Autobiography of My Mother Read online

  A long balcony ran the length of our dormitory. If we sneaked out on this in the evening we heard the lions roaring for their dinner across the harbour at the zoo. We could also hear the bells of St Mark’s chiming on the other side of Rushcutters Bay Park at Darling Point. Darling Point hillside was empty of habitation except for the spire of St Mark breaking the skyline and a few houses among the gum trees.

  Down some steps from the refectory was a huge recreation gym area. On wet days we amused ourselves in here. Trix played the piano for us. We danced the polka round the room to tunes like ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay’.

  The playroom opened onto a lawn with basketball and tennis courts. When I arrived at Kincoppal, I was fascinated to see girls with hoops, wooden balls and mallets, playing croquet on the lawn. How quaint and ladylike! I had thought croquet only existed in Alice in Wonderland.

  The playing fields at Kincoppal were like a giant paddock, with a view stretching from Garden Island round the harbour to Rushcutters Bay. At the far edge of the paddock were two grassy inclines. They were too steep for mowing, so the grass stayed green and lush. In summer they were covered with long-stemmed orange and black ixia flowers, sometimes even rare, pale green ones. On Mondays after we had eaten our lunch and before we went back into class, an Italian organ grinder used to appear on these slopes. He placed a battered hat in front of him so that we could drop our pennies in and played the organ for us. Every Monday he churned out the same tune, ‘Killarney’. Very occasionally, he treated us to ‘Santa Lucia’, but not often.

  A gate at the slopes opened onto a winding path through bush. The path wound down cliffs twenty to thirty feet high to the harbour. The path was bumpy with twisted, twining, licheny roots of Moreton Bay fig trees and odd flame-coloured fallen flowers from the coral trees round the chooks’ yard. The bush on the cliffs was full of wildflowers, native rosemary, lime-green banksias, pinky-mauve grevilleas, flat starry white flowers, native fuchsia and red honeysuckle from which we pulled the centres to suck the sweetness. Tongue orchids clung to the rocks. Over the years a freshwater spring seeping into the sandstone ledge at the bottom of the cliffs had hollowed out a natural rock pool like a bird bath.

  A harbour swimming pool was fenced in for us and beside it was a bath house. Long-legged, black water birds perched on the white lattice roof. Seagulls and other water birds frequented all the grounds at Kincoppal, as well as pigeons and doves. The cooing of doves was a familiar background sound about the school. In summer we swam before early morning Mass. We had to get up at six and, wearing neck-to-knee swimming dresses (far too decorous to be called costumes), we walked silently in single file down to the pool. We were never allowed to talk when walking. It was a real privilege to go swimming. Anybody who misbehaved instantly lost her swimming privilege.

  One feast day, a launch picked us up at the swimming pool and took us to a deserted island in the harbour for a picnic. Treats like this were what made Kincoppal so special and why I loved being there.

  After I had been about a year at the school, there was a crisis. Mum liked living in Sydney and thought that when Dad came out of the army, he would stay in the city with her. But he didn’t. Dad went back to help Grandma with the business in Yass. Mum refused to have anything more to do with Yass and she remained in Sydney by herself. Kincoppal was too expensive, Mum decided now, and told Trix that I would have to go back to the school at Randwick from which I had exited so ignominiously.

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ Trix said. ‘I want to educate her here.’ Like all the Coen girls, Trix had private means; Grandfather Coen had provided for them in his will. That’s how I stayed at Kincoppal – because Trix paid the fees. I was lucky.

  I was a weekly boarder. At the start it was lonely; I did miss my mother and longed for the weekends when I could see her again, but I came to accept it. For a while I cultivated the strategem of discovering I had forgotten something vital when I arrived at school on Monday mornings so I had to be immediately sent back to Randwick. However, this didn’t work for long. My Monday morning trips home were abruptly curtailed.

  Being a boarder and spending most holidays at Yass, I rarely saw my sister Mollie and my brother King, who were away at country boarding schools. Jack went to the Marist Brothers, Darlinghurst, and I saw him on weekends, but when Mollie and King turned up at the flat for their holidays, I was setting off for Grandma’s. I felt more like an only child growing up than part of a big family.

  The dormitory at Kincoppal was divided into cubicles, ten cubicles on each side of the room. Each cubicle was partitioned off like a little room on its own with a white curtain hung across the front instead of a door. It was furnished with a bed and a bedside chest for belongings. The mattress was of hard horsehair but I became so used to it I couldn’t sleep on anything softer. In the end cubicle, next to the showers, a nun slept. There were rumours that in the early days the girls at Kincoppal wore shower dresses to shield them from the sight of their own bodies, but I never knew if this was true or not.

  When I began at Kincoppal, we didn’t have to wear uniforms. Paula McDonagh, the youngest of Kath’s friend Isabel’s sisters, used to appear in a long romantic Kate Greenaway dress with a frill around the hem and little shoes like ballet slippers that did up at the ankle. The rest of us were much more plainly attired in ordinary everyday dresses that reached only a few inches below the knee. We cast envious looks at Paula, but then the nuns announced we had to wear a uniform. Our new blue and gold uniform consisted of a navy skirt, a high-necked, round-collared fuji silk shirt, a blue and gold tie, a panama hat with blue and gold band and a navy blazer.

  Even the youngest girls had to wear stockings. Stockings were the bane of our lives. They were held up with garters, which seemed to be always slipping and our stocking wrinkling. We were not permitted to pull them up in public, that was a strict rule. Not being allowed to hitch them up was agony. We never sat with our legs crossed, either; that was another rule.

  Up to the age of fourteen, if a girl behaved herself she wore a green sash across her uniform. From fourteen to seventeen, the best-behaved girls wore blue sashes. I managed to earn my green ribbon all right, but the blue one eluded me.

  We were also forbidden to dawdle on the way to school or be seen wearing a school uniform in a shop. I used to catch the tram in from Randwick to Taylor Square every Monday morning, a threepenny fare, then walk over to Elizabeth Bay. Not far, really; it just seemed a long way in the rain that first morning. The old gaol at Darlinghurst interested me most on my walk, I used to search for bricks with convict marks.

  On the corner of Macleay Street and Darlinghurst Road was an Italian fruit shop that sold cream-centred caramels. To buy sixpence worth meant risking expulsion, but who could resist those caramels with a creamy stripe down the middle?

  Many years later, the poet Kenneth Slessor told me he, too, as a young man living in Elizabeth Bay, was addicted to the same caramels from this shop.

  Anyone who spoke in the dormitory was almost automatically expelled. Two McDonagh girls were at school with me, little Paula and Anita who was closer to my age. The McDonaghs led a charmed life at Kincoppal, they were as naughty as anything and got away with it. Dr McDonagh and his wife both died young and the three older girls were bringing up these two younger ones. They all lived together in a big old house at Drummoyne. Anita kept us enthralled for hours with accounts of her sisters’ film-making endeavours. Her own antics were equally extraordinary to us.

  The dormitory was in darkness one night when suddenly we heard the twinkling sound of a music box. Everyone was instantly alert, straining to make out where the sound was coming from, but not moving at all, lest movement betray or imply guilt.

  The lights went on. Next we heard footsteps, and a nun’s habit swished up the dormitory.

  ‘Anita!’ came the shocked exclamation.

  Anita had been playing the music box. She explained to the stern-faced nun that at home she always had to play the music box bef
ore she could go to sleep. Tears just rolled down her face and she was forgiven. Only a McDonagh could have done it.

  Mortice, the gardener, lived in the basement under the playroom. He kept his tools there and ate his lunch in its shadowy recesses. Anita loved teasing Mortice. She put on a funny old floppy hat and skipped about outside the door mimicking him and singing out rude names as he stoically chewed away at his lunch.

  Anita suffered her own punishment, though. She hated insects of any sort, she was scared of them. One day we put a cicada down her back. Anita ran screaming in circles until she got it out, or the cicada fell out, while the rest of us laughed mercilessly. Anita did not forgive us or forget about the cicada for a long time.

  The cicadas were deafening in the summer at Kincoppal, at their loudest round exam time, just when we were trying our hardest. We couldn’t think for the incessant drumming.

  Kincoppal wasn’t keen on competitive sport. A tennis coach came in and we had a few tennis tournaments with other schools, but that was about it. Any girl who did achieve something in sport was entitled to a special pocket on her blazer. I won my pocket for basketball. Basketball was my forte; I used to wish they would send out a basketball team, but only the tennis team went round playing other schools. I liked tennis but I had weak wrists, probably from my early breaks. At thirteen I was tall and thin, about five feet seven, still very white-faced. Mum used to feed me up on malt and Robaline, which I took by the spoonful, but I didn’t put on any weight until I was in my thirties. Because I was so tall, I could just reach up and drop the ball in the basketball net. I could defend well, too.

  The men from Bjelke-Petersen’s gym in town used to give us physical culture lessons. They taught at all the private schools in Sydney. ‘The Emu’ and ‘O’Grady Says’ were my favourite physical culture exercises. ‘The Emu’ was a high-kicking step walk and ‘O’Grady Says’ was a game in which we had to follow the leader in a series of quick-changing movements.

  I deeply envied a little girl called Honey who lived in our flats at Randwick. I thought Honey was marvellous because she could do handstands over and over on the front lawn. I was always trying to emulate her and failing miserably. Being so tall and thin, I was quite the wrong shape for somersaults. Honey also danced in Christmas pantomimes. Her mother used to do her hair in golden curls so stiff you could put your finger through them. Later Honey virtually supported her whole family through the Depression with her dancing.

  But back in her handspring days, Honey was at our place one Sunday morning. We were in the kitchen play-acting and practising feats of physical fitness. Honey was jumping on and off the table in the middle of the room. Somehow her golden curls caught in the long, sticky paper streamers that hung from the light bulb to catch flies. Flies that alighted on these papers stuck there. Flies and all were now tangled in Honey’s hair.

  ‘My mother will kill me, my mother will kill me!’ she kept screaming. We finally freed the curls but it was a traumatic morning. When I last heard of her, Honey was a dancer at the Tivoli Theatre in Campbell Street.

  I was not very interested in schoolwork. I tolerated geography because of the map drawing and carefully coloured and intricately shaded detailed maps of the world. I liked geometry, too, because of the drawing, although I was no good at solving anything mathematical. But that was about the end of it.

  I hadn’t forgotten about being an artist.

  The Italian artist Dattilo-Rubbo swept into Kincoppal every Friday to teach art. Darkly handsome, his brown eyes flashing, and sporting a black goatee beard, a long scarf flung carelessly round his neck, he always wore a dark green Borsalino hat pulled low to one side. Here was an art master who looked every inch an art master. I was truly impressed.

  But art lessons were an extra, a luxury my mother couldn’t afford. I yearned desperately for drawing lessons with the dashing Signor Rubbo. I covered my notebooks, my textbooks, everything I could with drawings. I drew all the time.

  The Mistress-General was a Belgian nun called Mother Harmignie. When she smiled it was like the sun suddenly coming out on a grey day. But she seemed more than usually severe and grave on the day she called me into the study. I went in trembling, wondering what I had done wrong.

  ‘Sit down, Margaret,’ the conversation began. I sat.

  ‘You wish to draw and make pictures more than anything else?’ she went on.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered, worried, remembering the books I had drawn on.

  ‘I have arranged for you to have art lessons with Signor Rubbo,’ she continued.

  I burst into tears and could not look at her. Mother Harmignie was appalled, firstly by such a display of emotion in public and secondly because she had expected me to be happy about the lessons. Eventually I stuttered out that I was overjoyed and that I was crying because I was so happy.

  I couldn’t get over the shock of it. I think Mother Harmignie paid for my lessons out of her own pocket.

  So once a week for the rest of my school days, I had art lessons with Signor Dattilo-Rubbo. I lived for Friday afternoons; art classes were the only lessons I enjoyed and the hour and a half went too quickly. After art lessons we could go home for the weekend, which made me look forward to them even more.

  We did still lifes in pencil and charcoal. Sometimes we did designs, but mostly charcoal drawings.

  Dattilo-Rubbo held proper art classes in his city studio or atelier, as well as teaching us girls. He had taught artists such as Grace Cossington Smith, Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre, and was not a man to waste words of praise on any student, least of all on schoolgirls. He would come along with a feather duster. Without a word he would make one swipe and wipe a charcoal drawing, the whole drawing, off the paper pinned to the board in front of you. Devastating. But now nothing, not even Signor Rubbo’s feather duster, could alter my conviction that I was going to be an artist.

  ‘Sits badly and constantly fiddles,’ began one of my infamous school reports. By ‘fiddles’, they meant ‘scribbles’; a reference to my habit of decorating and drawing over my belongings. Being thin and tall, I found it hard to sit up straight, especially on refectory seats with no backs at all. We were supposed to sit up straight at all times. When I won a junior prize for physical culture, the Mistress of Studies wouldn’t let me have it because I sat so badly in class.

  I was also in trouble during religious instruction. Not because I couldn’t do the lessons but because I kept falling asleep. Dinner was at twelve thirty and we played outside from one to one thirty, then came inside for religious instruction. Without fail I fell asleep. Maybe this had something to do with being close to the water or maybe it was a natural consequence of eating the main meal in the middle of the day.

  My desk was another problem. It probably was untidy for not only did I decorate my books but I collected anything and everything: beetles, moths, lizards, alive and dead and one in a jar of methylated spirits. Much of my collection was housed in my desk.

  One year we had a fancy dress parade for Reverend Mother’s feast day. I made a costume by sewing the contents of my collection to my frock and went as ‘my desk’. I don’t think the Mistress-General approved, but the girls gave ‘my desk’ first prize. Mother Woodlock, who was then the Mistress-General, had to present the prize, which she did with barely concealed disdain. Years later at an old girls’ reunion she had the grace to laugh about it, but she wasn’t laughing at the time.

  I collected things at home, too. At Randwick I had a collection of Hairy Moll caterpillars. They were the decorative, not the stinging kind of caterpillar and I could handle them easily. I divided a strip of the side garden into areas of grass about a foot square, put pegs in the ground and ran cotton around the pegs like fencing to make stockades, in which the caterpillars could live.

  I had about twelve of them. The trouble was they used to wander off. I spent a lot of time looking for and recapturing caterpillars. A few liked being in the stockade, however; they were quite happy to stay put, eating
grass.

  They were very feminine-looking, and I named them all after actresses. Louise Lovely was especially pretty, with long grey hair (I called it fur) and red and blue spots. Mabel Normand and Lillian Gish were another pair. Because I was boarding, I saw them only at weekends. A pity, I felt, as I was very fond of them. It’s fortunate, I guess, that the caterpillar collection didn’t end up in my desk too.

  Strange pets have always appealed to me, like my tortoise who was so small I had to cut up his worms for him, which wasn’t very pleasant. He lived in my bedroom at Randwick. He used to get into the toe of my slipper at night to keep warm, and in the morning I would see him climbing out of the slipper and making his way across the room with a funny lopsided walk.

  There was one other person at school who loved animals: the German countess. She was an old nun, too old to teach. She spent her days wandering around the grounds and in and out of the classrooms. She used to collect all the dead flies off the windowsills.

  One winter, to our delight, the Countess was spied tenderly placing the dead flies on the stove. She was trying to warm them back to life – our own St Francis.

  At about the time I won the fancy dress competition, I was very taken with those schoolgirls’ stories in which they had midnight feasts. I was filled with a burning ambition to have my own midnight feast, but there was little chance of this at Kincoppal. Dormitory discipline was stringently kept.

  I had a great friend at school called Eugenia Devlin. Genie was tall and blonde, very bright and independent. We put on a play, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Genie was the piper in a wonderful pied costume which I admired. Genie was also an avid reader. We both loved Dickens, unusual for schoolgirls. We liked the more schoolgirlish novels of Mary Grant Bruce, too; the country settings appealed to me. Together we pored over any novel with a school setting. Genie’s bright blue eyes lit up wickedly as we read aloud every detail of midnight feasts. We decided to have our own nocturnal banquet.