Robin Levett

The Girls

Robin Levett was the youngest of three sisters. The Girls' of this book. Born in 1925, she had a mixed experience of schools, being asked to leave one after she set fire to it, but she found her feet as an art student at the National Gallery School, where she won the 1943 Travelling Scholarship.
After war service with the WRANS and WAS(B), she led a lurid life in England for two years, attempting to be a secretary without having the benefit of secretarial training. Returning to Australia, she worked for Sigint (British signals intelligence). She then married Geoffrey Levett, M.C.. and became a leading racehorse breeder, managing two studs. Lyndhurst Lodge at Skye and Willowmavin at Kilmore. Their successes included the Victorian Derby, the Brisbane Cup and the Perth Cup. Her husband was for eleven years on the committee of the VRC, and she was President of the Kilmore Turf Club from 1989 to 1994,
Somewhere along the way. she acquired an astonishing capacity to write stylish, evocative and captivating prose, a talent which she at last shares with us in this, her first book. She is currently completing a second, on Kashmir.
HUDSON
HAWTHORN
ISBN 0-949873-65-9
0 949873 6= ARRP SI9.9
9"780949"873651'
HUDSON

HAWTHORN
Hudson Publishing

The publishing division of
N. S. Hudson Publishing Services P/L
6 Muir Street, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122

First published 1997
Copyright © Robin Levett 1997
Typeset by tiie publishers
Printed by Currency Productions, Melbourne
National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data:

Levett, Robin, 1925
The
girls.

ISBN 0 949873 65 9

1. Levett, Robin, 1925-. 2. Australia. Royal Australian Navy.
Women's Royal Australian Naval Service - Biography. 3Great
Britain. Army Women's Auxiliary Service (Burma) Biography.
4. World War, 1939-1945 - Personal narratives,
Australia. 5. World War, 1939-1945 - Great Britain - Participation,
Female. I. Title.

940.548194

IV
Contents
PART ONE
1
1 Sorrento 3
2 Whitings 8
3 Walkers 16
4 Pa's India 22
5 Have 30
6 The Girls 35
7 Fishing 43
8 Cedric 49
9 Parents 54
10 Animals 61
11 Rob and Rose 69
12 Gardening 78
13 Visitors 83
14 Camels 93
PART TWO 99
15 Melbourne 101
16 Horses and snakes 110
17 Boarding schools 115
18 Acland Street and Cliveden Mansions 128
19Rose and Shipley Street 144
20 Jessie 152
21 Adolescence 158
22 War and Warburton 169
23 After school 180
PART THREE 187
24 More war 189
25 Travel 204
26 Arrival in India 214
27 Eighty-second Division 228
28 Burma 236
29 Rangoon 242
30 England 257
EPILOGUE 262
VI
PART ONE
1

Sorrento



IT WOULD BE EASY ENOUGH to imagine that our Sorrento,
the one on the edge of Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, was given
its name by some romantic, homesick Italian. There are times
when the Bay is every bit as blue as the Mediterranean and the
summer climate just as balmy, but there the likeness stops. Or
rather that's where the likeness stopped in the old days, before
Melbourne made Sorrento fashionable.
In fact the village was named after a property in Ireland owned
by the family of a long dead Premier, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, and
heaven knows what imaginative, ancestral Duffy could have
produced an Irish Sorrento. Sir Charles, having emigrated to
Australia, fell in love with the place, named it and shrewdly
invested in land with beach frontage. This was in the late 1800s,
when Sorrento's citizens made their living by the burning and
quarrying of lime. They built their cottages of limestone too, small
and white, square as dice and simple as a child's drawing.
When we first went to live at Sorrento it was self-sufficient,
gossipy, insular and as much like its Italian namesake as a broody
hen is like a peacock, The village looked more Irish than Latin, with
its white houses plumped around a curve of Port Phillip Bay, only
a few miles from Point Nepean where the land narrows into a
crab's-claw tip and disappears into Bass Strait. The villagers felt
rather special because Melbourne was hours away and Tasmania
just a name to them; to all intents and purposes they were the
guardians of Land's End.
Our house, The Haven, was built of white limestone like all the
rest, plain and solid as a country Church, and it challenged the Bay
from the middle of two acres of open land. It stood between
Sorrento and Portsea where the sea had scalloped out little scoops
of beach with rocky points at either end, and anyone who lived
above one of these beaches regarded it as their own. This may not
have been legally correct, but everyone with a beach built their
own jetties and swimming baths, and strangers on their sand were
trespassers, to be savaged and sent slinking away. A mile or so
south at Point King there were large, imposing houses with rich
owners, but the Point King beach was public property, and we
pitied them.
When you* were out on the Bay in a boat and looked back at
the cliff The Haven stood out, although it was the smallest cliff
house between Sorrento and Portsea. The other houses hid from
the wind and sea behind pine trees and hedges while The Haven
stood stripped to the waist like a boxer, ready for any punches that
came its way. It was at the end of a short lane called Lentil Avenue,
but Avenue was too grand and it was known as the Lane. It had
tall, ragged pine trees down one side and on the other a thick, lethal
boxthorn hedge. The Lane was death on cars because pine roots
criss-crossed its sand, sticking out like old bones, and the boxthorns
punctured tyres like icepicks. Depending on the strength of the
wind the pines sighed or roared day and night, and the sea
murmured or bellowed so that you stopped hearing either sound
consciously, except as a background for gulls' and children's
voices. It was only when you were away, somewhere like
Melbourne where all the noises were mechanical or man-made,
that there was an emptiness inside you as though something vital
was missing.
You walked out of The Haven's front door across thirty feet of
bull-ant infested buffalo grass, through a small wooden gate and
down a steep dirt path to the beach. It was a shallow, tiny cove of
sand, shells and rock pools, rich with curiosities at low tide,
creatures who moved in on one tide and out on the next, and in
between they hid in the rock pools waiting for us to find them.
There were sea-horses and jellyfish and starfish and crabs, and a
constant variety of small, nameless fish, sometimes spiked and
horned, sometimes fantastically coloured and marked. The seaweed
that waved under the surface of the water looked edible as
lettuce, and whereas on fine days fat baby waves danced onto our
sand like a chorus of cupids, the sea that slammed against the cliff
in a storm was the colour and consistency of minestrone, carrying
bits of rubbish from Melbourne at the top of the Bay.
Our jetty was a disgrace to the foreshore; nothing was ever done
to it, bar the odd, essential replacement of a rotting upright. All the
other jetties were painted and smooth, but ours was raw, splintery
wood, with gaps between the planks. The boats moored round the
other jetties were smart and elaborate as Hyde Park prams while
we had only The Jack, a grubby 12-foot wooden dinghy, infinitely
seaworthy and perfect for fishing. There was a tiny boatshed at one
end of the jetty, with a door that always jammed, and at the other
end was the baths, a rough, wooden structure designed to let the
sea in and keep the sharks out. We scorned swimming there; it was
dull and claustrophobic compared with the open sea, and although
there were plenty of sharks in the Bay then there were also a lot
more fish for them to eat, and they didn't seem to fancy humans.
The relative shabbiness of our beach didn't worry us; we knew it
to be the result of honest poverty rather than shiftlessness, and
neither The Girls nor I ever felt poor.
Sorrento was a proper village then, not the up-market suburb
it has become. The only tarred road was the one which ran through
Sorrento and ended in the sand at Portsea pier. The inland side of
the road was thick scrub, and almost the only houses along it were
the ones along the cliff. Sorrento's main shop was Stringer's Store
which had wooden floors and everything else a village shop should
have, including tiny cable-cars which zinged up and down wires
from the cash booth near the ceiling, carrying change. There were
bolts of material and axes and patent medicine, corsets and
cookware and hammers and nails, flour and sugar and canned
foods, all in a muddle that only old Mr Stringer understood.
Apart from Stringers, there was the butcher and the baker, a fle
pit for the movies, an ice-cream shop, a chemist with coloured jars
in the window, and Mr Johnson the fisherman who sold fresh fish
down near the beach. There was the Sorrento Hotel where people
one knew could stay if they weren't too fussy, and the ordinary pub
for drinking, where nobody one knew ever went. The wide main
street ran east and narrowed down to a sand-track leading to the
Back Beach and the ocean, and along it were the small cottages
where the real Sorrento people lived; they had geranium and
hollyhock gardens bordered with white stones and haunted by
garden gnomes. We knew most of the locals and loved them, and
I think they liked us but they couldn't rightly place us. We had
Pommie voices and we acted like Poms, like the people who came
down to their cliff houses for the summer holidays and vanished
again, whereas we stayed all the year round. We acted queer in a
lot of ways but we paid our bills and gave them something to talk
about, so they put up with us.
Day trippers came in summer, thrashing down the Bay in two
paint-bright old paddle steamers, the Weeroona and the Hygeia, and they spilled out all over the village, loaded with picnic baskets
and wailing children and bunnioned grandparents. The younger
ones, in mating pairs, would wander off along the cliff, looking for
somewhere to be alone. There was a right-of-way along the front
of our land leading to Point King, and sometimes they'd duck
through the little gate down to the beach, arms entwined, to do a
spot of quiet necking. They were always known as The Neckers
because physical contact below neck-level was so unthinkable
then that it was better to pretend it never happened. My sisters, The
Girls, kept a hose on a tap near the cliff edge, and when a pair of
Neckers was nicely settled on the beach they'd aim the hose over
the cliff directly above them, and turn the tap full on.
Our parents bought The Haven in the late 1920s. The Haven
wasn't their sort of name for a house, but they realised that even
if they changed it the locals wouldn't; they were shamefaced about
the name, but it stayed. In fact it was a perfect name, because of
our situation and because of the personality of the house itself.
Disaster had overtaken the financial affairs of my mother's family,
and Pa had been summoned from India by his in-laws to take over
the management of a number of huge Queensland grazing
properties which were floundering in a morass of drought and
debt. He knew nothing of sheep or cattle, there was no money left
to pay him for his efforts, and his Indian Army pension clearly
wouldn't maintain a wife and three daughters in Melbourne. I don't
know how or why some benevolent chance led him to Sorrento to
look for a haven, but he quite literally found one.
There our family spent its uncomplicated days, before it fell
apart like a moth-eaten ball of wool, all fragments and loose ends.
There The Girls and I were trained to accept the values and to
respect the taboos that our parents held dear. Black Holes existed
in our knowledge of the world outside, but they were voids that
Mama worked hard to preserve, and we weren't even conscious of
them until after we left The Haven.
Now the little limestone house has been used again for a story
about three sisters. When I saw the film 'Hotel Sorrento' I
recognised it at once, though it was heavily disguised by a false
facade. Everything looked so much smaller than I remembered, but
the sweep of Bay beyond the cliff was clear as a desert seen from
a hilltop, and the little living-room-cum-dining-room where I put
the possum up Pa's pants was there, almost exactly as we left it. The
Girls were there, hidden somewhere beyond the cinema screen
and Trixie, our labrador bitch, and so much else. I wished,
watching it, that my father hadn't taught me not to cry.
2

Whitings



WHEN THE WALKERS arrived in Australia from India in
1925, travelling en famille with all their worldly goods
in the hold, there were only four of them. There was Pa,
Geoffrey Beresford Walker, Mama who was born Aileen Whiting,
and their daughters Betty and Jenny, collectively known as The
Girls. I travelled in utero, and appeared as the fifth member of the
family shortly after they landed in Melbourne.
I was a girl too, but Betty had been around for ten years and
Jenny for seven, and I began as a mistake. Mama must have been
horrified by her pregnancy, but she consoled herself by taking it
for granted that I'd be a boy because she and Pa were forty years
old and this was their last chance for a son. When the baby turned
out to be a girl they could scarcely believe it and avoided giving
me a name for a whole year, hoping that the mistake might
miraculously be rectified. During the year of hope they called me
It, then grudgingly gave me a name that would fit either sex. Pa
went on hoping for a long time and insisted that I learn to ride
Sandhurst fashion, without reins or stirrups, and to fish and shoot;
tears were forbidden and dolls were banned from the house. Mama
made the best of the disaster feeling, perhaps, that it was partly her
fault, and I don't think she really lost hope until I reached puberty.
All through my childhood I was jealous of The Girls because
they'd been born in India. India had glamour, our parents talked
of it as second only to England in the order of Promised Lands, and
being born in Melbourne made me feel that I belonged to some
inferior subculture. Mama had been born in Melbourne but she
never seemed or sounded Australian, and when she and Pa talked

8
of England they always called it Home with an unmistakable capital
'H'. If Pa had stayed in India we would have been brought up in
England by his relations, because it was believed to be impossible
to bring up white children in India. We were taught subtly to feel
that by coming to Australia we'd been deprived of something
precious, and that constant vigilance was necessary to prevent us
becoming identifiably Australian.
Mama's parents, Robert and Rose Whiting, were both born in
Australia, and until the 1920s they were in what the Irish call 'a good
way of going'. They had money and they spent it, apparently on
the principle of the Cut-and-Come-Again-Pudding. The origins of
grandfather Whiting's money was a subject his family avoided. He
was a big man with a walrus moustache, and the kind of figure,
fashionable at that time, that warns of heart attacks in later life.
Prosperous, tall men of his kind were shaped rather like ice-cream
cones, all the weight at the top when they were young, but slipping
unbecomingly down their middles with age. He was a lawyer, and
rumour has it that when Melbourne planned its first tram lines, the
routes being a closely guarded State secret, grandfather had
mysteriously and at little cost bought many prime corner sites along
their way. He sold the sites at great profit to people who had the
foresight to build pubs close to tram stops.
He then went into partnership with a friend of his who also liked
the good things in life, and who was Australia's only hereditary
Baronet. Together, for about a shilling an acre, they bought
themselves vast tracts of sheep and cattle country across Queensland.
The properties were stocked, managers installed, and for a
number of years money rolled southwards as if from a giant
cornucopia, the partners and their families living like kings in what
must have seemed the most stable of all possible worlds.
Queensland is hard country, giving and unforgiving in unpredictable
cycles. The revelation that a mixture of over-stocking,
over-spending and absentee management combined with drought
can spell disaster came too late. The partners were old; it was
beyond them to go to Queensland themselves, to inspire the
managers with hope or to sack them as the case might be, and
unless someone could take control of the situation both families
were ruined. The banks were beating on the door, and no one
except 'that husband of Aileen's in India', was old enough or
capable enough to be of use.
Pa responded to the cries for help without argument, abandoned
everything he'd lived for until then, took on the impossible
and in the fullness of time achieved it. It's hard to believe that he
left India without regret but he never spoke of being sorry.
Australia suited him; it was a new battlefield, and all his training had
been for battles.
Mama's parents lived well during their palmy days, and when
the Victorian era expanded into the more permissive lifestyle of the
Edwardian era Robert took to it like a duck to water. Clubs,
racecourses and mistresses occupied a lot of his time and that of
his friends, but Rose, whose horizons were more limited, remained
a perfect specimen of Victorian womanhood to her dying day.
Rose was tiny , only 4ft 9ins in her stockinged feet, fashioned
and coloured like a piece of Dresden china. She came from a
Danish-Jewish family named Cohn, worthy, cultured people with
immaculate manners and conservative values. She bore four
children, but firmly denied any knowledge or experience of the
sexual act essential to child-bearing. Proudly laying claim to what
amounted to four immaculate conceptions, she lived happily in the
intellectual vacuum thought proper for Victorian wives. Her
favourite advice, given repeatedly to Mama, and to us as children,
was: 'Never contradict a man,' followed by, 'A man is always right!'
She obeyed these principles herself until she was little more than
an acquiescent murmur in the presence of her husband, or indeed
of any other man.
The Whiting children, were Harry, Claire, Aileen and Dorothy.
Harry, being a son, was given a proper education while the girls,
being intended only for the marriage market, were not. They
graduated from nannies to governesses who taught them to read
and write, but the educational emphasis was on the social graces

10
and accomplishments which might lead to a good match. Claire
and Aileen co-operated but Dorothy the youngest girl, was so
diabolical that no governess would stay with her, and she alone
was sent to school. There she behaved abominably, ran way and
was expelled. She was to marry a charming, docile and distinguished
Italian, have three daughters, and to become more Italian
than anyone else in Italy, demonstrating her Latin temperament by
language and behaviour which would have shocked the most
virulent Neapolitan fishwife.
Claire and Aileen were nice, normal girls, quite free of the
rattlesnake venom that flawed their sister. They were attractive
ratlier than pretty, with thick-flowing pre-Raphaelite manes of hair.
In the formal photos which survive from their girlhood the hair is
larded with flowers, the eyes demurely downcast, and frequently
one girlish hand clutches a lily. The lynch-pin of their upbringing,
driven home by Rose, the governess, and every other member of
their adult world, was the constant care needed to preserve that
most precious jewel on which marriage would depend. It became
Mama's creed, and as we grew up she reminded us repeatedly: 'If
you're not a Virgin, no decent man will ever marry you!'
Claire wasn't nearly as impressionable as Mama; she was by far
the tougher and more sophisticated of the two, and had a nice, dirty
sense of humour. She proved her toughness by surviving a long
marriage to Herbert, one of the least likeable men ever to wear a
Royal Navy uniform.
Mama was far less worldly than Claire. She never smoked, and
alcohol tasted nasty to her, so she never drank it. The life that Claire
lived in the moderately fast lane of Knightsbridge would have
killed Mama, yet in her own way she was talented and amusing.
She drew, producing silhouettes and woodcuts, wrote witty verse
and was brilliant at after-dinner charades. It was only when
confronted with Claire's rather chic friends or with the man-eating
Memsahibs of India that she felt inadequate. It's strange that Pa
chose her as his wife because outside his marriage he showed a
strong preference for sophisticated women, bordering on the Fast.

11

There were times when his liking for such women caused Mama
pain; Pa would be absent at times and she'd be tense and pale, but
always he came back to her. He'd be nicer to her than ever and
she'd glow again, and Pa would turn on us children, as though we'd
done something wrong, and say, 'Your mother is a Saint!' It was a
long time before I realised that in spite of these little aberrations she
manipulated him subtly, and that end results of importance were
always the ones that Mama wanted. She was far cleverer in her
choice of husband than Claire. If Pa strayed it was like the flight of
a well-thrown boomerang, and he always landed back at her feet.
If Herbert was faithful to Claire it was because no on else would
have put up with him, and besides that he was too uniquely
devoted to Herbert to be interested in anyone else.
When Claire and Aileen were growing up, the Whiting family's
year was divided into three stages, and one wonders how Robert
Whiting found time to conduct a law practice. Part of the year,
including Melbourne Cup week, was spent in town, the winters
were devoted to a lengthy visit to England and the summers were
spent at Hascombe, a rambling old house with a famous garden
about forty miles from Melbourne at Mt Macedon. At Hascombe
there were house parties and picnics, and the girls had their ponies
and tennis, and relative freedom. Rose was preoccupied with
entertaining and with the garden; it was her cherished and widely
declared fantasy that the huge, overstaffed garden was all the work
of her own hands.
The annual Grand Tour was important, in Robert's and Rose's
view, to the future of their daughters. It was organised on almost
military lines, involving mountains of luggage, endless planning
and a five week sea journey at either end. It was also appallingly
expensive, but how else were one's daughters to meet the right
people and, above all, the kind of men one hoped they would
marry? They were dragged through London Seasons as debutantes,
presented at Court and generally displayed like fish on a slab in the
hope that they'd make a truly brilliant marriage.
Claire succumbed to the questionable charms of Herbert


12
Hammond Chambers, and there was general rejoicing until her
parents got to know him, but Mama stayed stubbornly single. She
and my father finally met on board a ship between India and
England in 1914, Pa going Home on Leave and Mama at the start
of the annual Grand Tour. She was twenty-eight by then, and in
Rose's view irrevocably on the shelf. To Rose's great relief our
parents were married in Have, Sussex in 1916, when Pa was leave
from the war in Mesopotamia. Mama once confessed that her
ignorance of sex was so great that the day she named for her
wedding was the day on which she got her period. She was always
a quick learner and Betty was born on the 16 December of that
year, nine months and fifteen days after their wedding, when Pa
had gone back to his war.
Herbert Hammond-Chambers, the first matrimonial trophy, was
a prime example of the risks involved in husband-hunting on the
other side of the world. It was a mystery what Claire could ever
have seen in him, but, as he continually reminded everyone he was
very well related and in marrying a Colonial he had actually
married beneath him, thereby giving her a social status she'd never
have known otherwise. It didn't escape notice that he'd believed
her to be a very rich Colonial at the time when he proposed to her
Even as a young man Herbert was unattractive. Photos of him
taken then show a thin, down-turned mouth, limp hair parted in
the middle and drooping eyes, cold as oysters. As he grew older
he walked with his head poked forward, his collar a size too large,
and he looked increasingly like an ancient, ill-tempered tortoise.
His voice owed a lot to his youth when he twice rounded the Horn
under sail as midshipman and had to make himself heard from the
top of the mast in a blizzard. When he raised his voice, which was
usually in anger, it was formidable. His laugh was a rare phenomenon,
so rusty that it sounded like the shunting of an old steam
engine.
Claire and Herbert came to Australia quite often after the Second
World War. Claire, of course, was one of the beneficiaries of the
Queensland estate which by then, thanks to Pa's efforts, was

13
paying dividends. Herbert, who felt he'd been badly cheated when
the family finances collapsed, now feared that he was being
deprived of some of the money which should have come to him
through his wife, and this forced him to make repeated, costly
journeys to a country which he despised. He and Claire still lived
in Knightsbridge, but annually leased the top salmon beat on the
River Ness for the northern summer. Their style of fishing involved
all the conventional trappings; ghillies, boats, heavy two-handed
rods and rush baskets for the fish, and Herbert was convinced that
he was among the world's most skilled salmon fishermen
During one of their post-war visits I ran into Herbert by accident
on a crowded pavement in Collins Street in the heart of Melbourne.
He saw me first or I would have been gone, and he grabbed my
shoulder with a skinny hand, like a reincarnation of the Ancient
Mariner. He had been looking for an audience as usual, for he said
without preamble: 'Robin, did I ever tell you what old Angus the
ghillie said to me last summer?'
'No,' I said dismally. 'I don't think so, Uncle Herbert.'
Herbert made a string of his shunting noises, indicating that he
had a joke to tell, and raised his voice several decibels. Passers-by
eyed him nervously, and made a detour.
'Well, I was casting my fly... shunt, shunt, shunt... and Angus
said... shunt, shunt, shunt... Captain Hammond Chambers, Sir,
you cast a fly so bloody light... shunt, shunt, shunt... the BLOODY mosquitos COME DOWN AND FUCKIT... shunt, shunt, shunt."
Two old ladies sat down abruptly on the steps of a nearby bank,
and fanned themselves, a well-dressed man who had caught the
full blast of the punch-line muttered something about the police,
and I departed in haste without saying goodbye. It was still long
before the time when the 'F' word was permissible in public.
Herbert shuffled off happily along the pavement, shunting to
himself as he went, and clearing a path by repeating in ringing
tones: 'Come down and FUCK it, eh? Come down and FUCK it!'
Herbert and Pa didn't know each other well, but well enough
to dislike each other cordially. Pa thought that Herbert was

14
ill mannered and offensive beyond all civilised bounds, and Herbert
considered the Army, except for the Guards, an inferior, second
rate service, officered by nobodies. In addition Pa was Irish, and
Herbert despised the Irish, unless they had a title. Their dislike for
each other had created a cooling-off between Mama and Claire,
and luckily the two men seldom came together.

15
3

Walkers



PA CAME OF AN ANGLO-IRISH FAMILY which bred and
trained its sons for India as one breeds and trains a gun-dog
for shooting. His parents spent most of their lives there,
grandfather ultimately as the first British Financial Advisor to the
Nizam of Hyderabad, then the richest man in the world. The men
in both his and my Grandmother's families were drawn to India as
the moon draws the tide, and uncles, brothers and cousins studded
the subcontinent like raisins in a pudding. Pa arrived there by way
of Sandhurst, graduated with a King's Commission, served in the
Indian Army and was seconded to the Political Service as a Major.
Even in those twilight days of the Raj the Political Service was
considered something of a career pinnacle, being a small, elite
body of men who dealt exclusively with the rulers of the Indian
Princely States. Pa was relatively young when he became a
Political, and it must have torn the very fibres of his heart to leave
the Service so soon. He could tell wonderful stories about India,
strange and funny stories about legendary people, and about the
ghosts he'd met in old palaces and who were as real to him as his
friends. His stories were never quite the same twice because he was
far too Irish to spoil things for want of embroidery, but they were
always fascinating. When we lived at Sorrento and India was still
fresh in his mind Pa was in Queensland most of the time, or we
would have heard more of them. I would kill now to have him back
again and to cram his stories into a tape recorder, the magic of the
Indian Princes and their palaces, of hunting and deserts and tribal
uprisings, and all the fading colour of the sunset India of the Raj.
He was Black Irish, as the Protestant Irish were called, but he

16
had the red Irish hair, and the temper and the charm to match. His
temper, when it hit you, was like running into a hidden electric
fence, and after the shock was over you wondered where it could
have come from. He never lost his temper with Mama or Betty but
I, and to a lesser extent Jenny, used to trigger it with awful
regularity. The charm overrode the temper. Turned full-on it
caused strong women to weaken at the knees, and it worked
wonders with everyone else as well, from antagonistic Queensland
stockmen and bank managers down to children and animals.
Besides his charm he was over six feet tall, he held himself like a
soldier, and he was good to look at.
There was a bit of both his parents in Pa. George Casson Walker,
his father, was good-looking, diplomatic, and so rigidly honourable
that people mistakenly thought him cold. His children were
always slightly in awe of him but in fact he had both humour and
tenderness, and the children only knew him as a remote, God-like
figure when they were growing up. They were sent Home, like all
British children in India, to be raised by relations and educated at
an English school. Once or twice, at the end of the 1939-45 war,
I met ancient survivors of grandfather's time in Hyderabad and they
spoke of him with reverence and love, and simply because I was
his granddaughter they treated me as though I was someone
special.
If grandfather was loved then Fanny, his wife, was adored. The
old men I met laughed with remembered pleasure when they
spoke of her. She was a big, tall woman, with a mouth that turned
up at the corners so that she was always smiling, never sad or sour.
She came from Cork, and she had a crashing brogue tucked away
under her ordinary voice; she would produce it at the least suitable
moments, turning from Lady Walker to a Cork strumpet for the
sheer joy of upsetting the self-important. She was brave and wicked
and intelligent and kind, and she was awarded a medal called the KaiseriHind, the Star of India, for her work in famines and cholera
epidemics. It was a medal normally given only to men because
those were the days when Memsahibs were expected simply to sit

17
beside punkahs in shaded rooms, pressing a handkerchief to their
nose against the smells of India and the risk of contagion. Fanny
learned several Indian languages, worked with Indian women to
help them break down the barriers of purdah, and when grandfather's
enemies, the Hyderabadi nobles whose corruption he had
been sent to stop tried to kill him, she sat beside his bed every night
with a gun, trusting nobody else to defend him. She was a friend
of Queen Mary's; they both had the backbone that goes with
ramrods and bugles and troops rallying to the charge, and the old
Queen, I'm told, could be just as much of a devil as Fanny could
when she chose.
Hyderabad was an independent State when the Walkers were
sent there. Because it had never been officially conquered by
Britain the British Government viewed it with concern, but were
unable to interfere with its administration. The State even had its
own currency, distinct from that of the rest of India. Grandfather's
instructions were to straighten out, as tactfully as possible, a Court
whose dishonesty, nepotism and skulduggery had become notorious,
and if necessary to bring the currency into line with that of
the rest of India. To save the Nizam's face he was given the
ambiguous title of Financial Adviser.
The Nizam, like many other Indian rulers, was surrounded by
relations, courtiers and hangers-on whose sole aim was to acquire
for themselves as much money and power as possible, and to this
end they were prepared, in fact eager, to lie, cheat, rob or murder
whoever stood in their way. Such practices had been honoured for
centuries in most Eastern and many European courts but the
Hyderabadis had developed it into an art form, and considered it
perfectly legitimate. They were outraged when a strange Englishman
appeared, escorted by two Companies of infantry, and set
about changing things. They were even more horrified when he
turned out to be unbribeable, for no one else they knew had such
strange inhibitions. To round off their dismay the Nizam, who had
formerly viewed the most bizarre villainies of his court with a
detached tolerance, said that the Englishman must be obeyed.

18
I have included an extract from a letter written by H. Emon
Chubb of the family which made Chubb locks and safes. He stayed
with the Walkers in Hyderabad in 1905, and his letter describes the
Court as it was then.
He had kept up his friendship with George and Fanny Walker.
Grandfather had persuaded the British Government to let Hyderabad
keep its currency, cleaned up the Court, and at the Nizam's request
stayed on there after he was due for retirement, for he and the
Nizam had become friends. He was made a Knight Commander of
the Star of India, and he and Fanny finally came back to England
and settled in Sussex. Mr Chubb had stayed with them there in the
house they shared with another old friend, Rudyard Kipling. The
letter was written from the Connemara Hotel in Madras, in 1905.
To start with Mr and Mrs Casson Walker are two of the very best
people I've met; he slow, solid and humorous, she sharp,
intelligent, bright, girlish, largely built, with a kind face and an
enormous Irish brogue. She's the only lady I've ever felt I should
like to say to, "Are there any more at home like you?" for if there
were I'd write and ask them on the spot. I had a Simply topping
time with them, and felt I was living on the fringe of a medieval
court or else during the Arabian Nights.
Hyderabad is the most Native of Native States, never conquered
by the British it is quite independent though we have a Resident
there, but being Native its corruption is very great. And a great
government said, "let us see if we cannot put their finances in a
better state," and so Casson Walker was sent there to see what
could be done. He found that there were hordes of wasters living
on life pensions for no apparent reason, that the Nizam's Govt,
were losing hundreds of thousands of pounds through slackness
and corruption. So he began by wiping out many pensions, and on
arrival at the office he found thousands of files of lawsuits, some
thirty years old, against the Nizam and the Govt, for recovery or
appropriation of money. He has wiped out many of these and is
nearly up to date. Naturally the Nobles hate him, and there is little
doubt he has been poisoned twice; the first time nearly killed him,
and now a Native detective lives in the house and the servants are
very strictly watched, and Mrs Walker promised to pay double the
19
amount on the nail to any servant who gives proof that he has been
offered money to use poison. The cook is highly paid, and brings
all the food into the dining-room himself. Walker never speaks of
this, but Mrs Walker told me all about it. Some of the stories are
most amusing. Jacobs, an Armenian Jew, sold a diamond to the
Nizam for, I think, 80,000 pounds, several times its value, and the
Nizam paid part and had it valued, and found he had paid too much
already and refused to pay the balance, so Jacobs now lives in
Hyderabad waiting for the balance. At one time the firm Powell lent
200,000 pounds a year at 25%; this has not been paid and Powells
are, I believe, ruined. This is old history.
The Nizam is seldom seen. I believe he tries to drown a rather
monotonous existence in alcohol. Walker said nothing of this. He
has crowds of wives, and they say there are 10,000 women,
cousins, sisters, aunts and mothers-in-law, all living at his expense.
His jewels are terrific and at the Delhi Durbar he had a wonderful
cloth of pure gold covering his elephant, but he himself wore no
jewels, only a little yellow plume in his turban. At Delhi he bought
7 lakhs, 45,000 pounds worth of embroidery. This got mislaid, and
no one thought about it until Sergeant Hall, who teaches his boy
fencing, found some old wooden cases in the stables which
happen to be the purchase: he told me this himself.
Most interesting was Colonel Avasor. He was reported to have
been a Persian slave's child, and he is now Commander-in-Chief
of the Nizam's Army. He dined with us one day, and it was most
amusing to see Walker chipping him. He gets no pay, has had no
money left to him, and is very wealthy. He looks like a Spaniard
and a splendid soldier, having the polish of a French courtier, and
a look which makes his troops quake. He was immaculately
dressed all in white, riding breeches and boots all white: if he lived
in England and behaved as he does he would never be out of
prison, but as it is he is always put up for all the best Clubs. What
Walker was worrying him about was a complete dinner set of
Wedgewood which he had bought for a farewell dinner for Sir
David Barr. Avasor said it had cost Rs 20,000, but Walker says he
will have to pay at least Rs 30,000, of which Avasor will pocket a
good lump. The Nizam fears Avasor, he is getting very powerful,
and is nearly always posted near the Nizam's door; sometimes

20
when a big carouse is on he remains there for two days, and may
not sleep.
To go tiger shooting, which he does well, the Nizam makes a
camp and always takes his old mother. They both revel in the heat
and go at the hottest time of the Indian weather, and spend a lot
of the daytime lying on a rock without a shade or hat, basking in
the sun. Avasor hates the heat but is made to go there, and nearly
dies. No ice or punkahs are allowed in camp. Yet the Nizam heaps
titles on Avasor's sons. Last year his physician in camp sent word
that his (the physician's) only child was very ill and could he go
and see what could be done. No answer. Later, "The child is dying."
No answer. "May I go and bury the child?" No answer, and he dare
not go.
So much for the Nizam and his State. Walker says it is not as bad
as it seems, but I think he means it will not be so bad when he has
finished. He is a splendid man to fight for what he believes to be
right, and cares nothing for the British Govt, or his own life. The
Govt, wanted to put their coinage in use in Hyderabad, but Walker
fought it tooth and nail for what he terms 'abstract Justice'. The State
has not been conquered, therefore the Nizam has the right to his
own coins (which is one of the greatest holds a King has over his
country) so he held out and the Nizam is very grateful to him. Now
that his time in office is up the Nizam has asked the Govt, to get
him to remain, to which Walker has consented after making a few
conditions which give him greater control. Long may he flourish!
I met Mr Chubb in London after the war when he was an old, old
man, still of enormous charm. He bought me miraculous meals at
the Connaught Hotel when I could barely afford the price of a
Lyons sandwich, and while I made a pig of myself he talked about
the old days in India.

21
4

Pa's India



AT THE TIME when H. Emon Chubb was in Hyderabad Pa
was still at Sandhurst. He had been sent back to Cork as
soot, as he was old enough, to be brought up by a pair of
elderly aunts. As in Mama's family there were four children of his
generation, Daisy the eldest, then Geoffrey, Sheila and Dorothy.
Fanny and George had improved on the family planning skills of
their previous generation, since George had been one of thirteen
children and Fanny one of fourteen. Child-bearing in India was
certainly more hazardous than in Ireland, but that wouldn't have
bothered Fanny. The only plausible reason for their massive cut in
output must have been that, as children had to be raised elsewhere,
their number could not exceed the number of relatives willing
eventually to care for them.
Pa said he loved growing up in Cork. There were two highlights,
fishing in the local streams and leading a gang of boys on the train
from Queenstown to Cork City in a running fight with an opposing
gang. The leader of the other gang was Michael Collins, later of
Republican Army fame, and when they got to Cork City they all
stayed on the train and fought their way back to Queenstown.
The old aunts, though a sporting pair, felt that this pastime had
its drawbacks, and he was sent to a tutor. Mr McFetteridge dealt
wisely with him; he had taught a number of boys headed for public
school and the army, and knew the pitfalls of headlong confrontation.
He informed Pa that for every assignment properly done
there would be a stated time for fishing. Pa romped through his
entrance exams to St Paul's School in London, became a renowned
boxer, and emerged from Sandhurst as a King's Commissioned

22
Officer in 1907. He served with an Irish regiment of the British Army
for a short time, and then transferred to the Indian Army. For a
while, in deference to his father, he was attached to the Nizam's son
as minder-companion. He said that among other things it was his
job to see that the sum of money allocated to the heir as a weekly
allowance was spent, and that in order to achieve this, in one week,
he bought seven Rolls Royces. It was the kind of thing that
happened often enough in Princely circles, and the cars probably
stayed forgotten in the Royal garage until they decayed.
Having been raised in India as a small child Pa was delighted
to go back, but he found certain aspects of his novice period in the
army difficult. Young officers might not marry until they reached
a stated rank, and in general they were treated much as fags were
treated in public schools, being rarely seen and never, never heard
in the presence of their seniors. When they finally reached the
marrying stage it couldn't be done without the approval of their
Colonel, who was often far more fussy than their parents.
Although this didn't necessarily mean total celibacy in India, if
you were discreet, it did make English girls look dangerously
desirable once matrimony was within reach. Resident English girls
were in short supply, but a steady stream arrived by boat,
despatched by their families to snare a suitable husband. It was
almost impossible for a girl to miss out in the matrimonial market,
regardless of her defects. There was a solemn old great-uncle of
ours in the Indian Civil Service who patiently took receipt of nine
of his sisters, one every year, and had a positive matrimonial result
every time. Whether from disillusion or exhaustion he himself
never married.
There was a favourite fable of Pa's which he used to bring out
for The Girls whenever he thought they needed an example of
youthful virtue, and we all knew him well enough by then, young
though we were, to find it patently out of character.
'Until I was a Captain I scarcely spoke to a woman. I had never
asked a woman to dance, in fact it would never have crossed my
mind to touch a woman, even on the dance floor. The Colonel

23
wouldn't have allowed it. You girls are far too young to go
dancing.'
'Had you ever kissed a woman, Pa?'
'Don't be damned cheeky, Jenny. Of course not!'
It has always mystified me that he avoided the clutches of the
Fishing Fleet, as the husband-hunters were called, until he married
Mama. They were both quite old by then, nearly thirty. It's
impossible to imagine that Pa didn't cast an eye over the available
girls, because his eye was far too active and expert in middle age
to have been idle in his youth, but somehow he managed to dodge
all permanent attachments until he met Mama.
Certainly he had to work hard. Men who wanted to make a
career in India had to learn as many of the major native languages
as possible; for the Army alone one had to be fluent in three. Pa
was no linguist; French was beyond him because he hated the
French, but in India he spoke five different languages, and could
read Sanskrit. As a reward he was channelled into intelligence and
spent most of his Army life on the North-west Frontier, happily
engaged in what Kipling called the Great Game. He always swore
that he had known the original Kim and used him as an Agent, and
it was probably true. In 1911, the year of the Great Durbar, when
for the first time the British Monarch, George V and Queen Mary
came to receive the homage due to the King Emperor, Pa was
appointed Ceremonial Attache to the King.
The Great Durbar was an extravaganza on an unprecedented
scale. In a land where traditionally nothing was spared in displays
of wealth and grandeur this was the ultimate opportunity for the
Princes to show the Raj and each other what they were worth, and
none of them was prepared to worry if they bankrupted their State
in doing so. In trains and gilded carriages, and along the crowded,
dusty roads of India the Princes and their entourages, their
elephants and their squadrons of elite cavalry converged on Delhi.
They brought with them tents the size of ballrooms, their gold
dinner services, their brocades and jewels and their Maharanis and begums, also loaded with fabulous saris and jewels which they

24
could only wear behind the purdah screens. Delhi couldn't house
them: in the end there were more than a million camped round the
city, and the ordinary people grew dizzy with the scenes of
splendour. Every Ruler and every member of his Court had an exact
place in the Order of Precedence, and the slightest error in that
Order was carried deep in the soul, an insult to be brooded on for
ever. As Ceremonial Attache 'Precedence' was one of Pa's responsibilities,
and his daily nightmare.
He told us of the Tattoos they held at Agra in His Majesty's
honour, at night, in front of the Taj Mahal. Even in daylight the Taj
makes you catch your breath. It soars out of the dust and dirt and
poverty which is India, the colour and shape of a mirage. At night
it floats luminous against the indigo sky and the stars, a dreaming
ghost of all the loves and legends and spirits of India's past. It may
be that the only ceremonial ever worthy of the Taj took place
during the 1911 Durbar.
At the night Tattoos their Majesties sat enthroned, framed by
torches and flanked by the most noble of their subjects, at the top
of the marble steps, in front of the most perfect of all marble arches.
Before them was a long line of still, marble pools bordered by soft
grass, and beyond the grass tall, sentinel trees under which men
of lesser importance stood to watch. The moon turned the dome
of the Taj to the colour of a dove's breast, threw shadows like
spears from the turrets, and mirrored itself endlessly in the water
of the pools.
At the sound of a bugle a line of a thousand torches would flare
on either side beneath the trees, lighting the cavalry who came
galloping in ranks of four up the grass verges towards the throne,
lances held high. The troops were clothed in the strong, violent
colours of India, orange and pink and purple and peacock-blue,
their turbans were of gold or silver silk, their uniforms buttoned
with precious stones and the harness of their horses was of silver
and gold. They charged out of the dark into the torchlight,
glittering-drunk with their own glory and the magic of their speed,
each man shouting the battle-cry of his State and raising his lance

25
in homage to the Crown, then vanishing into the darkness again,
beyond the Taj.
As the troops blazed and thundered and vanished others
appeared, until the soft, watered grass turned to dust and the
torches smoked, softening the hurt of colour into a mist. Then there
would be fierce contests of horsemanship, tent-pegging, impossible
acrobatics at full gallop, mock battles with the cream of one
State's cavalry facing another's, and only a thin veneer over the
desire of the troops that the fight might be real. When the Mighty
had departed, with protracted ceremony, the Taj still bathed calmly
in the moonlight, detached and flawless.
The Political Service, to which Pa went from the Army, was
small in number and very senior in terms of prestige. It dealt with
the administration and conduct of the Indian Princely States and
saw that the Rulers, willingly or otherwise, behaved within the
bounds of decency and the standards of the Raj. The men chosen
as Politicals were required to have an encyclopedic knowledge of
the country, its customs and political intricacies, its languages, and
to have an unassailable reputation for integrity.
Integrity was essential because some of the Rulers, considering
honesty a bad character defect, were apt to offer their Political
Agent some trifle such as a handful of diamonds or a string of
pigeon's blood rubies whenever a favourable decision was required.
This would be brought into the Agent's presence by a
senior member of the Ruler's Court. No mention would be made
of the reason for the gift: the Ruler knew that the Political Agent
knew, and indeed it was his job to know, what schemes his charges
might be hatching.
The gift would be offered with dignity and deprecation, 'A small
thing which might perhaps please the Memsahib, and His Highness
would be flattered if she would accept. . .'The Agent would touch
the gift with his hand, smile gravely and wave it away. The courtier
would bow and withdraw without ill-will or surprise. If it had been
accepted there would have been disillusion and the end of trust,
and most certainly the end of the Political Agent.



26
The Princes were diverse and wonderful, many of them
educated in England and as polished as any European Royal, yet
ruling feudal kingdoms which had hardly altered in a thousand
years. There were Rulers who were genuinely feared, not only by
their subjects but by people like Pa who had to deal with them.
There was one who was said to have been responsible for
uncounted murders, and Pa disliked taking Mama with him when
he visited that State. There was one who bred, and boasted of it,
over a hundred sons in order to produce the perfect polo team.
There were palaces, Pa swore, which swarmed with ghosts, the
spirits of people killed in every sort of macabre manner, often
simply being bricked into the corner of a passage and left to
suffocate, this being a tidy and economical method of disposal.
'There was one old palace I used to visit quite often,' he told us,
'Where a young woman used to come and stand beside my bed
every night, and pull open the mosquito net.'
'Did you speak to her?'
'No, but she spoke to me, every time. She was English. She'd
just stand there looking down at me and say, "poor old thing."'
'Why, Pa? Did you ever find out?'
'Oh, yes, the Maharajah told me. Her husband was murdered in
that bed in the 1850s, during the Mutiny, and she found him.'
Mama tried very hard in India, but she was never really happy
there or entirely well, and perhaps one thing caused the other. In
the course of Pa's job they moved from one dreary, impersonal
bungalow to the next, never settling anywhere for long, Betty and
Jenny were infants and Mama would have half-mistrusted the Ayahs
who looked after them.
There was an important social side to the job as well, parties and
official functions which they had to attend, and she was quite
unable to cope with the infamous breed of Memsahibs into whose
company she was forced. Very few British wives were improved
by India; whatever their former circumstances, which weren't
always what they claimed, the majority were determined never to
lift a finger for themselves, nor to like or understand the Indian

27
servants who spoiled them, and in consequence they were
dangerously bored.
While their husbands worked they overcame their boredom by
gathering together for wholesale assassination of other peoples'
characters, and for the fascinating game of out-pointing each other
in their degrees of social supremacy. This entailed total contempt
for anyone who could not lay claim, valid or invented, to a
background which could be classed as at least County. Mama,
being an Australian, was beyond the pale, socially impossible,
especially as she didn't drink, There were nice Memsahibs, of
course, intelligent and civilised women whom Mama adored and
remembered for years afterwards, but they were hopelessly
outnumbered by the others who should never have been allowed
beyond the narrow confines from which they came.
When our parents left India for good in 1925, Mama must have
been enormously relieved, and at the same time guilty because she
had never really been part of her husband's India. The future was
full of uncertainties, and to make things worse she was carrying an
unplanned child. Once she set foot in a country which she knew
and understood, and as soon as she was delivered of her wrongly
sexed afterthought she became well again, as she hadn't been for
years.
She and Pa had scarcely any time together after they arrived in
Australia because Pa went straight to Queensland. The situation
there was critical: it was the beginning of a drought which would
last seven years, sheep were dying by the thousand, and such cattle
as could walk to the properties where they would be fattened for
slaughter were dying on the stock routes for lack of water. Pa went
straight to Isis Downs, the principal sheep property of the
Partnership near Longreach. He arrived at Isisford, the local town
after dark, having come by train from the coast. His introduction
to Queensland was not what he expected.
Pa said, 'I was told the Manager would be there to meet me, but
he wasn't. It's not much of a town, Isisford, just pubs and a wall
of bottles round the outskirts; people put their bottles on the wall

28
instead of throwing them away, and it's enormous. Anyway, I went
to the nearest pub and told them where I wanted to go, and a chap
said he'd drive me out.
'It was pitch dark, and after we went through the Isis Downs
gate there were dead sheep everywhere. As you know, its twenty
miles from the gate to the homestead and afterwards I estimated
there must have been about 45,000 dead sheep along the track.
Those were just the obvious ones, and it was the same all over the
property.
When we finally got to the homestead and I got out of the car,
I could hear someone screaming, a woman. You know the garden
there, lots of trees and bushes and I couldn't see a thing. Then a
woman burst out of the bushes and rushed towards us, and after
her came this fellow, stark naked, laughing like a maniac and
waving a carving knife.
'The chap who'd driven me and I took the knife away from him
and tied him up and bundled him into the car. His wife was
hysterical, we couldn't leave her alone, poor thing, so we took her
too. We had to drive back to Isisford, leave the man with the police
and the wife with a friend of hers. Very sad, you know, this chap
had managed Isis for quite a few years, and he just couldn't stand
seeing what was happening, it sent him right off his head. There
were a lot of people like him in Queensland then.'
It was the opening to a life which, for Pa, could have been no
more different if he'd switched planets. The Partnership was over
350,000 pounds in debt, the equivalent of millions today, and on
top of that the Depression was just round the corner. The bank,
which would have foreclosed if it hadn't been for the drought and
the uncertainty of rural prospects, summoned Pa before them and
demanded that the debt be repaid. Pa cordially invited them to
accept the properties in lieu of payment, and they shook their
heads. 'See what you can do, Major Walker,' they said, 'and good
luck to you.'

29
5

Have



BY 1928 PA HAD ASSESSED the problems facing the
Queensland properties, and realised that at the very best
they "Would take years to put right. Both the Clarke and
Whiting families were heavily dependent on Queensland for their
incomes, they were unused to poverty, and they found their
present situation catastrophic. Harassed by the difficulties on the
land Pa was equally harassed by the beneficiaries who made their
discomfort known, rent their garments, metaphorically speaking,
and called on him for greater efforts.
Before settling down to the exile ahead our parents decided to
make a trip to England, to see Pa's family and to settle his affairs
there. Fanny Walker was living in Have, grandfather having died
a little earlier, and Pa's middle sister, Sheila, whose husband had
been killed in First World War, lived with her and looked after her.
Our arrival set the scene for a family gathering, with Pa's two
other sisters, their husbands and children, converging on Have.
Daisy and Jim McLintock had a son named William, Barch and
Dorothy Christie a daughter, Tony, and Sheila Landale had Roy and
Aileen.
Of the seven cousins I was by far the youngest, the rest all within
a year or two of each others' ages. For some reason, when our
elders were gathered together, the subject of christenings came up,
and there was grave embarrassment when they realised that this
ceremony, as applied to their children, had slipped their collective
minds. If asked they would all have declared themselves loyal
members of the Church of England, for hadn't their Walker
grandfather been a Parson? Fanny, whose attitude to religion was

30
notoriously cool, chose to express horror and outrage on finding
that her grandchildren were unbaptised. She turned on a fine
Fanny drama, playing the matriarch and enjoying every moment of
it.
Having been caught in dereliction of duty the parents went
overboard in putting things right. The Girls told me later on that
they and the others who had slipped through the baptismal net
were treated like criminals, 'As though it was all our fault!' The only
revenge taken on Fanny was through the parents insisting that, as
she had started the thing, she must be Godmother to the lot of us.
The Have Church was booked, all available friends and acquaintances
were summoned as witnesses and as an excuse for a party
afterwards, and on the appointed day they filled the pews. In the
front row six furiously embarrassed adolescents and one infant,
held in a half-nelson by a nanny, waited for the torture to end.
Everyone waited. The Vicar looked expectantly at Aunt Sheila
for the signal to start the service, but Sheila had her head turned,
anxiously examining the congregation, pew by pew. She leaned
towards Pa, and hissed, 'Geoff, where on earth's Fanny?' Pa rose
to his feet, peered round the Church, and said ; 'Oh my God! She's
gone to the bloody football!' With the old habit of command, he
roared at the Vicar; 'Wait till I come back!' and disappeared down the aisle at a run. It was well known that football was higher on
Fanny's list of priorities than Heaven.
The congregation, having no choice in the matter, dozed or
whispered in the dusty shafts of Church sunlight. I struggled in
Nanny's arms, and shouted some of the shorter, more graphic
words my sisters had taught me in private. A well-meaning uncle
tiptoed forward and gave me a golf ball to keep me quiet.
The atmosphere had reached a muffled boil of disapproval
when Pa finally returned with Fanny. She took her time getting up
the aisle, bowing with immense dignity to those on either side,
settled herself beside Sheila, and nodded encouragingly to the
Vicar who was mopping his brow. He had observed during the
long wait that the older baptismal candidates were becoming

31
mutinous, and decided that he had better get them over first. Being
small and in custody I was more what he was used to, and could
wait.
He dealt briskly with the six older ones and Fanny graciously
acted as Godmother to each in turn. I'm sure there were Godfathers
but our parents could never remember who they were, and later
on we successfully appointed our own. At last, and with obvious
relief, the Vicar turned to Nanny and reached out his arms for me.
I don't remember it but I'm told that as he went to take me,
thanking God that I was the last one, I delivered the golf ball at
short range with all the weight of a solid three-year-old behind it.
The ball hit him squarely in the eye and he toppled backwards
down the steps of the font into Fanny's arms, where she, Gibraltar
built woman that she was, laid him out gently on the floor. She
straightened up and according to Aunt Sheila she smiled broadly,
and when her eye met mine, she winked.
Our parents didn't see Home again until 1951, by which time
even they had almost stopped speaking of it as Home. We grew
up though with the myth that this year, next year, or at any rate
before long, we would all go back there. There was always a sense
of semi-exile, and the distant, dangled carrot of the Promised Land.
Because of this we never owned a house after we left The Haven,
but moved every year or two from one rented place to another.
So that we shouldn't seem like Colonials on our eventual return
to England, our parents engaged an English governess to go back
to Australia with us, and a nanny for me. It has always puzzled me
that, if they were as poor as they said they were, they could afford
such luxuries, but probably it just reflects the pittance that nannies
and governesses were paid in 1928. For girls like Molly Ayers,
known as Mike, govemessing was the only form of employment
they could hope for. Twenty years later I saw Mike again in the
same narrow, dark terrace house in Have that we'd rescued her
from. She was the slave, by then, of a mad old aunt, and she told
me that her time with us was the only good thing that ever
happened to her.

32
Mike must have been in her early twenties when she came to
Australia with us, and I remember her built square like a primitive
wood carving, with freckles, billiard table legs, and straight, mousy
hair held back by a metal slide. She had never contemplated
anything so daring as make-up, and I don't think she was even
particularly well educated. She came from that sad section of the
British middle-class which clings to the vestiges of gentility but can
no longer afford its trappings. In her family background the
younger sons of younger sons had slipped gradually downhill,
breeding as they went. They filtered through the Church and
school-mastering and the lesser ranks of the Civil Service, underpaid
and without capital, and handicapped by the small range of
occupations considered suitable to their status. They grew poorer
and poorer, comforted by remote relationships to famous families,
and their daughters made do with whatever was left over when
everything possible had been done for the sons.

Since she lived in Have I suspect that Fanny knew Mike's family,
and recommended her as our governess out of pity, but as far as
The Girls and I were concerned she was a great success. We loved
her and she loved us, though we didn't deserve it. She was never
a dogsbody nor excluded from anything, but neither was she
treated like a young woman, introduced to a few young men of her
own age, or encouraged to have a life of her own. She was part of
our landscape, and I don't suppose it crossed anyone's mind that
her freckled body housed the hormonal urges natural to her age.
Governesses weren't supposed to have things like that.
As it happened, I was present at the scene that doomed Mike
to an accelerated return to the dark house in Have. I walked in from
the verandah and there was Mama standing flummoxed and
speechless, with Mike on her knees in unbecoming floods of tears,
her arms round Mama's legs, and her face pressed into the crutch
area of Mama's skirt. It was to be years before Mama understood
the term Lesbian. Probably neither she nor Mike had ever heard the
word, but they both realised that something undesirable had
happened; unwholesome, Mama would have called it, and Mike

33
was sent home. There, in that horrible, repressed Have terrace, any
lingering flicker of sexuality in her must have died, as a candle
flame dies without air.
In retrospect it was a tragedy for poor Mike, an unintended
cruelty born of ignorance, and lack of understanding. She was
warm and generous , and probably as heterosexual as Mama if the
truth be known, but for the first time in her life, warmed and
softened by the Australian sunshine, she had dared to look for love.
Mama just happened to be the only person available and her
passion was no more sinister than a schoolgirl crush.
Having been taught by governesses herself Mama thought them
far more effective than schools, and the value of serious education
for girls simply escaped her. Also, English governesses had an
advantage over Australian governesses or schools because they
insulated us against the stigma of an Australian 'twang'. The Girls,
having started off in India, spoke pure Oxbridge like our parents,
and I was required to do the same. Our accents were monitored
in the same way one house-trains a puppy, with constant vigilance,
beatings, and rubbing of noses in dirty vowels. When Pa was at
home and we slipped up, he hit us over the head with a rolled-up
newspaper kept specially for the purpose. When friends said to
Mama, 'What wonderful English accents your children have! How
d'you manage it?' she smiled modestly, and said nothing about the
effort involved. Accents were important in her circle. She and her
friends felt that if their children didn't sound Australian the English
might overlook the fact that they were Colonials. In most cases it
was a forlorn hope; their children grew up to be Australian, and
proud of it.

34
6

The Girls



Because The Girls were so much older than me, they were
both my torment and my ideal and I was their constant
scourge, a perpetual background bleat of 'Wait for me! I
want to come too!' They became maddened and threw things at
me, yelling, 'Go home, you're too small.'
They built a brushwood cubby-house in a secret place at the
end of our land, and told me that I couldn't go there, that it was
theirs. That made it irresistible and I was drawn there as by a
magnet, so they pulled my pants down and beat me with
brushwood twigs. It didn't hurt much, and Betty cried, but not me.
She could get away with tears; indeed, if she'd tried she could have
got away with anything.
Betty, named Elizabeth Sheila at the mass christening, was
absurdly beautiful from the day she was born, yet somehow she
turned the conventional standards of beauty upside down. People
judge beauty in terms of hair and features and colouring, but these
can be manufactured or faked. Betty had all the basics, and never
wasted a moment of her time thinking about them or trying to
improve on them; more than anything they embarrassed her.
She was very tall, with hair that varied through all the shades
of blond from ash to honey, and full, lovely lips that looked sad
rather than sensual. People used to turn and stare after her as she
passed, even when she was a child. She tried very hard to be
naughty because that was what other children were and she
wanted to join in, but she was naturally, inescapably good. Jenny
looked forward to every wild, wicked, forbidden thing in the world
as soon as she was old enough; she was in a constant hurry to start

35


on sophisticated sin, and she wove her dreams around it. Betty
wanted only to be the mother of twenty children; she spent hours
trying out names in anticipation, and worrying about their characters.
She neither spoke, saw, nor heard evil, and there was a kind
of puzzled sadness in the way she watched the antics of the rest
of us, as though she knew she was different and wanted to be the
same. I make her sound priggish, but she wasn't. She made herself
join in forbidden things and she never told tales, but bad things
saddened her.
Jenny had been given the name of Wendy at the baptismal orgy,
but someone" nicknamed her Windy so Mama promptly changed
it to Jenny, and forgot about the original name. It caused great
trouble later on when she wanted a passport; she swore her name
was Jenny, and the authorities pointed out there was no Jenny
Walker recorded in our family. The same thing happened to me
even later, because it turned out that I was still an unregistered
female child, due to the prolonged period of waiting for me to turn
into a boy. If our parents had produced a large family the confusion
might have been unthinkable.
Jenny wasn't as tall as Betty, and whereas Betty had inherited
the Walker genes and improved on them, Jenny had thrown to the
Whiting side of the family. She was dark and straight-haired with
enormous eyes, and a wide mouth in a square jaw got her the
nickname of Plain Frog. It was an exotic, rather Spanish face, full
of character. She went through her childhood with brows drawn
blackly together, jaw set, confronting everything head-on, discipline,
social niceties, sickness or being made to wear clothes she
didn't like. Her face would set trap-like, and there would be silence
to put your teeth on edge or else foul language, until she got over
it. She spent a lot of time being punished and brooding about it,
and seeing herself as a martyred figure, like Joan of Arc.
Her favourite things in life were all non-human, particularly any
creature that was sick or injured; she had a genius for making them
better, and the harder she had to work at it the better she liked it.
I suppose one should have known she'd be a nurse, but at the time

36
it seemed more likely that she'd be a vet. There was a tiny, disused
hut outside the kitchen door of The Haven, and there were more
huntsman spiders in it than you'd think possible in one place;
gross, hairy spiders who gave me nightmares. When Jenny was
really angry with all of us she'd sleep in the hut with them, saying
that the spiders were a damn sight nicer than her family
Because she was drama-hungry at that age she often felt that the
pace of life was too slow for her, and she must liven things up.
These episodes usually ended in tears, more often than not mine,
because being small and easily conned I was likely to be given an
undesirable role in the production.
Our next door neighbours were a family called Langford who lived,
during the holidays, in a large, gabled house on our southern
boundary. The children went to school in Melbourne, and they
thought we were odd because we had a governess, and because
we lived at Sorrento all the year round. Influenced by our parents
we thought they were pretty ordinary; they had the kind of voices
we were supposed to keep away from. Part of their land, heavily
pine-treed, ran round our fence, and we would gather down there
out of sight of both houses, to throw stones and insults at each
other.
Cedric Bright, whose parents lived nearer to Sorrento and were
friends of our parents, was our reinforcement against the Langfords,
besides being our proxy brother. He was the same age as Jenny,
and in an ideal world eventually they might have married. Cedric
had a round, inscrutable face, was besotted with fishing and
hopelessly untidy; he reeked permanently of fish. He went to
boarding school, but all through the holidays his skin, hair and
clothes were encrusted with scales and old bits of bait, his shoelaces
and shirt-tails trailed behind him, and when he talked he did
so with his mouth shut, and no separation between the words. We
could understand him perfectly, but he drove the grown-ups to
distraction. He ate with us a lot of the time, slouching in before
meals to ask what we were having and then ringing up his mother
to find out what was on the menu at home, either settling himself

37
at our table or vanishing without a word depending on what food
appealed to him most. The Girls and I thought he was wonderful.
He and Jenny decided that the Langford situation called for
more aggression on our part, and they drew up plans for a proper
war. There was an old shed known as the Boxroom down near the
stables, a few feet our side of the boundary fence. Among other
things it housed our coal supply, and you could get on its roof by
climbing up the windmill beside it.
Jenny and Cedric, helped by Betty who was making anxious
noises, laboriously shifted a large amount of coal onto the roof of
the shed. They collected a coil of rope from the boatshed, and then
Jenny came up to the house to tell me, with suspicious sweetness,
that they wanted me to play with them. I was amazed and flattered,
and with my non-existent chest stuck out I scuttled down to the
shed in Jenny's wake.
The Langfords were on their side of the fence, watching the
preparations with two or three of their cronies, collecting ammunition
and making nasty remarks. I asked, 'What are we playing?'
and Jenny said, 'You'll see. Just sit on this.'
To my outrage she produced the enamel chamber-pot I still
used. Mama had not yet lost her interest in my bowel movements,
and I tended to fall through the hole in the seat of our outdoor
dunny, but I yearned for the day when I'd graduate to a grown-up
lavatory.. It was obviously not going to be the sort of game I liked,
but before I could disappear Jenny and Cedric seized me, planted
me on the pot, tied my arms and legs and roped me securely to the
throne. My screams alarmed them, so Jenny took off her sock and
gagged me. She and Cedric then joined Betty who was on the roof,
saying quite uselessly, 'Jenny, Cedric, don't! You mustn't!'
Cedric challenged the Langfords. 'Cummonyermugs,' he shouted.
'Yergottatargetterday! Tryanitit!'
The pot and I were jerked skyward on the end of the rope.
Cedric, being the strongest, bounced me up and down and swung
me like a pendulum, the Langfords pelted me with dirt and pine
cones and The Girls bombarded them with coal. I was purple
38
faced, choking and shrieking behind the gag, Trixie, our Labrador
bitch, was hysterical and altogether there was more noise than at
Bull Run. Nemesis arrived in the shape of Mike and Mama, both
making as much noise as anyone else out of sheer fury. I peed into
the pot, wetting my pants which was the ultimate indignity. I was
unhurt, but distraught because I was too small to kill the lot of them.
For a few days afterwards The Girls were quiet and thoughtful, and
Cedric was absent. Betty was the only one to be vaguely happy,
because for once she had been punished too.
The Girls lived a very isolated existence for their age, and it
made them self-sufficient and naive at the same time. We weren't
allowed to mix with the local children, who were the only children
in Sorrento outside the school holidays, because of their contaminating
Australian 'twang' and, I suspect, because of a lot of other
idiotic values which no longer exist. They were values which
belonged to an different age and a vanished class, and even though
they're incomprehensible now they were accepted then. Some
values are basic, others as fickle as fashion, and fifty years on
people will look back on us as we are today with wonder and
contempt.
There was a Church of England church just round the corner
from The Haven, a sweet, plain, limestone building. The local
children went to Sunday School there, and we used to hear them
singing; we could hear the hymns during the Sunday services too,
but we never went to church. Church was a mystery, and
tantalising, but if we asked to go Mama said, 'Goodness no, surely
you'd rather be on the beach?'
God and Jesus came as a complete surprise to me when I went
to school. The Girls, at their lessons with Mike in the schoolroom,
were taught something called Divinity, but that was all about
missionaries in Africa who bravely saved the souls of the Natives
by making them wear clothes. There were books with pictures of
the missionaries standing proudly beside black people dressed in
shapeless white smocks, but there was nothing much about God.
I had to sit on the verandah outside the schoolroom, being

39
I

forbidden to wander out of sight. I could hear the lessons, and it
was horribly boring until Jenny taught me to read.
The omission of the Deity from Divinity lessons was in keeping
with my family's attitude to religion in general. Being an Anglican
was synonymous with being a Conservative and being British,
which automatically entailed a rigid reticence about all things
personal, complex or profound. Matters of the soul might be
discussed by alien beings such as Roman Catholics, but our
parents, and it seems to me most Anglican clergy, regarded religion
as a conversational indecency. It was one of the subjects Not
Discussed at Table, together with sex, which was unmentionable
anywhere, and money, because talking about money was vulgar,
whether one had it or not. 'And anyway,' said Pa, surrounded by
women, 'No woman can ever understand money - or handle it.'
The Sorrento children were nice, knockabout kids, and they
rightly looked on us as incomprehensible, stuck-up freaks. I doubt
if any governess had been seen in Sorrento before Mike, and even
apart from her we were branded as outcasts by our awful Pommie
voices, and our clothes. Sewing was one of Mama's hobbies; she
had an old Singer sewing machine, and a lot of time on her hands.
She still considered a cook essential, since between her gilded
youth, over-servanted India and the present she had never been in
charge of a stove or a saucepan, and she believed them to be quite
beyond her capabilities. As we were unable to pay any but the
lowest wages a series of slovenly, evil-tempered and inefficient
women ruined the food in The Haven's kitchen, and Mama kept
defensively to the front of the house, rattling and banging away on
the old treadle Singer.
By some evil chance she came across a pattern for bloomers,
and decided that they were the perfect garment for growing girls
to wear at the seaside. The bloomers were identical to the old joke
underwear of spinster schoolmarms, voluminous, elasticised at
waist and knee, shapeless and hideous. The only difference
between ours and the ancient chastity-type was that ours were
made of luridly coloured floral cotton bought at Stringers Stores,

40
and that while the schoolmarms kept theirs decently covered ours
had to be worn on the outside. Our dresses and jumpers were
stuffed in under the waist elastic, and we knew perfectly well that
we looked like nothing so much as three over-decorated pumpkins
on legs. The village children fell about laughing whenever they saw
us, and we were green with envy at their lovely, ordinary clothes.
The only member of the family, apart from Mama, who liked the
bloomers was Trixie. She was a young dog then, a black, long
coated Labrador Retriever, and after a lifetime of dogs she is still
of sainted memory. In those days of her youth her charms were
unlimited, and she was well aware of them; even from the confines
of our garden she managed to make the combined curs of Sorrento
and Portsea go mad with lust when she was on heat. Twice a year
they swarmed like moths to her irresistible flame, and even though
we Fort-Knoxed her in a wire run they gathered round to serenade,
lament and fight, until everyone within earshot was almost
demented.
It was on one of these occasions that Jenny showed a flash of
the practical brilliance that would one day make her a first-class
nurse. Mike, Mama and Betty were charging round the garden,
shouting and hurling things at assorted dogs, Trixie was singing a
dirge about unlawful confinement, dogs were fighting in the Lane,
round Trixie's cage, and on the verandah. Jenny came out of the
house with an old pair of bloomers and a pair of scissors, went in
with Trixie, cut a hole for each of her hind legs and one for her tail,
and put them on her. She said, 'Look out! I'm going to let her go.'
There was a hailstorm of suitors from every corner of the
landscape, and piercing screams of triumph as Trixie disappeared
under a rugger-scrum. She was a big, strong young dog, and after
a few moments she surfaced and staggered across the garden,
while as many of her admirers as could gain a hold clung to her
hindquarters. She looked, more than anything, like and overcrowded
Indian bus. As we watched her they started to drop off.
One by one they fell back, their faces puzzled; one or two mounted
her again, then retreated, whimpering. Trixie was getting irritated.

41
Hot for sex, she blamed the dogs, not the bloomers, and the next
one to approach her got bitten.
We put her back in her cage and the curs gradually disappeared.
Some of them hung round for a while but they'd lost confidence,
and when Trixie came off heat the bloomers had become her
power-totem. From then on when we went abroad in Sorrento
dressed in the horrible things Trixie came with us, similarly
dressed. If anyone, child or adult, laughed at us, she went for them
with teeth bared and lips drawn back, because bloomers were
sacred. She was never known to bite in her life, except for Alsatians
which she classed as Huns, but people didn't stay around to find
out whether or not she was serious

42
7

Fishing



FISHING RUNS IN THE WALKER BLOOD, genetically transmitted
from one generation to the next, When Pa first found
The Haven, and first stood on the cliff in front of the house
looking across the Bay, he would have been imagining below the
surface of the water the gliding, seductive shapes of his most
favoured prey. In India he had hunted tiger, stuck pig, shot
crocodile and deer, snipe in the marshes, and the gallant, black
horned sheep on the high passes. Innocent as savages, he and his
kind destroyed the wild game of India because it was a custom, like
polo, that belonged to their class. Most of them genuinely loved the
things they killed, but it had never occurred to them that what is
killed today cannot breed tomorrow, and must grow less in
number. The Indian Princes took pride in arranging elaborate
hunting parties in honour of the British, and as many of the Princes
were first-class shots who regarded the shooting of game as an art
form rather than as a sport, they brought to it the added incentive
of competition. This view of shooting is still widely held today, on
the grouse moors of Scotland and other holy places, and Pa, having
been raised in the bosom of a shooting race, might have been
expected to cherish the sport for life.
There must have been a conflict in Pa's soul between his
fondness for live animals and the strange compulsion to render
them dead, and in the end the live animals won. He said that the
fun simply went out of it, out of being the instrument that caused
something to cease living, and he sounded slightly puzzled, as
though he knew he'd lost something precious and could no longer
remember why he'd valued it. Instead he reverted to fishing and

43
whatever blood-lust lingered was satisfied by the pursuit of fish.
The finesse inherent in dry-fly fishing suited him best of all; I have
seen many fly-fishermen since I fished with my father, but never
a prettier nor more skilled one. If there were no trout available, he
was perfectly happy to devote himself to sea fish.
In India he had fished for Mahseer, the bravest and most
powerful fighting fish of all, now almost gone from the Indian
rivers, and when I was still a child he gave me the kind of gift that
fairy godmothers are supposed to flick off the top of their wands
when he told me about trout fishing in Kashmir. 'You must go there
one day,' he "Said. 'It's the most beautiful place in the world to fish,'
but by the time that my husband and I went there and lost our souls
to the Valley Pa was dead.
He would fish for anything, anywhere, stopping just short of a
bathtub which was clearly empty. Given the choice between a
wide, clean-banked, well-stocked river and a narrow, overhung
rivulet, he would go for the small stream every time, and get fish
out of it. Several times he described to me the Anglican Heaven for
which he believed he was bound, and it consisted of just such a
stream, with a few nice, open pools where the fish could rise, with
all his favourite dogs in attendance, and no inhibiting presence of
God.
The sad part about The Haven was that Pa was in Queensland
so often, and though fishing was as much part of our daily routine
as meals it was not the same without him; it became pedestrian.
When Pa was with us we went far out, to places otherwise
forbidden and in the foulest of weather without turning a hair,
always in the completely false belief that he was competent to
handle a boat in the Bay. In fact he was hopeless with engines in
either boats or cars, and he simply disregarded things like southwesterly
changes and hidden sandbanks, but such was our trust
that we ignored them too, and felt perfectly safe.
You hardly had to move offshore then, to get fish. There were
no speedboats, no water-skiers and almost no pollution. The
bottom of the Bay was a smorgasbord of everything fish like best,


44
and they came in from the ocean to feed as deer come to graze on
a prime meadow. Our jetty was about thirty yards long, and when
you sat in the dinghy at the end of it to clean your fish the sharks
would circle round you, greedy as the gulls, waiting for scraps. The
Girls were allowed to use the Jack on their own at a stated distance
from the shore, a hundred yards or so beyond the end of the jetty,
where they would drop their lines over the side and come back
half-an-hour later with enough flathead or whiting or baby
schnapper to feed us all for a couple of days. There were fish in
infinite variety, and because there were no freezers then you took
only what you and your friends could use immediately.
The real fishing trips, to places where the big fish lived,
happened either when Pa was home and we could borrow a
decent boat, or when we went out with Mr Johnson, the professional
fisherman. In South Channel there were King George
whiting, and schnapper. At the right time of year on the right tide
the schnapper were huge, taking the bait and running across the
seabed like bison over the prairie, so that you could almost hear
the roar of their powering through the water and the line burned
your hand. They were beautiful fish when you landed them,
brilliant pink and big-scaled, and not unlike a bison because all
their weight was forward in their head and shoulders.
There is the forgotten ghost of a small island in the middle of
South Channel. It was once fitted out as a fort to repel mythical
Russian invaders, the figment of some overheated 19th century
brain. The poor little island was tunnelled and shafted until it was
like a Gruyere cheese; they shored up the tunnels with timber,
hacked out munition stores along them, and built gun emplacements
and a harbour. The mirage-Russians faded and the island was
abandoned, useless for anything except the migratory mutton
birds. We would take picnics out there, land on the island and sit
on the harbour wall to eat, looking down into a clear, still aquarium
of sheltered water. Any sea creature you can think of was apt to
glide in from the depths outside and loll below you, relaxed and
visible as a bull in pasture on a summers' day. If you stood on the

45
top of the island in the rank, yellowish seagrass, it looked like a
poached egg, yellow in the middle, ringed by white sand, and with
a bite taken out of it at the harbour. The tunnels and weapons'
stores were dark and damp; the mutton birds bred in them, leaving
a smell of condensed cod liver oil, and in the breeding season a
carpet of squalling, powder-puff babies.
Whales came into the Bay then, and rays bigger than our
dinghy, passing slowly underneath it like huge, billowing carpets.
I saw a seventeen-foot grey nurse shark landed at Sorrento pier,
and was allowed to sit astride it, and two octopus, each longer than
a tall man swam under Portsea pier, speckled and obscene, just as
we were poised to dive.
There was a day when I was about four years old; it had been
blowing hard, and the sea was murky with stirred-up sand. I went
down to the beach to see what had been washed up because there
was always the chance of treasure after a gale, sometimes quite
disgusting things, but always worth a look. This time there was
nothing interesting, and I waded out about twenty-yards until the
water was round my waist, playing with the floating lumps of
seaweed.
I must have trodden on the poor creature, not being able to see
through the water, because something powerful and alive seized
me round the legs, holding me in what felt like rubber bands and
moving slowly up me at the same time. I had well-developed lungs
as a child, and my yells reached Mike, who was in the garden. She
screamed for Mama who called The Girls, and the whole lot came
charging down the cliff into the sea. They carried me, complete
with octopus, to the beach, and tried to untangle me.
The octopus was seriously disturbed, and no doubt just as
disenchanted with the situation as everyone else. Panicking, it
transferred its tentacles at random from me to my rescuers so that
we were all knitted together, pulling, cursing, and in my case
bawling. It was a fine, healthy octopus, amazingly strong and agile,
and it was getting the best of things until someone had the sense
to shout, 'A knife! Get a knife!' Like a giant ball of wool we

46
staggered to the boathouse a few yards away. Someone, somehow,
managed to get the jammed door open, a hand inside, and
miraculously grabbed a knife. Mama and Mike hacked away at the
tentacles, and as they severed them The Girls plucked them off and
threw them away. In the end it was done; the operative part of the
octopus lay on the ground and my rescuers, in varying stages of
hysteria, could rid themselves of muck, slime, and lingering
gruesome fragments. I had nightmares about things crawling up
me for years.
Going fishing with Mr Johnson, the professional fisherman, was
the best of all and because he charged for it we didn't go too often,
but when we did everyone went because it was too good to miss.
He had been fishing the Bay all his life, and when he dropped
anchor on one of his marks the fish were guaranteed.
There was a great build-up before going out with Mr Johnson,
packing a picnic lunch and organising all our fishing gear because
it was extra if we used his, and we all got bossy and uptight with
excitement. He was quite old, with a face ground by the sea and
the wind until it was the same texture as the rocks on the Back
Beach. I never saw him when he'd shaved, and until one particular
fishing trip none of us knew that he had any teeth. His boat was
an old, broad beamed, functional workman with an inboard engine
and a sail in case of breakdown, and the boat, the engine and
Johnson were all about the same age. Being a professional, and
loving his boat, he kept it always in perfect order, up in the slips
in winter for cleaning and painting, and though the engine was
unbearably slow it usually worked.
Johnson supplied the bait, having plenty of it in the way of
business, and brought his own lunch out of habit and because his
wife knew what he liked. His bait-tin was notorious, a square, four
gallon kerosene tin full of assorted mussels, squid, pilchards and
fish-pieces which had ripened in the sun for an unspecified period,
and stank accordingly. Since the bait we used always came off the
top we knew that the smell must come from a bottom layer which
was never disturbed.

47
On the day of the teeth we had been drifting happily across
prime fishing spots, hauling in a good catch and listening to
Johnson's fishing stories, all of which we'd heard before, and all of
which got better every time he told them. The sun being high
overhead, and our tummies rumbling, Mama suggested lunch.
She was unpacking our basket when Johnson, who had been
rummaging about in the bows, turned and said, 'Yer wouldn't
bloody believe it, I've fergot me lunch. Must've left it on the pier.
The wife won't 'arf larf.'
Mama gave him a sweet smile, and said, 'Don't worry, Mr
Johnson, we've got far more than we need.'
'Very good of yer,' said Johnson.
Mama was starting to put things on a plate for him when Jenny
grabbed her arm, made mysterious gestures towards her mouth,
and shook her head vigorously.
'What on earth's the matter, Jenny?' asked Mama.
Jenny pointed to two chops, a crisp bread roll and a sausage on
the plate, then to her own teeth, and shook her head again.
'Oh, I see,' said Mama. 'Mr Johnson, will these be too hard for
you?'
'Too 'ard for me?' Johnson inspected the plate with evident
pleasure. 'Bless yer, no. I got me teeth 'ere, 'aven't I?'
We stared at him in astonishment; it was as though Trixie had
announced that she wore glasses. As we watched he reached
behind him and dragged the bait-tin forward, then plunged his arm
into it above the elbow. He groped round in its bottom, stirring up
lethal blasts of rotting fish, then proudly withdrew his hand and
brandished his dripping uppers and lowers for us to admire.
'If I keep 'em in there,' he said, 'I know I won't lose 'em.'
He popped them into his mouth, picked up the plate of food,
and became happily absorbed in his lunch. Mike was leaning far
out over the stern of the boat, and Mama was a very curious colour.
I watched Johnson in fascination; as he ate I could see a high
watermark of maggots writhing helplessly in the hair of his
forearm.

48
8

Cedric



WHEN CEDRIC CAME HOME from Geelong Grammar for
the holidays The Girls' tempo of life changed because
there were different things to do, and someone different
to do them with. Cedric was nobody's dreamboat, but they
weren't in a position to be fussy. I've said before that Cedric was
scruffy, but it was more than that; he had developed scruff into a
lifestyle. His holiday outer-wear was an encrusted record of his
fishing and his meals, terminating in a pair of filthy sandshoes
whose laces trailed behind him like dried-out worms.
He pursued fish from first light till last with a dedication it was
pretty to watch, pausing only for sustaining intakes of food or, in
springtime, when the Bay was sometimes unmanageable even for
him, additions to his birds egg collection.
The birds egg collection was the exact opposite of Cedric's
appearance and habits, and an early indication that he'd one day
develop into a man of erudition and substance. It was lovingly
arranged in boxes lined with cotton wool, each egg neatly labelled,
delicately blown and varnished, more the work of a pernickety
naturalist than of a maverick small boy. He was the youngest of
three brothers, and like me he was the youngest by a considerable
space.
Ruby, his mother, had been a beauty in her youth and was still
exquisite; Alfred, his father, was very much her senior, and had
reached an age where his interest in most things, Cedric included,
was remote. He slept a good deal of the time, sitting in the sun in
the courtyard of their two-storey house, spectacles on the end of
his nose, and the great bald dome of his head shining like one of

49

the witch's balls which the Portsea nouveau riche favoured as
garden decoration.
Cedric regarded his father as a bad joke, no doubt resenting
Alfred's indifference to him. He worked really hard during the
holidays to make the old man's life hell, or perhaps to make his
father notice him, and we were recruited to help. There was a
balcony, handily placed above the spot where Alfred took the
afternoon sun. Cedric, while bird-nesting, would stockpile a score
or so of the commoner eggs, and keep them until they were at their
foulest and most sulphurous. We would sneak up to the balcony
en masse and bombard Alfred with a concerted volley, or else
Cedric would have target practice with his shanghai.
Alfred would stir vaguely, give a buffalo snort, pass his hand
over his dripping skull and go to sleep again. Ruby, who besides
being beautiful was hopelessly gentle, would come to wake him
up, reel back from the bad-egg fumes, and tenderly support him
inside to get cleaned up, wailing, 'Oh Ceddie! You are a naughty boy!' When there were no bird's eggs we painted spider's webs on
Alfred's bald head in Indian ink because Cedric said it kept the flies
away. There was great satisfaction in sharing these harmless
amusements, knowing that Pa would have beaten us half to death
if we'd tried them at home.
Fishing with Cedric, if one was honoured with an invitation to
do so, was apt to be unconventional. He had a long, narrow canoe,
about as seaworthy as a tin bucket, and no one but Cedric could
handle it. He would cruise along the foreshore just outside the line
of jetties, standing upright and keeping the thing balanced with his
feet. He had a great three-pronged spear like the spear traditionally
carried by Neptune, and he used it to spear stingrays. He needed
stingray barbs for school where they had good swap value, and his
method of getting them was to spear the ray, then lift it flapping
and whipping with its tail into the canoe, where he could cut off
the barb.
The Girls were strictly forbidden to go out in the canoe. Anyone
who has seen an enraged stingray in a confined space will





50
appreciate the sense of this. For one thing, if their barbed sting goes
into you a surgeon is needed to remove it, and when they are
aggressive they use their tail with the barb in its end like a
stockwhip. For another thing Cedric's canoe was designed for one
expert person with nothing to disturb his balance, and not for two
people dodging a stingray. Our parents took the view that if the
Brights wished to encourage their son to kill himself they had every
justification for doing so, but that they, personally, wanted to keep
their daughters a little longer.
Betty wouldn't have dreamt of going, having been told not to. Jenny would normally have gone, forbidden or not, but she had
recently overheard Mama and Ruby saying 'how nice it would be
if Jenny and Cedric ... later on ... wouldn't it?'Jenny was mortified
beyond belief; she had no intention of marrying anything less than
Royalty, and she went through a period of treating Cedric as though
he had leprosy. Cedric shrugged his shoulders, turned his back on
her, and gave me serious consideration.
His problem was that although he was getting plenty of barbs
he was not getting size and quality. The foreshore was a sort of
promenade for the rays and there were some magnificent specimens
even in shallow water, but he needed someone to stand on
the flaps when he got a big one into the canoe so that he was free
to grab the tail. I actually had certain advantages; not weighing very
much I was less likely to capsize the canoe, but on the other hand
I looked solid enough to hold down fair sized flaps, and young and
silly enough not to argue about doing so. In fact, because I was
always being told that I was too young and too small to do things,
and because Cedric was a God, I'd have jumped off the top of a
pine tree if he'd asked me to. He took me aside one afternoon and
told me to meet him at the end of the jetty at first light next morning.
Leaving the house at dawn was no problem; I often went
outside before the others were awake. It was one of those still,
misty mornings when the sea was so flat that it almost invited you
to walk on it. The silence was bottomless, and the seagulls
meditated quietly along the jetty rail, waiting for the moment when

51
the sun and the breeze would burst through the mist and compel
them to flight. I heard a whisper of moving water, and Cedric's
canoe slid round the end of the baths.
I still remember that morning, and light the colour of Peace rose
petals gradually creeping between sea and mist, tinting the oil-still
water with gold. The water was so clear, looking over the side of
the canoe, that there seemed to be no separation between us and
the bottom, and the stingrays came gliding along the sand,
sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, like early workmen on the
way to a job. Cedric was deadly in his use of the spear; he showed
me what to do, and in no time we were working as a team without
a word needed between us. Cedric would heave a flailing stingray
in-board, head toward me as I crouched in the stern; I would grab
the spear to give me leverage and plant my feet firmly on the flaps
while he caught the tail, cut off the barb, killed the ray and threw
it overboard. It wasn't really either dangerous or difficult. By the
time Cedric had enough barbs the sun was high, the breeze had
wiped away the mist and blown the gulls skyward, and we had
drifted down past Point King. We were both starving.
No one had actually told me not to go out with Cedric because
it never occurred to them that he'd want me to go, and for the same
reason they'd never told him not to take me. Consequently, when
my family woke up and found me missing they thought of every
possible disaster and tragedy, but not of Cedric. Poor Mama was
frantic; neighbours were telephoned along the length of the cliff,
and came running. The Sorrento police arrived and unhelpfully
pointed out that my footsteps, still plain in the damp sand, led to
the jetty and along it, but didn't return. They could see that my body
wasn't lying under the water, but could a shark have taken me?
Could I have fallen in, and the current carried me towards the
dreaded Rip? Or even kidnap?
When Cedric paddled the canoe past the Langford's jetty and we
saw the crowd of people on ours we were dumbfounded. Sorrento
was not a place for large gatherings, much less the Walker jetty, and
from the way they were all waving their arms about we realised that


52
something important was happening. I said, 'What are they all
doing, Cedric?' and he said, 'DunnoRobs.' Then we saw a police
uniform, and a terrible suspicion began to dawn.
'D'yatellumyacumminfishin?'
'Of course not, they wouldn't have let me.'
'Oh! Gawd!" said Cedric, separating his words for once.
There is no way a canoe can vanish off the water on a clear day.
One by one they turned and glared at us; Mama gave a loud wail
of relief, and the police made a noise like police dogs about to
'Hold'. Even in my infant innocence I sensed impending doom as
we got nearer to the jetty; from where I sat at sea level I could see
innumerable feet, and rising from them like a forest, legs and
bodies, all capped by furious, unsympathetic faces. Mama was in
tears, and so was Mike, and The Girls registered boundless
contempt. Thank Heaven Pa was away at the time.
Vengeance didn't last long at The Haven, and a couple of days
later everything was back to normal. Cedric shuffled into our house
at breakfast time, filthy as ever, hair stiff with salt and scales, and
mumbled, 'WasferbrekfusArnAileen?'
Mama didn't even have to look up; she had heard the door slam,
knew who it was and why. She said, 'Fishcakes, I think Cedric' He
moved to the phone, twirled the handle and asked for his home
number. 'WasferbrekfusMa?' He listened and said, 'Fishcakesere,'
hung up and seated himself happily at the table. Routine was
restored.

53
9

Parents


I


ALL THROUGH THOSE INNOCENT YEARS, when The Girls
legs were lengthening, their breasts, especially in Betty's
case, growing like baby pumpkins, and I was graduating
from chamber-pots to dunnies, Pa was changing as much as we
were. His long visits to Queensland were his times of learning, a
sustained effort on his part to learn all there was to know about
sheep, cattle and the land.
If Pa had been a proper British Army establishment type, his
transition to the management of the Queensland properties would
have been a disaster. He had a few establishment characteristics,
such as his views on Indian self-rule and the utter villainy of any
political party other than the Conservatives, but in Queensland he
kept such views to himself. Certainly there was his temper, which
could explode in peoples' faces like a landmine, but he never lost
it with animals or, as he used to say, 'People who can't hit back.'
Oddly enough he had humility; he was never afraid to ask
questions or to admit ignorance, and this helped him a great deal.
It endeared him to the proper pastoralists, the men who had spent
their lives on the land, and he sought them out so that he could pick
their brains. It helped him immeasurably with the managers and
stockmen who worked the properties, and who nursed an in-built
distrust of absentee bosses who, in their experience, knew nothing
whatever about sheep or cattle. Even more deep seated was their
hatred of Poms and Pommie voices, which they had learned to
associate with arrogance as well as ignorance. Their initial reaction
to Pa was suspicion laced with contempt.
Getting to the Queensland properties then meant long, exacting


54
journeys by car or train. Once there, the only way of inspecting the
country and the bores, or getting to the mustering camps to see the
stock was on horseback, which suited Pa very well. He looked on
horses as the only proper form of transport, and was totally
unsympathetic to motor cars which he drove abominably. He had
ridden all his life, especially in India, in the course of duty, in
amateur steeplechases, playing polo, pig-sticking or just for
pleasure. His years in the deserts of the North-west Frontier had
taught him to navigate on horseback in every kind of inhospitable
country, and the long, dusty rides across Western Queensland
simply made him homesick for India.
At first the men on the properties reacted as they did to all
Pommie Bastards; they set out to make life hard for him. They put
him on lunatic horses, and were incensed when he didn't fall off.
On trips to the bores or mustering camps, which could take several
days and nights, they abandoned him on one excuse or another
expecting him to get lost. He was well aware of what they were
doing and why, and would camp on his own when it grew dark,
track them in the morning, and rejoin them without reproach as
though it had been his own choice.
This upset the stockmen because it was contrary to their beliefs.
Poms weren't meant to be able to navigate their way across a
twenty-acre paddock with all the fences in clear view, and few
could stay on a stock horse long enough to do so. Also they were
nonplussed when he didn't make a fuss about any of it. After they'd
been with him a few times they found that he wasn't a bad bloke,
that he was as tough as they were and they could talk to him, and
from then on they began to teach him the things he wanted to
know. He never told me about this, but the men themselves did,
years later; they had a lot of stories about the Major.
Queensland was a hard place before aircraft opened it up.
People on remote properties were so far away from other humans
that they often became a little strange. Pa told a story about being
off-track on his own one night on the way to a mustering camp,
and of coming across a kind of humpy, surrounded by empty

55
bottles and cans and half-wild goats. It was getting dark; three men
came out, bearded and ragged, just as wild as the animals around
them. One was old, the other two youngish, his sons, and they
ranged themselves in front of the humpy, half-hostile, half-pleased
to see someone from the outside world. The humpy was made
from hammered-out kerosene tins and bits of wood with bark for
a roof, and piles of dingo and 'roo skins on stretchers were drying
round its walls. There was the glow of a fire inside the door, but
no other light.
They inspected Pa for some time, and then the old man said, 'It's
just on dark, mate. Yer'd better camp with us for the night and we'll
give yer a bit of tucker, eh?' Then to one of the young men, 'Find
us a bit of tucker, Wal, fast as yer can.'
He led Pa into the foul-smelling humpy which seemed to consist
of a sinister mass of garbage, unidentifiable even in the light of an
occasional leaping flame. Pa said the place reeked of goat and stale
male, and there was no telling which was the worse. He would
have ridden on but it was foolhardy in the dark, and the old man
was in a fever of excitement with the dammed-up talk of years
flowing out of him. Pa was offered, and refused, some rank,
powerful drink out of a communal bottle. Outside a goat bleated
twice, and then was silent. The old man rambled on, nonsense for
the most part, but he and his sons had given up talking to each
other a long time past, and for him it was like a purge.
Wal came in through the door, looking pleased with himself. He
stood in the light of the fire and said, 'Got the bloody tucker, Dad.'
He had a four-gallon kerosene tin of water in one hand, and in the
other the gory, unskinned haunch of a newly slaughtered goat. He
put the kerosene tin on the fire and thrust the goat's leg into it, hair
and all. He said to Pa, "That'll be bloody good tucker in an hour or
so, mate. She were a young goat.'
In those early years when Pa and Queensland were adjusting
to each other, Mama must have been dreadfully lonely. She had
plenty of people around her, but no one she could talk to about
her worries, and she had far too much time on her hands. She found

56
ingenious ways to fill it, incomprehensible to us but harmless, if
you exclude the conveyor belt production of bloomers.
She collected shells. The bottom of the Bay was thick with them,
and every morning brought a new crop to the high-tide mark on
the beaches. There were dozens of different kinds of shells, and as
many variations to each species in terms of size and colour. There
were cowries and conches and abalone, and the fragile nautilus,
delicate as tissue paper. You could sometimes see a nautilus
floating inshore, upright and brave like a miniature Grecian ghost
ship. We were made to follow Mama and Mike along the sand,
mutinous in our floral bloomers, fossicking as Emus fossick among
spent tickets on a racecourse. She had boxes made for her shells
like Cedric's egg boxes, varnished each shell and labelled them,
and the boxes followed us from house to house, unopened, until
somewhere mercifully they were lost.
She collected ships. Everything that came into Australia came by
sea, and everything bound for the port of Melbourne came past us,
up the Channel. She had a pair of binoculars and a mound of
notebooks made of hairy, brown paper, and we were all sworn to
call her every time a ship went up the Bay. She would rush out and
draw them in silhouette, accurate in detail to the last derrick and
ventilator, the funnel and boot-topping lovingly coloured in
crayon, and the name, country of register and destination filled in
at the bottom of the page. For years, during our moves, the
notebooks filled an unopened trunk, and when the trunk was
finally needed they were burned.
She taught us French. Three days a week were French days, at
meals and whenever she was present. She was fluent, and we were
quite reasonable until we went to school, where our French was
promptly ruined. She started a family magazine, and we were
forced to contribute, but our contributions made her and Mike
laugh so much that we were hurt, and it died a natural death.
Everything she did must have been time-filling between Pa's
departures and returns, gallant time-filling too because she never
let us think of it that way. The sad thing was that she never realised

57
that she could have put on an apron, ejected the slut-domestics
from the back of the house and occupied herself twice as happily
by doing their job. It wasn't snobbery that stopped her but the
honest belief in which she had been raised, that some were born
to the kitchen and some to the drawing-room, and that either one
in the wrong place spelled disaster.
When Pa came home she was luminous with a possessive,
protective glow, and for the first few days we were warned off him
as though he was an invalid, 'Don't bother your father!' It was
unnecessary because his homecoming routine was anything but
invalidish, after it never varied. He would unsheath and polish his
swordstick, advance on the garden and demolish the geraniums
round the outside loos until there was nothing left but short,
bleeding stubble. Then he would get out his shanghai and airgun
pellets, and if it was the time of year when the caddies from the Golf
Club came over our fence to steal fruit he would hide behind an
agapanthus bush and use their backsides for target practice. He'd
burn anything burnable he could find, including any toys we'd
accumulated during his absence because he said animals were
better for us, and when the place was tidied to his liking we'd go
fishing.
His lingering need for a son was manifested in the hours he
spent teaching me to be one. The Girls were accepted as daughters
and he was immensely proud of them, but there was still a faint
question-mark over the afterthought. I think he longed for someone
who would learn all the things he was fond of and good at,
and because I was young enough to be taught he decided to ignore
my sex and to give me a try. Some of the lessons were more
successful than others.
I was a coward about loud, sudden noises, especially bangs.
Thunder, guns and bursting balloons all sent me trembling under
my bed. Appalled by this, Pa got out his twelve-bore and
announced that I would learn to shoot. I tried to bolt, was caught
by the hair and towed outside, with Pa roaring, 'Stop being such
a bloody fool, Robin.' He dragged me to the edge of the cliff and

58
tried to load the gun with one hand while holding me with the
other.
'Damn you, stay still! It's not going to hurt you!'
'No! Damn you!'
'Don't bloody well swear!' He laid me flat, planted a knee in my
neck, loaded the gun and fired it out to sea, over my head. As usual
the noise did something indescribable to me and I almost stopped
breathing; my mouth was full of grass, I was black in the face and
hysterical. 'You see? he said, picking me up and dusting me off. 'It
didn't hurt you. Have a shot yourself
He tried to teach me to cast a fly but his rod was too big, and
the lessons always ended in Pa taking it from me and giving a
virtuoso performance himself, while telling me how it was done.
This was painless, and I enjoyed it.
His next step was to hire a pony from someone in the village.
It was about 10-hands high and 12-hands wide, with long, dry hair
dangling from every ample curve. Its eyes, small and piggy, glinted
through a tangled forelock, and it had no saddle. With boring
predictability, and horrible though it was, I fell in love with it and
became an addict.
At the first lesson Pa explained that at Sandhurst men are
required to ride without reins or stirrups in order to acquire perfect
balance. He forgot to mention that most Sandhurst cadets are
horsemen when they arrive there, and that perfecting their balance
is just gilt on the gingerbread. Also that at Sandhurst they at least
have saddles. When he lifted me onto the pony its corpulence was
so great that my legs stuck out straight on either side, and I
remember noticing that it laid its ears flat back against its neck. This
warning had no significance for me at the time.
Pa demonstrated the Sandhurst method of knotting the reins on
the pony's neck and folding my arms across my chest, then stood
back to admire the result. The pony took off with astonishing speed
for anything so fat. I automatically grabbed a handful of mane,
which at least gave me contact, the rest of me being airborne, and
a moment later had my first experience of being winded as the

59
pony charged under the low-hanging branch of our Angelina plum
tree. The first equine love of my life continued on through the gate,
up the Lane, and onto the Sorrento road. Mortified, Pa banged me
on the back until I got my wind, muttering, 'All ponies are sods, I
should have known.' My first words, when I could speak, were,
'When can we do it again?' and for the first time he had a flicker
of hope that I might be all right in the end.

60
10

Animals



PA'S RULE THAT WE HAD ANIMALS instead of toys didn't
worry us; we thought toys were dull anyway, and animals
seem to have been another genetic inheritance, like fishing.
Pa was an animal fanatic, with as much of a taste for the exotic as
for cats, dogs and horses. In India, on various occasions he had
kept pet deer, cheetahs, python, bear, and on one posting three
leopard cubs which had to be given to a zoo because they lived
under the sofa and ringbarked visitors' ankles. Australia's animal
options were more limited than India's, but he was apt to turn up
with forbidden things like cassowaries from Papua, and had to be
restrained regularly by Mama when any animal appeared without
an obvious owner attached.
Almost all the land at our end of the Peninsular was uncleared
ti-tree scrub, teeming with snakes, rabbits, wallabies and ringtail
possums. There were even koalas, and sometimes one or two of
them would take up residence in a tree in our garden, but apart
from supplying them with bananas we left them alone. We always
had a tribe of blue-tongue lizards, placid, thoughtful characters
who accepted the old dolls' house on the schoolroom verandah as
ideal lizard housing, especially as meals were laid on, and who sat
motionless in our laps dreaming reptilian dreams..
The ringtail possums were the best of all. If you walked through
the scrub it was common to find a castaway baby on the ground,
pushed or fallen from a nest, and we took these home to rear them.
Anyone who has reared a ringtail will know that when they are
grown and have to be released, one's heartstrings are torn as
though one had lost a child. They are gentle, wildly affectionate


61

I.

1
and extremely bright, and they have the advantage of not taking
up much room. Sometimes we each had two or three of them, and
in the daytime they lived down the front of our sweaters next to
our hearts, the enormous eyes and pink noses poking out under
our chins. We fed them with eye droppers on canned milk and
water, and when they were old enough they went back to the scrub
where we found them.
There were two who wouldn't go back, Chink and David. They
grew up at the same time, fell hopelessly in love with each other,
and apparently agreed that their idyll could be conducted better
with us than among competitive possums in the bush. I suspect that
the quality of our food had something to do with it. If we released
them a mile away they reappeared the next day, sitting on the table
outside the schoolroom window, demanding bread and bananas.
Betty found their devotion to each other particularly touching, and
in keeping with her motherhood obsession she decided that they
must have babies.
'D'you think they're married?' asked Jenny, sarcastically.
Betty looked worried. She said, 'Oh goodness, I suppose not.
You can't have babies unless you're married, can you?'
'Yes, I think so,' said Jenny. 'I think it's just that you're not
supposed to.'
Things you shouldn't do worried Betty terribly; she thought for
a moment and then said, 'Let's marry them.'
It was a beautiful wedding, attended by family and friends,
including the Brights who brought some roses as a wedding cake.
Betty made a long, trailing veil and fixed it to Chink's head with
elastic under her chin, while David had a stiff, white collar like a
choirboy, and a black coat. The altar was on a table, and both it
and the aisle leading up to it were made of fresh ti-tree blossom.
On another table was a wedding breakfast of all the things they
liked best including the roses, and a jar of cream which was
forbidden, and got there by mistake.
We put the bride and groom down at the end of the aisle and
they ate their way to the altar; while someone read an abbreviated

62
version of the marriage service they ate the altar too. They were
carried triumphantly to the food table where Chink, who was
already bulging, made a beeline for the one thing she wasn't
supposed to have, seized the cream jar with both hands, and thrust
her head in so hard that her ears went in too, and she was stuck.
'She'll suffocate!' yelled Betty.
'That cream'll kill her,' said Jenny. 'It's death to possums, too
fatty.'
Pa grabbed a piece of wood, struck the jar a mighty blow, and
broke it. Chink, creamy but unruffled, made a dive for the next item
of food on the table, and Pa said to Mama, with great satisfaction,
'I told you so, darling. Much better than any damn toys.'

The Girls, mainly Jenny, of course, had the happy idea one
morning of playing a harmless joke on their father, since he was
so fond of animals. They took me aside before breakfast and said,
'Robs, we want to play a joke on Pa, and we want you to help.'
Always the perfect sucker, I beamed happily, and waited to hear
more. Jenny produced a half-grown possum from her jumper and
handed it to me. She said, 'Hide under the table until Pa comes in
and sits down. We'll say you're down on the beach. Then just put
the possum's nose up his trouser leg and let it go. It'll be fun Robs,
you'll see.'
It sounded like fun; it was the sort of joke I could imagine Pa
playing on me, such as the times he'd stuffed huntsman spiders,
which I loathed, down the front of my clothes. I said, 'It won't hurt
the possum, will it?'
'Of course not, Pa loves them - it's only a joke. Get under the
table, quick.'
I planted myself under the table, plump and trusting, nursing
the possum and making no sound. The custom at breakfast time
was for Mama to ring the big brass bell when it was ready. She did
so; The Girls seated themselves, and there was a pause while they
waited for Pa. When he arrived I could hear Jenny snorting, trying
not to giggle.

63
'Blow your nose, Jenny,' said Mama. 'Ah, here he is.' Pa's legs
settled almost across me. 'Where's Robin?'
'She's coming up from the beach,' said Jenny. 'Don't wait for
her.'
'Are you sure? I'd better...'
I decided that it was then or never. I slipped the possum inside
the cuff of Pa's outstretched trouser leg, and gave it a sharp push.
He was of the generation that always wore long-johns. The British,
in the heat of the Indian climate, believed that wool next to the skin
was essential at all times, and instead of sliding on bare skin the
possum had perfect purchase. It must have thought it was in some
strange sort of hollow tree, and with the instinct of its kind it dashed upwards, settling with claws embedded in the T-junction of Pa's
crutch.
What followed was like a preview of Hiroshima. Pa's legs
convulsed, his knees hitting the edge of the table. The table gave
a great heave, and a medley of eggs, milk, toast, crockery and
cutlery arrived behind me on the floor. There was monstrous
bellowing, as Pa expressed himself in terms unheard in the house
before, and Mama's voice, in high register, shouting, 'Geoff! What
is it? Stop swearing like that!' The crash of the front door as The Girls
fled was hardly audible above the din.
I risked a look from under the tablecloth. It was before the days
of zip fasteners and Pa, his face a deep plum colour, was trying to
rip his fly open, hampered by well-tailored buttons. As the last one
broke, there was a stirring within, and through the vent of his long
johns appeared a pink-nosed, whiskered face, eyes huge with
enquiry.
'Good God, Geoff!' said Mama, shocked. 'What's that doing in there?'
There was a moment's silence, ominous and deadly; Pa went
down on his hands an knees, and his face appeared under the
tablecloth on a level with my own. I shut my eyes tight, and began to howl.

64
Our neighbour across the lane was a gentle, elderly man called Dr
Davenport. He'd long since ceased to practice and he had a
mysterious wife, never seen except as an outline sitting motionless
behind a window. We were told never to ask about her, and we
were never invited inside the house although Dawy substituted for
a vet when Jenny found injured animals, or birds with broken
wings. His surgical skill was usually adequate, but his only cure for
internal ailments was a massive dose of castor oil. For a long time
Jenny revered him, watching his application of bandages and
splints with her mouth hanging open and her eyes out on stalks,
until the day when we all rushed over to his house with a mortally
sick penguin we'd found on the beach.
Dawy inspected it closely, then said to Jenny, 'Don't worry, my
dear. I'll fix him up in no time.' He went inside, and came back with
a pint-sized bottle and a large spoon, forced open the poor bird's
beak and administered a spoonful of castor oil. There was a
moment of silence before the penguin gave a loud, un-penguin
like cry, rose vertically into the air and fell back dead.
'Well,' said Dawy. 'If that didn't save it nothing would.'
Jenny cradled the corpse in her arms and stalked off towards the
gate, tears streaming down her face. 'Bloody old quack,' she said
when we caught up with her.
Dawy's house and garden were both much larger than ours,
with pine trees and flower beds and vegetables, and a cottage
which housed his gardener-cum-handyman, Reilly, Reilly's wife
and their swarm of children, all wild and shy as a bunch of stable
rats. Reilly despised us as much as we feared him, and we avoided
him, until the night when Mike lost Oej.
It was quite soon after she arrived from England that Mike
acquired her treasure, a green ring-necked parrot whom she
christened Oej, as a variation on Joe. Oej lived in a cage which hung
from the verandah roof, developed an admirable verbal repertoire
and the vilest personality imaginable in a bird of his size. He
showed a modicum of tolerance for Mike, but even that was
unpredictable and she bore many scars since, in the face of all

65
evidence to the contrary she insisted that Oej loved her, and kept
trying to prove it. She was the one who had to feed him and clean
out his cage; none of the rest of us would go near the brute, because
even a gesture of goodwill could end in the loss of a finger. We
were scared of him, knew him to be lethal, and given half a chance
we would have laced his birdseed with arsenic.
Mike spent a lot of time with Oej, sitting beside the cage and
teaching him to talk; after the cats and canaries of Have he seemed
to her both miraculous and exotic. She even taught him to sing. Her
favourite song was The Rose of Tralee which she sang to him
patiently, over and over again. She had a record of it which she
played to him endlessly, while we all found things to do which took
us out of earshot. Oej was talented, one had to admit, and he
learned The Rose of Tralee so well that he and Mike could sing a
duet, and did so at the least excuse. The sickening tune was
inescapable because even on his own Oej hammered it out in a
tinny, maddening soprano.
Then came the terrible, tearaway night of storm when Oej
escaped. The cage had been swinging wildly in the wind and
perhaps the door blew open or perhaps someone helped it to
open, but that was never proved. Mike went out to check on the
safety of her beloved and there was a piercing wail of despair, 'Oej
has gone! Oej has gone!'
We all rushed into the garden, howling wet and black as it was,
all secretly praying that Oej had been blown to his destruction.
Mike was already as far away as the Lane, and her cries of, 'Oej,
Oej, Oej,' floated back to us on the wind. Then we heard a shriek
of triumph, 'I've found him! Come quick!' and we rallied to her
through the gate. Far above us in a lashing pine tree there was the
sound of a squeaky, exultant voice singing The Rose of Tralee.
No one was brave enough to climb the tree in that gale, and the
dark. Mike battered at the trunk, imploring her bird to come down
and weeping uncontrollably. 'She was lovely and fair...' intoned
Oej, his rhythm distorted by the motion of his branch, 'But it was
not her beauty alone that won me...' We were all tiring rapidly of







66
the scene, and wondering how to make Mike abandon him, when
Reilly arrived.
Reilly was small and bow-legged as an old jockey. He was
unshaven, grubby and malevolent, and always in one stage or
another of drink. When he had enough money to embark on a fullblown
binge he would beat up his wife, who was twice his size,
and terrorise his litter of feral children. These occasions were
clearly audible in The Haven, in spite of the boxthorn hedge and
the Lane between us. Reilly's loathing of us, and of practically
everybody else was well known, and it came as a surprise to find
that apparently he liked Mike, perhaps sensing another underdog.
He staggered out of the darkness and went straight to her, took
in the problem at a glance, and patted her on the shoulder. He said,
'Don't fret, Miss, we'll soon get the bugger down,' and then to the
rest of us, 'Pick up some of them rocks and pine cones and chuck
'em at the bastard.' It was the obvious thing to do and it warmed
us up, besides which there wasn't one of us who didn't want to
score a bullseye. Mike screamed in protest, but we all pelted like
mad, and finally The Rose of Tralee was punctuated by a violent
squawk as Oej reeled out of the tree, flapped helplessly in the
wind, and disappeared into the blackness over the edge of the cliff.
There was a pause while someone went to fetch a torch. When
it came, we all peered downwards, hoping to see a crumpled heap
of feathers at the cliffs base. By this time we had the consistency
of wet blotting paper, but the possibility of a fatal accident
overtaking Oej took our minds off it. Hearts sank as the torchlight
showed Oej, shaken but indestructible, clinging to a ti-tree branch
halfway down the cliff. His feathers were plastered against him like
burnished metal, he was rendered flightless and voiceless by the
gale, but still he survived.
Reilly must have been very drunk that night because he
behaved like a knight errant for the first and only recorded time.
He went to his house and fetched a rope, tied one end round his
waist and the other to the fence, and went over the cliffs edge in
a flurry of mud and stones. We heard a burst of wind-muffled


67
curses, some sharp, satisfactory screeches from Oej, and we pulled
Reilly up again, dripping with blood, the bird's beak sunk deep into
his hand and gory evidence of other wounds on his face and neck.
Mike embraced him, smothered Oej in a jumper for her own safety,
and supported Reilly back to The Haven where we doctored him
with iodine and bandages, and generous amounts of Pa's whisky.
When Mike left us to go back to England, distraught after her
declaration of love for Mama, we managed to persuade her that Oej
would be better off in the Zoo. It would be interesting to know
whether the other occupants of his cage learned The Rose of
Tralee, or whether they murdered him. It had to be one or the
other...

68
11

Rob and Rose



WHEN MIKE LEFT I missed her badly, far more than The
Girls did. She had been my middle ground between the
two disciplinary factors in my life, parental wrath and
judgemental siblings. Mama missed her too, especially when Pa
was away; they had seen the funny side of the same things and
sided together, as adults tend to do in the company of children. In
retrospect it's no wonder that poor Mike, deprived of any alternative,
fell in love with Mama.
A new governess was required as a matter of urgency, and
Mama departed to Melbourne to inspect likely candidates. She had
no sooner found one who seemed suitable than Grandfather
Whiting died, fulfilling the promise of his fashionable figure by
having a heart attack. Mama returned to The Haven for just long
enough to deposit Miss Roberts and collect some clothes, then fled
back to Melbourne to bury her father and deal with her mother. The
unfortunate Miss Roberts was thrown in at the deep end without
a family arbiter to act as referee, or to soften the inevitable blows.
The Girls were at what was known then as 'the difficult age', and
Jenny could be very difficult, even though Betty always did her best
to be co-operative. Betty's problems were different, but equally
grave in the eyes of Miss Roberts. Rising 16 she was already well
on the way to being 6 ft tall and most of her was leg, long, brown
and skinny, and far more evident below her bloomers than was
considered decent at the time. Topped by long, blond hair and blue
eyes, her appearance was beginning to have an unsettling effect on
the young males of Sorrento, and even though she was quite
unconscious of this, guidance, or at least a change of dress, was

69
clearly advisable. Jenny, not being a beauty, smouldered and
fantasised about becoming one; she spent hours behind locked
doors, gazing hopefully at herself in the mirror.
Miss Roberts was very different to what we'd been used to. She
was grey-haired, with an ample figure which was confined in
creaking whalebone. You could tell by the tone of each creak
whether she was sitting down, getting up or just bending over. She
wore glasses with steel frames, and the corners of her mouth turned
downwards into her dewlap as though they were tied in a knot
under her chin. Quickly she made it clear that she was deadly
serious about learning, discipline and punctuality. She disapproved
of animals, especially possums in jumpers, blue-tongue
lizards and dogs in the house. She never fished, and thought it a
sinful waste of time; she said one should buy fish from a
fishmonger. In her opinion the world outside the schoolroom, the
bush, the Bay, the whole sparkling, seductive wealth of land and
water was a worthless distraction, specifically designed to lure
pupils from their duties.
She was outraged by the things The Girls had not been taught,
by their dress, their behaviour and their language, and she thought
I was some kind of infant savage. Under House Rules we were each
allowed two items of food which we hated and which we weren't
forced to eat. Mine were liver and brains. Miss Roberts didn't
believe that I was excused from eating them; she said they were
very good for me, and that henceforth I would eat them. When I
refused she crammed them into my mouth and clamped her hand
over it; when I had to swallow for lack of breath the beastly stuff
went down and came up again at the back of my nose, and I
spewed everywhere. I got her tin-edged ruler across the back of
my hand, and I have never been able to face liver or brains since
then, raw or cooked.
Inevitably she blamed Mike for all our deficiencies, which
prompted a fierce, if belated surge of outrage and loss in The Girls.
They boiled visibly whenever she said, 'Do you mean to say
Whatsername didn't teach you this or that?' or, 'I don't care what

70
she let you do, you can't do it now.' If Mama had been there we
might have had some hope together, but she was away far too long,
through no fault of her own. In the end Jenny lost her temper; she
screamed at Miss Roberts, 'Shut up, you bloody vile old bitch!' and
threw a schoolbook. Miss Roberts grabbed her and boxed her ears,
and I joined in, pummelling the fat thighs without effect. Jenny was
locked in her room, and I got the tin-edged ruler until the back of
my hand bled.
The next morning, after a night of sulks and misery, The Girls
woke me early and we tiptoed down the path to the beach. We
took the dinghy from its moorings, loaded the fishing gear, and
pulled some mussels from the jetty for bait. The Girls rowed halfa-mile
offshore, and we anchored and fished.
Miss Roberts appeared on the cliff in front of the house soon
after we dropped anchor; probably she'd been in to wake us for
further punishment, and found us gone. We could see her making
beckoning gestures which quickly became threatening gestures,
and then she ran into the house and came back with the big, brass
bell which she swung mightily from side to side, making enough
noise to bring the Fire Brigade from Sorrento if they'd been either
awake or interested. We waved back impolitely and laughed, and
went on fishing. Finally, she gave up, exhausted, and went back
into the house. We fished on for a while, realised how hungry we
were and rowed back , defiant and uncertain.
She said nothing when we appeared; she was grim, and rather
pale, and we ate our breakfast in silence, feeling less pleased with
ourselves every minute. She must have been terrified of being
unable to manage us, and that when Mama came back horror
stories would be told and she would lose her job. She must have
longed to murder us; jobs for governesses were like hens teeth
during the Depression, and even the miserable wage she earned
with us meant the difference between survival with self-respect
and destitution. It was not only us but the whole environment
which was alien to her; her proper element was with some earnest
suburban family whose children walked abroad in hats and

71
glovers, on paved streets. That morning she made us feel small, and
from then on we managed to live in a state of armed truce, if not
of goodwill. The Haven's atmosphere changed, though; it was
choppy, like the sea when the wind blows against the tide. She told
us to call her Rob, told us in the manner of one bestowing a gift
or sealing a friendship; we were utterly indifferent, so we called her
Rob, and except for lessons and meals we kept out of her way.
When Mama came home there was another shock; her first
announcement was that Rose, Granny Whiting, was coming to live
with us. We knew very little about Rose, having only met her on
formal, agonisingly dull visits to her house in town, but we were
fairly certain that she was not Sorrento material.
The transplanting of Rose was a major operation for everyone
except Rose herself. True to her lifelong role as Helpless Little
Woman she relaxed, letting other people do the work. The house
she left in South Yarra was a middle-sized, charming old place,
probably the smallest she had ever lived in, yet The Haven would
have fitted comfortably into its ground floor. The South Yarra
house smelled of lavender and furniture polish; a maid in a black
dress and white cap brought a loaded tea tray to the sitting-room
at four-thirty sharp, and withdrew discreetly. When we went there
we had to sit with our hands in our laps and our ankles crossed,
and to speak only when we were spoken to. Cakes had to be eaten
off plates with no finger licking, and we were given improving
lectures about how girls behaved when Rose was young.
Rose was 73 when grandfather died, and it had never occurred
to her that she might have to look after herself, nor to anyone else
that she was capable of doing so. She had never dealt with anything
more serious than the most minor transgressions of her household
staff; she could add simple figures but couldn't subtract; she had
never cooked so much as a boiled egg nor been responsible for
paying a bill. She was quite unable to understand that there was
now no money with which to pay bills, so in her own house she
continued blissfully to run them up, and there was no alternative
but for our parents to take her into their own household so that they

72
could keep an eye on her. They probably thought at the time, her
age being what it was, that the situation would be fairly temporary.
They were wrong, and Rose was with them, her powers of reason
becoming ever more erratic, until she was 90.
At least the sale of Rose's house produced some money,
otherwise there was no way we could have expanded The Haven
to cope with all of us. Money being a mystery handled only by men,
Rose told Pa to use hers as he thought best and Pa, scrupulous as
ever, used it to make life as comfortable as possible for Rose. He
and Mama certainly never spent a penny of it directly on themselves,
and even in the alterations to The Haven the bare minimum
was used on the parts that would house the rest of us.

We were packed into the little place like sardines anyway. It was
suggested that I might move in with The Girls, and that my present
glorified cupboard might be put to some use, but The Girls made
throwing-up gestures, and said they'd rather die than have me with
them. Mama said she thought the easiest thing would be to build
them a sleep-out at the back of the house. 'Or two sleep-outs,' she
said. 'They're adolescents now, they could have friends to stay.'
The result was two basic 14-foot square shacks, built out of
asbestos sheeting because it was safe in case of fire, as well as being
cheap. Betty immediately took possession of one and Jenny of the
other; it was the first time they'd ever had rooms of their own, and
they behaved like dobermans over threatened bones. I stayed in
my cupboard, Mama and Pa moved into The Girls old room where
they could only dress at the same time if one of them dressed on
the verandah, Rob had a tiny room next to the schoolroom, and
Rose had the big, comfortable front bedroom looking over the Bay
that had been our parents room. The schoolroom was only large
enough for a table, chairs and bookcase, and that left the sitting
room which was also the dining-room, sewing-room and family
room, and in which it was impossible for everyone to sit down at
once except round the table for meals.
The bathroom arrangements were even worse. A passage ran
down the centre of the house and at the end of it, down a couple

73
of dark, unsafe steps, was a primitive bathroom containing a
scratched enamel bath, a wood-chip heater, and the only indoor
lavatory. In the fly-wire back porch there was a well with an ancient
hand-pump, and a kind of shower inside what looked like a meat
safe; to use it someone had to man the pump while another
showered, and the water was unnaturally cold. Some yards away,
in the garden, were two wooden dunnies known as Uncles and
Aunts. There was a geranium-covered trellis in front of each of
them which gave a pretence of privacy, except when Pa had
indulged in a pruning-frenzy with his sword-stick. They had no
lighting, anti on summer nights when the spiders were abroad it
took courage to visit them. It was never suggested that Rose should
use Aunts; the indoor facilities were hers, and the other grown-ups
queued patiently outside.
The most disgraceful part of the house was what Mama was
pleased to refer to as 'the maid's rooms'. These were two
comfortless little weatherboard closets, a washbasin and a tub,
tacked on behind the dark, unappetising kitchen. The whole of that
area was monstrous as were its occupants, anonymous, nomad
women, sometimes one and sometimes two at a time. They came
and went mysteriously, leaving either with drama and recriminations
or silently, bearing goods which belonged to us and not to
them, though really there was little of value to steal. Their quarters
were out-of-bounds to us children, and our paths seldom crossed.
It seems terrible to me now that people lived with us, and that we
simply ignored them, but I can't remember a single face or name.
We accepted the boycott on maids as we accepted the boycott on
the local children and other incomprehensible rules; we were too
young to ask why and anyway the only answer would have been,
'Because we say so.'
Mama herself was nervous of our itinerants; she knew that we
were bottom-of-the-market employers and that we got what we
deserved. When we moved to Melbourne and had proper maids
her whole attitude changed; they were respectable women and she
loved them, was happily ruled by them, and cared for them in their

74
old age. But in the Sorrento days a maid, however bad, was a thing
one had to have as a last, shredded banner of social status. Without
one our poverty would have been seen to be serious, while with
one Mama could pretend that our lifestyle was a rather chic,
idiosyncratic joke.
There was one disastrous occasion at The Haven when our
parents took to the kitchen, the current incumbent having walked
out in the late afternoon, at a moment's notice. Ruby and Alfred
Bright had been asked to dinner that night in the belief that there
would be someone to cook it, and Pa being at home Mama said to
him, 'Darling, you'll have to ring the Brights and tell them not to
come.' Pa said, 'Nonsense, of course they can come. I'll cook an
omelette.'
'Can you cook an omelette?'
'Of course I can. Have we any eggs?'
Mama rummaged tentatively in the kitchen, then shouted, I
can't find any.'
'Ring Ruby and ask her to bring some.'
'What about the children?'
'Give them a tin of something.'
We ate some cold baked beans, and gathered round the kitchen
door to watch. We had never realised that either of our parents
could produce food. The Brights arrived, very jocular and excited
about this innovative dinner, Ruby with the eggs and Alfred, with
his polished, bald head, looking like a giant extra egg.
The kitchen was a dark, smoke-soured room with*high-up,
inadequate windows, a table in its centre, cupboards like upright
coffins, and a black, evil wood stove that drew downwards rather
than upwards. One of the reasons we were banned from the
kitchen was the language our cooks used about the stove. On this
particular evening it had not had time to go out after the last cook
left, and was smouldering quite nicely.
Pa brought in wood and stoked the stove with his usual passion
for burning down and cutting up; he rammed logs home, opened
all the draught doors, and soon the stove was making the noise of

75
a tunnelled train. Mama found an encrusted frying pan and some
bread and butter, and was putting knives and forks on the table.
'Let's have it in here,' she said.
The Brights seated themselves and were given drinks. They
watched trustingly, knowing nothing about cooking themselves,
and remarked happily what fun this would be and how clever Pa
was to be able to cook omelettes. Ruby, always generous, had
brought a dozen-and-a-half eggs, and said she hoped they'd be
enough. Mama handed Pa a basin, and he broke all the eggs into
it, saying, 'Put the frying pan on the stove to get hot, darling, and
make some toast.'
Mama put the frying pan on the stove and opened the firebox
to make the toast. This gave further impetus to the fire which was
already roaring like a blacksmith's forge, and the hotplate under
the frying pan became a curious shade of red. From the door we
could see that a dark haze was forming below the ceiling, and there
was a funny, hot smell like burning rubber. Pa was beating the eggs
vigorously in the basin. Satisfied with their consistency, he said,
'Right! Aileen, put some butter in the frying pan!'
'How much?'
'All of it,' said Pa, without looking. 'Now! We've got to be quick
about this.'
Mama threw a pound of butter into the red-hot pan, and
simultaneously Pa threw in eighteen beaten eggs. There was the
sound of a thousand enraged cobras, a shower of burning fat, and
the kitchen blacked out as butter and eggs poured over the side of
the frying pan onto the white-hot stove. Trixie had been lying
under the table because, like all good Labradors, she considered
it her duty to be as close as possible to the source of food. She was
close enough to collect a smoking barrage of charred omelette, and
she almost wiped us children out as she fled through the door,
screaming. When we picked ourselves up the interior of the
kitchen was invisible, the Brights staggered past us in a frantic
search for fresh air, and Mama followed them choking dangerously,
looking as if she had been made up for a minstrel show. She

76
turned back at the door, and yelled, 'Geoff, are you all right?'
A voice replied thickly, out of the murk, 'Bloody hell, of course
I'm all right. No wonder that damned woman left, there must be
something wrong with this stove.'

77
12

Gardening



Once she had been laboriously settled in the best room in
the house, Rose revived her favourite fantasy, nourished
among the glowing flowerbeds of Hascombe, that she
was an expert gardener. Her actual contribution had been to tell
the Head Gardener what to plant, which he ignored, to order
flowers for the house, and to take her guests for walks to admire
what she stoutly declared to be the fruits of her own labour. Never
one to miss a cliche she would invariably declare at some point,
'I always say, my God is in my garden!'
She was undeterred when she arrived at The Haven and saw
that the barren, salty soil produced nothing except geraniums,
agapanthus and pig-face. Ignoring the declared fact that neither
Mama nor Pa had the slightest desire for ordered beds of annuals
she announced that she would create a garden, and left us in no
doubt that we were lucky to have an expert like herself to enrich
our lives. Reilly was paid to lay out and dig the beds, and that being
done Rose ordered seeds; she explored catalogues, made lists, and
wrote away for enough seeds to establish a commercial nursery.
Because I was young and innocent I missed the fact that the rest
of the family were all developing ailments or occupations which
would make it quite impossible for them to become Rose's garden
slaves. Betty took to obsessive school work for a mythical
scholarship, Jenny discovered First Aid classes in the village, and
Mama suffered from hay-fever for the first and only time in her life.
Even Rose could see that Rob's whalebone casing prohibited
gardening, which left me in the all-too-familiar role of burnt
offering.

78
Rose brought up the subject of my appointment as apprentice
gardener in front of my parents which wasn't fair; she knew very
well that they'd support her. She said, with ominous sweetness,
'You'd love to help Granny in the garden, wouldn't you, dear?
Think what fun that would be.'
'Say, "Yes thank you, Granny",' said Pa, sharply.
'Of course she will, mother,' said Mama.
I could see The Girls sniggering, and knew that I was trapped.
'Bloody slobs,' I hissed at them, under my breath. Pa heard me, and
slapped my head. Rose retired to her room to dress herself
appropriately for serious gardening.
She finally emerged and joined me beside the unpromising
patches of grey sand which passed for garden beds. Pa followed
her carrying a chair which he positioned in the shade, then lifted
her into it. It was not a large chair, but her feet, shod in high heeled
shoes, hung inches from the ground. On her head was a huge straw
hat whose brim extended well beyond her shoulders, and she had
covered her dress with a kind of cotton kimono. There was lace at
her throat, and a double string of pearls with a diamond clasp, and
pearl and diamond earrings hung from her ears. She wore white
cotton gloves, to protect her hands and her rings from the sun.
Trixie bounced up, welcoming this normally indoor person to the
garden, and was shooed roughly away. Rose firmly believed that
contact with an animal necessitated lengthy disinfection and
purification, rather as a Brahmin is required to ritually cleanse
himself after being touched by an Untouchable. To Rose all
animals, and dogs in particular, were a minefield of germs.
She had her bag of seed packages in her lap and she examined
them slowly, visualising their transformation to a future blaze of
monster blooms, and hearing again the cries of praise and envy
which had gladdened her heart at Hascombe. Finally decided
which seed should have first planting she handed me the packet,
and I went to work. It was clear that she'd read the instructions,
how deep the seeds should be planted and how far apart, for she
produced a ruler and made me measure each one, crumble the

79
earth to a fine powder, and if she didn't approve I had to do it again.
There was almost nothing she approved of. There was an infinity
of torture until the sun moved into her shade and Rose, who
regarded the sun as only slightly less lethal than animals, went
inside.
In spite of lavish watering and daily visits of inspection, weather
permitting, by the Master Gardener, not a seed came up. Rose said
pointedly that it was a pity she didn't have someone competent to
help her, and my elders and betters looked the other way.
Then she read somewhere that in barren soil seeds could be
raised by planting them in half-eggshells filled with mountain soil,
and transferring them to the garden when they were big enough
to survive. Mountain soil was procured with great difficulty, and
dozens of eggs. We endured a killer-cholesterol diet of egg dishes
for some time and the shells, delicately halved, were stockpiled.
There were endless sessions when I was forced to fill them with
mountain soil, plant a seed in each one, and arrange them in
wooden boxes. Rose supervised every move from her chair with
the zeal of a galley-slave master. Eventually, at what seemed like
the end of recorded time, the boxes were filled, watered, and put
in a shady spot near the rainwater tanks.
I had watched the rest of the family go off fishing while I was
being victimised, and when I roared with fury they said it was good
for me. During the gardening period I ran away twice. On each
occasion someone recognised me and brought me back, the
second time with slight sunstroke. No one was sympathetic. Rose
inspected the eggshells every day, and was finally overjoyed by the
appearance of small, green shoots; there was great rejoicing, and
she reminded us, at every opportunity, that she was indeed a
gardener of genius. The seedlings looked quite healthy, and The
Girls teased me about the day when I'd have to plant them out. I
stamped and swore, saying it was someone else's turn.
Just before the planting-out was due, Rose made her morning
visit to the garden to admire the seedlings and let out a screech of
such violence that we all rushed out, thinking she must have

80
trodden on a snake. There was a scene of devastation, boxes
overturned, eggshells smashed, scattered and emptied; total disaster
in fact, and Rose in tears. Everybody turned and glared at me
and in spite of the ban on weeping, I wept. Punishment deserved
I could accept, and I always owned up to things I'd done on the
principle that it was worse if I didn't, but this was a crime of major
proportions, and it wasn't me; my wickedness was not up to that
standard, and I wouldn't have dared.
No-one doubted for a second that I'd done it. As they pointed
out I'd done nothing but grizzle and whine about helping poor
Granny with a little simple gardening, so if it wasn't me who else
would do it? No one else had a motive; they all loved Granny's
garden. They marched me inside, smacked me, and locked me in
my room. In cold response to my screams of outrage they said it
was bad enough to have ruined poor Granny's seedlings, but
worse, far worse, to lie about it. No one would ever believe me
again, and there would be no birthdays, no Christmas presents and
no fishing until I confessed.
Rose bought more eggs, and The Girls had to do the planting
because I was under a cloud; they were much more sympathetic
by the time they'd finished. More green shoots appeared, and I was
forbidden to go anywhere near the seed boxes, as if I'd have
wanted to anyway. Then Mama paid a visit to Aunts one night when
the inside loo was occupied, and she was in a hurry. As she passed
the seedlings she heard a scuffling noise, and shone her torch
towards it. Once again there was carnage and in the middle of it,
frozen by the torchlight, was a large bushy tail possum holding an
eggshell, its mouth full of delicious seedling.
My family made it up to me; I was given treats, and played up
my martyrdom in the most poisonous way. Rose abandoned
gardening without a sign of regret and took up crochet work. For
years, until her eyesight became too bad, she produced a
monotonous breed of rugs made of crocheted squares in liquorice
allsort colours, all in the same stitch. She referred to them as My
Work, in the manner of a great artist.

81
Rose was really a sweet-natured creature, with a normal number
of brain cells which she deliberately smothered all her life, much
as Chinese women once bound their feet to make them smaller.
She knew that the more helpless and ineffectual she seemed the
stronger and wiser her menfolk felt by comparison, and that the
first and only duty of all females was to please men. She existed
in a world of verbal and attitudinal cliches, and needed no deeper
truths. She believed firmly that the Lower Classes, which included
the poor, labourers, servants, waiters and shop assistants, and all
those with coloured skins, belonged to a different species. One was
nice to them within limits, but on no account encouraged them lest
they should take advantage. When an accident, an illness or a
tragedy happened to one of them she would say, comfortably,
'Never mind, dear, they don't feel it like we do.'
She clung to the maxims of her youth, and belaboured us with
them. 'You must never wear red, dear. No nice woman ever wears
red,' and 'promise me you will never paint your nails. Only negroes
paint their nails.' And there were, of course, constant cries of
'Aileen! That child was kissing the dog! Aileen, that child should see
a doctor! Aileen...!' If we had been older we might have found her
funny; Mama and Pa could only have dealt with her for eighteen
years by seeing the funny side of her, but we were too young and
intolerant. She ruined my confidence and self-esteem by defining
the obvious so neatly that it became a family saying, produced in
public on many occasions by Mama herself.
Rose was gazing at the three of us, The Girls and me, during
lunch one day, and she made a discovery. 'Betty's beautiful,' she
said, 'and Jenny's handsome. Poor Robin!'

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13

Visitors



SORRENTO COULD BE MISERABLE in winter. When the
wind blew from the south-west and the rain squalls came
hissing across the Bay the house took the weather full in its
face, and we understood why other houses hid behind trees.
Winter was black-and-white, like a bad, old-fashioned film. If you
looked at the sea you saw dirty dishwater with white patches, the
pines and sheoaks turned black and streamed in the wind, and
great ink-and-wash clouds rolled in at cliff-top level, making the
inside of the house limp with damp. Everyone tried to get as close
as possible to the available sources of heat, and this led to trodden on
fingers and bad temper. Winters at The Haven had a dark, midnight quality about them which made you want to curl up and sleep until spring, like a hibernating bear.
Spring, when it came, had the sound and shape of dancing; the
dance of sudden light on water, of buds and mating birds, and of moths and butterflies that tumbled in the sun-shafts like Edmund
Dulac drawings of fairies. The dormant colours came out again,
briefly fragile before they strengthened for the blaze of summer.
We came out dancing too, pulling off sweaters, digging out fishing
lines, letting the Jack down from the davits and checking her for
leaks. Everything was a First at the beginning of spring; the First fishing, the First swim, the First picnic and the First visitors.
Visitors to Sorrento were seasonal creatures, and in winter they
were encouraged to stay away. There was no room for them
anyway, and they would only have made the discomfort worse, but
their absence made our boredom deeper, and our edginess with
each other more acute.

83
In summer there were plenty of visitors, people from India or
England, who not only came themselves but passed their friends
and relations on to us when they visited Australia. Some were good
and some were bad, but the bad ones were not asked back. A lot
of them were too old or too grand to be expected to deal with sleep
outs or outside dunnies and had to stay at the hotel, and some of
them, like my self-appointed Godfather, Avenue Evans, didn't
mind at all and came quite often.
Avenue Evans was Teddy Evans, Admiral Lord Mountevans or
Evans of the Broke, but I was unable to handle the word Admiral.
He was a small, toothy, enchanting man with an enormous, blond
Norwegian wife called Elsa who laughed all the time, even at
Teddy's frenetic womanising. He was quite incapable of keeping
his hands off any woman within reach; his arms, like Dr Strangelove's,
had a life of their own and Elsa, seeing some innocent female rise
like a driven grouse from a savage grope, would be wreathed in
smiles and say, 'Aaaawh, Teddy! Zat vos not nice!' Years later, when
he was old and grey, and navigated solely by grace of a walking
stick, he surprised me in a London taxi by squirming round Elsa's
mountainous back and somehow getting a trembling hand to my
suspenders. I was young and embarrassed and Elsa gently removed
the hand, tapped it reprovingly and said, 'Aaaawh, poor
Teddy! He vos always so fond of yunk gels!'
The big houses along the cliff filled up in the summer holidays,
most of them with people who were friends of Pa's and Mama's,
and children whom we knew. There were Baillieus and Myers,
Frasers and Yenckens and Spowers, and they had their friends to
stay too because their houses were so large. Our three Whiting
cousins were often staying with one or the other of the families.
They were Robert, Bertram and Ernest, and their respective ages
were roughly the same as ours. They were dark, good-looking
boys, and they came over to The Haven to fish and to climb
Dawie's pine trees until Cedric, from the highest branch of a tall
tree, dropped a pine cone on Robert's head and split it open. There
was blood everywhere, and Robert shouting, 'I'm dead, I'm dead,

84
I know I'm dead!' until we dragged him along the road to Dr
Camm's surgery and got him sewn up. It wasn't something we
could hide, and there was drama; we said it was an accident,
knowing Cedric's aim to be perfect after years of practice with his
father's head.
Almost all of the holiday children were more The Girls age than
mine, and the few who were my age perversely I loathed. I found
the older ones fascinating, and almost drove my sisters insane by
wanting to go everywhere with them. But even The Girls were
restricted; they went on picnics and fishing trips with the holiday
crowd but sometimes there were formal, lavish parties , birthday
parties or dances, and that was a different matter. There was a set
piece scene that started with Jenny saying furiously to Mama, 'But why can't we go? It's not fair!' and Mama saying, 'Because we can't
ask them back to a party like that, we can't compete.'Jenny would
swear and Betty would weep, and neither of them would understand,
any more than I can now, why we couldn't have asked them
back to the kind of party we could afford, and which they'd
probably have enjoyed.
Mama was very sensitive about being less well-off than her
friends. She carried the chop-for-chop principle to the point where
the chops exchanged had to be identical in size, shape and value.
I can't remember any of us having a birthday party which our
friends came to because we couldn't accept presents from them.
Later on, when even I left school and the family fortunes were
largely restored, Mama's attitude was still so deeply ingrained that
when an invitation came she would look at it and say, automatically,
'You can't go to that, we can't compete.'
Pa was far more relaxed about relative wealth. He spent a lot
of time visiting the holiday wives, most of whom were grass
widows during the week. They were a good-looking and sophisticated
bunch; he would go to have a drink with them in the
evenings and Mama, being a non-drinker, would stay at home. He
always gave Mama reassurance by referring to whoever he'd been
visiting with the preface 'poor'. 'I just had a drink with poor little

85
Hopey,' or 'poor little Peggy,' as though his visit had been an act
of charity, when it was well-known that they were far from poor
in any conceivable sense, and Pa himself came home wearing a
look of well-being and satisfaction.
For some time, well into the 1930s, Pa was afflicted with a
plague of would-be Jackeroos. It was the English custom then to
despatch delinquent, profligate or otherwise undesirable young
male relatives to the colonies, to be licked into shape. My father's
friends and relations were delighted to find him connected to the
pastoral industry since most of the young men they wished to get
rid of were unsuited to anything but manual labour, and there was
no stigma attached to a period as a Jackeroo. There was also the
chance that if they were sent as far away as Australia they might
stay there or even, in the fullness of time, make good.
The average Jackeroo-to-be, however nasty his record had been
at Home, arrived in Australia with the fixed belief that he was doing
Australia a favour by setting foot on it. He seldom came with
adequate funds so he borrowed, and often failed to repay. He
found the locals and their customs ludicrous, and said so. He
thought the Australian accent barbaric, and was infuriated by the
fact that many Australians either rudely mimicked his own accent
or failed to understand a word he said. He invariably claimed to be
a superior horseman.
Any illusions Pa may have had about the British rejects were
dispelled by the first few samples. After that he kept them well
away from Sorrento, had them met at the boat and despatched to
one or other of the Queensland properties without delay, then
waited resignedly for nature to take its course. Queensland
stockmen were not fond of Pommie youth, especially the upmarket
kind who tended to patronise, and they cherished certain
rogue horses whose sole function was the initiation of Jackeroos.
Pa tried hard to stop this and spoke sternly to the managers about
it, but as the managers had to endure the Jackeroos in their houses
and at their tables they were inclined to turn a blind eye. Very few
of the young imports lasted a full month before they were more or

86
less seriously damaged and discouraged, and Pa would again be
faced with medical costs, and the embarrassment of informing their
family. He gave up accepting Jackeroos, well before the war
arrived and substituted military service for remittance.
The highlight visit of the Sorrento years was when Aunt Sheila
came to Australia, bringing Fanny and her own daughter, Aileen,
with her. Fanny was still magnificent, but her mind had started to flicker and fade like a faulty striplight, one moment blinding, the
next uncertain. She still dressed in the old manner, in long, dark
dresses with high collars, rather like Queen Mary, and it suited her.
Sheila, who was even taller than Fanny, with the same tip-tilted,
smiling mouth, adored her mother. She acted as a buffer when
Fanny's wit and intelligence turned to aggression and confusion,
and a pathetic search for help in a world growing increasingly
remote. No one but Sheila could have handled the changeling that
her mother had become, but at the same time they, and Aileen,
somehow made everything we did more vivid and happy than it
had ever been before.
They rented a small house in Melbourne because it was to be
a long visit, and we made room for them at weekends by some of
us, not Rose of course, sleeping on the floor. Rose was the only
person who wasn't enthusiastic about them; she was outraged by
Fanny, having never met a woman like her, and hopelessly jealous.
It was plain that we all adored Fanny, and that as grandmothers go
Rose came a distant second. Later on, when Fanny died in England,
Rose said with satisfaction, 'Now you'll have to fall back on me!'
and Jenny, in tears, glared at the diminutive figure and said, 'If we
do fall back on you I hope we bloody well squash you.'
Fanny flattered me by demanding my presence, but I think it
was because I was the only one who could be trusted not to blink
an eyelid, no matter how curious her behaviour became. She and
I were left alone one day when all the others went to Sorrento in
the car to shop. Fanny said, 'Let's go down to the beach,' so we
wandered down the cliff path, and along the jetty.
There was a yacht belonging to some friends moored about

87
forty yards off the end of the jetty, in deep water; it lived there
during the summer, and one got out to it and back in the dinghy.
I was fully dressed, and I knew that there was a strict rule about
not swimming beyond the end of the jetty, partly because of the
sharks, but also because of a notorious current which swept along
the shoreline down to the mouth of the Bay at ebb tide. Even
grown-ups were afraid of it. When Fanny said, 'Robin, I bet you
can't jump in and swim to that yacht,' it never occurred to me that
she knew nothing of sharks or the current, nor that she was
unqualified to judge what a small child could or couldn't do. All the
same I did say, 'I'm not allowed to.'
'Not allowed to? Go on, now. I'm daring you to.'
'I've got my clothes on.'
'You're frightened to. Robin, there's one thing you've got to
learn, never be frightened of anything. Now, get in with you.'
I jumped in and started swimming; I knew I swam all right for
my age, and it wasn't all that far. My clothes made me a bit heavy
but Fanny was giving loud shouts of approval, and I paddled on
happily until I realised that the yacht, far from getting closer, was
disappearing in the direction of Sorrento, and I was being swept
round the end of the Langford's pier.
It was an unforgettable feeling, something between being
bolted with by a horse and being a cork in a storm drain; at the time
I was travelling so fast, and my mouth was so full of water that I
was surprised rather than scared. By some miracle there was a
dinghy anchored in my path, and a man fishing; he grabbed me as
I went past, hauled me out, emptied the water from me and rowed
me back. Fanny was laughing; she patted me on the back and said,
'I told you you could do it, Robin. Just remember now, I was right.
You must never be afraid.'
The man who'd rescued me didn't seem amused and he waited
until the family came home, then told them what had happened.
Everyone was very gentle with Fanny who was still triumphant, but
I was never left alone with her again. She went on giving me advice
though, seeing me as unworked clay to be developed in the right

88
mould. We were at lunch one day when she said emphatically, and
out of the blue, 'Robin! You must never tell a lie!' There was instant
silence and attention, and coming from Fanny who, though no liar,
was the greatest decorator of the truth to come out of Ireland, it was
a show stopper. I looked at her with rapt attention, and Sheila gave
Mama a proud, possessive glance, delighted at this proof that her
mother was still a potent moral force.
'No, you must never tell a lie,' said Fanny, thoughtfully. 'It's too
damned hard to remember what you've said later on.'
She came and went from us on that visit like the sun suddenly
finding a gap in the clouds, or at other times like a bolt of lightning,
doing things she'd never have dreamed of doing when her mind
was whole. She loved fishing, and Sheila craved days in the boat
as a thirsty man craves water, so we had more fishing trips than ever
before. In the boat Fanny was a different person, and behaved
perfectly.
We took them to the Back Beach as often as we could, the
summer they were with us. The ocean coastline behind Portsea
runs clear from Point Nepean to Cape Shank at the mouth of
Westernport Bay, a pure, unbroken miracle of sea and sand with
never a mark on it, in those days, except for the footprints of the
sea and the gulls. These days that coast is a thinly-disguised suburb,
and to go there is like seeing the tiger you once saw in the jungle,
proud and free, caged in a zoo. There were no roads between
Portsea and the Back Beach then, only sand-tracks with deep,
hidden drifts which bogged a car to the axles, and the best way to
get there was to hire a horse and cart. When you hit deep sand the
horse pulled, and everyone got out to push.
Long before you reached the Back Beach you could tell that the
ocean was coming to meet you. The ti-tree scrub stopped standing
upright and began to lie flat against the sand as a tangled ground
cover, forced prone by the south-westerlies. At about the same time
as you noticed the submissive attitude of the trees you started to
feel a sound in your head, much like the sound when you hold a
shell to your ear. It grew in you with every yard you travelled,

89
majestic as thunder, constant as breathing, compelling as God,
meeting you full force as you topped the last high dune in a flurry
of wind and sand, proving that the greatest voice of all in this world
is the voice of the sea. The beach stretched away forever with its
high-tide collar of kelp, and towards Point Nepean there rose
massive, lonely, time-eroded pinnacles of rock, survivors of an
older coastline, still standing breast-to-sea like centurions left to
face an enemy's charge.
At high tide, on days of storm, the breakers hurled themselves
in against the rocks like savages, the spray flew up higher than the
tops of the dunes, the wind tore the breath from you and the sea
roar broke you into small pieces. On benign, sunny days when the
tide was out, you could see the whole smiling length of the beach,
its border of reef exposed and the waves rolling shoreward, docile
and ordered as the fringe of a white silk shawl, all the blue and
white and green and gold melting into a mist of distance. On those
days we jumped from the top of the dunes and skidded down
through the sand to the beach, hunted under stones, dived and
speared fish in the rock pools of the reef and surfed, lying flat on
heavy wooden surfboards. There were sandy breaks in the reef
where you could paddle out on your board to catch the waves as
they came in, and we knew which gaps were safe, and which to
avoid.
There was a certain amount of rivalry between Mama and Aunt
Sheila in the matter of surfing. Mama felt that as an Australian she
should be the expert but Sheila, who was not a naturally agile
person, and came from the non-aquatic climate of Ireland into the
bargain, took to it like an over-sized dolphin. She was a head taller
than Mama, and thanks to the Irish passion for consuming food,
especially bread and cakes, at all opportunities between and
during meals, she weighed a lot. Mama, on the other hand, was
stout rather than fat, but quite amazingly solid. She had the solidity
of granite rather than flesh, and although Pa often teased her she
was proud of it.
Surfing may have been primitive compared to the art-form it has

90
become, but it was far from risk-free. The boards were made from
solid wood, not fibreglass; it took all an adult's strength to lift one,
and if one lost one's board in a wave and it fell on someone else
the damage could be severe.
Apart from the boards the Back Beach itself was tricky; there
were no flags and no life savers to tell you where it was safe to go.
The area we favoured was to claim the life of a Prime Minister,
Harold Holt, who unaccountably challenged it in adverse conditions.
We had enormous respect for the state of the weather, tide
and undertow, and there were not too many days when all three
behaved properly.
It was, however, on just such a blithe, long-promised day that
Mama proved her supremacy in the surf. The waves were high,
strong and uncomplicated, the tide was right, and even I was
untroubled by the undertow. Mama and Sheila struggled out with
their boards, discreetly bathing-suited in the fashion of the day to
conceal all the curves and hollows of their sex. The gap in the rocks
where they were surfing was not very wide, but the waves rolled
through it evenly; they paddled their boards out again and again,
and from the beach one could sense there was a contest.
Everyone knows about the seventh wave. It is higher, stronger
and more difficult than the six before it, and sometimes it behaves
very strangely indeed. Mama and Sheila were too fired up to bother
about counting, and they launched themselves on what was
obviously a potential dumper. They hovered in clear view on its
crest clutching the prows of their boards, then there was a smother
of foam, both boards hurtled skywards, and apart from an
occasional arm or leg we saw neither surfer until they were washed
up on the sand.
Mama got up straight away, and she was laughing. Sheila
heaved about in the shallows, clearly distressed, and everyone,
including Mama, rushed to her side. When we lifted her up and
examined her we were horrified. One eye was purple and closing
rapidly, her nose was bleeding, she was winded and various bits
of her were turning black. Mama was distraught. She cried, 'Sheila,

91
Sheila, did my board hit you?' and Sheila, mopping, gasping and
spitting, fixed Mama with her one open eye.
'Board be damned!' she said. 'It was you I ran into, Aileen, I
could see your bathers when I hit you. And I hope to God I never
do it again.'
We examined Mama closely, but she didn't have a mark on her.

92
14

Camels



SHEILA TOOK her mother and daughter Home at the end of
the summer, and we never saw Fanny again. Our parents
knew it would be the last time, and we sensed it; when they
left the winter seemed to settle round us, even though the sun was
still warm. Perhaps there was more to the premature threat of
winter than their leaving; the big changes in life have a way of
warning you, an unease, a prickling of the nerve-ends of the mind,
long before the event itself happens. The Haven was getting ready
to let us go, to spill us out like fledglings from a nest. It had cared
for us for five years and it was tired of us. All the same it allowed
us one more treasure before we left, because that winter was the
winter of the camels, and Abdul Mohammed.
He had been a fixture on the Sorrento beach in summer for far
longer than we had been at The Haven, materialising with his
horses and camels at the beginning of the summer holidays,
turbaned, bearded and smiling, with only enough English to
conduct the business of selling rides. He lived in a small tent on a
piece of wasteland with the animals grazing round him, bothering
no one, and when the sunnier ended he vanished overnight. He
was part of the seasonal scenery, and nobody greeted him or said
goodbye, or noticed when he began to move like an old man, and
his beard turned white.
Pa used to go and talk to him when he was at home in rapid,
fluent Urdu. The old man regarded this as miraculous, having been
starved of his own language for years, and he revered Pa as a minor
God. Pa came home after one of their get-togethers and addressed
Mama in the honeyed tones which always meant that he had done

93
something which might not meet with approval.
He said, 'Darling, I've just been talking to old Abdul Mohammed
down on the beach.'
'Oh, the old Afghan,' said Mama. 'Yes, he's a nice old thing, if
only he didn't smell so frightful.'
'I knew you'd like him. Doesn't he remind you of those old
camel-drivers in Peshawar? You used to say the camels were
beautiful too, didn't you?'
'Did I?' said Mama. She looked at him suspiciously. 'Why?'
'Well, he's getting very old, Abdul Mohammed. I hadn't really
noticed until today. He said it's a bit much for him, taking the
camels up North for the winter. Actually, he thought he might
winter down here to be ready for next summer, and it crossed my mind that there's that loft over the stables. He could live there and
cook all his own meals, and the camels and horses'd keep the grass
down while I'm in Queensland. Lovely things, camels, and the
children could learn to ride them.'
' YES.' 'we said, as one.
'Oh dear,' said Mama. 'Oh Geoff, how could you!'
When they arrived, swaying down the Lane in single file like a
Biblical painting, Abdul Mohammed burbling reassurance to the
camels in their own language, and he had installed himself with
immaculate discretion in the loft, even Mama was won over. Abdul
Mohammed chopped the wood, tended the garden, and bowed
low whenever Mama appeared; more importantly he taught us the
magic of camels. The new arrivals folded themselves down into our
buffalo grass with many benign grunts and rumbling approval.
They surveyed the garden through huge, liquid eyes, shadowed by
Odalisque lashes, and they touched our arms and hands with lips
of shorn velvet to show their gratitude. Only their breath was vile,
and one learned to avoid an open mouth as one avoids the yawn
of a garlic addict.
We were never conscious of the language barrier with Abdul
Mohammed. He taught us to ride the camels, and because there
were three of them I was allowed to ride too. He would mount one

94
of his horses and we would pad up the road to Sorrento in line
astern, turn right into the main street and along it looking down our
noses, idiot-proud in our camel-given glory. We rode past the
cottages with their garden gnomes, aloof as the camels themselves
when people giggled and pointed at us. Jenny knew for certain that
she was an Arabian Princess and Betty looked like a Valkyrie, and
I was in bliss beyond thought.
When we reached the Sorrento ocean beach Abdul Mohammed
would crack his stockwhip, and shout high-pitched camel commands.
The camels hardly needed to be told; they loved every
minute of it, and they would take off with us to the far end of the
beach, their heads high and their stride so long and smooth that at
the peak of each one you left the saddle and floated in mid-air,
connected to the camel only by your grip on the saddle horn.
Because my legs were so short Abdul Mohammed always tied me
to the saddle but The Girls rode free; dark, Arabic Jenny and Betty
with a yard of golden hair streaming, Abdul Mohammed on his
horse singing in soprano Urdu and all of us, the camels too, drunk
with joy.
When the summer came Abdul Mohammed left us. One
morning he and the camels and the horses had gone, and the loft
was as though he had never been there. The next time we went to
the Village we saw that the camels were back on the beach, and
his tent on its usual piece of wasteland. He was behaving as a bird
does, or an animal, in obedience to the seasons, and he hadn't the
words to explain. It was soon after he left us that our Sorrento world
started to fall apart.
It happened when Mama and Pa were both away; Rose was
working placidly on yet another crocheted rug, and Rob was in
charge. We had shaken down with her by then, drawn and
accepted the invisible boundaries that made coexistence possible.
She made it her business to be helpful to Mama, and certainly she
taught us more than Mike could have done, if Mike had stayed.
Unfortunately, when Mama was away, Rob felt it her duty to
supervise our leisure and even, at times, to join in.

95
Cedric had been given a new bicycle for his birthday. He
brought it straight over to show us; he was wildly excited, and
fishing was obviously going to take second place for a while. We
inspected it with awe. It had gears, and thin, delicate tyres, and the
paintwork was so beautiful it dazzled. He took it up to the high
point of the garden near the Langford's fence and whizzed down
past us with the speed of light. Betty had a turn, and then Jenny,
and Rob, who had been shouting strange things like 'Bravo!' and
'Hurrah!' said, 'Come on, Ceddie, give me a turn.'
He looked at her in disbelief, for Rob must have weighed
fourteen stone as well as being grey-haired, and said,
'YercarnridabikecanyerRob?'
'Of course I can, Ceddie, I used to ride one to school. Don't be
mean.'
'Yertoobig.'
'Don't be such a rude boy!' Rob turned an ugly shade of pink.
'Its a big bike. You must learn to share, Cedric. Give it to me!'
We watched her wheel it up to the top of the slope, Cedric
turning white with anxiety for his bicycle, and the rest of us
speechless with wonder. She heaved herself into the saddle,
grasped the handlebars and pushed off, weaving a snakelike
course down the hill. As she passed Cedric she was going at high
speed, and his nerve broke. He yelled, 'The wheel's buckling!' and
flung himself in front of the bike.
Rob looped the loop in slow motion, and the bicycle somersaulted
away from her. She lay so still that we all knew, deep and
inescapable, that this was something beyond our fixing. Jenny
fetched a rug, covered her, and stayed with her while Betty and
Cedric telephoned the Brights who telephoned the doctor, and
came straight round in their car. When they saw Rob they went
white too.
The doctor arrived and they got her into the back of his car, still
unconscious. There were no ambulances in Sorrento then. The
Brights got in touch with Mama in Melbourne, and stayed with us
until she came home. None of us talked much.

96
Rob had a fractured skull, and we never saw her again; no one
told us whether or not she had died and we were afraid to ask, but
we all believed that we had killed her. It was a long time before
Mama happened to say that she'd heard from Rob, and that she was
well again, and by that time The Girls and Cedric had suffered
agonies of guilt. Pa was summoned from Queensland straight after
it happened, and he and Mama talked interminably behind closed
doors while we snapped at each other in the schoolroom, and Rose
shut herself in her bedroom. Cedric, for once, was in solitary
confinement at home, with the wreckage of the bicycle.
When our parents finally talked to us they had the unmistakable
air of people with momentous news. We were to move to
Melbourne, they said, and The Haven would be sold. The Girls
would go to boarding-school until we could rent a house in town,
after which they would be daygirls. We wouldn't buy a house
because, after all, one of these days we'd probably go Home to
England. In a year or so Robin would go to school too, but in the
meantime she would have a governess. Yes, we would take Trixie.
No, not the possums. No, not the lizards, no, not the Jack, it would
be sold. There would be lots of things for us to do in town, and
anyway The Girls would be far too busy at school to think about
dinghies or possums.
Sorrento would have had to end sometime anyway. It's an
accepted fact that Eden and innocence were finite, but I wonder
whether Adam and Eve realised when they left there, any more
than we did leaving The Haven, what they were going to and what
they were leaving behind. The chances are that they were very like
us, witless children idealising the future, and assuring each other
that they'd outgrown the old place anyway.
We went round everything to say goodbye without really
believing it was finished. Somehow we thought it would all stay
with us, the Bay in the early morning, devilish or diamond-bright,
the texture of wet sand on bare feet, the breath and heartbeat of
water and pines. We walked our old paths along the cliff, bordered
with ti-tree and festooned with periwinkles where the butterflies

97
danced through filtered bars of sunlight, and we were bemused by
the myth that the grass could be greener in a different place.
The Girls truly believed it would be greener; they were silly with
excitement because the curtain was about to go up on the real
world. Betty could see her future brood of angelic, golden-haired
children more clearly defined; the image of their father was still
unimportant, but she knew she would recognise him instantly
when she found him. She declared that she would be an artist
between school and motherhood. Jenny smouldered sexily, one
moment Mata Hari and the next Florence Nightingale. Mama chose
to ignore Mat* Hari but was enthusiastic about Florence Nightingale.
She said she had always wanted to be a nurse herself.
Personally I was not so sure about the grass being greener in
other places. I went down to my cave in the cliff to sulk, suspecting
that the glittering prizes The Girls looked forward to might not be
mine. I couldn't conceive of any other world than The Haven, and
I wanted to stay.
The Girls wandered about together arm in arm, singing their
dreamtimes of the future in their separate minds, and their favourite
song of that moment in exultant duet. It was Massenet's Elegie, learnt during our three-days-French-a-week, sad and haunting
even when they sang it with joy, and for them, poor Girls,
prophetic.

Je ne voisplus le del bleu,
Je n 'entend plus
Les chants joyeux des oiseaux...

98
PART TWO

99
15

Melbourne



IT WAS AUTUMN when we drove off up the Lane for the last
time, a scuddy, showery day with a pale sea. The fruit trees and
the figtree were bare of leaves and house had closed,
uncurtained windows; it wore the expressionless look of a corpse
carefully laid out by an undertaker. A van left earlier with all our
things, the last item to go being the chair Rose had sat on
throughout, ignoring the chaos. Deprived of the chair she allowed
herself to be led to the car and got into the front seat beside Mama.
Trixie and I got into the back, and the engine drowned out the last
sound of sea and pines. Mama kept telling me what fun it would
be in town until both Trixie and I fell asleep.
Our first rented house was in Grange Road on the corner close
to Toorak village. It had roses in the garden, and red-brick paths
with daisies growing between the bricks, and after The Haven it
seemed enormous, but like all houses that don't own you it had no
soul. It did, however, have a lot of surprises.
There was a large van outside when we arrived, but not the one
which had taken the things from Sorrento. Inside the house there
were strange chairs and tables and large, mysterious chests against
the walls. Mama immediately started telling the men from the van
where to put things, Rose earmarked an armchair by the fireplace
and sat in it, and I was too astonished even to ask questions.
Everything was utterly different to The Haven, highly polished and
rich-looking, and when the chests were unpacked amazing things
came out of them, pictures and silver and china that I'd never seen
before.
The Girls had been boarding at Dothegirls's Hall since the


101
beginning of the school year, waiting for us to move to town, and
they came home for our first weekend. I'd never seen them in their
school uniforms and they looked alien; they talked of matters
beyond my understanding, and I was in awe of them. To my
surprise they went round the house picking up the silver and the
ornaments and patting the furniture as though they were old
friends. When I was brave enough I asked Jenny where it had all
come from, and she said, 'Don't be an idiot, it's been in store ever
since we came from India. There wasn't room for it at Sorrento.
You're too young to remember.' I asked where the Sorrento things
were, if they were in store, and Mama said, 'They've been sold,
most of them weren't worth keeping.' It was disturbing, as though
besides moving we'd become different people, people my parents
and sisters knew and were comfortable with, but I was a stranger.
Everything was different, especially the sounds and smells of
Town. The sounds were exciting at first, keeping you awake at
night; the whine of trams pulling themselves uphill, the clop of
milk-cart horses in the morning, the swish of tyres on wet roads and
the distant rumble of trains, but you got used to them, and then you
found yourself listening for the old, lost sounds. The smells were
more complex, and satisfying after a place that smelled overwhelmingly
of sea. Autumn, when we moved, was a mixture of
wood-smoke and leaf-mould, mown grass, wet pavements and
dog-turds, all of which are very pungent when you are small and
close to the ground. The house smelled different too; instead of salt
and sea it was steeped in toast and Sunday roast and furniture
polish.
There were days when Mama took me into the City with her to
go shopping, always hatted and gloved and dressed as she'd never
been at Sorrento. There were cable trams in Bourke Street with
clanging bells, and brewers' drays pulled by huge, arch-necked
horses, and paper-boys with voices like Cedric's who yelled, 'PipurPipun'. Readallaboutit!' and more people than there had
been shells on the morning beach. I had a recurring foetal dream
in which I was curled up small on the edge of the pavement,

102
menaced by a forest of moving legs which always missed me, as
though I wasn't there at all.
The Girls became daygirls after their first term at Dothegirls Hall
and were at home most of the time, but they had grown up so much
that I was invisible to them unless I did something wrong. I was
considered too young for school, and I was farmed out to share a
governess with the children of some friends of Mama's and Pa's.
They were very clever children who had been intellectually
stimulated since birth by parents who had advanced ideas about
child-raising; I was light years behind them educationally, and our
personalities clashed like Salvation Army cymbals. When they
wanted to read a dictionary I wanted to climb a tree, and when I
did climb a tree they ran to tell their mother, and there were long,
reasoned lectures about improving my mind.
We moved to another house, in South Yarra, a two-storey house
with a bigger garden, and I shared a governess with two other girls
who lived across the road. They had brilliant red hair and freckles,
and they were terribly clever too; they tied me to trees and beat me
with ropes, and I dreaded going there in the mornings.
We moved back to Toorak, to Kooyong Road, and this was an
improvement. The house was dark but there were good climbing
trees in the garden, and a messy patch at the back where I was
allowed to keep two pet ducks. More importantly, from my point
of view, I started school. The governess-sharers were all starting
school too, so there was no alternative. I was pleased about it
because, naively, I thought there would be safety in numbers
The Girls were responding to their new life by expanding like
the Japanese paper flowers you could buy then. These were
nondescript pieces of paper until you dropped them into a glass
of water when they unfolded themselves, changed colour, and
became lilies or chrysanthemums or roses. The Girls were doing
the same thing gradually, but you could notice it happening. Betty
was almost ready to do her School Leaving exams which no one
expected her to pass, and no one cared. It was clearly her fate to
charm and decorate, and the odds against her having to earn her

103
living as a lone spinster were very long. Art school would be a
perfect way for her to fill in her time before marriage, though Mama
made wistful references to Finishing Schools, and the benefits of
speaking perfect French. Betty sailed gently, beautifully above it
all, oblivious of the effect she had on people, and fitted in with
whatever anyone else wanted.
Jenny, having decided to be a nurse, was obsessed with
becoming one as soon as possible. She wasn't particularly brilliant
at school so she worked twice as hard as the rest of her age group.
Her friendships were spasmodic and fiery, while Betty's were
placid and long-lasting; increasingly, in every way, they ran on
different tracks. When Betty was lying in the sun, chatting with a
couple of her friends, Jenny was swotting in her room or else
stretched on her bed in some fierce, personal fantasy while the
gramophone played one of the sexier songs of the day. Mama
adored Betty, but she was awed and intoxicated by Jenny. She
could appreciate Betty and understand her, and she absorbed the
nice things said about her through the very pores of her skin, but
Jenny was special to Mama, her own frustrated dreams made flesh.
It was impossible, in Mama's eyes, for Jenny to do wrong, and
disastrously she built Jenny into a kind of saint, with the gift of
immortality attached.
We moved to St Georges Road, close enough to school for me
to ride there on a bicycle. The first term was distilled culture-shock,
and my teachers probably thought me retarded because I was
permanently open-mouthed. I had never seen so many children
together at one time, all flocking to bells and roll-calls, and all
sticking their hands in the air every time they were asked a question
or wanted to pee. I wasn't required to learn much that term, but
I did have my first lesson in anti-Semitism, Australian-style, and was
frightened by it.
It happened just before Easter. There were about twenty small
girls in my class and we were having Divinity which occurred with
great regularity, and which concerned God and Jesus about whom
I knew next to nothing. There was a girl called Dorothy in the class.

104
She was round and pretty, with enormous dark eyes and long, thick
plaits, and it happened that she lived next door to us in St Georges
Road, although I'd never spoken to her there. Our parents didn't
know each other, but I'd heard Mama say that she was the
granddaughter of someone who was very famous.
The Divinity mistress was a large lady, fitting into her clothes
like an over-upholstered armchair. She spoke with exaggerated
care, overdoing her 'h's' and whistling through her teeth when she
said 's'. She was carrying on about Easter, how it was both a sad
time because He died for us and a happy time because He rose
again, and suddenly she stopped and stared directly at Betty
Bennett.
'But not for Dorothy, of course,' she said. 'Dorothy can't be
happy because our Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead.' We all
turned to look at Dorothy, who went red.
'Who can tell me why?' asked the Divinity mistress, smiling
brightly, 'Who can tell me why Betty can't feel happy about our
Lord rising from the dead?'
There was silence while Dorothy's dark head sank almost to the
desk top. 'Would you like to leave the room, Dorothy? No? Well,
someone tell me. You've all been in my class long enough to know
the answer. Thank you, Margaret. Stand up and let us all hear.'
A child at the back of the room had her hand up. She rose to
her feet and said smugly, 'Please Miss, because Dorothy's one of
the Christ killers.'
'That's right, dear. Dorothy's a Jew, and it was the Jews who
killed our Lord Jesus Christ. And at Easter we rejoice because of His
resurrection, but of course the Jews don't because that's when they
killed Him Dorothy, if you're going to cry like that you'd better go
to the cloakroom. Wash your face before you come back, dear, and
blow your nose. Now girls.
It worried me even though I couldn't understand it, and I told
Mama about it when I got home. She looked uncomfortable and
said, 'That's dreadful, but a lot of people are a bit funny about Jews,
darling. You'll understand when you're older.' I remembered

105
Jenny saying that our Cohn relations were Jewish, and I said, 'But
the Cohns are Jewish, aren't they, and Granny Whiting? Does that
make us Jewish too? Are we Christ killers?' Mama went pink and
said, 'It's not the same thing at all! You're only quarter Jewish, and
your father's family... don't talk nonsense!'
'Well, can Dorothy come over and play with me sometimes?
She's only just next door.'
'I don't think so, darling, we don't really know her parents, and
I'm sure she has her own friends.'
Life was full of mysterious taboos, maintained but unexplained
by Mama. I*was virtually an only child by then, because The Girls
were so much older, and like all children I formed brief but
passionate friendships at school. I couldn't understand why some
of my friends were allowed to come to play with me at home while
others were rejected. Sometimes I'd appeal to Pa and he'd say, 'Do
as your mother tells you,' and she'd say, 'Don't bother your father.
There are plenty of other girls you can play with, but always ask
me first.'
Mama worried about social contamination and her friends all
worried about it too, clinging to the cooling body of a dead class
system, and pretending that it was alive and well. It wasn't
snobbery based on money or titles, but on style and accents and
manners, on the use of certain words and phrases and the
avoidance of others that were 'common', and it enabled Mama and
her like to recognise each other instantly. If we had grown up in
England, we were given to understand, the nuances of such things
would have come to us naturally, but in Australia one couldn't be
too careful. And yet Mama could be gentle and kind and loving to
the very poor, to the waifs and strays, the freakish and rejected. It
was the over-genteel and the pretentious who appalled her.
The Girls and I were scarcely on speaking terms by then, the age
gap between an eight year-old and an eighteen year-old or a fifteen
year-old being far greater than any other age gap in the average lifespan,
so we didn't discuss the family's social hang-ups. They must
have been expected to conform, just as I was, and Betty would

106
have done so willingly, without a second thought. She was leaving
school by then, having failed her Leaving Exams, and was gliding
onwards to life's next stage, swanlike and serene. She drove
Mama's friends with less exemplary daughters into paroxysms of
envy because she seemed indifferent to all the things their
daughters craved, boyfriends, clothes and jewellery. Because of
her beauty she should have loved such things, and they found it
unnatural.
Most of Betty's friends were like her, tall, strong and good
looking. The main difference between them and Betty was that
they, her inferiors in terms of looks, were all acutely conscious of
what they wore whereas Betty was a sartorial mess. Her skirts hung
down behind and rose above her knees in front, her hair was never
set and she couldn't be bothered with make-up. The result, in those
days of lacquered lips, crimped hair and corseted waists was
sensationally different. She had full, sensual lips, her eyes were
somehow sad, and the general effect was of a lost, yearning waif
from another world crying out for rescue. She roused unrequited
passion among the young men of her group who never realised
that she hardly noticed them. She was waiting for the one person
for whom she knew she was destined, the future father of her
twenty children.
Jenny, on the other hand, was drawn irresistibly to make-up,
clothes, and the full Hollywood-sophisticate image of the thirties.
She was plump, like Mama, and hated it, seeing herself ideally as
a whippet-thin, a mysterious, svelte creature designed for champagne
and dim-lit night-clubs and seduction. This vision was hard
to maintain in front of a mirror, but she kept on looking, in hope.
It would be even harder during her nursing training, dressed in a
shapeless uniform, lisle stockings and clumpy shoes, but she was
determined to be a nurse, and bullied her private self-image into
second place.
Even at fifteen Jenny was intrigued by sex. She must have heard
about it at school, since it was never mentioned in our household,
and the nearest Mama could bring herself to sex instruction was to

107
say, in a voice of strangled distaste, 'You must never let a man touch
you Down There!' This led me to believe for years that there was
something filthy and shameful about a woman's body Down
There, and to regard my own Down There with the utmost distrust.
Betty simply dismissed the whole matter, vaguely assuming that all
her conceptions would be immaculate, and anyway she had no
intention of letting anyone touch her until the pre-ordained father
of her children slipped the ring on her finger. Jenny, recognising
the uselessness of asking Mama, pursued her own enquiries
elsewhere, generously bringing home information and passing it
on to Betty„ who thought she was disgusting. Occasionally I'd
overhear an instruction session from my own room.

Jenny: '.. .and then the man gets on top and the girl opens her
legs and...'
Betty: 'Shut up! Shut up! I don't believe you! I don't want to
know!'
Jenny: You'll have to know one day.'
Betty: 'No I won't! You're filthy, you're making it up.'
Listening on the other side of the bedroom wall I thought that
she was making it up too; it sounded like some kind of silly game,
but I couldn't work out why Betty thought it was filthy.
We were shaped, as children, by the attitudes of our mother's
generation, and these stayed in some hidden corner of our minds,
even after we had grown up and found them to be false. Sex was
a forbidden subject, a mystery hinted at only in the most negative
way. The legacy of Mama's attitude to sex gave me, and almost
certainly my sisters as well, a disastrous tendency to link sex with
guilt. Jenny rebelled against the guilt-factor from the beginning,
instinctively knowing it was wrong.
The Girls and I weren't unique; Mama's views were widely held
at the time, and most of our friends had been brought up on the
same principles. The War would liberate our generation to a large
extent; we thought we were truly emancipated after the war, and
our parents were scandalised. Then came the Pill, and the
revelation that sex needn't result in pregnancy and disgrace. On

108
top of that the massive sexual revolution which followed in the
1960s made our imagined freedom of the war and post-war years
seem pathetically restrictive.
Mama remained blind to every one of the changes in sexual
standards and behaviour that took place during her lifetime. For
her they simply didn't exist, and she would have been incapable
of believing that her favourite daughter was to become, all too
briefly, one of their pioneers.

109
16

Horses and snakes



EVEN BEFORE WE MOVED to St. Georges Rd. I'd done what
innumerable boring little girls do, and become half horse.
The fat pony at Sorrento had lingered in my mind as a prime
object of desire, and I nagged about it. Pa found it difficult to teach
me to shoot and fish in town, so when Mama heard about a riding
school run by a woman in St Kilda he approved, and Mama took
me off to inspect it. There were stables in the inner suburbs then
and Albert Park had a riding track round the Lake, doubling back
along Queen's Road beside the golf course. There was a tan track
too, running round three sides of the Botanical Gardens, and
considered much more fashionable than Albert Park.
Hena Kemp's stables were tucked away at the end of a cobbled
lane, and when we finally found them we were greeted by a small,
bow-legged woman of uncertain age. She had the battered remains
of good looks, periwinkle-blue eyes and her hair, petrified by
peroxide, stuck outwards stiffly, like dried grass. She addressed
Mama in tones of terrifying refinement, only marred by a complete
absence of H's. We were shown the hacks in their boxes, elderly,
obese animals who seemed wise, benign and pampered. She took
a pony into the yard, saddled it and put me on its back to walk it
round saying, loud enough for me to hear, 'She sits right. She'll
make a rider when I've 'ad 'er for a while, don't you worry.' I almost
fainted with pride.
I spent more of my childhood with Kempie than at home, saw
her boozed, eccentric, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed, loved her
and feared her. I graduated from pupil to apprentice, happily
arriving at her stable every holiday morning to do the early dirty

110
work in return for unlimited riding.
All the time we lived in St Georges Road I was drearily,
compulsively horsey which must have been very boring for my
family, except that it kept me out of the way most of the time, when
I wasn't at school. Our house had a tennis court, and The Girls had
taken to tennis parties. Mixed doubles were a feature of the
weekends, the mixture being drawn largely from Betty's friends
and admirers. Her height, which was just on six feet, didn't seem
to be a deterrent to very short men, and there were always one or
two who hardly came above her midriff, but made up for their lack
of height with great overdoses of ardour. Betty would give them
the same dazzling smile that she gave to the Tarzans, and an equal
lack of attention to their ambitions.
There was one young man whom Jenny and I approved of
wholeheartedly because he was a snake-lover, and for a time it
seemed that Betty might even be vaguely interested in him. He
came from the Riverina, he was tall and good-looking, and when
he came to Melbourne he used to stay at Illawarra, a big, ornate
boarding establishment in a Crescent opposite us. It was a rather
gloomy, up-market place, fully of highly respectable old people
whose families used it as a sort of nursing home.
George was hardly there except for breakfast, but he seldom
travelled without a selection of his snakes, mostly lethal, bundled
up together in a chaff bag. He was never really happy without
them, and because his passion for reptiles was so great he couldn't
understand that not everyone felt the same way.
One night he failed to tie the neck of the chaff bag properly and
the snakes took to the panelled, carpeted corridors of Illawarra,
searching for the sheltering grass and rocks of their home. In fear
and confusion they glided through open doorways and took
refuge, curled up under massive pieces of Victorian furniture.
George woke in the morning to find his chaff bag empty, had a
hideous vision of aged feet poking into snake-filled slippers, or
innocent old hands reaching under the bed for a chamber pot with
fatal results, and knew he had to tell the Management.

Ill
The Management was incredulous at first, and George had to
locate one of the snakes under a hall-stand to convince them; then
they went berserk. The Police were called, the residents were
woken up and told to stay in their beds at all costs and the reason
for doing so, and their next-of-kin were summoned to be on hand
for death by snakebite or the even more probable heart-attack.
George crawled through room after room dragging his sack after
him, restoring snakes to its depths and trying to remember how
many he'd actually brought with him. His affinity with snakes was
so strong that they had no fear of him, and actually seemed to like
him handling-them.
George wasn't arrested, partly because no one could think of
a suitable charge and partly because the Management was desperate
to hush the whole thing up. None of the residents had a stroke
or a heart attack, and though their relatives went through the
conventional motions of outrage none seemed keen to take their
old people away with them. George spent the day in the missionary
position, checking and rechecking to see that not a snake had been
overlooked, and was told in gruesome detail what the Management
would do if they ever laid eyes on him again. Then he came over
the road to us for the night with his bag of snakes. Pa was
enchanted when he heard the story and wanted to give the snakes
a bowl of milk and some exercise in the laundry, but Mama said,
'Over my dead body!' She was never really a snake person.
The next day was a Sunday, and The Girls had a tennis party,
which was the reason for George's visit. It was lovely weather,
warm and sunny and perfect for watching tennis in the garden. For
some reason I wasn't welded to the back of a horse but sitting on
the lawn, observing my elders and betters at play.
There were about ten young men and women there that day,
and among them a short, bumptious, irritating suitor of Betty's
whom we all thought she could well do without. He lived close by
and was constantly underfoot, almost literally so as his head came
only to the level of her bosom.
George had brought his snake sack out of the house with him

112
and put it in the shade, under a tree. The short young man was on
the court, partnering Betty; he kept shouting inane things at their
opponents, and quite blatantly showing off. I saw George get up
and go over to his sack, open the neck and pull out a robust
looking black snake. He retied the sack, cradled the snake gently
in his arms, then walked over to the sweater which the little man
had thrown on the grass when he went onto the court. For a
moment or two George occupied himself with the sweater and
then quietly went back to where he'd been sitting. Nobody but me
had taken any notice of what he'd been doing.
The game finished and the foursome came off, the little man still
making a lot of unnecessary noise. He picked up his sweater and
started to put it on. Through its neck appeared a black, diamond
shaped head followed by a yard or so of shining black body; there
was an unearthly scream as the sweater was thrown into the air,
and its owner vanished rapidly up the drive.
'Sorry,' said George, expertly retrieving the snake. 'Must've got
out when I wasn't looking. Very quiet bloke, this. Wouldn't have
hurt him, but he left before I could say so. Sorry, Mrs Walker.'
I heard The Girls talking in their room later. Jenny said, 'You
ought to marry George, Betty. He was brilliant, getting rid of Stewie
like that.'
'D'you mean George did it on purpose? He said the snake got
out.'
'Oh, for heaven's sake! George is mad about you and was
behaving like an idiot . Don't you ever see what's going on?'
'Yes - I mean no!' said Betty. 'Nothing's going on. I like them
both, quite, but I don't think they're keen on me. Why should they
be?'
George didn't marry Betty, he married someone else, and
someone else again after that. I think Pa was sorry, being a snake
man himself, but Mama was relieved; the thought of a son-in-law
perpetually arriving to stay with a bag of snakes must have terrified
her.

113
The St Georges Road house had a big garden, and we accumulated
animals almost without noticing. Most of them slept together in the
laundry and came on regular walks together; when we took the
whole pack down the road cars swerved, and the neighbours
objected. We had Trixie, now grown old and fat, two cocker
spaniels, Moses the magpie, two ducks, Aaron, my pet bantam
cock, two cats and an orphan lamb I'd picked up on a visit to the
country. Walking them was a bit troublesome because there was
always one or another of them loitering and having to be rounded
up, but they all insisted on coming and enjoyed themselves. We
though the accusation that it lowered the tone of St Georges Road
was unjustified.
Because The Girls had defected to the adult world the animals
were my family. Aaron, the bantam cock, rode on the handlebars
of my bicycle wherever I went, including to school, where he spent
the day in a little basket beside my desk, so perfectly behaved that
no one objected. Moses the Magpie imitated our voices so well that
even the dogs came when he called, and snarled at him because
they'd been made to look silly. He dragged the newspapers into
the house for us in the morning, had a sip of sherry at drink time
in the evening, and swooned flat on his back with emotion, his eyes
closed, whenever one of us was good enough to play his favourite
record, 'Oh For the Wings of a Dove'.
It was a good house, the St Georges Road house, a place you
remember for the sunshine and not for the shadows, busy with
animals and people, and of all our houses the closest we would
ever come to the days at The Haven.

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17

Boarding schools



IT WAS AT ST GEORGES ROAD that our parents suddenly
announced that they were going away on a trout-fishing
holiday together. Pa had taught Mama to fly-fish in India, and
for heaven knows how long they must have been wanting a fishing
holiday together, but Pa had been too busy. They said that they had
hired a caravan, that Anne, our Irish maid would look after us and
Rose, and that they'd be away for ten days. I declared stridently that
I wanted to go too, and The Girls told me to shut up.
Mama said, 'You'll be at school anyway. Betty's going to be in
charge of you at home, and you're to do exactly as she tells you,
no arguments. Jenny'll keep an eye on you at school, and you're
not to make a nuisance of yourself when they have their friends
round. It's only for ten days.'
Betty was far too nice to be really heavy-handed with me but
she took the responsibility seriously; she may even have been
practising for her own children later on. She wanted everything
done on the instant, room-tidying, tooth-cleaning, homework and
so on, and she kept saying, 'Remember what Mama said, Robin, do
what you're told and don't argue.' She and Jenny took the
opportunity to have a great many of their friends round, and when
they came I was sent to my room or out into the garden.
Resentment grew in me like a cancer.
One night when Betty told me to go to bed I said, 'No!' She told
me again and I ignored her. She went on telling me, her voice
getting higher and higher, and when I looked at her she was red
in the face, almost in tears.
'Don't be an ass, Betty,' said Jenny, in a bored voice. 'Belt her.'

115
'I can't.'
'Well, I can. Give me that hairbrush.'
She bent me over, stripped down my pants and laid into me. I
roared, and Betty wept. When she'd finished Jenny said, 'Now, get
to bed, damn you.' I sat firmly on my stinging backside and said,
'No!' For the first time in my life I was determined to see how far
I could go.
They carried me to bed between them, biting, kicking and
swearing at them and inflicting quite satisfactory damage. They
must have told Pa and Mama about it when they came home. Pa
went back to*Queensland, but Mama called me into her room in
the voice that I knew meant serious business.
She said, 'Robin, your father and I have decided it's time you
went to boarding school.'
I thought for a moment and said, 'What about riding?'
'You can ride in the holidays. We've put you down for The
Hermitage in Geelong, and you start next term.'
'But I don't want to be a boarder. The Girls weren't boarders
except for one term. Why can't I stay at Dothegirls Hall?'
'Because we say so,' said Mama. When she said that one knew
that no argument, however reasoned, would help. 'The Girls are
growing up and they want to have their own friends round. You're
a nuisance, and it's not fair to them.'
I covered the whole range of self-pity and sulks until new
uniforms and Mama's fictitious stories of The Hermitage's virtues
distracted me. It was, she told me, a haven of leniency, tree
climbing, delicious meals and other delights, barely interrupted by
tenderly taught lessons. The girls there, she said, were famous for
their close comradeship and concern for new girls. My false sense
of security lasted until the end of my first day there.
The Hermitage was a Church of England Girls Grammar School
housed in an old, super-chilled Victorian residence on the side of
a windy Geelong hill. There were about three hundred girls there
at the time, and sixty of them were boarders. After Mama left I was
directed to the Junior balcony which ran along the southern side

116
of the house, on the first floor. There were twelve beds, iron
framed and with rock-hard mattresses, bare wooden floors and
sliding windows which had long ceased to slide. They stayed open
winter and summer, giving us full benefit of the bracing Geelong
air.
The first day at any new school is traumatic, especially a new
boarding school. In these enlightened days the staff take precautions
to see that no new girl is victimised by the old hands, but this
philosophy hadn't yet reached The Hermitage. We were herded
into bed on the first night, the single light on the ceiling was turned
off, and a harsh female voice said, 'No talking! If I hear anyone
talking she'll be kept in tomorrow after school.'
There was a brief silence as we heard her creaking away along
the passage. I lay stiffly in bed, trying to sort out the jumble of new
people and places that the day had been; I had no idea of the names
of the girls on the balcony with me. I could hear two or three of
them whispering to each other, and low giggles. Then, suddenly
there were dark figures standing all round my bed.
'What's your name?'
'Robin Walker.'
'Walker, Walker! Squawker Walker, you'll be. Silly little Squawked
Now, let's see if you'll squawk. Get up!'
'I don't want to get up.'
'Oh yes you do! Come on, give me a hand.'
They tipped me out of bed and stripped off my pyjamas, then
they shoved me over to the open window. It was a dark night, and
apart from the sound of a distant car the world might have been
empty.
The girl behind me said, 'Now, Squawker, new girls have to do
whatever we tell them. Look out of the window. See the ledge out
there?' I saw a ledge where the floorboards stuck out six inches
beyond the outside wall.
'You're going to get out of the window and walk along that
ledge to the end of the balcony. You'll be able to hold onto things
but don't look down. When you get to the other end we'll let you

117
in again, otherwise you stay there, and if you don't get out there
now we'll put you out.'
'I haven't got anything on!'
'We know that. It's part of the dare.'
'No one's dared me.'
'Same thing, all new-bugs have to do something, and we've
picked this one for you. Now, get out.'
Heights didn't worry me, but I was sick with fury and humiliation.
I got out of the window and found it was quite easy to shuffle
along the ledge; there were plenty of handholds. When I got to the
end they let me back in, shivering, and I thought it was over. I made
for my bed and was barred by three figures carrying wet towels;
it was my first experience of towel-lashing, and it hurt. By this time
they were making a certain amount of noise, and it reached the ears
of the Duty Mistress who was doubtless in front of a radiator in a
warm room. The girl keeping nit at the passage door heard her coming, and let out a low whistle. The pack leapt into their beds,
the towels were thrown underneath, and the balcony was sweet
with innocent, childish breathing.
As with all bullying the Junior Dormitory terrorism was organised
by one or two of the bigger girls, and the rest were cowed into
sycophancy. The ages of the girls on that balcony ranged from five
to eleven, and it gave the younger ones a fair foretaste of hell. They
got tired of me as a victim quite quickly but a five-year-old arrived,
homesick and tearful, and she wet her bed. I saw diabolical things
happen to her, and I don't know how she survived.
I wish I could say that I stood heroically between her and the
bullies, or even that I had the sense to tell someone about her, but
to my eternal shame I didn't. Bullying was a proud tradition among
the lower echelon, and there was no way the school staff could
have escaped knowing it happened. I didn't join in, but I was as
scared as the five-year-old and I kept my trap shut. Later on, when
I read The Lord of the Flies, I recognised The Hermitage instantly,
more particularly as it was in my second year there, for that was
the year of the Polio Epidemic and the Boarding House went from

118
the grisly to the downright horrific.
There was no Polio vaccine then, and when the epidemic took
hold in Melbourne it spread like a bushfire, until the front page of
the morning papers carried a casualty-list-cum-tally of the victims
of the day before. Parents were advised to move their children to
the country, and at all costs to keep them out of public places.
When I arrived back at The Hermitage for the new school year I
found that the boarders were isolated from the daygirls, barricaded
into a small area at the back of the school, with what had been the
little art-school building to house the lot of us as a classroom. The
Headmistress assembled us there on the first day. She told us that
anyone even talking to a day-girl would be severely punished, that
all visits either by relatives or friends were banned, and that for
those who lived in Melbourne there would be no holidays until the
epidemic was over; our holidays would be spent at school.
In principle it was quite rational, and no one wanted to get
Polio. In those days there were plenty of examples of what it could
do to you because it was always around, and every one of us knew
children with one leg or an arm shorter than the other, and had
heard of people in iron lungs. In practice, sixty girls aged from five
to seventeen, confined to a small area without adequate supervision,
added up to misery and mayhem.
The school staff was spread very thin; there were still the same
number of classrooms to be serviced for the daygirls, and they were
understandably more popular with the staff than ours. In the old
art-school building we were sorted roughly into age-group blocks,
but as we shared a single room it was almost impossible to hear
what was being taught, or to find elbow-room to write. It was hot,
stuffy, and reeked of stale-schoolgirl-and-ink, and the staff quite
rightly regarded their time there as a stint in the salt-mines. As soon
as school was finished in the afternoons they removed themselves
as far as possible from the boarders' area and left us to our own
devices, secure in the belief that as we had nowhere to go we could
do no harm.
Things didn't go too badly at first, but as the novelty wore off

119
the jungle crept in; you could see little patches of savagery starting
to break out, like a fungus. There was mental cruelty of great and
imaginative refinement, and physical intimidation that wasn't
refined at all. I remember a weekend when I was forced, by a mob
of about forty girls, to fight a girl twice my size, a fat, unhappy,
tearful child who was ashamed of her body, and hated it. They
ringed us like jackals round a carcase, pushing us back at each
other every time we tried to stop. Jessie was covered with blood
and tears and snot and so was I; we had been told to use our fists
and use them hard, or else. I remember the despair of knowing that
a whole year-lay ahead without a redeeming feature along the way.
That year dragged through its months like some obscene worm
through a dark tunnel. There were letters from home every week,
telling me about all the exciting things The Girls had been doing
and about the animals, and one saying that Aaron had died, but not
how. The gardener had always hated both him and me since I shot
him in the backside with an air-rifle Pa had given me; I had dark
imaginings about his fate.
The Headmistress had a hysterectomy. We were only told that
she was sick in hospital, because hysterectomies were far too
closely related to the sexual and reproductive organs to be
discussed with girls. Uteruses and ovaries and vaginas only
happened among the most senior students who were doing
biology. The Headmistress came back to school to convalesce; she
was a grey woman at the best of times, and she shuffled round the
boarding house in a pink dressing gown, her hair colourless and
straight, her face like putty, and her body bent almost double at the
waist. We couldn't hear her coming in her slippers and you'd find
her behind you suddenly, a queer, wild look in her eyes, and the
thin mouth opening to spit vitriol.
I put my tongue out at her once, and she caught me. It was after
she'd started taking the school Assembly and prayers again every
morning. Boarders were still in quarantine, but she made me walk
up the aisle of the hall between all the daygirls and climb onto the
platform in front of her, while the school watched with awe. The

120
boarders had been paraded outside the windows so that they could
see the execution too, and when I stood in front of her she eyed
me, up and down, up and down, while I shrank to insect size.
She demolished me forever, in one clear, ringing sentence.
'Never,' she said, 'Never, even in a mental home, have I seen
anything as repulsive as you. You may go.' Given that I was eleven
years old it was dynamite used to kill a mosquito, and I marched
down the aisle between the rows of silent girls wishing I was dead.
It was near the end of the year, when the epidemic had begun
to slow down, that I had my first visitor. Jenny had started her
training at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and was living on Cloud
Nine in spite of prehistoric conditions, lethal working hours and
non-existent pay. She managed to get permission to see me by
saying she was a nurse.
It was the 5th November, and she arrived with a large cardboard
box which she wouldn't let me open until we were upstairs on our
own, and when I looked inside it was full of the most wonderful
fireworks. She said, 'I thought these might liven things up a bit,
Robs. It must've been pretty dull down here all this time, but we'll
have some fun when you come home.' When she left I was on my
first high for months; there was life after school after all, and I might
yet live it. I stashed the fireworks under my bed, and managed to
steal a box of matches from Matron's office.
I told the girls on the balcony that I had a surprise for them but
I wouldn't show them until after it got dark, and knowing that I'd
had a visitor they all hoped that it was food. They kept nagging and
simmering and trying to get at the box under my bed until I got sick
of it, and about 10 o'clock I said, 'Okay, come over to the window
and I'll show you.'
I lit a string of crackers first to get things going, then as quickly
as possible lit the rest, bangers, candles, wheels and rockets in a
blind, reckless purge of all the foul, cold, loveless months behind
us. They sailed and banged and fizzed and showered sparks, and
for once the dismal night air of Geelong glowed like a Chinese
festival.

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Directly below the Junior balcony was a plot known as the
Headmistress's garden. It was a dry November, and the garden was
full of highly flammable asparagus fern, right up to the wooden
ground-floor verandah. The Duty Mistress that night was a timid
woman, a German refugee not long arrived from Europe. She
peered out of the door when she heard the noise, just in time to
see the verandah catch fire from the blazing asparagus fern to the
tune of almost constant explosions, and she rushed to the staff
commonroom screaming that the Nazis were coming.
The Senior dormitories were in an extension at ground level, at
right angles to the Junior balcony. The occupants had woken up
at the first barrage, and crowded to their windows, cheering wildly.
There was strenuous applause, first for the fireworks and then for
the fire; the Seniors had lived through a bad year too. When the
verandah burst into flames they came out through the dormitory
windows, crazy as kittens on cat-nip, carrying anything they could
find that would hold water and dowsing everyone and everything
except what needed dowsing. From where I was standing on the
balcony above them, considerably sobered, it looked like Walpurgis
Night. Then the door between our balcony and the passage
opened and I saw the pink dressing-gown, heard soft and gliding
the approaching bedroom slippers of Nemesis.
By the time things had quietened down, the Seniors had been
frog-marched back to bed and the Fire Brigade had left, I was in
Solitary. It was a small room, very like a cell, in the Staff quarters,
and I stayed there for three weeks until the end of term. Mama said
she wrote to me, but I never got the letters. She said that the
Headmistress had simply telephoned her and said that the school
was not prepared to have me back the next year, but not why, and
she had no idea that I was a prisoner. She drove down to collect
me the day school broke up, and when she heard what had
happened she sailed into the Headmistress's study like a warship.
She emerged tight-lipped and fuming. She said, 'That woman! I
never dreamed... I told her she isn't fit to run a school. She said it
was all due to upbringing!'

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There was a pre-Christmas panic to find a school that would
take me on in the following year. The grapevine had been busy,
and the reason why I was no longer welcome at The Hermitage had
been distorted and expanded until I was high on the list on known
undesirables. Mama was sorely tried; people kept telling her things
I was supposed to have done, and I kept telling her I hadn't, and
she didn't know who to believe. Luckily Toorak College at Mt Eliza,
a school very low in the ratings then, agreed to have me. At that
time, I believe, they would happily have accepted a drug-addicted
moron with homicidal tendencies, had one been offered, simply
to swell the numbers.
Toorak College was very different to The Hermitage. For a start
it was a school which had been built for the purpose, not a worn
down old Victorian home which had been gutted, revamped and
transformed into an endurance test for its occupants, and also it
was close to the sea. The main building was of red brick arranged
in vaguely classical form round a quadrangle with grass in the
middle, bordered by red brick arches known as The Cloisters. We
slept on balconies, just as open as The Hermitage balconies but the
sun and sea air came into them, and there were no dark, cobwebby
corners. The passages were institutional, but still more human than
the sinister bluestone tunnels I had left behind.
Girls who were sent to small, private schools then were not sent
there for serious education but for social contacts, the three
elementary R's, and Extras which were the things you would need
when you left school and entered the all-important race for a
husband. At Toorak College you could take as Extras bridge,
dancing, tennis, golf and piano lessons. Special teachers had to
come down from Melbourne for these once or twice a week, and
they were expensive. When Mama took me down to the school on
the first day of term we had an interview with Miss Jones, the
Bursar.
She said to Mama, 'Now, Mrs Walker, what Extras would you
like Robin to take. Our standard in Extras is very high. She'll take
dancing, of course, and tennis, and...'

123
'Thank you,' said Mama. 'I've seen the list, and they're very
expensive. I'm afraid Robin won't be taking any Extras, not yet
anyway.'
'Oh?" said Miss Jones. She put her glasses on, turned in her chair
and eyed me as if I had two heads. 'She'll feel very out of things,
you know. All our girls take some Extras. It's like a little club for
them.'
'Perhaps later on,' said poor Mama. 'Robin, you don't want to
take any Extras, do you?'
I didn't. Neither golf, cards, tennis nor dancing had any message
for me, and I knew I was hopeless at music. 'I'd like to go riding,'
I said. 'Someone told me there's a riding school near here, and
some of the girls go there. Could I...?'
Miss Jones bared her alarmingly false teeth and gave me a glare
which said quite clearly, 'One of those! I might have known!'
'If your mother gives you written permission. We take no
responsibility. Riding also costs money, Mrs Walker.' She was
obviously wondering if she should ask for an advance on school
fees, and she had me classified as bottom-of-the-barrel material.
Mama said, 'I'm perfectly happy for Robin to ride. I shall write a
note of permission for her now, and I will inform the riding school
that they can send the bill direct to me. Then I'll know exactly how
much it costs.'
The implication that Extras were a rip-off was not lost on Miss
Jones. She was a small, plump, chinless woman with a tight knob
of hair scraped to the top of her head, and the look of one whose
nose is permanently plagued by a bad smell. She had bad hips and
rocked rather than walked, one hand clamped to her pelvis for
balance and her elbow stuck aggressively out from her side. When
I took to drawing to while away the hours of classroom boredom
I doubled my pocket money by selling cartoons of Miss Jones and
it was cruel of me, because life had simply dealt her all the wrong
cards. On that first day she rocked angrily out of her office after
Mama, muttering witch-warnings over her non-existent chin, and
I knew that our time together wouldn't be easy.

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There were only about ninety girls in the school, almost all of
them boarders, and the staff were quite different to The Hermitage
staff who had been serious about academic standards, and were
highly qualified in their subjects. I found that a number of the
Toorak College mistresses, like Miss Jones, were Old Girls of the
School who had fallen on hard times and been offered a teaching
job as a refuge. There were others on the staff who found it a refuge
of a different kind, and I was surprised to see black-gowned
women wandering round the Cloisters in pairs, their arms entwined,
gazing into each others' eyes.
If the emphasis on the benefits of Extras was strong the
prohibition on contact with the male sex was even stronger.
Considering that we were being trained like athletes for the day
when we would have to run a man down it might have helped if
we'd been taught something about the nature of our quarry, or at
least been allowed to see what it looked like. My own age group
was utterly ignorant and smuttily curious about sex. I entranced the
Junior Dormitory early on by reciting the only dirty rhyme I'd
learned at The Hermitage. It was very basic.

Ma and Pa sat on the lawn,
Pa took out his hairy horn.
Ma said 'What are you going to do?'
Pa said, 'I'm going to stick it in you.'

It never got any further than that, firstly because we were all
helpless with giggles, and secondly because I'd never heard the
rest of it and didn't know what a hairy horn was anyway Most of
us, especially the country girls, had seen enough of mating animals
to know the mechanics of the thing, but we were unable to relate
it to our parents, much less to our future selves.
To confuse us even further about sex, the wing where the
mistresses lived ran off at right angles to our dormitory, and their
bathrooms were on our side. If we stood on our beds after lights
out we could see into the bathrooms if they forgot to pull the blinds
down. There were several couples who bathed together, and they
did the most mystifying things to each other. We noticed that these

125
particular couples were always together, and we giggled about
them but we didn't understand.
We were never allowed outside the school grounds unchaperoned;
to walk down the empty half-mile of road to the Mt Eliza
Store was a capital offence if you were caught, so we did it
commando-style, cross country from bush to bush, for extra food.
Our only official outings were on Sunday, after an interminable
Church Service presided over by the Frankston Vicar. We formed
a long line known as a Crocodile, in pairs, the youngest girls in front
grading to the biggest at the back, and mistresses prowling like
sheepdogs on either side. We wore hats, gloves, blazers and
gartered socks or lisle stockings, and we walked in the strictest
silence round an uninhabited block bordered by ti-tree scrub and
derisive birds. Then we went back to Sunday lunch, the only
decent meal of the week, whose leftovers would reappear in
various gruesome disguises throughout Monday and Tuesday.
Toorak College was a bed of roses compared to The Hermitage
during the polio year, and there was far less bullying. By then I'd
observed that clowns are seldom bullied, and was busy becoming
a successful clown but they still existed, the tyrants and the victims,
weaving their thread of torture and misery into the long, isolated
terms.
I have often marvelled at the precise, polished, perceptive
cruelty which children are capable of inflicting and wondered why,
if we're like that when we're young, we don't grow up as monsters,
every one of us. Perhaps children need the dagger in their own ribs
before they can understand its hurt, and to that end boarding
school is invaluable. And I was as guilty as anyone, specially to Miss
Jones, caricaturing and lampooning her until she became a comic
strip joke, and you could see her puzzling over why the girls in her
classes only had to look at her to get the giggles.
Besides being the Bursar poor Miss Jones had to teach the junior
forms French, to which she was a total stranger. Having been
brought up on Mama's Paris-accented French I couldn't understand
a word she said, not that she said much; she confined herself to

126
grammar, giving us a page of verbs or nouns to learn and hastily
boning up on the next page herself while we were doing so. Utterly
bored I drew cartoons of her under the desk and took no part in
the lessons. The poor woman, knowing quite well what I was
doing and loathing me anyway, tried valiantly to keep her temper.
Then one morning, she shouted for 'Attention!' three times, trying
hard to make it sound French, and I was too absorbed to realise
that it was aimed at me; I kept on drawing.
'Robin Walker!' she screamed, as her nerve finally broke.
'Gettez-vous out of here tres vite, and takez-vous an ordre mark!'

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18

Acland Street and
Cliveden Mansions



BY THE TIME I WENT HOME for my first holidays from
Toorak College my family had moved again. This time it
was to Acland Street in South Yarra, a smallish two-storey
house with a garden the size of a hen coop. As usual Rose was
installed in the best bedroom, Pa and Mama in the next best, The
Girls in a meagre two-bed cell, and my room might once have been
a large broom-cupboard.
Mama explained to me, 'St Georges Road was far too big,
darling, now The Girls are grown-up and you're at school. Jenny's
at the Hospital almost all the time, and Betty's off on her trip to
England soon. I'm sure I told you when I wrote.'
'Yes. What happened to Trixie? Where's Moses and the lamb?'
'Poor old dog. I thought I'd tell you when you came home,
darling, we had to put her down, she was just too old. And Moses
must've been taken by a hawk, he simply vanished one day. The
lamb's gone back to the country - that's nice, isn't it?'
We still had a cocker spaniel and a cat, but I mourned the others;
I felt I'd deserted them, left them unprotected. There was a sense
of things moving away from me, things kept from me, that I was
watching bits of my world spin off into space. I had learned at
school that if you wanted to find things out you shouldn't be too
fussy about how you did it, so I listened at doors. It became plain
that Betty's trip was not a Grand Tour to Finish her, but a forced
separation from someone she'd fallen in love with who wanted to
marry her. I picked up his name, Norman Campbell, and was avid
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to know more. I cornered Betty in her room.
'Betty, who's Norman?' She burst into tears.
I sat on her bed and said, 'Don't cry, tell me. Is he the childrens'
father you're always looking for?'
'Yes, sobbed Betty. 'Oh, Robs, yes. I love him so much.'
'Then why go away - why can't you marry him?'
'His bloody parents, they don't like me and they don't like our family. We're not rich enough. They want him to marry a
millionaire.'
'Why don't you go off together? Elope?'
'He hasn't any money of his own, he works for his parents on
their sheep station. They're so mean, they don't pay him anything,
and he just works and works. His mother's terribly rich, she's
known as the Airey Heiress, and she looks like a witch. His father
messes round in the kitchen making cakes like a woman, and
Norman runs the property. Anyway, I couldn't just go off like that,
think how miserable Mama would be.'
'What does Jenny say?'
'Oh - Oh! She says go to bed with him and get pregnant and
they'll have to let you marry him, and I couldn't! I couldn't! It's easy
for her, she's a nurse.'
There were tears, constant tears and a damp preparation for her
trip, with Mama telling her again and again what fun it would be.
It was that same old confidence trick of Mama's, and it didn't seem
to comfort Betty much. Norman appeared from time to time, and
he was both sensational to look at and nice to me, but manifestly
miserable.
About a month before Betty was due to sail for England Mama
had a car accident, and it led to yet another move. I was in the car
with her when it happened. It was a stupid, unnecessary crash
caused by our cocker spaniel who jumped over into the front seat,
and Mama hit her head on the pillar of the car door trying to push
it back. She knocked herself out and slid under the steering wheel
onto the accelerator so that the car, normally a sober family model,
developed wings.

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Providentially we hit a war memorial and not another car, but
Mama was dreadfully battered, and when I disentangled myself
from the wreckage in the back I could see her huddled body in the
front, covered with blood. I picked up the dazed spaniel and set
out to walk home certain, in my fuddled state, that Mama was dead.
Someone in the crowd that gathered round the car recognised
her, and against all the rules of First Aid he simply put her into his
own car and drove her home, while another man, seeing me
wandering bloodily along the footpath with the dog, drove me
home too. I think both the spaniel and I were in shock. When I got
there Pa had been summoned, and the house was in chaos.
They took Mama to hospital and she stayed there a long time,
with Pa at her bedside. I was sore and miserable, blaming myself
for the dog's leap, and a few days later I began to feel really ill. No
one had time to worry about it until Jenny came home on her day
off and took my temperature. The family Doctor was called, and
said it looked like polio; Betty, only days away from her trip, was
utterly demoralised by the string of disasters, and the only person
who managed to rise above the general gloom was Rose. She tut
tutted a bit to show that she'd noticed that something was wrong,
and placidly continued with her crochet work.
Imperceptibly things improved. I was diagnosed as mumps
meningitis which was better than polio, though no one bothered
to tell me what was wrong with me at the time. I couldn't go back
to school for a while, and a minder was engaged to follow me
round, presumably to watch for signs of brain damage. I was
puzzled and insulted, and I wasn't allowed to ride. Betty departed,
tearful and protesting, on her boat, and Mama came home from
hospital but kept mainly to her bed. I finally went back to school.
During that term my family moved again, on the pretext that Mama
wasn't well enough to run a house, and took a flat in a vast old
Victorian building next to the Treasury Gardens, called Cliveden
Mansions.
The Cliveden Mansions period lasted only six months, but it was
memorable because we were joined there by Mama's younger

130
sister, Dorothy, her Italian husband and their three daughters. War
was a looming cloudbank over Europe, and Europeans with
relatives abroad were making pilgrimages to visit them, conscious
that it might be their last chance. When the letter arrived announcing
her sister's intentions Mama had a relapse, Pa found urgent
reasons for visiting Papua, and Jenny and I stated that we wanted
no part of our cousins, regardless of the fact we had never set eyes
on them. Mama had read her sister's letters to us over the years, and
we knew that we could never match the brilliance, sporting
prowess or beauty of the three girls described therein. According
to their mother they swam to Olympic standard, rode like Centaurs, were in classes years beyond their age and had half the
men of Italy at their feet. We didn't believe a word of it, but we
hated them already. We were told to behave ourselves, to be nice.
Since we were living at Cliveden Mansions Dorothy wrote to say
they'd like a flat there too, to be near us, and would Mama please
arrange it. Their arrival at Cliveden had roughly the same impact
as George's snakes getting loose at Illawarra.
Cliveden had originally been a very grand private house
belonging to the family of the Australian Baronet who was
Grandfather's partner in Queensland. When it was sold two storeys
were added to it, and the interior converted to a complex of large,
gloomy flats. It was full of mahogany panelling, potted palms,
hideous bronzes and residents in an advanced state of decay. It was
one of God's Waiting Rooms, strictly First Class. There was a central
dining-room where everyone ate, a place of hushed voices, long,
rich menus, elderly maids with white aprons and starched,
streamered caps, and small tables where the aged and infirm were
fed with spoons by expensive nurses. A raised voice was sacrilege
in Cliveden, where the only permitted sound was the whine of its
ancient birdcage lifts, slowly grinding between floors.
Mama went to meet the Nathans at the boat; she said that with
five of them in the car there wouldn't be room for me, and she was
right. When she arrived back with them hours later her car was at
the head of a cavalcade of taxis, long enough for a respectable

131
funeral. I was hanging round in the lobby, saw her car pull up, the
passenger door open, and was deafened by a mixed blast of Italian
and English profanity. The Cliveden Hall Porter, a dear old man,
had run down the front steps to do his duty, and he reeled back
as if in the face of gunfire. Still in full cry my Aunt advanced across
the lobby followed by a tall, unhappy-looking man who I guessed
was Uncle Joe, Mama looking limp, and three girls. Behind them,
spilling out of the queued taxis came a stream of luggage.
'Merde!' shouted Aunt Dorothy, spicing up her Italian with a
little French. 'Do not put it there you bloody fool, put it there! Pick it up! Put it down! What imbeciles! Joe! You are the most bloody
useless God-awful fool I ever knew! Don't just stand there with
your bloody mouth open! Why do I always have to do everything
myself?'
Uncle Joe slowly lowered himself into a sitting position on one
of the cabin trunks, put his head in his hands and rocked
backwards and forwards murmuring, 'Oh God, Oh God.' Sweet,
gentle man that he was he had no protection other than God
against his wife, and invoked him constantly, without success.
Mama tried to reason with her sister, who didn't listen, and the
three girls simply looked bored; they had seen it all before only too
often, and I wished that Pa had been there to help.
The luggage was finally unloaded, and Dorothy was manoeuvred upstairs in the creaking lift to the flat Mama had rented for
them. As the last piece of luggage was carried through the flat's
door Dorothy decided that she didn't like it, and burst into the
corridor, the hallowed, funereal corridor of muffled sounds,
shrieking like a banshee.
'I might have known! You were always so bloody stupid Aileen! Even as a girl, stupid No one else would get me a flat like that! A bloody dump! Not one night there, I tell you! What is this one?'
She pulled open the door of the flat across the passage and
marched inside. A quavering, indignant voice was raised in protest
from its depths, but Dorothy ignored it.
'This one is better,' she said, turning to Mama. 'You can tell the

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Manager I shall have this one, it looks over the Park. You should
have taken it in the first place.'
'But you can't have it, Dorothy. Old Mrs Wigthorpe lives here,
she's been here for years.'
'She must move. Joe! Make yourself useful for once. Go to the
Goddamn Manager and tell him I'm going to have this flat.' Looking
more stricken than ever Joe mutely shook his head. 'I'll go myself
then! Get out of my way! God such fools!'
The Manager, as it happened, was a woman, a cold, basilisk
lady who was not impressed by her own sex, especially when they
tried to stand over her. My Aunt returned after a short time, puffing
slightly and with heightened colour. She went back into the
original flat and began to discover virtues in it that she had missed
earlier on. Mama went to bed with a bad headache.
Her return to the country of her birth persuaded Dorothy that
she needed an image-change; she announced shortly after her
arrival that she would forthwith be known as Peggy because it
suited her better. She also tried to restore the original red of her
tightly-curled hair and the result was frightening but served as a
warning, like the red ribbon in the tail of a pony which habitually
kicks. Her personality was unalterable, irrespective of name or
hair-colour, and she existed at the epicentre of a willy-willy of
temper, temperament and trouble.
The girls, Amelia, Georgina and Virginia, turned out to be
perfectly nice and normal, and good-looking enough to justify their
mother's superlatives in that direction at least. They were hopeless
at swimming and riding, and it was hard to tell whether or not they
were intellectual geniuses because English was definitely their
second language, and we had no Italian. Within a few days our
hearts were torn with pity for them, and even more so for Uncle
Joe. It was clear that no one in Peggy's family could do anything
right, except herself.
Their flat vibrated with noise; deafening gramophone records,
violent voices, the occasional crash of breaking china and slamming
doors. At the height of one row the flat burst open and

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Amelia, the eldest daughter, flew out stark naked and screaming,
followed by Peggy with her fists clenched above her head, and
shortly afterwards by the other two girls and Uncle Joe, all yelling
in Italian. Cliveden was rocked to its foundations and complaints
flew through the stagnant air like wasps, but Peggy brushed them
aside. 'Peasants live here,' she said. 'Bloody peasants, all of them.'
Years later I stayed with the Nathans in Rome, and realised that they
had actually moderated their behaviour in Melbourne, but for
Cliveden they were worse than a civil war.
When they went back to Italy, not very long before the start of
the war Jo, at-least, knew they were facing an uncertain future as
Jewish citizens in a Fascist country, allied with Nazi Germany.
Peggy, I think, imagined that not even Hitler would dare touch her,
and indeed if they had ever met I wouldn't have been prepared to
bet on the result. In Italy they owned a delightful villa at Tivoli and
a large house in Rome which Peggy always referred to as The
Palazzo, but because of Uncle Joe's Jewishness both were confiscated
and they spent most of the war in hiding, sometimes with
peasants in the country, sometimes in tiny tenement rooms in
Rome. It is hard to imagine the horrors the girls must have endured,
living at such close quarters with their mother during that time.
Soon after the war ended she bullied Amelia and Virginia into
marriages with men of her own choice, both of whom turned out
to be unspeakably awful. The girls left them, but there was no
divorce in Italy then. Georgina managed to marry an American
whom Dorothy didn't even know, and was happy.
Jenny, at this time, was well on the way to becoming what she
wanted to be, a high-class nurse. The Royal Melbourne Hospital
had the highest reputation in Australia for nursing training, if one
could survive it. The discipline would have made a penal battalion
look soft, the hours were inhuman and the trainees were paid ten
shillings a week. Jenny loved every moment of it, arriving home on
days off in a state of exhaustion, frequently with gruesome human
fragments bottled in formalin, and always with hospital anecdotes
which had to be banned at meals.

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Human parts had a fascination for her; we were in the car one
day when a tram hit the car in front of us and Jenny leapt out to
render aid, staying with the victim until the ambulance arrived. She
got back into our car and sat in the front seat beside Mama cradling
something in her hands. Mama, who was still slightly shaky about
accidents after her own, said, 'What's that you've got, Jenny?' and
Jenny proudly held up the larger section of a human ear.
She was also discovering that her healthy but incomplete
interest in sex could be further developed, that many of her fellow
trainees, in fact, regarded sex as a perfectly legitimate leisure
pastime. Like all of us she had been saturated with dire warnings
about Down There, and the ominous follow-on that 'If you're not
a virgin No Decent Man Will Every Marry You.' It took a very short
time as a trainee nurse to convince her that the latter was not
necessarily true, and very little longer to decide that if other people
got such a lot of pleasure from Down There it couldn't be as bad
as Mama said it was. In addition she had become the close friend
of a fellow-trainee from South Australia, Janet, who being an
expatriate of sorts took up permanent residence in Betty's empty
bed.
Janet was slim, blond and sexy, a good foil for Jenny's brunette
lushness, and she had the lazy, sinuous movements of a sophisticated
cat. Janet never sat on a sofa, she curled on it or stretched,
looking as if she might lick her paws. Her father was Secretary to
the Governor of South Australia, and there's no doubt that she'd
been brought up on the same diet of sexual prohibitions as
ourselves, but cat-like she'd disregarded them and gone her own
way.
I suspect that Janet's love-life had started well before her
nursing career; she had about her a confident air of know-how
which is as unmistakable as the indefinable gloss that marks the
very rich. Jenny was fascinated by it, and determined to achieve the
same aura; she tried dressing herself in the nearest she could get
to film-star clothes and painting her face until it cracked like an
eggshell, and it still didn't work. After consultation with Janet she

135
realised she must take the plunge; there were, after all, plenty of
interns and doctors only too willing to oblige.
I was sitting in the bedroom with her and Janet one evening
during the school holidays, Jenny getting herself ready to go out
and Janet was smiling at her with an after-the-cream smile. There
was an air of excitement in the room, pungent as incense.
Curious, I asked, 'Where are you off to, Jennifer? Why all the
war-paint?'
She turned to me, mascara brush poised. 'Never you mind
where I'm going,' she said, 'But I tell you this, I'm buggered if I'm
going to die+wondering. Tell Mama I've remembered I'm on duty
and gone back to the hospital.'
She won the Florence Nightingale prize for the best nurse in
training, and Mama was ecstatic. She asked no questions about
Jenny's comings and goings because one does not question
perfection, and perfection, for Mama, was inseparable from
chastity. On the rare occasions when she was at home Jenny spent
hours playing a record which went:

Once I loved such a ravishing physician,
Quite the best looking doctor in the State,
He looked after my physical condition
And his bedside manner was great.

In a very short time one noticed that she was achieving her
objective and becoming more like Janet; she looked older than
before, more self-assured, and her skin, which had been inclined
to acne, was perfect.
Betty wrote from overseas that she was enjoying her Grand
Tour; Austria had been exciting because the Anschluss took place
when she was there, and England was lovely, but please when
could she come home, she missed Norman so much? Most of the
time, except for her visit to Europe, she spent in Ireland with our
cousins.
There were four of them, all about her age, as close-knit as any
brothers and sisters could have been, and they slotted Betty into

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their group as though she had been with them always. There was
Aileen Landale who had come with Sheila and Fanny to Australia,
and her brother, Roy. There was William who was the only child
of Pa's eldest sister, Daisy McClintock, a brilliant horseman
following his father, Colonel Jim McClintock, into the Army, and
there was Tony, whose proper name was Cecilia. Tony's mother
was Pa's youngest sister, Dorothy who had married her first cousin,
Barch Christie, another professional soldier and brother to Archie
Christie who became famous when his wife, Agatha, the author,
staged a much-publicised fake-suicide to get rid of him.
William's mother, Daisy, was something of a mathematical
genius. Her husband was a Sapper, and they spent much of their
Service life in India where Daisy filled in her spare time by working
out missile trajectories and other obscure problems for the Army.
She was so good at it that when they returned to England and Jim
was given a senior posting with the Sappers on Salisbury Plain,
Daisy was as much in demand as her husband. They had a big, grey
old house in Donegal, a notoriously haunted house whose ghosts
were much prized as part of the family. The cousins had spent a
lot of time together there, while they were growing up, and it was
there that Betty spent the summer with them, the year she was
away.
Betty's summer at Dunmore started idyllically; the cousins and
their friends came and went, there were picnics on the Donegal
beaches, visits to mad, legendary, remote relations in crumbling
mansions, and an incessant Irish flow of rich, fattening food fit to
explode the liver in a Bresse goose. William McClintock came
home on leave and then went back to England to concentrate on
the two great loves of his life, Helen, the girl to whom he'd just
become engaged, and the horse which he intended to ride to
victory in the Sandown Gold Cup.
I never met William, but I've seen photographs; he was tall, fair
and splendid. Betty said he was wonderful to be with, fun and alive
and kind, and always first into anything they wanted to do, good
or bad. His parents adored him, especially his mother, though they

137
both deprecated his charms with a fierce, protective pride. Uncle
Jim's Sapper friends forecast a great future for him in the Army.
He started favourite or near favourite in the Gold Cup that year.
There was a bad fall at one fence; seven horses came down in one
of those awful, flailing tangles where it seems that no one has a
right to be alive afterwards, and the only rider who was badly hurt
was William. They took him to St Anne's Hospital, run specially for
officers in H. M. Forces, and there established that he had become
what we now know as a quadriplegic. In the 1930s there was very
little hope for anyone in William's condition, and his parents were
told that he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, helpless
to do anything for himself.
Daisy and Jim McClintock would have confronted the worst
thing that could happen to them with stiff upper lips because their
code of self-discipline, demanded it. If Daisy could have wept and
torn her hair instead of bottling up her agony things might have
been different. As it was she stayed in England near the hospital
and her son until the doctors said he might as well go home to
Dunmore, and it was arranged to have him flown to Ireland. It
seems that the medicos had detected a ray of hope, the slight
movement of a muscle in one of his shoulders, and thought he
might develop increasing movement if he was at home, in his own
surroundings. They didn't tell Daisy or Jim in case nothing came
of it.
Betty was in England at the time, staying with other relations
and just about to sail for home. She telephoned us at Cliveden to
tell us what happened. Mama picked up the phone and said, 'Betty
darling, what a lovely surprise!' Then her face changed and she
said, 'Robin, go into your room for a bit,' and she called for Pa. From
my room I could hear long silences and Mama sobbing, and Pa, in
charge of the phone now, saying quietly, 'Oh my God.'
Daisy must have made up her mind what to do about William
when he was still in hospital, when she was forced to accept that
her fine, glowing son had become an immobile lump of pain
wracked flesh. Uncle Jim said that she never showed him by the

138
flicker of an eyelash what she intended to do, but always talked as
though William would get better.
They got William back to Dunmore, with a wheelchair and a
nurse, and Helen, his fiancee, came over to be with him. On sunny
days he was wheeled outside to sit, uncomplaining and trying to
cheer everyone else up, in Dunmore's walled garden, under the
fruit trees. One morning when he was out there Daisy called the
nurse into the house. Then she went to Uncle Jim's gun-room,
loaded a gun, walked out into the garden behind her son and shot
him through the head. Without haste, or hesitation either, she
retired to the other side of the wall and shot herself.
Uncle Jim heard the shots, and knowing that no one should
have been shooting near the house hurried into the garden to find
first the body of his son, and shortly afterwards that of his wife.
Helen had been out walking somewhere, and when she came in
they told her, because the truth was too terrible to tell immediately,
that William had died of a haemorrhage. She didn't wait to hear any
details; she must have loved him very much because she went
straight to the gun-room, loaded another gun and shot herself too.
It was a tragedy that took Ireland by the throat. There were
people from one end of the country to the other who knew the
McClintocks, and loved them, or were related to them. There was
an awesome, Celtic quality about it that made the people in the
pubs and the cottages shake their heads, tell it and retell it, and
compare it to ancestral stories of curses laid on families in the past.
It was not long afterwards that Aunt Sheila wrote to tell us that
Uncle Jim had cancer and was dying. It must have seemed like a
blessing to him, poor man, because there was nothing he wanted
to live for. Sheila went to Dunmore and looked after him, and he
left Dunmore to her son, Roy, in his will. Roy had joined the Royal
Ulster Constabulary, and neither he nor his mother wanted to live
there so it was sold to a doctor from Dublin, said to be very rich.
The doctor and his wife refurnished the house, stocked the land
with cattle and went to live there, but in a short time they left saying
they had no peace at all with the ghosts. The ghosts in the

139
McClintock days had been perfectly friendly; they drove up the
drive in a carriage with four horses which you could count by the
sound of their hooves. They would draw up outside the front door, the carriage doors would open and close and they would drive off
again, worrying nobody. It's possible that by the time the Dublin
Doctor moved in there were newer, sadder ghosts.
Dunmore was never a beautiful house, and I only saw it after
the end of the war when it had been empty for some time. It was
like many other Irish family houses, square and grey, with lofty,
forbidding windows. The rooms inside were large and high
ceilinged, empty by then, except for dust and cobwebs and the
breath of ghosts. But there were marvellous trees all round it and
long grass, dappled by sun, and the remains of the old, walled
garden with crumbling pink bricks and fruit trees. It looked out
across meadows and marshes where William and Roy used to
shoot when they were boys, and the stream where they fished.
Someone nameless had owned it during the war, and used it as a
base for smuggling cattle across the Border.
Betty was on her way back to Australia, the sadness of what had
happened in Ireland diluted by the glorious prospect of getting
back to Norman. It had been agreed that if neither of them changed
their minds during the time of separation they would be allowed
to marry. There was no questioning Betty's fidelity; she would have
died rather than go unchaste to the altar but her innocence, on the
return trip, nearly brought her undone.
The Captain of her ship was a Dutchman, not that his nationality
had anything to do with it; as it happened he was also a man of
carnal appetites, accustomed to taking advantage of the pleasures
on offer while he was at sea. Sea voyages being what they were,
he normally had more pleasures on offer than he could handle.
It wasn't unusual for men to look at Betty with lust, nor for her
to mistake it for harmless friendship. When she realised that her
trust had been misplaced she was invariably shocked and horrified;
she told the man concerned that he was a no-good so-and-so and
went her way. The Dutch Captain was older and infinitely more

140
experienced than most of Betty's men, and having decided that on
this voyage nothing less than Betty would do he set about getting
her like a hunter stalking his prey. She knew none of the other
passengers, and a couple of days after they left England she found
herself moved discreetly to the Captain's table, in fact to the seat
next to him.
'He was awfully nice, you know,' she told me. 'Sort of blond and
stiff, very correct in a German way, specially at meals. He asked me
if I'd like to go up to the Bridge and see how things worked and
I did quite often, it was fun. Then he asked me to tea in his cabin
and he was still nice, he kept asking me what I'd done in Europe and so on. I told him all about Norman and what had happened
to William, and he was old, forty-five at least, so of course I thought
it was all right.
'Then he asked me to have drinks in his cabin one night before
dinner, and I thought it'd be a party with other people, but it wasn't.
He gave me some horrible Dutch stuff, Schnapps, and I didn't like
it and he laughed and grabbed me and tried to kiss me! I was
furious! I nearly hit him.'
'Why didn't you?'
'Well, he seemed so sorry. He apologised and swore that he
hadn't meant to, he'd never done such a thing before, he was a
married man - all that sort of thing, and I felt sorry for him. I hate
men pawing me, except Norman, but he made me feel stupid and
young and . . . Oh, just silly.'
'So you forgave him, I suppose?'
'Yes, and he went back to being sensible so I forgot about it.
Then we were talking at dinner one night and he asked me if I'd
ever done Swedish exercises. He said they were wonderful on
board ship where you eat too much and don't take much exercise,
which is true. He said he kept fit with them himself and he'd teach
me, but not on deck or the Bridge because the crew would laugh
at him. He said to come to his cabin in the afternoon and to wear
shorts, and he'd teach me how to do them.'
'So what happened?'

141
'Well, nothing I thought at the time. I mean, he showed me the
exercises mostly bending and stretching things, and lying down
with your legs apart and sitting up suddenly, and then he made me
do them myself. He was standing over by the porthole, watching
me, I thought, and telling me what I was doing wrong. I didn't
know he had a camera.'
'What's wrong with that?'
'Oh, Robs, you can't imagine! It's so awful! I had these shorts on,
you see, and they must have shrunk or something. I knew they felt
tight when I put them on, but I didn't look. When I bent over or
opened my legs you could see everything - everything! And he
developed his own films, can you imagine anything so beastly?'
'What happened then?'
'He asked me to come to his cabin next day, and he showed the
photos to me. I thought I was going to faint. I said, 'Give them to
me at once! I'll never speak to you again!' and he just laughed. He
said ... he said, "If you don't do vot I tell you the next person to
see these will be your vunderful Norman", and he said awful things,
what a cold, silly little fool I was, and how he could teach me to
grow up and be a woman. He went on and on about it! I couldn't
believe it was happening to me.
'It was only a few days before we landed in Melbourne so I
locked myself in my cabin and got the stewardess to bring me
meals there. I sent a message to the Purser to say I'd got a cold, and
would he please make my apologies in the dining-room, and I sent
a cable to Pa to make sure he'd meet the ship. I was terrified of
telling him, but he was the only hope of getting those awful photos
back.'
Mama and Pa would have been at the wharf to meet her
anyway, without the cable. They were thrilled by the thought of
having her home. They'd have imagined her being on deck,
waving to them as the ship berthed, and throwing herself into their
arms as soon as the gangplank was lowered. Instead of that they
had to run her to earth in a locked cabin, sodden with tears and
shame. Betty told me about it after she'd recovered. She'd seen

142
Norman by then, and it had been agreed that they'd get married so
her whole world was rose-coloured. The Captain and his photos
seemed like an adventure rather than a disgrace.
'When I heard their voices outside my cabin,' she said, 'I
honestly didn't know whether I dared let them in. You know what
Mama's like about men and things, and I thought Pa'd be furious
with me too. Anyway, I did unlock the door and then it all sort of
poured out. Pa just grunted and disappeared, and I cried on Mama's
shoulder and she said not to worry about anything, which was
comforting. It was ages until Pa came back but he had the
photographs and the negatives, and he made me check them to see
that they were all there. And then we came home.'
'Well, how did Pa get them? What did he say to the Captain?'
'Pa said he'd just talked to the Captain, and not to worry about
him any more. Maybe he punched him, I wouldn't be surprised. He
said not to tell Norman, so promise you won't. If you swear not to,
Robs, I'll show you something. I pinched a couple of prints.'
She produced two black-and-white photographs. The foreground
of both was filled with a pair of astonishingly long, bare
legs, in one they were on the floor and wide apart, in the other they
led upwards to a pair of broad, white buttocks hiding a torso bent
in the ostrich position. Betty had been quite right about the shorts,
they must have shrunk disastrously because they left nothing at all
to the imagination.

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19

Rose and
Shipley Street



OUR GROWING-UP YEARS seemed to pass in layers, each
layer defined by yet another set of furniture vans, another
rented house, each layer distinct as the colour-strata of a
rainbow, but fuzzy at the edges where they merged. In each one
the tempo of life was different, and each time we moved there was
subtle erosion, a crumbling away of whatever it is that holds a
family together.
We moved again, just after Betty came home, this time to a
maisonette in South Yarra, just off Punt Road. There was a bakery
opposite and a brothel on the corner. Mama firmly refused to
believe it was a brothel in spite of irrefutable evidence.
Our house was small and recently built, a maisonette with its
mirror-image alongside it. There were four bedrooms and a
bathroom upstairs, and downstairs there was a sitting-room,
dining-room, kitchen and a maid's room with a minute bathroom.
It was an article of faith in the design of 1930s houses, when
servants were on the way out, that all domestics were undersized
or easily folded. A path ran up one side of the house leading to a
small, enclosed back garden, a concrete patio and a balcony above
it. The house was compact and utterly ordinary, and Mama loved
it from the moment we moved in.
Rose, as usual, had the largest bedroom, next to the bathroom.
She was becoming noticeably slower and deafer, more silent and
detached. She was also harder for us, being young, to live with at
close quarters, and our parents were constantly on the watch for

144
signs of disrespect on our part. There had been an incident
involving Rose and me before we left Cliveden, and Mama
suspected me, quite wrongly, of being unkindly disposed towards
my grandmother. In fact I accepted her as an inexplicable fact of
life, quaint and harmless, and I was fond of her. She had gone
downhill both physically and mentally during the Cliveden period,
partly because of her age but also, I think, because of the trauma
induced by Peggy and her family. By the time they left she had
ceased to acknowledge Peggy as her daughter, or indeed to
recognise her at all.
Cliveden had two lifts, the ornate wrought-iron birdcage in the
front lobby and a stark, barred service lift like a zoo cage at the
back. Both, but specially the service lift, were prone to spasms of
wild jerking or sudden paralysis, and they were so old that there
was scarcely anyone still alive in Melbourne who knew how to fix
them.
Rose apparently took the wrong turning when she came out of
the dining-room after lunch one day, and meandered along the
passages until she came to the service lift. With rare acumen she
recognised it as a lift, got into it and pressed the button for our floor.
The lift went past the first floor, but halfway between that and the
second floor it stuck. Rose wasn't particularly alarmed because,
after all, there had been no situation in her life from which she
hadn't been rescued. She wasn't a screamer and she was pleasantly
full of lunch so she sank to the floor of the lift, dozed and waited.
Mama, who had been shopping in the city, arrived home a little
later. I heard her come in, open Rose's door and say brightly,
'Mother, I'm back. Did you have a nice lunch?' There was a
moment's silence, then she burst into my room saying, 'Robin,
what's happened? Where's Granny?'
I hadn't bothered about lunch. The dining-room was so awful
that I only went there at dinnertime with the family, or if I was
dragged there. When Mama was out I flatly refused to eat alone
with Rose, so Mama reluctantly gave me a couple of shillings to go
out and buy what was known as rubbish. I'd done so on this day,

145
bought a pie and a bag of peanuts, and come back to play with my
Meccano set. Mama, having established that Rose was nowhere in
our flat, was running in six different directions at once, wringing
her hands and crying, 'Where can she have gone? Poor old thing,
where is she?' Then furiously, 'Robin, stop playing with that
damned Meccano! Go round the passages, all of them, and look for
your grandmother while I go and ask in the lobby. She might have
gone out into the street!'
While Mama headed towards the lift I sauntered down the
corridor, unmoved; in my limited experience Rose had always
been a first-class survivor. I knew the back passages of Cliveden
intimately having explored them often in the boredom of flat-life.
I inspected those on our floor until I came to the service lift, and
pressed the button to take it down to the floor below.
It was no surprise to find that the lift had stuck between floors;
it happened every week or so, usually when it was carrying irate
people who yelled for help. This time there was complete silence,
and I went down the fire escape to the floor below. One-third of
the lift was above floor-level, and when I lay down flat and peered
between the bars I saw my grandmother, peacefully asleep in a
corner with pointed, buttoned shoes toed inwards and her skirt
decorously draped to cover her legs. Her grey head rested on her
arms and she looked for all the world like a small, sleeping animal
in a zoo. I shook the bars and said, 'Hey, Granny! Wake up! It's me,
Robin.'
She looked up rather blearily and said, 'Hello dear, this lift has
stopped for some reason. I don't know how I got here, it isn't the
usual lift. I want to get out.'
'Yes, I know. I'll go and get someone, I won't be long.'
'No! Stay here!' She was suddenly frightened, as sleep wore off.
She clawed herself upright and came unsteadily across the lift to
where I was lying on the floor above. She reached up to me and
I held her hand; she looked as though she might cry.
I said, 'It's all right, Granny, you're quite safe but I'll have to find
someone to get you out. I'll try to be quick.' Then I remembered

146
the bag of lunch-time peanuts I still had with me; I picked one out
with my free hand and gave it to her. 'Look, have a peanut, Granny,
they're nice.'
Still clinging to me with one hand she took the peanut with the
other, and nibbled at it. After a moment she said, 'I haven't had one
of these for years. Yes, they are nice, dear, give me another one.'
She held on like someone drowning while I patiently fed her
peanuts, and it was like this that the rescue party, headed by a
frantic Mama, found us a short while later. Perhaps because Rose
had reached the age when anyone her size looks simian, and
because the cage-like lift enhanced the zoo illusion, Mama refused
to believe that I had been feeding Rose peanuts to comfort her and
not to mock her. Rose wiped the whole thing from her mind the
instant help arrived. She had a mind like a schoolroom blackboard
as far as unpleasant incidents were concerned, and when she was
released she shuffled happily off to bed, still clutching my bag of
peanuts. When Pa came home he laughed and laughed about it,
and there weren't too many times when he got a good laugh out
of his mother-in-law.
The South Yarra house provided better security, as far as Rose
was concerned; she ceased to think about going out, and established
a routine for herself by which everybody could and did set
their watches. She was getting seriously deaf, and hearing aids, in
those days, were both cumbersome and unattractive. She refused
to consider wearing one, but as she had arrived at the stage where
one had to take a deep breath, bend down and scream into her ear
to attract her attention, something had to be done. She must have
found the answer herself, perhaps in some secret cache of treasures
handed down by her own grandmother because I have never,
before or since, seen anything remotely like it. I came home from
school on holiday to see Rose sitting placidly on the sofa in the
sitting-room with a single horn, like an inverted unicorn's horn,
rising from the centre of her head.
As ear-trumpets go, if they still exist outside museums, it was a
masterpiece. It was made of pure tortoise shell, light and pleasingly

147
curved, and it ran on a narrow headband trimmed with gold which
fitted over her head from ear to ear. If you tapped Rose on the
shoulder and indicated that you had something to say she'd pull
it round to her ear, and push it in. Amazingly enough, it worked.
The disadvantage was that if you were telling her something she
didn't want to hear, and it was usually poor Mama who had to do
that, she simply slid the ear-trumpet up to its unicorn position, and
heard nothing. It also had a distressing effect on visitors. Our
parents were so used to it, and to Rose, that they were often quite
unconscious of the distraction caused by an ancient, mute female
huddled in a*-chair with a tortoiseshell trumpet rising from the
middle of her skull. She became so cunning that it was impossible
to get through to her unless she thought it would be to her
advantage if she heard you.
The little patch of garden behind the house, sheltered, sunny
and hidden from the neighbours, stirred her gardening instincts
which had lain dormant since the fiasco at The Haven. Mama was
no gardener, and when Rose started murmuring about cinerarias
and carnations Mama indulged her by engaging someone to do the
work. The sight of an evolving garden seemed to give Rose a lot
of pleasure, and Mama pointed out to us all how perceptive she'd
been to guess what her mother would like best.
'I remember so well,' she told Pa, 'How she used to adore the
garden at Hascombe.'
'She never actually did anything in it, did she?'
'No, of course not. She never went outside without white gloves
on. But she knew the names of a lot of the plants, and she loved
showing people round it.'
'That's what I thought,' said Pa. 'But I swear I saw her squatting
down and digging in one of the beds the other day. I was so
surprised I went onto the balcony to make sure but she stood up
again, and she wouldn't have heard me if I'd called to her.'
Mama said comfortably, 'Heaven knows what she was doing, darling, she's never dug a hole in her life. I'm just so pleased that
the garden keeps her happy.'

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Rose went on enjoying the garden; she spent a lot of time in it,
specially when Mama was out shopping or seeing her friends.
The moment of truth came when Pa decided to change
insurance companies. One of the things that had survived the
family's financial disaster was Rose's jewellery, or at least enough
really nice pieces to make her and grandfather, when he was still
alive, feel that she wasn't forced to appear naked in public. In terms
of value it added up to a substantial amount. There were some
lovely strings of pearls with diamond clasps, long diamond and
pearl earrings, bracelets, and some really beautiful rings and
brooches; Claire and Peggy had particular items earmarked for
themselves in the future, and enquired tenderly after their welfare
in their letters.
When Rose first came to live with us at Sorrento she had been
inclined to wear most of the jewellery most of the time, but as she
grew older Mama gradually separated her from it except when we
had visitors, rolling it up in velvet jewellery rolls and tucking it deep
in Rose's drawers under redundant lace underwear and lavender
bags. Rose treated Mama as a substitute for her Lady's Maid, on
whom she had always relied to produce anything she wanted
rather than to look for it herself, and it never occurred to Mama that
Rose would dig deep enough to find the jewellery. She showed it
to us sometimes, privately, and we dreamed secretly of wearing it,
especially Jenny.
When Pa decided to switch the insurance the new company
naturally demanded a revaluation of the jewellery listed on the old
policy, which dated back some years. Pa, brandishing the list, said,
'Aileen, I've got to leave your mother's jewellery at Drummond's
tomorrow for valuation. Would you get it for me?'
Mama said brightly, 'Yes, of course darling,' and trotted upstairs.
There was a long pause before she reappeared, holding a
bundle of velvet jewellery rolls and looking very white around the
gills. She dropped the rolls into Pa's lap, flapped her hands, and
at last whispered hoarsely, 'Geoff! They're all empty!'
'Good God!' Pa sailed out of his chair, scattering velvet. 'How

149
the hell could they be? Have we been burgled?' Mama shook her
head.
'Then where the hell's the jewellery ? Ask her!'
They both stared at Rose who was crocheting a rug square.
Mama tapped her on the shoulder, slid the ear-trumpet into
position none too gently and roared into it, 'Mother! Where's your
jewellery?'
'Don't shout at me, Aileen!'
'Your jewellery, Mother!' She shook the empty velvet rolls under
Rose's nose. 'These were in your drawer with all your jewellery in
them and new they're empty. What have you done with the
jewellery?'
'Oh, those.' Rose brushed the velvet rolls away disgustedly.
'What a silly place to put good jewellery, Aileen. Anyone could have found it and taken it. Too silly for words.'
'Mother, where is it now? Geoff has to have it for the insurance
company.'
'It's quite safe, dear, you don't have to worry about it. Geoff can
tell the insurance people it's safe, though what it's got to do with
them I don't know.'
Where is it, Rose?' Pa's teeth were gritted and his moustache
bristled. Rose firmly switched her ear-trumpet to the top of her
head, gathered up her crochet-work with offended dignity, and
shuffled off upstairs to bed. Mama and Pa stared at each other.
Our parents maintained a myth that they never exchanged a
cross word during their marriage; in fact what they substituted for
the normal, healthy marital row, especially in front of us, was a
deadly, jaws-clenched form of self-control, and they used the word
'darling' like a scourge to prove that they weren't really fighting.
Pa said, 'Did you really leave them in her drawer rolled up in
those bloody things, darling?'
'Yes, I did, darling. She never looks in her drawers, except at
what's on top.'
'Well when did you last check to see if they were there? Are you
sure they were there when we moved in here?'

150
'Of course they were! What d'you take me for? I looked at them
all when I put them away, I... Robin, go to bed!' She began to cry. 'Wait a minute!' said Pa. It wasn't meant for me but I stood still
anyway. He looked as though he might strangle anything that
moved within his range. 'All this damned digging in the garden.
When did your mother ever get her fingers dirty? When, in God's
name, did she ever plant a plant? That's where they are, Goddammit.
They're all buried in the garden!'
We never found them, but that is certainly where they were. We
sifted the soil, scratched and dug and drove the contract-gardener
mad by disturbing his work, or it may have been that he had found
the treasure already. The latter is very likely because he gave our
job away soon afterwards, and wasn't seen in South Yarra again.

151
20

Jessie



LIVING IN A HOUSE instead of a flat meant that we could
have the animals back. We were still reduced to one cocker
spaniel and a cat, both of whom had been fostered out
during the Cliveden period and both of whom were reinstated in
the new house almost before we'd unpacked. Matilda, the spaniel
went on an immediate, meticulous tour of inspection, the cat curled
up on the sofa and the house became a home. The recent, unanimaled
past seemed like a time in the wilderness.
Shipley Street, South Yarra, was no St Georges Road; the garden
was adequate for one small dog if it was walked regularly, but the
animal population clearly had to be limited. We had all accepted
that the quota was one dog and one cat when Jenny produced
Jessie.
It was the year when she had finished her training and was
doing her midwifery. It was also the year that war broke out, still
months before it happened but already the future had a whiff of
cordite about it, a taint of sulphur, and Jenny had declared that if
war came she would be the first to join the Army as a nurse.
Midwifery was not an obvious qualification for Army nursing, but
she was determined to have every certificate she could get, to make
sure of being accepted.
One of her friends had recently married a dentist who apparently
fell short of being an ideal husband. He was also very
frightened of snakes. His wife had some muddled idea that shock
treatment would help, and to that end went shopping. There was
a small shop behind the Myer Emporium which specialised in
reptiles, and she bought one of their more impressive items, an 8ft

152
6in carpet snake named Jessie. In those days carpet snakes retailed
at ten shillings a foot, which made Jessie an expensive animal.
When the wife went home and advanced on her husband
brandishing a considerable length of active reptile the husband
didn't argue the point but started packing his worldly goods,
something his wife hadn't reckoned on. She abandoned her
position, promised to get rid of Jessie if only he would stay, and
then rang Jenny.
Jenny, of course, was enchanted, and happily paid what
amounted to two weeks wages on the spot. She arrived at home
breathless, carrying a large wooden box with airholes in the side
and put it down on the sitting-room carpet.
'Oh, darling! No more animals!' said Mama, recognising the
significance of the airholes.
'What is it?' asked Pa hopefully.
'It's all right,' said Jenny, opening the box. 'She won't take up
much room and she only eats every two weeks. I'll arrange about
getting her fed.'
Jessie's natural curiosity was only matched by her sociability.
What seemed like yards of fat, shining, beautifully marked snake
flowed out of the box, coiled itself neatly on the carpet and raised
a diamond-shaped head with bright, intelligent eyes to inspect the
company present. Mama leapt backwards and knocked over a
coffee table, Rose said vaguely, 'What have you got there, dear?'
and Pa went down on his knees, doting.
'I knew you'd love her,' said Jenny.
In fact, within twenty-four hours Jessie had won over everyone
in the house, including the cat and Matilda the spaniel. Rose, it's
true, never acknowledged her existence; a snake in the house was
so far beyond her that she refused to believe it was happening. She
didn't object, she simply treated Jessie as being invisible, even
when she coiled herself beside Rose on the sofa and put her head
in Rose's lap. Jessie liked getting into peoples' laps because they
were warm; if possible she would rest her head in the crook of your
elbow, and if snakes can purr, she purred.

153
There were risks attached to having Jessie in the house, and we
all realised that strangers were coming to the door, or old people,
might be badly frightened by her. She was mad about people, and
she soon learned that when the doorbell rang it meant that
someone new was about to appear. There would be a concerted
rush to get Jessie into her box before she had time to answer the
door in person, and the faster one coiled her in the faster she'd
uncoil herself out, so that by the time one got to the tail her head
would be halfway across the floor. Often people got tired of
waiting, decided we were out and went away.
It had never occurred to us, or we'd never thought about it, that
snakes might like to play as a puppy does, or a kitten. Jessie and
Matilda played together by the hour, Matilda with Jessie's head in
her mouth, and Jessie wrapped round Matilda's body in as many
coils as there were room for. She was far stronger than Matilda; if
she had squeezed there would have been no more dog, and by the
same token if Matilda had clamped her jaws there would have been
no more Jessie, but they threw each other harmlessly round the
room like a pair of wrestlers without a cross word between them.
For the times when Matilda was absent or unwilling Jessie invented
the chair-game.
Our dining-room furniture was solid; the chairs were Georgian,
a set of ten that Mama and Pa had bought in England, plain and
heavy. Jessie found a strange reptilian delight in wrapping herself
round the leg of a chair and whipping it sharply here and there
across the floor. It was quite normal to walk into the dining-room
and to see a chair zigzagging around, but if one didn't know that
there was a snake underneath it had a poltergeist effect that was
quite eerie. Pa transformed the chair-game into a polished act; a
performing snake was exactly the kind of thing he liked best.
He always had a lot of male friends he asked in for drinks,
among them at that time a number of high-ranking Army and Naval
officers from England who were planning, with their Australian
counterparts, for the coming war. Pa would put Jessie into the
dining-room before they arrived, and close the door. Then he'd

154
take the visitor into the sitting-room, ask what they'd like to drink
and leave them with Mama while he fetched it. The drink they'd
asked for was seldom what they got since Pa's aim was to have
them well sozzled before he exposed them to the chair-game, and
he knew that most of these men were talented drinkers.
I was genuinely shocked when I saw what he was putting into
the drinks one evening, but he said it was just a joke. One would
have thought that a mixture of brandy, scotch and gin would be
nasty enough to alert anyone, even when topped with soda, but
either men lose their palates by the time they reach high rank, or
else our visitors were all over-polite or abnormally thirsty. Whatever
the reason I never saw one of them so much as change his
expression on tasting Pa's hell-brew, and even the dullest of them
became chatty and amusing after the second drink.
It was usually after the second drink that they'd make a polite
move to say goodbye. Pa, very jovial, would slap them on the
shoulder and say, 'No, no old boy! You can't go yet. One for the
road! Come with me and get it.' He'd propel the poor man to the
dining-room door, the drinks being on the sideboard, and busy
himself with bottles while his stunned companion contemplated a
chair doing wheelies at the end of the dining-room table.
Usually the victim would advance to investigate, meet Jessie
and laugh, but occasionally one would tap Pa nervously on the
shoulder, and with his eyes starting out of his head say, 'Don't think
I'm mad, old boy, but that chair seems to be moving!' Pa would
turn, gaze blankly down the room and say, 'What chair? What are
you talking about?'
'That chair, there! Look, dammit, look!'
Pa would scan the room while the chair slid and bumped, then
examine the other man with grave concern and say, 'Are you sure
you're feeling all right, old boy? Like to sit down for a bit, perhaps?
Have a drink - might make you feel better,' and he'd hit the poor
fellow with a double scotch, so that by the time he left he'd passed
the alcoholic point of no return and was thinking of taking up
spiritualism.

155
Jessie was with us for a year. We managed to conceal her
presence from all but the people we knew to be civilised enough
to appreciate her, and it was hard to imagine life without her. She
was no trouble; every two weeks she was driven back to the shop
which had sold her, and installed in a cage with two or three white
rats. She would kill and eat what she wanted, sleep it off for a
couple of days and return home bright as a button, ready to play.
We stopped putting her in her box at night because she much
preferred to follow us upstairs to bed, and either to climb up the
curtain and hang from the curtain rod or to simply curl up on one's
feet.
There seemed to be no reason why she couldn't stay forever,
but subconsciously we felt guilty about her. There was always that
headlong rush to hide her when the doorbell rang, and the fact that
we never told our neighbours about her. That was our undoing.
Jenny's friend, Janet, was still living with us off and on; she had
qualified as a nurse too, but we remained her second home.
One sunny day when everyone else was out Janet decided to
sunbathe in the garden, and took Jessie out with her. This was quite
normal, because Jessie loved a nice bask under a bush when the
weather was right. Unfortunately Janet, who was always sleepy,
dozed off, and Jessie took a glide round the garden fence. When
Janet woke up and looked for her she was gone, and a hitherto
undiscovered hole at the bottom of a paling between us and the
next-door garden, was the only possible escape route.
Janet pulled a dress over her two-piece and went next door. She
rang the bell, and when the lady of the house appeared she said
politely, 'I'm sorry to bother you, but have you seen the Walker's
snake?'
The woman looked puzzled and said, 'Their rake? No, I don't
think we've borrowed their rake, but I can look.'
'No, not their rake, their snake. She's about 8 ft long, and I think
she must've slipped through into your garden. May I go and see?'
The unfortunate neighbour, who was not a snake-person by
any stretch of the imagination, gasped. 'A SNAKE! You're not

156
serious! In our garden!' then, 'My God, they should be prosecuted!
I'll ring the police.'
Janet went into the garden and retrieved Jessie who was
enjoying the change of scenery. When Mama arrived home the
police were already there, attended by the neighbour and her
husband both registering outrage, and Janet, with Jessie draped
becomingly round her neck, was trying to reason with them. The
police, to the neighbours' fury, said that keeping a pet snake was
not a chargeable offence, but they also warned Mama that it was
not likely to promote a spirit of goodwill and understanding in our
immediate vicinity, and reluctantly she had to agree.
Jessie went to a Wildlife Park where there was company of her
own kind. She may have found that she preferred the carpet snakes
to us, but I doubt it. It's hard to tell whether snakes show affection
among themselves or not, but there was no question about Jessie's
feelings when she was one of the family. She not only craved
affection, but she had so much to giwe.

157
21

Adolescence



DURING OUR FIRST YEARS in the South Yarra house I was
in the more hideous throes of adolescence, and all
adolescents were pariahs in those days. Teenagers hadn't
been invented, and it was made plain that one was in limbo, lost
between childhood and becoming human. In the holidays Mama
and her friends were apt to look at me and laugh, and say to each
other, 'Oh, my dear! But it really is a frightful stage, isn't it?' as
though I was deaf. Not infrequently Mama would quote Rose's Bon
Mot from Sorrento, 'Betty's beautiful, Jenny's handsome...' My self
esteem hadn't quite reached its all-time low, but it was sinking fast;
I consoled myself in bed at night with fantasies wherein I became
beautiful and heroic.
It was a strange year, 1939. There could have been few places
less exposed to the growing certainty of war than a girls boarding
school at Mt Eliza yet it penetrated even there, a feeling that
hovered between excitement and dread. We could sense our
elders adjusting themselves, shifting gear in their approach to the
future as though to ready themselves for steep, uncertain hills. Girls
with elder brothers were thoughtful, and talked together in low
voices; the teaching staff were edgy, and often distracted.
The actual outbreak of war was a 'what were you doing
when...?' time for everyone, a moment that imprinted itself on
minds as a tattoo is printed on the skin, ineradicable. No one was
moving very far from their wireless, in case of news, but when the
announcement came we were all upstairs, Mama and Jenny and
me, and Rose was being difficult about something with Mama.
Anne, our Irish maid, had the wireless on downstairs while she was

158
cleaning. She suddenly turned the volume up full and we could
hear her sobbing, and a voice graver than the grave said, '...that
we are at war with Germany'.
Mama burst into tears, and we didn't know what to do; Jenny
was too excited, and I was too inept. Mama, sobbing, said, 'Oh
God, it can't happen again. You don't know what it's like,' and
Jenny, who would finally know only too well what it was like,
couldn't stop herself from grinning.
The phoney war, those first few months of stalemate in Europe,
saw Mama and her friends become slightly paranoid. They felt
impotent and guilty because they were so far away from Home,
and because whatever horrors might come to Britain they were
shamefully safe. They formed every conceivable kind of patriotic
group, knitted socks and balaclavas, and as the months of
anticlimax lengthened they became frustrated and confused.
Pa, as an ex-Army man and holder of a King's Commission,
offered his services. He knew a lot of people in high places and
they, in turn, knew his record in India, his experience in Intelligence
there, and respected him for what he had done since coming
to Australia. He was retrieved from retirement and seconded to the
Army to organise Military Intelligence.
Jenny had finished her Midwifery Certificate, and was desperate
to join up. Her aim was to go overseas as soon as possible, but it
had been decreed by the Government that no nurse under the age
of 24 might serve outside Australia, and Jenny was 20. There was
also a problem because of her muddled Christian names, and she
couldn't join up until she could produce a Birth Certificate. This
inevitably had been lost during one of our moves, and the
Authorities were disinclined to believe that she was who she said
she was. After a lot of highly dramatised despair on her part, and
a great deal of string-pulling on Pa's part, a Certificate was issued.
Jenny paused only to alter the date of her birth on the Certificate
from 1919 to 1915 before joining the Army Nursing Service, and
requesting service overseas.
Betty was marking time. Norman's parents had agreed, reluctantly
159
and in principle only, to their marriage. Having done so they
produced, with evident relish, endless reasons why the wedding
should be postponed indefinitely. They decreed that while Norman's
younger brother might enlist and die for his country Norman,
as their heir, must stay at home and run the property, the Land
being a reserved occupation. They doubted, they said, that he
would have either the time or the money to cope with a wife. As
they were indecently rich, could have easily employed a Manager
or paid Norman a handsome wage, this was patently unconvincing.
Not only were they making excuses but they were being
monstrously cruel to Norman who, being a born warrior, felt
branded for life by being excluded from the war while his brother
was sent to fight. Betty went mournfully to art-classes and dabbled
in murals, then in stained glass, her eyes misty with longing for her
love, and as soon as possible after love was legitimised for the first
of the twenty-strong brood of children.
I was at school, a yeasty brew of emotion, introspection and
ignorance, a condition quite common among my age-group, and
far from attractive. I was eighty percent uninformed and twenty
percent wrong about sex which was also fairly common; one could
pick out the girls at school who really knew because they banded
together and sniggered at the rest of us. Jenny could easily have
educated me but it probably never dawned on her how ignorant
I was, and I had been so brainwashed by Mama's taboos that I
didn't dare ask.
The girls of my age had maudlin and romanticised ideas about
the war and the men who fought in it. We lived in an emotional
atmosphere of the greatest falsity, encouraged by the school staff
who wept over the sticky-sweet songs of the time about the White
Cliffs of Dover and the Nightingale in Berkeley Square. We grew
weak with our longing to comfort heroic pilots, to be where the
bombs were falling, and to risk our lives in some highly-sanitised
situation, preferably to the sound of general applause.
When the war had started in earnest, after Dunkirk, the
Headmistress heightened the emotional pressure with a night-time

160
ritual known as 'Taps'. If the news was either very good or very bad
a Taps night would be declared, and after lights-out we would
gather in our pyjamas at the windows looking down on the
Quadrangle. The staff would be standing behind the tall, gowned
figure of the Headmistress, solemn and silent, waiting for the full
weight of the occasion to sink into our childish souls.
When she judged us ready the Headmistress would step
forward into the moonlight, and in her deep voice she would recite.

They who shall not grow old as we who are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them.

And from behind our open windows we would chant in chorus,
'We shall remember them'.
Then taps; piping young voices, shaky with emotion, and tears
on cheeks.

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the sea, from the hills from the sky,
Safely rest, all is well,
God is nigh...

One of the staff would put a record of the Last Post on the
gramophone, and when its last heart-rending note died away we
would file off to bed, with not a dry eye between us. It was high
octane fuel for our under-developed minds, and left only a fraction
of our attention free for what went on in the classroom. On top of
that discipline was spasmodic, sometimes harsh, often nonexistent.
Betty
and Norman were married, in an austerity wartime
wedding on the day Paris fell, Betty in a short blue dress and a
blinding aura of joy, Norman handsome and unfamiliar in a suit,
and most of the wedding guests in a state of shock at the turn the
war was taking. Jenny was in the grey uniform of the Army Nursing
Service at last, her hat at a strictly non-regulation angle, and her
mind already on board a hospital ship. At the reception a lot of

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people cried, but they were almost certainly not crying about Betty and Norman; there were too many other things in the world that
called for proper tears.
I had started on a gradual, unconscious divorce from my family,
not through ill-will on either side but simply because we had begun
to lose each other. I either spent my holidays with Kempie or with
a school-friend's family on their Western District property, in a
huge, rangey house reeking of permanency, riding paddocks in the
wicked, cold winds which flatten the grass and bend the eucalypts
double on those open plains, and coming home frozen to log fires
and cocoa. Their family seemed to be far more integrated than ours;
they had clotted together over the years with their house and their
land, while our life was jittery and dislocated by comparison.
Pa and Mama didn't come down to school to visit me; they said
it was unpatriotic to use petrol, and besides, they were busy. I was
quite pleased; I was busy establishing myself as the school Enfant
Terrible, and didn't fancy the staff informing my parents of this at
first hand. In an undefined program of self-assertion I systematically
broke rules, went Out of Bounds, mixed the staffs breakfast
sugar with Epsom Salts, organised the whole school into a
successful sit-down strike and demoralised the German Mistress by
filling her desk to the brim with black-beetles. Because of the
superior academic standard of The Hermitage I had been put into
a class a year above my age-group when I first arrived; no one ever
demoted me, but during classes I simply switched off and drew
horses, cartoons or anything else that came to mind under the desk,
getting through exams by swotting for a week beforehand. After
school there was Sport, but I only appeared on the playing-field
when I'd been forcibly prevented from nicking off to the riding
school.
The coupling among the staff continued to flourish, encouraged
by the pressure-cooker atmosphere of wartime. The established
pairs clung to each other for comfort, parading round the Cloisters
hand-in-hand and playing sentimental music in their rooms. It was
towards the end of that year that Miss Cooke, the Games Mistress,

162
began to take an interest in me that struck even me as strange, given
that I had alienated every other member of the staff.
Miss Cooke had come to Toorak College at the same time as I
had. She was a slight, muscular woman in her late twenties, her hair
shingled at the back, a foxy, sharp-nosed face and lashless eyes.
She strode around parade-ground style, her arms swinging, her
legs bare beneath khaki shorts, followed by her Red Kelpie, Bunty,
whose colouring and features were uncannily like his owner's.
Miss Cooke was a singleton when she came, but the following year
a new and rather superior mistress arrived, It seemed that the
parents had at last rebelled against their daughters' French being ruined by Miss Jones, and demanded a replacement. The newcomer
was tall and thin, and had enormous eyes with purple
patches under them so that she looked like a cross between a Giant
Panda and Boris Karloff. Within a week of her arrival it became
apparent that she and Miss Cooke were walking out, and in no time
at all they were accepted as one of the official pairs.
When Miss Cooke started to single me out for attention I was
puzzled, then embarrassed, then flattered into discovering that if
I concentrated on games instead of horses I could play them
reasonably well. I won the school Swimming Championship, the
result of a short period when Mama had tried to make me into an
Olympic diver and subjected me to daily training under a crazy
German coach. Praise from Miss Cooke was harder to get than teeth
from a hen, and I swelled with pride when she handed me a minute
silver cup and a brusque, congratulatory speech.
Her next move was to ask me to run Bunty and to feed him
when she was away from school on her days off. Bunty's
relationship to her was that of a sucker fish to a shark; there was
a mysterious link between them, and he seldom moved beyond her
shadow. No one else had ever been allowed to touch him, and
once again my blind little ego sat up and purred. I was cherry-ripe,
both through age and circumstance, for that hideous schoolgirl
phenomenon known as a 'crush'. Crushes were rife in girls' schools
before the liberating influence of co-education; they were humiliating
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to both the crushee and crushor, and at super-segregated
Toorak College they were distressingly common.
Not only was my family becoming remote but I was increasingly
conscious that in terms of looks I didn't rate alongside my sisters.
It hadn't worried me much until then, but the girls of my age were
starting to be obsessed with glamour, and I had to face the fact that
not all grubs turned into butterflies. I had stupidly asked Mama
during the last holidays whether I was going to be pretty. She
studied me at length and then, as if grasping at straws, said, 'Your
eldest sister says you have nice eyebrows,' and I made up my mind
not to risk the subject again. With the emphasis on facial beauty
both at home and school I felt that I was giving the field a long start,
and as a result I was ravished by the miracle of someone of
importance, like Miss Cooke, deigning to take notice of me.
Miss Cooke made no serious move towards me that year
beyond turning me into her puppet, to be manipulated at will and
slavishly seeking her approval. In some ways it did me a lot of
good; I stopped being an Enfant Terrible and started to work,
besides thundering round the playing field trying to impress. The
change was so dramatic that I became a sub-prefect and captained
teams, and the school staff were amazed, but grateful. My peer
group, who understood exactly what was going on, knew that I
was making an idiot of myself, and gave me hell. Life became
unnerving and miserable; I never knew whether Miss Cooke was
going to be nice to me or snub me, and whichever it was someone
would notice and tease me about it afterwards. By the end of the
year I was heartily sick of the lot of them, including myself and Miss
Cooke.
Jenny was home on leave at the start of the summer holidays,
on the brink of her first overseas posting as a nurse on board the
Hospital Ship Oranje Nassau, a converted Dutch liner bound for
duty in the Middle East. She and Janet were both at home, and Betty
had come down from Warranooke for a few days too. Mama rang
me at school to say that I should come home after the school Breakup
by train. She said, 'There really isn't room for you here, darling,

164
till Betty goes back, so I've booked you a room at St Carol's.' St
Carol's was a boarding house, just round the corner from where we
lived. 'I know you won't get up to town until late, but you know
where St Carol's is. You'll be able to carry your suitcase there from
the station, and you can come round to us in the morning.'
'Couldn't you and Pa come to the Break-up?'
'No, darling, we're far too busy, and I want to be with The Girls
while they're here. You'll have great fun on your own at St Carol's,
it'll be good for you. The Manager's very nice, and he'll look after
you. Come round here after your breakfast.'
It was a fair way from the station to St Carol's, the suitcase was
heavy, and I arrived there puffing, sweating and feeling dispossessed.
The Manager showed me into a large bedroom, luxurious
compared to my room at home, but bleakly impersonal. I sat on
the bed, reluctant to unpack; I could hear music and voices in the
next room, and they heightened my isolation. Then I heard a door
open and close, and there was a knock on my own door. When
I opened it I was surprised to see a youngish man standing there,
his finger on his lips, smiling a roguish, conspiratorial smile.
Although he was clearly a man he was dressed in a long, tight skirt
with a slit down one side, and a frilly white blouse. He clasped his
hands, swayed from the hips like a dancer, and inspected me from
head to foot.
'Welcome, darling,' he said. 'But welcome.'We heard you were
coming, Jas and I, and I said tojas, poor little thing, I said. Fancy
arriving and being all on your own in a place like this! So I came
to meet you. Come into our room and have a drink with us, darling,
and meet Jas. You'll love Jas.'
I thought, 'they must be dressing up, playing charades or
something.' Anyway, anything was better than sitting alone in my
room, so I said, 'Thank you. Are you sure it'll be all right, with Jas,
I mean?'
'But of course!' He took me by the wrist and whipped me from
my door to his. The room was very dark, but I could make out
piled-up cushions and potted plants, and there was a strange,

165
sweetish smell coming from some sticks which were smoking lazily
in a Chinese vase. A big, soft man dressed in what looked like a
brocade tent was half-lying against a heap of cushions on the floor.
'This is Jas,' said my new friend. 'And I'm Robin. What's your
name, dear.
'How funny, I'm Robin too.'
'Don't tell me! How quaint!Jas, darling, do get her a drink to
celebrate. We're twins!'
Jas rolled his bulk sulkily against the cushions and said, 'Get it
yourself!' I sat down politely on the floor, and when Robin handed
me a glass saying, 'I think this should be to your taste, love, do try
it.' I tried it. It was sweet and sticky and tasted strongly of
peppermint, and it settled into my depths like a hot-water bottle
on a cold night.
Robin put some very weird music on the gramophone, poured
himself a glass of something, and sat on the floor facing me. He
talked with the uncontrollable flow of a burst water main. Every
now and then he leapt to his feet, still talking, and either refilled
the glasses or changed a record. At one point he said, 'Oh, damn! No more creme de menthe. Never mind, darling, try this, it's just
as nice.' I fancy it may have been Cointreau. I was feeling no pain,
and I was beyond knowing or caring what Robin was talking about.
My troubles began a little later: dizziness, nausea, and when I tried
to stand up a noticeable lack of directional stability. Jas heaved
himself upright for the first time, looked at me closely and said,
'Now look what you've done, you bloody fool. Get her out of here,
quick, she's going to throw up!'
Robin dragged me down to the Ladies Bathroom and stood
outside while I threw my heart up, then escorted me back to my
own room, patted me on the shoulder and shoved me inside.
'Night-night, darling,' he whispered as he left. 'You'll be fine in the
morning.' Either St Carol's was empty that night or everyone there
was a wonderful sleeper. I made several trips to the bathroom, and
the sounds of my suffering must have carried a long way, but
nobody stirred.

166
When I staggered over to my home next morning, pale and
shaking, Mama looked at me with interest and said, 'Haven't you
been well, darling? The school should have told me but never
mind, the holidays'll fix you up. Did you have a lovely time at St
Carol's?'
At that time neither Miss Cooke's attentions at school nor my
friends at St Carol's had, for me, any connection with matters
sexual, and I had no idea that in a vital part of my education I was
being exposed to the exotic rather than the straight.
During the next school year I became even more confused, and
considerably less trusting of my fellow human beings. To encourage
my new, conformist role I was given what was known as More
Responsibility. I was taking my School Leaving exams a year before
the usual age, and Miss Cooke deliberately played on my nerves
as though they were the keyboard of a xylophone. She missed no
opportunity to pinpoint me, either for approbation or withering
put-down, in shrewdly judged turns. She would touch me quite
unnecessarily on the games field in front of everybody, and she
secretly issued invitations for me to visit her alone at night in her
room. I refused; by now I was genuinely scared of her. Her
established soul-mate glared at me with open hatred, and the
Headmistress gave me a lecture about not becoming too familiar
with the staff. Even though I was going to great lengths to avoid
her my peer-group said, rightly enough, that it was my own fault,
and sneered at me. I became mildly anorexic, increasingly solitary,
and more certain than ever that I must be some kind of freak. I
passed my Leaving Exams but my family said that I was too young
to leave school. 'You can't just sit around at home,' they said, 'And
you're too young to join the Services. Go back next year and do
Leaving Honours.'
There was no point in arguing; it was what Mama wanted, and
Pa simply said, 'You'll do as your mother tells you.' Toorak College
was still going through a lean period, and for lack of a more suitable
candidate the Headmistress was forced to inform me that I would
be Head Girl in the coming year.

167
Before the term ended, on the 7th December 1941, the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbour. The war had made a giant leap from
Europe to the Pacific, and Australia watched with disbelief as a race
they'd hitherto regarded as an incomprehensible, rather primitive
joke proceeded to make a mockery of Britain's Far Eastern
defences. The Yanks, who to most Australians were almost as
foreign and remote as the Japanese, suddenly sprouted like fresh,
young grass across the country, challenging and changing our
perception of ourselves.
People like Mama who had nursed a lifelong reverence for
everything British, the accent, the rigid self-control, the class
system, were appalled by the newcomers. As a mother of daughters
Mama equated them roughly with the rapist, barbarian hordes of
the distant past. Young Australia on the other hand took to them
with joy, embracing them and their way of life, finding both
seductive. It was the beginning of the end of the old Australia, the
land of the macho man and his subservient woman, of the grazier
caste system and the colonial cringe. We didn't suspect that it was
happening, but in 1941 our doors to the world began to creak open,
and Australia would never be the same again.

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22

War and Warburton



THOSE SUMMER HOLIDAYS were like coming out of a cellar
into the sun, and I tried not to think about having to go
down to the dark again. The Oranje Nassau, Jenny's
Hospital Ship, had come back to Australia for a refit, and Jenny
came home on leave. The ship had been carrying the men
wounded in the Desert War from Alexandria down the coast of
Africa to the hospitals of Durban and Cape Town, and although
Jenny had been away for less than a year she had changed. She was
the same on the surface, a little thinner, but there was something
different about her mouth and eyes, a hardness and remoteness,
and she had withdrawn from our lives to some un-shareable place
of her own.
Mama was so overcome with joy and pride and excitement that
she didn't seem to notice the difference, and she insisted on
dragging Jenny round her own friends as though she was showing
off a trophy. Jenny put up with it politely but she treated Mama with
a tolerant, distant kindness, as people treat over-effusive children.
One felt that she had seen and learned things which could never
be explained to anyone as young and innocent as her mother.
She was different with me too, as if I had stopped being an infant
sister and become a friend. Most of the friends she'd had when she
left were scattered; even Janet was now an Army nurse stationed
in Queensland. The girls she knew in Melbourne were doing jobs
which seemed to be secondary to their absorbing love affairs and
social lives, and they had lost any relevance for Jenny; she avoided
them. There was nothing she could say to them about the things
which haunted her, the men whose bodies and lives had been

169
fragmented in the time it takes for a shell to explode or a bullet to
strike. Tragedies devoured her, and she was twenty-two, going on
forty.
We sat on the beds in her room late at night, after our parents
had honoured their on-the-dot bedtime of nine-thirty and shut their
door. She had brought back a couple of tall, stone bottles of Bols
gin, and stacks of oval Abdullah cigarettes. She brought them out
as we sat, blankets round our shoulders, poured large glasses of
neat Bols, gave one to me and lit a cigarette for both of us.
She said, 'It'll be fun when the war's over, Robs, the two of us
together. Hi take you out and show you round, but if you're going
to come out with me you've got to learn to drink and smoke. Suck,
for God's sake, don't blow! And don't chew the end. You're
supposed to toss Bols off in one gulp but you'd better not, just sip.'
Made bold by Bols I asked her about the Hospital Ship and her
work, sure that she wouldn't want to talk about it, but to my
surprise she did, savagely butting out her cigarettes as she talked
as though she was punishing them.
She said, 'They're so brave, these men, Robs. You can't imagine
how brave they are. They have great holes in them that'll never heal
or arms gone, or legs or they're blind. And the worst hurt ones are
the bravest of all, they never complain.
'When I was training here we used to joke about men patients,
how they moaned and fussed and thought they were sicker than
anyone else had ever been. And they were always wanting things,
even when we were flat-out busy. They were twice as much
trouble as women patients. I thought this'd be the same and it isn't.
Maybe it's because they've all been through it together and seen
each other hurt, so they can share it, the being hurt and crippled,
I mean. It's not just something that happens to one man on his own
and makes him feel important. But some of them are so bloody
young, just kids. You know they'll never be whole people again
and so do they, but they crack jokes about it.
'I lie in my bunk at night,' she said, pouring herself another Bols,
'and I cry about them. More often about the older ones, funnily

170
enough. The young ones only have themselves to worry about, and
they'll get looked after by their families or the government, and if
they're any good they'll make a life for themselves. But the married
ones who've got wives and kids, what's their future? A lot of them
won't be able to work any more and they'll get a pension, but their
wives'll have to stay home and look after them and a lot of the wives
won't do that. They'll get fed up and clear out with someone else.
And there'll be kids who grow up despising their fathers because
they're cripples. War heroes! Bloody hell! How I hate the rubbish
people talk - all these silly, deluded old Melbourne matrons. They
don't know a thing - David says...'
'David who?'
'Oh damn. Robs, forget about David. I haven't said anything
about him to Mama, she wouldn't approve. I'll probably never see
him again anyway.'
'Are you in love with him? Why won't you see him again?'
'He's in hospital in Cape Town, he was one of our wounded.
Maybe we'll go there again on our next run, but he'll probably have
been sent home.'
'Oh, Jennifer! Are you going to marry him after the war?'
'No, he's got a wife and kids in England. Don't look like that
Robs, have another Bols, these things happen all the time. I don't
think I'll ever get married, but for God's sake don't say so to Mama.'
'Why won't you?'
'Why not? Cleave to one man only for the rest of my life? Wash
for him, cook for him, breed his brats and tell him he's wonderful
five times a day? Not on your life! That's what it's like, you know,
marriage, except for people like Betty who're made for it. When
this is over I'm going to enjoy things. Maybe I'll go on nursing,
maybe not, but I'll live my own life and if I want to have lovers I'll
have them, not just one man I'll get bored with and start hating. If
you breathe a word of this I'll murder you, it'd give Mama a fit. But
I tell you now, all the poppycock talked about sex and marriage
in this house makes me sick.'

171
When her leave was up and she rejoined her ship it felt to me that
the house had somehow closed itself after her, in the same way that
a giant clam closes its shell. Mama put framed photographs of
Jenny everywhere, gazed at them and sighed over them, and
invented sacrifices for us to make in small, domestic ways to match
Jenny's privations at sea. She had her cooking by then to give her
some distraction, and the sacrifices showed up in our meals.
She had decided soon after Dunkirk that servants were an
unjustifiable luxury in wartime. Anne, the Irish maid who had been
with us for years, had decided to retire anyway; she was getting old
and cranky, and when she left us to go into a room in an Old
People's Home, a life of blissful inactivity and gossip, Mama
announced that in future she would do the cooking herself.
She took to it with alarming fervour. Recipes littered the house,
she was bitterly critical of anyone who still had a cook, she bought
and rapidly discarded every gadget which could possibly be used
in the kitchen. Each one was a new miracle, to be superseded by
a newer one. She drew the line at housework, and this was done,
from scrubbing and polishing to washing and ironing, by a nice,
gabby little woman called Mrs Kane. She had long, satisfactory
cuppa sessions with Mama over the kitchen table, and it was
impossible to avoid an intimate knowledge of Mrs Kane's extended
family because Mama gave Pa and me a new episode every night.
The worst thing about Mama's cooking was her patriotism. She
believed it was immoral to use more than half the prescribed
amount of any ingredient, such as butter, eggs or sugar, which was
on the ration list in England or might not be plentiful on board the Oranje Nassau. Arbitrary reductions took place in whatever
recipes she happened to be following so that cakes tended to fall
apart, sauces had the consistency of clag, and everything tasted flat.
Pa, who always had a good lunch at the Australian Club, was
immensely proud of her efforts, but said that he really preferred
plain, simple food at night. Their evening meals on most nights of
the week for the rest of their lives consisted of chops, potatoes and
a vegetable, followed by toast and jam.

172
Soon after Jenny had gone back to her ship Betty had a
miscarriage. It was the ultimate disaster for her, and the doctors
made it worse. They said that her pregnancies would always be
difficult, and that child bearing itself would be a risk. Her whole
life had been built round her twenty imagined babies and their
father, and the possibility of her own body betraying her dream had
never occurred to her. She heard what the doctors said, refused to
believe a word of it, and went back to Warranooke to try again.
I had been to Warranooke once or twice on visits, and didn't
know what to make of it. There was a coldness about it, not
generated by Betty and Norman but by Norman's parents and the
huge, dark, concrete house they lived in. It was an imposingly ugly
house, like a monstrous gun emplacement. It had been built onto
the old, original bluestone kitchens and servants' quarters which
still stretched behind it. There were lawns with peacocks and
palms, and a huge aviary full of native birds, and sunshine, but
inside the house it was dark and unwelcoming.
Betty and Norman lived in a cottage, separated from the main
house by a tall, brooding cypress hedge. The cottage was very old,
built of wattle and daub, with a floor that went up and down in
waves so that you felt that you were walking on the deck of a
moving ship. Betty had done her best with it, hanging prints and
reproductions on the walls and draping bits of bright fabric here
and there, but it needed money in large quantities, and they had
none. The in-laws were unsympathetic; they made no secret of the
fact that Norman's choice of wives had been his own, not theirs.
They patronised Betty, bullied her and put her down, and when
she was alone she sat on the cottage floor and wept. Norman was
out all day long doing the work of three men, and his mother could
torment Betty during the daylight hours at will. Jenny wouldn't
have put up with it for a moment but Norman was Betty's true and
only love, and she would have died rather than make trouble
between him and his parents. Having longed as a child to be
punished with everyone else she now reeled under punishment
that was completely undeserved.

173
The world was full of evil spirits that year, the last year I was
at Toorak College. At school one couldn't quite hear the thin wail
of the Banshees but one knew that the echo was there, just out of
reach. My age group was old enough to be aware that the world
we knew was dying, that millions of people were dying too, among
them people we knew. We felt cocooned and useless. As Head Girl
I was supposed to set an example of discipline and rectitude and
it all seemed irrelevant, a chore to be got through between news
bulletins on the radio.
In addition, there was still Miss Cooke. In some ways it was
easier to avoid her; I shared a proper bedroom with another girl,
which meant there was somewhere I could shut myself away
instead of being readily available in the commonroom or the
corridors. Unavailability and reluctance must have made me more
desirable, and Miss Cooke wasn't a woman to give up easily.
Mama telephoned me shortly before the end of the first term,
and the May holidays. She didn't ring very often, and this time she
had the bright, encouraging note in her voice that I had learned to
mistrust.
She said, 'Darling, about the holidays...'
'Yes, Mama. What about them?'
'Well, that nice Games Mistress of yours, Miss Cooke, rang me,
and I must say it's very kind of her. She says she's going hiking for
a few days round Warburton at the beginning of the holidays, and
because you've tried so hard at games she'd like to take you with
her. It'd be lovely for you, camping out and seeing the bush. I said
you'd be thrilled. Do go and thank her, darling.'
'Oh, please Mama, no. I don't want to go.'
My mother's voice ceased to be bright and encouraging, and I
could hear her thinking, 'Adolescents! What on earth gets into
them?'
'Why on earth not, Robin? Your father and I are busy, and there's
nothing for you to do at home. You're not going to spend all your
time with Kempie, you're too old for it.'
'I don't like Miss Cooke. Please, I don't want to go.'

174
'Oh, rubbish. A year ago you were telling me how nice she is.
Anyway, I've said yes, and that's that. She's got all the camping
things you'll need, so go and talk to her about it.' She rang off.
I didn't go to Miss Cooke but she came to me. She had a
triumphant look in her eye and she wisely didn't elaborate too
much, just told me that she'd spoken to Mama and which day we'd
be leaving, then walked away with a swagger that said, 'Game, set,
match.' I finished the term leaden with foreboding.
On the appointed day Mama drove me to Flinders Street Station
and delivered me to Miss Cooke. She was hung about with packs
and bedding rolls, a share of which she handed to me, and she
looked more aggressively masculine than ever. Bunty sat at her
feet, looking foxy. I was speechless, partly through fury, partly
through fear, and Mama gushed overdone gratitude to cover my
silence.
Miss Cooke told me that we'd get off the train at Warburton,
walk up the mountain to a hut she'd stayed in before, and camp
there for the night. Then she brought out a book and ignored me
so that I sat, as the train rattled on, wondering why I was scared
when the whole thing was so obviously harmless.
We trudged uphill through the bush. There was the silence of
tall, damp trees and ferns, a winding track, and every now and then
the temple-gong call of a bellbird dropping through the leaves like
a stone into water. I could see Miss Cooke's iron calf-muscles
pumping away ahead of me, and Bunty's tail waving just behind
them. I felt humble and stupid and told myself that it'd be all right,
that outside school everything was different. The hut when we
reached it was small and basic with two bunks against one wall,
and a fireplace. Miss Cooke sent me off to get dry wood and made
a fire; it was dark by then.
When the fire was going and she had put the billy on to boil,
and a frying pan for the steak, she began to talk. She had a flask
of whisky, and she poured a little into a mug of tea for me, and a
lot for herself. She started telling me that she'd been engaged to a
man who'd been killed early in the war but the story sounded false,

175
like something from a women's magazine. Then she began to talk
about her women friends, how wonderful they were and how she
loved them, then how wonderful I was, and I began to feel
uncomfortable; she said things that made no sense to me at all.
She said, 'It's so nice here, just the two of us, isn't it? So lovely?
I can't tell you how much I've looked forward to it, and you have
too, haven't you, darling? I'm going to get undressed now and you
get undressed too, and we'll get into the bunk together and keep
warm.' She was stripping off her clothes as she spoke, saying,
'Quick, quick! Hurry up and get your clothes off, silly!' and
laughing, and I just stood there with my mouth open, incredulous.
Stark naked she flung herself into the bunk, grabbed me by the
wrist and pulled me down on top of her. Her eyes closed and she
wrapped her arms round me. She whispered, 'Touch my breasts,
darling, please touch my breasts.'
I left the bunk as though someone had poked me with a cattle
prod. I had no idea what was happening, but at least I knew why
I'd been frightened of her, she was dangerously mad. Touch her
breasts, indeed! What for? Why would anyone want their breasts
touched? Maybe she was going to kill me, throttle me or something.
I seized my jacket and a torch she'd left lying on the floor, and
headed off downhill towards the lights of Warburton, slipping and
scrambling on the steep track. I was half out of my mind with the
fear that she might be following me.
The track ended at the station, which was cold and silent. There
was an old man hunched on a chair inside the ticket office and he
said to me, 'Was you wanting the milk train, Miss? It'll be 'ere in 'alf
an hour.' I went onto the platform and sat on a bench, shaking, and
expecting at any minute to hear Miss Cooke telling me to come
back to the hut, and thinking that if she did I'd kill her first.
Something touched me on the leg and I soared into the air trying
not to yell, then knew unutterable relief as I found that I'd been
joined by a dog
It was a red setter, collarless and skeleton thin and we sat
together, leaning against each other, taking comfort. When the

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milk train rumbled into the station we both got on board and curled
up together on the seat. I had enough money in my pocket to pay
the fare when we got to Flinders Street, and they made me pay for
the dog too. It was barely getting light when I telephoned home,
waking my parents up. I could hear Pa grinding his teeth as he said,
'Wait on the pavement outside the station until we pick you up.
You can tell us what the hell's going on then.' I forgot to mention
the dog, but we were standing side by side when the car pulled up,
and I could see Pa's eyes move from one to the other of us,
narrowing as they did so. It was plain that his self-control was
severely strained. He said, 'Where did you get that bloody dog? You
can't keep it.'
'I found it on Warburton Station, it was lost.'
'What were you doing on Warburton Station? You're supposed
to be camping with Miss Cooke. Well? I won't have you worrying
your mother like this, d'you hear!'
At this point I began to freeze; I could think of no way to explain
anything so improbable as what had actually happened, or why I
had been so terrified. I'd already begun to wonder if I'd behaved
like an idiot, whether it was really all right, what Miss Cooke had
done, and if I was being infantile and stupid. Pa, driving erratically
as usual, said, 'Well, we're waiting. D'you mind telling us what
you're doing back here?'
After a long pause I said, 'Miss Cooke frightened me, she...'
'Frightened you! What d'you mean, how could she frighten
you?'
'Well, it was all right till after we'd had tea, and then...'
'Yes, go on.'
'Then she got undressed, took all her clothes off, and she
wanted me to do the same.'
'Good God, it was bedtime, wasn't it? What the hell's the matter
with you?'
'All right!' I said, suddenly furious. 'If you must know she pulled
me down on top of her on the bunk and told me to touch her
breasts. I didn't want to, so I cleared out.'

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'Oh, what a lot of nonsense, Robin,' said Mama, laughing with
relief. 'You must have misunderstood her, why on earth would she
say that? What a fuss about nothing! Poor Miss Cooke, you'll have
to apologise to her. Really!'
Pa drove in total silence: I could see the outline of his cheek and
jaw, and they were rigid. After a couple of minutes he said, 'I don't
believe you!'
I said, 'Honestly Pa, that's exactly what happened, and it scared
me.'
He said again, 'I don't believe you, you're lying. It didn't
happen.' I burst into tears. Mama turned in her seat and stared at
me, genuinely astonished. 'I really don't understand what all the
fuss is about,' she said. 'All this silly drama when the poor woman
was just trying to be kind, and anyway, Geoff, what does it matter
if it did happen? I'll write to her and apologise, and you must write
too Robin, and let's hope she'll just forget about it.' She turned to
Pa and sighed. 'Adolescents!' she said. 'What an idiotic stage it is!
Heavens knows what that poor woman must have thought!'
There is no question that my father believed me, and knew
perfectly well what had happened and why, but the difficulty of
explaining lesbianism to his wife was too much for him. Besides
that, if he had told Mama what it was all about she would have
demanded that action be taken against Miss Cooke and possibly
against the school, and it would have become an open scandal. It
would have been easier for me if he had said, 'Look, I believe you
but there's no harm done, just forget about it,' but on the other
hand, by cauterising the truth as one might a wound, he made it
impossible for me to mention it to anyone and I might easily have
done so, to someone at school, causing endless trouble. The only
casualty was my self-confidence, already low, which now subsided
in a heap.
My last two terms at school were a battle to maintain a credible
front in my role of Head Girl while concealing the ugly, craven,
ignorant freak which I knew lay behind the facade. Miss Cooke
treated me with open hostility in public and issued urgent

178
invitations to secret meetings if she got me alone. I learned to look
through her as though she didn't exist, and to shun personal
relationships of any kind since, it seemed to me, they were
infinitely dangerous.
At the end of the year I'd accumulated a number of prizes, due
mainly to the depleted state of the school and the lack of
competition, but it persuaded my parents that they should come
to the Break-up to share in their daughter's single moment of glory.
All through the hypocrisy of the Headmistress's speech... 'throughout
the year the School has maintained its exceptional standard of
scholarship, comradeship and sporting achievement...' and'.. .the
splendid moral standard set for the girls by the staff, to whom I
extend my thanks...' I could see Mama and Pa in the front row,
smiling politely. Afterwards, during the tea and sandwiches. I
watched Mama moving graciously among the staff, shaking them
by the hand, and I thought with a sick, helpless feeling, 1 bet she'll
go and apologise for me to Miss Cooke.'
They told me Jenny's news on the way back to Melbourne,
Mama's voice shaky with pride. 'She was only home for a few days,
darling, and she sent you her love. She was sorry she missed seeing
you, but she's wildly excited. You see, Australia has decided to set
up its own Hospital Ship. It's a very small one, it only carries twelve
nurses, and they say they picked the best nurses in the Army to staff
it. Jenny was chosen, isn't it marvellous? Your father says they'll be
operating between Australia and New Guinea, so we'll see a lot
more of her when she gets Leave. The ship's being fitted out in
Brisbane, so she's gone up there to join the rest of the medical staff
until it's ready. It's a tremendous honour you know, to be one of
the few chosen out of all the Army nurses.'
'Yes,' I said, 'It's terrific for her, I'm so glad. What's the ship
called?'
'The Centaur,' said Mama.

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23

After school



WHEN I LEFT SCHOOL at the end of 1942 I was still too
young to join a Service, but it was hard to think
seriously about doing anything else. Pa said, what
about the University, what about doing Law, what about this and
that, and I said no to all of them. I agreed to go to the Art School
at the Melbourne Technical College because I knew I could drop
out of it as soon as I was called up. University courses seemed
irrelevant. The war was going wrong everywhere; in Europe, in the
Middle East, and in our own part of the world the Japanese seemed
unstoppable. The people who had been ashamed of their relative
safety were discovering, with alarm and indignation, that they
weren't so safe after all.
Betty, triumphantly, had produced her first son, wasting no time
after her miscarriage, and was hard at work on her second child:
her childbearing schedule had been upset, and she was determined
to catch up. The doctors were alarmed by the urgency of her
program, and insisted that she spend the last month of her second
pregnancy in town so that they could keep an eye on her. Betty and
Christopher were installed at home and Mama was delirious with
joy. She and Betty felt the same way about babies that Pa and Jenny
and I felt about animals.
Because of her size and her complete disregard for appearances
Betty's pregnancies were spectacular, and I was truly shocked by
the sight of my sister. I had missed seeing her in the pre-Christopher
period by being at School, and I was unprepared for her sheer
magnitude. She carried in front of her a bulge the size and shape
of a large beer-keg, and she'd bought no maternity clothes because

180
of the expense. She wore what she normally wore, so that her skirts
hung over her vast stomach and barely covered her crutch, like
inadequate awnings, while trailing down to mid-calf at the back.
On anyone but Betty it would have been bizarre, but your eyes
were drawn inevitably to her face which was lovelier than ever,
wreathed in the seraphic smile she had worn since Christopher's
birth.
Determined to be a model mother she had read every book on
the subject, accumulating contradictory theories and discarding
nothing. Like many mothers she would settle down with her
second child but poor Christopher, while receiving the most
abundant love, was a guinea pig. His mealtimes were disgusting
because he was a reluctant eater; he sat in a high chair throwing
up his food, and Betty grimly sat in front of him with a spoon,
feeding it back to him. It reminded me of my trauma with the liver
and brains at Sorrento and not even Mama could bear to watch.
While she was staying with us a lot of Betty's old friends took
the chance to see something of her. One of them, Margaret, was
a woman she'd known in her Art School days. She was a lot older
than Betty, professional, very clever, a spinster and almost certainly
a lesbian. She was devoted to Betty, but intelligent enough never
to have made a move towards her other than of the most harmless
and protective friendship. Betty valued and admired her and so did
I, and it was she who finally enlightened Mama, me and probably
Betty on the subject of homosexuality.
Miss Cooke had left Toorak College at the same time I did,
whether by her own choice or the school's, I don't know. It's quite
possible that her inclinations had involved someone besides
myself, and that she was no longer welcome. She had taken a new
job as Games Mistress at a school only half a mile from our house,
and had gaily informed Mama of this during Mama's inevitable,
laughing apologies for me at the School Break-up.
'I am so sorry, Miss Cooke! I can't imagine what came over the
silly child, but of course you'd know well enough what they're like
at that age.'

181
'Don't worry, Mrs Walker, I'll be coming past your house every
day to my new job, and I'll talk it over with Robin. I'm sure I'll find
out what was the matter. She might like to come to a concert or
something with me, once she's got it off her chest.'
'Oh, Miss Cooke, that is kind of you!'
I didn't hear the conversation of course, but that's roughly how
it would have gone. I was in such a state of nerves, uncertainty and
self-loathing that I had become almost agoraphobic. On the rare
occasions when I had to go somewhere Mama had to dose me with
sal volatile, otherwise I shook and sweated so that I couldn't get
dressed. The first time I walked round the corner of the house and
saw Miss Cooke, eager as a bird-dog, poised outside the gate, I fled
back into my room and locked the door. After that venturing into
the street was my greatest terror. She never actually came to the
house, but I never knew when she'd be hovering near the gate or
round the corner, waiting for me.
Margaret came to see Betty one day when Miss Cooke was
standing outside, gazing expectantly up the path. Margaret looked
at her curiously; she saw that the woman was obviously wanting
something, and she asked if she could help. Miss Cooke just glared
at her, and took herself off. We were in the sitting-room, Mama and
Betty and me, and when Margaret came in and said, 'Who's that
odd-looking woman hanging round outside the gate?' I felt myself
go white.
Mama said, 'Oh, that's just Miss Cooke. She was Games Mistress
at Robin's school and she was really terribly good to Robin, but
now the wretched child won't speak to her and I daren't even ask
her in. The whole thing's too stupid and embarrassing, Margaret,
I don't know what to do about it.'
Margaret gave me a long, appraising stare, then looked at Mama
with raised eyebrows. She was much nearer Mama's age than
Betty's, and I've no doubt she found Miss Cooke easily identifiable,
as a type. She said, 'I'd like to have a talk to Robin if she doesn't
mind. Alone. Could we use your bedroom, Betty?'
It was amazing how easy Margaret was to talk to. She sat me

182
down, and slowly, expertly, drew the whole story out of me, and
I could tell her without shame because she believed me, even the
part about Warburton.
When I'd finished she said, 'Oh dear me! Look, Robin, there's
nothing so terrible about all that, really. Miss Cooke's been a fool
but she can't help it, and you don't have to worry about it. Some
women like other women, love them in a sexual way, and some
men feel the same way about other men. I'm going to explain it all
to you properly because it's high time you understood. Come to
that, I wonder if Betty knows? Anyway, first of all I'd better explain
the facts of life to your mother.'
Mama never mentioned their conversation to me; she would
have found it too profoundly shocking, having never imagined
such things could exist. However, she did keep an eye out for Miss
Cooke, saw her lingering outside the gate again and charged out
to confront her. She came back red in the face, found me skulking
in my room and said, 'I've just told Miss Cooke that if I ever see her
round here again I'll call the police. I don't think she'll be back.'
Margaret threw light on a whole lot of things for me; the
interwoven couples on the school staff, my temporary friends at St
Carol's and jokes I'd heard about men who were 'pansies', but she
told me nothing about the mechanics of ordinary, straight sex, and
I was beginning to realise that one day, sooner rather than later,
I'd need to know. It was no use asking Betty or Mama; Mama
genuinely couldn't bring herself to speak of it, and Betty wouldn't
because she'd think that if I knew how it worked I might go out
and try it, like Jenny. I promised myself that next time Jenny was
home I'd tell her I didn't know, and I knew that she'd explain it all,
properly. In the meantime I still didn't know any boys and I was
certain that they wouldn't be interested in me if I did, so the matter
wasn't urgent.
By this time Pa had relinquished his position in Army Intelligence
to a younger man, and taken over the leadership of the
Volunteer Defence Corps, Australia's version of Dad's Army. The
VDC Headquarters were close to where we lived and Pa spent a

183
lot of time there; he had a staff of pleasant, elderly officers, and
although they all seemed to be having a wonderful time I never saw
any evidence of troops. In fact Pa appeared to have more time on
his hands than ever before.
He worried about me, I think, realising better than Mama that
I was mortally nervous and uncertain of myself, and that I met no
one except the other students at the Art School. Older women were
an open book to him, but girls of my age, ingrowing and
upgrowing, were a mystery. He tried hard to help, taking me to
places with him on our own, and with him I always felt normal and
relaxed. His sudden bursts of temper didn't worry me, nor his
occasional betrayals such as his denial of Miss Cooke's advances;
I understood because I was like him, and capable of the same
things.
Betty had another son, Tony. Once again the birth was
complicated, and the doctors shook their heads; they told Betty and
Norman that it would be most unwise to try again. You could see
the words going in one of Betty's ears and out the other; if she could
produce two beautiful, healthy sons she could produce the other
eighteen.
I was enjoying Art School; life classes absorbed me completely,
and for the first time I felt that I was doing something reasonably
well. Passing exams and getting prizes at school had made me feel
shifty because I knew that a lot of girls had worked harder than I
had, and that I was a fake. Drawing was different; everyone started
from the same point with a blank sheet of paper, and the results
spoke for themselves, good or bad. My drawing wasn't within miles
of the way I wanted to draw and I cringed from showing my work
to people, but I loved the bare, cold art-rooms and the texture of
good paper, and the wonderful, rare moments when you knew that
a line was exactly right. Concentration on the curve of a muscle or
the shadow of a facial bone could make a morning or an afternoon
pass unnoticed. I forgot myself, and even the war disappeared for
hours at a time; nothing mattered but paper, and how to put life
on it.

184
On a bleak morning, Friday the 13th of May in 1943, a few days
after the Technical School had broken up for the holidays, the
doorbell rang and I went to answer it. Both my parents were out,
Mrs Kane, the daily, was slapping round with a duster and Rose was
going through her interminable ritual of getting dressed upstairs.
There was a telegraph boy at the door and he handed me a
telegram in a matter-of-fact way, saying, 'Walker, is that right?'
I said, 'Yes,' and stood staring at the thing, feeling very cold and
strange. I remember saying to Mrs Kane, 'Something dreadful's
happened, Mrs Kane, Jenny's been killed. I've got to find my father
and tell him. Could you keep Mrs Whiting upstairs until I come
back?'
Mama had gone to a meeting at the Town Hall, but if I could
find Pa I knew he'd fetch her and break it to her. No-one but Pa
could possibly tell her. I went to VDC Headquarters, but he wasn't
there. I saw his Second-in-Command, a Major Oates, and said, 'I've
got to find my father. Jenny's ship's been sunk, and she's dead. Do
you know where he is?' and Major Oates, who was a family friend,
said, 'He's at Victoria Barracks. You go home, I'll find him and tell
him for you.'
I went home and sat in my room. I could hear Mrs Kane crying,
and Rose shuffling round her bedroom, mumbling to herself, and
I couldn't face either of them because my ears were ringing, and
I felt bloodless. Childhood training told, and I couldn't cry.
Then a car drew up outside the gate and I heard the screaming.
I knew it was my mother but it sounded like an animal, an
agonised, terrified animal, and I ran downstairs to the kitchen as
Pa half-carried her through the door, unrecognisable in her misery.
We got her upstairs and onto her bed, still screaming, 'No, no, no...'
and Pa rang the doctor who came and gave her a sedative. We
turned on the radio for the midday news, not expecting it to be
public property yet, but it was the first item. 'Australia's only
Hospital Ship, HMS Centaur, was brutally torpedoed last night in
Moreton Bay. She had just sailed on her return trip to New Guinea
to collect Australian wounded. There are reported to be a number

185
of survivors, among them one nurse who was on deck when the
torpedo struck. All those who were below decks at the time are
believed to have perished. The ship was clearly marked with the
Red Cross and was showing her lights in accordance with
International Regulations...'
Pa told Rose what had happened, and she understood well
enough to whimper like a child and go back to bed again, while
Mrs Kane made her a cup of soup. Mama was sleeping; the doctor
said she'd sleep until evening, not to wake her. Pa said, 'We need
something to do. Let's go for a walk and get a cake. People'll come
round, they always do when these things happen, and we'll need
something to give them.' It was practical, and we both wanted to
get out of the house. We were halfway down the hill to the shop
when Pa said, 'Where's the telegram, I'd like to have a look at it.'
I remembered that I'd put it in my pocket when it arrived because
I'd been going to take Matilda for a walk, and I had my coat on;
I was still wearing it. I pulled out the telegram and handed it to Pa.
He stopped short, turning it over in his fingers, and looked at
me oddly. He said, 'Didn't you tell Gus Oates what had happened,
that Jenny's ship had been sunk and she was dead?'
Puzzled, I said, 'Yes Pa, of course I told him what had
happened.'
'Well, how the hell did you know? This telegram's never been
opened.'
I looked, and it was true. I felt deadly cold again, and rather sick.
Pa put his arm round me and gave me a hug. 'It's all right,' he said.
It's the sort of thing that happens to people in Irish families.'

186
PART THREE

187
24

More war



AFTER JENNY'S DEATH a chill came over our house. She
would never have an official grave, but it felt as though we
were sharing her tomb. My mother's grief took her, for a
time, into an underworld beyond our reach. If Jenny had been a
son she'd have been mentally prepared for disaster in wartime, but
it never crossed her mind that Jenny might be vulnerable and the
blow was so great that she never really got over it.
The house was already crowded with photographs of Jenny, but
in the past when Mama looked at them she'd smiled to herself, as
if in a private salute. Now more photographs appeared; she went
from one to the other, picked them up and gazed at them for
minutes on end with tears running down her cheeks, or put small,
sad vases of flowers in front of them. Pa watched her miserably and
tried to comfort her, but she had a wall round her. His own grief
must have been great enough, but for Pa people he loved were
never dead, just temporarily absent, and he always said, 'Never be
sorry for people who die, they can't be hurt any more. Be sorry for
the ones left behind.' With Mama he was endlessly gentle and
considerate but his nerves and temper were at flashpoint, and
when something had to give I was generally in its way. I
understood but I hated being there; I was no good to either of them,
and they would have been better on their own.
Betty brought her children to stay for a while, and it helped.
Mama found children irresistible, and these were too small to know
that anything was wrong; they yelled and thumped and demanded
so that she was forced to think about them instead of about Jenny,
and she began to thaw. Betty was too immersed in motherhood to

189
be conscious of anything odd in Mama's behaviour, and disinclined
to believe me when I told her how things had been before
she arrived. She herself had changed in a way I found hard to
define; she seemed to have moved, with her marriage, into another
world of views and values as a chameleon changes colour in tune
with its background. When we talked about Jenny she astonished
me.
She said, 'Thank God Mama never knew what Jenny got up to
when she was training at the Royal Melbourne. At least she can still
think Jenny was perfect.'
'What d'you mean? Jenny didn't do anything so terrible.'
'Oh, don't be silly, Robin, I've heard stories about her and Janet,
and I was shocked, honestly. Norman says they were no better than
a couple of tarts.'
I knew how Betty felt about tarts, but before her marriage she'd
never have believed that Jenny was like that, or she'd have found
excuses. I remembered Jenny saying, 'I'm not going to die
wondering,' and thought to myself, 'I'm damned glad she didn't,
what use would all that virtue be to her now?
The Government used the sinking of the Centaur to inflame
public hatred of the Japanese, and this made life harder for all of
us. Unlike most wartime disasters, which were kept quiet for
security reasons, the Centaur was no secret. It had all the right
ingredients for flag-waving, being a mercy-ship staffed with
innocent doctors and nurses. It had been sunk on the very shores
of Australia, and Australians who were accustomed to their war
being remote and impersonal were to be shown that it was, in fact,
very close to home. For some weeks after the ship went down it
was impossible to turn on the radio without some expert elaborating
on the barbarism of the affair, and the probable death-agonies
of those who were killed.
Outside the house it was even worse; the Government wasted
no time in producing huge posters and pasting them on hoardings
in prominent places. They showed the bow of the burning ship still
visible above the water, and in front of it a handful of nurses

190
frantically waving for help while being torn to pieces by sharks. We
knew this to be a fiction; the survivors had confirmed that when
the torpedo struck amidships the whole deck caught fire so that
anyone in their cabin had died in a funeral pyre or in the explosion,
but not in the sea. Mama found the posters unbearable and stayed
at home behind drawn curtains; unless Pa was with her she hardly
ventured out.
Australia was outraged by the sinking of the Centaur since
hospital ships, clearly marked with the Red Cross and showing
their lights at night, are supposed to be sacrosanct under International
Law. Moreover, in this case, the ship had just left Brisbane
and had not even cleared Moreton Bay when she was torpedoed.
There seemed to be no motive other than criminal brutality for the
attack since she was empty even of wounded. As many people
said, in highly emotional speeches, it was proof positive of the
utterly bestial nature of the enemy.
International law also states, however, that a hospital ship
remains sacrosanct only so long as its cargo is confined to the
wounded, and to the people and equipment necessary for their
care. In fact there was a partial excuse for the sinking of the Centaur, a number of Ambulance personnel had joined the ship
on its return voyage to Papua, and some of them carried their
personal firearms on board. The rumour spread that the Centaur was carrying arms, and there was no shortage of enemy agents in
Australia then. The Japanese may have believed that the sinking
was fully justified.
At the end of those miserable May holidays I went back to Art
School, this time to the Melbourne Art Gallery school under the
headmastership of Daryl Lindsay. He was encouraging and kind,
and a year earlier I'd have killed to work under him, but Jenny had
made the war into a personal war, and I was too restless to stay. I'd be eighteen in the spring, and I had my name down for the
WRANS, but there was no certainty I'd be called up straight after
my birthday and in the meantime I wanted to escape from the
feeling of hiding in backwaters. In the outside world I might learn


191
some of the things I'd have to know when the time came, whatever
and whenever that might be. I felt grown-up on the outside and
empty on the inside, and I wasn't sure which was real.
My parents were too distracted to object when I said I was
leaving the Art School; Pa had always said we must be able to earn
our own living, and I used his words against him. I took a job as
a script writer at a radio station where all the men were gloriously,
unashamedly Gay, taught a bedridden child to read and write in
a squalid, slum hovel after working hours, and dabbled with the
National Theatre. It was all educational in its way, and the people
I met were light years removed from the boundaries of human
contact imposed on me by home and school. In the spring I left the
radio station and took a job as a Land Girl on a property near
Cavendish, in Western Victoria.
Kongbool was owned by Lady Smyth, the widow of a distinguished
British General and ex-Governor, and she was one of the
most unique and fascinating women I've known. She was in her
seventies, her children grown up, one son in the Navy and her
daughter married. Her property was by no means small, and like
everyone on the land at that time she was short of labour. Her staff,
in fact, consisted of an Italian POW, a dwarf covered with warts,
and me.
I'd never met her before the day I arrived at Kongbool, on a
warm spring afternoon. I walked up the drive from the bus,
carrying my suitcase. On my right were sheep yards filled with
ewes and lambs, the centre of activity hidden in a billowing cloud
of dust. A very English female voice reached me out of the dust
cloud saying, 'Drop that suitcase and come in here. You can start
work now.' It wasn't the kind of voice you ignored, no matter how
inappropriately dressed you were, nor how ignorant of sheep.
They were lamb-marking. I pushed my way through the sheep,
climbed the yard fence, and found my new employer with a pair
of castrators in her hand, covered with blood and dust, and
beaming happily. A dark, wiry man was standing in front of her
holding a lamb upside down by its legs, and a dwarf the size of an

192
eight-year-old child was shouting and shoving at ewes heavier than
himself. Lady Smyth said, 'Glad you got here, I can do with another
person throwing the lambs up. Just watch Angelo and do what he
does.' Angelo swung a lamb onto the board in front of her with
casual grace, glanced at its crutch and said, 'Bambino' or 'Bambina'
as the case might be, and Lady Smyth expertly castrated the
bambinos, tailed the lot and earmarked them. The dwarf continued
to bully the sheep in the yards, and I swung up what seemed like
endless lambs, wishing I had trousers on instead of a skirt.
When we finally finished the lambs Angelo and the dwarf
moved the sheep back to the paddock, and Lady Smyth took me
up to the house. It was bluestone and very big, outwardly a clone
of many other Western District houses I'd seen, but inside it was
quite different. The front steps led to an imposing front door and
a hallway with polished wooden floors, covered with tiger-skin
rugs. There were old pictures on the walls, and antique furniture;
at first glance it was formal and grand, until I tripped against the
snarling head of one of the tiger-skins. There was a wild cackle and
a burst of feathers and a small hen stampeded out of the tiger's
mouth, followed by several other hens who had been resting on
a brocade settee. Other hens bolted from under an elegant
mahogany table, and the whole flock left noisily through a hole in
the flywire of the front door. Lady Smyth didn't seem to notice
them.
She was a woman who lived at peace with her past and its grandeur and valued it, regarding the present as a rather improbable
joke which had to be taken seriously. It was obvious that
whatever money there had been in the past, very little of it
remained. The paintings on the walls were the kind that grace
rooms in the old, great houses of England, the furniture was
priceless and the upholstery threadbare, there were kerosene
lamps and no electricity, linoleum on the floors, and except for the
blazing wood fire in the drawing-room, no trace of heating or
comfort. An eskimo would have been cold; on her own she must
have been fearsomely lonely, but she was a woman who radiated

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a mixture of goodwill, courage and humour that added up to a rare
kind of grace, and made her special.
The dwarf and I started our day at four in the morning, milking
cows. The dwarf was so small that he moved from cow to cow
under their bellies, hardly bending his head. Angelo, the POW,
spoke scarcely a word of English, but made up for it with lavish,
Latin charm. He had been an acrobat before the war and was
worried about losing his skills, so when I rode the paddocks in the
morning, checking on the sheep and fences, it was common to
come across Angelo standing on his head on top of a fencepost or
turning somersaults in front of a woolly, mesmerised mob. He had
a guitar, and a syrupy tenor voice, and he sang throbbing Italian
love songs outside my window in the evenings without the
slightest desire that I'd respond, just practising. The property was
rabbit-infested to the point where sometimes the surface of the
ground seemed to be moving away in front of you, and the
paddocks were honeycombed with burrows and scoured by
erosion. Having ridden paddocks in the mornings I waged war on
the rabbits in the afternoons.
In descending numerical order of livestock on Kongbool there
were the rabbits (which may have outnumbered even the flies) the
sheep, the stock-ponies and the dogs. The ponies were skinny,
active little beasts, and the rabbit-pack dogs ranged from dachshunds
to deerhounds, with strange, unidentifiable variations in
between. They lived in a state of bondage on chains, praying with
their eyes for freedom whenever you went past. Last of all, except
for the four house-cows, there was the bane of my rabbiting
existence, an unmentionable tribe of ferrets.
Every afternoon I'd climb into a patched-up saddle held by a
rotting girth, put a cage of ferrets on my back, hang a spade from
my belt and let the rabbit-pack go. They'd take off blindly across
country, screaming with joy, and I'd have to go as the crow flies
too, to keep track of them. Sometimes Lady Smyth would want to
come and I'd saddle a pony for her, praying that the girth would
hold. Her rabbiting outfit was original and dashing; a blazer with

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brass buttons, a yachting cap at a jaunty angle, and round her waist
a string with a trowel, shears and several other implements whose
purpose was obscure. The moment she was in the saddle she'd
give a hunting cry, kick the pony's ribs and take off. Because of her
age it terrified me, but she never fell; the ponies were like cats, and
most of the fences were lying flat on the ground. Sometimes the
rabbit hunts were wonderful, more often they ended after dark, in
wind or drizzle, sitting at the mouth of a warren and thinking of
new names for ferrets who wouldn't come out.
In the evening Lady Smyth and I would sit in front of the huge
log fire and she'd talk about her husband and their life together;
they had done things and seen things which patterned her stories
with gold thread, and she was gifted in her telling. The fire lit and
shadowed the drawing-room's walls and ceilings, and the old, gilt
framed paintings leapt with crimson and gold as the firelight
touched them. The chairs we sat on were lovely, but their
upholstery was full of holes. I felt something moving underneath
me one night, reached under my backside and pulled out a mouse
that had its extended family comfortably housed in the chair's
stuffing.
Hunger defeated me at Kongbool; Lady Smyth had reached the
age where she ate almost nothing while I was seventeen and
healthy, starting work at 4 a.m. and finishing at dark. At breakfast
there was toast and tea, at lunch whatever one could find, and at
night, with horrible regularity, there was mince on toast. Sheep
were never killed for the table, but if one was found dead in a
paddock the dwarf would drag it into the kitchen, skin it and
butcher it, and he and Angelo at least would have a square meal.
They had their own quarters, and sometimes when I passed nearby
and smelled roasting meat, I nearly wept.
In the end I telephoned Mama secretly, explained my problem,
and asked her to invent an urgent reason for my return. It was
almost my 18th birthday anyway, and I was hoping to hear that the
WRANs had room for me. A month later I was in uniform.
Anyone, male or female, who had been to boarding school

195
started service life ahead of the rest. Young men who joined up,
having never been away from home, found themselves in a bearpit.
They were thrown into dormitories, harassed, regulated and
yelled at, and most of them thought they had been thrown into hell.
Service life for women wasn't quite as rough, but home-raised girls
still found it hard. Personally I found it very like school, but more
interesting. Instruction was dealt out by Chief Petty Officers who
were not only male, and therefore novel, but who were also living
caricatures of what one expected CPO's to be. The CPO who drilled
my intake was the shape of an inverted pear with a semi-shaven
head planted between his shoulders like a hasty afterthought, and
a mouth at permanent full-stretch to issue unintelligible orders and
scathing rebukes.
We were housed and trained at Port Melbourne, a block inland
from the sea in the shadows of the gasworks. Our time was divided
between classroom and drill, and in both cases the intellectual
demands were limited. I knew from the first day that the CPO
loathed me and would give me a hard time; as soon as I opened
my mouth and he heard my voice he stared at me as though I was
a bad joke, and yelled. 'Now! Speak proper! I don't want no lah-di
dah talk 'ere!'
I said, 'I'm sorry, Chief Petty Officer, I can't help it.'
He glared at me and snarled, and from then on I was dirt but
it didn't matter; I had seen enough B Class British war films to find
him fascinating. He could have been type-caste in any one of them,
word-perfect in the time-honoured abuse designed to stimulate
recruits on the parade-ground. We had no parade-ground, but he
marched us briskly up and down the windy streets of Port
Melbourne, swinging our arms and tucking in our chins, 'Hep ri' Hep ri' Keepthem bloody arms swinging and stick them chests out
and try not to look like a lotta dead bloody flowers!'
At the end of the course we were given our postings, decided
by Higher Authority who had never laid eyes on us, and based on
our written work and the CPO's assessment of our characters. I
hoped to be sent to a distant Naval Base, even as a kitchen hand,

196
because it would get me away from home. I knew that however
hard I tried to be self-effacing and helpful there I was still an
abrasive, a reminder to Mama of what she had lost.
The CPO told us our respective fates on the last morning,
leaving me and a girl I had been at school with until last to teach
us not to be lah-di-dah. He looked from the paper in his hand to
us with fury, and I knew that given his way he would have
condemned us to floor scrubbing for the rest of our term of service.
'Rating Walker,' he said, 'And Rating Martin. Yous two will report
to HMS Monterey in Albert Park.'
It was clearly a shore establishment, but I'd never heard of it.
'What's Monterey, CPO?' I asked. 'What goes on there?'
'Never you mind what goes on there, Walker. It's 'ighly secret,
and I can't tell you and you can't ask. Furthermore it's an 'ighly
cushy posting what you don't deserve, and instead of living in
barracks like what a Naval Rating should yous two will be billeted
at your 'omes.'
'Oh God,' I thought. 'Of all the postings in Australia I had to
draw this one.'
HMS Monterey, when Brenda Martin and I reported there, was
a long, two-storey wartime building, surrounded by twelve-foot- high cyclone fencing topped with barbed wire, and the gate was
manned by American guards, armed to the teeth. We had been
issued with passes complete with ego-destroying photographs of
ourselves, and we showed these to a gum-chewing Yank who
shuddered slightly, then led us inside the building to the Commanding
Officer.
Monterey was the embryo-beginning of Signals Intelligence, the
monster whose installations now harness satellites, pick up the
merest whisper from the inner sanctums of foreign powers, and
until recently terrified the people who lived near them because of
their potential as cold war nuclear targets. Monterey, in 1944, was
humble, noisy and largely experimental. It was a joint American/Australian operation, with Americans in the majority although the
Officer Commanding was an Australian from the regular Navy. The

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female complement, when we arrived, numbered only twenty
five, and we were put to work punching out cards of coded
Japanese radio traffic on the clattering, primitive ancestors of IBM
computers.
We worked watches, eight hours on and eight hours off, with
an occasional forty-eight hour break when things were quiet. I rode
a bicycle without a light from South Yarra to the middle of Albert
Park and back, night and day, rain and shine, and never fell foul
of a policeman, nor was I ever accosted. Melbourne, in time of war,
must have been one of the safest places in the world. It was my first
contact with Americans on a personal level; I had seen them
everywhere around town and been amazed, firstly by the smartness
of their uniforms and secondly by the size of their backsides,
relative to the Australian article. It may have been only the cut of
their uniform trousers, but American buttocks seemed provocatively
large and rounded. Everyone had horror stories to tell about
them: drink, sex, noise, brashness and too much money. I found
the prospect of nights on Watch with American seamen interesting,
but Mama feared the worst.
There was a certain innocence about the workplace relationships
in those days; the appreciative male pat on a female bottom,
the hug for a job well done or even a kiss was acceptable, not
threatening. Unemancipated girls like me, longing for a little
encouragement, welcomed these small attentions and were grateful
for them. A wolf-whistle was appreciated, even though you
tossed your head and ignored it, and it never crossed our minds that
it could be classed as harassment. With the Yanks came the fear of
the unknown, the possibility of orgies and massive moral corruption,
pregnancies and families disgraced. It was a prospect which
raised the adrenaline levels in young females to unprecedented
heights, their hormones blossomed in response, and the American
servicemen reaped a ready harvest.
The Americans working at HMS Monterey turned out to be
simple souls, pleasant and rather childlike when they were sober,
but with a habit of turning up for night watches in a state bordering

198
on the paralytic. They were no trouble because they usually passed
out, which meant more work for the female Hands and a truly
dreadful duty for us when the watch ended in the morning.
Because of Monterey's Top Secret Security classification no cleaners
were allowed inside the building, so the girls who had been on
watch had to clean out the men's lavatories as well as their own.
It was typical of the chauvinism of the time; no-one would dream,
in those days, of making a man do such a menial job, but it was
alright for the girls. We would finish the Midnight and Morning
Watch at 8 a.m. dead tired, then pick up buckets and mops and find
that our Allies had distributed their intake of the previous evening,
with abominable aim, from one end of their Heads, as the lavatories
were called, to the other.
There were periods of frantic activity, and quiet ones when
there was very little radio traffic coming in, and they were the worst
because it was so hard to keep awake. Our Commanding Officer
was a tall, thin man with a long, unsmiling face, eminently
caricaturable, and I took to drawing cartoons of him in idle
moments. In the end he either heard about it or saw some of my
efforts; as I held the lowest possible rank he couldn't demote me,
but he made it clear that my naval life hung by a thread which he'd
dearly love to cut.
I was still sexually illiterate and I had no boyfriend; I'd been
trained by Mama to regard sex as roughly comparable to leprosy
but I was aware that there was a lot of sex around, and it worried
me that I didn't even know what I was meant to keep away from.
The Yanks and I were mutually unattracted, and when I went out
it was with British Naval Officers whom Pa had brought home for
drinks, most of them twenty years older than me, and married. My
closest female friend was a 6ft 2in streak of blond glamour called
Angela; I met plenty of men with her, but they could never tear their
eyes away from her long enough to notice me. I watched Angela's
cyclonic progress through the hearts and beds of men with awe and
envy, and though I might have learned much from her I didn't ask;
if I'd asked she'd have known that I didn't know, and instead I

199
hinted at secret sexual adventures of my own.
The Naval officers were kindly men, and they treated me in a
curious, very British way, so that I never knew whether they saw
me as a younger sister or a potential lover. In off-duty hours they
were seldom, if ever, entirely sober. Their gin was duty-free and
absurdly cheap, and the higher the rate of gin consumption the
greater the reputation of the consumer. They threw parties in their
flats which ended in horse-play better suited to schoolboys, and
they absent-mindedly fed me gin as if I was one of them. Luckily
I'd inherited Pa's head for drink, and only occasionally found
myself weaving. When they came to pick me up at home they were
different people, and talked to Pa and Mama with measured
gravity. Pa would say to them, 'It's terribly good of you to bother
with this child. Don't let her be a nuisance,' and we would roar off
in one of their cars to another gin orgy. On Victory in Europe night
they threw the biggest party of all in the Officers Mess of the
Australian Naval H.Q., passing me off as an officer in the English
WRNS, and to this day I have no idea how I got home. It quite
escaped my parents notice that I was dressing in clothes more
suited to a thirty-year-old, and trying to hide the symptoms of
monumental hangovers. I was half-troubled, half-relieved that
none of the Royal Navy officers asked me to go to bed with them.
Mama was still far from well. Everyone seems to have some
particular part of their body which is their Achilles Heel, their
bowels or their chests or their hips, and for Mama it was her head.
She had headaches and dizzy spells, and then she got shingles,
again in her head. It was an agonisingly painful illness, and when
she came home from hospital she was blind in one eye.
As usual Pa suffered almost more than she did. He always talked
of her as 'Poor little Aileen', even when she was well, and her
illnesses destroyed him. When she came home he fetched and
carried for her, tiptoed and hushed, and I only had to close a door
audibly to get my head smacked. Rose bumbled round the house,
oblivious to everything, working further havoc with his nerves, and
Mrs Kane clattered around in the kitchen doing emergency

200
cooking. I came back from Monterey only to change, then to go out
and stay out as long as possible, regardless of where.
Mama recovered surprisingly quickly, bravely accepting the
loss of her eye but using it to shackle Pa to her side, except when
he had to be in town on Clarke and Whiting affairs. He still had
lunch at the Australian Club with his friends which helped to keep
him sane, while Mama was given her lunch by Mrs Kane or by me. She spent her afternoons surrounded by a puzzling collection of
women who, a few years earlier, she would have found laughable.
They sat round her in dreadful felt hats with string bags full of
knitting, saying separately or in chorus, 'Oh, Aileen, you are
wonderful! You're a real Saint!' If they were still there when Pa
came home he would rush upstairs, muttering about 'work', and
lock himself in his room until they left. Later in the evening Mama
would say to him, 'D'you know what Joan Bloggs said to me today,
Geoff? She said to me, Aileen, you're a Saint. Silly, of course, isn't
it?' ,
Fate rescued me, miraculously, one evening when I was lying
on the floor reading the Herald. There was an article, and a photo,
about one of Betty's old school friends who had married a British
Army officer. He had been in Burma with the 14th Army and she,
the article said, was a member of something called the Women's
Auxiliary Service (Burma), and had come to Australia to recruit for
it.
I said longingly, 'Gosh, I wish I could get into that.'
'Into what?' said Pa, and I handed him the paper.
He read it for a bit and then he said, 'Would you really like to
go? I might be able to fix it.'
'I thought Australian women couldn't go overseas, and what
about the WRANS?'
'You can still get a British passport, I've never taken out
domicile papers here. If you can wangle your way out of the
WRANS I'll see what I can do. It'd be good for you.'
I went to see Monterey's Commanding Officer, conscious that
after my caricatures of him he was unlikely to do me any favours,

201
and asked for a release from the Service. He eyed me nastily, and
asked? 'Why?'
I want to join the Women's Auxiliary Service (Burma), Sir.'
'What? What the hell's that? Never heard of it.'
'It's a women's service in Burma, Sir, part of 14th Army.'
'Are you out of your mind? You can't go to Burma after working
here! This is Top Security! What if you were captured, you could
give information! Dammit girl, if you weren't the lowest rank there
is I'd have you demoted. Get out of my sight!'
I bolted out of his office and went to see the Leading Hand of
my Watch, CPO Britt. She was a lean, tough, kindly woman, and
she had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Naval Rules and Regulations.
I explained my problem.
'Didn't you tell me that your mother's not well?' she asked.
'No, she isn't. She's been a bit strange ever since Jenny was
killed, and now she's lost an eye.'
'And your other sister's married up in the country, and your
father works? Look, it's simple. Apply for a Compassionate
Discharge in writing, give all those reasons and sent it to the Naval
Board. It's going over the CO's head, but he can't stop you and
you'll get it. You don't have to tell them what you're going to do
afterwards. Half your luck!'
I did as she said, and it worked. The CO took it like a man, and
when he said goodbye to me there was a flicker of a smile. His
parting words were, 'Good luck, and I'm glad you're not my daughter.'
My parents were manifestly delighted to see me go, and I didn't
blame them. I packed what I imagined might be useful in India and
visited the WAS(B) recruiter to be signed up. There was one clause
in the articles of my recruitment which made me pause . It
stipulated that I must be licensed to drive a motor vehicle and
experienced in doing so, and I'd never done more than steer with
one hand from the passenger seat while Pa lit his pipe. The WAS(B)
recruiter seemed very relaxed about everything so I signed
anyway; I wasn't about to be thwarted by one small detail, and I

202
could always pretend I hadn't read the document properly. I was
told that I'd be met in Bombay and sent to Assam, and that two
other recruits would be sailing with me.
Before I left I made one more attempt to unravel the mysteries
of sexual technique with Mama. It seemed to me that in view of
where I was going there had never been a clearer case of Need To
Know, and that when you boiled it down it was her job to tell me.
I was helping her make her bed, and I said, 'Mama, don't you think
you'd better tell me what happens when you go to bed with a man?
I mean I've never ... you know?'
'Good God!' she said, dropping her side of the blanket. 'I should
hope you haven't! I can't possibly discuss it with you, Robin, I've
told you before. Anyway, there's no need for you to know about
that sort of thing just because you're going to Burma. I've always
told you that if you're not a virgin No Decent Man Will Ever Marry
You, and it's up to you to remember that.'
I had fifteen Australian pounds when I left, as my sole capital.
Mama said that was all I could possibly need as I'd be met in
Bombay, and Pa reinforced this, 'To my certain knowledge all ships
are dry in wartime, so there'll be nothing to spend money on, not
even drinks.'
'It's a lot of money, darling' said Mama. 'Be careful not to lose
it.'
Pa had obviously been briefed by Mama about my embarrassing
question during the bed-making, because he said, 'Don't worry
about how men'll treat you when you get to Burma, All British
officers know how to behave towards women. They're gentlemen,
properly brought up. Wonderful fellas! I don't suppose you'll have
any contact with Other Ranks, but I can tell you, if you have any
trouble with men it'll be your own fault.'
Mama said, 'Yes darling, and if you always behave the way I've
taught you to behave men will respect you for it. Just remember
your sisters. If you think about poor Jenny and how well she behaved all those years when she was nursing you'll be perfectly
alright.'

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25

Travel



EVEN WITH THE EUROPEAN WAR ENDED there were very
few ships carrying civilian passengers between Australia
and India, and not many people who wanted to sail in them.
The Chyebassa, which had peacetime accommodation for twelve
passengers and was officially a cargo ship, had doubled the
number of bunks in the low-caste cabins in case of emergencies.
Passenger liners had been converted into troop ships, and were a
thing of the past. The two-berth cabin that my companion WAS(B)s
and I were to occupy had four bunks in it, and it was a small cabin
anyway. The other two were already there when I went on board,
trying to find somewhere to put their things. One of them was very
pretty, long-haired, square-jawed and blue-eyed; the other, with
carroty hair and a pale face, looked far too young and frightened
to be going on anything more daring than a school picnic.
We said 'Hello', stiff-legged as strange dogs; we had no idea
what to make of each other. We unpacked with hideous politeness
... 'Is it okay if I put this here?'... 'Oh, please do. Are you sure
this isn't in your way?' Then, suddenly, the deck under out feet
came alive. There was a whistle, a rumbling, a shudder, a regular,
heartbeat throb and a movement of air through an open porthole
said we were under way. We dropped everything, bolted through
the door and up onto the deck together laughing, touching hands
and feeling like sisters.
It seemed a long haul down Port Phillip Bay; I was certain that
even then something might stop me. I stayed on deck most of the
time, trying to pick out The Haven, watching the shoreline and
wondering when I'd see it again. Before we reached the Rip I went

204
up to the bows and stood there, waiting for the first big wave that
would signal the open sea. I felt it lift the deck beneath me, saw
the bows rise up and up towards the evening sky, and then they
fell with a thud and started to rise again, and all my prison gates
slammed behind me as the gates of the world opened. Jenny had
told me how it felt the first time she sailed on the Oranje Nassau, and it was true for me too. I looked for my sister through a cloud
of spray as the little ship plunged, and sent her my love.
Sea voyages were far more profound experiences than are
journeys to the same places by air. When you went on board a ship,
not a cruise ship but a vessel of serious transport, you went into
a sort of limbo for a significant period of time, suspended between
all your past and all your future. You knew that whoever else was
on board would mean the difference between boredom and
pleasure, love and hate, joy and depression until you reached your
destination. At first everyone eyed everyone else surreptitiously,
made a lot of wrong judgements and painfully revised them in the
course of the voyage. At first glance, which came on the first night,
at dinner, the complement of the Chyebassa seemed unpromising.
Ngari Campbell, the pretty girl, Beth, the carroty one and I,
being young, unimportant and unattached, had been seated with
several of the ship's junior officers. At the head of the dining-room
was the Captain's table, and when I looked at it I saw, with sinking
heart, a rather grand acquaintance of my parents. I knew her
daughter, and I also knew that she was the wife of the Governor
of Bihar. I registered her as a possible hostile witness to what I'd
hoped would be a life of liberty. There was a woman with her, too
deferential to be anything but a paid travelling companion, and a
squarish, military-looking man to make up the table numbers.
Against the wall there was a table for two with a glamorous
brunette and a tall, suave man, already kneading each other's
hands as though they were alone in the room, and another rather
subdued table of women, all plain as pikestaffs and dressed like
school mistresses, hosted by a depressed Purser. They didn't look
like the kind of women who'd enjoy India.

205
'Who are they?' I asked the Second Engineer, who was sitting
next to me.
'Missionaries' wives,' he said. 'They've all been parked in
Australia during the war, and they're meeting their husbands in
Bombay. They haven't seen each other for about four years.'
'What about the couple on their own?'
'Now that's different, they're on honeymoon. He's Army I
believe, and you may have heard of her, she was pretty well
known in Australia. Rhada something-or-other?'
Indeed I'd heard of her; she came from a well-known winemaking
family in South Australia, and had earned a widely
publicised reputation as a wartime swinger. It was surprising,
somehow, to find her on a honeymoon. She and her husband
seemed oblivious to anyone or anything in the dining-room, and
one wondered whether they'd be able to untangle themselves long
enough to eat.
'I believe she's something to do with wine,' said the Second
Engineer. 'They brought about a dozen cases of champagne on
board with them. Couldn't have known the bar's open twenty-four
hours a day on this ship.'
So I started on a journey so far removed from the decorous
progress foreseen by my parents that I decided against trying to
describe it to them. When I wrote, from Perth, I mentioned only the
missionaries' wives and the Governor's wife, with a small, polite
tribute to the seemliness of my fellow recruits.
Ngari and I became friends quite quickly. Beth was as young as
she looked and so shy and silent that we never discovered very
much about her, except that she came from a strictly Presbyterian
family in Brisbane. It was a mystery why she had ever applied for
or been accepted by anything so wildly unsuitable as the WAS(B)s.
If I was a sexual illiterate Beth had hardly left the womb; she went
scarlet at the mention of anything remotely connected to sex, she
drank nothing stronger than lemonade, and once she had seen
what went on at the ship's twenty-four hour bar she spent a lot of
time alone in the cabin, reading the Bible.

206
Ngari was a different kettle of fish; not only was she pretty but
she was an experienced operator, and it took me a very short time
to realise that I was about to be upstaged yet again. She had been
brought up on her parents plantation on Bougainville, and sent
south to a well-known boarding school at the beginning of the Japanese war. She had run away from school, she said, and in the
course of a hair-raising series of adventures, the details of which
changed every time they were told, she learned to fly an aeroplane,
drive a racing car, climb mountains and captivate men. It was
impossible to mention anything Ngari hadn't done superlatively;
she oozed confidence, and I could see that her career in Burma
would be a breeze compared with mine. So long as I mentally
divided everything she said by half and kept my mouth shut I
enjoyed her company, and we made a successful team.
The bar on the SS Chyebassa was a total contradiction of Pa's
belief that all ships were dry in wartime. After my addictive period
on gin with the Royal Navy I was relieved, and stowed the bottles
I had smuggled on board back in my luggage. Except for the
missionaries' wives, who drank soft drinks and knitted, the bar was
the social hub of the ship, patronised round the clock. The
Governor's wife had a permanent seat of honour at a small table
near it, and occasionally even the honeymoon couple surfaced
long enough to attend.
They were apparently engaged in a marathon celebration of
conjugal bliss which allowed for only the briefest of appearances,
until we hit the Indian Ocean and tropical weather. Then they gave
up their afternoon session in the cabin, brought rugs up on deck,
and made ardent love under the Vice Regal cabin window every
day between two and four o'clock. They did cover themselves with
a rug, but they were active and noisy. Besides that their champagne
glasses used to roll round and smash on the deck, and the
Governor's wife liked to take an afternoon nap. Deck space was
so limited that there was nowhere else for them to go, and their
cabin was too hot.
For the first few minutes after they settled their noise would be

207
subdued, like musicians tuning their instruments, then passion
would get the better of them and they would become fully
orchestrated. Immediately the head and shoulders of the Governor's
wife would appear through the cabin window. Rhada's
vocabulary was world class, as many people in Australia could
have testified, but the Vice Regal virtuosity was astonishing, and
more than held its own. The daily battle became the ship's most
popular spectator sport, and the ventilators, hatches and lifeboats
all served as cover for a fascinated audience. The finale was always
the same; Rhada would offer, and the Governor's wife would
accept, a glass of champagne, the window would close, Rhada and
her husband would go to sleep, entwined like twin vines, and the
rest of us knew that the show was over.
We stopped at Fremantle for longer than expected, but cargo
ships were subject to changes of program in wartime. We ploughed
across the Indian Ocean to Colombo and anchored in the roads
there; we went to and from shore in a lighter, and we stayed there
for ten days because of a submarine scare.
To my surprise the Colonel, who was the moustached, short
man at the Captain's table, had been wooing me for the past week,
and in Colombo he became serious and mentioned marriage. I was
horribly embarrassed because it was the first time anyone had
approached the subject with me, and I didn't know what to do
about it without hurting his feelings. I told Ngari who said, 'Don't
be silly. He only said that to you because I wouldn't have him. He
asked me ages ago.'
He took us to the Galle Face Hotel where there was a
swimming pool. We went to change, and when Ngari and I came
out together we saw our Colonel on the diving board, in bathing
costume. He was covered from head to foot in thick, brown hair,
not ordinary male hair but hair so dense and wiry that he looked
like a wad of coir matting. We both got the giggles so badly that
we had to go back into the changing room.
Colombo was a revelation; the brown, beautiful people, even
the smell of the place filled me with joy, and the red-hot curries

208
were the most delicious food I'd ever tasted. There was a strange
familiarity about it all, as though I was coming back to something
I'd known before. The lone cloud on my horizon was my almost
non-existent money. The fifteen pounds had dwindled to a shred.
Everyone had been more than generous, but it was impossible not
to insist on paying one's way occasionally, and my only hope was
for some pay-in-advance when we reached Bombay. We were a
day out of Colombo when the Captain came into the bar looking
white and shaken, and said, 'There's a message come over the radio
that you'll want to hear. The Yanks have dropped some God-awful
kind of bomb on Japan, and the war's over. The Japanese have
surrendered.'
Our first reaction was delight and overwhelming relief, laughter
and tears. We had no inkling of the significance of the bomb, of
how many it had killed or how it would change the world. The war
was over and we drank too much once again, and sang sentimental
songs until dawn. It wasn't till next morning, when our heads had
cleared, that the three of us started to wonder what on earth we
were doing in this ship, heading up the coast of India to a war that
no longer existed. We were all broke, and it seemed logical that
whoever met us in Bombay would turn us round and send us home
again.
'Should we send a cable to someone and ask?' said Ngari.
'Well, who? I said, 'And where?'
'I wouldn't mind going home,' said Beth.
'There's nothing we can do except stay put, and see what
happens when we get to Bombay.'
The ship rolled its way round the southern tip of India and up
the coast in seas the colours of a butterfly's wing, white beaches
and palm trees keeping us company to starboard, and little wing
sailed fishing boats bobbing in between. Peace disconcerted us;
everyone was restless because a new world was waiting at the end
of the journey, and we were nearly there. It had come so suddenly,
and to be isolated on a small boat in the Indian Ocean when it
happened made us feel rejected, robbed of something. Rhada,

209
most of whose remedies involved alcohol, decided that we all
needed cheering up.
'Stewie and I have a hell of a lot of champagne left,' she said,
'and this ship's not exactly short of drink. We ought to have a party
on the last night.'
'Good idea,' said her husband. 'There's no point in lugging
drink ashore.'
Ngari's personal cache of bottles, and mine, were still untouched
and we offered them eagerly. The Captain came into the
bar at that moment, and we put the idea to him. 'Splendid!' he said.
'We'll throw m some of the Company's grog too.' I looked over to
the far corner of the room where the missionary wives sat, silently
knitting, and said, 'What about them? It mightn't be their sort of
party.' A dreamy look came over Rhada's face. 'Leave them to me,'
she said. I'll look after it. They'll enjoy themselves all right when
I've finished with them.'
Ngari and I helped her with the drinks on the night of the party.
I saw that she'd wheedled some cans of concentrated fruit juice out
of the Chief Steward. 'What's the juice for?' I asked her.
'Fruit punch,' said Rhada. 'I said I'd make the old bags happy.
They'll never know what hit them.'
I was reminded of Pa mixing drinks for Jessie's chair-game,
except that he had a lighter hand than Rhada, fewer varieties of
liquor in stock to choose from, and he didn't disguise his poison
with concentrated fruit juice. Rhada's punch should rightly have
had smoke coming off the top, but she gave me a sip saying, 'What
does that taste like?' and I had to agree that it tasted mostly like fruit
juice, with some questionable undertones. 'That lot have never
tasted alcohol,' said Rhada confidently. 'If I tell them it's only fruit
juice they won't notice anything else.'
The missionary ladies knew there was going to be a party, of
course. They had coyly approved, emphasised their teetotalism,
and on the night they were in their usual corner, dressed in their
best, waiting for the fun to begin. Rhada advanced on them with
a tray of witch's brew and said, 'A little fruit punch, ladies? Made

210
specially for you, and guaranteed to do you good.'
'You know that none of us touch alcohol, dear?'
'Of course I do. I said that this was made specially for you. It's
lovely fruit juice, dears, do try it.'
They each took a glass and sipped tentatively. 'Oh, delicious,'
said the senior wife. 'How very thoughtful of you, dear, and so
clever. What kind of juice is it? Quite different to anything I've
tasted before.'
Rhada had put champagne on all the tables for dinner, but the
missionary ladies said virtuously that it was far too strong for them,
and that they'd rather continue with their nice punch. For once they
were quite rowdy; the Purser gazed round his table with his
eyebrows raised, and I saw him take a glass when its owner wasn't
looking, and taste it. He gave Rhada a look that spoke volumes, and
shook his head.
After dinner the party moved to the bar. Someone had a set of
liar dice, the younger officers produced a gramophone and
records, and we settled down to make a night of it. The Captain
came and went because he had things to do before we docked next
morning, but he topped himself up liberally on each visit. The
missionary ladies seemed to be having an hilarious time together
in their corner. At one point the senior wife weaved over to us and
said, 'Mishesh Shearlaw, dear, we sheem to have drunk all our
punsh. Do you think . . . kin'ly . . .?'
'Of course,' said Rhada, and retired to the Steward's pantry to
make more.
The liar dice game went on for a long time. I noticed that the
missionary corner was empty and thought, rather relieved, that
they must have gone to bed. About midnight a strange sound came
to us from the deck, loud enough to make us sit upright and listen.
At the same moment the bar door opened, and the Captain's face
appeared. 'Come out here quick,' he said. 'This you must see.'
We went out on deck and saw, lit by a tropical moon, a conga
line of five dishevelled women tripping and swaying round the
ship to the tune of 'Onward Christian Soldiers', the tune recognisable
211
if not the words. They struggled gamely up to the Bridge and
down again, circumnavigated a hatch and saw us standing there,
watching them.
'Oh, goodnesh!' exclaimed the senior wife. 'Wha'ever mush you
think of ush? Sush fun... I don't know when... Ladiesh, I think ish
time for bed.'
Trying gallantly to keep upright and clutching at whatever
stable objects came their way, they vanished below decks. 'Oh my
God!' said the Captain, 'How the hell are they going to be when
their husbands come on board tomorrow morning?' He turned to
Rhada. 'Mrs Shearlaw,' he said. 'I think you may have gone too far.'
Next morning the Captain, whose head was made of concrete,
expertly manoeuvred his ship through the tangle of Bombay
harbour and tied up to his allotted mooring. I was leaning over the
rail, watching the bustle of lighters, tugs, small pinnaces and barges
which darted about, seemingly as frantic and purposeless as water
beetles on a pond. I gazed in awe at the legendary arch, The
Gateway to India, which had welcomed so many of my family, and
wondered what it had in store for me. The Purser ranged up and
leaned on the rails beside me. 'See that?' he said, pointing to a
lighter which was nearing the ship. 'See those men coming towards
us?' The lighter carried a number of European men, all shading their
eyes, and peering up at the Chyebassa's deck. I said, 'Oh no! Don't
tell me!' and the Purser said, "That's right, it's the missionaries.'
There was just time for Rhada and Ngari and me to rush down
and help the wives out on deck. They were too weak to resist,
though they protested that they couldn't possibly meet their
husbands, not feeling the way they did. Their hair was tousled,
their faces drawn and pale, their skin shiny with the sweat of
nausea. We propped them in deckchairs and covered them with
rugs, seconds before the first of their husbands appeared, joyous
and eager.
I don't know about Rhada, but personally I felt total shame.
What should have been five touching reunions became five
pathetic farces, as the worried husbands bent over their mortally

212
ill wives. One of them knelt on the deck beside his spouse, and
took her hand in both of his.
'What is it?' he implored. 'Tell me, what's the matter? Why are
you all so ill?'
She opened her eyes a little, and gave him a brave smile. 'It's
nothing, dear,' she murmured. 'We had a lovely party last night,
and somehow the five of us must have got a bit of bad food. The
fish, I think. So silly, the food's been perfect, and it's never
happened before.'
There was the finality of goodbyes and going ashore, the brutal
transition from seaborn cocoon to reality which marks the end of
any long sea voyage. An official launch studded with gleaming
ADC's arrived to take the Governor's wife to the local Government
House, where she would stay before being conveyed with Vice
Regal pomp to Bihar. It came as a shock; we had become used to
thinking of her as just one of us, and rather fun. The rest of us left
the ship in a common lighter.
I found myself shaking as we neared the wharf with its
towering, Raj-relic of the Arch. People swarmed everywhere,
dressed in white, dressed like rainbows, skins tinted from ivory to
ebony, bearded, veiled or even naked, and covered with ashes.
They milled and eddied and spat and shouted with the confusion
of an ant's nest disturbed and I, with the romantic egotism of the
very young, thought ecstatically, "This is my place. This is where
I should have been born.'

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26

Arrival in India



NOT ONE OF THE THREE OF US had doubted our
recruiting officer's word when she told us in Australia that
we'd be met in Bombay, nor had we thought to ask her
who would meet us. We were young and green enough to believe
what our elders said; we had a mental picture of some smart,
efficient woman in jungle green who would attach importance to
our arrival, and look after us. There was nobody. We wandered
vaguely through the exotic, indifferent crowd, distracted and
fascinated, and only half-concerned.
'Who are we looking for, d'you know?' asked Ngari.
'I haven't a clue. I thought there'd be somebody from the
WASBies looking for us.'
'There's a Red Cross lady in front of that building over there,'
said Beth sensibly. 'She might know.'
We made for the Red Cross woman who was looking hot and
harassed, and snapping at a bunch of cowed British NCOs. We
explained who we were. 'Oh God, no!' she said. 'Not more of you
lot! No one told me you were coming.'
'But isn't there a WAS(B) officer here? We were told someone'd
meet us and get us across to Calcutta or Assam or something.'
'There isn't a WAS(B) between here and Burma as far as I know,'
said the Red Cross woman. 'I'm the dogsbody who's got to get you
across, and I'm sick of coping with WAS(B) mess-ups. The best I
can do is put you in an hotel tonight and get you on a train
tomorrow.'
I said, 'Look, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to cable my home
for some money, I'm broke. I can't move until I get some money

214
sent to a Bank here, unless there's pay-in-advance from the
WAS(B)s or something.'
'Forget it. There's no pay-in-advance and I'm not having you lot
hanging round in Bombay. There's a civilian train leaving in the
morning, and your fare'll be paid by the Army. Calcutta can worry
about you, I've got enough on my plate.'
We hung round, deflated, while she dealt with her NCOs. Our
Colonel appeared, and asked where we were going to stay. When
the woman told him the name of the hotel she was taking us to he
looked horrified, and said, 'But that's a flea-pit. Why there?'
'The Army's paying for them in transit, and they're only recruits,
after all. If they want to pay for their own accommodation they can
go where they like, as long as they're on that train in the morning.'
We shook our heads dismally. The Colonel, in a last, generous
gesture, took us all to dinner at his own high-class hotel, and as we
ate he asked us how much money we had between us. It amounted
to three pounds, seven shillings and sixpence. The seven and
sixpence was mine. He said, 'You can't possibly set off across India
on that money. Did that woman actually say she was sending you
on a civilian train?'
'Yes, she did. Why?'
'Europeans aren't supposed to travel on them, people are
always getting robbed or murdered on civilian trains. This country's
a mess you know, the Hindus and the Muslims hate each other,
and they're all anti-British; the Nationalists have just been waiting
for the war to end to go all-out for independence. Besides, these
trains take at least two-and-a-half days to Calcutta and there's no
food except what you can buy on the stations, and no washrooms
or lavatories. It's inhuman.'
'Well, she sounded as though she meant it. What can we do?'
'Clear out of that dump she's put you in and go to another hotel;
I'll pay. Then you can cable for your money tomorrow, Robin, and
I'll try to find someone who'll see that you're sent across in a proper
troop train. I know Bombay pretty well, I'll put you in an hotel she
won't think of.'

215
He was wrong; she found us, I don't know how. We went back
and collected our things and he took us to another, much nicer
hotel near the seafront, paid the bill for all of us and left. We hadn't
even been down for breakfast next morning when the Red Cross
woman arrived with four MPs, and a face like thunder. She and the
MPs stood over us in silence while we packed, then marched us
down the stairs like three criminals and bundled us into a paddy
wagon. We drove to the station where the MPs formed up round
us again, marched us down the platform and squeezed us and all
our luggage into one small compartment, second class. There were
two greasy seats, and with our luggage piled between them there
was barely room to stand. Ngari said some very unladylike things
to the Red Cross woman, who pretended not to hear, and the MPs
stood guard outside the compartment until the train started. I was
sorry about the Colonel; we didn't know where to write and thank
him, and he was a kind man.
The train ride was like watching some fabulous travelogue from
inside a prison cell. The windows had no glass in second class, only
bars, and at night we shut and locked wooden shutters on the
inside, leaving an open space at the top of the windows for the air
to come in. No one tried to murder us, but at night-time station
stops long poles with hooks on the end came in through the open
top of the windows. They fished blindly round inside the compartment,
hoping to catch onto something of value and pull it out; if
you grabbed the pole you risked getting your hand torn, and the
pole's owner would bang on the shutter, threatening you. We
hadn't enough money to buy proper food, but we bought tea at the
stations, and some oranges. There was nowhere to wash, the
station lavatories were so vile that we gagged going into them and
our insides turned to cement. It was hot; sweatily, unremittingly,
unbelievably hot.
Outside the train windows the magic of India dazzled me from
first light until dark, and at night the blackness would be broken
suddenly by the lights of a village, or the moon would rise, shaping
and shadowing the landscape into the fabric of dreams. In the

216
daytime the kaleidoscope patterns formed and melted, blinding
with life and colour at one moment, and at the next expanding into
a vastness of empty plain and distant mountains, lonely, ruined
temples and sunset, when the climax of colour was a grand finale
played by the orchestras of all the world.
There were constant, inexplicable stops, because civilian trains
were non-priority, and we sweltered for hours in sidings waiting
for troop trains to pass. The Indian passengers got out and squatted
beside the line to relieve themselves. There were no Westerners to
criticise us and we were desperate, so on the second night we
climbed out and joined them; it was far better than the station
lavatories, and no one took the slightest notice. The journey lasted
three days, and at the end of it our own mothers would have
refused to recognise us.
It was about nine o'clock on the third morning when the train
pulled into Howrah, Calcutta's main railway station. We put our
heads through the window to look for a porter, and abruptly
brought them in again. The station, as far as we could see, was
covered by a shouting, flailing mob of Indians engaged in mortal
combat. There was blood on the platform in significant quantities,
and a number of prone figures, some moving, some not. A short
distance away there was a notice that read Railway Transport
Officer, and I said to Ngari, 'Let's try to make it to the RTO's office
- he'll tell us what to do.'
No one even glanced at us when we got off the train; it was an
Indian quarrel, and we were irrelevant. A man in a loin-cloth
materialised beside us, and offered to carry our luggage, as if
everything was normal. Other men milled round us, brandishing
knives and hunks of wood, and screaming at each other; we ran
past them to the RTO's office, followed by our porter, and it was
as though we were invisible. When we reached the office it looked
empty; there was a table turned on its side, and papers all over the
floor.
We called out, 'Is anyone there?' and a face rose from behind
the table, followed by a hand holding a revolver, and a voice said

217
disbelievingly, 'Do you mind telling me what you three are doing
here?'
'We just arrived on that train, Sir.'
'You can't have, that's a civilian train.'
'Yes, we know.'
'Oh my God! Well, you can't stay here, there's a bloody riot on.
There's a YWCA round the back of the station I think, the Lady Mary
Herbert Home, there's a notice at the bottom of the stairs. Round
that corner over there - leave your luggage here and run like hell.'
He disappeared behind the table again. We pressed a note into the
porter's hand and ran like hell.
We found the flight of stairs and the notice and stumbled
upwards, panting and confused. There was a doorway at the top,
and two old Hindu women squatting outside it. They looked at us doubtfully, and I decided that it was time to try out the smattering
of Urdu Pa had taught me.
'Burra Memsahib kidher hai?'
'Malem ne, Memsahib.'
'Burra Memsahib jeldi mangta.'
They stared at me blankly. They were old crones, toothless,
wrinkled and dirty, and they chattered to each other in shrill,
malevolent voices. Without understanding a word they said at the
time, I realised afterwards what the gist of it must have been.
'What do these ugly, unclean daughters of pigs want?'
'What should they want in a place like this? I know nothing of
that Burra Memsahib the idiot-girl asked for, but we have plenty
of men. We can offer them men, but I think that our men will not
want them.'
They beckoned us to follow them down the passage, and I
thought they were taking us to the YWCA Supervisor, the Burra
Memsahib I'd been asking for. The passage windows were cracked
and the curtains were grimy, but I was relieved to see that under
the grime they were standard YWCA cotton check. From the station
below came a crackle of gunfire, and increased howls of rage and
anguish.

218
Halfway down the passage the old ladies paused and threw
open a door. The three of us passed through it, and stopped
abruptly. It was a largish bedroom with two beds, and two mother
naked Indian men standing expectantly beside them. We backed
out precipitately, and I turned on the two old women. 'Burra
Memsahib!' I yelled, wishing I had a better Urdu vocabulary. 'Sahib
ne mangta!' The crones waved their hands about and shook their
heads, then shuffled further down the passage to open another
door. This time we peered in with some caution; there was an
Indian girl on the bed, and a man energetically at work on top of
her. We withdrew again, and our guides squatted on the floor,
shrugging their shoulders.
'What do we do now?' said Ngari.
Beth, who was looking very pale, said, 'Gosh, I'm hungry.'
'Hell!' said I, feeling helpless. 'Well, we can't go back down
there - listen to it.' Then, mustering a few more words of Urdu,
'Khana mangta. Garum khana aur nimbu pani hai? Show her some
money, Ngari, for God's sake! We must have some left?'
Money they understood, instantly. They tottered away to find
food, and we sat ourselves down against the wall, exhausted.
They came back with hot food and cold drinks, and the food
was better than any other food, ever. It was greasy unidentifiable
curried something with chapattis to scrape it up into our mouths
and we wolfed it messily, sitting on the filthy floor. It was our first
real food for a long time, and while I ate my brain began to work.
This was Calcutta, wasn't it? And Pa's friend, Dick Casey, was
Governor, wasn't he, and my first cousin, Bertram Whiting, was his
ADC? Having thought that the WASBies would have us transferred
straight to Assam I hadn't even considered contacting Bertram; I felt
horribly shy of doing so now, but there seemed to be no real
choice.
We dozed miserably in the passage until early afternoon. At
about two o'clock the noise from the station below started to fade
and we could hear the rioters moving away, still shouting and firing
the occasional shot. I said to Ngari, 'I'm going down to try to find

219
a phone. I've got a cousin who's an ADC at Government House,
and he might be able to help us.'
Downstairs the station was empty, and apart from the welter of
wreckage and the bloodstains the riot might have been a dream.
The RTO's office was locked but I found a telephone and a phonebook
in the First Class Waiting room, and by some miracle the
phone worked. My voice was shaking, because I hadn't seen
Bertram for years, and I didn't know how he'd react to an
unannounced young relation with two hangers-on and no visible
means of support. He came to the phone quite quickly and said,
'Hello? Whiting speaking.' He sounded official, and important.
'Bertie, it's me, Robin. Robin Walker.'
'Robin! Are you in Calcutta? What are you doing here?'
I'm at Howrah Station with two other girls on the way to join
the WASBies, and we're in a brothel called the Lady Mary Herbert
Home, I think. The RTO here said it was a YWCA, but it isn't. We've
got hardly any money left. I'm so sorry, Bertie, but could you come
and get us?'
Bertie seemed deprived of speech. The silence was so long that
I said, 'Bertie, are you there? I'm running out of these little coins.
Can you come?'
His voice was hoarse. 'Wait where you are, I... this riot, no one's
allowed on the streets. I'll have to get onto the Army, and it'll take
a bit of time. Just wait there for God's sake, somewhere no one can
see you.'
I went back for the others and we waited for an hour, huddled
behind a column near the entrance. At last we heard a rumbling, and down the street towards us came two armoured cars with
Bertie uniformed and distraught-looking in the leading car. When
he saw us at close quarters his expression changed from anxiety
to pure horror, and I realised for the first time how dreadful we
must look after three unwashed days on the train, the riot, the
brothel and our recent life-saving curry. Worse than all of that,
though we'd ceased to notice it ourselves, I knew how we must
smell.

220

We told Bertie that our luggage was locked in the RTO's office,
and Bertie said, 'We can't get it now, I'll send someone for it
tomorrow. There's a general curfew today, no one's allowed on the
streets. How the hell did you... ? No, I don't feel strong enough. You
can tell me about it later. That YWCA Hostel was closed down
weeks ago, by the way.'
When the armoured cars deposited us at Government House,
Bertram inspected us with disgust, and gave a deep sigh. 'Now
listen,' he said. 'I'm going to take you to my quarters and you'd
better have a shower for a start. We have to go through the ADC
room, but just follow me and don't speak to anyone yet, please.
There's a party on later, so do what you can to clean yourselves up
and you can come to it.'
We couldn't do much with ourselves because we had nothing
to change into, but the shower was one of the wonders of the world
and it changed our outlook on life. We kept sniffing to make sure
our clean smell was real, and we all collapsed into chairs and went
sound asleep while our hair dried. When Bertie came to fetch us
our clothes were still filthy, but servants had ironed them: inside
them we were scrubbed and ready to go. I noticed Bertie eyeing
Ngari appreciatively, and fancied there was a reciprocal gleam in
her eye. Bertie was over six-foot tall, dark, Spanish-looking, and
quite unfairly endowed with charm under circumstances which
didn't include young cousins turning up in Indian brothels during
riots.
The contrast between the ADC's party that evening and our
immediate past was so profound that it reminded me of fairy stories
where pumpkins turn into coaches, and frogs into princes.
Government Houses were, by definition, grand, and few were
grander than that of Bengal. It was still the era of the Raj, and ADC's
were still the playmates of the Princes of their generation, at polo,
hunting, drinking and womanising. They aimed at the standards set
by the Princes themselves, and this party achieved them.
Bertie led me up to a pleasant-faced, rather stout young man
and said, 'Biyar, I'd like to present my cousin, Robin Walker. She's

221
just arrived from Australia, via a brothel as far as I can make out,
so forgive the way she looks and be nice to her.' Then, to me, 'Biyar
Cooch Bihar, Robin. He's a Maharajah but he's a friend of mine, and
he'll look after you.' He removed himself briskly, in the direction
of Ngari.
Biyar looked at me with amusement. I realised that I should be
calling him 'Your Highness', but he was too nice, and too friendly.
He said, 'Tell me all about it, I can't wait to hear.'
The evening glittered and spun like the champagne bubbles in
the tall, crystal glasses offered on silver trays by spectacularly
uniformed servants. The other women were all beautifully dressed;
they eyed us as though we were rejects from a zoo, and made wide
detours to avoid having to speak to us, but the men found us quaint
and made much of us, laughing. Biyar said, 'You've got to celebrate
after a trip like that. I'm going to take you to a Club I own, and give
you some food. Bertie and the others'll come too.'
He swept us off, his comet's-tail of State Ministers and courtiers
and minders trailing behind him, and a fleet of Rolls Royces took
us to his Club. It was huge and white, built in the shape of a cloverleaf,
with marble floors and classic marble columns. There was a
table at the top of the centre room, and other tables on either side
of it; Biyar sat himself in the seat of honour and placed us round
him, while his court occupied the lesser tables. Endless servants
plied us with wine and the most splendid food, an orchestra
played, singers sang, and when Biyar clapped his hands at the
Head Waiter some curtains near us parted, and a troop of glorious
half-naked girls floated through them to dance in front of our table.
We stayed at Government House that night, asleep before we
had stretched out properly, and in the morning servants brought
us trays with silver coffee pots, and large, indulgent breakfasts.
Bertie wasn't in evidence, but he came to see us around noon, and
it was clear that he'd been busy.
'I've done some checking up,' he said. 'I sent a signal to the head
WAS(B) in Assam, and she managed to phone me. There seems to
have been some kind of mess-up; she says she wasn't really sure

222

if you were coming with the war ending, but she can use you.
They're still running all the canteens with 14th Army, and a lot of
women have left to join their husbands so they're short-handed.
The thing is, they don't know when they can get you transport to
Burma, and you can't stay here indefinitely.'
'No, of course we can't. You've been terribly good to us already.
Is there some kind of hostel we can go to?'
'Not exactly, you've got to go to the Transit Camp at Barrackpore,
and the Army'll ship you over from there. It won't be too bad, and
you can get in to Calcutta by taxi - you will come in, won't you
Ngari? Oh, and I sent Uncle Geoff a cable Robin, to tell him you
need some money. I said to send it to my Bank, and they'll let me
know when it arrives.'
I could imagine Pa grinding his teeth, and wondering how I
could have managed to fritter away a sum like fifteen pounds; I
hoped he wouldn't refuse to send me any more, and what would
he make of a cable sent by Bertie from Calcutta? He'd undoubtedly
fear the worst and assume that I'd done something disastrous; I was
grateful for every mile that lay between us.
Barrackpore lasted for about ten days. There are few places less
appealing than an Army Transit Camp, especially at the end of a
war when it's run down and tired, but our stay there was significant
both for me and for Ngari.
Ngari and Bertram embarked without a moment's pause on
what promised to be a love affair of note. It lasted for about five
days, during which we spent more time in GovernmentHouse than
in the Transit Camp, and then he introduced us to a friend of his
who was passing through Calcutta on his way back to Burma. Peter
was a Captain in an Indian Regiment, better looking even than
Bertie and, we gathered, married. He and Ngari gave each other a
long, appraising look, and from then on Bertie might not have
existed; during our last five days in Calcutta she and Peter gazed
into each other's eyes when together and looked tortured every
time they were parted. It was during the Barrackpore period too
that I met Andy.

223
Peter and Bertram had asked us to meet them in Calcutta for
dinner at an hotel, and had set a time that was rather later than
usual. Barrackpore had rigidly enforced rules about when one had
to be back inside the wire at night, particularly for Other Ranks, and
for female Other Ranks most of all. The camp was a sprawling,
dusty, comfortless Army caravanserai staffed by disillusioned
discards from the mainstream of the Army, and the only official way
in or out of it was by the main gate, where sentries checked the
validity of your comings and goings.
Ngari and I were well aware before we went out that we had
no chance of being back at the regulation time. We were housed
in one of the peas-in-a-pod brick huts, four bunks, a cement
floored washroom and a lavatory bowl, but it had the advantage
of being alongside the barbed-wire boundary fence. Before we left
we fossicked round the camp until we unearthed three or four old
gunny-sacks, and these we hung over the wire behind our hut. We
knew that we'd come back either by car or taxi, and the sacks
would both identify our hut for us, and give us some protection
while climbing the fence. Beth never came on these excursions,
much preferring the earnest, teetotal young men who stayed in
camp at night, and who discussed the finer things of life with her.
When we got to the hotel where we were to meet it was
crowded, and either they were late or we were early, so we sat
down at a table and ordered drinks. Pa, to my surprise, had sent
twenty pounds and a 'what is going on?' telegram; I hadn't yet
answered the telegram, but I was feeling rich. Unaccompanied
young women had scarcity value in Calcutta at the time, and before
I could pay the waiter a voice said, 'May we join you? and another
voice said, 'Let me pay for those drinks.'
Ngari said, 'We're waiting for friends, but have a seat till they
come, they won't be long. I'm Ngari, and this is Robin.'
'Where d'you come from? You're not English.'
I said, 'How d'you know? Don't I sound English?'
'Yes, but you don't look it, you're both different to English girls.
I'm Andy, by the way.

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Andy was tall and thin, narrow shouldered and he wore glasses,
but he had a nice grin; he was attractive, I thought, in a funny way,
and he showed signs of finding me more interesting than Ngari
which endeared him to me. When Bertie and Peter arrived, Peter
and Ngari immediately became limp as two invertebrates, and I
introduced Bertie to Andy. Andy's friend looked bored, and
wandered off.
The evening was utterly predictable; dinner, a great deal to
drink at the bar afterwards, and a game of liar dice. Andy told me
he was a Captain in a Signals Unit with one of the Indian Divisions,
and had been at Imphal during the fighting there. He was on his
way back to his Unit in Burma after being on Leave. It was nearly
midnight when we realised that we should have been back at
Barrackpore two hours earlier.
'We'll have to take you back by taxi,' said Bertie. 'I can't risk
being nabbed by MPs in a Government House car with a couple
of Absent Without Leave WASBies on board. Come on Peter Andy,
do you want to come?'
We found an ancient, rickety taxi outside with a Sikh driver, and
managed to pack into it by putting a willing Ngari onto Peter's
knee. As we drove off Andy said, 'Keep an eye out for an MP's jeep.
I spent a few nights at Barrackpore once and they're bastards. If
they catch us they'll arrest the lot of us.' Bertie said, 'Oh God, that'd
be the end of me,' and twisted round to peer out of the rear
window.
The Sikh driver drove like all Sikhs, which is to say like a
homicidal maniac goaded by red-hot pokers. He careered round
corners and down every road on the wrong side at maximum
speed, clutching the steering wheel to his chest and muttering into
his beard. He found the Transit Camp in record time, but quite
understandably came to a noisy halt right in front of the gate and
the guardhouse. 'Make him go round the back!' I yelled. 'We'll have
to go over the fence!' The driver, believing he'd fulfilled his
contract, stopped the engine.
Andy and Bertram, with passable Urdu, persuaded the driver

225
that he must do a circuit of the camp. He gunned the engine into
deafening life and took off again in a shower of gravel, activating
a jeep full of MPs who had been waiting inside the gates, hoping
for something like us to brighten up their duty shift.
The camp was set on a large, square block of land with roads
all round it. Our taxi had a head start and a driver possessed of a
devil. We screamed round the first corner and up a mile of tree
lined dirt road, skidding from side to side, with the lights of the MP's
jeep dancing behind us.
'Where's your hut? We'll have to make him slow down and just
chuck you two out. I can't get arrested, H.E.'d sack me on the spot.
There's sure to be a ditch beside the road so roll into it and keep
your heads down, and we'll try to lose the MPs.
'We've got sacks over the wire along the back fence so try to get
ahead of them round the next corner, and we'll bale out. Then go
like hell!'
The jeep wasn't making much ground as we rounded the corner
into the back stretch; we could see their lights, but it was hard to
make out the distance through the dust. I thought we were about
level with our hut, and I yelled, 'Now!' Andy screamed at the Sikh
to stop, and he slowed down just long enough for the back door
to open, and for Ngari and me to be pushed out onto the road. We
hit fairly hard, but we both rolled towards the edge and down into
the storm ditch.
The sound of the taxi faded into the distance but another noise,
and headlights, took its place as the MP's jeep came to a stop above
us. We knew that we were caught, but I also knew that my face had
landed in something soft and wet at the bottom of the ditch, and
that there was an awful, unmistakable smell. Rough hands had me
by the shoulders, and I was being lifted up, dripping. 'Oh hell,' I
said. 'Watch out before you touch me. I've put my face in a bloody
cow-pat.'
The MPs shone their torches on us. Ngari was merely dirty, but
when they saw my face they laughed until they were weak, and it
saved us.

226
'Want to charge 'em, Bert?' one asked the other.
'Ave to take 'em back to the Guardhouse for that,' said Bert.
'Oo's goin' to clean the jeep out afterwards?'
'Gawd, not me! Where d'you live, ladies? An 'ut nearby, I 'ope?'
'Just there,' I said miserably, pointing to the sacks.
'Wotta coincidence, sacks and all. I wonder 'ow they got there.
Well give me an 'and, Bert, to put the ladies over the fence, and I warn you darlings, don't let us catch you at it again. Allez Oop!'
The taxi got clean away, of course, so I didn't have Bertie's job
on my conscience, not that Dick Casey would have sacked him; he
was too nice a man, and he would have seen the funny side. Bertie
was shaken though, and a little disenchanted by Ngari's lightening
defection to Peter; we saw little more of him before we left for
Burma.
Andy managed to get in touch with me every day, and either to
come out to Barrackpore for a visit, or to take me somewhere for
a meal. He said that he'd be stationed in Rangoon, and insisted that
we keep in touch when I reached Burma, and was allocated to a
Division. I liked him, but it hadn't gone beyond that. Apart from
my habitual shyness with young men I was convinced that I had
a new, ineradicable form of repulsion to add to all my other
deficiencies.
No matter how I scrubbed, washed my hair and creamed my
face, or even wasted money on a bottle of cheap scent I could still
smell, and was certain that others could smell, the lingering
fragrance of cow-shit.

227
27

Eighty-second
Division



IT SEEMED IRONIC to have travelled all the way from Australia
to India, secure in the belief that I was bound for the Indian
Army of my family's past, and to end up with a West African
Division whose presence in Burma I hadn't even suspected. I felt
cheated, but it had happened with my consent, and I couldn't
complain.
I was ashamed because we had arrived too late; it was like
joining a new school just in time for the break-up, and we were impostors The real WASBies had been through a war together, a
harsh, exacting war, and who were we to arrive, fresh and
unblooded when it was all over and say we belonged with them.
The WASBies had never been a large service. It was originally
formed, when the Japs entered the war in 1942, for cypher duties
in Rangoon, and it dissolved when the Japanese advance forced the
British to retreat.
One of its members then was Ninian Taylor, the wife of a Burma
Rifles Colonel. With thirty-two other women she survived a
gruelling journey out of Burma, and it was she who persuaded
Army Command in India to let her reform the service for canteen
and welfare duties. There was no other welfare for the men in the
field except NAAFI, and NAAFI was restricted to behind-the-lines
work in large, established bases. Nin Taylor, and a number of other
women who, like her, had husbands or friends fighting on the
Burma front, made the WASBies into a highly flexible and mobile
group which could operate as part of the fighting Divisions. They

228
had become a proud, close-knit sisterhood; some had been killed,
some Mentioned in Despatches and others had been decorated.
Some of them were surprisingly old, some very young, and they
included Burmese and Indian girls, as well as British. The dangers
they'd shared, the grief and the losses, their illnesses which they
ignored and the constant difficulties they overcame gave them
something indefinable and special. I felt it was an insult to pretend
to be one of them.
The three of us had been finally transported by boat across the
Bay of Bengal, and handed over to our first real, live WAS(B). We
were bustled off to WAS(B) Headquarters, and told that we would
be sent to our separate postings the same day to replace women
who had left. 'There are three postings available,' we were told,
'And it doesn't matter which of you goes where. Pick the one you
want.'
Beth, predictably, picked the least interesting one, with a well
established canteen in a large town, and I never saw her again. The
two other postings were with an Indian Division near Mandalay,
or to set up a new canteen with a West African Division camped
in the jungle north of Rangoon and waiting to be sent back to
Africa. Ngari and I looked at each other, both wanting desperately
to go to the Indian Division, and Ngari said, 'Look, I've simply got
to go to the one near Mandalay, Peter said he'd be there. Please,
Robin, it doesn't matter to you where you go, but I'll die if I'm not
near Peter.' I thought, 'Hell, why don't I stand up to her,' and said,
'Okay, I'll take the West Africans.' We both departed that afternoon
in different directions, Ngari in an Indian-driven jeep, and I in a 15cwt
truck beside a huge, purple-black, beaming West African who
addressed me as 'Missee'.
It occurred to me, as we drove across the Burmese plain, that
I hadn't the faintest idea of how to go about setting up a canteen,
and that no one had told me what to use for money, nor whether
there'd be any equipment to work with. The situation seemed
rather too open-ended to be funny but the Burmese landscape
distracted me, and I decided to leave it to fate. We drove through

229
paddy-fields at first, yellowish green in their lattice of paddy-bunds
and stretching to the horizon, broken only by the dark green
clusters of trees which sheltered villages. These clusters had a
secret, enclosed look, with nothing visible from the road but the
horizontals and verticals of the trees, and only wavering strands of
smoke rising into the still air to tell you that people lived under
them.
When the road ran through one of these shaded villages it was
not mysterious at all, but full of life. There were bamboo houses
on either side, washing and food-stalls and pony carts, babies and
dogs and chickens and ancient, wrinkled grandparents, all scattered
at random across the road and apparently oblivious of our
truck until it was almost on top of them. To make matters worse,
whenever we entered a village the African driver accelerated
furiously, and only slowed down again when we came to open
country.
'Why did you go so fast through that village?' I asked angrily
after the second one. I had heard screams fading behind us, but the
dust was too thick to see, and I hoped that at worst it had been a
pi-dog puppy.
The driver said, 'Bad, bad men stay for village, Missee. Dacoiti
men, shoot gun at us, no good for go slow.'
I hadn't heard about dacoits then, the savage little bands that
robbed, murdered and terrorised at random across the Burmese
countryside, but I had noticed a sten-gun behind our heads on top
of the seat, and wondered what it was for. A little later we came
across a small band of Burmese men loping along the paddy-bunds
beside the road. They were ragged and serious-looking, and they
all had rifles slung across their shoulders. The African beside me
went as near grey as was possible for one of his colouring, and
stood on the accelerator. The truck reached its maximum speed of
perhaps 35 mph, and I looked back through the window to see if
we were being threatened; the men were still on the same course,
and if they had noticed our passing they gave no sign, but my driver
was clearly a shaken man.

230
The country gradually changed from paddy to bush, and started
to rise. The road got steeper and rougher, and the scrubby bush
changed quite suddenly into jungle, tall, dense and diverse,
smelling of moss and mould, arching over us to hide the sky so that
we drove through a tunnel of tangled green. The road stopped
being even a track, and became two narrow concrete strips laid
over the rough ground, wide enough apart to take our wheels.
The jungle-tunnel ended abruptly, after what seemed like
hours, opening out to a dusty, red-earth clearing at the foot of a
high cliff. There were tents in the clearing, and huts, and a number
of incomprehensible notices. I realised that we'd arrived at the
Headquarters of the 82nd West African Division. My door was
opened from the outside, and a voice said, 'Would you be our
WAS(B) Miss?'
It was my introduction to Divisional Sergeant Major Stebbing,
a regular soldier of the old school, and a man who wielded
infinitely more power in the Division than its General. He was
stout, red-faced, and had the most magnificent waxed moustache
I had ever seen, even in picture books. He held himself ramrod
straight, and at the sound of his voice, even moderately raised, the
African troops trembled. He was eyeing me rather sceptically. I
said, 'I'm afraid I am your WAS(B), Sergeant Major, and I'm new
to it. I haven't a clue what I'm supposed to do.'
His face relaxed, and he said comfortably, "That's all right then,
Miss, we'll sort it out together. Anyway, we've 'ad a signal there's
another WAS(B) coming over 'ere tomorrow for a few days to show
you 'ow. Anything you want, you just ask me. I'll take you up to
your camp now, on top of the dam. Oh, and by the way, this 'ere's
your jeep.'
I swallowed audibly; I hadn't expected my lie about being able
to drive to catch up with me so quickly. It was a dear, battered,
tough little jeep, and I shuddered to think what I might do to it.
'And this 'ere's Kwami,' said SM Stebbing, saving my life for the
first of many times. He pointed to a squat, grinning African standing
near the jeep, dressed in nothing but a pair of shorts and beret. 'E'll

231

be your driver. It's regulations 'ere that either you or your driver
carries a weapon at all times, in case of dacoits. Dacoits is what we
call the local bandits, and there's a lot of them, and they've got
some very nasty 'abits, so until you gets used to the lay of the place
Kwami can drive and you sit in the back with the gun. I'll show you
'ow to use that. Now, put your gear in my jeep, and I'll take you
up to the camp.'
We took a steep track up the cliff and turned right across the
spillway of the dam. It was a huge, oily-calm expanse of water that
reflected the dark jungle all around it. There was stillness everywhere,
not the stillness of calm but of unseen things watching and
waiting, and the noise of the jeep seemed like an impertinence. On
our other side, below the dam wall, the treetops were thick and soft
as a green wool blanket, broken only by the Divisional Headquarters
clearing. I knew that there must be thousands of men camped
in the area, but there was no sign of them; I tried to imagine what
warfare in that solid mass of vegetation might have been like.
The track turned left after the end of the spillway and stopped
on the edge of the water, half a mile further on. There was a small
clearing with a woven bamboo shelter and two small tents; four I'	sacks stretched between poles half-concealed a thunderbox, and
this had been prominently placed, without cover, in the middle of
the clearing.
'This 'ere's your camp,' said the SM with pride. 'Took a lot of
trouble with it, the men did. They're that bloody pleased, beg yer
pardon, to be getting a canteen.'
Two Africans materialised out of the bamboo shelter; they had
the self-satisfied air of men about to go on holiday. SM Stebbing
gave them a glare which brought them quivering to attention, and
said, 'These two 'ere'll look after your camp and do the cooking.
They speak a bit of English, but don't take no lip from them and
make them work like buggery, beg yer pardon. If they don't, tell
me. We 'ave our own methods of discipline in this Division, wot
these men understand.'
I found this to be true; I never saw a flogging, though they

232

undoubtedly happened, but several times I saw Africans tied to
trees at night, their arms shackled behind the tree trunk, outside the
Sergeant's Mess. They would be left there until morning to cool off
after an illegal beer-drink or some other crime. I came to
understand that the Africans much preferred such punishments to
those laid down in King's Rules and Regulations, designed for
white men and quite incomprehensible to the African mind.
SM Stebbing continued, 'There's some other things I'd better tell
you, Miss. Don't go walking in the jungle on your own, please.
There's snakes round 'ere, and a lotta other nasties, animals and the
like; used to be a Game Park, this did. There was three of the
African troops taken by tiger last week, but that was from the units
on the perimeter, not 'ere. You'll 'ave guards on your camp at night
because some of these black men aren't wot you'd call civilised;
never seen a white woman some of 'em, I shouldn't wonder, and
they might 'ave ideas.'
The senior WAS(B) arrived next day. She was older than me and
had seen service in the most hair-raising conditions and places. She
bustled round, purring because everything was so peaceful and
easy, treated the SM with such casual irreverence that he bristled
and went red in the face, and confused me by organising
everything herself and not telling me how she'd done it. When she
left three days later I had a hazy idea of what I was supposed to
do, but no confidence at all in my ability to do it. An assistant
WAS(B) would be sent to me, she said as she left, but she didn't
know when. 'Anyway, you've got a good set-up here, I'm sure you
can manage on your own.'
The days were divided into two sessions, the first starting at
8 a.m. in a 15-cwt truck stocked with toothpaste, Brylcreem, soap,
biscuits and other male accessories which had been sent up from
the Rangoon NAAFI on the senior WAS(B)'s orders, and these had
to be distributed to the African units, camped in the jungle over a
wide area. I had a British Corporal to drive the truck, and SM
Stebbing worked out a roster so that every unit got its fair share of
visits. The senior WAS(B) had ordered stock based on the

233
requirements of relatively sophisticated Indian troops, and she
would have been surprised at the African reaction to her choice of
goods
Dispensing things from the back of the 15-cwt was hard work.
As soon as the truck stopped the men would swarm out of the bush,
shoving and screaming and pulling at my legs which were on a
level with their faces, in a frenzy to get attention. It was impossible
to understand what they wanted but experience soon taught me
that there were only three things in demand: toothpaste, Brylcreem
and biscuits. As soon as they had these in their hands they would
sit down under a nearby tree, spread their Brylcreem or toothpaste
on the biscuits, and eat them with the rapt enjoyment of gourmets
at a five-star restaurant. It was necessary to restock with these three
items at frequent intervals.
Daytime duty, Mobile Canteen duty, ended sometime in the
afternoon, then one restocked the truck's shelves, had a quick
wash or a swim in the pool below the dam wall, and got the night
canteen ready for the British NCOs. All the officers and NCOs in
the Division were British, and while the officers had their own
comfortable Mess tents, and the Sergeants and Sergeant-Majors,
being craftier, had an even more comfortable one, the NCOs below
that rank had nothing, until our canteen started. As a result their
standards weren't high, and they were wonderfully grateful for
what seemed to me very little.
There was no official alcohol for Corporals and Lance Corporals,
but they smuggled in their own and mixed it with the soft
drinks, and no one said a word. The food was a monotonous diet
of fried bread, fried eggs and potato chips, the eggs and potatoes
bought from the local villagers, and they had tables and chairs of
a sort, and a gramophone and packs of cards. The young men had
been dying of boredom and long-stale dirty jokes in their tents, and
they thought it was wonderful.
SM Stebbing and his friend, who was also a Sergeant Major,
appointed themselves as my official guardians. Instead of spending
the whole evening in their own Mess they set up a table and chairs

234
just outside the canteen tent. They put a lantern on the table, and
a bottle of whisky, and sat in a cloud of mosquitos until I was
finished, drinking Scotch laced with a dash of tea, and talking. They
had been friends for years, and what they still had to talk about was
a mystery, but they never drew breath.
Every half-hour or so one of them would reach into the canteen
tent, pull me out, and make me drink a slug of tea-and-scotch; with
a working day which lasted from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the Burmese
heat I was grateful for it. When the Canteen closed they would take
me with them to the Sergeant's Mess and feed me more whisky,
talking all the time to each other above my head. When Stebbing
decided that the bar should close he would clap his hands and two
African orderlies would enter the Mess carrying a stretcher which
they laid on the ground behind him. Stiff as a tree-trunk he'd fall
back on it and lie full length with his eyes closed, the two orderlies
would carry him to his tent and his Sergeant Major being slightly
his junior, would drive me back to my camp. They were wonderful,
self-appointed nannies, but not at all what Pa had led me to expect.

235
28

Burma



I HAD TO LEARN, SOMEHOW, to drive my jeep, before anyone
found out that I couldn't drive. I watched what Kwami did
every day from the back seat, and went over it in my mind at
night. We hadn't had a car at home for years, not since Mama lost
the sight of one eye, because Pa hated the cars anyway and used
her semi-sight as an excuse. I was car-illiterate, but in the end I
gritted my teeth, and one day when we were in the middle of
nowhere I said, 'Kwami, you sit for back seat, hold gun. Missee
drive.'
Kwami rolled his eyes a bit, but he didn't dare say no. He
climbed into the back with the gun and I got behind the wheel,
praying. I got the thing started and we proceeded for the first half
mile in frog-hops, wavering from side to side of the track. By the
time we were travelling reasonably straight and level I realised that
we were approaching Divisional HQ, that we'd have to pass it in
full public view, climb the steep hill to the dam spillway and cross
its narrow rim if we were to get to my camp. I wasn't sure which
gear I'd have to use in order to climb the hill, so I decided to put
my foot full down and rush it.
We blazed past Divisional HQ with my foot flat to the boards,
past all the notices saying Max. Speed 5 MPH, and I heard shouts
of protest. The brave little jeep made it to the top, its engine snarling
and hiccuping, and I managed the right hand turn onto the
spillway. By then I had panicked, and my foot stayed hard down.
I'd been aware of shrill African lamentations from the back seat for
some time, and as we reached the end of the spillway and turned
left Kwami hurled himself from the jeep, hitting the ground in a

236
cloud of dust. I wanted to stop, principally to see if he was all right,
but also because the track ended a little further on at the edge of
the lake. The method of actually stopping the jeep had gone from
me, and the only alternative seemed to be a watery grave. A
merciful God inspired me to turn off the ignition.
Kwami materialised beside the jeep unhurt, but his face was
grey instead of its usual burnished black and his eyes showed more
white than was decent. I was glad, for once, that we had so few
words of common language. Then SM Stebbing roared up in his
own jeep, having seen my record-breaking dash through Divisional
HQ. He walked round me several times, as I sat pale and
paralysed; his moustache was vibrating, and he said to Kwami, 'Get
off down to Parade Ground, double quick! Imshi!'
'Sah!' said Kwami, and vanished.
'Why didn't you tell me you couldn't bloody well drive?' asked
Stebbing.
'Sorry, Sar-Major,' I said miserably. 'I had to sign a thing to say
I could drive to get over here, and I lied.'
'Well, you're a silly little bitch, beg yer pardon, you might 'ave
killed yerself. Don't you never go through my 'Eadquarters like that
again or I'll 'ave yer, so 'elp me I will. Now, get into my jeep 'ere
and I'll teach yer to drive.'
In quiet times, and without a word to anyone else, he made a
driver of me. Kwami refused to get in the jeep with me again, so
he gave me a new African co-driver as well.
My assistant arrived; she was small, she looked like something
out of the chorus-line of South Pacific, and her name was Terry. She
said she was half Chinese and half Phillipino, and that she and her
mother had been interned in Hong Kong when the Japanese war
started. Terry had managed to escape from the internment camp,
and with three men she had walked out of China, across the
Himalayas and into India, a journey of such epic proportions that
it was hard to believe, looking at her, that it was possible. It was
true enough, confirmed and documented, but Terry hardly ever
mentioned it. Her whole soul was concentrated on the one

237
ambition which had sustained her through all the miles of snow
and hunger and hardship; she wanted an English husband.
The morning after she arrived I took her off in the Mobile
Canteen to show her the ropes. It was a hot, muggy day, one of
Burma's specials, when you had to take salt tablets just to stay on
your feet and your clothes stuck to you, smelling like stale dishrags.
When we finished duty I said to Terry, 'There's a pool in the
rocks down at the foot of the dam that the British NCO's swim in,
and we're allowed to use it. D'you feel like a swim?'
'I sure do!'
'Okay, put on your bathers and pull your dress over the top of
them, you can take it off down at the pool. It'll be full of NCOs but
at least we can cool off.'
Terry always favoured a direct approach. We drove down to the
pool, and it was full of young men, splashing and fooling about.
They eyed the new WAS(B) with interest. I said to her, 'Go behind
that bush there and take your dress off, it'll be quite safe,' and I took
my own dress off. There was a yell from the pool as if someone had
kicked a goal at a Grand Final, and a maelstrom of white water as
the swimmers thrashed towards our bank. I looked for Terry and
stifled a shout of horror. She had taken her dress off but she hadn't
a stitch on underneath it and was standing naked, hands on hips,
smiling provocatively at the rapturous NCOs.
Terry was sunny-natured, she worked well and I liked her; I
decided that what she did with her spare time was her own affair.
I was a Sergeant by then, and technically speaking I was responsible
for her, but I knew my limitations. The NCOs thought she was
the Almighty's blessing after a hard war.
After only a couple of months with the Division I became
engaged to Andy. He was stationed in Rangoon, found out where
I'd been posted, and arrived at Divisional HQ one day unannounced.
I came back from Mobile Canteen duty and found him
sitting in our bamboo shelter, drinking our drink with SM Stebbing
who had shown him the way to our camp and was quite obviously
vetting him. He came to see me quite often after that, or I'd hitch

238
a ride to Rangoon on Sundays to have a meal with him. On one of
these trips he proposed to me, and I said yes. I knew perfectly well
that I wasn't in love with him and marriage seemed too far in the
future to be taken seriously, but I was aware that an official
attachment, such as a fiancee, would make my life a lot easier.
Inevitably I was having man-trouble; it would have happened
to any single female in that time and place but I lacked Terry's lighthearted
approach to it. My mother's principles were still firmly
ingrained, and I took it all far too seriously. The Africans were not
problem, and if the younger officers had been interested I'd
probably have enjoyed it, but it was the middle-aged, married ones
who should have known better. They'd have a few drinks too many
at their mess, then drive up to our camp in the small hours feeling
randy and deprived, and wander into my tent opening their fly
buttons, convinced they were about to do me a favour.
I slept with my .38 revolver beside me. Stebbing had given it
to me saying that it was regulations for me to carry it at all times,
and although I was incapable of hitting anything with it I could
wave it about very menacingly. I thought of Pa's almost religious
belief that all British officers were perfect gentlemen, and wondered
what he'd make of the present crop. If I'd told him about
them he'd have accused me of lying, and probably smacked my
head for being sacrilegious.
Guiltily I knew that I was using Andy, but I felt that it cut both
ways. I was certain that he was no more in love with me than I with
him; he was reacting normally to years of war deprived of female
company, besides which with women in short supply a fiancee was
a feather in his cap. He was only twenty-two, not much older than
me, and there was plenty of time in the future for either of us to
back off if we wanted to. The question of pre-marital sex never
crossed my mind in the beginning, neither that he might demand
it, nor that in return for my use of him as a safety device he had
every right to it. I accepted a small sapphire and diamond ring as
proof of my betrothed status, and flashed it ostentatiously under
the nose of any man who seemed ambitious.

239
Andy was an ordinary, pleasant young middle-class Englishman,
an only child, educated at a minor Public School and raised
in a prosperous suburb of Brighton, Sussex. His upbringing had
been narrow and his mind followed suit; he thought me quite
peculiar in many ways; he excused it because I was Australian and
therefore bound to be odd, yet he never wanted to know anything
about Australia or my family. Once I was in England and married
to him, I gathered, Australia would cease to exist. He would finish
his accountancy course after his discharge, and when he was
earning a certain figure we'd get married. There would be a house
in the suburbs, and I'd be expected to follow the same daily routine
as his mother, library, bridge and gardening. His father, he told me,
owned chemist shops in London and commuted by train every day,
arriving home late to grumble at his wife and to eat a specially
prepared dinner on his own. It sounded alien and awful, and not
at all what my parents had led me to expect from life in the
Promised Land.
Letters to and from Australia were a rarity, travelling slowly by
sea, and subject to delays at either end. I wrote and told my parents
that I was engaged, and the little I knew about Andy and his family.
Months later I got an enthusiastic letter from Mama, taking it for
granted that I'd chosen a mate from the right social and financial
bracket.
'We always hoped that you'd many a young man in a Good
Regiment,' she wrote. 'You say his father owns chemists shops in
London. I expect that means that he owns Boots, in which case he's
a millionaire.' Poor Mama; in no way could Andy's obscure Signals
Unit staffed by very temporary soldiers be classed as a Good
Regiment, nor could his father's three chemist shops in Hammersmith
be compared to Boots.
Mama's world had resisted all but the most superficial change
and in it she still lived secure, shielded by the holy myth known
as 'your father's standards' which were, in fact, an invention of her
own. They were admirable in theory, and unsustainable in the real
world. When Andy put it to me, in the strongest possible terms, that

240
he wasn't prepared to wait forever before taking me to bed I gave
in. My virginity had become a bore and a burden to me anyway,
and he was welcome to it.
The term 'taking me to bed' is misleading because we had no
access to anything so comfortable. When I went to see him in
Rangoon I dossed down at WAS(B) Headquarters in a room full of
other women, and Andy shared a tent with another officer in his
unit. My introduction to sex took place in the back of a jeep in a
dark, mosquito-infested, jungly Rangoon cul-de-sac.
It was unfortunate that Andy's claims to extensive sexual
experience were fictitious because I knew nothing myself, and we
were both terrified I might get pregnant. It was uncomfortable and
degrading, and I was completely mystified; sex was glorified in
song and story, and by a whole lot of women that I knew, so surely
there had to be more to it than this. Andy said that it was all my fault
and I was humbly certain that he was right. After all Mama's
warnings about my Down There I couldn't imagine that anyone
could possibly get pleasure from it, and the idea that I might get
pleasure from it myself had never crossed my mind. Apparently, I decided, it was the woman's duty to pretend to like it and to let
the man enjoy himself, however unfair that seemed. Ignorant and
confused, I resigned myself to a lifetime of pretending.

241
29

Rangoon



14TH ARMY WAS GOING HOME, the Indian troops back to
their towns and villages, the Africans, most of whom would
never know what country they'd been fighting in, back to
Africa, The homesick British temporary soldiers would go back to
a country they'd hardly recognise when they got there, the
exhausted, battered British Isles.
Then there were the ex-POWs. I met some of the men who had
survived the Burma Railway, and they were just bone and sinew
held together by ruined skin, and although they tried to drink and
laugh their deep-sunk eyes stayed blank and haunted . I remembered
what Jenny had said to me about badly damaged men, and
wondered how many of them would survive their homecoming.
SM Stebbing told me that the Division would be moving down
to Transit Camp in Rangoon, and soon afterwards Nin Taylor, the
WAS(B) Commandant arrived. She was visiting all the WAS(B)
Units, asking each girl what she wanted to do with her future. There
were plenty of choices; they could opt for service in Japan, in Java
or with the Control Commission in Germany, or they could take
immediate discharge and free transport to any part of the world
they wished.
'I suppose you'll want to stay on in Rangoon,' said Nin to me,
'Seeing you've got engaged. I'll put you on the Headquarters staff,
to help ship the other girls out. Gay Tucker and Dosan Penty are
the other two there, and we've been allocated a compound in
Golden Valley. You can get on a troopship back to England when
everyone else has been sent off.'
It was sad to leave the camp on the edge of the lake. There were

242
discomforts that one cursed all the time, like sitting on the
thunderbox with one's head and shoulders above the sacking, in
full view of the Africans and anyone else who happened along, but
one got used to it. There were columns of man-eating ants, there
were snakes, there was constant prickly heat and dehydration.
There were sudden storms, with wind and rain and thunder that
frequently reduced the camp into sodden canvas buried in a sea
of red mud, but things dried out and tents were easy to put up
again. No one cared how they looked, clothes had to be worn long
after they were torn and stained, there was no make-up to be had,
and we used no mirrors.
It was the lake itself, and the jungle that I hated to leave. I could
see fish rising, making silver circles on the still surface, and I fished
for them, but the only thing I caught was a turtle who bit me to the
bone when I tried to free it. I'd walked in the jungle a lot, in spite
of Stebbings' warnings about nasties. I only went in daytime, when
most of the nasties slept, and there were unexpected open glades,
full of sunlight, and a feeling of being watched by hidden things
which wished you well. I would miss the Africans. Most of all, I'd
miss Sergeant Major Stebbing. On the other hand I knew Rangoon
to be frenetic, undisciplined and discharge-crazy, and it was bound
to be fun.
Just before we left I saw Ngari again. I hadn't heard from her
since the day we were given our postings, so I was astonished
when she burst into my tent at about three o'clock one morning.
She was dusty, and only half-coherent; I got her a stiff drink, yelled
at the Africans to find her a camp cot, and tried to make her tell me
what had happened.
'How did you get here?'
'In a jeep, it's on the track out there. I stole it.'
'I see, you stole it. Who from, and why?'
'It's just an Army jeep, I don't know. I've got to get to India to
meet Peter. I'll be gone in the morning before anyone finds out I've
been here.'
'Ngari, don't be a bloody idiot! I'm damned if I'm going to lie

243
about you being here, and they'll catch up with you for sure. What's
it all about?'
Peter, it seemed, had been stationed near her at Mandalay, and
their love affair had raged like a bushfire. Then Peter got his
discharge quite suddenly, and had been sent back to India where
his wife was waiting for him. He'd sent a telegram to Ngari a couple
of days earlier to say that he'd told his wife about her, ended his
marriage, and that she was to meet him in Calcutta as soon as
possible so they could go away together.
'But Ngari, it's crazy doing it like this! Go to Nin Taylor and tell
her the whole thing, she'll give you a discharge. There'll be hell to
pay if you bolt off now with a stolen jeep.'
'I don't care! I'm not waiting round for all the red tape! Anyway,
I think I'm pregnant.'
She was gone by daylight. The next time I saw her was in
England, in 1951, and by then she was a widow with a small son.
Peter had got a divorce, and they had travelled to Australia together
with their baby. They went north to Papua; Ngari was Bougainville
raised, she knew the area and she spoke pidgin They bought a
barge and sailed it round the Papuan coast, picking up war-surplus
equipment and selling it. They might have become rich if Peter
hadn't gone below decks one evening to start the engine, lit a
match to see by, and blown himself up. Ngari and the baby were
thrown over the side by the explosion, and rescued, but Peter was
dead.
When I arrived in Rangoon I found that our Golden Valley
compound was a war-scarred relic of British-Colonial senior
management accommodation, built as a status symbol for some
commercial executive. There were two houses, and a line of
servants' quarters between them and the road. Before the war the
houses must have been luxurious, light and airy and well designed;
since the passage of the Japanese Imperial Army they were lighter
and airier than ever, but far less comfortable.
Their roofs were a system of rafters between gaping holes, and
this was probably caused by the Allied bombing, but before they

244
left the Japanese had deliberately wrecked the place, together with
almost every other house and service facility in Rangoon. All the
doors had been torn off their hinges and smashed, every window
broken, electric wiring had been torn out and the power points
were just holes in the wall. There was no electricity anyway
because the Power Station had been destroyed, and the disadvantage
of broken water-pipes was minimised by the fact that there
was no longer any water supply.
For all that there was something rather grand about living
between walls after months in a tent. There was even the remains
of a cracked asphalt tennis court between the two houses, and a
garden which, like all Rangoon gardens, had returned to the jungle
so thoroughly that it was coming in through the windows and up
between the floor boards. Strange spiders and lizards disputed
possession with us; everything, including ourselves, grew a rich,
green mould, and smelled accordingly.
Gay Tucker and Dosan Penty had moved in by the time I
arrived. Gay, the senior member, was a Major, the ex-wife of a
Burma Rifles Colonel who had run off with a nurse, and she was
taking it very hard. She was slim and fair, with one of those thin,
handsome English faces one sees in the hunting-field, riding
fearlessly at mammoth fences. She had been Mentioned in Despatches
earlier in the war. Dosan was a Lieutenant: she had been
Mentioned in Despatches too, and awarded the MBE. She was a
Parsee, and also an economist, later to become Chief Economist at
Barclay's Bank in Bombay, and she was beautiful as an old Moghul
painting, fragile, gazelle-eyed, and incapable of making a movement
that wasn't miraculously graceful. I was overawed by these
two legendary women, quite willing to be their doormat and
dogsbody, instead of which they made me their friend, and we
remained friends for years.
Some of the Burmese WASBies came and went, staying for a few
nights or a few hours, but always lightening and brightening the
house like candle-flames. There was Ma Than We and Thin Thin
Than and half-a-dozen others, but it was mostly the first two who

245
taught me about Burmese folk-lore and wove Burmese magic.
They told me wonderful, ancient things, sitting in the star-lighted
dark round a broken, weed-green swimming pool, with a hedge
of gardenias behind us and frogs singing so that the night throbbed
with scent and sound.
The Burmese girls were Baptists, and had taught at the Baptist
school in Rangoon before the war. They looked terribly frail in their
white cotton blouses and their khaki-cotton lungyis wrapped
round pipe-stem hips, and they always tucked bunches of orchids
or jasmine into their smooth, black chignons of hair. The Baptist
school was in the Indian quarter of Rangoon, and while I was in
camp there had been a brief but deadly racial war between the
Indians and the Burmese, with no quarter given on either side. The
Burmese girls had risked their lives every night, wriggling on their
stomachs through the gardens of the Indian quarter to take food
to the school which was under siege, the staff and children
barricaded inside.
Rangoon was chaotic. It overflowed with troops of every
nationality, all on a perilous high because they were alive and
going home. In addition there was a huge camp of Japanese
prisoners-of-war who were waiting to be shipped back to Japan,
and this was surrounded by a barbed wire fence which would have
been laughed at by any self-respecting sheep. The camp was
administered by a staff of junior British officers who threw
continuous drunken parties, and couldn't have cared less if their
charges had disappeared into thin air, set up business in Rangoon
or committed hara kiri The Japanese had lost none of their
arrogance, and because of the way they themselves treated POWs
they were dumbfounded by the softness and stupidity of the
British, who let them do more or less as they liked. Burma's three
day Water Festival was normally a time of good fellowship, but in
1946 it turned out to be quite the opposite, and some anonymous
military lunatic made the mistake of arming the Japanese, and using
them to help discipline the anti-British locals.
By tradition the Water Festival was a harmless, messy affair in

246
which Burmese men, women and children hurled coloured water
at each other and had fun. At the end of the war Burma, like India,
had become bitterly nationalistic; the Japanese oppressors might
have gone but they had simply been replaced by the oppressors
of old, and the Burmese had had enough of foreigners. The Water
Festival was too good a chance to miss, so instead of throwing their
buckets of dyed water only at each other they filled the buckets
with bricks and sharp stones as well as water, and threw the
contents at every Britisher they saw. Some quite serious wounds
were inflicted, but it was still inexcusable to turn the Japanese loose
on them.
The first day of the Festival was bad enough, but there was still
a measure of tolerance on either side. On the second day things
turned nasty, and any European, in a jeep or on foot, was a target
and not only, as I discovered, for bricks. I had to stop my jeep at
a corner on the way to my office and saw a Burmese, his lungyi
raised, peeing vigorously into a tin can. He finished peeing, and
before I could drive on he stepped forward and emptied the can
over my head.
Later that day, having scrubbed my hair and tried to compose
my temper, I got back into the jeep and set off again for the office.
Even in a few hours the atmosphere had changed; there were few
British troops on the streets, and they were all conspicuously
armed. The only visible Burmese were groups of men, no longer
cheerful but standing about holding their buckets and looking
sullen. It wasn't until I was on the open road near the-University
that I saw half-a-dozen women and children throwing water at
each other and laughing.
I was about a hundred yards away from them when an open
truck rocketted past me at high speed. The back was full of armed
Japanese, shouting and beating on the cab roof with their rifle
butts. As they passed me they deliberately swerved off the road
straight through the group of women and children, then back onto
the road again, and vanished into the distance leaving a scatter of
twitching, mangled bodies in the grass.

247
I drove straight on, to find some MPs, or anybody who could
help. There was nothing much I could have done for the victims
on my own, and any Burmese finding me alone with the mess
would justifiably have knifed me. It wasn't an isolated incident, and
on the third day of the Festival there was a general curfew with the
Japanese disarmed and guarded, for once, in their camp.
Besides the Nationalists, who were serious militants, there were
the Dacoits who were merely rogues and vagabonds, with no
motive other than personal gain. Between the two hostile factions
life outside the controlled town limits was uncertain, and a number
of men who had survived the war died tragically before they could
be shipped home. A favourite trick was to string a wire across the
road, at neck-height for a man sitting in a jeep. Because of the all
pervading dust or mud it was necessary to drive with the
windscreen down, otherwise it was impossible to see, and because
often there were Burmese with rifles concealed in trees it was
necessary to drive fast. The wires acted like cheese knives, neatly
decapitating the jeeps' occupants before they knew what had hit
them
From our WAS(B) compound in Golden Valley we could see
the dome of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, and through the trees the
even more perfect Suli Pagoda, curved and spired, and covered
with gold leaf. We were woken in the mornings by the deep,
reverberating sound of the temple gongs, and there were always
I	pensive, saffron-wrapped Buddhist monks passing by, gentle and
absorbed, or lines of butterfly-light girls carrying offerings of fruit
and flowers. Wrecked though it was, the air in Golden Valley was
still gold at sunset or sunrise, and the stylised girls and the monks
and pagodas gave it a patina of peace.
In the evenings Andy and I usually went to the Officer's Club,
a rambling red-brick building which had been a British Club before
the war. There was a band and a dance floor, and a large dining
room which produced passable food. The only thing that stopped
it from being too crowded to get on the dance floor was the
shortage of women, since besides a few WAS(B)s and nurses the

248
WASBies were the only European women in Rangoon. Some men
came to the Club on their own, but most of them drank themselves
into lonely oblivion at their Mess.
Andy and I were no better off in terms of privacy than we had
been when I was with the Division, and coming down to Rangoon
for an occasional night. Our Golden Valley houses were hopeless,
always full of girls in transit, and besides that the absence of doors
made even a private conversation difficult. My own room was on
the ground floor of the second, smaller house so that I could keep
an eye on the transit contingent, and they had to pass through it
to get upstairs. As well as the WASBies a constant assortment of
animal life wandered in and out through the hole where the door
had once been, pi-dogs and cats, scrawny game-fowl, and even the
dreamy-eyed white Hindu cattle would visit for a while, and I gave
up trying to hunt them away. Andy, who had never had animals,
said it was disgusting, and muttered about fleas and rabies. There
were no hotels in Rangoon, of course, and the only women who
had a hope of civilised love-making were the nurses, hospitals
being full of beds; an alarming number of nurses became pregnant.
The line of servant's quarters in the front of our compound
housed our guard unit, whose duty it was to protect us against the
badmash element of Nationalists, dacoits and ordinary thieves. The
Indian troops were being sent home quite quickly, but the Africans
were having trouble mustering transport back to Africa, and it was
they who were allocated to us, to keep them out of mischief, I
suspect, as much as anything else. A platoon of enormous, coal
black men moved into the servant's quarters, and proved themselves
to be entrepreneurs by immediately setting up a flourishing
brothel staffed by willing Burmese girls. We let them get away with
it, as long as they didn't make too much noise.
We had been to the Club, Andy and I, and Andy had drunk
enough to become importunate. He stopped the jeep on the way
home, as usual at a spot which he said would be solitary and
romantic, but which, as usual, was swarming with mosquitos and
close to a Burmese household which kept pigs. The mosquitos

249
were ferocious, the smell appalling and once more it was a failure;
once more I blamed myself. Andy lost his temper with me, and I
found myself being driven home at top speed, in frosty silence. He
didn't bother to go up the drive but bundled me out at the gate in
front of the guard-house-cum-brothel and I stumped sadly up to
my ground floor room, chased a few chickens out of my camp cot,
and sat on it to ponder why I was so useless.
I knew then that my relationship with Andy was an exercise in
futility. I knew I should break it off, but I had too little confidence
in myself and the future to destroy the only lifeline in sight. Also
I could hear the echo of Mama's voice, 'If you're not a virgin	',
and I half-believed that I'd burnt my matrimonial boats once and
for all.

250
30

England



OUR LAST MONTHS IN RANGOON were monsoon months;
the rain bucketted through the gaps in the roof, turned
the roads into mud-slides and produced green mould,
lush as summer grass, on everything we moved, lived or slept in.
We reeked of jungle, and had ceased to notice it.
There were illnesses and a robbery, an earthquake, the
constant background music of thunder, and a growing sense of
isolation as Rangoon emptied itself of troops and became Burmese
again. The WASBies had all left, except for us and the Burmese
WASBies who had gone back to their teaching. Dosan and Gay and
I were at a loose end, fighting prickly heat and boredom and
drinking too much. Andy's unit, to my relief, had been posted to
Singapore, and I was to take the first available transport to England
and wait for him there.
Troopships direct to England from Rangoon had so far been
reserved for male troops, and women had been forced to make a
detour through India and leave from Calcutta or Bombay. Finally
we were told that a ship with accommodation for women would
be sailing in September, and that we could join it. Dosan was
longing to see England, and had elected to take her discharge
there; we had become close friends, and it seemed to both of us
that facing the unknown together would be better than doing it
alone. I blithely assured her that as all my relations were old India
hands they'd be delighted to meet her, and that they'd look after
us both. I sent a cable to Mama telling her when we were due to
sail, and asking for the addresses of my aunts and uncles and
cousins.

251
The day we sailed was one of steaming, rod-straight rain, so
heavy that one could only see through it for a few feet. We were
told to take on board only what we could fit into an Army bedding
roll, and remains of my worldly possessions fitted into one quite
comfortably. The few civilian clothes I'd brought from Australia
had either disintegrated or become so mouldy that I'd thrown them
out, and I had only my jungle-green drill uniform and a thick, hairy
male battle-dress to my name. No one had asked me to hand in my
.38 revolver and ammunition, so vaguely thinking that I could hand
it in at the other end of the trip I packed it in my bedding-roll.
The troopship, an old converted passenger liner, was anchored
in the river and we were taken out to it in an open lighter, ourselves
and our bedding-rolls sodden with rain. We could see mould
sprouting on the luggage, feel it between our toes, and our prickly
heat, encouraged by the humidity, tormented us all. Any hope that
the female accommodation on board might be comfortable lasted
only until we saw it: we were led down almost to the lowest deck,
and shown into a cabin which would have been barely adequate
for four people. It had been stripped of every fitting, and now held
16 bunks in tiers, so close above each other that the only way in
was to slide, horizontal, and it was impossible, once in a bunk, to
sit up. There wasn't so much as a hook to hang clothes on, and as
it was below the waterline there were no portholes.
Furious, Gay turned to the sailor who'd shown us to the cabin.
She said, 'I want to see an officer! We can't travel in this pig-sty all
the way to England.'
The sailor looked uncomfortable, but he said, 'Sorry Ma'am,
that's all there is for the ladies. There's another cabin alongside,
same as this, and your bathroom's through there.'
Gay poked her head into the bathroom. 'How many's this for?'
she asked. 'There's only one shower and one lavatory.'
'Thirty-two, Ma'am,' said the sailor. 'Now, if you'll excuse
me . . .'
If	The voyage was not only purgatory, it was insanitary. There
were permanent, urgent queues outside the one bathroom, and it

252
stank. It was bad enough for the pregnant women, most of them
nurses and unmarried, who combined morning sickness with seasickness
and despair, but it was undoubted hell for a young mother
who was packed in with us with two tiny children. She spent her
time white-faced and exhausted, juggling her infants on the edge
of her bunk and bravely trying to hush their incessant wailing.
Most of us dragged our mattresses up on deck every night and
slept there until the crew hosed down the decks at daybreak. A lot
of the troops did the same, and there were people to talk to if one
couldn't sleep, or one could lean on the rail under the brilliant, star
crowded sky, and watch the phosphorus skipping along the crest
of the ship's bow-wave and wake. We berthed at two ports but no
one was allowed ashore, and the trip took more than three weeks.
Letters from home had been almost non-existent during the
time I was in Burma, and I had almost forgotten about home. There
was no air mail and letters from Australia travelled by sea to India,
then through laborious Army channels to the designated Division
and eventually, if one was lucky, to the addressee in his Unit. The
WAS(B)s, once the war was over, became a phantom in the minds
of the Army postal authorities. Once we had left our Divisions we
had ceased to exist, and if letters arrived it was by accident. We
seldom wrote nor expected to get them. Once in a while a letter
would come from Mama with the bare bones of her own doings,
and Pa's; they were almost entirely about Betty and Norman and
the two boys. I head nothing from Betty herself, and I seldom wrote
to her.
Life must have seemed wonderful to Betty at that time, and the
future unlimited. She had the beginnings of her family, two small
boys, both fair-haired and healthy, Norman, friends she'd made in
the district, and a cottage she was gradually turning into the kind
of home she wanted. When I thought about her then I could see
her, settling with her lovely feathers fluffed out round her like a
contented bird on her nest. She must have learned to handle
Norman's parents by that time, or at least to keep them at a distance,
and she'd have been planning for her next child. 'Please God let

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it be a girl this time, then more boys if you like, but one girl, please?'
It would have been warm in her cottage, and there'd have been a
smell of cakes baking and nappies drying, and outside her two
corgies would be trying to catch the Campbell peacocks by the tail
feathers. It enraged Norman's parents, but nobody could cure
them, and the poor peacocks had both neuroses and tattered tails.
Mama said that Betty and the boys came to Melbourne quite often,
for doctors and dentists, and that she and Pa sometimes went to
stay with them. I could tell that they were her consolation and her
absorbing passion now, and I was glad she had them.
Mail, taken on board in Rangoon, was distributed to us the day
after we sailed, and there was a letter from Mama in reply to my
cable telling her I was going to England. I read it once and then,
in stunned disbelief, read it again. 'We're so glad you're going
Home,' she wrote. 'Andy's parents will look after you, of course,
and I'm not going to send you any of the family's addresses.
They've all had a hard time during the war, and I'm not going to
have you being a nuisance to them.'
I was genuinely shocked. I'd taken it for granted that I could go
either to the Christies or to Aunt Sheila, whom I knew and loved.
Pa's sisters had been part of the fabric of my life, mine as my sisters
were, or my parents, and I was horrified to realise that they might
look on me as a nuisance.
There were other considerations: I'd told Dosan that my
relations would welcome us, and she was counting on them too.
As for Andy's parents, I'd never heard from them directly. Andy had
read me rather lukewarm comments on our engagement from their
letters to him, and he had given me a small, blurred photo of them,
so that I knew roughly what size and shape they were. As usual I
had no money. My pay in Burma had been nine pounds sterling
a month, and that had gone nowhere at all during the last few
months when we had been idle, and having to buy our own food.
I was unqualified for any civilian job; I was determined to get work
of some sort, but I'd been hoping for a family bed until I could find
something. I felt a complete fool, presumptuous and stupid

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because I'd taken my relations for granted, and worse than that
because I'd let Dosan down as well.
We docked at Tilbury early one morning in a thin, cold, English
drizzle. The ship was suddenly very official and organised, and
orders flowed in a deafening, unintelligible stream through the
Tanoy system. We were to pack our belongings, leave them on our
bunks for inspection and assemble on deck. The troops would be
disembarked in stated order under their officers and taken to
Transit Camps, while oddments like us would be processed
individually by the Authorities before being allowed ashore. Damp
and bored we huddled under inadequate shelter, and watched the
troops marching down the gangplank.
'Robin listen!' said Dosan suddenly. 'That's you they're calling
on the Tanoy.'
'Sergeant Walker to the Guardroom,' said the disembodied
voice. 'Sergeant Walker to the Guardroom, on the Double!'
'What on earth is that all about'' I said. 'Maybe there's another
Sergeant Walker,' I made my way to the Guardroom.
Three officers, very pale and elegant compared to the Mepacrinyellow,
jungly men I was used to, were sitting behind a table. They
looked at me in a singularly unwelcoming manner.
'Sergeant Walker reporting, Sir,' said I, saluting.
'You're Sergeant Walker? What are you a Sergeant in?'
'The WASBies, Sir.'
'Oh God, yes. There are three of those on board, I believe,
whatever they may be. Well, how d'you explain the fact that you're
carrying firearms?'
'Firearms, Sir?' I remembered the .38 and the inspection of our
bedding-rolls. 'Oh, that. It was issued to me in Burma, Sir, when
I joined 82nd West African Division. They must have forgotten
about it when they went back to Africa so I brought it with me.'
'Don't you know it's a serious offence to be in possession of
firearms, particularly on board ship? Don't you read the Regulations?
I see that they found ammunition in your luggage as well.
You were going to take it ashore, weren't you?'

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'No Sir, I was going to hand it in as soon as I could.'
'You've had the whole trip to do that. How do I know that you
weren't going to sell it to someone on shore? If people got away
with that half the criminals in Britain'd be armed with His Majesty's
weapons! Penalty for this offence is six months gaol Without the
Option, Sergeant, and as far as I'm concerned you're under arrest
until further notice. We'll consider what to do with you when we've
got the time to think about it. Corporal!'
An immaculate, six-foot tall MP appeared through the door. The
officer said, 'This man - woman, I mean, is under arrest. I want her
on deck under guard until I give you further orders. Dismiss! Next!'
Gay and Dosan were still on deck, where I'd left them; when
I reappeared flanked by two large MPs they looked at me as though
I'd grown an extra head. Gay advanced on the Corporal and said,
"There must be some mistake, Corporal! This is one of my WASBies,
so why is she under guard?'
'Under arrest, Ma'am, that's all I know. I've got orders to guard
her.'
'Firearms,' I said miserably. "They found that rotten .38 in my
bedding-roll.'
'God!' said Gay, in disgust. 'How could you be so bloody stupid!'
'I just forgot about it.'
'That's enough!' said the Corporal. 'No talking. Quick march!'
They marched me up and down the deck for a while, grew
bored and paused by the rail. I stared down at the wharf,
wondering how things could possibly be worse than they were. I
got an immediate answer.
The wharf was deserted by now, except for a civilian couple,
middle-aged and respectable, and I watched them abstractedly.
They seemed to be trying to attract someone's attention on deck,
waving and shouting things I couldn't hear. I looked to see who
they were waving to, and there was no one. An awful thought came
to me and I pulled Andy's photo of his parents out of my pocket,
looked from it to them and said, 'Oh my God! They're all I needed.'
'What's that?' said the Corporal. 'D'you know them two down there?'

I!	256
'I've never met them but I think they're my future in-laws.'
He frowned and shook his head. He said, 'All right then, two
minutes on the dock, and don't you tell nobody I let you. Quick
march!'
Andy's parents watched me step off the gangplank, took in the
presence of the MPs, my crumpled, men's issue battle-dress and
unkempt appearance, and a look of frozen horror spread over their
faces. I said, 'How d'you do, I'm Robin, Andy's fiancee, and it's
terribly kind of you to come to meet me. I'm afraid I can't spend
much time with you, I'm under arrest.'
Later on I found out that they'd gone to great trouble and pulled
strings to be there, for the docks were still out of bounds to
civilians. I have no idea what kind of future daughter-in-law they
were expecting or hoping for, but she was obviously light-years
removed from what confronted them, and they went into shock.
Andy's father, who had a heavy, unsmiling, blue-jowled face, put
his arm round his wife's shoulders, a rare gesture of affection from
him, and said, 'Never mind, dear, never mind. Come on home.'
They left without another word to me, and I watched their bowed,
despairing backs retreating into the distance.
'Your future in-laws, are they?' said the Corporal thoughtfully.
'Well, I don't know, I'm sure, but good luck to you.'
Gay had to leave during the afternoon to catch a train to her
home county, but Dosan waited with me. She folded herself into
a small, sheltered space with the grace of a ballet dancer, and the
MPs watched her, mesmerised, because they had never seen
anything like her in uniform before. They brought us-a meal and
talked to her with grave respect, and made it clear that they thought
that my arrest was ridiculous. The officers in the Guardroom had
either forgotten about me, or perhaps thought they were teaching
me a lesson by ignoring me. Daylight faded, the rain fell in an
endless, dreary mist, and at eight o'clock Dosan decided to take
action. 'I'm going to talk to them,' she said, 'Although I don't
suppose they'll take much notice of an Indian woman, even if I am
a Major.'

257
'Don't you worry, Ma'am,' said the Corporal. 'We'll all go and
see them. The last train up to London goes at nine o'clock.'
The officers released me with a savage caution just in time to
catch the train, and Dosan and I sat, half-drugged with tiredness,
as the wet, war-damaged underbelly of London rattled past the
windows. It looked monstrously unwelcoming. It was too late to
change our Indian money for British currency, and between us we
had not much more than a pound in negotiable small change to last
us until the morning.
'Where are we going to sleep?' asked Dosan. 'We haven't
enough for a hotel.'
'Let's get a taxi and ask the driver. London taxi drivers are
supposed to know everything. We'd better tell him not to take us
too far, or we won't be able to pay.'
We found a taxi outside the station with an elderly driver, a
warm wrinkled Cockney, friendly as a buttered crumpet; we told
him what had happened to us and he tut-tutted over his shoulder.
He drove us through streets so dazzlingly lit that they seemed
unreal after Rangoon with its dim, smoking kerosene lamps, and
he stopped at a house in a street behind the Cumberland Hotel.
'The landlady 'ere's a friend of mine,' he said. 'It's no palace, mind,
but I'll 'ave a word with 'er and she'll see you right. There's no
charge for the ride, it's on me.'
That night we slept head-to-toe in the same bed, in deference
to Dosan's Parsee sensibilities. She came from a wealthy family,
and I doubt that she had ever shared a bed before, but we were
only offered a single room. When I woke I thought, 'The hell with
Mama and being a nuisance,' asked the landlady for a telephone
book and rang Directory Enquiries. I knew that Aunt Do and her
husband Barch Christie had a house near a place called Eversley,
and in a surprisingly short time I found them.
Do Christie answered the phone, and when I told her who and
where I was she responded with cries of wonder and delight.
Dosan and I were to catch a train at eleven o'clock, and they would

258
meet us at the other end. Why hadn't I let her know I was coming?
Why hadn't Geoff or Aileen written to tell her? Anyway, now we
were here we were to come and stay for as long as we liked, both
of us, and she couldn't wait to see us. She was as warm as the
summer sun, and the fragments of the world came together again
like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The Christies were playwrights then, with two plays currently
running in the West End of London. Barch, a Major-General, had
been invalided out of the Army with TB, after commanding the
artillery in Malta. He and Do both hated his sister-in-law, Agatha
Christie, and declared that if she could make money out of writing
so could they. Though Agatha was incalculably more successful
than they were, at that time they were enjoying a certain eminence.
Their house was full of fascinating people, and they swamped us
with love and kindness and laughter while complaining that we,
and everything we owned, still smelled overpoweringly of jungle.
We crossed over to Northern Ireland by ferry to stay with Pa's
other sister, Sheila Landale, who was living at Craigavad, near
Belfast, and once again we were treated as though we were some
kind of blessing rather than as two inconvenient, jungly waifs.
Sheila had saved up precious petrol coupons for us, and insisted
that we take her car and drive ourselves down the then primitive
West coast, 'To see Ireland properly and have a holiday.'
It was an extraordinary drive. The Partition of India was on the
horizon, and Dosan, proudly Indian and filled with foreboding
about the future of her country, chose the wilds of Ireland to reject
Western dress and revert to the sari. She also wore a large selection
of Indian jewellery, bangles and necklaces which she had brought
with her unknown to me. She would have looked lovely and exotic
enough anywhere, but her effect on the villagers down the
windswept Donegal coast was sensational.
When we got back to Craigavad there was a letter from Andy.
He was back from Singapore, with his parents in Brighton waiting
to be discharged, and would I please join him there as soon as
possible. The letter jolted me like the bell at the end of a school


259
break. I knew I should rush headlong to my betrothed, but I could
only think of him in the context of Rangoon and half-drunk nights
at the Officers Club; I couldn't imagine him fitting in with my newfound
relations, or with Ireland, at all. Besides, the look on his
parents' faces when they saw me at Tilbury was still fresh in my
mind, and I dreaded meeting them again.
On the other hand engagements were taken seriously in those
days; by my parents standards I was committed, and I knew I had
to go. I thought of Mama, and all her old warnings came flooding
back. Andy had deflowered me, after all, and no other Decent Man
would ever Marry Me. Aunt Sheila said of course I must go, but my
room would be ready for me any time I wanted to come back.
Dosan, frantic with anxiety about Partition and the safety of her
family, wanted to return to London so that she could get a quick
passage back to India if things there got worse.
I dragged my feet as much as possible on my way to Brighton,
staying with the Christies for a couple of nights, and arranging to
visit Claire and Herbert in London before I took the last, irrevocable
train south to Brighton and Andy. On my second night with Aunt
Do I had a truly dreadful nightmare. I was somewhere dark, a thick,
tangible dark, and a voice I seemed to know was screaming for its
mother, 'Mama, Mama, Mama...' again and again. Someone shook
me, and it was Do beside my bed saying, 'Wake up, darling, you're
screaming. You must have been having a bad dream.'
There was cold sweat running off me, and I was shaking and
gasping. I asked, 'What was I screaming about? I'm so sorry, Aunt
Do, I never do this sort of thing.'
'You were screaming for your mother, it sounded awful. Now,
come and have a cup of tea with me and go back to sleep. It's over.'
I could still hear the voice calling out, 'Mama,' but as though it was
someone else's voice, not mine, and it somehow linked itself with
the sound of my mother's screams when she heard of Jenny's
death.
Next day I presented myself at Claire and Herbert's flat in
Knightsbridge; it was the first time I'd seen them since I was a small

260
child. Claire greeted me effusively, but I could see that my
appearance made her wince. She herself was immaculate, down to
the tips of her carefully enamelled fingernails. Herbert muttered
something that might have been a greeting and looked straight
through me with his pale, tortoise eyes, wishing I'd go away. I'd
barely been there half-an-hour when the front door bell rang.
Claire went to answer it, and I heard her say, 'Yes, she's here, do
come in.' Then, a moment later, 'Oh no! How frightful! Will you tell
her or shall I?'
My cousin Tony, Do's daughter, came into the sitting-room. She
seemed close to tears. She said, "Thank God I've found you, I wasn't
sure you'd be here. A cable came just after you'd left Eversley, and
Mother phoned me. I'm so terribly sorry, Betty's dead.'

Je ne voisplus le ciel bleu...

And that was the end of The Girls

261
EPILOGUE



THIS IS THE EPILOGUE to a story I set out to write about my
sisters, The Girls, but I seem to have written mostly about
myself. I found when I started that the chasms of age and
absence had robbed me of so much of their short lives that I
wonder now if I really knew them. I do know though, that to me
and to others they were courage and comfort, love and daring and
beauty in their time, and it wasn't fitting that I should be their
survivor. And I know too that in spite of having so little time
together there was some link beyond explanation between us.
Mama wrote and told me how Betty died. She tried to have
another baby, of course, and things went wrong. Norman drove
desperately over corrugated dirt roads to get her to hospital, thirty
miles from Warranooke, and she died there calling for Mama at the
exact time I was having my nightmare in Eversley. And besides that,
there was Jenny's telegram that I never opened. Irish families, and
the breath of ghosts...
After Betty's death I tried for two years, by every means
possible, to get back to Australia, but I had a British passport. The
authorities said I must be classed as a migrant, and sent me to the
wrong end of the migrant queue. I was consumed with grief and
anxiety for my parents, and with guilt at being so far away and
unable to help, and with worse guilt because I was the one who
was left. Andy and I parted with minimal regret on either side, and
in retrospect my time in England seemed like a long sentence
served in a cold, dark cellar.
When I arrived in Melbourne I didn't know what to expect,
whether Mama might have reverted to her semi-comatose misery

263
of the months after Jenny's death, or if Pa, who adored Betty, might
have become a sad old man. To my surprise, when they met me
they seemed quite normal, even cheerful. They were still living in
the same house in South Yarra and their routine was unchanged,
chops, peas and potatoes at seven and bed at nine-thirty sharp.
Mama's life centred round visits to Warranooke to help poor
Norman and the two small boys; Pa still devoted most of his time
to the Queensland properties and lunched at the Australian Club.
There was still a cat, and the same cocker spaniel. In many ways,
I thought, things were a lot more normal than when I'd left home
nearly four years earlier.
Three weeks after I came home I understood just how little
things had changed. I was in the kitchen, and Mama was cooking
the chops. I knew that she'd been wanting to ask me something
because she'd been darting round details of my life in Burma and
England like a minnow, and then backing off. She must finally have
plucked up enough courage because she turned from the stove to
face me, a saucepan of peas in one hand, a pot of potatoes in the
other.
'Tell me, Robin,' she said, pale with the effort of putting it into
words. 'Have you ever been to bed with a man?'
In the split second when I should have said, 'No, Mama,' to keep
her happy, or 'Only one, but I was engaged to him, and I knocked
back a lot of others,' I was so astonished at my mother actually
asking such a thing that I just said, 'Yes, I have.'
She went white then, and both saucepans fell to the floor with
a crash as she said, in a voice of utter despair, 'You know, don't
you, that no decent man will ever marry you!'


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