Roundabout at Bangalow Read online

  My father is now in his thirties and has slipped easily into the culture of the meatworkers. They work hard, play poker at lunchtime and drink together after work. He’s a skilful gambler, very quick thinking, good at figures and, as we know, always lucky. Later he pencils for a bookie at the races; this requires similar skills. There are also bonuses to be made at work. A gallstone discovered in a still warm carcass, slipped into the pocket and sent to a Chinese herbalist in Sydney, can be worth a week’s wages, and slink skins, the skins of unborn calves, are sent away to be professionally cured and made into women’s handbags. He joins the Royal and Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, a working man’s lodge. They drink a lot and have obscure blokish rituals, something to do with buffaloes’ horns. Penalties are imposed for drinking too much, not drinking enough, for laughing, sneezing, swearing or for telling unfunny jokes. Later he will be flattered by an invitation to join the Masonic Lodge, for membership is the stamp of middle-class respectability and Masons are forbidden to touch their brethren’s wives or daughters. This still leaves eighty per cent of the female population. My mother will scoff and read the forbidden Masonic manual from cover to cover, an act of sacrilege if not blasphemy. She cares nothing for the Curse of Solomon; the way her life is it would probably be a bonus.

  He comes home each evening in the dusk and the whole house stills as we listen to his ritual and wonder how it will be tonight: the click of the side gate, the sound of the bicycle leant carefully against the shed wall, then the deliberate slicing of the chips for the morning fire. We never know what to expect. At times he is happy and laughing, having perhaps won at poker in his lunch hour. Or he may have detoured by the Saleyards Hotel, the Great Northern, or even the Five Mile, in which case his temper can flare up in an instant, and the house is too small for the battles which follow. Sometimes acrimonious disputes go on for months. When times are bad I lie awake late into the night listening to her recriminations and his threats to clear out as soon as the children are grown up — to New Guinea, to the war, to Tasmania — to anywhere but here. I’m afraid to go to sleep until the storm has blown itself out, and afraid to wake up in the morning. On many a morning I wake up wondering whether she is dead or he is gone, cleared out at last.

  It’s probably because of this that I behave so badly at school. I am the class fool, always passing notes, giggling and talking in class, disrupting the lessons. One day we are sent to do a special task in the Domestic Science block. We are to pack up the Christmas parcels for the ex-students in the forces and are sternly forbidden to include a note. None of us has even thought of doing this, but I in particular can’t resist the idea. All parcels for overseas have to be stitched up in calico and addressed in indelible pencil. The calico is rough, the needle big and awkward and the twine cuts my hands but I complete the job. Others address the parcel so I don’t know its destination. Months later I receive a note of thanks from someone who assumes I’m grown up and have myself donated the contents of the parcel. In my fulsome letter of reply (I’m flattered to get a letter from a soldier) I somehow reveal that I’m only fourteen (not yet old enough to carry a kerosene tin full of water) and the correspondence stops abruptly.

  All this time my mother is deteriorating. She is tense, hysterical, unable to do the simplest task on time. She hasn’t completed the unpacking in this, the sixth house in twelve years. The third bedroom is full of packing cases, and the packing cases are full of the crumbling mementos of the past. It’s as if she can’t bear to unpack one more time, or ever again. The washing is left soaking in the laundry tubs then forgotten, the ironing is put off for weeks then done in a burst of energy in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep. She runs up big bills at the doctor’s, but he can’t diagnose anything except, he tells me many years later, instability. She is agoraphobic at a time when neither the word nor the complaint has been heard of, and backs out of every outing at the last moment. Our father tries to be sympathetic but he’s orderly and can’t stand the mess. He’s at times kind, at other times enraged. The tension is catching; my hands break out in a rash of maddeningly itchy blisters which don’t clear up for years. I become an expert at gauging my mother’s moods and placating her. At some deep level I am attuned to her obsessions. I fear some obscure and horrible disaster which by some convoluted reasoning will be my fault. I cry a lot. My mother says I’m too sensitive. My father puts it more bluntly. The piss is too close to your eyes, he says, as he walks out in disgust.

  I try to escape but it’s too difficult. It’s been decided that my sister should go to Teachers’ College and I should stay at home and get a job in Grafton. At fourteen I am sent to sit for the examination for a telephonist, despite the fact that I’m right at the top of my class and a year younger than anyone else in it. I surprise everyone by coming first in the state and am offered my choice of any telephone exchange anywhere. I choose Canberra. My mother takes fright and sends me straight back to school. The next year I answer an advertisement for a teacher at a subsidised school at Crossmaglen. A subsidised school is one at which there are not enough pupils to justify a trained teacher, so the parents contribute to the salary, and the state subsidises it. I imagine myself leading a happy and carefree life among the little children in the lush countryside near Sawtell, and perhaps marrying a jolly dairy farmer like my uncles, but this is once again squashed. I cut out an advertisement for a position as cadet journalist for the social columns on the Northern Star in Lismore. Here I would be close to my father’s relatives whom I love, and I can just imagine myself writing descriptions of the lovely frocks of brides and debutantes. My mother is horrified by this, especially as I’ve recently (twice) proved that I can’t be trusted. I have at fourteen accepted an icecream from a boy and at fifteen kissed an airman. This is enough to chill any parental heart, and theirs are easily chilled.

  I meet a young boy at the butchers’ picnic at McPhersons Crossing on the Nymboida River. This is the same picnic at which a very beautiful young girl wandered off with a raunchy workmate of my father’s and got into trouble, thus buying many years of misery for herself and providing a horrifying lesson for the rest of us. Later I encounter the boy in Prince Street and he invites me to share an icecream sundae in Schwinghammer’s cafe. This is much worse than loitering with boys on street corners and getting oneself talked about. When my father somehow finds out there is a horrible scene at home and the boy is warned off. He is a pallid and uncertain youth, described by my father as looking like dog’s vomit. The first boy who takes any notice of me looks like dog’s vomit! Meanwhile it is established in the family that I need to be watched.

  The second episode is just as innocuous but is viewed more seriously. On holidays in Lismore I go with my cousin Grace to watch the football on Saturday afternoon. The place is swarming with young airmen, trainees from the base at Evans Head. Two of them invite us to the pictures on Saturday night and we accept. They kiss us goodnight in the moonlight outside the front gate; we rush inside and scrub our mouths out in case of germs or pregnancy. My acquaintance — he’s all of eighteen — gets my address and writes to me; my mother, as usual, opens the letter. He’s the son of one of the wine-growing families on the Riverina. If the affair had been allowed to proceed I might have enjoyed good wine for the rest of my life. This harmless incident then escalates as the aunty who supposedly didn’t watch me carefully enough and even my Granny are dragged into the horrible row that follows. Meanwhile both parents watch my growing up with fear, and will try to keep me a child as long as possible. In a way they succeed, for at sixteen I am chronically anaemic and don’t yet menstruate, a consequence, I realise now, of stress. Escape is not going to be easy.

  My sister does escape — psychologically at least. She is her father’s favourite, sober-eyed and responsible. At this time she has a dramatic conversion and joins one of the more fundamental churches in the town, so providing herself with a different family, happy, kind and more to her temperament. I try very hard for such a mirac
le for myself, but it doesn’t happen. I sit in many an evangelical service, hating myself. I want to go out the front and declare for Christ but just can’t do it, despite the big lump in my throat caused by the effort. So I take refuge in cynicism; I’m amazed that there are people who can accept such a simple solution to life’s miseries. My parents are appalled at her Christianisa-tion, her baptism, her strict observance of the Sabbath and her joining what my father calls a mob of wowsers, but she holds out stubbornly. Her piety casts a long shadow in which I sit alone, my flightiness all the more obvious to my parents.

  We sleep together, in the old brass double bed which my parents have replaced with a mahogany suite; anxious to take me with her, she questions me yet again before she falls asleep — am I saved? I sink into another abyss of fear. I have been reminded all too often of what awaits sinners like me, that in the last days, the unredeemed will hide in the crevices of the rocks for fear. Yet I’m still unredeemed, still unable to manage the miracle which some find so easy. My revenge is to sit in a far corner and read poetry throughout the prayer meetings and services. I have a crush on the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, as many others do at this time, and so while they sing with all their hearts of the river which flows by the throne of God, I am far away, dreaming of love and Persian nights:

  Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

  The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

  The Bird of Time has but a little way

  To fly — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

  All this time my mind is dizzy with poetry. I have Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, an anthology of poetry presented to me by the Presbyterian Assembly. They know not what they do, for it becomes my substitute Bible. I am entranced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, little known in South Grafton, and his lines sing in my mind to the exclusion of all else:

  The blessed damozel leand out

  From the gold bar of Heaven:

  Her eyes were deeper than the depth

  Of waters stilled at even.

  She had three lilies in her hand,

  And the stars in her hair were seven.

  What heavenly rapture! Meanwhile the hem of my tunic has been down for weeks, flapping about my calves, and I forget to mend it. I pin it up with pins which prang my legs when I move and snag my heavy black woollen stockings.

  I’m also obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, stories which do little to stabilise my mind. I borrow this book again and again from the library and read it with a torch under the blankets at night. I torment myself with the products of Poe’s diseased imagination: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat. The latter is the story of a husband who murders his wife and bricks her up in the cellar wall. Unfortunately for him he has also bricked in his cat, which he has consistently tormented, and its demented yowls betray him to the police. More thrilling still, to my morbid imagination, are Poe’s accounts of premature burial, where exhumed corpses are shown to have struggled in their coffins, six feet below the earth, embedding their fingernails in the coffin lids before they choke to death. These fantasies saturate my mind in the South Grafton nights until the whole world spins with horror.

  I don’t realise until many years later that Poe’s images, of choking and smothering, of descent into the maelstrom, are a perfect match for the depressive spiral which possesses our home. But my sister has escaped; she is set on a completely different track in life.

  Night thoughts

  At fifteen I enter my final year at high school, the all-important Leaving Certificate year, yet my mother has decided to join my sister who is working in Sydney while she waits for a place at teachers college. I can understand her decision; she is at this time only thirty-six years old, and much of her life so far has been disastrous. Nevertheless I am alone and vulnerable, for my father is working overtime almost every night. I am also overloaded. As well as my school studies, I have piano lessons and I’m learning typing and shorthand so that I can become a secretary when I finish the Leaving Certificate. In any spare time I’m cooking and keeping house for my father.

  My nights are particularly lonely, made bearable only by my study of mathematics, the one subject about which I’m passionate. There is a harmony in mathematical systems which is quite missing from my life, and perhaps this is the attraction. There is also a deep satisfaction in solving difficult problems, or applying complicated formulae and having everything come out perfectly. The three of us in fifth year who are studying maths honours are assigned a special teacher for individual tuition, but he’s also in charge of the textbook room and runs the Scripture Union in the school. He ignores us; if we want some help, we find him up a ladder in the dusty storeroom and, before we can get any attention, we have to accept a card of daily Bible readings and promise to use it. What a dismal fellow he is, as are so many Christians I meet at this time. They’ve obviously never felt the flames of Pentecost or dropped to their knees on the Road to Damascus. Instead they follow a grim and punitive God. It has been rightly said that puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy, or in this case that a child might get a glimpse of celestial harmony through the study of mathematics. Needless to say, none of us gets our honours.

  I quickly reach the target of fifty-five words per minute in typing. My piano lessons are more exciting, though for a different reason. My teacher is the wife of one of Grafton’s leading citizens. Several times when she goes out of the room her husband hurries in by another door, roughly seizes and squeezes my breast, then as quickly scurries out again. I’m powerless to prevent it, and soon he repeats this atrocity in a more public place. I’m waiting in the Red Cross shop in Grafton for the attendant to fetch a sponge cake from the kitchen, when he hurries in, springs at me (and I mean springs), repeats his assault and is back in his corner, smiling and benign, when she returns. I have no redress; I can’t tell my father for it seems to me at the time that he would somehow blame me. This experience teaches me to be very careful of men. I also see it, then and now, in terms of class; I am bitterly resentful of the fact that a man of such importance could do this to me and get away with it — his word would always be taken against mine.

  Class rules this town and its hierarchies determine the pecking order at school. The leaders are the children of the professional classes, the doctors, solicitors, dentists and chemists, and their social rituals are well established. Their Christmas holidays are spent at their beach houses at Yamba. Here their children play and bond together over the long Christmas break, whereas Wooli and Woolgoolga are the playgrounds of the working class, who holiday, if at all, in shacks or beach camps. The upper-class children may mix with us until the Intermediate Certificate but then they are spirited away to private schools in Sydney, and thence to Sydney University, for it wouldn’t do for them to meet and marry someone below their status. In small towns like Grafton the doctors are like gods and people feel flattered for days if their doctor pauses to speak to them in the street. The doctors are the keepers of the portals of birth and death. They understand the workings of the body and that greatest mystery of all, the heart. There is no bypass surgery, no antibiotics. The heart beats for its allotted span until a stroke or a seizure drops a man like an ox. For others who have a growth or the dreaded TB, there is no cure; they slowly waste away.

  The lawyers and their children also walk in a rosy glow, for the lawyers hold the key to the mysteries of justice and many a working man is goaded into suing for some perceived or imagined injustice and then paying for it with the little he has or has not. The bank managers have a different kind of power — they can call in the mortgage at will. These people are enormously rich in comparison with the rest of us and from the outside seem to be ridiculously prosperous and happy. These hierarchies, so visible in small country towns, can lead to ludicrous social distinctions between, for instance, the owners of a property (over two thousand acres) and mere farmers, or between a bank manager, high up t
he social scale, and his accountant, well down. These hierarchies are only broken up when university education becomes commonplace in the sixties and seventies and a new and more democratic professional class emerges.

  There are other reasons for exclusion besides class. It is unacceptable to be bad at sport, to read or study too much, or have wild enthusiasms such as mine for Poe and calculus, or even to play up, as I do, in school — it’s important to conform.

  My teachers, with few exceptions, seem grim creatures, ruling by sarcasm or punishment. Our middle-aged French teacher is typical. She has a massive blonde hairdo and three-inch heels. She looks like a good-time girl teetering into the room and sitting languidly at her desk for the whole period, but she is steely-eyed and her tongue is bitingly sarcastic. We translate a passage of prose each day and repeat the whole exercise after school if there are any mistakes in our translation. Our set text is Cinq Maitres du Contes Frangais and we learn the English translation by heart just as, in our earlier Latin studies, we had learned the English translation of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, for this is the way that languages are studied in the forties. Most of us get As and even oral passes in French but none of us could ask a Frenchman for a drink of water with any confidence. Our history teacher until the Intermediate Certificate is George Bowman, famous for a history textbook called Bowman’s Compendium. This lists kings and queens, dates and events, with handy lists of causes and effects which we learn mechanically. We are not encouraged to think or analyse. For the last two years we study European history from the French Revolution on. This ignores what has been happening in Asia or Australia for the preceding 150 years. The viewpoint is also slanted: we learn of the glorious conquests of the British Empire and the benefits of Imperialism for the native races, but nothing of the Opium Wars or the Boxer Rebellion.