My Place (10 page)

We didn't know about Mum's secret weapon. Apparently, she'd given up trying to control us and placed us in the hands of God instead.

I guess Mum had always been quite religious in her own way, but it only became really obvious to us as we grew older, and after Dad died. She had occasionally gone to a church meeting when I was younger, but Dad was not very positive towards such things and that would have discouraged it. Basically, I suppose, religion and the spiritual were private and personal with Mum.

She supplemented her prayers by taking us to every religious meeting imaginable. That was one thing you could say about Mum, she wasn't biased when it came to religion. We attended the Roman Catholic, Baptist, Anglican, Church of Christ and Seventh Day Adventist churches.

Our favourites were the Seventh Day Adventists. One of our neighbours, Mrs Brown, was an SDA, and every second weekend she entertained the local children with films. We didn't mind the films, even though the content never varied. Nearly every film was about the devil.

One night, hundreds of fluffy, white angels appeared on the screen, they were all smiling and floating on large, golden clouds. Unfortunately, the soundtrack that accompanied these visions of holiness gave the impression of a raging storm. Through the whooshes of wind and crashes of thunder came the sound of
heavy footsteps and evil, raucous laughter. We all burst into giggles. Mrs Brown flicked on the lights and began fiddling with the machine at her side.

‘There, I think that's got it, lights please.'

This time, the devil appeared. He was predominantly black, except for a red face and two small, red horns. His long, dark cape billowed around him like a bulging thunder-cloud. Lightning flashed, sharp and yellow, across the screen, illuminating his awesome visage. The rain clouds above shook, heaved and burst forth, but the rain turned to hissing steam when it reached the devil, who kept shooting bright, red flames from his large pitchfork.

If it hadn't been for the soundtrack, we would have been terrified. He was the most frightening creature we'd ever seen. However, each time he threw back his horny red head and laughed a presumably wicked laugh, the only sound we heard was that of rushing heavenly voices singing Alleluia, Praise the Lord!

Jill took all our religious instruction seriously, and there was nothing she feared more than the devil. One day as we sat in our backyard, creating elaborate tunnels out of wet sand, a narrow white bone, about the width of a finger, suddenly appeared, pointing upwards.

‘Jill,' I shouted, ‘it's the devil's finger! He's come to get you!' Jill took one look and ran, screaming, inside.

A few minutes later, Mum came stomping out. She was furious. Jill kept trying to get away, but Mum held her firmly and tried to drag her closer to the devil's finger. ‘Sally, you sod of a kid, tell Jill it's not really the devil!'

I looked down at the knobbly white bone in front of me, and then, slowly, I looked at Jill.

‘It is,' she cried, ‘it is,' and, with a desperate heave, she wrenched herself from Mum's grasp and ran inside. Mum pulled the bone out of the ground, then she looked at me and burst out laughing. It was the closest she'd ever come to belting me.

Every evening before we went to bed, Mum liked us to recite the Lord's Prayer. Jill had a wonderful memory. She could read a
large page of writing and then recite it word for word. We all thought she was very clever. After Mum listened to Jill's prayer, she came and sat on the end of my bed to coax me to say mine.

Usually, I hid my head under the covers and pretended I was asleep, but she would pull back the rugs and say, ‘It's your turn now, Sally.'

‘I never say the Lord's Prayer. I can't see the point, Mum.'

Mum sighed and said, ‘Well, perhaps you'll feel like saying it tomorrow night.' Then, she tucked me in and turned out the light. The bathroom was just near our room and the light there burned all night. I was too scared to sleep in total darkness.

‘You're horrible, Sally,' Jill whispered after Mum had left. ‘Every Sunday, they ask me why you won't come to Sunday School. What am I s'posed to say? I can't keep telling them you're sick.'

‘Aw, I don't care what you say. It's none of their business.'

‘That's the trouble with you, you just don't care what other people think. You're the only kid in Sunday School who doesn't get a book at the end of the year because you haven't gone enough. You make me 'shamed.'

‘Aw, shut up and go to sleep,' I muttered as I rolled the other way. I knew I'd hurt her feelings, I could hear her sniffling under the rugs. It was years before I learnt what compromise meant.

When Mum wasn't praying for the benefit of my health and wellbeing, she was taking me to the doctor. I used to feel very frustrated with my weak body. If I could have, I would have disowned it.

During one visit the doctor told Mum, ‘You're living in the worst possible place for this child. Isn't there any way you can move? She won't get any better unless you do.' I looked hopefully at Mum, I'd always wanted to travel. Mum just shook her head and said, ‘I have to stay where I am.'

She was quite cynical about his advice. On the way home, she said, ‘I'm a widow with five kids, where does he think I can move to?'

‘Don't worry, Mum,' I said confidently, ‘I'll survive.'

‘I pray you will,' she sighed. And pray she did. I never saw her praying, but I knew if there were a competition, Mum would be the best prayer in the neighbourhood.

Almost a year to the day after Dad died, I contracted rheumatic fever. Many times on the way to school, I had to stop and hold my chest until the pain had passed. Mum rushed me to the local doctor twice, but he maintained that I was merely suffering from growing pains. I had no idea that getting taller could be such agony.

Night-times were the worst, I curled myself up into a tight little ball and willed the pain to go away. I hurt too much to cry. Nan tried to help me as much as she could. I could tell by the look on her face and the sympathetic noises she made that she was worried about me. She admonished me for sleeping in such a peculiar position and then, gently, she straightened out my arms and legs, encouraging me to sleep more normally.

She spent hours wrapping wet towels and torn-off strips of sheeting around my limbs, all the time reassuring me that the pain would soon disappear. I remember a couple of nights, when I was particularly bad, she just ran her hands slowly down the full length of my body, not touching me, but saying, ‘You'll be all right, I won't let anything happen to you.'

As soon as the bandages and towels had dried, she slowly unwound them and then went and wet them again. ‘You're very hot, Sally,' she said, ‘it's not good for a child to be that hot.' By the time I finally fell asleep, I felt as stiff as a cardboard doll. When I awoke the following morning, the pain had generally gone, but not for long. I learnt a valuable lesson from being that sick, I learnt I was strong inside. I had to be to survive. My illness eventually subsided without any medical treatment.

Nan had many beliefs to do with health that she passed on to us. For one thing, she was obsessed with healthy bowels. So was Mum, but whether this was because of Nan's influence or because she'd reached the same beliefs herself from her lengthy sessions in the toilet was hard to tell.

Nan worried about people who stayed in the toilet too long. If Mum took longer than ten minutes, Nan manifested her concern by knocking on the toilet door and calling, ‘Glad … are you in there?' Mum invariably replied, ‘Of course I am, you stupid old woman.'

‘Now don't get nasty with me, Glad,' Nan responded. ‘You always get nasty with me when you're in the toilet. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.'

‘What the bloody hell do you think's going to happen to me in here?'

‘You could faint, Glad. I'll never forget old Mrs Caulfield, she fainted in the toilet. It was hours before her daughter found her. You're lucky you've got someone to check on you, Glad. Glad … are you still in there?'

By this time, Mum was so annoyed that she flushed the toilet violently and emerged, ready to berate Nan. Nan's sense of timing was perfect; when she heard the chain being pulled, she walked quickly to her room and locked herself in.

I later realised that the time Mum spent in the toilet was her only chance for peace and quiet. With five children in the house, where else could she go?

Both Mum and Nan convinced us that a lot of illness was caused by constipation. We were quite happy to go along with their views in theory, but when their obsession began to extend to us in the form of regular doses of castor oil, Laxettes and what we crudely termed ‘glycerine sticks', we balked. Our co-operation became more and more difficult to obtain, and Mum finally decided that the hassle in first discovering our separate hiding places and then literally dragging us from them wasn't worth the satisfaction she got when we all lined up for the toilet.

In a sense, Mum and Nan weren't health fanatics so much as sickness fanatics. They took great pleasure in reading of the discovery of diseases with unknown causes. They were particularly interested in tropical medicine, reasoning that as Australia was in cooee of the equator, anything could come wafting down.

While Mum and Nan's interest in exotic diseases may have
added a little excitement to their daily grind, it added only fear to ours. Our views concerning common childhood illnesses were a trifle unbalanced. We were convinced that leprosy and the bubonic plague abounded in our piece of suburbia, and when we caught measles and chickenpox, we wondered what they would lead to. Illness was a great mystery to us, we didn't know what caused it or how to cure it, and Nan's gloomy hints added nothing to our already tenuous sense of security.

It was Nan who first brought out the sceptic in me. I was suspicious of outsiders, especially those in authority. Nan convinced me that most people were untrustworthy, especially doctors. For years, she had been talking about the Old Cures, the ones they used in the early days. I knew the Old Cures were the best.

One of Nan's great cure-alls was pepper. Any gashes were stuffed full with pepper and then tightly bound with strips torn from an old, white sheet. She also believed that eating a tin of beetroot would replace the blood you lost. While we exhibited various higgledy-piggledy scars on our arms and legs, the result of wounds stitched at Hollywood Repatriation Hospital, Nan had none. Her skin always healed soft and whole.

But there were two of Nan's health measures that I found difficult to accept. The first concerned Enos. She regularly dosed herself with Enos because she was convinced it helped oxygenate the blood. ‘You try it, Sally,' she said to me one day. ‘It makes your blood clean and your head clear.' I did take a mouthful, but, to me, the taste was so foul I immediately spat it out.

The second measure involved kerosene. Nan maintained it was wonderful for removing aches and pains and for generally keeping your body in tiptop condition. When I was suffering from rheumatic fever, Nan begged me to let her rub my arms and legs with it. I steadfastly refused, I hated the smell. Nan was so conscientious about her twice-daily kerosene rubs we feared, that, combined with her chain-smoking, a sudden blaze might one day be the cause of her death.

Nan's interest in health was not restricted to the human population.

One hot Saturday afternoon, when I was stretched out on an itchy blue towel, soaking up the sun, it slowly dawned on my numbed senses that Nan's restless movements around the yard had ceased. Curiosity overcame lethargy, and, peering under my sweaty armpit, I took a quick glance around to see where she was.

I observed her, standing very still, close to the smallest gum tree in our backyard. Using the back of her knuckles, she tapped on the trunk twice, and then once with her stick. Then, she inclined her head towards the trunk as though listening for something. After a lengthy pause, she seemed satisfied, and, giving the earth a quick prod with her stick, she moved on to the paperbark further down.

‘Nan,' I called out, ‘what on earth are you doing?'

She started in surprise. I had been quiet for so long it was obvious she'd forgotten I was there. She waved her stick at me in a threatening manner and said crossly, ‘I'm not doing anything, you go back to sleep!'

‘Come on, Nan, I saw you tapping on that tree, what were you doing?'

She jabbed her stick in the sand, turned to me and said, ‘You can't be trusted any more, Sally. I can't walk round my own backyard without one of you kids spying on me.'

‘You know I wasn't spying. I just happened to see what you were doing, that's all. Now, are you going to tell me or not?'

She could see I wasn't going to give up without a fight, so she said quickly, ‘All right, I was just checking on them to make sure they were all right, that's all. Now, no more questions, I got work to do!'

‘Okay,' I sighed as I burrowed my head down into my towel once again.

I hadn't comprehended her answer at all. What on earth did she mean, making sure they were all right? I puzzled over her words for a few seconds and then dismissed them. There was so much about Nan I didn't understand.

Mum was offered a job as a cleaner at our school at the beginning of the year I started Grade Six. The hours were perfect, because they fitted in with the two other part-time jobs she was doing. But she didn't accept the job straightaway. First, she got us all together and asked if we would mind her taking it.

‘What on earth are you talking about, Mum?' I said.

‘Well, I don't want to take the job if you children would mind. I thought you might worry about what your friends would think.'

Without hesitation I replied, ‘We wouldn't mind, Mum, we'd really like it because we'd see more of you.'