Book: Redemption - Part IX - Chapter 7...SECTION TWO...

SECTION TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN

Moving on

1969 - 1970

After breaking up with Darrin I spent my Friday nights with Gayle at The Open Door, a dance club in the Valley. It may have been run by former man-of-the-cloth and radio host, Hayden Sargent, but two of the cutest guys I worked with played in a band there. Lead guitarist and vocalist, Tony, worked on my floor and Darryl, who alternated between base guitar and drums, worked on another floor. One night in late April, two scruffy, leather-clad lads casually strode in at closing time. They stood around for a while before approaching us, then the only people on the dance floor. Tony played two songs just for us before calling it quits and in that time we learned they had been on their way home from a party.

A little over two weeks later, the young man who danced with me found me among the throng of people at the Exhibition Grounds for the after-march party. Labour Day marches of the 1960s were very different to those of recent times and the post-march entertainment was first class. When the gig wound up he invited me to at his place at Highgate Hill for an after-party party. Fate had clearly decreed I was to meet Steve, but not until the time was right for we could have met at any time over the previous year. Steve was a Foco and Treasury steps regular, a young man I probably passed time after time as I weaved my way among the crowds. Later that day, I had my first ride on the back of a motorcycle, but not with Steve. He was a few months shy of being legally able to carry a pillion passenger. Roy was one of Steve’s housemates; a man he trusted implicitly. I had imagined it would be terrifying but I was wrong. It was exhilarating!

When I was legally able to ride with Steve, we went on runs up or down the coast every weekend. It was the best fun I’d ever had, despite occasionally getting a little scared on sharp turns or burning my leg on the exhaust pipe. On a run to Gympie one Sunday morning, we could see a storm brewing so Steve decided to turn back only to ride directly into the tempest. Until then, I never knew rain drops could ever feel like needles! Somehow, someway, we arrived home safely and spent the rest of the afternoon talking about our lives and hopes for the future. 

Darrin may have talked incessantly about the paranormal, but he never offered any real proof. Steve, on the other hand had, but his ability to ‘see’ was something he was loathe to discuss. I’ll never forget the night, early in our relationship, when we passed three young people, two boys and a girl, walking in the opposite direction. He only glanced at them, as you do when passing people on a crowded footpath, but I distinctly heard him whisper they would all be dead in the morning. I will never know for sure if they were the same three people, but in the next day’s newspaper I read about a single motor vehicle accident that claimed the lives of three young people, two boys and a girl. 

This part of who Steve was would later contribute to our first argument. I had asked him to take me somewhere on the bike but he refused, something I found annoying because it was so unlike him. In the ensuing argument I managed to win him over, but less than a kilometre up the road, he braked suddenly and told me to get off and walk. I was furious and stormed off, vowing to make him pay. What I didn’t know until much later was that within minutes of leaving me stranded he collided with a car. He admitted that he had “seen” the accident play out in his mind that morning. He was unharmed, but as he said, the outcome could have been vastly different if he had me to worry about.

But the true test of our budding relationship come early one crisp Sunday morning when he arrived to tell me he was taking me on a run to the Gold Coast. I told him I couldn’t because I had to go to Mass. Instead of accepting that he told me to grow up. He said I was a hypocrite and that it was time I learned I wasn’t going to die and go to Hell if I didn’t attend Mass on Sunday. He then said if I wanted to attend Mass thereafter that was fine, but I should not be going simply because I feared the consequences of not going. And so began the longest day of my life. I cannot begin to describe the gut-wrenching fear that consumed me as I sat on the back of that bike, going sixty miles an hour down the coast road, expecting the Devil to claim me at every turn. At 5pm, I was safely back in my room but the day was far from over. The longest, darkest night stretched out ahead of me. But when dawn broke the next morning, I leaped from my bed screaming: “Hallelujah!”

In August, Steve bought me a friendship ring, and in September, I left the hostel and moved into the house he shared with his mates. I was still a virgin and we slept in separate beds for the first three weeks. We had no need of words for he knew instinctively when I was ready to take our relationship to the next level. I was blissfully happy, but I also knew it was only a matter of time before Gladys was banging at the door. As it turned out, it was Kathleen. She threw everything she thought was mine into boxes and cases she’d brought with her and dragged me off to live with a local family she had arranged for me to board with. I fought, screamed, kicked and yelled but it made no difference until we both heard the unmistakable sound of a motorbike beyond the crest of the hill. It was Steve and his reaction was immediate. The next day she left a letter of apology on the front steps. How different she was to her sister, Marie.

Some weeks earlier, after visiting Marie, she walked with us to Steve’s motorcycle parked out on the street. Gaunt Street was a wide divided road, low on Marie's side but high on the opposite side where another of my former classmates lived. Lyn used to live up the road from me at Wilston, near the bakery, and we thought it hilarious that she moved to hilly Newmarket to become part of Marie's world. That afternoon we spoke of many things, none being the bike, but just as I was putting on my helmet, Marie snapped at Steve about endangering my life “on the back of that contraption.” He saw it for what it was and returned fire in kind, but after a few minutes they both tired of the game. When I kissed her goodbye, she threw her arms around me and whispered: “Hang on to him, Mary. He’s the one for you.”

Me with Steve in 1969

As October began, I felt nothing could dampen my spirits, not even that vengeful harpy, Gladys Walsh. So much so, I was completely unprepared for the day she turned up at my workplace. She strode out of the lift and thrust open the glass doors with terrifying force, shrieking: “Mary Warman! Living in sin will claim your eternal soul!” Thankfully, my boss, an agile and determined man, intervened and escorted her downstairs. Long after she was gone I remained confused and frightened, but as the day wore on I became more determined than ever to forge my own destiny. My meddlesome relatives could say what they liked, I no longer cared.

On Saturday 11^th October 1969, Steve and I were summoned to attend a meeting with Uncle Pat. Contrary to what I was expecting, Pat assumed the aura of a kindly judge when he interviewed us, first separately and then together, before delivering his verdict: Live apart or get married. Steve had obviously been deemed suitable husband material and it was only the thorny issue of “living in sin” that needed resolution. Glady must have taken him to task over it because if he really wanted to intervene he could have done so a lot sooner. When ‘court’ was adjourned, he walked us to the door and, like a benevolent benefactor, patted us on the shoulders and advised us to go home and think about it. All seemed fine and yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling he had executed his duty as my legal guardian and, like Pontius Pilate, was washing his hands of the whole affair.

We rode home in silence, each thinking the same thing: there was no way we were ready for marriage. For my part, I saw my uncle’s ultimatum as being manifestly unfair, especially as he had had nothing to do with me for three years. We’d been home for about an hour when I said to Steve: “So, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” Then, more seriously, I asked: “Do you want to get married?”

“I don’t know." he said. "I like you. Actually, I like you a lot, but I don’t love you. I don’t believe in love. It is so overrated. You can fall out of love with someone, but if you really like someone, like I like you, then you will always like that person.”

“Would you like to say that again?” I asked laughingly.

“No.”

“Then, was that a proposal?”

“I guess so.”

Pat, however, had overlooked one vital element in his haste to get the mess cleaned up. Steve, like me, was a minor and needed his mother’s consent to marry. In stark contrast to the inquisition we endured at the hands of my family, Edyth asked only one question: “Are you pregnant?” Had the answer been yes she would have refused. At sixteen, and pregnant with Steve, she married his father because “she had to” thus beginning a life of appalling abuse. Steve’s father was a violent schizophrenic with a weakness for rum. 


Edyth

As my wedding day approached my mother’s sister, Irene, made  my trousseau from my own designs. To her credit, she didn’t try to talk me out of what I wanted: an unconventional white crepe pantsuit under a hooded lace gown split from knee to ankle.

My wedding dress design 1969

My bridesmaids wore red crepe and lace empire-line dresses, also designed by me but made by their respective dressmakers. Unfortunately for me, my rebellious heart was not rebellious enough to overcome the tenets of my upbringing. Every time I thought about marrying outside the Church I heard Sister Teresita carp: Mary Warman, you will burn in Hell if you marry that Protestant boy in that Protestant church. I tried to ignore it, but the Church’s control of me proved too great so on January 17^th 1970, I took my vows in the same church my parents had taken theirs two decades earlier.

Steve’s housemates, Roy and Jim, were best man and groomsman respectively, while my bridesmaids were my friend from the hostel, Gayle, and Chrissie, Roy’s girlfriend. Pat and Kathleen stood in for Mum and Dad and the reception, a low-key affair for relatives and close friends only, was held at a city venue called The Bamboo Room. The official photographer was a friend of a friend and later that evening, at the party we had for everyone else, we discovered he had other talents as well. He was an amateur hypnotist and a very good one at that.

Bridal Party: L-R: Chrissie, Roy, Steve, me, Jim, Gayle - 17 January 1970

I settled well into married life and on Christmas Eve 1970, I left my desk at the Main Roads Department for the very last time. In the New Year, I was beginning a four-year course in Costume Design at the then-named Queensland Institute of Technology. This was the culmination of a lifetime’s dreams. I even had a name for my very own label: Contrary.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

Has designs on Carnaby Street.

Mary Quant, be very wary

Mary Bird’s the one to beat.

At ten, my father decided I was wasting my talent on paper dolls so he encouraged me to experiment with other forms of art, starting with the obligatory landscape. At eleven, he discovered I had a knack for portraits so he learned all there was to know about charcoal portraiture so he could teach me before moving me on to watercolours and oils. At twelve, Mum entered one of my portraits in a parish art competition and when I won she grew bolder and entered me in the annual Sunday Mail Art Competition. I didn’t win but I did get a special mention. That was all the encouragement my parents needed. At thirteen, I got my first commission, a charcoal portrait of a classmate’s grandfather who had recently passed away. At fourteen, I was doodling pencil sketches of George Harrison and Pattie Boyd at school. At fifteen, I barely picked up a pencil. At sixteen, I was back to drawing paper dolls only they weren’t dolls, they were fashion models. Each had a wardrobe of my own designs.