Autobiography of My Mother (3 page)

They travelled through Ireland, visiting Cloonmore and Sneem where the O'Dwyers came from; then Scotland, before settling down at Appledore to wait for the birth. In Kent Dad took things particularly easy. Soon after the baby was born, they returned to Australia.

To escape from Grandma Coen, Dad bought a small business of his own, a general store in Nowra on the New
South Wales south coast. My sister Mollie was born just before this in 1903; my second brother Jack was born in Nowra in 1905.

One day Mollie and Jack rushed excited into the Nowra store, begging Mum to come and look at the big yellow dog in the yard. The dog was a lion that had escaped from the circus. Jack and I have always had a terrible weakness for circuses.

Dad's great success in Nowra was having a billiard room erected at the School of Arts. But he was not a businessman. The dairy farmers round Nowra were suffering because there had been no rain. Dad sent a bill out only once; if people didn't pay he let it go. The farmers couldn't pay their bills because of the drought and Dad was going broke. The drought broke, the farmers still didn't or couldn't pay their bills; that was the end of Dad's business in Nowra.

To the disappointment of the local musical circle and Dramatic Club (as reported in the
Shoalhaven Telegraph
), he wrote to Grandma Coen saying he would have to return to Yass and work in the store. By 1908 he and Mum, with my two brothers and my sister, had moved back to Yass. My mother wasn't happy. She didn't like Yass or Grandma Coen. She thought my father ought to have stayed out on his own instead of going back to his mother.

Grandma bought them a house in Rossi Street, Yass. The house was large, my mother found it too hard to look after. She thought the open drains in the back yard were unsanitary. Mum was miserable. Even though she had bought the house, Grandma wasn't any fonder of Mum. In fact, Grandma openly ignored her and refused to speak to her. For her part, Mum thought Grandma was taking advantage
of Dad's working in the family business not to pay him a proper salary.

Grandma's hostility scandalised Father Alphonsus, Dad's half-brother, when he visited Yass for a holiday. Father Alphonsus took Mum aside and told her Grandma had no right to treat her like this. He also had a word to the parish priest. Next time pious Grandma went off to confession, the parish priest delivered her quite a lecture about being uncharitable. If Mrs Coen wasn't nicer to her daughter-in-law, he warned, there would be no absolution for her.

Soon after, while Jack and Mollie were playing outside, a strange young woman appeared, looking very friendly.

‘Come here, little boy, little girl, come and talk to me,' she said. Grandma had sent Dad's young sister Mollie to act as peacemaker. It was the first time Mollie and Jack had met her. Relations between Mum and Grandma became fractionally more cordial after that, at least in public.

Mum was expecting another baby at this stage; she miscarried. Then quickly she became pregnant again.

I firmly believed that the angels dropped me over the wrought-iron lace balcony as they flew past on Palm Sunday morning.

I was born on 4 April 1909 in the Rossi Street house Grandma had bought for my parents. It had been the old Braidwood Store before Grandma converted it into a private residence. The house was two-storeyed, the front door opened onto the street, the upstairs balcony overhung the street by about twenty feet. We slept on this verandah in summer; in winter we roller-skated along it.

The house was called Kenmare after the Bay of Kenmare in Ireland, but someone had scratched out the ‘a' and changed it into an ‘o' so it read ‘Kenmore', which was the name of the lunatic asylum in Goulburn. As long as we lived in the house, the ‘o' remained. The house had ten rooms, which was one of the things my mother had against it. Even though she had a servant to help her, it was still too much work for her. The rooms were enormous.

The playroom-cum-sewing room was huge; I suppose it had been a storeroom originally. We could do anything in
that room – draw on the walls or scribble over them; my mother never went near it. We kept our toys in the playroom and on wet days we didn't move from there.

A mission was being held up at the church and lengthy sermons went on. My mother heard strange sounds coming from the playroom. We used to lock ourselves in so she had to look through the keyhole. Jack had draped an eiderdown over his shoulders. He had the cat up on a chair and was giving it a wonderful sermon, like the mission bishop at church, all about the mortal sins cats commit.

Through the gaps between the floorboards in the sewing room, we could look at the swallows building nests on the rafters below; we could see the baby swallows when they were born and watch their mothers feeding them.

Over the wrought-iron lace balcony, we had a grandstand view of the town's funeral processions. We loved the hearse, adorned with black plumes and trappings. Rossi Street led up what was called Cemetery Hill. The horse and plumes would be followed by a line of buggies, followed in turn by men on horseback.

Doctor English, our family doctor in Yass, ordered my mother to take long walks; she complained of being tired and lacking energy, of not enjoying life. The walks were not the right treatment, for they left her more exhausted than ever, but I loved them. Every afternoon, my mother and I set off. Our walks took the same route as the funeral processions. Rossi Street soon turned into a steep hill with quaint little cottages. Their front gardens were crammed with flowers. The hollyhocks planted along the fences were ten feet high; creamy yellow, red and mauve flowers and much taller than I. Bluebells grew everywhere beside the road; bluebells and creeping pink flowers, tiny pink
convolvulus which I called pink bluebells, much to my mother's amusement.

At the top of Cemetery Hill, the road turned right and meandered past paddock after paddock until it reached the cemetery. Usually we walked to the first paddock. I would break away from my mother's hand, squeeze under the fence and go racing across the stubble of grass and through the blue and white flag lilies with their wild smell. I would pick a bunch of lilies from the paddock to take home. The next day, we would hold a fete. The flag lilies and anything else I had picked over the fences on the way home I put in jamjars. (I always took any flower I could over a fence; I still do.)

I made mud pies for my stall, too. They were almost good enough to eat, decorated with whiting we kept for cleaning the hearth. All morning I stood hopefully by the stall waiting for customers, flicking away the flies with a gum leaf twig.

The stall was out the back near the yellow pisé wall that ran round the house. A gate in the wall led to an orchard and by the gate was an old fig tree. The pisé wall was wide enough to run along, and the fig tree could be climbed from the wall. During summer we stuffed ourselves with the purply figs, waiting until they were so ripe they were ready to burst before we pushed them into our greedy mouths.

A Jersey cow lived in the orchard. Dad used to milk it and Mum left the milk in big basins on the stove overnight. In the mornings she peeled off cream half an inch thick. We put it on our porridge with brown sugar. We also ate bread and jam with a slice of cream.

The orchard had a side fence that was also the back yard of a man who had an open-air picture show. In the evenings we used to go down there, climb the fence, balance precariously and watch the distant flickering screen. We saw crazy
Keystone comedies, Ben Turpin looking cross-eyed, Mabel Normand simpering coyly. Then someone would fall off the fence and we would be sent home to bed.

Opposite our house was the court house and behind it the police station. The court house had a porticoed front like the Parthenon. Whenever I looked at the court house, I thought of Cuckoo Singh.

Cuckoo Singh was an Indian hawker who had lost his mind. I always thought he was called ‘Cuckoo' after the bird. Only later I realised where his name came from. Cuckoo Singh had a breakdown and was locked in the gaol, which had cells surrounded by a high stone wall. We were sleeping out on the balcony and lay awake all night, listening to Cuckoo Singh screaming.

The next day he was taken off to the asylum, Kenmore, at Goulburn. On the way, they said, he tore up the floor of the wagon with his teeth.

Cuckoo Singh haunted our nightmares. If we wanted to frighten other children, we told them the story of Cuckoo Singh.

There were other terrors in those early days, such as the greenhide. This was a weapon wielded on the boys by my father, whom I recall as an impressive figure with a gingery moustache. One day the greenhide vanished. Somehow I knew it was at the bottom of the water tank and that my brother King had put it there. The boys won. The greenhide was not replaced.

Dad loved concerts, theatricals, receptions, dinners, entertainment of every description. There was tremendous shouting from the sewing room whenever he was preparing for a concert. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more', his voice boomed out.

Dad never stayed around the house much. If he wasn't off to a theatrical event in later years he was up at the Soldiers' Club. The children … well, we were very nice, but that was all the notice he took of us. Nevertheless we worshipped him.

One exciting time he won the prize at a fancy dress ball by going as a cabbage. He had spent the day before sewing cabbage leaves onto an old suit. Then he wanted to take me to a Red Cross conscription rally to play the part of a dead Belgian child, but Mum wouldn't permit it. My mother regarded Dad's eagerness to join in other people's parties with little sympathy. She said Dad would do anything for anybody except his own family.

Mum had been very fond of Dad when they were married, but they had different temperaments and she had grown tired of his easygoing joviality and impracticality.

‘Your father is a fool,' she would snap, but we loved him because he made us laugh, like the time he took us to see a Charlie Chaplin film at Williams' Picture Show.

A fat aunt who was visiting Grandma came with us. Dad was not a small man either. As we were sitting there, in a row of canvas deck chairs and laughing at Chaplin walking bowlegged in baggy trousers, suddenly Dad's deck chair collapsed.

‘Get me out of this!' he shouted. But we were already too weak from laughing to help him up. Then our aunt's chair gave way. We thought we would die of laughter.

Dad's impracticality went back to boyhood. On one occasion he had dropped a match into a barrel from the store that contained a small quantity of spirits. The barrel was blown to pieces in the explosion that followed. Dad's hair was singed and his clothes burned, but apart from a
minor injury and the fright of it he was unharmed. ‘A narrow escape for Master Coen', the
Yass Courier
summed up this escapade.

Things weren't very different in adulthood.

When the Jersey cow was blown, he summoned the boys and they lit a bonfire in the back yard. Dad heated the poker Mum brought him; the boys were to hold the cow while Dad tried to pierce her side with the red-hot poker.

The cow broke loose.

‘Hold her, hold her!' Dad's commands were too late; the cow was already out of the orchard and up the lane. Dad's agitation at the cow escaping was nothing to his frenzy when he picked up the poker, which he had dropped in the excitement, by the red-hot end.

‘Your father is a fool,' sighed Mum in exasperation.

The tank sprang a leak. Dad's method of fixing it was to nail a piece of tin over the hole.

‘Your father is a fool,' became a household refrain.

Dad remained amiable. He retaliated only once. He had come back from some country excursion with a very young white cockatoo. My mother was left the job of feeding it, and it squawked day and night.

Mrs English, the doctor's wife, paid us a visit and Mum told her a tale of woe about the bird. Mrs English liked white cockatoos and told Mum she would be happy to look after even a very young, noisy one.

My mother gave her the cockatoo, telling her not to say where the bird had come from. Mum's plan was to tell my father that it had escaped and flown away.

The cockatoo was in a box. Mrs English left the house and immediately went down to Coen's store to buy a cage for it. By some mischance, my father served her. She
explained what she needed and as she departed with the cage, the awful truth dawned on Dad. He came home straight after work and confronted Mum.

‘Did you give my cockatoo to Mrs English?' he demanded.

Argument and recrimination lasted for hours, but my mother didn't ask for the cockatoo back. My father never brought another bird into the house, either.

My best friend Gladys lived two doors up. Because my brothers King and Jack and my sister Mollie were older than I was, I didn't play with their friends much. Gladys and I shared a passion for cats. We dressed them up in dolls' clothes and dragged them around the yard in a boot box attached to a piece of string.

Gladys came to the door in tears one day when my mother was out, and told me her mother was dead. An angel had come in the night and had taken her mother to heaven, she said.

She asked me to her house and we crept into her mother's bedroom. It was very quiet. In the middle of the room was a long, polished wooden box. We looked into it and saw Gladys' mother lying whitefaced and perfectly still. Beside her was a tiny waxen baby, no bigger than a doll.

I was shocked. The day before, Gladys' mother had been alive. She had given Gladys and me a piece of cake each. I thought the dead baby was the angel who had come to take her away. I couldn't understand why the angel was dead too.

We stood by the coffin crying until someone led us outside. Gladys, still crying, came home with me. I took Gladys into my parents' bedroom where my mother kept two pretty rings in a little silver box on her dressing table.

‘Never mind, Gladys,' I said. ‘You can have these if you stop crying.'

Gladys accepted the rings. The sparkling stones stopped her tears and she took them home with her. Later, a woman arrived at the door and asked my mother if the rings were hers. I was in trouble because I had given away my mother's engagement ring.

The funny little steam train that we used to call ‘the tram' was quite a feature of Yass. It ran from Yass to Yass Junction, crossing the Yass River by the railway bridge. The boys in Yass, including my brothers, used to walk halfway across the railway bridge, then hang upside down by the sleepers as the tram went past. Gladys and I listened enviously to their stories of this feat. We wanted to be as daring as the boys.

The tram tracks through town ran along a road parallel to the main street. Accidents happened wherever the tram crossed the road. People in buggies were killed; later there were car accidents. We were always being told how dangerous it was to play around the tram tracks.

Gladys and I heard the boys saying that, if you put pennies on the tram line, the tram would pass over them and make them twice the size. We decided to try for ourselves. Either we were too slow running away from the line or we didn't run far enough, because the tram stopped where we had put our pennies.

The tram driver got out and chased us. Gladys and I ran for our lives. The tram driver kept shouting that he would tell our parents we had been playing on the tram tracks. Fortunately Rossi Street was just around the corner from the tramline. Gladys and I breathed a deep sigh of relief when we were safely home. We vowed never to go near the tramline again.

Brothers could be a torment. I came into the playroom one day and found sawdust scattered over the floor. King and a friend had been operating on my favourite doll. They had cut her down the middle to take out her appendix. No attempt had been made to stitch the patient up after the operation and I fled in tears with my ravaged doll.

I remember very little about my curly-haired sister Mollie, except that I envied her curls. By the time I became aware of her, she and King had won scholarships to boarding school. They were whisked away to Goulburn for the next five years.

King had gingery, sandy hair and freckles; Jack was very red-haired with freckles. My own black hair was fine and straight with coppery highlights, different from my mother's and Mollie's blue-black hair. I also had freckles, which I hated, but, like Mum, Mollie didn't have a freckle on her face.

For a while Grandma also owned a house at Randwick in Sydney where the family could stay. When my brothers were having a holiday there, Dad's brother Barney took them out fishing in a rowing boat at Coogee. They sat in the boat with their feet up as they dangled their lines over the side. Since they were all so gingery and white-skinned, Barney included, the soles of their feet were badly sunburned.

The boys and Barney retired early to bed to ease their stinging feet. My Uncle Frank had left his fox terrier Spot at the house. Spot chose this evening to bite Grandma's sister Auntie Lizzie on the nose, which caused considerable commotion. It did not have very happy consequences for Spot either, who was immediately banished to the King Edward's Dogs' Home at Waterloo.