Authors: Carla Van Raay
On Sundays we sometimes accompanied them on rides in their shiny old black Ford, chauffeured by the faithful Bertie. Upon the ladies’ return home Bertie had to inspect every room and look under all the beds to check for intruders before they would enter the house themselves. Then they would make him tea, pay him and let him go.
Having no immediate family, the two old ladies confided in their accountant, and it was he who eventually inherited their fortune. The first thing this villain did after the younger woman died was to demolish the house against the express and earnest wishes of both women. Then he built a number of villas on the site.
Mrs Greig crocheted a rug for me with many squares, edged in black. I treasured it, and luckily my mother kept it for me while I was ‘out of this world’ and later gave it back to me. I have it still, a reminder of the graciousness of two English ladies who made up for the absence of younger friends in my immediate neighbourhood.
I went back to school, but only occasionally, as my mother had difficulty coping with the three children who were still at home. It was on my way to school that I came across love-in-the-mist, a very delicate, blue, star-like flower surrounded by a mist of fine green tendrils accentuating the flower’s blue tenderness. My romantic heart melted when I saw this miracle. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes—if I’d first seen it in a drawing—I wouldn’t have believed it could be real. English cottage flowers, which grew so well in Melbourne, were new to me.
The woman owner of the garden picked a sprig for me and told me its incredible name. I held the flower to my heart, and wished it could be right inside it. Then I thought of giving it to my overworked teacher, Mother Mary John, whom I hadn’t seen for a while.
Mother Mary John was wearing her black-rimmed round glasses and her face was very pale when I caught her before assembly, in the middle of a run between the classroom and the lunchroom. I offered her the flower with the lovely name. She had the grace to slow down for a moment, then put the magnificent blue flower back in my hands. I could get a vase if I wanted and put it in front of the statue of Our Lady in the classroom.
I was wounded by her matter-of-factness and tears came. I was a child-mother hoping for some mothering myself; I had hoped to trade my gift of a special flower for some
special love from my teacher. I felt so tired. But, I realised I shouldn’t expect too much from people.
And so I turned my thoughts to Jesus, who was present in the tabernacle of the church in his mystical way, locked up there in the round white communion wafers and the bigger wafer of the monstrance. Yes, I knew that love existed. The only trouble was that humans were short of it.
I transferred my need for love to Jesus when I was thirteen, and entering puberty. I started to feel romantic love for him. I poured out my heart to him in the church at playtime and lunchtime. Jesus must love me, even if no one else did, and so my imaginary relationship flourished. It was my version of a relationship with the Divine: I loved Jesus even though I had never met him, couldn’t possibly know what he looked like, and had no idea of who he really was.
This relationship saved my heart from closing up. It was the joy of all my romantic teenage years. It kept me alive. And when those sickly holy pictures were circulated with Jesus pointing straight at me with the words, ‘You, yes,
you
, I
want
you!’ my heart melted for being wanted and said, ‘Yes! Yes, Jesus! I will forsake my mother and my father and brothers and sisters and all the world and follow you!’ I pinned the picture up on the side of my wardrobe and prayed on my knees before it every day, my heart often leaping with the ever-growing certainty that I would become a nun one day, an ultimate lover of Jesus.
IN ALL, I SPENT
more time at home than at Our Lady of Good Counsel primary school. My presence at home was probably a safety net for my mother; it helped her avoid her husband’s sexual advances when he came home for lunch every day. She was too accessible, and so afraid of going
through all that pain again. Nevertheless, he could not leave her alone and she became pregnant again and miscarried once more in the fifth month. After that, my mother underwent an operation to mend the parts that had stretched too wide. Oh, the bittersweetness of being relatively well again! There was no excuse now and she proceeded to have three more boy children; the last child was conceived after I left home.
In spite of all the busy happenings at home, my sister Liesbet and I did the ironing for Sister Kevin on Saturday afternoons, to earn extra pocket money. To give Saturday afternoons away was a big sacrifice and, much to Sister Kevin’s annoyance, we didn’t always make it. Upstairs from the convent laundry, we ironed table and bed linen and the nuns’ strange-looking underwear, and put aside anything that needed mending. Sister Kevin caught us dressing up one afternoon. In a fit of giggles, we hadn’t heard her climb up the long set of stairs and she gave us a shock. The inevitable lecture followed. We blushed and promised never to do it again, but laughed all the harder after she left. Sister Kevin was good at heart and always treated us to tea and cake.
Sister Kevin was well known to the boys because they gave her a hard time over her chook pen. The chicken run was next to our backyard, just behind the cyprus hedge, and its roof was too easy a target. Sticks, stones and rubbish were regularly thrown at it from the heights of the hedge, frightening any unlucky chook on her way to lay an egg. Really, it was all done to see Sister Kevin get into one of her prodigious tempers. The boys sniggered at the spectacle of this indignant nun ‘off her rocker’, as they would say.
AND SO PASSED
my first two years in Australia. Hormones had already started their work on my sister who, despite
being younger, experienced her first period at least six months before me. She found blood on her knickers and went to my mother in alarm, to be told matter-of-factly that this was a sign that she would be able to have babies later on. She was introduced to wearing cotton rags—old, thin but absorbent nappy material—which she had to pin to the inside of her knickers. I felt inferior to my sister and often ducked into the thickness of the cyprus hedge near the house to check my own underpants. My sister was much more sexually aware than I and attracted plenty of attention as a stunningly beautiful teenager. I would never be like her. I suppressed my sexuality as hard as I could, feeling awkward in the presence of boys and men.
It was during the summer after my thirteenth birthday that my periods started, in rather inauspicious circumstances. A large Dutch family well known to my parents lived on a farm not far from the sea, and they agreed to have me stay with them for a week or so. The woman of the house was a sturdy worker of few words, with a warm gruff sort of voice and a good heart. We went to the beach several times, and one day I decided to go there by bicycle, taking her youngest child, a boy of three, on the back. She packed us a lunch and off we went. We spent a couple of sunny hours at the beach and then it was time to go back. However, I was not quite sure which way to turn when I faced the highway. Both sides seemed familiar. I chose to turn right and set off with trepidation, knowing my propensity for getting things wrong. It wasn’t until I reached the very end of the peninsula, the end of the road, that I was sure I was on the wrong track. Now I knew the way back, but it was an appallingly long distance! The afternoon was hot, the traffic dangerous to ride in, and my legs were ready to give way under me. But I had to press on, heart beating
overtime, legs on fire, and my eyes burning from exhaustion, heat and shame.
Finally, there she was, the mother of my little charge—who had silently clung to the back of my bicycle all this time—ready to catch her boy in her arms and set him down. Then she noticed something else: the back of my dress was soaked in blood. She told me to take it off while she fetched me one of her daughter’s dresses. She didn’t scold me or tell me to go and clean myself up, but simply rinsed my dress, petticoat and pants in cold water and then plunged them into the soapy tub in her backyard, where she had been working when we arrived.
Sensing her motherliness, I soon recovered. Although she said very little, it was her attitude and her actions that counted. I was horrified at the sight of my feminine blood, but her natural acceptance of the situation confirmed our femaleness as good. The only thing she did not guess was that this was my first time. She gave me a clean strip of folded rag and two safety pins to fix to a pair of bloomers, and I relaxed in my borrowed dress while my own dried on the line.
My first menstrual bleeding could have been better, but it could also have been worse if it had occurred in my mother’s presence. My mother was apt to call her daughters ‘sluts’ when they bled, or, at any other time our womanhood was obvious. Perhaps our youthfulness reminded her of the ‘bad girl’ she had been herself. Even my leaning idly against a doorway to watch a plumber do some work in our house one day exasperated her sense of decency.
‘You filthy rag,’ she said with venom in her suddenly husky voice, ‘Stop standing like that, showing off to the plumber!’
She had spoken in Dutch, her insult passing over the head of the plumber. I looked down at myself in surprise, became conscious of my stance, and caught the energy of her guilt. Tears welled up, and anger, but the damage was done. I needed a mother during adolescence, one I could run to for protection, but she was doing the attacking herself.
NEXT TO AN
impressive church on the biggest hill in Richmond’s Church Street stood the gracious Vaucluse convent and its Ladies’ College. Also run by the FCJ nuns, Vaucluse catered for migrants and the less well off, offering them a rather lower standard of education than Genazzano.
If Jesus, who was supposed to be poor, had ever had children they would not have been accepted into Genazzano. And it wouldn’t do for the gardener’s daughters to go there either. Nuns make a vow of poverty, while keeping strictly to the class system that helps to perpetuate it. However, this system did allow the nuns to cater for the poor, and we girls received our education free of charge, as the children of the caretaker of Genazzano. The six boys went to the Christian Brothers after primary school.
That first morning at Vaucluse, the nuns didn’t know where to place the migrant girls, Carla and Liesbet. They put their heads together for a few minutes, then Mother Eleanor made an announcement in her best English accent. ‘You, Carla and Liesbet, will both go to Year 8 (the first year of secondary school) because we know that you must be behind, on account of your mother language not being
English, and because you, Carla, have missed so much school over the past two years.’ The words were spoken as from a pulpit. ‘You will be able to give each other encouragement in a new and strange environment by being together in the same class,’ said the other nun.
The well-intentioned nuns never thought of interviewing either of us to make a reasoned decision. The normal age for Year 8 was twelve. I was fourteen. My heart sank heavily, but I didn’t have it in me to say anything.
We slept in the same bed, my dark-haired sister and I, not always the best of friends because we were…well, so different. Our double bed was at the end of a long narrow room with a second double bed at the other end, where my two youngest sisters slept. My only claims to personal space were the wall over our bed, where I hung a neon cross I had been given for my birthday, and one side of the wardrobe, which I filled with holy pictures, the bigger the better, and the text of the prayers I recited every day. To be thrown together in the same class felt like an extension of sharing a bed, a forced mixing of our identities. I smarted from the humiliation of being put in the same class as my younger sister, and from not having been consulted. And so, for four long years I submitted to almost total boredom, feeling too old, too tall—in other words, a misfit.
Before we were admitted into our upstairs classroom, we all lined up on the broad covered verandah with its green-painted wooden railing. ‘Lift up your skirts, girls, so we can inspect your bloomers.’ Our bloomers were to guard against possible exposure during netball games or when going up and down stairs, and the hems of our skirts had to be just below knee-height. We wore stockings of thick brown lisle, lace-up shoes, a white blouse with a crisp white round starched collar and the college tie. ‘You know, of course, that
you are to wear college gloves and hats whenever you are in uniform off the premises.’ Inspections by nuns and prefects continued until there was complete conformity.
Mother Eleanor was a good teacher, relying heavily on charts that she had made herself. The classroom was festooned with them, giving it an air of accomplishment. She always repeated what she said at least three times, knowing the principles of repetition and summary. But I was bored out of my mind. I stared out of the windows, which started above head height to shut out the world and reached to the ceiling. I wanted to scream, or jump out of those windows. Instead, I kept my frustrations bottled up, clenched my teeth and got easy high marks. High marks were a cinch; I could never be proud of them.
WE WERE FORBIDDEN
to enter a non-Catholic church of any kind. Sometimes, rather than waiting in a long queue for a tram, I would walk to the next stop a short distance away, passing a Greek Orthodox church. The church, sandwiched tightly between old buildings serving as offices, was just a building until one afternoon it emanated strange haunting music which stirred something very deep in my soul.
‘Maria,’ I said to my Italian girlfriend, with whom I often sauntered a block or so, ‘let’s go in.’
To my delight she agreed; her wicked spirit of adventure was temporarily stronger than her superstitious fears. It wasn’t her conscience that bothered Maria—church directives and school rules were totally amenable to her and her Italian family and friends (one followed them if they were convenient)—but superstition about the dangers of strange religions was another thing entirely.