Leeward Page 7

  I was about eight years old and playing with neighbouring children near the vegetable beds. A sudden sun-shower started and they chanted ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring’. The phrase the children were singing – ‘the old man’ – seemed cruel and mocking. Their parents were younger than mine. The sun-shower and children chanting reminded my of a recurring dream I used to have. In my dream, my parents had died and I would wake up with tears on my face.

  My father planned to support the family with rents from his houses when he sold the Liberty in 1948. He may have expected wartime rent control would disappear. But legislation entrenching rent control was passed in the same year. He was fifty-six, had a wife who did not work, and now two children at private schools. He may have worked his boat for a few years longer if he had realised two decades of near-penury lay ahead.

  The first tenants in the red-roofed cottage were an English family. They were replaced by the Leitners. ‘Old Man Leitner’ as my father called him was a Jew, bald with a hearing aid, who survived the Nazis because he had an Aryan wife. She had a goitre (an iodine deficiency caused this, my parents explained, which could happen to people living far away from the sea).

  The Leitners lived with a fair-haired daughter, Lotte, who had a ginger-haired toddler. They also lived with a son, Freddy, a handsome man with a broken, flattened nose and a beautiful Italian wife, Juliana. Freddy had fought for the Germans in Italy, my parents said. They suspected his broken nose was not an accident. Old Leitner had an aquiline nose.

  There was no shortage of would-be tenants. My father chose the Leitners because he warmed to ‘Old Man Leitner’. They conversed in loud voices – old Leitner holding a hand up near his ear that had no hearing aid, and my father partly deafened by thirty years of engine noise as he criss-crossed the harbour in the Liberty. The Leitners installed large knitting machines in the front veranda of the cottage and pulled the handles backwards and forwards hour after hour. Knitted woollen stuff piled up in baskets beside the machines. Freddy worked for a debt collection firm and at night came up to our house to make business phone calls.

  We were invited down the hill to inspect Juliana’s newly-born son. We tiptoed into their front bedroom where he was asleep. (This had been my parents’ bedroom, where I slept until I was five.) Pointing to her stomach, Juliana asked sotto voce: ‘Am I still as fat?’ I did not understand the mechanics of pregnancy. I was abashed. For me, she was the most beautiful woman I knew – more beautiful than my eighteen-year-old cousin and even Miss Cooper. I stammered: ‘Yes’. She laughed. I realised I had made a mistake.

  The Leitners were good tenants, but my father had to work hard to get a living from his main source of income, ‘Fifty-three’. He glassed in the front veranda of the downstairs flatette on the southern side. My sister and I helped him hang new wallpaper. At one stage the tenants in this flat – according to my father – hid some old boots under the house, to become mildewed and claim to the Fair Rents Court that their flat was damp. Their claim may have been true. The wall of their kitchen was built into the side of the hill and was permanently dank.

  A middle-aged couple, the Scanlans, sometimes invited my father in for a cup of tea in their northern downstairs flat. This had been one long room – the former ballroom, my father said – now divided by a folding screen, varnished cedar on the living-room side, and pale green on the side facing their kitchen. They explained to me scenes from the Knights of the Round Table depicted on the tile surround of their marble fireplace.

  Mrs Humphries, well into her seventies, with prominent false teeth and purple-tinted, permed white hair had the upstairs northeast flat. Her balcony had not been glassed in and the original railing was still in place. She had just a room.

  Old Mr Matthews occupied a room at the back of Mrs Humphries’s flat. He smelt of sweet, stale tea and stood at the door of his room in a dressing gown – a bookish, smiling sort of man. He became increasingly frail and moved out. My father glassed in his part of the veranda, creating a narrow L-shaped kitchen on the corner of the building. It was the last bit of veranda my father glassed in. I was with him while he was cutting up rosewood slats for the venetian blinds, and sawing the fibro panels – carcinogenic asbestos dust floating in the air – on which the windows were to stand.

  ‘Fifty-three’ had just two bathrooms, including toilets, shared by all the tenants: one upstairs and one downstairs. All the flatettes and both bathrooms had bulky grey-painted metal gas meters that had to be fed with pennies. The door to each flatette had a yellow cut-glass handle. The tiled downstairs hallway had white arches held up by plaster female heads with flowing hair, and a wide cedar staircase leading to the upstairs hallway. Windows in common areas had red and blue panes, or clear glass with stencilled frosting.

  My father was often on the slate roof of ‘Fifty-three’, replacing broken slates and patching sheets of lead in the valleys. In later years, when his houses were almost deserted, he complained about thieves stealing the lead off his roof.

  I never penetrated far into the low, dark cellars of ‘Fifty-three’ where my father stored the large framed engravings he bought for their glass, and old brass beds he bought for resale as scrap metal (while salvaging the small hand-painted ceramic decorations). But friends and I fossicked in the former stables of ‘Fifty-three’, inspecting the hundreds of empty liquor bottles stacked there by the tenants. We ignored spiders and the smell of alcohol dregs, fascinated by colourful labels and different bottle shapes. When the bottle-oh came, we heard the clashing noise of glass tipped into hemp bags.

  My father kept inventories for each flatette’s contents, down to the knives, forks and spoons. Each item added up and brought in extra pennies every week. He bought everything at auction, and had me shake hands with Mr Ellis the auctioneer at his favourite Bridge Street auction rooms. I slept in second-hand pyjamas, and my childhood bed-sheets were stamped ‘US Army’.

  I sometimes accompanied him to the tenancy courts, where he was fighting battles about rents. When he advertised a vacant flatette, he was deluged with begging letters. Our family sat around the dining room table of the skinny house, reading and discussing each letter. My father held up one: ‘Listen to this: “Please let me have a go at your flat”.’ He laughed: ‘Have a go at your flat! We don’t want him!’ This shortage of accommodation and my father’s stupid battles in tenancy courts, I was beginning to realise, were the result of government rent controls. By the age of ten I was a believer in free markets as well as an atheist.

  I was about to go to a high school where my classmates would be much older and my friendships weaker. Much of my childhood was solitary. There was a 20 foot (6 m) high stone embankment between the two levels of East Crescent Street. I used to stand at the bottom with a tennis racquet, hitting a ball against the rock face, and imagine I was adopted.

  DIANA

  ‘I like being a woman’, my sister Diana once said.

  A few years after Diana’s death I was with my Japanese daughter-in-law Manami and grandson Rui, inspecting apartments. They were spacious and newly built, in landscaped gardens with a sprinkling of older brick buildings, tastefully restored. It was sunny. Everything was calm, architect designed, with a lot of greenery.

  I began to have an odd sense of déjà vu. Some of the older buildings looked familiar. Then I found a plaque. This had been the site of the Children’s Hospital in Camperdown, where I spent hours sitting on lawns at age seven, waiting with one parent to visit my sister in her hospital bed, while the other was visiting her or talking to doctors. My sister did not have a fatal disease; she had something wrong that was not explained to me, and over some months had a series of operations.

  Other parents of fatally ill children may have been even more anxious than my worried parents, and also waited on these lawns or stood by the beds of their children in these older buildings that were once hospital wards.

  I do not know when my parents found out my sister was born with a congen
ital defect. When it was discovered, they concealed it from relatives and friends, and there was a long history of silence and secret shame that my sister maintained after our parents died, and until her own death. One of her repeated directions was: there was to be no autopsy and her body was not to be used for medical research.

  Diana was born in December 1935, eleven months after my parents’ marriage. She was baptised ‘Diana Isabel Lehmann’ five months later. I was born during the war and my parents never got around to having me baptised. At the Anglican schools where I was a pupil, when the issue of my being confirmed in the Church of England was raised, I would point out there was an impediment: I’d never been baptised – I was quietly proud of this fact.

  As a child, I teased my parents about the set of initials they’d burdened my sister with: DIL. My father photographed Diana many times during her first four years, and wrote her age in ink on the photographs. In one she is in a swimming costume on the beach next to ‘Leeward’ – a normal little girl, hair still wet and salt water droplets clinging to her skin. In another she is sitting by herself in a white organdie dress at a child’s tea party, fair haired and with a cheeky smile. My father made her small cream table and chairs and painted Minnie Mouse designs on them.

  I have copies of two letters sent by my mother to her cousin in Melbourne. The first is dated August 1938 and is from ‘Leeward’:

  My Dear Molly,

  How are you all? Well, I hope. It has been a cold winter has it not.

  Leo took this snap of Diana one Sunday morning – she is 2yrs 7 mths – or at least she was then – she is into the 8th month now. Her father made the furniture, which is a deep cream. There is nothing Diana likes so much as to have a ‘tea par’ she calls it – with nothing to eat mind you. She abbreviates all big words. She always calls Grandma ‘Ma’. I say to her ‘Where shall we go today?’ and she says ‘Ma’s’.

  Hoping you are all well

  Love from Iris.

  There is no anxiety in these letters. My sister looks like any other little girl. My impression is she had an idyllic childhood in the first four-and-a-half years of her life and my parents were unaware of any problem.

  Then I was born.

  Because my father worked his boat on weekdays, there was no-one to look after Diana while my mother was in hospital giving birth. Bella, the ‘Ma’ of Iris’s letter, lived a few streets away, was in her mid-seventies and not too elderly to play the piano. Most grandparents would have been delighted to look after a granddaughter aged four-and-a-half. But not Bella, it would appear.

  Whatever the reason, Diana was sent off for a short stay at a children’s home. A few days became prolonged when my mother’s milk failed and my anxious mother along with the baby (me) was sent to a Tresillian Centre to revive her milk. For a woman who was afraid of anything to do with the human body, getting her milk back was traumatic – sleepless nights, hot and cold compresses several times a day, and nurses inspecting and pummelling her dry breasts until at last milk came. (When I was twelve years old, I was the involuntary audience for my mother’s repeated stories about this ordeal.) Meanwhile my sister was still at the children’s home, feeling abandoned, as the days became weeks. Weekend visits from her father did not alter the feeling of abandonment – something that lingered with her for the rest of her life. My sister rarely talked about her emotions, but this was a time she sometimes mentioned.

  My mother and I came home, and my sister came home. But life at ‘Leeward’ was not the same. My mother was now forty-four and absorbed in caring for this unexpected baby – this pre-menopausal statistical outlier. I don’t know what the sleeping arrangements were at ‘Leeward’. But when we moved along the bay to ‘Ivanhoe’ in about 1941, I slept downstairs in my parents’ bedroom in a cot, and Diana slept upstairs in her own bedroom. This baby – me – lived in the most privileged room in the house, the parents’ bedroom. Diana was exiled upstairs.

  My mother used to call me ‘my pet lamb’. My father may have worried she was turning me into a sissy. He used to call me ‘Tiger’ and recite:

  What are little girls made of?

  Sugar and spice and all things nice.

  What are little boys made of?

  Slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails.

  I hated being made of slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails. I would have much preferred sugar and spice. The ‘sugar and spice’ may have been a doting father’s overture for Diana. She was still the apple of his eye (and remained so until his death). He called her ‘Princess’ and continued to take many photographs of her.

  In about 1945 we moved up the hill to the ‘skinny house’. My parents’ bedroom was upstairs at the front of the house, facing the harbour, and my sister’s bedroom was at the back, facing the street. She was now on the same floor as the rest of us and her bedroom was large and sunny. I was envious. Although this time I was in a proper bed, once again I was sleeping in the same room as our parents. I suspect Diana resented this – I was still the favoured child and she was the exile.

  Diana was hostile and bossy and I got back at her by nicknaming her ‘Stinker’ – but not to her face. She was bigger and stronger. I recruited younger friends, Jimmy and Ivan. I’d call out to them, ‘Look! Stinker’s coming. Let’s hide.’ We started collecting Lord Howe Island palm seeds, which were like large green bullets, and storing them in the decaying stumps of Moreton Bay figs my father had cut down. Our plan was to bombard my sister. We enjoyed climbing up on the stumps, which were taller than we were, and preparing for an aerial Armageddon.

  That day never came. But my enmity still festered. Diana and I were down on our beach sitting on the sand, and our father was fixing things on the Liberty. It was a peaceful morning. I noticed a piece of wood with a nail in it, part of a fruit box that had washed up. My sister’s back was turned and I weakly thwacked her with it, drawing blood. My father saw something was wrong and rowed ashore. I cried so loudly and piteously that he must have thought, ‘Here’s Diana picking on her younger brother again’, and he began to berate her.

  My sister’s heartbeat developed an unpredictable arrhythmia. When her heart began beating quickly, our entire family hurried up Blues Point Road and took a tram to Dr Dey’s surgery opposite St Leonards Park. The arrhythmia always stopped by the time we reached Dr Dey. My sister began to grow rapidly and became tall for a girl of her age, with heavy acne and perhaps facial hair. I took no notice of the details but it seemed to me she was growing suddenly like the giant Alice of the illustrations in Alice in Wonderland.

  Her odd appearance drew unwelcome attention. She may have been threatened in the train on the way to school. She was certainly attacked by some of the Lavender Bay children. My father brought her home in tears. A small cut to her face was bleeding. What happened was not explained and I did not ask.

  When she was about eleven, she was hospitalised for some weeks at Camperdown Children’s Hospital and her adrenal glands were cut out, the only treatment at that time. (There may have been some surgical reconstruction as well. I became aware of this possibility after my sister’s death.) Her doctor was Lorimer Dods, Australia’s first Professor of Child Health. For the rest of her life Diana had to take cortisone.

  My sister was deeply ashamed of her disorder. It affects about one in 10 000. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, before surgeons began removing adrenal glands, women who grew beards masqueraded as men. In Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life, a boundary rider, Nosey Alf, with a disfigured face, sings and plays the violin in the moonlight in his lonely hut, and the narrator Tom Collins fails to recognise ‘he’ is Molly Cooper. Nosey Alf had a light down above his lip and was not one of those bearded women. But he was one of that group of women whose bodies forced them to live as men.

  As a child I had only a vague idea of what Diana had gone through. I was under the impression she had been operated upon more than once. She sometimes described to me what it was like – one child confiding to another in thrilling and g
hastly language – the sickly-sweet smell of the gas (she referred to it as chloroform) and the sinking feeling as she lost consciousness, like a lift rapidly descending, and the nausea when she woke up. These experiences in the operating theatre made her want to be dead. I do not know how much she understood as a child. But enough was explained so that she submitted to the treatment, which was radical at the time.

  Our bodies have two adrenal glands, duplicates of each other, one above each kidney. I imagine she had surgery twice: first, one gland was cut out, her condition was observed, and then the other was cut out. The protracted treatment, the anxious waiting between operations and the ordeal of the eleven-year-old girl were all experienced by me at second-hand.

  Dr Dods was a careful diagnostician. He used to examine the elastic of my sister’s school hatband for traces of fungus that might be aggravating her teenage acne. (In my twenties I suffered from recurrent conjunctivitis in my right eye. Diana, applying what she had learned from Dr Dods, suggested my eye trouble was caused by my hair, parted on the left and flopping across into my right eye.)

  Our mother trained my sister to be intensely private, but she liked prying into other people’s lives and looked up Dr Dods’s address in the telephone directory. On a weekday during school holidays when it was unlikely anyone would see us, my mother, Diana and I travelled by public transport to the eastern suburbs and stood outside his house. We looked across a brick fence down into his garden. He lived in a cream brick cottage with a second story. I can still see his house, as though I am still standing there. I was ashamed of my mother’s indecent curiosity and wanted to run away and hide.

  Diana was at Ravenswood school when she was absent from class for weeks and inexplicable things were done to her in a hospital. She may have wondered what was in the minds of her classmates – if they noticed when her body began developing strangely – and what they thought about her absences, if they thought about them at all. My sister rarely mentioned Ravenswood later in her life, although I think she enjoyed her last few years there and had school friends who would have liked to stay in touch.