Autobiography of My Mother Read online

  Easter Sunday came. We were seated round the long dining room table and Ina asked, ‘Shall we open the chocolates now, Mama?’ They always called Grandma ‘Mama’.

  ‘Yes,’ said Grandma.

  Ina went to the sideboard, brought out the strangely light chocolate box and opened it. Not one chocolate was left.

  I left the table and fled down the back yard as far and as fast as I could. My flight established my guilt beyond doubt, but I have no recollection what punishment I received, if any.

  I went to school when I was four because it was so close. The back fence of the orchard at Rossi Street was also the back fence of the school. To get to the kindergarten, I only had to squeeze through a hole in the palings.

  Sister Loreto ran the school. She used to cane the boys and called them ‘sir’. I used to be glad I was a girl when she said, ‘Stand out here, sir’, and a trembling small boy held out his hand to be caned.

  Glass-fronted cupboards ran round the sides of Sister Loreto’s classroom and in them she kept a collection of tiny dolls in costume, all under lock and key. I longed to be able to open the glass doors to play with these dolls, especially the gypsy doll. Three or four inches tall and dressed in vermilion and yellow with long, black hair that came down on either side, the gypsy doll sat in a wooden swing about eight inches high.

  Although she was ferocious to pupils like me, Sister Loreto was devoted to the Aboriginal children who came to school. She used to go out every weekend to the so-called ‘blacks’ camp’ outside Yass and wash the heads of the women and children. If she didn’t, the other children complained they got nits from the heads of the Aboriginal children.

  The bigger part of the school was ruled by Sister Dominic. Sister Dominic had a great sense of humour; she was always smiling. I loved Sister Dom, as I called her and named the two clay dogs someone had given me Dom and Nic after her.

  A school concert came up. Another nun, Sister Michael, taught me my piece for it. Sister Michael was very stern with fierce black eyebrows that met in the middle. She frightened me.

  ‘Lickings’ was the title of my recitation, a tale of children being beaten for wrongdoing. By the time of the concert, I was word perfect.

  My turn on stage arrived. Dead silence. I tried to start. No sound came out of my mouth. I could see Sister Michael’s face with the black line of eyebrow, making desperate signs at me from the wings to get on with it, but I couldn’t.

  I just stood there until I burst into tears, then Sister Michael dragged me off by the scruff of the neck. She scolded me so much I was afraid to go to school next day. However, Sister Dominic greeted me, smiling as usual and saying I wasn’t to mind about forgetting my recitation.

  Green pepper trees, the kind seen everywhere in country towns, grew in the school yard where we played rounders and did a lot of skipping. The pepper trees had pretty pink seeds with a curious smell. They grew around the school and down Meehan Street to the Catholic church.

  I was always breaking bones. First, I broke my wrist. My father used to come home from the store between one and two for dinner, as lunch was called. I came home from school for the meal, too. Running back to school after saying goodbye to my father, I tripped and fell on a drain in the back yard. A sharp pain shot through my wrist. A nursemaid who helped my mother picked me up and bustled me into the dark sewing room. ‘Keep quiet,’ she said. ‘Your mother is lying down. Don’t let her hear you crying.’

  She left me and I sobbed until just before tea time when my mother came in and put my arm in a sling.

  After tea Mum took me down to the chemist, but the chemist was shut. At last, in response to my mother’s frantic banging, he very crossly opened the door.

  ‘Take her to the doctor,’ he said.

  Down the street we went to the doctor’s. The doctor pronounced the arm broken, pushed the bone into place and bound it up. It hurt for a long time afterwards and when the splints came off, it looked quite crooked.

  On special feast days we went to Mass at the church before school. On the way to school after Mass one day, I fell over. I had broken my collar bone, although I didn’t know what was wrong. I had cried all morning, but nobody had thought of sending for a doctor until I went home for lunch.

  The place names around Yass constantly intrigued me as a child. Dog Trap Road, Bogolong, as the Julians’ property was called, Wee Jasper (was it named after a dwarf, I used to wonder?), Burrinjuck. I loved the sounds and the strangeness of them.

  The railway at Burrinjuck Dam had only eighteen inches between the tracks. The tiny carriage, just wide enough to hold my mother and me, looked like fairyland. The jewel-bright wildflowers covering the hills around the dam made it especially magical. Except for bluebells, wildflowers didn’t grow around Yass much because the land had been so thoroughly cleared.

  The heat in Yass was ferocious, very dry, often over one hundred degrees. Winters were cold with frosts and fogs. The sun wouldn’t come through until half past eleven or twelve and disappeared again by half past three.

  Rolling plains surrounded Yass, bleached blond in summer, bright green after rain. The plains were the home of merino stud sheep, with the most sought-after fleece in the world. They were also great for mushrooming. In autumn we wandered for miles until our baskets were filled with velvety, pinky-black mushrooms.

  Living in a country town gives you the feeling of a complete world on its own. We had the various religions, professions, commercial enterprises, and cultural activities of the outside world. Yass had a musical society, a library and, of course, the School of Arts, all existing in a small familiar space. Living in Yass felt very safe.

  Coming into town from the southern end, we crossed the big, rattly bridge spanning the sluggish Yass River, then we were in Cooma Street, the wide main street that ran right through town and out the other side to the plains.

  Iron lace decorated most of the buildings. They were painted white with black, wrought-iron verandahs just like our house in Rossi Street. Steep hills rose on either side of town: Cemetery Hill was one of these hills but both our house and Grandma’s were on the flat.

  The flat part of town flooded regularly, the Yass River coming as far as Cooma Street in floods. One year we saw muddy water tipped with waves at the bottom of Rossi Street. My brothers and their friend Lenny Cusack built a boat.

  The boat was a wooden box, across the bottom of which they nailed planks for reinforcement. The boys set sail down Rossi Street. Water rushed in where they had hammered in the nails and they had to be rescued immediately.

  The Catholic church was on the flat in Meehan Street, next to the Convent of Mercy. The Church of England was on the hill opposite Cemetery Hill. It was a handsome building with pine trees planted in front and a few old gravestones in the garden. There were also Wesleyan and Methodist churches.

  Yass had a surfeit of both churches and hotels. The Australian Hotel was next door to Grandma’s store. A few doors up was the Commercial. The Royal was on the opposite side of Cooma Street and there were another two hotels near the bridge, with one more by the court house. The court house, with its white pillars, was the town’s most splendid edifice. According to local lore, it had originally been intended for Young, a much bigger town than Yass, but the plans went astray and it was built at Yass. (While this story is not actually correct it added considerably to the impressiveness of the building.)

  An argument in planning, too, caused Yass to be bypassed when the train line was put through, which was why Grandpa Coen had the tramline installed.

  Taking the steam tram out to Yass Junction was always an adventure. Little Nicky McNally, who was no more than five feet tall, would be sitting in his cart at the station like a leprechaun. If you were coming to meet someone at the train by buggy or car, Nicky would bring the luggage into town with his cart. His pony was a rogue.

  Nicky lived with his mother opposite the Catholic church. One night Nicky’s pony got out and went across the road. He was a clever pon
y, as well as wicked. He opened the presbytery gate and ate the priest’s garden. Everyone in town knew about that when it happened. Nicky was one of their favourite characters.

  The park in North Yass was full of pine trees. We used to gather fallen pine cones and eat the sweet nuts out of them.

  Down by the river was a garden belonging to John, the ‘Chinaman’. John supplied fresh vegetables for the town, bringing them around in a cart. When one of our cats had kittens, Mum did a deal with him.

  ‘Do you want a cat, John?’ Mum asked innocently.

  John was delighted; he loved cats. Mum handed him a basket, inside which she had packed the cat and her kittens.

  John came back the next day, ecstatic. On the way home, he told us, the cat had had kittens. He had six cats now, instead of the one he thought he had. John was overwhelmed with happiness. In gratitude he brought a giant watermelon up to Rossi Street.

  The pitiful collection of tin shanties where the Aborigines lived was down on the river, too. The Yass Aborigines, who were very tall and fine-featured, used to work around town. My grandmother had a gardener named Caesar, a very tall old man who tended her persimmon trees.

  Mrs Nelson, another Aboriginal, was in demand by everyone to do washing. I remember my grandmother talking about Mrs Nelson’s kitchen. ‘It is only a tin shanty,’ Grandma used to say, ‘but Mrs Nelson has it so nice. She has a beautiful lace cloth over the table, she makes you a cup of tea and cooks you a cake as good as anyone’s in town.’

  The queen of the blacks was called Julia. She often appeared at our kitchen door dressed in an amazing array of cast-off finery from the whites; a brightly patterned silk coat, a hat bedecked with artificial roses, a feather boa.

  Julia was immensely old, upright, regal and very black, though a rumour persisted round the town that her father had been a white man of God, a minister.

  A great fuss was made when Julia paid us a visit. Afternoon tea would be served in the kitchen with one of the best cups and a slice of cake. Then for a silver coin – sixpence for children, a shilling for adults – Julia would tell fortunes. She told the most exciting fortunes, full of romantic promise and exotic places: ‘A tall, dark, handsome stranger will come, you will visit faraway lands.’

  A couple of shy Aboriginal children sometimes accompanied Julia. She would proudly introduce them as her daughter’s child or her son’s son and ask if we had any old clothing for them. Julia must have had many grandchildren, because the same child rarely came with her twice.

  Three miles out of town the river ran through a gorge, at the end of which it took a bend. This was called Hatton’s Corner and fossils were found there, seashells millions of years old. An artist who did pastel sketches was a familiar town character who haunted Hatton’s Corner.

  Miles Franklin lived nearby at Brindabella. They used to talk about her and about her book My Brilliant Career a great deal when I was young, because Brindabella is so close to Yass.

  I loved books. I could read before I was five. I liked books I could weep over; I pored over The Little Mermaid, the saddest story by Hans Christian Andersen. But Thumbelina was my favourite and I longed to find a tiny friend for myself.

  The boys had the Boys’ Own Paper, and my sister had copies of the Girls’ Own Annual. We also had the works of Australian balladists such as ‘Banjo’ Paterson in our bookshelf, as well as a good selection of Dickens. I read David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. I agonised over poor Oliver; the illustrations of the fierce Fagin in the condemned cell were the most terrible things in the world to me.

  My father never read to us, but he recited, rehearsing for his theatricals. My mother sang us songs like, ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?’, ‘I’m the Girl from Gay Paree’, and ‘I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard’; music hall songs she had learned on their honeymoon.

  A rhyme was dinned into us at night about a little boy who wouldn’t say his prayers.

  Once there was a little boy who wouldn’t say his prayers,

  And when he went to bed at night away upstairs,

  His father heard him holler, his mother heard him call,

  And when they went to look for him, he wasn’t there at all

  And the bogey man will get you too if you don’t watch out!

  It worked. I was never brave enough not to say my prayers at night. Every hour through the night, the town clock chimed and could be heard everywhere. I never minded the clock chiming; I thought it was rather nice.

  Suddenly things changed. The war had begun. At Grandma’s, beautiful fruit cakes were sewn into hessian bags, to be sent to the boys at the front. We prayed every night that the war in Germany would stop; that God would end the war and look after the little children in France and Belgium. We had heard terrible stories about what happened to children in war. Then my father was crying, sobbing out loud over and over again. ‘He’s dead – Frank. My brother’s been killed!’

  Frank was the golden boy of the Coen family. He’d had a promising career as a barrister before he enlisted and was keen to enter politics (he’d already been a Liberal candidate for the Senate in the Federal election of 1914). On the ship going over to Egypt, he had written a letter home to Grandma saying that when the barber on board was cutting his hair he had carefully snipped a curl from his forehead and given it to him in an envelope to send home to his mother. The curl was enclosed with the letter.

  In a letter from the trenches at Gallipoli, he thanked Grandma for two parcels which had just arrived. He was happy as a sand-boy, smoking the first of the cigarettes she’d sent, he wrote, and very pleased with the socks and scarf that were in the other parcel. It was four months since he had changed his socks or any of his clothes, he continued. Through his field glasses he could see Australian and Turkish dead lying side by side a few hundred yards away and a shrapnel shell had just burst near his dug-out, knocking earth on to the letter he was writing.

  But Frank survived Gallipoli and was moved on to France. There, in July 1916, he was killed at Pozières. Nothing was the same for us in Rossi Street after that. Mum was pale and sad. Dad was soon dressed in khaki, the end of his moustache waxed and pointed. He was to vanish out of my life for the next few years.

  Before he married Mum, Dad had been a lieutenant in a volunteer regiment. After the war started, following in his father’s footsteps he was elected Mayor of Yass and as such led the official celebrations to welcome the ‘Kangaroos’, a much-publicised recruiting march that went from Wagga Wagga to Sydney. But now Dad, too, was in the permanent army.

  He failed to be passed for overseas service because of an eyesight problem and some heart trouble, and instead was stationed at Holsworthy, near Sydney, guarding German internees or prisoners of war. Dad took charge of entertainment at the camp and organising theatricals. There was plenty of time for rehearsals, scenery painting and making costumes. Dad probably enjoyed himself thoroughly, producing the programs with the prisoners.

  My mother was left alone in Yass with four children and Grandma, whom she still didn’t like any better. Our big, empty playroom was full of women sitting at wheels, spinning raw fleece into skeins while others knitted up socks with the wool.

  Christmas came. One gift each was all we had; no one could afford toys with a war going on. But even if there were no toys, there were still plenty of flowers. Mary Roche from Normanton asked me over to pick violets. Mary Roche was a novelist who had written a book, a love story called Roses, under the name of Mollie Bawn. Normanton was a huge, rambling house at the end of town, with endless violet beds.

  ‘Pick as many as you like and pick a bunch for me,’ she said.

  A whole afternoon with nothing to do except pick violets! I was in heaven.

  Later, Mrs Grace, a round, comfortable-looking woman, said she would take me to play with her daughter Kathy, to stay with them out in the bush.

  Ten miles in a buggy seemed to take forever. ‘Are we nearly there?’ I kept asking. ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Not y
et; soon,’ I was told again and again. At last we turned into a gateway and drove up to the house. Kathy, who had rosy cheeks and long brown plaits, came running out to meet me.

  ‘Come and eat walnuts,’ she said.

  I followed her to a shed. We climbed a steep ladder into a loft where there were bags and bags of fresh walnuts.

  ‘Eat as many as you like,’ Kathy smiled at me and I smiled back.

  We ate until we could eat no more.

  Kathy and I were to sleep together in a room at the end of a long verandah. It felt strange and unfamiliar. When Mrs Grace took the candle away, I missed my mother in the darkness. A terrible moaning and groaning started up.

  ‘Kathy, wake up! It’s the ghost of Cuckoo Singh!’ Perhaps he had escaped from the asylum and followed me. Frantically I shook the peacefully sleeping Kathy.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘It’s only the dingoes.’ Kathy went back to sleep immediately but it was ages before I could close my eyes.

  Next day, dingoes and Cuckoo Singh forgotten, I cheered up and fed a pet lamb from a bottle. Then a sheep was going to be killed, Kathy told me; obediently I trailed along after her. There was the poor sheep. A man held back its head with one hand, while his other held a knife at its throat.

  I started to run home. The Graces picked me up in the buggy and took me back into town. I was very glad to be back inside the pisé walls of the house at Rossi Street and never went out to the Graces’ again.

  My mother was determined to leave Yass and get back to Sydney. Apart from the problem of Grandma, she hated the Yass climate and suffered from the snobbery of the town. The Catholics felt that the Protestants, particularly the Anglicans, looked down on them. Equally strong, though it didn’t affect my mother, was the social discrimination between the various Protestant groups. The Wesleyans and Methodists were at the bottom of the ladder.

  For the Catholics with whom my mother could have socialised, card playing was the favourite activity, but my mother wouldn’t play cards so she didn’t fit in. No one in her family played cards; Mum said her father had made her promise never to do so.