by Adrian Tame
CHAPTER TWO
Roots of Evil
KATHY AND HER BABY son are going visiting. The proud sixteen-year-old mother wants to show off Dennis to her Nan, Bertha Mason. Having travelled halfway across town to Bertha’s home in West Brunswick, Kathy is tired and wants to sit by the fire. Only there’s somebody already there. It’s ‘that lady’, the woman who is always turning up unexpectedly, always making a fuss of Kathy and Wilma, introducing them to a series of men she refers to as ‘uncles’. But this time there’s something different.
Why is ‘that lady’ sitting by the fire in Nan’s house? Kathy isn’t left wondering for long. ‘Meet your new grandson,’ says Bertha, looking at ‘that lady’ and gesturing towards the bundle in Kathy’s arms. The meaning of Bertha’s words sinks in instantly, and leaves Kathy’s heart pounding, her mouth dry and her mind whirling. ‘That lady’ is her mother. Maybe it’s something she’s subconsciously suspected all along. But to be confronted by it so suddenly, so casually . . . Almost defensively, Kathy hugs Dennis a little tighter. He’s hers, her very own, and she knows it. No uncertainties, no rude surprises. Nobody can change that.
* * *
It’s eighteen years later. Baby Dennis has become a man in a prison cell. He’s doing time in Pentridge for the latest in a series of violent outrages that have brought a rapid escalation through the punishment book of juvenile crime—probation, fines, supervision orders, boys’ homes, and now adult prison. Dennis has just received a letter, and the familiar handwriting on the envelope tells him it’s from his sister, Kathy. She’s a regular on visiting days, and writes constantly. But there’s a time bomb ticking inside this particular letter, primed to explode in Dennis’s head. The first few lines are unusually affectionate and form a declaration of love and, for some reason, guilt. Then he reads the words: ‘Dennis, I’m not your sister. I’m your mother, and I love you.’ Something snaps inside him and his head spins . . . just as Kathy’s did eighteen years ago by the fire at Bertha Mason’s.
This process of children being reared by their grandparents or great-grandparents has happened in Kathy’s family for three generations now. It began with Kathleen Shields taking Kathy, Wilma and Barbara away from their mother Gladys. Then Kathy became a mother at a ridiculously young age and was unable to cope. So Gladys stepped in and took Kathy’s first two sons, Dennis and Peter, away from her. Kathy’s children, particularly Peter, also became parents at an extremely young age, and lost their children. Peter was a grandfather at thirty-five, making Kathy a great-grandmother at the age of fifty-two.
* * *
During the later stages of her pregnancy Kathy found work, performed at home for a card manufacturing company, earning four shillings and fourpence a gross for tying ribbons around the cards. The first item she bought from her earnings was a cradle—’I used to look at it and line it up, this cradle. It was like I was waiting for a doll of my own.’
Childbirth for a frightened sixteen-year-old was a mixture of mystery and terror.
I was petrified. My water broke and I got the shakes, all cold and trembly. My aunty took me to the Royal Women’s, and they shaved me and got me ready. There were a lot of wogs screaming in the labour ward. In those days it was just one big room with sliding curtains, no private rooms. I was outside waiting to go in, and I could hear all this screaming and I’m thinking: ‘Is that what you have to do?’ But I shut up anyway. Labour wasn’t a long time—three or four hours. And they did come in and tell me I was a good girl, because I was so frightened from all the screaming. But that’s not me. They gave me the mask and I kept putting it over my mouth and taking big gulps. Then they laid you on your side, it’s not like today. They put one of your legs in the air, and the baby comes out. It was worth it when I saw him. I thought he looked beautiful. They didn’t give them to you straight away, like on your breast nowadays. They took them away and washed them and swaddled them up real tight. All you could see was their head. When I got him on my own I undid the blankets to see if his ten fingers and toes were there, naturally, like any mother would. I just felt he was that beautiful, I had waited that long. I had something of my own to love. It was like my own doll. Before he was born I used to go to the cradle and look at it and think: ‘Soon I’ll have a baby in it.’ But I didn’t know it was going to be a boy.
Today, examining the first photograph taken of baby Dennis at a few weeks old is a strangely unnerving experience. The overriding impression is of an almost startling alertness about the eyes. Are they simply impish and mischievous? Or would a subscriber to the theory of original sin detect a glint of something more sinister? For Kathy there was no doubt. She loved Dennis without qualification.
He was beautiful. He was beautiful. Oh yes I loved him. Dennis was my first-born, and I loved him most of all. But if it hadn’t been for Dennis a lot of the things that went bad wouldn’t have happened. We’re all still paying for Dennis.
The young mother and child left the hospital five days after the birth and went home to Kathleen Shields.
I didn’t know how to bath him or do anything, and my great-grandmother I can remember putting on a big apron, taking hold of him. She’d lay him on the towel, soap him all over first. We had a baby’s bath, and then she’d put the towel around him and do his head first till he was all soaped up, and then after his head was dry she’d put the rest of his body in. That was the old way of doing it.
Kathy remained with her ‘Mum’ for the five weeks between the birth and her marriage to Dennis Ryan. She then moved with Dennis senior and junior into Dennis’s sister’s and brother-in-law’s home in the inner suburb of Albert Park. There were already six people living in the two-storey house, and the Ryans were confined to a small bedroom.
Dennis was an otherwise unexceptional baby, but he had problems getting off to sleep. Kathy devised an unusual but, as it turned out, oddly appropriate method of soothing him. She used to visit an uncle and aunt at a shop they ran in Union Street, Brunswick.
My uncle was a wag. He was a Pom, and he had the police radio playing all the time in his car, and we used to have to drive Dennis around to put him to sleep. That was his lullaby, the police radio. We’d get to the scene of the crime before the police.
When Gladys became involved with little Dennis, there were far-reaching consequences. It was only when Gladys first saw the baby that Kathy finally learnt the truth—’that lady’ was her mother.
I was round at my Nan’s and that lady was there for some reason. Well, she nearly fell of the bloody chair, me Mum, she didn’t know I’d had a baby, and I didn’t know she was my mum until she told me that day. I was stunned. There was no embracing, none of that. I suppose I hid my emotions. I do a lot of that. I dunno why. So I kept everything in. I just cuddled my son tighter, he was mine. I had something of my own. I didn’t need anyone else. It didn’t make me feel any less about Kathleen Shields. My great-grandmother was always my Mum to the day she died, and still is today. She was my life.
There was animosity between me and Gladys. Later in life we had a fist fight. One time we were sharing the same kitchen and I was getting Billy off to work, and she was getting her Harry off. There were two stoves, and she wanted to use the one I was using, and that’s when I started on her. I got to know her later on when she was dying. I tried to do the right thing by her. I’d take her meals round, and she’d say: ‘They’re too bloody spicy.’ She didn’t want them. She always had a freezer full of food, and she’d say: ‘Find something to take home with you,’ but the things were always out of date by years. She gave me a packet of mixed fruit to make a cake, and it was walking.
Whether or not Gladys had designs on Kathy’s husband Dennis is uncertain, but one incident around the time of Dennis junior’s birth aroused Kathy’s suspicions. Gladys was living on board an old rust bucket scow moored on the banks of the Maribyrnong River where Kathy and Dennis came to visit her one day. Dennis took Gladys for a ride on the Triumph—and didn’t come back. Several hours later Ka
thy was left to beg her fare home from the man with whom Gladys was living on the boat.
It was one day when me Mum had put red dye in her hair, and I thought her head was bleeding. Then the next thing I know Dennis has disappeared with her. Most probably she fancied him. If she could have taken him she would have. He was young and I didn’t matter.
Dennis duly came back and shortly afterwards Kathy, still only seventeen, fell pregnant with her second and last child by him. Peter was born on 25 January 1953, again in the Royal Women’s Hospital.
I’m on the trolley outside the labour ward, right? Well, he was in such a hurry to come he nearly fell off the bloody trolley. I was in the passage ready to go into the ward and he wouldn’t wait. I thought: ‘God, he’s going to fall off.’ There was no nurse there. When they came out I said: ‘He’s born.’
Dennis senior had left to serve in the Korean War when Kathy was five months pregnant and was still away when Peter was born. In retrospect Kathy thinks he joined up more out of panic than patriotism. Lack of money and a fear of being tied down in his early twenties with two children were his main motivation, she believes. But his going off to Korea reminded Kathy of her last links with her own father and his fatal involvement in World War II.
My grandfather on my Dad’s side worked for the military. He was pretty high up. I had gone to see him to get my dad’s medals and the stuff left when he was killed. When I saw my grandfather in his office, he told me how he had won his money in a lottery, and given all his grandchildren this and that. I said: ‘Who the fuck am I, you old bastard? I’m your fucking granddaughter, too, and so is Wilma.’ He was nonplussed because we’d had nothing to do with him after dad died. He didn’t want to know us, we didn’t exist.
Meanwhile Kathy was learning all about life as a young single mother.
The local policeman used to ride around on his push bike, he only lived up the street. His daughter was on the cover of Post magazine, and she was up herself. And I was walking Dennis up the street to get the paper, and she walked past me, and she’s la de da and everything and she said to me: ‘He’s nothing but a little bastard.’ I was angry, I wanted to bash her. I did smack her face, and then I went straight and told her dad, and she got a belting. He was a typical old policeman, the old style—kick you up the bum.
Later on in years to come I met her at a wedding. She said to me she had been jealous of me, and here she is on the cover of Post and that. I dunno whether she was jealous of me having the baby or what.
Peter was just three weeks old when Kathy met the second of the three men who fathered her children—William George Peirce. She believes if she had stayed with Dennis Ryan and never met Peirce, her life would have been conventional and law-abiding, but ultimately boring.
I had no intentions of having a boyfriend or anything because my husband was in Korea. And this bloke’s ran out of the pub and said to me something about how I looked beautiful. I think he had a suit on with the wrong colour shoes. Well, I didn’t know what he was on about, because I looked a good sort, he reckoned. He was a good-looking bloke, a bloody lady killer. He followed me, and then it evolved from there.
‘This bloke’ was Billy Peirce, and a few months after they first met he moved in with Kathy and the two boys who, because of Dennis Ryan’s absence, were back with Kathleen Shields. Over the next eight years Kathy was to have six children by Peirce. She sums up their time together in just one sentence—’He was good-looking, and he loved a drink and a fight.’
It was Billy who introduced Kathy to the world of crime, and his influence on her behaviour gradually made the more conventional Wilma ashamed of Kathy and her young family. So much so that she paid Kathy twenty pounds to stay away from her wedding to avoid any embarrassment on her big day. Predictably, Kathy accepted the money, spent it, and turned up anyway. ‘Wilma didn’t say a word to me, but I behaved myself,’ she laughs.
The awkward question of how she would tell Dennis Ryan on his return from Korea that she had found a new man never arose. Dennis simply didn’t bother looking up his wife and two children. This didn’t particularly worry Kathy, as she was so deeply involved with Billy Peirce. Kathy and Dennis’s divorce, thirty years later, was almost as farcical as their wedding. In the early 1980s Kathy had started to acquire property and was concerned her long-lost husband might make some claim on her, so she filed for divorce.
The reason I did it was because I owned a house, and I didn’t know how he’d turned out, and so I had to cover my skin. I said to the judge, ‘I haven’t seen him for thirty years, Your Honour’, expecting to have to wait a month after the decree nisi, right? He made it absolute straightaway. And then I found out Dennis had already divorced me, and I’m blueing with myself because it’s cost me $400 to get divorced from him.
Kathy and Dennis met only once during those thirty years—on a bus, of all places—but still managed to end up in bed together.
I was alone for Christmas dinner. I’d caught the bus. I had burnt my bra years before everybody else, and I’d dyed my hair blonde and had this black top on, with no bra, and I saw Dennis about to get off the bus. I said: ‘Excuse me, would you mind getting off the bus. I want to talk to you.’ He looked at me stupid, and I said: ‘I do happen to be your wife.’ He shit himself. Got off the bus. Then we went out to my aunty’s house, and I had a cold sausage for Christmas dinner, and he stayed the night. We had a lot to talk about—the letters he sent me from Korea. He was impressed with the way I dressed. Then we never saw one another again.
In the early stages of her relationship with Billy Peirce, Kathy’s two young sons, Dennis and Peter, were more often than not living with Gladys in Monbulk in the Dandenong mountains on the outskirts of Melbourne. After her series of bigamous marriages Gladys had finally settled into a relationship which was to last for the best part of half a century. Her partner was Harry Allen, from whom Dennis and Peter took their surnames, although Dennis was buried as a Ryan. Unlike Gladys, who died in 1993, Harry is still alive.
Harry worked in a sawmill and one of his legs had been crushed in an accident, for which he’d received very little by way of workers’ compensation. So life wasn’t easy for him and Gladys.
Billy Peirce had a job in Hughesdale, halfway between the city and the Dandenongs, working as storeman in a clothing factory and there were prospects for Kathy there too. By now Gladys’s relationship with the two boys had evolved into a form of semi-permanent guardianship, which had come to suit Kathy and Billy Peirce. Their plan was to pay Gladys and Harry from their wages for the upkeep of the two boys. Kathy hotly denies that Gladys had taken on the boys out of a sense of guilt at having forsaken her three daughters and wished to atone by bringing up her two grandsons.
It was nothing to do with that. She and Harry needed the money. My idea was if Gladys minded them I’d send her money. But I never got ’em back. It was supposed to be short-term. I used to pinch Dennis and my Mum used to kidnap him back, so in the end I gave up. I’d go to school to pick him up, and she’d already collected him early.
This allowed Kathy and Billy, who was still in his early twenties—only five years older than she was—the independence to enjoy the blossoming of their love.
We lived in a house in Drummond Street, Carlton, and we were dearly in love. We used to run down the street together hand in hand all the way to Flinders Street, skipping and jumping. That was one of my happy times. We’d spend hours lying on the beds just reading together and talking. There were three single beds in the bloody room!
Kathy was prepared to leave the two boys with Gladys and Harry partly because she had been told that if she went onto social security they would be taken from her and put into care. So the Monbulk arrangement, painful as it was for Kathy, came to be accepted. She would visit the boys at least once a week and was always with them at weekends. Monbulk was not an easy place to reach by public transport, and Kathy had no car.
The problem was alleviated when Gladys and Harry moved with the t
wo boys to Carrum, another outer suburb, but more accessible by public transport than Monbulk.
Billy Peirce didn’t have a car either, but considered public transport beneath him. So each weekend he found a different means of getting to Monbulk or Carrum.
He bloody stole cars, didn’t he? I got in this one car with him, and we were on the way to Monbulk. By the time we got to Gladys’s I was hanging onto his tie, because the doors were gone. They fell off. He bloody well hit trees and God knows what. Then one day I was already up there and in the night he came up in a green Met bus. Gladys said, ‘I don’t know what’s coming into the yard, but it’s got bright lights,’ and it got bogged so they got the timber jinker to get him out. There was a cliff up there, and the next thing the bus goes over the bloody cliff.
By this time both Dennis and Peter were starting to call Gladys ‘Mum’ and regarded Kathy as their sister. Kathy felt if she told them the truth it would have an adverse effect on their relationship with Harry and Gladys. This didn’t stop her feeling guilty, either then or now. As with Kathy’s relationship with ‘this lady’, the subterfuge continued for many years. Until he was eighteen Dennis was never sure exactly who his mother was. The manner in which he found out the truth may well have had some bearing on the way his character developed in later years.
He thought I was his sister for years. Gladys told Dennis she was his Mum and I was his sister, and he believed that. By then I had other children, and I was still going down to Carrum to see him, and I did, I did try and steal him back. Many times I wanted to tell him the truth. He was running around unsupervised, and he started to get into trouble. I visited him when he was in Turana and Malmsbury, the prisons for kids. I thought he had enough on his plate without me telling him this. When he was eighteen and in Pentridge I’d had enough, and I wrote to him and told him I was not his sister, I was his mother, and I loved him. I had guilt, the guilt was all mine. I couldn’t tell him to his face, I could only put it in a letter. It must have been hard for him to be in there and read it. I think by then he had an inclination, because I was always at Pentridge at the weekends. I dunno.