Mother of Ten (11 page)

Faced
with the possibility of having to fight criminal charges for unpaid
maintenance, he wrote to the Orphanage, apparently to come to an arrangement in
respect to his debt and future payments. The contents of this letter reveal the
spineless nature of Henry Bishop. He justifies his negligence in not making
payments by claiming that ‘my wife deserted me and my children while I was in
the army and I just had to do the best I could under the circumstances.’ That
makes my blood boil, not only because the claim that Myrtle deserted her
children is  untrue but because no self respecting man in the 1940s would
use his wife as an excuse for anything even if she were at fault. If he had any
sense of decency he would simply not have mentioned it. To hide behind a false
claim about her is downright cowardly. He further excuses his actions in not
making payments with: ‘I have since been married and I have two young children
and my eldest son to keep. I am just an ordinary painter and I do not collect
any fancy wage and besides I have to live and pay rent.’

Although
he claims in the letter that ‘I will do my best to wipe off the debt’, it
appears to have been a delaying tactic. According to the Orphanage records,
Henry Bishop left the address in Brisbane where they had managed to locate him
and they ‘have heard nothing since’.

Of
course, Noel was unaware of all this. In fact, he did not even know his parents
were alive and was not aware he had a brother and a sister. Noel, Audrey and
Bertie were all unaware that many kilometres away their mother was alive and well
with a new family and a new husband.

By
1963 my father’s illness had advanced considerably. He lost weight and his
dark, tanned skin started to take on a yellow hue and there was a gauntness about
him. The optimism, confidence and the hint of mischief that had characterised
him were no longer there. My mother probably noticed that his sleeping patterns
had changed; how he tossed and turned. Perhaps she sometimes awoke in the
middle of the night to find his side of the bed empty and the sheet damp and
clammy from perspiration.

Nevertheless,
my parents took care to make sure their children’s lives continued as much as
possible in the normal way. We were hardly aware that Dad was sick and certainly
had no inkling that his illness was serious. Apart from anything else, Mum and
Dad were both of the generation that believed children did not need to be
burdened with what was happening in the adult world. We did not hear either of
them complain and, as was her habit, my mother used cheerfulness and laugher to
hide her emotions. Dad continued working, although it must have been extremely
difficult for him to do so.

The
pressure on my parents was made worse because, although I did not realise it at
the time, Nan also started to show signs of ill health about a year after we
moved in. I do not know the nature of her illness but she was in her seventies
so presumably it was something age related. She started to spend more time in
her room resting and was quieter than usual. My mother became more concerned
about any noise we made.

Inevitably
there was tension in our home. Bobby and Maxie were entering adulthood. Maxie
had become moody and refused to sleep in the same room as his brother. He was
now sleeping in the dining room, the room that had once been kept in pristine
condition for Sunday lunch and Christmas Day. The twins fought with each other
daily. They had also moved to another bedroom. Well, it was really just a
section of the back veranda that my father had partitioned off for them. I had
entered the self-absorbed moody teenage stage and that must have been
particularly difficult for the adults to deal with. It is no wonder that the
noisy, unsettled brood in the household tested the patience of both my parents
and Nan.

One
wet afternoon we were all ‘cooped up inside’. My sister Irene was with Mum,
watching her breastfeed the baby. This was also one of the intimacies I enjoyed
with my mother as a young child. Another was brushing her long hair in the evenings.
She was patient and loving in the way she suffered my clumsy yanks and pulls at
her hair. Eventually, she taught my young hands how to handle the brush without
hurting her and I would give her hair one hundred smooth strokes.

On
this particular day, I was in the kitchen with the twins while Nan was
preparing the vegetables for the evening meal. Mum and Nan shared the cooking
but when Mum ‘had her hands full with the baby’ Nan would usually cook tea for
all of us. Kevin and Georgie, who were around ten years old at the time, were
playing a board game called
Snakes and Ladders
. It was a game I liked
playing but on this occasion I had been delegated to supervise the twins and
keep them occupied. As usual, Kevin and Georgie were arguing with each other.

“You
landed on the snake. You have to go down.”

“I
did not. I was here.”

Georgie
moved his die back to the square it had been on previously, according to his
reckoning.

“If
I move five spaces I get to here.”

He
placed the die one square before the top of the snake.

“You
weren’t there,” said Kevin.

“I
was so.”

“You
liar! You were here. Tell him, June.”

“I
was not. You’re stupid. Tell him, June. He’s stupid.”

“June,”
said Nan, who had her back to us at the sink where she was working her way through
a mountain of potatoes, expertly peeling them with her kitchen knife. “Keep
those kids quiet. I can’t hear myself think.”

“Stop
it, you two,” I said. “You’ll have to start the game all over again now.”

“That’s
not fair. I was winning.”

“Were
not. I was.”

“Shut
your gob.”

“Shut
your big fat gob.”

“Shut
your cake-hole.”

“That’s
enough. I’m packing up the board. You can go and play somewhere else.”

I
began packing up the game. Kevin started yelling at me. Georgie started crying.

“Now
look what you’ve done,” said Nan.

“It’s
not my fault. I shouldn’t have to look after these bloody babies.”

“We’re
not babies!”

Nan
turned from the sink.

“That’s
no way for a young lady to talk,” she said sharply, drying her hands on her
apron.

“I
don’t care. I wish they weren’t my brothers. I hate brothers!”

“That’s
enough!”

Her
sharp tone stung me. I had a close relationship with Nan from spending many
happy hours with her in the kitchen. Any indication that she did not love me
cut me to the quick, sensitive child that I was. I felt warm tears welling and
got up from the table, ready to storm from the room.

“You’re
always picking on me,” I yelled at her.

“What
nonsense,” scoffed Nan, reaching for a saucepan to put the peeled potatoes in.
“Now leave your brothers alone and go and do something useful.”

This
curt dismissal was too much for my breaking heart to bear. The tears started to
roll down my cheeks but I turned my head quickly so that no one could see. Like
my brothers, I viewed crying as a sign of weakness. Since Nan was, in my eyes,
deliberately trying to hurt me and picking on me for no good reason the
appropriate response was to hit back. I wiped away the tears, took a deep
breath to prevent any trace of tremor entering my voice and turned to face her
with fury steaming from every pore of my skin.

“I
hate you!” I yelled

Quickly
turning my back on her I yanked at the door handle. The saucepan Nan had been
holding became a projectile. It connected painfully with my heel as I escaped
through the kitchen door, slamming it hard behind me. I raced around to the
side of the veranda, curled up in a corner under an overhanging plant and
bawled my eyes out. As I often did during this period of my development, I sank
into a mire of melancholy. The whole world was against me. No-one cared about
me.

Poor
Nan. The adult me can look back and appreciate what a terrible thing that was
to say to her especially after she had so generously taken us all in, cooked
for us, played with us and allowed her house to be taken over.

I
regret to say that I once also yelled such spiteful words at my mother. It was
when we were still living out on the Bonang. I was around five or six years old
and was angry at being thwarted by her authority. In my frustration, I stamped
my foot and spat out the words with childish fury in each syllable.

“I
hate you. You’re the worst mother in the whole wide world.”

Her
face blanched. Anguish swamped her soft hazel eyes. Her hands gripped the edges
of her apron as though she was trying to rip it from her body. I knew I had
scored a bull’s eye. The sense of satisfaction this gave me extinguished my
anger. Yet my defiant triumph collapsed as I watched my mother. She closed her
eyes and quickly turned away, busying herself at the kitchen sink. There was no
indication of anger, no slamming down of pots or cutlery. Her movements were
slow, methodical and quiet.

This
reaction startled me. She was used to my childish tantrums and usually just
laughed indulgently or calmly ignored me. I had never seen her react this way before.
The warm invisible
thread that connected me to my mother had been inexplicably severed to be
replaced by a cold void. Fear held me captive. I did not fully understand. I
only knew that somehow my words had torpedoed into a vulnerable place within my
mother. It frightened me to realise that the source of my security could have a
weakness that allowed her to be toppled like the lofty trees of the forest that
swayed and crashed to the ground when they were felled by my father’s axe.

I
wished anger had been her reaction. Her anger, which erupted when I tested her
to breaking point, was something I understood and expected. She might grab my
skinny arm and slap my bottom with her hand. If I was quick enough to escape
her grasp she gave chase, sometimes pursuing me around the house with a broom
or a saucepan. If I managed to get out the back door and down the steps before
she caught me, I knew I was safe. She never chased any of us beyond the back
steps.

Her
anger never frightened me but this silent withdrawal terrified me. I stood
watching her back. My eyes took in her pretty brown hair coiled up at the neck,
her shoulder blades moving under the floral cotton of her dress as she arranged
plates on the draining board, her slim waist with the strings of her apron tied
at the back, her bare legs and flat slippers. I breathed in the musky smell of
her talcum powder. She was as familiar as she had always been. Yet, I knew she
was not the same. Confusion filled my child brain. Several long minutes passed.
Outside, cockatoos screeched across the sky.

Finally,
I left the kitchen and headed for my usual sanctuary, the hayshed at the far
end of the back yard, clambering over the rectangular bales of hay inside to make
my way up to the top. Once there, I crawled into a gap between two bales and
decided to stay there forever.

Later,
Mum retrieved me from the hayshed. She stood outside and called my name. She
always did this, called to me from outside rather than coming into the hayshed.
It was as though she did not wish to intrude in my private world. Her voice
revealed no hint of hostility or coldness but I was hesitant about facing her
and climbed down out of the hay reluctantly.

Emerging
into the sunlight, I took slow steps toward her, head bowed, not wanting to
look into her eyes. I knew I was guilty of a grave offence even though I could
not fathom exactly what it was. When I reached my mother, she rested her arm
lightly on my shoulders as we walked back to the house. Her warmth embraced me.
I inhaled the closeness of her and heard her words, softly spoken.

“It’s
all right, love,” she said.

She
had the merciful wisdom of a caring mother and recognised that I had no
understanding of the pain I had caused her.

Likewise,
the teenage me that had been so hurtful to Nan had no understanding of the
seriousness of our family’s situation. I was not aware that my grandmother was
ill and my father was dying. Not only that, but I was at the stage when I was
the only important person in the world. Yet, I did not seem to be important to
my parents anymore. I was able to come and go more or less as I pleased. While
my friends’ parents imposed curfews on them when we went riding on our bikes or
for picnics along the creek, Mum and Dad did not. I took this as a sign of
their neglect and lack of caring. Now, of course, I realise that they had so
much on their minds and were in such deep despair about their situation that
minor details like what time I returned from daytime excursions with my friends
must have seemed inconsequential.

During
this period we also saw more of my father’s temper than we had ever done. His
anger was fearsome in action but was usually slow to kindle. However, his
illness and no doubt our crowded living conditions meant that his tolerance was
frequently stretched to breaking point. Discipline of the day was ‘the strap’
administered across the buttocks or backs of the legs. As a rule, Dad used this
only as a last resort and more often on the boys than on me or my sister. 
However, he now used it more often on all of us, including me.

Oblivious
to the stress that the adults in the house were under I was concerned only
about myself. I have no doubt I pushed them to the limit of their forbearance.
As a result, my father sometimes felt it was necessary to give me a good
hiding. I saw this as a serious betrayal because he had always been gentle and
caring and generous spirited toward me. So, in order to punish him for
punishing me, I would refuse to cry when he strapped me. This was a bit silly
because whenever any of us started to cry when he was using the strap on us he
would always stop. However, using flawed childish logic, I reasoned that if he
couldn’t make me cry he would think he had not hurt me. That would be my
revenge. Perhaps that was also Audrey’s attitude to the nun who tried to ‘break
her’.

One
day I decided to be particularly stubborn. Dad had brought his belt across my
legs several times and red welts had formed. However, I kept my mouth firmly
shut and my eyes dry until his belt accidentally caught on an ornament I had
hanging on the wall. It was something I had won in a competition and meant a
lot to me because of that. The ornament, made of porcelain, smashed into pieces
when it hit the floor. I burst into tears. My father stopped belting me
immediately. With tears streaming down my face, I directed an accusatory stare
at him. He looked a little non-plussed, as if he couldn’t understand why the
breaking of a worthless little trinket could cause me to wail like a banshee
when his physical punishment could not. I saw the anger in his eyes dissipate
to be replaced by something else; regret I think. Not regret that he had given
me a good hiding because he never belted us without cause, but perhaps regret that
he had allowed his anger to control the length and intensity of the beating.