God's Callgirl

by Carla Van Raay

Our classes were reorganised and, on the whole, school in the camp turned out to be more fun than it had been in Holland, on account of a few in our rag-tag unhomogeneous group who dared to be rude, inspiring the more timid. It took two teachers at a time to control us and instruct us in rudimentary English. We stuck our tongues out at them with a sneer when they tried to show us how to pronounce ‘th’.

  ON THE VERY first weekend, we went swimming with people from an Australian church. They offered to drive the children to Bathurst (the closest town) to ‘the baths’, as the pool was called, for a treat and we all accepted with a great deal of gusto. We spent hours at the baths, frolicking in the sun’s generous heat, and nobody realised, until it was too late, that we were getting horribly burned. My back came up in blisters; the camp doctor came but couldn’t help. This was learning about Australia first-hand.

  The authorities in Holland had told us to cut our hair short, and sell our furs and blankets ‘because it’s so hot in Australia’. Since we eventually decided to settle in Melbourne, it was just as well that we did, at least, keep our woollen blankets. Even in the Bathurst camp, much further north than Melbourne but high on a plateau, the nights were as cold as the days were hot. We piled on six army-issue blankets at night. And the mysterious natives we were told about—the kangaroos, that is—were nowhere to be seen.

  Cultures from different countries became apparent in rich and unexpected ways in the camp. Although most of us were Dutch, there were Italian and even Russian migrants. Each evening at sunset, a sonorous haunting Russian song would rise from the nearby hills. The time of day lent a quality of stillness to the air, allowing the sound to gently roll down from the hills into our astonished ears. The singing delighted us even as it made us shiver. We never saw the man who owned the voice and never knew what it was that made him sing like that. People surmised that he was singing his homesickness, or had a broken heart.

  The Dutch Catholic priest from Victoria, Father Maas, came to visit our family.‘There’s a head gardener’s job going at a convent in Melbourne, and it might be that God is giving this one to you, John.’ My father listened with eyes all intent. An outdoors job! This was not what he expected. ‘It comes complete with a cottage for the family.’

  My father and the priest went together to check it out. The ‘garden’ was about eighteen acres of grounds, neglected for years, surrounding a massive convent. Its name was Genazzano and it was also a college for girls from well-to-do families.

  The cottage was in the convent grounds and still occupied by the previous gardener, who had been there for twenty years and refused to accept the sack or move on but had abandoned his job. Tall weeds surrounded the cottage, providing a fine home for snakes and rabbits. Undaunted by any of this, our whole family lived in large tents erected right outside the gardener’s house by the desperate nuns while he was on holidays with his family. We were allowed to use the house’s toilet facilities. This camping adventure was followed by a more dignified stay in a gracious house in the convent grounds called Grange Hill. Only when it became obvious that we were there to stay, and that my father had taken on the job he had so long neglected, did the old man and his family decide to leave.

  The grateful nuns cooked dinner for us on the first day we moved into the cottage. The Reverend Mother came down and we all shook hands. She was a constantly smiling congenial nun, the one my mother would take to because of her unfailing kindness. She turned out to be often ingenuous and impractical, but was forgiven for her shortcomings, being an angel of light and soft-spoken roundness. She was accompanied by her impressive second-in-command—tall and straight and square-looking, who carried herself with an air of impeccable breeding but not a hint of snobbery.

  Our English was broken, but we understood enough. My father was to have free run of the place to do whatever he could to improve matters, with a sizeable budget that had been put aside for the rehabilitation of the convent gardens. We children would attend the local parish primary school, run by the same nuns, free of charge. The cottage was free of rent and there was no charge for electricity. Paint would be provided to make the cottage a better home, and some other materials too, like plasterboard to fix a large hole in one of the walls.

  We looked around the wooden house and couldn’t believe our eyes. ‘Look at that! Wooden planks on the inside walls, not even nailed on straight, caked with grease, and the grease is full of dust!’ The planks were weatherboard, usually meant for outside walls. The floors were either scuffed wood or worn linoleum. The bedroom walls carried ugly smudges; the windows had apparently not been cleaned for months, or even years. My mother, my sister Liesbet and I would be doing most of the work to put things in order. We surveyed the scene together, staring incredulously and sighing. ‘It’ll scrub up into something decent,’ we philosophised. It would just take some women’s work and a bit of women’s imagination; nothing new.

  Some furniture had been left behind, and under the old couch in the living room we found a large Bible with a brass clip and gilded edges, and sensational nude figures of Adam and Eve and other vivid half-clad characters from Jewish history. Bethsheba was there, and the Sabine women being carried off to be raped. The Bible, to the Catholics of the Dutch south at least, was almost a heretical thing, something read only by vile Protestants. Alas, because of our prejudices, the precious book was not recognised for its historical or artistic value. It was promptly burned in the backyard incinerator, a 44-gallon metal drum.

  The longed-for boxes of furniture and other belongings finally arrived from the waterfront, but they had been broken into. Heartless Australian wharfies must have taken our silverware. Most of my mother’s precious embroidery, sewn in her younger days before she had children, was also missing. It was so sad, but we could only accept the situation, as most migrants were treated in the same way. ‘Melbourne wharfie’ was synonymous with ‘thief’ in those days.

  There were no dolls for me; they weren’t stolen, they’d never been packed. ‘There wasn’t enough room,’ my parents said in soft voices, conspirators who had decided that enough was enough. My tears were huge, not only at the loss but at this betrayal. ‘I’ll buy you another doll sometime,’ my father said, feeling sorry for me. Still, he must have hoped that I would forget, for one day when we were window shopping he told me sadly that the dolls were really too expensive and I had to wait. ‘Till when?’ I was trying to pin him down to a date, to an event, or a tangible time. But I already knew it was time to resign myself to a life without dolls.

  My mother, sister and I set to with a tremendous will and made that greasy gardener’s cottage spotless within a week. The three older boys—stocky Adrian, nine; curly-headed Markus, seven; and little five-year-old Willem—gathered wood for the chip heater and helped our father. We all minded the littlies—brown-haired and brown-eyed Berta, aged two, and blonde toddler, Teresa, who was only one.

  Brother Leo, from the Redemptorist monastery up the street, stopped by a lot. Leaning his bicycle against our backyard fence, he would watch us climb the enormous pine tree in the yard. He told us about The Age newspaper. ‘The red map of Australia, printed on the top left corner of the front page, proves that The Age is owned by Communists, and it’s best not to buy it.’ It was the time of Bob Santamaria, when the Catholics versus the Communists issue occupied political and Catholic minds.

  In a few weeks the whole house was renovated; a shed was built for mending shoes and making windvanes; then a garage was built for the Chevrolet; and later still, a granny flat to house my three Australian-born brothers. They arrived over the next seven years, and would do as they pleased, rejecting their parents’ old-fashioned and other-world discipline. The weedy paddock near the house was transformed into an extremely productive vegetable garden, and trees were planted as well. The best was a willow tree, which soon grew big enough to support a swing.

  As for the grounds at Genazzano, my hardworking father gradually made a showpiece out of them. He was not only caretaker of th
e gardens, but the convent’s electrician, plumber and carpenter too. He was the man-about-the-convent for about thirty nuns, who called themselves Faithful Companions of Jesus and lived in a fine three-storeyed house with a slate roof. The nuns were appreciative, and my father responded to being appreciated and being entrusted with responsibility. He could let his imagination run riot on a project while trying to save the nuns as much expense as possible. He established a nursery to save them from having to buy seedlings. And he grew flowers especially for the chapel in a designated bed in a bid to have the rest of the flowers left alone in the garden.

  My father was happier than he had ever been. His volatile anger diminished for a while, and he no longer approached me at night. I had turned twelve, we were in a sunny if small house with paper walls, and Dad had been introduced to a new culture by crusty George, the assistant gardener. This was the culture of the ‘men’s room’. Nuns and girls were prohibited. The walls were hung not with holy pictures but photographs from risque calendars. All sorts of glossy magazines lay in drawers, filled with advertisements from Melbourne establishments offering satisfaction to those who needed to be satisfied.

  My father was eventually initiated into a more sophisticated—and more expensive—way of releasing his constant sexual drive than he had ever known. In his naivety he must have imagined that it was a safer way, and something that he could easily keep a secret. Never did he suspect that after many years of growing carelessness he would bring syphilis home to his wife one day, or that she, after suffering great mystification and confusion about her condition (he never said anything until she nailed him) would take a taxi to an address in Lygon Street and loudly and tearfully accuse the prostitute she found there. In spite of her pitiful condition, it was decided between my parents that it should be kept a family secret. But the secret was too heavy for my mother to bear alone. She eventually confided it to my sister Liesbet, who was grown-up by then. Eventually Liesbet confided it to all her sisters.

  IT WAS OUR Dutch custom to visit people on a Sunday, and since there were no grandparents to go to now, we visited other Dutch families. Ten months or so after our arrival at Genazzano, we all boarded a train to visit a large family who had travelled with us on the transit ship, to find out how they were doing. The conversation was about the go-slow unions who threatened hardworking newcomers for showing up their lax attitudes; or the lack of choice in delicatessens and the food of home that we were all missing. It was about teenage daughters and sons, and how they disapproved of their friendships with those unreliable Australians.

  We children were left to play with each other. We formed a sizeable bunch and, as usual, I felt nervous about being accepted by the others, even though I was one of the eldest at almost thirteen. To join in, I would have to speak up and be aggressive, and I wasn’t in the mood that day. There was a tree in the yard. I was wearing a dress, but that didn’t deter me from climbing to the very top. In spite of this feat, I went unnoticed. A heavy sadness came over me; there I was, alone at the top of the tree, desperately wanting to be like the other children, but separated from them and feeling so strangely lonely. I started to cry. Sobs welled up and, suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt free to let loose a deep, unnamed distress.

  Everyone must have heard, including the adults inside the house. I glimpsed my mother’s head at the back door briefly. She must have gone straight inside again. I imagined her announcing that Carla had thrown a tantrum and it was best to ignore her. The hot humiliation brought on by that assumption made me truly desolate. I had no clear idea why I was crying. My father’s touch in the night had ceased since coming to Australia and I had been freed of a horror I had grown used to. The night-time visitor never returned—I had been used and discarded, and now I felt empty. I had lost my father’s attention and so I wasn’t his special girl any more. Even though I retained no waking consciousness of his nocturnal visits, my body missed his closeness and I felt strangely abandoned. I wailed even more loudly. The other children took no notice whatsoever. What could they do anyway? They could see that if I wanted to come down it would be not very difficult for me. The mystery was too much for them to handle.

  The upshot was that my parents, understandably, felt humiliated in front of the other family by their queer child who wailed for attention instead of having a good time like all the other kids.

  My emotional state was all too difficult for my parents, who were going through their own adjustments as best they could. I would soon be a teenager, their first one. What were they going to do with me?

  NEW WINE IN OLD SKINS

  OUR LADY OF Good Counsel, that was the name of our parish church in Holland. Its side wall held a magnificent Byzantine mosaic picture of the mother of Jesus with her child snuggled up against her, and hopeful little candles constantly burned there in her honour. People prayed to her, and then they went away and did what they wanted.

  We had travelled for six weeks across the world and, by some uncanny karmic coincidence, ended up in a parish of the same name 12,000 miles later. We were in a strange land, in a different culture, but, incredibly, the picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel was the same, though not in genuine mosaic. It gave me the feeling that in some strange way nothing had changed. She had followed us to Australia, Our Lady, who was supposed to give us good advice. Why didn’t I find the omen particularly comforting?

  On our first day at the parish school, our mother dressed us up the way she had always done in Holland: she put big satin bows in our hair, and we wore the shiny lace-up shoes our father had made. The bows made us look conspicuous but it wouldn’t have mattered what we wore: the Australian schoolchildren, Catholic or not, despised the newcomers simply because we were different. They couldn’t understand us, so they ridiculed us.

  They had derogatory names for migrant people. Dagos was reserved for the Italians who arrived in droves after 1950. We were called Clogs, quite a benign word compared with the one they used for their own indigenous people, who were also different. If we wanted to be cheeky, we would ask them what their grandfather’s prison number was. After all, these children were nearly all descendants of the English and Irish sent to the penal colony for their misdeeds only two or three generations ago. The insult was lost on most of our classmates until our English improved.

  I was eager to learn this new language and found it surprisingly easy. The roots of English, like Dutch, are in Latin, so guesswork paid off many times. As for trying to speak it, I listened to the broad accents of the local children, compared them to the educated newsreaders from the ABC and decided that I would never speak ‘strine’ but would opt for the King’s English. My speech ended up a peculiar mongrel version of the official language, but I thought that at least it had class.

  The nun in charge of our class taught three grades at the same time in the same room. Her name was Mother Mary Luke, FCJ. (FCJ was short for Faithful Companion of Jesus; all the nuns had these initials after their names.) Mother Mary Luke had seen a thing or two in her life, which had given her some sense of reality. She read out our written work and praised our unusual ways of putting things as imaginative.

  The words of Keats’ poem, written in huge calligraphy on a yellowing poster on the classroom wall, delighted me: ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…’ It was this piece of poetry that invited me to appreciate the dreaded English language. It often perplexed me; why, for example, pronounce ascertained as ascertained when certain rhymed with curtain?

  All of us excelled in maths that first year, because the levels in Australia were way below what we were used to in Holland. Mother Mary Luke made shining examples of us by inviting us to do sums on the blackboard. The prestige helped—we began to be respected. Within a few months, we would join in reviling new migrants from other countries, and so we became part of the fabric of school society.

  In the classroom next door my brothers did not fare quite so well at the hands of Sister Bartholomew. She al
ways carried a long wooden ruler with a metal edge to it, and beat her pupils’ hands and legs until big welts appeared. Sister Bartholomew was the boss of her classroom and children had to know it; she was a woman born in the bush and had a strong hand. When all the boys—Markus, Adrian and Willem—came home with welts on their hands and legs, our mother decided to march up to the school to remonstrate with Sister Bartholomew, in spite of her broken English. Nobody could make out her words, but everybody knew what she meant.

  Sister Bartholomew was loud in her own defence. In those days, it was next to a sin to disagree with a nun and my mother was brave indeed to risk both ridicule and the nun’s self-righteousness. We were all ashamed of our mother’s poor command of English, but proud of her pluck. Our ‘us and them’ attitude now included our mother in ‘us’ and Sister Bartholomew in ‘them’. The stakes were higher and life had become more exciting.

  Mother Mary Luke, who had a conciliatory streak, assigned my sister and me tasks with a certain amount of responsibility, like looking after the flowers for the altar in the church. Our classroom was separated from the church by a wooden concertina room-divider; on Sundays, the concertina wall was shoved aside to accommodate the large number of parishioners, who sat on our desks. It was a cosy sort of feeling, being so close to Jesus in the tabernacle. I was promoted to the great responsibility of preparing the altar for next morning’s Mass, which had to be done after school. I also had to make everything ready for the priest in the sacristy, where he got dressed up. I learned the words chasuble, alb, maniple, cincture, amice and stole—the essential wardrobe for the priest-craft.

  Every single morning I attended Mass, and even acted as altar boy when the official one did not turn up. More and more frequently he failed to turn up, knowing I’d be there to take his place. I felt privileged to be so closely involved with the rites of the Mass. My devotion to Jesus grew.