Roundabout at Bangalow (28 page)

I take this very badly. I can't bear the injustice of it or the implied inequality. And so, the following year, when I hear that invitations to the ball are once again being prepared, I go to one of the committee members and ask for an invitation. She's the daughter of the man who harassed me when I was fifteen, which causes me some amusement. She's quite horrified at my effrontery, no-one has ever before actually
asked
for an invitation, but she consults with the committee and they send me one. I'm quite ashamed now of having pandered to small-town snobbery and so become a part of it, but at the time I see it as an issue of social justice — and I do enjoy the ball, dancing until the early hours in a deep red velvet dress which is duly noted in the social columns of the
Daily Examiner
the following morning. It's carefully placed last in the descriptions of frocks, a rebuke from the paper's social scribe for my presumption, which she's no doubt heard about. She wields as much power in the community at this time as Hedda Hopper does in Hollywood. Once I begin teaching again an invitation to the Race Ball is out of the question, for it's unfashionable, not the done thing, for a married woman to work.

Similar hierarchies, more subtle but just as ingrained, rule the Education Department. The local inspector of schools, desperate for staff, invites me to return to teaching when my daughter is four and a half and, as an inducement, decides that she can start school a year early. Despite his sponsorship, I come back into a situation that is slanted against married women. Teaching is seen as a profession for men, but a fill-in activity for women, and this is enforced by the distinction between
temporary
and
permanent
teachers. A woman who resigns to have or take care of children returns as a
temporary
teacher and usually remains temporary until she retires. It's as if resignation renders a woman transitory, or as if having and caring for a child rots the brain. A temporary teacher (and these are always women) has no access to superannuation, no chance of promotion and can't progress past a certain level on the salary scale. For some women this means another thirty years on a lower rate of pay than the man with whom she teaches, followed by a penniless retirement. Many women endure this injustice. At first, as I'm working for money only and am well below the salary cut-off point for temporary teachers, this distinction is unimportant.

What does goad me is the way that the froth has risen to the top in the fifteen or so years since I first began teaching. My immediate superiors include a neurotic woman who won't allow a piano in the school because of her
nerves
and, when I am shifted to a co-educational school, several men whom I recall as having barely passed their exams at teachers college. These have prospered, often by window-dressing for the inspector. An example is the long and unnecessary weekly staff-meetings imposed by one of my superiors in which he gives
instruction
to the staff on simple tasks they've been doing well for years. He rocks on his heels before us as he pontificates, boring and humourless as a dog. Dull as he is, he's determined to succeed. Minutes, carefully kept for the inspector, imply that this principal has
instructed
and
improved
his staff. We all resent this, but know that it's the way to get ahead as a primary school teacher. Many of the most innovative students at teachers college have long ago left for other places where creativity and vision are valued.

A temporary woman teacher, on sufferance as it were, isn't supposed to talk about her children in the staffroom, let alone make any allowance for looking after them, and desperate measures need to be taken if a child is sick. I'm meticulous about this, but my loyalty to the system is tested in the aftermath of the big flood which has left a muddy lagoon through the middle of the farm between the house and the road to town. The car is parked on this road and each day when I'm ready to go I have to wade through perhaps a hundred yards of shin-deep muddy water with the boys, carrying our shoes and stockings/socks, while my husband carries our daughter, a bucket of clean water and some towels. On the other side we wash our feet, finish dressing and drive off to school for the day as if nothing has happened. This continues for ten long weeks as the expanse of slushy mud slowly dries up, until one day we are at last able to drive all the way up to the house. To mention this at school would be seen as special pleading for what is essentially a private matter.

Soon I begin not only to look over the fence, but to look up at the stars. Ever since I left teachers college I've longed to read and study, to do a university degree. For someone in my position this seems totally presumptuous, like demanding an invitation to the Race Ball, but it's a burning desire which can't be suppressed forever. I long to test the limits of my mind, to become a part of what I see as a higher realm of thought. I know that it's possible to study at a distance, away from the university, for several of the men with whom I work are doing courses at the University of New England. Their main aim is promotion, and the Department of Education encourages this to the extent of paying their fees, a privilege which, I soon discover, is not available for
temporary
(that is
women)
teachers. After passing one university course with distinction and paying for it myself, I attempt to join the
permanent
staff, not for advancement but simply to have my fees paid.

I discover that the official excuse for keeping women like myself as temporary is that, being married, we are considered unable to move to another area. This is quite transparent. Not one of the men who works with me would take a shift if it were offered — they're all quite open about this — nor would they be demoted to temporary if they refused. So I proceed, filling in the forms to apply for
permanency
and, when I come to the question —
Are you willing to serve anywhere in the state of NSW?
— I take a deep breath and tick the
yes
box. I don't like to lie but I'm quite confident that, as the male members of staff are never asked to shift, I won't be either.

My application is processed, even to the stage of having a medical examination for superannuation, and I'm quietly confident — until three days before school starts the following year, when a telegram orders me to transfer immediately to a small school on the coalfields outside Cessnock. It's obvious that I've been set up to punish my presumption. I ring the transfer officer in the Department of Education at Bridge Street, Sydney, an address which inspires respect and even fear in many teachers, for the department is all powerful. He's extremely hostile and has obviously been waiting for my call. I grovel. I remind him that I have a husband, as well as three children at high school, and can't shift. He enjoys it. He instructs me to either take the shift or telegraph a cancellation of my application for permanency. I send the telegram, bitter about the level of hypocrisy in the department. But there is a sequel: the local inspector of schools hears of my treatment and is disgusted. During the next year when he is relieving the area director of Education he processes my application and sees that it succeeds. At last I am on the permanent staff and my university study is paid for. But there's a nasty taste to this. I would rather it had happened through some just process than through special pleading. What happens to people who don't have an influential patron?

The garden of Ceres

This contest with the Education Department and my subsequent university study take place under the darkening shadow of family drama. Just before I go back teaching my father leaves for Tasmania; as far away as he can get, he says, without going to the South Pole. He is not alone. When my mother knows that he's gone she begins to shake. Her trembling becomes uncontrollable. Since eighteen and probably well before that she's been terrified of betrayal, of desertion, and with good reason. But still she can't believe it, after thirty-two years of marriage. She sits on a bed in the front room of the farmhouse, dark and withdrawn, and nothing will stop her trembling. I send for my own doctor who, and this is quite unusual, agrees to drive out to the farm (dusty road, new Buick). He surveys her misery with clinical detachment, says that she'll probably never improve and should perhaps be institutionalised. He isn't known for sympathetic dealings with women. He's just warned me against the hysterectomy I need because, he says, the resulting rearrangement of this and that has been known, on occasion, to hinder a husband's pleasure!

She's then treated by a series of country doctors; at this time there's no Prozac, no magic pill for unhappiness. One well-intentioned medico decides to hypnotise her and alter her thinking patterns while she's
under,
but finds himself staring into such an abyss that he steps back smartly and, instead, sends her to Dr Harry Bailey, a Sydney psychiatric specialist much in favour at the time. Many country GPs are sending their
difficult
cases there. We take her to see Dr Bailey in his Macquarie Street offices and it's soon obvious that he's himself deranged. For the whole of our interview he's in a state of maniacal rage and doesn't attempt to hide it. He interrupts us several times to rant on the phone, abusing a gang of carpet layers working in his home. He directs us to take my mother to a private hospital and not enquire about her or visit for ten days. He assures us that she'll be in a deep and calming sleep for the whole of that time, and will wake up a different person.

The truth about Harry Bailey comes out twenty years later. There is a Royal Commission into his
deep sleep
treatments at Chelmsford Hospital and he suicides. We learn that most of his patients were women suffering from depression due to some crisis in their lives, perhaps something as simple and even universal as poverty or a broken marriage. Under deep sleep sedation, deep down to the level of coma, many of these patients lay, uncleaned and unattended, in their own excrement for weeks on end, some with their legs glued together with bedsores. Shock treatments were given without anaesthetic and when some died of pneumonia and other side effects, their records were falsified. His activities were ignored by the Department of Health, by assisting doctors and by most of the nursing staff, such was the aura of infallibility surrounding this psychiatrist and his quackery. The deep sleep therapy, now seen as extremely dangerous, and the numerous shock treatments administered by Harry Bailey further damage my mother.

Returning home even less able to cope with her depression, she begins to self-administer. She takes Relaxatabs, sedatives that are at this time freely available, and soon becomes addicted to them, as well as to the Serepax the doctor prescribes for sleeping. She sits for days in a velvet armchair in the jewelled rays of light through the stained-glass window in her flat, the air somnolent with dust-motes. She increases the dose every time reality threatens and the floor is littered with the small cellophane wrappers of the drug. Soon, she knows, she will go to pieces and be taken away to hospital so she takes more, just in case. She falls into bed at any time of the day and then stays up, agitated and hyperactive, all night. Sometimes she collapses on the floor, isn't found for twenty-four hours, and wakes up, unrepentant, in hospital.

Her flat is in a musty old mansion, a warren of fibro partitions, makeshift kitchens and bathrooms, shared by deserted wives, pensioners and derelicts. The stench of rising damp and spent gas mingles with the miasma of depression. She inhabits what was once the grand drawing room, lit from the garden end by a massive semicircular stained-glass window. The baroque wallpaper and ornate plaster ceiling are stained from half a century of leaking slates, and further discoloured from her obsessive smoking. In the hazy light filtering through the stained glass she labours from armchair to bed to sink to armchair, caring for nothing but the drugs with which she dulls her mind.

She has notebooks for this, notebooks for that. In one she notes the time in beautifully fashioned numbers, for she was always neat. Every five minutes on the minute she writes down the time, checks it on a series of clocks and makes sure they synchronise. Although her time is eternal she must note the passing of every minute. She goes carefully through the
Daily Examiner
each day, checking for spelling mistakes. She's still proud of her perfect spelling. She cuts out each misspelt word carefully and puts it into a special envelope. At the end of the year she will post the bulging envelope to the editor, and so rebuke his carelessness. She still has some sense of humour. In another notebook she writes —
Oh No! Oh No! Oh No!
— endlessly, covering page after page in copperplate script. She's caught in a spiral of depression, wheel within wheel, wheel without end.

An overgrown colonial garden fronts the old mansion, and at its centre is a mossy statue of Ceres, the mother of the harvest. Ceres is the goddess who descended into the underworld to rescue her daughter from the powers of darkness. Every Saturday for the endless years of my servitude I push my way through the overgrown garden, past the classical statue, its eyes serene and unknowing, and knock on the triple-fronted door, never knowing what I'll find, dreading every descent into the underworld and returning always without the slightest hope.

This is the most painful period of my life, more painful even than a childhood in the shadows. I'm humbled again and again, pleading with her to stop taking the drugs she can't do without, pleading with doctors to stop her destroying herself, and dealing with her repeated collapses and admissions to one hospital or clinic after another. I descend again and again into the realm of psychosis, come out empty-handed and return to my family unable to relax and smile on them. Worst of all is my fear that her condition is genetic and that I'm condemned to repeat it. Meanwhile my sympathy is mixed with a bitter resentment. I want to force her to know me, to acknowledge my love. But people who take drugs to block out their own feelings are oblivious to the needs of others and, inside, she's determined never to relinquish her pain. Once I find her in a coma with the open bottle of pills on the bedside table and know that, as soon as she opens her eyes, she'll take the rest. The temptation to walk away and leave her is ovewhelming. I screw the lid on the bottle, hide it and, once again, call an ambulance.