by Biff Ward
I nodded. Okay, so she knew about that.
Yes, Libbie said.
She was taking her time. There were pauses while she watched me. I was watching her. What else has she to tell me?
And the court case. She remembered the court case.
I have never heard of a court case. Well, except for Gwen Kelly’s story—He had protected her through the courts and the pain inflicted by others—and I dismissed that as a fiction, a wild guess into someone else’s past.
Now Sue and I turned to Libbie in unison.
What court case? asked Sue.
What court case? I echoed.
Libbie looked at me. Oh, no, she said, you didn’t know . . .
What court case, Libbie? My words were urgent, even pushy, yet my thoughts were fracturing, tumbling wildly.
I don’t know, said Libbie. I’ve no idea. She just said she remembered the court case.
Well, if there was a court case, there’ll be a record. It would be the coroner’s hearing, Sue said.
She alone of the three of us sounded sure of anything.
I’m sorry, said Libbie, reaching her hand to me. I thought you knew . . .
It’s okay. I’m all right, I blustered. Truly, it’s okay . . . I just had no idea I’d find out like this . . . out of the blue. Here. From you.
Well . . . that’s all I can tell you. Libbie was visibly relaxing.
Can I talk to her? Your mother?
Yes, I think she’d like that.
That’s good, then.
But you’d best write to her first. She’s deaf, so you have to know how to talk to her. She’s good at writing. Sharp as a tack. Talking’s much harder because of her deafness.
Sue’s brown eyes smiled into me. She and Libbie moved on to other topics. I was hearing them as though from an echoing distance, catching only occasional phrases. In my mind there was a loose thread flailing about, trying to find another thread to connect with, looking to tie a knot. A court case. Was it in the papers? Are there pages of stuff in a dusty archive somewhere? I had a grainy image of a 1940s courtroom, lots of dark wood in downtown Sydney and my mother there, twenty-five years old, with my father, twenty-six. Babes themselves.
Libbie pulled out silver placemats in honour of our visit and dinner appeared on the long refectory table, the three of us ranged around one end for fish and eggplant coconut stew with rice and salad. Libbie and Sue were still talking. The eggplant was caramelised, delicious. I ate slowly.
After second serves, I began to long for my knitting. My hands were restless: it was impossible to focus on their talk. I had all I needed to start the green school jumper for my granddaughter.
There was a pause in their conversation.
I’m sorry I’m being so quiet, I said.
The news, said Sue. The court case.
Yes. I’m just a bit stunned. Floored by it.
Of course, Libbie smiled. Of course you are.
I’m going to get my knitting. I stood up.
Of course. And they went on talking, letting me be with my wool and needles and pattern.
I was afraid I’d be awake all night but the feather doona and steady rain on the tin roof did the trick.
Back at home, I wrote to Libbie’s mum, Erica. Three weeks later I received an envelope holding two pages, all in lower-case printing, neat in the way a good girl writes. She had a conversational, chatty tone, a ramble of connections from when they (she, Arch and my parents) were young in Adelaide and some reflections on Armidale in the ’50s—‘a long way from anywhere’.
When she did get to the point, she went straight away to the gloves, just like everyone else. But Erica had a twist: I realised she was always wearing gloves because she had pushed the baby under the bath water . . . I gasped and then took a deep breath. I read it again, that sentence, and again.
I had thought this. For many years, it had been my private theory, a theory I had shared only with Mark.
She couldn’t bear what her hands had done, I said to Mark. That’s why she gouges. And the gloves—they go together. It’s all the same thing.
As I consulted with people who knew my parents, I didn’t have to ask about the gloves because, just like Erica, it was the first thing they mentioned. It was as though everyone knew that’s where the mystery lay. But Erica had found the answer. The inquest recorded that the death occurred due to post-partum depression, she adds in her letter. Her information comes from the sister of a friend who did nursing with Mum in Adelaide and therefore noticed when the inquest was written up in The Advertiser.
It was written up in the Adelaide paper? It’s possible that it was reported as some sad news of recent Adelaide residents whose families were, if not pillars of the community, then at least fancy painted palings. I went back to the library and searched The Advertiser for the days and weeks after the death and inquest in 1941. I found no such report. So it must have been talk.
As I read and re-read the two flimsy pages from Erica, I thought again of the women in that Armidale period who would have talked about my family. I remembered the day the Top Girl visited Mum, saying ‘they all wanted to help’. I realised there would have been gossip, the titillation of the salacious, but there must also have been the talking women do when they try to explain the lives of themselves and others, when they hold pain and struggle. Erica had been one of these women.
Six weeks later, I went back to Byron Bay to meet Erica and spent several hours with her one day. She sat in a chair beside her bed, one foot in a surgical boot, raised on a pouffe. She enjoyed having company and wanted me to stay longer but she was consumed with imaginings, saw people tumbling on her bed, antics causing her to giggle and point. What’s happening? I asked.
She rolled her eyes. Oh, shocking, she laughed uproariously. I joined in and couldn’t believe how much fun I was having.
But I was too late—there were no answers to my questions. I had caught the last of her useful memory in the exchange of letters six weeks earlier. Next day it was established that Erica was in some kind of delirium. Four days later when I went with Libbie to say goodbye, Erica couldn’t stay awake more than a couple of minutes. A week later, Libbie rang to tell me she had slept for two whole days and was now bouncing back, wide awake again.
I decided to follow up her mention of ‘an inquest’.
Can I get a copy of it? I asked helpful John at the NSW Government Archives.
It arrived a few weeks later, five photocopied pages.
It’s a ‘Magisterial Inquiry’ (a lesser phenomenon than an inquest) and it’s dated 11 August 1941, less than two weeks after Alison died. There are two depositions, one from a female doctor, C.J. King, and one from Mum which is clearly constructed by a police officer in response to standardised questions. Then there’s the Coroner’s finding that Alison ‘died from Asphyxia from Drowning, accidentally caused when her Mother (Mrs Margaret Alice Ward), who was bathing the deceased in a baby’s bath tub at the time, fainted and became unconscious, at the same time and place’. These three documents represent a bureaucratic formality: I imagine neither Dad nor Mum was there.
It’s Mum’s deposition that arrests me, especially the phrases that are probably her own words, though filtered through police-talk. I keep going back and re-reading them. A picture of that morning emerges: Began to bathe the baby at 9.30 . . . Felt dizzy . . . Perspiration broke out on my face . . . Don’t know how long I remained unconscious . . . The baby was lying on her right side in the bath . . . She was limp . . . Wrapped her . . . Ran to a neighbour . . . A doctor and an injection . . . Artificial respiration . . . Her lips were blue. Towards the end of her signed statement, the policeman clearly turned some of her answers into police-speak, using terms such as the ‘the deceased’, which is not how she would have spoken. It reads: Dr Lyons told me that the deceased was dead . . . My husband identified it to him [the doctor] as being that of Alison Russel Ward . . . The deceased was a healthy baby.
I picture a scenario where t
he doctor contacted the police and, after speaking together to Mum and Dad, they talked in the shadows by the main door. I imagine the police wanted to get away from my mother’s silent crying and my father’s uncomprehending eyes and that, after conferring, the doctor touched my father on the elbow and murmured, Accident, as they all left.
Some of the text from the magisterial inquiry into Alison’s death
So there was no inquest with its whiff of potential culpability. There was a simple inquiry because it was a death that occurred beyond the purview of medical records. Erica and others may have heard there was a legal process but a ‘court case’ it was not.
I notice the magistrate’s finding capitalises Asphyxia and Drowning and even Mother and recall that these were removed during the messy transfer of this sentence to the death certificate. A pity: those capitals confer a gratifying gravitas.
Jean, Dad’s sister, was ninety-two (with all her marbles) when I broached the question of culpability with her. I was tentative, thinking still that she might recoil from too much directness.
I’m wondering, Jean, if you remember . . . What I want to know is whether the question about her maybe killing Alison was there from the beginning.
I really didn’t expect an unequivocal response but she spoke immediately. Yes. Absolutely. It was there from the very start. Always.
So there it was. Yet still I wondered, Why? Was it caused by her mental illness that wasn’t noticed until later?
And then, out of the blue on a Friday evening, I found the answer to the question I’d carried since the night when I was twelve and heard her cry out, I did do it!
A young red-headed man, Craig, appeared on television and said, I’m here to talk about ‘post-partum psychosis’.
I knew at once. That phrase said it all. For a second I was immobilised, a wooden spoon vertical in my hand. Then I turned off the gas and sprinted to my TV seat.
It happens to about one in five hundred mothers, he said. They become ill after they have given birth. Eighteen months ago, my wife killed herself when our baby was nine months old. We had never heard of it, this psychosis. I want to tell everyone: I want people to know about this.
Yes, I thought. Yes!
Then he said, Some women kill their babies while they have this psychosis.
My God. This was it at last: the explanation.
We had nowhere to turn, he said. There are no handbooks for what to do when psychosis arrives in your family.
I was hardly breathing, certainly not blinking.
Craig spoke with an elegant, restrained passion for nearly fifteen minutes about the calamitous events in his life and what he had learnt as a result. When he was finished, I rang the ABC and gabbled my thanks. Then I rang friends in the mental health sector: they must contact him, connect him to our community of people who educate about mental illness. When I met him, it struck me that it was seventy years since my mother and father were whacked with this syndrome which was unnamed, yet here was Craig, even with a medical explanation, still struggling to get people to listen.
I had been googling ‘post-natal schizophrenia’ and ‘infanticide’ and any other term I could think of and had never come across this knowledge. I ordered an American book, Understanding Post-Partum Psychosis, written by a woman who survived it and put her law career on hold to work as an advocate in the field. Known as PPP, the illness is caused by the flood of hormonal change that occurs as the baby leaves a woman’s body. It’s generally accepted that four per cent of women with PPP will kill their baby and about six per cent will kill themselves. It’s a temporary condition, an acute and obviously very serious condition, but eminently treatable. The key is early detection.
Back when I was visiting my friend’s son at the mental hospital in Adelaide, I remember seeing, across the grass, a specialist ward for mothers and babies and being surprised that there was so much serious post-natal depression. Even with my ears so keenly attuned to the nexus between mental illness and a dead baby, it didn’t occur to me that the answer was right before me in those prams outside that building at Glenside.
PPP does occur more frequently in women who have a psychotic illness—bipolar or schizophrenia—or a predisposition towards such an illness. The only evidence for my mother’s ‘predisposition’ to schizophrenia before Alison was born is contained in Dad’s observation that she was ‘fey’. From all that I can glean, she manifested schizophrenia after the death of Alison, perhaps triggered by the PPP and what she did under its influence.
Thanks to Craig and the ABC, my mother was no longer our own unique and hidden aberration. She was now a member of a statistical group; here was a numerical and clinical explanation of what she had done. When I try to think of how she carried her horror alone, it is as though I opened a door but the walls fell away.
As I write, a young woman in Perth who, according to the newspaper reports, had been battling ‘post-natal depression’ (as PPP is still often erroneously called) is found lying on her living-room floor beside her two dead babies, seven-month-old boy twins. The babies were drowned before they were dressed, the report said. The mother was surrounded by a concerned and supportive family. They chose the wrong day to let down their guard.
The Perth family had the glare of media scrutiny on their tragedy. Is this because the mother took pills, trying to kill herself too? Or because of the poignancy of two babies lying side by side?
I wonder how often it happens nowadays in the way it did for my parents, that the authorities decide it’s an accident. It is, in a sense, an accident—the mother’s mind is temporarily rearranged into a thought pattern that can make the unimaginable not only thinkable, but also do-able, even necessary.
I was so elated by my discovery of PPP that I regaled friends with it, including my old friend Julia. She responded at once. It’s called ‘maternal morbidity’, she said. It’s a real thing. It has a name.
What?
My mother called it that.
What do you mean?
One of her older sisters got married, said Julia, and had a baby and went mad. It was in the ’20s. She didn’t kill anyone but they called it maternal morbidity and she got put away in an asylum.
Really? My eyebrows must have disappeared into my hair. I’d known Julia for over forty years and never heard this before.
Yes. My mother looked after the baby for a year and then the father’s family came and took it away. That’s what she always focused on—the loss of the baby. It was terrible for her.
What happened to the baby’s mother? I asked.
She never came out of the asylum. She died there in her middle age.
So there they were—my voices. Dad telling me what I really wanted to know by sending a message, his voice, through Sal, after he had died. Then, from the furthest periphery of my teenage past, the voices of Arch and Erica Nelson, with their strong opinions and worries about my family, about Mum in our midst, about her hands in the gloves. And finally Craig, a complete stranger, speaking from the television in the corner of my living room, explaining what had happened to my mother and to Alison. To all of us.
SIXTEEN
The Funeral
Mum started to go downhill herself not long after Dad died. The first sign was her leg, her left leg. She’d always loved smoking. She smoked when we were babies and when we were children and she didn’t stop when so many others did. When importuned to stop, she used to say, Oh, it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t cause cancer—they’ve made it up.
No, Mum, they’ve done studies . . .
She’d break across my words, It’s not true. It doesn’t cause lung cancer.
I’d end up laughing, because what could you do? Her ability to be irrational in the face of widely established fact was not usually so blatant, but around her own health, it was absolute. By the time she contacted me, her leg had swollen to double its normal size, was bright red and causing her agony. A thrombosis, presumably. She was popping painkillers like Smarties, the only pil
ls I ever knew her to take. But she would not go to a doctor.
This was a mighty change. In a letter of Dad’s from 1953, he describes her relationship to doctors then: One of the forms of M’s illness is a compulsion to change doctors upon impulse. She’s never been to less than three or four each year for the last few years, and in peak periods to nearly a dozen within twelve months. She’s had about four since we came here [six months in Canberra] . . .
Her attitude to doctors changed halfway through her life, near the time she left Armidale, so I hadn’t known that she had become phobic about doctors until the leg. I begged her to see someone. I said I would go with her. I promised that nothing would happen unless she agreed to it.
No, she’d say, with her wonky smile. It’ll get better.
It went on for two weeks. I rang or visited every day. The pain was palpable; she could think of nothing else.
I have a doctor friend, a nice woman, I cajoled. I’ll bring her here with me. You won’t have to go anywhere.
No. She was adamantine. I will get better.
I wrote poems to help myself get a grip. In one I reflected that we were not put upon, Mark and I, by a mother expecting to be coddled. And just when I was deciding to ignore her wishes, to take my friend to her, she rang.
I’m better, she said, giggling. I told you. I knew it would be all right.
It couldn’t be true. I jumped in the car.
But it was. Her leg was nearly normal in size again with only traces of the dreadful red, but it was her face that told the real story: the pain had gone. I’m still taking two or three a day, she said, but I’m better!
When Mark and I tried to understand her reluctance to get help, we theorised that the last time she’d seen a medico was when she’d been certified, back in 1961 when she was forty-five. The word ‘doctor’ presumably included notions of ‘police’, ‘coercion’ and ‘betrayal’ for her. No wonder she was such a tough nut.
She never had prescription glasses. In her last twenty or thirty years, she bought spectacles in op-shops, ones she swore made everything bright and clear and were better than if you’d had them made specially.