In My Mother's Hands

  About the author

  Biff (Elizabeth) Ward wrote Father-Daughter Rape (1984), a feminist analysis of child sexual abuse (CSA) before that term was invented. Her poetry appeared in Three’s Company (1992), and various other writings have been published in anthologies. This memoir, In My Mother’s Hands, is about her family’s experience of her mother’s mental illness at the same time that her father, the historian Russel Ward, was writing The Australian Legend. Biff lives in Canberra amid the high mountain country that has long been her spiritual home.

  In My

  MOTHER’S

  HANDS

  A disturbing memoir of family life

  BIFF WARD

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Biff Ward 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 911 6

  eISBN 978 1 74343 766 7

  Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

  Photograph of Biff Ward on page i courtesy of Di Lucas

  For my father

  Russel Ward, 1914–1995

  Author’s note

  I have changed the names of a small number of people in this memoir, either because I could not contact them or, in one instance, by request. One minor figure has been fictionalised.

  I have greatly appreciated the generosity of people who shared their memories with me. I was, to some extent, dependent on these informants to affirm and extend my own memories. The way I selected and shaped the material that was vouchsafed to me is mine alone.

  Eventually we accept the ghosts that haunt us and we become their familiars, at which they lose their terrors for us and are soon our playthings.

  Alex Miller, Landscape of Farewell

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 Alison

  2 The Mother

  3 The Father

  4 The Undercroft

  5 Secrets

  6 Brittle

  7 Shorthand

  8 The Tower

  9 The Pills

  10 Knife

  11 The Cobweb

  12 Running

  13 Longhand

  14 The Desk

  15 Voices

  16 The Funeral

  Epilogue: The Grave

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  There is in my family a grave that was never visited.

  When I was a child I knew that somewhere, over several hills in another part of Sydney, there was a cemetery where the baby had been buried. Buried and left. My parents never went to it, as far as I knew. And the one time I tried to, I was quickly put right.

  I was eight and home from school with a cold. My mother and I got talking about the baby who died before I was born and about the grave. It wasn’t that far away, it was actually close enough to visit, so we became excited, my mother and I, about going to the grave.

  Do you want to take flowers? she said.

  Can we? Oh, yes, I answered. Violets.

  I wanted to make a bunch, a pom-pom of purple flowers surrounded by shiny green leaves, the perfect posy, the kind men sold on street corners in those days, an offering suitable for a baby. And there were violets growing in our backyard. My mother’s clever fingers held the stems together while I tied them with a ribbon. When I held what we’d made in my hand, it was almost as I’d pictured it.

  We walked together, collected Mark from the Infants’ School and then waited across the road for Dad, watching the big boys stream out of the High School building. We waited to surprise him.

  Dad, I called. Look, I’ve got flowers.

  He crossed the road, his face a mix. Delighted to see us so unexpectedly? Perplexed as to why we were there, his little family, waiting in a bunch? He stepped onto the footpath.

  We’re going to see the grave, my mother said. She was smiling, her lips all wobbly.

  As he took it in, he glared at her and thunder broke over our heads.

  Don’t be bloody ridiculous, he snapped.

  Don’t be mad, he added, turning his back resolutely against the direction where the tram lay.

  We’re going home, and he took her arm with his knuckles white and turned us back towards Avenue Rd. We set off, a silent troop, my violet posy drooping, pointing to my trudging feet.

  That night at tea, Dad ate his soup without a word. We all watched, waiting for a sign, something that would explain, something that would bring him back. He left the table and went to his desk and stayed there instead of reading to us like he usually did. Next day, I didn’t hold his hand on the way to school. I joined up with some other kids and we walked behind him, the tall figure with the battered brown kitbag holding a classful of English essays and his lunch of tomato sandwiches.

  As it turned out, I didn’t get to see the grave until forty years later.

  ONE

  Alison

  I have only one photo of the day my parents were married. There’s no professional finesse about it: it’s definitely a snap. The sun is angling in on them from the right, so there are swathes of shadow and light across their bodies. Dad is holding Mum’s hand snug inside his own where it sits beside his ribs, elbow bent to hold it close. His other hand is tucked behind his back, the more to incline himself towards her. He is looking down at her body with a delicious grin on his face. She is smiling at the camera, her mouth full and luscious. She has a cascading corsage on her cream suit and a hat which looks as though birds are trying to fly off it. There were no bridesmaids, just Mum’s sister Lib as matron-of-honour. Both sets of parents must have been appalled by the departure from expected protocol.

  It took place on a Monday morning in the early spring of 1939. The photo captures the moment when Margaret Alice Ind let go of her surname and became a Ward.

  They are standing on the steps of St Martin’s, an Anglican Church in the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide that was virtually part of the estate of my mother’s family for generations, just down the road from the house where she was born and grew up.

  My parents on their wedding day, September 1939

  When they married, Mum needed only a couple of months to finish her three years of nursing training but in those days a trainee could not complete the course if she married, and married women were not employed as nurses anyway. So why were they wed in such a hurry that it had to be on a Monday? At the age of twelve I decided it must have been because Mum was pregnant. When I found out that their first child Alison was born in 1941, eighteen months after the wedding, I realised my surmise was wrong. In Dad’s autobiography, he says the timing of the wedding was determined by his desire to leave his teaching post at Geelong Grammar and take a new job in Sydney. Whatever the reason for the rush, they look pleased with themselves in the photo, full of the young love that expects everything will go well.

  The next day the
y boarded ship to steam from Adelaide to Sydney. They called the six-day trip their honeymoon. War was declared in faraway Europe as they sailed. Dad began to teach at Sydney Grammar and they settled in some rooms in a house at Woolwich Point, one of those skinny noses that poke into the harbour on the northern side.

  Their first child Alison was born while they were in those rooms. She also died there. After a while, they moved to get away from where this had happened, but only down the road, twenty or so properties further along, towards the pointy end of the nose.

  By the time I was born in November 1942, Dad had joined the army to fight Fascism, and served for over four years. He was never sent overseas so he taught himself rudimentary Russian to appease the boredom of military life, which included quite a bit of ‘sandhill bashing’, watching for Japanese submarines at various points on the huge Australian coastline. My brother Mark was born in April 1944.

  The place my parents had moved to was a bungalow owned by a widow, Mrs O, who had to share her home to make ends meet, a not uncommon circumstance at the time. Our two rooms caught all the north-eastern sunshine and looked across the back garden which sloped down to the Lane Cove River and a small golden beach. There was a swimming pool: a rectangle of seawater made safe from sharks by a wall of sandstone blocks with a few holes whereby the tide came in and out. Dad always said I could swim before I could walk because of that pool.

  There used to be photos of Mum and Dad standing naked on the worn sandstone stairs that went down to the beach. Dad had one foot a step higher than the other, grinning cock-a-hoop. When I recall that picture of Dad, I hear him laughing, feel the sun on my skin, the safety of his voice. The one of Mum is less vivid in my mind. I think she was facing the camera, one hip jutting a little, looking off to the left. Summoning that picture, I see a beautiful woman fading in and out of view, managing to never be completely with us. And thus it was, Dad loud and lively, Mum vaguely present, something always ephemeral about her.

  I have to dredge up memories of these pictures because Mum destroyed all the family photos after Mark and I left home. We have replaced the lost record of our childhood as relatives have sorted through their collections and given us copies. Not unsurprisingly, these two nude pictures have not come back to us from any aunt or cousin but they were part of our childhood, kept among the other photos in the old chocolate box with purple and yellow irises on its lid.

  What I remember best of that Woolwich house is our bedroom, probably the original ‘drawing room’ because it had a large curved window facing the river. Mark slept in a cot and I had a low bed covered by a dark green rug. The wooden floor was buffed by age to a matt glow. Those boards were where we first crawled, learnt how to put one part of our body purposefully in front of another, how to stand on our wobbly feet. It was eternal summer in that airy room, squeaking and rustling sounds floating in from the garden as I fell asleep.

  An archway, a large opening near our beds, led to the dark alcove where Mum and Dad slept. We walked past their bed to get to our other room with its table and chairs and small kitchen.

  During the next four years of the war and its aftermath, when Dad was away most of the time, he wrote long poems to her, love poems. They are passionate and carnal, rich in the detail of his travels, purple-prosed in his political flights, his poetics alternately transcendent or crass. He was a heart-on-the-sleeve poet, given to hyperbole and extreme metaphors. This is a typical mid-range example, written when he was in Perth:

  Like Flinders on our Southern coast

  Let me explore your throat,

  Faring free on your sleek shoulder

  Till, by your fain sighs grown bolder,

  I glide bemused by slow degrees

  To the twins of the Hesperides,

  Fruited globes of golden milk

  Sweet as honey, soft as silk.

  Dad was never beige. If he were a colour it would be a rich maroon, a gleaming claret like the livery of his school days at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide.

  Mum, on the other hand, inhabited the soft end of the yellow spectrum, ranging from a faint cream through the pastels to occasional flashes of daffodil. Later, when we were older, there were the orange-red times.

  Dad believed in being open with children, so he was the one who told us about Alison, the baby who is buried at Ryde, the baby we did not visit.

  Before you were born, he would say, we had Alison and she was beautiful. Like you, he would smile, hugging us.

  It seemed I had always known about her, so he must have started telling us when we were really young. He’d always told us the same two facts: before you were born, there was Alison and, secondly, that she had drowned in her bath.

  Aged five or six, I asked, How? How did she drown? Being aware that we, my brother and I, had a bath every day. Were we, perhaps, in danger of drowning?

  And that’s when the third piece of the story about Alison’s death surfaced. But it was different from the first two, it kept sliding sideways, it was a slippery kind of fact.

  Mum fainted, he said . . . or something. She said she fainted.

  It was in his tone. There was a rasp to his voice and his eyes fell to the floor as he looked into the past. There was a crack, a fissure, a rent in the story.

  Alison died when she was four months old, on 29 July 1941.

  I search for clues as to how my parents reacted to the shock of her death. In Dad’s autobiography, written forty-five years later, there’s one paragraph in which he deals with several things: Alison’s death, their grief and his final shift to atheism as a result of the offensive platitudes of a local Anglican minister (God will not mind that the baby was unbaptised). The next paragraphs suggest they were off to parties and political meetings within days. It doesn’t sound quite right. Surely such a trauma took weeks? months? to recover from.

  Another clue might be the bath, the one in which Alison drowned. It was used again for me and then for Mark when we were babies. It was made of tin, an oval with handles at the narrower ends and three decorative indentations around the sides. It had once been painted blue but in my childhood the colour was reduced to streaks of sky. When Mark and I graduated to the big bath, the tin tub became an ocean with three inches of water and boats in the backyard. Then it became the dirty clothes place and the washing basket under the clothes line. Once, after we moved to Canberra, Dad took it to collect the bitter plums which we had to pick from the trees beside Parliament House—he made them into jam. Years later, it stood in for a wood-box beside the slow combustion stove in Armidale. So the bath tub stayed with us throughout my growing up, eventually assuming the character of a rubbish place, and no one spoke of its connection to Alison.

  After Alison died, when they moved down the road, what did they feel, what did they think each time they walked past the house where it happened? Passing that house was the only route to the shops, to anywhere. Did they avert their eyes and quicken their step? Did they, on the contrary, slow a little to look at the house and find their breathing becoming laboured?

  I search for photos of her. There are none.

  Some must have been taken. She was the first grandchild on Dad’s side, the first girl after two boys on Mum’s side. They didn’t own a camera but they would have created a recording occasion so that they could send photos of their first baby to all the interstate relatives, as they clearly did with me and then Mark. Not one of Alison remains.

  The closest I have to what a photo of her might have looked like is a small black and white snap which has faded to half-sepia. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting, is ‘Russel and Margaret with Elizabeth (4 months) March 43’.

  Me with Mum and Dad, March 1943

  It’s a picture of my father and mother standing beside a melaleuca with me as a baby. Dad is standing side-on to the camera dressed in his khakis, sleeves rolled above his elbows, holding the baby in his arms. He’s beaming, fairly brimming with delight, one hand curved around the baby’s bum and thigh, his fingers
lying soft against a white shawl. The baby’s head is turned to look towards the person taking the picture. My mother is standing close, very close to them, her blouse sleeve almost touching his wrist. But where is she looking? A cursory glance would say she’s looking at them. A closer inspection, holding the photo up to the window, suggests she is looking past them, looking at something or someone else beyond this little family. She may be, just could be, looking at him. She’s certainly not looking at the baby.

  Is this how it always was in our family—him with the children and her looking away?

  The ‘4 months’ on the back is significant, a hot moment, because Alison died at four months, exactly to the day. So what did they think, each of them, to have this second baby, a replacement girl, me, reach four months?

  Dad writes in his autobiography that when I was born he took two weeks of compassionate leave from the army, fearing that the birth might upset Margaret and then adds but I need not have worried. What he doesn’t mention and I only found out when I was in my forties was that his youngest sister, my Aunt Claire, virtually lived with Mum and me through my first year while he was away. She was there to make sure there would not be another catastrophe.

  I set out to find the record of Alison’s death, to dip into that blue bath, sixty-five years after she died. In the library in Canberra, I peered at the microfiche screen, brow screwed tight as the slightest pressure of my fingers on the lever caused ten pages to fly past. Back and forwards I went, muttering foully. Suddenly, I was in the right section: 1941. That was her name! I yelped like a pup as it whizzed past. I saw it! Holding my breath, I eased back, gave a final nudge and there she was: Alison Russel Ward. It was her. It could be nobody else.

  I had a ridiculous thought: she really did exist!

  I had not seen or heard her middle name before but I didn’t need to. Mark and I had ‘Russel’ for our middle names, so of course Alison would too. Even as a child, I thought it odd that we had to have not only Dad’s family name, Ward, but his first name, Russel, as well. It was the surname of his father’s maternal grandparents, the Russels with one ‘l’, and his parents plucked it down the decades to name him, their firstborn.