A Paper Inheritance

by Dymphna Stella Rees

  Most of the occupants in the six other flats were elderly couples. As the only children in the building for many years we made the waterfront our own domain. Our parents taught us to swim soon after we could walk – a necessary precaution when bringing up children on the edge of deep water. By the age of two I was confident when out of my depth.

  My capacity for self-lifesaving was proved one bleak day when I was eight. I went down to the waterfront by myself, dressed in layers of clothes including a woollen overcoat and lace-up shoes. The swimming pool was covered in its winter mantle of yellow-green seaweed. We used to call it the Sargasso Sea. I must have been peering in and tripped, for the next thing I knew I was in the water struggling to bring my head up from under the heavy carpet of weed. Despite the sodden overcoat and my own surprise, I swam my way to the steps and eventually dragged myself out.

  Up the ladder and along the paths I trudged and squelched. I stood in a puddle at the front door and called my mother. ‘I fell in,’ I announced matter-of-factly. It must have been the shock for she was speechless. She stripped off my clothing right there and marched me into the bathroom for a warm bath.

  Nobody used the boatshed and ramp next to the saltwater pool so my father arranged to pay a few more shillings a week in rent to use it. The boatshed was built out over the shoreline and had a floor of wooden slats through which you could see the tide washing against the tawny oyster-encrusted rocks. At low tide there were small black crabs skittering about among tufts of sea lettuce.

  When my cousin Rose was staying for the holidays, we devised a plan to camp in the boatshed. This could be our own version of Five Go to Smuggler’s Top (we were both hooked on Enid Blyton). There was a wooden bench along one wall that we agreed was strong enough for us to sleep on, toe to toe. My father, always one for an adventure, supported the idea. He dug out some decrepit camping gear including a little spirit stove. He fixed the side door of the boatshed with a nail and wire hook so we could lock ourselves in and told us we had to think of a password. My mother provided some old blankets and a hurricane lantern.

  The night of our camp was cold and blowy. We descended to the boatshed before dark and ate our provisions. The lamp was flickering, making spooky shadows on the walls. A southerly had sprung up and the strong wind, combined with a high tide, was making the water surge up and down under the floor slats and occasionally send up a spume of spray. We crawled under our blankets on the uncomfortable shelf and tried to sleep. About ten o’clock there was a knocking on the side door.

  In tremulous voices we called out, ‘What’s the password?’

  ‘Bungarra,’ came the reply. My father had come down in his maroon dressing-gown to check on us. Should we capitulate, admit defeat and go straggling up to our warm beds? What would the Famous Five do? Before we could even consider such a question, my father shone his torch around and said enviously: ‘This looks very cosy. See you in the morning.’ With that he closed the door and was off to his own bed.

  Another of our maritime adventures took place in Patience Rewarded with the enthusiasm and support of Charles Maclurcan who lived next door. He was a visionary character. Although his family owned the Wentworth, one of Sydney’s well-known hotels, he preferred to spend his time on the top floor of his house where he had installed a radio transmitter and receiver. From there, in the middle of the night, he would speak to other amateur radio enthusiasts on selected short-wave frequencies. Mr Maclurcan, as I knew him, had been a yachtsman in his younger days. He appointed himself my honorary grandfather and took great pleasure in aiding and abetting any waterfront enterprise. In his workshop under the house he secretly created a pair of oars for PR made of balsa wood, that lightest of timbers used in the Kon-Tiki expedition, to replace the heavy oars that had come with the boat, which I could hardly carry. The new ones were the right size for a ten-year-old and he painted them cerulean blue, which my father explained was the colour of the sky.

  My father hatched a plan that we should row PR all the way up the harbour, under the Harbour Bridge and then down the Lane Cove River. This was a long way for oar power to propel a heavy clinker-built dinghy with an adult and two children aboard. It would require an overnight stay. Mr Maclurcan, who had a facility for tools and timber (my father was limited in that capacity), created a system of interleaving planks to fit between the thwarts so that we could sleep in the boat. He then drew up plans for a system of interlocking pipes to make a superstructure to support a light tarp for keeping out moisture or – heaven forbid – a downpour.

  These were the halcyon days on the harbour before outboard motors and other speedy devices came and shattered the peace. Our expedition was relying upon our rowing power and faith in our father’s judgement. We did, in fact, make it to the shallow end of the Lane Cove River by nightfall. What our father’s judgement had not accommodated was the movements of a tidal river. Three of us stretching ourselves out on planks in a three-metre boat already seemed the height of discomfort but when the tide receded, the boat lurched to an ungainly angle and sat there on her beam, happily wedged in the mud. What was a romantic idea turned into the longest night of our lives.

  Our flat was chilly and shadowy in winter as it faced due south. From the lounge room windows, through the angophoras, you could see diagonally across to Cremorne Point and the cottagey outline of its roofed ferry wharf, moving up and down with the tide or rocking slightly in a swell. But from the waterfront below, on a still morning and at spring tides, a swimmer could look across the water to Double Bay and Rose Bay on the other side of the harbour. In between, the line of vision was crossed by the wake of passenger ferries chugging back and forth or tugs or fishing boats or steamers with spurts of black smoke rising from their stacks.

  From our flat we looked across to the other side of Shellcove where native bush rose from the foreshore of tumbled rocks to halfway up the slopes: a tangle of grasses, ferns and understorey shrubs among the casuarinas and angophoras. Above the tree line was a row of gentrified two- and three-storey boxes, blocks of flats that backed into the hillside and nestled below the road above. Their front windows would have been in direct sight of the Sydney Opera House on Bennelong Point – had it been built. But that was still decades away, unthinkable in wartime and postwar days. At that time opera was not part of the Sydney arts menu; it was considered to belong in Europe whence it came.

  Directly opposite our waterfront sat Old Mother Rock, a giant rounded explosion of Hawkesbury sandstone that in some faraway aeon must have come cascading down the hill and landed, plop, in the shallows. Now settled in her place OMR formed a regular part of our outdoor living. My father embraced the rock as a setting for publicity photos. We would row over and he would perch on some craggy protuberance, casually displaying a typed manuscript or published copy of his latest book while Megan and I were required to look engrossed in one of his works as if we had never seen it before. All this was staged to take in the background of the harbour. After all, his books were all about celebrating the glories of nature.

  Looking at her from our side of the bay, Old Mother Rock sat golden and welcoming. Some winter Sundays, my parents would walk round the bay to her or row over in PR, complete with wooden fruit cases to sit on and piles of manuscripts and some cheese and chutney sandwiches. Thus set up, they would get on with their collaborative writing, enjoying shafts of winter sun while our side of the bay was in gloomy shadows.

  To mount Old Mother Rock’s lacy indents from the bush track on the other side, you had to leap across a number of smaller rocks, some crowned with periwinkles and jagged oysters or, at a higher tide, fringed with swaying green seaweed. This passage could be tricky and slippery. In this context, my father introduced us to the tongue-twister: ‘Round the rugged rocks, the ragged rascals rambled’ though ‘scrambled’ would be a more appropriate verb and many a slip resulted in a shoeful of water or waterlogged trousers. To avoid this, I preferred to row over in Patience Re
warded. My proud boast was that I could reach OMR’s outer side in eleven strokes of my oars – with a small glide in between with oars shipped. This was only possible when the water was glassy. If a strong southerly was blowing or there was even a slight chop, the boat would take the swell on the broadside and shipping the oars would see me blown down to the narrow shallows in no time.

  Given the right weather, I would sometimes ferry Aunt Averil across the water after she had been visiting us. She lived in one of the flats on the eastern side, almost directly opposite. Going by boat saved her the long walk round the head of the bay and along the other side by the bush path. For Aunt Averil there was no such thing as ‘smart casual’, even when climbing into a small boat. In her high heels and stockings, twinset and pearls, she would make the leap from my rocking dinghy onto Old Mother Rock, climbing up and over in a sprightly fashion. With a degree of trepidation, I would watch her corsetted figure negotiate the jump across small encrusted rocks exposed by the lapping water before she scrambled up through the bushes towards her home.

  Scrambling through bush or hopping across submerged rocks to get around what are now inner suburbs of Sydney might seem far-fetched to a modern reader but my parents did not own a car. Very few people of our acquaintance did. There were three common means of transport: walking, trams or ferries. Walking was not considered exercise – that was calisthenics. Walking was just how you got to school or work or the shops, sometimes coupled with a tram or ferry ride. My father took the ferry to Circular Quay and then walked up to the ABC offices in Market Street, later Pitt Street. To get to school Megan and I walked about two kilometres to the tram stop. The green and yellow ‘toast-rack’ – so called because of its rows of narrow transverse compartments – would rattle slowly up the steep hill to Neutral Bay Junction, its wheels screeching and slithering on the iron rails. My mother caught the ferry into town for shopping, business or meeting friends.

  My parents did not own a house either. They lived for nearly three decades in their waterfront flat overlooking Shellcove. They rightly argued that they could never afford to live in such a beautiful area with luscious water views and only a ten-minute ferry ride to town if they had to buy it. However, there was absolutely no stigma attached to living in rented accommodation. Most of the people I knew did. The concept of a mortgage in the suburbs was unheard of.

  The privations of wartime followed by a decade of austerity and recovery meant that living was simple and spare. Most families only had one breadwinner (invariably male) and his responsibility was to put food on the table and pay for a roof over their heads. Maybe in other parts of the country home ownership was more the norm but where I grew up, the streets were stacked with blocks of flats, usually no more than three storeys. I’m not sure how the term ‘flat’ originated, but it was common terminology for a rented home. This was before the Americanisation of Australian English. The glitzier word ‘apartment’ had never been heard of. My mother always referred to our home as either ‘Shellcove’ or ‘the flat’. ‘I haven’t been out of the flat in a fortnight’ was her familiar lament.

  When recording her oral history towards the end of her life, my mother spoke wistfully about ‘the lovely flat at Shellcove where we lived for thirty years and the girls were born, brought up, educated and married’.

  Shellcove burrowed itself into our psyches and became a part of each of us. It permeated our dreaming like no other place ever has.

  ‘What a privilege,’ my mother declared, ‘to bring up our children in that beautiful environment!’

  And how lucky were we that our parents made that choice.

  18

  A Writer for a Father

  I was fortunate enough to have two mothers, both of whom influenced my formation, contributing their accrued wisdom, their grace and style, their determination and resilience to my template of Essential Womanhood. But what was it like having a writer for a father? What was his part in my growing years, my golden Shellcove childhood?

  I remember his smiling face bearing a plate of Vegemite toast fingers to tempt me when I was a little girl, sick in bed. I remember him patiently rising from sleep every time I called out insistently in the middle of the night: ‘Daddy, I need to go to the LAV-TREE!’ He would escort me through the darkened rooms, so full of sinister shapes, to what seemed like the faraway bathroom. He did not hesitate or complain. He would wait outside in the hall then escort me back to bed, tuck me in and return to his own bed and my sound-asleep mother who made it quite plain that night duty was his call.

  I remember him striding along the bush paths of Cremorne Point on our regular weekend walks, calling out quiz questions or throwing nuts in their shells so we could race ahead on our scooters and pick them up. As a child, I could never keep up with my father’s walking pace so if I wasn’t on my green scooter, I had to more or less lope alongside.

  I remember my father bearing trays of food for each of us as we sat around in our lounge room, the wireless tuned to the ABC’s Sunday Night Theatre. It was part of his ABC work to maintain the broadcast radio drama repertoire of at least three plays a week, each of at least an hour’s duration, some much longer. While he would have selected and edited the scripts – indeed, often been part of the writing process itself – he needed to review the final broadcast work to assess the quality of performances and production. For family Sunday night play-listening Dad would serve his standard fare, what he called ‘Welsh rarebit’ (for years I thought it was ‘Welsh rabbit’), a slab of grilled cheese on toast, decorated with Holbrooks chutney and served with a few stalks of celery and raw carrot, followed by a cup of tea. After that we would settle down, often with a pile of mending, sewing on buttons or darning socks. We listened to radio plays as quietly and with as much discipline as if we were in a theatre or a church, giving our utmost concentration to every word and never, ever speaking – that is until after the broadcast, when there would be a burst of energetic discussion and critique. Our opinions were always taken seriously, as if we were adults. Without knowing it, we learnt to analyse and evaluate, and to articulate our responses.

  Indivisible from my father was his passion for swimming. In summer, when he came home from the office, Dad would swing in the door and yell, ‘Who’s coming for a swim?’ We would drop everything, get into our togs and troop down to the waterfront. If our mother had started cooking dinner, Dad would implore: ‘Leave that, Coral.’ After swimming, cold water from a rusty shower plumbed against the rock shelf was used to wash off the salt. Dad insisted we dry ourselves by the ‘George Bernard Shaw method’. This entailed using one’s hands to slick water off the body, creating a friction which, if combined with standing in the sun, obviated the need for towels.

  The self-appointed chief custodian and curator of the harbour pool, Dad would think nothing of setting the alarm to get up in the middle of the night when the tide reached its zenith and going down the dark steps to the pool ‘to put the plug in’. The pool was substantial. Made of whitewashed concrete, it was ten metres long and, when full of water, two and a half metres deep. Seawater entered through an ingenious arrangement: there was a small round aperture in one bottom corner of the outer wall with a sand-filled India rubber ball which would be pushed just out of the way by the incoming tide. The theory was that when the pool was full and the outside seawater lower than the inside water level, the pressure of the water would roll the ball back into position to cover the hole. While the physics of this were convincing, the system was not infallible. So there was a back-up apparatus: a vertical plug hole of about a hand-width’s circumference just above the ball. The plug itself was a heavy pewter disc with a ring on top onto which was fixed a long wire. A person could perch on the outside wall of the pool (about thirty centimetres wide) and juggle the plug in or out of its casing. Dad would work by the tide chart to ensure the plug was out for the incoming tide. However, to keep the maximum height of water in the pool, the plug had to be put back
as soon as the tide was on the ebb. Dad would rise from sleep to do this if it happened in the middle of the night but if by day, we might get a call from the ABC office: ‘Could you go down and put the plug in?’

  One might hesitate to swim in the waters of Sydney Harbour today, but in my childhood the water was so clear I could stand on the edge of the pool and gaze down the steep descent of the harbour walls to the dark green depths below. The sides of the harbour drop away like those of a fjord but in the shallows the brown kelp waved to and fro and fish darted in and out. You might catch sight of a brown-and-yellow-striped Port Jackson leatherjohnny mouthing a floating morsel.

  By four years of age both Megan and I could swim the length of the pool and we would spend hours in the water. One of our favourite activities was ‘turtle rides’. One of us would climb onto Dad’s back and he would breaststroke along, then suddenly plunge underwater and continue swimming until the passenger fell off. Great hilarity! As we got older we had races, up and down the pool. Dad borrowed a silver stopwatch from work (it had ‘Property of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’ engraved on the back). He timed us and gave us tips on improving our style. This training became more intensive in the lead-up to school swimming events. Although my parents were not remotely interested in competitive sport, they encouraged our swimming prowess. As a point of honour, each year my father advised his head of department he needed to take a day off work to attend our school swimming carnival at North Sydney pool, under the northern end of the Harbour Bridge. Our mother and Aunt Averil would be there, too, to cheer us along.

  Dad also took a great interest in our schoolwork – some subjects more than others. A lacklustre performance in maths or science was acceptable, even expected. My mother called it ‘the inherited family weakness’. But where it came to language, particularly the English language, we were expected to excel. After all, it was in our genes. Not only in our genes but in our daily lives.