship of a disapproving sister while she had the world around her to explore, her menagerie of animals — trapped and tamed — to heal. She had her imagination for company.

  The other side of Carole’s life unfolded in the evenings, after the sun left the sky, when her companion cats were banished from the house and her father was home. He was the only fear she knew as a child. It was a terror that made her stutter. Reginald worked all day at the meatworks and when he was irritated he would come home and relieve his aggression with the slap of his belt. He lashed out when dissatisfied, at furniture, at Carole, her sister and her mother. His anger left red welts and marbled bruises on their arms and legs. Carole quietly hoped she would be ignored, especially when eclipsed by the older, more rebellious Margaret. Most times she could escape detection but would, on occasion, draw her father’s ire by not speaking or by stuttering with nervousness.

  Carole could not understand Margaret’s fascination with boys. To Carole, all men were like her father, who yelled at her and beat her and left her shaking with fear when he shouted at her for being “stupid” and “a fool”. When furious, he would grab at his belt with one hand while he held her hair with the other and she would feel the sharp whip of leather against her skin. She would say to herself that the more she knew about men, the more she liked cats.

  She would suffer his rage if she failed to complete a chore to his satisfaction or if he was angry with her mother if she cried. And he was so unpredictable. Carole would freeze after accidentally dropping a bottle of milk, expecting him to shout abuse at her, but instead he would say with a laugh, “You know what they say, no use crying over spilt milk.” But then when she dropped a glass of juice, he yelled at her for being wasteful and not appreciating the cost of things and sent her out to stand in the cold night air to reflect upon her “selfishness”. Instead, she stood in the dark on the back step and puzzled about the difference between spilling milk and spilling squeezed oranges.

  Her father embodied the night, her mother the day. If her father’s presence in the evenings frightened her, the freedom of her rustic playground and the safety of her mother’s presence ensured happiness during her childhood days. Her other escape, her only other point of reference for the wider world, was the moving pictures.

  She had first seen Cary Grant in Every Girl Should Be Married when she was just eight years old. In the darkened cinema, Carole felt, for the first time, attraction to a man. She was entranced by the way he looked, transfixed by his self-assured manner and acid wit. Her infatuation grew when she saw Room for One More, in which Grant played a devoted family man and husband. As the antithesis of her father, Grant was her ideal. She knew that he would never lash at her with a belt or yell at her when she stuttered. Since then, she had seen every new film he’d been in, watching each new feature once a week while it screened at the theatre. Except An Affair to Remember, which she saw ten days running, crying at the ending each time.

  Carole read everything she could about Cary Grant. She saw him as a man who hid secrets behind the polished sheen of his on-screen charm. Born in Bristol to a working-class family, Grant’s father was a trouser-presser given to murderous rages and insisted that his wife never speak to others at parties. Carol could empathise with the image of the cowering child and the silently suffering mother and wife. Even when Hitchcock brought out the brooding, bleak side of Grant’s character — as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest (the kind of man who made women who didn’t know him fall in love with him) and Devlin in Notorious — the strange, shadowy angles of the camera revealed a confident, worldly charm. To Carole, Grant was a man who could understand the split between her own night and day worlds.

  Margaret left home when she became pregnant to her boyfriend Darren. When Margaret announced she was departing, her father raged, calling her names that made Carole blush. Margaret had told her that marrying Darren was a way of escaping their father, but to Carole, it seemed like her sister was leaving one prison and entering another. Carole had never liked Darren, finding him too confident, too slick. He winked at her and called her “Doll” while he waited for Margaret to finish getting ready to go out. Carole couldn’t keep from staring at his shoes; they were too shiny. Carole, in contrast to her sister, kept her distance from men who tried to court her, fearing that she would be suffocated by marriage just as her mother had been. Having learnt her mother’s lesson, Carole didn’t wish to have another man standing over her, abusing her and making her feel trapped.

  Carole wanted to be a vet. She could then do what made her happy — looking after animals — and be able to escape her father. She planned her High School studies around this goal, but in her second-last year her father stopped her. He had allowed her to begin, believing she would fail. Sensing her success drawing close — with good grades and glowing reports — he forbade her to continue. No pleas, tears or ultimatums could move his iron will and Carole was transferred into the subjects required for secretary school. Not even her school’s administration could persuade her father to rethink his actions. Carole knew from the lifetime of sarcastic comments directed at her mother that there was no escape from her father’s demands and any opposition to his decisions only made him more unwilling to compromise.

  As Carole cried for her lost dream, locked in her room and surrounded by the memorabilia of her childhood, she looked at the photograph of Cary Grant on her mirror taken when he was filming Destination Tokyo. Grant was dressed in a naval uniform, his eye
s seeming to focus on the inner thoughts that preoccupied him, his hand clasping binoculars. His wedding ring sat prominently on his hand.

  Cary Grant had always offered her an escape from her home life, even if it were only for the hours she watched him on the screen. Now he gave Carole an idea of how she could escape permanently. There was something in the reflective resolve of Grant in the naval uniform that drew her in.

  Carole had older studio shots in her scrapbook from Grant’s earlier films. In three he was dressed in Air Force uniforms. He was a member of the Royal Flying Corp in The Eagle and the Hawk in 1932, a blinded pilot in Wings in the Dark in 1935 and a French flyer in Suzy in 1936. All were made before Carole was bom. He had, Carole recalled, had donated his fees for Philadelphia Story and Arsenic and Old Lace to the war effort. He had flown to London to ask what he could do to help the Allied cause, only to be told that he should return to Hollywood “and carry on doing what you do best”. The US government decided that he was more valuable to them as an actor than a soldier. Grant was disappointed, but had said: “Wherever Uncle Sam orders my utilization to the best purposes, there I will willingly go, as should every other man. I feel that Uncle Sam knows best.”

  Carole applied to join the Women’s Royal Australian Navy, the WRANS, in 1957. She passed the admission test and was accepted. It was then she discovered that she would need her parents’ consent since she was only seventeen. Her father refused and Carole already knew that it was beyond her power to change his mind.

  Then, unexpectedly, her father’s sister arrived. Aunt Beatrice saw her brother only on rare occasions. In the quiet of the afternoon, she spoke with her brother behind the closed door of the lounge room. Carole and her mother sat silently in the kitchen and heard the muffled and heated voices.

  “How did she know of Father’s refusal?” Carole whispered.

  “I wrote her,” her mother replied, her brow furrowed as she looked at her wedding ring. “I should have thought to do it when he made you change your subjects. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Mum,” Carole said as she touched her mother’s hand, knowing how much courage such a secret, subversive act would take. “Thank you.”

  “Let me make a cup of tea,” her mother replied, rising and releasing herself from Carole’s touch.

  Carole never did discover what transpired in the meeting with Aunt Beatrice to make her father change his mind. She would forever wonder what words were used, what argument presented, that could make him budge from his bullish stance. She marvelled that there might have been magic words or phrases that could have prevented straps across thighs and arms. She would never know that it wasn’t the power of language but the power of money that had secured her freedom.

  Saying farewell to her mother and father on the docks as she set sail for Victoria, Carole watched as other girls, making the same trip as her, said tearful and loving goodbyes to their families. Her father’s parting words, loud enough to cause others to turn and stare, were, “You’ll be back in six months, pregnant.” Her mother wept for the freedom her daughter had found and with something that bordered on envy.

  Carole had scored so highly on her entrance examination that she was to be trained for intelligence work. She was sent to Melbourne where she shared a large house with twelve other girls. Her gentleness made others instantly feel comfortable with her, but her shyness and inexperience in social situations meant she kept aloof and apart from the others and from their jealousies and intrigues. She preferred to read on the nights she did not go out to the pictures.

  While other girls struggled with the strict regime of the Navy, Carole found the discipline more relaxed and lacking in the night-time terror of her previous home life. She relished the stimulation, challenge and responsibility of her work, and a financial independence she had never imagined. With a good salary and with the Navy taking care of many of her expenses — accommodation, clothing and food — Carole was able to save most of her pay cheque. She sent money to her mother, but her mother’s letters revealed that her father confiscated it; she then reverted to sending gifts, things that her mother could never afford for herself—a velvet coat, French perfume, a floral scarf, leather gloves.

  Her mother’s fate with an unloving husband remained a warning to Carole and she continued to avoid the attentions of the men around her. She had expected to be constantly repelling the attractions of men in such a male-dominated quarter of a male-dominated world. Instead, she found that her work kept her mainly in the company of other women. They informed her which of her superiors had wandering hands and she felt fortunate that she had been able to avoid any ’incidents’.

  In Melbourne, and later in Canberra, Carole still defined men by her experiences with her father. She feared that, underneath the exteriors of the men who took her to dinner and the movies, there lay someone brutal. Each date presented the threat of the trap that had closed around her mother. That was, until the bus trip with Bob Brecht.

  There was something in the dark aspect of this Bob Brecht — she had noticed it as soon as her eyes rested on his face — that reminded her of the unassuming gallantry and gentlemanly softness of her matinee idol. He was the kind of man she felt she would be safe with, a man so unlike her father.

  As Bob Brecht walked along the edge of the road that threaded through the naval base, he reflected on the woman he had just met, the woman who had agreed, against his expectation, to meet him on Sunday. Her soft, crisp “Quite”, her educated accent and tender, gorgeous face had melted him. He felt an exhilaration and anticipation he had not felt since he was a young child in the Boy’s Home and was about to kiss Annabel Stewart behind the chicken coop.

  16

  1943

  THE STRONGEST MEMORY Bob Brecht had of his mother was a citrus scent, crisp and tart. Their family home had two large lemon trees in its back yard and his mother had used the fruit for cooking and the juice to clean bench tops and clothes. The odour from the fruit had clung to his mother, lingering in her soft recesses.

  Even after she passed away, Elizabeth’s lemon scent remained in the air, ghosting her, and through the aroma, her second youngest could sense her close, as though she were about to re-enter the room.

  Bob was five when his mother died. His eldest sister, Patricia, then seventeen, was working as a seamstress in a nearby shop. Thomas had left long ago to join the war and not been heard from since. At the funeral, Patricia had clutched Bob, a quiet bundle of a child, pliable in his numbness and confusion at the changes occurring around him. Danny, then four years old, clung to Daisy, a precocious eight, who was trying hard to act as guarded as the older children. William stood aloof, strangely quiet. In the thawing early spring of 1943, all around seemed lifeless and empty.

  A large-boned, dark-skinned boy, William started to gather up his shirts, trousers, winter coat and boots. The other children watched him pack and leave; the determined look on his face was enough to keep them silent. They knew this mood of bottled anger all too well. His decision to leave left Patricia an acute sense of abandonment and also a feeling of betrayal. She would now be the eldest child, left to care for the three youngest. She constantly tried but was never able to reach out and connect with William, had been unable to free him from the thoughts that spiralled him into sullen moods. She had seen his tenderness, how docile he could be when he was released, but only Daisy with her smile, her cajoling and her teasing, could bring him back from his thoughts. He would lift her up to carry her on his shoulders or tickle her until she begged him to stop, and his spirits would rise.

  “Don’t leave us,” Daisy pleaded with him as he zipped up his bag with finality.

  “Princess, I have to go. I’m no good to you here. I need to do this,” he said, pausing to look at her. “I’ll do this and then I’ll come and get you.”

  “No. No. You’re wrong.” She tried again. “I need you.”

  William hesitated for the shortest moment.

  “No,” he asserted again.
“I must. One day, you’ll understand.”

  William’s large frame assisted him in appearing a supposed eighteen years rather than his bare seventeen, and he enrolled to fight in the war. His brothers and sisters could not know that their mother’s funeral was a final farewell to their troubled brother too.

  To Grigor, the children were a reminder of Elizabeth; their distant murmuring began to grow louder. They haunted his house and formed part of the modest collection of personal belongings his wife had left behind.

  He dealt with the loss of his wife the best he could, grieving in his own way. He threw her clothes into the hearth fire. He destroyed her trinkets — cheap glass vases, a polished brown seashell and an imitation ivory brush and mirror set; he threw other possessions away — a jade brooch, a silver hair-clip and a piece of emerald-green and gold Chinese cloth. His anger gave way to the bitterness of losing the focus of his affection and love, the centre of his tenderness. It hardened him against a world that he had already believed to be riddled with callousness and unfairness. He reached for the one thing that he could find solace in: the slow-warming comfort of liquor.

  Grigor continued to cast an ominous shadow over the house, crushing everything lemon and light. He would arrive home late at night smelling of the sugary pungency of strong spirits, yelling at any child who was the cause of discomfort or a reminder of his loss. When things were not done as Elizabeth had done them, it was a reminder to him that she was gone. Through his shouting and raging he did not notice his children’s terror, did not sense that they grieved as he did nor understand that they too had lost something that intricately and crucially made up their lives.

  Patricia, now eighteen, was determined to look after Daisy, Bob and Danny, to make sure they didn’t lose anyone else. She juggled the work she did mending and altering clothes for the nearby laundry and the increased domestic duties to try and replace their mother in some small way. She did so until, one day, Mrs Crawford from the Aborigines Protection Board knocked curtly on the front door. The agency had been alerted about the Brecht family by a neighbour who had been concerned about the violent sounds of arguing that came from the house in the late hours of the night. Mrs Crawford would normally have retreated from a family where a white father was in charge, but Grigor, in a sombre hangover of grog, grief and spent rage, stared distractedly at the fire as she spoke.