Leeward Page 8

  Academically, she was about the middle of her class. Our family attended school sports days and the end-of-year prize giving. Her growth spurt stopped. By her final school year, she was normal height, with a trunk slightly longer than usual and legs slightly shorter. The heavy acne eventually faded.

  The sister–brother hostility also faded. My sister appreciated she had been given piano lessons by Miss Bosworth, an advantage I was denied as a boy. She set about teaching me to read music, and showed me how to practise scales. I became moderately proficient in some easy scales, but without formal lessons I did not progress. The only piece I remember her playing (expressionlessly, as an exercise in finger gymnastics) was Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’. I began to hate the opening notes of this piece. I suspect she was simply indifferent to it. When the piano lessons stopped later in high school, she never opened the piano again. After our father died in 1968, we divided the furniture up, and my mother and Diana were happy to leave the yellow walnut veneer Lipp piano with me – someone who couldn’t play it.

  With the onset of puberty I also had pimples – not as extreme as Diana’s – and she shared with me her tube of Teenaid, a pink ointment, a proprietary medicine manufactured by the communist father of the artist Keith Looby, who later became a friend of mine.

  Diana’s favourite subject in her last years at school was ancient history. I read her text book avidly. After we moved to the Sydney suburb of Gordon, she arranged for us both to join Gordon public library. I started reading Science Digest and popular psychology and acquired a smattering of Freud, Jung and Adler.

  On Saturday mornings, under Diana’s leadership, she and I began borrowing books from a bigger library in the city (‘in town’ as we called it). The Sydney Municipal Library was in the Queen Victoria Building and permeated by the sickly scent of wine from the Penfold cellars in the basement. This, however, neutralised the dusty smell of thousands of old books. I was excited by the pseudoscience of Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision and a book about Colonel Fawcett’s fatal search for a lost city of gold in the Amazonian jungle.

  When Diana was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship there was family talk of her studying physiotherapy at university. It would have taken longer than a secretarial course. My mother was a trained stenographer and may have wanted a daughter who followed uncritically in her footsteps. My mother’s ambitions were focused on me. It was an era of low expectations for women and Diana was encouraged to go to a secretarial school, which she did.

  Diana never expressed regret at her lost career as a physiotherapist. My regret at the time may simply have been egotistical. After a year at Miss Hale’s Secretarial College, she was happy to become a legal secretary.

  There may also have been an unacknowledged family dynamic at work. My mother’s own mother, Bella, had groomed her to become the spinster child who would support and care for her until she died. Then the docile Iris at the age of thirty-eight broke free and unexpectedly married. Iris may have had an inkling Diana could be a companion into her old age. Unlike Bella’s failed attempt, my mother’s probably unconscious entrapment of her daughter succeeded.

  There was a paradox in this. My mother was a timid person and Diana was strong-willed and determined. But Diana had a body which betrayed her as she matured. She wanted to hold onto her early years of innocence. Her mother was a link with that time. I, too, became a willing conspirator. I didn’t have to worry about my mother – she was cared for by Diana. They found love and comfort together.

  The late 1950s were some of Diana’s happiest years. During the week there was the novelty of being a secretary at an old established law firm. She would come home with stories about the senior partner old Mr Crowther, her boss Mr Edwards, and the employed solicitors and articled clerks. Sunday was a washing day and almost every Saturday the four of us went by train and bus – our father couldn’t afford a car – to a beach or place of interest. Later in life Diana longed to re-create this period and did not seem to understand why I did not.

  She later became a voluntary aid or VA at Lady Gowrie Hospital for veterans. On her scheduled weekends she dressed in a pale blue uniform with a red cross stitched onto a white patch and walked out of the house in her tightly-laced black nurse’s shoes.

  When I was about nineteen I had a dream. Diana and I were flying past a coastline of sandstone cliffs, side by side with our arms stretched out. We were suspended high in the air above a calm grey-blue sea.

  Diana formed three good friendships at Miss Hale’s: Shirley Lee, a forthright ethnically Chinese girl who lived in Dixon Street in Chinatown; Gerda Pick, who was the daughter of Jewish refugees from Europe; and Roseanne Fuller, a beautiful girl with brown eyes and hair who inherited her looks from her mother, but not her mother’s wildness. I often saw Mrs Fuller about the city, small and dressed in a Gypsy fashion: multiple black pleated skirts, bangles and long earrings. She was a legal registration clerk – an occupation that attracted free spirits, as they did the rounds of court offices and registries with bundles of documents in fair and foul weather.

  Roseanne had a remarkable calm and equanimity. Diana’s friendship with her lasted throughout Diana’s life. My sister drifted apart from Shirley Lee – they may have had differences. She remained friendly with Gerda Pick but the link became tenuous after Gerda moved to Melbourne. Both Gerda and Roseanne married and had children.

  I was about thirteen when my sister took me to lunch with Gerda and her parents at their northern beaches house. We ate outside on a raised patio and Gerda’s mother served cold meat with a salad – a few slices of tomato, half a boiled egg and two or three iceberg lettuce leaves, neatly set out on each plate. I tested the bits of salad warily. It wasn’t like my parents’ mashed salads sluiced with brown vinegar, sugar and salt. I remarked afterwards to Diana that the Picks’ salad was one I could eat. I was relieved – I was no longer weird.

  Diana began taking me to Keatings Dance Studio above Newtown railway station when I was about fifteen. We learned the jazz waltz, the quick step and foxtrot. I was one of the youngest there, a slow and clumsy learner, an adolescent version of the child who fell over on the steep paths of the skinny house. The bored female dancing instructors, with permed blond or brown hair, led me around, in their lightly perfumed cloud. Though half in love with them, I regarded these eighteen-and nineteen-year-old women as intellectual inferiors.

  My sister started going to dances by herself. She had admirers – one of them a young solicitor. I sensed there were men she fell in love with, but she held back. She could not tell them about the events of her childhood. One night she came home from a dance, upset. She had allowed herself to be monopolised by two Italian men. They told her ‘how kind’ she was to dance with them, and ‘you should have a boyfriend’. Then they quarrelled over who should have the next dance. They told her ‘come out with me on the weekend … become my friend … you’re the only girl who likes me…’ Eventually one asked her to marry him, and she left hastily.

  There had been no family holiday since the 1948 Hayman Island trip. As soon as she had saved money from her first job, Diana paid for a family holiday in Melbourne, taking my mother and me – our father did not come. We stayed in a temperance hotel and music from My Fair Lady – just out – was playing in a foyer decorated with enormous blue-dyed feathers in a brass bowl. Iris was able to see her sister Eva and brother Tommy, and revisit the site of the old St Kilda Palais de Danse which had burned down. We stayed at a guesthouse in Sorrento, a beach resort outside Melbourne, where Iris had holidayed in her twenties with her mother Bella – in the era of silent movies, glamorous nights and eligible young men who had courted our inhibited mother.

  More family holidays (minus our father) at Nambucca Heads and Forster were to follow. For the Nambucca Heads holiday, we caught a train to Macksville, then a bus through timber-getting country, picking up and dropping off children after school. I saw a beautiful Aboriginal girl with a green shawl, sitting at the back of the bus. I wrot
e a poem about her in which I saw: ‘in a jungle of vivid green/ The strange unfolding of a dark brown iris.’

  The single-storey guest house at Forster looked across the water. A couple on their honeymoon sat across the room by themselves for the evening meal. The bride’s face was lightly flushed, and when they left after a couple of nights I was downcast. We hired a small open boat. I had to pull-start the inboard motor with a leather belt, and we chugged across great shallow lakes under glaring January skies, avoiding sand shoals. When I started my second year of university, I stopped coming on these holidays.

  Diana obtained her first and last passport. Labelled ‘British Passport Australia’, this described her as 5 feet 4 inches (1.6 m) tall with blue eyes and brown hair. In August 1961 she and her friend Roseanne passed through the Suez Canal. Diana visited the house in Wales where our grandmother Annie Jones grew up. They travelled in Europe and their ship arrived back in Australia before Christmas. In Switzerland one night, in a restaurant with a tour group, Diana jumped up from her table afraid, when a man crawled up on all fours, pretending to be a cow and grunting around her legs. The other diners tittered. Diana was reliving her panic as a child, when our father used to crawl up on all fours to the kitchen table and pretend to snip the hem of her frock with phantom scissors, reciting:

  And cut her petticoats all about

  And made the old woman to shiver and sneeze.

  My sister never travelled overseas again. She began to suffer unpredictable nausea attacks and illnesses, even on short car trips. She never drove a car. She was convinced losing her adrenal glands and the cortisone she took had unbalanced her bodily chemistry.

  Diana began taking colour slides of the family, ‘warts and all’ photographs, in our old clothes: my father sitting in a dilapidated cane chair in the sun wearing a pair of old shorts and a singlet; me in pyjamas, unshaven and lying idly in bed, a model of adolescent ennui and affectation.

  There was a lunar eclipse of Venus in 1962. It was a clear and brilliant night and my sister decided to photograph the moon as it inched across the planet. Hurrying down the old wooden steps of our Gordon house she unfolded her tripod on the lawn and set her camera for a time exposure. About a quarter of an hour later she reappeared in the house, with camera and tripod, disappointed. Her attempt had failed. It was a technical impossibility.

  Diana’s social life was narrowing. I bought a length of tangerine Thai silk for our mother to make into clothes for her. ‘Where can I wear it?’ Diana insisted. ‘I’m too ill to go out.’ The silk was folded up and put back in its brown wrapping paper for storage in a cupboard.

  When I married at age twenty-nine, my mother and sister began hinting I should have no children. Dr Himmelhoch, our family doctor, told me the gene for my sister’s condition was rare, both parents had to have it, and the child had to get two copies. I might not even have the gene. He told me the name of my sister’s condition: congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

  I imagined it might be worse for girls. When my first child, a girl, was born, I had a pang of dismay. It being the early 1970s, a time when husbands did not usually attend births, I arrived in the delivery room shortly after Julia was born. With a proud smile and holding my naked daughter by the feet, Dr Himmelhoch displayed her to me upside down. I did not realise at the time what he was showing me: this is a normal little girl.

  THE HOUSE AT GORDON

  All the houses of my childhood have vanished, except one – the cottage at Gordon, my last childhood house, where I fell out of love with my mother.

  In the late 1940s my sister and I were at private schools. Our mother was concerned we should live in a suburb suitable for private school children. She may also have been hoping to form friendships with other mothers. It was awkward telling them she lived in McMahons Point. My father was North Sydney born and bred, but happy to move. His habits of speech were changing. He still made mistakes – pronouncing ‘monk’ to rhyme with ‘honk’ – but he was no longer dropping his ‘g’s’ at the end of words like running; and there were fewer ‘bonzers’ and ‘buggers’ (though he had never used words like ‘bugger’ in my mother’s presence).

  Our family went to look at possible houses along the North Shore line. Our northbound train had to go through two tunnels. The windows chattered in their frames, and the sound of steel wheels on steel rails ricocheted off the tunnel walls. I imagined thousands of pieces of broken glass were being shaken around until we emerged into daylight and an abrupt silence.

  As we emerged from the second, shorter, tunnel, the North Shore Gas Company’s khaki-grey gasometer, as high as a sixstorey building, loomed up from a valley of untidy bushland, and beyond it the gasworks that dumped coke in the harbour that we gleaned for our winter fires.

  I brought Middy Malone comic books on these train trips. I could not read, but revelled in their full-colour illustrations on large pages of thick, good quality paper, and learned about pirates and sailing ships and the Sargasso Sea. (Their author and illustrator was an Australian socialist cartoonist, Syd Nicholls, who started his own publishing company when no-one would publish his Middy Malone stories. Nicholls may well have been one of the bohemian picnickers my father took up the Lane Cove River.) I knew parts of Middy Malone off by heart. Once, as my father was reading it to me in the train, I anticipated the next panel and announced ‘and the sails began to creak’. My father laughed.

  We found a house in Gordon. There were still price controls just after World War II and the owner wanted more than the regulated price. When contracts were exchanged, my father gave Mrs Freeman a diamond ring (bought at auction for about a third of the retail price) to clinch the sale.

  The Gordon house had ‘protected’ tenants and we had to wait for them to move out, which they did two or three years afterwards. Their only child carved his initials ‘VB’ into the cream painted stucco of the Gordon house. Not long after they left, Victor was killed when his motorbike collided at an intersection with a car driven by an old man.

  The house next door to our Gordon house was also owned by Mrs Freeman. She had sold it and moved out by the time we moved to Gordon. The new owners were a former naval man, who was Irish, and his Russian wife. They had a daughter, Helen.

  My father set about clearing the long backyard – chopping down hundreds of tall privet bushes and dozens of wild tobacco or bug trees, with their unpleasant smell and large furry leaves. The Russian lady was upset when my father began hacking down this mini-forest. Her words, leaning over the fence, to admonish him – ‘Chop! Chop! And down they come!’ – became a family joke.

  The house once belonged to Launcelot Harrison and his wife Amy Mack. He was a professor of zoology and published light verse under the pseudonym ‘Alter Ego’. She wrote children’s books. An old lady, Miss Austin, was often out weeding in the front garden of her large house on the corner of our street. She told me the poet Louise Mack lived in our house. Louise was Amy’s sister and wrote ‘To Sydney’: ‘O little City, let me tell – / A secret woven of your wiles…’

  After my father had chopped down the mini-forest, thousands of bulbs sprang up in the grass and flowered in the following spring – yellow ixias and white sparaxis with a russet reverse – the ghosts of the Harrisons. This bookish couple also bequeathed us a small arbour in the back garden: a tall red-flowered Chaenomeles (flowering quince) and plum trees with small white flowers, followed by small, bitter, red fruit. When the plums and quince were flowering – white-flowered branches arching over red-flowered prongs – Puss lounged among the falling petals, his tabby coat sticky and honey-scented.

  The move to Gordon had a downside for Puss. When the weather warmed and he looked out of sorts – an unambiguous symptom was his back legs faltering – we searched him for ticks. If we located a paralysis tick, bloated like a small, blue-grey bag, my sister or I held him down, and our father poured turps on the tick before removing it with tweezers. The powerful smell of turps hung around Puss like a cloud he could not escape. A
s soon as he was released he ran off into the garden and stayed away for hours. One day we could not find the tick. My mother was the only person with him as he died. She was distraught when we got back late in the afternoon.

  The house had a rusty galvanised iron roof that had once been red and the front section of the house was stuccoed brick painted cream. One of the two front bedrooms became my sister’s, and the other my parents’. We had a dining room 30 feet (9 m) long and a 1919-style bathroom, primitive even by the standards of 1951, with no hot water apart from a gas-heated geyser. In a wooden box fixed to the wall, next to the toilet seat, were neatly cut-up squares of newspaper – substitute toilet paper, then still a luxury.

  The rear section was weatherboard and had weatherboard ceilings varnished a handsome red colour and weatherboard internal walls painted a dull ochreous yellow, like solidified fat. There were three rooms at the back: a small sewing room, a large kitchen and, next to it, my own bedroom – at last!

  I became a prolific reader. I sat up in bed reading the red and gold Dumas volumes my mother gave me. I had no understanding of the ‘mistresses’ Dumas wrote about and my mother studiously ignored this aspect of his books. I once read all night – Dumas’s The Black Tulip. As the sun came up, I switched off the light, relieved my all-night reading was undetected.

  A long path led to the back door and kitchen. It was bordered by a tangled wave of wisteria, grey and ugly in winter, and with heavily scented pale purple flowers in spring. I began to take an interest in the garden – not the sort of interest parents would normally welcome. Weeding had no appeal. I just wanted to plant things.