One Life: My Mother’s Story

ONE DAY in 1945 Louis came to them and said he was planning to sell off part of his land. Did they want to buy it?

Nance had brought her savings into the marriage, a hundred and fifty pounds. Ken had about the same. Buying the land would clean them out. But buying and selling, buying and selling: she’d grown up with the power of capital to change lives. She feared Ken might still be enough under the sway of Trotsky to resist, but he was ahead of her with all the arguments. Rent was dead money, Louis’ land was a beautiful block and big enough that they could subdivide later if they wanted to.

On the title deed Nance and Ken were listed as joint owners. Ken was Kenneth Grenville Gee, Solicitor. She was Nance Isobel Gee, his wife. It was only a piece of paper no one would ever see again, but she wished she’d made the solicitor change it. Nance Isobel Gee, Pharmacist.

Signing the papers, she could feel her heart going too fast. She kept thinking of her father standing in the doorway of the Cally the day they’d left for Mittagong. Nothing could go wrong, and then it did. She and Ken had spent all they had and they didn’t even have a house, only an acre of land with a tumbledown hothouse, a grove of bananas and a great glossy bank of Monstera deliciosa. He was making better money at Sullivans than he had at his father’s, but it would take years to save enough for even a modest place.

At Narrabeen, Mr Quinn said as usual, Don’t suppose you’d like a job, Mrs Gee?

This time she didn’t laugh. She said, What would I do with the boys, Mr Quinn? She saw his surprise, looking from her eyes to her mouth and back again to see if she was joking.

It was nothing as deliberate as a decision. She had no idea what she’d do with the boys. But she knew she was going to take the job.

My mother’s with us, she said. What was she doing thinking out loud with this man? The only thing is, she’s not reliable. And Christopher’s due to start school next year.

Well, I tell you what, Mr Quinn said, there’s a little school round the corner. Takes them nearly from babies. Lakeside, Lake View, some name like that. Children running around naked, people call it the Babies’ Brothel!

Lakehouse School had a sign on the gate but it was an ordinary house. A woman called Guyda showed her around. It wasn’t like any school she’d ever seen. There were two big sunny classrooms. No blackboards, no rows of desks, just low tables. No stiff-faced children chanting the seven-times tables, and no one pouncing on them to spell indeed. No one running around naked, either. At one table a little girl doing a drawing had her head on one side and her tongue out the corner of her mouth. By the window three boys were laying coloured wooden blocks in patterns. A couple of children were sprawled on big pillows, reading. Out on the verandah a boy was bossing some others around, putting on a play. That’s our Jack, Guyda said fondly. He’s going to be an actor, you know.

Guyda told her the philosophy of the school: a school should fit the child, not the other way around. Nance thought, That’s all very well, but what about reading and arithmetic? Guyda knew what she was thinking. I assure you, Mrs Gee, by the time the children leave here they can all read and write and do sums. She pointed to the boys with the coloured blocks. We don’t call it arithmetic, Mrs Gee, but that’s what it is.

The school should fit the child. She thought of her own childhood freedom, running around the paddocks at Rothsay with Frank, dreaming her way through the trees. Once in their lifetime, a person should have that kind of freedom.

Lakehouse School took children from as young as three, boarders as well as day pupils. Guyda said she’d take both boys, even though Stephen was not quite three. For a little extra, they could stay on after school with the boarders until Nance finished work.

It was an outrageous sort of school. But she thought, I’ve broken away from my own background. Got more education than anyone else in the family and married a man from a different world. Why not think differently about what a school could be?

Ken didn’t take much persuading that working at Quinn’s was a good idea. He was as keen as she was to get the money for the house. He didn’t ask what arrangements she was planning to make for the boys. When she told him about Lakehouse School he did no more than nod. The children were her concern.

Dolly saw a place for herself in the new set-up. Promised to keep the house clean and tidy and get the tea ready of an evening. It would be a big help, Nance agreed. It was the one good side to her mother’s restlessness, she thought: Dolly had never been frightened of hard work. She was always fired up at the prospect of something new, something better.

When Nance left the boys at Lakehouse School on the first day, Stephen was already playing with a board criss-crossed with shoelaces and Christopher had found a box of Meccano. They hardly looked up to say goodbye. Still, her heart was pinched at leaving them. She should be the one teaching them to read and kissing them better when they fell over. She was doing what her own mother had done—sending them off, too young.

It wasn’t much fun being in the shop with Mr Quinn. He was glad to have her there, but really he thought a mother shouldn’t be working. She’d catch him watching her, this woman whose husband couldn’t keep her.

The money started to build up in the bank, but she was impatient at how slowly the numbers got bigger. Nance knew the arithmetic of pharmacy as well as the chemistry of it. She knew what Mr Quinn paid in rent and what he paid her. She knew the mark-up on every bottle of aspirin. The profit he made was an easy sum to do. Marx was right: you’d never get rich on a wage.

It was such a mad idea that the first time it came to her she snuffed it out. It came back rich with detail. What would it be like to have her own pharmacy? Work for herself and keep the profit?

She supposed it was impossible. The mothers of young children might go out to work, though that was rare. But she couldn’t think of any who had their own business. If she started up her own pharmacy, she’d be a one-off. Still, she woke up with it in her mind every morning.

She brought it up one night over dinner. There’d be an opening for a pharmacy in Newport, she said. I could start one, you know. Ken glanced at her, his face the careful blank of lawyer’s caution.

Yes, Ken, she said. She stopped herself from saying, Otherwise the boys will be grown up before we get enough for a house. Parted her lips in the silence to let the unspoken words evaporate.

But Dolly already had the shop up and running. Oh yes, Nance, she said. Nothing closer than Quinn’s, and all those people giving themselves headaches on the beach, you’ll make a fortune on the Aspros alone!

Her mother’s enthusiasm almost made Nance doubt. Would this be another perfect scheme that would turn sour?

After the reflex caution, Ken threw himself into the idea. Went through the numbers with her, and wondered if there was any chance the bank would extend a line of credit if he pretended it was for him. You’d have to have a place near the bus stop, and would she need an assistant or should she get an apprentice? The only thing he didn’t think of was the biggest one: how to make sure the boys would be all right.

She thought it could work, though she’d never seen it done. She’d drive the boys to school in the morning and drive back to open the shop. Then in the afternoon she’d close up a bit early to drive back down to Narrabeen to pick them up.

All of it was a risk. Dolly promised hand on heart that she’d stay, but she wasn’t reliable. It would be a lot of driving. It would be touch-and-go at the start, paying out rent and building up a business from scratch. But marrying Ken had been a risk. Moving to Mona Vale had been a risk. Putting everything they had into the land had been a risk. Imagine if I stay behind the counter at Quinn’s, she thought, putting a few pounds away every week. Yes, we’d be safe, but we’d only be half alive. Sometimes in life you have to jump.

The simplest thing nearly stopped her before she even started: there were no shops to rent in Newport. There was a cottage next to the grocery, but it was for sale, not rent. However, word had got around the Mad Half Mile, Nance Gee was going to start a pharmacy. Ula came to her one day: would Nance be interested in a partner? She had some money from before she’d married Guido and could buy the cottage. Nance would have the pharmacy in one room and Ula would run a home-nursing business from the other.

Nance felt her face taking on Ken’s lawyerly blank. It was surely too good to be true. So Ula told her the full story. She wanted to make a life of her own, because Guido’s eye was roving again. He’d charmed her away from her perfectly nice husband with a lovely old poem, she said. Gone down on one knee, recited it with tears in his eyes. Ula knew he had his eye on someone else now, because he’d been hunting around the house for the book with the poem in it.

Nance told Mr Quinn. Oh yes, Mrs Gee, he said. Your own place. Certainly. She’d come to hate the way he stood at the door of the shop, looking out and humming with a little pleased smile on his face. If ever she doubted, that look was a goad. She would not be stopped.

There were endless delays with permissions. You had to get a Licence to Purchase Poison, a Certificate of Compliance for how you stored the poisons, a Certificate of Inspection that a man had come and approved of the locks on the dispensary. Nance was supposed to produce the piece of paper she’d been given on the day she was registered as a pharmacist. In all the moves it had gone missing, so she had to go to the university and arrange to get a duplicate, and no one was going to hurry about it. There were days when she felt like Columbus, sure of the Indies when everyone thought he’d fall off the edge of the earth. Or Cortez. All his men / Looked at each other with a wild surmise. That was the look she wanted to see on Mr Quinn’s face.

At last the news came that they’d all been longing to hear: on the second of September 1945 the Japanese surrendered. Nance came home from Quinn’s to find Dolly rushing off a letter to Frank. She glanced over her mother’s shoulder. My dearest son, at last you are free, I thank Almighty God for your deliverance. It was a surprise to Nance that her mother was thinking in terms of Almighty God. God had never seemed any part of Dolly’s life. But no one knew that Nance had lit that prayerful candle for Frank. She thought, What mysteries we all are to each other.

He’d come and stay with them. The boys could go into the sleepout and Frank would have their room. She’d have to fatten him up, cosset him. She’d sit with him and talk. Remember the cubby at Rothsay? How the sun slanted in, how the dust was as fine as talcum powder, how it was so quiet you could hear the river running over the stones way down at the end of the paddock?

She was coming out of Quinn’s a few weeks later, putting her coat on, and almost brushed past Ken waiting outside. Nance, he said. She was startled, looked at him as if he was a stranger.

The telegram came today, he said. I’m sorry, Nance. But he didn’t put his arms around her, and that was what she needed, to be held tight, because otherwise everything inside her was going to float off out into the great hostile world that had taken Frank away. Then there was nothing but the bleak drive home, Ken silent beside her. Even before she went into the house she could hear Dolly shouting and crying as if someone was hitting her. Nance heard her in the night. Got out of bed and went to be with her. But her mother pushed her away. My darling boy, she kept saying. Oh, my darling boy.

The letter came a few days later. Frank Russell had died of dysentery and avitaminosis. Dolly didn’t know what that was. Starvation, Nance said. It means he died of starvation, Mum. She thought, How dare they dress it up.

He’d died in the PoW camp, in Thailand, on the eighth of April 1944. That was eighteen months ago. She tried to think back to what she’d been doing that day. Was it the day she’d read about the shortage of rubber and pictured him standing under a rubber tree thinking about his sister? You had to find some comfort, no matter how silly. Otherwise the grief ate you up and swallowed you.

Later the medals arrived in the post. Dolly came to her with the three little tinny things on her palm. Went to say something but the words dried up. By then some of the truth was starting to come out. Not only the terrible things the Japanese had done to the prisoners, though that was sickening. Worse was how it could have been different if the men in charge had been more competent and less arrogant. The British had taken so many Australian soldiers to fight in Europe that there weren’t enough left to fight the Japanese. So much for the Mother Country. When the chips were down, Mother turned her back. But the Brits had made out it would be all right. Singapore could never fall. All that boasting. The general in charge had got away in a boat, gone home and got a medal.

If Frank had died saving someone, or striking a blow against the enemy, there’d be some sort of consolation. But the more the truth came out, the more you were left with nothing but bitterness. She knew now that what people called destiny was really the system everyone was part of. The ones on the top of the pile kept everyone thinking they could get ahead, when in fact ordinary people never had a chance. The generals and the politicians were all feathering their own nests. The newspapers and newsreels were mouthpieces for the people who ran things. They’d say whatever suited the big people, and everyone would believe them. Ken might have called himself a revolutionary, but she was the one who’d become the real radical.

After Frank’s death she went through the days like a machine. Life happened at a great distance. She didn’t want to eat, her clothes hung on her and her face in the mirror was gaunt. She went through the motions with the boys and pretended cheerfulness for their sakes, but knew her smiles were a grimace. The idea of starting a pharmacy was ridiculous. It was impossible to believe that anything mattered or that you could ever care about anything again.

Dolly had become a pathetic old woman wrecked by grief. She took to visiting a spiritualist down at Dee Why. She’d get the bus in the afternoon and come back pale and lined, her eyes still sunk back into her head with crying but something eased around her stiff mouth. Nance looked at the little messages that were supposed to be from Frank:

A soldier Boy to the war did go

Fighting hard to beat the Foe

A wonderful boy so loyal and true

Always with his loved ones tender and true

When you sit alone I am with you Mother

Just to whisper in your ear

Not goodbye just good night

Love Frank

Oh, she wished she could believe. Not goodbye just good night. The reality was that Frank was a few bones somewhere in the steamy dirt of Thailand, and everything that he’d been was gone, gone, gone.

Her father wrote to say he’d had a visit from a man called Wal Ward who’d worked on the Burma Railway, what they called The Line, alongside Frank. Wal had been Frank’s mate. He was a man with a big heart. He thought it might help Bert to know how things had been with Frank. Russ tried to look after the younger men, Wal had told him. Made sure they kept the flies off their food. Vigilant about that sort of thing.

Wal told Bert about another mate of Frank’s. This man, Ernie Chapman, had managed to keep his watch hidden from the Japanese. When Frank got sick, Ernie sold the watch to a guard. Ernie was living on a cupful of rice a day, like everyone else, Wal said. But all the money went to buy extra food for Frank.

Nance wanted to find Wal Ward so she could talk to a man who’d known Frank, who’d been his friend through so much suffering. Wanted to find Ernie Chapman, too. Would have gone down on her knees to thank him. But Bert hadn’t thought to get any addresses. Wal Ward had walked away down the drive of Green Hills and disappeared into a world full of hundreds of other men called Ward or Chapman.

One Sunday she took the boys down to Mona Vale Beach, the shallow part among the rocks where the water was still. Lay back on the sand, closed her eyes so the world was the red of her eyelids, the thump and rattle of the waves sliding up the beach, the cries of the gulls. She might have slept for a moment. When she opened her eyes the world was colourless, white shapes and black shapes, unfamiliar, sinister. Where were the boys?

Nance lurched to her feet, stumbled in a panic down to the water’s edge. They could be anywhere, sunk to the bottom with their lives ticking away. The noise of the surf covered everything. Stop, she thought, for God’s sake, stop so I can hear them! She waded in, pushing against the solid dead mass that pushed back, heading to the shadowed part under the rocks where the water was dark and evil.

Then they were there, two shining brown bodies up on the rocks, running along with their hands full of something, tossing them into the air—shells, they must be—and screaming with laughter to see them rain down onto the still water. She stood watching them, stroking the surface of the water with her palms. It was silky, soft against her skin, a part of the lovely merciful world that had not taken her boys.

Later they came to where she was under the umbrella and lay on each side of her, their skins goose-bumped from the cold water. They fell asleep and for a long time she looked at the small things about them. The way the salt was drying on Christopher’s arm in delicate lacework. The way Stephen’s hair grew from two crowns, so that the hairs spiralled softly away from each centre like something stilled in the middle of moving.

Frank’s hair had grown like that, from two crowns. Dolly had said it meant you were good at arithmetic. Like a gift, the thought came to her: Frank wasn’t gone. He was right here, part of his nephews. The boys had some of Ken, and they had some of her. Through her they had some of Frank, too. The world had taken Frank, but it had given her these two. And a few minutes ago it had given them to her all over again.

She had to live the life that Frank had been robbed of. Live it in handfuls. Live all the possibilities, not turn away too timid or too sad or too weary, because that was the best way to honour Frank.