THIS WEEK HAS been the anniversary of Elsie’s death. Such has been my distraction lately that it has arrived and almost taken me unawares. The living make their demands, but the dead have rights too, especially those whose memory remains a source of strength in difficult times; in that way, they live on. ‘How’sitgoingluv?’ her telephone voice would say in the days when voices from afar sounded far away; when an imperious official would interrupt to say, ‘Nine minutes up. Are you extending?’
The last time I saw her in her natural habitat was that last day on the beach before Claude’s funeral. It was late autumn in the southern hemisphere. We sat in the place where we usually sat whenever I came home: in a saddle of sand against the promenade wall touched by the first spokes of early morning sun. ‘Now listen,’ I said to her almost as a ritual, ‘you may wear that hat [it was a wonderful straw sombrero] but you still have a lot of freckles.’ To which she gave her standard reply, ‘Do me a favour, love. Swim behind the shark net, will you?’
We had sat in that place for a few days during almost every one of the twenty-seven years since I had left Australia. My return meant much to her. For the first day, she would speak non-stop about Claude and the past, without ever saying his name. Then she would listen, her sunglasses on her nose. I would talk about perhaps coming back to Australia to live, to which she would say with due solemnity, ‘I think it’s too late, John.’ Year after year I would fly down from South-east Asia and tell her what I had seen and what had moved and shaken me. Her listening, during my divorce, saw me through it.
One of our rituals, on the beach, was to stare at those great gateposts to the South Pacific, Sydney Heads, and try to imagine the thoughts and fears of our Irish great-grandparents, Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer, who arrived in leg-irons in the 1820s. Francis had been sentenced to fourteen years’ ‘penal servitude’ in New South Wales for ‘uttering unlawful oaths’ and ‘making political agitation’. Mary was an Irish scullery maid who was sentenced to death for stealing. This was commuted to ‘transportation for life’. They both belonged to what Queen Victoria called ‘the inflammable matter of Ireland’: animae viles, as Robert Hughes wrote, that had to be disposed of along with the ‘swinish multitude’ of the English lower orders.1
Most of Elsie’s large family – she was the fifth of nine children – did not wish it to be known publicly that ‘the Stain’ was upon them: that is, they had convict blood. (It is now fashionable to admit it.) In order to obliterate all evidence of this congenital flaw, her siblings embraced certain sub-Thatcherite poses, such as attempts (often hilarious) to eradicate the nasal sound from their speaking voice and the adoption of ‘English ways’, including an obligatory xenophobia towards all non-British elements: that is, Tykes, Yids, Refos, Krauts and Abos, to name but a few. Once in my presence, when a sister questioned the veracity of our criminal pedigree, Elsie managed to silence the room by saying, ‘I’m proud of the McCarthys. They didn’t belong to some false respectable deity. They had guts. Give’em a break.’
She met Claude when she was sixteen and he was eighteen. I have a sepia photograph of them swooning beside a lake: she was a few inches taller than he. She was always self-conscious about this; and I would thank her for giving her height to me. Although she spoke fondly about a medical student, and later on there was a shadowy character called Lex, Claude was her life-long love; and I hope she will forgive me for saying that out loud. This piece is a tribute to them both.2
They had grown up in the Kurri Kurri, New South Wales, where Claude was an apprentice coal miner, having left school at fourteen during the First World War, when his father, an old clipper sailor, was forced out of the pits for being of German birth, even though he was one of the first naturalised Australians. This was wine-growing country; and Claude became famous as the boy who beat Ebenezer Mitchell’s record by tying four acres of vines in a single day. With the proceeds, he supported his impoverished family.
Elsie didn’t meet him until both had come to Sydney, where she was one of the first ‘scholarship girls’ at Sydney University. Claude was then an ‘artisan in training’ at the SydneyMechanics Institute, where he read avidly for the first time: Dumas, Dickens, Shakespeare, Marx and his favourite, the American writer, O. Henry. Elsie would smuggle him into the university library, which was still being built. He was one of the early members of the Australian Socialist Party, which was an offshoot of the American ‘Wobblies’ and in the new world radical tradition. Long ago he told me, in his cautious way, that he and Elsie shared ‘decent politics’.
When in 1922 she took him home to her family it was just as well she asked him to wait at the railway station, because they made it clear to her they didn’t want a Bolshie carpenter with a German name for a son-in-law. Her response to this was to marry the Bolshie carpenter. On the morning of her wedding, she sent her family a one-word telegram, ‘GOING’. That afternoon she followed it with another, ‘GONE’.
She claimed it was pure coincidence that they got married within sight of the Female Factory, where Mary, her great-grandmother, had been interned, and which was now the Parramatta lunatic asylum. ‘During the ceremony,’ said Elsie, ‘I remember the wailing from the imbeciles’ yard. I said to your father, “God, I hope this isn’t a bad omen!”’
They moved into a room overlooking the surf at Bondi, and she began to teach Latin and French, almost losing her first job when her headmistress found a copy of The Socialist in her locker. She was accused of ‘bending young minds’. Her students at this school so loved and admired her that every year until her death, they held a dinner in her honour – and often in her absence: she had long lost confidence in herself.
She lost it perhaps because, as she wrote in her letter of resignation, there were ‘domestic considerations’. That meant that she and Claude were coming apart. I cannot remember when it happened; there was shouting in the night and she seemed to grieve constantly; and I resented her tears. It doesn’t matter who was to ‘blame’. In truth, neither was. She made her demands, and he found another.
Suddenly, she changed her life. She went to work in factories, on assembly lines making fake leather handbags and model aeroplanes; she cherished many friends there and her rumbustiousness returned from time to time. Claude now had a government job driving in the Outback; and he relished those dawn mornings when he would strap a canvas water bag to the front bumper of his Vauxhall Velox and head west, where his freedom was.
In 1962, on the wharf at Circular Quay, she told me she knew I was ‘going for good’. Something happened then. In her sixties, with little more than her state pension, she set off around the world. She would disappear from view occasionally, turning up once in the Solomon Islands. In London, she stayed in my eight foot by six foot garret in Old Compton Street, Soho, where I would find her on the doorstep laughing with the prostitutes from the club next door. ‘Do you know my son very well?’ she would ask them as I approached.
And when we went to Paris that weekend she distinguished herself by ordering, in her fluent Aussie French, a brute of a taxi driver to open the door for her; and he did. When a stroke took most of her language, she continued to speak in French, as sometimes happens with stroke victims who are bilingual. Our discussions on the beach, joke-telling and family bitching included, were now conducted in fractured French, with slabs of Latin. Nil illegitimi carborundum!
She and Claude had not seen each other for thirty years, though they had spoken once on the phone, accidentally. That last day on the beach I told her he had died. She stared out at the Heads, then said, ‘Well, he was getting on . . .’ The next morning she watched me put on a dark suit and tie and go off to his funeral; she waved from the balcony. Something made me turn back, and I found her on the floor of the kitchen.
August 2, 1991