My Place Read online

  All year, Mum had been promising us that Dad would take us on a picnic. We’d spent the May holidays playing down the swamp and visiting Dad in hospital. Now, we were halfway through the August holidays and we’d given up all hope of the picnic ever eventuating. So we were very surprised when, one sunny Saturday morning, Dad said, ‘Right, we’re off to the hills.’

  We had an old 1948 Ford van by then. The Studebaker we had had for years was up on blocks in the drive; it was another one of those things Dad hadn’t gotten around to fixing. The van had been a gift from one of Dad’s old employers. When Dad was sober, he was a good worker, and it had been given to him in appreciation of a job well done.

  The van had no back doors, just a big open back. The roof was padded with kapok, and soft, fluffy pieces poked through the torn lining.

  In summer the van was great, because it let in the breeze, but in winter, the roof acted like a sponge, soaking up the rain and depositing lumps of soggy kapok into our laps. While we shouted our complaints from the back, Mum sat, dry as a bone, in the cab, giggling away.

  She’d confided to me once that she’d learned to laugh over difficult situations early in life, but I found this philosophy no comfort when it came to smelly, wet kapok.

  The roads around Roleystone were narrow, steep and winding, and going for a picnic to the hills was no tame, family outing, it was a real adventure.

  Once we’d eaten our camp pie sandwiches and stuffed down the cake Mum had cooked, we all ran, screaming, into the bush. We spent hours collecting stones, insects, rocks and wildflowers. We knew that, when we returned home, Nan would ask us what we’d found. She loved the bush, and always made us hand over any of our treasures that she thought could have special significance.

  Too soon Mum began shouting for us to return to the car. We played a bit longer, but when we heard Dad tooting the horn, we knew he meant business.

  Billy, Jill and I leapt in the back, while Mum took her usual place in the front, holding our baby brother David on her lap.

  It wasn’t too long before we began to realise what a difficult task Dad had trying to manoeuvre the van around on a tiny section of bitumen. He had a rough gravel track ahead of him, a cliff face on one side and a deep bush valley on the other. We all hung on tightly as he backed towards the edge of the bitumen and closer to the valley.

  In sudden terror, we pressed as close to the cab as we could. With no back doors to hold us in, we feared that one sudden brake from Dad and we’d be catapulted into oblivion.

  To our horror, Dad failed to brake at all. Instead, he continued to back closer and closer to the precipice. The wheels may have been on safe ground, but we felt practically airborne. Worse than that, the back of the van now sloped down, making it even more difficult for us to hold on. We began to scream.

  ‘Shut up, you bloody kids!’ Dad roared as he poked his head out the side window. He edged a few inches more and we screamed louder.

  ‘For God’s sake, Bill, stop! We’re going over the edge,’ Mum shrieked as she clasped his shoulder. She was scared of heights. Her obvious panic incited us to greater efforts. We squashed our faces against the small window that separated the front cab from the back and, without taking a breath, we screamed as loud and as long as we could.

  ‘Bill, please.’

  ‘Listen, Glad, you bloody stupid woman, I know what I’m doing!’

  ‘Bill, stop! You can kill yourself if you want to, but you’re not going to bloody kill the rest of us!’

  By this time, Dad had had enough. He pulled on the handbrake and shouted, ‘Get out, the bloody lot of you!’

  We eagerly clambered to safety and stood in a nearby gully. We watched helplessly as Dad continued with what, we were sure, would be a death plunge. The back wheels rolled off the bitumen and spun on the loose gravel. There was a sudden roar of the engine as the van leapt forward and Dad neatly executed an awkward turn. With a look of smug satisfaction, he told us to get in.

  Mum was quiet all the way home. Dad whistled.

  Pretending

  Nineteen fifty-nine, and another Milroy began school. Billy’s initial reaction was similar to mine, he hated it. Every morning when we set off for school, Billy lagged behind, sobbing. How he managed to walk straight and not trip over always puzzled me, because while his body was trudging in the direction of school, his face was turned backwards towards our house.

  He knew that Mum would be watching us from behind the curtains, and, if he looked really upset, she might weaken and call him back. Some days, he began his sobbing ritual so early that by the time we left, his face was red and puffy, his nose snotty and snorting. These occasions were generally too much for Mum, who only let him get as far as our letterbox before calling him back.

  Billy’s unhappiness at school never spilled over into recess and lunchtime. He was the kind of boy other boys looked up to, so he was never short of a pal. Billy was the image of Dad and, when it came to mateship, exactly like him.

  Nan had a soft spot for Billy, too. She supported him in his dislike of school. ‘Let him have the day off, Glad,’ she pleaded when Billy began his crying routine, ‘the child’s not well.’

  To Billy’s credit, he didn’t look well. I attempted to copy his mournful look several times, but to no avail. After a few pathetic attempts, it became obvious that what worked for Billy would not work for me. I had to resort to more deceitful means.

  I found that a light spattering of talcum powder, rubbed first into my hands and then patted lightly over my face, worked wonderfully well.

  ‘I feel really sick in the stomach, Nan,’ I groaned as she gazed at my pale face. ‘I think I’m gunna vomit.’ Nan grabbed an empty saucepan and bent me over it. After emitting a few strangled noises, I straightened up and said, ‘It’s no use, it’s gone down again.’

  ‘Go and lie down,’ Nan instructed, ‘I’ll send your mother in.’

  Within a few minutes, Mum was standing by my bedside, looking extremely sceptical. ‘Sally … are you really sick?’

  Nan always interrupted, ‘Course she’s sick, Glad, look at the child’s face.’

  ‘I’m not puttin’ it on, Mum, honest. I feel real crook. Maybe I’ll be better by lunchtime. Nan can send me to school then.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Sally,’ Nan countered, rising to the bait, ‘you can’t go to school, you’ll pass out.’

  ‘All right,’ Mum relented, ‘you can stay home, but don’t eat anything and stay in bed.’

  Jill wandered in after Mum and Nan had left and said, ‘You’re rotten. You’re not really sick, are you?’

  ‘Course I am! Go away, you’re makin’ me feel sick. Mu-um, tell Jill to go away, she’s makin’ me feel worse.’

  ‘You come out of there, Jilly. You let Sally sleep.’ Jill gave me a disgusted look and walked off.

  Once Jill and Billy had left for school, and Mum had left for her part-time job in Boans’ Floral Department, I called out to Nan, ‘I’m feelin’ a bit better Nan. Do ya think I could eat something?’

  Nan pottered in, with her old tea towel slung over her shoulder, and said, ‘Oooh, you still look white, Sally. I don’t think you eat enough, your mother can’t expect you to get better if you’re not going to eat. You stay there and I’ll bring in some toast and a hot cup of tea.’

  After six or so rounds of toast and jam and a couple of mugs of tea, I said to Nan, ‘Gee, it’s stuffy in here, Nan.’

  ‘Yes, it is, go and sit outside, there’s nothin’ like a bit of fresh air when you’re sick in the stomach.’

  Nan only spoke to me after that to tell me when lunch was ready. I spent the rest of the day outdoors, playing all my usual games and climbing trees.

  I was sitting on the back verandah step, inspecting the cache of small rocks I’d collected, when Mum returned home from her day at work.

  ‘How’s Sally?’

  ‘Hmmph, she’s all right,’ Nan grumbled. And then, with a giggle, she added, ‘Been sittin’ in that tree al
l day.’

  Mum wandered out. ‘Another miraculous recovery, eh Sal?’

  ‘Yeah, dunno what it was, Mum, but I hope I don’t get it again.’

  ‘Don’t hope too much.’

  Apart from learning different ways to feign illness, there wasn’t much to school that year. All my lessons seemed unrelated to real life. I often wondered how my teacher could be so interested in the sums I got wrong, and so disinterested in the games I played outside school, and whether Dad was home from hospital or not.

  The best thing about school was that Grades Two and Three shared the same room, so this meant I saw more of Jill and we sat near one another.

  One afternoon, our teacher asked if there were any children in the class who could sing in a foreign language. Four children immediately raised their hands, Jill and I included. At the teacher’s instruction, the first two kids got up and sang ‘Frere Jacques’ one after the other. Then it was Jill’s and my turn. We were both very shy and embarrassed and walked to the front with our eyes down.

  We linked arms and then, swaying energetically back and forth, loudly sang ‘The Internationale’ in Italian.

  Mrs White was as stunned as the rest of our class at our sudden show of theatrical talent. We usually shunned any form of public display. ‘Lovely, girls,’ she finally said, ‘lovely.’

  Dad was in hospital at the time so we were unable to tell him how we’d performed, but we knew that he would have been proud of us.

  Whenever Dad was in hospital, Mum and Nan went out of their way to make home a nice place for us. We were allowed to stay up late, and we didn’t have to worry about keeping quiet. It was much more relaxed.

  Sometimes, Mum even scraped together enough money to shout Jill, Billy and me to the local outdoor theatre.

  The theatre fascinated us. We loved the gaily striped canvas seats, the large spotlights and the huge white screen. It was such a magical place, we even felt excited during intermission.

  But one of the best nights we had there was the time Mum provided the entertainment.

  After we paid our threepence entry fee, we walked up and down, searching for four empty seats. Mum reckoned we’d be lucky to find any, because they always sold more tickets than they had seats. We were fortunate, Billy’s keen eyes spotted four beauties.

  ‘Over there, Mum,’ he shouted. ‘Look over there.’

  Mum looked in the direction he was pointing and sighed: they were in the middle row of the centre block, and almost impossible to get at. The rows of seats were so narrowly spaced it was difficult to walk between them, even when they were vacant. Only a fool, or someone very brave, would consider trying to claim them when all the surrounding seats were full, and, when one of our party happened to be a woman who was eight months pregnant …

  ‘There must be somewhere else,’ Mum said helplessly as she glanced around the overflowing theatre.

  ‘There’s not, Mum,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘If we want to sit together, it’ll have to be those.’

  As we struggled over the various arms and legs jutting in our path, Mum kept apologising, ‘I’m sorry, I’m awfully sorry. Please excuse me …’ By the time we reached the empty seats, Mum was blushing and exhausted.

  Darkness descended and we all grinned when we heard Mum breathe out. She responded by giving us a no-nonsense look that said shut up and watch the picture!

  It was halfway through a new item on the Queen Mother that Mum disappeared. There was a sudden rip, following by an urgent gurgling noise. All we could see was her desperately flailing arms and legs.

  Fumbling in the dark, we managed to grasp her hands and tried the old heave-ho, but to no avail. A sympathetic chap in front leaned over the hard metal railing that separated each row and gave us a hand. As he pulled, we pushed Mum’s feet towards the ground in the hope that it would give her more leverage. Instead, our fake grunts and groans sent her into a fit of giggles, which was no help at all.

  The newsreel rolled on, but the Queen Mum’s final wave was totally ignored. A lady kindly went to fetch the manager, and returned with the bouncer as well. When they reached Mum, she was a quivering, giggling mass and we were near hysteria.

  By the end of the newsreel, Mum was free. Embarrassed, but free. She was supplied with a hard metal chair to sit on, and a small bottle of lime cool drink by way of compensation. Mum consoled herself with the fact that at least it hadn’t been necessary to turn on the lights.

  It was early in Grade Three that I developed my infallible Look At The Lunch method for telling which part of Manning my classmates came from. I knew I came from the rough-and-tumble part, where there were teenage gangs called Bodgies and Widgies, and where hardly anyone looked after their garden. There was another part of Manning that, before I’d started school, I had been unaware of. The residents there preferred to call it Como. The houses were similar, only in better condition. The gardens were neat and tidy, and I’d heard there was carpet on the floors.

  Children from Como always had totally different lunches to children from Manning. They had pieces of salad, chopped up and sealed in plastic containers. Their cake was wrapped neatly in grease-proof paper, and they had real cordial in a proper flask. There was a kid in our class whose parents were so wealthy that they gave him bacon sandwiches for lunch.

  By contrast, kids from Manning drank from the water fountain and carried sticky jam sandwiches in brown paper bags.

  Nan normally made our sandwiches for school. She made them very neatly, and, sometimes, she even cut the crusts off. I was convinced that made our sandwiches special. There were occasions when Mum took over the sandwich making. Her lunches stand out in my mind as beacons of social embarrassment. With a few deft strokes, she could carve from an unsuspecting loaf the most unusual slabs of bread. These would then be glued together with thick chunks of hardened butter and globules of jam or Vegemite. Both, if she forgot to clean the knife between sandwiches. We always felt relieved when, once again, Nan assumed the sandwich-making role.

  In April that year, my youngest sister, Helen, was born. I found myself taking an interest in her because at least she had the good sense not to be born on my birthday. There were five of us now; I wondered how many more kids Mum was going to try and squeeze into the house. Someone at school had told me that babies were found under cabbage leaves. I was glad we never grew cabbages.

  Each year, our house seemed to get smaller. In my room, we had two single beds lashed together with a bit of rope and a big, double kapok mattress plonked on top. Jill, Billy and I slept in there, sometimes David too, and, more often than not, Nan as well. I loved that mattress. Whenever I lay on it, I imagined I was sinking into a bed of feathers, just like a fairy princess.

  The kids at school were amazed to hear that I shared a bed with my brother and sister. I never told them about the times we’d squeezed five in that bed. All my classmates had their own beds, some of them even had their own rooms. I considered them disadvantaged. I couldn’t explain the happy feeling of warm security I felt when we all snuggled in together.

  Also, I found some of their attitudes to their brothers and sisters hard to understand. They didn’t seem to really like one another, and you never caught them together at school. We were just the opposite. Billy, Jill and I always spoke in the playground and we often walked home together, too. We felt our family was the most important thing in the world. One of the girls in my class said, accusingly, one day, ‘Aah, you lot stick like glue,’ You’re right, I thought, we do.

  The kids at school had also begun asking us what country we came from. This puzzled me because, up until then, I’d thought we were the same as them. If we insisted that we came from Australia, they’d reply, ‘Yeah, but what about ya parents, bet they didn’t come from Australia.’

  One day, I tackled Mum about it as she washed the dishes.

  ‘What do you mean, “Where do we come from?”’

  ‘I mean, what country. The kids at school want to know what country we come
from. They reckon we’re not Aussies. Are we Aussies, Mum?’

  Mum was silent. Nan grunted in a cross sort of way, then got up from the table and walked outside.

  ‘Come on, Mum, what are we?’

  ‘What do the kids at school say?’

  ‘Anything. Italian, Greek, Indian.’

  ‘Tell them you’re Indian.’

  I got really excited, then. ‘Are we really? Indian!’ It sounded so exotic. ‘When did we come here?’ I added.

  ‘A long time ago,’ Mum replied. ‘Now, no more questions. You just tell them you’re Indian.’

  It was good to finally have an answer and it satisfied our playmates. They could quite believe we were Indian, they just didn’t want us pretending we were Aussies when we weren’t.

  Only a dream

  By the time I was eight-and-a-half, an ambulance parked out the front of our house was a neighbourhood tradition. It would come belting down our street with the siren blaring on and off and halt abruptly at our front gate. The ambulance officers knew just how to manage Dad, they were very firm, but gentle. Usually, Dad teetered out awkwardly by himself, with the officers on either side offering only token support. Other times, as when his left lung collapsed, he went out on a grey-blanketed stretcher.

  Jill, Billy and I accepted his comings and goings with the innocent selfishness of children. We never doubted he’d be back.

  Dad hated being in hospital, he reckoned the head shrinkers didn’t have a clue. He got sick of being sedated. It was supposed to help him, but it never did.

  I heard him telling Mum about how he’d woken up in hospital one night, screaming. He thought he’d been captured again. There was dirt in his mouth and a rifle butt in his back. He tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. Next thing he knew, the night sister was flicking a torch in his eyes and saying, ‘All tangled up again are we, Mr Milroy? It’s only a dream, you know. No need to upset yourself.’