Style was all very well (what could be had of it), but Yvonne liked to get home to the family pretty promptly after work, so in all probability Yvonne and Harry (that seems to have been the nice-looking young pilot’s name) walked the few blocks down to Wynyard Station. By this time she’d become more or less disengaged from Gordon, they were too alike, they’d decided, so it wasn’t likely to work. A remarkably mature viewpoint to take at just eighteen. I was twice that age before I came to understand it.
The ramp leading down into the bowels of Wynyard Station was lined, as it is today, with an assortment of shops and kiosks selling everything from shoelaces to magazines and ice-creams. For a tentative first step in a courtship it was perfect, if lacking in class. What could be more innocent than a chocolate milkshake on Wynyard ramp on the way to catch your train? Escape was so easy, offence lightly avoided. Or so it must have seemed at the time.
What exactly happened next seems rather unclear, and although I’m by no means uninterested, it’s not really something I can ask about. ‘I went out with him quite a lot,’ Yvonne says, ‘with friends. He was a very nice chap.’ There doesn’t seem to have been any grand passion—why should there have been? it’s not obligatory—but there was enough strong feeling for a certain mark to be overstepped on one occasion. Unfortunately (if I might again speak of myself as a misfortune), that was enough to change for good the course of Yvonne’s life. It still seems to me that the disarray, if I can put it that way, that resulted from meeting Harry has never quite resolved itself.
To this day, when she speaks of that time, she speaks of having done something immoral. To tell the absolute truth, I find this confusing and painful and wish she wouldn’t say it. The first time she said it I could feel tears in the back of my throat. I said something brightly modern back, I remember, and then we both fell quiet.
Falling pregnant, as Yvonne might put it, came as a shock to her. From what I can gather, she really does not seem to have made a strong connection between what had happened with Harry and pregnancy. As if it were some unspeakable disease only the poor were prone to, no one in the family appears to have thought it proper to point the connection out. Some months after meeting my father, Yvonne had left Verey’s and was stationed as a typist at Clifton Gardens. Feeling exhausted in a way she knew was ‘not quite right’, but putting it down to the long route marches she’d been on, Yvonne took herself to Victoria Barracks for an examination. She was shocked and dismayed to be told she was pregnant. ‘I promptly fell in a heap,’ she said.
She was called up to the adjutant and ‘drummed out of the army’, as she puts it. ‘They didn’t have single girls’ pensions or things like that in those days. I had nowhere to go but Mother’s.’ One other possibility did unexpectedly present itself, she now recalls, and that was a proposal to marry her (regardless, I take it) from the adjutant’s aide at Clifton Gardens. (Oddly enough, he had the same unusual name and came from the same suburb as the woman I first asked to take me to church. Was it her son? Was there a cosmic plot to have me live in Austin Street, Lane Cove, come what may?) Another fork in the road, but she didn’t take that turning and I think it’s only now, fifty years later, she realises it was a real option. But Yvonne is not wistful by nature.
So she went home to Mother’s and was ‘hidden from sight’, as she says. Mother, as we know, was deeply shocked. Yvonne had the freedom of the house—only her sisters and younger brother were at home—but had to go to her room if anyone called. Only at night, under cover of darkness, could she leave the house. The next-door neighbours, she remembers specifically, were not to know anything. There was no discussion of the situation. ‘Neither then nor since,’ she says now. ‘It’s never been mentioned.’
As soon as she knew she was pregnant, she telephoned Harry, who was still in Australia. He didn’t believe it. He said he’d ring back later, but he didn’t. In fact, he left for the war the next day and for security reasons it was impossible to find out where he’d been sent. Yvonne and Harry never met or spoke again. And then he was dead. Not that anyone thought to tell her. She came across it in the evening newspaper a couple of years later. A helicopter had crashed. There was even a photograph—the only one, incidentally, she ever had. Not that she could cut it out and keep it, that would not have been quite right, Yvonne says, under the circumstances. The circumstances were that she was now married to Gordon with another child. A legitimate one. All above board.
Yvonne actually missed another fork in the road. Well, she less missed it than was led blindfolded past it by Mother. My father did return on leave to Sydney and did telephone, but the call was taken by Mother. He wanted to speak to Yvonne but Mother would not hear of it. It took Mother fifty years or so to mention this telephone call to Yvonne. It took, in fact, my reappearance on the scene. ‘I was really livid,’ Yvonne told me. But she has forgiven Mother, whom she sees as someone who has always done what she thought was best. A terrible thing to say about anyone in my book, but life has taught the two of us very different lessons. ‘If only she’d let me speak to him that day, you might’ve had a father,’ she said to me. ‘A proper father.’ ‘I did have a proper father,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course you did,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean to be disrespectful.’ And I caught myself wishing she had been more disrespectful all along.
In February 1944 Yvonne was taken to a dungeon in Crown Street, hardly a mile from where she’d first met Harry, for the climax of this thoroughly disgraceful affair. She understood that the decision had been made that her baby was to be adopted. The decision had been made, needless to say, by Mother. No one in those days appears to have thought of consulting with the mother. Yvonne was, after all, totally dependent on her mother economically—‘Mother must even have paid the hospital bill’, Yvonne says, even now not ungratefully—so she took it for granted that she was without a voice on the subject of her future. Some sort of murky business went on at Crown Street hospital well out of Yvonne’s sight and hearing. I know (as Yvonne did not until I told her) that Jean and Tom inspected me in my bassinet at the hospital and were taken with the way I fixed my crossed eyes on them and roared, and I also know (as Yvonne did not) that the almoner at the hospital met my father, Harry. She gave Jean and Tom a report on him which they passed on to me. So I can only presume he came to the hospital and sat talking to the almoner yards away from the woman who had had his child on the understanding that he would not try to see her or speak to her. With whom did he have this understanding? With Mother? My mother remembers to this day feeling ‘a strong dislike’ for the almoner, but it’s a guilty memory because, as she says of her antipathy, ‘it must have made Mother feel dreadful.’ These are lines of guilt and blame so insidious, so intricate, someone of my generation can barely disentangle them.
Yvonne remembers no visitors at all, either at the hospital or at the home for unmarried mothers near Strathfield she was taken to shortly after the birth. The photograph (not fading at all, it’s very sharp) proves that at least one sister visited her. And one day, shortly after it was taken, I was gone. Yvonne knew I was to be taken from her, but not when. One day I was just not there any more. She didn’t say goodbye. I vanished and the matter was not spoken of again.
‘Did you have a sense of grief?’ I asked her, when I knew her better.
‘Well, yes, I did,’ she said.
‘And did it last a long time?’
‘Well, yes, it did, Robert. It just never goes away, actually.’
Yvonne was feeling rather ‘annoyed’ with Harry, as she now says, characteristically using a word that underlines her lack of any right to a more powerful, self-assertive emotion. If the truth be known, I think she was almost maddened with grief. She thought he’d tried to ‘cut her out of his life’ and was allowed to keep thinking this for almost fifty years. So she was inclined to let him fade. To this day she seems unsure of his background, who his parents were, exactly where he came from, whether he had any brothers or sisters—the sort of thing memory us
ually records very sharply when we’re in love or even just rather smitten. To this day she seems curiously detached from any clear memory of my father, except for the eyes, although I may be misjudging her. At any rate, the lack of interest is catching.
When Gordon came back from New Guinea shortly before my birth, he and Yvonne became engaged again and married the month after I was born. And had a strikingly good-looking son. I’ve only seen photographs of him—he’s dead now, like Harry and also Gordon. They make me smile because, whereas I can see little of myself in my mother, I can see quite a lot of myself in the half-brother I never met and shared nothing with. The way he stands, the knees, the angle of the head, the expression. And here I was thinking I was self-made.
Over the half-century since March 1944 the gap between the paths our lives have taken has yawned wider and wider. You can imagine, when I did eventually one day walk into that room in Longueville and kiss my mother on the cheek, what care we had to exercise to begin bridging that gap without falling into it.
Some things we shared. Neither of us, for example, had proved much good at marriage while expecting a lot from it. Her marriage to Gordon, at least as she relates it now, seems to have turned into something akin to a musical comedy: Yvonne would live with Gordon for a week, decide the whole thing was impossible and go back to Mother’s with their child. Poor Mother, she says. It was really only when they started getting divorced that things picked up: he’d call in to Mother’s, they’d go out dancing or to the cinema, spend an enjoyable evening together and then he’d drop her back at Mother’s. The ending was not comic: Gordon had had a bad time in New Guinea, suffered serious mental disturbance and died in his late thirties. ‘So were they unhappy years?’ I asked Yvonne, meaning no more than to prompt her to describe the precise kind of unhappiness she’d experienced. ‘Oh, no, not at all,’ she said, ‘Gordon and I were very good friends.’
What a deeply puzzling word ‘friend’ is. I don’t understand it, yet I sometimes feel if I did many things would become clearer. This shifty English monosyllable covers such a vast and amorphous mass of emotions, loyalties, attachments and feelings that you can never be sure exactly what anyone means when they use it. Whatever it is, sex doesn’t seem to go together with it very well, historically speaking, perhaps because sex seems to involve masked power-games and in friendship the illusion of equality is at least fostered. Obviously a sexual relationship can be coloured with all sorts of feelings proper to friendship, but I don’t think it’s common for people to want to have sex with the people they call their friends. Yet for some reason I don’t fully understand men and women are supposed either to invest their permanent sexual relationship with that vast range of emotions and loyalties we call ‘friendship’ or else they’re expected to choose one member of the opposite sex they consider a ‘friend’ and invest the friendship with a symphonic range of sexual feelings. En exclusivité. This seems to me to be a tragically impoverishing arrangement for all concerned. Gordon was obviously a friend, not a husband. Dovetailing the two might work, but why try to conflate them down to the last millimetre? (Basically, I suppose, because it turns us into neatly squared-off building blocks to build a neatly squared-off, vertically stable society out of. No lop-sided hexagons, fish-shapes or rubber-boot-shapes allowed, except at the top, where they won’t rock the boat.)
For over ten years in the late ’forties and early ’fifties, Yvonne lived mostly at Mother’s, making leathergoods in the factory her father had built and Mother still ran at the back of the house in Campsie. Unwisely (in my view) she then opted for a husband rather than a friend. I don’t think she’d put it like that, and might even object strongly to my putting it like that, but, as she tells the story, it becomes clear that by her early thirties she was (how should I phrase it?) deeply disappointed in men; except for her brothers, who seem to have retained for her a kind of pre-war gentlemanly glow. I don’t know them—and am sure they would not want to know me—so can’t comment. But Yvonne is sure that men were different before the war. She’s mentioned this to me several times. I don’t think she means simply that sexual mores were different, but that ‘a good man’ meant something different, something more reassuring, kindly and reliable. ‘I thought they were a dreadful lot,’ she said to me once, meaning post-war men, ‘real villains.’ All the same, she eventually married a man we might call Colin, a much older, well-travelled, knowledgeable man she’d met through her brothers—a husband. When she described him in those words to me, I couldn’t help smiling. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, smiling the same kind of smile, ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of what the psychologists would say, aren’t you?’
Yvonne is a tiny woman, you’d think she’d blow away, and when she first sat and told me about the years that followed (over twenty) she seemed to shrivel up into something even tinier before my eyes, something about to be trodden on and crushed. In a sense I was wrong, my perspective was skewed, it wasn’t all grinding misery, but as I listened to my mother speak about those years I could feel my breathing slow to almost nothing. For a while she worked for no wage in Colin’s shop, hardly any distance at all from Mother’s. They lived above it. Her reward (perhaps from Colin’s point of view a practical arrangement, we have no right to judge him harshly) was to be a holiday in Noumea (the French connection) and, eventually, ‘a lovely home’. Middle-class dreams, you may be thinking, but scarcely greedy ones. In fact, there was no ‘lovely home’ and no trip to Noumea. To this day she’s hardly been more than a hundred miles from home, except to attend her son’s funeral. That was two hundred miles away.
She had another child and, in the late ’sixties, Yvonne, Colin and the two boys moved to a beautiful part of the coast north of Sydney, an area of estuaries and bushland and bright yellow beaches with holiday shacks dotted up the hillsides behind them. For some years Yvonne worked picking tomatoes and beans on a nearby farm. Eventually an RSL club opened in the growing township and she walked over to see if it might have a job for her. It did, as a cleaner. ‘I was greatly surprised,’ she told me, as if still not wholly able to believe in her good fortune. ‘It was good, honest work.’ And went on for many years.
It was a township Yvonne and her family had spent holidays in several times before they moved there, and, strange to relate, during those same years I spent two summer holidays there myself as a child. There was only one road to speak of in those days, running up the hill from the ocean beach, across the bushy ridge and down again to the ferry-wharf on Brisbane Water, all oyster leases and warm, briny air heavy with eucalyptus. That’s where the shop was, down opposite the wharf. We no doubt passed each other on the road sometimes, going in and out of our separate houses, waited behind each other in the shop, perhaps, or even climbed onto the little ferry together to go into Woy Woy. I probably saw my half-brothers pottering around the rocks on the ocean side like me, poking their fingers into sea-anemones or catching crabs in bottles. But it wasn’t a movie—it was real life and nothing happened.
While Yvonne was working in that shop in Campsie and picking tomatoes and cleaning up after the local returned servicemen in that settlement by the sea, I was living a very different life, as you’ll have gathered, mostly at the university in Canberra. For a teenager whose father was a mere messenger-boy (he’d come out of retirement to take on this job) and mother a part-time baby health centre sister, the ANU was a shimmering foreign land, seething with conflicting certainties. Canberra even turned a fiery red in late April like real European cities and in August it might occasionally snow. Important people popped up everywhere: A. D. Hope might say a word to you in the library, Manning Clark might take a tutorial, the Prime Minister’s wife was in our French class and one of the Whitlam boys was living in college. It was like a vast live-in club for the intelligentsia and everyone seemed to be moving onwards and upwards into university posts, the diplomatic corps, jobs in America. People took holidays in England and Italy—even the students—and seemed to take it for gran
ted that they had a valued contribution to make to something or other. Writing, talking, arguing, analysing, reading—we were born to it.
Up to a point, of course, it was stressful coming face to face with a world which fundamentally disagreed with you about absolutely everything—disagreed and patronised. If you’re a Hindu in Budapest, you at least have the protection of your cultural cocoon, woven over millennia, but I had no cocoon: my culture was basically everyone else’s culture, only my ideas were different. Lunatic, some must have said. I coped, as I do now, mainly by treating all the world-views we were served up as tales that were told, to be understood on their own terms, as you might study the Koran and even become learned in it—or A Brief History of Time or Derrida, for that matter—without either espousing or rejecting the doctrines you’re encountering. It was like studying the street-maps of cities you never expected to visit. Deep down convictions brew—how could they not?—a core attitude hardens, dissolves, reforms, but I’m beginning to suspect, now I’ve met my mother and grandmother, that more of what forms deep down is innate than I once thought, less open to remoulding by the purveyors of advanced new social doctrines than I’d hoped.
By the late ’eighties both Yvonne and I, each unaware of the other, had resettled in Sydney to contemplate starting new lives after our marriages had broken up miserably. (Not that Yvonne blames anyone for her unhappiness: ‘The trouble I’ve been in I’ve brought upon myself,’ she told me firmly once, lest I imagine she held anyone else to blame.) It would be nice to think we passed each other on the steps at Town Hall Station or walking up George Street, but we probably didn’t. Yvonne was living on the western outskirts of the city, a long train ride from Mother’s, in what once would have been called severely reduced circumstances, while Sydney for me meant a Paddington terrace, the fringes of the theatre world, dinner in Oxford Street cafés, and latterly a large house on the hill at Manly, bays and bushy headland glimpsed through banana palms, gums and towering cordylines. Yet I was beginning to think of her now, not melodramatically as I might once have done at some agonising adolescent moment, or hopefully or needfully, but, after that night in Cairo, mainly because I felt I wanted depth to my story, some sort of verticality I could run up and down in my mind, not just breadth—I’d had that in abundance. That may sound dry and calculating just when you’d hoped for something heart-felt. In reality it was heart-felt, it’s just that I’m choosing my words with great care.
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