Canowindra
Without Prejudice
I loved Canowindra, and still do. Sleepy, snoozy and hot. We began our trip from Avalon,wearing new white tracksuits bought by Dad. He was wearing a pith helmet when we left, loaded up to the gunnels as we were in The Vanguard Estate Car.
Dad in a happy mood as ever, laughing and asking us to ask him what his Pith helmet was for. and when we did back would come the naughty answer
"For Pithing in, of course"
And my Mum would smoke incessantly and cling to the car door as if we were all going to be pitched out of the car at any moment. We crossed over The Blue Mountains, the most beautiful place I had ever been in. Then on to Canowindra and our new home. Mum ran a cafe in the Main Street and we lived in the accommodation behind. Dad was opening a panel shop, just a shed around the back blocks, but he was doing OK. The country people were curious to meet us and came into the cafe, ordering Milkshakes and fish and chips or lollies. Saturdays were mad with Mum and Jackie serving hot roast dinners and the SP Bookie holding an illegal betting shop in the front room. With the radio going non stop and the heat from the roast dinners the place was mad.
We kids would help with the serving at the front counter. Dipping the long handled ladle into icy milk in stainless steel vats stored under the refrigerated section and then a scoop of ice cream, adding malt and topping, whooshing it all up in the stainless steel cup and adding a straw. Or making a Sundae in a gondola shaped glass with ice cream in the bottom, slicing a banana in half and adding topping, crushed nuts and malt and two wafers cut in triangles stuck in the top like wings. We made spiders with icecream and coke or fanta or any virulent coloured pop soda. We counted mates and raspberries into white paper bags hung on string and ripped off. Biscuits came in the tin then. Big square tins, with a paper round the rim that had to be cut away, revealing a sharp edge that could slice your finger with vicious monotony for the unwary.
Kids at school said their parents weren't going there anymore, Mum's cafe, as our White cat, Puss was seen sitting in the front window where the frier was stored. Licking its face and shedding hair everywhere. the work was tremendous on my Mother. She was always tired and cranky and we had to pretty much look after ourselves. She wasn't like other Mothers, other Mothers were knitting or dressmaking, belonged to the social committees, guided guides, volunteered at the school canteen, met up at the Church do's.
Mum said bollocks to all that and only socialised with Family, hated knitting or dress making, she had "people" for that. The woman up the hill that was married to the alcoholic, made my Junior Deb dress. When I needed wool for french knitting at school, she bought me one ball of baby pink, which I kept hidden in a paper bag. All the other kids had loads of coloured wool from their knitting mothers, unlike me.
I wanted her to be normal. like other Mums, but there was no way my Mother was going to be like others and didn't give a toss for what others thought. She had one kid that was at reading level 13 years and was 7, and a son who was Dux of Cowra High School. We also triumphed at the local pool, swimming as a family and winning relay after relay. Jackie taught me to swim there, making me dive in from sitting and bending over and once I had that the rest was easy. I took to swimming like a duck to water and loved the competition and the winning. Dad said on my first grown up race at night, I just dove in and swam the entire length of the Olympic Pool with out drawing breath, not once.
Dad trained us though, 5am every morning cold or not, we had to get up and train at the pool. Dad making us swim at least 50 lengths, before kick boarding with just kicking and learning strokes and breathing with the coach, Dad, holding his stop watch and clicking it off when we reached the end. Racing ourselves against the clock and bettering out times. It was important stuff to Dad and we complied. We liked winning and going to other swimming meets loaded up on Glucose tablets and salt tablets. My fair hair turned green that year, an ugly bottle green from all the chlorine in the pools, a photo taken then shows me in red speedos, sunburned skin and straw like hair jutting out at angles, one eye squinting in to the sun. I was never out of those bathers in Summer, that was my uniform.
We moved to another fibro Comission house, amongst all the other comission houses in the poor end of town. We had rotten neighbors and great neighbours. Next door were the Urens, a single slatternley Mother, fat enough to be able to not get up much and reprimand her unruly sons, Billy and Pat.
They were bad kids from day one, laughing at our upper class accents and "posh, wordy" way of speaking. They threw rocks on our roof and did all sorts of damage, but we just ignored them. Fighting back was only going to make them worse. The house was basic and small but the backyard was huge and for the first time in our lives we had chickens and a goose and a couple of ducks. I remember George screaming in that house. Waking us all in the middle of the night with his harsh bellowing. And we knew what it was, it was from Jamies death. So we would hold him and tell him it was OK. Sometimes I thought he did it for attention and one night we got into a brutal fight and Ian had to pull me off him. I had scratched his back so badly it was bleeding. Ian ticked me off which I thought was unfair, George could be a royal pain in the arse.
There wasn't much money coming in, only what Dad made at the Panel Shop, Ian leaving school and helping him. Dad hired a showroom and put Triumphs in it on commission. We held a train Exhibition there and we had a Go Kart exhibition and Dad took us out to a track and we all had turns riding them. George flying around and around screaming for a while until we realised he was screaming he couldn't stop and we had to run behind trying to slow him. We laughed for ages, George getting furious. George was my Mothers blue eyed boy, in her eyes he could do no wrong, no matter how much we protested the opposite. He was an unhappy boy George given to strong mood swings and Jackie and I were either ticking him off or rolling around in the dirt with him, punches flying.
Jackie was still the lady and I was the tomboy, she helping Mum with the housework and me rocketing around the neighbourhood with all boys and one girl. Times were so very simple there and for us so very poor, but we didn't know we were poor, until other people started telling us we were poor. The snobby lady, married to a Solicitor, who took me for my first test as a "Brownie", Jackie was already in The Girl Guides an exemplary one and I was a little ratbag according to the lady. God, and I'd brushed my hair for once. She was an absolute pill and I knew it. the first test how to wash dishes. I knew that from having to do them ad nauseum at home, but I was not too sure about the crystal glasses. She sneered at me, poor little posh girl that I was, telling me my parents were poor and virtually lower than pond scum. I never told my parents but she passed me on the test.
My Mother flipped suddenly and disappeared, she sometimes did this and we had to go and pick her up in Avalon. She was standing under the washing line when we found her. Dad spoke to her gently and we led her by the hand back to the car and back to home. There was no explanation to us, her children, for her disappearances, it was just Mum. She often had funny turns and would lay in bed for days with excruciating headaches, migraines. We left her then playing outside quietly and beating up the kids next door at long last when they once again threw rocks on the roof. George split the boy next doors lip and blackened his eye and was in big trouble for a while until I explained what the boys had been doing. Then he was a hero and ran around with a sword for a while, thinking he was a knight.
David went through that time thinking he was a dog and would only answer in woofs, expecting us to treat him as a dog. Even when Mum took him to the local shop he would only utter barks, this went on for ages and he eventually stopped but it was weird for a while. He wasn't old enough to be at school with the rest of us, yet, so stayed home with Mum. We kids were coming in to our own around then too. I did my Junior Deb with my beautiful white lace dress and Jackie said I spent the whole time whizzing up and down across the sawdust floor, dirtying my dress, my carefully curled hair dropping out within minutes. But I became "The Storyteller" for the concert and was allowed to sit off stage, narrating. This was a big deal, apparently and ever after people from the town would come up and congratulate me. I had no idea as to why they made a fuss of me, I was just a little girl of 8 by then. Swimming as much as I could, fascinated with breathing and stroking properly.
Long days at the pool always ended up with Mum and Dad coming to pick us up, bringing fish and chips, or hot pies and cold ice lollies. And we would have been at the pool all day, exhausted and sunburned and were asleep within minutes of getting in the car. I can still remember those hot nights spent on the sloping hill facing the pool, the breezes cooling our skin, making the hair on our arms rise, our wet bathers drying on our bodies, towels around our shoulders, chatting amongst ourselves and others. We were a family no matter what and we bonded in our simple times spent together. And organised how to beat the others at everything.
We all used to have our favourite radio shows. I actually thought there were people in the radio, in miniature and would look around the back at the burning bulbs in disappointment. The stories and shows were thrilling. The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Bob Hope, George and Gracie Burns and a school comedy with a bad boy called Bluebottle, who was always in trouble. We sat reverently in front of the radio and felt connected to the world in some way, sitting cross legged on the bare wooden floor and chewing on spearmint leaves lollies and milk kisses. Mum and Dad leaving us to it. I became a Brownie then and camped beside the Belabula River, wide and deep, fringed with Willow Trees we could swing out to the water on. We made cheese twists on sticks and damper in a billy. The Posh lady was there and ignored me pretty much, expect for having to ask about the "Newbies". It was the first time I came across discrimination for no reason, other than that I was poor.
But who was I to talk, we all looked down on the orphan kids, that came from The Catholic Orphanage, those kids were really poor. They always had chilblains on their heels and school sores around their mouths, shabbily dressed and poorly shod, they were figures of pity to us all and we did our best to be kind to them, all of them very quiet, bowing to society's conventions of being born probably illegitimate and not wanted. I often had to go there, as I was having piano lessons, taught by one of the Nuns, entering the huge and hushed convent for the first time, quaking. I could hear womens voices, murmuring, saying prayers about "Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus".
A Nun approached me and I began piano lessons with not much talent but a willingness to learn and the metronome would click and swing and the Nun would lean over me with foetid bad breath and I would play and play. it was my Dad's idea I have piano lessons as he liked his children to play an instrument and God knows how he found the money, but he did. He wanted us all to read music too, so many a long hour was spent with music pages and notes explained, and I never actually "got it" till I played in a fife band and could follow the music. Jackie was a natural and so was Ian but I struggled as did George with his trumpet and Dave with his drums. I preferred writing and I began writing in Canowindra and won my first prize at 8, a book with my name printed on the frontispiece.
And round then Mum decided to help out at the School Canteen, so we could run to her and get Hot Tomato Soup or Dark gritty Cocoa, sweetened. We were so happy to see our Mum, there, like "normal" Mums, mixing with "normal" mums, Mum always said
"What's normal??" as if the rest of the World was crazy and she wasn't.
And now i look back at those times, I realise she was exhibiting all the signs of Manic Depression, or similar, we never did work out what was wrong with Mum. By the time she died at her own hand aged 53, she had an overactive thyroid, which made her eyes bulge out, she had depression, clinical, which they treated with sedatives and ECT, she had it all and she was sometimes lucid and Ok and that could last for Months. Then she would scream and see things and hear things and goose step up and down the verandah, saying "Heil Hitler" and scaring the neighbours. And then she would get violent.
Towards the end she was a mess, her looks changed, her standard of hygiene went out the window, and instead of a beautiful elegant aristocratic mother we had a mad woman. A woman that stripped off all her underwear and wearing only a pink see through nightie run out into the street begging the Milk man or baker for a cigarette, she chewed peanuts all the time, never seeming to get enough, she smoked incessantly even when pregnant with Helen and she shook, her hands always shook. And she was always anxious and then she stopped sleeping. So they gave her sleeping pills that knocked her out, Zombie like. She had so many pills to take and it was exhausting to get her to take them, she'd fight you every inch of the way. her blue eyes snapping or going blank and she'd talk like a child.
She was the most genius like female you could ever meet. In Canowindra she wasn't too bad. She seemed to hold it all together, mainly for us kids. After the migraines would go, she would emerge from the shadowed bedroom and start mothering us again, completely normal. She would dress prettily and do her hair, wearing make up and perfume, Chanel No 5, of course. She would come with dad to all our Sports Night Presentations, Ian for Cross Country running, the rest of us for swimming.
I won a place at the National Championships in Sydney. I was terrified and excited at the same time by all the fuss. I came fifth and Mum and Dad had a nasty fight and he left her behind at Manly beach. She demanding to get out of the car and he took off with Dave and Me in the car. And suddenly it became my very important job to keep him awake as he drove home through the Blue Mountains. I persuaded him to stop beside a creek and we slept in the car. Dad had a wash in the creek the next day and a shave and I watched him as he swept his skin clean in careful strokes, the sun glinting down through the trees and the cold water trickling over rocks.
"We have to go back", I said.
"We have to go back and get her!"
So we drove all the way back and she was sitting on a bench near where she had got out of the car, the Palm Trees lit by the early morning sun, gold. And we drove home and they were friends again and I was happy.
I loved Canowindra, and still do. Sleepy, snoozy and hot. We began our trip from Avalon,wearing new white tracksuits bought by Dad. He was wearing a pith helmet when we left, loaded up to the gunnels as we were in The Vanguard Estate Car.
Dad in a happy mood as ever, laughing and asking us to ask him what his Pith helmet was for. and when we did back would come the naughty answer
"For Pithing in, of course"
And my Mum would smoke incessantly and cling to the car door as if we were all going to be pitched out of the car at any moment. We crossed over The Blue Mountains, the most beautiful place I had ever been in. Then on to Canowindra and our new home. Mum ran a cafe in the Main Street and we lived in the accommodation behind. Dad was opening a panel shop, just a shed around the back blocks, but he was doing OK. The country people were curious to meet us and came into the cafe, ordering Milkshakes and fish and chips or lollies. Saturdays were mad with Mum and Jackie serving hot roast dinners and the SP Bookie holding an illegal betting shop in the front room. With the radio going non stop and the heat from the roast dinners the place was mad.
We kids would help with the serving at the front counter. Dipping the long handled ladle into icy milk in stainless steel vats stored under the refrigerated section and then a scoop of ice cream, adding malt and topping, whooshing it all up in the stainless steel cup and adding a straw. Or making a Sundae in a gondola shaped glass with ice cream in the bottom, slicing a banana in half and adding topping, crushed nuts and malt and two wafers cut in triangles stuck in the top like wings. We made spiders with icecream and coke or fanta or any virulent coloured pop soda. We counted mates and raspberries into white paper bags hung on string and ripped off. Biscuits came in the tin then. Big square tins, with a paper round the rim that had to be cut away, revealing a sharp edge that could slice your finger with vicious monotony for the unwary.
Kids at school said their parents weren't going there anymore, Mum's cafe, as our White cat, Puss was seen sitting in the front window where the frier was stored. Licking its face and shedding hair everywhere. the work was tremendous on my Mother. She was always tired and cranky and we had to pretty much look after ourselves. She wasn't like other Mothers, other Mothers were knitting or dressmaking, belonged to the social committees, guided guides, volunteered at the school canteen, met up at the Church do's.
Mum said bollocks to all that and only socialised with Family, hated knitting or dress making, she had "people" for that. The woman up the hill that was married to the alcoholic, made my Junior Deb dress. When I needed wool for french knitting at school, she bought me one ball of baby pink, which I kept hidden in a paper bag. All the other kids had loads of coloured wool from their knitting mothers, unlike me.
I wanted her to be normal. like other Mums, but there was no way my Mother was going to be like others and didn't give a toss for what others thought. She had one kid that was at reading level 13 years and was 7, and a son who was Dux of Cowra High School. We also triumphed at the local pool, swimming as a family and winning relay after relay. Jackie taught me to swim there, making me dive in from sitting and bending over and once I had that the rest was easy. I took to swimming like a duck to water and loved the competition and the winning. Dad said on my first grown up race at night, I just dove in and swam the entire length of the Olympic Pool with out drawing breath, not once.
Dad trained us though, 5am every morning cold or not, we had to get up and train at the pool. Dad making us swim at least 50 lengths, before kick boarding with just kicking and learning strokes and breathing with the coach, Dad, holding his stop watch and clicking it off when we reached the end. Racing ourselves against the clock and bettering out times. It was important stuff to Dad and we complied. We liked winning and going to other swimming meets loaded up on Glucose tablets and salt tablets. My fair hair turned green that year, an ugly bottle green from all the chlorine in the pools, a photo taken then shows me in red speedos, sunburned skin and straw like hair jutting out at angles, one eye squinting in to the sun. I was never out of those bathers in Summer, that was my uniform.
We moved to another fibro Comission house, amongst all the other comission houses in the poor end of town. We had rotten neighbors and great neighbours. Next door were the Urens, a single slatternley Mother, fat enough to be able to not get up much and reprimand her unruly sons, Billy and Pat.
They were bad kids from day one, laughing at our upper class accents and "posh, wordy" way of speaking. They threw rocks on our roof and did all sorts of damage, but we just ignored them. Fighting back was only going to make them worse. The house was basic and small but the backyard was huge and for the first time in our lives we had chickens and a goose and a couple of ducks. I remember George screaming in that house. Waking us all in the middle of the night with his harsh bellowing. And we knew what it was, it was from Jamies death. So we would hold him and tell him it was OK. Sometimes I thought he did it for attention and one night we got into a brutal fight and Ian had to pull me off him. I had scratched his back so badly it was bleeding. Ian ticked me off which I thought was unfair, George could be a royal pain in the arse.
There wasn't much money coming in, only what Dad made at the Panel Shop, Ian leaving school and helping him. Dad hired a showroom and put Triumphs in it on commission. We held a train Exhibition there and we had a Go Kart exhibition and Dad took us out to a track and we all had turns riding them. George flying around and around screaming for a while until we realised he was screaming he couldn't stop and we had to run behind trying to slow him. We laughed for ages, George getting furious. George was my Mothers blue eyed boy, in her eyes he could do no wrong, no matter how much we protested the opposite. He was an unhappy boy George given to strong mood swings and Jackie and I were either ticking him off or rolling around in the dirt with him, punches flying.
Jackie was still the lady and I was the tomboy, she helping Mum with the housework and me rocketing around the neighbourhood with all boys and one girl. Times were so very simple there and for us so very poor, but we didn't know we were poor, until other people started telling us we were poor. The snobby lady, married to a Solicitor, who took me for my first test as a "Brownie", Jackie was already in The Girl Guides an exemplary one and I was a little ratbag according to the lady. God, and I'd brushed my hair for once. She was an absolute pill and I knew it. the first test how to wash dishes. I knew that from having to do them ad nauseum at home, but I was not too sure about the crystal glasses. She sneered at me, poor little posh girl that I was, telling me my parents were poor and virtually lower than pond scum. I never told my parents but she passed me on the test.
My Mother flipped suddenly and disappeared, she sometimes did this and we had to go and pick her up in Avalon. She was standing under the washing line when we found her. Dad spoke to her gently and we led her by the hand back to the car and back to home. There was no explanation to us, her children, for her disappearances, it was just Mum. She often had funny turns and would lay in bed for days with excruciating headaches, migraines. We left her then playing outside quietly and beating up the kids next door at long last when they once again threw rocks on the roof. George split the boy next doors lip and blackened his eye and was in big trouble for a while until I explained what the boys had been doing. Then he was a hero and ran around with a sword for a while, thinking he was a knight.
David went through that time thinking he was a dog and would only answer in woofs, expecting us to treat him as a dog. Even when Mum took him to the local shop he would only utter barks, this went on for ages and he eventually stopped but it was weird for a while. He wasn't old enough to be at school with the rest of us, yet, so stayed home with Mum. We kids were coming in to our own around then too. I did my Junior Deb with my beautiful white lace dress and Jackie said I spent the whole time whizzing up and down across the sawdust floor, dirtying my dress, my carefully curled hair dropping out within minutes. But I became "The Storyteller" for the concert and was allowed to sit off stage, narrating. This was a big deal, apparently and ever after people from the town would come up and congratulate me. I had no idea as to why they made a fuss of me, I was just a little girl of 8 by then. Swimming as much as I could, fascinated with breathing and stroking properly.
Long days at the pool always ended up with Mum and Dad coming to pick us up, bringing fish and chips, or hot pies and cold ice lollies. And we would have been at the pool all day, exhausted and sunburned and were asleep within minutes of getting in the car. I can still remember those hot nights spent on the sloping hill facing the pool, the breezes cooling our skin, making the hair on our arms rise, our wet bathers drying on our bodies, towels around our shoulders, chatting amongst ourselves and others. We were a family no matter what and we bonded in our simple times spent together. And organised how to beat the others at everything.
We all used to have our favourite radio shows. I actually thought there were people in the radio, in miniature and would look around the back at the burning bulbs in disappointment. The stories and shows were thrilling. The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Bob Hope, George and Gracie Burns and a school comedy with a bad boy called Bluebottle, who was always in trouble. We sat reverently in front of the radio and felt connected to the world in some way, sitting cross legged on the bare wooden floor and chewing on spearmint leaves lollies and milk kisses. Mum and Dad leaving us to it. I became a Brownie then and camped beside the Belabula River, wide and deep, fringed with Willow Trees we could swing out to the water on. We made cheese twists on sticks and damper in a billy. The Posh lady was there and ignored me pretty much, expect for having to ask about the "Newbies". It was the first time I came across discrimination for no reason, other than that I was poor.
But who was I to talk, we all looked down on the orphan kids, that came from The Catholic Orphanage, those kids were really poor. They always had chilblains on their heels and school sores around their mouths, shabbily dressed and poorly shod, they were figures of pity to us all and we did our best to be kind to them, all of them very quiet, bowing to society's conventions of being born probably illegitimate and not wanted. I often had to go there, as I was having piano lessons, taught by one of the Nuns, entering the huge and hushed convent for the first time, quaking. I could hear womens voices, murmuring, saying prayers about "Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus".
A Nun approached me and I began piano lessons with not much talent but a willingness to learn and the metronome would click and swing and the Nun would lean over me with foetid bad breath and I would play and play. it was my Dad's idea I have piano lessons as he liked his children to play an instrument and God knows how he found the money, but he did. He wanted us all to read music too, so many a long hour was spent with music pages and notes explained, and I never actually "got it" till I played in a fife band and could follow the music. Jackie was a natural and so was Ian but I struggled as did George with his trumpet and Dave with his drums. I preferred writing and I began writing in Canowindra and won my first prize at 8, a book with my name printed on the frontispiece.
And round then Mum decided to help out at the School Canteen, so we could run to her and get Hot Tomato Soup or Dark gritty Cocoa, sweetened. We were so happy to see our Mum, there, like "normal" Mums, mixing with "normal" mums, Mum always said
"What's normal??" as if the rest of the World was crazy and she wasn't.
And now i look back at those times, I realise she was exhibiting all the signs of Manic Depression, or similar, we never did work out what was wrong with Mum. By the time she died at her own hand aged 53, she had an overactive thyroid, which made her eyes bulge out, she had depression, clinical, which they treated with sedatives and ECT, she had it all and she was sometimes lucid and Ok and that could last for Months. Then she would scream and see things and hear things and goose step up and down the verandah, saying "Heil Hitler" and scaring the neighbours. And then she would get violent.
Towards the end she was a mess, her looks changed, her standard of hygiene went out the window, and instead of a beautiful elegant aristocratic mother we had a mad woman. A woman that stripped off all her underwear and wearing only a pink see through nightie run out into the street begging the Milk man or baker for a cigarette, she chewed peanuts all the time, never seeming to get enough, she smoked incessantly even when pregnant with Helen and she shook, her hands always shook. And she was always anxious and then she stopped sleeping. So they gave her sleeping pills that knocked her out, Zombie like. She had so many pills to take and it was exhausting to get her to take them, she'd fight you every inch of the way. her blue eyes snapping or going blank and she'd talk like a child.
She was the most genius like female you could ever meet. In Canowindra she wasn't too bad. She seemed to hold it all together, mainly for us kids. After the migraines would go, she would emerge from the shadowed bedroom and start mothering us again, completely normal. She would dress prettily and do her hair, wearing make up and perfume, Chanel No 5, of course. She would come with dad to all our Sports Night Presentations, Ian for Cross Country running, the rest of us for swimming.
I won a place at the National Championships in Sydney. I was terrified and excited at the same time by all the fuss. I came fifth and Mum and Dad had a nasty fight and he left her behind at Manly beach. She demanding to get out of the car and he took off with Dave and Me in the car. And suddenly it became my very important job to keep him awake as he drove home through the Blue Mountains. I persuaded him to stop beside a creek and we slept in the car. Dad had a wash in the creek the next day and a shave and I watched him as he swept his skin clean in careful strokes, the sun glinting down through the trees and the cold water trickling over rocks.
"We have to go back", I said.
"We have to go back and get her!"
So we drove all the way back and she was sitting on a bench near where she had got out of the car, the Palm Trees lit by the early morning sun, gold. And we drove home and they were friends again and I was happy.
