The Long Hot Summer (6 page)

They remained in America until the end of 1947, then returned to Sydney. Curiously, my mother had never become pregnant during the early years of their marriage living overseas, but within a year of returning she did become pregnant and went on to have three children in rapid succession – my brother Dan, me, and my little sister Jane. This was the period of our family life that was the most traumatic. Although I have no memory of it, Mum drank heavily even during her pregnancies and when we were babies. This I was told by my sister Margaret when we finally met again in 2002. Mum's drinking, together with her constant fighting with my father, were two of the factors which prompted Margaret to escape on her eighteenth birthday and make her own way in the world.

Around this period, my baby sister Jane tragically died, my brother Jon became a marine engineer and left for the sea, and somehow Dan and I muddled along and survived.

Mum came to live with David and me when I was twenty-five and the mother of two young children, so essentially I only lived apart from her for about six years of my life. Dad had died and left her with very little financial security, so it seemed natural for her to become part of our growing young family. She was a great person to have around the house and everyone loved her, although there were times when her forceful personality made her difficult to live with. As she aged, her daily routine became fairly rigid. She developed a dislike of going out except once a week to the bank, the newsagency and the liquor shop – stocking up for the week ahead. She always woke early and had several cups of tea to revive her. She then read the newspaper from cover to cover and did the crossword and various word puzzles. Despite the haze of drinking and smoking, her mind remained sharp as a tack and she could take the ABC news down in shorthand until the day she died. She particularly loved finding fault in the work of other journalists, both in radio and print, and kept a notebook record of their grammatical or factual errors.

Although our children insist that Mum sometimes helped herself to the Scotch bottle during the day, I was only ever aware of her drinking in the evening. She would have an afternoon nap and then at five o'clock sharp she would march into the kitchen and grab two ice blocks from the freezer for her first drink of the day. Her consumption was fast and furious. The level on the Scotch bottle would drop dramatically between five and six p.m., and for me it was always a race to get a meal on the table before the seven o'clock news because by that time she would be utterly smashed. Like a lot of heavy drinkers, Mum lost interest in food and was gradually becoming thinner and more
frail. She would fill up on alcohol before dinner, then just push the food around her plate. To try to overcome this, I changed her routine and started cooking her a hot lunch in the middle of the day, so that at least she would have something solid in her stomach before she hit the Scotch bottle at five.

If Mum was an outspoken woman when sober, she was totally uninhibited after a few drinks. Her penchant for saying exactly what she thought to anyone at any time caused me a huge amount of embarrassment when I was a child. But as I grew older and matured, I sneakily admired her forthrightness; although it could be alarming, it was mostly just very funny. When Miriam was first married, her husband Rick's family would come to visit and we liked them enormously. Once his elderly grandmother Phylis was visiting from England and she came for a family dinner which was a great success. Mum did her usual trick of drinking too much and disappearing off to bed without even saying goodnight. She reappeared an hour later, however, having obviously dozed off for a while. She was dressed in a ragged old nightie, her white hair was standing on end, and she had removed her teeth. She came over and sat beside Rick's grandmother and put her hand on her arm.

‘You'll have to forgive me, Phylis,' she said to explain her earlier disappearance, ‘but I'm pissed as a fucking newt.'

Spoken in her most cultured voice, it was a bit of a conversation stopper.

Mum no longer resembled the beautiful and elegantly dressed journalist she had once been, but the spirit of that young woman was always there. It never disappeared.

She often had falls in the evening although she rarely injured herself, which was amazing because I imagine her bone density
must have been low. I organised for Home Help assistance to get her in and out of the shower as she grew more and more frail, and I also had handrails installed in the bathroom, toilet and hallways to try to minimise the number of accidents. Towards the end I bought her a commode chair – a handsome one make of oak that sat beside the bed so that she wouldn't have to brave the long hallway in the middle of the night to go to the toilet.

Mum's nightly ritual of drinking and going to bed early always culminated in a dramatic farewell. She had maintained her strong left-wing political beliefs and even though it had been decades since she was a member of the communist party she still admired much of what it stood for. Every evening she would emerge from her room to say a final goodnight, usually dressed for bed and looking rather raddled. Her parting words were invariably: ‘Goodnight dear. I've got one last thing to say.' At which point she would raise her right arm in a defiant gesture. ‘Up the revolution!' Then she would turn and disappear for the night.

Once a week Mum and I would meet friends at the pub in Wentworth Falls for a drink or two. One of them was the retired politician and judge Jim McClelland, who shared a left-wing political background with Muriel. It was one of the few occasions I could lure her out of her smoky bedroom. We would go to the pub at five o'clock and be back home by six-thirty to watch the ABC gardening show on which I was a presenter. It was an enjoyable ritual that got Mum out of the house for a while and into the company of others. She had steadily become a little reclusive and spent far too much time alone in spite of the fact that she was in the midst of such a large and busy family.

One rainy Friday she declined the weekly trip to the pub, saying she felt unwell. I tried to persuade her to come. ‘You'll feel much better when we get there, Mum. Come on, it'll do you good to get out.' But she insisted on staying at home. I had barely arrived at the hotel when there was a phone message for me over the bar.

‘Your son just called and asked if you could go home immediately. Apparently your mother is unwell.'

I was home in a flash. It was Ethan who had called. He had also called our GP, who had been with Muriel for several minutes before I got there.

‘What's wrong with Grandma?' I asked Ethan.

‘I don't really know,' he said, ‘but she told me she had a pain in her abdomen. When I asked her what was wrong, all she said was, “I think I'm dying but don't tell your mother, she'll be worried.”'

Our doctor, who was also a good family friend, said I must get Mum up to the hospital as quickly as possible. He was unable to make a firm diagnosis but could clearly see she needed immediate attention. He called an ambulance but there was none available. Apparently there had been a series of accidents on the highway as a result of the rain and we would have to wait two hours to get one.

‘I'll take her myself,' I announced.

It's the funny things you remember in the midst of an emergency. There had been a delivery of cow manure for the garden that morning and the truck driver had dumped it outside the front gate. The rain had turned it into a soggy, smelly mess and somehow the doctor and I had to carry Mum over the cow manure to get to the car. The humour was not lost on her as we arrived in casualty stinking like a cow shed. There was a long
queue but our doctor friend had phoned ahead to say that Mum must be given a bed to lie down on – she was too sick to sit on a chair in the outpatients waiting room.

What transpired over the next few hours is difficult to describe. The road accidents had filled the emergency room and there were not enough doctors to attend to the backlog of patients. Nobody had been seriously injured but there was a queue waiting to be seen, and Mum was quite a long way down the list. She was seen by a nurse, who was able to take notes but not offer any assistance in the way of pain relief. That would have to wait until a doctor could examine her. Mum's pain grew more and more intense. She was writhing on the narrow casualty bed and I tried my best to comfort her. It was appalling. I kept asking how much longer she would have to wait, but they kept saying they didn't know. At one stage I actually lay beside her on the bed, stroking her face and trying to soothe her. I was aware that none of the people being treated was critically or even seriously injured, but the hospital was handling cases in the order in which they had arrived. For four hours Mum was in agony, and eventually I couldn't deal with it any more and insisted loudly that a doctor must see her.
Now
. Not in ten minutes but
now
.

She was examined, but the young doctor on duty was uncertain about the cause of her pain. He ordered pain relief which worked almost instantaneously, much to my relief. She relaxed instantly once the terrible pain had been deadened.

‘Mrs Moody,' the earnest young doctor said, ‘I think we need to do some tests on you to find out what's causing the pain. I'm about to organise a Care Flight helicopter to pick you up and take you to Nepean Hospital.'

Mum had a flying phobia, which hadn't been an issue for a
while because she hadn't needed to fly anywhere for decades. ‘Young man,' she said, again in her most cultured voice, ‘I haven't flown for thirty years and I'm certainly not flying anywhere tonight.'

So an ambulance was ordered. I was advised to go home and get some sleep and then to drive down to Penrith in the morning to be with her for the tests. It's a decision I will always regret. I should have just gone with her in the ambulance, but somehow I thought she was going to be okay. She wasn't. She was dying as I kissed her goodbye and watched the ambulance head out of the hospital driveway and down the highway.

It was after midnight when I crawled into bed totally exhausted by Mum's painful ordeal. I thought it was a terrible state of affairs that an elderly woman, obviously in terrible pain, had been made to wait for four hours before being seen by a doctor. As I fell asleep I made a mental note to myself to write to the hospital and also to our local state member of parliament to complain about the inadequacies of the system.

I had not been asleep for long when the phone rang. It was Nepean Hospital. I must come immediately because my mother was gravely ill. David and I threw on our dirty clothes from the day before and drove like maniacs down the dark deserted highway. I knew she was dead and that they just hadn't wanted to say it over the phone. I repeated it over and over to David.

‘She's dead, I know she's dead. I should have stayed with her. I should have gone with her in the ambulance.'

She was dead, of course, and they wheeled her into a small private area with curtains around so we could have some privacy. She had tubes going into her mouth and her face was distorted and strained. She did not look at peace.

I was totally stunned and barely able to speak. ‘I need the children here now,' I said.

So David phoned them at their various homes and woke them from their sleep to get them to come to the hospital and sit with us. I had spoken to them all from the hospital earlier that evening to say that their Grandma was being admitted but that she seemed to be okay. So they all knew she was sick but none had expected this.

Miriam was pregnant with her second child. Little Eamonn was barely two and he played cheerfully around his great-grandmother's lifeless body, chomping on biscuits while the rest of us sat grimly trying to come to terms with what had just happened. We were shaken and in a weird state of disbelief. How could Grandma die? We all knew she was frail and that her health had been deteriorating for years now. But her character and her personality were so strong and so forceful that somehow none of us imagined that she could disappear. She seemed indestructible. Indomitable. Now here she was, a small grey shadow of a woman with tubes in her mouth. Muriel had gone.

The days between Mum's death and her funeral were a blur. I guess we were all in shock, but there was so much to be done. David was a great support, taking charge of so many of the practical things that needed organising and phoning people far and wide who needed to be told of Muriel's death. He chose the funeral directors because they were women and they wore white instead of the usual grim men in black suits. We had a fit of the giggles when they showed us the display booklet of ‘caskets', all with their own special names. The Promethean was a gold-plated affair costing $40,000. We opted for the Essential, which was a plain wooden box for about $400. We had plans for it. In fact, we had plans for the entire funeral because we didn't want to just hand over the day to a funeral company. We wanted to be in control and make it our own. And Mum's, of course.

We placed a notice in death column of the
Sydney Morning Herald
. It was the usual wording, with one slight exception. Mum had been affectionately known as ‘the old bag' since I was a child
and we all called her that from time to time. Often her birthday cards were written to ‘the old bag' rather than to Mum or Grandma. It was a family tradition and a term of endearment. So at the end of her death notice we simply said ‘Farewell Old Bag'. It was picked up by the Column 8 editor, who made a disparaging remark about our disrespect for our ‘deceased relative'. On any other occasion I would have written him a terse response, but there was too much going on at the time. Too much to be done.

We wanted to paint the coffin to personalise it. We wanted to bring Mum home for a night and have her lying in her coffin on the kitchen table. We all agreed that she had left in such a hurry that rainy Friday evening. She needed to come back and spend one last night at home with her family. We also wanted to have the funeral service at the house and not in a church or a crematorium. Mum hadn't been inside a church for decades and it seemed absurd to us to allow a stranger to conduct a funeral service. The women in white listened to all our requests and happily agreed. There was no reason why we couldn't do exactly what we wanted. Mum's body could be brought home and we could have the funeral around her in the kitchen where she had spent so many happy years.