Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  Doctor English, our family doctor in Yass, ordered my mother to take long walks; she complained of being tired and lacking energy, of not enjoying life. The walks were not the right treatment, for they left her more exhausted than ever, but I loved them. Every afternoon, my mother and I set off. Our walks took the same route as the funeral processions. Rossi Street soon turned into a steep hill with quaint little cottages. Their front gardens were crammed with flowers. The hollyhocks planted along the fences were ten feet high; creamy yellow, red and mauve flowers and much taller than I. Bluebells grew everywhere beside the road; bluebells and creeping pink flowers, tiny pink convolvulus which I called pink bluebells, much to my mother’s amusement.

  At the top of Cemetery Hill, the road turned right and meandered past paddock after paddock until it reached the cemetery. Usually we walked to the first paddock. I would break away from my mother’s hand, squeeze under the fence and go racing across the stubble of grass and through the blue and white flag lilies with their wild smell. I would pick a bunch of lilies from the paddock to take home. The next day, we would hold a fete. The flag lilies and anything else I had picked over the fences on the way home I put in jamjars. (I always took any flower I could over a fence; I still do.)

  I made mud pies for my stall, too. They were almost good enough to eat, decorated with whiting we kept for cleaning the hearth. All morning I stood hopefully by the stall waiting for customers, flicking away the flies with a gum leaf twig.

  The stall was out the back near the yellow pisé wall that ran round the house. A gate in the wall led to an orchard and by the gate was an old fig tree. The pisé wall was wide enough to run along, and the fig tree could be climbed from the wall. During summer we stuffed ourselves with the purply figs, waiting until they were so ripe they were ready to burst before we pushed them into our greedy mouths.

  A Jersey cow lived in the orchard. Dad used to milk it and Mum left the milk in big basins on the stove overnight. In the mornings she peeled off cream half an inch thick. We put it on our porridge with brown sugar. We also ate bread and jam with a slice of cream.

  The orchard had a side fence that was also the back yard of a man who had an open-air picture show. In the evenings we used to go down there, climb the fence, balance precariously and watch the distant flickering screen. We saw crazy Keystone comedies, Ben Turpin looking cross-eyed, Mabel Normand simpering coyly. Then someone would fall off the fence and we would be sent home to bed.

  Opposite our house was the court house and behind it the police station. The court house had a porticoed front like the Parthenon. Whenever I looked at the court house, I thought of Cuckoo Singh.

  Cuckoo Singh was an Indian hawker who had lost his mind. I always thought he was called ‘Cuckoo’ after the bird. Only later I realised where his name came from. Cuckoo Singh had a breakdown and was locked in the gaol, which had cells surrounded by a high stone wall. We were sleeping out on the balcony and lay awake all night, listening to Cuckoo Singh screaming.

  The next day he was taken off to the asylum, Kenmore, at Goulburn. On the way, they said, he tore up the floor of the wagon with his teeth.

  Cuckoo Singh haunted our nightmares. If we wanted to frighten other children, we told them the story of Cuckoo Singh.

  There were other terrors in those early days, such as the greenhide. This was a weapon wielded on the boys by my father, whom I recall as an impressive figure with a gingery moustache. One day the greenhide vanished. Somehow I knew it was at the bottom of the water tank and that my brother King had put it there. The boys won. The greenhide was not replaced.

  Dad loved concerts, theatricals, receptions, dinners, entertainment of every description. There was tremendous shouting from the sewing room whenever he was preparing for a concert. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more’, his voice boomed out.

  Dad never stayed around the house much. If he wasn’t off to a theatrical event in later years he was up at the Soldiers’ Club. The children … well, we were very nice, but that was all the notice he took of us. Nevertheless we worshipped him.

  One exciting time he won the prize at a fancy dress ball by going as a cabbage. He had spent the day before sewing cabbage leaves onto an old suit. Then he wanted to take me to a Red Cross conscription rally to play the part of a dead Belgian child, but Mum wouldn’t permit it. My mother regarded Dad’s eagerness to join in other people’s parties with little sympathy. She said Dad would do anything for anybody except his own family.

  Mum had been very fond of Dad when they were married, but they had different temperaments and she had grown tired of his easygoing joviality and impracticality.

  ‘Your father is a fool,’ she would snap, but we loved him because he made us laugh, like the time he took us to see a Charlie Chaplin film at Williams’ Picture Show.

  A fat aunt who was visiting Grandma came with us. Dad was not a small man either. As we were sitting there, in a row of canvas deck chairs and laughing at Chaplin walking bowlegged in baggy trousers, suddenly Dad’s deck chair collapsed.

  ‘Get me out of this!’ he shouted. But we were already too weak from laughing to help him up. Then our aunt’s chair gave way. We thought we would die of laughter.

  Dad’s impracticality went back to boyhood. On one occasion he had dropped a match into a barrel from the store that contained a small quantity of spirits. The barrel was blown to pieces in the explosion that followed. Dad’s hair was singed and his clothes burned, but apart from a minor injury and the fright of it he was unharmed. ‘A narrow escape for Master Coen’, the Yass Courier summed up this escapade.

  Things weren’t very different in adulthood.

  When the Jersey cow was blown, he summoned the boys and they lit a bonfire in the back yard. Dad heated the poker Mum brought him; the boys were to hold the cow while Dad tried to pierce her side with the red-hot poker.

  The cow broke loose.

  ‘Hold her, hold her!’ Dad’s commands were too late; the cow was already out of the orchard and up the lane. Dad’s agitation at the cow escaping was nothing to his frenzy when he picked up the poker, which he had dropped in the excitement, by the red-hot end.

  ‘Your father is a fool,’ sighed Mum in exasperation.

  The tank sprang a leak. Dad’s method of fixing it was to nail a piece of tin over the hole.

  ‘Your father is a fool,’ became a household refrain.

  Dad remained amiable. He retaliated only once. He had come back from some country excursion with a very young white cockatoo. My mother was left the job of feeding it, and it squawked day and night.

  Mrs English, the doctor’s wife, paid us a visit and Mum told her a tale of woe about the bird. Mrs English liked white cockatoos and told Mum she would be happy to look after even a very young, noisy one.

  My mother gave her the cockatoo, telling her not to say where the bird had come from. Mum’s plan was to tell my father that it had escaped and flown away.

  The cockatoo was in a box. Mrs English left the house and immediately went down to Coen’s store to buy a cage for it. By some mischance, my father served her. She explained what she needed and as she departed with the cage, the awful truth dawned on Dad. He came home straight after work and confronted Mum.

  ‘Did you give my cockatoo to Mrs English?’ he demanded.

  Argument and recrimination lasted for hours, but my mother didn’t ask for the cockatoo back. My father never brought another bird into the house, either.

  My best friend Gladys lived two doors up. Because my brothers King and Jack and my sister Mollie were older than I was, I didn’t play with their friends much. Gladys and I shared a passion for cats. We dressed them up in dolls’ clothes and dragged them around the yard in a boot box attached to a piece of string.

  Gladys came to the door in tears one day when my mother was out, and told me her mother was dead. An angel had come in the night and had taken her mother to heaven, she said.

  She asked me to her house and we crept into
her mother’s bedroom. It was very quiet. In the middle of the room was a long, polished wooden box. We looked into it and saw Gladys’ mother lying whitefaced and perfectly still. Beside her was a tiny waxen baby, no bigger than a doll.

  I was shocked. The day before, Gladys’ mother had been alive. She had given Gladys and me a piece of cake each. I thought the dead baby was the angel who had come to take her away. I couldn’t understand why the angel was dead too.

  We stood by the coffin crying until someone led us outside. Gladys, still crying, came home with me. I took Gladys into my parents’ bedroom where my mother kept two pretty rings in a little silver box on her dressing table.

  ‘Never mind, Gladys,’ I said. ‘You can have these if you stop crying.’

  Gladys accepted the rings. The sparkling stones stopped her tears and she took them home with her. Later, a woman arrived at the door and asked my mother if the rings were hers. I was in trouble because I had given away my mother’s engagement ring.

  The funny little steam train that we used to call ‘the tram’ was quite a feature of Yass. It ran from Yass to Yass Junction, crossing the Yass River by the railway bridge. The boys in Yass, including my brothers, used to walk halfway across the railway bridge, then hang upside down by the sleepers as the tram went past. Gladys and I listened enviously to their stories of this feat. We wanted to be as daring as the boys.

  The tram tracks through town ran along a road parallel to the main street. Accidents happened wherever the tram crossed the road. People in buggies were killed; later there were car accidents. We were always being told how dangerous it was to play around the tram tracks.

  Gladys and I heard the boys saying that, if you put pennies on the tram line, the tram would pass over them and make them twice the size. We decided to try for ourselves. Either we were too slow running away from the line or we didn’t run far enough, because the tram stopped where we had put our pennies.

  The tram driver got out and chased us. Gladys and I ran for our lives. The tram driver kept shouting that he would tell our parents we had been playing on the tram tracks. Fortunately Rossi Street was just around the corner from the tramline. Gladys and I breathed a deep sigh of relief when we were safely home. We vowed never to go near the tramline again.

  Brothers could be a torment. I came into the playroom one day and found sawdust scattered over the floor. King and a friend had been operating on my favourite doll. They had cut her down the middle to take out her appendix. No attempt had been made to stitch the patient up after the operation and I fled in tears with my ravaged doll.

  I remember very little about my curly-haired sister Mollie, except that I envied her curls. By the time I became aware of her, she and King had won scholarships to boarding school. They were whisked away to Goulburn for the next five years.

  King had gingery, sandy hair and freckles; Jack was very red-haired with freckles. My own black hair was fine and straight with coppery highlights, different from my mother’s and Mollie’s blue-black hair. I also had freckles, which I hated, but, like Mum, Mollie didn’t have a freckle on her face.

  For a while Grandma also owned a house at Randwick in Sydney where the family could stay. When my brothers were having a holiday there, Dad’s brother Barney took them out fishing in a rowing boat at Coogee. They sat in the boat with their feet up as they dangled their lines over the side. Since they were all so gingery and white-skinned, Barney included, the soles of their feet were badly sunburned.

  The boys and Barney retired early to bed to ease their stinging feet. My Uncle Frank had left his fox terrier Spot at the house. Spot chose this evening to bite Grandma’s sister Auntie Lizzie on the nose, which caused considerable commotion. It did not have very happy consequences for Spot either, who was immediately banished to the King Edward’s Dogs’ Home at Waterloo.

  Mum with her clear skin looked the exact opposite of the gingery, fair-skinned Coens. She used to pay us threepence a week to brush her long, black hair, being a firm believer in the value of one hundred strokes a day. Brushing hair for a long time can be tiring and boring. I once brought the brush up the wrong way and tangled her hair. Mum spent hours unravelling the knots I made; I was not in favour.

  Then the boys decided they wanted a tent. Mum was out at a Red Cross meeting so they raided her wardrobe. Her lace wedding dress with the boned sides and waist that she so treasured was hung over a pole in the orchard and the full skirt and train were staked to the ground. The boys were in trouble that night.

  The circus came to town. That was an unforgettable event. For months the posters had been pinned up in shop windows and stuck on street lamps. ‘Wirth’s Circus’ was written across them with an orange-and-white-striped tiger’s face and, much smaller, a tiny ballerina riding on a white horse.

  Elephants led the parade down Cooma Street when the circus finally arrived, pulling a wagon with a ‘wild beast’ inside.

  We loved the animal smell of the sawdust as we sat around the ring at night; the lions and tigers, the elephants, the clowns, all were magical to us. It was the first circus I saw, and I became a circus fan for life.

  On the second night of the circus, Jack disappeared. He was found asleep under the benches, in the process of running away with the circus. Jack had run away before; as a very small boy he had taken all his clothes off, put on a hat of Mum’s, then, with his legs astride Dad’s sword like a hobby horse, had set off down the street to visit Grandma. He had a wonderful time until he was captured and brought home.

  A commotion of another sort occurred when an old lady who lived alone by the river wandered into our walled back yard. Once in, she was unable to find her way out. She thought she was in the walled yard of the gaol. ‘Let me out, oh God, let me out!’ she shrieked. There was a bottle on the bench beside her. We were terrified and enchanted.

  I remember my fourth birthday party. My mother had decorated my high chair by twisting ivy leaves around it; she put flowers among the leaves and made a wreath for my head.

  For a birthday present I was given a little gypsy’s caravan. Steps led up to a covered wagon made of shiny, silvery stuff. I put threepence in the wagon, which was a money box. It was my favourite thing. Somehow I lost it. I don’t know what happened, and for a long time I felt that a part of life was missing. I searched high and low for the gypsy caravan.

  Another uncomfortable childhood image that remains with me is lying under a bed feeling ill after having eaten a box of chocolate Laxettes.

  A joy of my childhood was driving out to buy ripe Black Margaret cherries from the orchard. My mother would pick up cherries on a stem and drape them over my ears for earrings.

  ‘Look at yourself in the mirror and admire the view,’ she used to say.

  Tommy our pony bolted the day we went to the orchard for a sugar bag of apples. I thought my mother was very brave as she stood up straight, fiercely holding onto the reins.

  ‘Hang on tight, don’t stand up,’ she told Jack and me. Jack leapt out but I clung on, crouched down in the rattling sulky. At last a man came running alongside and Tommy was subdued.

  Tommy hated to be driven out of town. Going to the park to collect pine cones, we had to force him to put one foot in front of the other, but when the buggy was loaded up, he would trot home spryly.

  In winter, the fire was piled high with pine cones. We would sit as close as possible staring at the pictures in the flames. My mother would bring in her sewing basket with cotton reels threaded on the handles for the kittens to play with. The old mother cat gazed steadily into the fire, occasionally swishing her tail to and fro for the kittens’ amusement.

  The greatest treat was to be bathed in front of the fire in the shallow tin dish that took kettle after kettle to fill. Afterwards my mother would wrap me in a large towel and, bathed and warm, I would fall asleep in her arms.

  Then there was Grandma. An awesome and mysterious figure, reputed to be made of money and not amused by life, she went into black the instant my grandf
ather died and stayed in her widow’s weeds for the next fifty years. Her only concession to vanity was a rich brown wig that she called a ‘transformation’.

  Grandma lived with her daughters. The eldest, Evangelista, had already entered the convent; the next two, Trix and Ina, were preparing to go into the convent; and gentle Mollie who played the piano was harbouring a secret wish to become a nun. Kathleen, my youngest aunt, was still at school. There was also a curly-haired general servant named. Annie who looked after Grandma and ‘the girls’ as my aunts were called.

  Grandma lived next door to the store in Cooma Street. Her low, single-storeyed home with pisé walls a foot thick was known as The House. Several times I lived with Grandma and my aunts at The House.

  Most people were frightened of Grandma. She could be very stern, and her manner to us was always gruff, perhaps because of the hostility between her and Mum. But I got on well with Grandma, despite such episodes as my lapse with the chocolates.

  The dining room at The House had a long cedar sideboard with three compartments. One held sherry, whisky and stout or porter, as Grandma called it. Grandma drank porter every day. (I, too, was given porter because I had such a pale face. A little porter at night was supposed to improve the colour.) The second compartment held condiments, pepper and salt for the table. The third was reserved for special things such as chocolates.

  Lent was kept very seriously at Grandma’s. Someone had given ‘the girls’ a box of chocolates but the chocolates were put aside until Easter.

  I must have been about three at the time; it was during one of my stays at The House. In my wanderings I discovered the box of chocolates stored in the cedar sideboard. The temptation was too great, I knew they weren’t to be eaten, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t let myself look at them, just put my hand in, lifted the lid and felt. My finger closed on a chocolate. Having a very sweet tooth, I had to eat it. More and more often I went back to the sideboard until I couldn’t feel any more chocolates.