Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  The other snobbery was about people ‘in trade’, as the shopkeepers were called. Graziers, doctors and lawyers headed the desirable list in Yass. People who worked in the bank were just acceptable and shop owners certainly less so.

  My mother did have two women friends in Yass. Neither was a Catholic and both were very independent women. They were Mary Yeo (called Pol Yeo by her friends), and Kit English, the doctor’s daughter. Mary Yeo was a local historian who also had an interest in archaeology and geology. She was supposedly the first person in Yass to learn typing and shorthand, and she opened a school in Rossi Street where she taught these. Kit English studied insects. A species of blowfly she discovered was named after her.

  My mother enjoyed the company of both these women, I think, because she would have liked a freer, more adventurous life herself. I always remember her talking about the importance of the Married Women’s Property Act. This was the Act that stopped a husband automatically taking any monies belonging to his wife. The injustice of her own mother having to hand over her wedding present money to Michael O’Dwyer, who spent it so rapidly, remained strongly in her mind.

  All this time, too, my mother was sick. The malaise of which she complained to Doctor English was a stomach tumour that remained undiagnosed until 1918. Finally Mum went up to Sydney for an operation at Lewisham hospital. After this she became well again. But ill health added to her dissatisfaction with life in Yass.

  The war was almost over, but Dad was still away with the army at Holsworthy. Mum couldn’t stand being alone in the big house by herself any more. Mollie and King were at boarding school, Jack and I were the only company she had. She wanted to be near my father. So, without consulting anyone, she decided to leave Yass forever. She never came back to live there.

  Mum took Jack to Sydney with her. I was left with Grandma. For the next few years I remained in the pisé house next to the store with the short, formidable figure in black and a collection of female relatives.

  THREE

  A HOUSE FULL OF WOMEN

  Grandma had a cockatoo that said, ‘A piece of toast, please.’ Cocky had tea and toast for breakfast every morning, which won me immediately.

  The House was full of women. There was Grandma, who thought she was Queen Victoria; her stumpy figure really did look like Victoria’s. Her daughters, Trix, Ina and Evangelista had gone off to the convent, but Mollie and Kathleen, who had just left school, were still at The House and so were Grandma’s two sisters Linda (Belinda) and Lizzie. There was also Annie who did all the work.

  The aunts, as Linda and Lizzie were known, were short and not very good-looking. They were the most close-mouthed and secretive couple. Linda was a retired schoolmistress; with her knowing eye and beaky nose she reminded me of a cockatoo. Lizzie had lived with Grandma as her housekeeper since the death of my grandfather.

  Mollie by this stage had admitted that she too intended to enter the convent. She was older than Trix, who was already a nun, and had wanted to enter for a long time, but wasn’t brave enough to tell Grandma. Grandma was growing a bit upset about all her daughters becoming nuns. Mollie had beautiful long brown hair, so long she could sit on it. I thought it was terrible that it would soon be cut off in the convent.

  Mollie loved music and playing the piano. She used to sing to me:

  Listen to the watermill all the livelong day

  How the grinding of the wheel wears the day away,

  The mill will never grind with waters that have passed …

  It was so sad. I cried and cried.

  ‘Margaret,’ Mollie used to chide, ‘I won’t play for you any more because it makes you cry.’

  ‘But I like crying,’ I assured her.

  On the day she left, Mollie gave me a gold medal she had won for her music. It had an Irish harp on one side and an Irish wolfhound on the other.

  In Mollie’s bedroom was a portrait of a saintly lady, her hands joined in prayer, smiling sweetly against a stained glass window, a November lily, the symbol of purity, growing up beside her. I asked permission to copy this painting and the request was granted. I made a careful copy in pencil which was much admired by Grandma and the aunts. They even framed it.

  ‘You’re quite the little artist,’ they said.

  I was convinced that this was what I wanted to be, an artist. I also copied or tried to copy a framed drawing of the nursery rhyme, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, with the mouse running up the clock.

  Grandma, Linda and Lizzie all wore wigs. Nobody told me they were wigs, but you would have had to be blind not to spot that their hair wasn’t their own. I don’t know if they were bald or just had very fine hair; the three of them were redhaired, and redheads sometimes do go bald early. Grandma had a surprisingly youthful face and her wig was a rich red. She never wore a white ‘transformation’. At ninety-three her hair was still as brilliant as ever. Perhaps because she ran a business, Grandma was determined not to show her age. Auntie Lizzie had a little white through her wig, but Linda kept hers deep red until she was eighty.

  Before she went away to boarding school, my sister Mollie had a terrible fight with a girl at the Yass school.

  ‘Your grandmother wears a wig,’ the girl sang out in the playground.

  Mollie was stung. She didn’t even know what a wig was (they were always called ‘transformations’ in front of us), but she knew she had been insulted.

  ‘She doesn’t wear a wig,’ Mollie said. ‘She does not wear a wig!’

  ‘Oh, yes, she does! Everybody knows that,’ the girl retorted.

  They were so secretive, these Victorians; I never saw a wig hanging up. They wore quite fetching mobcaps to bed, caps with lace edging and ribbon threaded through.

  Grandma used to get up at half past five, summer and winter. She would go down to the icy outside bathroom wearing a towel draped over her head, hanging to her shoulders like a sheik’s headdress, to have what I can only presume was a cold bath.

  Curious though I was, I couldn’t manage to catch her with the wig off. I used to cross-question Annie about it, but she would only go off into peals of silent laughter at the mention of Grandma’s wig.

  The aunts disliked each other. There was great jealousy about rival plots in the garden. Lizzie grew chrysanthemums but Linda fancied delicate plants that wouldn’t flower in the Yass climate. She had a passion for tiny rockery plants called geums. If Linda appeared in the garden while Lizzie was watering her chrysanthemums, the hose was accidentally on purpose turned on Linda and a shrill series of short screams ensued.

  Linda picked on Lizzie. Linda picked on everyone. She was perpetually the reproving schoolmarm. Among other things, she didn’t care for the cats that hung about under three large tanks behind the kitchen.

  At the back of the store were bins of chaff and cattle feed. The grain was kept in a shed where I loved playing, climbing over hay piled twenty feet high.

  Mice were a problem because they chewed through the bags of chaff to make their nests so Harry Smith, who was in charge of this side of the business, used to encourage stray cats. They came round the back of the house, where Annie surreptitiously fed them with scraps sneaked from the fowls’ tin.

  I loved cats. I begged Annie to give me a saucer of milk for them. ‘Don’t let Linda catch you,’ Annie warned me. But Linda saw me pouring the milk into an old saucer. Linda spoke very precisely, as if she were still addressing a class of school children.

  ‘Margaret, you are not allowed to feed the cats or give them milk. Your grandmother does not want to encourage cats,’ she said. ‘We have to eat off that saucer.’

  ‘We’ll never eat off this one,’ I retorted.

  I picked up the saucer and threw it against the brick wall at the side of the house, where it smashed instantly. It’s a wonder I didn’t throw it at Auntie Linda, I was so angry.

  Annie’s anxious face was peeking out the kitchen window. She was delighted but didn’t dare show it.

  ‘Your grandmother shall hear of t
his,’ Linda stormed off. Linda never liked me and I never liked Linda. I never heard anything from Grandma about the smashed saucer.

  Grandma’s brother Luke Trainor, who was general manager of the store, also lived at The House. There were always visitors such as Uncle Barney or Dad’s other brother Joe, or various relatives of Grandma’s. Like Mum, Uncle Luke’s wife Kit couldn’t stand Yass, or more likely Grandma, and lived in Sydney. Pauline, their daughter, who was devoted to her father, often came to stay at The House. Pauline and I would rush into each other’s arms when she arrived; half an hour later we would have to be forcibly separated because we were fighting so violently.

  Pauline had long, pale golden hair and glasses. She was supposed to be very religious and she did eventually become a nun.

  Pauline came up with a new idea for self-denial. ‘If you have a piece of cake or some lollies,’ she said, ‘you should plant it in the garden for the angels to eat.’ This apparently kept them going. We fed the angels for a couple of days. The important thing was not to look back, Pauline told me, because angels didn’t like to be seen.

  I had just dutifully buried a piece of my cake under the Isabella grapevine down the back yard and gone off when something inspired me to return. I found the angel halfway through my cake; it was Pauline. In the course of the fight that followed, I knocked her glasses off, so I was the one who ended up in trouble.

  Pauline and I adored the shop, and spent a lot of time in there on Sunday afternoons. The door from The House to the shop was left open and we would disappear into the grocery department. We liked the biscuit section best. We knew we weren’t allowed to eat them, but we couldn’t resist the lure of their sweetness. We opened the different tins. Arnott’s Iced VoVos were our favourites; we crept in, filled our pockets with biscuits, then sneaked out again.

  One Sunday, Pauline felt daring. Having seen a tin of Iced VoVos on the top shelf, she climbed up a ladder to reach them. She was stretching out her hand to the tin when she dislodged the whole shelf. Tin after tin came down on her as she fell off the ladder in fright.

  Uncle Luke was in the office catching up on some work and heard the clatter. He read us a lecture about stealing biscuits, then let us go. But it was the end of our Sunday afternoon expeditions into the shop.

  Much later, I spent weekends in Sydney with Pauline and her mother at Waverley. Auntie Kit was full of complaints. She said Pauline was in the habit of bringing home old men whom she found in the street for a cup of tea. She would discover Pauline in the kitchen giving tea and biscuits to any old derelict because he reminded her of her father, who was still living in the country.

  The last time I stayed a weekend with Pauline at Waverley, I woke up on the Saturday morning to find her opening all the drawers of a big cedar chest of drawers. I asked her what she was doing.

  ‘I pray every night that God will give me a baby brother or sister.’ She was looking for a baby brother or sister in the chest of drawers.

  Pauline became a nurse, then a nursing sister and eventually a nun. She ended up working in an old men’s home, where she was very much beloved by the elderly patients. They undoubtedly all reminded her of Daddy.

  Mrs Reid, a friend of Annie’s, gave me a kitten for a present. I was overjoyed, but I wasn’t game enough to take it without asking Grandma first. My throat went dry as I tried to stammer out my request.

  ‘Yes,’ came the gruff reply. Grandma had said yes! I could keep the kitten. And what a patient kitten it turned out to be. I dressed it in doll’s clothes; its bed was a wooden box with minute sheets and blankets. I took the kitten to school to show Sister Dominic, who usually endured any sort of nonsense from me. Sister Dominic took one look at the kitten dressed in a doll’s nightshirt and exploded.

  ‘Take that cat home immediately,’ she ordered. Crestfallen, I obeyed.

  I discovered I loved mice as well as cats. At the bottom of an old concrete tub, so deep I had to climb into it, I found a shivering, drenched mouse. I rescued it and installed it in a house, a box lined with cotton wool with a few holes for it to breathe through. The mouse soon recovered and its fur grew glossy. I thought I had a pet mouse for life, but three days later it gnawed its way out of the box and escaped. I was disgusted.

  The box came from a thrilling room at the shop that held all kinds of delightful boxes; boxes for shirts and corsets, boxes filled with the empty spools from silk ribbons. Any sort of box you wanted could be found in that room. I was allowed free run of the box room, so I had a constant supply of beautiful boxes.

  Grandma’s shop, an old-fashioned country store, sold anything and everything. It had a millinery department with a milliner to make up women’s hats, a men’s department with men’s clothes, a boots and shoes department, and a drapery department, as well as the fully stocked grocery section.

  The room above the shop that had been turned into a dormitory for the Coen boys when they were growing up was now full of disused stock; another place I liked investigating.

  Pauline and I loved playing games among Harry West’s bags of wheat and chaff in the shed at the back of the store. He was always yelling at us to get down, because he was frightened the bags might fall on us. The bags had a lovely smell of wheat.

  There were still plenty of mice in the store, despite Harry’s stray cats. This mice plague led to another mouse story (not as pleasant as the previous one).

  I had been reading about making garments out of skin and I decided to make something out of mouse skins. I asked Harry to save me some mice. Harry gave me a few dead ones, which I proceeded to skin with some sort of sharp instrument – an awful job. I pinned the skins to a piece of wood, intending to cure them and make myself a pair of nice mouse-skin gloves.

  About halfway through the third mouse, I suddenly felt sick; I couldn’t go on with the skinning. I showed Annie the hapless victims and she was alarmed in case I caught some disease from handling mice. In the end she laughed and told me to bury the lot of them. I gave the mice a proper funeral. The mangled bodies were placed in the inevitable box from the box room lined with cotton wool, which I took down to the garden. I made a grave with flowers on it and said a few prayers over the box before I covered it with earth.

  The grain shed also housed the phaeton, a horse-drawn carriage with seats facing each other. I felt very rich and proud, going for rides in the family phaeton.

  My first sight of Canberra was from the phaeton. Grandma took a party of us – the aunts, Annie and me – to see how the new city was growing. The forty-odd-mile drive took us most of the morning. Canberra wasn’t much – a few suburbs had been named – but even so, it was easy to get lost. We seemed to spend hours driving round Canberra in circles.

  The House was fascinating. A narrow verandah with iron lace faced onto the street; the front door was just inside this verandah. Our friends could come into the house at any hour, for the front door was never locked, except when Annie placed the key inside at about twelve o’clock each night. The rest of the time, the key was in the door.

  Through the front door was the hall, eight to ten feet wide, with a cedar hallstand. Grandma’s house was full of cedar furniture. The hallstand held walking sticks, Grandma’s ebony cane and men’s hats. These were mainly made of felt, though occasionally Dad or Uncle Luke wore a straw hat.

  The drawing room was off to the right of the hall. Past the drawing room door was a long cedar sofa covered with stiff, black horsehair. If visitors arrived at The House, instead of showing them into the drawing room, Annie would ask them to sit on the sofa while she fetched whomever they wanted to see. The hall was a kind of waiting room.

  Dad’s brother, Frank Coen, had been a champion rower for St John’s College at the University of Sydney, and his oars were hung up along the hall. Perched on top of the oars was a little doll, a mascot, ten inches high, dressed in a tartan skirt. It maddened me that I couldn’t have this doll, but Frank’s name was sacred and I knew there was no way I would ever be able to have it. />
  The walls were painted white and there was linoleum covered with mats on the floor. Carpet wasn’t laid through the house until much later.

  The drawing room was used constantly. Afternoon tea was served there, carried in by Annie on a tray from the kitchen. Cards were played there every night after the family rosary had been said. The room was full of different-sized chairs: large grandfather chairs for the men, smaller grandmother chairs for the women and assorted other armchairs. Over the fireplace was a print by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun which I adored, a self-portrait of the artist with her small daughter.

  Auntie Mollie’s piano was in one corner of the drawing room and the other held a large rosewood cabinet, Frank’s special present to his mother before he went off to war – a wind-up gramophone. This miraculous invention delighted everyone. Records of Caruso, Melba, the Irish tenor John McCormack and Italian singer Galli-Curci would be played over and over. ‘Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark’ sang their favourite, Galli-Curci, her high voice soaring like a bird. I entertained Annie for hours in the kitchen with my own rendition of ‘Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark’.

  On the other side of the hall was Grandma’s bedroom. It had a dressing table with a bracket on either side to hold candles at night and a marble-topped washstand with a jug and basin on it. The bed was heavy with white linen. The bedspread was beautifully embroidered with white thread and the two pillow cases had ‘M’ on one and ‘C’ on the other: her husband Michael Coen’s initials. Grandma did the embroidery herself.

  Her children were born in this bed and Grandpa Coen died in it. Gentle Auntie Mollie was so upset when her father died that she couldn’t bear to walk past the bedroom and had to go out by the back of the house.

  The next room to the left down the hall was the dining room. A portrait of Napoleon hung at one end and at the other was an oval-shaped, life-sized photograph of Father Alphonsus, Dad’s half-brother, the Passionist priest. Alphonsus had a reputation for speaking powerful sermons. Dressed in the black robes of the Passionists with the Sacred Heart attached, even his photograph was intimidating enough. The dining room was dominated by the portraits of these men.