The Mother of Mohammed

by Sally Neighbour

  She married Jim on the rebound. The son of a Lithgow coal-miner, his given name was Kenneth Roy Hutchinson, but everyone called him Jim. He had left school at fourteen, worked variously as a salesman in the Sydney department store Mark Foys, a fruit and vegetable vendor, machinist, and telephone linesman for the Post Master General’s Department. He enlisted in the army in 1943, as a private in the Second Battalion of the Second Australian Infantry Division, but never made it overseas to fight, apparently because of extreme myopia. The closest he got to seeing action was at Townsville in north Queensland, home of the Australian Army’s Heavy Anti-Aircraft Battery. His war record was distinguished only by an admonition for going ‘AWL’—absent without leave—and another for ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline’, the details of which were not recorded. Because he never saw active service over seas, his father-in-law would often joke derisively about Jim’s time in ‘the bucket brigade’.

  Bessie’s father, a dour Scotsman named Archibald Roy McCallum, was the bane of Jim’s life. Archibald was the grandson of a Scottish settler, Donald McCallum, who had migrated to the Australasian colonies in 1831, and turned his hand to farming on the fertile plains of the Cudgegong River valley around Mudgee. Donald and his wife Christina had nine children, among them Archibald’s father, John McCallum, born in 1845, who listed his occupation as ‘maintenance man, farmer, Gold miner’. John himself never struck it rich, but his eldest son, John Alexander, found a nugget the size of a cricket ball, enough to set himself up in comfort.

  John junior’s brother, Archibald—Robyn’s grandfather— was a gifted horseman who turned his skills to training racehorses for a stud at Cullenbone on the Cudgegong River. Robyn recalls that on weekends Archibald would travel to race tracks around the district to cheer on his charges, dressed in his customary navy pinstriped suit and waistcoat, with his silver-grey hair parted neatly down the middle beneath a grey fedora hat. He drove a mustard-coloured Vauxhall with a wooden dashboard and leather seats, which he polished lovingly with saddle wax. Race days were the only time old Archibald abandoned his stiff reserve. Family folklore has it that the most excited he ever got was when one of his rank outsiders came in first, and he slapped Bessie so hard on the back that her false teeth went flying over the railing.

  A God-fearing Presbyterian who never drank, cursed or womanised, Archibald (who was commonly known by his second name, Roy) had no time at all for his hard-drinking son-in-law Jim, who was Roman Catholic, to make matters worse. ‘My grandfather hated him with a passion’, says Robyn. ‘He considered my father beneath him.’

  Jim wasn’t the only one who cringed under Archibald’s withering disapproval. ‘Everyone was afraid of my grandfather except me and I think that’s why he loved me’, Robyn recalls. ‘He used to call me his wee bonny lassie. He was the person I loved most in my life—I don’t think anyone loved him except me.’ She called him ‘farv’ or ‘farvie’, short for grandfather. While the others tiptoed around the old curmudgeon, she would fiddle with his fob watch, and blow her snotty nose on the starched white handkerchief embroidered with his initials that peeped from his breast pocket. Only his ‘wee bonny lassie’ was game to tease the peppery patriarch.

  ‘You’re Scotch, aren’t you?’ she would ask with mock innocence, to annoy him.

  ‘Do I look like a bottle of whiskey? I’m a Scotsman’, he would indignantly reply.

  Archibald’s wife Lurline had been a pillar of the Mudgee citizenry, eulogised in the Guardian as ‘a member of a very old district family … a kindly, charitable lady (who) was held in the highest regard by her neighbours’. After her death, the widower had sold his own property and rented a room in a neat weatherboard bungalow a dozen doors up Horatio Street, owned by an upstanding local family named the Pitts, whom Archibald considered far more respectable than his own unruly brood. ‘They were the epitome of what he approved of—husband and wife, mother and father, solid job, own home, family car, church on Sunday. Their little girl was always immaculately dressed with ribbons in her hair’, says Robyn. Such was Archibald’s scorn for his son-in-law that he refused to set foot in Jim and Bessie’s home. When the children wanted to see their grandfather, they would have to walk up Horatio Street to visit him. ‘It was very sad for my mum. She had been the apple of his eye—until she married my father.’

  When their daughter was still a toddler, Jim and Bessie decided to leave Mudgee and make a new start in the city. Robyn’s vague recollection was that her heavy-drinking father had been retrenched from his job, but the urge to escape the pitiless scrutiny of his overbearing father-in-law may also have been a factor in the move. They relocated to the working-class seaside suburb of Narrabeen on Sydney’s northern beaches, where Jim and Bessie took over the snack bar in the beer garden of the Narrabeen Hotel. Their new home had an orchid garden and a backyard swimming pool that had been filled with concrete after a child drowned in it. Surrounded by bushland, it was almost like being back in the country.

  George was a serious, responsible boy, who could safely be left in charge of his little sister. She was a scrawny, pale-skinned runt, with a shock of frizzy white-blonde hair and an eye-patch she wore from the age of two to correct a severe astigmatism. What she lacked in physical stature she made up for in sheer pluck, as she stumbled through the bush behind her brother like a pint-sized pirate, game for almost anything.

  ‘My mother used to say that poem: “There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead, and when she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid”. She used to throw her hands up in the air and say “Thank God you’re not twins”, because she never knew what I would do next. I didn’t have any fear.’ At age two, Robyn recalls packing a toothbrush, face washer and some scraps of food and striding off into the scrub to collect cicada shells in a paper bag, hoping Bessie could bring them back to life. By the time she wandered home several hours later, the local police were leading a search party through the bush to find her.

  While Bessie slaved all hours in the hotel kitchen, Jim spent his time propping up the bar and yarning with the regular clientele. Over time, his drinking got steadily worse, as did his volatile temper. Publicly, he was an amiable enough drunk, but at home after a heavy night he would sometimes lash out in violence. ‘He never beat my brother and I, but he beat my mum’, Robyn remembers.

  Her half-brother, Roderick, thirteen years Robyn’s junior, paints a sobering picture of their father. Roderick was one of two sons born to Jim Hutchinson’s second wife. He made their lives a misery. ‘He was always violent’, says Roderick. ‘I love my father but I’ll never forgive him for the alcoholism and the beatings. My dad would come home from the pub each night, and he had two moods—if he whistled he was happy, if he was silent I would cop the beatings. It went on till I was fifteen or sixteen years old. Never once in my life did he tell me he loved me. There was nothing.’ Roderick’s brother Brett, who was a year-and-a-half younger, committed suicide at the age of twenty-seven. Roderick himself attempted suicide three times and was finally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which he attributes to his brutal upbringing.

  Fortunately for Robyn, Jim Hutchinson was not yet the extremely cruel man he would become. And in any event, Bessie was not one to tolerate such treatment for long. There were constant arguments, occasional bursts of violence, and money was always tight. By the time Robyn was about three years old, Bessie had had enough; she packed up the children and went home to Mudgee.

  ‘My mother, in the face of damnation, left my father and went back to Mudgee and tried to survive—in a world that did not cater for divorced women. My family was looked down on because Mum had separated. My grandfather wouldn’t support her financially, and she was too proud to take welfare. So she worked. She had to do jobs that were normally done by men, because in those days they paid double the wages that they paid to women.’

  Bessie and the children moved into the Woolpac
k Hotel, a gold-rush–era bloodhouse that still had the old stables out the back where thirsty prospectors would tether their horses when they stopped for an ale. Now derelict and with its windows painted over, the old pub had ceased trading and was operating as a cheap boarding house. Bessie found work as a ‘donkey stoker’ at another hotel, shovelling fuel into the coal-fired hot water system known as a ‘donkey’. Her other tasks included chopping wood for the hotel fireplaces and cleaning out the stinking black sludge from the cesspool where wastewater from the kitchen and bathrooms stagnated before flowing to the sewer. While George was at school, Robyn would trail around after her mother as she worked. ‘I was always at the pub. I hated it’, she recalls. Bessie’s wage was barely enough to put food on the table for her and the two children. Robyn remembers her mother eating bread and dripping while the children ate meat, and buying cheap Dairy Bell margarine that she wrapped in discarded butter paper so the children would think they were eating butter.

  The old teetotaller, Archibald, was horrified at his daughter’s new circumstances. In 1950s Mudgee, ‘good women’ didn’t divorce and they didn’t go to hotels at all. Those who did were allowed only in the dining room or ‘ladies lounge’; the bar was reserved for men. ‘My grandfather couldn’t bear it, so he shunned her’, says Robyn. ‘His view was “you are second class”. He felt she had brought shame on the McCallum name.’

  As best she could under the circumstances, Bessie instilled in her children a strict moral code, which prized good manners, respect for one’s elders, adherence to the Queen’s English, modesty, frugality and above all honesty. ‘My mum was a very strong woman who taught us honesty and truthfulness and that you stand on your principles. She hated gossip, I guess because she was a victim of it all her life. She taught me very strongly that what’s important is not how people perceive you, it’s how you are yourself. If someone is saying something about you, it’s either true or not true; and if it’s not true, you don’t care what they say. It gave me a very strong sense of self-worth.’

  Bessie insisted the children were always neat and clean, even though their clothes were patched and threadbare. ‘Being poor is no excuse for being dirty’, she would tell the children. They only ever had three sets of clothing each; it was all they needed, according to Bessie—‘one on, one off, one in the wash’. A former neighbour, Stephen Gay, remembers Bessie as ‘a rough and tough typical Aussie’ who enjoyed a laugh and a few beers but was a stickler for her rules, which included forbidding the neighbourhood children from running up and down her hallway. ‘She was a genuine old rough diamond’, says Gay.

  The only occasions Robyn got a spanking were when she told lies. One time was when her mother sent her to the shops to buy a packet of her favourite Capstan cork-tipped cigarettes and Robyn spent the ha’penny change on lollies, lying to her mother afterwards that there had been no money left. Bessie found out and whipped her with the cord from the electric iron.

  ‘Do you know why I’m punishing you?’ she asked her whimpering daughter.

  ‘Because I stole money?’ sniffed Robyn.

  ‘No, because you looked me in the eye and you lied. And there is nothing on the face of this earth that’s worse than a liar.’

  Robyn didn’t mind the odd thrashing; a far worse punishment in her view was being ignored. ‘If my mother beat me, it didn’t have much effect, but if she stopped talking to me, it used to kill me. Because for me, to be ignored was just intolerable. It’s just my personality—I can’t stand to be ignored.’

  Aside from the occasional hiding, it was a carefree life for an intrepid child. Robyn had an old red bike with no brakes, on which she would pedal up to the Flirtation Hill lookout with the other kids, wait for a puff of smoke in the distance, and then race the train, careening at full pelt down the hill to the showgrounds. It got so that Bessie refused to buy her another dress; even her ‘Sunday best’ was constantly being darned. ‘It was always ripped, the lace would be hanging off it, because I’d been up a tree, or crawling under the barbed-wire fence, or in the chicken coop playing hospitals with the chickens.’ Playing hospitals was Robyn’s favorite game, but she was never one for make-believe—all games had to be as real as she could make them. One Christmas, to Bessie’s horror, she ‘operated’ on her brand-new Red Riding Hood doll, cutting a chunk out of its leg with a kitchen knife and then hacking off its hair.

  At four years and ten months—‘as soon as my mum could get rid of me’—Robyn was packed off to Mudgee public primary school, dressed in a little brown tunic and yellow shirt and lugging an oversized schoolbag, her eye-patch replaced by round tortoiseshell glasses. She came home unimpressed after day one in kindergarten. ‘I told my mother it wasn’t school, it was playschool. They didn’t teach me how to read or write. All we did was sing songs and play games. I said it shouldn’t be called a school because we didn’t learn anything.’

  She devised her own ways of making kindergarten more interesting. One day she led a gang of children to play horses in the yard of the old Mechanics Institute next door, a dilapidated barn of a place with a rusty corrugated-iron fence and overgrown grass. Always a forceful personality, she liked being able to get the other kids to do what she told them to.

  ‘We’re all wild horses, so first we’ll graze and then we’ll run’, she announced.

  Her playmates started pretending to eat grass, which wasn’t good enough for Robyn.

  ‘You’re not being a real horse’, she chided them, ‘you have to really eat it, or it won’t be real’.

  So the children proceeded to eat grass, until one boy began to gag.

  ‘He went blue in the face and nearly choked, then he started crying and the teacher came, and my mother got called up to the school’, Robyn recounts. It was the first of many times that Bessie Hutchinson would be summoned to the school about her errant daughter’s behaviour. ‘Poor mum, I was a shocking child. Not that I was a delinquent, but I was always coming up with the most outlandish schemes and acting them out—and they would have to be as real as possible.’ Whenever there was trouble, the teachers knew where to look. ‘I always got caught because I wasn’t allowed to lie. So if anything was wrong in class, the person they would ask was always me, and I would have to tell the truth.’

  During her second year in primary school, the family abruptly packed their bags and moved again. Bessie had a new boyfriend whom she’d met at the pub, a rouseabout who did mustering and shearing on farms around the district. He moved with them to a one-horse town called Wollar, 50 kilometres out of Mudgee, which consisted of a couple of dirt roads, a pub, a bakery, a general store, a one-teacher school and about twenty houses. As Robyn recalls it, their new home was little better than a shack, with dirt floors, no bathroom and no electricity. They used kerosene lanterns and cooked on an open fire. Once a week Bessie would fill a tub with water from the copper and scrub the children in front of the open fire until their skin shone. Robyn’s memories are not of grinding poverty but of rollicking, childish adventures. ‘I was in my element there. We had all sorts of animals. I used to go rabbit hunting with my brother, and we used to pick wild mushrooms the size of dinner plates and bake them in the oven at the local bakery.’

  Weekday mornings, George and Robyn would clump across the paddock from their house to the tiny school, which was elevated on concrete stumps to let the air through and keep the snakes out, or so the children were told. On Saturday nights the townsfolk would dress up in their finery for the weekly square dance at the newly built memorial hall, a large corrugated-iron shed with a fancy cement-rendered Art Deco façade stuck on at the front. Inside was a polished dance floor with bench seats lining the iron walls, and a stage where a local bush band would bash out the latest hoedown tunes on a squeezebox, a banjo and a ‘lagerphone’— a broomstick with metal beer-bottle caps nailed down its length, which makes a racket not unlike music when thumped rhythmically on a hardwood floor.

  A few months after their arrival, Robyn had something else to
amuse her—a baby sister named Susan, whose birth presumably explained the family’s hasty departure from Mudgee.

  ‘One day Mum went away and had this baby. I didn’t even know she was having a baby. I just got up one morning and she was gone. Our neighbour was there and she said to me, “your mother’s gone to get a baby from underneath the cabbage leaf”. So she came back with this baby, and after a few hours I said “OK, it’s a nice baby but you’d better take it and put it back under the cabbage leaf now”. I was very, very jealous, because for seven years I’d been the baby of the family, with no competition.’

  Like her father, Jim Hutchinson, Robyn’s stepfather was a drinker with a quick temper, ‘a bit of a no-hoper’, she recalls. She claims that one day when she saw him hitting her mother, she picked up his rum bottle and clubbed him over the head. Not long afterwards, Bessie packed up her three children and their few belongings and returned, yet again, to Mudgee.

  Under sufferance, Bessie’s father Archibald took his daughter and her young brood in. They moved into a semi-detached bungalow in Lewis Street, Mudgee, which Archibald shared with Bessie’s bachelor brother, Noel. Uncle Noel was a simple, good-natured fellow who delighted the children with his first-class yodelling—which drove old Archibald almost to distraction— and took them spot-lighting at night in his ute for rabbits, which he skinned and sold for their pelts. Noel worked for the council as the night-soil collector, doing the rounds of Mudgee each evening to empty the sewage cans from the backyard dunnies of the town. He would regale anyone who would listen with stories like the one about the time he was bailed up by a blue cattle dog with a brimful can on his shoulder and ended up with shit all over him. After school, Uncle Noel would drive Robyn in his pickup truck to the main drag, Church Street, and pull up in front of Wilf Hodges’s radio and television shop. Television had just been introduced and Robyn’s family could not afford one. They would stand transfixed among a small crowd of townsfolk in front of the store, watching Rin Tin Tin without sound through the plate-glass window.