Autobiography of My Mother Page 2

  Michael Coen despaired. He didn’t want to stay in Dubbo after that. Life seemed too sad. But he had his two little sons to think of and so hired a governess to look after the boys. Margaret Trainor was a clever woman. Her father had been a teacher who educated his daughter himself. A year after they met, Margaret Trainor and Michael Coen were married.

  My father, their first child, was born in Dubbo in 1879. Michael Coen still wanted to start afresh, so with the new baby the Coens moved to Yass, where Michael had bought the Australian Stores in Cooma Street. (Cooma Street is spelt ‘Comur’ now, but then it was always ‘Cooma’, like the town.)

  Being their first son, my father was a great favourite of his parents. They called him ‘little King’. His real name was Michael Joseph, but all his life he was known as ‘King’.

  The Coens had three more sons and six daughters. The second youngest, a little girl called Annie, died of diphtheria when she was five. With Michael Coen’s two sons from his first marriage, it made eleven children who were being raised in the pisé house next to the store. A huge room above the store was turned into a dormitory for the boys.

  Michael Coen did very well. He was able to send money back to his parents in Ireland so that they could buy some land. He also brought out a number of his sisters and cousins from Ireland, including Tom Waldron, ‘the strongest man in the world’.

  Tom Waldron was one of our most famous family legends. The newspapers of the day were full of his prodigious feats of strength. When he joined the police force, louts used to shape up to him in pubs. Because he had such a soft Irish voice, they never guessed he was so strong.

  ‘Come with me, my pretty boys,’ he used to say. Next thing, Tom Waldron would emerge from the hotel with a lout under each arm and another between his teeth.

  When he was sent in to clean up a notorious grog joint in Melbourne, he threw out ten men, one after another. The eleventh man had a bulldog that attacked the giant Irishman. Tom Waldron picked up the bulldog by the tail, twirled it round his head, then hurled it through the air. The bulldog landed on a roof several houses away. Such was the legend of Tom Waldron.

  Michael Coen took a keen interest in civic affairs. He became an alderman almost as soon as he arrived in Yass and was three times mayor. Yass was off the train line and Michael Coen was responsible for the tramway that linked the town to the main line. He was also instrumental in getting gas to Yass in 1892. Grandma carefully saved all the newspaper clippings concerning both events. The Yass Courier in one article described how, amid great cheering, Michael Coen had driven the last silver rivet into newly constructed gasworks. ‘The spectators numbered upward of three hundred and considerable interest in the proceedings was manifest,’ the paper reported. The mayor, according to this same account, then invited all present to adjoin to the machinery house, where bottles were opened and the success of the undertaking drunk in bumpers. As children, we were greatly excited seeing ‘M. Coen’ written on all the gas lamps.

  To celebrate the opening of the gasworks, he gave a grand ball at the Mechanics’ Institute which was attended by His Excellency the Governor of New South Wales, the Earl of Jersey. Guests came in plain or fancy dress, as instructed by the invitation, and the mayoress, Grandma Coen, was clad in rich black corded silk trimmed with black silk lace and had a beaded headdress to match. The institute was decorated with a miraculous display featuring dozens of fairy lights and globes lit with the new gas. ‘Like a fairy bower’ the press enthused about the ball’s illuminations. There was dancing till dawn and a sumptuous supper provided by Mr T. J. Sheekey, with the assistance of his mother. The supper eclipsed all Mr Sheekey’s previous catering efforts. Only one guest complained to the local paper that he missed out on his share of the wine jelly at supper.

  The day after the ball, over five hundred schoolchildren accompanied by the Yass town band marched to the show-ground to attend a picnic, again organised by Michael Coen. According to my mother, people said that Michael Coen had a genial, generous nature like a homespun shawl.

  He made money, enough to buy two more sheep stations, but in 1896, when he was only fifty-six, he died suddenly. Kathleen, his youngest daughter, was only three weeks old.

  Michael Coen was much mourned, his obituaries were glowing. His bequests included a trust fund at the Yass hospital so any derelicts admitted would not be entirely destitute when they took to the road again. Grandma Coen, now forty-six, stalwartly took over his business.

  The stores ran smoothly under Grandma’s iron hand. The profits from them, together with the money Michael Coen had left to the family in his will, ensured that there was no financial hardship for the Coens.

  My father went to school at St Patrick’s College, Goulburn, and like his brother Joe, he later attended the Jesuit college St Ignatius (Riverview) in Sydney. The younger boys, Frank and Barney, went to the Yass school run by the nuns until they were twelve, then to Riverview.

  The Coen boys were bright. John Joseph, the elder son of Michael’s first wife, became a Passionist priest; the other, Timothy, an orchestral conductor in America. Of the second Margaret Coen’s sons, Joe and Barney became doctors and Frank a barrister. Being the oldest, my father was destined to inherit the business.

  My father’s great passion was for the theatre. He loved play acting and reciting at concerts. I think he met my mother at one of these concerts in Yass, or perhaps at a dance. Mum loved dancing.

  My mother was twenty-three when she married; Dad was twenty-two. Mum never talked much about those years between the time she came to Sydney at the age of fourteen and when she married Dad. She did her apprenticeship as a milliner in Sydney. After she finished, she worked in stores in country towns such as Mudgee and Forbes. A milliner was very important in a country drapery store at that time because women wore such elaborate hats; all pleated lace and tulle, decorated with everything under the sun – handmade flowers, feathers, little artificial birds. Mum was very good with hats. She could take a handful of flowers and ribbons, twist them around and arrange them in no time.

  Eventually she answered an advertisement for a milliner in a shop called Woodhills in Yass, a big general store on the corner of Rossi and Cooma streets. So my mother came to work in Yass. She boarded with a woman who rented her a room just up the road from the Coens’ shop in Cooma Street.

  The main meal of the day was lunch. Soon after she had taken this room, Mum came home one lunch time and there was nothing to eat on the table. Mum was hungry after working in the store all morning. She found her landlady out the back of the house, doing the washing in a big old-fashioned boiler.

  ‘I suppose you want your lunch,’ the woman said.

  Yes, she was hungry, Mum replied.

  ‘A couple of eggs will do you.’ The woman picked up two eggs and threw them in with the dirty washing.

  ‘Oh no, they won’t,’ Mum retorted. She went into her room, packed her bag, walked into town and rented a room at one of the hotels – a daring thing to do then.

  ‘The belle of the south,’ Mum said they used to call her in Yass. With her waist-length black hair, piercing blue eyes and tiny waist she had a good many admirers, but her heart was set on marrying King Coen.

  My mother and father were both very Irish, but as different as could be. The Coens were red-haired, freckled, musical, amiable, fond of playing cards. The O’Dwyers were much more austere; black-haired, blue-eyed, distinguished-looking. My mother called them ‘Spanish Irish’. Grandfather O’Dwyer looks wonderfully handsome in his photograph, but Grandfather Coen was foursquare and sturdy.

  Friction between my mother and her mother-in-law, Grandmother Coen, started straight away. Grandma disapproved of Mum. Whether it was because Mum was a little older than Dad I don’t know – she might have been jealous of Mum stealing her Little King away from her, or she might have thought that a milliner, a store employee, wasn’t good enough for her son. Maybe she thought Mum was too pretty; perhaps because Grandpa Coen had died so young, she w
as frightened of losing another man from her life or from her business.

  Anyway, she didn’t come to the wedding, which took place in Sydney on 5 February 1902. Mum left for the service from the Flanagans’ house in Boyce Street, Glebe, and the ceremony itself took place at the Ashfield Catholic Church. Dad’s half-brother, the Passionist, who was known as Father Alphonsus, assisted at the church, so there was some Coen participation. I don’t think Mum’s own mother was present either. Mum and Dad had a carriage drawn by four white horses, decorated with bells and ribbons. She felt very grand.

  Their honeymoon began in Melbourne, where they spent a few days before taking a boat to England and Dad began to write his diary. He found Melbourne an altogether more agreeable city than Sydney. The streets were much wider, he wrote, and the trams all that could be desired, though the fares were excessive.

  The Melbourne visit seems to have been a whirl of activity. They dined out in style. At Her Majesty’s Theatre they saw the comic opera San Toy and the famous actress Grace Palotta, whom Dad described as charming. They went twice to another comic opera, The Runaway Girl, in which Grace Palotta also had the leading role, which they enjoyed even more. At the Princess it was Nellie Stewart in Sweet Nell of Old Drury, whose splendid performance they applauded. They went on several shopping expeditions, and visited the Zoological Gardens. They also attended the races at Caulfield on two occasions, and Dad backed a few winners. As well they had formal photographs taken at Johnstone O’Shannessy and finally they collected £400 worth of circular notes (the equivalent of traveller’s cheques) from Thomas Cook and Sons and prepared to depart for the honeymoon proper.

  On Tuesday 25 February 1902, they travelled by train to Port Melbourne and boarded the Arcadia for the treat of their lives, or so they thought.

  Dad was dreadfully ill throughout the voyage. He couldn’t go on a ferry without being seasick. ‘Never spent such a night in my life, sat on my cabin trunk the livelong night,’ he wrote about their first night out of Melbourne. ‘I would not have cared had I been thrown overboard,’ he wrote a little later. He was constantly feeling squeamish, miserable or very sick – ‘feeding the fishes again’ – as he put it.

  ‘Who is the longest man in the world?’ was the joke going around the ship.

  ‘King Coen, because he retched all the way from Melbourne to London,’ was the answer.

  But suddenly Dad cheered up when he discovered that seasickness was greatly helped by a bottle of champagne at lunch time. The Coens were always partial to champagne. While he didn’t have any sort of reputation as a drinking man, Dad’s father, Grandfather Coen, enjoyed it greatly. The champagne remedy was repeated in the evening and by the time Dad made the trip home from England he was warding off seasickness with a bottle of champagne for, or instead of, breakfast.

  On the way over, thanks to the champagne he was soon able to join the gentlemen’s meetings in the smoking room which organised the shipboard games and amusements, to take part in deck sports and concerts and to win a euchre tournament (ten out of eleven) for which he received a cut-glass inkwell as a prize.

  The boat stopped at Colombo. They watched the natives diving in the harbour and joined the other passengers in buying native trinkets which had to be brought up the ship’s side on a rope. Ashore they thoroughly enjoyed themselves taking rickshaw rides, admiring the Oriental architecture, savouring the food and enjoying evening drinks at the Galle Face Hotel. They were also entertained by a display of Ceylonese juggling, including what Dad called the ‘famous mango tree trick’, though he failed to say what it was.

  With Dad still suffering intermittent seasickness, despite the champagne cure, they journeyed on to Aden, through the Red Sea to Port Said and on past Italy, Marseilles and Gibraltar, until finally they arrived in England. How my mother felt during this voyage was not recorded in Dad’s diary. But by the time they reached London she was pregnant, so her journey might not have been so comfortable either.

  Dad’s diary is remarkable for its failure to mention Mum. While he carefully noted every play and concert they attended in London and also sent his impressions of their trip back to the Yass Courier under the title of ‘A Yass Citizen Abroad’, there was nothing about his bride, her feelings, or what he thought of her. He barely acknowledged the birth of their son, my brother King, at Appledore in Kent, in November 1902.

  In London, Dad indulged his love of theatre to the full; the diary is filled with names such as Caruso and Melba. Mum loved their visits to the music hall. She always sang us songs she had learned from the shows they saw on their honeymoon. Despite all their gadding about, Dad’s favourite phrase ‘took things easy’ still made plenty of appearances in his diary. During the whole of their prolonged honeymoon he did a great deal of taking it easy. Sometimes, in fact, he even ‘took things very easy’.

  They travelled through Ireland, visiting Cloonmore and Sneem where the O’Dwyers came from; then Scotland, before settling down at Appledore to wait for the birth. In Kent Dad took things particularly easy. Soon after the baby was born, they returned to Australia.

  To escape from Grandma Coen, Dad bought a small business of his own, a general store in Nowra on the New South Wales south coast. My sister Mollie was born just before this in 1903; my second brother Jack was born in Nowra in 1905.

  One day Mollie and Jack rushed excited into the Nowra store, begging Mum to come and look at the big yellow dog in the yard. The dog was a lion that had escaped from the circus. Jack and I have always had a terrible weakness for circuses.

  Dad’s great success in Nowra was having a billiard room erected at the School of Arts. But he was not a businessman. The dairy farmers round Nowra were suffering because there had been no rain. Dad sent a bill out only once; if people didn’t pay he let it go. The farmers couldn’t pay their bills because of the drought and Dad was going broke. The drought broke, the farmers still didn’t or couldn’t pay their bills; that was the end of Dad’s business in Nowra.

  To the disappointment of the local musical circle and Dramatic Club (as reported in the Shoalhaven Telegraph), he wrote to Grandma Coen saying he would have to return to Yass and work in the store. By 1908 he and Mum, with my two brothers and my sister, had moved back to Yass. My mother wasn’t happy. She didn’t like Yass or Grandma Coen. She thought my father ought to have stayed out on his own instead of going back to his mother.

  Grandma bought them a house in Rossi Street, Yass. The house was large, my mother found it too hard to look after. She thought the open drains in the back yard were unsanitary. Mum was miserable. Even though she had bought the house, Grandma wasn’t any fonder of Mum. In fact, Grandma openly ignored her and refused to speak to her. For her part, Mum thought Grandma was taking advantage of Dad’s working in the family business not to pay him a proper salary.

  Grandma’s hostility scandalised Father Alphonsus, Dad’s half-brother, when he visited Yass for a holiday. Father Alphonsus took Mum aside and told her Grandma had no right to treat her like this. He also had a word to the parish priest. Next time pious Grandma went off to confession, the parish priest delivered her quite a lecture about being uncharitable. If Mrs Coen wasn’t nicer to her daughter-in-law, he warned, there would be no absolution for her.

  Soon after, while Jack and Mollie were playing outside, a strange young woman appeared, looking very friendly.

  ‘Come here, little boy, little girl, come and talk to me,’ she said. Grandma had sent Dad’s young sister Mollie to act as peacemaker. It was the first time Mollie and Jack had met her. Relations between Mum and Grandma became fractionally more cordial after that, at least in public.

  Mum was expecting another baby at this stage; she miscarried. Then quickly she became pregnant again.

  TWO

  THE ANGELS ON PALM SUNDAY MORNING

  I firmly believed that the angels dropped me over the wrought-iron lace balcony as they flew past on Palm Sunday morning.

  I was born on 4 April 1909 in the Rossi Street house Gr
andma had bought for my parents. It had been the old Braidwood Store before Grandma converted it into a private residence. The house was two-storeyed, the front door opened onto the street, the upstairs balcony overhung the street by about twenty feet. We slept on this verandah in summer; in winter we roller-skated along it.

  The house was called Kenmare after the Bay of Kenmare in Ireland, but someone had scratched out the ‘a’ and changed it into an ‘o’ so it read ‘Kenmore’, which was the name of the lunatic asylum in Goulburn. As long as we lived in the house, the ‘o’ remained. The house had ten rooms, which was one of the things my mother had against it. Even though she had a servant to help her, it was still too much work for her. The rooms were enormous.

  The playroom-cum-sewing room was huge; I suppose it had been a storeroom originally. We could do anything in that room – draw on the walls or scribble over them; my mother never went near it. We kept our toys in the playroom and on wet days we didn’t move from there.

  A mission was being held up at the church and lengthy sermons went on. My mother heard strange sounds coming from the playroom. We used to lock ourselves in so she had to look through the keyhole. Jack had draped an eiderdown over his shoulders. He had the cat up on a chair and was giving it a wonderful sermon, like the mission bishop at church, all about the mortal sins cats commit.

  Through the gaps between the floorboards in the sewing room, we could look at the swallows building nests on the rafters below; we could see the baby swallows when they were born and watch their mothers feeding them.

  Over the wrought-iron lace balcony, we had a grandstand view of the town’s funeral processions. We loved the hearse, adorned with black plumes and trappings. Rossi Street led up what was called Cemetery Hill. The horse and plumes would be followed by a line of buggies, followed in turn by men on horseback.