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Madeleine

Page 4

by Helen Trinca


  He also said that Sylvette suffered ‘delusions’ that Ted was courting his secretary, noting that Ted was a barrister, with the implication that his version of events was the more credible. Finally, Dr Fraser advised:

  The husband would like to have his wife confined under the Inebriates Act if this offers the best chance of meeting her problem, though he cherishes the outside hope that the shock of R. H. [Reception House] admission might induce a belated sincere attempt at AA.12

  Read fifty years later, the letter seems severe and judgmental, one written by an enemy, not by a doctor engaged to help cure depression and alcoholism. But it indicates the severity of Sylvette’s illness and the lack of treatment for mental illness at that time, when it was often seen as a crime, not a medical condition.

  Dr Fraser called the Chatswood police. When they arrived at The Rampart, they asked Sylvette if she had intended to take her life. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have nothing to live for, I want to die.’ She turned to Ted and asked, ‘Are they taking me to the Reception House?’ When he said yes, she said, ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter, I will do it again.’13

  It was enough for the police. Sylvette was deemed insane, taken to the Chatswood Police Station, and charged with attempted suicide. Then she was driven across the bridge to the Reception House. It was just after midnight on 15 March and she was still drowsy and unsteady on her feet.

  The following day Sylvette was brought before a magistrate who was informed that the ‘wife of a barrister’ was ‘acutely miserable and depressed, lacks interest in self and surroundings, states she has only one plan for the future that is to die, says she will try to suicide if given the chance’. Sylvette’s file was marked ‘alcoholic’ and she was remanded in the Reception House for seven days.

  She was emotional. On 18 March, staff noted that she was uninterested, but at least over the next few days she slept. On 21 March she was given a drug to help her sleep and this was repeated the following night ‘with effect’.14 On 23 March, Sylvette was released to the Westhaven Private Hospital in Waverley, a specialist facility for patients with drinking or psychiatric conditions. When she was discharged some weeks later, she refused to go back to Number 9 and moved in with friends.

  It is not clear how much, if anything, Madeleine was told, but she knew her mother had moved out of the family home. She wrote to Ted urging him to give Sylvette some money.15

  Over the next few months, Sylvette controlled her drinking and, around October 1953, she and Ted decided to give the marriage another try. One Saturday, home from St Catherine’s, the girls were told the news. Ted swept eight-year-old Colette into his arms, took her outside to the terrace and said, ‘How about if I tell you Mummy’s coming back!’16 Madeleine and Colette were thrilled, but Ted kept them in boarding school while he and Sylvette tried to work things out.

  At the end of her first year at St Catherine’s, Madeleine won a scholarship for the following year. Things had improved at home and Ted decided the girls should stay at St Catherine’s, but as day students—Sylvette was able to care for them again.

  But life at Number 9 soon descended once again into arguments and recriminations. Sylvette had bouts of ‘hysteroid’ behaviour—depression triggered by the feeling that she had been rejected. She found Ted increasingly critical and later told a doctor that her husband embarrassed her in public and told people she was a drunkard and a suicidal maniac.17 It seems unlikely that Ted would have used such words publicly—the comment suggests Sylvette was becoming increasingly irrational. She was dependent on prescription drugs as well as alcohol and she consumed high levels of both. She woke frequently in the night, crying, and complained of illnesses in every part of her body.18

  It was no secret now in close-knit Castlecrag that Sylvette was in a fragile state. Her friends were concerned about her mental condition. The Whitlams noted the St Johns were no longer available for socialising.19 On one occasion, Colette surprised her mother, who was clearly inebriated, trying to hide a bottle in the laundry cupboard. ‘Can you keep a secret?’ Sylvette asked her wide-eyed daughter.20 On another occasion, Colette saw Sylvette embarrass Ted. The St Johns were visiting a male friend, also called Ted. When they arrived, Sylvette, who had probably been drinking, jumped on the couch, threw her arms around the man’s neck to give him a hug and exclaimed, ‘Oh Ted, what have you done to me!’ The other Ted pursed his lips in disapproval.21 By the end of first term in 1954, Madeleine and Colette were back at boarding school.

  Madeleine was happier this time. New boarders arrived to start secondary school. Among them was Deslys Moody, Des as she was always known, and she and Madeleine became close friends. Des later recalled that Madeleine was ‘bouncy and happy’, joining in the hijinks and midnight feasts in Dorm Five on the back verandah of the school and excelling at her academic studies and the piano.22

  Ted told his wife that he wanted to divorce her. Sylvette interpreted this as his desire to protect his reputation at a time when divorces were granted mainly on proof that one or other party was guilty of adultery,23 and in May, after a ‘severe drinking bout’, she took more than a hundred sleeping tablets and was rushed to Royal North Shore Hospital unconscious.

  The assault on Sylvette’s body was severe, but after six days in a coma she regained consciousness. She was taken to the Winchester Private Hospital in Darlinghurst where she was yet again given ECT.

  Ted told Sylvette that the marriage was over, and she begged for another chance. But she was not well enough to leave hospital and, on 16 June, she was admitted to the Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic, part of the large mental health complex at Rozelle in Sydney. She was assessed and her personal history—based on Ted’s account—was recorded. The document noted she was ‘demanding, selfish, domineering and v. temperamental’, given to ‘much attention-getting behaviour, very ambitious…witty, vivacious, jealous, v. inconsistent’.

  Two days later when she saw a psychiatrist Sylvette repeated her conviction that Ted had had an affair with an older woman in 1950, and she was diagnosed with a ‘depressive state’ caused by Ted’s desire for a divorce.

  A week later, it was Ted’s turn to meet the psychiatrist. He did not make a good impression, appearing ‘rigid and unrelenting’ with ‘nothing pleasant to say about his wife’.

  After three weeks at Broughton Hall, Sylvette was granted weekend leave to see Colette, who was in hospital with scarlet fever. It proved a difficult weekend, and when Sylvette returned to the asylum, she reported that Ted had ‘ordered her out of the house’ at Castlecrag and moved members of his family in. This was an exaggeration, but it was the case that Ted’s sister Pat and her husband, Maitland Buckeridge, had moved in to help look after Madeleine and Colette when they were home from school.

  Ted was worried that Broughton Hall staff would release Sylvette to allow her to nurse Colette, and he wrote to psychiatrist Dr Marie Illingworth and the superintendent of the institution urging them to keep Sylvette in their care:

  Having regard to the fact that my wife seems to react badly when responsibility is thrust upon her & to her recent history, I would not be happy about my wife nursing Colette from the point of view of mother or child. Yet if she is discharged and is not permitted to nurse Colette I think she will take it badly. I do not pretend to be a psychiatrist; but I know my wife pretty well & I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to discharge her now. She is capable of a deceptive brightness of demeanour which belies what goes on beneath the surface.24

  Ted’s entreaties were successful and Sylvette was held at the asylum till 22 July. Her discharge was recorded in her file but there was no account of her treatment or of her state of mind on release. ECT was the most common treatment at Broughton Hall in the 1950s. Overseas, psychiatric patients were given alternative help such as psychotherapy or insulin treatment, but at Broughton Hall, due to the large number of women, sometimes more than seventy, there was not the time or staff for psychotherapy. A shortage of supervisory staff mea
nt that the women lined up naked in a corridor waiting their turn for a bath because there was no time for them to undress and dress in the bathroom. Dr Illingworth said later that patients were often discharged with insufficient or no treatment.25 It is likely that Sylvette was in that second category.

  Sylvette did not return to Castlecrag—she moved into a shared house in Chatswood. One Saturday, Ted took Madeleine to see her mother there. He let her out of the car and she walked up to the door and rang the doorbell. There was Sylvette. ‘I am just making the bed, come in and help me,’ she said. Sylvette introduced her daughter to the other people in the house and she and Madeleine spent the day together:

  I had my mother to myself that day and I remember walking up the street to the cinema and we had our arms linked…we just go into this instant mother–daughter [relationship] as if nothing is wrong. We are not pretending, it is just a happening thing.26

  They walked past a chemist shop and Sylvette pointed to a manicure set in the window, telling Madeleine she would buy it for her if she stopped biting her nails. Madeleine would have had a lot to tell her mother: the night before, she had performed a piano solo at the St Catherine’s annual concert.27 Madeleine remembered this day fondly: a day when she and Sylvette were alone and completely united, a perfect day.

  Sylvette and Ted argued over the divorce and about who would live in the house. After a short stay at Chatswood, Sylvette moved back into Number 9, and Ted went to stay with Pat and Maitland. Sylvette was alone and worried about how she would survive without a job and without a husband. Henriette and Marcel Pile found her a job in a shop in the Chatswood area, selling home goods. She was to start in the last week in August.28

  On Saturday 7 August, Madeleine and Colette were waiting for their mother to collect them from school for a day out, when Madeleine was told that she had been grounded for a misdemeanour. Sylvette eventually arrived at the school, and Madeleine was allowed to go into the driveway to talk to her for a moment. Sylvette was wearing the Dior copy, the ‘New Look’ black suit that her daughter adored. Madeleine recalled:

  I told her how sorry I was that I was not able to go out with her and she had these very big brown eyes and she was just looking at me and there were great big tears welling up in her eyes, and there were kids all over and I was terrified that she was going to cry—not because I minded her crying but because I didn’t want the other kids to see her. [So I was] patting her arms and telling her everything was all right.29

  Sylvette told the girls that Ted was going to divorce her and that she was frightened about the future. The three of them clung together, sobbing, in the St Catherine’s driveway. Colette remembered:

  It was horrific. We had the last interview with our mother on the driveway, in the freaking driveway of the school, late in the day, they could not or would not accommodate the visit in any other way… My mother was saying that the marriage was over, and over forever, that this was it…Madeleine was saying, ‘What are you going to do?’ and my mother was saying, ‘I will be all right, I will be fine, I will just get a job in a factory or something.’30

  That night, Ted responded to his wife’s calls for company and went around to the house to see her. He was concerned about her fragility, but he was reassured—Sylvette did not mention suicide, which she had so often on other occasions.31 But all was not well.

  Sylvette told friends she was going away to the coast for a few days before starting her job, but on Tuesday 10 August, she was still at Castlecrag.32 She telephoned Friedel Souhami and invited her over for a drink. Friedel walked down the side path from her home in The Parapet to the St John house to be greeted by a distressed Sylvette: ‘I am lonely and I wanted you to come over and keep me company.’ But by the time they parted, Sylvette was calmer and Friedel did not think she was suicidal. They agreed to have lunch the following Friday.33 On Thursday night, 12 August, Sylvette again phoned Friedel to ask her to come over but Friedel was busy and declined.34 Anyway, she thought, they would see each other the next day.

  Anita Date always kept an eye out for her neighbour, and on Friday morning she was concerned. The St John house was locked up and silent, and Sylvette had not surfaced. Before long, Anita was so worried that she raised the alarm.35 Ted left work and drove over. He no longer had a key to the house and had to force his way in. Anita went inside with him.

  Sylvette was lying on the double bed. She had been dead for a considerable time. On the bedside table was a glass with a small amount of water in it and a spoon, but no suicide note. Ted called a doctor and Sylvette’s body was taken to the city morgue.36

  Across the city at St Catherine’s, the boarders were getting ready for evening study when the headmistress announced that Madeleine and Colette were to go to her study. Madeleine knew instinctively what was about to unfold. ‘I knew there was no other reason that we could be summoned to the headmistress’s study…she would not be going to tell us to go to her study just to tell us my mother was sick.’ Miss Fitzhardinge told the girls there was ‘something very hard’ that they had to contend with.37 It was a terrible moment. Over and over she said: ‘Your father loves you very much, you just have to carry on as usual.’ Ted was on his way, she told them, then left the study to get them some hot milk. Madeleine began to cry. ‘I think she’s dead,’ Colette told her older sister.38

  When Ted arrived, accompanied by his brother-in-law Bill Baker, Colette rushed into her father’s arms but Madeleine held back: ‘[He] turns up, he is a block of concrete, he doesn’t want to touch me, he doesn’t want to know me, he doesn’t even put his arms around me. He just stares at me in this totally block of concrete way.’ 39

  Bill embraced his nieces and the men disappeared into the study with Miss Fitzhardinge, leaving Madeleine and Colette on a bench in the corridor outside. When they emerged, Ted and Bill said goodnight and left.

  No one told Madeleine and Colette that their mother was dead. They had to put the pieces together for themselves. And there was no talk of the girls going home to Castlecrag, but Miss Fitzhardinge asked if they wanted to sleep in adjoining beds rather than in their separate dorms. Madeleine declined. ‘We did not want to have anything to do with each other,’ she recalled. Looking back, she was scathing about Colette, who had asked Miss Fitzhardinge whether Sylvette was now in heaven. ‘I mean, pass the sick bag, Alice! It was a pure performance, it was completely bogus,’ Madeleine said.40 Her bitterness was extreme but not surprising: the death of a mother would have been devastating for any child.

  Bill Baker had rushed to Ted’s side when he heard the news. As a clergyman, he had to enforce the church rules that barred suicides from full religious rites. He wanted to know if Sylvette had deliberately killed herself or whether it had been an accidental overdose, and he went to the morgue to investigate. The medical advice he was given was equivocal and Bill, with some relief, decided Sylvette’s death was not suicide.41

  Some time later, Dr Stratford Sheldon performed the autopsy and gave as the cause of death ‘poisoning by pentobarbitone’.42 Sylvette’s body was released to the family and funeral arrangement were made.

  The Sydney Morning Herald carried the death notice: ‘St John, Sylvette—August 13 1954 at her residence 9 The Rampart, Castlecrag, beloved wife of Edward Henry St John.’ There was no mention of Madeleine or Colette.

  At St Catherine’s, Madeleine’s friends knew her mother had died but there was little time for tears: ‘I was just expected to get up and proceed as usual, and some of the girls came and gave me their sympathy and condolences. But apart from that I was expected to proceed as normal, which is what I did.’ 43

  On Monday, at 1.45 p.m., the funeral service was held at St Thomas’s Church of England in North Sydney. Henriette Pile remembered it as a cold ceremony filled with an atmosphere of blame towards Sylvette.44 Neither Madeleine nor Colette attended and they were given no details of the funeral or their mother’s cremation at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. In retrospect their exclusion seems harsh,
but Ted doubtless thought his daughters, aged nine and twelve, should be protected as far as possible from the tragedy.

  Madeleine’s cousin Antony Minchin, just eleven years old, sent her a letter of sympathy, but Madeleine and Colette had no contact with Feiga and Jean Cargher, who would have been of such comfort. It was the last week of term and the girls stayed on for the school routines of morning prayer, class, meals and prep. Over in Castlecrag, the adults whispered of suicide and the children knew something terrible had happened, but a veil of secrecy was drawn over the event. Ted wrote to Florence, who was living in London: ‘The poor girl is at peace at last.’45 Madeleine and Colette knew never to speak of it again.46

  During the school holidays, the girls finally saw their Cargher grandparents. They also visited Bill Baker and his family. Years later, Madeleine claimed that, during that visit, her cousin Felicity Baker told her that Sylvette had suicided.47 For Madeleine, the question of whether or nor her mother had intended to kill herself became a defining issue. There was a lot at stake. A suicide would mean that Sylvette had abandoned her; an accidental death allowed Madeleine to believe she had not been rejected by her beloved mother.

  It was some months before the inquest was held, but on 27 October Coroner Frank McNamara held a brief hearing. Constable Aubrey Goodyer went first, citing the details of 13 August when he had gone to Number 9. Ted was then sworn in. He said he had been ‘temporarily away from home’ after Sylvette’s discharge from Broughton Hall at the end of July. It was a potentially embarrassing situation for Ted, who was in and out of the courts on a daily basis. Now he was being interrogated about the circumstances of his wife’s death. But the coroner asked only one question: ‘Any medical man ever give you notice of the cause of her condition?’ Ted said he had never had a satisfactory explanation, and the coroner did not delve deeper.

 

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