by Ruth Park
The touchy situation was exacerbated by the fact that we and our three children were castaways. Unable to go forward to England, or to return to Sydney because of lack of accommodation, we were marooned.
‘Surely you could get something!’
‘We’re trying very hard, honestly. All our friends are looking out for us.’
‘D’Arcy’s mother could put you up for a while, of course she could.’
Glumly I thought of the poor Nilands squashed into their two damp, dark, crowded rooms, victims of the housing shortage as much as we. To make matters worse, the old house of which they rented a small part had recently been sold, the new landlord entering upon a campaign of terrorising the tenants, so that they would leave him in vacant possession. We were homeless now, and soon they would be homeless and helpless as well.
The atmosphere was tense; we all suffered the nervous strain caused by too many people in one small house. I often felt depressed to the point of desperation, and if it had not been for my father’s unchanging congeniality I could not have survived it.
All this time both of us wrote doggedly, I my ABC scripts, D’Arcy short stories for the publications to which he regularly contributed. And constantly our friends in Sydney sought accommodation for us.
‘Anything, anything!’ we implored. In retrospect the Petersham flat seemed paradise. Even Wits’ End at Collaroy took on a delusive desirability.
‘After all, we were happy there,’ we reminded each other. ‘It was just that bed – hard on the backbone.’
‘And those creepy things that came up the bath plughole.’
‘And the primus stove going bang at three in the morning.’
‘Never mind. We’re together, Anne and Rory and Patrick and you and me. And the new bub will be a beauty, if he’s not a calf.’
D’Arcy looked somewhat thoughtfully at my middle. Certainly there was a lot of it. Still, it was no more than a week before delivery date that the doctor discovered we were to have twins. The news was not received well. My mother wept.
‘You’ll have three babies under a year old!’
Even my dear Mera said it was a catastrophe. But suddenly my world had righted. The confusion I had endured about the meaning of our aborted voyage disappeared; I began to see the road ahead, and it was a good, if difficult road.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said to my mother. ‘This is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.’
‘You are crazy,’ she replied with doleful conviction.
‘Everything will be fine now,’ I assured D’Arcy. ‘Maybe tough for a while, but fine in the end.’
‘Do you feel it wherever it is that you live?’ he asked.
‘Yes, no need to worry any more.’
Our twin daughters were strong, blonde and identical. Later in life they decided not to be twins, achieving this by means of the many arts known to women, but that is no business of mine.
After the numbing months I was aware once more of the immediacy of life and the hope of future contentment. I felt like a mother cat with kittens, very delighted indeed that my room in the nursing home had originally been the bedroom and study of Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand’s first Labour Prime Minister, who had always been my hero. I felt this a splendid omen.
No more was their arrival considered a catastrophe. The twins were no more trouble than a pair of puppies, and just as playful and good tempered. Nuki and Nui my father called them - Big and Little, one being minimally smaller than the other.
Meanwhile our friend, Cyril Hume, the ship modeller, had tracked down an old house at Neutral Bay. So eagerly were houses sought after we had to pay three years’ rent in advance, this taking most of our savings. This was not exploitation of a malicious kind, as I think the owners of the ancient house in Ben Boyd Road were not aware, as we were not, that such an arrangement was illegal.
Poor Cyril was dismayed when we cabled our decision to take the Old Manse, as it was called. He said he’d only told us about it because it was his duty, that his wife Leonora had looked it over and nearly had a fit, that it was in fearsome condition. Please don’t do it, he begged. Why didn’t I keep quiet? he berated himself.
But D’Arcy and I didn’t think twice. He had been quieter than usual after the twins’ birth, though courteous and pleasant in his usual way. When I asked him if anything were the matter, he merely replied, ‘Just thinking about this and that. No worry.’
He left New Zealand first, taking Anne and Rory by sea. Cyril had had the electric power reconnected to the Old Manse, and ransomed our furniture, such as it was.
D’rcy wrote: ‘Well, you wanted an old house and by crikey you have one. After I put the kids to bed I wandered through with tears in my eyes and my heart in my boots. The architecture is by Bram Stoker. It has a high peaked roof and false gables through which possums bound and fruit bats fly. Vampires too, no doubt. And under the master bedroom floor there is a cave. A cave!’
His tone was lighthearted; I thought he was exaggerating for the sake of fun. And anyway, I knew how Anne and Rory would love that cave and even the elderliness of the house. What if it were rundown? We would soon renovate it, mend it, paint it; we were young and energetic. What made me happier still is that when I flew back to Sydney with Patrick and the twins, my old St Benedict’s friend, Ina Ratliff, was coming too. An ardent amateur actor, she was going to try her luck in Sydney.
‘If it comes to nothing I can always go back to teaching,’ she said. As she was a merry warm-hearted girl of many talents, domestic and otherwise, I was delighted at her decision.
The week before we left, I had another letter from D’Arcy.
I’m going straight out to post this letter, for fear that I might change my mind. I want to let you know what happened to me last night. Like I do most nights I prowled through this calamitous house, the cold loneliness, the dirt, the doors that lead nowhere and the windows that haven’t been opened for half a century, knowing that we’ve done more than half our savings on this bloody incurable ruin. I sat down on a box in a dark room that smelt of mice and listened to the possums widdling through the ceiling. Something happened – a revelation, a kind of clearsighted knowledge, what you’d call a flash, I suppose. I realised that it is absolutely my own selfish fault that we’re stuck here, and I feel a bastard. You said we weren’t ready for England, but I wouldn’t listen.
Do I ever listen to other people? That’s what bothers me. If I always follow my own ideas regardless, believing I’m right, walking over other people’s needs, do I understand anyone at all, even from a literary point of view? How’s a man to tell?
I can fancy you smiling at my bringing writing into this letter when it’s really about being a husband and father. But all three seem involved to me.
Well, when you land here with Ina and the little kids, you’ll notice I’m different, that I’ve sorted myself out quite a lot. I wish I’d done it before but I didn’t seem to know.
Don’t mention this letter to me when we meet again. I’ve said all I want to, or indeed that I’m able to.
So I never did mention it. I saw that he was gentler, more considerate, had thrown away some of his old prejudices, both male and family-based. And it was indeed, as Bertha Lawson was to predict – we did not yet know that fascinating old woman – as if he had become a mature man at last. Hers, as we know, never did.
So the five of us arrived from Auckland and took possession of the Old Manse.
‘We’ll feel better when we’ve had a good hot meal,’ said Ina, whisking on an apron and approaching the gas range.
‘I don’t think much of the cooktop,’ she said, looking dubiously at the four extraordinary, spiky burners, which D’Arcy had scrubbed within an inch of their lives but which still looked like charred relics of a bush fire. She opened the oven door. Two time-pocked batwings of iron formed this door, and one could hear the oven trays shifting about menacingly even before she opened it.
There was an instant’s dism
ayed silence and then the oven spat a fossilised sausage roll at her. For a moment even Ina looked as though she wanted to go home.
‘Renovation of the kitchen is on top of the priority list,’ said D’Arcy firmly. ‘Even before the twinnery.’
‘We love this house, Mum,’ said Anne. ‘It’s not like any other house in the whole world. It’s full of really great horrible things.’
The Old Manse was indeed a fantasy house. In spite of the manner in which it swallowed up most of our earnings even as we earned, its unspeakable discomfort, its haunted room, I was never able to hate it. I wrote comic articles about our efforts to make it liveable, I put it into children’s books, including the two Callie’s Castle books.
We had scarcely taken possession of the Old Manse before the crisis affecting my husband’s family became an emergency indeed. For six months now Barbara Niland had endured the kind of wicked persecution which, sadly, is known best to the old, helpless or indigent. The new landlord changed the locks on the doors of their apartment; entered at will and carted away the furniture; constantly harassed this ageing woman who was incapable of dealing even with ordinary crises.
Frank, following his lifelong habit, had cleared out, gone on the shearing circuit, and was now safe in northern New South Wales, firing off a letter of sage advice every two days, and castigating his distraught wife for not having done what he had advised two letters before. He was righteous, sincere and even pious, and his eldest son, accustomed as he was to pusillanimous behaviour from his father, hit the roof.
‘Drop off your twig, you hypocrite,’ he wrote. ‘Running away is about all you can do. I’m ashamed of you. You’re no father of mine, you no-hoper.’
To my knowledge he had abandoned his father to the four winds at least twenty times before, so I took no notice. I was disturbed, however, at his distraught and fatigued appearance. He could not settle to work but prowled about, smoking his head off. Half the night he walked around the house, kicking aside children’s forgotten toys, often rubbing his chest absentmindedly.
‘Do you have a pain?’
‘Indigestion.’
He seemed unable to think of anything but the older family’s predicament. Constantly I found myself finishing an article for him, typing out this or that story, writing alone some play contracted to be written by the two of us for the ABC. When Ina went off to find a good life of her own, mine became very difficult. Not only her hard work as cook and deckhand, but her cheerful, laughing presence had made easier our struggles with five young children and the intractable Old Manse. At last I objected; ‘Look, this can’t go on. I can’t carry the whole burden by myself. You have to do some rethinking.’
‘I know,’ he said sadly. ‘But I can’t help myself. I feel responsible for them and I don’t know how to stop.’
Cynically, I remembered that his brothers had known how to stop. They left Australia and found safe haven in another country.
However well I understood the peremptory nature of the calls upon his lifelong loyalty, it was still an imposition that severely strained our personal relationship. For in this present emergency as in innumerable others throughout the years, I could plainly see it would always be myself and our children who would be forced to take up the slack. Also I didn’t like the way my husband looked or behaved; he seemed like a man on the verge of breakdown. So the problem had to be faced head on.
‘There’s only one answer,’ I said. ‘Only one solution for your mother. She has to be settled in some place where she can’t be evicted, no matter how much your father tries to bitch up the situation. We have to buy something.’
At the time, after years of hard saving, even after wasting thousands of pounds on our unwise lease of the Old Manse, we had at last enough to pay a deposit on a home for ourselves. We had even begun to look at modest houses for sale.
‘Oh, crikey, do you think we could?’
No generosity was in my heart; bitterly I resented our capital, mostly my own earnings, vanishing this way. But if my own family had been in a similarly critical position, there was no doubt of what D’Arcy would have suggested. He would not have thought twice.
‘I’ll build up our funds again some way,’ he promised. ‘I’ll even write a novel.’
From his expression I knew that this was the sorest trial possible. What could I do but laugh?
At last we found a tumbledown old cottage in Leichhardt, not wonderful at all, but all we could afford.
‘It’s not all for us, is it?’ asked Barbara timidly, so pleased, so disbelieving that my heart misgave me that our funds could not stretch to something better for this unlucky woman who had always lived in places largely occupied by hostile strangers.
She was much taken by the extensive backyard. ‘Frank always liked gardening; this will be the making of him. It’s like a miracle.’
‘You see what I mean?’ asked D’Arcy that night. ‘She never loses hope that her prayers will be answered.’
‘Well, maybe they will be.’
D’Arcy insisted that the family not know we had purchased the cottage. It belonged, he told them, to the friend of a friend.
‘If they know it’s me, they’ll lean all the more. And I want them to have self-respect, responsibility, pay rent, feel that they’re making their own way.’
Undoubtedly they paid the small rent from the allowance he made them thenceforth, but pay it they did. When D’Arcy had settled his mother in the house, back romped Frank and moved in, celebrating a place all to himself by a mighty spree. That evening we had calls from the police and three irate neighbours.
‘Well, bang goes our money once again,’ said my husband sadly. ‘Yet how can anyone get a drunk to play a man’s part, tell me that? The gutless way he made for the country! You couldn’t see him for dust. Well, I give in; I’ll never be the bunny again. We can’t hope for any improvement as long as he’s alive and kicking.’
‘Forget it. There was a priority. We did what we could.’
‘Of course, there’s always a chance he might get interested in growing vegetables.’
In fact, Frank did. His garden may have given some satisfaction to that always unsatisfied man. But until his father died, D’Arcy was never free of phone calls from the police, indignant neighbours, his beleaguered sister. Always drunkenness, fights, arrests, bailings out, troubles, tears, misery. Not until the youngest sister, that Dordie whom Anne had loved, was able to take charge of the household, though she too had been left unsupported, with two young children, one very ill, was there any peace from this ancient situation, where the parent had become an uncontrollable child, and the son assumed the duties of a father.
Yet when the father died, D’Arcy had tears in his eyes. He said, ‘Don’t be too hard on him, Tiger. We don’t know what it’s all about, do we? And besides, he was a bloody good woolclasser.’
In the meantime we stopped fretting over the parlous state of our finances and set to work at the typewriter and with the paintbrush. If we were stuck with a ruin, at least we could try to make it livable. Even picturesque. People in magazine articles were doing it all the time. We had every do-it-yourself book available, and we learned as we went along. But alas, too many decades had gone by; the Old Manse presented a chain reaction of deterioration. If we removed a window to reputty the glass and paint the frame, we discovered that the windowsill had terminal dry rot. Taking out the sill in order to replace it, we found that the bricks underneath were crumbling, the mortar turned into fine powder.
Once, tackling the kitchen wall – the kitchen was the only room we managed to make bright, pleasant and functional - we actually removed those dead old bricks of 1860, only to discover that the house had no damp course at all. So we had the wall jacked up and a damp course put in, a process I shudder to remember.
Few had loved or cared for the Old Manse since the minister left. It was anchored on the crest of a monstrous breaking wave of sandstone, literally anchored in some places by rusted stanchions of ir
on clawed into that Jurassic rock. In spite of the gables it had a crouched, cranky look; its knocked-in tin roof leaked everywhere; the gutters were bewhiskered with starling nests; the downpipes gaped with ragged holes that sheltered lizards, stray shivery grass and cockroaches.
Oh, that house! Somewhere in its innards was the core of its being – a small dwelling, built of sandstone, a hall straight through its middle like a tree trunk, large square rooms branching off on both sides, rooms with magnificent red cedar ceilings, and fireplaces and mantels of carved stone or timber stretching up fronded arms that once enclosed family paintings or looking glasses half a century gone.
In the time of the minister’s family the garden stretched halfway down Ben Boyd Road. There was an orange orchard below the house, and two Jersey cows in the home paddock.
But through the years, during the Old Manse’s journey down the via crucis that is the destiny of most ancient houses, people had boarded-in its verandahs, added nasty bits to outside walls, divided rooms. Anne and Rory ran around claiming these almost secret rooms, some now boarded up even from the inside, perhaps to keep out the sweeping draughts, and converted them into castles and cubbies, forbidden to everyone else.
‘It was a cheap boarding house,’ said Dame Mary Gilmore, ‘and I had a room there when I taught at the Neutral Bay Public School at the top of the hill. Let me see, that would have been about 1890.’
Strangely, Beatrice Davis, senior editor of Angus & Robertson, had also lived there as a small girl during the first World War. The school where Dame Mary had taught was her first school. It seems that the Old Manse then belonged to Beatrice’s maternal grandparents, and although the dwelling must surely have been in better condition, she clearly remembered the multitude of mysterious little tacked-on rooms.