by Ruth Park
My husband fought and defeated me on the name Brigid, which I wanted to call this little girl. We both fought off his mother, who was profoundly disappointed when we would not call her Eileen, after an infant of hers who had died at birth. In the end she became Anne.
• 5 •
The day of my daughter’s birth I sat up in bed in Crown Street Women’s Hospital and swore by God I would never again bear a child in a public hospital. I do not criticise the medical care exercised, but the curt, rough, dictatorial way it was exercised. Communication with the patients on a human level was nil. The women around me, in severe pain, exhausted, mostly with too many children already (and no family-planning clinics), were treated as units in a vast, though probably competent system. They, like me, were ‘on the free’, and that makes a difference.
We did not have names. We were addressed as ‘mother’ even before we were mothers.
‘Stop screeching. It has to come out the way it went in,’ I heard a nursing sister say, coarsely impatient, to a woman in the ultimate throes. I myself was slapped by a nurse on a painful swollen breast because I was awkward in feeding my child.
‘But I don’t know anything about babies yet!’
‘Your worry, mother.’
During my four days in hospital I distracted myself by mapping out a seven-part adventure serial for the ABC Children’s Session. On the fifth day I walked home. Taxis were unprocurable. They whizzed past by the dozen bearing US servicemen and their girls. It seemed a very long way to Devonshire Street. I carried the baby and D’Arcy carried my suitcase. I was bleeding like a stuck pig. There was something amiss with my reproductive system, though no one at the hospital had mentioned it.
‘You get into bed this very moment!’ said Mrs Cardy. ‘Let me have the baby. Ah, the little duck, she has a complexion like a sweetpea!’
Thank God for that kind woman, for I had kindness from no one else except the girls at the ABC and my brother-in-law, Beres. I remember weeping woebegone because the baby’s grandmother had not come to see her, and I knew very well why.
‘It’s because Anne is my daughter. And I don’t understand any of it.’
The child’s father sighed. He had no understanding of the matter either.
This little girl of mine was deliberately invited into life so that I would have a friend of my own. This is not a good reason to conceive another human being, but it was so with me. For D’Arcy still belonged halfway to his own family, and once Beres went off on manpower jobs there was no one for me except the girls at the Children’s Session, and of necessity, they had to be business-hours friends.
‘How homesick you must be, darling,’ wrote my mother, she who had pined so bitterly when marriage had taken her far away from her mother and sisters. ‘But D’Arcy’s mother will do her best to make you feel at home, I know.’
As I have said, there were many things I did not tell my mother, for life during wartime was stressful enough without added apprehension for an absent child. So I had told her nothing about that poor woman who did not understand homesickness because she had never had a home, but had fled helplessly like a lost hen from one corner to another, as the winds of circumstance blew. Her only home was her children, as she was their home, patient and faithful, the static centre of turmoil and disorder. Perhaps this is why she could not come to terms with my very existence; she feared that in some undefined manner I would disturb the small cell of security that her ardent maternal love had built.
There seemed no subtext to her dislike, which showed itself unabashedly by disagreeable remarks to me and about me in my presence. She was also an obsessive borrower, almost a spontaneous borrower, of everything from my shoes to the baby’s clothing coupons, which scarcely covered more than the infant’s nappies, anyway. Nothing borrowed was ever returned, and in most cases I could not afford to give away the requested article, in which case I was abused for weeks. She seemed to have no orthodox feelings about this genteel annexation of another person’s belongings, and laughed heartily as she told Mrs Cardy about going to the parish priest, that old Irishman built of granite and rustic shrewdness, and asking him for ten shillings.
‘Get out of here, you’re worse than a field of tinkers!’ he said. She found this not at all mortifying.
‘Oh, that Father Denehy, he’s made of iron, God bless him!’
I could not attribute her attitude towards me to jealousy, resentment or revenge. Thus her animosity differed greatly from my own Irish grandmother’s persecution of the unfortunate Philomena, a good girl who became engaged to Grandma’s sole and idolised son, Poor Jack. That persecution, it was plain even to us grandchildren, was grounded in murderous jealousy. Yet, like Philomena, I had no answers. There are no real answers to irrationality.
Before we married D’Arcy had told me of her obstinacy, her fixed ideas, and asked me to be patient.
‘She’s had a hard life,’ he said. ‘Two children dead, nothing but poverty always. I owe her. Think of the ninepenny dictionary.’
As a little boy, mad with desire, he had led her to the shop window of the Chinese storekeeper, Kwong Sing, and shown her a little dictionary. ‘Is that really what you want?’ she asked. And he answered, ‘It’s words.’
She didn’t know where the next meal was coming from, but somehow she found ninepence and bought it for him.
‘I think I learned every word in it. I used to recite them for her, like a litany of the saints, she with this look of wonder on her face.’
How could I not promise to be patient? It did not enter my head that the time would come when I broke into a cold sweat every time I heard her voice.
I plotted simple stratagems. I tried to talk to her, to draw her out about her mother, a wonderful woman, but her answers were vague and disjunct. All I learned about her family, the Egans, came from her older sister Bid, a darling old woman with what Beres called chaotic feet. He was indignant on her behalf, for she had spent her life as a presbytery housekeeper, running here and there and everywhere on her broken tortured feet after her thoughtless and often lazy masters.
‘If I get to heaven first,’ proclaimed Beres, flushed and passionate, ‘won’t I tell God about Auntie Bid’s poor feet, and that pig of a Father X calling her in from the kitchen to hand him the tomato sauce, when all he had to do was stretch out his holy paw and get it from the sideboard.’
Auntie Bid did not complain. All I ever heard her say with a sigh was, ‘All them black socks!’
As with Barbara, her religion was without spot or stain of doubt. It was a mythic world, but a true world for them both.
Barbara knew nothing about me and didn’t want to know. She had no interest in my background, family, achievements, aims or opinions. I had sprung fully-fledged into her life, a kind of freakish manifestation more than anything else – educated, peculiar, speaking like a Pom. She spoke always as if D’Arcy did all my writing.
‘I liked that story of his in the ABC Weekly.’
‘But that was one of mine.’
‘Yes, he’s very good, always was.’
I understood D’Arcy’s feelings for his mother; I truly did. I loved my own family and thought all children felt the same way. There was a tender, non-tensile bond between Barbara and her son, perhaps with all her children. I never saw D’Arcy kiss her or even hug her; I think she herself was an affectionate woman but her wretched life had taught her to fear rebuff. D’Arcy knew so many things for which he pitied her. He remembered her as a soft-faced, fuzzyhaired young woman who didn’t deserve the life she got as unwanted wife. When he was fifteen he tried to run away with her and the young children. They were like a tribe of penniless tinkers, with bundles and baskets and one boy half-dead with the whooping cough. Yet he got them all to Sydney, settled them in a little house, found the children a school and himself a job of sorts. ‘I was like a dog let off the chain. I thought we’d left it all behind, all the fights and humiliations, the miserable, hopeless life any family leads with a drunk. Bec
ause you know, I knew we had potential, I knew I had potential.’
As soon as the family was settled, up turned Frank, full of penitence and promises, and his wife gladly took him in, giving thanks to God that he had changed.
‘But he still hasn’t changed, and that’s eight years ago!’
‘Well, that’s my Mumma. She has faith that if she waits long enough her marriage will be what she wants it to be.’
‘That doesn’t explain why she’s so unfriendly to me. Or excuse it either. It’s not fair.’
‘I’m not asking for fairness, girl, I’m asking for kindness.’
‘She’s not kind to me, not one little bit.’
‘I’m not asking for a trade-off either.’
‘But it’s upsetting me dreadfully, can’t you see?’
‘She is who she is, and you are who you are. You’re strong.’
‘Bloodyminded blarneying Irishman!’
‘How about a bit of a cuddle then?’
So, for love or what I thought was love, I kept my tongue between my teeth, was civil and pleasant, behaved like a girl of whom my loved teacher Sister Laurencia would approve. Still, D’Arcy’s request should never had been made. No one should be asked, for love or anything else, to permit a third person persistently to erode one’s self-esteem, not even for malice, merely for sluggish mischief.
Mrs Cardy took another and cynical view.
‘Don’t forget I’ve known Barbara since she was a youngster. She’ll never let up on you until you put a flea in her ear.’
‘I just couldn’t.’
‘Then I’ll put one in D’Arcy’s ear.’
I asked her not to, hypocritically, hoping she’d do so, anyway. Yet that very night he took the wind out of my sails once more. As I lay in his arms, our little baby asleep in the canvas bassinet squashed in beside the table with the typewriter, he told me of the time she’d saved him from getting his head cut off. A magician had visited Glen Innes, where the family lived, and somehow Frank had scraped up enough money to let Barbara and the children have this rare treat.
‘The showman asked for volunteers to come up on the stage, and naturally I shot up there like a rocket. I had to kneel down and put my head on a block, while he brandished a huge axe. Even at the age of eight I knew my head would remain connected. But suddenly there was a fearful commotion in the audience and up rushed Mum. First she kicked away the block and then she kicked the magician, and I was dragged down the centre aisle and out of the tent, all our little kids shrieking. I was so mortified I can feel the pain yet.’
‘Very funny,’ I said coldly, though secretly I thought it was comical. I could feel him thinking, ‘What else can I tell her? I háve to make her understand somehow.’
So he came out with another story, of a time when he worked at William Brooks’s printery, proofreading directories and telephone books. One afternoon when it was pouring rain his mother waited outside with his coat wrapped in newspaper.
‘It must have been an hour until I clocked out, and she didn’t have a coat herself. Wasn’t that just like Mum!’
The vision of Barbara, standing outside the printery, soaked with rain, but with her son’s coat wrapped in sodden newspaper struck me as both sad and hilarious, as we both began to laugh. But I could have kicked him. It was just like Barbara, a woman who had nothing in her life but her kids, a woman with nothing to look forward to but more calamitous quarrels and lovelessness. She had but one hope, that her children would turn out to be decent people, with better lives than hers. And in this she succeeded almost perfectly.
I don’t know whether there was any coherence to her perception of the exterior world. I don’t think there was. But I have noticed that inaccessibility to the external world is a frequent characteristic of very ill, or very distraught people. The noises from within are deafening.
In the end I could bear her harassment no more and gave her a dressing-down. I had rarely been rude to a person older than myself; it was not the way of the young in those days. I felt bad about it for years, but as things turned out, Mrs Cardy had been right. Barbara flung out of the house, but that was the end of it. After that she treated me as a human being. In later years I became very fond of her.
I thought often of what her youth must have been, isolated on a starveling farm. Her father was a brutal man from Offaly, then called King’s County. He was a travelling blacksmith and wheelwright, and had a wagon fitted up as a forge. When he was away for months at a time, his wife, her four daughters and one retarded son lived as best they might. The mother became a bush nurse, and on her small earnings they lived.
Mrs Cardy said, ‘No one ever called in vain for Nurse Egan. I can see her yet, going off on her horse, with a storm lantern and a little oilcloth bundle on the saddle in front of her, with clean starched white aprons, and scissors and string for the cord, and sometimes baby clothes she had made herself for the poor mother.’
As a midwife, Margaret Egan became famous in New England. This did not stop her husband beating her and the girls whenever he returned from his travels. It must have been a relief when he fell off his wagon when drunk, and the startled horses trampled him. He was buried far from home, and no one in his family cared a jot.
But first he forced Frank Niland to marry his daughter, and such was his reputation for ferocity that one fancies the handsome young man jumped to it. Frank was engaged to another girl, whom he loved dearly and, it appears, all his life, but he had done the common thing and got another young woman pregnant. Lonely Barbara had fallen for his carnation cheeks, his summer blue eyes, his slender wiry frame. Perhaps he had a sluthering voice, though God knows when I knew him it rasped like a file, ruined by coarse wine, griding on and on saying nothing. But when young he must have known how to get his own way and the soft Irish voice is often the way to do it.
Frank’s love was a girl called Alice Gunn. Often when he was drunk he would get out her picture and her letters and weep over them. This small tearstained packet has come to me at last. I look at Alice’s direct dark-eyed gaze, her strong face and level eyebrows, and think that if Frank had married her she would have stood no nonsense with the bottle. She would have straightened out that young tearaway and made out of him the man he was capable of being.
For he came of a long-established, well-respected New England family, several generations of prosperous sawmillers and coopers who sprang from the emigration in 1841 of Original Thomas and Original Mary Niland. Thomas had been a cooper with Guinness’s Brewery in Dublin; when D’Arcy Niland and I visited that brewery 123 years later there were still Nilands working as coopers there. We met two of them and they were the dead spit of one of D’Arcy’s brothers, Joseph, as well as a cousin, Professor John Niland of Sydney, and several remote cousins once and twice removed and living in the Northern Rivers district.
Frank Niland’s father was the fifth living child of Original Thomas, one of the first Nilands to be Australian-born. When this grandfather died in 1924, he was described as being of a refined and pious nature, esteemed and loved by all. Something of this disposition remained in D’Arcy’s father, in spite of alcoholism.
Queer little fragments of good manners used to pop out in him. When sober he was quiet and well-behaved, reading the newspaper through glasses he had picked up at the flea market, one earpiece being made of ginger-beer wire, and lopsided. On one occasion, which touched me greatly, he looked up from his paper, and said in a melancholy voice, ‘This would have been our boy Jack’s birthday.’
Jack was the lost son John, whom D’Arcy remembered vaguely as a beautiful jolly little fellow, who died in terrible pain from an intussusception of the bowel when he was two or three.
I saw then that Frank, scallywag as he was, mourned the death of his two children, and my hard judgment of him was gentled a little.
But how much he didn’t want to marry the daughter of furious William Egan the blacksmith! She was older than he, almost thirty, and he longed for Alice, it seems, w
ith all his soul.
On Barbara’s wedding day he thrust a dagger through her heart, though probably he didn’t think of it that way. A train passed through Tenterfield, carrying Alice Gunn to a destiny we do not know, and he went to the station to say goodbye.
‘When he came back his eyes were red,’ Barbara told me in later years, and at the thought of that cruel humiliation tears filled her own eyes.
There ensued for her the ignominy of the unwanted woman. Every degradation, some unspeakable, was inflicted upon her. She was arrested for begging when Frank had left her and the children penniless for weeks. She had sold the children’s beds. They slept on heaps of newspapers and old clothes. The parish priest paid her fine, and St Vincent de Paul’s Society found her some shelter when she was evicted from her house and was discovered sitting in the park with her little children. Someone had given her some money, but had she bought milk or bread? No, the children were eating saveloys and drinking lemonade.
‘I wanted them to remember it as a picnic,’ she said, ‘not as something frightening.’
She had the variety of wisdom that in a mother is passed on to good and mostly happy children.
Nevertheless her life was one of unremitting deprivation and adversity. She was a person capable of loving greatly, I think, but Frank did not want her love. He wanted Alice’s.
She said to me once, ‘It makes you wonder what a body’s born for.’ Was there ever such a summing up of her life and those of countless other women? Ah, not just women. Men, also.
Barbara outlived both her husband and her eldest son. In later years we were able to get them a little house, and Frank became interested in making a vegetable garden. But he still got drunk whenever his pension arrived, raging around, ‘arging’ about everything, driving his wife mad with his torrents of meaningless talk. She faded away into arteriosclerosis.