Madeleine (5 page)

Was Ted's behaviour due to nerves, a desire to break the ice, an effort to jolly along his children on a dismal day, or the well-known tendency of the St Johns to mockery? Looking back, the adult Madeleine was not interested in such explanations. In her mind, Ted had been deliberately cruel that morning.

For Colette, boarding school was a ‘thunderbolt out of the blue'. It was as if Ted had removed them from their own lives:

One week we were getting on a bus and going to local public schools and everyone was singing on the bus and then a few weeks later we were transported to hell. [At Castlecrag] we were loved and adored by our nuclear family, by our extended family, we were connected to our extended family, we were connected to our grandparents, we were connected to our Aunt Josette and her babies, we were connected to everybody in Castlecrag by flesh, by culture, by trees, by our life.
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The transfer of her daughters to boarding school shamed Sylvette. It was a public signal to Castlecrag that she could not properly care for her children. ‘She was labelled unfit, unworthy', Madeleine recalled. ‘I am sure he did it in order to punish her…[It is] one of those ultimate crimes to separate a mother from her children.' Madeleine could not, or would not, see that Ted had been pushed to the limit by Sylvette and that he was trying to protect his daughters. Her grief was intense. ‘I can't describe even now, I am not going to attempt to describe, how it felt to be separated from my mother and the pain I was in and the tears that we shed,' she said in 2004.
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At St Catherine's on that first day, Madeleine wrote her mother a letter saying how much she missed her. Her sense of abandonment was acute.

Madeleine and Colette were placed in separate dormitories. The school was cold and institutional with heavy stone buildings and a routine defined by bells, abysmal food, prayers and evening study, known as prep. It was a punitive, Dickensian place, with an ‘atmosphere of correction', Madeleine remembered. She likened it to Lowood, the notorious charity school in
Jane Eyre
, and she ridiculed the headmistress, Una Fitzhardinge, who suffered from Bell's palsy: ‘Female from a good family, very grave, very Anglican. Your father is an archdeacon or your uncle is an archdeacon. Very good family, very good class of suits, and they have that handwriting that is like Greek. She was out of that box.' Madeleine's fellow students were also found wanting. They were ‘great, lumping, uncultured, country hick girls and girls from the surrounding neighbourhood, which was not a posh neighbourhood in those days.'
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Madeleine and Colette were united in their dislike of the school.

Boarders were allowed to go home every Saturday, and at the end of the first week, Madeleine and Colette cried all the way back to Castlecrag. Ted asked them to make a special effort to stop, but as soon as they saw Sylvette waiting at the top of the steps at Number 9, they burst into tears and spent the day weeping. Sylvette wrapped them in her arms, but she did not mention the letter Madeleine had sent her that week.
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Separation from her daughters did not help Sylvette's mental state. She had managed to stay sober for two months, but then began drinking heavily again. Then, on 13 March, she swallowed sixty Sedormid tablets, a prescription sedative, and was found semi-conscious at home. Ted had been unconvinced by her earlier attempts at suicide, but this time, he felt that she was serious. He called in her physician, Dr Hugh Fraser, and they decided that Sylvette, still groggy, should be committed to the Reception House at Darlinghurst.
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This institution no longer exists, but at that time it was the main entry point into metropolitan psychiatric hospitals in Sydney. Patients were remanded under the Lunacy Act when they were considered a risk to themselves or to others. Dr Fraser wrote a letter, describing Sylvette as a:

vain, self-centred, lime-lighting woman with a marked sense of inferiority masquerading under a superficially vivacious, witty social manner…Mrs St John has always been a demanding, dissatisfied woman, feeling she has never had a good deal. She is half French—half Jewish—born in France—parents' marriage unhappy, though never separated—now living in Sydney…
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He also said that Sylvette suffered ‘delusions' that Ted was courting his secretary, noting that Ted was a barrister, with the implication that his version of events was the more credible. Finally, Dr Fraser advised:

The husband would like to have his wife confined under the Inebriates Act if this offers the best chance of meeting her problem, though he cherishes the outside hope that the shock of R. H. [Reception House] admission might induce a belated sincere attempt at AA.
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Read fifty years later, the letter seems severe and judgmental, one written by an enemy, not by a doctor engaged to help cure depression and alcoholism. But it indicates the severity of Sylvette's illness and the lack of treatment for mental illness at that time, when it was often seen as a crime, not a medical condition.

Dr Fraser called the Chatswood police. When they arrived at The Rampart, they asked Sylvette if she had intended to take her life. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘I have nothing to live for, I want to die.' She turned to Ted and asked, ‘Are they taking me to the Reception House?' When he said yes, she said, ‘Oh well, it doesn't matter, I will do it again.'
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It was enough for the police. Sylvette was deemed insane, taken to the Chatswood Police Station, and charged with attempted suicide. Then she was driven across the bridge to the Reception House. It was just after midnight on 15 March and she was still drowsy and unsteady on her feet.

The following day Sylvette was brought before a magistrate who was informed that the ‘wife of a barrister' was ‘acutely miserable and depressed, lacks interest in self and surroundings, states she has only one plan for the future that is to die, says she will try to suicide if given the chance'. Sylvette's file was marked ‘alcoholic' and she was remanded in the Reception House for seven days.

She was emotional. On 18 March, staff noted that she was uninterested, but at least over the next few days she slept. On 21 March she was given a drug to help her sleep and this was repeated the following night ‘with effect'.
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On 23 March, Sylvette was released to the Westhaven Private Hospital in Waverley, a specialist facility for patients with drinking or psychiatric conditions. When she was discharged some weeks later, she refused to go back to Number 9 and moved in with friends.

It is not clear how much, if anything, Madeleine was told, but she knew her mother had moved out of the family home. She wrote to Ted urging him to give Sylvette some money.
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Over the next few months, Sylvette controlled her drinking and, around October 1953, she and Ted decided to give the marriage another try. One Saturday, home from St Catherine's, the girls were told the news. Ted swept eight-year-old Colette into his arms, took her outside to the terrace and said, ‘How about if I tell you Mummy's coming back!'
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Madeleine and Colette were thrilled, but Ted kept them in boarding school while he and Sylvette tried to work things out.

At the end of her first year at St Catherine's, Madeleine won a scholarship for the following year. Things had improved at home and Ted decided the girls should stay at St Catherine's, but as day students—Sylvette was able to care for them again.

But life at Number 9 soon descended once again into arguments and recriminations. Sylvette had bouts of ‘hysteroid' behaviour—depression triggered by the feeling that she had been rejected. She found Ted increasingly critical and later told a doctor that her husband embarrassed her in public and told people she was a drunkard and a suicidal maniac.
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It seems unlikely that Ted would have used such words publicly—the comment suggests Sylvette was becoming increasingly irrational. She was dependent on prescription drugs as well as alcohol and she consumed high levels of both. She woke frequently in the night, crying, and complained of illnesses in every part of her body.
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It was no secret now in close-knit Castlecrag that Sylvette was in a fragile state. Her friends were concerned about her mental condition. The Whitlams noted the St Johns were no longer available for socialising.
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On one occasion, Colette surprised her mother, who was clearly inebriated, trying to hide a bottle in the laundry cupboard. ‘Can you keep a secret?' Sylvette asked her wide-eyed daughter.
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On another occasion, Colette saw Sylvette embarrass Ted. The St Johns were visiting a male friend, also called Ted. When they arrived, Sylvette, who had probably been drinking, jumped on the couch, threw her arms around the man's neck to give him a hug and exclaimed, ‘Oh Ted, what have you done to me!' The other Ted pursed his lips in disapproval.
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By the end of first term in 1954, Madeleine and Colette were back at boarding school.

Madeleine was happier this time. New boarders arrived to start secondary school. Among them was Deslys Moody, Des as she was always known, and she and Madeleine became close friends. Des later recalled that Madeleine was ‘bouncy and happy', joining in the hijinks and midnight feasts in Dorm Five on the back verandah of the school and excelling at her academic studies and the piano.
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Ted told his wife that he wanted to divorce her. Sylvette interpreted this as his desire to protect his reputation at a time when divorces were granted mainly on proof that one or other party was guilty of adultery,
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and in May, after a ‘severe drinking bout', she took more than a hundred sleeping tablets and was rushed to Royal North Shore Hospital unconscious.

The assault on Sylvette's body was severe, but after six days in a coma she regained consciousness. She was taken to the Winchester Private Hospital in Darlinghurst where she was yet again given ECT.

Ted told Sylvette that the marriage was over, and she begged for another chance. But she was not well enough to leave hospital and, on 16 June, she was admitted to the Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic, part of the large mental health complex at Rozelle in Sydney. She was assessed and her personal history—based on Ted's account—was recorded. The document noted she was ‘demanding, selfish, domineering and v. temperamental', given to ‘much attention-getting behaviour, very ambitious…witty, vivacious, jealous, v. inconsistent'.

Two days later when she saw a psychiatrist Sylvette repeated her conviction that Ted had had an affair with an older woman in 1950, and she was diagnosed with a ‘depressive state' caused by Ted's desire for a divorce.

A week later, it was Ted's turn to meet the psychiatrist. He did not make a good impression, appearing ‘rigid and unrelenting' with ‘nothing pleasant to say about his wife'.

After three weeks at Broughton Hall, Sylvette was granted weekend leave to see Colette, who was in hospital with scarlet fever. It proved a difficult weekend, and when Sylvette returned to the asylum, she reported that Ted had ‘ordered her out of the house' at Castlecrag and moved members of his family in. This was an exaggeration, but it was the case that Ted's sister Pat and her husband, Maitland Buckeridge, had moved in to help look after Madeleine and Colette when they were home from school.

Ted was worried that Broughton Hall staff would release Sylvette to allow her to nurse Colette, and he wrote to psychiatrist Dr Marie Illingworth and the superintendent of the institution urging them to keep Sylvette in their care:

Having regard to the fact that my wife seems to react badly when responsibility is thrust upon her & to her recent history, I would not be happy about my wife nursing Colette from the point of view of mother or child. Yet if she is discharged and is
not
permitted to nurse Colette I think she will take it badly. I do not pretend to be a psychiatrist; but I know my wife pretty well & I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to discharge her now. She is capable of a deceptive brightness of demeanour which belies what goes on beneath the surface.
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Ted's entreaties were successful and Sylvette was held at the asylum till 22 July. Her discharge was recorded in her file but there was no account of her treatment or of her state of mind on release. ECT was the most common treatment at Broughton Hall in the 1950s. Overseas, psychiatric patients were given alternative help such as psychotherapy or insulin treatment, but at Broughton Hall, due to the large number of women, sometimes more than seventy, there was not the time or staff for psychotherapy. A shortage of supervisory staff meant that the women lined up naked in a corridor waiting their turn for a bath because there was no time for them to undress and dress in the bathroom. Dr Illingworth said later that patients were often discharged with insufficient or no treatment.
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It is likely that Sylvette was in that second category.

Sylvette did not return to Castlecrag—she moved into a shared house in Chatswood. One Saturday, Ted took Madeleine to see her mother there. He let her out of the car and she walked up to the door and rang the doorbell. There was Sylvette. ‘I am just making the bed, come in and help me,' she said. Sylvette introduced her daughter to the other people in the house and she and Madeleine spent the day together:

I had my mother to myself that day and I remember walking up the street to the cinema and we had our arms linked…we just go into this instant mother–daughter [relationship] as if nothing is wrong. We are not pretending, it is just a happening thing.
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They walked past a chemist shop and Sylvette pointed to a manicure set in the window, telling Madeleine she would buy it for her if she stopped biting her nails. Madeleine would have had a lot to tell her mother: the night before, she had performed a piano solo at the St Catherine's annual concert.
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Madeleine remembered this day fondly: a day when she and Sylvette were alone and completely united, a perfect day.