by Meg Stewart
The feast was planned for a Monday night. Genie was to bring the lollies, I was to bring the cakes. At Kings Cross on the way to school, I bought six assorted cakes in fancy shapes with different coloured icings.
When we arrived at school on Monday mornings, the beds were already made up. We just unpacked our suitcases, put our nightdresses and clean things away in the chest of drawers, then went downstairs. I unmade my bed, put the cakes in flatly under the sheets and blankets and carefully made the bed up on top of them.
After tea that night, I was told that the Mistress-General, Mother Woodlock, wanted to see me in her office. On the desk in front of her she had a plate of the heavy yellow cake, made with lard, that was served at school tea.
She looked at me across the plate of cake. ‘Don’t you get enough to eat here?’ she began.
I didn’t know what she meant. It hadn’t dawned on me that they could have found my cakes, because I had hidden them so well, I thought.
‘So you have to provide yourself with cake to eat in the night, do you?’
My heart sank. I had never reckoned on the nuns re-checking the beds in the mornings after the girls had put their things away. Mother Woodlock wanted to know who else was involved. They obviously hadn’t discovered Genie’s sweets. She kept on asking, but I wouldn’t say. I just stood there, crying.
Mother Woodlock realised that her questioning wasn’t achieving much. She pointed to the two slices of cake on the plate.
‘You have to eat this for supper every night because you don’t get enough to eat at tea time,’ she said.
I took one bite. The cake stuck in my throat and I couldn’t get it down; I was choking with tears as well. Mother Woodlock sat there implacably as I slowly forced down mouthful after mouthful. About two-thirds was all I could eat.
‘Why did you do this?’ Mother Woodlock pressed again.
I didn’t answer. Mother Woodlock was an American. She must have known what a midnight feast was. I stared down at the remaining cake. She was still trying to find out who else was involved but I wasn’t going to talk so, with a last wry lift of her eyebrows, she released me.
Desperate to warn Genie, I shot off. I had to tell her to get rid of the sweets, but I couldn’t let them see me doing it. Somehow I managed to convey the vital message.
I ate two slices of that wretched cake every night for the rest of the week. By the end of the week, I was able to get it down quite quickly, although I always found the first mouthful hideous.
Besides Genie and Alice Bolger whom I had met on the first day, my other good friend at school was Amber Hackett, who also lived at Randwick. Small, blonde and dainty, Amber arrived at school on Monday mornings in a chauffeur-driven white Rolls Royce. Her father was a wealthy bookmaker. Amber had a brother named Noel and, when I didn’t go to Yass, the three of us spent the holidays together at Randwick. As I became more friendly with Amber, I was also driven home on Friday afternoons in the back of the Rolls. Very posh.
One Friday afternoon Amber’s mother picked us both up and took us into town to go shopping at David Jones. In those days we didn’t have modern methods of disposable sanitary protection. We had to use strips of ordinary towel, which we took home at the end of the week to wash out. The chauffeur went off on some business of his own while we were shopping and when we came back we discovered that Amber’s beautiful leather overnight bag had disappeared from the car. Someone had stolen it.
Mrs Hackett, Amber and I couldn’t stop laughing, because the thief was in for a surprise. The expensive little suitcase contained nothing but soiled towels.
I remember three English sisters at school, with clear blue eyes, blonde hair and the fairest, palest skin imaginable. They were not allowed to expose their skin to the sun and never appeared outside without gloves and hats lined with red veiling that hung down over their faces. For their entire time at school they were veiled like this, by their mother’s special request. Their skin stayed flawless.
The Eton crop caused a sensation when it appeared at Kincoppal. This was the time of Colleen Moore in the Hollywood film Flaming Youth. Colleen Moore was tall and sparkling. She danced the Charleston and she wore her hair cut very short, just like a man’s. Every teenager the world over had to see Flaming Youth or bust. Mum was away on a holiday, Auntie Lizzie was looking after us. The film was showing at Randwick. Dared we ask Auntie Lizzie to take us?
We braved it and Auntie Lizzie agreed. She sat back grimly throughout the film, if not disapproving, obviously unimpressed. It was a very mild sort of picture, really, despite all the fuss. Lizzie said afterwards she could not for the life of her see what was so wonderful about it. We loved it.
A girl arrived at school with the new short haircut. The nuns were aghast. By eleven in the morning the girl had received the message that the Reverend Mother wanted to see her. Why had she cut her hair like this? Reverend Mother wanted to know. What had possessed her? The girl was stunned. She blurted out that her mother had cut her hair; she had had nothing to do with it. The nuns rang her mother who said that girls everywhere were cutting their hair short now. Reverend Mother digested this. The Eton crop could stay, it was decided, but it was a near thing.
‘She needs to watch over a tendency towards the grotesque which takes away from her a spirit of refinement,’ was another comment on my school reports. About the same time as the midnight feast misadventure, I adopted a pseudonym. I fancied myself as a wit and wrote funny stories. I wanted to start a school newspaper. The nuns frowned on the idea, but I painstakingly made up a few copies at home and secretly distributed them.
‘The Grey Ape of Clarendon’ was the name I used for this venture. Clarendon was the name of the flats in Botany Street; where the Grey Ape came from I don’t know.
When Noel Hackett went to boarding school at Riverview, he wrote me some schoolboy love letters, more to keep face with the other boys, I suspected, than out of passion. Perhaps he was lonely.
Dutifully I answered his letters and included some of the Grey Ape’s literary efforts to lighten them up. I also promised Noel a comic opera, but it was never written and I still have a letter from Noel saying how disappointed he was that the Grey Ape hadn’t come to light with it.
Like all schoolgirls, I had crushes which ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. To look and love was enough, and all my lovers were equally unobtainable. There was Lord Byron, dark-haired, white-faced and passionate, every schoolgirl’s ideal romantic hero. Rudolph Valentino, who deserves a chapter to himself, was my other great love. Women the world over were mad about him and we were no exception at Kincoppal.
One of the prefects, a clever, meek and mild girl who never put a foot wrong, became his most ardent devotee. She turned her bedroom at home into a shrine, lit two candles in front of his photographs and had fresh flowers arranged around it. If his name was mentioned, she went into a trance. ‘Oh, Rudi,’ she would sigh, rolling ecstatic eyes.
In the school holidays, my sister Mollie and her best friend Lila Logan went to see Rudi in The Sheik at a cinema in town. The Sheik was the story of the divine Sheik Ahmed, who spirits a young English woman away to his desert tent. At first the young woman rejects the Sheik’s passionate advances, but after an encounter with desert bandits she happily submits to his embraces. The Sheik won Lila immediately. She became another absolute Rudi devotee. She spent the entire holidays at the cinema. The first session started at eleven in the morning. Lila would be there and stay until the last session ended at eleven at night.
The Sheik was a silent movie. But before each session a man dressed as the Sheik came out on stage to entertain the audience.
‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’, he used to sing, and ‘Less Than The Dust’, (two love poems by a woman who used the pseudonym Laurence Hope).
Less than the dust, beneath thy Chariot wheel,
Less than the rust, that never stained thy Sword,
Less than the trust thou hast in me, O Lord,
&n
bsp; Even less than these!
Less than the weed, that grows beside thy door,
Less than the speed of hours spent far from thee,
Less than the need thou hast in life of me.
Even less am I.
Lila lapped it up; we all did. It was our favourite song. While the boys and men professed only scorn for ‘the green dago’ (so-called because his pale skin looked sallow and sallow skin can appear green), they still to a man grew side levers just like Rudi’s.
The woman who lived in the flat above us at Randwick was named Joy. She was a healthy blonde with a beautiful complexion and long hair and she looked like a Venus by Rubens. She must have weighed about fifteen stone. Valentino’s co-star in the sequel to The Sheik was the Austrian actress Vilma Bánky. She was as blonde as Joy, but there the resemblance stopped, for Vilma Bánky was as slight as Joy was full of figure. Joy, however, saw herself as a facsimile of the Sheik’s petite object of desire.
If the prefect at school had a shrine to Valentino, Joy had a temple. She made a pair of Turkish trousers and a little sequinned top (why the Sheik’s wife should wear Turkish clothing was a mystery known only to Joy). She draped the lounge room like the inside of a tent, put cushions on the floor and bought incense.
After she had done the housework every day, Joy lit the incense, lay back on the cushions in her Turkish attire and read the Edith Maude Hull novels of The Sheik which she had bought. It was her idea of sheer bliss.
Secrecy about sex was not confined to Yass. It was the absolute key word all my adolescent years.
The nuns at Kincoppal simply never mentioned sex. We had no sexual instruction. My first period came as a complete surprise to me.
Once they had a Redemptionist priest at the school to give a retreat. We listened agog to his endless ranting and raving about purity. He was not invited back; the nuns felt that the Redemptionist was too much for us innocent girls. Probably it was too much for their own gentle souls as well.
Except for Noel, boys of my own age were a bit of a non-event. Spending my holidays at Yass meant that I missed out on parties with my friends in town. But one holidays when I was staying at Grandma’s, I was asked to Ursula Cusack’s birthday party. I was thirteen. My cousin Pauline was also asked.
The Cusacks lived at the other end of Cooma Street from Grandma’s. Lenny Cusack was my brother’s best friend in Yass and there were plenty of boys and girls at Ursula’s party. We played the piano and danced, we never thought about the time. When the party was over, we trooped out from the Cusacks’ in a gang of about twenty. We walked everyone home from the party. Pauline and I, one of the Cusack girls and three of the Cusack boys were walking hand in hand. We went up Cooma Street, round the hill behind Yass in a giant circle back down to Cooma Street so we arrived last at The House.
Suddenly the clock struck two and I realised how late it was. Our entrance had better be discreet. We whispered, ‘Goodnight’ to the Cusacks and Pauline and I took off our shoes and started to creep into the house.
Pauline was a giggler; once she started, there was no stopping her. I, too, was prone to giggling attacks but it was Pauline who started that night. Frowning as hard as I could, I mouthed for her to be quiet, but to no avail; she couldn’t stop.
As I opened the front door to step into the hall, Pauline dropped her shoes, bang, bang, on the stone step. The sound reverberated through the house. Like clockwork, Auntie Linda came out of the drawing room, her head wrapped in a white towel because she had taken off her wig.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ she demanded.
I was also laughing by this time; we were both hopeless cases. Linda was outraged.
Grandma was away in Sydney buying for the store that week and her absence gave Linda added vehemence. How dared we come home so late? Linda glared at us. When she told Grandma what we had done, Grandma would send Pauline and me straight back to Sydney because we couldn’t be trusted. She went on and on. Half an hour later, our ears ringing with Linda’s invectives, Pauline and I slunk off to bed.
We didn’t appear at breakfast and waited until Linda had gone about her business before we got up and went into Annie’s room looking for sympathy.
‘Auntie Linda is most upset about you,’ Annie said solemnly, with a twinkle. ‘She doesn’t know what on earth you could have been doing at that hour of the morning. She’s going to make your father have a talk to you.’
I thought about this. ‘Why didn’t Dad or Uncle Luke come and get us?’ I asked. It was only a quarter of a mile down the street to the Cusacks’; if they were so worried they should have come and fetched us. We seemed to have logic on our side.
Dad and Uncle Luke, in fact, had never given us a second thought. Dad had been to the Soldiers’ Club, come in and gone straight to bed. Uncle Luke came in later than Dad and also promptly retired. Only Linda had sat up waiting and worrying.
When Grandma did come back next day, Linda subsided. As usual, she was not really brave enough to tell tales to Grandma; Dad certainly wasn’t going to say anything because it had been his fault, not ours, and so the party passed over. But Linda gave us hell all the day before Grandma’s return.
I had my first crush on a real person when I was fifteen. I fell in love with a blond tennis player named Paddy who lived at the end of the street. I followed him everywhere, which wasn’t very far since I was away at school all week but on Monday mornings I made sure I was on the same tram. I tried to stand as close to him as possible and I stared at him with longing across the crowded tram. I was far too shy to talk to him; I couldn’t begin to open my mouth in his presence.
Mollie had left school by then. She used to hold Friday night card parties at our place for her friends. She knew Paddy and occasionally he was asked on Friday nights. I wasn’t invited but hung about all night swooning in the background.
My swooning must have been more obvious than I realised. Paddy had a friend called Bill. One Monday morning Paddy wasn’t on his usual tram, but Bill was. Bill was a tease, he came up and chatted to Mollie and me.
‘Paddy tells me you’ve got a crush on him,’ Bill said with a wink to me. I glared at him, humiliated beyond measure. I was furious that my love for Paddy should be a joke and that he should know the way I felt. He could hardly have failed to notice the way I haunted him, but such is schoolgirl passion. Paddy’s appeal diminished rapidly after that.
Having a photo of the person with whom you were in love was very important. I developed a passion for another of Mollie’s friends. I didn’t have a photo of my new crush, but he reminded me irresistibly of the picture of an ape in a Cole’s Funny Picture Book so I cut out the drawing and gazed fondly at that. My infatuation with the ape also failed to develop into anything more serious.
About this time, my cousin Joe, the son of Dad’s brother Joe, the doctor, who was at school at Riverview, and I had a perfect day together. Grandma had been away with Kathleen on a cruise, Joe and I went in early one Saturday morning to meet their ship near Darling Harbour.
Grandma stayed at the Hotel Metropole whenever she was in town. The house she’d bought in Randwick was long sold now. Once she was established at the Metropole she would ask us in for a meal with her. After the meal, she would reach into her black bag (Grandma’s big old-fashioned black handbag was a part of her) that contained an endless supply of two shilling pieces, and give us 2s each as a present.
This particular morning she was buying for the shop, so instead of taking Joe and me to the Metropole, she gave us each £1 and told us to enjoy ourselves. This was a fortune.
First we treated ourselves to a breakfast spread of bacon and eggs, tea and toast with jam. Breakfast over, we headed off to an eleven o’clock session at the pictures but before we went in we had enormous green and pink ice cream sodas in tall glasses. More ice cream soda and sandwiches followed for lunch. Then we saw the afternoon session. When we came out and counted our money, we had only our tram fares back to Randwick and enough to buy one c
opy of Smith’s Weekly. So we bought Smith’s Weekly, sat down in Hyde Park and read it together from cover to cover. We laughed at the cartoons and caricatures, and read the jokes out aloud. With our last fourpence we caught the Randwick tram home. It was a day to remember.
Mollie was eighteen now and in full social swing, going to parties and dances every weekend. I was in awe of her and her friends. One of her girlfriends came to stay with us on a Friday night. Mum had put a folding bed down in the middle of the big bedroom that Mollie and I shared. I was locked out while Mollie and her friend dolled themselves up. They came out looking a picture, I was suitably impressed and envious. The friend was said to be the best dancer around. She was a thin girl with a surprisingly large bust for such a slender body. Her hair was puffed out over her ears in the style of the moment. She and Mollie swept off into the night.
About two in the morning, I was woken by their giggling. As I lay in bed watching them undress and listening to their gossip, I was startled to see Mollie’s friend pull out two pads that held her hair so fashionably puffed. Out of her camisole came two more pads; her beautiful bosom. To my horror, finally she proceeded to remove her teeth, which were also false. Her teeth had all been extracted because of an infection. It made an indelible impression on me.
However, Mollie’s friend was soon engaged and married, and lived happily ever afterwards. She must have danced her way into her boyfriend’s affection.
We wanted to have a party at home, King and Mollie especially, but Mum wasn’t keen on our having parties. The flat wasn’t suitable, she would say. It wasn’t big enough.
She was right, but when she went up to Yass for a holiday, Mollie and King decided to hold a party to end all parties. We moved the entire contents of the second bedroom into the back yard, dressing tables, wardrobes, beds, the lot, and prayed it wouldn’t rain. The boys even took up the carpet and sanded the floor for dancing.
Lila Logan came to stay. She helped Mollie to prepare the food. They did the cooking on the day of the party. Lila and Mollie were beside themselves with excitement and made strange, high-pitched little whistling sounds to each other when it got too much for them. They made trifle after trifle for supper.