Mother of Ten

by J. B. Rowley

  Dad would sometimes join in the singing sessions but often, tired after his day’s work, he preferred to sit in Pop’s chair reading the paper.

  Less than a year after we moved into our new home, Mum was expecting another child. Dad had joked that with Irene, now three years old, sleeping in their room they would have little opportunity for ‘hanky panky’ as she grew older. He told Mum they should ‘make hay while the sun shines’. That had made my mother blush but apparently they had done just as he suggested. Peter, Mum and Dad’s seventh child, was born in May 1960.

  “Look at that,” Dad said proudly when he first laid eyes on the newborn. “Another chip off the old block, eh, Mum?”

  My mother might have been subdued in her response because she had lost a lot of blood and was suffering from anaemia. The doctor warned her against having more children. However, my father was always in high spirits on the birth of a new child and Peter’s birth was no exception. He held the baby, cocooned in soft rugs, high above his head to show him off to the rest of us.

  “Look at him. You couldn’t wish for a healthier baby,” he grinned. As Peter’s tiny fingers grasped his, he added, “and strong as a Mallee bull like his dad. Comes from good stock, he does.”

  I am sure the arrival of Peter gave my parents hope. Dad’s poor health must have weighed heavily on their minds. They might have reasoned that there could be nothing seriously wrong with Dad if he was able to produce a strong, healthy child.

  As time passed, Dad’s tiredness became worse and the strenuous physical labour of work in the bush eventually proved too much for him despite his determined efforts to continue. Peter had not long passed his second birthday when Dad had to give up being a wood merchant. He started working as a yardman at Marshall’s hotel, known to the locals as ‘the top pub’ because it was at the top end of the main street. There was another hotel at the bottom end of the main street which was, of course, ‘the bottom pub’.

  I am not sure that a diagnosis had been made at this stage because I never heard either of my parents mention the name of my father’s illness. With my ability to make myself into an invisible listener, I feel I would have discovered this secret if they had known it. On the other hand, it is possible they had by this stage been informed that it was myeloid leukaemia but did not want to say the words aloud.

  It must have seemed incomprehensible to Mum that a young man, after all Dad had not yet reached forty when the symptoms first appeared, so physically strong and positive and passionate about life could suddenly have that life threatened by a serious illness.

  I think my father faced the possibility that he would succumb to the disease before Mum did. I am sure that each time he went to the Alfred Hospital for further tests, now often accompanied by Nan, Mum imagined they would find a cure. She probably envisaged him running through the door on his return with jubilation beaming from every fibre in his body. The nightmare would be over and she could smile and say, “See, I knew you would get better.” Instead, he seemed to become weaker.

  He had started to talk about making preparations ‘in case anything happens to me’. They went through the paperwork together and wrote to the appropriate government agencies to ensure she had all the necessary documents to claim the widow’s pension.

  “We’ll always have a roof over our heads, that’s the most important thing,” Mum said.

  Dad nodded. “But you’ll have a lot of mouths to feed too, Myrtle. You’ll need money for that and for their education.”

  “That’s what the Child Endowment is for,” she told him with a smile. “With that and the widow’s pension we’ll be just fine. Not that I intend being a widow any time soon, mind.”

  She laughed but his serious face sobered her mood.

  “Honestly, Dad. We’ll be all right,” she said. “Bobby is already doing part time work and Maxie will do the same. They’ll both be working full time soon and June is smart enough to get a scholarship. As far as food is concerned, well, we don’t buy that much anyway, what with all the food everyone gives us.”

  People in the community were aware of Dad’s illness and wanted to help. The local shopkeepers knew him well. There was always something given to Mum every time she went up to the street. The baker gave her bread he said he could not sell. The grocer gave her the biscuits that had become broken in the tins and could not be sold. The market gardener gave her boxes of fruit and vegetables. Often she simply found boxes of food that had been left at the back door by individual townspeople.

  “Don’t worry,” Mum told him, “you have so many friends in this town your family is not likely to go without if anything happens to you.”

  He sighed. There was so much in that sigh; his regret, his loss and his grief.

  Looking back, I know I missed much of their story simply because I was absorbed in my own world but their love for each other was always evident.

  I can imagine them that night in the warmth of their bed as they lay quietly together. Across the room Irene and Peter lay sleeping in the cot Irene had once had to herself. In that silence, in the darkness of their bedroom, Mum might have finally accepted the cruel reality that her husband, the man who had loved and protected her year after year with the deepest passion and the purest commitment, was sick enough to die. I imagine the tears rolling down her cheeks. I see her hand reaching for his under the covers and squeezing it. I see his fingers closing over hers.

  Chapter 13

  All this time, and for many more years, we (the Rowley children) were completely unaware of the Bishop children; our three half-siblings who were living out their lives without their mother.

  At the age of three and a half, Myrtle’s first child Bertie was placed in a Home temporarily when the marriage of Myrtle and Henry Bishop fell apart in 1942. In those days the NSW Child Welfare Department issued licences to ‘respectable’ women who wished to set up a Children’s Home. A woman who needed to find a way to survive without a husband, such as a widow or deserted wife, was able to make a living by converting her house to a Children’s Home. No qualifications were required, no training was necessary. Children might be placed in such a Home permanently or for a period of time during a family crisis. It seems likely that Bertie, Audrey and Noel were placed temporarily in a Home of this kind.

  Unlike his sister and brother, Bertie was taken out of care after a short time. He went to live with his paternal grandmother and grandfather at 536 David Street, Albury, where he stayed until he was around nine years old. Why were the other two children left in institutions? Perhaps there were financial reasons but I believe the main reason was that Agnes Bishop had got it into her head that Audrey and Noel were not her son’s children. This woman’s spitefulness came through strongly during my research into what happened to my mother. I have no doubt that Agnes was the instigator behind the rumours and events that led to Myrtle’s three children being taken from her.

  Society made it easy for Agnes Bishop’s malevolence to bear fruit. At that time a woman could be declared an unfit mother, which would result in her children being removed from her care, simply because the children had been absent from school on several occasions. It was also a time when a neighbour or a relative, such as a child’s grandmother could, and often did, cause children to be placed in Homes even when the children were living in safe, secure and suitable family situations. Such an incident is related in Joanna Penglase’s book Orphans of the Living: Sylvia Baker’s maternal grandmother who ‘had never thought our father was good enough for her daughter’ asked the NSW Department to investigate how the children were being cared for after the children’s mother died. This resulted in Sylvia and her siblings being placed in a Home despite, or because of, the fact that the children’s father was willingly caring for his children with the help of a housekeeper.

  Bertie was not able to give me detailed information about his life with his grandparents but I imagine he spent his childhood engaged in activities common to other children living in Albury at the time:
picking mushrooms and blackberries, making ‘flying saucers’ out of dry cowpats, letting off firecrackers and indulging in other harmless mischief. He might have made a billycart out of a wooden fruit box from the grocer and raced it down a hill with other children. Perhaps his grandmother allowed him to go to the pictures when there was a Saturday matinee on at the local cinema.

  His grandparents cared for Bertie and looked after him. However, during his time with them, Bertie’s grandmother took the opportunity to poison his mind about his mother, telling him Myrtle was a slut and a bitch, among other things. This makes me very angry not just on my mother’s behalf but because of how it must have made Bertie feel to believe his mother was such a person and to grow up thinking she had callously abandoned him.

  Bertie recalled that as a young child he was once approached by a woman at the gate of the house in David Street. She alighted from a bicycle to hand him a gift of toys but he was quickly snatched away from her by his grandmother.

  “You mustn’t go near that woman. She’ll steal you away,” Agnes Bishop told him.

  The memory of this incident stayed with Bertie because he wondered if the woman offering the gift was his mother. From the description that he gave me when I met him, I believe it was. If this was Myrtle, her actions do not seem consistent with a mother who ‘deserted’ her children which was what Henry Bishop claimed. I also think the remark by Bertie’s paternal grandmother is revealing. She may have said it merely to frighten the child but her words could also suggest she thought that Myrtle might try to get her children back, which throws further doubt on the desertion accusation.

  Technically, perhaps Myrtle could be described as deserting her children for if she was being forced to take them on as a single parent she simply could not have done so. As a woman on her own in the 1940s and the daughter of a widow, Myrtle would not have stood a chance of being able to support herself and her children. She would not have been eligible to claim social security payments and work would not have been an option. Given the prejudices toward married women and/or mothers in the workforce at that time she would have found it almost impossible to get a job. With no kindergartens, child care centres or ‘before and after’ school care, she would also have had to find someone to take care of the children while she was at work. Myrtle would have found it as difficult as Joanna Penglase’s mother who was forced to place her daughters ‘in care’ in the 1940s. In Orphans of the Living, Joanna writes:

  ‘What else could my mother do? In the immediate post war era there was an acute housing shortage and very little government or community assistance. Women’s wages were low and not equal to a male – a breadwinner’s – wage. But how could my mother go to work, if she had found a job? Who would look after her children, one of them a baby? Even finding accommodation was difficult. She lived in a much stricter, more judgemental, moral environment than we do now, and women on their own – especially with children – were suspect.’ Joanna Penglase could just as easily be talking about my mother.

  I wonder if Myrtle allowed herself to be named a deserter, or perhaps was pressured to allow it, because that was the preferable option that would be acceptable grounds for divorce. The other options were adultery and cruelty, both of which would have resulted in significant newspaper coverage which, especially in a relatively small place like Albury, would have done a great deal of harm to the family’s reputation. This choice would also have made the children the targets of gossiping tongues.

  Perhaps Myrtle felt that she had virtually deserted her children because she had lost her will to care in the normal way as a result of post natal depression. People who were placed in Homes as children often mention they were put there as a result of their mother suffering a ‘nervous breakdown’ after the birth of a child. Such conditions were not discussed and often not considered worthy of medical treatment. In Myrtle’s case it might not have even been post-natal depression but simply depression as a result of spending over four years with an uncaring husband while enduring the manipulative influence of a mother-in-law who did not want her around. However, rather than desert her children, Myrtle appears to have made every effort to remain close to them until she eventually had to face the heartbreaking reality of her circumstances.

  From my knowledge of her as a mother I know that she would never willingly give up her children. Mum was a totally committed mother who went out of her way to make our young lives fun, interesting, healthy and educational. She spent time and thought on the things she could do with us, and for us, such as making an Easter egg trail so that we would have fun following the route and finding eggs hidden in unlikely places – a few small chocolate eggs but mostly painted boiled hen’s eggs. It didn’t matter what sort of eggs, Mum understood that it was the fun of searching and discovering that gave us joy. I know she would have given the same commitment to her first three children had circumstances been different. Perhaps her unceasing dedication to us was partly because of shame that she had had to relinquish her other children but if that is the case it only reinforces my opinion that she cared about them.

  When I first began my research I, in my ignorance, could not understand why she had not fought tooth and nail to keep her children with her. I am now in a better position to understand the complex issues involved. Sometimes I berate myself for having had such unkind thoughts and being so quick to pass judgement. There could have been several reasons why Myrtle did not, or could not, fight to keep her children. For one thing, she did not have the financial resources to take care of them. Added to that was the likelihood that she was bereft of the emotional resources to fight for them and because of that possibly felt they would be better off with their father or in a Home.

  It was not Myrtle but the children’s father who placed them in orphanages. Henry Bishop claimed, I assume in order to justify his actions, that Myrtle said she couldn’t look after the children. We don’t know for sure that Myrtle said that. After all, the statement comes from a man who did his very best to avoid his responsibility to his children and was only too ready to believe his mother’s malicious lies about his wife. However, if Myrtle did say it there could be many reasons why. Perhaps she meant she could not do it on her own and needed help. I also wonder if Henry Bishop told her she would receive no financial assistance from him. Since he believed at least two of the children were not his, he would have felt justified in withdrawing his financial support.

  Admittedly, in those days it would have been difficult for a single father to rear three children. Putting children in an orphanage or Home was not only a common solution to family breakdown but seen as appropriate and best for the children. Therefore, I must (grudgingly) allow that purely practical reasons might have been behind Henry Bishop’s decision to place his children in Homes. Whatever the reason, Audrey and Noel remained in institutions after Bertie went to live with his grandparents.

  At around the age of nine, Bertie became too wild for his grandmother to handle. The situation was apparently brought to a head when Bertie found some detonator caps in the glove box of an unlocked car. Not knowing what they were, but intrigued by them, he placed the caps in his pocket and continued on his way, which happened to be along the railway line. Perhaps still thinking about his new ‘toys’, he did not hear the train coming until it was almost too late. Bertie scuttled out of the way in time but the train driver reported the incident to the police. No doubt the train driver considered a young boy wandering along the railway tracks to be a tragedy waiting to happen. Had he also known about the detonator caps he would surely have been horrified. The Albury police, when they interviewed Bertie, were horrified and took the matter seriously. Bertie’s father, probably in response to a summons from Agnes Bishop, travelled from Queensland to Albury to sort out the problem.

  The aftermath of this incident which resulted in court proceedings was that the family decided it was time for Bertie’s father to take charge of his eldest son. Consequently, Bertie travelled with Henry Bishop by train to Manly
, Queensland 1500 kilometres away to join his step-mother and three half-siblings. A two-day journey on a steam train might have been a dream come true for a young boy but it was extremely unpleasant for nine-year-old Bertie who suffered with motion sickness the whole way.

  In his new home, Bertie experienced some initial adjustment difficulties. Agnes Bishop, who did not approve of her son’s second wife any more than she had approved of Myrtle, had given Bertie a mission. He was to cause as much trouble as he could in his new home with the aim of breaking up his father’s marriage. Clearly, no woman was good enough for Agnes Bishop’s son.

  Bertie was essentially an obedient child and did his best to carry out his grandmother’s wishes. He became so troublesome that he was sent for a period of time to Boys Town: a boys’ residential facility and school established by the De La Salle Brothers. In recent years, former residents have spoken of sexual and physical abuse they suffered in this facility. Boys Town was one of 150 orphanages and detention centres in Queensland under review by the Forde Inquiry which ‘encompassed the period from 1911 to 1999’. The Inquiry ‘found significant evidence of abuse and neglect of children’ which ‘included emotional, physical, sexual and systems abuse’. Bertie did not speak to me of his experience at Boys Town so I do not know if he was an abuse victim during his time there.

  He was eventually returned to the family home where his step-mother did her best to look after him and include him in the family. He enjoyed spending time with his father, especially helping him tinker with cars. However, his previous behaviour had impacted on their relationship and they did not establish a close bond.