Roundabout at Bangalow (16 page)

The second episode is just as innocuous but is viewed more seriously. On holidays in Lismore I go with my cousin Grace to watch the football on Saturday afternoon. The place is swarming with young airmen, trainees from the base at Evans Head. Two of them invite us to the pictures on Saturday night and we accept. They kiss us goodnight in the moonlight outside the front gate; we rush inside and scrub our mouths out in case of germs or pregnancy. My acquaintance — he's all of eighteen — gets my address and writes to me; my mother, as usual, opens the letter. He's the son of one of the wine-growing families on the Riverina. If the affair had been allowed to proceed I might have enjoyed good wine for the rest of my life. This harmless incident then escalates as the aunty who supposedly didn't watch me carefully enough and even my Granny are dragged into the horrible row that follows. Meanwhile both parents watch my growing up with fear, and will try to keep me a child as long as possible. In a way they succeed, for at sixteen I am chronically anaemic and don't yet menstruate, a consequence, I realise now, of stress. Escape is not going to be easy.

My sister does escape — psychologically at least. She is her father's favourite, sober-eyed and responsible. At this time she has a dramatic conversion and joins one of the more fundamental churches in the town, so providing herself with a different family, happy, kind and more to her temperament. I try very hard for such a miracle for myself, but it doesn't happen. I sit in many an evangelical service, hating myself. I want to go out the front and
declare for Christ
but just can't do it, despite the big lump in my throat caused by the effort. So I take refuge in cynicism; I'm amazed that there are people who can accept such a simple solution to life's miseries. My parents are appalled at her Christianisa-tion, her baptism, her strict observance of the Sabbath and her joining what my father calls a
mob of wowsers,
but she holds out stubbornly. Her piety casts a long shadow in which I sit alone, my flightiness all the more obvious to my parents.

We sleep together, in the old brass double bed which my parents have replaced with a mahogany suite; anxious to take me with her, she questions me yet again before she falls asleep —
am I saved?
I sink into another abyss of fear. I have been reminded all too often of what awaits sinners like me, that in
the last days,
the
unredeemed
will
hide in the crevices of the rocks for fear.
Yet I'm still
unredeemed,
still unable to manage the miracle which some find so easy. My revenge is to sit in a far corner and read poetry throughout the prayer meetings and services. I have a crush on the
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,
as many others do at this time, and so while they sing with all their hearts of
the river which flows by the throne of God,
I am far away, dreaming of love and Persian nights:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly
—
and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing
.

All this time my mind is dizzy with poetry. I have Palgrave's
Golden Treasury
, an anthology of poetry presented to me by the Presbyterian Assembly. They know not what they do, for it becomes my substitute Bible. I am entranced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, little known in South Grafton, and his lines sing in my mind to the exclusion of all else:

The blessed damozel leand out
From the gold bar of Heaven:
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even.
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven
.

What heavenly rapture! Meanwhile the hem of my tunic has been down for weeks, flapping about my calves, and I forget to mend it. I pin it up with pins which prang my legs when I move and snag my heavy black woollen stockings.

I'm also obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe's
Tales of Mystery and Imagination,
stories which do little to stabilise my mind. I borrow this book again and again from the library and read it with a torch under the blankets at night. I torment myself with the products of Poe's diseased imagination:
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat.
The latter is the story of a husband who murders his wife and bricks her up in the cellar wall. Unfortunately for him he has also bricked in his cat, which he has consistently tormented, and its demented yowls betray him to the police. More thrilling still, to my morbid imagination, are Poe's accounts of premature burial, where exhumed corpses are shown to have struggled in their coffins, six feet below the earth, embedding their fingernails in the coffin lids before they choke to death. These fantasies saturate my mind in the South Grafton nights until the whole world spins with horror.

I don't realise until many years later that Poe's images, of choking and smothering, of descent into the maelstrom, are a perfect match for the depressive spiral which possesses our home. But my sister has escaped; she is set on a completely different track in life.

Night thoughts

At fifteen I enter my final year at high school, the all-important Leaving Certificate year, yet my mother has decided to join my sister who is working in Sydney while she waits for a place at teachers college. I can understand her decision; she is at this time only thirty-six years old, and much of her life so far has been disastrous. Nevertheless I am alone and vulnerable, for my father is working overtime almost every night. I am also overloaded. As well as my school studies, I have piano lessons and I'm learning typing and shorthand so that I can become a secretary when I finish the Leaving Certificate. In any spare time I'm cooking and keeping house for my father.

My nights are particularly lonely, made bearable only by my study of mathematics, the one subject about which I'm passionate. There is a harmony in mathematical systems which is quite missing from my life, and perhaps this is the attraction. There is also a deep satisfaction in solving difficult problems, or applying complicated formulae and having everything come out perfectly. The three of us in fifth year who are studying maths honours are assigned a special teacher for individual tuition, but he's also in charge of the textbook room and runs the Scripture Union in the school. He ignores us; if we want some help, we find him up a ladder in the dusty storeroom and, before we can get any attention, we have to accept a card of daily Bible readings and promise to use it. What a dismal fellow he is, as are so many Christians I meet at this time. They've obviously never felt the flames of Pentecost or dropped to their knees on the Road to Damascus. Instead they follow a grim and punitive God. It has been rightly said that puritanism is
the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy,
or in this case that a child might get a glimpse of celestial harmony through the study of mathematics. Needless to say, none of us gets our honours.

I quickly reach the target of fifty-five words per minute in typing. My piano lessons are more exciting, though for a different reason. My teacher is the wife of one of Grafton's leading citizens. Several times when she goes out of the room her husband hurries in by another door, roughly seizes and squeezes my breast, then as quickly scurries out again. I'm powerless to prevent it, and soon he repeats this atrocity in a more public place. I'm waiting in the Red Cross shop in Grafton for the attendant to fetch a sponge cake from the kitchen, when he hurries in, springs at me (and I mean
springs),
repeats his assault and is back in his corner, smiling and benign, when she returns. I have no redress; I can't tell my father for it seems to me at the time that he would somehow blame me. This experience teaches me to be very careful of men. I also see it, then and now, in terms of class; I am bitterly resentful of the fact that a man of such importance could do this to me and get away with it — his word would always be taken against mine.

Class rules this town and its hierarchies determine the pecking order at school. The leaders are the children of the professional classes, the doctors, solicitors, dentists and chemists, and their social rituals are well established. Their Christmas holidays are spent at their beach houses at Yamba. Here their children play and bond together over the long Christmas break, whereas Wooli and Woolgoolga are the playgrounds of the working class, who holiday, if at all, in shacks or beach camps. The upper-class children may mix with us until the Intermediate Certificate but then they are spirited away to private schools in Sydney, and thence to Sydney University, for it wouldn't do for them to meet and marry someone below their status. In small towns like Grafton the doctors are like gods and people feel flattered for days if their doctor pauses to speak to them in the street. The doctors are the keepers of the portals of birth and death. They understand the workings of the body and that greatest mystery of all, the heart. There is no bypass surgery, no antibiotics. The heart beats for its allotted span until a
stroke
or a
seizure
drops a man like an ox. For others who have a
growth
or the dreaded
TB,
there is no cure; they slowly waste away.

The lawyers and their children also walk in a rosy glow, for the lawyers hold the key to the mysteries of justice and many a working man is goaded into
suing
for some perceived or imagined injustice and then paying for it with the little he has or has not. The bank managers have a different kind of power — they can call in the mortgage at will. These people are enormously rich in comparison with the rest of us and from the outside seem to be ridiculously prosperous and happy. These hierarchies, so visible in small country towns, can lead to ludicrous social distinctions between, for instance, the owners of a
property
(over two thousand acres) and mere farmers, or between a bank manager, high up the social scale, and his accountant, well down. These hierarchies are only broken up when university education becomes commonplace in the sixties and seventies and a new and more democratic professional class emerges.

There are other reasons for exclusion besides class. It is unacceptable to be bad at sport, to read or study too much, or have wild enthusiasms such as mine for Poe and calculus, or even to play up, as I do, in school — it's important to conform.

My teachers, with few exceptions, seem grim creatures, ruling by sarcasm or punishment. Our middle-aged French teacher is typical. She has a massive blonde hairdo and three-inch heels. She looks like a good-time girl teetering into the room and sitting languidly at her desk for the whole period, but she is steely-eyed and her tongue is bitingly sarcastic. We translate a passage of prose each day and repeat the whole exercise after school if there are any mistakes in our translation. Our set text is
Cinq Maitres du Contes Frangais
and we learn the English translation by heart just as, in our earlier Latin studies, we had learned the English translation of
Caesar's Gallic Wars,
for this is the way that languages are studied in the forties. Most of us get As and even oral passes in French but none of us could ask a Frenchman for a drink of water with any confidence. Our history teacher until the Intermediate Certificate is George Bowman, famous for a history textbook called
Bowman's Compendium.
This lists kings and queens, dates and events, with handy lists of causes and effects which we learn mechanically. We are not encouraged to think or analyse. For the last two years we study European history from the French Revolution on. This ignores what has been happening in Asia or Australia for the preceding 150 years. The viewpoint is also slanted: we learn of the glorious conquests of the British Empire and the benefits of Imperialism for the native races, but nothing of the Opium Wars or the Boxer Rebellion.

By the time the Leaving Certificate comes around I've already sat for and passed the entry examination for the public service, a haven of security in the post-Depression years. I finish my last exam one Thursday morning and begin work as a typist for the Board of Tick Control that afternoon. The local office of the Tick Board is upstairs in Victoria Street, opposite the colonial post office (1880) and the Land Board office, which is set back behind clipped lawns and frangipani trees so gnarled with age that they must be the oldest in the city. The office where I now work is the control centre for the army of
tick dodgers
— all of them returned soldiers from the Great War — who regularly dip all the cattle in the valley in arsenic dips to stop the spread of the cattle tick. Three men also work in the office, one of whom spends much of his day scratching the addresses off the OHMS (On His Majesty's Service) envelopes so that they can be used again and so save King George some money. The area supervisors, usually ex-army officers, come in from the country with their reports each Friday afternoon. They are now in their fifties and treat me with wonderful kindness, as if I were one of their daughters. This is in marked contrast to the man who has been harassing me.

Each week, as well as letters, I type up the list of dips and the number of cattle dipped in each. I don't know where most of these places are but their exotic names roll through my mind — Cham-bigne, Dundurrabin, Fine Flower, Gerrigerow, Koolkhan, Kun-gala, Lanitza, Lavadia, Lowanna — each name suggesting to my imagination a lonely dip-yard in the bush where a
tickie
, someone who looks like Chips Rafferty, sits on the rails yarning to the farmers while the cattle struggle through the dip, bellowing with terror, almost drowning in the poisonous fluid, and climb out the other end with the chemicals pouring off their flanks. These old dip-sites are now shunned for they are almost as poisonous as Chernobyl, but no-one worries about this at the time. Meanwhile, although this is my first and most welcome experience of paid work, I already have another prospect in view.