7th June 1967
From Welfare Officer, Adelaide, to the Director
Marie continues to have fairly severe discharges. Marie will go into ACH on 18/12/67 for investigation of above . .
11th June 1968
Home visit report to the Director by Welfare Officer, Adelaide
Earlier in the year there had been concern about a vaginal discharge which Marie had suffered from for a few weeks. However, this has now been diagnosed as premature menstruation [at the age of 8] and is being treated with Stilboestral tablets which apparently restores her normal hormonal balance. On a recent visit to the hospital doctors were happy that her condition had now stabilised.
A 2009 study by the Boston University School of Medicine among 68,505 participants revealed that children who were subjected to sexual abuse were 49 per cent more likely to experience the early onset of menstruation, and the severity of the abuse increased the likelihood. In later life the abused can also look forward to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, cancer and depression. So unfortunately the abuse doesn’t end with the perpetrator’s last act, victims are stuck with it until the end of their days.
The Stilboestral (otherwise known as Diethylstilbestrol) of which I had been given a daily dose for a number of years was phased out in the late seventies when it was found to cause cancer in human beings. After researchers discovered its harmful properties, Stilboestral was confined to veterinary use.
But despite the army of social workers and psychologists and doctors who were supposedly looking after my best interests, nobody asked me what was going on. Nobody asked me about the supposed ‘grass seed’, which could have only gotten there by human intervention if it had existed at all. Nobody asked me about the blood on my underpants which was a result of his endlessly probing fingers. They just questioned my foster mother while I sat in silence beside her burning with shame.
But aren’t human beings amazing creatures and even at an early age we can choose to let the bad things in life devour us and we sink or we can make the most of the good bits and swim. A report by the welfare officer in Adelaide on the eleventh of November 1968, five months after my last hospitalisation, shows that I chose to swim:
Marie is at present in very good health, vivacious and attractive in appearance … Because of her bright personality Marie has few problems in her social relationships and appears to be very popular at school and with family friends …
Somewhere around that time Welfare decided that my placement was a success and I didn’t need any more monitoring so obviously my ability to present a good face despite the circumstances was working. Whether I’d learnt this skill during the brief three years with my real family or whether compartmentalising my life into good and bad was an instinct, I’ll never know, but I do know that it helped me through some very tough times.
As I got older I managed to escape any more hospitalisations by fighting off my foster father when he tried to poke his fingers where they weren’t wanted. He still persisted in shoving his hand between my legs or grabbing my breasts when I had to walk past him though, and this continued until I left home when I was eighteen.
Although I knew I’d be able to get away from his endless shit one day, it still wasn’t easy. Sitting in the same room as him was an effort, I have never felt so much hatred for a human being in all my life. If anyone had given me a gun and told me I was free to use it I would have stuck it in his face and pulled the trigger with no hesitation. I hatched a few murderous plans, like planting a knife in his chest, or smashing his head in with a hammer when he was sleeping, but I had the good sense to stop myself from carrying them out. I knew I would never be believed: he was a God-fearing man who went to church every Sunday and I was just some black kid he and his wife had ‘saved’, so I acted like I didn’t care, which irritated him even more. Unfortunately I wasn’t his only victim – he molested other close family members and the children of family friends as well, including the younger sister of a schoolmate of Julie. Nothing could take away the suffering his actions caused so many people, but having a letter I’d written telling him to rot in hell read out to him on his death bed did give me the greatest pleasure. I think he had a lot of pain in his heart because I never saw him happy. I found out many years later that our mother had known what her husband was getting up to, but her marriage vows to love, honour and obey, for better and for worse, were more important to her than protecting a child in her care.
Communication was another area where I had difficulties. English was not my first language and my foster mother told me a number of times that during the first six months they’d considered ‘sending me back’ because they attributed my ‘refusal’ to speak as a sure sign of mental retardation and they didn’t want to be lumbered with a disabled kid. In fact I probably didn’t understand a word they were saying or how to respond, so wisely decided to keep my mouth shut. For a long time there were different words floating around in my head and on the occasions when I did speak them I received a sharp slap across the face for troubling to talk in my native language. It took a while to sort out which words were acceptable and which were not but in the end the forbidden words faded away. These words were my last link to my real family and if I’d known the importance of that I would have clung on to them forever. But I didn’t know and anything that wasn’t important to my survival at the time was let go.
Learning a new language and white culture from scratch didn’t come easy. Any bad behaviours such as speaking without being spoken to, moving any faster than walking pace in the house, belching, sitting without my legs together and gobbling my food were soon whipped out of me with our mother’s pink fairy wand. This was a thin rattan cane that had once had a kewpie doll attached to it like the ones you bought at fetes. It worked wonders. The wooden spoon or a vigorous spanking were her other weapons of choice and if Julie and I were bickering she would grab us both by the hair and smash our heads together. The headaches were excruciating and thankfully the head-banging stopped when Julie collapsed after one particularly vigorous episode and started vomiting.
Routine was another thing I wasn’t accustomed to, but in no time I was conforming to the position of the hands on the clock like I’d been born to timekeeping. Depending on where the hands pointed, it was bath-time or bedtime, time to eat or time to leave for mass. If I was absorbed in play or dawdling, the pink fairy wand would come whistling through the air and find its mark on my legs or arse. This meant that once I got to school I knew how to tell the time better than anyone else.
The life I had left behind and the life I was learning were different in other respects too. Apart from being checked daily for nits, and rashes that might indicate the presence of leprosy, and suspicious coughs, I had to get onto my bony little knees and repeat prayers after our mother until I knew the ‘Hail Mary’, the ‘Our Father’ and the ‘Glory Be’ by rote. I had no idea what I was saying but I mimicked her perfectly, while she beamed from ear to ear, no doubt pleased with herself for instilling the virtues of Christianity into her little savage. After that, I was allowed to ad lib a few prayers of my own – requests to help the starving kids in Africa, or asking God to look kindly upon my parents. According to my foster mother, I was born a sinner because my real mother was a woman of the night. It was only many years later that I realised she was calling my mother a prostitute and saying I was the result of her carnal activities, which were completely untrue. But back then I took this as her way of saying that my mother was black like night-time and it was a sin if you weren’t white, so I tried scrubbing my colour off in the bath. When that didn’t work, I resigned myself to the fact that I would always be a sinner and the prayers I had been fervently offering up weren’t going to do me any good anyway, so why bother. I decided then that at least if I were a sinner I could behave badly and be excused for it because mine was a condition of birth, not of free will. And when I hit my teens I realised it was all just a big load of shit anyway.
4.
Despite my parent’s disagreeable ways, life with them wasn’t all bad because they had books. Lots of them. And although I had never seen books before I arrived there, they captured my soul from the very first moment I opened one. Julie had all the favourites like Rupert Bear, Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh, so I started with those. Not being able to read wasn’t a problem – each page I turned was still a new and exciting discovery.
After I’d had my fill of Julie’s books, I moved on to the bookshelves in the lounge room, and this is where my mind was blown wide open. Strange animals and flowers, flags of the world, a whale swimming serenely in an ocean of intense blue far above the shape of a tiny boat – I just couldn’t get enough. And the books without pictures were just as fascinating. If I looked hard enough the squiggles became patterns that repeated themselves in various ways and combinations, and these patterns were repeated in other books too. When we went to bed we were allowed to read for half an hour before the light went out and my choice was always a book with no pictures. When our father would sneak into my bedroom in the night I thought of those patterns and they entertained me while he was entertaining himself.
At the age of four I had the great fortune to go to a playgroup of about ten kids at the home of a woman called Mrs Roberts. She had the usual sandpit and cubby-house and other toys, but she also had a heap of kids’ books and she read a story to us every day. This was the first time I’d associated books with the spoken word because at home we had to look at our books in silence as our mother believed that children should be seen and not heard. But Mrs Roberts wasn’t like our mother and she was very happy to point out to me the association between the squiggles and speech. This was such a defining new discovery in my life that I still remember an almost audible click when it sank into my brain.
After the joys of playgroup came school, which was even better. Here I learnt how words were put together, and the crazy rules of the English language, and after that reading just happened. I opened up a book one day and realised that I could read, and after that the world became a bigger and better place.
5.
I think our mother suffered from depression. Apart from her bad temper she hated Julie and I doing things that would disturb her cocoon of silence, and the noise that topped the list was farting. It provoked a terrible sense of outrage in her and an inquisition to determine the offender (even if it was obvious) was always her immediate response. I think this was done to shame the miscreant into desisting from giving a repeat performance. This was a bit of a joke as our mother was the worse one of all when it came to farting, her twenty-one gun salutes were a regular feature of our day. After the offender was named it was an immediate toilet jail sentence where Julie or I would be made to sit on the loo until we produced solid evidence to prove her theory that farting was the anal equivalent of the oven timer going off after a cake had been baked. The perpetrator of a noisy fart could of course be identified fairly quickly but it was the silent killers that always gave her the most angst while we did our best to avoid detection. I was the victim of many wrong accusations as I couldn’t pull off an innocent face like Julie.
The toilet was one of those old clunkers with the cistern up on the wall for a gravity-fed flush and a chain to release the water. To pass the time I would count the links in the chain and rearrange them into groups of twos, threes, fours etc., with the odd ones being placed either in the middle as a miscellaneous group or between the other groups to separate them. I practised my times-tables on this chain but could never confess to my teachers how I’d become so good at them for fear they would think badly of me for spending so much time in the toilet. I would also unroll the toilet paper and roll it up again to see how carefully I could do it, and look for insects to catch such as flies and beetles to let out through the gap at the bottom of the door. I liked to make up stories in my head as well and the next time I was back doing toilet detention I would add some more to the plot.
Although I did get up and move around, I did so at my own peril as I never knew when my mother would sneak up and fling open the door to see what I was up to and then castigate me if I was not positioned on the loo waiting to be relieved of my burden. But sitting on the toilet for so long wasn’t easy as my arse was too small for the seat and it would hang into the bowl while I leant forward to counterbalance myself so I wouldn’t end up in the water. This put pressure on the backs of my knees which became quite sore after a while. On a few occasions I was rudely awoken when she found me asleep bent in half in the toilet. I was also found curled up on the floor. She suggested once that I put my time in the toilet to good use and pray which I thought wasn’t a bad idea. But when my prayers to have a quick crap went unanswered I gave up on the power of God to help me out and hoped for a good old miracle instead. If I did manage to provide our mother with the object of her desire I had to fetch her so she could inspect it before flushing it away.
Mealtimes were never a means of escaping from the toilet as our mother thoughtfully put my food aside until my digestive tract had complied with her wishes, but if I ended up being unproductive I would be sent to bed with an empty stomach to remind me of how lucky I was compared to the starving kids in Africa. I could never work this one out.
But with every rotten situation if you look hard enough you’ll find a good side and it was while stuck in toilet hell that my mental gymnastics forged new creative pathways in my brain. I could memorise entire story plots that never needed to be written down, I became a whizz at maths and spelling, I built mental images of Lego towns brick by brick, I could identify different birds outside the window by their songs. So although my incarceration was literally a pain in the arse, I can now see that it was time well spent as I acquired all manner of skills that I would probably never have otherwise.
6.
Our mother had her own unique way of looking at the world. She had a lot of opinions that didn’t make sense to me but I just learnt to nod my head and go along with them. Like her habit of trying to make me eat white chocolate. She had the belief that because I was brown I had to eat white chocolate but because the rest of the family were white they ate brown chocolate. I hated both types of chocolate, in fact I hated sweet things and this was something that she could never fathom. I got around this tricky issue by pretending to be a good Christian and donating my chocolate to friends at school.
She also had a habit of trying to curl Julie’s straight hair with rag curlers and force my curly hair into straight tresses by brushing it while it was wet and slathering it with anti-frizz gunk. Neither worked and although she obviously got some enjoyment from pulling our hair around, it did nothing to improve our looks or tempers. I loved how my hair would defy her and spring back into place causing her no end of anguish and how Julie’s would flop as soon as she took the rags out.
Our mother was adamant that there were no such things as ghosts, but Sister Damien had some very different ideas about that and had explained to the class that there was a thing called the Holy Trinity and it was made up of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. When I told our mother about this ghost that went to mass every Sunday she took her usual stance and condemned the idea outright. Although our mother was usually pretty good at convincing me of things with the pink fairy wand, for the first time I found myself doubting her and believing Sister Damien instead. After all she was a bride of Christ and her lines of communication to the holy beings such as God or Jesus or angels would have been a bit stronger than those of our mother, no matter how much time she spent on her knees. When I asked Sister what this Holy Ghost looked like she said she didn’t know, so it was certainly a we
lcome surprise when I was sitting at the doctor’s surgery waiting for Julie and our mother to come out of their appointment that there in my magazine was a picture of a whole bunch of ghosts. They were wearing sheets over themselves just like Casper the Friendly Ghost and there was a burning cross behind them like the Archangel Gabriel with his flaming sword or trumpet, or whatever it was. I ripped out the page and wasted no time in showing it to Sister when I got to school the next day. No one can take a photo of the Holy Ghost, she said dismissively as she unfolded the page and had a good look. Her face twitched a bit while I fidgeted on the spot in anticipation, a habit that galled our mother but one I had great trouble controlling for some reason. Sister was usually good at letting you down gently so I was shocked when she said these weren’t ghosts, they were bad men who killed black people. They were called the Ku Klux Klan.
And so began a time in my life when fear was not a temporary and passing condition dependent on the whims and moods of my parents, but an all-consuming one. After Sister’s revelation I would find myself scanning the streets for the Ku Klux Klan as we drove somewhere or went into shops. Picnics and school excursions became a nightmare as I constantly scrutinised my surroundings for men dressed in sheets. Then one night when I woke up in fright to our father’s hand going up my nightie I realised that I didn’t have to be afraid of the Ku Klux Klan lurking somewhere out there in the big world because I had enough fear to contend with in my own house.
7.
Although I enjoyed some of the stories of the Bible, like Adam and Eve getting turfed out of the Garden of Eden or the three wise men bearing gifts, there were some that didn’t make any sense and these only served to increase my doubts about the Catholic faith. Stories like Jesus walking on water and turning water into wine just didn’t seem possible. And what made them even harder to accept was that the image of Jesus I had in my head had at some point become synonymous with the dad of my friends Denise and Karen. Denise and Karen lived across the road with their mum and their dad, who worked at a television studio, would sometimes visit. He was skinny with long black hair and beard, and a face that looked like a piece of creased-up paper. His hands shook incessantly especially when he was trying to light a cigarette, and his eyes were dark and looked like empty holes in his head. He was always jittery which Denise and Karen’s mum said was because he drank too much. Our mother said Denise and Karen’s mum drank too much too, but in my opinion she was nowhere as bad as he was. If I was playing inside with the girls when he arrived I always knew it was him because he revved the car up the driveway and I could hear the clink of wine bottles when he came in the front door. He never turned up without wine, which he and the girls’ mum would then get stuck into if she let him kiss her when he arrived, or he would drink alone if she was in a bad mood and didn’t kiss him. When he left he would swerve all over the road and their mum would say he was playing the fool. I know now that he would have been blind-drunk. Sometimes he would yell at their mum and other times he would be crying and on his knees in front of her like he was praying. When he wasn’t doing that he would be spewing and Denise and Karen’s mum would send them over the road to our place so they wouldn’t see their father making a tit of himself. Whenever Sister or Father mentioned Jesus of Nazareth in church or in our class I would always picture Denise and Karen’s dad wandering around preaching in white robes or walking on water with one cigarette in his hand and a glass of wine in the other. I could never get that image out of my head.
Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea Page 5