Book: Redemption - Part X - Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

A fork in the road

1971 - 1974

“So Mary, tell me about William Golding’s book.”

I could scarcely believe my ears. Fifteen minutes earlier, every possible scenario had played itself out in my mind. None were even remotely close. My ordeal began when my English teacher handed out the first assignment of the year. Instead of the poor mark I was expecting to see, she had written: Come and see me after class. I had watched the fearsome Mrs Weatherall stride up, down and across the room handing out papers with ruthless precision. I had watched optimistic faces fall like dominos. Lord of the Flies was a formidable book to read at the best of times let alone one to write an essay on so early in the year!

Only when satisfied with my answer did she take my paper to grade it while apologising for putting me in such a situation in the first place. Her explanation was that she needed to be sure I had written the essay myself and if I had, that I fully understood what I had written. She went on to ask me a few questions about my schooldays and when I left, although elated at having been given a near-perfect mark, something I had never received for an essay in my life, I was saddened by her observation: “You are not the first convent student to suffer from such prejudice. Nor, unfortunately, will you be the last.”

Charged with renewed optimism and a new respect for my English teacher, I made my way home believing for the first time I really could turn my dreams into reality. Until then I had been uncertain. Not because I doubted my skills as a designer, but because I doubted my ability to pass English, a compulsory subject regardless of the course enrolled in. Getting a bare pass in Maths or Shorthand at school was understandable; getting one in English defied reason. But that’s how it was for me throughout my school years. My father, thinking he could help me master the intricacies of the language, even filled an exercise book with grammatical dos and don’ts for me to study. Study them I did but it made no difference. And it made no sense – until that day.

On the way home I remembered something long forgotten. In 1967, at a time when the Main Roads Department was housed in a rundown building in Turbot Street (the Department didn’t move to Spring Hill until 1969), there was a lengthy period when there was very little work to do. This was fun at first, but after a week of the same my colleagues and I soon gained a new appreciation of the concept of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. It was mind-numbingly boring and when people started pouncing on files like starving crows we knew it was time to come up with an alternative.

The guys never tired of flicking rubber bands or making paper clip chains but we girls proved the more resourceful for we transformed our dowdy workplace into a fashion house. Janine proved to be a  talented hair-dresser and beautician while Maureen was happy to compere as Louise, a former winner  of the Miss Sun-Girl Quest, modelled original garments designed and made by me.

The natural progression of designing clothes is the drafting of patterns, which I did on the long benches we used as work stations. Remarkably, this, and even the cutting of fabric and the pinning of seams were deemed acceptable, but when my boss drew the line at the sewing machine I had to sew at home. The fashion house was only a short time fix and eventually led to my first short story. It was so well received I was asked to write more. That was the first time I was told I had "a way with words". 

In 1969, after the move to Spring Hill, I was back in the fashion business with girls from many floors requesting  "stylish uniforms". I was doing my best work then and knew I had a future in the field so in December 1970, I left work to study fulltime at the Queensland Institute of Technology (now the QUT Gardens Campus) which was how I came to be in Mrs Weatherall's class.

By 1971, with my life planned out ahead of me, I was the happiest I had been in a long time. Then, just weeks after my twenty-first birthday, I fell pregnant. I even knew the moment of conception because I ‘felt’ it happen. I now understand this was a clairsentient experience but at the time, clairsentience, like clairvoyance, clairaudience and claircognizance, were words beyond my knowing or comprehension. When I told Steve I was pregnant and how I knew he looked at me as if I had three heads. His sixth sense had clearly deserted him because when tests proved I was indeed pregnant he was so shocked he took up smoking to calm his shattered nerves!

For my part, I was dreadfully torn. On the one hand, I felt immensely privileged to have been given the opportunity to experience the miracle of life in such an extraordinary way. But on the other, I couldn’t understand how fate could be so cruel. That was my second attempt to study fashion design! The first was the part-time course I enrolled in shortly after getting married. I had to drop out then because Steve started night shift and could no longer pick me up. Although he never satisfactorily explained why he wouldn’t allow me to walk from the Botanical Gardens Campus to Queen Street to catch a bus home we reached an agreement. I would leave work at the end of the year to take on full time study the next.

But there I was again, thwarted once more by fate. Despite not having done anything overly strenuous I started bleeding, and despite following my doctor’s advice, the bleeding continued. At the sixteen week mark, I was given an ultimatum: give up the course or give up the baby. With a heavy heart I surrendered my studies to give my baby the best chance at life. I survived the crushing disappointment I felt by channelling my frustrations into setting up my baby’s nursery, but as money was tight I had to become ultra creative. Money always seemed to be tight. In fact, it was the reason we couldn’t afford ‘the pill’ the month I fell pregnant.

Edyth helped me wherever she could, but I was basically on my own. In my need to learn as much as I could I read books, lots of books. Some I bought, but most I borrowed from the library. The more I read the more I wished I knew where the book was that Mum had, the one she used as a reference source during those long-ago sex education lessons. It was probably a medical textbook Dad had obtained for her. One chapter was devoted to the ever-changing foetus and even its pages were shaped like a woman’s expanding belly. In a little book I bought I learned the gestation period was 280 days. With the aid of a calendar I calculated my baby would be born on December 31^st 1971. Dates, however, meant nothing to Steve. He boldly declared our child would enter the world on a stormy night. We were both right to a degree for on New Year’s Eve, as revellers counted down the last seconds of 1971, lightning lit up the heavens and thunder shattered the night. Two hours later, with rain still streaming down the windows of my hospital room, my water broke.

 

Up until the middle of November I lived with the inexorable fear that I would not reach the hospital on time, undoubtedly due to the circumstances of my own birth. But after being admitted to the Mater Mother’s Hospital with suspected pre-eclampsia all I cared about was getting out. My blood pressure was dangerously high, I was told, so for six long weeks I was a prisoner, unable to do anything more strenuous than sit on the bed and draw. Some years later, when pregnant with my second child, and again hospitalised with high blood pressure, the nurses at the Royal Women’s Hospital thought me a little daft when I thanked them profusely for allowing me to walk to the bathroom. 

On December 28^th 1971, I was inexplicably moved from my bed in the public ward to one in an intermediate ward. There were three beds in the room but only one other patient, a woman in her late thirties. Twenty minutes after my water broke I began experiencing contractions. The night nurse refused to take me seriously. She said they were first stage contractions and chided me for being silly and melodramatic. After she left I became so agitated I woke the lady in the other bed who didn’t think twice about getting up to sit beside me. Angered by the night nurse’s rigidity, this woman thankfully took matters into her own hands and fifteen minutes later, I was on my way to the labour ward. However, despite the apparent urgency of my situation, my contractions were too short-lived to be effective. It was not until 7.12am on January 1^st 1972 that doctors, using a ventouse (a vacuum extraction device) were able to safely deliver my daughter. 

If she had been a boy her name would have been a foregone conclusion. Even before we were married Steve told me his first-born son would bear the name Che, after Che Guevara, the man whose face enigmatically gazed from posters on walls throughout the city. If a girl, the choice was mine. Our daughter’s first name eluded me until I heard it spoken in an episode of The Saint immediately prior to entering hospital. As the character in question was European I knew it would start with a 'K' not 'Ch", but I had to guess at its spelling. Using my sister, Frances, as a guide, I deduced the name would end in 'en' for a girl. Her second name was never a problem. It was always going to be Louise after the stunning young woman who once modelled my designs. Trying to find a name that coupled nicely with Louise, however, had proven more difficult than I imagined. Unlike Steve, the name I really wanted was one I refused to bestow on a child of mine for the simple reason it was too “different”. Years later Kristen told me I should have because she loved the name. Be that as it may, I believe my eldest child was never meant to be Cheyenne, these days a relatively common first name for girls. Also, she was meant to be Kristen, not Kristin, another bone of contention between us. I will never forget the day she came home from school furious at me for having given her a “boy’s name”. This, she deduced from the fact that a new boy in her class was named Kristen with an 'e'. To make matters worse, in the coming years, every time she saw her name in print it was always spelled with an ‘i’, not an ‘e’. The day did come when she decided 'Kristen' was much prettier in print than 'Kristin'.

When I left the safety of the hospital I left with the false perception that mothers innately know what to do. This is not so. With no mother to turn to I harassed the poor woman next door incessantly. But my perceived lack of maternal instinct dramatically came to the fore for me one night in February. Kristen was barely six weeks old when Steve’s frantic yelling woke me from a deep slumber. I found him desperately shaking life back into our baby’s tiny body. His sixth sense saved our daughter from becoming a victim of SIDS – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or Cot Death as it was then known. I was appalled that, as a mother, I did not know my baby wasn’t breathing. All I could think of was that she could have died and I would have slept through it!

  

In April 1972, I received a cheque from Uncle Pat accompanied by an itemised statement. Nearly forty years later, I still haven’t been able to get my head around the fact that my legal guardian, my own mother’s brother, reimbursed himself every cent he spent on my wedding and reception. But that was typical of Pat Casey and his way of looking at the world. Not more than a year later Peter, who had saved enough money to put a sizable deposit on the Wilston house, approached Pat with an offer to buy it. He was denied. Pat’s reasoning was that it would not be fair to the rest of us. He was the only one who saw it that way. The house was eventually sold to strangers and our final link to our past was snatched away like everything else. I hated him for that. To me he was saying that everything Mum and Dad went through to redeem the house was for nothing and it haunted Peter for years. In fact, it took an insightful observation by his daughter thirty years later to pull the sword from his heart.

I decided to use my inheritance as a deposit on a home, something Steve tried to deter me from. The trouble was we both knew we couldn’t stay at Highgate Hill with a baby. It wasn’t fair to the others, and anyhow, I always wanted a home with a wraparound verandah. This may have been a subconscious yearning to return to a time when life was less complicated. In nearby Dutton Park we found just such a home and a few months later, Steve started work on a large construction project at Gladstone. I was blissfully happy. I had a beautiful daughter, a lovely home, a great husband, money in the bank, and one morning in May, I received a letter from Liz!

I had written to her the morning after Kristen’s conception and again when I had proof of my pregnancy. I had written to share my agony at nearly losing her and at the pleasure I felt when she started to crawl. I never received a reply. Her letter explained everything, even how she found me. Shortly after we started writing in the 1960s, a classmate of hers wrote to a classmate of mine. I knew Irene hadn’t heard from Lesley in a long time and I knew the last time she had, it wasn’t good which was why I had no intention of asking her to help me track Liz down. As for Liz, she had her own issues with Lesley but when her letters to me were being returned, she sought Lesley out and urged her to contact Irene in the hope of reconnecting with me.  

As the daughter of a Polish family where girls were undervalued, Liz constantly had to fight to retain her independence and sanity. When she could take no more she married a man she’d only recently met but sadly, this meant enduring months of physical and mental abuse before deliverance came when he was arrested for a parole violation. Because Liz was born in London she had dual citizenship and a British passport so it was to England that she fled. From there she instigated divorce proceedings and declared she was never returning to the United States. She did, of course, and later remarried a much nicer chap but only because her mother refused to allow her “to live in sin”. Unfortunately, that marriage was also doomed. 

On December 2^nd 1972, the ALP emerged from the political wilderness with its catchy “It’s Time” slogan. It was indeed a time of change. It was also a time of excitement, drama, excess and scandal. Conscription ended, barriers to immigration were lowered, and more importantly, Gough Whitlam promised greater independence from the United States of America in the matter of foreign affairs. He increased funding for pensioners, women and Aborigines as well as the arts, heritage, housing and education. He also pledged that a university education would no longer be out of reach of the working class and that universal health care would become a reality. The people had spoken and the people had been rewarded. But for every up side there is a down side.

In 1973, a major recession was looming. In Queensland, as elsewhere in the country, unemployment was rampant and inflation was spiralling out of control. The end of Steve’s job at the Comalco Smelter in Gladstone couldn’t have come at a worse time. Six months later, with our savings depleted, we had no choice but to sell the house. It was one of the saddest days of my life, and with nowhere else to go, we moved in with Steve’s mother.

What a culture shock that was. Edith lived in a small rented house at Cribb Island with her other three children and a grandson. In the 1920’s, Cribb Island was considered a choice holiday resort area. It’s even possible that the house at 78 Cribb Parade was then one of the nicest in the area. But the years had not been kind. By 1973, it was shockingly dilapidated, but it was all Edyth could afford. “Cribby”, as it was affectionately known, was not really an island. Its name came from the fact that at high tide water covered the mud flats linking the area to the mainland.

Steve with Kristen at Cribb Island 1973

The only good thing about the house was its position. It was adjacent to the beach and next to the local convenience store. Steve and I were allocated a section of an enclosed porch. At night, the sound of waves crashing onto the shore proved to be very therapeutic when I struggled to find sleep. It was hard to believe  that very same sound could once  extract such terrors from my subconscious mind. The beach itself was poor due to years of dredging and indiscriminate dumping of rubbish, but it was quiet and peaceful.



Cribb Island

Living at Cribb Island was an ordeal rather than an experience, but it taught me a lot about myself. Once, when using a methylated spirit stove because we had no electricity, I came face to face with another of my deepest fears: fire. Kristen, then about twenty months old, was happily sitting in her highchair waiting for dinner. Steve was in the bathroom having a shower. Edyth was in her room getting ready to go out. No one else was home. I had taken a saucepan off the stove when I noticed the fuel well seemed empty so I added more fuel. Flames instantly leapt from the stove to the bottle. Reacting instinctively, I dropped the bottle which spewed flaming methylated spirits over the kitchen floor. Screaming like the devil himself was after me, I ran out the door and into the yard, omitting to grab my baby as I went. As naked as the day he was born, Steve raced from the bathroom, snatched a perplexed Kristen from her high chair while yelling at me for leaving her there, and still managed to put out the fire out before rushing back into the bathroom. This was all in the space of a few seconds, the time it took for Edith to come out of her room to ask what all the shouting was about.

I never could explain the hows or whys. I only knew how horrified and ashamed I felt. Other than the fear I felt whenever I had to light the geyser, a gas-fuelled water heater we had as a child, I had never experienced such fear. In the long silent minutes that followed a humorous observation by Edyth came to my rescue. She had been a Sunday school teacher, a stenographer and a sales assistant, but she really wanted to be a nurse so shortly after that incident, she moved into the nurses’ quarters of the Royal Brisbane Hospital. It was as if the events of that day made the decision for her. Before Christmas that same year, Steve’s siblings were also gone and we ‘inherited’ the house.

In January 1974, Cyclone Wanda tore down the Queensland coast with a force so great it inundated vast areas of Brisbane and the south east. It cost sixteen people their lives and caused untold property loss and personal devastation. At Cribby, we only had tidal surges to worry about, but they were unlike any I had ever seen. The sheer force of a king tide combined with the storm surge destroyed the break-wall, which was all that separated the house from the beach. Surreal and terrifying, I watched in awe as the waves just kept coming. Minutes later we watched in disbelief from the safety of a neighbour’s house on the opposite side of the street as water lapped at their fence. Steve and I left Kristen in their care and waded across the road to save what we could of our meagre possessions. When the house started moving, Steve ordered me out. I refused. There was no way I was allowing my husband to be swept out to sea in a rickety little house. Then something miraculous happened. The house that had been bobbing up and down to the rhythm of the waves settled gently but precisely where it belonged as the tide went out.

A few days before Christmas that year we came home to find some packages on the front steps. Kathleen had been around. Along with the packages, which were Christmas and birthday presents for Kristen, she left a note that simply said: For the child. She also left a bottle of beer for Steve as a peace offering. With that, a new chapter in my relationship with her was forged. And what a chapter it was!