I like to think that I have inherited resilience from my American great-grandmother and a degree of restlessness from the wandering Kerrs. My strongest memory of my grandmother is that she was great fun and a constant source of stories about her Sydney girlhood. She used to tell us tales of the Paddington streets, of the rag-and-bone man to whom she inadvertently sold her mother’s silver teapot. She told us how she would come home from school to find her drunken mother sitting on the front steps and had to cope, a story hotly denied by her son, my mother’s only brother, Norman. In one of my favourite stories, she was walking down Martin Place in Sydney when the elastic broke in her knickers, and she simply stepped out of them and left them there.
My grandmother was very much her own person. For one thing, she had changed her name by deed poll in her twenties because she didn’t like her birth name, Nell. Henceforth she was to be known as Helen, far more modern, and when grandchildren came along she was to be called Helen and never Grandma. She never admitted she was six years older than her husband.
Often it’s easier for children to communicate with a generation once removed. It was my grandmother who talked to me about sex. A school friend from the outback had explained to me the mating habits of sheep and cattle and I said, ‘My parents would never do anything so disgusting!’ Helen gave me a much better picture of the facts of life.
My paternal grandparents have no shape in my memory, but I have a very clear picture of Mum’s parents – Helen was short and plump, Will was tall and thin. From him and my mother I have brown eyes in a family whose members’ eyes are mainly blue. His theory was that sailors of the sixteenth-century Spanish Armada washed ashore in Devon, married the local girls and created a long line of dark-eyed descendants.
By 1944 fighting was concentrated in the Pacific and Mum and I were able to cross the Indian Ocean to rejoin Dad in Colombo. It was still a hazardous voyage and it was not easy to get passage on a ship from wartime Australia, although family reunions must have taken some priority. My father had not been on active war service, though potential invasion must have been stressful.
At 22 months of age I met my father for the first time. Has there ever been any research on the thousands of children of my generation who didn’t know their fathers in their early childhood? If those very early years are definitive in the formation of later character and personality, a whole generation has suffered from paternal deprivation. One of my friends remembers her father coming home, a strange man in uniform, and her screaming in terror every time she saw him. For the men coming home from war, family life must have been an uncomfortable experience.
In Colombo, once the danger of invasion had passed, life continued much as it had before. These were the dying days of the British Raj in India, but most of the Europeans in Ceylon were only vaguely aware of the rumblings of discontent. For my mother, it was a return to the life she had first experienced in 1937 – grand colonial bungalows, servants and a busy social program to fill the leisure time that servants enabled. There were clubs for Europeans only – the Garden Club, the Prince’s Club, the Colombo Swimming Club – race meetings and polo matches.
My very first memory as a child is of falling out of bed. Freudians might make something of that. We were up-country, staying on a tea estate. I fell out of bed in the dark, not onto the floor but into the mosquito net tucked around the mattress. I remember screaming with terror as I thrashed around in the netting and my parents rushing into the room. My father took me onto his knee, while my mother sorted out the bedding.
I didn’t know at the time, but this tea estate holiday was two months before the birth of my sister Louella. There had been no talk of a baby coming, and I suppose parents didn’t talk of such things to children. I remember very clearly falling off a swing in the garden in Colombo and running into the house crying, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ only to be told that Mummy had gone to the hospital ‘to get you a new baby’. But I didn’t want a new baby, I wanted my mother.
When Dad took me to visit my new sister at the Fraser Nursing Home, my strongest memory is of a snake under my mother’s bed. Throughout my life I wondered how I could have actually seen under the bed, and I thought perhaps I had imagined seeing that snake. A few years ago I went back to the hospital and my memory of 60 years before was crystal clear. I remembered instantly which room had been my mother’s, the first to the left of the entrance, about a foot from the ground, so its floor would have been at eye level for an almost-three-year-old walking up the path.
Snakes were a recurring presence during my Ceylon childhood. When I was about three there was great excitement one day when one slithered through the open rafters of the front porch of our bungalow and all the servants gathered underneath with long sticks, broom handles and much shouting. Once, a few years later, I was playing in the garden near an old brick wall and I turned to see the glittering eyes of a snake looking at me through a hole in the wall. At every children’s party, at the Garden Club or Prince’s Club, the gully gully man would play his pipe and his cobra would hiss and sway out of the basket while we watched in awed fascination.
The birth of my sister Louella (named after the Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons, as I had been named after the film star Sally Ann Howes) was difficult for me. I had spent two years and ten months as a spoiled and pampered only child, not only of my parents but also of my grandparents and uncle in Sydney. No one had prepared me for the shock of displacement. And the hurt didn’t disappear with her actual arrival. My mother later told me that I had insisted on perching on the arm of her chair while she fed the baby, and I remember, to my great shame now, putting salt in Louella’s orange juice. I am comforted by the fact that she wouldn’t have known at the time, and would forgive me now. During our itinerant childhood we often had no other companions but each other and so were close, as we are to this day. The next baby was not to come along for another eight years.
The Pacific War ended in August 1945 and in February 1946 we took a ship for Britain to rescue Jill. It was hard to get passage, because every ship sailing from Colombo was full of troops returning from the East and the war against the Japanese. But with one other civilian family we did manage to get berths on the SS Sontay, which had become a troop carrier, and there were few signs of its former life as a passenger liner. Mum used to tie Louella’s pram to the ship’s rails when we were on deck.
I remember only two things from that voyage. One is going through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, when it was very hot. The other is being in a cabin with a naked man and being given jellybeans. Neither is an unpleasant memory. But as I grew up I wondered whether they were real. The burning heat of the Red Sea was a documented reality, but I wondered whether the man in the cabin was a figment of my imagination.
When my mother was in a nursing home in her final years I told her about this childhood memory, wondering whether it could possibly be true. She said, ‘Oh, yes, that was Lieutenant Simpson!’
I nearly fell off my chair, and asked: ‘So what did you do about it?’
‘Well, your father was extremely cross.’
‘Cross!’
‘What could we do? It had been hard to get passage on the ship, and we were only there under sufferance.’
I include this incident because I’m sure it was supposed to have had an effect on me. But my memory is very short on details. I remember a man being naked and on a bed and I remember the jellybeans. I have no idea how or why I was there. In my forties, when I discovered the story was true, I had a series of feelings. The first was anger at my parents for letting this happen, I had apparently said, ‘That man hurt my bottom.’ And then I was angry at the Royal Navy for putting young children in the way of men who had been at war and away from their families for six years.
Over the years since, and especially now that so much has been revealed about sexual abuse, I’ve thought a lot about my experience; I have never remembered it with horror. Is this because it was a one-off and I didn’t know the man invo
lved? Perhaps much of the trauma of child abuse comes from a familiarity with the perpetrator. When my mother told me she had known about it, I was angry with her. But then I did understand her defence, that she couldn’t have done anything about it, we were on a ship at sea and at the mercy of the British Navy. Perhaps I subconsciously wanted to let go of any anger, to move on from it.
We went to Strandhill, a small seaside town in County Sligo, Ireland. Sligo was almost on the border of Eire and Ulster and many men had gone to fight in the war, to the dismay and contempt of others. Stories were told of soldiers changing out of their British uniforms at the station of Enniskillen, the border town, before they boarded the train for home. This was where my grandfather lived. Dad’s parents were now separated, although not divorced, as divorce was not permitted in Ireland.
Jill came to live with us in a guesthouse called ‘Ocean View’ and I played with the local children, friends of the son of the owner, Mrs Park. I remember Mrs Park’s mother’s funeral, which women in Ireland did not attend, and Mrs Park sitting sadly at the kitchen table. We children watched the procession down the street from behind lace curtains at a first-floor window. I remember being taken on a walk to Queen Maeve’s grave, a huge stone cairn onto which you threw a stone. Jill was a Girl Guide and I went with her to a church hall to meet Lady Baden Powell, wife of the scouting founder. In the barn outside the guesthouse, where we children played, there was a great portrait of an old man with a white beard. ‘That’s God,’ said Ian Park, aged five. And that’s how I always thought of God, until, as Lord Mayor, I went to Brisbane’s St Patrick’s Day dinner at the Irish Club. There was the portrait, not of God but of St Patrick.
We spent the summer in Strandhill, an Irish summer far too cold for us to swim. Then we went to Belfast and had Christmas in Mrs Tait’s boarding house. The winter of 1946 was the coldest for many years, perhaps the coldest on record. I saw snow for the first time and my first live theatre, the Christmas pantomime Babes in the Wood; my first thrill, never to leave me, was at the red velvet curtain before it rises. Belfast was a grim city still in the grip of wartime rationing. As an industrial city it had been badly bombed, and there were holes in the ground and bombed-out buildings. Everything seemed difficult. One day, Mum hung the washing on a fireguard in front of the gas fire, and it toppled over and all the clothes were burned. My mother’s weeping seemed to symbolise the misery of war and its aftermath. I’m sure it was with enthusiasm that we departed for Liverpool and a ship to Colombo.
We sailed in February 1947 on the SS Scythia. The ship was packed to the gunnels with women and children returning to the East after the war and desperate to do so. These were families who had been sent ‘home’ ahead of the Japanese invasion to suffer the horror of the war in Britain with its unfamiliar cold, wet and bombing, away from their husbands and fathers.
Mum, Jill, Louella and I shared a cabin with about thirty others. Dad had already gone back to Colombo after his leave. We were squashed like sardines into bunks and there was little peace, with babies crying throughout the night and mothers trying to soothe them. There always seemed to be a baby crying in a long non-stop wail.
At night the women would tie red cellophane over the lights to dim them enough for children to sleep but to give enough light for the mothers to undress by. Some time on the voyage Mum got dengue fever and was put into the ship’s hospital and 15-year-old Jill looked after us. There must have been some fun, too, for Jill won a box of Chinese chequers in a deck game.
When we arrived in Colombo we went straight to the Galle Face Hotel. However, rumblings about independence from British rule had grown louder in our absence. Hotel servants went on strike, including the kitchen staff. With the true British spirit that had carried them through the war the guests mucked in. Most of them had never had to do as much as make a cup of tea.
There were pockets of unrest all over the island. Louella and I were coming by train from up-country with our ayah, the nanny who looked after us. As the train got closer to Colombo it suddenly stopped and there was a great commotion, shouting and yelling from outside. We little girls were pushed under the seats and made to stay there until the train took off. Curious as we were, we never really knew what happened.
Ceylon became independent in February 1948 with much celebration. There were ceremonial flags and marching, up and down the Galle Face Green, and we enjoyed it all enormously.
THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka, was a British colony that had also been Dutch and Portuguese. The effects of all that colonising were still there, in attitudes, architecture and even the name ‘burghers’, a Dutch word that described people of mixed European and Singhalese or Tamil heritage.
Colombo was the commercial hub of the island, home to the offices of the big tea firms such as Brooke Bond and Liptons, and the banks that had made their money in the East, including the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. In many ways it was a garrison town, with the presence still of the Royal Navy. In the hills around Nuwara Eliya the tea estates were still mostly owned by individual planters. Nuwara Eliya itself, with its Hill Club, golf course and Grand Hotel, was where the white citizens of Colombo escaped the heat. The houses had names like ‘Bonnie Doon’ and ‘Braeside’, reminiscent of home. There was also the Hill School, a boarding preparatory school to which we yearned to go. Expatriate children were sent there as an alternative to being sent to school in Britain or Australia – they often had to travel by ship, alone and unsupervised.
Poor Jill, at 15, was to be uprooted again. She was sent to Sydney to live with Mum’s parents, people she had never met in a city where she had never been. Though she had a feisty personality, she never seemed to harbour a grudge about her upbringing. Once when I was seven and complaining that something wasn’t fair, Jill said, ‘Nothing in life is fair.’ I understood. Even as a little girl I felt guilty knowing that her life had not been easy and thinking that somehow I was responsible.
Our early childhood in Colombo was lived in proper British colonial style, and our lives were as regimented as those of the royal family. Up early and into our little cotton playsuits, shorts with a pinafore bib, we were taken out for a walk by our ayah whom we called ‘Nanny’. This was not a social occasion but a brisk constitutional, along the roads with their heavy scents of wet earth and lush foliage, carefully stepping over the red stains of betel nut on the footpaths. Then it was home for breakfast and getting ready for school, which finished at lunchtime. Afterwards, we rested for a couple of hours. When we were small we slept, and later it was a great time for reading. We didn’t have to sleep, just lie quietly, which I still think is a very good habit.
Then it was up and off for another walk, but this time to a park where the ayahs would congregate while the children would play together. The ayahs would chat about their charges’ families. When I was very small, if asked my name I would say ‘C.T. Kerr’s daughter’ because that’s how my ayah described me. In spite of the British snobbery, which meant my parents and their friends didn’t mix socially with the native Ceylonese, among our park companions were the Senanayake children whose uncle was to become Sri Lanka’s first prime minister, and we would visit their very large and palatial home. There was no class or race distinction in very young children, though a few years later I was to find that it developed.
We would come home to afternoon tea with our parents in the garden, the tea things set out on a small table with comfortable chairs around. Parents led grown-up lives. Dad went off to work each morning, driven by a chauffeur in the office car. Sometimes he would come home to lunch, sometimes it would be taken to him in a tiffin tin. Mum gave orders to the servants, played bridge, went shopping, talked to her friends and generally led a life of little purpose.
I’m sure as we got older we had some meals with our parents, or saw them at other times, but I only remember that on our ayah’s day off our mother bathed us and dried us roughly, which was so much better than the gentle patting by na
nny. And I have a memory of Mum getting her licence, and then losing it. Well, not so much losing as leaving it. She must have been a reluctant driver as well as a nervous one. I recall her panicking in the middle of the traffic one day and just getting out of the car. I can’t remember how we got home, but I presume we caught a passing rickshaw, and I have no idea what happened to the car.
Our ordered existence came to an end the year I turned ten. All of our homes in Colombo had been rented ones, usually company bungalows whose occupants were on leave for six months. Between houses we camped at various hotels. That year we moved into the Mount Lavinia Hotel, a glorious wedding-cake pile which had once been a governor’s beach house. Louella and I were considered old enough to dispense with our ayah, and I suppose there was no room for one in the hotel. We had a suite on the top floor and for a few months we ran wild. We collected hermit crabs on the beach and kept them in a big basin in our room until they got out and spread all over the hotel. One of our favourite tricks was to take the shoes that guests had left outside their doors and swap them for others, causing havoc each morning. But our best trick came after an electrician, using a manhole in our ceiling to get under the roof, left a ladder in place there. Up we got, under the roof and out onto a parapet overlooking the courtyard of the hotel. I can still see and hear the commotion below as two little white faces suddenly appeared hanging over the top. A few years ago I was back staying at Mount Lavinia, looked up to the roof and realised what shock and panic we must have created.
After Mount Lavinia, we moved into an apartment across the road from the Galle Face Hotel. We would often walk along Galle Road to the Colombo Swimming Club, which was at least a 15-minute walk along the busy main road. We would spend whole afternoons in the pools with no supervision. Our freedom is now a source of great wonder to me, as there never seemed to be any thought that little girls wandering about a busy city could be in danger – another question I wish I’d asked my mother. We hung about the Galle Face Hotel while Vivien Leigh was staying there to make the movie Elephant Walk with co-stars Peter Finch and Dana Andrews. There were dark whispers about Miss Leigh having a nervous breakdown or at least an affair with her co-star. The film was eventually recast with Elizabeth Taylor as the lead, at a cost of $3 million, which made it one of the most expensive movies of its time.
No Job for a Woman Page 2