by Biff Ward
Then there was knocking at the door and Dad led two men in navy uniforms past us, the three of them talking in those quiet rumbles men adopt when things are unsayable. After a while, they came back, manoeuvring a stretcher with Mum on it through doorways and into that small hall that led to the front door. We moved, my brother and I, moved the other way, past the bedrooms to the front verandah, which looked over the street. There was an ambulance in front of our house. The men were pushing the stretcher with Mum on it into the back. Several groups of neighbours were standing at their front gates watching, talking quietly among themselves. I wondered how they knew. Maybe there’d been a siren that I hadn’t noticed.
When the ambulance drove off, Dad stood alone, watching till it disappeared into Queen St. The neighbours kept watching him, their necks like stalks in a breeze, swinging their heads this way and that to disguise their staring. Sometimes they looked at us on the high verandah. He turned and walked slowly back across the little yard below where we stood, back to the path at the side of the house.
I realise now that apart from everything else he must have done at that time, he also dealt with her vomit, removed it or buried it. We didn’t go to The Show. Not ever.
Years later, I asked Dad what she had done to make herself sick.
She ate rat poison, he answered.
In one of his letters to his parents he talks of her drinking DDT. In the following years, he writes often of this time as ‘her breakdown’.
She was taken to a private mental hospital at Bronte Beach.
It was while she was away that I became fascinated by the paintings—well, prints—on the dining-room wall. Picasso’s Guernica, black and white and grey, was to my left as I sat at the table. I studied the screaming, anguished faces of people and animals night after night. The fact that Dad looked sad but spoke with wonder when he talked about it meant that I was compelled, over and over, to enter into that fractured mayhem in order to try and understand just one part so that the rest might follow, so that some sense might prevail. The other prints were van Goghs which they’d cut from a book and had framed with cream mounts and narrow black borders. I liked the blue cart in the sunny hayfield best.
Dad and Mark and I crossed Sydney by bus and ferry and tram every Sunday to see her. Sometimes Dad called it a hospital, other times we heard him refer to it as The Home. She was there for so long, Grannie came from Adelaide to help Dad look after us.
The first time we visited, Mum was waiting on the verandah. She was smiling crookedly. As we walked with her towards the water, I broke into a run, shouting like I always did at the sea, I’ll beat you! to Mark.
I slowed down when I saw the beach was deserted. Mark had ignored me anyway, stumping along beside Mum, their heads bent away from the wind. Dad had a picnic of sandwiches and fruit which we ate on the cold sand.
Another time we were walking along the beach after our picnic when they started shouting at each other and Dad sent us back to sit by his bag while he and Mum gesticulated near a cave. When they came back she looked frantic and he looked as though he’d like to cry.
When I cast my mind back across the spectrum of my childhood, it was around this time, maybe on that blustery beach, that her spirit started to turn grey. By the time I was fourteen, her whole presence was grey. Yet on the living-room wall, always in pride of place, there was a portrait of her by Paddy Taylor, a not insignificant artist of the time. He painted it in 1946, just as we moved from Woolwich to Mosman. Here, she is luminous.
It’s an oil painting, almost modernist in style and tone, of an arrestingly beautiful woman. She is sitting in an armchair knitting. The colour is strong: orange armchair, creamy yellow bouclé skirt and top over a red short-sleeved jumper, the wool of her knitting bright green in her lap. Her hands come up under the needles, unlike most knitters whose hands are on top, and they are prominent because they are held in front of her with the knitting between them. Her nails are a glamorous red against the green wool. They look strong and capable, those hands of hers. Her lips and cheeks are rouged, her hair a perfect ’40s fall of chestnut waves. There’s the bump in her nose that I inherited and the glint of her silver wedding ring.
The eyes have always caught me up short, as they do everyone who is familiar with this painting. They focus to the viewer’s right, looking out of the scene, sliding off her half-smile over your shoulder to that place where she was attending to something that was not in the room with you, something you couldn’t see. In Paddy’s portrait, the other-worldliness in her eyes belies all the beauty of the rest of her.
Long after they were living separately I asked Dad what had attracted him to her. She was fey, he answered instantly. There was something fey about her. I was fascinated, he finished, the memory of it brightening his eye for a moment.
Portrait of Mum by Paddy Taylor, 1946, oil on canvas, 78 × 61 cm
As it turned out, there was no following her into fairyland, not even for him. It was a place she inhabited alone.
The knitting in the portrait reminds me that when I was young, she was a great knitter, fast, accurate and prolific, like I am now. Why do I forget this? Is it because the knitting fell away, disappeared into a bag of wool scraps in the linen cupboard by the time I was ten, along with so many other aspects of her?
She always knitted one-colour jumpers—no fancy Fair Isle for her—but she played around with stitching. I remember a red polo-neck sweater she made for me in a pattern of little boxes. Mark had an identical one in blue. I liked to trace how the stitches jumped from one box to another and how there were rows of boxes going upwards and rows going sideways so you could never work out where it all began.
I was wearing that jumper when I lost my ivory brooch. The brooch was a carved basket of flowers, the tiny petals brightly painted so that it had both the creamy translucence of ivory and the multi-coloured glitter of a child’s preference. The day I lost the brooch, we’d sat in a picnic shelter at Bronte because it was raining and Mum and Dad hardly spoke at all. On the way home, we were getting off the tram into chill, wet blackness at the Quay when I saw the bumpy red wool bereft of the basket of flowers. I cried. I cried because all the adults spoke as though it was special, being ivory and all, and because it came from my mother’s aunt I had developed a belief that it was a grown-up brooch.
My tears mingled with the drizzle on my face and Dad snapped at me, Stop that. It’s gone.
Where were his usually gentle words? Were they left on the windy beach at Bronte? The heavy coal-smoke air and the salt smell of the wharf stung my eyes.
Eight years later, there was a postscript for me, to the story of my mother eating rat poison. When I was sixteen, one of my Armidale friends lived in a house on the edge of town. Most of my friends were the eldest in their family like me but Janet was the youngest of four, the youngest by a long way. For me, her sister faded into the walls, but her two big brothers who still lived at home—one tall, dark, intense, the other blond, bland and distant—fascinated me. I often asked her about them, wanting to know about brothers who were actually men. She always turned me deftly aside.
Once we sat together at a school sports carnival and somehow tiptoed our way to the parallels between our mothers. There was the strangeness, having no friends, then periods in hospital and then, finally, how they’d tried to kill themselves. The same way as it happened. In those days, there was a packet of Ratsak, greeny grey flakes of the stuff, in nearly every home.
Although we never talked about it again, the next time I went to her house I looked at her family differently: it had happened here to these people too. I remember the closed-off faces of those brother-men—especially Max, the lithe, handsome, dark one who showed how much he cared about Janet by teasing her.
I kept wondering why her mother had tried to kill herself. I see now that I spent more time wondering about her mother than I did about my own. I don’t think I ever wondered why my mother tried to kill herself. That question went into my own undercroft along with the sh
adow of my violet posy, where everything about her was unaccountable.
But after that day, whenever I visited Janet’s house or drove past it in the car, I wondered where they kept the Ratsak—kitchen or laundry?—and thought how most people wouldn’t know, wouldn’t know what had happened even if they saw it, just a green cardboard packet sitting on a shelf.
These events—giving herself up to the police, the hysterectomy, the night we were shut out and Dad was so stupefied, and taking poison and vomiting in the cellar—all occurred while I was seven or eight, and the accumulation of them shaped Mum for the rest of her life. Perhaps it shaped Mark and me too. It certainly shaped our family life for the next twelve or thirteen years.
I was in my forties when I began to unravel my childhood, much of which centred on this period and another dramatic time in my teens. It was a process which took over twenty years to complete. Even after that, I was sideswiped when I read a letter from Dad to his sister Jean, written when I was nine. There’s a couple of sentences which rippled the skin on my scalp: We are very delighted by the way because Biff came top of her year in the final exams just completed. She happens to have this year a very capable teacher who informed me after the half-yearly exams that she should have done much better than she did (27th) if it had not been for her over-anxiety and nervousness.
What fixated me was her over-anxiety and nervousness. I had never heard myself described like this before. His words for me were sensible, strong, responsible, no melodramas. I certainly became these things. Maybe he gave me these qualities as his way of willing them into being, to help me overcome the fears that assailed me in our house and clearly spilled over into the classroom.
These events also caused Dad to leave the Communist Party. He always said he left when he did in 1949 because of Mum. I remember Lance Sharkey, the national president, visiting one night—the only time he did—and Dad washing up with clenched jaw while Sharkey hovered at his shoulder, pouring a torrent of words into his ear. Maybe Sharkey was pressuring him to desist from resigning. Dad left not because he’d become disillusioned with Marxism but because, in his words from a later interview: . . . my wife went out of her mind, and one of the forms the delusion took was [that] the secret policemen were hiding under the bed . . . He goes on to say: I thought the least I could do to remove this particular delusion was to get out . . . but I didn’t stop seeing my old mates.
Poor Mum. The scare-cries of anti-Communism, the McCarthy witch-hunt in America which spilt over into Australia with its slogan of Reds Under the Bed, was designed to terrify citizens and have them dobbing in Commies. People in the Communist Party and their friends were decried as monsters, what Tom Keneally in his obedient Catholic childhood experienced as ‘The Devil’ living right next door. While Dad and his friends could joke about being cast as monsters, Mum lived with a shifting sea of invisible terrors, and the idea that people were really watching us must have constituted the very worst set of circumstances possible for her.
Her family were no help. As far as they were concerned her marriage meant that she was saddled with Dad and his politics. Even quite recently, a cousin told me he had grown up with the impression that Dad was the leader of the Communist Party in NSW, revealing in that comment a glimpse of his family’s aggrandisement of Dad, their evil brother-in-law.
At this same time, Dad wrote to his parents about a discussion with Mum’s psychiatrist, one Dr Edwards, who, having initially been unsure about the diagnosis, had concluded that she was suffering from ‘paranoia’. Dad’s letter ends with: He further said that he thought her chances of recovery were very slight, though the course of things may be ‘delayed’ by treatment and by being divorced or completely separated from me. I’m afraid there are some signs that he’s right, but of course it’s difficult to the point of impossibility to do anything useful about it.
This is the only evidence I have that divorce was ever raised—and Dad segues straight to impossibility. Two weeks later, he writes to them: In one way time passing makes things easier . . . One can become accustomed to anything at all I suspect.
So in spite of his strength and resilience, he was powerless in the face of what was unfolding. We were all crumpling into shapes determined by the impact of my mother’s state, a state which had no words outside the doctor’s rooms and Dad’s letters, a state in which Mark and I lived with less than whispers.
The cold silent gloom from the undercroft was taking up residence in our bodies.
FIVE
Secrets
Suddenly, we had a car. Dad was like a kid, dancing around it, showing us.
It was a cream Austin 8 with only two doors and a truly miniscule back seat. There were several holes in the canvas hood and they were frayed around the edges, frilly like the petals of sea anemones. The windows were made of mica and screwed into place with butterfly wing-nuts. When the windows were on, it was hard to see through the smoky yellow layers and when they were off, the car became a roadster, letting wind stream through our hair.
We often stood outside touching the car, Dad and Mark and I, making plans for trips. When no one was around, I spent hours sitting at the wheel, imagining driving us to houses in other suburbs, to homes on the spokes of the Party network that I could trace from memory. I pictured the exact route and transmitted it through the steering wheel, keeping it level for the straight stretch up to the top of our street, then a careful turn to the left, followed by a hard right, all the way to Lane Cove, Hunters Hill, Manly. Complete journeys were etched in my mind: the texture of the different stretches of road under the wheels, the houses, parks and trees we passed, the changing sound of the engine as we laboured up hills and then flew down. It’s no wonder I became a woman who can read a map.
Then nails were hammered into a tyre, two four-inch nails, side by side. I remember standing on the sandstone kerb, looking down at the heads of the nails on the rear offside tyre and then looking up and down the street, wondering who had done this to us, our car, our family. Were they the same people who stood and watched the ambulance? The people who threw rocks in the night? Dad also looked up and down the street, as though he too was trying to guess who had done this.
When it sputtered to a halt on Raglan St Dad took it to a friend, Jack, who was an NRMA patrolman. Jack said, Someone’s put sugar in the petrol tank.
Another time, it was piss. Then more nails.
We knew the name of nearly everyone on the street—our two blocks of it, anyway, before it curved and veered away. There were the Oldbacks, with five kids who went to the Catholic school, the Youngs with the girl who couldn’t talk and was kept in a big playpen in the front room, the McDonaghs with the father who worked in the bank and the mother who looked down her nose at us but put on lipstick when Dad was around, and at the top of the street the identical twin boys who always stayed inside doing their homework. Our immediate neighbours were, on one side of us, Dorothy and Little Mark, and on the other side, the family where the mother slept in the same room as her own mother while her husband slept alone and their two kids were not allowed out on the street at all. Finally, there was the family on the corner whose daughter was the only other girl my age but she wasn’t allowed to play on the streets like I was.
The mighty Austin
The depredations on the car continued and Jack often had her for weeks on end. Eventually, there came a day when Jack assured Dad the car was truly okay for the holiday adventure he had been planning. Jack’s brother Leon owned a tract of bush with a house on it beyond the Hawkesbury and he had told Dad we could go there whenever we liked. I had picked up that Leon’s wife was in a mental hospital, so Leon and his children lived with his parents. This was not a temporary arrangement. Somehow I knew that this could have been our story. Mother gone for good, gone somewhere shameful that grown-ups talked about in whispers.
We drove north towards Leon’s place at Mangrove Creek, Mum taut and silent. We left the main road for a dirt one which turned into a track of wheel
ruts through grass. Finally, we came, as Leon had said we would, to a gate where deep yellow sand covered the way and cars could proceed no further. Mum carried a suitcase of clothes and some bedding, Dad a bag and a box of food. To our right stood a deserted house and a field of corn; to the left the creek, wide and shallow, gleaming with bouncing coins of sunlight. Over all was the summer smell of heated eucalyptus leaves and the squealing of a million cicadas. The track ran parallel to the creek and around the first bend we stopped. On the other side was an old house, a long, very long, house made of wood greyed almost to white, the verandah shaded and inviting, the whole capped with a tin roof, rusted russet-brown soft, flowing like a carpet up and over dormer windows.
We’ll go first, said Dad, you kids wait until we see if it’s safe.
Mum was in front with our smartest suitcase when she began to sink and yelp.
My God! Quicksand! Dad floundered to her side.
We were laughing to see Mum sinking and ungainly, and simultaneously breathless with terror at the very thought of quicksand which we’d only come across in books about deepest darkest Africa. When they reached the bank, Dad came back for us and we thrilled to the pull and suck of the quicksand around our ankles. It was so rare for the four of us to laugh together, I sighed with happiness.
The house was an inn from the nineteenth century, built beside a road that ran behind it, now a bush-covered platform. The sandstone blocks buttressing the road were placed there by convicts, Dad told us. We felt the heft of history, so we touched them only with the tips of our fingers. Beside the creek there were small sweet fruit on wild orange trees and we spent hours floating downstream and splashing our way back up to float down again. We played explorers in empty rooms and attics and we dreamt to the sound of dingoes hallooing from the bluffs lining the valley.
It was the summer of 1952–53 and while Mark and I had a sublime week, a line from a letter of Dad’s tells me: going away to Mangrove Creek for a week . . . seemed to upset her very considerably. And then, three weeks later, he says, Margaret has been much better for the last few days, after a very bad patch up at Mangrove Creek.