by Denise Scott
* * *
It wasn’t just homesickness that brought me back to Australia; I was also lovesick. Or maybe it was just loneliness. Either way, the whole time I was in Darwin and Europe—and, trust me, this is a painful admission—I had continued to write letters to Mr Right: upbeat, cheery tomes that sometimes included a funny drawing or a photo or a poem I’d written, all designed to make him aware of what a truly amazing individual I was—brilliant, unique …
He never wrote back.
Now, most people of sound mind, given their ex did not respond in any way, would have concluded that their ex was happy to be just that—an ex. But I wasn’t of sound mind. And so, as soon as I arrived home from Europe, I called him and said I needed to see him. Could he come over?
He said he couldn’t.
I said please.
He said no, he couldn’t, because he didn’t have enough petrol in his car.
I suggested he go to a service station and fill it up.
He said he didn’t have any money.
(But how could this be? He had a full-time job and was a cautious spender.)
I said I would pay for him to put petrol in his car.
He muttered something about being too busy.
I kind of begged then, explaining that I needed to ask him something.
He suggested I ask him over the phone.
I said that I had to do it face to face.
And so finally he agreed.
He arrived. I greeted him at the front door, and we went and sat in the backyard underneath the oleander—a tree noteworthy for its poisonous sap.
Without so much as an informal warm-up chat about the weather, I asked, ‘Do you think you could ever love me again?’
Without a second’s hesitation he said, ‘No. I’ve met someone else and I’m in love with them.’
Oh well, rightio then. As you were, everyone.
* * *
‘Denise, what are you doing?’
My mother had followed me down the garden path, cigarette in hand. I was dragging two green garbage bags behind me that I had just retrieved from my parents’ garage, where I had my few possessions in storage. I was heading to the greybrick incinerator located at the far end of the yard. When I arrived at my destination, my mother came and stood next to me. She asked again what I was doing.
I told her I was going to burn my diaries, two full bags of them. I had written daily entries in them since I was twelve.
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’
‘Yes, I’m positive.’
‘Why?’
I’d read in one of my New Age hippie books that it was a way of cleansing one’s soul, a way of letting go of the past. But I didn’t bother telling my mother this, assuming it would make no sense to her.
‘Denise, why don’t you wait and have a think about it?’
‘Because I don’t want to, Mum. I just want to burn them.’
‘Please, Denise, please wait.’ It was weird that my mother was speaking to me like this. She was the greatest getter-ridder of stuff I knew. ‘Denise, what about in years to come? Maybe you’ll want to read them.’
‘I won’t, Mum.’
‘Well, you might want to use them, turn them into a book or something.’
(How right she was. If only I’d listened to her this whole writing thing would’ve been so much easier.)
‘Mum, I don’t want to read what’s in these diaries and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to.’
‘Oh Denise, please wait …’
Too late.
I lit the match and up they went.
Thoughts, hopes, dreams, doubts, triumphs, arguments, embarrassments; Spirax notebooks full of words and pictures, hardback diaries with gold-lined pages, a 1971 desktop calendar, a pink diary with a key, exercise books: all disappeared before my eyes. Their demise was quick. My father, not usually associated with handyman status, had constructed an extraordinarily efficient incinerator, the air being sucked in from underneath, making the flames whoosh. Within minutes there was nothing but a small pile of ash.
I walked back towards the house, passing my mother, who stood there staring at the incinerator, looking strangely distraught.
chapter nine
Passing the baton
There is no doubt in my mind that oppression—that burdensome weighing down of the mind by past hurts and shame—gets passed from one generation to another. I know this for a fact; Dr Phil told me. And what a powerful beast it is, oppression: almost impossible to fight or shake off, much easier to just accept and live your life accordingly, never asking questions, never arguing, never saying what you really think, never taking a risk: better to keep your head down, your mouth shut, and stay away from trouble. Th at was what I learnt from my mother. I hasten to add that I also learnt brilliant things from my mother—the importance of family, love, kindness; taking joy in the simple things in life: sharing a meal or a cuppa, doing some gardening, going for a walk and taking the time to look up and admire the beauty of the sky. But I became aware that there was an oppressive force with a hold over my family soon after returning from my ill-fated overseas trip. I was staying with my parents. At twenty-four years of age I didn’t have a job, didn’t have a boyfriend and didn’t have anywhere else to live—it wasn’t a high point.
It was a summer evening and we had just finished dinner, and my mother and I were lying on newly purchased yellow plastic banana lounges in the backyard. My father was inside doing the dishes, a task he had willingly embraced after my sister and I left home.
As usual, my mother lit up an Albany cigarette. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her slowly and lovingly inhale and exhale. I longed for one, but I still hadn’t found the courage to admit to her I smoked. My sister hadn’t admitted to it, either.
Given that Mum was a thirty-a-day woman, it may appear odd that we couldn’t confess our nicotine habit to her, but the reason was simple: she would have disapproved.
My mother, as was her wont, commented on the evening sky. ‘Look at that sunset. Isn’t it beautiful? Looks as though it’s going to be warm tomorrow.’ There was a slight pause before she continued. ‘Denise, there’s something I want to tell you.’
Oh God, don’t tell me I’m adopted. Surely not! My eyeballs—they’re identical to my father’s.
‘May wasn’t my sister. She was my mother.’
Wow! I was not expecting that.
Once that bombshell had been dropped, it seemed to spark an avalanche of information. Mum told me May had been fifteen years old when, in 1924, she had given birth to my mother, Marg, ‘father unknown’. Such was the family’s shame, typical of the era, that it was decided my mother would be raised by May’s parents, Ma and Pa Bock, as May’s baby sister. Two years later, at seventeen years of age, May became pregnant again and gave birth to a second daughter. This time May married the father, and they moved to Tatura.
Family rumour had it that the shock of May’s second pregnancy caused her mother, Ma Bock, to die at a relatively young age. Her death meant that my mother was now without a mother, because her real mother (May) had gone to live elsewhere and her pretend mother (Ma Bock) was no longer alive.
At this point I was forced to interrupt. ‘So, hang on, Mum, this means Pa Bock wasn’t my grandfather; he was …’
‘Your great-grandfather. Is that right?’
Even Mum was confused.
She lit another cigarette. As I desperately attempted to breathe in her second-hand smoke, she continued, ‘Yes, that must be right, because Pa Bock was May’s father, so that means he was my grandfather, so your great-grandfather.’
It seemed Mum was on a roll. There was no stopping her. She retold me her family’s story, but this time, unlike that time at the kitchen sink when I asked who Pa Bock was, she didn’t head me off at the pass: she told me the truth. Pa Bock had indeed remarried after Ma Bock, May’s mother, died, and Bridie, an Irishwoman, had come to the marriage with a half-dozen or so children.
This
meant my four-year-old mother had been living with her grandfather (who she believed was her father), her stepgrandmother (who she believed was her stepmother) and a tribe of Irish step-uncles and step-aunts (who she believed were her step-siblings), the youngest one being Peggy, she of the ‘day the custard caught’ fame. When I was sixteen my mother had said that Bridie hadn’t been very nice to her. In fact, Bridie had loathed my mother and was mean to her. She had tormented her cruelly, making her sit on a stool in the hallway next to where the old-fashioned wind-up phone hung on the wall. Bridie would pretend to call the police and ask them to come and take my mother away and put her in jail for being a naughty girl.
On one occasion my mother was so terrified of going to jail that she ran away. The police were called for real, and the whole town gathered to join in the search for the missing child. The fact that my mother had only got as far as hiding under the house increased her fear. Crouched in a tiny ball, hidden from view, she watched the feet of all the locals coming and going. Too frightened to come out, aware of the trouble she would be in, she stayed hidden for hours. When she finally emerged, a local chap grabbed her and held her aloft. ‘She’s been found!’ Everyone cheered, thrilled that the child was safe. No-one cared about the fact that she had just been hiding under the house. Except Bridie. She was not happy, not happy at all.
And so at five years of age my mother was sent to live with a foster family. The foster family abused her.
Mum didn’t give me many details of the abuse, except that the boys in the foster family forced her to drink their urine out of a little cup, part of a tea set my mother cherished. After she had been with the family for some months, one of her Irish ‘stepbrothers’ arrived in a horse and cart to visit her. He was horrified by the situation he found her in and took her back to live once more with Pa Bock and Bridie.
But Bridie’s detestation of Mum had continued unabated, and my mother was sent to live with her ‘sister’, May, and her husband, and their ever-expanding brood of children. Mum loved her ‘big sister’ and adored her ‘nieces’ and ‘nephews’ (who were actually her half-siblings), especially the eldest, Noreen.
When my mother was fifteen, she was walking home from the local hotel where she worked as a cleaner. (She left school at fourteen.) As she passed a large vacant block a couple of local boys called out to her. She was familiar with them and so stopped to chat.
They tried to rape her.
A local man came riding past on his pushbike, and Mum managed to call out to him. He didn’t hear her, but it was enough of a distraction, and my mother made a run for it. She got away from the boys and arrived home hoping to sneak into the house and tell no-one of her ordeal. But as she came around the corner of the house she ran smack-bang into May. My mother’s dress was ripped and covered in dirt. She was crying.
May forced her to say what had happened. My mother begged her not to do anything, but there is nothing on earth as ferocious as a mother’s protective instincts when her child has been hurt, even if the mother–daughter bond has never been acknowledged. May went to the police to get justice for her ‘younger sister’ and to make sure her attackers were punished. The two boys were charged with attempted rape. A court case was held in Bendigo. Mum didn’t tell me what the outcome was, but she did tell me that afterwards her life became hellish.
The two boys had been from the ‘good side’ of town, from well-to-do families who looked down upon people like my mother. After the court case Mum was ostracised by many of the locals for getting those poor boys into trouble. Who did that little tramp think she was? One day, one of the boy’s mothers passed Mum in the street and spat on her and called her a bastard. My mother told me that throughout her life to that point she had often been called a bastard but hadn’t known why.
It was around this time that May’s sister-in-law, who cared a great deal for my mother, suggested she look for her birth certificate. She found it in a cupboard and learnt for the first time that May was her mother, not her sister.
My mother said nothing about it to anyone.
When she was twenty-two, living in Melbourne and about to marry my father, my mother was told that if she could produce a parent’s signature for some particular bit of paperwork it would make the marriage process a lot more straightforward. And so she wrote to May, telling her she knew she was her mother and that all she wanted was for May to sign the document; she promised never to mention their secret again. May never signed the document or acknowledged the letter. She and her husband went to my parents’ wedding, famously bringing a freshly decapitated and plucked chook wrapped in newspaper as a gift for my father’s family.
* * *
My mother had one final shock for me that evening. ‘Now, Denise, your dad knows about this but no-one else. So please promise me you won’t tell anyone. Not even your sister.’
Was she for real? Not tell my sister? Julie and I never kept secrets. We told one another everything. How could I possibly keep something like this from her? Apart from anything else it didn’t seem fair for me to know something so important about our family and my sister not. But Mum was adamant. She was worried Julie would tell her husband. ‘And what if he has a few drinks and says something at a family do?’
I deeply regretted not being able to share these revelations with my sister. They helped explain so many things about Mum. Why she so yearned for the ordinary: not because she had come from an ordinary family, but quite the opposite, and now what she craved was a straightforward, uncomplicated family life. Why she loved my dad’s family so much: because they had welcomed her with open arms, invited her into their home and loved her unashamedly. Why she so loved my dad’s father: because she’d never had one. Why she’d been so stricken with grief at May’s funeral: because not only had she lost her mother but she had lost the possibility of ever having her mother acknowledge her as her daughter. And, of course, that was why Pa Bock had been so cold and distant when we visited and why everyone had been so surprised to see him at May’s funeral: because he was ashamed of her and my mother and what they represented. I recalled telling my mother about a friend who’d had a tough time growing up because her parents had gone through a messy divorce, and how Mum had scoffed, ‘What would she know about tough times? She’s had it easy.’ At the time I had been taken aback by her dismissive tone—it had seemed inappropriately harsh—but now I understood where she had been coming from.
Why did my mother reveal her secret to me on that particular evening? Was it something to do with me burning my diaries? At the time she had been so horrified, standing at the incinerator, watching all those memories going up in flames, disappearing without a trace. She had appeared so desperate for that not to happen. Did she fear the same fate for her own memories, especially her secrets, those secrets that she’d carried for so long, all on her own, at least until she met my father? Did she fear that they’d disappear without trace? Did she determine there and then that there was no way that was going to happen, that she had to make sure there was at least one other person besides Russ who knew exactly what she had been through in her life?
Whatever her reasons, one thing was clear. Just like my mother and father before me, I was now, albeit very reluctantly, a keeper of the family secret.
Well hello!! Suddenly life was well and truly extraordinary and yet there I was, absolutely desperate for it to be ordinary again. I snuck out the front door and walked around the corner to Beewar Street. Until that night it had never occurred to me how close the name was to ‘beware’, such ominous overtones: ‘Beware the extraordinary, it ain’t always pretty.’ I looked around; the coast was clear, there was no-one in sight. Thank God for that! I went and hid behind a tree and smoked a cigarette.
chapter ten
The call of the wild
At twenty-five years of age I was still single, living on my own in a small flat in St Kilda, doing a bit of acting and a lot of waitressing, and forever feeling on the brink of overwhelming panic that I’d neve
r find love again.
And then I met John.
It was meant to be. Really it was—of that I have no doubt. It was towards the end of 1980 and I’d applied for a full-time job with Popular Theatre Troupe, a left-leaning community theatre company based in Brisbane. A performer named John Lane had recently left the group, meaning there was a spot up for grabs. I flew to Brisbane, auditioned, and got the gig.
In the meantime, the aforementioned John Lane decided to take a year off to travel around Australia, departing from his hometown, Melbourne. First stop: Albury, 314 kilometres north on the Hume Highway. He intended to stay for one night before moving on but that evening he met up with a friend of a friend of a friend, Mark Shirrefs, who just happened to be one of the directors of the Murray River Performing Group, a local professional theatre company. As usual, John had his ukulele, juggling balls and kazoo with him, and no doubt he spontaneously performed a casual backflip while walking down the street. He was that sort of guy. Mark was impressed and immediately offered John a job with the MRPG’s brand-new clown ensemble. John accepted, and thus his year long ‘hitching around Australia’ adventure came to an abrupt stop only a few hours out of Melbourne.
At the same time, only a few days before I had to fly to Brisbane to start my new job, a friend rang. ‘Hey Scotty, have you heard, the MRPG are setting up a clown ensemble and I know for a fact they’re still looking for one more clown—it’s got to be a woman. Why don’t you audition?’
Why? Because I’d already accepted the job in Brisbane. And, oh yes, that’s right—I hated clowning, couldn’t stand it, had no interest. Then again, Albury was a lot closer to Melbourne than Brisbane, and I did have some friends already living there, and I’d heard on the grapevine that this new clown troupe was aiming to be experimental and create clowns for adults, ooh la la, so …
I got the job. God knows why because for my audition, since I couldn’t juggle or cartwheel, I decided to go for pathos instead and I earnestly sang an a cappella version of the Beatles hit song ‘Help’.