The Dressmaker's Daughter (23 page)

W
hen Richard and Becky drove off from our house with my sewing machine, which I was only too glad to be rid of, I saw that my life had petered out into a thin trickle. I was quite happy to rear the children but I had no idea of what else to do with myself.

Post-object art had come in and I no longer had any faith in selling objects on walls so I closed the Dulwich gallery. Richard and Becky kept our North Adelaide gallery open for another year or so.

I went to the doctor, who suggested I take up pottery. Pottery! I’d rather be dead. I thought, ‘So it has come to this! I am to devote myself to making mugs.’ I sensed that he did not mean pots of the kind that it takes twenty years to perfect and several trips to Japan. He meant coffee mugs and thick platters. It was common at that time that women in my position studied either modern dance at Elizabeth Dalman’s school of dance, or yoga with one of
the many teachers around, or became potters in aprons with kilns in the backyard. I had tried modern dance and the only part of it I was good at was leaping diagonally across the room, a form of flight I loved.

On weekends, I often took a taxi down to Henley Beach with the children and stayed with my friend Julia, a recent widow, at her big, old home on the Esplanade. Her husband had been an English composer, Philip Britten, and they had come from South Africa with their three children when he had taken a job at the Conservatorium, or the
Conservatoire
as Julia called it. Julia taught sociology at Adelaide University and was the most interesting woman I had ever met. She and Philip had left their civil marriage ceremony forty years earlier on the back of a truck, on which he was playing a piano. She was twenty years older than me, worldly, and had been a theatre critic in South Africa. She wore a glittery red bikini and had a Steinway grand piano in her bedroom, which faced the sea where the sun set in wild red streaks. When I first walked into her house, on the floors of the passage and bedrooms there were more books of the kind I wanted to read than I had ever seen.

As we walked between the Henley and Semaphore jetties, Julia talked to me about the Red Blanket people of Africa, or of Philip teaching African children to sing Bach. She told me about Pericles and once said, ‘If you study the Classics, it means that you always have something to
think about.’ When a local artist covered herself with honey and released bees into the room where she lay as part of her performance, Julia said scornfully, ‘That’s nothing new. A Roman empress did that in the second century.’

It was clear that I needed something to give my life meaning besides my children. They would leave and what would I be doing? Once Hugh had said, when I admitted I had a lover, ‘Women shouldn’t.’ I said, ‘Well, your father has Becky. What am I to do?’ He repeated himself. I said, ‘Look, Hugh, one day you and Caroline will leave and I will be standing on the veranda waving to you, saying: “Have a good life!” I will not be rubbing my eyes and crying, “Don’t leave me!”’ But how was I to accomplish this?

Julia suggested that I go to university. But how? I had left school at fifteen and could hardly spell. How could I matriculate and what would we live on? Would I still be entitled to the widow’s pension while I got the degree? (At this time, a single woman with children was entitled to this pension.) And I never thought, ‘And then what?’ The mere idea of getting a degree seemed as far as the moon and yet it appealed in a way that pottery did not.

Recently I had read the autobiography of Caitlin Thomas, the widow of Dylan. She said that after he died she did not know how to live. She felt she had ‘leftover life to kill’. And now so did I.

Then, by chance, my friend Lynn Collins, who had shown his art with us in the Dulwich and North Adelaide galleries, came round to visit me. He had taught at the School of Arts in Adelaide, and during his visit mentioned that he knew of a new school called the Adult Matriculation School in Marryatville, and that that was where I should go if I wanted to do a course that would prepare me for university. I rang up but the course was fully booked for February, which was in a month’s time. But the principal agreed to put my name on a waiting list and asked me to telephone on a certain date. I was on North Terrace when I remembered and went to a telephone box. They had a place for me. I jumped up and down in the box and said, ‘Mr Stanley, you will never regret it!’

Daily I rode my bike up to the school. Putting it down under a tree, I thought, ‘Yes, this is all very well, but how long do you think you can go on doing this to pass the time?’ Then before three weeks had passed I was hooked. Classical Studies did it. I learnt about Pericles at last. We read his speech to the women of Athens.

The school comprised people who were at a turning point in their life. Some like me were being divorced, some were Vietnam veterans, some were rich and had decided to become doctors, some had been retrenched, some had had nervous breakdowns, some were looking for purpose and some were just lost. I was among those of my own kind.

It was clear that we needed a school newspaper. When I suggested it, somebody said that if I wanted one, I must create it. Too right! I put a notice on the blackboards in the demountable lecture rooms and waited for contributions. They came in volume. One day a girl with golden hair, wearing a bright blue woollen dress, walked up and asked if I was the editor. She had written an article on psychiatrists and the need their patients had to become friends with them. Her point was that the patients had a right to this and that they would heal faster if they could become friends. Bad idea. But I didn’t know it at the time. This was Ghilly. Her mother had told her these things and Ghilly had responded by writing about them. Her article was in our first edition. The school newspaper only had one edition. It was called L.S.D., which was, I think, a pre-decimalisation pun on money, which was a continual topic for us all as we tried desperately to manage it, and also a reference to the drug that was popular at the time and of which one of the teachers was a devotee.

The look on my friend Janie’s face when I had told her that we should prepare for the second edition had been enough to show me that I would not have any friends left if I tried for a second. Janie, a friend from this school, had come to live with me earlier that year because she had found it hard to rear her teenage brothers with a new stepmother. Her own mother had died of a brain tumour some years before in England. Janie looked like Grace
Kelly and all the boys were after her. We had printed the paper on an old Gestetner machine on the black dining-room table and collated it by laying the pages in piles down the passageway. It took all our time for days. Then we stapled it and charged two dollars a copy. A more peculiar and heart-rending magazine has seldom been published. Full of ardour, naïvety, the drug culture, and our poems (mine included), which were what I now recognise in my students, that sort of laying down of anything that comes to mind without much idea of how to compress language or use rhythm. The air seemed to be full of brown-paper homemade kites and torn flags with messages stitched to them. We had a wonderful time. Janie was Lothar to my Mandrake. But when I saw her face when I mentioned the next edition of the school newspaper, I faltered and knew I had pushed her as far as I could. How sensible she was. We could not have passed our exams if we had taken all the room in the passageway for the next edition; we were to need every inch for the genetic diagrams and formulas that we tried to absorb to pass biology.

Soon after this, Ghilly came to live with us. (Her stepfather had been released from Glenside Psychiatric Hospital and had threatened to kill her and her mother. He had a gun in the boot of his car.) She was a soprano who had won a singing competition on television. One day, home from art school, she had seen a singing competition on television and, having had a few glasses of rosé wine
from a flagon she was sharing with her friend, said, ‘I can sing better than that!’ The friend suggested Ghilly go to the station and audition, which she did. After she sang ‘Georgie Girl’, the judge said, ‘Next!’ Ghilly turned to leave but he told her to stay because she had been accepted.

A decade later she was to sing the leading role in
Lucia d’Lammermoor
and to sing Violetta in
La Traviata
at the Sydney Opera House as a resident principal. I became used to riding up in the lift after her performance on opening night and knocking on her dressing-room door. Ghilly would be sitting at the dressing-table taking off her wig and makeup. Outside, the sea below lapped the walls of the building, and, further out, boats rode, but we could not see them as we were too high up and only the dark rough water was visible. An assistant would appear and hang the costume, from which Ghilly stepped, onto a clothes rack. Then Ghilly would open champagne, pour all who were in the room a glass, make a toast, and step into the shower. It was a long way from the flagon of rosé wine and ‘Georgie Girl’.

All that was far into the future. We had many men to grieve over before this, and Ghilly had then and there to escape her poor mad stepfather. As must be clear, she did, and, in fact, he killed himself with his gun, and not his wife or Ghilly.

At school, we were studying Pinter’s
The Birthday Party
and so we decided to put on a performance of the play in the gallery. For weeks we had readings and then rehearsals in the gallery and then we had a single performance. Nobody ever explained to us – certainly not our English teacher, Des, whom we all loved – what the play was about. What was Pinter doing? It was a sign of the times that it was thought to be perhaps too dictatorial for a teacher to actually tell students what the ideas were that lay behind a work. Structuralism and postmodernism came a little later, but they may well have been in vogue at that time for all the direction we got. We had complete freedom to decipher what we could of a text and with that we then had to battle and defend our position in an exam where we competed with students from other institutions who had been taught in the classical method of letting them know what the ideas behind the work were. I found the method by which we were taught completely baffling and it only added to my idiosyncratic ideas and the almost complete ignorance with which I approached reading.

For many weeks in class we had discussed which texts we might like to study. This drove me to a frenzy. Having got to school and being so hungry to learn, sitting in class day after day not actually learning anything but listening to people discuss what they might prefer – say, Wilfred Owen’s poetry or
Anna Karenina
– was very similar to the
sort of talk I was used to in cafés and at lunches. I had not come to school to go on with café talk. I longed to know something; I longed to be able to abandon mere opinion, of which I was full, and to learn to think and to talk as those people did who had come to the dinners Richard and I had given for all those years. The difference I could see between the people at our table was that those who had been to university spoke in a logical way. You didn’t need to agree with them but when they argued one thing followed another and they could support their argument with facts, or at least things they said were facts.

One day I rode my bike home at lunchtime from class and actually began to scream in frustration at yet another class where we had discussed what we would study. My flared tomato-red trousers caught in the bike chain and I came to a sudden halt.

Eventually we did begin to read the books, having decided on something, and we began to write essays. I did not know what an essay was. But we were to write on a book of our choice for the first essay. I wrote three pages in about two hours on
Anna Karenina
and tore back to school after lunch and handed it to Des. I wrote a covering note saying that I did not know what an essay was but I had heard that they had a beginning, a middle and an end, and that I hoped that this was in fact one. He sent back a note a few days later saying that it was, indeed, an essay and I could have a Distinction for it.

Towards the end of our year at school, the Labor Government in Canberra decided to close the National Education for Adults Training Scheme (the NEAT Scheme) that was the means by which the students had an income and so were able to study. The Whitlam Government had set up this scheme to retrain adults and to get them into the workforce. This was devastating news for us. It meant that many of us would not be able to afford to go to university, even if we passed our final exams.

Three of us were voted into a group to go and put our case to the Minister for Labour, Clyde Cameron. There was Allan, a forty-year-old from the UK, who had been retrenched; a tall man, whose name I can’t remember; and me, who had been a nurse and was now divorcing my husband and rearing children as a single parent. We represented a range of the students.

The day of our appointment came and nervously we went up in the lift in the office block in King William Street, the men clearing their throats. The Minister’s young senior adviser, John Bannon, came out to welcome us and shook our hands. He ushered us in. The Minister was at his desk, signing letters. He continued to do this while signalling us to sit and to put our case to him. This we did. John Bannon stayed in the room. One by one we told our story and explained that without the money the NEAT Scheme provided for matriculation and university education, our time at school would be wasted because
we would not be able to train as the teachers, doctors, public servants, lawyers and other professionals that we had hoped to be. (What I hoped to become, I had no idea. I simply wanted an education and, as usual, had no further plans.)

Asked what we were planning to study for our degree, one of the men listed subjects, among which was history.

‘History!’ seethed the Minister. ‘That’s a waste of time! What good are historians?’ Gesturing down to King William Street, he said, ‘Down there, those men with picks and shovels know about work. What do historians know about work?’ I like to think John Bannon flinched but I can’t say so; he just stayed there, a witness.