CHAPTER FIVE
A New Order
1966
A week after Mum was laid to rest her sisters began the heartbreaking task of sorting though her personal effects. Not long after that we learned we wouldn’t be able to stay in the house. When Mum made a new will she was advised to nominate someone to act as our legal guardian in case something happened to her. That someone was her brother, Pat. Unfortunately, the advice was flawed because we were still minors. In the eyes of the law, minors without proven residential adult supervision automatically become wards of the state. The only alternative Pat could find was to split us up, the one thing he knew his sister would never sanction, but he saw no other alternative. Marie told me not to worry because “your Uncle Pat will do what is right for everyone.”
Marie was more like Mum than either of her sisters, but that wasn’t only the reason she was our favourite aunt. We trusted her implicitly and she understood that. She assured me her brother’s decision to place us with the family was the best possible solution. Pat, however, was a pragmatist, a number-crunching accountant, something I would learn only too well in the not too distant future. Pat and his wife, Noreen, took in John simply because they had sons his age. I was assigned to Kathleen and her husband, Mick, because they had girls my age. Peter, Frances and Anne were assigned to Marie and her husband, Wal. Peter because they had sons his age and the girls because Marie would hear of nothing else. Irene and her husband, Ray, were excused because they had enough on their plate with a special needs child. We were all set to go to our respective new homes when Gladys overruled them on Frances and Anne. Young children, she declared in typical bombastic style, need lots of milk, fresh air and exercise, and as all three were in plentiful supply on the farm, they were going to Nanango. End of story.
The boys feigned jealousy because, in their words, I got ‘the rich ones’. It was true that Mick was a well-known solicitor who kept his family in a beautiful split-level home in the ‘posh’ suburb of Ascot, but I did not deem myself lucky. Mick and I didn’t see eye to eye but to her credit, Kathleen did try to make a home for me with her family, but her situation – and mine – made it impossible.
Around this time I had a strange dream featuring a black car, much like Dad’s Oldsmobile. As it descended from the sky, its doors magically opened. John, Peter, Frances and I got in, but Anne refused. The driverless car then took off, much like an aeroplane. I screamed for it to go back for Anne, which it did, but she wouldn’t come. We had to pack her into a suitcase like a rag doll and on our return to the car it ascended once more into the clouds. But then the suitcase, with Anne inside, fell from a window. In the years to come I would learn just how prophetic that dream was. At the time, though, it was just one of many strange dreams that disrupted my nights.
I had been plagued by such dreams since I was very young, but a series of recurring dreams about spiders and sharks really bothered me. In the spider dreams, which never seemed to make any sense, I was lying in my bed with only a mosquito net to protect me from a gigantic black spider. It was so large it spanned my bed and netting, yet seemed oddly weightless for it made no depression in the net. The shark dreams were more terrifying, but at least I thought I knew what was behind them.
I was five years old when a massive tiger shark was captured at Redcliffe. We watched from the beach as some fishermen hauled it up onto the sand. Still alive, it opened its huge mouth to expose razor sharp teeth as it thrashed about in a futile attempt to free itself. When these movements resulted in a sudden forward lunge everyone on the beach screamed and ran backwards. A few men standing by fired a hail of bullets into the monster and gradually, its life force ebbed away as the water was stained with its blood.
As it was the biggest tiger shark caught at Redcliffe it was packed in ice and put on display in a huge metal tub. We lined up with hundreds of other people to gaze at the lifeless creature. When my turn came I was convinced it was still alive and was going to get me. I remember letting out a scream that brought the crowd to a standstill. Dad scooped me up and carried me out of the tent, continually reassuring me that the monster was dead. It would never get me, he said. No, it wouldn’t get me, but it tried. For years afterwards, it tried. Nothing, it seemed, could stop its relentless pursuit of me. Night after night, it came out of the water and onto the beach, then up the grass and over the road until it forced its way up through the floorboards and into my room.
The spider finally left me alone, but the shark continued to lurk in the deep recesses of my mind. Even in my teen years, if I was at the beach or could hear the sound of the ocean, the shark would come. The last time was in 1967. I was spending a weekend with a co-worker and her grandparents at Noosa. That time the shark almost succeeded but thankfully, Roslyn woke me just as its teeth were sinking into my flesh.
In the space of eleven months my siblings and I had lost both our parents and were given no right to choose what would become of us. John seemed happy enough with the Casey family but later told me the years he stayed with Pat were some of the worst of his life. The Casey boys were different, though. They possessed a wicked sense of humour and their adventurous ways certainly enlivened school holiday time. Peter had it made with Marie, although two Peter’s of the same age did cause a few problems, especially when both were always up to no good. To differentiate between them, our Peter was referred to as Peter W while hers became Peter D. They were more like brothers than cousins and remain close to this day. I, on the other hand, have only had sporadic contact with the girls in the family I was placed with. I may not have been happy but at least I was dealt a better hand than my sisters. Anne was only nine years old and Frances eleven when we were separated. Taken from all they knew at such a young age, they were supposed to fit in wherever they could, but in faraway Nanango, they didn’t even have their friends to ease the blow. Pat’s strategy may have been pragmatic, but it was akin to playing Russian Roulette with our lives.
In my case, it was the small things that tipped the scales. One incident still rankles. I had bought a brown suit. It was a very nice brown suit made from cheap synthetic fabric, but it was affordable. I proudly wore it to work the next day only to come home to a roasting by my aunt, Kathleen. Her eldest daughter, Carmel, had also bought a brown suit. But because hers was made of the finest linen and well tailored Carmel had accused me of mocking her.
I had been raised in a simple household, with simple rules. At Ascot, I had to dress for dinner, never wear high heels in the house, never do this, that, or the other. Nothing I did was ever good enough, especially where Carmel was concerned. Even the pleasure I got and gave with my natural ability to draw became an issue. When she brought a dashing new beau home, an art student, she showed him some sketches I had done in her determination to humiliate me. Her plan backfired when he said they were quite good. Besides the little I learned from my father in his determination to save me from the fickle world of haute couture, I had never had an art lesson in my life until I met him. He showed me some basic techniques as we sat on the front patio on Sunday afternoons. Carmel became so enraged she dumped him.
The irony was that if not for Carmel I wouldn’t be alive to worry about what she did. When I was eight years old the five Casey families gathered at Caloundra, on the Sunshine Coast, for a week’s holiday after Christmas. There were some big waves, but like my cousins, I was unperturbed and charged headlong into the surf to cool down and have fun. Caught in a rip, I felt myself being pulled further and further towards oblivion when suddenly, Carmel’s frantic fingers clutched mine.
Carmel was not the first-born in her family. Anne was. She was the one I believe Ann Ann was referring to, despite feeling the child my son had been before reincarnating was much younger at the time of death. Anne was just two years old when she died after tumbling head first into a bucket of hot water her mother had readied to mop the floor. A portrait of her held pride of place on the wall above the internal staircase and I never could avoid looking at it every time I walked up and down those steps. I don’t know if it was because of that painting or because of my own loss, but when The Picture of Dorian Gray was again televised, this time late at night, I watched it for a second time. But unlike the first time, I was alone and I felt its full impact. As I descended the stairs to go to bed the house was in darkness and all I could see in front of me was the hideous portrait of Gray’s corrupted soul.
I came to accept the tragic manner of Anne’s death contributed to her mother’s neurotically obsessive need to keep a spotlessly clean house. Nothing could be out of place and there was something about me, or the way I did things, which led to hysterical screaming matches over the slightest infringements. My rebellious nature frequently got the better of me and we had countless battles over religion, too. Despite my brash talk of turning my back on the Church, I was too afraid to. Years of brainwashing will do that.
I did make a small stand, though. I refused to date Catholic boys. They were ‘octopuses’ as far as I was concerned, fleet-fingered boys with no intention of changing their ways. Why should they when the Church implied they could do as they pleased so long as they confessed their sins on Saturdays and attended Mass on Sundays. By October 1966, things had reached the point of no return and I was dispatched to a women’s hostel at East Brisbane on the other side of town. Years later, during a phone conversation with Kathleen, I learned it was providence. Her sister's husband, Ray, was a bricklayer who had been hired by Mrs O’Connor, the house-mother, to repair the fence and they got to talking.
Some of the girls at the hostel were wards of the state who had horrendous tales to tell. Some were country girls working in the city. Others simply had nowhere else to go. Mrs O’Connor alternated between being so strict you couldn’t get away with the slightest misdemeanour to pretending she didn’t see this or that. Most of the girls were pleasant and some solid friendships were forged, but at that time, Liz Dabrowski was my only true friend.
Her first letter arrived in the spring of 1965. She was an amazing girl whose life read like an adventure novel compared to mine. She even played guitar in an all girl band. Once, I received a letter from her containing nothing but a scrawled black line. Her explanation came in another letter: "That was my Maybelline eyebrow pencil. It was the only thing I had to write with the day The Turtles (a sixties’ pop group) came to the party." Another letter contained wool fibres and the words: This is from Sonny Bono’s waistcoat. A year older than me, Liz was the most exotic creature in the world as far as I was concerned. She lived in Los Angeles, California, had long, jet-black hair, wore fringed leather outfits, and drove a red sports car.
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| Liz Dabrowski 1965 |
That I even knew she existed was clearly another part of the ‘Divine Plan’. Shortly after my fourteenth birthday, Dad encouraged me to join the pen pal club in The Catholic Leader, a Church newspaper. I think he was becoming concerned about the amount of time I was spending listening to the radio. Over the next six months I received thirteen responses from girls from the American mid-west. All were incredibly dull and boring. By the time Liz’s letter arrived Dad was gone. I remember Mum looking at her name on the aerogram and saying she was a good Catholic girl. When I asked how she could know that from the outside she explained that as Dabrowski was a Polish name it stood to reason the writer must be Catholic. She also suggested I not be so blasé with what she saw as the start of a new cluster of penfriends. She was right about one thing. Liz did have had a Polish name and she was raised a Catholic. I never grew tired of her letters because she always had something amazing to report. She even used to joke about Californian earthquakes saying she’ll “Roll over for a visit during the next big one.” Liz always knew how to make me laugh. After yet another battle with Carmel over something innocuous she sent me a pair of pink triangular sunglasses so everything would be "rose-coloured". And when her times got hard too, we decided to run away and meet at London’s Heathrow airport. I never made it, but she did, only for a completely different reason.
Liz was so unlike the other girls who had written because she had not found me through a sister publication of the The Catholic Leader. Somehow, someway, she saw my name and address in a newspaper put out by her favourite radio station, KRLA. They had offices in Pasedena, California. Every time I heard the Jan and Dean hit The Little Old Lady from Pasedena I couldn’t help but think about that. The funny thing is Liz always said The Beatles brought us together and maybe they had. At 8pm, every week night, thirty minutes were dedicated to the Fab Four on Brisbane radio station 4BC, and every week I wrote to DJ Tony McArthur requesting a favourite song. In that respect, I suppose it is not outside the realms of possibility that my contact details found their way to the other side the Pacific – with a little help, perhaps, from someone in Spirit.
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