Leeward Read online

  My mistress kept a strict eye on me and would never allow me to go to the country races or dances, she thought they were too rough and the town wicked, but as we had our own race course and tennis court on the station and many callers, travelling from one station to another, I learned to love the life … There were plenty of wild dingos and dear little wild pigs straying around and also a wild white horse, which could not be captured … I got to know the names of many of the trees, such as the wilga and quandong, the latter having lovely red and white berries which make very nice jam…

  She does not explain how this pastoral interlude ended or her return to Melbourne.

  Passing over a few years I met my husband while he was a medical student. He was to go to Edinburgh for his final … While in Scotland he contracted pneumonia and under doctors’ orders he had to take a sea voyage … so his studies were for the time laid aside. In the meantime he had come in for a considerable fortune only to lose it again on the failure of the banks in 1893.

  William and Bella married in Melbourne in 1892. In 1893, the year Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Homes, they left the colony, so William could resume his studies in Edinburgh. My grandmother kept a newspaper cutting headed ‘CLEARED OUT – APRIL 22’ listing over 200 passengers, including ‘Mr. and Mrs. Rainer’, who were leaving on the Arcadia.

  In London, she writes: ‘before proceeding to Scotland we lost no time in “seeing all the sights”’. She also lists the many plays they saw and writes about a Sunday afternoon service at Westminster Abbey where ‘I saw dear “Maggie Moore”. She looked at me so hard I was sorry I had not spoken to her.’

  Maggie Moore was Mrs JC Williamson – hence Bella’s inverted commas – and was a famous American-born Australian actress married to an equally well-known theatrical entrepreneur and actor. I wonder if Bella stared so hard at ‘Maggie Moore’ that ‘Maggie Moore’ returned the stare.

  After the young couple’s London interlude, they ‘lost no time in getting to know Scotland’. She again lists all the sights and describes going ‘to the outskirts of Craigmillar Castle (accompanied by my dear little son) and I would take sewing (mostly darning socks) and lean against those massive walls and think of Mary Queen of Scots, who spent so much of her time there…’

  She enjoyed watching ‘the Highlanders marching’ in Glasgow where they went for William’s final examinations, and he ‘passed his triple qualification in Edinburgh and Glasgow with flying colours’.

  By this time what was left of her husband’s fortune after the 1893 bank crash seems to have gone, exhausted by living in style in London and Edinburgh. In 1894 William got his first assist-antship near Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire. It was for a single man, and she took lodgings in a room in nearby Bradford – a comedown from the sights and theatres of London and Edinburgh. But for a while Bella’s high spirits were not to be dampened.

  Her lodgings were next to a theatre, and ‘with a wink and a nod to the doorkeeper’ she got into the gallery to see ‘a capital pantomime’ eight times. She became so familiar with the music, she could play the score of the pantomime from beginning to end on the piano ‘much to the surprise of our host’. On these visits to the theatre, who cared for Leslie, then aged one, is unclear.

  Bella and her husband next went to Cumberland, ‘the land of the red man, as the colliers are called – an iron district, the men get covered in red dust’. While they were in the Lake District they witnessed a visit by Kaiser Wilhelm II, and later partook ‘of some of the dishes expressly prepared for his ex-Majesty such as the Emperor Soup, William entrée etc. We all took a turn in sitting in the chair occupied by his Imperial Highness…’ She goes on to describe how ‘my own dear little son’ – later killed in World War I – ‘waving his hand and joining in the cheer-ing’ was among the crowds welcoming the Kaiser, ‘little dreaming that in a few years he would be the supreme sacrifice…’

  Bella and her husband next spent ‘a short time in Hull with its many canals and the ferry trip’. She visited Thornton Abbey where ‘we picked some most lovely mushrooms amidst the ruins’ and reports my mother’s birth while on holiday in Manchester, which was ‘followed on the next day by an urgent telegram to accept a locum tenens at Gargrave Yorkshire…’

  She often accompanied her husband on his consulting days to see the historical sites. Presumably a servant cared for the two small children. There are detailed discussions of the places she saw:

  Wandering into some private fields and seeing a beautiful residence in the distance I asked a boy to whom it belonged. He replied Earl Manners (Pierrepont), once the home of the famous Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

  At this point she adds:

  I prefer not to say why my husband was continually on-the-move, suffice to say no sooner had I got to know desirable people than my friendship was crushed.

  After a short stay they went on to Brixton in Derbyshire ‘exceptionally lovely, wild daffodils, blue-bells and snapdragons’; then to Newport in Yorkshire ‘purely hunting and shooting country. One week we had continually meals of hares and rabbits… Our conveyance was a dog-cart with coachman in livery.’ Then two assistantships in Wales:

  My husband had to hold surgery twice a day, attend calls, draw teeth and make up medicines. The calls were down valleys or up mountains (often at night) and across creeks with only the light of a hurricane lamp.

  He also had to ‘battle with’ the Welsh language, buying a Welsh language textbook, and had to contend with opposition from other doctors, as his type of practice, employed by a workers’ club or lodge, was looked down upon. William tried to establish roots in the communities where he worked. The Hebburn Colliery Association Football Club published a card for their 1902–1903 season listing ‘Dr. Rainor’ [sic] as their ‘Hon. President’.

  By this point it is apparent Bella was becoming increasingly desperate. Early one morning she was woken by a noise of travelling carriages:

  On getting out of bed I surveyed a long procession of elephants’ caravans and lions in cages. I longed to join them.

  She realised later this was a circus she had attended with the children at Ebbw Vale.

  We eventually reached London, my husband securing two assistantships only to end in disaster; we were living in one room, five children, myself and husband. One day walking through Covent Garden I stooped to pick up some wood (thrown away as waste from boxes) acceptable to me for a fire, when I was approached by a man, saying, ‘I saw you pick up something from the ground Madam.’

  I did not know what to answer, so was silent. He went on to say, ‘Will you come this way.’ I became frightened, so I followed to where there was a group of men. Addressing me, one of them said ‘You must be very poor. We have been watching you. We have made up a little collection. Will you accept it?’ handing me 15 shillings and sixpence, which I gratefully accepted with tears and joined my husband and children.

  I appealed to the Medical Society for help, which was granted without delay or a committee meeting, as the head of the medical profession (a titled man), a name I shall not mention as happily he is still alive (for I read of him presently) granted the application. He said he was astounded at the knowledge that a doctor, his wife and children were practically starving in London.

  While there I was not to be cast down however. I used to attend Westminster Abbey services regularly, getting the children off first to St Pancras’s Church near where we lived, to Sunday School.

  During these months in London she ‘would occasionally go to see a society wedding (from the outside)’. She once joined a crowd outside Chesterfield House where the names and titles of arriving guests were called out. She recalled:

  a hurried stride from a young man requesting to be announced. ‘What name?’ the crier queried. ‘Lord Hyde’ was the answer (the present Earl of Clarendon) … Such shouts took my thoughts away from home.

  She was only briefly bucked up by events such as these. The unhappy months in London came to an end in 1905. Worse was to follow:<
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  We left London for Australia, the day of the opening of Parliament and viewed the procession with the King and Queen in their glass and gold carriage. We then departed for Tilbury Docks, my husband securing a position as ship’s doctor. After a short stay in Melbourne we went to Queensland, my husband dying tragically in his sleep at the age of forty years and I still in my thirties, my eldest boy being a little over thirteen years old. It was a great shock to me as I had just rejoined my husband a few weeks before.

  It is typical of her account that viewing ‘the King and Queen in their gold and glass carriage’ and her husband’s death all occur in the same short paragraph.

  Bella did not like the Queensland town of Eidsvold (unnamed) where her husband had become the resident doctor. Eidsvold, she recalled, consisted of three stores, several hotels and a disused goldmine, which ‘happened to be in the yard of our house’. The mine was flooded – a death trap for small children. Their brief stay began with a ‘terrifying experience’.

  On the day following her arrival with the children, William had to go to an outlying station 57 miles (90 km) away, a journey of a day and a half. When he got there, the station hand he was to see was already dead, and (my mother told me) he had to dig the grave and bury him. While William was away, Bella wrote:

  I was living alone with the children, and a terrible thunderstorm came on. We had to get rugs, curtains, anything to try and keep the lightning out. There were deluges of rain, and things were not made easier by knowing that blacks haunted the place – one day my eldest boy came running into the house excitedly saying he had seen a nude black girl in the creek.

  Bella did not stay long in Eidsvold after William’s death. They returned to Melbourne and she explained, ‘I took a fairly big house, near church and school and let rooms for 7 flats’. Bella says she was able to furnish this house and received ‘a grant from the benevolent medical profession’.

  Her eldest son, Leslie, took up rural work in Gippsland. My mother remembered Leslie standing, on the verge of tears, among the giant mountain ashes – Eucalyptus regnans which can grow up to 90 metres tall. He was thirteen. He remained in Gippsland, sending money to his mother, and joined a correspondence school with a view to becoming a commercial artist. Then war broke out in 1914 and he enlisted. Bella wrote:

  I had the last tea [the evening meal] with him in his tent out at Broadmeadows and decided that I must see him again on his departure from Port Melbourne. The next day I arrived there and joined the crowd near the embarkment, mostly composed of women. As I stood in the background one of the women (minus hat and [in] rough working clothes) said to me, ‘Have you anyone going?’ I said, ‘Yes, a son.’ She had words with her companions, saying make room for her, she has the best right to get in the front. The policeman, seeing what was taking place, addressed me saying, ‘When you see your son, you can join him.’ So my dear son came swinging along, pleased and surprised to see me. I joined him, catching him by the arm and marched with him to the landing place. That was the last I saw of him.

  She relates that he was one of the last to leave Gallipoli and went through many battles in France ‘without a scratch’ and went missing in action at Flers. She would not give up hope, thinking he might be a prisoner in Germany, until a letter arrived from General Birdwood confirming that he must have been killed. His typed letter, dated 27 May 1917, from 1st Anzac Corps, France, states:

  … I fear there is nothing but bad news I can give you regarding him … I find that on the 15th November last he was employed in carrying bombs to the front line in Flers, which he reached safely. He then left to return to our support line, but was not seen again, and it would seem almost certain that he was killed by German snipers who were particularly active in that vicinity … Movement, as you will realise, is restricted mostly to the night, while the ground, as a result of the continual heavy shelling, is so torn and shattered that very often it is quite impossible to trace our men … It would be quite wrong of me to attempt to buoy you up with hopes that your son is still alive and a prisoner in the hands of the Germans … it is, I fear, certain that he was then killed…

  The last page of Bella’s recollections describes her involvement in ladies’ auxiliary committees for the church and she says all her other children are now happily married and doing well, and there are six grandchildren. She concludes: ‘And now I am alone’.

  When she lived in Wales, Bella enjoyed the blue cornflowers growing near the door of her house. But they were the German national flower and after Leslie’s death she came to hate them. She was critical of my mother for marrying a man with a German surname, and claimed her own married name of ‘Rainer’ was Austrian not German – the Austrians in her view having no responsibility for the war.

  Her recollections are written in a bold, chaotic nineteenth century hand which, despite its steady slope, is often barely decipherable, with its loops and flourishes. Some sentences took hours to decode. I thought she picked up ‘food’ scraps in Covent Garden and days later I realised it was ‘wood’. There are numerous passages taken up with details about the family relationships of nobility and royalty. Page after page of this trivia made me feel slightly bilious.

  The few surviving letters from her husband are written in a small, meticulous and lucid script. He was ambidextrous and, as one hand tired, switched hands when taking lecture notes. William Rainer’s elder brother Tom, a bank manager, had simi-larly neat handwriting, and kept a watchful eye over his brother’s family after William’s death in Eidsvold. One letter he wrote to Bella criticised her careless use of apostrophes, and warned her my mother’s correspondence showed the same failing.

  Bella’s recollections are evasive. She was not in her thirties when William Rainer died. She was forty, almost forty-one – only a few months younger than her husband. There are two important omissions. One of them is laughable. She did not mention she was the daughter of a well-known publican, Joshua Mooney. That may be why she says ‘My father’s name will not bear repetition as it is so well known’. She hid the fact that she was a publican’s daughter.

  Joshua Mooney’s Victorian section of the Cobb & Co coach business could not compete with the railways when they were built. In 1866 he became the licensee of a hotel on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets Melbourne and renamed it ‘Mooney’s Prince’s Bridge Hotel’. He became well known for lighting the fire for his saloon with the IOUs of poets – literary figures of the era such as Adam Lindsay Gordon and Marcus Clarke used to drink there. Under its current name of Young and Jacksons, it claims to be Australia’s most famous hotel.

  Unfortunately the jovial publican formed a friendship which was to be his undoing. In Bella’s ultramarine blue ‘Album’ she has cuttings from the year 1883: ‘Arrest of the Absconder White’, ‘The Absconder White’ and ‘More About White’. They report how not once, but twice over the years Mooney was conned by White, a Quaker. Mooney died before he could set aside bills with his forged signature.

  Bella mythologised her father. Shortly before his death Bella said: ‘Oh pa, and you never left us any money’. His reply: ‘That’s what’s killin’ me Belle, that’s what’s killin’ me’. As he lay down on a couch to die, he announced: ‘Bring me me hat an’ me stick, for ah’m goin’ a long journey’. The family myth is that his dog then jumped to its death in the cellar of the Royal George Hotel.

  The death of her ‘Dear Father’ is recorded in her family bible. But her mother’s death is not. Bella preserved little relating directly to her mother. She kept a short newspaper article published after her mother’s death. The brief side note in her recollections about corroborees refers to ‘my mother’ with no adjectival endearment – unlike ‘my dear father’ and ‘my dear husband’. One senses an estrangement between them – two strong-willed women both wanting to be the centre of attention.

  Bella’s life was coloured by being the daughter of a publican. William Matheson’s billet doux, which begins ‘Je vous aime’ has ‘I love you�
�� in brackets. He may have doubted she could understand French. My mother recalled that her mother as a child loved to look out of the upstairs windows of Mooney’s Princes Bridge Hotel at the passing traffic – horses and carriages crossing the bridge, billows of steam from the trains pulling into Flinders Street railway station, and portmanteaux carried into the vestibule of the hotel.

  There were less savoury aspects of living above a pub – the smell of liquor, the nocturnal comings and goings, the sounds of drunkenness and occasional skirmishes heard up stairways or through windows open on summer nights. A girl who lived in a hotel was not respectable. Bella seems to have been educated in public schools and perhaps by governesses at home – in the hotel.

  She is almost a caricature of a woman of the Victorian era. If she were not my own grandmother, I might be able to feel more sympathy for her thwarted life. Bella gazing out of an upstairs window as a child became the woman who kept scrapbooks about other people’s lives, and gazed out the window in Wales in the early morning, and longed to join the passing procession of elephants’ caravans and lions in cages.

  Bella’s recollections are surprisingly reticent about her piano playing, referring only to the incident in Bradford. My mother remembered a more striking example of her virtuosity at the piano. When Bella was a governess out in the wilds, she overheard a piece being played on the piano. Later she sat down and began playing it herself. The composer came into the room, exclaiming, ‘Where did you hear that?’

  (I have two memories of Bella. I had probably just turned three. Bella is seated at a black piano in her flat, her aged fingers travelling across the keyboard. I may have brought her some light blue plumbago flowers, picked from the low hedge at ‘Ivanhoe’. A couple of months later we visit her in hospital. She is rapidly fading. I still have her piano stool and reams of her sheet music dating back to the nineteenth century.)

  The most important omission in Bella’s recollections is her silence about why William had so many medical assistantships: he was an alcoholic and morphine addict. Nor does she explain how he contracted pneumonia in Scotland before their marriage. He had a bet with fellow medical students in Edinburgh he could sleep out in the snow all night. He took along a whisky bottle, won his bet and lost a lung.