Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  With Mollie safely married off, I settled back to work.

  A huge parcel addressed to Norman Lindsay arrived at 12 Bridge Street. Norman was up at Springwood but on his next visit to the studio he opened it and inside was the manuscript of We Were the Rats by Lawson Glassop. Norman was daunted by the enormous, unwieldy, untidy bundle of typescript. He leafed through a few chapters and handed it over to Doug. Doug’s reaction was similar to Norman’s.

  The manuscript was accompanied by a desperate note from Lawson, imploring Norman to read the novel and tell him if it had any worth. I felt sorry for the worried author, besides which I was a compulsive reader, so I offered to read it myself. Norman and Doug both looked vastly relieved to be absolved of the duty.

  All night I stayed up reading; I couldn’t put it down. I was completely captivated by his story of the seige of Tobruk. The Australianness of it moved me; the way he described the line of men enlisting for the army. The officer asks one man what defence force he wants to join. The man looks back at him and shrugs. ‘I’m easy.’ So of course they send him off to the infantry, the toughest part of the army.

  I enthused to Norman and Doug the next day. ‘You must read it,’ I said. ‘Skip the first two chapters. Lawson is just trying to find his way in those; they’re not very good. Drop them off, the rest of the book is wonderful.’

  So they read the manuscript and agreed with me. Norman sent off a letter full of praise to Lawson who was with the army up in northern Queensland. As soon as he read Norman’s letter, Lawson went AWL.

  He arrived at the studio door in an air force uniform, one of the three uniforms he used as disguise while making his way down from north Queensland to Sydney. He said he was so excited by Norman’s letter that he had to come and see him.

  Norman wrote to the army explaining why Lawson had disappeared, and asking that he not be in trouble as a consequence. The army took no action against Lawson, which shows how respected Norman was.

  Another AWL sought refuge at the studio. A boy came round with a letter from Norman, allowing him to draw the model in the studio. The boy’s sole ambition was to be an artist, but then he was conscripted. He protested violently. He hated the army, he said; he would never make a soldier.

  To no avail. He was sent to a training camp in north Queensland where recruits were taught how to handle weapons. He told me afterwards that every time he held a rifle or bayonet, it made him sick and he vomited.

  Apparently the army chose to ignore any weaknesses in their recruits. They were ordered overseas, this boy included. He couldn’t stand the thought of having to go off and use these weapons on other men. So he fled back to Sydney and begged me to let him stay in the studio.

  ‘If they catch me, they’ll shoot me for being a traitor,’ he said, almost in tears.

  It was heartrending, but I didn’t really want him living in the studio and I was sure Norman wouldn’t either. I persuaded him to telephone an aunt of his, who agreed to look after him. Immediately afterwards I rang Norman at Springwood, and Norman again wrote off to the boy’s commanding officer.

  More letters were required before the boy was let off and he had to go to Goulburn for some sort of psychiatric assessment or treatment, but soon after that he was released.

  Although we had ration cards for food and petrol, we weren’t as short of supplies as people in Europe, we had enough. Black market goods were always available; even if we didn’t buy any, we knew they were around.

  After Norman moved out of the studio, odd characters who had posed for him paid me the occasional visit. Sometimes they were looking for work, sometimes they were begging. I would give them two bob and they would go away.

  A particularly scruffy fellow came by several times.

  ‘I want to see Norman Lindsay,’ the conversation would begin.

  ‘Mr Lindsay isn’t here,’ I would answer, ‘he’s up at Springwood.’

  I expected the usual request for two bob at his next appearance, but instead this day he furtively produced a stained envelope from his pocket. He said he wanted to sell it to Mr Lindsay.

  ‘What’s in it?’ I couldn’t resist asking.

  Humming and ha-ing, shuffling and shifting, at last he said, ‘Can I trust you not to breathe a word of this?’ and produced a ration card for butter and meat. I don’t know if it was his or not.

  The temptation was too great for me.

  ‘How much do you want for it?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten bob,’ he replied.

  I gave him ten bob and used the ration card on food when Doug and I next went to Springwood.

  I don’t suppose it was much of a crime, but I felt guilty and a bit haunted; I thought that since I had bought one card from him, he might come back with more. If I heard a knock at the door, I cowered.

  ‘My God, it’s him!’ I used to think.

  Rosaleen Norton was another visitor at the studio. At one stage she lived above George Street in The Rocks in a strange three-storeyed stone building called Buggery Barn. Its occupants didn’t really live in the building, they just seemed to camp there.

  Rosaleen was always broke. I went to visit her in Buggery Barn once. She had a sick cat in the room with her. She didn’t look very well herself, and the cat kept vomiting. I was appalled. She was an artist herself, but she also offered her services to other artists as a model.

  ‘Oh, please, Margaret, give me five shillings,’ she would say in her quiet, refined and hesitant voice. ‘I’ve got to have some dinner. Give me five shillings and I’ll pose for you.’

  ‘Don’t bother about posing,’ I would say as I gave her the money. Rosaleen wasn’t a good model. She could hold a pose but wasn’t particularly attractive. Her body was starved-looking and often covered in insect bites.

  She had an obsession about looking like a witch. She used to draw on eyebrows that arched right up over her green eyes and her hair was dyed bright orange; I could remember when it had been dark brown. I still have a drawing that I did of her looking very witch-like.

  Very different were the two New Zealand nurses who came to visit Doug. They had been serving overseas and turned up in Sydney on their way home to New Zealand for rest leave before going off to war again.

  Irene Taplin and her friend Johnno were both striking-looking and very tall, about five feet nine. It was summer, and they used to wear their white nurses’ uniforms round town. Everyone in the street turned to stare because they were so stunning.

  The girls used to call in at the studio about nine in the morning. ‘We’ve bought you a present,’ they would chorus. The present would be a bottle of Bols gin in a lovely stone bottle.

  The bottle was put on the table, we would chat for a while then one of the girls would say, ‘Let’s have a gin.’

  ‘All right,’ I would weakly answer.

  Several gins later, they would happily make their way downstairs and head off uptown looking for adventures. They seemed fine. I was the one left staggering to face the day’s work on three early morning gins. I don’t know how many empty stone bottles of Bols gin were in the studio when they left.

  I painted Irene Taplin twice, once in her uniform and once in her own clothes with an orange tiger lily in her hair which matched the lights in her brown eyes and the glint of her auburn hair. She was a real tawny beauty.

  They also came up to Springwood with Doug and me and posed for Norman. Norman was very impressed, not only with their looks, but also with their contribution to the war.

  On New Year’s Eve, we had a party with the girls in Doug’s flat at the Cross. At ten minutes to midnight we went down into the street for the procession they had through the Cross every New Year’s Eve.

  These two girls in their white nurses’ uniforms led the procession. They strode along and everyone fell in behind them. People on the footpath cheered. The Cross was much smaller then; it seemed that all the people who lived there knew each other.

  Doug came over to the studio every day for lunch now. He ha
d been appointed literary editor of the Bulletin by this stage and I shared his excitement as the poetry came in. I remember his surprise and delight at discovering new talent, such as the day he received a poem from the sixteen-year-old schoolboy Francis Webb.

  A young woman with her dark hair drawn back in a bun came to see him with a couple of poems: Nancy Keesing. Then there were Rosemary Dobson, shy and intense, and tall Nan McDonald, her long fair hair plaited in a crown round her head. Towards the end of the war came David Campbell in his air force uniform, fresh from fighting in New Guinea.

  My mother was in the studio one day when David appeared; she was instantly smitten. ‘He looks like a Greek god,’ she gasped after he left. I think Mum fell in love with David the moment she set eyes on him. Most women did; he was outrageously good-looking and had the most charming manner.

  Whenever Doug and I went to Springwood Doug and Norman talked endlessly on nature – mostly Norman talked and Doug listened. They covered art, poetry, music, philosophy and literature. Norman had read almost every book in existence, it seemed, and could discuss them all with equal volubility. He had favourite topics, such as the lost island of Atlantis, or – more comprehensible to ordinary mortals – the twelve volumes of diaries by Samuel Pepys; a mighty task of reading in itself.

  Norman believed passionately in the importance and worth of Doug’s poetry. He loved The Golden Lover so much that, as soon as he read the manuscript, he was immediately inspired to paint a large watercolour illustrating the play. The painting showed a dark green forest with Tawhai, the beautiful dark Maori girl, and Whana, the phantom golden lover, locked in each other’s arms.

  Norman’s studio out the back was more or less as it is now. There was the lay figure, a silent, jointed figure bound in cloth, usually draped with material, black lace oversewn with scarlet and purple satin roses or silvery moon-coloured chiffon or midnight-blue-spangled net.

  A ship model would be on a side table. He always worked on a ship model in any spare time he had. In one of the smaller rooms next to the studio, he kept three or four of these models in various stages of progress, together with materials for their fittings, such as the tiny timbers for the top deck. He fashioned every detail of the models himself, the ropes, the sails, the wheel, the oars.

  Norman never relaxed. When he wasn’t painting or working on the ship models, he would be writing a novel to take his mind off things or moulding figures to adorn his bookcase. Many years after this he built me a black lacquered cabinet with painted panels and a mermaid’s figure on every corner. On one occasion, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop working, he thought he’d take up playing cards. So he made himself up a pack of cards and drew and painted every card in the pack.

  The main house at Springwood had been decorated by Rose and was lovely. The front room, where Norman’s special oils hung, was quite extraordinary; the walls were covered in hessian with gold leaf over it. The paintings didn’t hang on the wall; they were fitted into special grooves.

  When Doug and Norman weren’t talking, Doug and I went for long walks in the bush around the house and, once with Jane, we climbed down to the waterfall at the bottom of the gully. Norman didn’t go with us; a stroll around the garden at the end of the day was about as much outdoor activity as he cared for.

  I didn’t paint as much as on my first visits there alone, but with walks and talks, our Springwood days sped by fast. At night I entertained Norman and Doug by reading aloud from Dickens, de Maupassant or Conrad. I particularly remember reading them a large book of Conrad’s short stories. I enjoyed it, maybe because of the days when Uncle Joe read aloud to us at Clarendon, or maybe those enforced mealtime readings aloud at Kincoppal stood me in good stead.

  When Rose came back from America in 1941 Norman continued to live in the back studio but we all ate together in the main house and there was much more activity about the place.

  I always took my paintings up for Norman to criticise. He was enormously supportive of my work. He never touched my painting; he didn’t need to. Norman’s own technique was so clearcut that he just used his work as an example. It was up to me to follow his advice.

  Looking at my early paintings is interesting now. I drew very carefully. The colours, such as the blue in a bowl of delphiniums, are practically the same as in later paintings, but my method is much freer now. You have to be in complete control of your technique before you free yourself.

  I always painted flower pieces straight off, with the flowers in front of me. After years of experience I can take home a landscape, put it up and do one from it twice the original size, but flower pieces are different. Flowers have a life of their own.

  Flowers aren’t static; they move. It’s fantastic how some flowers move. Nasturtiums will turn right round to look at the light in a room. Movement in flowers is difficult to paint, but that’s the aim. The slightest movement makes the world of difference to a painting.

  If we didn’t go to Springwood on the weekend, Johnny Maund took us out. Doug was writing, I was busy painting and often Sunday was our only day off. Before Johnny Maund started providing his car we used to explore the coast by bus on Sundays. We took the bus from Wynyard up to Whale Beach and Palm Beach, a long trip, but we did it.

  John Maund, the president of the Watercolour Institute, was the solicitor who had saved me from the psychiatric nursing stint. On the weekend he painted watercolours. I think Johnny deeply regretted in his later years that he hadn’t devoted his life to art rather than to the law, and he was trying to catch up.

  His weekly petrol rations were saved for these painting expeditions. He had a large car which was always very full of passengers: Doug and I (Doug didn’t paint, but he was happy to watch or he could go off walking), Isabel MacKenzie and her sister Nance, and John Young from the Macquarie Galleries.

  Our trips ranged from Ku-ring-gai Chase to Frenchs Forest and Narrabeen Lakes; anywhere there were trees and bush. Doug and I were grateful just for fresh air. Besides, the drives were fun, sometimes more fun than the painting. Johnny used to treat us to lunches. Often we ate at a Frenchs Forest restaurant that specialised in delicious Sunday lunches. The owners had a large poultry yard with all sorts of game birds, including pheasants and peacocks. Once they put a clutch of peacock eggs under an old chook. The fowl successfully hatched and mothered them and we would see her wandering round the yard, scratching up tidbits for her flock of young peacocks.

  The owners also had a pet cockatoo named Philip. We had to be careful getting out of the car because Philip used to attack everyone. He was such a vicious bird he even reduced a lady friend of Johnny’s to tears.

  It was late in the day before painting resumed after lunch. We would fill in a few more hours, then head back to the city. Johnny would rustle up dinner for us in his flat. He used to buy steamed chicken from a delicatessen. The nights with Johnny passed as pleasantly as the days.

  But one evening didn’t go so well. Johnny was doing his duty and entertaining a young American soldier on leave. Johnny was a connoisseur, especially of wines and liqueurs. He served up a dinner with the appropriate accompanying wines, and afterwards produced a bottle of cherry brandy he had been zealously hoarding until it was well matured. The cherry brandy, together with liqueur glasses, was carefully set down on the table.

  The American boy was asked if he would care for a liqueur. He promptly helped himself not to a liqueur glass full, but a whole wineglass of Johnny’s cherished cherry brandy, and proceeded to down it in one mouthful. We sat back horrified; Johnny looked as if he might explode.

  ‘I don’t know what you call it,’ the boy announced, ‘but that’s a mighty fine brandy you’ve got there,’ and he helped himself to a second glass.

  The cherry brandy that had been saved for years went in one night. Johnny, who was normally the most generous of men, took several weeks to recover his equilibrium.

  I must have been getting some painting done on our excursions, or else it was the result of my bus tr
ips with Doug, because when I had four paintings hung in the Royal Art Society’s 1940 annual show, there were two landscapes, Rocks and the Sea and Cliffs at Curl Curl, among them. It was about this time that I first began painting seriously in oils. Or attempting to. I found painting in oils quite hard. I remember fighting one flower piece inch by inch. I found that if you left off painting in oils for even a few weeks you slipped right back in technique. Even just holding the brushes felt awkward.

  My birthday came round. I was painting in the studio when Doug arrived with a surprise.

  ‘I think I’ve found something you might like for your birthday,’ he said. We walked down to the Quay and in the window of the pet shop was a cage of kittens.

  ‘Which one would you like?’ Doug asked.

  I was surprised and delighted. My last handsome black cat, Felix, who reigned at Botany Street for so many years, had sadly died a few months before so the prospect of a new kitten was very welcome.

  A beautiful silver-grey half chinchilla, only about six inches long, had its tail stuck straight up like a flagpole. ‘That one,’ I answered. If you want a kitten, always choose the one that carries its tail erect; it’s the sign of a healthy cat.

  We bought the kitten and christened him Silver on the spot. I carried him back to the studio and put him in a box to take up to the Cross in a taxi.

  Doug and I were going out to dinner so I thought I would leave the kitten at Doug’s flat while we ate. The driver complained all the way, because Silver wouldn’t stop yowling. Silver cried so piteously that I couldn’t leave him in the flat, so kitten and box were surreptitiously smuggled into the restaurant, and stayed on my lap under the table for the birthday dinner.

  After Felix died, my mother vowed she wouldn’t have another cat in the place, but fortunately one look at Silver and she melted, which was just as well for me because she looked after him while I was at work.