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  The family story is that William would have liked to train as a lawyer. But his parents wanted him to study medicine, as the ‘brainy one’ of their five children, and have the title ‘Dr’. Binge drinking may not have been a problem for a lawyer, but it was for a medical practitioner. William restrained himself for weeks or months, then started drinking and could not stop – running down the street and throwing pennies to the children. A doctor who disgraced himself like this could not be trusted by his patients. The family had to move on.

  William was a schoolboy boxer and won prizes at Wesley College. High jinks were reported in an 1889 newspaper, when he was one of a contingent of seven medical students sailing from Melbourne on the Valetta for further studies in Edinburgh. William was the social secretary on the ship. He sent out notices for an evening concert and was one of the performers. He sang ‘Sailing’ and ‘Maid of Athens’.

  Bella mentions the ‘fortune’ which he came into and lost. In 1891 he inherited £15 000 from his maternal uncle, Thomas Moubray, a mayor of Melbourne in 1868, and founder of one of Melbourne’s largest drapery stores, where my mother became a seamstress at age thirteen in about 1910.

  William was not a casual user of drugs. According to my mother his ‘normal’ dose would have been fatal for most people. She remembered him offering her a teaspoonful of cocaine, saying, ‘Here, have this. It’s good for you.’ His clinical notes mention prescriptions of cocaine for patients.

  If William had married Alice Wilson, he may have sobered up. Bella was ill-suited to dealing with William’s addictions. There is a story, perhaps told by Bella against herself, or witnessed by the children. When they arrived back in London in 1905, she insisted on buying a copy of the fashion magazine The Tatler. This was a time when Bella was seen picking up firewood in Covent Garden. William protested there was not enough money for them to live on. Bella insisted she must have it.

  Bella’s recollections are evasive about the period when they sailed from England in 1905 and her husband’s death in Queensland in a town which she does not name.

  Early in 1906 William obtained a position as medico for the town of Oakey, in the Darling Downs area of south Queensland. He set out alone in the steamship Arrawatta. There was soon a series of newspaper stories which Bella pasted into her album. She appears to have been a passive spectator as the events unfolded.

  Under the heading ‘Tragedy Suspected’ it was reported that a large carry-all bag with medical textbooks and instruments belonging to Dr W.G. Rainer was found abandoned on the rocks at Bondi beach – the implication: when his ship stopped at Sydney, William went to Bondi and jumped into the sea.

  A few days later, a man from Randwick advised there was no tragedy – Dr Rainer had continued sailing north to take up his position at Oakey. Finally Dr Rainer himself confirmed his bag had been stolen from the ship. It had been left on the rocks at Bondi, when it was found to be of no value. The very last newspaper cutting may have been mailed by William to Bella. Referring to the adventure with the carry-all bag, the local newspaper welcomed Dr Rainer to Oakey.

  Shortly after these events, there is an entry in his clinical notes:

  On 3rd February 1906 was called to examine a man James Noonan aged apparently about 45 years who was found in the creek at Oakey. On examination I found that he had incised wound of the front of the neck. Was made obliquely from left to right, higher on left side than on right, and carried downwards, and being deeper on left side. I formed the opinion that the wound was self-inflicted as such a wound is common in suicide cases…

  My grandfather then set out further details about the body. On the opposite page there is an entry I assumed at first was inconsequential musings. It took me a while to realise it was an oddly incoherent poem in rhyming couplets he had started, with many crossings-out, but in a more elaborate hand than his clinical notes. It begins:

  There is nothing so pleasant as work that’s light too Where the ordinary mills are more than busy putting flour thro’

  Several almost illegible couplets follow. It was not part of the family myth about William that he wrote poetry. A final incomplete couplet rhymed ‘sugar mills’ with ‘ills’. He may have been trying to say the ordinary mills make you happier than the sugar mills – ordinary pleasures are better than highs from morphine.

  Bella and her children did not have ‘a short stay’ in Melbourne before they went to Queensland, as her recollections suggest. William was away from his family for at least ten months before they were reunited in Queensland. Her claim that his death ‘was a great shock to me as I had just rejoined my husband a few weeks before’ was also false, as he met up with his family in Queensland just nine days before he died.

  William had not stayed for long at Oakey when a lodge of the Manchester Unity International Order of Oddfellows took him on as resident medical officer at Eidsvold, a gold mining town then in decline, and 200 miles (over 300 km) further north – a harsher environment than the Darling Downs.

  His elder brother, Tom, the bank manager who cared about the correct use of apostrophes, gave moral and perhaps financial support to William’s family in Melbourne over the ten months or so when William was in Queensland. Like many wealthy families who become impoverished, Bella and her children were to become paranoid in later years about where the money had gone. They would not accept it had been in the wrong bank in 1893. They formed the ridiculous belief that Tom had robbed them.

  William’s last letter was to Bella, dated 16 October 1906, on paper headed ‘Eidsvold General Hospital’. It is in his meticulous hand and with no crossings-out. He wrote in the top left hand corner: ‘Let Tom see this letter’.

  It begins ‘My dearest Belle’ and gives her detailed instructions about how she and the children were to travel to Brisbane and the boat she should catch. He adds: ‘if you miss it, all my arrangements for you are thrown out of gear’. He would meet her in Brisbane after she disembarked, and escort her further north on the last leg of the journey to Eidsvold. But she is to send a telegram ‘letting me know you have started. If I do not receive that wire I will not start from Eidsvold as I would presume that you had missed the boat.’

  The last paragraph reads:

  I think, after you have settled down here and got used to the quietness of the place, that you will like it. You will never be in want of money, and as regards dress, books and those things can be got up by the parcel post from Anthony Horderns’ Sydney. You will be made a lot of here, and we should be happy. I know without being egotistical, that I am [a] great favourite with all sections, and the Committee would do anything, within reason, to keep me here permanently. They are all looking forward to your coming, and I am sure that when they see we are settled that my salary will be raised to £250. Now dear Belle I will conclude, hoping soon to have you and the children with me and looking forward to a bright future.

  Your loving husband

  W.G. Rainer

  Despite the expression of affection, there is a formality about much of this letter. My grandfather underlines the ship’s name (the Arrawatta, coincidentally the same ship my German grandfather travelled on from Brisbane to Sydney, to die a day after arrival). The detailed instructions to Belle, as he calls her (rather than the more exotic ‘Bella’ she called herself ), and the warning that he would assume she had missed the boat if he did not get a telegram, sound like a parent writing to an unreliable child.

  Nevertheless there is genuine warmth towards the end. Perhaps the letter is simply to a loved wife from a man who has treated her badly and cannot be sure she wishes to join him after ten months apart. No significance attaches to the oddly formal signature ‘W.G. Rainer’. This was how he signed letters to his children.

  She did send a telegram, and he met her and the children in Brisbane. They probably got to Eidsvold on the 11th of November and he died six days later on the 17th. He came back late and drunk in the afternoon before his death, having gone into town to buy presents for the children. My mother heard
them arguing. He is supposed to have said ‘Belle, I’m turning over a new leaf ’ and let Bella know he had taken morphine – his normal dose – and they slept separately, apparently having reconciled after their quarrel. My memory is that my mother was the first to discover him dead next morning.

  The cause of death on the death certificate is ‘Poisoning by Morphia’. The inquest was conducted by WW Farquhar JP, the secretary of the Oddfellows Lodge which had employed my grandfather as their local medical officer. By the time of the inquest Bella and her children were back in Melbourne, having received money from a benefit concert organised by William Farquhar.

  My mother remembered hearing her parents argue. Their ‘reconciliation’ sounds like one of Bella’s fabrications. Whatever the argument was about, I am inclined to side with William. He had exhausted his chances in more civilised places. He had come to terms with his own unreliability and her flightiness, and felt they could make a go of it in a harsh, tropical mining town. I believe Bella said no.

  My mother remembered the hymn at the funeral service was ‘Thy will be done’. It stuck in her mind as a child because this line is sung at the end of each verse like a repetitive axe stroke. But it was not the will of the authorities that Bella or her children should attend the burial. He may have been buried in unconsecrated ground.

  Copies of some receipts survive. Farquhar paid the undertaker’s bill and also the grave digger ‘for digging grave no. 70’. There was no headstone when I visited the cemetery more than sixty years later. Also Farquhar, as the secretary of the Cemetery Trustees, issued a receipt for ten shillings cemetery fees to himself as the secretary Eidsvold Hospital.

  There is one very odd receipt with a duty stamp dated 20/11/06:

  Received from Mrs Rainer the sum of two pounds being amount due to the Eidsvold Hospital on account (Lizzie) aboriginal, from Hawkewood Stn.

  W.W. Farquhar

  Secretary

  Eidsvold Hospital

  My grandmother paid for none of the other expenses. Why was she asked to pay to the hospital a not insignificant amount for Lizzie?

  My mother’s memory of her three weeks stay in Eidsvold played through her mind like a colour film she saw again and again – the blacks in chains at the railway station at Mount Perry, tomatoes ripening quickly to red on a railing, the night of the terrifying thunderstorm, the white silk suits her father and Farquhar wore, a black man rummaging for drugs in her father’s surgery after his death, the white girls with her sister Eva, dancing naked around a hose one evening – but my mother would not join them.

  Bella’s vanity was such she could not live away from the bright lights. Eidsvold was different from the imposing sheep station where she had been a governess. She did not like living next to a disused goldmine. William seems to have been prospering in Eidsvold in his own erratic way – until Bella joined him.

  Bella implies in her ‘Recollections’ that she survived after her husband’s death by renting a large house and subletting rooms. My mother’s story was that for two or three years they moved from house to house in Melbourne; Bella let the rent mount up and they flitted. My mother went looking for her mother in hotel bars to bring her back home. Relatives became wary of meeting them, expecting requests for a handout.

  My mother never outgrew her childhood. Apart from a few notes and letters, she left no written memoir. I have a photocopy of a note on the back of a postcard. The front of the card may have had a photograph of a bridge – a small arched stone bridge over a river running rapidly among jagged rocks. In a quavery but clear hand my mother had written:

  Jesmond Dene near Newcastle on Tyne. Came over the bridge I think and walking along right hand side, my father pretended to throw me in which frightened me. Was about five then I think. I was Iris Rainer then. And what year, well, I’m not sure of that. This is 19/12/68.

  My mother often used to say: ‘Read Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. She was writing about her father. That’s my father’s life too.’

  When I eventually read the novel, I was struck by the parallels. Richardson’s father had his medical training at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities, like my grandfather, but twenty years earlier; then went from medical practice to medical practice in England, always failing, like my grandfather. He came back to Australia, made and lost a fortune and died insane. In real life Ethel Richardson was nine when her father, the hero of her trilogy, died. My mother was ten.

  Another parallel between the two lives emerged from a strange conversation with my mother. I had just divorced and, as my mother and sister saw it, I had been married for a few years and now that part of my life was over. I was to become theirs again. That I was caring for three small children for half of each week was irrelevant. My feelings about the end of the marriage were irrelevant.

  We were sitting around my dining room table. My mother, who was then eighty, announced suddenly, ‘Don’t go fucking around’. I had never heard her use that word. She was desperate to convey her meaning. She added, ‘Your grandfather was a very good man. He got syphilis from a woman in Edinburgh. He cured himself with arsenic and gold injections. He made sure he was cured before he married my mother.’ (Richardson’s father died of tertiary syphilis.)

  My grandfather’s teacher at Edinburgh University was Dr Joseph Bell, the model for Sherlock Holmes – something my mother often talked about. Several years after her death I was reading Sherlock Holmes stories to my son Nicholas. We came to a passage about Holmes’s use of morphine. I had a shocked intuition. Dr Bell might be linked to my grandfather’s habit that ruined his family. I explained to Nicholas why I needed to pause for a few minutes.

  More than a hundred years had passed since William’s death. I had been married to Gail for thirty years, and we were visiting the old medical faculty at Edinburgh University. We were standing in the quadrangle of nineteenth-century buildings. It was reassuring to be surrounded by this solid stone architecture; we were enclosed, protected from the outside world. I thought how enticing, to lie here one night in the snow, with a whisky bottle for company. Was this where William carried out his wager? One would feel quite safe. Nothing harmful could happen.

  SHORE SCHOOL

  Despite my mother going through Latin and French exercises with me at home (although she had no knowledge of either language) and the special tutoring I had from Mr Yarnold at Mosman Prep, I did not get a scholarship to Shore.

  Somehow my parents managed to afford the fees, and one morning in 1952 I placed on my head the school’s distinctive straw boater with the broad diagonal navy blue and white striped band, and caught the train from Gordon station to North Sydney, where Shore (Sydney Church of England Grammar School), with its tower, stood at the top of the hill in landscaped grounds, looking out over Lavender Bay and McMahons Point, where I had grown up. The school was far grander than Mosman Prep. The main buildings faced north into the sun and overlooked a large rectangular playing field.

  It was an all-male school with a mysterious group of country boys who boarded at various ‘houses’ in the school grounds. We dayboys were also allocated to one of these houses. Our headmaster was LC Robson, ‘the Chief ’, who watched from the front door of his dwelling in School House as the boys filed into morning chapel – a tall, dry, thin, imperious figure. He stood gazing out, shading his eyes from the morning sun, with his hand across his brow in a kind of salute. One boy was less in awe of the Chief ’s icy demeanour, and walked up to him one morning, imitating the salute-like gesture, hand over his brow, and Robson laughed. No other boy dared repeat this extraordinary act.

  The Art Master, Ross Doig, who taught at the school from 1954 to 1989, in an interview published in the school magazine, had some recollections of Robson, who, Doig recalled, ‘had the status almost of a demi-god’:

  I only saw him in his last years and he was unlike anybody I’d met before. He had a habit of grasping at every opportunity pieces of paper between each hand and using his finger-nails t
o shred them into increasingly smaller pieces. I never did see where he discarded them, but he was always doing it.

  Doig mentions that his predecessor as Art Master, John Lipscomb, had persuaded Robson that a bequest left to the school by a doctor should be spent, not on a swimming pool as originally intended – which apparently was not possible – but on an Art School complex. This was unique at that time in New South Wales.

  When Doig was first interviewed for the position in 1954, he said:

  I didn’t know anything about this type of school or its ethics and Headmaster Robson said to me ‘What religion are you?’. So I said quite casually, ‘Atheist.’ He put up both hands and said ‘Don’t say that too loudly around here’…

  A ‘sergeant-major’, Mr JH Dixon, patrolled the grounds in a navy blue uniform with silver buttons. He had a pink pugnacious face and short-cropped ginger hair under a military-style cap, and conducted after-school drills. Boys who misbehaved were made to run around for twenty minutes in a pack. The leather baton he carried under his arm was quick to whack the backside of any boy with his hands in his pockets. There was a story that a boy was standing, hands in pockets, gazing at a noticeboard, and the inevitable whack followed. The face that turned around with surprise was that of a rather short schoolmaster. Neither spoke and they walked off in opposite directions.

  Apart from Dixon’s whackings, I don’t remember much corporal punishment at Shore, only drills and Saturday detentions, and writing out ‘disobedience’ 100 times on a sheet of paper after school had finished.

  I was eighteen months below the average age of the class but I was tall for my age, and not at a physical disadvantage. I came about tenth in the top-streamed ‘A1’ class. But I was immature in other ways. I became friends with a boy in the next year up. Eleven years old, I had not yet reached puberty and had no idea about sex. I made some ignorant remarks. He and his friend decided I needed to be told how babies are made. I was shocked and surprised, but grateful for the knowledge.