Mother of Ten

by J. B. Rowley

  The day Dad came back from town after seeing the doctor he announced that he had to go to Melbourne for more tests.

  “They seem to think I might have some sort of blood disorder,” he said. “I told the doc there was nothing wrong with my blood; good blood. Rowley blood, I told him. But he wasn’t having it; thinks it might be serious. They want me to report to the Alfred Hospital next Friday.”

  Mum did not know what to say.

  “Could be a virus,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Dad smiled ruefully. “That’s what the doctor said. It could be just a virus; some sort of new virus upsetting the balance of blood cells, or something like that.”

  Mum smiled hopefully.

  Dad decided to drive down to Melbourne on the day of his appointment at the Alfred Hospital, setting off around two in the morning. We all went. It was too far for Dad to drive on his own as he was not well, although he protested that he was ‘perfectly all right’. Mum could not go with him unless we went too. They packed us into the back of the truck and set off. Dad had rigged up a makeshift canopy over the tray at the back to make a mobile bedroom, with blankets and pillows from our beds. Mum nursed my sister Irene on her lap in the cabin.

  Dad knew the way well. We had made many trips to the Alfred Hospital before with my brother Kevin (one of the twins) who had epilepsy and suffered with sudden and severe convulsions.

  I’ll never forget the first time I saw him having a fit. He lay on the kitchen floor, his head yanked back by an invisible force. His thin body jerked up and down as though in response to sudden electrical shocks. Legs kicked. Arms flailed. Eyes rolled upward. Lips turned blue. His breathing sounded like a dentist’s suction hose. White froth spilled out of his open mouth.

  My mother ran to him and tried to hold his head still. “Get me a pillow,” she yelled, “and a blanket.”

  We all stood around gaping, my three other brothers and me.

  “Quickly,” yelled my mother. Panic warped her voice to an unrecognisable screech.

  I ran as fast as my eight-year-old legs could carry me, grabbed a blanket and pillow from my parents’ bed, ran back and dropped them on the floor next to Mum. She deftly slipped the pillow under my brother’s head and draped the blanket over him. All the while, his body continued to jerk like a crazy, robotic machine.

  When he was quiet, my mother carried him to his bed and made sure he was warm. He slept for hours afterward.

  Mum had become very efficient in handling Kevin’s sudden seizures. On instructions from the doctor, she always had a soft wooden peg handy to place in his mouth lest he start to swallow his tongue. He had such an angelic face, it was weird and frightening to see it distorted and grotesque during his fits.

  Our journey to Melbourne was not easy. Much of the road was bumpy and the springs in the truck’s seat that were threatening to push through the upholstery would have made the trip uncomfortable for my parents. Added to this discomfort was the noise coming from the back where their non-angelic kids were not sleeping. Dad made regular stops to reprimand us. Each time he stopped, he was bombarded with complaints.

  “Maxie keeps rolling over onto my blanket.”

  “She keeps moving around and waking everyone up.” (‘She’ was the way my brothers referred to me when they were annoyed with me – which was most of the time.)

  “Bobby snores.”

  “Kevin lets off poot poots,” said Georgie.

  Kevin giggled.

  “And they stink,” added Georgie.

  When Dad had finally had enough of the frequent stopping to adjudicate our squabbles he used his sternest tone to threaten us.

  “One more peep,” he said, shining the torch on us. “One more peep out of any of you and I’ll have the strap around your legs.”

  This was met with subdued silence from inside the back of the truck.

  “Do you hear me?” he roared.

  None of us spoke. With eyes on the belt around his waist, we nodded our heads, intimidated by his tone and his threat.

  “Now lie down, all of you.”

  We obeyed meekly.

  “And I don’t care who is bumping into who. You can’t expect to be sleeping in the back of a truck and not have someone bumping into you. It’s not the Ritz you know.”

  He waited until we all settled back with our blankets curled around our thin bodies, eyes closed feigning deep and peaceful sleep. His anger, which was exaggerated for optimum effect, subsided as quickly as it had come. When he was satisfied we had settled, he pulled the canopy down and tied the ropes. We heard his footsteps returning to the cabin, heard the door open and bang shut. Then the truck began to move again.

  It was shortly after dawn when we reached the outskirts of the city. Dad pulled the truck over to the side of the road and cut the engine. I heard my mother’s voice, groggy from slumber.

  “Get some sleep,” she urged. “I’ve been sleeping most of the way. I’m fine now. I’ll keep an eye on the kids.”

  He slept in the driver’s seat stretching out his long legs as best he could. There was no sound from the back; my brothers were all asleep. The bush was quiet except for an occasional rustle in the undergrowth. I peeped through a hole in the canopy and could just make out the outline of dark trees. Hours passed while I watched the darkness of night merging into morning light as my mother must have done. Once, Mum quietly eased herself out of the cabin and crept stealthily around to the back to peek through the gaps in the canopy to check on us. She would have seen me apparently fast asleep.

  When shafts of light streaked through the trees and kookaburras and magpies called through the leaves, Mum woke Dad. I heard his boots scrunching the twigs and leaves underneath as he strode into the trees to relieve himself. When he returned, he opened up the canopy and we all headed for the trees while Dad cranked the truck back to life. Once we were all safely back in the truck, the last leg of our journey began.

  I cannot remember what we did while Dad was in the hospital. I assume poor Mum tried to keep us occupied and under control in the park across the road. No doubt she had sandwiches and thermos flasks of water.

  On the way home, I remember Dad saying to Mum, “They don’t know what’s wrong with me, love.”

  He sounded as though the weight of the world was on his shoulders. Mum said nothing.

  There were to be more trips to the Alfred Hospital and many more tests before my father’s illness was diagnosed.

  Chapter 10

  Apart from the trips to the Alfred Hospital, my father’s illness did not change our lives at first; the lives of us kids that is. At the weekends we got up to our usual mischief. During the week we, the five who were school age, attended Orbost North Primary School which was a three kilometre walk.

  Mum usually walked with us to the end of Duggans Road where it intersected with the highway. She issued strict instructions that we not walk on the road or in the State forest but through the trees that formed a border between farmland and the highway. The best part of going to school was getting there. Along the way we looked for tadpoles in ponds, frightened birds from their nests and indulged in other playful antics such as mooing at the cows that sometimes lingered along the fences. In some sections, the smell of fresh cow dung and wet hay followed us, as did the flies. Our backs were usually covered in a layer of these black insects. Slapping one another’s back to cause a swarm of the pesky flies to scatter through the air was lots of fun.

  At the time I gave no thought to what it was like for Mum after we went to school. Now, however, I do wonder how she fared on her own with just one small child for company and only the bush for a neighbour. She was safe from the mrarts that wandered the forest because, for the most part, they only appeared to Aboriginal people. But what about her own phantoms; the ghosts of the living? To me she seemed to be a happy, dedicated mother but of course I knew nothing of what she was hiding. ‘...to those around me I appear quite normal,’ states Cheryl King who was forced to give up her child at b
irth. ‘However, no-one knows the torment that I suffer regularly. There are so many nights that I go to bed to cry and secretly mourn the family I have lost.’ (Releasing the Past: Mothers’ stories of their stolen babies)

  My mother’s torment might have haunted her during the quiet daylight hours when my father was away and we were at school. Driving into town as a distraction was not an option even though she now had a car. The Erskine had been replaced, perhaps because of ‘injuries’ received when Mum was driving, by an old blue ute. The ute was used only when absolutely necessary. Mum and Dad did not have enough money to ‘waste’ petrol on driving the car around ‘for no good reason’. Of course she would have been kept busy with housework, the garden and cooking but her mind was not as occupied as it usually was. She corresponded regularly with her mother, cousins and aunts in Albury. Writing these letters must have stirred buried memories. Would she have been troubled by thoughts of what had happened to her in Albury? To ensure the past did not bear down on her, she might have kept herself busy reading the short stories and serials in women’s magazines and listening to the wireless. I know she always stopped at lunch time to listen to a fifteen minute radio soap opera broadcast on the ABC called Blue Hills.

  I think Mum looked forward our visits to Nan and Pop. The Sundays that Dad was at home we usually went into Orbost to have a roast dinner with our grandparents. Mum must have missed the companionship she enjoyed with her cousins in Albury and the close relationship she had with her mother. With Nan, she could share some of her experiences as a mother and perhaps seek her advice.

  Nan and Pop had once owned a dairy farm but by this time they were living in Salisbury Street, Orbost. Nan was short and fat and round and she enchanted us kids. She increased our fascination by telling us she had ‘Gypsy’ blood and relating all sorts of exotic stories about faraway places. Pop, who had spent solitary days on the road as a drover, was quiet, thin and gentle. He seemed to spend a lot of time sitting in his favourite chair or pottering about in the shed. In my memory, Pop was always an old man but Nan said he had been a very handsome young man with wavy black hair and Valentino eyes when she met him. (Rudolph Valentino was a sex symbol of the silent movies who apparently had dark, smouldering eyes.) According to Nan, all the girls were after Pop but his smouldering eyes were firmly fixed on her.

  It was not just Mum who looked forward to seeing Nan and Pop. We all loved going to their place for Sunday dinner, which was a midday meal as lunch was called dinner in those days. Nan and Mum cooked the meal together in Nan’s kitchen which was at the rear of the house at one end of the back verandah. The kitchen had cupboards along one wall and a heavy wooden table pushed up against another. A long bench with a sink was strategically placed along the opposite wall where a window overlooked the side path. Anyone using the path to come to the house, which was almost everyone because the front door was rarely used, would be spotted immediately by Nan who spent a lot of her time at the kitchen bench. The bench stopped short of the remaining wall leaving a corner with enough space for a chair; Pop’s big old comfortable chair. On cold nights Pop always had the best seat in the house because it was right by the open fire. Next to the fireplace was the large wood stove where the meals were cooked and which always had a kettle of water keeping warm at the back.

  Although the table in the kitchen was used for most meals, we had Sunday roast in the ‘formal dining room’. I thought this room, with its large fireplace and tall bay windows, very grand. Nan’s best china was displayed in a walnut cabinet with glass doors. A gleaming mahogany table occupied pride of place in the centre of the room. A fat round ceramic vase bursting with freshly cut hydrangeas, their full round heads verifying Nan’s skills as a gardener, sat on the table. This piece of antique furniture that had been handed down through generations of Nan’s family, had an extension leaf. Its mystical ability to change size was a source of fascination for me and my siblings. We all gathered around to watch as Dad opened the table, unfolded the hidden panel and clicked it into place. Our eyes gleamed with delight to see the oval table magically transformed into what seemed to us to be a majestic banquet table. Sunday dinner was as grand as the room: roast lamb with gravy, potatoes, pumpkin and peas followed by jelly and cream.

  The day Pop died my grandmother came out to our place in a taxi to tell us the news. It was January 1959, less than a year after my father’s first trip to the Alfred Hospital. January that year recorded temperatures as high as 107.8 degrees (42.11 Celsius) in East Gippsland. Consequently, Orbost was surrounded by bushfires. In fact, the township itself had been under threat by a fire that jumped the Snowy River. Fire had wiped out thousands of acres of bush. Forest fires were burning around our place on the Bonang. It was not until mid February that the fire danger began to pass.

  Pop’s death was not unexpected because he had been ill for several years but that did not make it any easier for Nan. They had been a good match and Pop had been an excellent husband and father. Nan would miss him.

  Not long after Pop died, Nan told Dad she did not want to live on her own.

  “There’s no reason why you and Myrtle and the kids can’t move in with me, George,” she said.

  Dad nodded. He knew his mother was not really concerned about living on her own; it was his situation she was thinking of.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want, Mum?”

  “What am I going to do with the extra rooms?” said Nan. “Besides I’d be grateful for Myrtle’s company and a bit of help around the house.”

  Nan smiled across at my mother.

  “You won’t have much room if my brood moves in with you, Mum.”

  “We’ll all fit in here just fine.”

  My mother laughed. “The kids’ll drive you crazy.”

  Nan smiled. “Let me worry about that, Myrtle love. The way things are you’ll be much better off here in town with me. I would have suggested it sooner but you know how poorly Pop has been. It wouldn’t have been fair on him, or you and the kids for that matter, to have you move in while he was ill.”

  Mum nodded her understanding.

  “I know George worries about you,” Nan continued. “And so do I, out there on your own with the kids when he’s away. Worrying about his family won’t help him get over his illness.”

  Mum tilted her head and threw a teasing look at Dad.

  “Oh, you don’t need to worry about him, Mum. He’s as strong as a Mallee bull. He’ll be back to his old self in no time.”

  My grandmother smiled.

  “Of course he will. He’s always been strong and healthy. The doctors’ll sort him out as soon as they work out what it is; some new fangled virus no doubt. But for the time being they want him to do lighter work, don’t they?”

  Mum nodded.

  “No work, more like it,” said Dad with a dismissive laugh. “Honestly, these doctors must think a bloke’s made of money; wanting me to lie around all day doing nothing.”

  Mum and Nan exchanged smiles at the thought of Dad with nothing to do.

  “Well, anyway,” said Nan. “Light work and doctors’ appointments will be much easier to manage if you’re with me here in Orbost and if you have to go back to the Alfred Hospital you won’t have to worry about Myrtle and the kids. Besides, it’ll be good for me; stop me fretting for Pop.”

  And so the decision to move into town was made. My brothers were enthusiastic about the idea.

  “Grouse!” said Bobby. “I’ll be able to visit my friends from school.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Maxie. “We won’t have to walk twenty thousand miles to school anymore either.”

  (Maxie was always prone to exaggeration.)

  “We can climb Nan’s apple trees,” said Kevin.

  “Yeah, and we can play in the paddock next door,” said Georgie.

  The double block next to Nan and Pop’s place was empty and usually covered in long grass.

  When the time came to move, my brothers enthusiastically helped Dad with clean
ing our yard and packing up. My sister was too young to fully understand but joined in the general atmosphere of flurry and excitement, eagerly trying to help Mum. She obediently tottered out to the verandah with small pieces of rubbish and dropped them on the pile of unwanted items ready to be taken to the rubbish tip. I seemed to be the only one upset about moving. My mother tried to bring me round by highlighting the advantages of the move.

  “Just think, you won’t have such a long walk to school anymore.”

  That had no effect at all since I enjoyed the walk to school.

  “You can help Nan make scones and cakes.”

  Even this had no impact on my pig headed resistance. Mum tried one last time.

  “You’ll have lots of fun with Nan in the evenings. You know you like listening to her songs and stories.”

  That one almost weakened my resolve because I, like my brothers, loved sitting at Nan’s feet while she stomped out old tunes. She sat outside on a creaky wooden box singing folk songs and sea shanties, accompanying herself on the piano accordion and the mouth organ, and tapped her foot to the beat. Some of those sea shanties were quite bawdy and probably unfit for young ears, but that never stopped Nan. We were too young and probably too innocent to be aware of sexual innuendo; it was the music and the fun atmosphere we enjoyed and her stories were seductively scary.

  In the end, I was not persuaded by any of my mother’s arguments. Our small rented cottage nestled in the Australian bush had been the only home I knew. I hated the thought of being in town with houses and people everywhere. Stubbornly, I dug my heels in and refused to change my mind.

  Despite my opposition the move continued. Dad made frequent trips into town with an assortment of items piled high on the back of the truck. Bobby and Maxie squashed together in the cabin with Dad and helped with the unloading at the other end.

  The final day meant hours of hard work for my parents and excitement for my brothers. It was almost dark when the last piece of furniture had been loaded on the back of the truck. The boys had jumped up and spread themselves out among the household items and settled down for the journey to their new home. Mum carried Irene, who was sleeping and wrapped in rugs, out to the truck and settled her on the seat in the cabin.