3

JOAN MET THE man with a nautical name at a party one night in Ipswich. Stirling introduced them, or so Joan would later say when asked under oath how they had come to know each other. Other than that, I’m not sure of much – whose party it was or even when it was held. The host might have been Joan’s good friend Jean, who worked as a sales assistant at T.C. Beirne in Ipswich and was married to a younger man who liked to wear women’s clothing.

The party was held sometime in 1952. It might have been the same night that Stirling was arrested and charged with public drunkenness for the second time that year. The arrest happened in Ipswich after a night out with Joan. In the custody hearing in mid-1954, Joan’s counsel put it to Stirling that he was ‘in such a drunken condition, insisting on driving the motor car, that the police took him away’. Stirling denied this version of events, saying his wife was at the wheel and that he had not drunk very much that night. ‘I am thinking,’ he said, ‘that something had been arranged.’ He did not elaborate on what he believed the conspiracy might have been. He was suggesting, I suppose, that his drink had been spiked.

How did it start? Perhaps she has seen him from across the room, before they are introduced – a man, tall and dark like her husband but with an entirely different air. Perhaps they have exchanged glances. Something in the way he looked at her, or the way she looked at him has sparked a fire. Perhaps she has seen him perform at Easter, with one of the bands that played to the thousand-strong crowd in the Australian brass band championships. Or maybe he is playing the cornet the night they meet, late, as the party wanes and the numbers dwindle, her husband already lost to his drinking. He plays ‘Sunshine for Your Smile’, as though it is just for her. It’s a song she’s always loved, one her father used to sing to her when she was a girl. She is thirty-three, a mother of four children; she feels old. For those few minutes she has no sense of anything at all except the lilting caress of that sweet soprano sound.

In early 1949, deep in debt and still gambling heavily, Stirling resigned – or was sacked – from his job at McWhirters. It’s impossible to know exactly what happened – my information is contradictory, drawn from sworn affidavits filed by Joan and Stirling during their custody battle and divorce. One likely scenario goes something like this: Stirling is called to a meeting with the managing directors of the firm, his brother Duncan and Harold Fielding. He is told he is not performing well enough in his current position as a buyer for five departments on the basement level of the store, and that they have hired another man to replace him. He is offered a position on the floor at the same salary, effectively a demotion.

As a buyer, he has become accustomed to making his own decisions, striking his own deals and managing his own time. He has been able to travel to Sydney and Melbourne for work, timing it with major race meetings. As a floor worker he will still have some responsibility, supervising junior sales staff, but he will be expected to be on hand to field customer enquiries. He will be watched. He says he will resign. Duncan says to Mr Fielding, ‘We cannot have a McWhirter tendering a written resignation.’ They agree that he will leave, but his resignation is not officially recorded.

In May Stirling set up a new business, a manufacturer’s agent called Stirling McWhirter Agencies. It was a joint venture: Joan sought out an office space on the corner of Adelaide and Edward streets, while Stirling travelled to Melbourne to source suppliers. Once the business was set up, she managed the day-to-day running of it, seeing to the books and meeting with suppliers while Stirling travelled throughout Queensland seeking buyers for their clients’ wares. A manufacturer’s agent makes their money through commissions, so if they do not sell, they cannot turn a profit. For a few months in early 1950, Stirling was laid up recovering from a car accident – he had been hit by a truck late at night, presumably after drinking. After that, Joan starting selling as well.

It was not a profitable business, at least not in those early days. Their gross profit for the eight months to the end of 1949 was £50. In 1950, they made £200. To put this in perspective, Stirling’s annual salary at McWhirters had been around £600. In a good year, the dividend on his shareholding – before he divested it – would have earned them an additional £4,000.

Joan would later claim that the business’s lack of success was Stirling’s fault; that while she worked hard, he spent most of his time drinking. In response, Stirling stated that neither he nor Joan regarded the business as their primary source of income. He said it had been established ‘so that I would not be regarded only as a professional punter’. Even if this were true, by the middle of 1950 – with their house at Indooroopilly sold to pay off their debts, his inheritance all but squandered – it must have been clear that gambling was not a profitable career move. In 1951, the agency still not making enough money to support the family, Stirling went to work as a travelling linen salesman for Ray Sealy & Son. He earned around £16 a week in salary and commission. He stayed there for around a year. In May 1952, he was involved in another car accident, t-boned by a truck at an intersection in Roma, his cousin Jill’s husband, Harry Frizzell, at the wheel. He lost consciousness for ten minutes. It was later ruled that the truck driver was at fault. In June, Stirling was arrested for public drunkenness. In September, he started work as a car salesman at Farsley Motors. No doubt, strings were pulled.

By late 1952, Joan is more or less running Stirling McWhirter Agencies on her own. Business has improved, but the firm is still not earning enough money to support the family and pay off Stirling’s debts. So, while she goes off to the Adelaide Street office every morning, dressed smartly as she always is, in clothes her clients let her keep when they see how well she wears them, he drives to the Farsley Motors showroom. There he spends his days talking ccs and cylinders, hydraulic brakes and steering, to men in the market for a new Standard Vanguard or DeSoto Diplomat. Wearing tailored cotton trousers, a poplin shirt and a checked sports coat, he is easily the best-dressed of all the salesmen. If only this had some bearing on his success. He can banter with the best of them about boot size and headroom and road-hugging stability, with a wink and a nod about impressing a lady friend – and with his slim six-foot frame and glasses, he seems trustworthy. But he doesn’t have the hunger that breeds success in this game, the unwavering focus on the end result, the readiness to do anything to make the sale. Even though he needs it as much, if not more, than anyone. Customers like him well enough, he is told, but if he’s to make commission, he needs more of an edge.

Joan, on the other hand, thrives in her new role. She has always loved how fabrics feel against her skin – the weighty security of being wrapped in fur or the delicate blush of a silk voile blouse at her neck, her wrists, her décolletage. She has always loved clothes, and the new fashions – the pencil skirts that mould to her hips and derrière, and the full-circle skirts with taffeta petticoats that swish around her calves as she walks – are no exception. She has always loved modelling and putting on a show, ever since she was a girl: the titillating warmth that comes with being looked at, appraised. And though she is now fuller-figured than she would like, especially about the chin, waist and hips, she still wears a frock as well as anyone. Or so her clients tell her, when she parades for them in her office, or their hotel room. They are always sure to give her extras of anything she buys – something to keep for herself. Does she lean in a little closer than she needs to, at times, so that they might smell her perfume? Or hold their gaze a little longer than she ought? Or take up their offer of a drink or dinner – to discuss business, nothing more, as two businessmen might – knowing full well that their wives and her husband might not see it that way? And who could blame her if she did? Stirling rarely looks at her like these men do, not anymore; he barely has a hand for her that isn’t primed by anger.

Which is not to say that this is her only motivation. She is a businesswoman now – at least, she is trying to be. She has discovered there is a certain satisfaction that comes with working, being busy; some days she even forgets to feel resentful she should have to. She likes the feeling of being in control. She likes that everything she does – maintaining records and balancing books, meeting with clients and giving directions to the traveller she has hired – can be done her way. As 1952 draws to a close and she realises that this year’s profit will be double that of the year before, she feels as though she’s won, that she’s the victor. But she does not claim it, can’t, because of what it means: she would be better off on her own. This idea – that she doesn’t need him – doesn’t match with anything she’s been taught or how she expected her life to be.

And so her satisfaction is easily tarnished. All it takes is a flicker of pity or scorn, from a debutante she barely knows, or a society wife she does, when they see her lunching at Lennon’s with a client, rather than her husband or a group of women friends. She is reminded then that a woman of her standing, the wife of a man who was once one of Brisbane’s most eligible bachelors, shouldn’t have to work. They envied her once, these women; this she knows. They clamoured for her friendship, and to be seen with her. Now the social invitations have all but dried up. She tells herself she doesn’t care, that she never liked their gossipy ways, but she hates knowing that when her back is turned they are whispering. If she had been a better wife, they say; if she’d cared less about her appearance, about beautiful expensive things; if he hadn’t felt such pressure to keep her, he may not have gambled as much, or as badly. If she had loved him as a wife ought, he wouldn’t have sought affection from their maids, or the tarts he met in hotel bars and God knows where else.

He barely tries to hide it now, his infidelity. And the drinking is getting worse. She thought, after the first arrest in June – when he came home with bruised ribs and a sore back, complaining he had been beaten by the police, when in fact he’d fallen down the stairs at the local station – that he might try to dry out a little. By the end of 1952, he goes out drinking after work most nights and doesn’t leave till closing time; she doesn’t know where or with whom half the time. She’s almost stopped caring about that. But she cares about her home, about keeping some semblance of order there. So she keeps his dinner warm on the stove until he comes in full of grog some time after nine. ‘Where were you?’ she asks, knowing he won’t answer. ‘I’ve kept dinner,’ she says. ‘Not hungry,’ he slurs. Some nights he throws the meal, plate and all, out the window, all that compressed rage at what his life has become now bristling at the surface. She yells at him then: ‘How dare you!’ But he waves her away as he stumbles towards the children’s bedroom, weaving in and out of sideboards and standard lamps, sofas and tables, cussing and kicking at anything that gets in his way.

‘Don’t,’ she says, softly first and then, when he ignores her, louder. ‘You’ll wake the children!’ He doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. Another woman might know to stay out of his way, but she confronts him, raises her voice and tries to block his path. Or she throws a glass or a shoe across the room, whatever comes to hand. She might hit him square in the back of the head or break a window, or a plate might land and shatter on the floor. The children’s nanny, Bongo, will try to keep the peace if she’s home. ‘It’s late,’ Bongo implores, ‘they’ll be asleep.’ If they persist or get in his way, he’ll shove them aside. He even lashes out at Bongo. Bongo, who has stayed all this time, because of the children, who hasn’t been paid in two years. ‘A father’s got a right to say goodnight to his own children.’ And later, in the dark bedroom, when it’s just the two of them, his hands at her breasts, his whisky-smothered breath at her ear: ‘A husband’s got a right to have his wife.’

Of course I don’t know what went on between them in their bedroom late at night. My grandmother never accused Stirling of forcing himself upon her, only saying, in an affidavit, that he ‘used to come home late and create disturbances, assaulting me and disturbing the children and altogether creating a very unpleasant situation.’ But the children slept together in one large room, next to their parents’ room, and my mother remembers being woken in the night: Stirling yelling, Joan shouting, furniture crashing, Joan crying. My mother assumes now, with a shrug, that what she heard was her father demanding what was still then his legal right: to have sex with his wife when and how he wanted to, whether she wanted it or not. And her resisting in whatever way she could, until she could resist no more.

He will say, of course, when questioned in court, that she was the violent one – that throughout their marriage she struck him with her fists, with clothes brushes, shoes and handbags. She broke his spectacles, he’ll say, on at least six occasions. He struck her only once, in the neck, after she hit him in the head with a shoe. While he remembers Jean coming into the room one night and pleading, ‘Leave Mummy alone,’ he’ll say that his wife had been putting on an act, that she’d started to scream and go on. Perhaps this contains some truth – she has never been one to conceal her emotions. Or perhaps his memory of those drunken nights at the tail end of their marriage isn’t so good. Perhaps he’s unable to admit what he’s become.

Mum’s memories of her childhood, of those nights in the house by the train line, are not tainted by this – at least not in a way she is aware of. In 1952 she was still a dreamy nine-year-old, and when she describes that time now, and thinks of that bedroom – a kind of dormitory, really, with four beds for four children all in a row, and a big bay window at one end, she thinks of it as a magical place.

In the quiet hours around midnight, when her parents are asleep, she lies awake and stares at that window, thinking of one of her favourite stories. As the curtains flap and the trees outside rustle in the wind, casting their wavering shadows across the bedroom floor, she sees Peter Pan perched on the windowsill with his arm outstretched, offering to teach her to fly. ‘You just think lovely wonderful thoughts,’ he says, ‘and they lift you into the air.’