Mother of Ten

by J. B. Rowley

  “Don’t cry,” he said in his soft voice. “I won’t hurt you.”

  I hesitated, wanting to believe his words. I had no rational understanding of why I was crying. In my child mind I had no reason to distrust him.

  “I only wanted to play with this,” he said as he slipped his fingers inside the leg of my panties and touched the soft area between my legs.

  The murmur of the car engine changed as though the car was slowing down. The man withdrew his fingers and looked around nervously again. Then he picked me up and placed me once more in the bike basket. He wheeled the bike along the track back to the highway where he mounted the bicycle and resumed pedalling toward town. I had stopped crying but I was confused, not sure what had just happened. I had now removed the illusion that the man was my father but he had been gentle. He had kept his promise; he had not hurt me. Now he was taking me home. Everything seemed normal. I was with an adult who was looking after me.

  Meanwhile back at home, as I found out later from my brothers, Bobby and Maxie were receiving a wrathful scolding from our mother. She was aghast when they returned from the tip without me.

  “You left her there?”

  “She wouldn’t come with us.”

  “So you just left her there to walk home on her own?”

  “She won’t have to walk. There was a man there with a bike.”

  “Yeah. He’ll probably give her a ride home.”

  “A man? Who?”

  “Dunno. A blackfella.”

  I can only imagine the fear that would have surged through my mother as she listened to my brothers casually relate how they had left me at the rubbish tip with a stranger. She must have exercised a great deal of discipline to keep that fear and, no doubt, her anger from translating into panic. Her tone was sharp as she admonished my brothers.

  “How many times have I told you about not speaking to strangers? Yet you go and leave your sister there with a stranger?”

  My brothers later told me they had ‘never seen her so mad’. ‘Her eyes were like a tiger’s.’ Faced with the urgent problem of finding me, Mum didn’t waste time in punishing them at that moment. She rapped out orders at them.

  “You two stay here and look after the babies. Do you hear me? You stay here. Keep an eye on those babies. If anything happens to either of them while I am gone your lives won’t be worth living when your father gets home.”

  Bobby and Maxie had already realised that they were in line for a ‘jolly good hiding’ when Dad got home. They were smart enough not to do anything to make it worse. Both of them searched their brains desperately for something that might put them back in Mum’s good books.

  “I think it was Jacky, Mum,” said Maxie.

  “Yeah. It looked like Jacky, Mum. He’s not a stranger, is he?”

  Jacky was an Aboriginal man, one of the local Kurnai people, who often worked in the bush with my father and the other timber workers. His wife, Lizzie, would sometimes bring their children, two boys and three girls, out to our place when the men were away working. We would all play together while Mum and Lizzie sat and drank cups of tea.

  “Good for your Junie to have some girls to play with for a change, eh?” Lizzie would say.

  Mum liked Lizzie and her children. She loved the way Lizzie’s kids flashed big cheeky grins at her.

  “Your kids are always so happy, Lizzie,” she would say.

  Lizzie would puff up with pride and nod her head.

  “Naughty little varmints, that’s what they are,” she’d say, “but, yeah, they’re happy so I don’t mind. So long as they’re happy, eh?”

  The thought that I might be with Jacky or someone else we knew may have given my mother some relief but she continued to glare at my brothers.

  “For your sakes, it’d better be someone we know,” she said. “And you’d better hope she hasn’t gone off on her own and got lost in the bush.”

  With no phone and no vehicle, walking back to the rubbish tip herself offered the best course of action to Mum even though she was six months pregnant. She could have gone to our neighbours at the dairy a kilometre away but that might have wasted time; she could not be sure of finding someone there with a vehicle.

  As she hurried along Duggans Road to the highway that day Mum must have been hoping that it had been Lizzie’s husband at the tip and, thinking I would be safe with him, that he had decided to bring me home on his bike. She might also have wondered, though, why Jacky hadn’t simply made sure my brothers took me home with them.

  Jacky and I were less than a kilometre from home when Mum saw us. She stopped and waited, her hand resting on her swollen stomach. As the distance between us closed, I could see the tension in her face. A half smile appeared, perhaps because she recognised Jacky. Her eyes were on me as Jacky braked and put a foot on the ground to stop the bike. With the uncanny intuition of a mother, Mum saw something in my face that caused her half smile to disappear.

  “Are you all right, love?” she said.

  “Yes, Mum. I got some books from the tip.” Afraid that I would get into trouble for not going with my brothers or for what had happened with Jacky, I wanted desperately to distract her.

  “Did you, love?” Her eyes were gentle as she looked into mine. I was too young to know that eyes can reveal much so I did not take evasive action by looking away or lowering my eyelids. My mother apparently saw enough to know that nothing dreadful had happened to me but that something was not quite right.

  “Jacky, what are you doing with my daughter?” She said as she helped me out of the basket and set me down. I could not see the look in her eyes but the tone of her voice revealed her suspicion.

  “Bringin’ her home to you, missus. Those brothers, they left her there, left her at the rubbish tip. Too far for little girl to walk, missus.”

  I heard apprehension in Jacky’s voice.

  “I think you had better go, Jacky,” said my mother.

  Jacky rode off on his bicycle. Mum and I walked home. She never said another word to me about that day.

  I was surprised when I did not receive a scolding or a hiding for not going home with my brothers. Even though my naivety prevented me from fully understanding why, I knew that what Jacky had done was wrong. However, I saw myself as the guilty one and was determined that my mother should not find out so I never spoke about it. The incident became just another adventure in long days full of adventures. It wasn’t until years later when a friend from high school days mentioned Jacky’s name that my memory opened up its album of pictures and showed them to me as bright and clear as the day it had happened. I also discovered that the town kids knew Jacky was a ‘perve’.

  I don’t think my mother discussed her suspicions about Jacky with Lizzie. How could she, after all? However, she must have been concerned for Lizzie’s daughters because one day she dropped a hint. Mum and Lizzie were sitting on the veranda where they always sat. I was at the end of the veranda playing ‘knuckle bones’ with Poppy, one of Lizzie’s daughters who was the same age as me. I pricked up my ears when I heard my name mentioned.

  “Junie still miss her father when he’s away?” asked Lizzie.

  “Yes, she pines for him like a puppy pines for its mother.”

  I heard Lizzie’s rich laugh. There was a pause before my mother spoke again.

  “Her father’s very good with her. Some men are not good with their daughters. And Lizzie...”

  My mother paused again. A subtle change in her tone caught my attention. I looked over at them.

  “Some fathers,” continued Mum, “can be...”

  She broke off. Lizzie looked across at her. Mum didn’t turn to look at her. Instead she stared out at the bush.

  “Well,” continued my mother, “sometimes they can be too friendly with their daughters.”

  Lizzie turned away, cradled her cup of tea in her hands and also looked out at the bush. The two women sat in silence.

  “Too friendly,” said Lizzie finally. “Yeah, I know what
cha mean. We have to look after our girls, eh?”

  As she placed her cup back down on the saucer, Lizzie looked over and caught me eagerly digesting their conversation. Her face broke out in a broad grin.

  “Whatcha doin’, you two? Listenin’ to grown-up talk? Haven’t ya got better things to be doin’?”

  Poppy and I giggled, gathered up our knuckles bones, joined hands and ran away with the laughter of our mothers following us.

  Knowing what I know now, I wonder if my ‘adventure’ brought thoughts of Myrtle’s ‘lost’ children to her mind. Did she wonder about their safety? Did the guilt of not being there to protect them surge to the surface? Did she worry that Audrey, now a teenager, might need protection and advice?

  Chapter 7

  My mother’s pregnancy resulted in the safe delivery of a healthy baby girl at Orbost Hospital in November, 1956. This time my father was singing Goodnight Irene. As with all his children, he enjoyed interacting with Irene from the beginning. He often held the baby in his arms and rocked her back and forth to put her to sleep or to sooth her.

  Although Dad enjoyed tactile involvement as a proud father, Mum was definitely the expert with babies. I found her casual competence fascinating. When the twins were little, I was often with her when she was changing them. She needed me to keep one occupied while she attended to the other one. She would lay the baby out on a ‘bunny rug’, push up his little singlet and rub his tummy playfully to distract him while she undid the large safety pins on each side of his nappy. Then she would quickly remove the dirty nappy, fold it over and place it to one side. I loved the way she would lift up both his chubby legs in one hand, like a trussed chicken, and wipe his bottom with a damp cloth. If he was red and chafed she would rub Vaseline over his skin before lowering his bottom down onto a clean nappy.

  The next step was to sprinkle talcum powder over the lower part of his body. Sometimes she allowed me to do this. All during this process Mum would keep the baby distracted by occasionally kissing his stomach, tweaking his nose or talking to him with her face close to his. The final step was the trickiest to manoeuvre because regardless of which twin it was, he hated having the new nappy put on. However, Mum folded up the corners of the nappy and deftly slipped the large safety pins through the folds of fabric before his protest had a chance to get into full swing.

  I also helped her with other household chores. I don’t remember her ever asking me to help. Being with her was a natural part of my life and she simply included me in what she was doing. Sometimes we would pick fruit from the trees in the orchard. Mum reincarnated this home grown fruit in various ways. She made fruit pies, bottled some of it, stewed some of it and made much of it into jam. I loved her plum jam because she always left the pips in. I enjoyed discovering them in the jam that I spread thickly over my bread, and sucking on them.

  One job we all wanted to do for Mum was collecting the eggs from the chook house. We would fight to be the chosen one.

  “Can I, Mum? Can I? Can I?”

  “I wanna do it, Mum.”

  “It’s my turn. You did it yesterday.”

  “I wanna do it.”

  Our chooks were good layers so what we did not need for our own use Mum exchanged for other foodstuffs such as milk from the dairy. Wrapping up the eggs was another job she did with casual ease. She wrapped each one individually and yet kept them together so that she ended up with a rectangular block of six eggs snugly enclosed in newspaper.

  One Saturday morning about six months after Irene was born a new arrival of a different kind had my father in a state of excitement.

  Saturdays and Sundays provided us kids with hours of adventure and wide open spaces to ramble. Apart from the thrill of visiting the rubbish tip, we had sheep to chase, rams to ride, blackberries and mushrooms to pick. We tried to entice rabbits out of their burrows and startled goannas out of hollow logs. Having the disadvantage of being a girl and younger than Bobby and Maxie, I was not always permitted to roam about the countryside.

  On the Saturday morning of the new arrival, I was helping my mother in the vegetable garden. Mum’s vegetable garden was extensive. Pumpkins sprawled all along a side fence, potatoes grew in profusion among the rows of peas and beans and tomatoes. She always had a large patch of rhubarb; a favourite vegetable of hers. The vegetable patch was actually a source of delight and discovery for us kids. We searched for hidden potatoes and watched to see how big the pumpkins would get. We especially loved eating fresh pea pods straight off the vine. Mum and I were picking peas on this day when the honking of a car horn interrupted us.

  The twins, now almost five years old, were playing together close by. The two boys had evolved into very different individuals. Georgie was a serious child who hardly smiled and was inclined to be a little chubby while Kevin was slim and agile and radiated cheekiness with his dimpled smile. At the sound of the horn, the twins stopped playing.

  “Car, Mum,” said Kevin.

  Mum smiled at him. She dropped a handful of pea pods into the pot that was already three quarters full of fresh green pods, then placed it in the shade behind the plants.

  “Come on,” she said. Like little ducklings, we all followed her as she started off toward the front of the house to see what was happening. The car horn sounded again as we rounded the corner of the house.

  There in the driveway stood a large black saloon, its motor still running. Two headlights stuck out like overgrown ears on either side of the long bonnet snout. Standing by the open driver’s door, with one foot on the running board stood my father, his old navy beret cocked to one side on his head. A grin lit up his handsome, angular face. In that grin my mother might have seen remnants of the cheeky young soldier he had been when she first met him more than ten years before. He beamed at her, like a kid proud of procuring some treasure that he never thought he would find.

  Behind my father stood his good friend Gus McCole, a gentle giant even taller than my father’s six feet. Gus McCole was well known in the district as an expert axeman. He was held in high regard, not just for his legendary prowess with the axe, but because he was a man of sincerity, loyalty and integrity. Gus’s kind eyes sparkled with merriment when he saw the look of surprise on my mother’s face. I noticed Bobby and Maxie, who must have heard the car arrive, running across the green paddock next door.

  “What is that?” my mother asked, her eyes fixed on the car.

  Dad and Gus threw back their heads and laughed. They looked like two little boys who had been up to mischief together. The twins ran to the vehicle. Kevin headed for the front of the car, leaning on the bumper and reaching up to try to touch a protruding headlight. Georgie watched his brother with a serious expression.

  Dad stopped laughing to answer Mum. “This, Mrs Rowley, is your new car.”

  Mrs Rowley was a term of endearment he sometimes used. In that title he proudly claimed her as his wife and declared his love for her.

  Mum took a step back as though fearful for her life.

  “My what?”

  “Your new car. I want you to have some form of transport for when I’m out in the bush. You and the kids are too isolated here.”

  “But I can’t drive this thing. I haven’t driven in years.”

  “Don’t worry. Once you’re in the driver’s seat it’ll all come back to you. Eh, Gus?”

  Gus, still grinning at Mum, nodded. “You’ll pick it up in no time, Myrtle.”

  “I’ll teach you how to drive this little baby,” said Dad eagerly. He was always keen to instruct her in new skills.

  “Teaching me is one thing but I’ll need to get a licence.”

  “Of course you’ll need a licence. But with me teaching you, you’ll have your licence before you can say Jack Robinson.”

  Mum rolled her eyes in mock disbelief. “Where on earth did you get it? We can’t afford a new car.”

  “It’s not exactly new; it’s a 1928 Erskine,” said Dad. “And she won’t cost us anything except registration a
nd running expenses.”

  Mum widened her eyes in surprise.

  “Gus found it lying around in a shed.”

  Gus laughed. “That’s right, Myrtle. This old Erskine has been sitting around doing nothing for years. What earthly good is that? One of the best cars ever made, this little beauty. Might as well put her to good use, I reckon.”

  It was no surprise that the generous Gus McCole had come to our rescue. He and his wife Mavis were not well off and yet they were always ready to help anyone out.

  Dad stepped back and gestured at the gleaming automobile. “Isn’t she something?”

  My mother’s expression no doubt conveyed her opinion that it was just a black car. Seeing Kevin was attempting to climb up onto the front of it, Dad gently pulled him away. Gus stepped forward and hoisted Georgie up onto his shoulders. Bobby and Maxie arrived panting with exertion.

  “Can we go for a ride?” they chorused.

  Without waiting for an answer, they climbed into the back seat scrambling through separate doors in an attempt to beat each other inside.

  “Come on, love. Hop into the driver’s seat,” said Dad.

  Mum laughed and made no move toward the car.

  Gus offered encouragement. “Go on. Take her for a spin.”

  Mum shook her head. “I’m the one who’ll be in a spin.”

  Dad was not going to take no for an answer. His excitement about his new acquisition was infectious but Mum continued to eye the black vehicle thoughtfully. Despite her apprehension, she was no doubt considering the advantages of having a car to use while Dad was away. Dad sensed she was ready to yield.

  “Come on, Mum. Just take her down to the gate. Get a feel for her.”

  He carried Kevin to the car.

  “Let’s put these two little tykes in the back with their brothers.”