by Neil, Linda;
As a child, in the absence of this knowing, I became connected to other things. I became a blind person in a world of sound and vibration. I crept into the furthest corners of our chaotic house, lay under pillows, behind dusty curtains, my feet wedged into the star-shaped holes of the besser brick that covered the front wall of our house, and tried to imagine what it would be like to be dead. I listened for ghosts and ghostly sounds. Sometimes, when the house was suddenly quiet, when even the constant music had stopped, I thought I could conjure up the sound of the past, both recent and distant, and train my ears to discern the intricate melodies within these invisible things.
Many of the details of my childhood are about listening: to songs, to melodies, to words, to radios and record players, to birds and cars and children and cricket and football and conversation, to stories, both real and imagined. But we were bodies as well as voices, which, according to my mother, are one and the same thing, so there are some indisputable things that can be listed. Details about the relationship between Mum and me include the fact that she rarely discussed hair, makeup or wardrobe issues with me during my childhood or adolescence, except for the times I was performing music, when the matter of clothes seemed to become important. When I was first learning the violin, she had also painstakingly and painfully played note after note on the piano in order to ‘drum the pitch’ into my ears. She wanted me to be practical like my grandmother, who had once earned money by ‘taking in sewing’. I never quite understood what it meant to ‘take in sewing’, even after I was, literally, taken to sewing lessons in an old building in town after I had twice failed sewing in Grade Four, when Sister Mary Serenity had written on my report card that the stitches on my sampler reminded her of ‘dog’s teeth’.
We never had much money and apart from our school shoes we often only had one extra pair of shoes for the whole year. But I remember that Mum once bought me a pair of brown vinyl Mary Jane shoes with a gauze bow after she found me crying on my pillow one night because I was so sad at having such ‘ugly old things’ to wear to school birthday parties. She also let my grandmother curl my hair around old rags at night, turning them into ringlets when I went to my local primary school during Grades One and Two. I loved my neat, perfectly curled, hopelessly old-fashioned hair and was devastated when for ‘practical reasons’ Mum cut it all off after I was sent to the big St Hildegard’s School in town to begin Grade Three. A couple of years later when I learned some more Biblical stories I compared the loss of my ringlets to the shearing of the sleeping Samson by his cunning Delilah. I felt small, ugly and powerless with my formerly luxuriant mane now cropped close to my head in a hairdo that an older cousin once compared to a curly swimming cap.
It was the sort of hairdo old ladies wore after their hair turned blue or purple, the sort of hairdo that, I was told, I would grow into. Gazing up at all the short permed hairdos that women seemed to wear after a certain age when, as far as I could see, aesthetics no longer had any bearing on their choices of clothes, shoes, handbags or hairdos, I was horrified by the thought that it would probably be forty or fifty years before I would ‘grow into’ the hairdo my mother had chosen for me and that all I had ahead of me was a lifetime of looking hideous and old before my time.
Mum remains in hospital for two weeks and returns home like a newborn herself, and I cancel music jobs in Sydney and the New South Wales north coast in order to spend Christmas with Mum for the first time in years. The sleeping pills she began to take while staying in Ward 6B give her the sleep she craves, but their side-effects make her body feel increasingly disorientated and exhausted. Other problems develop as well: she stops driving her car, becomes more reluctant to speak to people on the phone, and seems less and less capable of taking care of her own needs. I become the designated driver, her secretary, her personal assistant. Over a period of weeks, then, and with little conscious choice, I become her carer.
It will only be for a couple of months, I tell Raphael, who is becoming increasingly wistful as I regularly forget to ring him back when he leaves messages asking how I am and for me to call him. A couple of months till she is back on her feet, I now say enigmatically whenever a friend from Sydney or Byron Bay asks when they might expect to see me again. The truth is not so simple, nor as vague as I make out to them.
I like being home. This comes as a surprise to me. I like being with Mum. A couple of months turns into three, then four, then more, until, at the end of March 1999, I arrange for my things to be sent up from down south, set up house in the flat at the back of my mother’s home, and, on the advice of Mum’s doctor, apply for a full-time carer’s allowance. Later, I will see this step as a milestone of sorts. The day I sign on for this allowance marks a demarcation point that officially brings me home again to my mother’s house in a full circle. I am no longer living an artist’s life out in the world, no longer playing and recording music, or exploring love. The art I am developing now is altogether different.
WE’LL MEET AGAIN
Dad was always considered the literary one of the family. But later, when I go through Mum’s things, I discover piles of old newsletters issued by the Music Teachers’ Association of Queensland, to which she regularly contributed notes about singing. I discover passages that illuminate more than just the simple mechanics of the voice: they reveal my mother’s devotion to her craft and the sharpness of her mind.
Mum was never fascinated with the voice itself as a musical instrument. She felt that singers should mould their voices into flowing, correctly shaped and meaningful words. ‘We should work for beauty and resonance,’ she wrote in July 1990. ‘Big is not necessarily beautiful. It is better to be light and right than strong and wrong. Singing is a flowing living language that can speak of joy and sadness in ways that words cannot.’
Mum wrote a lot about being nervous. How not to be nervous. She studied many books about how to calm the nerves, as well as the reasons why they were there in the first place. Finding a way to rise over the chaos of emotions and feel peaceful and balanced was a kind of personal quest for her that wasn’t only to do with performing music. She tells me that as a young woman she struggled with feelings of timidity and that she had to work hard to develop a strong mental approach, not just to singing, but to every situation in life.
She knew how loud the destructive dialogue could be inside your head and encouraged all her students to identify and discard the negativities that tightened up the throat and made a full clear tone difficult to produce. She knew how many of her pupils had been told when they were children that they could not sing to save their lives, that singing was something other people did, that singing should remain in the bedroom or the bathroom. She also understood how easily a singer’s terror could transmit itself to an audience and she worked hard to build confidence in all her students.
As for me, Mum pushed me year after year to perform, in exams, in competitions, for eisteddfods and auditions. Without her, I would perhaps have just stayed in my room reading books and dreaming of other lives I might have led. Without her encouragement, I would never have attended my first audition for the local youth orchestra and found myself ushered straight into the First Orchestra rather than having to do my time, as so many others had to, in the minor orchestras as a prelude to ‘making it’ to the big one.
Despite all her encouragement, though, I never stopped being terrified when I had to perform classical music. My fingernails were bitten down to the flesh and my knees used to quiver uncontrollably whenever I had to play in public. So it could have been me she was addressing when, in 1988, she wrote: ‘Try to perform with ease, assurance and artistry. This gives the listener a feeling of pleasure and relaxation. Nervousness is catching, but so is assurance.’
On 25 April 1999, Mum’s birthday, the traditional Anzac Day Benefit Concert at the Westminster Hospital takes place for the first time without Mum accompanying her singing students, who have always been – and will be this year for t
he last time – an integral part of the occasion. After a depressing birthday lunch at a Chinese café – neither of us feels like eating – we drive to the hospital where Jonus Nicholson is hosting the concert. The program promises us a patriotic show consisting of old war tunes and slides celebrating ‘the glory and sorrow of war’.
First up is Hilary, a young secretary from Wynnum. For the past five years she has travelled to St Lucia every week to learn singing from Mum. Hilary loves musical comedy and before the concert she tells me she would one day like to teach singing in a room underneath the house where she lives with her young family, just like Mum did. In the concert, Hilary sings ‘We’ll Meet Again’ with such emotional precision that by the end of the song many in the audience are crying. Their tears might also have something to do with the slides that are shown on a screen behind her while she sings – of diggers and soldiers, young men and old men, leaving for and returning from wars. But I sense also that there is something inside Hilary’s body as she sings, some feeling she is trying to access and translate into vocal timbre and resonance. Beside me, Mum is feeling those things too, willing them from her body into Hilary’s body, as if she is singing along, a strange duet of teacher and student, bound together through resonance.
The concert is long and Mum is fatigued by half-time, but stands bravely beside me among the crowd sipping champagne and nibbling on small cakes and pies. Occasionally, we are discovered by one of Mum’s old colleagues, or by the families of Mum’s students who are starring in the concert.
Jonus finds us after we have both sat down exhausted behind some potted palms. He is jubilant. So far the concert has been a great success. But he is still anxious for Mum’s approval.
Well, Joan, he says. How do you think I sound?
It’s a question that needs a tactful answer. Despite his other career achievements, Jonus is especially proud of his singing ability, even though during the first half of the concert he had bellowed off-key British war tunes with the sort of confidence and poise that suggested he may have been tone deaf.
Well, Jonus, Mum offers weakly, it’s certainly getting better. Just keep listening to your tapes like I told you to. And it will keep on improving. Just remember the first rule of performing – don’t let your nerves get the better of you.
A lot of the performers at the Anzac Day concert are nervous, but most manage to hide it. Their training has made it possible to overcome what normally constricts the ability of the diaphragm to expand and suck in air. Though none of Mum’s students will ever be well known, they have achieved enough of their potential to have their own moment of glory on Anzac Day.
One of them is Geoff from Morningside, a beefy truck driver whom Mum took on as a student after he’d been rejected by both the university and the Conservatorium of Music. Before he begins to sing, Mum whispers to me that Geoff is a rare find: a bass baritone with real charisma. Though he’s only in his early twenties, Geoff sings with a resonance you might expect from a mature man. His voice is rich and vibrates with warmth and power and his diction is clear and flawless. Both the conservatorium and university rejected him because he wasn’t educated and spoke so roughly, she tells me, quickly growing weary from the effort of speaking. They couldn’t look beyond the surface and see and listen to what was underneath. So they sent him to me.
After the concert, Geoff comes up and gives Mum a kiss on the cheek. She beams at him maternally, yet I can see she is distracted and confused by the attention from so many students and friends who have not seen her for months and who crowd around her when the concert is over.
Whaddya reckon, Mrs Neil? Geoff asks in a broad ocker voice. He towers over her: a giant man and a little woman. But his demeanour is respectful and it’s obvious her words carry weight for him.
Wonderful, Geoff. Now you really ought to go and audition for the opera company next. If opera companies have one thing in common it’s that there are never enough bass baritones, she flatters him.
Geoff shakes my hand effusively before leaving us. Relieved, Mum takes my arm and leads me towards the door for some fresh air. Suddenly she is sanguine: One of the proudest moments of my life was when he won the Grand Prize for Opera from Margaretta Eldridge at the National Eisteddfod in Sydney, she tells me. She wrote a glowing review of his singing. That showed them – all the knockers – that you should always try to give everyone a chance, no matter where they come from.
On the evening of Mum’s birthday, inspired by what I have heard and seen at the Anzac Day concert, I record the first of many interviews with Mum about her work as a singing teacher.
Linda: Do you remember how you always seemed to take on pupils who everyone else had rejected?
Joan: I prided myself on getting ordinary people with ordinary abilities and teaching them, first of all to do the most basic things like sing in tune, the rudiments of good diction, then teaching them that a song was a story told in music and that they had to mean every word for the song to get across to the listener.
Linda: I remember sometimes we’d hear your students from upstairs. Some of them were so awful.
Joan: I don’t like words like ‘awful’. Who decides what’s awful? I didn’t think that people should be denied the opportunity to do what they loved to do just because they may not have any natural ability. And how do you know, if you rejected people out of hand, that you might be letting go of something precious and meaningful, not just in their own lives but for us, the audience as well? People can be taught a lot of things: how to have good diction, how to produce resonance, how to understand the mechanics of singing. But what they can’t be taught is what’s already inside them: their spirit and their soul. Singing really opens everything up. It opens up the singer and the one who is sung to as well. It was always a joy to me when students of mine with little or no ability got up to sing at a recital for the first time. The sense of accomplishment they had. The joy and happiness in their faces.
By the end of 1999 both Mum and I have lived through many new beginnings as well as endings. I join a gym and begin exercising regularly for the first time. I start yoga, meditation and chanting. Despite all these healthy efforts, though, I don’t always handle my new life well. Sometimes I am ashamed to be back in Brisbane and go out of my way to avoid old acquaintances who see me across streets or in crowded shopping centres. Many nights I sob deeply into my pillow, missing my old life, missing Raphael and the friends I have left behind, as if somehow I have failed by coming home to my ailing mother, as if this was not some kind of life too, this return.
Not long after the Anzac Day concert in 1999, Mum teaches her last singing lesson. Her decision to stop teaching doesn’t come to her in a sudden flash of clarity; rather, she just loses the will and the energy to do it. It’s something I used to live for, she tells me. Now the thought of it makes me want to cry.
She continues taking the medication prescribed for her in hospital. As well as taking antidepressants and occasional sleeping tablets, she also begins to see a psychiatrist every now and then, not because she wants or needs to talk, but because these are the doctors who are involved in the treatment of the kind of vague malaise from which Mum now seems to be suffering. I am not comfortable about this. I sometimes wonder if Mum’s medication might be creating more rather than fewer problems for her. But I have nothing to base my discomfort on. I only notice that she is turning inwards, growing increasingly unsure of herself and is tired a lot of the time.
She also abandons her morning walks, as well as get-togethers with friends. Long phone conversations are also things of the past. To fill the sudden gaps in her days and weeks, she finds new routines and interests. It is even fun for a while exploring the possibilities that change brings us. An adventurer at heart, I have always liked new things, but Mum is more a woman of routine and familiar things, and needs coaxing to take up new activities to replace those she has lost.
Other changes are valuable re
compense for things I have lost. I get to know relatives again with whom I’ve been out of touch. Mum’s brother Neville was once the captain of the Wallabies back when Rugby was neither professional nor lucrative. He and his wife, my Aunty Margo, are regular visitors to Mum’s home. They also host her for frequent visits to their home at Mogill and during the drive to this outlying western suburb, Mum and I share stories from her past, she from her girlhood as the sister of a future Rugby Union star and me from my – often sanitised – life on what I laughingly called ‘the road’.
Her new fragility makes her more tolerant of the kind of life that I have lived. Mum and I have dissimilar views about a lot of things: religion, politics, sex, race relations. Our differences once seemed crucial and fundamental, but now I barely notice them as we chat and laugh while driving along once familiar roads and highways.
Neville and Margo are kind and genuinely welcoming to Mum and to me. Margo especially sparkles when we visit and both she and Neville are concerned by Mum’s problems, even though they are still unnamed, which are now making more changes necessary.
These changes incorporate Mum’s belief, like her mother’s, that an enquiring mind is a healthy mind. We look through the pamphlets for the University of the Third Age, which offers a variety of classes from which Mum chooses French, philosophy, and religion and spirituality. She enrols in each course, but attends class only once. I know she loves French, as Dad did, and once studied it at the University of Queensland. She also sang songs by Debussy and Ravel in their original texts, and enjoyed the occasional Charles Aznavour ballad, but now she says she cannot concentrate on anything so finely nuanced as the French language. Her supposed enrolment in secular philosophy is, she tells me, a clerical error, while the religion and spirituality class involves discussion about the philosophies of world religions, which leads Mum to decide that the matter of faith needed no deconstruction. I know what I believe and that’s enough for me, she explains to me when I meet up with her after her first and only class at the Shingle Inn in Edward Street for tea and strawberry lamingtons, one of the simple pleasures that she is still able to enjoy. Later, when she joins the yoga and meditation classes for the over 55s at the City Hall, she often returns home in tears, unable to cope with the fear that now grips her when walking through city streets she has walked for most of her adult life.