The Road from Coorain (16 page)

For a little while, we actually lived the dream. Bob’s life was taken up with piano lessons, music theory, and a growing interest in classical music. Now six feet four and a half in height, he was so handsome that people turned to stare at him on the street. Women and men alike found him instantly attractive, and he made friends easily with people of all ages. He seemed unconscious of his striking physical beauty, and was likely to take his little sister along to concerts as well as the young lady of the moment. He was unaffectedly happy at his progress as a pianist, tireless in practicing, and always ready to supervise my first efforts at the keyboard when I arrived home from school. Because he thought it important, he went along with me to the youth concerts of the Sydney symphony orchestra to enlarge my
musical education and encourage my beginning interest in performance.

Barry, now eighteen, promised to be as tall, though of slighter physique. He and Bob shared an interest in all things mechanical, especially cars, motorcycles, and the finer points of automotive design. The ancient sports cars of their friends were frequently pulled up outside our garage, while clusters of sun-bleached blond heads bent intently over temperamental engines, or while the group gazed silently at some wonder of engineering.

On my fourteenth birthday, the two boys presented me with my first grown-up dress. It represented their recognition of my early maturity, a recognition that startled my mother, who was reluctant to recognize that I was no longer a child. In fact, I was five feet six inches tall, emerging from my schoolgirl pudginess, and by turns precocious and childish. I circled happily around my brothers’ world and joined their expeditions, becoming as familiar with the language of sporting car enthusiasts as I already was with jazz.

Because of the attractions of my brothers’ company, I did not connect fully with my own generation. My school friends, now a lively and intelligent group of day students, began to discuss their romantic attachments with their counterparts at the neighboring boys’ schools, but I was too entranced by my brothers and their friends to share the interest. I was also too shy to strike out on my own and move beyond the world provided for me by family and school. I spent much time at weekends with my mother, and slipped back into the role of her confidante and emotional support. She would pour out her considerable body of worries to me, for as our financial pressures eased, her anxieties were simply redirected. She worried about whether my brothers’ friends were suitable, about simple decisions relating to the management of Coorain, and ominously, this most vigorous of women began to worry about her health. Feminist though she was, she did not question the accepted wisdom which defined the menopause as a
time of ill health. She counted every hot flash or night of interrupted sleep as a portent of disaster to come, and her confidences led me to see her as in delicate health. I was at a loss to offer relief from her worries, and there was sadly little in our environment to take her mind off them. Had she continued working in the city, friends might have got her to the theater, concerts, and lectures. As it was, she paced her lovely house, worried endlessly, and waited for her children to come home.

As Miss Everett had predicted, I began almost without noticing it to become absorbed in my studies at school, and it was these rather than the entertainments of my school friends which drew me into a world outside the family. Chemistry and biology were not just subjects, they offered the vision of an ordered material and living universe, whose elements and their components were arranged in complex patterns, the principles of which were dazzlingly simple. The wonder of making crystals and understanding the reasons why they formed left me so preoccupied I missed my stop on the afternoon train, and had trouble explaining why I was so late home. History classes now treated the question of causation, leaving the memorization of dates for larger questions of free will and determinism. Our study of Shakespeare was no longer the prettier comedies, but
Henry V
, opening the possibility of seeing history as a glittering pageant of greed, ambition, nobility, courage, and suffering.

I became possessed with the need to understand the world which produced Shakespeare, and began to comb the catalogues of my mother’s lending library for books on Tudor England. By accident, I came upon my first of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and was launched on reading about the Dark Lady guided by Miss Shell, one of the learned and brilliant literary scholars who taught English to the senior classes at Abbotsleigh.

I began to do very well academically, except in mathematics, an area in which the Abbotsleigh of my day displayed a tragicomic flaw. Much as we all admired Miss Everett, we could not help holding her accountable for her selection of Miss Allen as
the vice-principal of the school. Miss Allen, who taught senior mathematics, had the mind for detail and the passion for order which meant that she was more than willing to assume responsibility for working out the yearly class schedule. She flourished at administering stern rebukes to students who had misbehaved, and she throve on intimidating the younger teachers. She liked to be feared, and managed her classrooms by instilling fear in her charges. Her voice, usually sharp, would become soft and liquid as some poor student blundered from error to error in algebra. We all knew that she was savoring the chance to show up stupidity and that she would drag out the ordeal with feigned patience, until she turned with a sickly smile in the last minutes of the class to elicit the correct answer from someone who had known it all along. She was an extremely poor teacher whose temper could flare into hysterics if the students she regarded as gifted mathematically ever failed to get the point. Then her books would be slammed on the teacher’s desk, she would utter cries of rage and frustration, and sweep sobbing from the room.

We could not comprehend why such a person was kept in authority, and were too naive to understand that she performed unpleasant tasks for the Head, who was ready to acquiesce in other matters because the tiresome details of school administration were performed tirelessly and effectively. Miss Allen possessed great talents for self-dramatization, so that there were periods of hush around the staff room, as everyone kept quiet so as not to try Miss Allen’s nerves while she labored over the next term’s schedule. Indeed, much of the school’s discipline rested upon the universal agreement of all who came in contact with her that Miss Allen’s extremely delicate nerves should not be tested. We would collapse in nervous laughter at the recollection of one of her rages and undignified exits, yet we were careful to modulate our voices whenever she hove in sight. Comic as the emotional storms seemed, we were also aware of real inner suffering in Miss Allen, and consequently the classes in which she lost her balance were a torment even as they were absurd. I dreaded
mathematics classes, froze when she entered the room, and made my way through the various levels of senior mathematics by committing the solutions to all the problems in every text to memory, exactly as I would have set out to memorize the telephone book. She instilled an aversion to mathematics in everyone but the most mathematically talented, and convinced us all of the impossibility of ever developing the most modest mathematical skills.

Fortunately there were other, wonderful teachers, who gave us a sense of competence, and encouraged high intellectual aspirations. History and English literature were taught by women who might well have held university positions, yet who had the gift for fitting the level of their teaching to the abilities of their students. Miss Hughesdon and Miss Shell taught extra classes in their own free time for students with special interests in history and English. Our curriculum, set by the state educational authorities, contained no reference to Asia and Asian history, but Miss Hughesdon created extra classes for those curious about Japan, China, and our near neighbor Indonesia. Miss Shell happily read poetry with interested students, and it was in a borrowed volume of hers that I first read T. S. Eliot and discovered modern English poetry.

In 1949, the year my brother Bob turned twenty-one, I was in my third year of high school, transformed from adolescent rebellion to genuine intellectual interests. That year, I refused instruction for confirmation, explaining to a disapproving school chaplain, aptly named Canon Pain, that I had no religious faith. To my own experience of disaster at Coorain, I now added the pictures of Belsen and Dachau, and the chilling photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While these might well have convinced me of the truth of original sin, they served me at the time as further confirmation of the malign nature of the fates, and reinforced my sense of religious faith as a sentimental illusion.

My mother, normally a stickler for the correct thing in such matters, raised no objection, since she had become interested in
the anti-Christian ideas of Theosophy, and in the popular cult of spiritualism. Her interests were expressions of her inability to accept her own personal tragedy and her quest for some certainty on which she could rest a troubled spirit. Here her lack of education was a real handicap, because she had no historical or philosophical perspective from which to analyze her own experience of loss and grief. Because we lived in the cultural wasteland of suburbia, there were no schools or evening classes she might have attended which could offer an intellectually disciplined approach to her quest. Nor were there any churches which might have offered comfort through the beauty of their liturgy. The local Anglican church was evangelical and, like its neighboring Protestant congregations, was more concerned with controlling behavior than with death and salvation. So her quest led her to small sects and groups of bereaved persons like herself who looked for insight from scrambled versions of Eastern wisdom, or sought comfort in contact with the spirits of the dead. She looked for tangible signs of the survival after death of those she loved even as she studied great Oriental texts on surrendering the attachments of this world. My first awareness of her fallibility came from my recognition of the contradiction between these two desires, but the insight which this recognition prompted was indefinitely delayed by the fresh disasters which quickly turned my mother’s suburban dream into an uninterrupted nightmare.

The tensions within our household which unfolded around the celebration of Bob’s twenty-first birthday indicated the fragility of the illusions on which my mother’s dream rested. They were tensions of three kinds, all brought to the surface by the question of celebrating Bob’s coming of age. Our ample house would have been ideal for a party on the occasion, but my mother was reluctant because she disapproved of the manners and mores of the boys’ friends. Since these were mostly jazz musicians, music students, or sports car enthusiasts, they were a cheerfully iconoclastic lot, not the buttoned-up socially respectable types of whom my mother approved. Then there was an irreconcilable
difference of views about what refreshments should be served at such a party. Australian mores dictated champagne, or spirits and beer for such an occasion, and if these were not available, Bob wanted no celebration. My mother, equally intransigent, refused to consider a party for young people which served alcohol. So there was no celebration. Underneath these conflicts was a more profound one. My mother, who could be cheerfully sociable in the known world of the outback supported by her husband’s reassuring presence, never wanted to enter into the social world of a large city. She might want her children to make what she thought desirable friends, but she was incapable of creating a social world in which they might meet them. She could manage a sheep station superbly, but managing a social world alone as a hostess was simply beyond her consciousness. This meant that her efforts to control our destinies were mostly negative, and that our youthful quests for peers and lively social relationships took place entirely outside our home. It also meant that she relied more and more on her children for intellectual and emotional companionship, and that there was no constructive outlet for her formidable energies.

Bob’s birthday was marked by the gift of a tiny vintage car, antiquated, contrary, and endlessly fascinating to him as he fiddled with its engine, assembled and disassembled its transmission, and fussed with its valves. We had hilarious rides in it, tearing noisily around our neighborhood, pushing it as much as we rode, elated at the pleasure of riding in an open car in the perfume-filled midday sunshine of Sydney’s mild winter climate. It was a symbol of release from train and bus schedules, the promise of speed and motion just at the moment when we were all straining to break free of childhood constraints. We were certain that Bob would win many prizes driving it, and that with the three of us to shine it and polish its every nut and bolt it would triumph in tests of its class.

The second weekend after Bob’s birthday was a school long weekend for which I invited home a boarder friend, Jocelyn
McLean, a beautiful and gentle person I had sat next to in class for several years. We were to enjoy a variety of feasts from my mother’s kitchen, plumb the pleasures of a matinée at the local movie house, and take long walks in the beautiful countryside which verged on our pretty suburb. Bob was to be away that weekend competing with a friend in a road rally which would last two days and nights. We saw him off, blue eyes shining, after he had dashed in for his piano practice and collected the maps that were needed to chart the complicated route of the drive. His excitement was infectious. He was part of a two-man team, driving an open sports car, and they were well favored to win their class. Barry went from work to speed them on their way, and join in the lively party of the various clubs which were participating in the rally.

Our evening at home was taken up with the usual occupations of schoolgirls: long confidences about ourselves and our families; laughter about the personal quirks and absurdities of our teachers, tall stories for my mother about pranks of the past. We fell into bed at eleven, full of hot cocoa and cookies, and talked drowsily for a very short time before falling asleep on what turned out to be a very frosty winter night.