BEFORE I WENT TO THE war I had travelled widely in the State of Victoria with my parents, living in tiny, isolated railway settlements. I was sometimes called ‘the Duchess’ by my parents.
The Duchess spent her childhood trying not to offend, to be invisible, which is tough when she was born an extrovert. Moving to a new settlement and unknown settlers and schools, with old feuds, habits and standards that were always unknown to us on arrival, was always a tense time. Of course, when Kathleen was still at school I had the world champion boxer-wrestler of all time at my side for protection, but with her being seven years older than me, and the school leaving age being fourteen, I did not enjoy her patronage for long. And being small I was unable to emulate her prowess in the ring.
Whenever I used a word not common in our surrounds, repeated some story I had thought beautiful, made a gesture with my hands or body, or admired anything that children in their ken did not do, my act was aped and the cry rang out: ‘Oh! Hark at the Duchess!’ To counter this I learnt slang and swearing and cursing, and had a repertoire that few country people to this day could enlarge on. Because of this ‘bold’ talk, as Mum called it, I was in trouble at home, and at the little schools I became feared because of my quick, sharp tongue which was the only weapon available to me.
The Duchess did try not to offend, not to be an extrovert, not to put forward solutions to anything until someone else stepped forward and then she could often manage, without stepping on anyone’s toes, to proffer an easier or better way to approach a problem, even if it were only the words of a certain song. And that behaviour is real tough if you are a bouncy person. And I was: a ‘goer’ as the saying went. At little country schools I planned concerts and wrote programmes which included dances, songs, recitations, group and solo performances and poetry readings, and coaxed the teacher to allow us to present these entertainments in the school.
These ‘concerts’ must have been appalling. I can’t remember anything about those at school, but I do remember one of my ‘concerts’ at our house which, at that time, was right on the railway platform at Monomeith. I drove our milking cow in through the side gate, singing:
Why has a cow got four legs?
I really don’t know how,
I don’t know, and you don’t know,
And neither does the cow!
and by this time I had driven the milker out the back gate and later returned for my bow. I guess this was probably the standard set in my irregular eruptions of art. Mick Yates from Caldermeade railway station was often hauled in to perform in my plays when his mother, a station mistress, was visiting my station-mistress Mother. The ladies hopped on and off trains as if they were taking taxi rides in the cities! I could never get Kathleen to join my act and she has not been to a theatre, ballet or opera to this day and lives perfectly happily without such frills in her life.
From Monomeith railway siding we were only a few miles from Koo-wee-rup, a tiny town, but at least a town – which Monomeith was not. (Monomeith was only us.) At Koo-wee-rup I saw a musical, my first theatrical entertainment. Mum took me in on the railway ‘trike’ – in officialese a ‘manual tricycle’ – with her propelling by pushing and pulling the handbars (and sweating) and me sitting side-saddle on the back of the trolley. There was an element of danger here, because this line was busier than others we had lived on and men had to use manual power, not motors or a Casey Jones, to enable them to hear a steam train which may, because of some emergency, not have been scheduled. Outside Koo-wee-rup Mum pulled the trike off the rails and we set off on foot to the performance.
The title of the musical was ‘Wait till the Sun Shines, Nellie’, or something like that, and I recall the chorus sang ‘We’ll make hay while the sun shines, and make love when it rains’, which appears a little more risque than one would imagine for the 1930s. ‘Oh, take me where the daisies cover the country lane. We’ll make hay while the sun shines …’ etc. And when it was over we went back to the rail line and Mum manoeuvred the iron three-wheeler back on to the tracks and off we set for home, singing ‘We’ll make love when it rains’, and laughing and retelling the jokes which doubtless were corny but we repeated them for months.
In that same year my Mother carried me on her back from Flinders Street railway station to Melbourne University where I was to sit for an Australian Music Examination Board exam. Some weeks before the examination I had been running along the parapet of a railway bridge, lost my balance and fell off, tumbling down to the dry creek bed below. My ankle was badly sprained and ligaments were torn and I could not walk or lower the grossly swollen limb for some months. In the meantime, I had prepared for this piano examination and we knew we may not be so close to a city by the time the next exams would be held, so we went to Melbourne by train, my crippled leg sticking out like a fallen tree trunk. When we reached Flinders Street station, Mum asked for directions to ‘The University’ (there was only one university in Victoria in those days), and we set off, me clinging to her back, my arms around her neck and legs around her waist, and she bent over. After a while she had to put me down and ‘have a blow’, and then she set off again through the throng of city people who averted their eyes as though we were a freak show. Time and again she had to rest. We didn’t speak. Once I tried to hop on one leg but this jarred the injury and I screamed. I don’t know how far it is from the station to the university but there are quite a few tram stops but nobody thought to tell us then about the tram and, once Mum had set off, it was too late because, like a heavy-labouring man she had no energy left for brain-storming, she could afford only to remember to force her legs to keep going one after the other along that seemingly never-ending pavement. I look back now and remember this day some sixty years ago with a sort of horror that makes me feel faint and terribly sick.
I can remember the exhaustion of trying to hang on to Mum and even as a child knowing her own effort might kill her but knowing she’d never give up. She’d never given up any labour that needed to be done, the whole of her five-foot frame straining until she righted the problem, especially if it was to do with her children or her husband. So she was unlikely to give up this day.
Lindsay Biggins, the fine musician and examiner, discovered us sitting on the steps of the conservatorium, Mum’s pretty hair dishevelled, her face pouring sweat as though it were rain. It is this woman I write about. Her actions may bewilder a person today, but she was unique, even in her day. When something occurred that she could not handle, was not able to carry on her back and she sensed harm of any degree to her children, she attacked like a lioness, but this wasn’t always clear to outsiders – or to us children.
My title, ‘the Duchess’, was endowed on me when I screamed in fury ‘I’m not going to scrub floors!’ It was not only a social crime – there were outsiders visiting us at the time – but worse. Mum knew what I meant. Every girl we ever knew in our milieu went ‘to work’, and the only work that was available for women in the bush was housework or, as it was often called, ‘being a slushy’.
‘I’m not going to scrub floors!’ There was no time for silence or shock. Mum had leapt up as if she had expected this. ‘The Duchess, eh? Too big for your boots to scrub floors, eh?’ And all the while she shouted it I knew it was something else that contorted her voice and twisted her face: she knew there was no other employment and there was no more schooling for me. I would have to go out as a slushy. Had we been alone it wouldn’t have boiled over like this, she may have discussed it, said it wasn’t real flash but what else was there? But now the lines were drawn. I screamed ‘I’m not going to scrub floors!’
I had often scrubbed floors, like anyone brought up in a workingclass household, and thought nothing of it. All houses had a floor cloth, a very poor rag indeed for anything less ragged would have been put to better use. Down on your knees on the floor with grey, home-made soap which had been left on the splintery board that served as a shelf in the washhouse until it was hard as rock. The soap was made of old fat and lye and fit to take the skin off the hands as well as dirt off and out of the bare wood floor. It even wrecked the linoleum that was cut to fit so many different houses we lived in that eventually it would fit nowhere and congoleum was bought as times were hard, and when the next move came it proved its lack of mettle by refusing to be rolled into a cylinder and cracked across every fold. ‘Cheap stuff,’ Mum snapped in the frustration of loss.
But now I would stop. ‘I’m not going to scrub floors.’ It was a sort of inarticulate cry that had nothing to do with the scrubbed floor but more with the indignity and the sense that childhood could end at this point.
And I never did scrub floors, not for any but my own.
* * *
Kathleen and I couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Most people meeting us refer to it – at their peril, for we two may appear to have nothing at all in common but any outsider who comments on it leaves with scars from both of us.
Writing didn’t come easily to our Kathleen, but she was once moved to send news to Mum. ‘Old Bill Leaf about a week ago.’ It took Mum weeks of delicate enquiry to learn ‘old Bill Leaf had died.
Because she came into the family seven years before me she had some good years before the depression when there was enough money to have her taught music, voice production, Scottish dancing and what passed for ballet. But she had no talent for these things. Mum tried to get her to teach me the piano when she was seventeen and I was ten. We sat at the wooden-framed Bord piano. ‘Put your finger here.’ ‘Which finger?’ ‘Any finger. Now: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P …’ and so my finger went to the end of the alphabet and the keyboard, and that was the last lesson I received from Kathleen.
When we were grown and away from home I didn’t correspond with her greatly, she not at all with me. The roses didn’t leave Kathleen’s cheeks, they didn’t ‘fade away and die’ as the old song says; her voice was never sad, it was often strident, barbing me until I screamed in temper. I cried but she didn’t cry, I could never say that in her lifetime I saw ‘tears bedim her loving eyes’. Not in the deep sense. Except, years later, at Mum’s funeral where she stood weeping tears that fell like a waterfall and she could not control the flow. And her mourning was painful and long.
Mum loved company. We played and sang every Sunday evening around the piano and always included ‘I will take you home Kathleen’, the haunting melody with the tender lament. Kathleen had no singing in her, couldn’t hold a tune or recognise one. I had and could, but didn’t sing this song, couldn’t see through the tears to read the notes so I played by memory. ‘I will take you home Kathleen’ I vowed over and over and over again. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what it meant to me.
She had a rage in her. Her elder brother, Jack, (well, that’s a puzzle, that is) became so insane with her behaviour one day when visiting us he chased her with a log of wood – which was his undoing and her saving. The log inhibited his speed and movement and after her head was split open she escaped and hid until Mum came home. Her taunting extended to teachers, aunts (she once belted Aunt Vera to the floor with her fists and Vera was a big woman), and me; which meant I got beaten for screaming and clawing at her while she, much taller, older and stronger, held me at arm’s length. ‘I don’t know what’s got into her’ she’d say to Mum, who then got into me. But in a way for which there are no words, she was my champion. I don’t know what she saw me as, perhaps just a little girl, although that can’t be the only reason. When I was grown she would still protect me. Would do so to this day. We were all each of us had, and I still cannot hear that beautiful, sad refrain without tears bedimming my own eyes.
I will take you home again Kathleen
Across the ocean wild and wide
To where your heart has ever been …
One night when Kathleen was away our gentle Dad said, as if in a dream, ‘None of us will ever know what is in Kathleen’s heart or where it has been.’ And he was a man who loved her dearly for her madcap carryings-on and her courage and stalwart stance when life was not the thing the romantics say the bush and the depression were.
But I will take you back Kathleen
To where your heart will feel no pain
For when the fields are fresh and green
I will take you to your home, Kathleen.
But she found her home without my help, although she still gives me hers. Her marriage – not her early marriage to Bob which was lost in the war – but her young man who came back from the war still a scallywag, a laugher, but with a severe speech problem from some shock he never speaks of, fracturing his words into a staccato stutter that was doubtless painful for him but painful too to those of us who tried to understand him because we couldn’t help him. I knew Kathleen and he had each met their match when he came in one day and tried to tell her there was a market stall being set up outside their house. But we couldn’t understand what he was saying. I tried the conventional ‘it’s alright’ sympathy, which was quite wrong and made him angry and his stuttering worse. Kathleen showed no sympathy at all. She laughed with what seemed glee. ‘Well then, let’s make money,’ she said. ‘We’ll set up a stall for the poor stuttering old soldier.’ He stared, then began to laugh, they began to wrestle, I was laughing, we were shouting, near crying with mirth at the absurdity. It wasn’t medical science that cured him of his affliction, it was Kathleen, over the years of teasing him, imitating him and both of them carrying on like ten-year-olds laughing, pushing one another around, having a beer, wedded as if they were Siamese twins. Now they are in their seventies but when they were younger they came out with some quite original hilarity to do with sex, never grubby but always side-splitting. From listening to them I learnt what ribald fun sex was. And also, what true love was.
And yet, for all that, there are odd, always unexpected moments when we two women – now so far away from harm, protected by friends and our children – can see ‘the passing shadow on your brow’ and we avert our eyes.
We are careful, we do not ever stand on a battleground or take up weapons, we never vent spleen. I sometimes wonder if she recalls the line, the haunting song:
I will take you back, Kathleen,
To where your heart will feel no pain.
Perhaps she has found that place but I never knew it. Perhaps it was only me looking for someone to take me home. But now I know no one does that. And why should they? We must each find our own way home.
And a life without Kathleen would have been no life at all for me.