Au Revoir (5 page)

Because of this closeness I know I must prepare them for my going away. For several months beforehand I talk about it casually. We look at the globe together to find France and India, we talk about how long six months is; to help the younger ones, who have no sense of time, to understand, I have nominated Christmas as the time when I will be back home with them all. They call me Mutie, because when Eamonn was born there were four great-grandmothers alive and kicking as well as two grandmothers and all the usual names—Grandma, Gran, Nana, Granny—were already taken. I tell them that Mutie will be having a lovely holiday in France then coming home in time for Christmas.

I am also concerned about the garden, though it is quite low on my list of priorities. As I have been so frantically busy for several months, it has already started falling into neglect and without me around for such a long period it will no doubt run riot. I film a segment for the program on how to prepare a garden for a long absence; it's particularly aimed at all the retired couples known as grey nomads who take off on caravan holidays around Australia leaving their poor gardens to survive alone for months, or even years. I smother everything with newspaper and straw, install a few extra irrigation lines, and prune back as much as possible. But it's all done in haste and I simply have to banish it from my mind or it will drive me crazy. I can always start again when I get back.

My four children grow quieter as the days grow closer to my departure. They are thrilled for me, but also quite daunted at the prospect of not having me around for such a long time. And now, as an added emotional complication, Aaron and Lorna announce that they are expecting their second child, which is conceived after my decision to go and expected in early September. I feel dreadful that I won't be around to help, having been so closely involved in the births and aftermath of the other four babies, but it's too late to change things. It will be good for everyone having to cope without me being the constant backstop. At least, I hope it will.

David has become rather withdrawn too, and anxious about all the fine details and the logistics of travel. A natural worrier, he is concerned with issues of safety such as driving in France, and the fear of my getting lost. He is always the navigator and international driver when we travel together, and I have always cheerfully deferred in my role of passenger and bag carrier.
I think David is also contemplating that I might just be running away to find romance or to have an affair. After all, I was only twenty-one when we first got together and now I am nearly fifty. He hints at the possibility that I might have a fling. I laugh it off, of course, but it has occurred to me as well. I have always been far too busy being responsible and surrounded by too many people ever to engage in a clandestine affair. This could be my chance, and he knows it.

The day before I leave I should be packing, but so many last-minute things crop up to be attended to, and my bag sits empty in the corner of my room. We have a family farewell dinner which is unusually subdued, and in the morning I literally throw clothes into my pack at random. I must carry appropriate gear for trekking the Himalayas, including heavy boots and thermal underwear. There are countless emergency medications for this first part of the trip, and fortunately I had sorted them out weeks ago. I then need loose clothing for Delhi, which hovers around 45 degrees in May, and summer clothes for France. It will be winter by the time I leave, so I will also need a coat and gloves and warm pyjamas. I should have made a list, but without one I just hurl everything into the bag and hope for the best.

I thought I had said my final farewells to the family the previous night, but less than an hour before I am due to leave they start to arrive at the house, kids in tow. As David loads my bag and backpack into the car, I hug everyone tightly and they wish me a great journey. The little children have gone to play down in the back garden, and I wait until the last moment to say goodbye. Before I even get down to where they are gathering eggs I am sobbing like a fool. Eamonn, the oldest, is terribly embarrassed. He kisses me on the cheek and immediately turns
back to what he was doing. At eighteen months, Theo is oblivious and Hamish, although just three, is too fascinated by his game to pay very much attention. However Sam, the sweet-natured, lisping one searches my red, tear-stained face with his soulful brown eyes.

‘Why are you tho, tho thad, Mutie?' he asks.

‘I'm not sad, Sam. I am happy. But I am going to miss you all very much.'

I dash to the gate, into the car, and continue to sob until we are way past Springwood. At the airport David and I share a drink with my closest friend Christine and her husband Richard. Our oldest son Tony and his wife Simone, who live in Sydney, also drop by for a last-minute hug. David has asked to have the last half hour alone, but we really have nothing much to say to each other. We sit in silence, glancing at the departure board as I sip my last Australian beer for quite some time. However, the look on his face when I push my bags through the customs gates says it all. It will be a rough six months for him, I am sure.

G
ROWING UP AS THE CHILD
of alcoholic parents in the 1950s was hard enough. Growing up as the child of communists during this repressive era made it even harder. For decades my father had managed to keep his political affiliations a secret from his employer, Sir Frank Packer, which enabled him to rise to the position of editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
; had Packer known my father was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party he would have been sacked on the spot. This meant that my father led a double life: by day he was the editor of a newspaper that espoused middle-class white Australian values, and at home he was a frustrated left-wing intellectual. To his credit, Packer rarely, if ever, interfered with the editorial content of the Sunday paper—even then it was considered more of a weekend entertainment paper than a hard-hitting news vehicle—unless, of course, there was a genuine news break in which case my father's basic journalistic instincts came to the fore. The only times Dad had a problem were late on Saturday night if Packer had lost heavily at the races and had too
much to drink, when he could unexpectedly turn up and ask to see the first three pages. Usually this was okay, but every so often he would demand a remake or a rewrite, which really caused problems, especially if the paper was ready to go to press. Sunday mornings after such an event were fairly bleak in the Moody household.

At home my parents were determined that their children should follow their political beliefs. They took great pains to explain to us, in the most ridiculously simplistic terms, various aspects of communist doctrine, giving us catchphrases to quote to school friends about the evils of capitalism, and how the only hope for the future of humanity was if communism were to dominate the world. Despite the extremely anti-communist mood that prevailed during this period, my parents never warned us to keep our political beliefs under our hats and so, like an evangelist, I felt it was my duty to communicate these ‘essential truths' to my school friends, even when I was very young. My brother Dan, less gullible and less gregarious than I, had the intelligence to work out pretty quickly that beating my parents' political drum would earn him few friends. I, on the other hand, found myself in endless debates and although I was never without a small handful of friends, I was treated with the utmost suspicion by most of my classmates.

Our indoctrination did not stop with politics. Religion was another favourite topic of derision. My parents taught me that religion was the means of keeping the masses oppressed and that therefore priests and ministers were evil people, probably child molesters, or at the very least sexually suspect. I was forbidden to attend a teenage girls' fellowship group organised by the local minister's wife. They were all lesbians according to my father,
and I earnestly believed him without any understanding of the meaning of the word. It was hard fitting in with society when at home we were constantly told that all landlords, shopkeepers and police, and most politicians and people in any position of power or authority, were not only unintelligent but evil. As a result, for most of my childhood, I felt very much an outsider.

To balance this bleak view of the world, my parents somehow constructed an artificial picture of us as a perfect family. According to their version of our life, we were much brighter, better read and better looking than our peers and certainly the other families who lived in our neighbourhood. Their interpretation of our lifestyle led us to believe that we ate better food, had better jobs and were in fact superior in every way to those around us. I found this hard to reconcile against the reality of our unstable home life. Other people had cleaner houses and their parents spent a lot of time ‘doing' things with them. Our flat was always a frightful mess and often very dirty because my mother had long ago abandoned all housework apart from the basics. Cleaning and tidying just were not on her agenda, and I was always too embarrassed to bring my friends home.

Part of my personality relished the fact that we were so different, so much apart from the crowd. Yet part of me longed to be ordinary, to be like everyone else. Until my mid teens I believed earnestly everything my parents told me, and my education as a budding young communist extended to being sent to a Eureka Youth League holiday training camp at Minto where we were given workshops on the glorious teachings of Marx and Lenin as well as singalongs around the campfire. It was just like the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides who, we were told, were subversive organisations aimed at indoctrinating young
people to love God, Queen and Country. The hypocrisy was totally lost on me.

Despite the insanity during my childhood that stemmed directly from the relentless drinking and fighting, I never felt unloved or underprivileged. My parents were great talkers, they loved words and bandied them about to express their thoughts and ideas, both positive and negative. As a small child I remember my mother telling me constantly how much I was loved. I was reassured that I was very special and this certainly helped me to develop some self-esteem and confidence. However the atmosphere in the house had such a strong undercurrent of potential violence there was always a feeling of insecurity. At any moment there could be an irrational or unexpected explosion of anger. I seemed to spend my growing years constantly walking on eggshells, tiptoeing around and hoping that my father's temper would somehow remain under control. I realise now that even though he never once struck out at me directly, I was always terrified of his presence, anticipating his constant outbursts of anger.

And so the role I took on in my family was that of peacemaker. I tried to maintain some balance between my parents by being both extraordinarily helpful and compliant, as well as trying to be sweetly amusing. I developed all sorts of strategies for diffusing potentially explosive situations and lightening the atmosphere, and this method of managing people in awkward situations has remained with me all my life. I particularly tried to help my mother by doing things like tidying up the house and preparing the vegetables for the family meal before she arrived home from work. From the age of eight I was, without being asked, peeling potatoes and stringing beans and setting the table, so that all
Mum had to do was grill a few chops at the end of a busy working day. I became very good at seeing what needed to be done around the house, and then doing it without thought of complaint. My young mind must have worked out that if Mum was getting some assistance she would be less likely to nag at my father, and so the risk of an explosive argument would be reduced.

At school I adopted the role of class clown, using my rather underdeveloped wit and humour to draw attention to myself. This generally backfired, and I spent more than my fair share of time out of the classroom standing in the corridors, sometimes for an entire term thanks to my interjections and practical joking. My parents had little or no contact with the school and were quite unaware of my outrageous behaviour. In later years I even managed to intercept my school reports in the mail, and they somehow never even noticed that no end-of-year report had arrived. The main highlights at school were when I was asked to perform public speaking duties, or when my confident verbal skills made me a valued member of the debating team. Otherwise academically I just wasted my time, particularly at high school. And nobody at home was any the wiser.

Instilled in my heart from that period of my life is a terror of loud verbal or physical arguments. To this day I will walk twenty miles to avoid a confrontation, preferring instead to try and jolly people along rather than lock horns with them. I have a fear of uncontrolled anger, a fear it will escalate into violence, and I have always tried to keep a lid on such emotions within my own family. This need to please and to keep everybody feeling happy at all times stems directly from the way I learnt to cope with my parents at a very early age. There were so many unhappy people around me during those formative years that I resolved,
quite unconsciously, to make sure that in my own family everybody would be happy ALL the time. A big ask. Certainly not very realistic.