She wouldn’t, after all, be the first person to travel from the UK to Australia and seize the opportunity to shake off her social class. Australian history has recorded similar deceptions. Arthur Orton, a butcher’s son from London, came to Australia in the mid-1800s and claimed to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy – a fraud so brazen he managed to convince the real Tichborne’s mother, who gave him an allowance of £1000 a year.
Or, closer to my mother’s time, there was the Australian designer Florence Broadhurst. She was born poor in outback Queensland, travelled to Shanghai and London, where she pretended to be French, and then came back to Australia in 1949. Once here, she pretended to be an aristocratic English artist visiting the colonies in order to recuperate from the ravages of the war. She fooled most of the people most of the time, rising rapidly in Sydney social circles during the same period as my mother. Broadhurst created a business designing and manufacturing wallpapers for the homes of the well-to-do, and by the mid-sixties was well ensconced in Sydney’s top drawer.
The Broadhurst story shows how easy it was at the time to adopt an accent and an attitude and to be taken for the real thing. Or, to put it another way, how the well-heeled of Sydney were hungry for the opportunity to rub shoulders with what they imagined were British toffs. I wondered if Broadhurst and my mother ever met – two women using identical methods to achieve identical results at pretty much the same time. I wondered, too, if either would have twigged to the other’s bunged-on accent.
‘Lavatory, Florence?’
‘Oh, yes, Bunty, it’s just through the drawing room. Do leave your napkin on the sofa.’
Broadhurst, as it happened, died a horrible death – brutally murdered in her studio. Some say her fake past was a magnet for her killer, who may have told similar lies. So, I suppose, there are ups and downs to this business of having a fake past.
On the other hand, the chance to break with the past is central to the Australian story – or at least to that part of the Australian story that doesn’t deal with indigenous Australians and the theft of their land. Our modern history begins in 1788 with the dumping of the human detritus of Britain: people who were poor, mostly ill-educated, criminal. Yet, repositioned in the sunlight, they flourished. Given a similar experiment today, plenty of people would mutter about ‘bad genes’ and say, ‘Well, that idea will never work.’ And yet it did. This was colonial Australia’s great gift to the world: practical proof that, when it comes to human society, the soil is more important than the seed. Maybe my mother was just an extreme, confabulating version of one of the world’s most inspiring tales: how a country called Australia, full of air and sunlight, transformed the lives of the millions who took the chance it offered.
Back home, I recruited the help of a wise friend, Neil Phillips, who works as a psychiatrist, mostly helping people in pretty tough situations. We’d found a spare day in both our diaries – Anzac Day – and I headed to his house. He made us coffee, took a seat in an armchair and motioned me towards the couch.
Jokingly, I asked, ‘Should I lie down?’
Jokingly, he replied, ‘Well, you are here to talk about your relationship with your mother.’
Neil is New York trained, which in his case means the Freudian tradition; his Viennese mother had even attended lectures by the master. For all that, Neil tends to embrace the practical and the compassionate, rather than the five-days-a-week couch-fest of psychoanalysis. I remained sitting upright and we both chomped on Anzac biscuits. Between mouthfuls I told him, briefly, my mother’s story and explained how I had discovered the truth when I was nineteen.
Neil has the ability to pose the perfect question. He asked, ‘Did it trouble you when you found out?’
I answered honestly: ‘Not at all.’ I explained that even though my mother had often told me the story of her aristocratic background, I’d never paid attention to it. ‘I was,’ I added, ‘pretty uninterested in my parents from an early age.’
If this was a film the music would swell up and the analyst would take an extra-long drag on his cigar. Instead, Neil just sat there and then said something so bleedingly obvious that naturally I’d never thought of it.
‘I wonder if you were uninterested in your mother’s story because it felt like it was made up. There was a superficiality there that you picked up on.’
He was so clearly right, I felt quite dim for not having thought of this myself.
Since he was on a roll, I pitched up a question.
‘Should I see my mother’s behaviour as an attempt to con everyone, or just as a rational response to an awful childhood?’
‘Maybe a bit of both,’ he replied. ‘It may have been reinforced over time. As a young woman, she wanted to be free of where she found herself. Then, after a while, it worked. And the fact it worked would tend to reinforce her satisfaction with it.’
Neil was particularly interested to hear that she may have gone to perhaps a dozen schools. In his clinical practice, he told me, he takes note if people have attended more than about five schools. ‘It can create a state of being closed to proper relationships, a lack of confidence in relationships lasting. And there would also have been rumours: “Your father’s a crook.” Instead she fantasised about a completely different life. Instead of a dad on the run and twelve different schools, she had the big estate and the wealthy parents and the fancy private school.’
So was it common? Had he come across other stories like this in his clinical practice?
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘The more common response to a difficult childhood is to recount it in all its misery, sometimes even to exaggerate the misery, and then say, “Look how far I’ve come.”’
It was the same answer that the genealogical researcher, Nick Barratt, had given me back at the National Archives.
I told Neil the story of her coffin and the grave plot she had all laid out, with the gravestone already engraved and put in place. He didn’t seem surprised. ‘She has constructed her whole life from birth onwards and so has been constructing her own death. Now that’s what I call controlling. I’m very impressed.’
I took another Anzac biscuit. ‘So,’ I said, ‘it’s a constructed life.’
Neil nodded. ‘It’s interesting she was involved in the theatre. That’s what plays and books are; they are constructed lives. And that’s what she’s done; she’s created a play. She must have had a magnificent imagination.’
Neil seemed far too won over by the florid subject I’d brought him. So, from the couch, came a little voice.
‘But what about me?’
He asked me what I meant, and I talked to him about my need for approval, my hunger to prove myself worthy through my work, and how one bad piece of writing, or one criticism by a listener or reader, will leave me hurt and bruised, as if I’m not worth feeding unless I can write something amusing or agreeable. And yet, I told him, I also possess a crazy-brave confidence. On live radio, in particular, the presenter’s ignorance and foolishness is on daily display; you are forced by the medium to begin every sentence not quite knowing where it will end. You can’t last five minutes without some level of self-belief.
Neil thought about this for a time. ‘You may have inherited some of your mother’s anxiety – the sense of “Am I good enough?” But it doesn’t sound like your parents were out to get you. They weren’t malignant, just neglectful. And for your first three years, you had this substitute mother in New Guinea.’
Neil, as a medical student, had spent some time in New Guinea and fell into a reverie about that country’s traditional parenting style – close and physically bonded – and how it creates incredibly confident children. He described walking in the New Guinea Highlands and these groups of children who’d run ahead of the visitors. The kids would stay out for days, sleeping in neighbouring villages, before returning to their own families.
‘In those first three years,’ he said, ‘something was cemented into you, something about confidence and giving. I think t
hat was crucial. You also must have experienced a great loss when you were packed up and removed to Australia. That loss has been swallowed by the fog of infantile amnesia, but it must have been severe.’
Maybe, I thought as I drove away, my mother’s story was more upbeat than I thought. She was creative – constructing a series of narratives for herself. The aristocratic only child; then, after she’d run off with Mr Phillipps, the sensualist caught up in the world’s most romantic affair. Both of them creations to escape less attractive realities: her father; my father. Yet there was also still a step to go. I needed to properly understand how I was affected, even created, by these inventive narratives; I needed to determine the role I had been allocated in her storylines. The sentiments I’d always expressed to Debra – ‘I was never very connected to them’; ‘I just wanted to be dutiful’ – no longer seemed good enough. In my own ears, they were beginning to sound more like evasions than admissions.
Parenting, PNG style: me with some pals in the New Guinea Highlands.
Six months later I was cleaning out my mother’s house. I felt guilty doing it. She was always so insistent it be kept in perpetuity, frozen as it was during her reign, all the furniture and books in place, a sort of Presidential Library for Her. We could use it as a holiday house, she’d regularly insisted. In theory, I would have liked to grant my mother’s wish, but it didn’t seem such a practical idea. She’d long before put me in charge of her legal affairs and, at some point, the house would need to be sold. Dementia had tightened its grip on her: she still seemed to recognise me, but no one else. Sometimes I would talk to her about Mr Phillipps, the great love of her life, hoping to generate a spark of recognition, but even for him there was now not a flicker of response.
I’d flown up on a Friday night after work, hoping I could see my mother twice and clean out her house, all before flying back on Sunday night. It was weird to be there on my own in her silent home. The place was so peculiar, so much an imprint of my mother, with the pool plonked in the centre of the house, the formal English rooms arranged around it, the photo gallery of herself around the walls. I’d ordered packing boxes from the removalist and was dividing things into three categories. The first pile of things would be sent to my son Dan, who had just bought a house in rural Victoria – in the latest town to give him a radio job. Daniel wasn’t that keen on receiving a truckload of old furniture, but knowing my mother’s horror at her things being sold, I’d encouraged him to at least take a share. The rest I had marked either to Sydney, for sale, or to be carted, by me, into my mother’s garage for eventual disposal.
It sounded simple and yet every few minutes I stood frozen – an object in my hand. Was this something valuable or a piece of junk? I didn’t really know, I’d just have to decide. At one point, late on the Friday night, I opened a tin trunk and found it stuffed with my mother’s clothes from the 1960s – glamorous gowns from designer labels, all dry-cleaned and still in their plastic wrappers. I could get a mint – well, $40 – for these in a second-hand shop in inner Sydney, but did I really want to be bothered?
And then there were things that left me feeling quite tender towards her; in particular, a series of diaries in which she’d written fancy words, presumably dictated by Mr Phillipps, in an attempt to improve her vocabulary, still limited by her interrupted and short-lived schooling.
Carpe diem – seize the day
Mot juste – silent T (Mo)
Fait accompli – deed accomplished
Icarus – Wings with wax, flew too close to sun + fell into sea
Contemporaneous – occurring at the same time
Non-sequitur – conclusion which does not logically follow from the premise
Tautology – same thing twice over in different words
Erudite – learned
Slipped into the diaries were little pieces of paper in Mr Phillipps’ handwriting, given to her, presumably, in an effort to improve her grammar. A self-appointed Henry Higgins to my mother’s Eliza Doolittle, Mr Phillipps had sternly underlined the significant words.
May = Present tense. Might = Past tense. If he left early he might arrive tonight. Observe sequence of tenses.
Shall & Will
Singular and Future
I shall
You will
He. She. It will
Plural
We shall
You will
They will
He then gave examples of the difference between ‘will’ and ‘shall’.
I will be obeyed (equals – I am determined or wish to be.)
You shall be punished (equals – it is decreed.)
I put the notes to one side and contemplated both the lecturing tone and Mr Phillipps’ weird, controlling choice of illustrative sentences.
Yes, I know. What a fuckwit.
I jumped out of bed early on Saturday morning and decided to tackle the filing cabinet in my mother’s office. I’d assumed it would mostly be old tax documents and bank records, easy to discard. I heaved open the first drawer. It was stuffed with papers. I pulled out the first file. It was marked in my mother’s handwriting: ‘Anna’s letters from Canberra to Armidale.’ The next said: ‘His letters. Stage second.’ I delved further into the filing cabinet. It was full of love letters between my mother and Mr Phillipps. Here I was, eight o’clock on a sunny Saturday morning, and it was immediately obvious there were at least hundreds of letters. I soon realised there were thousands.
The correspondence started in 1972. This was only a year after my parents had arrived in Canberra. The affair had started much earlier than I’d imagined. Somehow the Pepys diary stuff now seemed even weirder: presumably Mr Phillipps was already sleeping with my mother, or nearly sleeping with her, while also getting me to record for him every detail of our family life. The letters started as occasional billets-doux, then became weekly, then bi-weekly, then daily, like a speeding-up train. At times, during the white heat of their love affair, they’d exchanged several letters each day and she’d kept them all. My mother had rented a post-office box in Manuka, a Canberra suburb, so she could receive his missives. By early 1974, he was numbering his letters and including both day and time: one would be marked ‘No 51. Wednesday evening. 9.30pm.’ The next: ‘No 52. Wednesday evening. 10.30pm.’ Both would be several pages in length.
I sat at my mother’s desk, staggered by the sheer size of the collection. Here, in tidy envelopes, was the day-to-day narrative of my mother’s love life and the secret, long-term passion that had caused her to leave me and my father. The letters were erotic, there was no getting around that, with much anatomical description. The raunchy language was at its most vivid in his letters to her – with much use of words like ‘thrusting’ – but reciprocated in her letters to him. They were also romantic, full of Tolkien-inspired whimsy about how they could make a life together, just as soon as my mother was set free of my father. There was talk of stolen afternoons, in which they’d arrange to meet, and of weekends away. It seemed this went on for the best part of three years before she finally left.
She wrote in one letter:
I think that our love is terribly special. I sort of know now why God made me wait so long, he knows I am a good girl and he has given me you and I feel he will look after us and let us live long and happily.
Or again:
I love you my Gandalf, love me and know that I shall think of you every moment we are apart, I am yours entirely and yours alone, you found me and made me live and for me there is no other man and there never will be.
Then, once or twice, the letters become businesslike – my mother recounting the discussions she’d had with a Canberra divorce lawyer.
If in any way at all Ted could prove any infidelity on my part he could remove me from the house . . . if Ted got nasty and did this I could end up with practically nothing and you could be sued for alienation of affection. I explained the rotten marriage I had had and the years and years of drinking and with great difficulty told hi
m of the complete lack of sex.
In the same letter, she described her dream of living with Mr Phillipps in ‘our Hobbit hole’ and how she was determined to achieve it by ‘having a plan of campaign that is smarter than all the rest can produce’. She ended by saying she had enclosed a cheque, explaining she hoped soon to have more money under her control, at which point she would send more cash. It ended with a lipstick kiss, a real one made by kissing the paper. It was still hot pink after all these years.
After a while, the Manuka post-office box disappeared, and the correspondence shuttled back and forth between Sydney, where my mother had moved temporarily in order to earn money as an arts publicist, and Armidale, where Mr Phillipps had started his employment at the private girls’ school.
I flipped though the endless pages – many of the letters two or three thousand words in length – and then spotted a mention of my own name. It was a letter to Mr Phillipps in which my mother recounted how I had telephoned her out of the blue, at 4.30 in the afternoon, without really having anything to say.
She wrote:
I have since felt really bad, wondering about him and what has happened to make him so desperate that he would get home at that time to telephone – I shall never know – I love him – but unbelievably I don’t love him not even a part of the amount that I love you.
I sat and read the sentence a few times over. It was hard not to feel hurt by it.
I also noticed that she’d used the term ‘my boy’ in lots of the letters, which, after a few moments of puzzlement, I realised was her phrase for Mr Phillipps, and not for me, which also produced in me a tiny, surprising stab of pain.
Then in July – I have no memory of this – I visited her in Sydney to mark my sixteenth birthday. My mother wrote to Mr Phillipps the night before my arrival: ‘I wish so much you could be here, not even for Rich can I raise one bit of enthusiasm, preparing a party with the most important person absent is just no fun.’
Flesh Wounds Page 18