Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  Norman still came down to town from time to time and painted from the model with me, but as the years went by his visits became increasingly rare. However, I often used to go up to Springwood and have a few days’ painting there with him, so we stayed close. At first I went on my own but soon Doug started coming up too. It was during these visits that I came to know Jane so well. She and I became great friends; so did she and Doug. Also, of course, I became acquainted with the Springwood cats.

  I had loved cats passionately ever since my first cat I dragged around dressed up at Yass. Norman was very fond of cats as well and Springwood always abounded with them. I was especially fond of what Norman referred to as his ‘studio assistant’ cats, which had names such as Slim Jim, Fidge and Fuzz Buzz.

  Norman didn’t move into the big house at Springwood. Instead he lived and painted in his studio out the back. Jane inhabited the two other rooms next to him there. Besides Jane there was a housekeeper called Mollie Chapman, who did the cooking for them. There is an amusing account of one of my Springwood efforts at a landscape painting in a letter I wrote to Doug while he was away trout fishing: ‘I took my paints & the two dogs right down the bottom of the gully and found a nice waterfall. I sat down in a slight drizzle and thought I would paint, weather or no. Well, I was attacked by millions of sandflies. They flew in my ears and eyes and mouth. I nearly went mad. I tried painting with one hand and waving the pests off with the other, no use. They put me in a kind of fever in the finish. I felt myself getting flushed and hysterical. Finally my nerves gave way. I sprang up and broke my painting glass and departed, terrified that millions of snakes would be after me. Really it was a horrible experience.’

  In fact over the year I have suffered endless torment from sandflies when I’ve been painting in the open. It’s one of the tribulations of being an artist.

  Not only was the war disruptive, it was also frightening. It was dreadful every day, waiting for the news posters to go up round town, then reading the headlines. First we saw ‘Holland lays down her arms’ – that was the phrase they always used – and our hearts sank. Next, ‘Belgium lays down her arms’, then France. France was worst because we knew the Nazis now had broken a critical line of resistance.

  Doug went off to enlist in the AIF. I was beside myself. He disappeared into Victoria Barracks for a whole weekend. I cried for the two days. But he was rejected on medical grounds, for which I was most thankful.

  Though I was grateful that Doug was saved from the army, it did seem incongruous that only the fittest specimens were accepted for the slaughter. There was no sense to it. Doug became an air raid warden, so he wasn’t exactly shirking responsibilities, and I am sure the world is richer for his writing during the war years.

  After the Japanese came into the war, I received a call-up notice myself; not to go into the army but to do my civilian duty by working at Parramatta asylum, the last thing in the world I felt capable of doing.

  I panicked, not knowing what to do or whom to turn to. Then I thought of John Maund, president of the Watercolour Institute. He was a solicitor; he might be able to help me. To my relief, Johnny was totally sympathetic.

  ‘Ridiculous, Margaret,’ he said, frowning at the piece of paper. ‘I’ll attend to this. I’m going to ring your uncle.’

  My uncle was Dad’s brother Joe, by now a Macquarie Street specialist. Johnny told him I was an artist, entirely unsuited and unfit for working in any asylum. Besides, I had to look after my mother, which was true. At that time, one member of the family was allowed to remain at home to care for any aged relatives.

  Thanks to Johnny Maund and Uncle Joe, I heard no more about Parramatta asylum. I did a lot for Mum, who was quite elderly now, making her morning tea and breakfast and tidying up the flat before I went into the studio – but that wasn’t the real reason I didn’t want to work at the asylum. I just couldn’t. I happily donated paintings to raise money for wartime charities, but the other was too much.

  You hear about the big things in war, such as the bombing of cities, but often the little things were the saddest. I remember preparing for a Watercolour Institute show, fifty per cent of the proceeds of which were going to the air force. Harry Julius, of Smith & Julius, was helping us. His son, Rex, an artist too, was only a boy. He brought in a painting to the exhibition and stayed while we hung them. He was in his naval uniform; he’d recently been made an official war artist and it was the last day of his leave. The next day he would be shipped off overseas. He was so young and cheerful. Less than a fortnight later, the news came through to Harry Julius that his son was dead.

  The fall of Singapore shattered us. Singapore, we thought, would never fall. Now we realised there was nothing between us and the Japanese. Real gloom set in. It was hard to be optimistic after February 1942. Everyone was despondent.

  Everyone, that is, except Norman.

  Norman made a famous remark to Robert Menzies. Menzies had visited the studio to pay court to Norman and, like the rest of us, he was full of pessimism about the war.

  ‘The Japs will be here in two weeks,’ he said to Norman.

  ‘No, they won’t,’ Norman answered. ‘I have something to stop them!’ He had just read Doug’s Ned Kelly and he was referring to the play. Norman meant that a country couldn’t be taken while its artists were making such full use of their creative faculties, while the mental energy of the people was so high. Any creative effort, he believed, was as good for a country as a battalion of soldiers.

  His faith was very contagious. It was impossible to be near him and stay down for long.

  The arrival of MacArthur and the Americans changed things, though. One morning as I was going into town on the tram, I saw two enormous black sentries standing on either side of the wooden entrance gate to the race track in Alison Road. That’s how I knew the Americans were here. The American troops used Randwick racecourse as their headquarters in Sydney.

  As far as I was concerned, it was the turning point in the war. England was too far away to be of any real help to us but now the Americans had arrived it seemed we had a chance.

  Doug and Mollie were both air raid wardens. Mollie’s shelter, or sector post as they were called, was in Macquarie Street, Doug’s in Manning Street at the Cross. The city was blacked out and there were continual practice drills. Our ears were left ringing from the wailing sirens.

  The wardens had to attend their sector posts until the raid or mock raid was over. Doug’s companion warden at the Cross was a whisky-soaked World War I veteran whose sole contribution in times of crisis was a series of commands left over from the trenches.

  ‘Assume the prone,’ he would bellow at Doug, who would come back to Crick Avenue afterwards repeating out loud, ‘Assume the prone, assume the prone.’

  The wardens took their job seriously, to begin with. One awful night Doug and his partner had to carry the patients out of the local hospital to the shelter. This was a difficult task, as most of the patients were elderly ladies. Doug was startled when the matron suddenly hissed in his ear that she wanted a word with him.

  ‘Get rid of the drunken warden,’ she ordered. ‘Assume the prone’ was duly dispatched and they struggled on.

  The wardens also had to ensure that all lights were out during a drill. Doug had an ongoing battle with a brothel round the corner. The brothel catered for the Americans and business was too brisk for them to be bothered with air raid rehearsals. They had more action going on inside than Sydney had seen outside during the whole war and they were not plunging customers into darkness for a mere warden, a man without even a uniform. Doug never won with the brothel lights.

  Mollie once had a traumatic night in her sector post. She and her friend from the Taxation Department were in the shelter when somebody lit a match. The gas had been left on and the shelter immediately exploded. No one was hurt, but it caused some confusion.

  I was painting in the studio one Sunday when Doug arrived unexpectedly. He had heard air raid sirens from his flat
and, knowing I was working, thought I mightn’t hear them. Heroically he decided to rush into town, risking life and limb under the threat of bomb fire, to warn me. However, as he approached Bridge Street, he realised that the relentless, high-pitched note was not in fact the air raid signal, but the routine wailing of fire engines going about their day-to-day business. He arrived breathless and a little shamefaced. As reparation he took me to lunch at Aaron’s, which was always a treat.

  Aaron’s, with its dark wood and panelled walls, was a pub in Gresham Street, a tiny narrow passageway off to the right of Bridge Street. A splendid place to eat, it specialised in roast dinners: roast lamb, roast pork with apple sauce, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. Not expensive, either; it was possible for those without much money to eat at Aaron’s five nights a week and still not be too broke.

  Another Sunday we were lunching there with Ron McCuaig when the hotel was raided. As it was Sunday, no one was supposed to be drinking. The police took everyone’s names and addresses. Doug was saved because he was still off alcohol and I wasn’t drinking either, but Ron was caught.

  Unabashed, he gazed coolly at the police officers. In response to the pen poised above their inquisitorial notebook, Ron came up with the names of two dead presidents of the United States: Benjamin Lincoln. Blatantly fake, you would have thought, but the police wrote it down without a blink, and also the false address Ron obligingly supplied, and went on their way.

  The night that the Japanese submarines came into the harbour was pandemonium. No sirens sounded, but up at the Cross Doug actually heard the bang when a ferry was hit. He rushed down to Manning Street in such a hurry that a shoe came off, and he arrived to do his duty, shoe in hand. But a fellow warden was in a worse state of disarray. In his fright he had put his trousers on back to front.

  Mollie, Mum and I were at home in the flat. We were issued with instructions – if we weren’t in a shelter we were to go under the house. If we couldn’t go under the house we were to get under a table. The best position for the table was in the hall. We dragged the kitchen table into the hall and wedged it near the front door.

  We were worried because the invading troops would obviously come straight down the garden path to the front door, up the stairs, into the hall and find us under the table. So we decided to arm ourselves. If armed, we could at least take a swipe at their legs. Mollie had Dad’s beloved sword from World War I; Mum had the carving knife.

  I had the blackthorn Irish shillelagh. The shillelagh is a beautifully balanced weapon, not a straight stick, but curved, with a two-sided knob on the end like a hammer-head shark. It looks murderous and the strange thing is that when you pick up a shillelagh you do want to hit someone. It has its own inbuilt impetus. Any invaders in the hall would have to watch out.

  At nine o’clock at night no lights were on; it was pitch dark. The three of us squashed in under the kitchen table – neither Mum nor I could be described as a small woman – waiting with our weapons for we weren’t quite sure what. The suspense was killing.

  I desperately wanted to go to the lavatory. I tried to think about other things, such as the danger, but it was no use. I had to go. Mollie had to crawl out from under the table first before I could extricate myself.

  ‘You stay there, Mum,’ we instructed, thankfully stretching out to our proper height. ‘Don’t you move.’

  I went off to the bathroom. When I returned, Mollie, who always had more courage than I, announced she was fed up with being under the table.

  ‘I’m not going back under there,’ she said. ‘Come out onto the front verandah and see if anything is happening.’

  To go onto the verandah, we had to climb back under the table where Mum was still crouched up, but no longer clasping the carving knife, I noticed.

  A heated row was in progress two doors up at Careys’ stables, and we leaned over the balcony, trying to see what was going on.

  ‘You’ll have to move away from here, you’ll upset the horses,’ Jerry Carey was saying in a loud voice.

  The Americans kept their tanks and armoured cars at the racecourse, an easy target for an air attack. When the alarm sounded, their vehicles were ordered to disperse. They moved off up High Street, one tank had come down Botany Street and stopped outside Jerry Carey’s. Jerry’s only concern, as ever, was for his horses.

  ‘If you draw the bombs here, you’ll kill my horses! You’ll have to go this instant.’ Jerry’s fury was beyond measure. The Americans caved in before such passion. The tank revved up again and moved off up the street.

  Mum came out from under the table, said she wasn’t having any more to do with this nonsense, and went to bed. Mollie and I stayed up until the all clear sounded, then we too retired. It sounds funny now, but it was a terrible evening – terrible for the young naval cadets who drowned in the harbour and for their families.

  As the war wore on and the threat of an air attack seemed less likely, the air raid wardens stopped taking their duties so seriously. Each sector post was furnished with a bed and a medicine cabinet. The first aid kit contained medicinal brandy. Most of the wardens were single men and the air raid shelters rapidly degenerated into love nests. The wardens invited in their women friends, drank the brandy and made appropriate use of the beds.

  Life at home had its lighter side, too. Mollie won the lottery – that was an event.

  I had left the studio and gone off shopping one morning. When I came back round the corner from George Street into Bridge Street, Mollie was standing on the doorstep of number 12 with a newspaper under her arm, looking more excited than I had ever seen her. She waved the newspaper wildly at me.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘You’ve won the lottery.’

  ‘How did you know?’ she spluttered.

  ‘Mollie,’ I grinned, ‘why else would you be in here at this hour with that look on your face?’ But she was still dumb-founded that I could have guessed.

  Mollie was so excited; she took me and the girls from the office to Usher’s Hotel in Castlereagh Street for lunch. Mollie looked as if all her Christmases had come at once. Lunch went on the whole afternoon.

  The next excitement in Mollie’s life was her engagement. That really did rock us. Jack Scully was the name of her fiancé, she had known him since she left school. Jack’s father had racing stables a block up from us in Randwick, and Jack had been one of Mollie’s racing friends, but they were never more than that until Jack’s father died.

  The Scully family home was pulled down and a block of flats was built on the site as an investment. Jack lived in one of the flats with his sister and it was about this time that he began courting Mollie. They were like a couple of seventeen-year-olds, holding hands and gazing at each other moonishly.

  Jack would put a geranium on the windowsill when his sister was out so Mollie could pop up and have a whisky with him. Mollie lived for these little assignations, and the rest of us bore with them as patiently as we could.

  Mollie was still as mad as ever about the races. Jack Scully had a racehorse called Old Rowley entered in the Melbourne Cup. Old Rowley’s odds were not good at a hundred to one. Jack kept urging Doug to have a bet on Old Rowley but Doug was totally sceptical. Even lovestruck Mollie wasn’t convinced that Jack’s horse would win.

  But Old Rowley surprised us all. He thundered home and won the Cup at a hundred to one; it was the most historic Cup Day in our house. Mollie was ecstatic. It was a pity none of us except Mollie had anything on him.

  Mollie and Jack were married in May 1943 at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church, Randwick. A few days before the wedding, Mollie had already left for work and I was about to go to the studio when a distraught figure came racing back up Botany Street.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, looking at Mollie’s frantic face. ‘I’ve lost my engagement ring, my diamond engagement ring,’ Mollie repeated between bursts of sobbing.

  ‘Mollie, quieten down,’ I tried to calm her. ‘It will be all right. We’ll go home and loo
k for it. We’ll find it.’

  Mollie and I searched both the dressing tables in our shared bedroom, hers first. I didn’t see how the ring could be in mine, but we did it too from top to bottom, then the chest of drawers, then the wardrobe. We searched the whole house; no ring. It was nearly lunchtime by now.

  Suddenly Mollie dramatically stuck her hand out in front of her. ‘My God, I’m wearing it!’ she exclaimed.

  In her ‘I’m-going-to-be-late-for-work’ morning panic, Mollie had slipped the ring on her right hand. I heaved a sigh of relief and went off to the studio to salvage what was left of the day.

  I was bridesmaid at the wedding. In the photos I am wearing a little velvet magenta hat, adorned with an impressive feather. Mary Edwards, the artist, saw the photos.

  ‘I must paint your portrait in those feathers,’ she said.

  I got on well with Mary Edwards, whom I had met at various times over the years. She used to exhibit with the Royal Art Society. She also knew and liked Doug because he had written about her paintings. We were both keen on her work.

  Mary Edwards has been underrated as an artist, I think. She has been penalised too much for her squabble with the trustees of the New South Wales Art Gallery when Dobell won the Archibald Prize with his portrait of Joshua Smith. Although she did seem to have a penchant for litigation – the Dobell case was not her only court appearance – Mary Edwards was a fine portrait painter.

  She used to visit Doug in the studio to discuss her dream. She had bought some land in the Blue Mountains at Mount Tomah which had views up and down the mountains and Mary’s dream was to turn it into a park, a conservationist’s paradise. Her ideas about this park were ahead of her time.

  Mary loved painting feathers. Most of her portraits of women have feathers in them; that’s why she liked my hat. And so my souvenir of Mollie’s wedding was immortalised. Her portrait of me, in fact, was one of the paintings Mary entered in the Archibald Prize contest in the year Dobell’s portrait of Joshua Smith won. She also had a portrait of the aviatrix Nancy Bird Walton hanging in the Archibald that year.