by Biff Ward
We visited her once, all three of us. After entering the main gate, we drove through acres of bushland until we came to an arc of brick buildings and residences dating back fifty years, beside a lake. The grounds were park-like, hillsides of lawn dotted with trees and beds of bright colour, a smooth, unmoving perfection. There wasn’t a person in sight.
Dad drove slowly along a curving road. He seemed to know which of the buildings we needed. We approached a huge buzzer. We couldn’t hear the bell ringing inside but after a minute we heard clanging sounds, metal crashing on metal. We stood close together, watching the door.
When it opened, Dad said his name and the uniformed woman stood aside to indicate we could enter. No smiles. Wordlessly, she led us through a series of doors which I realised she had opened and then locked again on her journey out to get us and was doing yet again as we travelled inwards. Except for her, there were still no people in sight. No sounds either, except for the keys—dozens of them—rattling in her hand and the crashing of the metal-grilled doors. A dark corridor led to another door through which we heard muffled voices. We found ourselves in a room full of people who were sleepwalking or, like a game of Statues, sitting or standing in a softly frozen state, staring, drooling, muttering.
My mother appeared through the wadded air and smiled crookedly. Her whole face had slipped. She came with us as the woman clanked us back through the doors to the outside. We went to a kiosk where we were the only customers. We bought toothpaste for Mum and fizzy drinks for us.
In a letter that Dad wrote to his sister Jean about Mark and me before we went he says: I’ve thought much about taking them to see her and I feel, on balance, that the misery and shock they will certainly suffer will probably be less psychologically crippling to them in the long run than the suppressed or subconscious feelings of guilt they may incur if I leave them at home . . .
Dad had packed a lunch and we sat by the lake on the dark green rug we always used for picnics, the one that had covered my bed when I was a toddler at Woolwich Point. Mum had had electric shock therapy, so she’d forgotten that Mark was in fourth year and she’d forgotten that I had made the blouse I was wearing.
A family sitting by a lake.
She was still in hospital when I did my last exam on the morning of my seventeenth birthday. Three weeks later, Dad and Mark and I drove down the highway again, this time to bring Mum home. She had forgotten more things about our lives, who Mark’s friends were and that I was headed for university the following year. Those forgettings, caused by the electric shock, propelled us even further away from her. She told us a woman had died in there and that no one seemed to care. We didn’t know if it was true or was one of her imaginings.
She came home with pills. There had been talk at the hospital and in the car about how she must take them, two at a time, night and morning. She must.
They would have been sedatives, known as ‘major tranquillisers’, the only medication available before the wave of anti-psychotics a few years later.
She took them for a day or two or three and then there was the night we were all in the kitchen, Mum and Dad drinking after-dinner coffee at the table, Mark and I drying down the bench after washing-up. I saw the pills, two tiny shiny red pebbles on her gloved palm. She turned to the sink to take them, to swallow them down with water. I saw her pop the pills down the plughole. Mark saw too. Neither of us spoke while she drank the water, as she pretended to take the pills.
Did Dad know what was happening? Surely he realised what she did? He was only a yard or two away as a bird might fly, a bird that might call out a warning.
We were all focused on those pills. Daily medication for anything was almost unknown at that time, so the pills were a novelty, a marvel. Yet precisely because they were so rare, so out of the ordinary, perhaps even Dad didn’t believe in what they might have been able to achieve. Did we silently collude, Dad and Mark and I, in obliterating this one concrete sign of what had happened? Was our horror about her hospital sojourn and the stigma of mental illness so great that we willed the pills down the S-bend ourselves? Were we each harbouring a harebrained hope that she might get better without the pills? Or was it that having no language, no words to talk about what had happened, we couldn’t maintain our attention for the pills because we would one day have to mention why she needed them?
He was optimistic again when he wrote to Jean that month: Margaret . . . is now amazingly better, far far better than she has ever been at any time in the last ten years. I now feel rather guilty that I never could quite bring myself to allow her to be forcibly taken away for treatment long ago . . . there’s no guarantee that her illness will not return again at full force at any time, and I don’t dare to allow myself to hope that the improvement may be permanent, but if it keeps up it will mean a new life for both of us and the children too.
I see again in this letter how, no matter what he shouted at her, he never stopped hoping. And she added to his hope at this time by buying a dress, a crisp cotton patterned in white and dark navy, which showed off her slim figure. I remember it well—the little gasp from each of us when she appeared in it, because it was so different, so smart, compared with how she’d been looking. There’s a photo of her wearing it where the white gloves appear to be part of a dressed-up outfit—unless you know. In spite of the dress and the fact that she was calmer for a while, there was no real improvement. She still wore her gloves, always wore them, and gouged at her hands when we were out of the room.
Every night, lying in bed before going to sleep, I was aware of the creak of Dad’s oak chair through one wall and the thunderous silence from where Mum sat in the kitchen on the other side of my room.
One night not long after she came home, just as I was falling off the ledge into sleep, that moment when sleep and wakefulness are evenly balanced, I had a glimpse of my mother’s hands before the gloves. It was an opaque and furry vision, but they were coming towards me to succour, to help me, as she did when I was a sick child, when I had measles in the Mosman days. But I jerked awake because her hands reaching for me were in the gloves and I didn’t want them anywhere near me.
Mum in her surprising navy and white dress
TEN
Knife
We went to Adelaide again that Christmas, Mum back from the hospital—quieter, certainly, calmer, but still disconnected, not really with us. And I was licensed, helping Dad with the driving. We headed north-west to Moree in the two-tone grey FJ Holden and then due west in a straight line through evocatively named towns—Collarenebri, Walgett, Brewarrina—until we came to the granddaddy of them all, Bourke. From there we headed southwards on a dirt track beside the Darling in scorching dry heat. When we stopped at Louth for a drink, I remember people briefly looking askance at Mum, at her blank eyes, her wafty silence, but then swinging their attention back to us, back to Dad. Apart from that moment, I have not one clear memory of Mum on that trip.
We spent four weeks in Adelaide, mostly at Grannie’s house. We went to Paradise a few times: it was still dripping with peaches, though they seemed to have gotten smaller as we grew up.
Dad had to manoeuvre arrangements so that Mum was not left alone too much with Grannie. It was after this visit that Grannie moved to Melbourne, across the road from Jean and her more normal family. In letters between the siblings, Dad and Claire and Jean, Claire points out that Grannie can’t, of course, live in Armidale because ‘Margaret has made that impossible’. Some years before, when Claire was drafting her will and pondering the what-will-happen-to-the-children question in the event of a double fatality, she wrote to Jean asking her to have them because while ‘Russel would be fine, Margaret isn’t fit to have children’.
What, I wonder, did she think about Mark and me, about how we were turning out?
After Adelaide, Mark went back to school while I was headed for university, two miles up the road. The student population at that time was overwhelmingly from the country towns of northern New South Wales, so a
series of colleges had been established to provide bed and board and community for them. Dad and Phyl decided that Sue and I would live on campus in order to be where the bulk of the students were, to be part of the full gamut of university life.
Dad was at that time a staff representative on the university council and he was trusted by students to the extent that some took their problems to him. Nearly every day, in the lunchtime ebb and flow around the Union, he would greet me with a whoop of delight and a hug. Often we would walk somewhere with his arm around my shoulders. If he was with a visiting academic, he would introduce me proudly. His room was at the far end of a long corridor in a ‘temporary’ hut. I walked that corridor a hundred times to arrange to borrow the car or to talk, just catching up on the things that were safe to mention. Often I heard his voice as I neared his room and I would find him on the phone, face alight. He’d say, Biff’s here. Bye, and hang up quickly. I knew it was Phyl and that the phone call would resume again soon after I left.
I loved seeing him so happy; this felt like his real life, not the one at home.
Meanwhile, I joined the group that put out the student paper, I started a society to support the local Aboriginal people, I was elected to various student bodies, I went to a thousand meetings. And I knitted. I told my friends I’d knit them whatever type of jumper they wished if they bought the wool. I churned out a garment a week, all done during meetings, through winter term.
What was going on? Where was this manic activity coming from?
I had been watching Dad all my life and the lefty instincts that I’d imbibed along with the scent of his body, with the softness of his voice when he talked about Alison, with his passion for the ballads of working men, with his horror of racism, had become my instincts, my raison d’être. It was how I saw the world and it gave me endless scope for activity—there was always something to discuss and activities aiming to make the world a better place. I can see now that I was also running from the things I carried within me, the things that had no name, and that my mother was patrolling the halls of my psyche with the axe in her hand.
It may have been the reason my friendships were so important—they anchored me in my new life. One evening Sue came back to college tearful and distressed after having dinner at her home. Come in here, she said, taking my hand, drawing me into her room.
I can’t be your friend anymore, she said.
What? Why? What’s happened?
I’ve found out your father is having an affair with my mother, she said.
Ye . . . es.
The whole town must have known about them, her mother and my father, buying brandy for their soirees, the wife of the local member with Dad. Sue had been away at boarding school, hardly ever on the main street. Until now. We stayed up all night talking on the bed in her room until I convinced her that we could remain friends. At dawn we hugged and I went to my room next door.
When I went home at the end of my first year of university, two momentous incidents happened in quick succession.
The first was that Max Hartwell, the man who’d headed the selection panel that unanimously chose Dad for the lectureship at the University of NSW four years earlier, went public about the involvement of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in the decision not to appoint him. We had always heard of ‘the secret police’, ‘the thought police’ or, a favourite of Dad’s, ‘the wallopers who control seditious thoughts!’ said with a guffaw and up-flung finger. It was part of the lingua franca of living with Dad. Max was secure in a readership at Oxford by 1960, so he had written an account of the 1956 event in an academic professional journal.
While Dad’s blackballing at UNSW had been a scandal in academia for years, Max’s decision to come out in this public way caused our phone to be reborn as a conduit to the world beyond Armidale. Journalists, colleagues and academic trade union activists all wanted to talk with Dad. Suddenly, long-distance phone calls were commonplace in our house.
The explosion of media interest that Max’s article unleashed reached even to the Armidale police. An ex-Communist in town! Maybe NSW Special Branch rang them because their tentacles couldn’t reach from Sydney, maybe ASIO itself called in some country-town sleepers. We could hear the hastily connected tape recorder whirring down the road when we took phone calls. A uniformed policeman sat on a motorbike outside the house for days. He looked very unsure of what he was meant to be doing as we went in and out with our friends and bicycles. Sometimes we waved: a young one looked away, blushing. For us, the sense of surveillance under the Armidale summer skies was a joke, the local police trying to be spooks, frantic and fatuous.
For Mum, of course, it was different. People really were watching the house again: it was lighter fluid to her paranoia. Dad kept flying away to consult with his supporters about that bastard Baxter, while we stayed out in the sunshine and left Mum to her imaginings in the dark rooms inside.
The second incident was a short conversation I had with Dad. Thinking I might have some new objectivity as a result of my absence, he asked, How do you think she is?
Not good, I replied.
Really? He looked at me intently.
Not as bad as last year, I said, referring obliquely to the axe and him not there. But she’s pretty bad.
He nodded. Okay, he said.
And then he took her to the doctor. I was alarmed, scared even, that my one small comment was allowed so much wallop. I didn’t want to be the one whose remark was used to do this to my mother. But who was I to question his decisions? At just eighteen, my loyalty to him was continuous with my childhood: he was the rock, the one thing I could count on.
A month later a plan was hatched to take her back to Morisset. Dad wrote to his mother: . . . the doctors all stressed a year ago when she came home [from hospital] that she ought to go back for more treatment before she became really ill again. They thought the time had come last week and so I had to take her down to Newcastle . . . There is, I think, no doubt that she will be home again in two or three months considerably better for the rest and the treatment.
There’s his optimism again. Recently, I came upon a letter he wrote to his sister Jean at the same time which outlines the plan more graphically: As she has no insight at all into her own condition she can only be brought to hospital and treatment by force or fraud. This time, under doctor’s instructions it had to be the latter, with me as the chief deceiver. I took her down to Newcastle on Fri last and went straight on afterwards to Sydney with Mark.
And then he goes on, in the same paragraph, with details of Mark’s job-hunting and the plaudits his paintings are attracting.
This, I realised with a start, was the actual moment of Mark’s leaving home. He left school at the end of 1960 and spent that bizarre summer caddying at the golf-course and doing his first large oil paintings (a parrot, Ned Kelly) with the policeman sitting outside. Then this trip which took him to Sydney to start his adult life.
There’s so much missing from Dad’s letter. Did he tell Mum she was going to Sydney? Or Newcastle? When did she realise what was happening? Was it when they turned off the highway? Did they go to Newcastle Hospital? Or out through the bush straight to Morisset in its park by the lake? Did she rage? Did Dad explain? Did Mark cry? Did they hug her goodbye?
And that last clause: I . . . went straight on afterwards to Sydney with Mark. What does ‘afterwards’ indicate? What scenes are contained inside that word? How did it feel between Dad and Mark after they left her and drove on to Sydney? Did they talk about it at all?
I know they wouldn’t have said a word. They drove on across the Hawkesbury and wound down towards Sydney in the dark. Mark has no memory of the trip, yet there it is in Dad’s letter, the documentation rendering it a fact.
When Dad came home and I asked how Mum was, he told me that the doctor, our bland family doctor, had said that he was surprised she hadn’t knifed us all in our sleep. That was all. Just that. The doctor thought this.
The
carving knife in our house had a curved blade with a bone handle, part of a set they had, with steel and fork, a wedding present. All my life, Dad had used this knife to produce perfect wafers of hot steaming meat. When he told me what Dr Fisher had said, it was this knife, the carving knife used with such skill in Dad’s hand, which I instantly pictured. It became the knife of fear in my mind, the one I pictured when I thought of Mum, the one I saw when there were stories of knifings on the news. Decades later, the mere mention of Armidale could summon that knife.
And it was in that same conversation that I asked, my heart stopped for an instant as I launched into forbidden territory, What is it? What’s wrong with her?
He answered, The doctors told me long ago that she has incurable paranoid schizophrenia. His voice was flat and tired as he added, And they said, ‘You’ll be better off if you leave her now.’
We sat there, letting these hopeless pieces of information from long-ago doctors clump on the floor at our feet.
She had more shock treatment. None of us visited this time.
Decades later, I tried to get hospital records from Morisset. They sent me photocopies from admission registers, pages with her name from the two times she was taken there. As for her medical records, a building burnt down, they told me, and we lost all the records for that period.
From the Morisset Hospital Historical Society I obtained a book named A Private World on a Nameless Bay, a title which stands as a good exemplar of the denial caused by the stigma of mental illness. This ‘history of Morisset’ is almost exclusively an account of the staff and their social gatherings over the decades, the lovely parties they had.