Snake Cradle

by Roberta Sykes

  The details of Uncle George’s early morning visit were revealed to me only in small pieces over time. Was this because I had lost the ring, a gift to me from Mum? Was I to be punished by being kept ignorant of its return?

  During the next week I learned of the ring’s recovery, and Mum said I could have it back when my finger had grown a bit fatter. In the meantime, it was to stay in the wardrobe in an old handbag in which she kept her trinkets.

  I was amazed by Uncle George’s cleverness at locating the ring as I was so sure it had been lost forever. He had told Mum the ring had fallen straight down and lay glinting in the sunlight through the clear water. He’d retrieved it at first light and walked in the cool morning air for over two hours to bring it to our door, and then he hadn’t even come in for a cup of tea.

  But who was ‘Uncle George’? And ‘Aunty Maggie’? This was the last time I saw either of them, and references to them, of which there were very few over the years, made them figures of even greater intrigue. George was a very black man with loose but kindly features and, beside him, Maggie was pale, probably a white woman, with limp brown hair. Her most startling feature, to my young eyes, was that she had all her front teeth missing. Mum said they lived in the bush because they wanted to be free and because they liked ‘a drink’.

  Years later, Mum evaded my questions about Uncle George and Aunty Maggie. It was her way to become angry when pursued on subjects she didn’t want to answer. I gathered she was related to George in some way, and that they were the parents of a young girl roughly the same age as me, my cousin Betty, a pale girl with lank hair who lived with adoptive parents not far from us.

  Betty’s adoptive mother was an obese woman with a huge suppurating tropical ulcer on her leg. She was married to a quiet, nondescript man who’d made Betty the most wonderful rocking horse in the world—which she seemed only rarely permitted to ride. Generally speaking, theirs was not a happy household, as the woman could barely hobble about and Betty had to do many chores and errands, including bathing and dressing the ulcer; a nauseous task which I assisted with on several occasions. Mum said it would be good for me to stay in touch with Betty because she would be handy later. I wondered what she meant at the time, and about her reversal of this advice a few years further on.

  Young children accept being kept in ignorance on all sorts of issues and I was no exception. By the time we are old enough to assert our curiosity, we’ve already, to a great extent, internalised our knowledge about the natures of the people around us—our parents, relatives and neighbours—and we’re usually canny enough to know who we can ask questions of and whether they are likely to be answered.

  As children, instead of receiving answers, we were often dismissed or given a reassurance in lieu of a reply.

  I learned that Mum was from a large family, perhaps as many as sixteen or eighteen children, most of whom lived, during my childhood, in Queensland though not in Townsville. I only knew her sister Gladys who lived in Brisbane.

  Our mother was not normally a demonstrative person, and her devotion to us, her children, became apparent—with a few exceptions—only by the commitment she showed us over time.

  It’s hard to explain why Mum didn’t like us to touch her to show our affection. She did all the necessarily close things to sustain life such as breastfeed us as babies, but she could not have afforded to feed us otherwise. Once, when she was lying on her bed feeding Leonie, I pestered her to taste the milk that the baby was gulping down with gusto. She sent me to the kitchen for a teaspoon, rather than allow me to crawl up beside her and taste it from her breast. I was four, and on reflection this seemed cold and fairly typical of her actions towards me.

  She didn’t allow us to clutch her leg, though we had to hold onto her skirts when we were crossing roads. We were chided and told to, ‘Hold on properly,’ if our hands brushed her hip or thigh. She picked us up, as parents do, when we had to be any place higher than the floor, but we were constantly admonished to ‘sit up straight’ and ‘stand up straight’, which meant we were not to be touching either her or each other.

  I imagine I experienced the emotional coldness of our lifestyle more intensely than my sisters, in part because, as the eldest I was expected to pull the younger ones into line; tell them to stand and sit straight, to be independent and not lean on or touch one another.

  Perhaps periods of sharing a bed with my sisters was some compensation, though I certainly didn’t think so at the time since one suffered from incontinence until her teens.

  Mum shared little of her feelings with us and only in crises did her love for us become obvious. On one such occasion I was playing under the house and poking around in some boxes stored there, which I’d been forbidden to do, when I found a ‘lipstick’ in a metal case.

  Lipsticks represented the epitome of grown-up possessions to me, so I was determined to put some on, but the lid was very tight.

  I got a tack hammer and carefully tapped away at it for a long time until I eventually managed to prise the top off. I was terribly disappointed when it was open because it wasn’t the bright red colour of lipstick, but a yellowish grey sort of mud. When I couldn’t get the lid back on again, I decided I’d have to take it to Mum, even though this meant I’d probably get in trouble for poking in the boxes.

  Mum was sewing at her treadle machine on the verandah when I came up the stairs behind her. When she heard me she turned and asked, ‘What have you got there?’

  At the time, my head was only slightly higher than the top of the bench of her sewing machine. I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what I had, and I thought she’d tell me.

  I recall her shock as I showed her the two halves and asked what was the stuff down the tubes.

  With her eyes wide open with fear, Mum made me put the pieces down carefully and back away. Then she picked me up and carried me, held in place firmly under her arm, through the house, out the back and down the stairs to the laundry where she washed my hands with a cake of laundry soap, her body trembling against mine the whole time.

  When she’d finished cleaning all traces from my hands, she put me back on the ground and bent so her face was level with mine.

  ‘Never,’ she hissed, ‘never play with a bullet again.’ I burst into tears, blubbering that I didn’t know it was a bullet. The more I sobbed and carried on, the angrier she became—but only when she felt assured that the immediate danger was over. She grabbed my head between her hands, shaking it and hurting my ears. ‘You could be dead. You must never hit a bullet with a hammer.’ She began to shake and weep, repeating her words louder and louder and shaking me even harder. I felt I’d more likely be killed by her concern for me than by the bullet.

  She went inside and I was frightened to go onto the verandah where she was working so I hung around just inside the door, intending to peek outside to see what she was doing.

  I could hear her making a noise and it took me a long while to realise she was crying. Even when I knew what the sound was, I couldn’t believe it. My mother didn’t cry.

  When I stepped around the door for a better look, I saw her sitting with her arms folded on the top of the sewing machine, her head resting on them, and yes, she sure was crying.

  Torn between taking off to avoid her seeing me and giving me a flogging, and feeling I should comfort her because of the trouble I’d caused, I edged towards her. When she noticed me, she grabbed me close and snuffled in my hair. I didn’t mind.

  2

  Mum was fond of telling us she’d been put out to work at age twelve, that her first job had been keeping things clean in a cafe owned by a Greek, and she’d been barely tall enough to see over the top of the tables she had to wipe. It was a live-in job, and she was given a hessian bag to sleep on in the kitchen. She said the man was ‘smarmy’, always trying to touch her, and she ran away after working at the cafe for a year. By that time she knew her times tables, could add and subtract money, and she’d heard there were lots of other places looki
ng for girls with these skills.

  She could never be pinned down as to where the cafe was, or in what town she’d lived until then, or about virtually anything concrete between that time and when she had us. Mum had a few stock phrases which she uttered that told me a little more. From time to time she’d lose her temper and swear at us, and her language, when I was small, was enough to scare us rigid. She had ‘fits of temper’, but the rest of the time she was completely under control. After these fits, perhaps trying to explain herself, she’d say, ‘My father was a bullock-team driver—that’s where I learned those words, and I’ve got plenty more!’ We weren’t about to argue.

  On other occasions she would tell us she’d once flown into a rage and put a claw hammer through one of her sisters’ tongue. One time when she mentioned this and wasn’t bordering on another temper fit, I asked her why she had done it. ‘Because she wouldn’t shut up when I told her to shut up, that’s why,’ was her short reply.

  Mum’s temper tantrums, though not daily, were legendary, and they weren’t necessarily directed at people, either. Once when I was playing in the yard, a rotary egg-beater came sailing out the kitchen window and into the yard, with a few choice words following it. When I was sure the coast was clear I ran to get it, thinking that she’d thrown it away because it wasn’t working properly. I found it worked fine and began using it to beat my mudpies. Minutes later, Mum looked out the window and saw me, raced down the back stairs, grabbed the beater out of my hands and threw it even further up the backyard into the chicken run. I wasn’t brave enough to go and fetch it nor question her about it.

  When she called us in to eat a short time later, she plonked our bowls on the table with just one comment: ‘If the bloody thing won’t work for me, be buggered if I’ll let it work for you!’ After that, lunch was quiet.

  Our neighbours were used to things sailing out of our windows. If the cutlery drawer stuck, out went the knives and forks. ‘You don’t want to wear that school uniform I ironed for you?’—and we’d find ourselves scrambling up onto the next door roof to retrieve it. Books, saucepans, glasses, whatever, they were all the same to Mum when she was displeased. The neighbours would hear her yelling and come out to raise their eyebrows and occasionally to smile to cheer us up.

  I always knew Mum was regarded fairly widely in our area as a ‘sinner’. She used to tell us so. When I was very young I thought it was because she didn’t join those people who rolled up, so spotlessly clean and often in shining cars, to attend mass at the cathedral on Sundays. Mum was a single parent before ‘single parent’ even became a phrase, and not a woman who had lapsed once by accident but the mother of three ‘mortal sins’. She called herself a widow, but when I occasionally—and futilely—asked her when her husband, our father, had died, I realised that there had been no ‘husband’ in my lifetime, and I was the oldest of her three daughters.

  Dellie looks sufficiently like me to be my sister in the full sense, but Leonie, younger than me by four years, does not. She has Asian features. I heard all sorts of rumours, none of which I was ever brave enough to bring home to my mother. But from my infancy I have many memories of us standing outside a shop in Denham Street run by two brothers, Henry and Dennis Mah Kong, and of being sent into the store with notes. Leonie was a baby in a pram, and Dellie, at two years old, would be sitting on the end of it. The store was dimly lit and a very old and wrinkled woman would see me and call to one of the brothers in a foreign language.

  I was told, ‘Don’t give this note to XX, only give it to YY’, but the problem now is that I’ve forgotten to which of the brothers I was ordered to give it. I’d stagger out under the weight of a bag, flour or sugar, and once we even received a packet of Corn Flakes. I remember this vividly because I was excited to have something so flash as we usually had oatmeal which came very plainly wrapped. When we got home and Mum put some into plates for us and poured milk on it, she cried because the cereal melted down to almost nothing, unlike the oatmeal and Weetbix we were used to.

  My role there, I think, was as intermediary between my mother and my sister’s father. One or other of the brothers used to go around the neighbourhood in an old truck, set up like a shop with a set of scales and laden with fruit and vegetables. Women lined up to buy food or sent their children down when the truck pulled up at the corner. Whenever I was sent out, I was particularly told to ask for ‘pumpkin with no wood in it’. Later, the brothers and their truck disappeared from our lives and I don’t recall seeing them beyond when I was eight or nine.

  The store remained there longer, and at some stage, perhaps when I was in primary school and in charge of shepherding my sisters to and from school and kindergarten, I was told we were never to go into that shop for any reason. Mum had her secrets and we were obliged to act on them, without knowing what they were. When I was a bit older and had to walk past the shop from time to time, I always did so with an acute sense of embarrassment, though I didn’t know why I should feel this way. As soon as I was old enough to jaywalk across Denham Street’s wide lanes of traffic, I crossed over to avoid going near the premises.

  Whatever my mother’s sins were reputed to be, ‘the drink’ was not one of them. Mum had a friend, Nell, whom she described as ‘a spinster’, who was the cook at Lowth’s Hotel. They met in the local ladies’ lounge, known as the snakepit, to have a few shandies on Saturday afternoon while we kids were at the matinee. At a quarter to five, Mum was always standing outside the theatre, waiting for the film to finish so she could walk us the three blocks home. I never saw her drunk in her life, and only perhaps a half dozen times did I see her even tipsy.

  Mum was also known as a very hard worker, a fact on which she prided herself and from which she drew great strength. She took in laundry as a living, and our backyard was full of long wire clothes lines which stretched from house to fence posts and back, propped up with lengths of wood, worn smooth and shiny, to keep the laundry from dragging on the ground.

  For a few pence, Mum washed and ironed men’s shirts, trousers, socks, handkerchiefs, singlets, and, very occasionally, clothes for women. She had a wood copper which she stoked up before dawn, and by breakfast the first loads of washing had been rinsed and wrung out by hand and were drying on the lines. I know, because my job was to walk along beside her handing her up items and clean wooden pegs from the basket. If I handed her a damp or darkened peg which made a mark on the clothes, or dropped an item of clothing on the dirt so it had to be rinsed again, I was in deep trouble.

  Our days were spent around the laundry. I’d wake from a nap and Mum would tell me to go ‘feel if the shirts are dry yet’. If they were, she’d come down to take them in because I was too small to reach the line. Then we’d fill up the empty space with more things—there was always more wet laundry waiting its turn. Singlets took longer to dry, trousers longer still. By early afternoon, we’d be ready to iron and Mum would light the wood stove on which the iron stood to be heated. Mum did the ironing in the backroom on a table, which was also where we ate. She had two irons, and my early job was to ferry them to and from the stove so she wouldn’t have to stop her work. Then she taught me how to spit on my fingers and touch the ironplate to test its heat, and my next job was ironing boxer shorts and men’s hankies with a warm iron.

  Mum kept lists. Mr Smith liked his shirts starched, Mr Dunn did not. Another would want only his collars and cuffs starched. She had her own methods of sorting out which shirts belonged to which customer, marking long-standing customers’ clothes with their initials in tiny letters in indelible pencil. For others who might be occasional or irregular, she lightly stitched a small coloured thread in some inconspicuous place. She boiled the starch and I’d often do the starching, learning my letters and numbers very young in order to read her lists.

  These tasks made me feel essential to the family and I never resented having to do them. They were my life. There was a joke in our family about how once, at four years old, I was ironing my quota when I drop
ped the iron on Mum’s foot as I was stepping onto a brick platform she’d made to enable me to see on top of the table. Her scream of pain shocked me so much, and I was so frightened she was going to hit me, that I scrambled under the table and hid, and when she got over the sting of the burn, she couldn’t find me. I also recall that when she finally did find me, she went to lengths to tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that our lives had just been cut out to be hard.

  We lived in a large dip, separated from the main road by a high retaining wall with a fence on top of it which prevented people and cars from falling the twenty or so feet onto our level. Directly opposite us was the Sacred Heart Cathedral and presbytery, in Stanley Street, Townsville. Both our house and the one next door had once belonged to the church and had been the priests’ accommodation. Of almost identical structure, they were built of timber, small and plain, with a few stairs leading up to a little verandah running across the front. The house next door had a narrow hallway with four small bedrooms opening off it in which priests had lived, a tiny kitchen and another room at the back, while our house had only three bedrooms and a parlour.

  At some stage, when a new presbytery was being built, the houses had been carried across the way and mounted on stilts in the style of all North Queensland houses. They had been placed sideways and side by side across a steep slope of the hill, so on one side there were high poles and enough room for a tall man to pass under without stooping, while on the other even my mum’s pet dog could barely burrow her way out. The hillside had been tiered and shored up with rocks to accommodate the houses.

  There were three houses situated along our little track, the third was built in the same style but, according to Mum, it hadn’t been a priests’ house. Our house was in the middle. In the house downhill from us lived old Mrs Scott and her lodger, Edie, a travelling saleswoman for lingerie goods.