Rebellious Daughters (2 page)

Still, there are quite a few fathers and even stepfathers here who evoke their daughters' rebellious instincts,
as in Eliza-Jane Henry-Jones's account of her uneasy relationship with her alcohol and prescription medication addicted father. In this story, as in that of Kneen, grandmothers too loom as these ‘strangest, craziest', larger-than-life figures against whom we must rise.

‘Time blunts the sharpness of resentment,' writes Caroline Baum. The passage of time is important in her memoir and not just because it played a role in her reconciliation with her parents, but also because only in her 40s did Baum come to think of herself ‘less as a daughter' and develop a more diverse range of identities. Indeed, judging by our contributors' accounts, timelines of rebellion vary vastly. While Baum is a late bloomer, some daughters begin as early as babyhood – rejecting their mother's breast, wriggling in resistance on the changing table. And for others, being a rebel becomes an ongoing project, a permanent marker of Self. Regardless of different timings, what arises from all stories is how powerfully familial rebellions linger in our psyches, often becoming our ‘origin myths', to borrow Siemienowicz's words.

Lee and Maria

DAUGHTERS OF DEBATE

MARION HALLIGAN

‘The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow.' Spoken by Elizabeth 1 of Mary Queen of Scots

I have in my garden, leaning against an oak tree, a concrete tablet. My father made it when he was constructing the paths marking the garden beds in our new house not far from the sea, where he dug the sand out to two spades depths and filled it with good soil so he could grow vegetables. The tablet is about twenty centimetres square, and incised into it are three rows of initials: AJC, MAC, MMC. My father, my mother, me. I was two. I suppose he used up a left-over chunk of concrete. It hung about
our back garden for more than 40 years, and when my mother died and we sold the house, I kept it and brought it to Canberra.

This may seem a funny little narrative, and quite trivial. But I find it very moving. I see in it my father's pride in his little family, his delight in it, his tracing out our names for some sort of posterity. Perhaps his relief that this had happened at all. I didn't find out until the eve of his funeral that my mother wasn't his first wife. He had proposed to her when they were both young, but she thought him high-toned and arrogant, and his family snobbish, so she refused him. He married a woman called Thelma. Oh, we knew of Thelma, but thought she was just an old girlfriend, sent away when he met up with my mother again. I used to wear a silk evening scarf that I knew she'd made him, not nearly so well as my mother would have knitted it. But not till after his death did we learn that he had married her, and that she died of consumption some six months later. My mother said that he had known of the disease, had thought he could cure her, and was heart-broken when he failed. He fled away up north, and it was some years before he came back and courted my mother again. This time she said yes; he was probably less arrogant, and she was keeping house for her parents and various unmarried siblings, while my grandmother sat and embroidered. I suspect she thought she might as well be keeping her own house instead.

Hence my father's pride in something he must have thought might not happen. He was 36 when I was born, old for those days, and I was 36 when he died. These are numbers of some neatness but absolutely no significance. I knew how much he loved me. He would lie on the couch with me and read the Sunday paper. Once I asked him about what was going on in the political cartoon, and he said it was a picture with a double meaning. I climbed over him to look at the other side of the paper, to see the double meaning. He was patient with all this scrambling. There is a picture of my fifth birthday party. We are all wearing spectacular crepe paper hats, mine is a sunrise, which I think would have been made by my aunt the milliner. We are standing surrounded by my presents; there's a big blackboard, with a picture of a sailing ship on it. A wheelbarrow. A doll's cupboard. A small table and chairs. All made out of wood and painted by my father. Hours of work.

By this time, my sister was born. And then several years later another sister. My father was a rather patriarchal man, and would have liked a son. But I don't think he ever made any of his daughters think she should have been a boy. He liked having all these daughters, even though he also quite enjoyed grumbling about everlastingly being surrounded by women. His sister would have liked there to be a boy, too, in order to carry on the family name. When I had a boy, she said I should
give him my surname as a middle name. I was appalled by that. I was delighted to give up my so-called maiden name. Halligan was the name of my husband, and it was so wonderful to be able to say it and people could hear you and would know how to spell it. My own name you had to repeat over and over and people still didn't get it, and they couldn't hear the spelling either. This name was Crothall. That same aunt, who was a fierce spinster hospital matron, had a way of communicating it to people. She'd say, Crothall, and when they looked at her cross-eyed, she'd rap out: rhymes with brothel.

I was 23 when I got married. There was no way, in the polite world I lived in, that I could possibly have said this word. And there was no way I was going to lumber my beautiful new little boy with this difficult name. And anyway my father didn't pronounce it to rhyme with brothel, he said it with a slight emphasis on the ‘all', especially I reckon to avoid the connection.

Decades later, in the days when I was a Penguin author, we went to a Penguin party at a boutique brewery in Sydney, and somebody said to my husband, You're Marion's husband, aren't you. What's your name? Graham said, Oh my name's Halligan too. I took her name when we got married. He said this so perfectly deadpan that he made the questioner nervous, not having any idea whether he was joking or not.

I was a good girl, a virtuous daughter, dutiful. I mostly behaved well, and my parents knew it. I pleased them. Though sometimes the situation was morally somewhat ambiguous. One day, when I was in my teens (teenagers hadn't been invented but you could be in your teens) I brought home a book from the library. I had just graduated from the children's library to the adult; you grew out of one and automatically into the other. Another thing that hadn't been invented then was young adult fiction.

Anyway this book (can't remember what it was) was on the table. My father picked it up and said, I don't think you should read this. I don't think this is a fit book for you to read. He knew because he'd already read it, he was a very keen reader. All right, I said, I'll take it back. A good girl, you see, obedient. But here's the morally tricky bit. I didn't let on that I had already finished it. My father was right, it was rather a nasty book, not really a suitable thing for me to read at all, I knew that. I have often wondered if he was surprised by my acquiescence, but if he guessed what was going on he didn't say. That book was unpleasant, with some very weird sex scenes, but I don't think it did me any harm. I put it out of mind. I was robust; the delicate ones were my parents, I often felt they had to be spared the knowledge of difficult things, like the fact that their innocent daughter had read this book.

My father might have been surprised that I didn't argue my right to read it. I often did have energetic conversations. Not because I defied him but because I disagreed with things he said. I remember one night at dinner a vigorous argument about modern art. I was studying art at school, very much my father's doing. The school had put me into the Latin stream but he wrote flowery (and very Latinate) letters to the headmistress saying how important it was that I study art because I was good at drawing. The school fought back but he won. I regret the Latin but loved the art. The streaming was art and geography, or Latin and history, and yes, the former was certainly thought to be less intellectual. The art teacher, Jean McGilchrist, wasn't having that. Her art involved history, language, philosophy; there was a practical side, painting, drawing, but what mattered was the ideas. She cultivated me. I was an ardent modernist in my youth and took it for granted that I would one day live in a Mies van der Rohe-style house with Bauhaus furniture. Ha, that didn't happen. The argument at dinner was about Picasso. Miss McGilchrist taught us to look at paintings, gave us a technique and a vocabulary to understand them, and I wanted to make my father see what I did in Picasso. But he couldn't, he liked art to be a recognisable picture of some obvious reality, a Constable, or a Gainsborough, whose beauty was clear to the most ignorant eye. I said that Picasso could paint
like that if he wanted to, but that had been done so thoroughly in the past that he was keen to do something different. I got a book and showed him some paintings. No, he said, I'll never see it, that, that's an abortion.

I was stunned by that. You didn't ever use that word in our house. Even the word pregnant was going a bit far. But what really shut me up was the realisation of how strongly my father felt about these things, so strongly that he was prepared to use a word like that to a 15-year-old. Seeing how thoroughly I had lost, I stopped arguing. I know there were other fierce arguments, but that one has stuck in my head for 60 years, my father's vehement faint stumbling over an unsayable word.

I sometimes see myself as a kind of John the Baptist figure where my sisters were concerned, the one who came before, who paved the way. Consider the bicycle. My high school was a long way away, it took more than half an hour to walk there. You could catch two buses, but it was a dreary long way round. A bicycle would solve all my problems, and I would not have to carry my large Globite school port full of books. My father wasn't keen. I talked and talked, nagged and nagged, probably. I felt I was close to persuading him, when my friend Louise riding to school got the front wheel of her bike caught in the tramline and tumbled over the handlebars. She broke her two front teeth.

All my work was undone. I never did get a bike. But my sister Brenda, three years younger, began the same routine and almost immediately father gave in. How unfair this was. I never ever learned really, though when I came to Canberra as a student I did one day borrow someone's bike to ride to the swimming pool, which considering I'd never done it before was a rather dangerous enterprise.

Other times my relentless persuasion worked better. When I was in fourth year, as they called it, fifth year being when you did the Leaving Certificate, the school took us on an excursion to Sydney to visit the university. This was Newcastle Girls' High, a selective school of clever girls and clever teachers. We got shown the beautiful old sandstone buildings, the science labs, the Union, the lawns. I fell in love with it. I wanted it. My father did not really believe in what he called ‘higher education for girls'. We'd get married and it would be all wasted.

Of course I knew the answer to that claim. The desirability of the educated mother, etcetera. For over a year I argued. He'd suffered through the depression when Thelma died and, at the beginning of it, he threw in his decent job and ran away up north, full of grief. Discovered how hard jobs were to get. I explained that if I had a degree, I would always be employable. And what if I never got married? Since he wouldn't have
a telephone in the house, it was extremely likely that I never would. Three daughters, no telephone, he'd be lumbered with us forever. I'd have to earn my own living.

The bike didn't work, but the university did. Not Sydney, alas, money didn't run to that. But Newcastle University was just starting, so I could live at home. Part of the point was not to live at home, but I didn't say that. I know he never regretted that I talked him into it. In later years he used to boast how many degrees there were in the family, including his three sons-in-law. This was embarrassing, but it made him proud.

After four years of university degree I did a Dip -Ed. We had to go to Teachers' College to do that. DipEds always hated Teachers' College. It was repressive and childish and deadly dull. You weren't allowed to wear trousers. But our year decided to be good. We would co-operate, see where that got us. I can't now work out how we decided these things as a body, but we did. Each year had to do a play, usually some strange anachronistic one-act drawing room comedy. The English teacher gave us a book of these to choose from. No, we said, we are going to do
Medea
. (These decisions seemed to come as some sort of divine inspiration.) And we did. I wanted to be Medea, but that role went to a girl with a huge head of red hair. I was the leader of the chorus, a fine meaty role, and I was considered to be very good with the words. We had floating muslin costumes that
we dyed various brilliant colours. It was a great success.

We were good about sport. I got a tennis umpire's certificate. Our reward was that we could choose whatever sport we wanted. Golf, we said, in that curious one-voiced way. The teachers blanched a bit, but said okay. They didn't really honour it, we only got to go twice. And classes were still very boring. I read a book under the desk, a novel. There were two mantras for the teachers of teachers, the first: You can't possibly teach until you've done the method subject, in my case English and history. The other: A graduate can teach anything. The contradictions didn't occur to us. We weren't supposed to have any other jobs; the scholarships were generous and all our time was for course work. I was tutoring in the English department at the university, and instead of objecting they would mutter sotto voce to distinguished visitors: One of our girls is tutoring at the university. Hypocritical, I thought.