Autobiography of My Mother (30 page)

‘What happened?' I asked, startled.

Gladys recounted the sad story. Lindy's kitchen was in the basement. A small lift in which the food came up and down ran between the restaurant and the kitchen. We often saw Lindy anxiously peering down the shaft, checking the working apparatus, we supposed. This night Lindy was looking in the column when the lift fell down on his head.
That was the end of Lindy. Gladys was right. It was enough to make you go to church on Sundays.

Beatrice McCaughey had given me a sum of money as a wedding present and with it we bought a tiny dark green secondhand Ford Prefect. Until we rented a garage, Doug used to park the car on the corner of Greenknowe Avenue where the post office is, which was a block of vacant land.

The little car made a big difference to our lives. Now we could go painting or exploring at will. We liked beaches, most of all Warriewood, especially in winter. Unbuilt on, unspoilt, steep sandstone headlands protected a swirl of white foaming surf. We had to clamber down to the sand on foot.

Once, Claudia Forbes-Woodgate and a friend saw me perched precariously halfway up the Warriewood cliff. I was looking intently down at the water and every so often I put something down on a sheet of paper in front of me.

Both being artists they were intrigued by this. This was before Claudia and I had met but the friend thought she recognised me and climbed up the cliff for a closer inspection.

‘That's Margaret Coen,' she reported to Claudia, ‘and she's trying to do a wave.'

The wave worked out well; Howard Hinton bought it for his Armidale collection. Years later when we moved to St Ives, I met Claudia properly. We exhibited together at the Watercolour Institute and the Royal Art and became close friends.

Beatrice McCaughey was also involved with the most unusual visitors I ever had at 12 Bridge Street. Grandma Coen's sister, the nun, who was by now very old, wrote me a letter asking if the nuns could come and see my pictures. I
thought she meant two nuns – herself and one other. I wrote back agreeing and a time was made for their visit.

The day I was expecting the nuns Beatrice rang up and wanted to see me. I dutifully took myself round to the Hotel Australia. After having had just a couple of gins with her – Beatrice was rather partial to gins by now – I managed to escape. The nuns were due at two-thirty. It was two o'clock when I began rushing back to the studio. As I came flying down Bridge Street I saw what looked like a black cloud rolling down the hill from George Street and disappearing into number 12.

The nuns had arrived half an hour early. They were clustered blackly round the door of the studio by the time I'd climbed the stairs. Not two nuns. Nine nuns. The shades of Venus and Apollo, to say nothing of Bacchus, must have been in a state at such a visitation, I wrote in an account of the afternoon that I sent up to Norman. Anyway, I let the nuns in. There was no time to open the windows or clean my teeth to get rid of the perfume of gin. However, it all seemed to be going quite well until one took a deep ecstatic breath and said, ‘You can tell it's a studio, smell the turps.'

I immediately flung the widows wide open. She took another deep breath and repeated that she loved the smell of turps and paint. I replied that I did too. But some people find it oppressive, I added. Then I offered her a chair to sit on because I didn't want her fainting on me. Somehow she missed the chair and ended up on the floor.

‘I can assure you I have not been to a public house on the way,' she proceeded to announce.

No, but I have, I felt like replying. The afternoon passed relatively smoothly after that. The nuns duly departed. I hardly had time to heave a sigh of relief before Beatrice
arrived with nine boxes of beautiful chocolates and nine bouquets of flowers for my visitors. Beatrice and I had to jump into a taxi and chase the nuns out to Enmore where they were staying.

At the time it was like being in the middle of a mad dream. Afterwards my only fear, as I concluded in my letter to Norman, was that the nuns would pass the word on about the flowers and chocolates, and start calling on the studio en masse.

I didn't stop painting for a minute after I was married. I kept the studio on. When I wasn't painting landscapes on car excursions with Doug, I worked on my usual flower pieces. I used to get exasperated in summer when I had to keep doing variations of roses and lilies. Apart from those two flowers, often all I seemed to be able to find at florists were zinnias, zinnias, zinnias, which I couldn't come at because they reminded me of the rather formal flower painting of an artist called Albert Sherman. I used to long for April when the flowers would improve. Spring flowers with delicate forms and colour were what I found most appealing.

In 1946 I had a show at the Centennial Galleries in Brisbane. The war had stopped me having more solo exhibitions before that. I didn't go up to Brisbane because travelling was so expensive, but the show almost sold out and the relayed accounts of its success were thrilling, to say nothing of the financial remuneration.

Norman wrote a very flattering introduction for the catalogue in which he talked about the ‘full brush' method of watercolour painting, when ‘a brush is loaded with water and pigment'. There were twenty-one watercolours of
flowers and seven watercolour landscapes, as well as seven oil flower studies and one landscape in oils called
Near Duckmaloi
. My painting of the yacht at Elizabeth Bay was included, and another was again titled
From Merle's Garden
in tribute to Mick Blunden's Kurrajong retreat and her generosity with flowers.

The following year, to Doug's and my great delight, I was pregnant. We dearly wanted children.

No morning sickness, not a pain or an ache. The nine months passed without a hitch and only in the last few weeks did my feet start to swell. They were so swollen that I had to buy a pair of men's shoes. John Fountain from the
Bulletin
got them afterwards; nice blue suede shoes, they were.

I amused my doctor. About a month before the birth was due, I called in for my routine check-up, carrying a shopping basket with a bottle of milk and a few other things.

‘You're off home now, are you?' he asked kindly as I stood up to leave.

‘Oh, no,' I replied. ‘Actually, I'm on my way in to the studio. I have a painting to finish.'

We decided to move out of Larbert and live at the studio. Crick Avenue was up three floors; a long way to carry a baby and baby things. Bridge Street had two flights of stairs which was an improvement and the front room was enormous. We had much more space.

We organised ourselves into the studio just before Christmas. The baby was due at the beginning of January. Almost the last morning at the Cross we woke up very early. It was intolerably hot and breathless so we drove down to Bondi and walked along the beach. The beach at that hour is at its best. The water and walk revived me and I've never forgotten them.

The worst of the move was having a refrigerator installed. Our new refrigerator arrived one morning just as Doug and I were having breakfast. The two men who delivered it were very indignant at being expected to carry such a heavy load up two flights of stairs. After ranting at us for non-stop for about five minutes they announced they were taking the fridge away again.

Doug was furious and told them he was going over to the
Bulletin
office to arrange for ‘a gang of men' to help shift it. After another five minutes Doug arrived back with the journalist Phil Dorter and two huge men, whose job was to haul the great rolls of newsprint around. Between the lot of them, amid much grunting and groaning, they managed to move the fridge upwards. Being summer made it even more uncomfortable for them, of course. They had just negotiated the awkward bend in the stairs when the tiny cleaner who worked in the building appeared.

‘Don't you mark them walls,' she scolded. ‘If you do Mr Parker will shoot the lot of yous.'

Mr Parker, who owned the building, was the most proper of old gentlemen. He always wore a flower in his buttonhole and, needless to say, would never have dreamed of shooting anyone.

The studio was much the same as when Norman had been in residence except I had moved in my mirror that I had in my very first studio in Margaret Street. Norman's bookcases with the boxes underneath for drawings were there; he couldn't be bothered having them moved up to Springwood. His lacquered screen covered the odd little square-shaped stove. It was years before I had a proper gas stove.

I bought a round cedar table and a cedar sideboard from
an auction shop in William Street, a couple of comfortable chairs which I re-covered, and a set of delicate cedar dining chairs from the auction rooms opposite in Bridge Street. These were a mistake, because the backs were so frail that they broke whenever a male guest leaned back after dinner.

We weren't short of company. Doug's friends from the
Bulletin
, Ron McCuaig, John Fountain and Phil Dorter, often dropped in for lunch or dinner. Cecil Mann from the
Bulletin
never came to the studio, but his wife knitted me a beautiful blue and white coat for the baby. Beatrice McCaughey brought a parcel of oysters to celebrate the move. Beryl McCuaig was a frequent visitor who always made me laugh with her quick wit and gossipy anecdotes.

The first night I spent in the studio, I woke about three in the morning. An incredible clatter was going on, clanging and banging. I couldn't make out what the noise was; it sounded like a battalion of tanks rolling down the street.

God, I thought, not another war.

It was the street cleaners.

‘We'll never be able to stay here,' I whispered agitatedly to Doug who was now awake too. ‘We can't be woken up like this every night.' I was well and truly alarmed.

Strangely enough, that was the first and only night the noise of the street cleaners woke or worried me.

A lane ran down the side of 12 Bridge Street into another lane between Bridge and Dalley streets. Our bedroom windows faced onto this back lane while the front windows opened onto the side lane. More life went on in the lane behind the studio than I ever saw at the Cross. Drunks naturally congregated there, robberies were common, there were bashings and rapes, heterosexual and homosexual.

As well as harbouring assorted misdeeds, the lanes were
great getaway routes for villains. It was possible to go from Bridge Street to Circular Quay via the lanes without entering either Pitt or George streets. The Dalley Street lane led into another lane and so on down to the harbour.

Our windows overlooked the little lane at the side of the studio. These windows faced the nor'easter so the winter sun came in, making it nice and warm, but there was a sheer drop from all the windows. The thought of that drop and a baby terrified me. So Phil Dorter came over and fixed bars outside the window for me, to my relief.

Christmas came and went. Doug and I took a showboat trip up Middle Harbour. The ferry shuddered and shook the whole way and we were both convinced the baby was going to be born on the showboat, but the infant stayed put.

On New Year's Eve we stayed in the studio and didn't go up to the Cross for the procession, the first time we missed it in years. It was January.

Doug had booked a private car to take me to hospital; our own car was garaged out of the city. I don't know why we didn't think of calling for an ambulance. Stella Kidgell and Isa Lorrimer said we could use either of their phones when the time came. (There was no phone in the studio.) I painted placidly on. There wasn't anything else to do. Unlike my hastily purchased wedding dress, this time I had shown some foresight and collected a layette for the baby.

The McCuaigs moved into a new flat at Thompsons Bay and we spent an afternoon visiting them. After we left we drove down to the beach and sat looking at the water, then we went for tea with Mum in the flat at Botany Street.

Grandma was dead by then but Kathleen had kept up the tradition of despatching Yass Christmas cakes to all the
family. She used Grandma's recipe and sent a cake to each of her sisters in the convent and one always arrived at Botany Street for Mum. I had already eaten a fair share over Christmas, but I could never say no to Grandma's cake. This Sunday night was no exception, but about three in the morning I woke up feeling dreadful.

‘I'm going to be sick,' I thought. ‘I shouldn't have eaten the Christmas cake.'

For an hour I lay there feeling ill and blaming the cake. Pain started round my back. It wasn't the cake; the baby was coming.

Doug shot upstairs and called the car he had booked. I made my way down the two flights of stairs, which I didn't much appreciate, but I managed it.

The driver set off in a tearing hurry. I think he was terrified the birth was going to happen in his nice clean car. In fact, the baby wasn't born until three in the afternoon. Doug kept telling him to slow down, the driver would relax for a second, then his foot would be on the accelerator again.