Clio's Lives

by Doug Munro

  The reason is clear enough to Walvin – namely, Joe’s commitment to his

  own mother, the only person who had never given up hope for his safe

  return from the war. Joe’s own wife had left him for another man during

  his absence and he ‘resolved to care for the one woman who had stuck by

  him through the bleakest of times, and whose daily prayers had somehow

  worked. As long as his frail mother lived, Joe could not commit himself

  to another woman’, and so he lost his opportunity (p. 68): ‘I was her son

  before I loved you,’ as the lines in Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore go, ‘I cannot

  abandon her now.’

  There is nothing so dramatic in My Father’s Daughter. Sheila is the daughter

  of the radical Australian historian and civil libertarian Brian Fitzpatrick

  (1905–65). There was one outright affair (pp. 51–3) and he had numerous

  girlfriends, platonic or otherwise, which naturally upset his wife Doff.

  Sheila also ‘started to find Brian’s girlfriends seriously irritating’ (p. 106).5

  This was not the only dynamic making for an uncomfortable home life.

  Dominating the household was Brian’s heavy drinking, which ate into

  the family finances and prevented him getting an academic appointment

  5 An account by one of ‘Brian’s girls’, in reality a protégée, is by Beverley Kingston, ‘Brian Fitzpatrick’s Graduate Student: A Memoir’, in Stuart Macintyre and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds, Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 88–96. See also Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter, 210.

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  3 . WALvIN, FITzPATRICK AND RICKARD

  and a secure income. Sheila was able to make her ‘great escape’ from what

  she frankly describes as an ‘unhappy’ family (pp. 2, 9) at age 15 when she

  enrolled at the University of Melbourne and lived in a residential college.

  Doff’s grievances with Brian and her not unjustified perception that

  he was the cause of her misery (pp. 17, 64) had a snowballing effect,

  with every new grievance piling upon the last. Bearing the brunt of her

  dissatisfaction was Sheila: ‘My memory of my mother in these years was

  that life was unrelentingly hard on her, and she was unrelentingly hard

  on me’ (p. 96). Sheila’s close childhood relationship with Brian soured at

  adolescence when he became a repeated embarrassment to her, notably

  when his drunken personality took over from the sober one (pp. 105–6,

  166), and it had hit ‘rock bottom’ when she made her ‘second escape’ and

  left for postgraduate work at Oxford. As a mark of her disapproval, she

  refused to answer Brian’s letters when he offended her with one of his, and

  then suffered appalling shock and guilt when he suddenly died. There was

  eventual rapprochement, first with Brian’s memory when Sheila returned

  to Australia after a 15-year absence, in 1979, and discovered that he ‘had

  become part of the pantheon of the Left during the Whitlam era, it was

  an enormous relief to me; I had come to see him so strongly in pathetic

  terms, in terms of failure and futility’ (p. 110). Reconciliation was also

  achieved with Doff. John Legge, the foundation professor of history at the

  recently created Monash University appointed Doff to a tutorship (having

  already rejected Brian for a position). Her confidence and self-esteem

  soared, her outlook on life changed, and by the 1990s she had abandoned

  ‘a lifetime’s practice in communicating grievance’. The metamorphosis of

  Doff and her changing relationship with Sheila are beautifully conveyed

  in the final pages of My Father’s Daughter, where we get the definite sense

  that Sheila, finally, had also become her mother’s daughter.

  The theme of change

  That there is change over time is a truism, especially in the context of

  the accelerating changes on all fronts in the eight decades since Rickard

  was born. Every autobiography deals with dissimilar times from the

  contemporary present, when circumstances were not the same and when

  people thought and acted differently. Whereas the theme of change over

  time is implicit in My Father’s Daughter, it recurs in Different Times, as its 43

  CLIo'S LIvES

  very title suggests.6 One motivation to write the book stemmed from

  Walvin’s talking to his sons and grandson: ‘they listen to my tales as if

  I were talking about a lost Amazonian tribe. It was utterly beyond their

  ken’.7 Different times is also an underpinning theme in An Imperial Affair.

  It is also ‘a portrait of a marriage’ in much the same sense as is Nigel

  Nicolson’s famous book of that title about his own parents,8 and Rickard

  uses the story of his parents’ marriage to illuminate:

  the larger story of Australia’s role as a ‘dominion’ in the British Empire,

  which, although it had entered a terminal decline, still commanded the

  cultural allegiance of most Australians. My parents, like most middle-class

  folk then, took England and Empire as a given … Australia was a much

  smaller and more conformist society, with a population of a mere seven

  million, and although the War had exposed the irrelevance of Britain

  to our defence, the imperial connection remained fundamental to our

  sense of national identity … [World War I] was, as far as Australia was

  concerned, a British war in defence of empire (pp. 3, 7).

  With Philip being in the air force, the forms and observances that tied

  Australians to loyalty to the reigning monarch were intensified in the case

  of the Rickard family.

  The notion of the recent past being so different from the present is most

  pronounced in Different Times, which, as the back cover blurb states,

  ‘weaves the personal details of one family’s life into the broader story

  of the industrial north’. When Walvin was a youngster, his hometown of

  Failsworth was still dominated by the cotton industry. The characteristic

  chimneys of the cotton factories extended in every direction, an

  unrecognisably different landscape from today. Not simply the landscape

  but life itself was in the thrall of cotton. Although in terminal decline,

  cotton remained the greatest single employer, dominating the district,

  6 Historians’ autobiographies of childhood that make explicit comparisons between past and

  present are surprisingly rare. Even when their titles suggest a then-and-now approach, this does not turn out to be the case. See Paul Johnson, The Vanished Landscape: A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004). Those that make explicit contrasts include William H. McNeill and Ruth J. McNeill, Summers Long Ago on Grandfather’s Farm and in Grandmother’s Kitchen (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2009); Peter FitzSimons, A Simpler Time: A Memoir of Love, Laughter, Loss and Billycarts (Sydney: HarperCollins Publishers Australia, 2010).

  7 James Walvin, email, 26 November 2014.

  8 Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, and numerous subsequent editions).

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  3 . WALvIN, FITzPATRICK AND RICKARD

  much like the coal mines and steel factories in other parts of Britain.9

  But the sites of labour that sustained life were also ‘killing industries’.

  As well
as the numerous-enough industrial accidents, respiratory diseases

  such as pneumoconiosis (from coal dust) killed miners and byssinosis

  (from the pervasive cotton fluff) saw off many cotton-factory workers

  (pp. 27–8, 73, 192). Walvin provides a salutary reminder that some of the

  conditions of labour associated with the nineteenth century persisted well

  into the twentieth century.

  Family life

  Childhood involves being part of a family. The Fitzpatrick and the

  Rickard households were described as being ‘tight’ or ‘tightly knit’ little

  families, but they mean two different things. The Fitzpatrick family was

  ‘tight’ in the sense of being ‘close, crowded, tense, hard to breathe in’, not

  to mention being hard-up (p. 9). The Rickards were ‘tight’ in the sense of

  being cohesive (p. 114). Their dynamics were quite different. They were

  marched in directions they did not want to go.

  Doff Fitzpatrick’s negativity cast a long shadow over the family, as did

  Brian’s drinking (pp. 80–2). Both caused rifts between Sheila and her

  parents. The Rickards confronted an intruder of a different kind with the

  onset of Pearl’s depressive episodes in the early 1950s followed by heart

  palpitations, which the doctors were unable to diagnose correctly, and

  eventual shock therapy for the depression. In delicate health until her

  death 10 years later, in 1962, Pearl endured more hospitalisations, lived in

  fear of a recurrence of depression and was then diagnosed with cancer of

  the bowel. Family life was anything but normal despite ‘a sense of guarded

  determination to live a normal life’ (p. 133). Rather, Pearl’s ill-health was

  a brooding presence, intrusively and inescapably hovering over the family.

  In the same way, the Walvins’ home life was dominated by his father

  ‘wasting away under the corrosion of tuberculosis’ (p. 13). A stark

  childhood memory is his ‘enfeebled’ father coughing gouts of blood into

  the kitchen sink – the only sink in the house – whilst being physically

  supported by his wife (p. 39). This general scenario went on year in, year

  9 Catherine Cookson’s novel Maggie Rowan (London: Macdonald, 1954), ch. 1, compellingly portrays how a Tyneside coal-mining community was dominated at every level by living in the

  shadow of the pithead.

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  out, and Emma was left with a ‘pervading sense that there was no way

  out of the cycle’ (p. 48). She was the breadwinner and responsible for the

  upbringing of two small boys. Walvin recalls the ‘unrelenting drudgery’

  that became part of his mother’s daily life. There was never enough money.

  Midweek the money would run out, and often too the food had run out

  or was running low, so that ‘there was nothing to do but wait for the next

  pay packet, or hope for a gift or a loan from a relative or friend’ (p. 48).

  The food itself was unappetising and unwholesome, dominated by Spam

  and potatoes.

  It was only the kindness of friends and especially of relatives that enabled

  the Walvins to get through. Whereas the Rickards and the Fitzpatricks

  were essentially nuclear families, the Walvins were more an extended

  family. During their childhood, the two Walvin boys were in the care or

  spent time with their maternal grandparents (p. 39), which took some

  of the strain off their mother. The grandparents helped out by buying

  shoes and clothing for the children, they chipped in with financial help,

  and they took the boys to soccer matches and for seaside holidays at

  Blackpool.10 But they also gave more than material assistance; the moral

  support provided an emotional ‘safety net’ (pp. 82, 201).

  The charity of friends and wider family were expressions of working-

  class solidarity, but as Walvin points out the tight-knit working-class

  communities of Greater Manchester were essentially ‘local’ – that is,

  bound by a narrow locality – and based on nearby institutions such as

  ‘workplaces, shops, places of worship, drink and entertainment, and

  schools’ (p. 97). There is no nostalgia in his account, only a vision of

  a largely unlamented world, inhabited by the crooked timber of humanity,

  which nonetheless had it good points, foremost of which was a sense

  of responsibility to others. Help and even salvation could come from

  unexpected quarters. When Ian was having difficulties with his uncaring

  stepfather, a couple with whom the family had very little contact enabled

  him to escape a difficult domestic situation by taking him in as a boarder

  (pp. 96–7, 188). The short and simple annals of the poor make for

  depressing reading.

  10 Seaside holidays were a national institution. During their stay in England in the late 1930s, the Rickards also went on seaside holidays, but at respectable Bournemouth rather than the more-distant and downmarket Blackpool ( An Imperial Affair, 40).

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  3 . WALvIN, FITzPATRICK AND RICKARD

  Walvin’s working-class background has shaped the historian he became,

  as evidenced by two of his books on nineteenth-century British social

  history. Not only has he written about seaside holidays, which he so

  enjoyed in his youth, but about childhood itself, and both books are

  to some extent concealed autobiography.11 Much of the content of

  A Child’s World corresponds to childhood experiences of his own. A Child’s

  World is not only informed by the events of his own upbringing but is

  overwhelmingly about impoverished children, as he once was.

  Sexuality

  The greater willingness of contemporary autobiographers to relate more

  intimate detail is another indication of living in ‘different times’. The same

  authors who might, say, 40 years ago, have been circumspect are now less

  restrained and move with the spirit of a more candid age. Nonetheless,

  Rickard, Walvin and Fitzpatrick tell markedly different tales of sexual

  awakening and early experiences.

  When he was well into his teens, Rickard’s father introduced him ‘to

  something called “the facts of life”’. That such a highly sexed man should

  feel so awkward and embarrassed by his fatherly duty speaks volumes

  about the reticences of the age. ‘You’ll soon get interested in girls’, he

  explained, a statement that struck Rickard as both ‘faintly indecent’ and

  ‘highly unlikely’ (pp. 113–14). If the penny does not drop, it does so

  14 pages later when Rickard relates his first homosexual relationship. His

  parents suspect what is going on and he is outed; in what must have been

  an excruciating experience for all concerned, Philip and Pearl suddenly

  confront him, framed by the doorway to his bedroom, ‘leaning forward

  a little, yet careful not to step into my room, as if somehow respecting

  my privacy while even intruding on it’ (pp. 128–9). As Rickard explains

  elsewhere, ‘for me the 1950s was a sex-free zone. Not of course that

  I wasn’t thinking and fantasising about sex but, given the social mores of

  the time and my own family background, I had great difficulty coming

  to terms with my sexuality’.12

  11 James Walvin, Beside the Seaside: A Social History of the Popular Seaside Holiday (Lo
ndon: Allen Lane, 1978); Walvin, A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800–1914

  (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982).

  12 John Rickard, ‘Sydney: The Class of ’51’, Australian Historical Studies, 27:109 (1997), 176,

  doi.org/10.1080/10314619708596052.

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  Walvin is equally frank in describing the lack of sexual knowledge and

  experience of his generation of teenagers, who went to single-sex schools

  where sex education was off limits. Neither were such matters discussed

  in family circles. There was, nonetheless, a fascination with all things

  sexual. Adolescent males had a rampant interest in this great unknown

  and would swap coarse stories, but that was pretty much the extent of

  it: they were ‘innocents in an age of innocence’ (p. 130). The height of

  his experience, if it can be called that, came at dancing lessons, which

  provided the ‘fleeting opportunity to hold a girl in my arms. One girl

  was especially busty, and holding her close, in the last waltz, was an early

  experience of sexual bliss’ (p. 108).

  Fitzpatrick was more liberated. Living in Women’s College, an affiliated

  residential college of the University of Melbourne, gave scope for sexual

  expression that would have been out of the question had she remained

  at home. An early entrant to university, aged 16, her new milieu was

  liberating in more ways than one:

  In this new world, remarkably, there were people like me; I was not

  [the] oddity [that I felt myself to be at high school]. I had friends, even

  a boyfriend. Away from home, I could forget the old dragging undertone

  of uneasiness, the everyday worry of what unpleasantness might turn

  up next (p. 128).

  It also involved swapping stories with fellow students-in-residence about

  what awful parents they had.

  It went from good to better. To solve her shyness, she had boyfriends

  and for the first two years was always holding someone’s hand. There was

  a practical as well as a romantic reason – her short-sightedness presented

  initial difficulties in finding her way around (p. 127). There was also the

  discovery of sex, which was enjoyable ‘both in and of itself and as a way

  of being close to someone’, and it is difficult to imagine these days that