Dellie didn’t return, so I went alone to McKimmins and looked around at the plain black skirts and white shirts that were similar to those worn by women at my work. Although I yearned to own some fine things, different from the rough fabrics I’d bought at Woolworths with a loan from Mum so that I could start my job, I was relieved Dellie wasn’t with me and that the decision of whether or not I’d become a receiver of stolen goods was staved off for another day.
The following afternoon, Mum came into the newsagency, told Mr Foley there was an emergency at home and asked him if he would let me leave an hour early. She was red-eyed with grief and he told me to go immediately. On the way up the street, Mum asked me if I knew that Dellie had been stealing or that she’d run away. I hadn’t personally seen Dellie take anything so I said no to both questions.
We had to go to the police station where a detective was waiting to interview me. I told him the same thing I’d told Mum. He said he wanted to drop Mum off at her house and, with a uniformed officer in tow, go on to the Y and look through my belongings for stolen goods.
I felt wretched arriving at the Y with these two just as the other girls were beginning to arrive home from work. There was a front room where men sometimes came as visitors to sit and talk with the residents, but men walking through our living quarters was a most unusual sight, particularly police in uniform.
They examined the few items I had in my locker and hanging space, looked under my bed and asked me if that’s all I had. I went to hunt up the key and get my suitcase out of the luggage room. It was dusty because it hadn’t been opened since the first few days after I’d arrived. Satisfied that I had nothing to arouse their suspicions, I thought they’d leave me alone.
Instead, the detective said I was to come with him. They drove me to Mum’s house and had me wait in the car with the uniformed officer while the detective spoke again with Mum. Returning to the car, he said I could get out and he’d see me later.
Mum was even more distressed than before. When the police had first come to the house and told her about an incident which had happened the previous day involving Dellie and her friend, she’d been incredulous and had run in to look in Dellie’s wardrobe. A stack of satin and sequinned frocks, glamorous dance outfits, bikinis and underwear had come tumbling down from the shelves. Mum had gone to pieces. When the police left the house she’d asked Leonie what she knew about this business, and Leonie had told her she knew nothing.
After the police had dropped Mum off on our way to the Y, she had gone out to the toilet in the backyard. The toilet bowl, Mum told me, was aglitter with jewellery, and she realised Leonie had thought she was disposing of her share of the goods by flushing them away. They were so heavy, though, that the water hadn’t been able to carry them. Mum had fished them out with a stick and confronted Leonie. So by the time I returned they were both weeping.
Mum said that the detective was coming back after dinner and she wanted me to drive around with him to look at places where I thought Dellie might be holed up. Hoping that I might be able to coax Dellie to deal with the crisis instead of running away with the police in full pursuit, I agreed.
The detective arrived on his own. He said that two old bicycles had been taken from the railway yards and that he thought Dellie and her friend might be hiding somewhere on the edges of the town. I kept my eye out as we drove up and down some streets in town, then along the Strand, around Kissing Point and Belgian Gardens, and eventually he said we would drive to Cape Pallarenda to take a look.
Cape Pallarenda sat at the end of a road which ran past Happy Valley. There was only a store and a very few sparse dwellings in the area. By day, the Cape was a popular spot for people with cars as the road ran right beside the beach. At night, however, it was a Lover’s Lane—quite desolate and deserted.
When the detective circled the car in front of the store, at the end of the road, I was relieved because there really wasn’t anywhere for us to look. It was unlikely that Dellie would be hiding out in such rugged scrub, and I knew how much she disliked the spiders, snakes and small creatures that would live in it.
But not far back along the road, the detective pulled up, under the pretence of stopping to discuss where next we should look. He was a middle-aged man, tail, with brown hair, and he looked just like anyone’s father. We had been parked there for only a few minutes before he started asking me personal questions about myself, such as how old I was and whether I had a boyfriend. The answers were fourteen and no. He then put his arm around my shoulders and began to pull me towards him, his hand on my knee and sliding up my leg. I stammered and stuttered because I didn’t know what to say, but I pushed him away and moved along the bench seat until I was hard up against the car’s door.
When he followed me across the seat, plunged his hand down the front of my blouse and tried to kiss me on the mouth, I was out of the car in a flash, running swiftly and quietly through the scrub. I bent low so that I would be harder to see in the fading light, and headed for a small grove of trees in the distance. I hid there in case he was searching for me, but he just stood near his car and called out. Staying low, I began to thread my way through the bush running parallel to the road. I didn’t want to be seen but I didn’t want to wander off into Happy Valley and get lost. Nightfall was rapidly approaching. I would have tried to get a lift from one of the few cars that passed, but with their headlights on I couldn’t be sure that they weren’t the detective’s car until they had passed me.
It was a long run into town. I went the back way, through North Ward and over Melton Hill, in case he was sitting somewhere watching out for me. Coming down Hale Street I saw his car at the bottom of the laneway to Mum’s house, I felt I was close enough to home to be safe, so I just walked past it. He was at the wheel, sitting and watching. When I reached Mum’s front gate, he turned on the headlights, blinked them on and off a few times and drove away.
Mum was still in a state because Dellie hadn’t been found, and I was disgusted to hear her talk about the detective in glowing terms. A family man with children of his own, she told me, prepared to give up his free time to look for her daughter. When I said that I had to go back to the Y, Mum tearfully begged me to ‘give up this foolishness’ and come home to help her with this crisis. I agreed, and Arthur said that he would fetch me the next day. He then drove me back to the Y and, for the last time, I fell asleep in the security of the hostel. As I drifted off, I worried about where Dellie was putting her head down that night.
Mum came to the newsagency the following day to tell me that Dellie and her friend had been sighted, headed for Ayr on bicycles, and that the police had detained them at Giru. They were being brought back to Townsville. The police had told Mum that she had lost control of Dellie, and that Dellie would be sent to a reform school.
Mum took the day off work to go to court, but she didn’t tell me where she was going until it was all over. A heavy sadness descended on the house when Dellie was no longer there, and the tensions with Arthur that had prompted me to move out to the Y in the first place continued.
Dessie’s husband Reg had become more predatory towards me and I only visited them when Dessie drove me there and brought me home. Still, they would visit Mum and Reg would make excuses to leave the conversation and come into my room. If I tried to walk out past him, he would grab me and maul the front of my dress, swooning his eyes as if with desire and pretending it was all a big joke. Mum tried to convince Dessie to leave him because of the beatings, but she would cry and ask who would look after her and the children. Also, she was pregnant again. I didn’t know who would look after her either, so I felt it best to say nothing about Reg’s constant and unwanted attention. I didn’t want to be the one who broke up their home and left Dessie and the babies penniless.
I was very fond of Dessie and regarded her with greater affection than Leila, who didn’t bother to maintain contact when she was away and was something of a phantom in our lives with her unscheduled comings and goin
gs. Leila seemed to have a lot in her favour. She had graduated as a nursing sister, and people compared her looks favourably with the movie star, lean Simmons. But there had always been an ominous side to her personality and we began to hear of her dismissals from various hospitals due to her suicide attempts. They weren’t made public, Mum said, in order ‘to protect the hospitals’. Leila would turn up with suitcases full of glamorous clothes and lay around gloomily for days before disappearing again.
Dessie, on the other hand, had remained closer to us. She and Reg had moved to Sydney for a while, and when they were living at Dee Why, her baby had become very ill. Completely broke, she had taken the baby in her arms and walked from Dee Why to Manly Hospital where they’d examined the infant but refused the child admission. On the way home the baby died in Dessie’s arms. It was at this point that Mum had encouraged me to write to her, and for a long time I seemed to be almost her only friend. Even though I was much younger than Dessie, she would pour out her heart, grief and hopes to me in her letters. She must have been desperate to have been able to overlook the enthusiastic, but childish, letters she received in return. Now that she was back living in Townsville, I didn’t want to wreck the marriage she clung to by dobbing in her husband, although I thought she was foolish for hanging in there when he beat her so badly. If she had known that he was also trying to seduce me and was making my life miserable, it may have been the last straw for her.
I still talked hopefully about finding a high school that would allow me to continue my studies so that I could do medicine. Mum said she’d help me to look for a nursing placement. I knew it wasn’t the same, but it would help me to leave the increasingly difficult situation I was in at home.
I came in from work one day to find Mum happily waving a sheet of paper around and telling me she’d been successful. A hospital in Charters Towers was interested in having me train there.
I told Mum I’d go there on the long weekend to check out the hospital. My friends at Garbutt were also talking about an upcoming rodeo which was to be held in Charters Towers on the same weekend. Mum wasn’t too happy about this, but Arthur was refereeing every weekend for the entire season, so there was no chance that they could take me.
To help me go, Mum gave me some money to supplement the savings I’d managed to accumulate since moving home. I rang ahead and booked a room at a hotel which Mum told me was respectable and she had Arthur drop me at the railway station.
From the hotel manager’s expression I could tell he was surprised to see me, but I’d booked the room and arrived in a taxi from the station, so he couldn’t very well turn me away. His wife came out of the bar to look at me before he showed me up to my room. The hotel was a typical country building, two storeys—the bar and dining room on the ground and accommodation above. My room was the last one along the long wooden balcony. I knew immediately that they thought I was a lowlife, so I was determined to keep my room looking neat and tidy for the three days I was to be there.
I walked up the street to the hospital, and then walked all the way around it, taking in the large lawns, tidy buildings and free-standing casualty department, separated from the main hospital by a sweeping driveway. I was afraid to go in, as Mum hadn’t answered their letter yet and I shied away from the idea of bowling up to strange white people without some sort of letter of authority or explanation. Instead, I walked to the outskirts of town where the rodeo was being held, and spent the day watching people eat dust and many Aboriginal stockmen walk away with their pockets full of prize money. I didn’t see any of my friends from Townsville and guessed they hadn’t been able to scrape up the money to get there, after all.
In the evening, I sat on the verandah of the hotel, reading a novel while waiting for dinner. My reading was disturbed by heavy footsteps coming up the stairs and I looked up to see two detectives walking towards me. They asked me a lot of questions about why I was there, then they said they wanted to see my room. Everything was neat but they stripped the bed and rolled back the mattress to check if I had anything hidden under it, and they hauled my clothes out of the wardrobe onto the floor. I’d told them I was applying to be a nurse at the hospital and had come to look around, but they kept asking me if I was ‘under the Act’. I had no idea what Act they were talking about. Eventually they shrugged, warned me not to bring men up to my room because they’d be watching me, and then left.
Apart from this incident, the weekend was quiet, even boring, and when I returned I asked Mum to write to the hospital and say I was willing. She was excited because, she said, the Matron, whose name was Moffitt, had been a sister at Townsville Hospital when I was born.
I hit the roof. What did she mean, ‘when I was born'? Hadn’t I been born in Maryland?
‘Don’t think you’re too big for me to tan your arse for talking to me like that! Who do you think you are?’ was the only response I could get from her.
Things moved very quickly once Mum wrote to Matron Moffitt. The hospital was short-staffed and they wanted me to come at once. I was to be a nurse’s aide until the next induction, when I could begin regular training. I gave notice at the newsagency, and was pleased when Mr Foley said that if nursing didn’t work out for me, he would be happy to have me back.
Arthur and Mum took the day off to drive me to Charters Towers and make sure I got settled in. When they left, I was nervous about this new situation, but my sense of relief at leaving Townsville was enormous.
At first, my work consisted of keeping the pan room sparkling clean, rolling bandages and putting things away. However, I soon discovered how desperately under-staffed they were when, the first week after my arrival, a nurse demonstrated how to wash patients and set up and dispense from a medicine tray, and these were added to my list of duties. About six weeks later I was shown how to give injections.
The hospital was small. The main building had two storeys, with three wards on the ground floor: men’s, women’s and children’s medical, as well as the operating room and large kitchen. The second floor consisted of men’s and women’s surgical, with a line of private rooms running along the front. On the ground, a walk in one direction separated the nurses’ quarters, and in another, the maternity section. The resident doctor’s house stood at a distance, past maternity. Well-tended lawns and gardens created the effect of a cool oasis in the middle of an otherwise drab landscape.
Unlike big city hospitals, there was enough work to keep us moving at a steady pace all day, but we were rarely rushed. On some mornings no patients attended casualty, although this was rare.
Quite early in my training I was woken one night by knocking on my door. This was a surprise because, as a new member of staff, I was on day duty. An emergency had come in which required an operation. New staff, I was told, always had to attend an operation so that they could get used to it.
I was excited by the prospect and quickly dressed in one of my new white uniforms and starched caps. I had already met the resident doctor, a tall, youngish man who strode the hospital corridors with his eyes on the floor, rarely glancing up when he passed mere nurses. Another nurse’s aide stood waiting outside the operating room, and she and I were shown how to scrub up before we were ushered in. The doctor was barely recognisable behind his mask. In the theatre, he chatted with the sister who was assisting him, patting knives and other surgical equipment into his hand as he asked for them. From time to time he glanced over in our direction, but otherwise our presence was barely acknowledged. A short time into the operation the other aide suddenly turned and left, and I was unsure whether I was supposed to follow her. No one told me to go, so I continued to stand there, fascinated by the mystery of things that lie just below the skin, and pulse, throb and slide around under surgeons’ fingers.
The patient had been stabbed, or had managed to stab himself with some sharp object such as a stick, and splinters had to be fished out and torn tissues repaired. As operations go, this one was minor. On his way out, however, the doctor said, ‘Well, cong
ratulations, Nurse.’ I learned later that, like the other nurse’s aide who’d come in with me, most trainees and aides faint or become nauseated and leave at their first sight or smell of blood and the heavy fumes which permeate surgical theatres.
The doctor also ran the nurses’ training programs, but by the time he formally called a class together, I had already been giving enemas, injections and other personal care duties for months. The only thing that was a shock to me on our training day was when he held up a huge syringe, which looked like a needle for a horse, and told us it was for lumbar punctures and was used to draw fluid from the spine. I came over sick and faint as I had had that cruel-looking instrument plunged into my backbone so many times when I’d had meningitis. When the doctor went into detail about the position patients had to adopt in order to insert a lumbar puncture—a squat kneeling position with their heads bent over the bed so their spines were fully extended—I got up and walked out of the room because I thought I was going to throw up.
After a couple of weeks of assisting a nurse on night duty in the men’s medical ward, I was allocated the role of night nurse in this ward myself. I was also to keep an ear out for cars pulling into the hospital driveway, because there was no casualty nurse rostered at night.
The variety of experiences I encountered in the hospital was enormous. Unlike the larger hospitals where a trainee often spends months working on one aspect of nursing, in Charters Towers we were obliged to do everything that came along. In men’s medical, most of our patients were elderly and many did not survive their hospital stay. Although I gradually learned how to attend the dead—to wash their bodies and pack their orifices to prevent seepage and leakage—my first mortality event occurred within weeks of my arrival. I was called upstairs to assist with some chore in the private patients’ section. Here I was told that a woman had died and that I was to make sure she was presentable for the relations to view. I was apprehensive, and knowing looks and smirks passed between the nurses on the floor. When I opened the door another nurse was standing near the bed, and she immediately walked out, leaving me there alone.
Snake Cradle Page 17