Madeleine (4 page)

There was a relaxed attitude generally to infidelity in the suburb. ‘People knew about each other's affairs and there were affairs all over the place in the Crag,' Lorna Harvey said. She remembered Ted as a ‘bit of a flirt. He was trying to flirt with me a bit. It was all the done thing to flirt.'
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In later life, Madeleine never so much as hinted at having any notion that her father had been unfaithful—although she accused him of almost everything else. Colette recalled four or five women whom Ted knew and admired and with whom he had friendships in that period but she doubted her father had had an affair.
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Sylvette was witty, vivacious and charming. But she was also dissatisfied. She wanted more—more success for Ted, more parties, more of a leading role in fashion and society. Ted had done well at the bar but he believed Sylvette was disappointed he had not been a ‘brilliant overnight success'. He was at a crucial stage of his career. His ambitions at the bar required serious work, and he struggled to understand his complicated wife. Sylvette kept the house clean and looked after the family well physically but not, in Ted's view, psychologically.
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The tensions increased as his workload grew. Madeleine saw some of the arguments:

I remember my mother saying [to Ted] if I only had one egg I would give it to my children but in your family if there was one egg, you would give it to the father, and my father denied it. But she was right, that was the way that family worked and it was the way my father expected his family to work.
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At other times, Madeleine saw Sylvette turn on the charm to try to lift Ted's mood. ‘My mother must have been totally desperate,' she said.

He would come home from work and she would have been slaving all day to keep the house and [put] wonderful food on the table and flowers in a vase and she gets this person who doesn't want to know [her] and sits like a stone and eats his dinner and you are chattering away and chattering away and trying to overcome this wall of silence and you are making more and more of a fool of yourself and finally the children go to bed and finally it's your bedtime and you have to get into bed with this block of concrete who doesn't want to talk to you…She must have felt, he doesn't love me anymore, he doesn't find me attractive anymore, he wants to throw me on the scrapheap.
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Sylvette had not been a particularly heavy drinker during the war, but as the couple's marriage deteriorated, she began to drink. Madeleine recalled her mother's behaviour and blamed her father:

I think there were times when [Ted] would ring her up from his chambers or she would ring him and he would say something so horrific to her that she would have a few drinks or half a bottle to fortify herself or even more to blot out the whole of life. I think she was trying to be unconscious sometimes. I think unconsciousness was what she was after. She is trapped, she can't leave or she would be giving up her rights to the children. She is trapped in this situation, she can't fight and she can't flee. An animal in that situation would chew its leg off and I think that was what she was doing when she drank those dreadful potions—she was chewing her leg off.
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Ted was alarmed at the impact of Sylvette's drinking on the children. When Madeleine chastised her intoxicated mother one night, saying, ‘I hate it when you talk in that silly way,' Ted was horrified.
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One day he came home to find Madeleine pinned against the wall, Sylvette slapping her face and screaming at her.
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On another occasion, Madeleine, just nine years old, found her mother unconscious on the kitchen floor. When things were particularly bad, Sylvette would shoo her daughters out of the house and tell them to go next door to the Dates so they would not see her in an intoxicated state.
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But this was much worse. ‘I ran straight out of the house and I can't remember where I went and what I did,' Madeleine recalled. ‘It was my first inkling that something was very badly wrong.'
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Somehow, Madeleine and Colette continued with the business of childhood. Madeleine and Tina Date played Chopin duets on the piano and constructed elaborate fantasy games. The Date girls and the St John sisters were joined by Ingrid Relf. They called themselves the Famous Five and modelled their games on Enid Blyton stories. Mothers whistled up their children, running wild all day, as the dark set in.

Colette found Castlecrag an ‘amazing place to live…We had Holocaust survivors living up there, we had schnitzel, we had dogs and fish and cats and the Dates had ducks, and we had the Castlecrag gullies.'
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Creativity ruled. Colette was a born actor and a talented mimic. Madeleine was less of a performer but was very musical and had a natural eye, and she had plenty of encouragement to sketch and paint. Once Madeleine and Colette along with Tina and Tonia Date and Lorna's two children, Antony and Diana (Didy), put on a puppet show poking fun at the pretensions of a neighbour, artist Bernard Hesling. The adults loved it.
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Ted felt Sylvette was developing ‘depressive and suicidal tendencies'.
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His sister Florence felt he was desperately trying to ‘contain the situation…he was at the bar and trying to be a success. Sylvette could not look after the children, she was not in a state to look after them.'
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The school holidays presented a particular problem. The family had often gone to the Blue Mountains for the May term break, but in 1950 Ted packed his wife and daughters off to his Aunt Lil's sheep station at Quirindi. Looking back, Madeleine thought Ted did it to save money: Sylvette could not spend up big at David Jones if she were in the country.

Sylvette, with her negative memories of the bush from the war years, was miserable, and the children were desperately bored by life at the station. The depression that had begun in Ryde in 1946 and hovered over Sylvette at Castlecrag worsened with her fury and frustration. One day, the misery was relieved when Madeleine and Colette found a rabbit. ‘We were in raptures, we had this adorable bunny and we were perfectly ecstatic till it escaped the hutch and we were inconsolable.' The next day, Aunt Lil's adult son, Beau, announced he had found the rabbit—then he broke its neck. He thought it a terrific joke to pull on his city slicker cousins. Madeleine and Colette wept for days. Madeleine recalled the incident as an example of the St John family's lack of empathy, even though she conceded that Ted had been outraged when he learned what happened.
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By mid-1951, under pressure from Ted, Sylvette admitted she had a drinking problem and agreed to see a Macquarie Street physician. The visits continued for a year, but there was no improvement in her condition. Madeleine saw her mother in terrible states and realised she had ‘been drinking or she'd been doing something to herself, [that] she wasn't well and [that] she smelt weird.' Colette was also aware something was wrong. One day, an inebriated Sylvette kicked the family cat, and Ted hurried the little girls up to Friedel Souhami's house for the night.
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The St John marriage was in crisis. The trouble was far worse than domestic rows or excessive drinking. Sylvette was suicidal. More than once, she tried to gas herself in the kitchen.
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On one occasion, she tried to drown herself, and afterwards telephoned her husband to collect her, dripping wet, from the beach. Ted was not convinced these were serious suicide attempts, but he was at his wits' end with the deterioration in Sylvette's mental condition.
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In September 1952, Sylvette received her first course of electroconvulsive therapy as treatment for her depression.
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ECT had been introduced in 1938, but it was not until the 1950s that the procedure, of inducing seizures by applying an electrical current to the brain, was widely used in Australian psychiatric hospitals. There was a severe stigma attached to ‘shock treatment' and Sylvette begged Ted not to tell anyone she had received the therapy.
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ECT did not cure Sylvette's suicidal feelings. Two months later, in November 1952, she took an overdose of sedatives and was admitted to the Mater, the big general hospital on the North Shore. The link between her condition and her alcohol abuse was clear to doctors and she was transferred to Hydebrae in Strathfield, the first hospital in Australia to focus on the medical treatment of alcoholism. It was run by Dr Sylvester Minogue, a compassionate and influential psychiatrist who had launched Alcoholics Anonymous in Australia in 1945. During her three weeks at Hydebrae, Sylvette signed up to AA.

The St Johns traditionally spent Christmas holidays at Avoca Beach on the central coast of New South Wales, and it was there that Ted broke the news to Madeleine, aged eleven, that her absent mother was an alcoholic.

My father decided one morning to wake me up at five o'clock and tell me quite brutally to get up and get dressed. I got dressed. I put on the clothes I had taken off the night before; there was a thin cotton dress I had been wearing with yellow and brown flowers on it, puffed sleeves. So I put this dress on and he told me to come out to the car. The leatherette-type seats were clammy and I wished I had a cardigan. So we drive straight to this cliff top and I was sure he would drive straight over the edge. He went right to the fucking edge of this cliff top. I was completely terrified, and he stopped the engine and staring straight ahead, he told me that he thought it was time that I knew that my mother was a drunkard, that was what was wrong with her and why she had to keep going into hospital, because she was an alcoholic.
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Madeleine felt Ted blamed her for the catastrophe:

He was giving me the feeling in a tone of huge resentment and bitterness, he was telling me it was my fault, that I was totally responsible. I didn't understand what he was getting at. I didn't know what any of it meant. What I did know was that there was very bad trouble between my parents and that it was spilling out onto me.
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Madeleine's life went over a cliff that day. Ted was presumably desperate to give Madeleine a logical explanation for her mother's constant illness and absence, but Madeleine was unable, either as a child or later as an adult, to make sense of the information.

Sylvette was discharged from Hydebrae in early 1953. She dismissed Alcoholics Anonymous and argued that she could master the problem of alcohol unaided, declaring to Ted that she was not an alcoholic.
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CHAPTER FOUR
A Mother Lost

One lovely spring day in 1953, as Madeleine and Colette played with their cocker spaniel Candy, a petite woman arrived at Number 9. Margaret Michaelis was a professional photographer, an Austrian Jew who had come to Australia in 1939. She had photographed the Spanish Civil War and had been politically active, but was now specialising in portrait and dance photography.
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She had artistic cachet, especially in self-regarding Castlecrag, where a European sensibility was taken for granted by a confident mob who were creating their own idea of what it meant to be Australian. A family portrait session with Michaelis, a reserved and stylish woman with a strong accent, was proof of good taste. And of ambition.

Michaelis set up her camera in the living room. Sunshine flooded the room as she arranged the furniture for a composition showing the family at leisure. The image suggested a weekend, perhaps Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning, although the man of the house holds a file of papers, adding a serious note to the scene. Madeleine and Colette pat Candy, while Ted looks at his wife and smiles. But Sylvette looks at no one. She stares beyond the camera, almost forcing her face into a smile. She is dressed smartly, but she looks physically uncomfortable and, like her husband, a little sad. Madeleine and Colette smile openly to the camera and seem untroubled. But the camera lied: the year had been a desperate one for the St John family.

Several months earlier Ted had driven his daughters across the bridge to their new life as boarders at St Catherine's School in Waverley. This was the same school attended by Ted's sisters before the war, the same school where Ted had been so captivated by Sylvette's charm when they had debated on rival teams in 1939. Now, just fourteen years later, Ted had decided that St Catherine's would shield his little girls from the domestic chaos generated by Sylvette's alcohol abuse and depression.

Madeleine was distraught about leaving Castlecrag. It was Ted's fault, she believed, but she recalled that Sylvette offered no solace:

She never talked about it to us, she never sat down with us and said, this is a terrible thing for you to have to endure and terrible for me too but we'd got to be brave together. She was just blank about it, getting the uniforms ready and sewing on all the name tapes.
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The blankness may have been caused by sleeping tablets. Sylvette had temporarily stopped drinking but she was far from stable. Feiga came over to Castlecrag to help prepare her granddaughters' school kit—navy knickers, white knickers, laundry bags and shoe-cleaning bags, summer uniforms and winter uniforms.
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She was sympathetic to her daughter, although she was losing patience.
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On the morning of their first day, Ted lined Madeleine and Colette up on the side terrace to take a look at them. Madeleine recalled she had been in a ‘state of zombie-like mixture of dread and denial' about St Catherine's. She thought the uniform was hideous. Neither she nor Colette could really believe ‘this horrific thing' was ‘seriously going to happen':

We are standing side by side being inspected by my father who is standing six feet away with his hands folded together in front, looking at us, and he says, ‘Good Lord did you ever see such a miserable face, two such miserable faces,' and he roared with laughter and he laughed and he laughed and he laughed. Apart from causing such acute grief to my mother he was going to have the added bonus of causing the deepest kind of misery to us. He genuinely enjoyed the spectacle of other people's pain, or at least of our pain.
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