Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  The first week, Silver cried continuously unless Mum was nursing him. As a consequence, she became extremely attached to him.

  With his wonderful silver coat and golden eyes, Silver grew up to be a charming and affectionate cat. His most disarming habit was eating violets. As soon as you put a bowl of violets on the table, Silver would sidle up and delicately but determinedly begin nibbling. When Mum broke her arm, Doug bought her a bunch of snowdrops from a florist at the Cross. She came out in the morning to find snowdrops scattered around the room. Silver had been playing with them.

  He was also a great mouser. Jerry Carey borrowed Silver to help get rid of the stable rats. Silver cleaned them up in no time. He brought the bodies back to us and laid them across the doormat. The little silver kitten from the Quay was a most successful birthday present.

  Doug often also did theatre reviews for the Bulletin, which meant that we had the best seats in the stalls to plays, ballet performances and Tivoli shows. We went to the opening night of the Minerva, the new theatre in Orwell Street in the Cross.

  Norman did a mural for the Minerva. It was supposed to go between two pillars of Lalique glass, but the architect’s original design was altered, the ceiling had to be lowered and the mural wouldn’t fit in the space. Instead of Norman’s painting, the foyer was decorated with a photograph of Sydney Harbour; rather a letdown, we thought.

  Edwin Styles, an English actor who later went on to have a career in films, was a favourite of ours. His repertoire ranged from comic monologues at the Tivoli to more stylish comedies at the Minerva. We also liked Roy Rene because he was so Australian.

  Rene was a very funny man, he could always make us laugh. His humour rested on very simple sketches, but always clearly with a double meaning, accompanied by much winking and smirking. A classic skit was ‘Flo’s letter’, in which as the character Mo, with suitable innuendo he threatened to read aloud a letter. The comedy was the innuendo, he never actually got round to reading the letter itself. One Saturday I had taken my sketch book with me to the Tivoli as I often did and while the acrobats were warming up the audience I caught a glimpse of Rene lurking in the wings, his shadowy figure almost hidden beside the bright lights of the stage. I made a quick drawing of him waiting there and then painted it the next day.

  In 1943 Doug’s Ned Kelly had its first stage production. May Hollingworth, the head of the Sydney University Dramatic Society, was dedicated to Australian playwriting. As soon as she saw a copy of Ned Kelly, she wanted to put the play on stage. It had already been performed on ABC radio in 1942 but it had been written for the theatre, so now May Hollingworth was offering to put Ned on in a theatre.

  Doug and I were both very excited. It was a thrill to see actors up on stage saying words he had written, becoming the characters he had created, watching the audience respond. It was performed on Sunday nights in the tiny SUDS clubrooms above a pub at 700 George Street near the Haymarket. An actor called Guy Manton played Ned; I’ve never forgotten him striding around the stage. May put the play on a second time at the Metropolitan Theatre in 1947, this time with Kevin Brennan as Ned, and he was equally memorable.

  In between the two Sydney productions Doila Ribush wrote to Doug, suggesting that he, Doila, should put on the play in Melbourne. Doila was a Russian Jew who had fled to Australia and made his money out of manufacturing chocolates. As a young man, Doila had been keen on acting and the theatre in Russia, but his father, sensing they might soon be leaving their homeland, insisted that he should have a second trade, a means of making money quickly to use in a strange country, so Doila learnt how to make chocolates. Every time he came to see us over the years, Doila brought me wonderful presents of his chocolates, which were extremely rich.

  Doila actually arrived in Australia on Melbourne Cup day, and was perplexed to find the whole of Melbourne shut down on a weekday. He was astonished to find that the cause of this was a horse race. To begin with, his factory was the flat where he lived, but he soon extended.

  Doila’s first love remained the theatre. He was passionate about his productions and had an intensity quite different from that of Australians. He threw himself into producing Ned Kelly with his usual dedication. Norman was engaged to do the stage designs, which he did. Doug’s verse was treated with as much respect as the lines in a Chekhov play. Chekhov was Doila’s god.

  ‘Listen to the pauses,’ Doila used to say reverently to Doug, extolling the virtues of the divine Chekhov.

  The war made it difficult, if not impossible, for us to attend the opening of Doila’s production of Ned at Melbourne’s University Union theatre. We dearly wanted to go, but you had to apply for permission to travel interstate by train and going to the theatre wasn’t a good enough reason. Petrol was rationed so even if we’d had a car, driving it was still out of the question. But then Jane Lindsay’s friend Andy Campbell, who had a car, said he could get some petrol and offered to take us down. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

  I was worried about having nothing to wear. The play opened at the end of September and I thought it might still be cold in Melbourne. In a letter to Norman I joked that I would have to borrow one of the Springwood cats’ fur coats to wrap myself up in glamorously.

  Driving down by the coast road took three days. When we went inland for the last part of the journey, we seemed to do nothing but cross little bridges, listening to mile after mile of frogs’ chorus. I thought Victoria must be inhabited entirely by frogs.

  When we arrived at about three or four in the morning, Doila’s plump figure was anxiously standing by the open garage door. He had been up all night in a state of nervous trepidation, waiting for us. His brown eyes flashed relief as we drove into the garage. He pushed the door shut behind us and locked it. We found out afterwards that Doila had been terrified of us driving down by car. Maybe the fear was left over from or caused by memories from Russia.

  Doug was only thirty-one. He had published two books of poems since I had met him, three plays and a book of short stories. His output amazed me. I remember reading a newspaper article about him in Melbourne that listed his achievements and being so proud of him.

  Ned Kelly went down well in Melbourne, receiving a lot of publicity and critical acclaim. The actors were taken to visit men recovering in military hospitals. I have photographs of them talking to soldiers in a scrapbook I kept of all the press reports that came out while we were down there.

  Doila’s great friend was Moravian-born Edouard Borovansky, the ballet master who was also based in Melbourne. Borovansky had put on a ballet about Ned Kelly and visited Doug because he was worried Doug might make some copyright claim on the ballet.

  Doug couldn’t claim any ownership of Ned Kelly and he liked Borovansky, so he asked him to lunch with us in the studio. A shop at the Quay had excellent fresh fish and I bought a big snapper which I decided to cook up as a mornay instead of sensibly serving it straight. The advantage of the mornay was that if the guests were late for lunch, as they frequently were, it didn’t matter because the food would be waiting on the stove intact.

  I don’t think Borovansky was late. But anyway he was thoroughly enjoying his mornay and a glass of white wine when suddenly he stopped, a forkful of fish midway to his mouth. He laid the fork on his plate, put his hand to his mouth and pulled out a long black hair. My hair was neatly bunned at the back, but it was obviously mine.

  ‘My God,’ I thought and started to stammer out an apology.

  ‘It’s all right. What does it matter?’ Borovansky said. He flicked the hair nonchalantly aside and continued eating. I thought he did it with wonderful aplomb.

  Borovansky remained our friend. A dancer in his company, Laurel Martyn, was another friend of Doug’s and she used to come across and visit us in the studio, too. When Doug became the ballet critic for the Bulletin, we saw Borovansky dancing in many roles as well as the ballets he produced.

  About the time Doug was writing Ned Kelly, I began painting portraits in the hope th
at I might be able to earn my living as a portrait painter. I practised on my friends, Doug included.

  Doug looks quite dangerous in his portrait; I think he was being each member of the Kelly gang in turn. Writers do become the characters they are writing about. The portrait only took about four sittings, but Doug had spent many months writing the play, carrying those characters around in his head. No wonder he looks a bit brooding.

  I painted most of my friends; Beryl McCuaig, my cousin Marie Lysaght, Annie from Yass, Marguerite Brennan, the wife of Jack Brennan from the Bulletin, Joan Mas the poet (whose maiden name was Morgan, and as Miss Morgan also posed nude for both Norman and myself in the studio), Rita Young, Godfrey Blunden’s sister. They were all oil paintings.

  I used practically no turps or linseed oil, just paint straight from the tube pressed well into canvas; I never painted on hardboard. This method looks good after about twenty years when the oil paint matures. Sometimes freshly painted oil paintings look too new and oily. After a few years a skin grows over the paint, which still looks fresh but not raw.

  None of these portraits was commissioned. I gave them to my friends, who put them away and forgot about them. None of my friends framed their portraits or hung them up, except for Godfrey Blunden’s sister. She was so pleased with hers that she sent me a present of sheepskins sewn together as a rug from Adelaide where she lived. I had it in the studio for years.

  Thirty years later, the portraits suddenly started coming to life again. Marguerite Brennan’s was the first to surface. Her son found it rolled up on top of the wardrobe and wanted it hung; Marguerite came in to ask my advice about a frame. Ron’s boys discovered the portrait of Beryl next. I myself hunted out Doug’s portrait which I had stuck away in the laundry and resurrected it in the hall. Doug said the explanation is simple: as people grow older, they like to see themselves looking young. Perhaps that’s it, but I do also think the paint improves with age.

  More portraits appeared. I had painted a friend of Mollie’s called Mollie Garry and her six-year-old daughter. The Garrys had a property outside Yass and I stayed there while I did the portrait. The little girl posed in a long tulle dress and picture hat which she had worn to a fancy dress birthday party as Lady Hamilton.

  One portrait was commissioned. An old school friend rang me and said she had a sitter for me. The sitter turned out to be a woman from Bellevue Hill, very much from Bellevue Hill. She was bedecked with pearls and a diamond wristlet watch. I persevered, painted the jewellery to the best of my ability and handed over the finished portrait. The woman was happy with the results until she took the portrait home and her relatives pounced. Her aunt looked too stern, a niece began the objections. The family conferred and I was summoned to take the portrait back and paint a smile on the lady’s face. This was duly done to the family’s satisfaction and the now smiling portrait installed at Bellevue Hill. The episode was enough to convince me that a portrait painter’s lot is not such an easy one. At least flowers don’t complain if they’re not painted right.

  Miraculously the war ended. It was August 1945, we had survived a world war. Three months later Doug and I were finally getting married.

  TEN

  HONEYMOONING WITH HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON

  If we lived through the war, I thought, we might as well get married. We had proved we could live through anything together. I was always a bit frightened of marriage. I could have married other men, but I was wary of marriage and domesticity. I didn’t know if I could I stick it or whether I would want to escape, run away from the responsibilities of running a house.

  Doug wanted to get married right from the start. He wanted to have children, but awful things were happening in the war and I felt it would be unfair to bring children into such an unsafe world. Besides which, he was totally engrossed with his writing; he didn’t have time for a family, I argued. And since Mollie had married, Mum was on her own and I had to look after her.

  All of these were excuses for my own apprehension. I was plain frightened of being tied down, I think. I could see myself overcome by domestic chores, swamped by washing dishes and scrubbing floors. I found cleaning up the flat for Mum quite enough housework. I didn’t enjoy it, I endured it. We never had a vacuum cleaner or anything like that at Randwick; I did all the housework there by hand. I could envisage only too clearly all day spent like this with no time to paint.

  A maid was the answer. Doug promised me that when we were married I would have a maid to do the housework and I could paint as much as I liked.

  The maid was a dream. I knew we had no money for a maid and only in the last few years have I had any help in the house, but it was gallant of Doug to think of promising and certainly he never interfered with my work. I already trusted him about that when I agreed to the wedding.

  Doug did make romantic promises. On one occasion I was away and he was feeling down in the dumps. After I rang and cheered him up he wrote me a letter saying that I would be rewarded with a Rolls-Royce and thirty-seven white mice with silver bells on their tails. He didn’t elaborate as to what the mice were for but it was an enchanting notion. His letters were always full of jokes and affection, as well as poetic images like this.

  Once, in a letter written when he was away trout fishing, he included a sloughed, spotted snakeskin as a present for me, which I adored. If it wasn’t so fragile I would have worn it in my hair, I told him. As it was, the snakeskin took pride of place in my collection of oddities of that time.

  I have managed to survive the housework though I still dislike washing up. I didn’t have a maid, but I ended up with a washing machine and a proper vacuum cleaner. My advice to women who want to work is to forget about the housework. Do your painting or writing or whatever first. It’s not a bad idea to make the bed. That doesn’t take long; a couple of minutes and you can feel that the house is presentable. If you do the housework first, you’ll be nagged by the feeling that you would rather be doing your own work. You waste energy hating the housework. If you clean up afterwards, you’ll fly through it in no time and have some exercise too.

  Swapping gossip over the back fence or discussing husbands over cups of tea are definitely out. You must get on with your work. That’s how I survived nearly forty years of marriage and working at home.

  The date set for our wedding was 5 December 1945 and I was flat out working at the studio until the day. I didn’t have any of the usual round of activities like shower teas before the event.

  A taxi driver who lived near us in Botany Street, if he saw me setting off into town, would stop and give me a lift free of charge. He was an ex-soldier with a large family. He had bought a house and was desperately bargain hunting for furniture. A wardrobe had been advertised in the paper. The taxi driver told me with delight how he had bought it for a guinea, a real bargain.

  ‘Of course, you’ve heard about that murder in Darlinghurst?’ he continued, ‘the one where the woman was stabbed and stuck in the cupboard? Well, this is the wardrobe. That’s why it was cheap. You couldn’t tell; no blood, no stains, not a mark on it,’ he concluded happily.

  A day or so before the wedding, the taxi driver asked me if he could come up to the church for the event. I was touched, but not quite so touched when I heard the reason. He was hoping to pick up some fares going from the church to the reception and make a few extra bob.

  Norman came down to paint in the studio that week, which made me even busier. I was rushing to get the studio ready for him, then cleaning up afterwards. I was so busy, in fact, that it didn’t dawn on me until the last minute that I hadn’t a wedding dress.

  I panicked and set off in a flurry to buy a frock. Eventually after much searching I found what I considered a suitable dress at Mark Foy’s. The pale pink, drop-waisted crepe dress I chose had a finely knife-pleated skirt and long sleeves. It was embroidered with pink and silver sequins and there was a hat to match.

  The hat was a problem. Small hats were fashionable and this hat was extemely tiny, mad
e of stitched pink crepe de chine with roses round the narrow brim. The hat seemed all right in the shop, but when I tried it on in front of the mirror at home, there was no way I could make it sit right.

  I have a big head, maybe that was it, I don’t know. I ended up buying some pink tulle and making a sort of fall of it about my face and down the back, which successfully softened the look of the little pink hat.

  The wedding was in the afternoon at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church, Randwick, where Mollie had been married. Mollie was the matron of honour in an amethyst-coloured crepe frock and a tulle-covered hat. Mum had a new silver lace outfit, which she teamed with a black hat. So in the end we were all very well hatted. King and Mary were there with their three children and so were Jack and his pretty wife Dorrien. Dad had come up from Yass. Ron and Beryl McCuaig were in attendance; Ron was best man. The taxi driver was waiting outside.

  The church was decorated with November lilies and marguerites. My own bouquet had tiny Cecile Brunner roses and gardenias. Mollie carried small pink arum lilies and hydrangeas, and Mum, pansies. Because Doug wasn’t a Catholic and as the church was much stricter about mixed marriages then, we were married in the sacristy, not at the altar rail. Church austerities aside, it was a very happy wedding and we set off into town for our reception at the Forum Club.

  Cocktails were being served and everyone was beginning to relax. We were about to sit down to dinner when Dad, trust poor old Dad, threw a dreadful spanner in the works. In the middle of a conversation with me he turned white as a sheet, swayed on his feet and passed out flat on the floor. For a minute or two, I thought he had died.

  Dad wasn’t dead; he had fainted. His brother Joe summoned an ambulance and rushed him off to Lewisham hospital.

  Dad arrived from Yass early in the morning of our wedding day and had filled in his time by visiting friends around town and toasting his daughter’s wedding in champagne. At lunchtime when he went home to change, he couldn’t find any food and had a whisky instead to calm his nerves for the walk up the aisle. He drank another whisky or two at the Forum Club. Dad could drink with anybody and never show the effect, but all that alcohol on an empty stomach in the summer heat was too much for him. He didn’t appear drunk at the wedding. He passed out quite gracefully, really.