The Dressmaker's Daughter (17 page)

W
hen in 1962 I was about seven months pregnant, Richard and I were wondering what we might call our child. Richard had been named for his grandfather, the Welsh schoolmaster who had taught the children of the copper miners at Moonta, about two hundred kilometres north of Adelaide. I liked the name but Richard thought it might be too confusing. At that time, Australia was about to leave Papua New Guinea to begin self-government. Sir Hugh Foot, a British diplomat, had become involved, urging Australia to relinquish its hold. Earlier he had been instrumental in Rhodesia’s moves towards independence and he was somebody whom we admired. One day as I walked into the kitchen from the living room, it struck me that Hugh was a name we might choose; we could name the child, if it were to be a boy, after this man. I suggested this to Richard and he agreed.

We had a name.

When Hugh was about twelve months old, Sir Hugh Foot resigned from the British delegation to the United Nations, which he had led because he did not approve of Britain’s reluctance to withdraw from Zimbabwe, as Rhodesia was about to become. Conviction and principle had brought him down and for some time he was in the political wilderness. I decided to write to him to tell him that we admired him and had named our son for him. I had not done it before, because I didn’t want to imply flattery, but now, since he was no longer as popular as he had been, it seemed possible to approach him. Mainly I meant to console him.

We had a reply that said that he had never had a letter that had pleased him more. And that he was sending us a copy of his book,
A Start in Freedom.

Foolishly, I wrote back. I now know how naïve that was. I should have waited until the book came, read it, and then sent our thanks and left it at that. It is almost always a mistake to write again to a stranger whom you admire if they have responded. It punishes them for their openness.

Sir Hugh sent postcards from Zimbabwe from time to time and then a card of the castle to which he had retired, in Wales, I think. Some of these are now lost but some are maybe inside the pages of the book.

Hugh was an underweight baby at birth and I had trouble breastfeeding him. He was thin because I had dieted so hard during the pregnancy that I had a backbone as sharp as a rail. When the anaesthetist had inserted the needle for the pelvic block for Hugh’s birth, he remarked on how easily the needle went in because there was no fat. It was the first such anaesthetic in the State and the doctor had just returned from England where he had learnt the technique. He held my hand during the birth and I clung to him in those moments of Antarctic loneliness that have to be lived to be understood. Something occurs during the birthing process that has the most enormous effect of pathos and loneliness. I suppose this is now medically understood. The hand I clung to, which helped me leap this abyss, belonged to a man whose name I never knew and cannot thank.

Depressed and thin, I was not well enough to go home to Richard and the shop when I left hospital with the baby. My parents came and drove me back to the farm where I stayed in bed with a baby, a dummy and a whiskey bottle beside the bed. Then, daily after his bath on the kitchen table, half-ounce anxious, my mother weighed Hugh on her cooking scales. He was like a skun rabbit she said. She tried to build me up but I would not eat. ‘You can’t keep a good cow in a bad paddock,’ she remarked. But I took no notice. How could I? I had to stay thin because to be fat would be worse than death.
Walking out of the hospital, down the steps, I wore the straight, watermelon pink, woollen skirt that I had worn before I was pregnant and nothing would induce me to add an ounce to that already tight fit.

After about a week, my parents drove me home to Hyde Park and I began life again, opening the shop at seven-thirty in the morning with Richard behind the counter, ready to take in the drycleaning that people dropped off on their way to work.

Richard’s mother had breastfed him and mine had breastfed me, but I could not feed this baby. I breastfed him up to seven times a night and yet still did not produce enough milk. Medical opinion holds that frequent feeding builds up supply. If so, why seven feeds a night for weeks and weeks? And try telling that to a starving mother in Ethiopia.

The practice then was not to offer any other fluid to the child because it was thought that they would refuse the breast. I solved the problem of the crying child by mixing up a cupful of boiled milk, water and a cereal called Baby Rice with a sprinkling of sugar. Hugh survived on this, although he was dehydrated. Richard and I were sleepless but I was determined. Nobody was going to call me a bad mother. I would feed this child or die in the attempt.

We had a marvellous group at that time called the Mothers and Babies Association. Infants were taken once
a week to be weighed by the nurse in charge and it was plain that mine was slow to thrive. Finally the nurse said that he should be weighed before and after feeding and it became clear that he received almost nothing from me, even though it was the first feed of the day when the supply was meant to be the most plentiful. The nurse made up a bottle of milk and he drank the lot. His fontanel was more concave than normal because he lacked fluid. From that time onwards I saw that I had failed and that my child would now thrive. It took four months for this to happen and I knew that I would never try to breastfeed again, no matter what they called me.

I
think of my parents as bookish and yet when I try to remember either of them reading I can’t. Books they had, but when the four children arrived I think the idea of sitting down to read must have become ludicrous and perhaps they never read again until my brothers and I all left home.

My father had belonged to Foyle’s Book Club before he was married. We had those books and others in revolving shelves beneath a carved black table. Other books stood on shelves and when I was about ten I began to read them.

My husband, too, was a reader. A small suburban library had come with the drycleaning shop we bought when we were first married. The library was one that charged a few cents to borrow a book. Old women came with their Netta Muskett book from last week and exchanged it for another romance. Richard and I read some of the books on our shelves, too.
The Cruel Sea,
by Nicholas Monsarrat, and others, the names of which I can’t remember.

From about ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, I sat out the back of the flat in the sun, if there was any, reading. When Richard rang his small brass bell, I came in and folded up the drycleaning for a customer or brought in a bottle for Richard to urinate in when we withdrew into the living room. I took in his lunch on a tray, but, other than doing these things, I spent the rest of the day reading.

When Hugh was born, we sold the books in the library and partitioned off that part of the shop to make a room for the baby. Then, three years later when I was eight months pregnant with our daughter, Richard’s parents bought us a house because there was no room at the shop for another child. The house was at 16 Swift Avenue, Dulwich, near Victoria Park Racecourse. It was then that I began to enter recipe contests.

During the Sixties, there grew a custom of promoting certain brands of kitchen equipment or jewellery by holding recipe competitions in magazines. If your recipe was judged the best, you won a box of Ronson electrical kitchen equipment, or perhaps Mikimoto pearls or a Tissot watch.

Before I entered the contest, I felt that it would help if I considered who the judges were and what they might like. For instance, the American food writer who lived in England, Robert Carrier, would, I imagined, be keen on food that involved summer and its romance. As far as I
could see from reading English
Vogue,
the English were mad on spending summer in a warm place – France, Italy, Morocco or the Bahamas.

I thought, therefore, that having lived in London for so long, Robert Carrier would like our summery food, peaches, lemons and outdoor eating. Or, as he would have called it, ‘alfresco dining’. The contest required people to write about their best ever meal. I set the scene for my entry under our lemon tree and described picking peaches from the neighbour’s garden, and slicing and soaking them in port wine. I gave the recipe for spinach pie and said that we would drink Cinzano vermouth with it. (Which reminds me – years earlier I had invented a cocktail called a Romeo that combined Barossa Pearl wine and a coffee liqueur. I didn’t win that one. It would have made a good emetic, though.)

I was a finalist this time. The company that made Cinzano, seeing the mention of their name in the magazine, sent me a case of vermouth. I can’t remember what I won but I realised I was on to something and began to enter competitions with a will.

I soon had almost a complete set of Ronson products, as well as other prizes. Then Ronson put an electric carving knife on the market and I knew that I must have one. I joined another of their competitions and almost considered putting in a note saying that I had the rest of the set so they only need send the knife. I won the whole box and dice.

I had needed that knife because I was not very good at carving and the friend who usually carved at our dinner parties, Peter Knight, the man who performed the first kidney transplant in South Australia, was leaving to take up a Chair at the University of Ontario. Richard, being ninety per cent paralysed, couldn’t carve, so I needed an electric knife to help me to learn.

I felt a bit guilty when the box of goods arrived and I set it on the back lawn deciding what I would keep. I took all except the knife into David Jones in the city and traded the items in on things I believed I needed.

In another competition I won a strand of Mikimoto pearls and earrings that the advertisement said were worth a hundred dollars. When they came, they didn’t look valuable to my eye. I took them into the jewellery firm Prouds, in Rundle Street, to have them valued. Prouds was an elegant shop, the sort where the manager wears a silk tie and a waistcoat. This was the firm that had given the pearls for the contest. I asked to have them valued. The assistant took them away and came back a few minutes later with the news that they were worth much less than the advertisement for the prize had claimed. In the meantime, Hugh, who was about three years old, had opened a Christmas stocking I had just bought him and spread the contents, including tiny round sweets, across the luxurious maroon carpet.

Feeling at a disadvantage, I set about claiming pearls to the value of a hundred dollars. I pointed out that I had won the strand and the earrings and that Prouds had claimed they were worth more than they actually were. The manager emerged. He said there was nothing he could do about it. I rejoined with the fact that my husband had shares in the company and that the board would perhaps not be pleased to hear that the firm had been involved with a shady piece of advertising. The manager drew himself up and said that the firm of Prouds had no shareholders. I retorted that I knew that they did, as they were an offshoot of the firm Edmonds and it was in this firm that my husband held his shares. The manager withdrew his head into his shoulders like a snail and said wearily, ‘What would you like?’ I said that I would like a strand of pearls to the value that they had advertised and would like a watch with the value of the earrings.

I came home with a Tissot watch and a more expensive strand of Mikimoto pearls.

Years before this, when I was aged about ten and we were at the Yallunda Flat show, when I said that I did not like the kewpie doll I had chosen from a stall and would go back and exchange it for one I did like, Granny Shemmeld said afterwards to my mother, ‘Tommy, that girl will go far.’ Neither my mother nor her mother believed that I would be able to exchange the doll as I
had been carrying it around on its stick for some time. I came back triumphant and that was when Granny spoke like a sibyl.

There were other winnings at the time of the magazine contests. I won a brush-front fence (because I had exchanged the goods that I had won for cash and spent it on the fence), a vacuum cleaner and other things I’ve long since forgotten.

Not satisfied with the Ronson products I’d won, I wrote to the managing director of the company and said that I thought they had a good name for a poor product. I pointed out that the electric egg-beater did not beat eggs as fast as they could be beaten by hand. A few mornings later, a tall young man in a pale fawn suit rang the doorbell. The Ronson man. He had come to show me how to use the beater. We went to the kitchen and I took out two bowls and six eggs. ‘Choose your bowl,’ I said. He took off his elegant jacket, hung it on a chair, and together we broke the whites into our bowls and began to whip – he with the Ronson beater plugged into the wall and I with my whisk. Mine were white and stiff before his were. I suggested that he take off his watch and we then time the extra minutes it would take him to get the eggs white. It was a few minutes until his eggs were white. We parted amicably. I said, ‘Please tell the managing director I stand by my claim.’ As he had taken off his jacket and hung it on the kitchen chair, the man
had said, ‘My wife is not going to believe this.’ All in a day’s work, I suppose.

There was no
CHOICE Magazine,
no consumers’ tribunal, and nothing to support a dissatisfied customer except the firm’s desire to keep their good name, and, in most cases, that was probably sufficient.

I see now that those first entries of mine into recipe contests, where we were asked to describe events, meals and situations, were the beginnings of my learning to be a writer.

G
randfather Llewellyn and Richard were annoying each other because our rake had been mislaid. Richard was sitting behind his desk and Grandfather was wandering around crossly. I was walking up and down our drive looking for the rake in an idle way, feeling the contractions of birth. It made the rake seem less important. I was thinking that if we didn’t find it soon, they could go on being annoyed, but I would be having the baby shortly, come what may. Then and there if this went on much longer.

Whether the rake was found or not I can’t recall, but at midnight I decided it was time to go to hospital so rang Grandfather, who had long since gone home, and woke him. He drove me in to the Memorial Hospital in my blue dressing-gown.

By one o’clock on Sunday 5 September 1965, the obstetrician was called away from his Father’s Day lunch. He barely had time to scrub up. A girl, according to him. I said, ‘No, it’s a boy. I can see his penis.’

‘That’s not a penis; that’s part of her umbilicus.’

They washed her and folded her in a cotton blanket.

As the doctor was leaving, I called, ‘Don’t go yet. I need a script for stilboestrol.’

He wrote one and gave it to the sister. This drug was used to suppress breast milk. This time I was not going to try to feed the baby because of my experiences feeding her brother, Hugh.

I was glad to have a daughter. I couldn’t believe the luck of it. Three days after her birth, and before she had been named, a parcel came in the post. A sister brought it in and put it on my bed. I unpacked it – out fell a froth of white veil. It was to spread over a pram or bassinet to keep insects away. Suddenly I had an impulse to put the veil with its frilled edge over my head. As the veil fell around my shoulders, a feeling of ecstasy came over me.

Far up above the pale narrow bed, I floated, wafting like the feathers of a shot bird, not yet knowing that half my world had fallen into the sea.

Ecstasy means to stand outside oneself and that is what I felt I was doing. I was not earthbound. I lay there for some time feeling that this was a mystery, a feeling I had never had before. After a while it passed. I took the veil off, folding it back into its box.

About an hour or so later, Richard was wheeled into my room. It was not normal visiting hours and I could see by his face that something had happened. I said, ‘Is it
Hugh?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Is it my father?’ and he said, ‘Yes, it is. He died about an hour ago. He had a heart attack.’

I didn’t cry much; I just lay there. If a sword had been swept over me and removed an arm, it could not have had more effect on my life. I was changed forever. But at that time I didn’t know it. I just lay there thinking.

All around me were mothers with their babies. Some women were in the labour wards giving birth; life was going on. There was no place for death. I felt it would be ridiculous to mourn. There were important things like birth happening and death must be kept at bay. Silence was the only sensible response.

Two days later, on the day of the funeral, friends came to visit. They brought daffodils, tulips and spring flowers. I didn’t like to tell them that, while we were there sitting together, my father’s funeral was occurring. They didn’t know he’d died. It would have embarrassed them, so I said nothing and tried to act normally. We drank tea and laughed and talked.

I spent the next few days crying in the night, taking a shower and crying in there at four in the morning. The tears ran down the drain. Then I walked calmly back to bed and waited for the baby to be brought in for her bottle.

What I couldn’t say out loud was that I was waiting for the doctor to come to talk to me about the fact that my
father had died. Five days passed and he didn’t arrive. I saw it as another piece of evidence that this calamity to me was nothing important to the world and that I should simply recover and not draw attention to it.

On about the sixth day after the baby’s birth, I asked a sister if I could go shopping. A daughter – I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to buy her a sun bonnet. I dressed and took the bus to David Jones. The pink gingham sun bonnet came back to the hospital in a bag.

At the entrance desk, standing before the admitting sister I suddenly felt as if a bucket of warm water had been thrown over my legs. I looked down and blood was pooling around my feet and spreading out over the floor. Dark, gleaming red, like a spilt bucket of paint, it flowed and flowed down over my shoes.

Put to bed, with the foot of the bed raised, I was to stay until the haemorrhage ceased. It slowed but kept on. This meant I could not go home but instead went to Torrens Mothers and Babies’ Hospital for a fortnight until the bleeding ceased.

While I was comfortable with the staff knowing that I was haemorrhaging, I had a tremendous fixation that nobody else should know. Yet if nobody was to know, what was I doing staying on at the hospital? My mother-in-law came to visit and, in spite of knowing that I could not safely walk down to the room where the babies were kept, I took the risk and trailed a scarlet satin ribbon of
blood down the cream linoleum rather than tell her what the problem was. Why I had this fixation, I don’t know, but I held it in common with a few other matters that I considered private. There was no end to the lengths to which I would go to avoid letting somebody know something that I considered private. It was this peculiar and mysterious attitude that caused trouble for me. In the end, it took another calamity to break this bond, this plaster across my mouth. It took almost my life and, in a strange, inexplicable way, the breaking of this taboo was the true source of my writing. But that was some months into the future and writing was not on my mind while I was in my blue dressing-gown trailing blood around the hospital, pretending there was nothing wrong with me.

It was at this second hospital that Richard and I named our daughter Caroline Mary. Caroline because it means noble-minded and because we had recently been to dinner with a man who had come to Adelaide to manage Tip Top Bakeries and whose wife was called Caroline. (In fact, we were at dinner with them the night before the birth and I could not understand why I felt I must eat a baked potato, which I normally would not have done, always being on a starvation diet, pregnant or not.) This woman seemed to be calm, beautiful and serene – everything I hoped the baby would be. And Mary because I liked the name. Old-fashioned and dignified. Llewellyn means lightning, so she was to be noble-minded
lightning. I have always thought children should be given something to live up to.

Eventually I was sent home with my daughter, who was thriving. The doctor never did arrive to talk to me, which only served to underline the fact that the tent of grief in which I lived was nothing much at all and of no importance to the world. I became a stony martyr to my grief. I held it to me silently and thought I was normal.

Into the house and down the long passage I walked with my daughter in my arms. As we went into her bedroom, I saw that the bush outside her window that had been sticks when I left had bloomed. A mass of white May blossom filled the window. It seemed an omen. And it was. She became my joy and my delight. It was like having a dolphin in the house. Her presence was like a lit lamp.