Autobiography of My Mother (14 page)

The pianolas sold all right; the trouble was that, as the Depression was beginning, no one made payments on them. They were a financial disaster.

This was heartbreaking for my mother; her dream of her own house receded even further. The rest of us, though, were happy enough in Botany Street.

Mum's other dream was to go to Russia. Back when we had been staying at the Coogee boarding house, the Villa Taormina, a man named Jim Quinn was lodging there. He
was a builder and a member of the Communist Party, which we didn't know at the time, who left a vast fortune to the party in his will.

Every time I met Jim Quinn, he would say, ‘How's your art going?'

‘Very well,' I answered dutifully.

‘Ah,' he would intone, ‘art is a weapon.'

He lived a solitary life and became very attached to us during our stay at the Villa Taormina, particularly to Mum. His endless talk of Russia, I think, inspired her with this wish to travel there.

Our cleaning lady in Botany Street was Russian too, which might have fuelled Mum's fantasies. This woman had been a dresser with the Russian Ballet before the Revolution and her husband was a strong man in the circus. They had walked across Siberia to Vladivostok to escape from Russia and come to Australia.

Until she was a very old lady, Mum talked about going to Russia one day. But she never did.

Mollie was born on Melbourne Cup Day. She loved racing and she loved horses. Being so close to the racecourse, Randwick was full of racing stables, and Botany Street was in the midst of them. Jerry Carey lived two doors up. O'Connor's were three or four doors away; T. J. Jamieson, a New Zealand trainer, was also nearby, and Jack King's big stables were at the end of the street opposite where the entrance to the University of New South Wales is now.

When we first moved to Randwick, I used to pick bunches of boronia and other wildflowers on the university site, which was a big paddock. I think the wildflowers
thrived on the sandy soil. Soon they started quarrying. The quarry left a huge pit which, to our horror, became a tip. The smell of garbage used to waft up the street to the flats, but the hole was filled and they turned it into a small golf links. None of the locals could believe that the university was to be built over the old tip; they said the university would sink into the quarry. But it seems to have survived.

Irish old-style racehorse trainers, the Paytens, lived on the corner of the block and opposite the Paytens lived another trainer, Jim ‘The Grafter' Kingsley. Grafter Kingsley weighed over twenty stone and used to ride down Botany Street in a tiny sulky drawn by a very small horse. From the back, the sulky almost touched the ground under the strain of the Grafter's immense weight.

George Lambert and Grafter Kingsley lived within a few hundred yards of each other. It fascinated me that two such different worlds were so close, yet they couldn't have been further apart.

Mollie lived for the races. For days before the big spring and autumn meetings we heard of nothing else. The phone rang hot with tips for her. You could always rely on Mollie for a sure tip at Randwick. ‘That horse can't lose', ‘That horse will lose all right', ‘That horse can only come last', ‘That horse is a surefire winner'; I can't tell you how often I heard those phrases.

I took it all with a grain of salt, but Mollie was deadly serious about her predictions. She would be positive her horse was going to win and, if by some mischance it lost, she had every excuse off pat.

At Easter, down at Inglis's stables, they held the yearling parade. The yearlings were led round the yards with great pomp and ceremony. Dad used to come up from Yass to
spend Easter Sunday with us and he and Mollie never missed a yearling parade.

Mum's younger sister, Aileen, also used to stay with us at Easter. Aileen was a champion rider who came up from Murrumburrah for the high jump events at the Royal Easter Show. She used to share my room and I remember her waking up once at about four in the morning.

‘Listen to the horses' hooves!' she said excitedly. The racehorses were setting out for their early morning training gallops. We were accustomed to the noise and slept through it but Aileen, being a visitor, was awakened instantly. She jumped out of bed and stared through the window. She couldn't understand why we weren't up watching them, too.

The racing atmosphere in Randwick was contagious; even Mum, who was not a gambler, sometimes had a bet on. She would often dress up on a Saturday afternoon and walk round to the races with Mollie.

I didn't share Mollie's passion for horses and, like Mum, I was not a gambler, but I did watch the races from ‘the hill'. From the top of the sandhill where the university now is, there was a clear view of the race track.

Every Saturday afternoon, a mixed crowd gathered on the hill, mostly down-and-outs, old soaks, a few children and teenagers. Bets were in twopences and threepences, but a smart bookie could still make ten shillings on a race. If he was overextended or couldn't make his payment, he just used to disappear, so as soon as a race was over everyone would make a circle around the bookmaker to ensure he didn't run away.

The Little Sisters of the Poor were familiar figures in Randwick on race days. Since most of the trainers were Irish
Catholics, they virtually supported these nuns, whose order, many years later, cared for both Bea Miles and Dulcie Deamer before they died.

The trainers were Irish, Catholic and highly superstitious. A trainer had put his hat on ready to take his horse to the track, when a Chinese man who went round selling fruit and vegetables from a cart came by and wished him luck.

The trainer's horse won the Summer Cup that afternoon and the trainer said ‘the Chinaman' had brought him luck. He arranged to have him call before every big race and wish him luck after he had put his hat on.

The back of our flats adjoined Jerry Carey's stables. His apprentices came from the country; often they had just arrived in the city. They were boys of twelve and thirteen, small for their ages. Because they took the boys so young, the trainers were responsible for their welfare. Stable boys led a strictly disciplined life.

One night we heard screams followed by the sound of someone being sick. The lights in the stables went on, a boy's sobbing was heard.

‘Will I die, Mrs Carey? Will I die, Mrs Carey?' he whimpered. It was surreal. ‘Don't worry, it's all right. One of the older boys took him to a party and got him drunk, that's all,' another voice shouted over the fence. Next thing we heard was Jerry's voice booming out to the older boy, ‘Now pack your bags and go!'

King bought himself a punching bag, the sort you hit as if you are boxing with someone. King wanted to build himself up, and pounded away at the bag on the first morning he got it. That evening Jerry Carey came round to the flats.

‘Mr Coen, I'm sorry to tell you this,' he said. ‘The horses were nearly driven crazy with the noise this morning, so if
you don't mind you'll have to stop using that punching bag.' Jerry said it nicely, but sounded as if he meant it; King didn't use the punching bag again.

One of the Careys' horses took a fancy to a cat I had, and horse and cat became inseparable. The cat still came home to me for dinner, as well as filling up on extra tidbits at the stables, but that was all I saw of my cat after it met the Careys' horse.

At Danny Lewis's stable, they bought a milking goat for the children. The goat and a horse fell in love. The goat did everything with the horse except accompany it onto the track.

That was racing Randwick. It was quite unique.

My brother Jack loved everything electrical. In Jack's bedroom, we had to pick our way through red wires, blue wires, half-made wirelesses, crystal sets and ‘cats' whiskers', a name that always intrigued me. I don't know how Mum ever fought her way across the room to make his bed. Jack never made his own bed. Even the floor underneath the bed was covered with paraphernalia. Jack's bedroom was his workroom. When he managed to hear a strain of music or a few words on a wireless he was making, he emerged, wildly excited, and dragged us in to listen to his new set. Jack not only made wirelesses that worked, he sold them too, which impressed us no end. At one stage he worked in the radio department of David Jones. The radios sold fastest when Nellie Melba was on, according to him. He used to deliver them by hansom cab.

Giving us electrical shocks was part of Jack's home experiments. He would drop a penny into a basin and run an electric current through the water. We had to line up holding hands, then he made one of us try to pick the penny up. The resulting shock was quite something; the current
ran through all of us. One person only had to touch the water; you couldn't get anywhere near the penny. The family tolerated Jack's shocks in much the same way as they put up with my wanting to be an artist.

Jack enjoyed fiddling with anything electrical. Joy's husband Bill from upstairs, the dancing instructor at the Palais Royal, used to get home at about one o'clock on a Saturday night and he often brought a group of friends back with him. A dozen or so people would party on upstairs almost until daybreak. Mum got tired of the racket. She said she wasn't feeling well; perhaps she was just fed up with the sound of other people's parties. She was never a party person and anyway, the dancing on the floor above our bedrooms was very noisy.

One Saturday night, Mum said to Jack, ‘Go upstairs and fix them.' Jack disappeared outside and disconnected their fuse box. The flat upstairs was plunged into darkness. We could hear the expressions of surprise and dismay that ensued and the guests departed rapidly. Mum slept soundly. On the Sunday morning, Bill came downstairs very apologetically to ask Mum if Jack would be so kind as to have a look at their fuse box.

Jack, who could keep a poker face, said he would be delighted. He went upstairs, restored their box to order and accepted their thanks without the slightest twitch of a smile. Party nights did decline a little after that.

King and particularly Jack had a bad time of it in the Depression. People couldn't afford to be too choosy about where they worked. Jack was sacked from various places as they closed down; that's why he ended up working for himself, making wirelesses. In the bank, King was at least secure.

One day King bought a motor bike with a sidecar. We woke up and there on the front lawn was this dreadful, decrepit machine. He hadn't said a word about it to anyone except Jack. The bike wasn't secondhand, but about twentieth hand; King paid £15 for it and Jack chipped in so he could have a share. I don't know how they even lifted it inside the front gate.

It took King weeks of tinkering to get it going. Amber and I used to drive around Bondi beach during the day like princesses in the chauffeur-driven Rolls, then after tea Jack or King would come around to the Hacketts with this old bike. We would pile in, about six of us squashed into the sidecar, and go for a bone-rattling drive around Randwick before we went home.

King had a girlfriend, Mary Frost, who used to go everywhere with us. She was like one of the family already. We thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world, with her black hair and eyes and complexion the colour of pink carnations.

The bike needed a run. King decided one long weekend he would take Mary to Goulburn to visit some relatives of hers. Mary, rugged up with blankets, scarf and hat, was installed in the sidecar and they set off. Goulburn was quite a distance away. A begoggled King concentrated on the road and the bike, while Mary bumped along beside him for hours. Just before Goulburn, King turned to say something to his passenger. To his horror Mary was gone. There was no sidecar, no Mary, nothing.

The sidecar had dropped off along the road about ten miles back, King discovered, and Mary had been left sitting by herself on the roadside. King wondered if Mary would ever forgive him, but she did. Soon afterwards they announced their engagement.

Life had its ups and downs. Some cousins had a weekend house at Cronulla, which they let us have at Christmas and for weekends through the year. Usually about twelve of us stayed there, mostly King and Mollie's friends. Mum made it a condition that we did the work, otherwise she said the holiday only meant extra chores for her.

On one occasion eight of us, four boys and four girls, including Mary Frost, rented a boat. The boys took it in turns to row, as we made our way across the glassy flat sea to Point Hacking. A sudden southerly blew up and on the way back the boat seemed to stand on its head every time it went over a wave. It would drop down again before going up and over the next wave. We were terrified. Mollie was weeping, Mary and I were in the back of the boat saying rosaries out loud in between exhorting the boys to row harder. We were going to drown, this was the end, I thought.

Mollie started calling on St Jude, patron saint of the impossible. St Jude came good. The boat finally seesawed into Cronulla and safety. Mary and I said another rosary in gratitude.