Leeward Read online

  Through this series of accidents, I was to have Pat as my English master for three years. I suspect I first came to his attention one day when he was teaching a soporific class of boys, heads lowered, all working on an assignment he had set. He may also have thought us a very smug group. To wake us up, and perhaps himself also, he asked in his dry, country accent: ‘Is there anyone here who is not absolutely certain there is a life after death?’

  This was a carefully worded, but subversive question to be asking. Pat could ask it – his reputation in the school was rock solid and it was a tolerant institution, like the Anglican Church itself (apart from its evangelical wing).

  I was the only boy who put up his hand. If he had inquired further, I would have replied one could not be absolutely certain of anything. But he did not wish to expose the sole dissenter in the class to further embarrassment. He mumbled that some people believed in a communal life after death.

  Afterwards, a boy accosted me in the lunch hour. Did I believe in God? Several informal lunchtime debates between us began, with three or four boys gathered around to listen. The rest of our class had no interest. Or they may have had religious beliefs but did not wish to debate them. Until then I had never mentioned my atheism to anyone – but I was prepared to argue for my position. (At a sixty-year reunion, my fervent Christian antagonist told me he had become a Catholic. Through Pat’s English classes he fell in love with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins had helped lead him to Catholicism.)

  Pat handed out copies of poems for us to critique. The first which caught my attention was WR Rodgers’s ‘Stormy Day’. The poem begins with an overwritten description of the stormy day. But its language is vivid and contemporary. It finishes with a reference to the end of the ‘phoney war’ in 1940 and ‘motionless newsposters announcing/ That now the frozen armies melt and meet…’ This was my introduction to modern poetry.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Graves, John Crowe Ransom, ee cummings, TS Eliot, WH Auden – their poems were about a world I could recognise. Poems might have hidden meanings. Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’, for example, was not just about a rose. It was about formal religion corrupting innocence and spontaneous sexual desire.

  In my two final years, 1955 and 1956, I was a member of Pat’s English honours classes. These were held in his study, in one of the school’s boarding houses, where he lived as housemaster with his wife Flo. Surrounded by walls of books which we were allowed to borrow – Virginia Woolf, André Gide, James Joyce, Graham Greene, as well as poetry – our late Wednesday afternoons with five or six other boys were a magical time, as we looked from the windows across the harbour to Pyrmont, pennants of steam from the power station’s chimneys and the lights coming on in the dusk.

  In 1954 I had begun writing poems, in rhyme, in fixed and free forms and different styles: two or three a week. I showed some of these to Pat. He thought I should meet a prastising poet and arranged for his friend RD FitzGerald to give a talk to our group. ‘Fitz’ as he was familiarly called (although I never called him that) talked about what it was like to be a poet. Gesturing to the radiator – it was a winter’s night – he said: ‘If you’re going through a dry period you have to start again somewhere; you might start by writing a poem about that radiator.’

  Another Australian poet I first heard about from Pat was James McAuley. Pat took him on as a housemaster at Barry House in the early days of World War II. McAuley came back at night and played jazz piano after the boys were in bed.

  I also found in an old school magazine, dating back to about 1916, a school song written by Kenneth Slessor when he was a pupil at Shore. Its title was, I think, ‘The Old Red White and Blue’. Already Slessor was a fluent versifier.

  In the thirty years I knew him, Pat never mentioned that he wrote poetry, although I should have guessed. He started in his youth and continued until the night before his death. Some of his poems were in bush ballad style and others were epigrams, such as this lampoon about an early nineteenth century pastoralist and explorer:

  x = ck’s

  Did Gregory Blaxland’s surname ever

  Inspire in him the feeling

  That the acquisition of his land

  Was really a kind of stealing?

  Although we never discussed religion, I was conscious of Pat’s religious scepticism:

  Cogitation at a Cremation

  The ‘undiscovered country’ which

  Must finally be found for all

  For most of us will be a niche

  Now vacant in a long brick wall.

  Pat never lectured us. He presented things to us and asked what we thought. He was unopinionated; at the most he might gently guide us. He was well aware of what he was doing and wrote these lines on his retirement:

  Now departs one

  Who taught as unsuccessfully as most others have done.

  But he had good books on his shelves

  Which did induce a few to find out things for themselves.

  During his years of teaching at Shore, from 1924 to 1965, his salary was modest and he and his wife Flo never went overseas. Nor, when he retired, did they travel around Australia as they had planned. Inspirational teachers are rarer than good headmasters. If his mother had not sent him to Joey’s he might have been a headmaster of a prestigious Protestant private school by 1954, and my life may have been very different.

  When Pat retired, I continued to see him. He and Flo bought a house at Roseville. I had lunch with them and they had lunch with me from time to time. He loved to feed kookaburras. They gathered around him on a rotary clothesline, while he handed them pieces of raw meat, smiling tolerantly as though they were his pupils. The last time I saw Pat, he was in his eighties. He was having difficulty getting a taxi in George Street in the city, and I flagged one down for him.

  IRIS

  My mother was born in 1896. In the years after her brother Leslie died in World War I, she became critical of organised religion and developed a social conscience. ‘All the starving people in the world’ was a favourite phrase of hers.

  Not all happy families are alike and we were a happy family in our own strange way. We lived together in the Gordon house from 1950 until my father died in 1968. Diana looked back fondly on those years. She still had a father and mother – and loved them both – and a brother living at home, even if he was an unreliable member of the household.

  My father Leo wore long singlets under his shirts and never owned underpants. He did not care about external appearances. He was a man of property. His happiness was a simple, mathematical sum.

  Iris was the least satisfied of our family quartet. Despite her social conscience, she cared about appearances. She was ashamed that we had no car, that our front fence was falling down and that the house was unpainted. She felt uprooted geographically. When her brother Billy moved from Melbourne to Sydney, Bella had imperiously insisted that she and Iris follow him. Iris hated Sydney. She compared it with Melbourne in predictable comments. People in Sydney were crass, and Melbourne people were gracious. These comparisons prompted my father to sarcasms about ‘Smelbourne’ – a standard witticism from Sydney-siders dating back to the nineteenth century, when Melbourne’s Yarra River ran with sewage overflow.

  Apart from a few relatives, my mother had no friends. We were visited every few years by her Melbourne cousin Bell Firth, a jovial, plump, unmarried woman, with pink shiny skin and grey curls. Bell’s loud voice cheered my mother up when she came to stay. Two other Melbourne cousins, Molly and Jimmy Blake, a sister and brother who lived together, occasionally visited. Jimmy was a sports journalist with Melbourne’s Herald Sun, and a jokester. These three cousins were my mother’s only real friends later in her life.

  Leo badgered Iris about money. He thought matches were an extravagance and brought home flint lighters for the gas stove. Iris could not learn how to flick the small flint wheel with her thumb and persisted with matches. By the 1950s, as the mother of older children, she had leisure time
and cheered herself up reading books and newspapers. She railed against ‘the Americans’ and ‘the Catholics’ and idolised Bertrand Russell. One day she noticed an iris growing in a bed of onions in our backyard. ‘I’m an iris among the onions’, she told us.

  I was an articled clerk and drinking three glasses of beer with work mates at lunch, and more beers after work. Diana mentioned my bleeding gums. My mother said, ‘It serves you right. It’s all that staying out at night and getting no exercise.’ I replied: ‘You’ve got such a satisfied look. On your mean little face.’ ‘Mean little face! I shall remember that until I die,’ my mother said later at lunch.

  Iris was a pretty child, with brown hair and lupin-blue eyes, and throughout her life was proud of her fair ‘English’ complexion. When they were in England, as children of a doctor, even one as peripatetic as William Rainer, their household usually had servants.

  Three years after her father’s death, as the second oldest child, at the age of thirteen she left school and went to work as a seamstress in the factory of the Hicks Atkinson department store, founded by her grand-uncle, Thomas Moubray. Her father had been one of the beneficiaries in his estate. Now her family was penniless. She told stories of herself as a school child fetching her mother, smelling of alcohol, from hotels to cook the family dinner and help put the younger children to bed.

  Working in a clothing factory was a bitter loss of status. At about the same time, the poet Lesbia Harford, a committed socialist, gave up her middle-class life to become a seamstress in Melbourne. My mother did not have a choice. She told us how she used to jump up on the trestle table in the sewing factory. Swathing herself in a gown, she would call out to the other women and girls: ‘Fancy me in fancy dress’. After a forewoman caught her doing this, she did not do it again.

  Iris was desperate to escape factory life, and took singing lessons. Her fantasy was to be an opera star with the stage name ‘Irisi di Rinia’. Her paternal grandfather John Cragin Rainer (she told me impressively) ‘sang before Queen Victoria by special request’.

  He was a baritone from New York and a member of the ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’. In 1846 they performed for Queen Victoria, their faces painted black and lips white, their jokes toned down for the royal family. While on tour in the United States, Rainer’s forehead was grazed by a bullet from a man in the audience – not a story, I suspect, my mother knew about. In 1852 ‘Rainer’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders’ arrived in Australia from the Californian goldfields.

  As well as taking singing lessons, Iris also learned typing and shorthand at what was then known as ‘night school’. She found she could not afford both classes, so gave up singing – something she regretted for the rest of her life. She got a job in the bankruptcy office and used to stand on the stools and take down the heavy, bound court records and read about her forefathers’ bankruptcies.

  She went dancing with boyfriends at the St Kilda Palais de Dance and had a lively girlfriend, Bessy Sinnott, whom she likened to Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. At these dances Iris wore a dress she had made of an eye-catching green. A poem I wrote in the 1960s retells one of her stories.

  The Australian Summer of 1913–14

  My mother, Hugo Wolf and Henry Davis

  Paraded on St Kilda Pier, a threesome,

  My mother sweet on Henry, not poor Hugo

  Who tagged along – until an urchin squawked

  ‘Two into one won’t go!’ and laughed and ran,

  And Hugo never went with them again.

  My mother and her sweetheart Henry Davis

  Hands linked, strolled past the fish-shops of St Kilda,

  Through long suspended pre-war summer dusks.

  Iris’s elder brother Leslie enlisted, as did the boys she danced with at the Palais de Dance. My mother handed out white feathers to able-bodied men who had not enlisted, a story about herself she later repeated, ashamed. Before he arrived in Gallipoli, Leslie sent a postcard to Iris’s younger sister Eva from Heliopolis, Egypt, dated June 1915, telling her about a trip ‘with a fellow named Lilly. Mother knows him. We went through the principal pyramid. The passages inside are very steep, we had to take our boots off. Else we could not walk up the slippery marble…’

  Leslie was among the Australian troops who survived the torpedoing of the Southland on the voyage from Egypt to Gallipoli. One of the last to leave Gallipoli, according to my mother, Leslie survived for almost two years in France.

  Before General Birdwood’s letter of 27 May 1917 to Bella, advising of Leslie’s almost certain death, my mother received a letter from a man signing himself ‘Cecil’. Cecil tells Iris not to give up hope. Because of the confusion in the dark, Leslie could have wandered into the German lines and been taken prisoner. That had almost happened to Cecil himself, when he and his mate worked out where to go from the noise of a German gun opening fire. Cecil concluded:

  … this war has knocked what inclination I had to roam, all out of me and if I do not get bowled over they will have to drive me out of the house if they want me to go anywhere; once I get home I will get you to play to me … you could always play the piano real well before I left … P.S… I have still got great hopes of hearing Les sing some of his favourite songs to all of us when this war is over.

  I had no idea my mother could ‘play the piano real well’. I have no memory of ever seeing her play the piano. This was not for lack of opportunity; our houses and my father’s boat all had pianos. Living for many years with the piano virtuoso, Bella, she may have lost confidence – the mother outshining the daughter, which was the pattern of Iris’s life.

  When the war ended, my mother was a twenty-two-year-old office worker. Many of her pre-war boyfriends did not come back, and those who did were less idealistic. Iris was still inhibited and impractical. Henry Davis came back, but their pre-war romance did not revive as my mother may once have hoped. I do not know if Cecil came back, and if she played the piano and sang for him. Iris and her mother visited hospitalised war veterans in the hope that one of the veterans with memory loss would be Leslie.

  My mother went on holidays with Bella to Sorrento, the beach resort close to the entrance of Port Phillip Bay. After days spent on the ocean beach in a discreet bathing costume and rubber bathing cap, there were walks around the foreshores of the bay as the sun went down, and sing-alongs around the piano at night at the guest house. Iris often sang songs from that era to Diana and me: ‘How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree’.

  My mother went to mayoral balls in St Kilda and boasted that she had she danced with General Blamey. She and her mother were active in the social life of the Anglican churches they attended, and she saw many films. When I was a child she talked about Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino, and W D Griffiths and his The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. In later years she became anti-war and supported the campaign for nuclear disarmament. She talked about Wendell Willkie’s book One World and became a believer in world government.

  Iris’s middle brother, a second William George Rainer, Uncle Billy to my sister and me, moved to Sydney. Bella insisted on following him. As Iris lived with her mother, the two women moved to Sydney in about 1930. Iris counted seven bridges and hated them when Billy drove them across Sydney. She was dismayed by the waterways and hills. Melbourne was flat and safe and Sydney had razor gangs in William Street. She began to notice cars backfiring – unburned fumes exploding in the exhaust. It was: ‘Another person shot’ until she was told it was just a car backfiring.

  The two women settled in a rented flat in Rose Bay. My mother got work as a stenographer. She was now unmarried and in her thirties. Although she still had her youthful good looks, she was ‘on the shelf ’. Billy, as a man, was able to make introductions for Bella and Iris, and at a party at the O’Donnell’s – their name is all I remember about them – my mother met my father.

  Iris and Leo were such a strangely assorted couple it is hard to imagine what brought them
together. Perhaps having been brought up by widows was something they had in common. After a courtship of a couple of years, they married. Although a bit overweight from drinking with the ‘Buffs’ (or Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, sometimes known as the ‘Poor Man’s Freemasons’), he was presentably handsome. She married him, she told me, because he made her feel safe.

  When my mother married and moved into ‘Leeward’ at the head of Lavender Bay, Bella moved to a nearby flat in ‘Burundah Hall’ in East Crescent Street. My mother visited Bella often with Diana, and then with me when I was born. I have a distant memory of these visits, the dim echoing hallways of ‘Burundah Hall’, and my grandmother with gold-framed spectacles, dressed in black, opening the door. After Bella’s death in 1943, my mother and sister used to point out her former flat from the street when we walked past.

  My mother did not note Bella’s death in the family bible, but she took Diana and me to visit her metal niche with inscribed plaque in the crematorium’s garden of remembrance. Bella’s marriage to William in her early twenties was a love match between two glamorous people. My mother lived in her mother’s shadow for forty years; then as she was approaching menopause married a working-class man, whom she did not love. But my mother’s marriage persisted for more than thirty years, without dramas or incident, until my father died.

  My meek mother’s boldest act was marrying a man who she felt was beneath her. Bella was possibly even more surprised than her daughter when this working-class man paid cash for three waterfront houses at McMahons Point.