God's Callgirl (10 page)

My very first day at school was grim. The schoolroom was makeshift, like everything else. The wooden walls had open spaces gaping between them and the roof. On that first day, a football kept coming into our room through the high windowless holes, and kept getting lobbed back out. Our male teacher was very young and couldn’t easily control his class. Half the children had their back turned to him, since we sat on benches at long trestle tables arranged in rows like
desks. To make it even more difficult for him, the room was L-shaped and his charges were of varying ages.

We were given plenty of free time to draw pictures while the teacher thought up something better to do. He consulted a colleague near the door as the football kept appearing and disappearing, causing a constant commotion. I lost interest in all of it and completely immersed myself in my drawing.

I was fond of pictures of ballerinas. To achieve their mesmerisingly sensuous poses, I had to try to get the curves and the proportions right, especially the curve of the foot as it balanced on the big toe—so unnatural, so feminine and so elegant. It didn’t matter to me that bedlam reigned all around; I was used to concentrating while doing homework in a kitchen where my parents might be entertaining a visitor, or where younger sisters or brothers yelled and carried on, and occasionally the radio added to the cacophony. In such an environment I had learned to completely ignore whatever went on around me.

In this classroom it was no different, and so I didn’t notice that while I was intently drawing and colouring, the class had been bullied into a deathly silence. The teacher had finally had enough and was beside himself with indignation. The class sat in absolute stillness, while the teacher dared anyone to speak again without putting up their hand first. It was in that perfect silence, charged with the teacher’s fury and the children’s fear of retribution, that I spoke softly but clearly to the girl sitting opposite me. ‘Can I borrow your red colouring pencil?’

Her big eyes grew bigger with incredulous fear, looking first at me, then up at the teacher behind me. I had no time to figure out what was wrong: hands of steel gripped my shoulders and shook them mercilessly. The outraged teacher
vented his helpless anger and frustration in a furious attack on my body. I was on the bench directly in front of him, so I was an easy target. The energy of his anger was familiar to me—just like my father’s, and just as explosive. I was a trembling mess. Holding back the tears, I tried to keep my body rigid, in case it should slump and receive worse treatment.

Our classes were reorganised and, on the whole, school in the camp turned out to be more fun than it had been in Holland, on account of a few in our rag-tag unhomogeneous group who dared to be rude, inspiring the more timid. It took two teachers at a time to control us and instruct us in rudimentary English. We stuck our tongues out at them with a sneer when they tried to show us how to pronounce ‘th’.

ON THE VERY
first weekend, we went swimming with people from an Australian church. They offered to drive the children to Bathurst (the closest town) to ‘the baths’, as the pool was called, for a treat and we all accepted with a great deal of gusto. We spent hours at the baths, frolicking in the sun’s generous heat, and nobody realised, until it was too late, that we were getting horribly burned. My back came up in blisters; the camp doctor came but couldn’t help. This was learning about Australia first-hand.

The authorities in Holland had told us to cut our hair short, and sell our furs and blankets ‘because it’s so hot in Australia’. Since we eventually decided to settle in Melbourne, it was just as well that we did, at least, keep our woollen blankets. Even in the Bathurst camp, much further north than Melbourne but high on a plateau, the nights were as cold as the days were hot. We piled on six army-issue
blankets at night. And the mysterious natives we were told about—the kangaroos, that is—were nowhere to be seen.

Cultures from different countries became apparent in rich and unexpected ways in the camp. Although most of us were Dutch, there were Italian and even Russian migrants. Each evening at sunset, a sonorous haunting Russian song would rise from the nearby hills. The time of day lent a quality of stillness to the air, allowing the sound to gently roll down from the hills into our astonished ears. The singing delighted us even as it made us shiver. We never saw the man who owned the voice and never knew what it was that made him sing like that. People surmised that he was singing his homesickness, or had a broken heart.

The Dutch Catholic priest from Victoria, Father Maas, came to visit our family.‘There’s a head gardener’s job going at a convent in Melbourne, and it might be that God is giving this one to you, John.’ My father listened with eyes all intent. An outdoors job! This was not what he expected. ‘It comes complete with a cottage for the family.’

My father and the priest went together to check it out. The ‘garden’ was about eighteen acres of grounds, neglected for years, surrounding a massive convent. Its name was Genazzano and it was also a college for girls from well-to-do families.

The cottage was in the convent grounds and still occupied by the previous gardener, who had been there for twenty years and refused to accept the sack or move on but had abandoned his job. Tall weeds surrounded the cottage, providing a fine home for snakes and rabbits. Undaunted by any of this, our whole family lived in large tents erected right outside the gardener’s house by the desperate nuns while he was on holidays with his family. We were allowed to use the house’s toilet facilities. This camping adventure
was followed by a more dignified stay in a gracious house in the convent grounds called Grange Hill. Only when it became obvious that we were there to stay, and that my father had taken on the job he had so long neglected, did the old man and his family decide to leave.

The grateful nuns cooked dinner for us on the first day we moved into the cottage. The Reverend Mother came down and we all shook hands. She was a constantly smiling congenial nun, the one my mother would take to because of her unfailing kindness. She turned out to be often ingenuous and impractical, but was forgiven for her shortcomings, being an angel of light and soft-spoken roundness. She was accompanied by her impressive second-in-command—tall and straight and square-looking, who carried herself with an air of impeccable breeding but not a hint of snobbery.

Our English was broken, but we understood enough. My father was to have free run of the place to do whatever he could to improve matters, with a sizeable budget that had been put aside for the rehabilitation of the convent gardens. We children would attend the local parish primary school, run by the same nuns, free of charge. The cottage was free of rent and there was no charge for electricity. Paint would be provided to make the cottage a better home, and some other materials too, like plasterboard to fix a large hole in one of the walls.

We looked around the wooden house and couldn’t believe our eyes. ‘Look at that! Wooden planks on the inside walls, not even nailed on straight, caked with grease, and the grease is full of dust!’ The planks were weatherboard, usually meant for outside walls. The floors were either scuffed wood or worn linoleum. The bedroom walls carried ugly smudges; the windows had apparently not been cleaned for
months, or even years. My mother, my sister Liesbet and I would be doing most of the work to put things in order. We surveyed the scene together, staring incredulously and sighing. ‘It’ll scrub up into something decent,’ we philosophised. It would just take some women’s work and a bit of women’s imagination; nothing new.

Some furniture had been left behind, and under the old couch in the living room we found a large Bible with a brass clip and gilded edges, and sensational nude figures of Adam and Eve and other vivid half-clad characters from Jewish history. Bethsheba was there, and the Sabine women being carried off to be raped. The Bible, to the Catholics of the Dutch south at least, was almost a heretical thing, something read only by vile Protestants. Alas, because of our prejudices, the precious book was not recognised for its historical or artistic value. It was promptly burned in the backyard incinerator, a 44-gallon metal drum.

The longed-for boxes of furniture and other belongings finally arrived from the waterfront, but they had been broken into. Heartless Australian wharfies must have taken our silverware. Most of my mother’s precious embroidery, sewn in her younger days before she had children, was also missing. It was so sad, but we could only accept the situation, as most migrants were treated in the same way. ‘Melbourne wharfie’ was synonymous with ‘thief’ in those days.

There were no dolls for me; they weren’t stolen, they’d never been packed. ‘There wasn’t enough room,’ my parents said in soft voices, conspirators who had decided that enough was enough. My tears were huge, not only at the loss but at this betrayal. ‘I’ll buy you another doll sometime,’ my father said, feeling sorry for me. Still, he must have hoped that I would forget, for one day when we were
window shopping he told me sadly that the dolls were really too expensive and I had to wait. ‘Till when?’ I was trying to pin him down to a date, to an event, or a tangible time. But I already knew it was time to resign myself to a life without dolls.

My mother, sister and I set to with a tremendous will and made that greasy gardener’s cottage spotless within a week. The three older boys—stocky Adrian, nine; curly-headed Markus, seven; and little five-year-old Willem—gathered wood for the chip heater and helped our father. We all minded the littlies—brown-haired and brown-eyed Berta, aged two, and blonde toddler, Teresa, who was only one.

Brother Leo, from the Redemptorist monastery up the street, stopped by a lot. Leaning his bicycle against our backyard fence, he would watch us climb the enormous pine tree in the yard. He told us about
The Age
newspaper. ‘The red map of Australia, printed on the top left corner of the front page, proves that
The Age
is owned by Communists, and it’s best not to buy it.’ It was the time of Bob Santamaria, when the Catholics versus the Communists issue occupied political and Catholic minds.

In a few weeks the whole house was renovated; a shed was built for mending shoes and making windvanes; then a garage was built for the Chevrolet; and later still, a granny flat to house my three Australian-born brothers. They arrived over the next seven years, and would do as they pleased, rejecting their parents’ old-fashioned and other-world discipline. The weedy paddock near the house was transformed into an extremely productive vegetable garden, and trees were planted as well. The best was a willow tree, which soon grew big enough to support a swing.

As for the grounds at Genazzano, my hardworking father gradually made a showpiece out of them. He was not only
caretaker of the gardens, but the convent’s electrician, plumber and carpenter too. He was the man-about-the-convent for about thirty nuns, who called themselves Faithful Companions of Jesus and lived in a fine three-storeyed house with a slate roof. The nuns were appreciative, and my father responded to being appreciated and being entrusted with responsibility. He could let his imagination run riot on a project while trying to save the nuns as much expense as possible. He established a nursery to save them from having to buy seedlings. And he grew flowers especially for the chapel in a designated bed in a bid to have the rest of the flowers left alone in the garden.

My father was happier than he had ever been. His volatile anger diminished for a while, and he no longer approached me at night. I had turned twelve, we were in a sunny if small house with paper walls, and Dad had been introduced to a new culture by crusty George, the assistant gardener. This was the culture of the ‘men’s room’. Nuns and girls were prohibited. The walls were hung not with holy pictures but photographs from risque calendars. All sorts of glossy magazines lay in drawers, filled with advertisements from Melbourne establishments offering satisfaction to those who needed to be satisfied.

My father was eventually initiated into a more sophisticated—and more expensive—way of releasing his constant sexual drive than he had ever known. In his naivety he must have imagined that it was a safer way, and something that he could easily keep a secret. Never did he suspect that after many years of growing carelessness he would bring syphilis home to his wife one day, or that she, after suffering great mystification and confusion about her condition (he never said anything until she nailed him) would take a taxi to an address in Lygon Street and loudly
and tearfully accuse the prostitute she found there. In spite of her pitiful condition, it was decided between my parents that it should be kept a family secret. But the secret was too heavy for my mother to bear alone. She eventually confided it to my sister Liesbet, who was grown-up by then. Eventually Liesbet confided it to all her sisters.

IT WAS OUR
Dutch custom to visit people on a Sunday, and since there were no grandparents to go to now, we visited other Dutch families. Ten months or so after our arrival at Genazzano, we all boarded a train to visit a large family who had travelled with us on the transit ship, to find out how they were doing. The conversation was about the go-slow unions who threatened hardworking newcomers for showing up their lax attitudes; or the lack of choice in delicatessens and the food of home that we were all missing. It was about teenage daughters and sons, and how they disapproved of their friendships with those unreliable Australians.

We children were left to play with each other. We formed a sizeable bunch and, as usual, I felt nervous about being accepted by the others, even though I was one of the eldest at almost thirteen. To join in, I would have to speak up and be aggressive, and I wasn’t in the mood that day. There was a tree in the yard. I was wearing a dress, but that didn’t deter me from climbing to the very top. In spite of this feat, I went unnoticed. A heavy sadness came over me; there I was, alone at the top of the tree, desperately wanting to be like the other children, but separated from them and feeling so strangely lonely. I started to cry. Sobs welled up and, suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt free to let loose a deep, unnamed distress.