Roundabout at Bangalow Page 20

  We are still living in the unventilated tractor shed and it’s there that I return to convalesce. The October heat is stifling and I’m alone all day. Under the bed are stacked the boxes with our wedding presents and other belongings, waiting for our house to be built. I am lying comatose in the heat, watching the clever little gecko lizards crawl on the walls around me, bleaching themselves almost transparent to match the concrete (they change their colour according to their background), when a snake crawls leisurely out from under the bed on which I’m lying, and crosses the floor. Perhaps there are lots more under there, nests of them. This one is what’s known on Rita Island as a yellerbelly, a black tree snake with a yellow underside. Not particularly poisonous, they are everywhere. Later I find them slithering up the steps of the new house, festooned along the verandah louvres and even in a dressing-table drawer. This time I spring off the bed like a jack-in-the-box but, as I’ve nowhere safer to go, I crawl back and tuck my feet in. It takes me a long time to recover.

  Soon, too soon according to the doctor, I’m pregnant, after nearly four years of disappointment, and afraid of what is ahead of me, especially of giving birth. I can’t imagine myself performing this seemingly impossible athletic feat. I’m also terrified of pain and I’m certain this is going to hurt a lot. The hit-tune of the moment is a bouncy quickstep with a New Orleans flavour called the ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’:

  And so I held her in my arms

  and told her of her many charms

  and kissed her while the dance-band played

  the Bonaparte’s Retreat

  This jaunty tune runs through my head all day long and quite possibly influences the baby’s later career as a musician, if you believe in prenatal influence. On the other hand, if such influence does exist the baby should be quite unstable. Its mother spends the entire nine months out of her mind in a heady mixture of bliss and absolute terror.

  It’s at this time, when we are both triumphant and congratulating one another on achieving, after so long, what most couples do quite easily and sometimes regret, that a terrible tragedy befalls my husband’s family back on the farm outside Grafton. As well as the three older boys, all returned safely from the second war, there is a younger son, now nearly eighteen and sixteen years younger than my husband. He is a favourite with everyone and is currently working with his father on the farm. He falls suddenly ill and is diagnosed with a brain tumor; within months he is dead. The doctor who operates on him in Sydney is considered the best in the world, sent for to operate on the American General Patton in France in the closing months of the war, yet even he can do nothing.

  At our distance we are helpless, without even the airfare for LF to fly to Sydney to see him before he dies. The wife of a neighbour who has been banking the child endowment money for years — often the only money that a woman can call her own — hears about this and without any hesitation lends him thirty pounds, enough to make the long flight through Brisbane to Sydney. He finds his young brother already blind, his head swathed in bandages after the unsuccessful operation. He’s been listening to the radio in the ward and manages to sing the words of the latest hit — ‘The Bonaparte’s Retreat’. He sings this song and waits to die at eighteen while I, far to the north and not much older, am creating new life to the rhythms of the same silly jingle. There must be some meaning to this.

  My husband stays for a few days then, as the situation is hopeless, starts on the long journey back. He hitches a flight from Kingsford Smith aerodrome to Brisbane on a cargo plane piloted by an old flying mate, then boards the Sunlander without enough of the thirty pounds left to buy meals on the way. He’s starving by the time he reaches Rockhampton station but decides to have a (free) shower and change into clean clothes. Just as the train is about to pull out of the station, he finds a forgotten one-pound note in the pocket of his spare trousers, a small miracle but more than enough to buy a railway pie, or several. Soon after his return we get the telegram we are dreading, but too late for either of us to go to the funeral, even if we could find the money for another trip. The old couple travel back from Sydney to Grafton by train with their son’s coffin in the baggage car behind them, their lives ruined. It’s a bitter irony that this old man who has seen so many young men die must now, at a time when all seems safe, lose the one he cherishes most. He leaves the farm in the care of a share-farmer, buys a house in Grafton and within a couple of years is dead, supposedly as a delayed result of his war injuries but clearly of a broken heart.

  Meanwhile, determined to conquer my fear, I study Dr Grantley Dick Read’s The Revelation of Childbirth, which promotes a theory of effortless, painless childbirth that is, at this time, sweeping through the world of women. It’s a pernicious theory in that it brands as a failure any woman, and perhaps the majority of women, who can’t quite carry it out. The doctor has been coucheur to the nobility in England and spices his account with anecdotes of aristocratic childbirth. He tells for instance of one duchess overcome with shame when she passes wind as she bears down during labour (Don’t mention it, Your Grace, it’s quite natural!). His theory is full of self-righteous male authority. If women suffer it’s their own fault; they’re not relaxed enough, haven’t persevered with his exercises. I prefer the honest Rita Island response — I’m paying so I’ll scream if I want to! Nevertheless each day I do every single thing that Dr Grantley Dick Read asks, no matter how seemingly futile. I do breathing, stretching and pelvic exercises, lying all alone on the polished floorboards and hoping for the best. At the same time I listen attentively to stories of excruciating foul-ups among my women friends. I’m paying so I’ll scream if I want to comes from one who’s been slapped and told to shut up during a difficult labour in the Ayr Hospital.

  I should mention that hospital treatment is free in Queensland at this time, a matter of great pride for the state. Because it’s free it’s spread very thin. There’s none of the pain relief for childbirth, such as nitrous oxide gas, which is considered standard in the south. There’s one other factor: none of my friends will go to a Catholic doctor for we’re quite convinced that in an emergency he would save the baby and let the mother die. The hospital gynaecologist is a Catholic so I pay to go to a private doctor, Dr Taylor, known as Squizzy, as is every Australian man with the surname Taylor. Similarly all Clarks are Nobby, all Martins Plugger and all redheads (except my husband) Blue. These nicknames are universal, their origin hidden somewhere in our folklore. At this time the fee for delivering a baby, including pre- and post-natal care, is three guineas, about half the average weekly wage, and no-one would dream of suing the doctor no matter how badly things go wrong. A brain-damaged child? An incompatible blood transfusion which kills the mother? I’ve heard of both of these and they’re regarded as deplorable but unfortunate accidents. No-one rushes for a lawyer.

  Before I go to hospital I have one more emergency, a cane fire which escapes and burns right up to the house. During the crushing season patches of cane are burned on Sunday afternoons and perhaps mid-week as well. The aim is to burn off the trash (and all the rats, snakes and toads) leaving bare black stalks for cutting. A cane fire is an awesome sight and occasionally a farmer or cutter has been caught in one and badly burned. However it’s possible to isolate and burn a patch, even in the centre of the cane field, by pushing a two-foot break around it, then lighting it on either side so that the walls of flame roar towards the centre, sizzling and crackling and belching smoke, sparks and a flurry of black streamers. The air is heavy with the stench of burnt sugar, and the sooty floaters drift and spiral, stick to any washing still on the line and fall like black snow on the lawn. It’s inevitable that sooner or later the high grass between the cane fields will catch, the flames will roar towards our house, surrounding it, and then away through all the uncleared land on the island. Chooks, dogs and, in this particular case a mother cat with kittens, have to be brought to safety near the house. Nothing is as secretive as a cat with kittens and this one only reveals her hiding place a
nd darts into it as the flames reach it. I scoop them all up into my skirt with the fire flickering at my face (it’s that or roasted kittens) and stagger back to the house, my lungs full of smoke. Each of my births at Rita Island is closely preceded by a cane fire roaring right up to and threatening my small green patch of civilisation.

  This is not the place to talk about the horrors of childbirth; enough to say that I leave Dr Grantley Dick Read behind at the door together with all personal rights, for the patients are treated like naughty children who need discipline. I lie in exquisite agony on a cot outside the labour ward, listening to the bellows of the woman who precedes me, and waiting my turn in a queue of women stretching back to Eve and forward into eternity. This is the clover chain in its most basic form, and I must endure it. What affronts me most is the impersonality of the carers. During the long time that I’m in labour I am examined often by a doctor who is a stranger to me; the hospital has mistakenly entered his name on my admission form. He comes with the matron, examines me, makes some discouraging comment and departs without a word. This is the doctor who operated on my husband’s neck and he is avoided by many of the women because of one of his procedures. Other doctors repair any tears at the time of birth when a natural anaesthetic is operative, but he prefers to take the mother back into the theatre the next morning and stitch her up without any anaesthetic. I’m not sure whether this has some basis in medical theory but I’m certainly more terrified by him than by the birth process itself. At the last minute my own doctor turns up, full of apologies for the mistake, gives me an anaesthetic and drags the baby into the world.

  This is a moment so transcendent that time stands still, the sun is arrested in the heavens and the earth swings on its axis, free of gravity and rational law. I wake to the conviction that the whole world has rotated beneath me, one hundred and eighty degrees on its axis, to mark the miracle of release. There is no greater surge of joy than that which comes with the first sight of one’s own child. A deep wave of emotion, possibly the purest she’ll experience in her life, moves the mother. A forefinger tenderly traces the eyebrow and searches for familiar patterns in the lineaments of brow-line, shape of the head, the lips, the feet and hands, so new yet already showing their genetic patterning. How much has come from genetic inheritance, how much will time and experience shape?

  At this time I have the naive belief that each generation will, indeed must be an improvement on the last, that bad temper and depression will be bred out, that loving care and above all a respectable upbringing (I’m very keen on respectability) will ensure a successful outcome. But this child and the two who follow will be very much of their generation. The world they inherit will be that of the Vietnam war and its effects: anger, cynicism and the rejection of all values. Eighteen years later when conscription for Vietnam is decided by a lottery on television, by birth dates drawn from a barrel, this child will miss out by one day and, unlike his father and grandfather, will not go to war.

  My husband chooses a name with a resounding ring which we hope will see him into noble manhood. It’s the name of an old army mate, one who was not only a firm friend for five years, but also quite a larrikin. He kept the blokes in the same tent in stitches throughout the war. By now the blokes in the same tent have assumed mythic status, all seven foot tall, clever practical jokers with apocalyptic stories to share. Years later we encounter the original on Townsville station. He’s on his way to Mount Isa, the refuge of many an estranged male, whether on the run from the police or the missus, and famous for its hard-drinking life and high wages, inflated by a bonus for working with lead. He is very drunk and doesn’t seem to be seven foot tall. I take it that he’s yet one more casualty of the recent war. Since then one of the blokes has gone mad and another has suicided. War wounds come in many guises, and the worst are not always the most visible.

  This encounter happens on one of our typical outings during these years, a family trip to Townsville on the rail-motor with our next-door neighbours Sonia and Jack. These trips are usually fouled-up either by the men, or by the conditions of life here. The rail-motor takes several hours, puttering through a landscape scattered with reminders of the war: abandoned airfields with their rusting dumps of forty-four-gallon drums and a grove of coconut palms near the Stewart Creek gaol, many of them snapped off by Japanese bombs during the Battle of the Coral Sea. We arrive at eleven, take a taxi to the main street, abandon the babies (at this time I have two and Sonia four) at the council-run child-care centre, listen to a lecture from a permanently sour matron on the subject of dummies, run back down the stairs with outraged screams ringing in our ears, then prepare to systematically work through the shops.

  The men repair to the Strand Hotel while Sonia and I buy hats (for these are still worn) and dress materials: silks, sea-island cottons and the newly released nylon. There is at this time a rumour that the photographic process, whose mysteries we don’t fully understand, sees through the nylon: a woman photographed in a nylon dress will, we are told, be revealed in naked splendour. We take the chance. Designing my own clothes, cutting my own patterns, handling the beautiful materials and making them into garments that are unique, if sometimes bizarre, is my only creative outlet at this time.

  Soon it’s time to pick up the children, find the men and catch the rail-motor back in the early afternoon. There is obviously a downside to this whole day, but worse is the occasion when we go to Townsville with Jack and Sonia in his Customline, a long and rackety monster with exaggerated fins (this is before he shoots the children’s dog). He’s had a puncture on the way up and doesn’t get it mended in Townsville because he’s been delayed at the Strand Hotel. We set off back at night without a spare tyre along the coast road, an unfrequented track that follows the railway line, only to have another puncture in the middle of nowhere. The men go for help, walking miles back along the track to a lonely siding, breaking a window to reach the phone and ringing a taxi in Townsville to bring out a new tyre. It’s just one more challenge to men who have faced Rommel’s Afrika Korps, the Vichy French in Syria and the Japanese in the jungle. Meanwhile I walk the road for hours, my legs bitten up to the panty-line by swarms of mosquitoes, for I’ve put my skirt up over the baby to protect him from bites. This is called giving the family a day out and any woman who can’t see the fun in it has no sense of humour (a familiar charge). It’s little wonder that during my time in the north I become tighter lipped by the day.

  My second baby is born at the end of 1953, just after the Queen’s visit to Townsville, a spectacular occasion that occupies our minds for months. Schoolchildren are lined up in squads in the tropical sun to catch a glimpse of the royal limousine passing by, and an enthusiastic crowd of Italians and Spaniards from Ayr, their children waving Union Jacks, are determined to get as close as possible to their very own young and beautiful monarch. It’s obvious that I can’t go, but I listen eagerly to their breathless accounts. It’s said that as the royal yacht Britannia berthed at the dock in Townsville the Duke, eager to show off his naval skills, personally threw the bowline with its lead weight to the wharf, almost decapitating the chief dignitary in the welcoming committee. This is almost certainly untrue but it makes a good story.

  At this time, Christmas 1953, my mother has a terrible breakdown, the culmination of a lifetime of domestic tension, and scandalises my father’s convivial family by (apparently) overdosing on Christmas Day, just before she is to join their family celebration in the beach house at New Brighton. After efforts to revive her in Mullumbimby and Lismore hospitals, she is transferred to the psychiatric ward in a major Brisbane hospital and given a course of shock treatment. At this time attempted suicide is a criminal offence, but charges can be avoided if the person is considered insane. For this reason suicide victims are, if possible, certified and committed to a mental institution. My mother is not insane, just at the very end of her tether, but will be permanently affected by the shock treatment. Meanwhile this baby, who weighed ten pounds and had a very
difficult entry into the world, is not thriving, nor am I. My doctor advises me to keep right away from my family (he means forever) but I immediately hurry south to help my mother, convinced as always that it only needs more effort on my part and she’ll get over her miseries.

  When I arrive in Brisbane I take a taxi to the hospital, the driver warning me of the reputation for violence of this particular ward, and he’s right. I find my mother sitting in a cane chair in a busy ward, confused about where she is but adamant that she didn’t overdose intentionally. The ward lives up to the taxi driver’s description. Opposite is a young woman trying desperately to garotte herself with the short length of cord lacing up the back of her chair. The nursing staff are blasée, timing their visits to her just as, tongue swollen and protruding, she is gargling and choking. They carefully remove the cord from her hands and re-knot it around the back. They obviously consider this a form of occupational therapy, a substitute for basket-weaving. Meanwhile a trolley is hurried past by ambulance men, on it an attempted suicide, bright blood soaking the cloth around a newly cut throat. I have a two-year-old clinging to my skirt and a heavy and very cranky baby. I go to the washroom to heat his bottle under the running water only to find that a patient has used the basin as a toilet, a great mess right under the tap. I have no choice; I avert my face, turn on the hot tap and warm the bottle. Outside at the bus-stop I run into my journalist suitor from eight years before. Now working on a Brisbane paper, he’s visiting his wife in hospital with their new baby. He’s shocked to see me there and no wonder: at twenty-six I’m a matronly frump lugging two frantic little kids. I could do without this encounter.