by Sally Morgan
‘Go outside and play,’ Nan ordered grumpily.
Jill immediately raced out the back to play with Billy, but I decided I’d like something to eat first. I was just coming out of the kitchen with a Vegemite sandwich half stuffed in my mouth when the familiar sound of an ambulance siren drew me to the front door. Nan stood impatiently on the porch, she had her hand over her mouth. When she saw me, she turned crossly and said, ‘I told you to go out the back and play!’
Two ambulance men hurried up the path. A stretcher case, I noted, as they walked briskly through. In a few minutes, they returned, and I watched as they carried Dad carefully, but quickly, down our faded red footpath. This time, I couldn’t see his face.
Billy, Jill and David pushed up behind me, followed by Mrs Mainwaring, our neighbour. Before I knew it, she’d ushered us into the lounge room and told us to all sit down, as she had something important to say. It was then that I noticed Mum squashed in the old cane chair in the corner of the room. Nan hovered beside her, stuffing men’s handkerchiefs into her hand. It occurred to me she already had more than enough.
‘What are ya crying for, Mum?’ I asked, puzzled. Whenever he’d gone before, she hadn’t cried. Dad was like a boomerang. Mum continued to sniffle. I tried to reassure her by saying confidently, ‘He always comes back,’ at which, she broke down completely and hid her face in a striped grey handkerchief.
‘Please sit down, Sally,’ said Mrs Mainwaring. ‘I have something to tell you all.’ I obeyed instantly. She was a nice middle-aged lady and we were a little in awe of her. Her home was very neat.
‘Now …’ she continued, ‘I have some bad news for you all.’ She paused and took a deep breath.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I was sure I said it out loud, but I couldn’t have, because everyone ignored me.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I repeated, but still no response. My heart was pounding. Mrs Mainwaring’s lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear a word. He was dead, I knew it, Dad was gone.
‘Now children, I want you all to go to your rooms.’ Somehow, this sentence managed to penetrate my numb brain. I looked around at my brothers and sisters, no one was moving. I craned my neck to look at Mum, she was avoiding my gaze. We all looked blank. What were we going to do in our rooms?
Mrs Mainwaring finally pulled each one of us up and ushered us out. As I closed the bedroom door, Jill said, ‘What are we s’posed to do?’
I was shocked, it wasn’t like her not to know what the right thing was. With the superior confidence of a nine-year-old, I flung myself stomach-down on the bed and said, ‘I s’pose we’d better cry.’
We cried for what seemed a long time, when our bedroom door slowly opened and the freckled face of Billy peered around.
‘I’m going outside, who wants to come and play?’
‘You horrible boy,’ I growled, ‘don’t you know he’s dead?!’ After all, he’d been with Dad all day. Billy vanished.
‘He doesn’t understand,’ Jill defended him as usual. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s s’posed to do.’
We lay on our beds a few moments longer. I began to count the fly specks on the ceiling.
‘Sally … do ya think … we could … go outside and play now?’ Jill asked, hesitantly.
‘You’re as bad as Billy.’
‘Well at least I cried. That wasn’t easy, you know.’ Jill put her head under her arm. I watched her silently.
‘Oh, come on then,’ I relented. And leaping up, we joined Billy in the yard.
Family and friends
I felt very strongly about families sticking together. So strongly, in fact, that I had a secret meeting with my brothers and sisters; for some reason, I was frightened we would be put in an orphanage. I’d read about things like that happening and I was determined it wouldn’t happen to us. We all pledged to run away together if it looked like happening.
But we needn’t have worried. A couple of weeks after Dad had died, Mum informed us all that Billy was now the man of the house. This came as a great surprise to me, because Billy was only six years old.
But Billy took Mum’s Man Of The House thing very seriously. For example, whenever anything broke down, he insisted that it was his job to fix it. But, whenever Billy fixed anything, Mum ended up having to pay out money. So much so that when he accidentally locked himself in the toilet, she felt like leaving him there.
‘I’m sure he’ll grow up to be a great inventor, one day,’ Mum said after she let him out. ‘He’s so interested in the way things go together.’ I just grinned and listed the clock, the toaster, Dad’s old watch and David’s clockwork train that were all now in pieces. Mum laughed, ‘Well, he has to practise on something.’
Whenever one of us mentioned Dad’s death, Mum would say, ‘Never mind, Billy’s the Man Of The House now. He’ll look after us, won’t you Billy?’ It was an old-fashioned thought, Billy was the eldest son. I think Mum meant to reassure us with her statements, but she only confused us. We wondered if Billy had special powers we didn’t know about.
A few months after Dad’s death, Mum found out the contents of the Coroner’s Report. The verdict was suicide. Mum was very upset. She had told us all that the war had killed Dad. She’d fixed it into our minds that Dad’s death was due to something called War Causes.
In a way, the coroner did our family a favour. He attributed Dad’s suicide to the after-effects of war, and that meant there were no problems with Mum obtaining a war pension. It was regular money at a time when we needed it.
The suicide verdict never worried me a great deal. Though I guess, like Mum, it made me feel guilty and a little responsible. I knew there was nothing any of us could do to bring Dad back, and, to a large extent, that was a relief.
Fear had suddenly vanished from our lives. There were no more midnight flits to Aunty Grace’s house, no more hospitals, no more ambulances. We were on our own, but peace had returned. I was still afraid of the dark, but I didn’t burrow under my pillow any more.
Dad’s death crystallised many things for me. I decided that, when I grew up, I would never drink or marry a man who drank. The smell of alcohol, especially beer, had the power to make me sick. I also decided that I would never be poor. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of what we had, or the way we lived, it was just that there were things I longed for that I knew only money could buy. Like art paper and paints, piano lessons, a pink nylon dress and bacon sandwiches.
It had also made me very choosy about different men who seemed keen to befriend our family. There was one local chap who was always keen to take us on outings, but I knew he was only interested in Mum, not us. I’d heard about men like him, they play up to the mother and get rid of the kids on the sly. That was the only time in my life when I wanted to be a witch. I’d have loved to turn him into a frog.
Mum growled at me several times for being so rude to him. This made me really mad, because I felt she couldn’t see through him and I could. I decided another secret meeting was necessary.
My brothers and sisters were shocked when I told them what our neighbour was really like. We all agreed that he had to go. And go he did. We told Mum, quite bluntly, that if this chap continued to persist, we would run away. Helen and David began to cry then, because they suddenly realised that when you run away, you leave the mother behind. When Mum finally calmed them down, I made her promise faithfully never to marry again. She agreed to this quite happily and it certainly was a weight off our minds.
We saw very little of Dad’s brothers during those early months. One uncle gave Mum what he thought was good advice. ‘Glad,’ he said, ‘a good-looking woman like you, in your position, there’s only one thing ya can do. Find a bloke and live with him. If ya lucky, he might take the kids as well.’ Another uncle turned up a few weeks later and drove off in our only asset, the 1948 Ford van. He reasoned that as Mum didn’t have her driver’s licence, she wouldn’t be needing it.
Mum was pretty down after that. It wasn’t like her. She d
idn’t know how to assert herself, she was to confused. ‘Men,’ she told us cynically, ‘they’re useless, no good for anything!’
If it hadn’t been for Uncle Frank, we probably would have gone along with Mum’s theory. Mind you, she wasn’t too pleased when he showed up. She was sick of drinking men.
‘G’day, Glad,’ he said when she answered the front door, ‘just brought this around for ya. How ya goin,’ kids?’ he grinned as we appeared behind Mum in the doorway. ‘Well, better get goin’. See ya later, kids. We’ll have to go out one day. ’Bye Glad.’ Mum smiled and closed the door.
‘What you got there?’ Nan said as she poked in the box. ‘Chicken, eh? And vegetables. Who gave you that?’
‘It was Uncle Frank, Nan,’ I said. ‘Do ya think we could have it tonight, do ya?’
I couldn’t believe it was real chicken, such a luxury. I don’t think Mum could believe it, either. Frank, of all people — she’d thought he was just another boozer.
To our surprise, Frank came around the following weeks with the same thing. Then, Mum found out that the Raffles Hotel was holding a weekly lottery. The prize was always a box of fruit and vegetables and a fresh chicken, and the winner was always Uncle Frank. His lucky run was to continue for over twelve months.
Frank gave us more than just a helping hand. He introduced his wife to Mum and they became good friends. Aunty Lorna had a little car and she took us for picnics in the bush. She always packed a delicious lunch.
Frank encouraged Mum to have driving lessons. He was a bit of a mechanic in his spare time. He said he’d fix the van up for Mum. For some reason, my uncle had returned it. Mum said she’d heard that other blokes had made comments to him.
Pretty soon Mum got her licence, then she and Lorna took it in turns to drive to the hills. We were still poor, but Nan was good at making a little bit go a long way. And, as far as us kids were concerned, it was more than we’d ever had.
Now that Mum had her driver’s licence, she also began to make regular visits to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I think she was hoping they’d take an interest in us kids, but it didn’t really work out like that. The only one they were really keen on was Billy, and that was only because he was the image of Dad. Grandpa always liked to have Billy close to him, but the rest of us were relegated to the backyard. Our cousins were allowed inside, but we had to stay outside.
Being outdoors at their place wasn’t much fun. There was no bush near Grandma and Grandpa’s, and no old bikes or toys. We spent our time sitting on an old log and brushing our fingers through the sandy dirt, exposing and collecting the small, brownish pebbles that lay just below the surface.
Other times, we amused ourselves by hiding behind a large bush and pretending we were in prehistoric times. When we tired of playing dinosaurs, we resorted to endless rounds of Simon Says. Finally, Mum would come out with a tray of drinks and a piece of cake for each of us. After that, we knew it was time to go home.
It wasn’t that our grandparents disliked us. In fact, they always treated us kindly, in their own way. After all, half of us belonged to Dad. It was the other half they were worried about.
It took only a few months for our regular visits to cease. Sometimes, we bumped into Grandpa in town; Mum was always taking us window-shopping. Grandpa would cry when he saw Billy. I remember once he actually tried to apologise to Mum for Grandma’s attitude. ‘What can I do, Glad. Ya know what she’s like.’ Mum just shrugged her shoulders. When we said goodbye, Grandpa would mop his eyes in a resigned kind of way. He always spoke nicely to us, but Grandma ruled the roost.
Fortunately for us, Mum somehow managed to hang onto the television after Dad died. There were many other things we needed in our house far more desperately, but the TV did more for us than warm clothes or extra beds ever could. It gave us a way out.
We got into the habit of making up rough beds on the floor of the lounge room. Mum stoked up the fire, and, snuggled beneath our coats and rugs, we became enraptured in movies of the twenties, thirties and forties.
Apart from romantic musicals, the Nelson Eddie and Jeanette Macdonald variety, we were very fond of war movies. Mum often said, ‘Your father fought there,’ or, ‘I remember your father telling me about that place.’ It made the pictures seem more important than they really were. Sometimes, one of the actors would look like Dad, and I’d try and pretend it was him, living out an earlier part of his life on the screen. It never worked for long, the glamorous heroism portrayed in the movies seemed far removed from what I’d heard Dad describe.
When television finished for the evening, Mum made us all hot cups of sweet tea and toast with jam or Vegemite. We stoked up the fire again and swapped yarns and stories until the early hours of the morning. Sometimes, we had a singalong — those went on for hours. We only stopped when we were asleep or too hoarse to sing any more.
I’ll never forget those evenings; the open fire, Mum and Nan, all of us laughing and joking. I felt very secure, then. I knew it was us against the world, but I also knew that, as long as I had my family, I’d make it.
I had little idea of how hard that first year was for Mum and Nan. Mum was thirty-one when Dad died, and she had five of us to rear. I was nine years old, while Helen, the youngest, was only eighteen months old.
Mum didn’t like leaving us, but she knew that if we were ever to get ahead, she would have to work.
That was one thing you could say about Mum, she wasn’t afraid to work. She had always kept some money coming in all the years Dad was sick, with some part-time work, but now she increased her load and took on whatever jobs were going. It was difficult to find full-time employment, so she accepted numerous part-time positions, most of which only lasted a few weeks.
Mum had a old friend, Lois, who helped out financially. Lois was an older lady who we didn’t see much of, but she had befriended Mum in Mum’s teenage years and, having no children of her own, considered her a daughter. She’d never liked Dad, but wasn’t one to bear a grudge.
I remember, at one stage, we were really desperate. Mum and Nan kept talking in whispers. They decided to write a letter to Alice Drake-Brockman in Sydney to see if her family could lend us some money. They were really disappointed when the reply came; it said that they were broke, too, and couldn’t lend us anything. Nan was very bitter. She said she didn’t care that they were bankrupt, they owed her. I didn’t know what she was talking about.
Besides good old Uncle Frank and Lois, the other saviour of our family at this time was Legacy. All fatherless families of returned soldiers were assigned a Legatee. Legatees were generally gentlemen of good community standing who had a soft spot for children, and, while the system was only as good as the particular Legatee you got, we were very fortunate. Ours proved to be a kindly, older man with only one child of his own. His name was Mr Wilson, but we affectionately shortened it to Mr Willie.
Mr Willie got into the habit of taking us to the beach, and on picnics and barbecues. He had what we considered a really flashy car, and we always felt very special when we rode in it.
Mr Willie told us he would be taking us to all the Legacy outings, and he also informed us that we would all have to take part in the Anzac Day march once a year.
‘Why do we have to march?’ I asked him one day.
‘Because your father was a soldier. All children who belong to soldiers have to march. People need to be reminded of the legacy the war has left. And anyway, your father was a brave man, you should march to honour him.’
I wasn’t keen to remind people of the war, but I couldn’t fault his argument about Dad.
Wildlife
In no time at all, our house became inundated with pets. Cats, dogs, budgies, rabbits and, of course, the chickens — any stray creature found a home with us. When our cat population hit thirteen, Mum decided it was too much and found homes for half of them. Then, my white rabbit escaped, one of the dogs was run over, and another cat went wild.
The dog we lost had been an ol
d and treasured member of the family. I decided we needed another dog to replace him, so I persuaded Mum to look around some local pet shops.
‘We won’t buy one, Mum,’ I confided, ‘we’ll just look.’
‘No more animals, Sally.’
‘I know, Mum, I know, but can’t we look?’
‘All right. It’ll be an outing for you kids.’
A pet shop nearby had six kelpie-cross pups, all of them adorable. We all huddled around their cage in awe as they licked our fingers and looked at us appealingly.
‘That one,’ I said to Mum, as I eyed the largest pup. ‘We’ll take that one, Mum.’
‘I’m not buying a dog, Sally. I’ve hardly got enough money to feed what we’ve got without adding to it.’
‘That one’s older than the others,’ interrupted the shopkeeper. ‘No one seems to want him.’ It was the best thing he could have said.
‘You see, Mum, no one wants him. What’ll become of him if we don’t buy him?’
‘I’m not buying him.’
‘Can I take him out of the cage and hold him, Mum, it might be the only cuddle he ever gets.’
‘Good idea, little lady,’ said the storekeeper enthusiastically as he opened the cage.
I lifted the pup out, he was gangly and awkward. ‘Isn’t he beautiful.’ I held him up to Mum.
‘Oh my God, look at the size of his paws, they’re huge.’
‘I’m sure his mother was only a corgi,’ said the shopkeeper quickly.
‘More like an Alsatian. No, Sally, not now I’ve seen his feet. He’ll be a big boy when he’s fully grown.’
‘But Mum, we’ve never had a big dog.’
‘Please, Mum,’ pleaded my brothers and sisters.
‘We-ll,’ Mum sighed as the pup gave her a lick.
‘Be a good guard dog, Mum,’ said Billy.
‘I’ll let you have him for half price,’ coaxed the storekeeper.
‘Oh, all right,’ Mum groaned, ‘we’ll take him.’