CHAPTER FOUR
Out on a Limb
1965 - 1966
1965 was pretty much a blur for me, something I hadn’t realised until four decades later when I attended an informal class reunion. More responsibility had fallen on my shoulders because John was away much of the year. He had taken up a cadetship with the Irrigation and Water Supply Commission. Dad was so proud of him, but Dad was gone by the time John left for Longreach. He’d return on and off but only to undertake one of the many courses he had to do before setting off for Bundaberg or Mackay. He was back in Longreach by November which meant he was away for Christmas, our first Christmas without Dad.
Sometime during the nine months between Dad’s death and Christmas, Mum’s health began to deteriorate. She was being treated for thyroid problems and stomach ulcers but she knew there was more to it, although she kept that to herself. She knew that if John had any inkling she was as unwell as she was he would have walked away from his job. She also worried about my prospects. If I didn’t do well in my final exam I would not be able to get a decent job and she wasn’t having that.
My mother was a perceptive and intuitive woman whose sixth sense helped us avoid some major mishaps over the years, although her sage advice was often ignored. One instance that readily comes to mind occurred during the August school holidays. I can’t recall the year, but we were playing a game called Fly. The rules were simple. Sticks were lined up about twelve inches apart with the last one placed further still. Players had to step between the sticks without touching them and then jump over the last one. As each player had a turn, the last stick was moved further away which meant that leaping over it become harder each time. Mum had ordered us not to play because she said Peter was going to break his leg and holidays were no places for broken legs. We didn’t listen and she was right. On another occasion she told him not to use the garden fork without shoes because he would put one of the tines through his foot. I can still hear the yelling as blood streamed from the deep wound between his toes.
The funniest time, though, was when Peter was helping himself to the Milo tin. Mum often went to church in the evenings and when she came home she would have a go at him. We swore we never told her so Peter deduced she must have marked the tin in some way although he couldn’t figure out how. Mum had great fun with him over that. However, when Peter changed the time of his raids we realised she didn’t have X-ray vision after all. She later admitted that when stopping to talk to the shopkeeper across the road she had a clear view of Peter’s indiscretions through the kitchen window.
Mum’s wicked sense of humour was subdued by Dad’s death, but one incident will be forever etched in my memory. She had inherited her father’s prematurely white hair and on the morning of her forty-eighth birthday, we begged her to have it dyed. When we came home from school we found she had – to a shocking shade of purple! John and I inherited that Casey gene too, but it bothered me more than it bothered him. I was in my mid-twenties when the first signs made themselves apparent. By thirty, I had a look young women would eventually pay a fortune for. By forty, I was a regular client at Julia's salon up the road. In my mother’s time things were very different for there was no money to waste on one’s vanity.
Mum had the knack of making respectable meals out of inexpensive cuts of meat but I could not bring myself to swallow most of them. I knew it was all she could afford, but it made no difference. I even refused to enter the kitchen when they were being prepared. Despite her telling me I would make a poor wife to a good man I vowed never to touch offal. With the exception of ox-tail, I have kept that vow through some very lean years of my own. One can do amazing things with rice, vegetables and more palatable cheaper cuts of meat.
In the years before Dad’s death Mum was content to bake for hours, even on the hottest of days. In a reading I had with Jason McDonald in 1998 I learned this was her way of showing how much she loved us. She made the most delectable pastries, éclairs, biscuits and cakes, and of course, Dad’s favourite, a chocolate slice made with Arnott’s biscuits, copha, cocoa and icing sugar. Her exquisitely decorated cakes were legendary and in lean years she earned money with wedding and twenty-first birthday cake orders. She never baked bread, though. She and Dad believed in supporting the fine bakery up the road so we took turns walking up the hill to buy a loaf. That was the one job none of us tried to get out of. Unfortunately, there was little more than a crusty shell left by the time we had walked back down the hill. We would be punished in whatever manner was seen fit and another of us was sent to buy a replacement.
As a dressmaker, Mum possessed a gift that went beyond fashioning suits. She only needed to look at an outfit once, and no matter how intricate it was she could recreate a facsimile using whatever was at hand. In 1953, when Dad was extending the house, Mum asked him to spare her a small corner for a sewing room. My father never did anything by halves. Mum’s sewing room consisted of massive ten-foot long, three-foot wide Masonite bench with drawers and shelves built in underneath. At one end was a massive roll of butchers’ paper, complete with cutter. This she used for drafting patterns. The only store-bought clothes that touched our skin were the ‘samples’ Uncle Wal, her sister Marie’s husband, gave us. He was a travelling salesman. When I was eleven or twelve, Mum tried to teach me the finer points of the trade, but I always had more pressing things to do. She had hoped my interest in fashion would instil in me a desire to create my own clothing empire, which, naturally, had to start with the basics. I never cared about that side of the industry and resented my Saturday afternoon sewing lessons while my sisters were free to laugh and play outside. The only pleasure I got was the thought that they would be where I was one day. Sadly, they never were.
In desperation, Mum told me that if I paid more attention I could have any outfit I wanted. To prove a point she made me replicas of every outfit that took my fancy. This standoff continued until the day I came home from school in 1964 to find an exact replica of the Beatles’ collarless jacket hanging in my closet. Never once in all those years did she lose her temper with me – something I had to keep in mind when I was trying to teach Kristen the benefits of the craft. Unlike my mother, I never succeeded. I can still recall the horror I felt when I discovered a stapled hem on her beautiful black crepe skirt! I never had that problem with Tamara. She may not have bought herself a sewing machine, but she never shied away from a proper hem or fashioning a small bag for herself.
After we lost Dad, Mum tried so hard to keep things together, but every now and then she showed signs of the stress she was under. When I think back I don’t know how she was able to stay so centred. Her faith helped, but I didn’t. When she suspected I was smoking she told me she would cut off my fingers if she ever caught me. After a particularly nasty confrontation I took her huge tailoring scissors and thought about killing myself. My reasoning was she would be sorry when I was gone. I was certainly glad I didn’t because I couldn’t remember what the argument was about a week later.
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| L-R: Anne, Edna (Mum), Mary (me), Frances, 1965 |
Two weeks after leaving school, on December 14th 1965, I started my first job, as a clerk in the Main Roads Department. Although I knew Mum had pulled some strings, being the first in my class to get a job meant more to me than just having one. It vindicated me. During a class discussion on career options one of the nuns smugly announced I would have to settle for demeaning low paid employment because I was disruptive, rebellious, antagonistic and stupid. She was not my favourite person either.
Once I was working and paying board, Mum decided I was adult enough to confide in. She told me she had been less than honest with us about her financial affairs, but she wouldn’t go into detail. I had my own ideas on that and her admission went a long way to confirming them. In the more vicious arguments between my mother and grandmother, Granny threatened to leave ‘her’ house to the Church when she died. I never knew what Mum thought about that, but I do know Granny voiced the same threat shortly before she died. These squabbles always took place when Dad was at work and I don’t know if Mum ever told him. For all I know she may have thought Granny was just venting her anger and frustration. I bit my tongue and asked what I could do to help. “Nothing more than you’re doing, Mary”, she had said.
She told me the worst was over and that it was just a matter of keeping to the strict budget she had drawn up. She added that John’s being away helped a little. This made me very sad for just a few months earlier I had stolen a £10 note from a case she kept on top of her wardrobe. I can still see that case. It has been burned into my soul. My sense of betrayal was beyond description. I was worse than Granny for at least she was up front with her treachery. In 1998, during a meditation I cried when I received a message of forgiveness. I still cry when I think about it. What little pleasure had my duplicity denied my mother?
With 1965 drawing to a close it was glaringly obvious Mum was a very ill woman – a woman who had given her all to ensure Christmas was special. In the final week of January 1966, she no longer refused medical intervention and was hospitalised for some tests. A few days later she was allowed home, but only for the weekend. I sat beside her on the bed holding her hand. We talked of many things before she gently pulled me towards her, saying she needed me to pay attention because there were important matters she needed to discuss with me.
With an unnatural calm, she told me she was not going to survive the operation and that I would have to take care of my brother and sisters. When I asked how she could know this, she just smiled and said she had been told. I was going to ask who could have told her such a thing when she squeezed my hand and urged me to pay attention. She said it was crucial that I concentrate on what she was saying because with John away, I was the eldest, and therefore, the younger children were my responsibility. She told me where she kept important papers and taught me what she could about running the household and how to manage the budget book. In the two days she was home she thought nothing about her own situation. It was as if she no longer mattered. Many years passed before I understood the power of that conversation. My mother had indeed left her house in order.
At exactly 11am Wednesday, February 2nd 1966, my mother left this life, just as she said she would, during the operation. She didn’t have stomach ulcers; she had stomach cancer. I will never know for sure if I knew Mum’s prophecy would be fulfilled because I trusted her intuition or because I knew she was right, but until 11am, when all traces mysteriously vanished, I had been violently ill. The nurse wanted me to go home, but I refused. Being at work or being at home would make little difference. At 1.15pm, my boss told me I had a visitor. The moment I saw Uncle Pat I knew my mother was gone - at exactly 11am. I was amazed at my composure. It was as though another part of me took charge, a part that knew this was no time for hysterics. I had been entrusted with my family’s welfare and I would do everything my mother asked of me.
As soon as John received word of Mum’s death he made plans to fly home and take charge. As the eldest, he felt it was his duty to do right by us, a duty he has never been able to shake. On his first night home we talked about the house and Granny’s will. He told me Granny hadn't followed through with her threats to bequeath the house to the Church. By accident or design, she simply left an ambiguously worded will stipulating her property was to be shared equally between her children. John said that due to gift tax a substantial burden would have been imposed on Gladys had she gifted her inheritance to her brother. As a result, Dad was forced to go into debt to buy out Gladys’ share, a share that Mum had recently finalised with the help of Dad’s superannuation. Kathleen later told me that if not for a good friend of Dad’s, a man of considerable influence, Mum would have been forced to wait months before that money was released. By then we would have been destitute.
On the advice of this man, Mum accepted a lump sum, from which she finalised the loan, while arranging for the balance to be paid out as a pension – a pension that was terminated by her death. It may have been deemed the best option in 1965 but it was grossly unfair. Dad was thirty-five years old when he married and forty-four when the last of his children was born. In 1956, my financially shrewd father calculated he had approximately twenty working years left so he opted to have a significant percentage of his wages paid into his superannuation fund. His only thought was that his family’s future was assured should anything happen to him. Although this meant living hand to mouth it was deemed an acceptable sacrifice. But all that changed when loan repayments had to be factored in.
It was not until after I ‘ran into’ Kathleen after seeing Ann Ann the Extraordinaire in 1996 that I learned the truth. Granny had indeed left an ambiguously-worded will, but gift tax was not the problem. Gladys had assured Dad he needn’t concern himself with technicalities because the house was his. It always was and always would be. In 1964, she reneged on that promise. This was what Dad was dealing with when he died. Anger, betrayal and fear of what would become of his wife and children kept his spirit from moving on. After Mum’s death, Kathleen told me a decision was made by her siblings to never speak of it again. Dad died on March 20th 1965, the very day his sister turned forty-five. On her birthday every year Gladys had to face her demons. And face them she did. For years I never understood the relevance of the strange dreams I was having, but when I did I knew a part of Gladys had been reaching out to me for forgiveness.
I had several of these dreams, but two recurred for years. In the first, Glady would ring to beg for a loan of my vacuum cleaner. She said she couldn’t clean the filth anymore and I had to help her. In the dream, I promised to send her mine, despite knowing she still had the fancy Volta she kept (in reality) on the wall outside the kitchen. In the second dream, I paid her a visit but can't recall why. The farmhouse looked the same as I remembered. The steps were sturdy and despite the boards on the verandah being weathered, they, too, were sound. Yet, when I walked inside, I noticed the floor seemed unusually grubby. The further in I went, the dirtier it became until I saw that decay was eating away at the heart of the building with the room she shared with Jack dangerously dilapidated. A gaping hole was in the middle of the room and where the floorboards had splintered, the projecting points were like weapons waiting to rip the flesh from my bones at the slightest misstep.
Between 1996 and 1998, I often thought about these dreams. Had they been sent to me by my father who was lost – trapped in the astral – unable to move forward – unable to help those he loved – unable to find his beloved wife? Was that why Kristen was put in the position she was? Was that why – when I asked my hairdresser if she knew any clairvoyants – she was able to pull a slip of paper with a name and phone number on it out of her pocket – a slip of paper she was given that very morning, not more than an hour before my appointment?
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