Autobiography of My Mother (36 page)

Undoubtedly their closeness must have been galling for Rose. (Perhaps that's why Mum never spoke of it; maybe she was plain embarrassed about it in later years.) Rose, in the letter to Kenneth Mackenzie mentioned before, had a lot to say about the affair. As Rose bluntly puts it, my mother ‘got' – as in landed – Norman in about 1932.
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She describes Norman as initially having been ‘besotted' by my mother and proud as a ‘pouter pigeon' to have been involved with a woman so much younger than him. She also says plainly that he told her before she left for America in 1940 that the affair was over.

Rose, as you might expect, is not very complimentary about Mum in her letters to Mackenzie of this period (after all, she was letting off steam in a private letter to a sympathetic and attractive male recipient). Another, dated 1942, includes one of her comic drawings mentioned in
Letters & Liars
; it shows my mother, overly large, and a diminutive Norman waiting together at Springwood station to catch the train.
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Just to complicate matters, Mackenzie, ‘a silver-tongued, charming Adonis', as Mum described him, and very much married, claimed in a letter to Rose in October 1941 to have
had an affair with my mother that lasted nearly four years.
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However, two months later he confessed to Rose that he had been more or less drunk for the past four weeks and that given this he may not always have been the most reliable of correspondents.
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It should be pointed out here, too, that in the early 1940s Mackenzie was involved with Jane Lindsay, to whom he dedicated his collection of love poems
The Moonlit Doorway
, published in 1944.

The letters between Norman and my mother began when Norman left the studio at 12 Bridge Street in 1940 and went back to live at Springwood. There is no written record of when their passion was supposedly at its height. A few of my mother's early letters to Norman were put in the Mitchell Library by Rose Lindsay, and I placed many more there at a much later date (at the time unread by me).
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Rose attached to the letters she deposited the wry comment: ‘Very amusing examples of the “Puss Puss” period.'
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What the letters reveal is the undeniable bond between Mum and Norman in the Bridge Street days of the 1930s. Both mad about cats, they refer to each other in the letters as ‘Dearest' or ‘Darling Puss'. Mind you, it wasn't just Norman; Mum called all those close to her ‘puss' for most of her life. In letters to Norman after I was born I am the ‘little puss'. It becomes really confusing when she starts writing about Silver, the cat Dad gave her, as ‘Puss' or ‘Master Puss'. Oh no, who is she talking about now, you wonder, before realising that this time she is referring to a real cat.

The early letters, written while Rose was in America, also show how much my mother looked after – fussed over, you might say – Norman. When she returned from seeing him,
probably for the first time, settled in his Springwood studio at the back of the main house, she wrote: ‘Dear Puss, I arrived in town safely, last night. I felt very blue leaving puss & had a weep in the train but I had no idea how beautiful & convenient everything is up there. I am getting busy on the studio so when puss comes down he will be surprised how clean it is; it really is terribly fusty, it makes me think I have neglected puss.'
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Further on in the same letter she mentions sending him some tobacco, some warm underpants and pyjamas. ‘Make sure puss that they give you a green veg everyday & pears or apples & keep up your food,' she instructs, a few lines later. ‘I think you will be very comfortable puss & it is very fitting to see the dear cat in beautiful & dignified surroundings.' Now the letter
is
signed with six crosses for kisses.

There is no sex in the letters. About as physical as they get are the mentions of Norman's frequent lumbago attacks and the various other ailments they suffered from, such as colds and stomach upsets. During the first winter Norman was back at Springwood Mum made him a warm jacket, which did provoke a more overtly romantic response than usual from him:

The incriminating ‘Puss Puss period' of address, except for occasional lapses, soon eased off. Cats, however, maintained an ongoing presence in their letters. Norman nearly always managed to include some anecdote concerning the antics of the Springwoods cats, and often enclosed a drawing of them.

The letters are also full of painting and the problems they were encountering in their work. ‘I wish I was down with you to discuss harmonies in water colour,' Norman confesses in one. ‘Don't forget the invariable rule that there is no brilliancy in water colour without an under wash of yellow, especially if you are using cool colour. Particularly blues.'
³⁰
An exchange went on through several letters about the commissioned portrait of the woman in pearls Mum had such a struggle with. There are a few, not very many, swipes at modern art and contemporary Australian artists.

Apart from art, they wrote about what they were reading, the weather, what my father was writing and so on. (During all this time he and Norman also kept up a separate literary correspondence.) There were frequent requests for my mother to send up tobacco, tubes of oil or watercolour paint, such as Raw Sienna, Purple Madder, Alizarin Crimson, New Blue or Aureolin, and various other painting necessities. Besides fulfilling such requests, Mum was always despatching cakes, biscuits or chocolates to him. (Oddly enough, she also prepared Norman's income tax returns during the 1930s and 40s, a task which gets quite a few mentions.)

Rose returned, unhappy, to Springwood in 1941. Most of the paintings from the sixteen crates of Norman's best work that she had hoarded over the years and taken to America (out of concern about the war) had been destroyed in a fire
at Pennsylvania as they were being transported by train to New York. This devastated her. As soon as she arrived home Norman dashed off a letter to my mother saying that Rose wanted to call on her and bring her up to Springwood ‘to sort of ease off her job of having to tell me about it'.
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While one feels this might be a not entirely accurate version of events, it is interesting. (Norman, in fact, reacted to the loss of his works with surprising equilibrium, merely announcing to Rose that he would have to paint her some replacements, which he promptly set about doing.)

From 1939 on, my father was well and truly on the scene. His letters to her, usually written when he was away fishing, or when she was away at Yass, show how clearly he was smitten. ‘The world does not exist without you,' he finished up in one.
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In another, having explained the inadequacy he felt buying some watercolour papers at Penfolds to post to her, he continued with the declaration: ‘You are a benevolent, beautiful & brilliant person & you are sadly missed.'
³³

My mother's letters to my father are embellished with a more grown-up flirtatiousness than her ‘Puss Puss' letters to Norman. In a letter from Mylora, where she had been staying while painting a portrait of Mollie Garry, she begins by remarking that, thank God, she's finished the face, so now there are only trees and background left to do. Then she tells my father how she has been on a walk along the creek the day before. ‘Coming back through a dark green paddock were enormous white mushrooms, the kind you would see in a dream,' she writes. ‘I filled my skirt up with them & walked home very rudely with the upper part of my legs showing. I am sure you would have enjoyed the sight.'
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In a letter of November 1940, after remarking that she hopes there were no blondes on a motor car trip he
has taken in Victoria, and that he hasn't been tempted by any fillies at the Melbourne Cup, she reminds him that abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. She ends cheekily, with a touch of her school-day humour: ‘Be kind to accept a kiss behind your hairy knees & one on each ear & your noble brow with all love from Margaret the “Grey Ape of Clarendon”.'
³⁵

My father's accounts of the days he and Mum stayed together at Springwood, firstly with just Norman and Jane when Rose was away and then later with more of the Lindsays, are filled with a nostalgia for halcyon days. ‘What a twittering and a twinkling and tinkling of laughter and a froufrou of pretty dresses and a glitter of witty, wicked conversation there was,' he describes in his memoir of Norman.
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He lists, too, the number of poems he wrote between 1940 and 1955 which owed their inspiration to Springwood and the surrounding bush. The helmet orchid that looked like a little purple ear bent to the ground; a water scorpion in the fishpond; a drowned kookaburra in the swimming pool that he transferred in words to the waterfall in the gully and turned into a Bunyip; snake orchids with blood-red darting heads; a red-breasted robin bathing in a rock pool; Slim Jim, the Springwood cat, chasing a toad across the lawn at night – all became poetry.
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In
Portrait of Pa
Jane Lindsay recalls how Norman was forever encouraging everyone to ‘keep at' their particular creative endeavour. ‘Margaret was kept at her watercolours,' Jane writes, ‘and would bring bunches of flowers with her on Friday night ready for the weekend painting jag. She worked with quiet industry in the corner of the studio with Pa
darting over to inspect her watercolour from time to time and comment encouragingly, dropping an odd hint or two about colour or wash as he flitted by.'
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Norman's opinion of Mum's work was expressed in a letter he wrote replying to one of hers about how moved she was (it reduced her almost to tears, in fact) by the way he had ‘fought the battle for faith in art, & surmounted the depression of the world at war, to produce the most inspiring and beautiful painting' he had ever done.
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Norman's reply also unequivocally indicates what Mum meant to him:

Lin Bloomfield, in her recently published
Norman Lindsay Oil Paintings: 1889–1969
, quotes a letter by Norman to his old friend John Tremearne. It was written in the 1940s after he had been staying at 12 Bridge Street: