Snake Cradle

by Roberta Sykes

  One day Mum pointed out an advertisement in the Townsville Daily Bulletin; a chemist store required a girl for a few weeks pre-Christmas work. She said to apply and to make sure the manager saw me. I was very intimidated by the idea, and hung around outside the shop for half an hour before gathering up the courage to walk through the door. I was told to ring or drop by the next day as the manager was making a decision that night.

  I didn’t want to be embarrassed by being told to my face that I didn’t have the job, so at Mum’s insistence, I made a call from the phone outside the Greeks’ shop. I couldn’t believe my ears when the woman who answered said I had the job. I ran home to tell Mum, who smiled knowingly.

  ‘D’you know whose shop that is?’ she asked. I didn’t, of course. ‘It belongs to the man whose roll of money you found, Mr Stuart Ritchie, and that’s Ritchie’s Chemist shop. I knew he’d want an honest girl to work for him, and he knew from his own experience that that was you.’

  My job was to unpack boxes of gift perfumes and toiletry sets at the back of the store, dust them and put them around the counter for the sales staff to place on the shelves. I also ran errands all along the main street. Other store managers and salespeople were surprised to see me. They said, ‘Hmm . . . you work for Mr Ritchie?’ in ways which indicated to me that they were going to check this out with him before they gave me anything to take back to the store.

  At lunchtime I walked around the other stores and looked at the merchandise—just as I saw other working women do. As I did so, I often heard people talking about me, ‘the dark girl from the chemist shop’. Once Christmas was over, I had the rest of summer to spend at the pool.

  When school resumed I had a major fight on my hands because the Queensland school system consisted of four years of high school after completing the scholarship exams, and this was to be my first year. I felt as if I was on the verge of realising my dream to study medicine and specialise in surgery, and that the experiences I’d had with animals and cutting up kangaroos and sheep were all leading in this direction. I’d carefully decided on the courses I would need to take—Latin, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, along with core subjects, such as English and Maths.

  The nuns, however, had a different program mapped out for me. Although my scholarship marks were good enough to entitle me to go in any direction I chose, the nuns said I was to do Domestic Science subjects—sewing and cooking. Mum told me she didn’t want me to be trained as a slave, and reminded me that she’d been putting little sums of money away so I could go to university if I was smart enough. But she wouldn’t tell the nuns any such thing and expected me to make them change their minds. When they involved her at last, she tried to get us all to strike up a compromise—she told the nuns that she wanted me to take typing, bookkeeping and shorthand. I challenged her later about her change of mind, but she said it was obvious the nuns weren’t going to give in, and that maybe my aspiration was a pipe dream. It was more likely, she thought now, that since I could be sickly all my life, I’d need a job where I used my head, such as clerical work, rather than my strength, as in heavy domestic work. I was very angry about this because it wasn’t a job they were all talking about—it was my life.

  Eventually, we entered into what was for me a very difficult arrangement. I would do the subjects they wanted me to study if they’d also agree that I could do the subjects? wanted to take. I had two years before I’d be required to sit for the Junior exams, and by that time it would be obvious which of the subjects I excelled in.

  My life became frantic as I tried to juggle twelve subjects plus find time for swimming training. Only one nun at St Patrick’s College, Sister Sebastian, tried to understand me. She, too, was asthmatic and we shared ideas about the causes and how to control it. Fortunately, she taught science subjects and was happy to meet me at the school at seven-thirty in the morning so that she could give me lessons in Chemistry, which was the only subject I couldn’t manage to fit in during my regular schedule. Sister Sebastian had a great sense of fun, and we’d be bent laughing over our test tubes and bunsen burners; it was a wonderful start to the day. I took to carrying Vita-Brits with cheese and honey on them around in my school bag because I’d never know where I might be at mealtimes and I couldn’t afford to lose weight.

  A new member of staff was taken on at the Mater Hospital laundry. She had ideas Mum couldn’t agree with, so Mum looked around for another job. The Central Hotel needed a laundress, and took her on. She started at six-thirty in the morning and finished theoretically at three-thirty, but she was free to go whenever she had completed her work. She lamented having to leave the hospital because she hated the smell of sour bar towels, which were used to soak up spilled beer. She said some people who took rooms at the hotel wet their beds as frequently as patients at the hospital, who couldn’t help it, but that their beer-piss smelled worse. Most of all, she told me, she missed flying through the darkened streets on her bike, with the wind in her face, in the early hours of the morning. She had felt then as if the whole town somehow belonged to her because no one else was out at that hour. Even the dogs didn’t stir, she said.

  Mum hadn’t renewed the YWCA laundry contract because rent from the lodgers in Mrs Sullivan’s house was meeting the bank payments, and as long as she had the Central Hotel job she could afford to feed us. We still occasionally had to clean a house or apartment, but this was rare and we did them only on a Saturday. She retained a few of her favourite laundry clients who had used her services for many years. We did their clothes together and split the money according to which of us had done the most work. This way Mum helped me to earn pocket money, which I needed for admission to the swimming pool and to keep myself in Speedos.

  During the first months back at school, I finally joined the ranks of the lucky girls who had their monthlies. Under pressure from me, Mum had talked to a doctor about my problem and been told that the most likely reason for my slow development was my weight and previous ill-health.

  Once I started them though, I didn’t like it. Mum bought us each a dozen small white barber’s towels that we were to use, and which we were to wash out discreetly and hang on a special line concealed under the house, and then only overnight, so that no men would see them. Walking around with these thick wads between our legs was no fun at all, and I envied those girls at school whose parents could afford store-bought disposable pads.

  At this time I became a member of the swimming club and began to participate in races. My wins attracted the attention of a trainer, who offered to train me for nothing. Mum came to the pool to meet him and didn’t like him, but I couldn’t afford another trainer and no one else offered. When I missed training for five days at a time, he told me to speak to some of the women from the Olympic team, but I was far too shy to approach them. Finally, he or one of the other trainers did so, and a few other young female swimmers and I were taken into the ladies’ change rooms where the wonders of Tampax were explained to us. If we had any problems, the women said we were welcome to speak to them again.

  When I told Mum she was horrified and said things like that cause cancer and illness, and that she wouldn’t buy them for me. Her message was reinforced by Maisie, who was renting our front room, and by Nellie. Apart from buying us the towels, showing us on a table how to pin them, and giving us instructions about soaking and laundering them secretly, Mum had never spoken to us about this or any other sexual aspect of our lives. Instead, she had given me a slim book when I was about ten, called The House Not Made With Hands. It referred to the bodies of women as temples and how they should remain chaste, but offered no practical information or advice about what that meant or how we were to go about preserving ourselves from being defiled. Any other discussion had been delegated to Maisie.

  Despite their admonitions, I bought tampons and figured out how to use them. After a while, Mum said that she had been thinking about the female Olympic swimmers and how they had to manage with their constant training and race dates, and said
that ‘they look healthy enough’. I felt that this was her way of telling me that she’d been groping around in my things and found my box of Tampax, and that as long as I only wore them when I was swimming, I would probably be alright.

  Chatting casually one day, my swimming trainer mentioned an upcoming event, the Magnetic Island to Townsville Swim. I became fascinated with the idea of swimming so far, and I was intrigued with the cages that the participants were to use for protection from sharks. By this time I was swimming several miles a day, and I loved the meditative state long-distance swimmers go into which helps them overcome pain and exhaustion thresholds. I began to think that I could swim that distance, eight miles, and that I should start a program of training with that long swim as my aim. I was thrilled when my trainer told me that I had the stamina and just needed the strength, and that he’d help me develop a program with this goal in mind.

  I began to spend every spare minute at the pool, doing a couple of miles before school—except when I had Chemistry classes with Sister Sebastian—and more laps after classes. Most nights I was back in the pool for a few hours before it closed at nine o’clock. On rare weekends I was invited to stay over with Kay and her family, who lived above the pool. This was fun but we were usually too exhausted to do much beyond talking about our homework before falling asleep. Laurie Lawrence often wasn’t well and the family often seemed a bit stressed, but they always made me welcome.

  Some Murri friends drew me aside and told me they weren’t allowed in the pool, and one day I asked Mr Lawrence about this. He said they had sores and he couldn’t let them in. From then on I watched to see if white people were allowed in if they had sores, and when I saw how many were admitted I found it deeply troubling. I brought this up with my trainer and he said, ‘Yes, there’s a lot of discrimination around.’ I didn’t know what the word meant and his meaning wasn’t obvious from the dictionary definition when I looked it up, so I had to resort to asking Mum. She took a while to tell me that it was about being kept out of places because of skin colour or religion. She said that lews were kept out of as many places as dark people were, and that they were white, so discrimination wasn’t just about having dark skin. Her explanation made me more confused, but I didn’t want to push the issue because I knew she’d get angry to learn I’d increased my circle of ‘dark friends’. I didn’t know any Jewish people, or, if I did, I didn’t know that they were Jewish. Despite this incident, because of my personal association with them, for many years I regarded the Lawrences as being the least racist family I knew in Townsville.

  7

  Maisie and her husband, Fred, invited a guest to the house for dinner one night. Arthur became the classic ‘guest who came for dinner’ in that he never seemed to go home; he dropped in every day. At thirty-five years old, he had a little barber shop in town and still lived with his parents. Their house was just through the cutting (an overhead pass at the top of the hill), and he walked by our house on his way to and from work.

  Mum and Maisie often discussed him—his drinking habits being of main concern. But Mum defended him, saying that ‘anyone interested in picking up with a woman who has three kids can’t be too bad!’ The fact that he was almost twenty years younger than Mum may have added to his attraction. Also, he would peel notes off a great wad of cash he always carried in his pocket, and flash them at every opportunity.

  Mum’s attention to us kids became less intense when she took up with this man. His presence freed me up enormously as Mum no longer flew into a panic when I arrived home a few minutes late. Sometimes our meals were late because Mum was hanging out waiting for Arthur to join us. Then his mother started turning up, shouting over the top fence that his meal was ready at his own house. Once she threw a pile of his clothes over the fence, yelling, ‘If you like it there so much, stay there!’ Arthur eventually moved in with us, but he tried to keep the peace with his parents by going to their house for dinner from time to time. Nevertheless, the bickering continued.

  Arthur refereed soccer matches on weekends, and Mum often went with him. I was shocked to see how differently she acted now there was a man in her life. She had brought us up to be quite independent, and to a large extent we were each in the habit of looking after ourselves. Suddenly, Mum was running after this man, offering him cups of tea, washing and ironing his clothes, and even taking him breakfast in bed. When he sat down at the table she would tell us that we had to wait on him. We weren’t used to waiting on anyone, it was ‘everybody do as much as they can for themselves’ in our house. Dellie and I often aired our resentment at having to trot in and out with Arthur’s dinner and his dirty plates. He would leave his cup wherever he was sitting and we were expected to go looking for it when we were doing the washing up.

  Arthur was from Wales and spoke with a pronounced accent. He was about four and a half feet tall, with a stocky build despite his lack of height, and he tried to make up for his size by using a deep voice and acting like a bully.

  He introduced several people from the United Kingdom into Mum’s small circle of friends. A Scottish couple began coming by, and Mum and Arthur would also go to their house. They would eat and drink beer and get merry and sing. Everyone said that Arthur had a good voice, he particularly liked to sing ‘Mona Lisa’ and ‘Barrow Boy’. My sisters and I would raise our eyebrows whenever he launched into his renditions, especially when we were trying to do our homework while a party was going on. Mum drank shandies and laughed a lot, but we kids were upset when we came out in the morning and had to clear away glasses of stale beer and clean up from the night before.

  I had begun writing, mostly essays and poems, and continued to read as avidly as ever. Arthur regarded both these activities as a waste of time, but Mum, unbeknown to me, entered my name in the short story section of the local eisteddfod—then promptly forgot that she had done so. When I came in late one Sunday evening, Mum told me about the nomination and that the entry had had to be in by the previous Friday. An eisteddfod organiser had come by our house to tell her that my entry had not been received. Mum made me sit down, tired as I was, and write something for her to take in early the next morning on her way to work.

  Our old house had a stove recess which had become very ricketty, and Arthur had made a big show of his carpentry skills by offering to fix it. He had peeled off the back wall, and then the sides, before realising he didn’t have a clue what to do next. We pulled the stove from the recess and it stood in the middle of the kitchen, where we still had to use it, for a couple of months. Our kitchen wall, meanwhile, had a gaping hole in it. One day, heavy clouds gathered and at last Arthur was forced to do something before the rain poured in. Rather than repairing the recess, however, he hammered a sheet of tin across the hole, so that we had no stove recess at all.

  As I sat at the kitchen table wondering what to write about, my eyes fell on the stove in the middle of the room. There was my story—a comedy. Unfortunately, I exceeded the permissible number of words and so didn’t win in my section, but I did receive a Special Mention as a highly talented young writer. Arthur, meanwhile, was extremely unamused.

  It was only a matter of time before a blow-up occurred between him and me. One evening, instead of Mum telling me to wait on him, Arthur told me himself. I brought his meal out and when he had finished, he got up and said, ‘Clean up now.’ I was doing my homework at another small table and replied that I’d clean up when I was ready. He swore at me and turned red and blustery in the face. I stood up to stare him down.

  ‘You’d like to hit me, wouldn’t you?’ I taunted.

  ‘Yes, and I damned well will!’

  ‘Well, if it’ll make you feel big to hit me, go ahead.’ I was still very small for my age, thirteen, and thin as a bean pole, and it had never occurred to me that a grown man would attack me. My ear rang and my eye smarted when he whacked me right across the face, nearly knocking my head off my shoulders.

  In the moment I recovered, I saw in his eyes that he had lost cont
rol, they were bulging and straining in his head.

  ‘Feel big now? Want to feel bigger? Hit me again if you have to?’ He hit me on the other side of the head this time.

  I spun on my heel and walked through the house, out the front door and down the lane. By the time I got to the Hale Street corner, I knew where I was going.

  I went into the police station and told the officer on the counter what had happened. He was solicitous and said he could see the bright red marks on my face. He called a detective and they asked me if I wanted to make a complaint. I agreed, and gave them a signed statement.

  When I went home nobody spoke to me and I went straight into my room. Dellie came and stood in the doorway, her shoulders hunched up with fear. She wanted to know if I was hurt. I told her not to worry, that I’d taken care of it, but I didn’t let on what I’d done. I didn’t want Mum or Arthur to get it out of her, so the best way was not to tell her.

  At school a few days later, my teacher told me that I could leave early because my mother wanted to talk to me. Mum had come to the school on her bike so I collected mine and we went across to the Strand. She hadn’t said a word so far, as the Sister had done all the talking at school.

  ‘Roberta,’ she said in her most serious voice, ‘the police came to the house. Did you go there telling them our business?’

  ‘What do you mean, our business? Where were you? It’s not just “our business” when I’ve got to fight a grown man. He could have killed me. I don’t mind having to fight off kids my own age but when I’m home I shouldn’t have to fight men.’

  ‘It’s not “men”. You’re a big girl now and you have to begin to understand about these things. After all these years I’ve been alone and working to keep you kids, I have to worry about who’s going to look after me in my old age. You’re nearly grown up. Are you going to look after me for the rest of my life?’