It did happen again. Money was a perpetual problem for the women of the Land Army. Unlike the officially recognised services, workers in the AWLA had no way of knowing how much they would be paid as they shifted from one job to the next. The female wage had been pegged at 53 per cent of the male wage since 1907, but in many rural industries paying women anything at all was seen as setting a dangerous precedent.
Often it was claimed that a farm’s very financial survival depended on the unpaid labour of wives and daughters, and unions worried that a woman’s wage would destroy the farming industry’s profitability. As a result, when AWLA workers arrived on the land to replace the men who were leaving for the front, many farms either assumed the AWLA women were there to work for free, or simply refused outright to pay them.
Edna was determined to make her own way in the world. She never asked her parents for help. Her pride came with a price. And the ‘misunderstanding’ in Ballarat was not the last time that Edna went hungry after her weeks of work.
The Biographer
Nel Cranmer did not invite me to sit down. I hovered in the bright light.
‘I saw the paper,’ she began, abruptly. ‘Tragedy, tragedy, tragedy.’
‘I’m sorry, I –’
Nel held up a finger, then pointed to the door. I went to it, opened it. The corridor was empty.
‘I am not infirm,’ said Nel. ‘I am old. That nurse is Percy’s latest idea. He is fussy. I suppose Victoria was heavily involved in those articles? She always has idolised her mother.’
‘The articles were all mine.’
Nel raised an eyebrow. ‘I wondered if Victoria would see this through, or if she would grow bored. I see that the media provided a more immediate source of gratification for her than publishing some book. Let us be completely clear: Edna did not care about any of this. She did not wish to exhibit. You have been with the family long enough to know that.’
‘With all due respect, I don’t know that. She was private, sure, but she was also an artist, and a brilliant one, who never stopped working. Even after she stopped exhibiting.’
‘If Edna’s work had been worth noticing, it would have been.’
‘Emily Dickinson only had a couple of poems published during her lifetime. Van Gogh only sold one painting. Edna’s work is important. Bomana. Poppies.’
Nel’s face twitched. ‘Bomana? She painted the cemetery at Bomana?’
‘You haven’t seen the triptychs?’
‘That must have been in the 1950s, when Max and Edna visited Papua New Guinea. Edna was mad, forcing him to go back there.’
‘No, these were done in the 1980s, in the studio Max built for her. Mrs Cranmer, you should see them. They’re incredible.’
‘Max says you’re a faker, a troublemaker. What do you say to that?’
‘Max has misunderstood me, and my intentions.’
She snorted.
‘Excuse me, Mrs Cranmer, but do you really want to talk to me?’
‘You are writing about my family. If you are going to publish articles about my family you have to get it right. I have to be involved now. You’ve given me no choice. The Cranmers have a long history. You know you got the year Edna applied for the gallery school wrong in that article you wrote.’
‘Anything you can share with me will be really valuable – about her life and her work.’
‘Work. You mean art.’
‘Okay then,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk about her art. You were her first patron, her only real patron. What drew you to her?’
‘Imelda. Imelda was a very good person. Very dedicated. Very hardworking. Pure, in a way that is quite old-fashioned now. She had the courage of her convictions. I took Edna on because of Imelda. I did a lot for Edna, not that she was grateful. And Max did a lot for her too, of course. Max was such a dedicated husband.’ Nel sighed. ‘So how does this work?’
‘It’s up to you. What would you like to talk about first?’
‘Pour the tea.’
I leaned over the small table and poured us each a cup. She held her cup delicately in her swollen hands. Through the window, I could see the edge of the garden shed that had been Edna’s original studio. The roof had fallen in.
Later that afternoon, as we were wrapping up our interview, Nel Cranmer asked, seemingly offhand, if I had spoken with John Whitedale.
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘The last I heard of John,’ she said, ‘he was in France, being a hippy layabout. Needless to say, he didn’t even return for Edna’s funeral. No gratitude, that one. Now, I suggest you contact …’
She launched into a list of names, and I picked up my pen and pad. I have always wondered if Nel Cranmer guessed. When I left her, she was perched on her fainting couch, surrounded by the hothouse blooms.
EDNA: A LIFE
The sketchbooks reveal that, by the end of 1943, Edna knew that Imelda’s friend Celine had given birth to a child, John, in London, and that with the child’s father out of the picture Imelda had become a surrogate parent. Although she doesn’t mention the baby by name, Edna’s sketching that December is preoccupied with preparatory drawings for a small picture book that had the dedication: ‘For Baby after his first step.’ The title on the book’s ‘cover’ – Strange Birds Down Under – is intricately drawn, a series of interwoven letters, the end of each fanning out into delicate feathers.
The five pages of the book itself are wordless, full of birds in flight, preening themselves on spindly branches, or facing off, beaks open, comic eyes squeezed closed. The book’s audience is not really the young toddler, but the two women looking after him in the middle of the wartime city.
The incredible care Edna took with the book, at a time when paints and paper were scarce, suggests that she is trying to remind her distant sister of the importance of their bond. The book is full of ‘in-joke’ sketches, caricatures of their aunts, uncles and characters in Geelong with whom Celine would have been unfamiliar.
Towards the middle of the book, the hero bird – a black swan – unceremoniously eats a fat frog that she has found hopping on the edge of the bay.
It’s unclear if Edna ever finished the book, or sent it to London. Even if it had arrived, the older women would not have had time to decipher the veiled anger in its pictures of the preening birds. With the baby to care for, they must have taken alternating shifts, passing the child between them when they returned home, exhausted and filthy, from ambulances and hospitals across the blacked-out and bombed city.
Today we count the military and civilian lives lost in the Second World War in separate tallies, but for Imelda and Celine there might not have seemed a difference. The bodies would have all looked the same stretched out on the floors in the makeshift hospitals.
Every day and night that the women worked, they would have been aware that the war could come marching into London again at any time, that the front was only ever a handful of miles away, held at bay by just a short stretch of water over which Imelda’s mother, Margaret, had fled in one war and then Celine in the next. Nearly 400,000 British military died during the course of the Second World War, and 67,000 civilians. On the other side of the Channel, 217,000 French military died and 350,000 French civilians lost their lives.
The Biographer
Leaving the conservatory I almost had to grope my way along Nel’s dark corridor, purple and blue impressions of the conservatory swimming in my vision as my eyes adjusted to the gloom of the rest of the house.
In the foyer, I called out for the nurse. There was no reply. Pretending I was looking for her, I opened one of the doors that led off the entry hall.
The room I found myself inside had once been grand. A long table stretched through the gloom, its pristine French polish giving off a soft glow.
Over the sideboard hung a series of portraits. The Cranmer family posed classically, encased in big gilt frames. Victoria as a child, next to a rose bush. Percy in his grammar school uniform, standing in front of an empty fireplace
.
In the centre, a huge group portrait that looked as if it could have been done by Dargie again. The background of the portrait was a wash of regal reds. Nel Cranmer sat on a low-backed chair in the centre of the painting, flanked by her husband and son. Both men were in uniform. Pop Cranmer stood behind her, chest out, staring haughtily down at the viewer. To Nel’s right was Max, straight backed and limber in his washed-out green, strong jawed and fierce-looking. I wondered if it had been painted before Max went to war, or if Nel had commissioned it afterwards, when he was already dragging the mangled mess of his legs up and down the hallway.
I tried to picture Edna in that room, passing in and out in her maid’s uniform, serving Nel, Pop and Max dinner at the long, heavy table. Tight, controlled and subservient. Helping Max up from the chair at the end of the meal. Or had she been more like the Edna in photographs, loose in her uniform, wild-haired, sardonic? The two versions of her slipped and slid into each other.
Back in the entrance hall, I didn’t stop to think before taking the stairs two at a time. Max had used the stairs to help build the strength in his legs. He had insisted on living upstairs after the war, despite the effort it took. Victoria had told me about it: her stubborn father, one step at a time, Edna at his side.
The second floor was awash with light. The once-red carpet in the corridor had faded to a tired and dusty rose. Doors gaped open on either side. I slipped through one. Nothing. Damp stains and mould marked the walls in long streaks. The floors were uneven, and there was a strong smell of mildew. A double bed, stripped of sheets, stood alone in the middle of the room.
The next room was empty too, and the room after that. It wasn’t until I came to the end of the long corridor that I found a room containing furniture. A closet with a mirror set in it made of a dark, dusty wood, and a camphor chest. When I lifted its lid, it was full of old toys: a GI Joe, a couple of Barbies, their hair soft and perfect, blank pelvises staring up at me.
Someone had pushed a sofa bed under the wide windows. There was a pile of dirty sheets on the floor beside it. It looked as if they’d been there a while. Dust had gathered on their folds.
I went to the window. Down below, the grey sea baths were empty. The wind had picked up; the arms of the palm trees thrashed on the slope. On the far side of the bay, the dark flicker of the oil refinery and the superphosphate plant, and then the slopes of the distant You Yangs rising high out of the flatlands.
Back on the ground floor, I spent what felt like a long time looking at the paintings in the entry hall. There must have been at least sixty works on show there, crowded up against each other, still lifes displaying mounds of fruit, heaps of rich interiors. I had a thrill of recognition when I found a small von Guérard: a wide landscape of the Australian bush, tiny people far away in the distance, struggling up the side of a mountain.
Not one of the paintings on the wall was by Edna.
The nurse did not come back. I let myself out.
Victoria called. She’d had a puncture on the Princes Highway, had spent four hours waiting for the RACV to arrive. And she was furious.
‘Gran’s an old lady, she wanted me there for the interview. That was the deal.’
I didn’t fight back, didn’t tell her that her grandmother had not asked after her, not once.
Victoria came to my next three interviews with Nel Cranmer, perching on the edge of her grandmother’s fainting couch in the tropically heated glass room. I sat opposite them, dictaphone on the ground next to my chair, tiny tapes spiralling as Nel talked.
She spoke mostly of herself, of Max, or of Victoria and Percy as children. She spoke lovingly of Imelda, and confessed to supporting her when she wanted to join the VADs. Victoria would grow frustrated, attempt to steer the conversation towards Edna’s life, but Nel was immoveable.
After the last interview, as we were standing in the dim hallway, Victoria sighed deeply.
‘This house,’ she said. ‘It will be hard to see it go too, once Gran’s gone. Mum and Dad met here. I grew up here. Every Christmas, Pop would get us something mad – a carousel for Perce and me, or a pony to ride around the backyard. It drove Dad crazy – he said we’d be spoiled, but we weren’t, of course, because afterwards, on Boxing Day, we’d go to Granny Margy’s and the Whitedales. Percy and I still have our own rooms upstairs. We sleep over sometimes.’
As lies go, it was a small one. I pictured Victoria, stretched out on the unfolded sofa bed under the bay windows in the empty room, the confetti of bug carcasses sprinkled across the faded carpet: flies, moths, beetle husks. Still, I couldn’t help myself. I pushed her on it.
‘Is it okay if we look around up there?’ I asked. ‘Are there any of your mum’s pictures?’
Victoria glanced at her watch. ‘I’m running late,’ she said, apologetically. ‘Maybe another time. And I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something anyway. Can we grab a coffee?’
In the only cafe on Moorabool Street we ordered coffee and were given burned milk and brown silt. Girls in school uniforms rested against the plate-glass window, waiting for their bus.
I already felt guilty for baiting Victoria. Part of me wanted to reach over, touch her hand. Tell her that it was okay that there weren’t rooms for her and Percy upstairs at her grandmother’s house anymore. That all families change over time. But I didn’t.
‘What did you want to talk about?’
‘I’ve got big news,’ Victoria said, taking a deep breath. ‘I’ve been in touch with some people in Canberra about donating paintings to the War Memorial. At first they said no, they get thousands of asks. But there’s this woman I went to high school with, Lisa, she has a job in the Department of Veterans’ Affairs doing PR – she’s really quite feminist. I sent her some of the photos we had done, and then the articles. She loved them.’
‘Does she know people at the War Memorial?’
‘Yes. And she’s got an idea about some campaign that the government might be doing soon, a commemoration one. And I want you to go up there and talk to her.’
The chance of getting out of the tiny attic room in my mother’s house, of escaping to another place even for a short time, of leaving the long routine of night walks, the silences, opened up hope in my chest. But, then again, the longer I spent on the project, the longer I would be stuck up in that attic.
‘Don’t you think you should do that?’ I asked.
Victoria shook her head. ‘I’d go if I could. But it has to be you. If I turn up at the War Memorial and start talking about Mum’s work I’ll sound desperate, as if I want a favour. I’m her daughter. But the whole point of you writing the biography now is you didn’t know Mum, you meant nothing to her, you’re the writer, so if you go up and talk about her work they’ll think you’re a professional, and they’ll take you more seriously. It really should be you. Could you please just go?’
I sipped my burned milk. On the other side of the plate-glass window, the girls streamed onto the bus; arms linked, hip-to-hip.
Victoria saw my indecision. ‘You can do other stuff for the biography too, while you’re there,’ she insisted. ‘You could look at Dad’s war service records. And Grandpa’s. And Mum applying to be an official war artist to Vietnam – they probably have that there too in the archives somewhere, right?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look, I’ll pay for it,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about that part.’
She left in a rush.
The Falcon was parked on the opposite side of the street. I crossed one lane of traffic, then hovered on the median strip, waiting for the lights to change so I could sprint over the second lane.
Even with his back to me, even with twenty metres of traffic separating us, I knew his shape.
Joe.
He stood in front of the exotic imported rug shop on the corner, where everything was permanently on sale. There was a woman with him, a woman with smooth dark hair wearing a pencil skirt and a corporate-looking jacket. She put her hand on
his shoulder lightly, so casual and yet so intimate, and I felt the touch as if she was punching me. In a split-second, my heart jumped from its normal pace to a fluttering illness in my chest.
I had nowhere to go. I was trapped between the rushing lanes of traffic. He shouldn’t have been there. He never visited Geelong.
He turned away from the shop, started walking down the footpath towards the Falcon.
The traffic was still moving. I spun around and dashed back through the cars to the cafe. Someone blared their horn at me. In the doorway of the cafe, I looked back, just for a second.
He had seen me. He raised his hand in a half-wave, smiled uncertainly.
I waved back. I had to. Then I walked as fast as I could into the women’s toilets. I locked the door. The adrenaline rose like a tide, pressing against my pelvis, my chest, my throat.
Sitting on the closed toilet seat, I relived the expression on Joe’s face the night I told him I was leaving. We’d stood in the hallway. Later, on the floor, as he held me down, I could see into our bedroom, could see the socks I had been looking for stuffed under his clothes rack.
He’d said: ‘I hope you get pregnant, and I hope you have to abort it.’
That afternoon in the cafe in Geelong, I stayed locked in the toilet until someone knocked on the door, angrily. Then I hovered in front of the ordering counter, peering out at the street. Joe was gone.
EDNA: A LIFE
In a letter to her great-aunt Enid Whitedale after the end of the war, Edna recounted hearing a radio commentator call the AWLA ‘the spud pickers’.
The Biographer's Lover Page 13