Autobiography of My Mother (27 page)

As the war wore on and the threat of an air attack seemed less likely, the air raid wardens stopped taking their duties so seriously. Each sector post was furnished with a bed and a medicine cabinet. The first aid kit contained medicinal brandy. Most of the wardens were single men and the air raid shelters rapidly degenerated into love nests. The wardens invited in their women friends, drank the brandy and made appropriate use of the beds.

Life at home had its lighter side, too. Mollie won the lottery – that was an event.

I had left the studio and gone off shopping one morning. When I came back round the corner from George Street into Bridge Street, Mollie was standing on the doorstep of number 12 with a newspaper under her arm, looking more excited than I had ever seen her. She waved the newspaper wildly at me.

‘Don't tell me,' I said. ‘You've won the lottery.'

‘How did you know?' she spluttered.

‘Mollie,' I grinned, ‘why else would you be in here at this hour with that look on your face?' But she was still dumb-founded that I could have guessed.

Mollie was so excited; she took me and the girls from the office to Usher's Hotel in Castlereagh Street for lunch. Mollie looked as if all her Christmases had come at once. Lunch went on the whole afternoon.

The next excitement in Mollie's life was her engagement.
That really did rock us. Jack Scully was the name of her fiancé, she had known him since she left school. Jack's father had racing stables a block up from us in Randwick, and Jack had been one of Mollie's racing friends, but they were never more than that until Jack's father died.

The Scully family home was pulled down and a block of flats was built on the site as an investment. Jack lived in one of the flats with his sister and it was about this time that he began courting Mollie. They were like a couple of seventeen-year-olds, holding hands and gazing at each other moonishly.

Jack would put a geranium on the windowsill when his sister was out so Mollie could pop up and have a whisky with him. Mollie lived for these little assignations, and the rest of us bore with them as patiently as we could.

Mollie was still as mad as ever about the races. Jack Scully had a racehorse called Old Rowley entered in the Melbourne Cup. Old Rowley's odds were not good at a hundred to one. Jack kept urging Doug to have a bet on Old Rowley but Doug was totally sceptical. Even lovestruck Mollie wasn't convinced that Jack's horse would win.

But Old Rowley surprised us all. He thundered home and won the Cup at a hundred to one; it was the most historic Cup Day in our house. Mollie was ecstatic. It was a pity none of us except Mollie had anything on him.

Mollie and Jack were married in May 1943 at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church, Randwick. A few days before the wedding, Mollie had already left for work and I was about to go to the studio when a distraught figure came racing back up Botany Street.

‘What's the matter?' I asked, looking at Mollie's frantic face. ‘I've lost my engagement ring, my diamond engagement ring,' Mollie repeated between bursts of sobbing.

‘Mollie, quieten down,' I tried to calm her. ‘It will be all right. We'll go home and look for it. We'll find it.'

Mollie and I searched both the dressing tables in our shared bedroom, hers first. I didn't see how the ring could be in mine, but we did it too from top to bottom, then the chest of drawers, then the wardrobe. We searched the whole house; no ring. It was nearly lunchtime by now.

Suddenly Mollie dramatically stuck her hand out in front of her. ‘My God, I'm
wearing
it!' she exclaimed.

In her ‘I'm-going-to-be-late-for-work' morning panic, Mollie had slipped the ring on her right hand. I heaved a sigh of relief and went off to the studio to salvage what was left of the day.

I was bridesmaid at the wedding. In the photos I am wearing a little velvet magenta hat, adorned with an impressive feather. Mary Edwards, the artist, saw the photos.

‘I must paint your portrait in those feathers,' she said.

I got on well with Mary Edwards, whom I had met at various times over the years. She used to exhibit with the Royal Art Society. She also knew and liked Doug because he had written about her paintings. We were both keen on her work.

Mary Edwards has been underrated as an artist, I think. She has been penalised too much for her squabble with the trustees of the New South Wales Art Gallery when Dobell won the Archibald Prize with his portrait of Joshua Smith. Although she did seem to have a penchant for litigation – the Dobell case was not her only court appearance – Mary Edwards was a fine portrait painter.

She used to visit Doug in the studio to discuss her dream. She had bought some land in the Blue Mountains at Mount Tomah which had views up and down the
mountains and Mary's dream was to turn it into a park, a conservationist's paradise. Her ideas about this park were ahead of her time.

Mary loved painting feathers. Most of her portraits of women have feathers in them; that's why she liked my hat. And so my souvenir of Mollie's wedding was immortalised. Her portrait of me, in fact, was one of the paintings Mary entered in the Archibald Prize contest in the year Dobell's portrait of Joshua Smith won. She also had a portrait of the aviatrix Nancy Bird Walton hanging in the Archibald that year.

With Mollie safely married off, I settled back to work.

A huge parcel addressed to Norman Lindsay arrived at 12 Bridge Street. Norman was up at Springwood but on his next visit to the studio he opened it and inside was the manuscript of
We Were the Rats
by Lawson Glassop. Norman was daunted by the enormous, unwieldy, untidy bundle of typescript. He leafed through a few chapters and handed it over to Doug. Doug's reaction was similar to Norman's.

The manuscript was accompanied by a desperate note from Lawson, imploring Norman to read the novel and tell him if it had any worth. I felt sorry for the worried author, besides which I was a compulsive reader, so I offered to read it myself. Norman and Doug both looked vastly relieved to be absolved of the duty.

All night I stayed up reading; I couldn't put it down. I was completely captivated by his story of the seige of Tobruk. The Australianness of it moved me; the way he described the line of men enlisting for the army. The officer asks one man what defence force he wants to join. The man looks back at him and shrugs. ‘I'm easy.' So of course they send him off to the infantry, the toughest part of the army.

I enthused to Norman and Doug the next day. ‘You must read it,' I said. ‘Skip the first two chapters. Lawson is just trying to find his way in those; they're not very good. Drop them off, the rest of the book is wonderful.'

So they read the manuscript and agreed with me. Norman sent off a letter full of praise to Lawson who was with the army up in northern Queensland. As soon as he read Norman's letter, Lawson went AWL.

He arrived at the studio door in an air force uniform, one of the three uniforms he used as disguise while making his way down from north Queensland to Sydney. He said he was so excited by Norman's letter that he had to come and see him.

Norman wrote to the army explaining why Lawson had disappeared, and asking that he not be in trouble as a consequence. The army took no action against Lawson, which shows how respected Norman was.

Another AWL sought refuge at the studio. A boy came round with a letter from Norman, allowing him to draw the model in the studio. The boy's sole ambition was to be an artist, but then he was conscripted. He protested violently. He hated the army, he said; he would never make a soldier.

To no avail. He was sent to a training camp in north Queensland where recruits were taught how to handle weapons. He told me afterwards that every time he held a rifle or bayonet, it made him sick and he vomited.

Apparently the army chose to ignore any weaknesses in their recruits. They were ordered overseas, this boy included. He couldn't stand the thought of having to go off and use these weapons on other men. So he fled back to Sydney and begged me to let him stay in the studio.

‘If they catch me, they'll shoot me for being a traitor,' he said, almost in tears.

It was heartrending, but I didn't really want him living in the studio and I was sure Norman wouldn't either. I persuaded him to telephone an aunt of his, who agreed to look after him. Immediately afterwards I rang Norman at Springwood, and Norman again wrote off to the boy's commanding officer.

More letters were required before the boy was let off and he had to go to Goulburn for some sort of psychiatric assessment or treatment, but soon after that he was released.

Although we had ration cards for food and petrol, we weren't as short of supplies as people in Europe, we had enough. Black market goods were always available; even if we didn't buy any, we knew they were around.

After Norman moved out of the studio, odd characters who had posed for him paid me the occasional visit. Sometimes they were looking for work, sometimes they were begging. I would give them two bob and they would go away.

A particularly scruffy fellow came by several times.

‘I want to see Norman Lindsay,' the conversation would begin.

‘Mr Lindsay isn't here,' I would answer, ‘he's up at Springwood.'

I expected the usual request for two bob at his next appearance, but instead this day he furtively produced a stained envelope from his pocket. He said he wanted to sell it to Mr Lindsay.

‘What's in it?' I couldn't resist asking.

Humming and ha-ing, shuffling and shifting, at last he said, ‘Can I trust you not to breathe a word of this?' and
produced a ration card for butter and meat. I don't know if it was his or not.

The temptation was too great for me.

‘How much do you want for it?' I asked.

‘Ten bob,' he replied.

I gave him ten bob and used the ration card on food when Doug and I next went to Springwood.

I don't suppose it was much of a crime, but I felt guilty and a bit haunted; I thought that since I had bought one card from him, he might come back with more. If I heard a knock at the door, I cowered.

‘My God, it's him!' I used to think.

Rosaleen Norton was another visitor at the studio. At one stage she lived above George Street in The Rocks in a strange three-storeyed stone building called Buggery Barn. Its occupants didn't really live in the building, they just seemed to camp there.

Rosaleen was always broke. I went to visit her in Buggery Barn once. She had a sick cat in the room with her. She didn't look very well herself, and the cat kept vomiting. I was appalled. She was an artist herself, but she also offered her services to other artists as a model.

‘Oh, please, Margaret, give me five shillings,' she would say in her quiet, refined and hesitant voice. ‘I've got to have some dinner. Give me five shillings and I'll pose for you.'

‘Don't bother about posing,' I would say as I gave her the money. Rosaleen wasn't a good model. She could hold a pose but wasn't particularly attractive. Her body was starved-looking and often covered in insect bites.

She had an obsession about looking like a witch. She used to draw on eyebrows that arched right up over her green eyes and her hair was dyed bright orange; I could remember
when it had been dark brown. I still have a drawing that I did of her looking very witch-like.

Very different were the two New Zealand nurses who came to visit Doug. They had been serving overseas and turned up in Sydney on their way home to New Zealand for rest leave before going off to war again.

Irene Taplin and her friend Johnno were both striking-looking and very tall, about five feet nine. It was summer, and they used to wear their white nurses' uniforms round town. Everyone in the street turned to stare because they were so stunning.

The girls used to call in at the studio about nine in the morning. ‘We've bought you a present,' they would chorus. The present would be a bottle of Bols gin in a lovely stone bottle.

The bottle was put on the table, we would chat for a while then one of the girls would say, ‘Let's have a gin.'

‘All right,' I would weakly answer.

Several gins later, they would happily make their way downstairs and head off uptown looking for adventures. They seemed fine. I was the one left staggering to face the day's work on three early morning gins. I don't know how many empty stone bottles of Bols gin were in the studio when they left.

I painted Irene Taplin twice, once in her uniform and once in her own clothes with an orange tiger lily in her hair which matched the lights in her brown eyes and the glint of her auburn hair. She was a real tawny beauty.

They also came up to Springwood with Doug and me and posed for Norman. Norman was very impressed, not only with their looks, but also with their contribution to the war.

On New Year's Eve, we had a party with the girls in Doug's flat at the Cross. At ten minutes to midnight we went down into the street for the procession they had through the Cross every New Year's Eve.

These two girls in their white nurses' uniforms led the procession. They strode along and everyone fell in behind them. People on the footpath cheered. The Cross was much smaller then; it seemed that all the people who lived there knew each other.

Doug came over to the studio every day for lunch now. He had been appointed literary editor of the
Bulletin
by this stage and I shared his excitement as the poetry came in. I remember his surprise and delight at discovering new talent, such as the day he received a poem from the sixteen-year-old schoolboy Francis Webb.

A young woman with her dark hair drawn back in a bun came to see him with a couple of poems: Nancy Keesing. Then there were Rosemary Dobson, shy and intense, and tall Nan McDonald, her long fair hair plaited in a crown round her head. Towards the end of the war came David Campbell in his air force uniform, fresh from fighting in New Guinea.