by Mary Moody
‘Why not? Wasn’t it fun?’
‘I don’t like that Father Tom,’ she said. ‘He squashed me on the mat.’
‘Oh well, you don’t have to go if you don’t enjoy it.’
Now what could be a more descriptive danger signal to a parent than that? He squashed me on the mat. I knew that Miriam wasn’t at all sporty – in fact her bad eyesight and glasses had made sport a bit of a nightmare which she chose to avoid at any cost. So I dismissed it as that. She didn’t like all the gymnastics and tumbling and the roughness of the boys.
Eighteen months later Father Tom disappeared from the community, and soon afterwards was charged with molesting young girls. It would seem the Kids’ Club was one of places where he most frequently committed these offences. He obviously hadn’t got very far with Miriam, but that’s not the point. I was her mother, her confidante, her protector. She had told me quite clearly that something unpleasant had occurred and I had, for whatever reason, chosen to ignore it.
It gets worse.
Click forward to August 2007, the time I spent in France, ostensibly working on a new book but also having a break after those five exhausting months on The Catch-Up. Like a bolt from nowhere came an email from Miriam that alarmed and upset me.
More than six months had passed since she and Rick split up and she appeared, to me, to be coping extremely well. Too well, in many ways. I knew she was having counselling, and I thought it was a good idea. I hoped both of them were having counselling – maybe even marriage counselling. The email she sent that day was, she said, part of her ‘homework’.
It was angry. Reproachful. In brutal terms she told me that from the age of eleven until she turned fifteen she had been sexually abused by a teenage boy in our neighbourhood. Not every day. Sometimes not for months at a time. But random attacks of sexual violence that included biting and digital penetration.
She had hidden it from me. She didn’t want to cause a problem for me or our family or for the family of the boy involved. She just put up with it and tried to avoid him as much as possible. She avoided being in situations where she was alone and developed strategies to protect herself as much as possible.
I was there all the time. I worked from home. I cooked dinner every night. I talked to my kids. I knew their teachers and went to endless P&C meetings. I worked in the school canteen and helped with fundraising. Encouraged sport and music and never missed a concert.
Why didn’t I know this was happening under my very nose? Was I so caught up in the appearance of being a ‘great mother’ that I simply didn’t connect with them on a deeper, more personal and, quite frankly, more important level? Didn’t Miriam trust me enough to tell me? Did she think I wouldn’t believe her? She apparently had bruises and bite marks and other visible signs of abuse. She could easily have shown me. I would have believed.
The story doesn’t end there.
Some years later, when she was the mother of four boys herself, Miriam actually told me about these attacks. Not in graphic detail, although she made reference to having been ‘jumped’ by a boy at the bus stop after school. This wasn’t very long ago – maybe five years; we were sharing a glass of wine and reminiscing about the ‘good old days’ when Miriam and her brothers were growing up. She talked about being an awkward, gangly teenager with braces and glasses and painfully thin legs. Then she told me that this particular boy had often pounced on her. I must have closed the conversation down or moved on to another topic. I can remember her telling me, but at the time nothing untoward about the situation registered in my mind.
Head in the sand. Head in the sand. No wonder she was angry with me. I wasn’t there to acknowledge her pain when she was a child, when she was being attacked. And years later, when she told me, I just glossed over it. Was I incapable of admitting that bad things happen and they can very easily happen close to home? Was my rosy, naïve view of the world another symptom of my ‘fantasy life’?
I phoned Miriam from France in the middle of the night. We both cried.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I did. I told you.’
‘You did, I know you did. I remember the conversation now but it honestly didn’t impinge. Why on earth didn’t you tell me at the time it was all happening?’
‘You didn’t give me permission to, Mum. You never wanted to hear anything bad.’
I feared her observation was accurate. I didn’t want my life to be touched by anything negative.
My phone conversation with Miriam left me in a sombre and reflective frame of mind.
All I had ever wanted was a big, happy family. I was wedded to the whole rose-covered cottage and picket-fence notion of family life. A vegetable patch, chickens scratching in the backyard, bread baking in a fuel stove, vegetable soup simmering on the hob and rosy-cheeked children running in from the garden for afternoon tea. Grandma knitting by the open fire and perhaps a basket of kittens purring nearby.
Well, that’s what I created. Consciously, and with plenty of hard work and love and humour, I made this fantasy real. I believed in this lifestyle explicitly and implicitly. In a funny way, for an atheist like me, it was my religion. It defined who I was, and where I stood in life.
Now, alone in my house in Frayssinet, feeling unwell after my diagnosis, and desperately worried about my daughter, I wondered if I had been kidding myself. For some time, I realised, I had been living at odds with my dream. It started to unravel when I first ran away to France and experienced a tantalising moment of freedom from my perfect life. I was happy to come home to the warm bosom of my family but there was no doubt a certain restlessness had set in. I had itchy feet, and uprooted David from our home of twenty-five years to live further west on a small farm. I went back to France, fell in love with another man, and created havoc in my happy home. I thrashed around for several years, unable to decide what I really wanted from my life.
When I was forced into a corner and had to make a decision about our future together – whether I would remain married to David or leave and make my own way in the world – my love of family unity was by no means the only reason I decided to stay. I had taken a long hard look at my marriage and reached the conclusion that there was enough love left to repair the damage that had been done. But the happy family environment I had created around David and the children was an important part of my decision. I wasn’t going to repeat the mistakes my parents had made. I believe we either unconsciously follow the patterns of our parents or deliberately set a different course. In David I had chosen a partner who was very different from my father – sober, faithful and careful with money. I had tried to avoid being like my mother in most ways, avoiding the constant arguments that punctuated her relationship with my father. I was a peacemaker rather than a battler. The atmosphere in my childhood home was unwelcoming to visitors and I rarely had friends over to play or socialise. I had been determined to make a home where the children would feel comfortable inviting their friends to stay, and especially during their teenage years the house at Leura had become a refuge for a floating population of youngsters.
Yet I was well aware that there were certain facets of my parents’ personalities that were hard-wired into my character, despite my best efforts to avoid them. Just as blood is thicker than water, genes can triumph over even the best intentions.
19
The 1950s was a period of social repression. In the decades between the war and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, family life was portrayed as neat, clean and harmonious. A woman’s place was in the home, and her role as a mother and homemaker had saintly overtones. It’s easy to look back and laugh at the innocence of those days, but there was a dark side as well. Women were clearly subservient to their husbands, economically and in every other sense. I can remember in vivid detail how difficult life was for my mother when I was a child, and how she grasped the nettle to change her lot. She was ahead of her time.
Every week, my father handed my mother ‘housekeeping’ money that was
intended to provide food for the table, buy clothing for the family, and pay a few small bills. After the rent he kept the rest of his not inconsiderable pay packet entirely for himself. It was his responsibility to pay the more substantial bills, such as telephone, gas and electricity. Sometimes he did, but if he lost at the races on a Saturday afternoon the accounts were shoved into a drawer and forgotten until the debt collector or bailiff banged on the front door early Sunday morning.
By the time I was seven my mother decided the family unit could no longer survive unless she got a job. In many ways, working probably saved Muriel. She had some cash flow and could pay the bills. She bought a car to get out and about in, and work provided an escape from her embattled domestic life.
She didn’t manage money well, nor did she enjoy housework. Both she and my father smoked and drank heavily, which meant that although there was always plenty of food – and good food at that – there were rarely any new clothes for her or for us children. My father, on the other hand, spent lavishly on his wardrobe. He was a vain man and a dapper dresser. He could easily justify this expenditure because of the nature of his job as a newspaper editor, but in truth his appearance was important to him because he also enjoyed the company of women. It was hard for Mum to address his selfishness with him because he had a fiery, irrational temper and was violent when cornered in an argument. Feisty Muriel was not cowed by his outbursts, but I certainly was. And I have remained nervous of confrontation all my life.
These days, few women would tolerate a situation like my mother’s. But in the 1950s, divorce was rare and carried a social stigma. I cannot remember any of my friends in primary school having divorced parents, but by the time I reached high school one or two were being raised by a mother alone. Divorce was mentioned in hushed terms. The women and children involved were pitied and, to some extent, scorned.
A neighbour of ours had four children; one day her husband simply disappeared. At first she spread the story that he was working interstate, but when he failed to rematerialise, even at Christmas, she took to her bed and the family situation became grim. No shopping was done, no cooking, no housework, and the children ran wild. The women in my mother’s circle of friends discussed her situation but nobody tried to intervene or to offer assistance. They were either too polite or too inhibited to confront her with the reality that she had been deserted and needed help to raise her family. Eventually a relative came to the rescue and life for this family improved. Even years afterwards the fact of this woman’s separation and possible divorce was never publicly mentioned. It seems almost unbelievable today.
There are now more avenues of escape – supporting mothers’ benefits and women’s shelters – that didn’t exist then. Our society is much more understanding of women in this difficult situation – if perhaps still not as supportive as some would like. The courts generally favour women financially and in child custody, and although this is not always entirely fair, at least it means that women are no longer trapped in desperate or controlling marriages. There is a way out. For my mother there didn’t seem to be any escape. She was emotionally tied to my father in spite of his awful behaviour and was frightened of being seen as a failure, by her own family in particular.
Once again, there it is: that terrible fear of failure. Just one of the things I’ve inherited from her.
My parents’ love of alcohol and tobacco was more than just a reflection of the social mores of the time. My father had long bouts of depression and undoubtedly suffered from bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it was called then. He was born in 1910 and died in 1972, and the condition, although medically recognised, was not commonly diagnosed during his lifetime. Bipolar usually manifests in young adulthood with uncontrollable mood swings and soaring and plummeting energy levels that can often end in suicide. Untreated it can be a crippling disease that shatters the lives of sufferers and those who love them.
My father, I now believe, managed his symptoms by self-medicating with alcohol from a very early age. When I was younger, I assumed his obsessive drinking was a result of his job. It was almost mandatory for journalists to drink to excess – it went with the occupational territory. Hilarious anecdotes about the antics of drunken journos, here at home in Australia, or in London’s Fleet Street or in New York, were legion in the mid-twentieth century. These characters, mostly male, seemed like romantic figures. Intelligent, risk-taking, charming and witty. They liked women and they enjoyed the adventure and the kudos of their work. The association of alcohol with this glamorous lifestyle was a heady and appealing mix. It obviously appealed to my mother who, as a beautiful young woman, leapt into this orbit and joined my father in a wild drinking spree in America where he was posted as a newspaper correspondent during World War II. So many of the photographs of them during that period testify to their hard drinking – puffy faces and bleary eyes. My mother told stories of reckless weekend parties and socialising. I’m amazed their livers made it back to Australia intact.
It always surprised me that my mother fell in love with a boozy, unreliable journalist because her own father, Augustus James Angel, was exactly that himself, and you would hope she might have learned to avoid the type. I’m not sure that Augustus rose much above the level of a court reporter, but he certainly enjoyed a drink or two and was unemployed (or unemployable) for long periods, much to the shame of his gentle wife, Ellen.
I was named Mary Ellen after my two grandmothers, who couldn’t have been more dissimilar. My father’s mother, Mary, was a hardworking, eccentric woman who ran a successful pawnshop business in Melbourne, and kept the family going financially in spite of her husband’s failings. My father’s father was a bit of a shady character. Mum told stories about him which she must have heard secondhand from Dad. He wasn’t a very lovable man – certainly not nice to Mary and their five children – and he died at the age of fifty-three of cardiac failure and tertiary syphilis. I wonder how many generations back this legacy goes?
I don’t believe I ever met our paternal grandmother in person, but in the days when she could remember such details from her childhood, my sister Margaret told me amazing stories about her. Mary didn’t sleep on a conventional bed, but on a pile of newspapers and old clothes in the corner of a room above her shop. There was no bathroom and no toilet. Like other tenants of the slum area where they lived, she squatted over a hole in the ground in the courtyard out the back. During the war, when the city was teeming with drunken and sex-starved servicemen on leave, she carried a couple of pistols strapped to her waist. She was a force to be reckoned with, that earlier Mary Moody!
My mother’s mother was quite the opposite: gentle and sweet and non-confrontational. She was, however, quite stubborn and proud and possibly, I believe, a bit of a snob. She cared very much what her neighbours in Haberfield thought and was deeply embarrassed by their poverty, going to great lengths to hide the fact that they often survived on food vouchers and other handouts. Mum was a cultured young woman for someone from a lower middle-class western suburb of Sydney in the 1930s. The fact that she studied ballet to quite a high level was amazing, given the family’s fragile financial status. She went to symphony concerts and balls in elegant frocks that Ellen, a tailor, fashioned out of old curtains. In our black and white photographs she looks a million dollars, but I know that she gave most of her weekly wages as a secretary and later a trainee journalist to her mother. I suspect my attractive father was an escape from this depressing situation.
Attractive he was. A slender, handsome widower with two unhappy children who needed mothering. A fairly irresistible cocktail for a warm and sensitive young woman. I’m not sure if Mum already enjoyed a tipple when she met Dad or if she gave in and joined him in his daily libations. By the time they returned to Australia after the war she was, by all accounts, a seasoned drinker.
There is a difference between a drinker and a drunk, between a person who is fond of a social drink and an alcoholic. Much depends on the drinker’s ability to continue
functioning. If someone can drink every day and still hold their life together – still hold down a job and pay the rent – then they can’t be an alcoholic, can they? I suspect that’s what my father thought as he dodged and weaved his way through life with a glass in his hand and a flagon under his arm. He was a highly successful professional. Mum constantly reminded us of his elevated status, his high income, the respect that was afforded him in many circles. Then why did we have no money? And why didn’t we own a house or car? Why did my parents run out of cash before week’s end and need to pawn various household items to buy food and grog? Simple. My father was an alcoholic and it impacted on his life, the lives of his children, his marriage and, ultimately, his health.
I am not sure how much Dad drank as a younger man, but I expect it increased as his income did. I know that when I was a child he always had a ‘heart-starter’ around 8.30 am – a couple of shots of whisky on the way to work. He topped that up with beers during the day – a couple mid-morning, a couple at lunchtime, a couple mid-afternoon and a few more on the way home from work. Then he switched to claret, which he drank from a sturdy tumbler from the time he came home until he fell into bed quite early. He never looked very drunk to me – I was used to his florid face and quick temper – but he did look terribly hungover on a couple of occasions, usually after family get-togethers. His reputation at such gatherings was much talked about. I don’t understand why he felt it was okay to get uproariously drunk and make a scene at these social events. I was told in hushed tones, decades later, of the night he gave my mother a black eye at her niece’s twenty-first birthday. He wasn’t welcome at family parties after that. Then, at my cousin’s wedding, he managed to get drunk before the ceremony and bop some hapless friend of the family on the nose. Disgraced, he was sent home in a taxi – at vast expense – and next morning discovered he had managed to lose his glasses and his false teeth in transit. In social situations involving his work he was generally better behaved, but I have heard rumours of him throwing a fellow journalist down the steps of the Journalists’ Club late one night. The story goes that the man was a dwarf, so I can’t even begin to imagine what was going on there!