WE ALWAYS HAD CHRISTMAS WITH my mother’s family when I was growing up: her three brothers, their wives and twenty or so kids, along with Mum’s mother, my nana. The menu was chicken and potato salad, followed by watermelon. There were devilled eggs at Tom and Mary’s, brandy flames on the plum pudding at Tony and Jill’s, and no pudding sixpences at ours because Mum worried about the choking hazard.
I famously danced on the table when I was two, my uncle Tom encouraging me into a frenzy, a whirling dervish, everyone in fits of laughter until, inevitably, I collapsed in tears in a plate of watermelon.
I was full of beans, Mum said. I look ridiculous in photographs taken in my early years. Mum cut my thick hair straight across at the front in a blunt fringe, forming a right angle on each side. My chubby cheeks pushed my eyes closer together, and Mum told me, many years later, that Nana believed there was something wrong with me mentally—based on the fringe rather than the whirling dervish incident, although the whirling dervish probably didn’t help.
My oldest cousin, Marg, used to visit our house with Nana. Marg would have been ten when I was two. When they arrived one day, I was in the sandpit wearing nothing but a nappy, using the wedding silver for digging tools. Even Marg knew, she said, when she told me the story years later, that something wasn’t quite right, that the silver wasn’t for digging. I was the third baby; the fourth was on the way. The next day, Nana came back with Marg, bringing with them Nana’s cleaner. No one remarked on this, Marg said. The cleaner sorted out the house while us kids gobbled down the cakes Nana brought from the Shingle Inn cake shop in the city. And then they left.
Mum used to drive us around in the car on Sundays after Mass and we’d get lost. There was a man at Mass, Joe, who had cerebral palsy, and before we went on the drives Mum would always stop and talk to him. Others, including me, gave Joe a wide berth—spit came out when he talked and he had trouble with words. Mum would seek him out. She’d struggle to understand him, but she’d stay there until they’d had a reasonable conversation. Then she’d wish him well and tell him she’d see him next week.
On the drives, I think Mum only pretended we were lost. We had a big old Austin called Granny that had belonged to Nana and the back door would sometimes swing open around corners. My two big brothers, Ian and Andrew—one of whom would always reach across and pull the door shut when it flew open and frightened me—were much better at finding the way home than I was. We lived in a spec-built weatherboard house in Chapel Hill and all the roads were dirt, so Granny would fill up with road dust and Mum would lead us in a song she composed called ‘I Wonder How the Dust Gets In’.
When I was four, my brothers and I were taken away to a children’s home north of Brisbane. I think Mum’s younger brother, our uncle Tony, the doctor, drove us there. He may have found the home. It also might have been Tony who told us Mum needed to have a rest.
Soon after I arrived at the home I was stared at by a doctor who had a moustache. I’d been told to strip off to my green cottontail underpants to be weighed and he was staring at me. Did they provide us with clothes? I think they did, even the green cottontails. I didn’t like being in cottontails in front of the doctor. I might have bitten him. I still had the fringe so it’s possible that, like Nana, he thought I was mentally unhinged. I don’t recall a punishment.
My older brother Andrew, closest to me in age and a beautiful child, told a care worker to shut up when she said something nasty to me—I wet the bed and it may have been about that. She told him if he said things like that she’d have to wash his mouth out with soap. He told her to shut up again and she washed his mouth out with soap.
My younger brother Lachlan, not yet two, was in the babies’ section at the home, divided from us by a high wire fence. When I went to the fence to talk to him, he threw himself on the ground and screamed. I think he wanted to get out. One of the workers on his side of the fence shooed me away. Mum came to visit us on the Saturday with Nana, who brought chicken. I don’t remember anything they said. They left and we were there for what felt like a long time. It was two weeks, one of my brothers said later.
Tolstoy said all happy families are alike. Jeanette Winterson’s mother asked why be happy when you can be normal. Our family didn’t have the wherewithal for even the semblance of normal. Dad worked from around four in the afternoon until one in the morning. He was a journalist on the sub-editing desk at The Courier-Mail, so he helped to create the newspaper each night. Mostly Mum was on her own with us kids.
In the mornings, we had to be extra quiet because Dad finished work so late and needed to sleep. I would lie in bed and tell myself stories or get up and make funny faces in the mirror. If we did make too much noise, and this happened frequently, Dad would yell from the bedroom. If we were really noisy, and this happened frequently too, he would stomp out and yell at us in person.
Our house was a mess. We drew all over the walls in crayon. We didn’t pick up after ourselves. At school, we never had those pre-peeled oranges other kids had. We might have benefited from Supernanny but there was no Supernanny in those days and I know for a fact I would have hated her. I can’t even watch the show as an adult without becoming annoyed.
We were more Addams Family than Brady Bunch—not like the Wadleys, the even larger Catholic family contemporary to ours: Nana’s friends Sir Douglas and Lady Vera; their two boys John and Peter, who grew up with Mum; John’s wife Denise, who’d worked as a journalist with Mum before either of them married; and a stack of kids we went to school with. If we were whirling-dervish-wedding-silver odd, the Wadleys were Denise’s-column-in-The-Courier-Mail-Fig-Tree-Pocket-family-fun perfect. We wore our damage openly because we didn’t have a choice. Perhaps if I’d seen their back rooms I’d have discovered that other families, maybe even the Wadleys, were damaged too.
While we weren’t normal, I wouldn’t have said we were unhappy—not us kids, anyway. Mum was a kindly presence in our lives and enormous fun when she was feeling bright. Dad wasn’t kindly really, but he wasn’t present much either. I remember noticing a difference when I first visited other children’s houses. One family at Indooroopilly had twins the same age as me, and their father ran around chasing them with an axe. When he caught them he hog-tied them in the backyard. As I say, it’s possible every family has its damaged places, but the father meant well, I’m fairly sure. I do recall a sense of alarm as he held the axe above his head and screamed at his son in a way my father probably wouldn’t have screamed at Andrew. He said he was an Indian.
The first thing I learned at school is that being full of beans is not helpful in a classroom with forty other children, at least as far as teachers are concerned. If someone had thought to explain it to me that way—I’m sorry, dear, but no one can keep forty children still for six hours straight—instead of saying I was the problem, for wriggling, for talking, for being bored, I think I might have hated school less.
As a child, I was routinely mistaken for one of four boys rather than the only girl in our family. I watched the wrestling on the television wearing underpants and a singlet so that I could act it out, and I wanted to be a range of superheroes, all male. My gender identity, although that wasn’t what I would have called it, was to do with clothes—my brothers’ pants and t-shirts, and that haircut favoured by my mother (who at some stage bought a bowl for the purpose, which at least smoothed the right angles off)—but also what I came to like. Mum and Dad gave me a doll for Christmas one year, and I gave it to the girl up the street. My brothers were my first playmates. I played their games. They treated me as one of them. I felt like one of them.
I was the smallest in my class, and also the youngest. There was nothing I liked about school, not the routine, certainly not the uniform—a dress—and not the rules. I was often labelled attention-seeking, as a criticism rather than a compliment. I was still so small by year three that one day, when I’d been down to visit Lachlan, who was still in preschool, I was mistaken for a preschool child from a distance as I headed back up to the big school. I quickly ran away from the teacher, who was beckoning me back to preschool. For weeks afterwards, I expected she’d come up to the big school to get me and take me back to prep for being too small.
By then, I’d discovered that when you’re small the best way to get noticed is to do things you’re not supposed to do. I became quite good at it. I liked being noticed. I don’t know if this is more or less considered normal for children. I don’t know if I had some deficit in my sense of self that made me feel not quite good enough or if all children feel that way. I’ve often wondered, given what came later. Was I marked from birth? Was there some flaw in me that made me more likely to falter on the road to adulthood? And if there was, exactly what was it? I did have an absolute belief that grown-ups were good, perhaps because in my childhood most of them had been.
Mum normally dropped the two big boys at the train for their school in the city and then took me to the convent before dropping Lachlan at the preschool. One day, I was sick—not terribly sick, a little fever—but Mum said I could stay home with her. I watched as the preschool teacher peeled Lachlan one finger at a time from Mum. After we left, she bought me an ice-cream and took me for a drive and I didn’t have to find the way home. I remember the winter sun coming in through the windscreen on the way out to the farmlands of Brookfield, having Mum all to myself, and then waking with melted ice-cream all over my shirt when she stopped the car in our driveway, being mad that I’d fallen asleep and wasted some of the day we had together.
The midday movie was The Old Man and the Sea. The old man was losing his fish, and I couldn’t stop crying, loud gut-wrenching sobs. Mum, who very much wanted to see Anthony Quinn in the role of Hemingway’s great character, was perplexed about what to do. Finally she turned down the sound and we watched it silently. There wasn’t any dialogue and without the sad music, my cheeriness returned. My uncle Tony suggested, when Mum told him later what she’d done, that she could have turned down the brightness as well and we could have watched the black screen together. When I swallowed Jesus, Mary and Joseph from our nativity scene a few years before it had been Tony who’d said, when Mum rang him in a panic for medical advice, that it would be better if she rang the priest.
My brothers and I developed an outstanding collection of comics and other kids would visit us just to read them. As we grew older, all our friends hung around our house. Mum made toasted sandwiches in the old style, using a frypan and a ton of butter, and accepted a broad range of behaviours. One of Andrew’s friends wrote me after we’d met up in middle age to say he’d had cause to reflect on his life and the handful of people who’d been kind. My mother was first among them, he said.
Mum had married Dad when they were both journalists at The Courier-Mail. It was the society wedding of the season, Margy told me. Mum had already finished her BA and a Diploma in Journalism at the university. Dad had dropped out. Mum was paid less than Dad, and quit work late in her pregnancy with Ian and never went back.
I have two photographs of my mother. The first was taken when she was small, perhaps a year old, and it is in a plain wooden frame on my wall. She is sitting on a table against a nondescript background dressed in nothing but a nappy. Black curls surround her face. Her hands are busy.
Her eyes welcome the world. She is smiling, not at the photographer, but at something else she can see beyond the frame.
In the second photograph, which is in our family’s album, she is wearing her university graduation gown. She is still smiling but her smile is smaller, manufactured. Her eyes would not welcome the world. She has learned something. She is wiser but would not trust you, not really.
I look at these two photographs of my mother and wish I could have changed whatever it was that took her smile from her. I have hazarded a guess, as many adult daughters have had to do, because that generation never told their secrets. Loyal to whoever was requiring her silence, Mum never in her lifetime, nor in her journals left for me, spoke of what had knocked her from happiness to unhappiness. But something had.
That was the second part of what Tolstoy said. Happy families might be all the same, but unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way.
I have worried you’ll think poorly of me on a number of counts—you have plenty to choose from—but I hope from the outset you will try to understand my mother. Your other mother has been so different from mine, different also from the mother I am to Otis.
I can see the questions your other mother might ask about my mother. What was my mother doing when she should have been banning her children from drawing on walls? Why was she letting us read nothing but comics? Why didn’t she stop what happened from happening?
She’s your grandmother, my mother, and I want you to think well of her. I love her very much. As for keeping what happened from happening, I don’t know what my mother could have done to protect me. I only know she would have done it if she could.