by Mary Moody
Our lives changed dramatically in the next few years. Mum died suddenly of a ruptured aorta—attributed directly to her heavy smoking. During her last two years she had been extremely frail and had had numerous falls. Fortunately the impact of most of these was softened by her state of inebriation. She seemed half pickled most of the time, although I only ever saw her drinking in the evenings. Yet throughout those last few years her spirit and sharp mind never diminished, so her sudden death caused us all a great deal of shock and grief. But there were happy changes too. During this period Miriam married Rick and they moved back to the mountains where they subsequently gave birth to two more sons, Sam and Theo. Aaron and his girlfriend Lorna, not to be outdone, produced their baby, Hamish, about the same time as Sam was born. Four grandsons in five years. Quite a surprise for someone not yet fifty.
For years I had dreamed and fantasised about living overseas for a period of time—perhaps for a whole year. Although David—in the course of his film-making—had done much more travelling than I had, during the past decade I managed to squeeze in several forays into Europe, the UK and America, mainly to photograph beautiful gardens for my pictorial library. In our travels together David and I particularly loved Ireland, Italy and France. We often talked about the possibility of dropping out for while and living abroad. Financially it always seemed just out of reach, and now that our lives were filled with small grandchildren, the idea of escaping seemed even further from reality.
Suddenly, with my fiftieth year looming I decide to take some affirmative action on my own behalf. I will take six months and spend it alone. I decide to go to France. It seems the most comfortable and the most affordable option. And David and I have always loved being there, whether it is Paris, or the Loire Valley, Normandy or Provence.
While I am not feeling unduly stressed or dissatisfied with my life, I am beginning to ponder a few simple truths. I realise I have never lived alone and that for most of my life I have lived under the same roof as my mother. I have needed to work from the day I left school—through pregnancies and babies and child rearing—and my working life has escalated into a series of hectic deadlines and pressures and high expectations. I have been, for almost twenty years, the primary carer for our children, with David away so much of the time. I am a grandmother and a mother simultaneously, the two stages of my life having merged into one. More importantly, I realise that I have never had time in my life to stop and think. To be reckless or irresponsible or just plain lazy. Perhaps to sleep in or to spend the whole day in bed without actually being sick. To wake up in the morning and wonder What will I do today?, then to roll over and go back to sleep.
I realise that for many, many people at my stage of life, both men and women, the idea of stopping and dropping out for a bit is simply not possible. For me it will be difficult, but I am determined to make it happen.
It is time to let go.
2
IF YOUR PARENTS AND the circumstances of your childhood shape you as an adult, then I certainly must be the product of mine. I can only believe that my personality and my character strengths and weaknesses were forged during a growing-up period that was a bit of a roller coaster, bouncing along with many highs and lows. Now, as a woman of nearly fifty, I am aware that my childhood memories and sensations were both good and bad. The setting was certainly one of the really good things. The Sydney harbour suburb of Mosman during the 1950s and 60s was a heavenly place to grow up, both for its physical beauty and for the safety and freedom allowed children during those innocent years. Once you learned how to swim out of your depth, the beach became yours to explore without adult supervision. There were plenty of safe places away from the sharks—a sweeping netted area, a small but crystal-clear rockpool, and the baths—as well as rocky headlands to explore, massive fig trees along the Esplanade to climb and gloriously clean stretches of sand that were seldom crowded. At times my brother Dan and I had Balmoral beach entirely to ourselves. We knew every rockpool and channel and understood the best times to swim according to the tides. The only danger was the summer sun which scorched our fair and freckled skins, creating the embryo cancers that decades later we are having frozen from our hands, cheeks and foreheads.
We lived in a small second-floor apartment in a block of liver brick flats with fantastic views out to the headlands that opened into Sydney harbour. Our parents were both journalists and our mother Muriel, having been brought up in what she considered the stigmatised working-class western suburb of Haberfield, had chosen Mosman as a suitable suburb for the family. Ironically, these days Haberfield and its surrounding suburbs are considered trendy, with the Federation-style brick houses that she so detested now fetching vast prices for their proximity to the city and their yuppie desirability.
Our father, Theo, came from the slums of Fitzroy in Melbourne where he had helped support his mother and family after the early death of his solicitor father from syphilis and alcoholism. Theo was born in 1910, the fourth child in a family of four brothers and one sister. They lived over a pawn shop and my father claimed there was a pub on every corner. In later life he attributed his extreme fondness for alcohol to this, but it was much more likely due to the dodgy genetic inheritance from his father.
Theo had left school at fourteen and was largely self-educated. I have no idea what menial jobs he took to survive during his early teens but I know—from his occasional half-sloshed reminiscences—that he devoured knowledge through his love of reading and by the age of twenty was both literate and confident enough to gain a cadetship on one of the Melbourne daily newspapers. His voracious reading included the wordy volumes of Karl Marx, Engels and Lenin, and their philosophies, combined with the human deprivations of the Great Depression, filled my father with a great passion for social justice. He joined the Communist Party in Melbourne in the early 1930s and remained a card-carrying member until his death in 1972.
Theo’s first marriage at the age of twenty-one was to the young and beautiful Veronica Fanning. Her family were respectable and financially successful members of the Victorian Catholic establishment, and her father was later to become the Postmaster General of Victoria. Veronica’s family were horrified at her liaison with Theo so in order to get married the young couple eloped, travelling as far away as London to escape her family disapproval. In England my older siblings, Jonathan and Margaret, were born, but lack of work brought the young family back to Australia, where my father got a job as a reporter on a Sydney newspaper.
Various aspects of Theo’s personality began to emerge even at this early age. He drank heavily and spent a good proportion of his wages on elegant clothing for himself, frittering away the remainder on horse racing and womanising. He often worked the night shift and came home drunk in the early hours of the morning. Veronica was in constant despair. One morning he came home and found she had committed suicide, leaving him with two children under the age of ten. Various family members rallied to his aid, but it didn’t take Theo long to find and fall in love with my mother. Ten years his junior, Muriel Angel was working as court reporter and copytaker on the Daily Telegraph where Theo was news editor at the time. Muriel came from a large family of journalists and was considered a great beauty in the Celtic tradition, with a mane of jet black hair and bright blue eyes. Even then she was painfully thin from her habit of chain-smoking instead of eating. Her father had also been a court reporter and a freelance journalist and, like so many in his profession, was a problem drinker who failed to provide very well for his family. Given this, why our mother was attracted to our hard-drinking, self-centred father is hard to comprehend, although from photographs Theo was undoubtedly handsome and dashing, with a head of springy bright red curls. He also had a wicked sense of humour. This humour—and his hair—are part of my inheritance.
Despite her youth, Muriel was more than up to the task of taking on two young and obviously damaged children. The new family immediately got along famously, which was just as well: within weeks of getting married, my
father was posted to New York as a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and he left Muriel alone in Sydney with the children. It took a year before she and the children were able to join him, and their time together in America was, I feel certain, the happiest of their married life.
3
FOR MANY YEARS DAVID and I had contemplated the idea of taking a year off work and spending it living somewhere overseas. It’s the usual sort of dream for people who have travelled, especially if they fall in love with a particular country or region and yearn for a more leisurely stay. In our various travels over the years we have discussed spending more time in the Italian countryside, probably Umbria; in rural Ireland, possibly south of Dublin; and in the south of France, undoubtedly Provence.
I start by making plans for a break of six months—that’s all we can afford—from the end of May until December. David has been talking about spending at least part of the time travelling with me, but then two film projects he has been working on for years suddenly look like going ahead, which means that he will need to be in Queensland filming during that period. I am determined to go away regardless, and notify the ABC of my intentions. The television program I work on is popular and rates well with the audience, but in my opinion it has become rather stale over the last few years; my going away will give the producers an opportunity to try some new faces and perhaps shake up the format a little. In my heart of hearts I would like to move on. After nine years with the program I feel a bit lacking in inspiration (not to mention frustration after years of dealing with some of the mediocre executives at the ABC). But I know it’s not a good idea to shut the door completely as no doubt I’ll be desperate for some sort of regular income when I return.
Every year I lead a trek to the Himalayas in India during late May. My plan after this is to fly from Delhi to Paris then on to Nice. The Indian trek takes groups to look at the flora of the Harki Dun Valley in a glorious eight-day climb high into the mountains in the northern part of India. I am the group leader, but we also take a local botanist and one or two highly experienced local guides, as well as the ubiquitous porters. This trek has become one of the most enjoyable and exciting sidelines of my work, and I look forward to it every year with pleasure.
My original plan is to find a place to live near Grasse in Provence, a region we have visited several times after attending the Cannes Film Festival, and where we have come to love the atmosphere and the countryside. However my Grasse real estate agent contacts have been finding it difficult to get low-cost accommodation for six months—the summer period is always booked out and rentals are at a premium. All they can offer is a fifth floor apartment in a modern block on the outskirts of the township. This is far from the romantic garret in which I picture myself. I love the old stone houses and the narrow, winding back streets and would prefer to rent a simple room or two above a shop or in any old building. I want peeling shutters and creaky stairs and I don’t care if the bathroom and kitchen are basic, as long as I have a bed and table and chair. But organising such a modest wish list from the other side of the world is difficult, and I am beginning to think I will never find a place to stay.
Then my friend Gil Appleton suggests I contact an old boyfriend of hers from the seventies, Jock Veitch, a retired journalist now living in the tiny village of St Caprais in a little-known rural region in France called the Lot. It’s certainly a long way from my first choice of Provence, being close to the Spanish border in the southwest, a region which David and I have only ever driven through, but it might just be worth a try. I email Jock, introduce myself, and ask if he knows of any rental accommodation in his region. He says he’ll ask around and over the next few weeks I get a couple of tentative replies from him, but nothing definite. Then he writes and offers me a room in his house until I can find what I am looking for. This takes quite a weight off my shoulders and I happily accept his offer of a roof over my head. I really know very little about the region, but it’s rural, it’s remote and it’s French, and that’s good enough for me.
I haven’t really allocated a financial budget for this trip, but I will have to do it as cheaply as possible. Living overseas, it’s easy to spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars a week on rent, and hundreds more to hire a car, not to mention living expenses. As I am without an income for six months I can’t justify spending up big time. This isn’t a junket and isn’t going to be a rich woman’s retreat. I don’t want to do it as rough and ready as a young backpacker, but neither do I want to drain the family coffers in the process. My needs are fairly simple and surely part of the enjoyment will come from living without all the clutter of modern life. I can cheerfully live without satellite TV as long as I have a radio and can find a local channel that plays good music. I don’t need a swimming pool or a sun deck as long as there are rivers to walk beside and sunny places to curl up with a book.
Knowing that I can land on Jock’s doorstep gives me confidence to proceed with my plans. I organise to borrow a car for the six months from our old friends Richard and Fabienne Barnes, who live in Nice; the mobility will be important for me. I spend a lot of time daydreaming about the trip, picturing myself in cafés and wandering down country lanes. But I am also feeling very pressured about organising the logistics, as well as tying up all the loose ends of my professional and private life so that I can actually get on the plane with some peace of mind.
4
MY MOTHER MURIEL WAS A spirited and warm hearted young woman who loved reading, walking and classical music. She had been a promising ballet dancer in her early teens but, like our father, her family circumstances dictated that she leave school and abandon her ballet studies in order to work and help contribute financially. In those days there were no pensions for widows as such, and everyone needed to rally to support relatives who were unable to work.
My brother Dan and I were not born until after the war when Muriel and Theo returned from their exciting years abroad. Having been unable to conceive during the entire time they lived in America, Mum saw a gynaecologist once back in Sydney; after a simple curette, she produced three babies in three and a half years. First Daniel, then me and twelve months later baby Jane, who died towards the end of her first year of life. This sudden population explosion placed a huge strain on the family, with two teenagers and three babies in what was only a two-bedroom flat on the second floor. The dark and dreary laundry was in the basement and consisted of a gas-heated copper and manual wringer; steaming hot clothes were handled with a wooden pole, and after wringing were hung out on a bowed line lifted high with a wooden clothes prop. Somehow my mother managed to wash our clothes, including dozens of nappies every day, and keep the family fed in spite of the difficult circumstances. We had no car and the shops were at the top of an extremely steep hill. My father didn’t help very much domestically—apart from buying a loaf of fresh bread every evening at Circular Quay on his way home from work.
When Jane became ill and was taken to the Children’s Hospital, things became really grim for the family, though my information on this period is largely based on my mother’s later recollections. She was not encouraged to visit Jane—in those days parents were considered a nuisance by the hospital staff—and in any event the hospital was in Camperdown, a good two- or three-hour journey on public transport from Balmoral Beach. No clear diagnosis was ever given, and Jane simply lost condition over a period of six months. She never came home again.
What happened during this period set the scene for what was to become the dark side of my childhood. Both our parents began drinking heavily and fighting violently on a regular basis. Their reminiscences of their time in America included constant references to drinking—it was the fashion to drink spirits in vast quantities during the war period, especially among journalists and people in the creative and artistic professions. Mum often recounted stories of drunken binges first in New York, later in their clapboard house in Connecticut. They fell in with a wealthy, hard-drinking crowd and many of the photographs from t
hat time, although glamorous, reveal puffy faces and glassy eyes. The habits formed during these first years of their marriage remained with them both for the rest of their lives. They also smoked heavily and although Mum didn’t generally start drinking until the evening, she could down a large bottle of sherry or the best part of a bottle of whisky in just a few hours. Dad started drinking early in the day. On his way to work, at around eight o’clock in the morning, he would have two ‘heart starters’ at the Ship Inn, an early opener at Circular Quay. At work, he would leave his desk on the hour and go downstairs into Castlereagh Street to have two drinks at the corner pub. Surprisingly, he didn’t frequent the bar during his lunch hour, but spent the time lifting weights at the gymnasium of the fashionable City Tattersalls Club. He was vain about his appearance, and wanted to look fit and flat-tummied in spite of his dissipated lifestyle. He had also continued his habit of engaging in torrid love affairs, and obviously believed he needed to look good to attract suitable women.
Mum, stuck at home with two toddlers, grieving for baby Jane, and knowing of my father’s constant dalliances with younger, available women, drank even more heavily than she had done before. Jonathan escaped by qualifying as a marine engineer, which allowed him to spend most of his time at sea and return for just a few weeks at a time. Margaret was in the final year of a fine arts degree at East Sydney Tech, which infuriated my father whose political ideologies regarded the arts as unnecessarily frivolous and bourgeois. He was continuing to wave the red flag of communism in total contradiction to his own self-indulgent way of life. He and Margaret clashed badly. She was a powerfully intelligent young woman who always stood up to him, often defending my mother and digging her heels in during repeated confrontations. Eventually, after a particularly ugly fight on her eighteenth birthday, she stormed out and never returned. She contacted Mum once or twice but within a few years emigrated to Canada where she became an arts academic.
