CHAPTER 2

Mum’s Early Years

Mum was an indifferent student and daydreamed through life until the twins arrived. She was 12 years old when her brother and sister were born. She hated them. An indulged only child, she now had to take them for a walk after school every day. Once she let their pram career down a hill and it overturned and tossed them out, luckily without serious injury. Mum added school to her list of hates. She left aged 14 and became an apprentice cutter and tailor at the Myer Emporium department store in Melbourne, not knowing or even caring if she would like it. All she could think of was getting away from the bloody twins.

She was attractive and delighted in wearing smart clothes. Thanks to her critical father, she was a perfectionist and suited to the tailoring and fashion industry. No detail was too small. Mum would copy French Vogue fashion magazine patterns at work and make them for herself; she spent lunch hours window shopping in Melbourne’s labyrinth arcades and laneways. It was the Jazz Age and fashionable young people were out and about.

Her father crafted impeccable rowing skiffs and her mother kept an impeccable house and garden. Mum was expected to be impeccable also. After work she must be on the first tram home. Her father travels this route from the boatyard and knows exactly what time she should arrive. There is no room for dalliance, not even on Friday night when there is late shopping and the streets are alive. Mum longs to be there and envies the older girls their vivid red lips and false eyelashes. Oh, to be older and not living at home. To be a movie star like Pola Negri who is ‘a woman of the world’. Just like Clara Bow, the ‘IT’ girl.

My mum took her mother to see The Sheik when it came out. Now there is Son of the Sheik, which the girls at work say is even better. She reads the poster while waiting for the tram home: ‘A photo play of tempestuous love between a madcap English beauty and a bronzed Arab chief. When an Arab sees a woman he wants, he takes her!’ Mum commits this quote to memory . . . When an Arab sees a woman he wants, he (shudder) takes her. Aged 14, these words thrill Mum, and would continue to for the rest of her life.

At Myer, Mum reinvented herself. As she advanced, she learned social graces while creating tailor-made clothes for Melbourne’s elite. She enjoyed dealing with the rich and famous and became la-di-dah herself. No-one needed to know she lived with her parents in working-class West Brunswick. Everyone called her Ev, but she now insisted on being known as Evelyn. Myer would choose pretty girls like Mum, dress them in the latest style they were keen to promote and send them to fashionable events.

Melbourne was shocked in 1934 when her famous boss, Sidney Myer, died suddenly aged 56. ‘He was such a handsome man,’ Mum said. ‘Always beautifully dressed.’ She joined thousands of staff on three special trains to Box Hill Cemetery to see Myer buried in a huge oak casket. Fortunately, Sidney’s nephew, Norman Myer, still drove the huge store towards fashion. Two months later, Mum was chosen with other smart young things to represent Myer at the Melbourne Cup. They were to keep an eye out for women who had bought fur coats and other finery from Myer, expecting to return them for refund after the event. Everyone said Mum should have had her picture in the newspaper instead of those posh girls from Toorak.

Mum even backed the 1934 Melbourne Cup winner, Peter Pan, her first ever bet. Few believed the stallion could win the fabled cup a second time. However, Mum had always loved the Peter Pan and Wendy story and had promised herself that if she ever had children, she would name them Peter and Wendy. The boy first, then the girl. That way the boy could look after the girl, and when they grew up, he’d be able to chaperone and introduce her to his friends.

By the time she was a senior staffer at Myer, she was as smart as a tack. Grandpa’s hand-coloured photographs showed a head-turner with a ready smile and a nice figure, and she was always impeccably dressed. She understudied Miss Ella McDonald, who unbelievably went overseas on buying trips for Myer every year. Ella was also famous for being Melbourne’s first platinum blonde. Just to think about Ella made Mum envious.

She’d worked at Myer for 10 years when she met Thomas Vincent Geddes, but he was known as Vin, was still living at home and sharing a room with little sister, Roma. But there she was at the famous jazz club, sharing a beer with a classy university student who’d just been loudly applauded for his piano bracket with the Graeme Bell jazz band.

He wasn’t a full-time member of the band, but like Bell, he was a classically trained pianist and was regularly invited to play with them at dances and clubs around Melbourne. The group was acknowledged as the greatest jazz band outside America. Dad told Mum he had just completed his London Conservatorium exams at Melbourne University and was considering a classical music career. Mum was impressed and happily agreed to another beer. She was doubly impressed when he took her home in the big Chevrolet sedan.

Her dad rode a motorbike and sidecar and as a teenager Mum was forced to sit on the pillion seat behind him while her mum nursed the twins in the sidecar. He ran the bike off the road on a spin out to Heidelberg weir one weekend, and Mum flatly refused to travel with him again. Although he regularly reminded her that she was still living under his roof, she was learning to dig her heels in. Besides, it was undignified travelling on the back of a motorbike with your family. ‘What if someone from work saw me?’

Mum kept Dad a secret from her parents. She could never admit she knew any boys. Instead, she would make excuses about working back, going out with the girls for a meal or a movie. Dad would park the Chev around the corner from her house so they could smooch unobserved. Her father would have hit the roof if he’d known Mum was unchaperoned in a car with a man. Let alone a bloody Catholic.

Mum and Dad both loved movies and enjoyed sparking lines off each other.

Dad: ‘What about when Myrna Loy comes into the bar and there is William Powell sitting with a martini in front of him.’

Mum: ‘And she asks how many drinks he’s had.’

Dad: ‘Five.’

Mum: ‘Well, make me five and line them up.’

Dad: ‘Yeah, and then she drinks them all down, just so she can get high like him.’

This scene legitimised boozing as a fashionable and desirable state, and they also copied the movie stars’ flamboyant smoking styles. Mum even postured with a long cigarette holder. Privately, they practised blowing smoke rings.

They rehearsed being ‘witty and gay’ like in the movies.

‘Sarcasm is the highest form of wit,’ Dad would say.

‘Dancing is the most popular form of social intercourse,’ Mum would reply.

They began meeting for lunch, and at weekends Mum joined the fashionable crowd at the Yarra River marathon swims. Dad was a strong swimmer, and she was thrilled to be associated with him in such classy company. Dad had been a boarder as a college boy and was one of the select few to attend Melbourne University. He had lots of wealthy friends who did ‘silly fun things’ they would never have dreamed of in West Brunswick, and Mum lapped it up.

One of Dad’s drinking mates was the son of a major Melbourne undertaker and he arranged a part-time job for Dad driving mourners to and from the cemetery. ‘Don’t ever think funeral processions are slow, dignified affairs,’ Dad told Mum. ‘You have to drive like a bat out of hell to keep up with the hearse.’

In addition to his professional mourner’s suit, Dad had an elegant dinner suit and use of his mum’s car. They were invited to lots of parties where Dad’s wonderful piano-playing made him the centre of attention. He was tall, not bad looking, and a pretty good catch. ‘Let’s face it,’ she told Marjorie. ‘How else will I get away from my bloody father?’