My Place

by Sally Morgan

  At the end of first term, our Physics teacher gave the class a little talk.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ he said, ‘only two more terms to go and I can already tell which of you will pass or fail. And I’m not just talking about Physics. In this class, most of you will pass. Then there are a few who are borderline, and one who will definitely fail.’ He looked with pity at me. ‘I don’t know why you bother to turn up at all. You might as well throw in the towel now.’

  Everyone laughed. I was really mad. Up until then, I hadn’t cared whether I passed or failed. I’ll prove you wrong, you crumb, I thought.

  During second term, I made sporadic attempts at study. Once the August holidays were over, I began in earnest. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy task. I lacked the photographic memory of my two sisters, and I was way behind in my work. As usual, Mum tried to encourage me by bringing every snack imaginable.

  Instead of having a good night’s sleep before each exam, I kept myself awake by drinking strong coffee and trying to cram as much extra information into my brain as possible. By the end of my exams, I knew I’d passed English, History and Economics. I was doubtful about Chemistry and I was almost certain that I had failed Physics, Maths 1 and Maths 2.

  I confided none of my fears to Mum. I figured she’d be disappointed soon enough. I needed five subjects to score my Leaving Certificate and I was confident of only three. It seemed all my hard work had been for nothing.

  Mum gave me what she considered good advice for every teenager.

  ‘Now that you’ve finished your exams, you want to go out and let your hair down a bit.’ I knew she thought it wasn’t normal for a girl my age to be spending so many nights at home.

  ‘Look, Mum, will you give it a rest?’ I yelled. I’d had a short fuse since my exams. ‘I just want to sit here and be left in peace!’

  Poor Mum, she now had within her family two extremes. On the one hand, there was me attending prayer meetings, and on the other, there were Jill and Bill who, like normal teenagers, spent their weekends raging about Perth. Bill had just completed his Junior Certificate exams.

  Every Saturday night, they returned home as drunk as skunks. And they always managed to convince Mum that their vomiting was due to food poisoning, not booze. I just used to look at Mum sadly. I knew deep down she couldn’t really believe it was food poisoning. It was just that she didn’t want to face the possibility that one of us might turn out like Dad.

  I was becoming very worried about my soon-to-be-published Leaving results. The results were printed every year in the West Australian and I thought this was terrible because it meant your shame was made public. Sometimes, other people knew even before you whether you’d failed or not. I could cope with the public exposure myself, but what about Mum? She’d always boasted to the neighbours about how bright all her children were. It would be a real slap in the face if they should see her eldest daughter’s name in print with a string of fails after it.

  There was only one thing to do, disappear. I volunteered to help out at some church camps for young children, it meant I would be away when the results came out.

  Camp proved an interesting experience for me. I’d always enjoyed the company of small children. I had a group of ten to look after, and two of the girls were Aboriginal. They talked to me about their lives at home and what part of the country their mums and dads had come from. I seemed to have a natural affinity with them. That wasn’t to say that I didn’t get on well with the others, but I felt that I had a special insight into the Aboriginal girls.

  A few days before the results were due to come out, Mum rang to see how I was and to ask what bus I was coming home on.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ I told her firmly. ‘They’re short of helpers here so I’m staying on.’

  ‘Don’t you want to read your results in the paper?’

  ‘I’m in Rockingham, Mum, not Africa, they get the paper down here, too.’

  ‘Sally,’ she said suspiciously, ‘you’re not staying away because you think you’ve failed?’

  ‘We-ell …’

  ‘Oh, what’s to become of you?’ Mum wailed.

  ‘Don’t go weepy on me, Mum,’ I implored, ‘I might have passed.’

  We both hung up at the same time. Make a liar out of me, God, I prayed. Mum deserves some success in life.

  My prayer was answered, because the day the results came out, I received a long, mushy telegram from Mum, extolling my superior intelligence and patting me on the back for passing five subjects. By the time I returned from camp, she had convinced herself that I’d go to university and become a doctor.

  She was very disappointed in my decision to never study again. I told her I was sick of people telling me what to do with my life. I wanted to work and earn some money. I wanted to be independent.

  ‘But Sally,’ she protested, ‘you’re the first one in our family to have gone this far. Why can’t you go to university? What about becoming a doctor or a vet? When you were little, you loved looking after sick animals.’ I opened my mouth to protest, but Mum cut me off with, ‘Now I know you were always worried about having to treat a sick snake, but I’m sure that’d be rare and you could always sedate them.’.

  ‘Mum,’ I groaned. ‘I don’t give a damn about sick snakes. I just don’t want to do any more study.’

  ‘So you’ve come all this way for nothing? You’re too stubborn for your own good. You’ll regret it one day, you mark my words.’

  ‘Oh stop complaining, you’re lucky I lasted this long. Aren’t you pleased you’ll be having a bit of extra money coming in?’

  ‘I never worried about the money. All that work,’ Mum bemoaned.

  Shortly after that, I began attending Saturday afternoon basketball matches. Not to play, just to watch. By then, as a result of camp, I’d made some good friends with girls from other churches. When their games were finished, we’d stroll down and watch the boys’ basketball.

  For a while, I’d been hearing about a girl who attended a church a few suburbs from mine who was supposed to have a great personality and sense of humour. I was keen to meet her. Firstly, because I hadn’t met many girls with a great sense of humour, and secondly, because I’d come in on quite a few conversations about this girl that had ended in, ‘Yeah, but she’s got a great personality’ or, ‘Yeah, but she’s nice, isn’t she?’ I wondered what was wrong with her.

  When we finally met, I understood. I can’t remember her name, but she was a very dark Aboriginal girl. We became friends and I enjoyed her company on Saturday afternoons.

  One day, she told me she was leaving.

  ‘What do you mean, leaving?’ I asked. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going back to live with my people.’

  ‘Your people?’ I was so dumb.

  ‘Yes. I’m going back to live with them. I want to help them if I can.’

  I was really sorry I wouldn’t be seeing her any more. And I wondered who her people were and why they needed help. What was wrong with them? I was too embarrassed to ask.

  The working life

  Towards the end of summer, in 1969, I managed to secure a job as a clerk in a government department. It was an incredibly boring job. I had nothing to do. I begged my superiors to give me more work, but they said there was none. I just had to master the art of looking busy, like they did. A couple of weeks I was even forced to work overtime, not that there was anything to do, but they were all working overtime and they said it would look bad if I didn’t too. In desperation I took to hiding novels in government files; that way, I could sit at my desk and read without everyone telling me, ‘Look busy, girl. Look busy!’

  I became so bored that, one day, I took a dress patten to work. I laid it out on a large table in our office and began cutting. My immediate boss walked up behind me.

  ‘You’re cutting out a dress?’ he said incredulously.

  ‘Well, I’ve nothing else to do,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said sof
tly, ‘oh dear, dear me,’ and disappeared. He returned a few minutes later with the section head.

  ‘What’s this? What’s this? What are you up to now, girl?’ he said crossly. ‘Last week, you were drawing dragons on all our estimate folders and now you’re here with this. Do you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘I’m cutting out a dress.’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, girlie. Put it all away, what if the Super walked in, how would it look? I don’t mind you reading, but you can’t come to work and expect to sew.’ I sighed and packed up my things.

  I lasted there about six months and then I resigned. And I thought school was boring. That was my first experience of being employed and I hadn’t liked it one bit. It was an important experience for me, because it taught me something about myself that I had been unaware of. I wasn’t going to be satisfied with just anything. And I wasn’t lazy.

  I had been unemployed about four months when I decided that it was time I began looking for another job. I was sick of sitting around at home with little to do.

  I found a job as a laboratory assistant. For some reason, my new employer assumed that as I had studied physics and chemistry at school, I must have known something about them.

  My job was to analyse mineral samples from different parts of Western Australia for tin, iron oxide, and so on.

  I accidentally disposed of my first lot of samples, so, in desperation, I invented the results. My boss was quite excited. ‘Hmmm,’ he said as he looked over my recording sheet, ‘these aren’t bad. Good girl, good girl!’

  I felt so guilty, I imagined that, on the basis of my analysis, they might begin drilling straightaway in the hope of a big strike. I took more care after that.

  The women I worked with all had strong personalities. Our boss was hardly ever in so we took extended lunch hours and had long conversations about whatever came into our heads. I was very impressed with the whole group. They were the first females I’d met who actually had something to say.

  To my delight, there was one English woman, Joan, who loved taking the mickey out of her superiors. One day, our boss returned to find us all tearing around the office in a mad game we’d invented. He berated everyone, especially the older women, for not setting a good example to me.

  Joan was not to be outdone. She took a black Texta pen from his desk, painted a small Hitler-type moustache under her nose and said, in a thick German accent, ‘I gif ze orders round here!’ Then she saluted. She was a natural mimic, it was difficult not to laugh. The boss felt he couldn’t fire her because she was an excellent geologist.

  The other women were just as interesting as Joan. One of them confided to me that she was schizophrenic. It was a confidence that failed to enlighten me, I just wondered what country she came from.

  One day I returned to the office from my lunch hour to find everyone abnormally subdued. Our office was going to be moved away from the city.

  No one was keen on this, because it meant the whole company, instead of maintaining small branches here and there, would be under one roof. We would all have to knuckle under and behave. I decided to resign.

  My boss offered me a rise in pay if I stayed. He said I was the best laboratory assistant they’d ever had.

  The decision was taken out of my hands when I suddenly developed industrial acne as a result of being allergic to the chemicals I was using.

  By the time I left the laboratory job, I had developed an interest in psychology. I had looked the word schizophrenic up in my dictionary and found out it was not a nationality after all.

  I was more realistic about myself now. I realised that the chances of me finding a job I was really happy in were remote. I needed to do further study. I decided to enrol in university for the following year, along with Jill who, having now completed her Leaving, was keen to study Law.

  Home improvements

  Home improvements were a long time coming to our house. Now that I was getting older and had more experience of the world, I wanted our home to be more like everyone else’s. Not that I wanted our lifestyle to change, rather, I was hoping that Mum might be persuaded to spend a bit of money and install some modern conveniences.

  It wasn’t difficult to persuade her to spend money, but it was just about impossible to talk her into spending it on something really practical. There were some things I found increasingly difficult to live with. Like the pink chip heater in the bathroom and the way Nan boiled up all our clothes in the copper.

  The copper was good in that your clothes always came out clean, if a trifle shrunken. What was not good was the fact that numerous cigarette burns and holes gradually appeared in every item due to Nan’s incessant smoking. Even Mum was becoming fed up. She went so far as to maintain that Nan deliberately burnt holes in the dresses she didn’t like. And, knowing how cantankerous Nan could be, I wouldn’t have put it past her.

  The final straw came for me one morning when I put on a lovely new dress Mum had bought me from the second-hand shop, only to discover to sizeable holes burned in the material that was supposed to cover my left breast. When I stuck out my chest and angrily pointed out to Nan where the damage was, she just laughed and said, ‘That colour doesn’t suit you anyway!’

  And then, one evening, Mum returned from work cross and embarrassed.

  ‘Just look at my skirt.’ I glanced down at Mum’s skirt. There, just about in the centre of where her bottom would be, was a sizeable hole.

  It was a blessing in disguise, really, because, the following afternoon, Mum went out and bought a twin tub washing machine and installed it in the laundry.

  ‘You’re only to use the copper for boiling the dog’s blanket in,’ she told Nan crossly. ‘From now on, the clothes are washed in this machine. I won’t have any more holes in my dresses.’

  Nan was reluctant to use the machine. It ran off electricity and she feared that, combined with the water, she’d get electrocuted. Even when I explained to her that all the wires were covered up and that it was perfectly safe, she still refused to touch it. In desperation, Mum finally gave her an ultimatum: use the machine or give up smoking while she washed. Now giving up smoking for any length of time to Nan was like cutting off an arm or a leg. She agreed to have a go at the machine.

  To our amazement, not only did new holes begin to appear in our clothes, but the old ones got larger as well. Mum was furious. She berated Nan for still using the copper, but, to our surprise, Nan maintained that she had been using the twin tub.

  ‘Well, show me what you do,’ asked Mum suspiciously as she accompanied Nan to the laundry.

  Ten minutes later, Mum returned and collapsed in giggles next to me on the lounge. Apparently, Nan had been using the machine, but the whole time it was chugging away, she stood over it to make sure nothing went wrong. Now and then, she would plunge in the stick she used to stir the copper with, retrieve different items of clothing, and closely inspect them to make sure they were clean. That was when the fatal ash fell.

  The pink chip heater in our bathroom had been a thorn in my side for years. Jill, Bill and I had all pleaded with Mum to have a new hot-water system installed, but Mum was adamant that she couldn’t afford one. We knew this was just an excuse, because with Mum’s florist business doing well, and the loan paid off, we were now better off than we’d ever been.

  Great skill and ingenuity were required to maintain a consistent trickle of hot water from the shower, which was positioned over the bath. In fact, it was only possible by one of two methods. The first required teamwork. A leisurely soak could be enjoyed if someone else could be persuaded to man the heater and continually feed it with small woodchips and pieces of scrunchedup newspaper while you showered. The second method was more modest, but less convenient. Three buckets of woodchips were placed near the heater. As the water coming from the shower cooled, you leapt naked from the bath, taking care not to slip on the bare cement floor, threw a few handfuls of chips into the heater, and leapt back under again.

 
The issue finally came to a head one Saturday afternoon when a friend of mine asked if he could shower at our place before going out that evening. Coming from a wealthy Victorian family, for some reason he assumed that everyone’s bathroom was the same. Funnily enough, we assumed the same thing, and so began to matter-of-factly explain the workings of our chip heater.

  I watched as my friend’s ready smile slowly changed to dismay, and then, just as readily, back to a lopsided grin.

  ‘Stop,’ he cried. ‘Stop having me on!’

  The culture shock Jeff experienced when he saw our heater was enough to send Mum running to the nearest gas appliance centre in shame.

  I often found myself sandwiched between Nan’s cantankerous nature and Mum’s strange approach to home improvements, like the night I helped Mum remodel our lounge room.

  From a bin of specials in a wallpaper shop, Mum had purchased eight rolls of chocolate-brown paisley print wallpaper. It wasn’t nearly enough to cover all the walls, but Mum reasoned that it was better to have one feature wall of paisley print than none at all. It would give our place a bit of class.

  Having paid out for wallpaper, she wasn’t about to pay out for glue, buckets, rollers or a ladder. Instead, she dragged out a large tin of glue from the laundry, which she mixed up in the bath. Our ladder was three pine crates piled on top of one another near the wall, and as for rollers, well, as Mum so succinctly pointed out, what were hands for?

  I was given the dubious honour of running down the length of the hall that joined the bathroom to the lounge room with each length of soggy, gluey wallpaper. As I entered the lounge room, I had to make a frenzied leap onto the top of the pine crates and slap the wallpaper against the wall, aiming it as close as possible to the ceiling line. Mum’s part in this was to hurriedly press the paper down as I held it. Once she’d patted the bottom part on, I pressed down the top part. Then I climbed down from the crates and the whole process started all over again.