Honor Auchinleck by Elyne Mitchell
It was at 49 that I saw television for the first time in 1959. Granny didn’t have a TV set but Mrs D did, and Granny said we could go to the kitchen and watch Mum, looking smart in a suit and wearing a hat rather like a crown of sparse magpie feathers, receiving the Children’s Book Council Award of ‘Highly Commended’ for The Silver Brumby. While pleased, Mum was disappointed that The Silver Brumby was not awarded Children’s Book of the Year simply because the horses talked. Mum was always striving to do better, and 49 was a source of inspiration and support for her. With her father’s military memorabilia surrounding her, his successful military career became a benchmark of achievement and excellence. She wrote about him later in Light Horse to Damascus (1971), Light Horse: The Story of Australia’s Mounted Troops (1978) and the novelisation The Lighthorsemen (1987), from Ian Jones’s film script.
I was plagued by colds, stomach upsets, violent vomiting and diarrhoea, both at 49 and at Towong Hill. When we were staying at 49, Mum called on Dr Lawrence Stokes, a well-known Melbourne doctor and an old family friend. On more than one occasion he gently pushed and prodded my cramping stomach as he tried to ascertain what was making me so ill. Medicine came from Oggs, the chemist with the large apothecary jars in its Toorak Road shop window.
With medical matters, Mum believed in going to the top as she had done with Dr Stokes. If she didn’t know the top doctors personally, she usually knew someone who did. Inevitably there were appointments with other doctors and dentists during our visits to Melbourne, and we each had our tonsils out. Mum thought we would catch fewer bad colds if we didn’t have tonsils, though I don’t think it made much difference.
Harry and I were lucky enough to have our tonsils out at the same time. We shared an L-shaped room in the children’s ward at St Andrew’s Hospital where our windows looked out onto the dark, bluestone, Gothic-looking St Patrick’s Cathedral. During our first evening in hospital before the operations, Harry irritated the nurse by imitating the cathedral bells long after they had finished ringing. In his short blue cotton pyjamas with brown spots, leaping in and out of his shiny, high hospital bed, he looked rather like a naughty blue leopard with a great big smile.
Being smaller and with shorter legs, I was less agile. The nurses caught me racing around and reminded me that I was in a hospital where other children felt ill and needed peace and quiet to recover. I don’t suppose that Harry or I were really as happy as our mischief led the nurses to believe; I was five and couldn’t remember ever having spent a night away from home or Granny’s house without Mum. I was frightened of the operation, and I reckoned Harry was too. That evening I saw the sunset and then the dark, silhouetted spire of the cathedral. The next thing I remembered was waking up feeling sick and with a horribly sore throat. And Harry wasn’t laughing and talking or leaping in and out of bed any more.
Fortunately, selective amnesia has spared me from other less pleasant memories. My next recollection of that time is a nurse at my bedside. ‘There is another little country girl like you in the big ward,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see her? She hasn’t got a big brother here like you have, and her mummy is in the country with her dad and brothers and sisters.’ I nodded, imagining that I might meet a playmate. I hadn’t thought to ask what was wrong with her. The girl’s eyes were bandaged, and the bandages wound all around her head, leaving only her nose and mouth uncovered. She couldn’t see me. As she tried to scratch at the bandage, she kept saying, ‘It is itchy,’ and then she cried for her mummy.
‘My name is Honor,’ I said, ‘and I have a brother called Harry and we could come and play! What is your name?’ The girl didn’t reply. She just tossed back and forth in misery on her bed. I’d never seen anyone of my own age in such discomfort and so unhappy.
After a few minutes, the nurse returned. When she told the girl that she was taking me back to my bed but I might come again later, the girl didn’t reply. I didn’t see her again and neither do I remember anything else about St Andrew’s Hospital, but all of a sudden my throat didn’t seem to hurt quite as much. I knew instantly that I was fortunate and I never forgot it. I’d learned a little about compassion. Later, while recuperating at Granny’s house, I tasted pink junket for the first time. When we arrived home at Towong Hill my jodhpurs were loose, but I soon regained the lost pounds.
11
The Bittersweet Schoolroom
In some of my earliest memories of Mum writing at Towong Hill, she sits at her desk in the front hall with her back to me, hunched over her notebooks and typewriter in a gorgeous pool of early morning sunshine. Her back spoke silently, firmly indicating that she didn’t want to be disturbed, but I always wanted her to turn around and give me a hug. Above the windows in front of the desk there were magnificent Federation-style stained-glass windows with designs of trees on undulating countryside.
Mum’s desk was at the east-facing window looking out past the verandah to a circular lawn surrounding a flowerbed. Beyond more flowerbeds were the large European trees surrounding the garden like a wall, separating us from the world beyond. Peeping above the treetops were the peaks of the Dargals Range, or ‘one of those inextinguishable flares’ or ‘ice-etched symbols’, as Mum frequently called them in winter. Often she would sit thinking, writing notes and doodling, preoccupied perhaps with the view and almost certainly with thoughts and dreams well beyond the boundaries of the family, house and garden – and probably even beyond Towong Hill and the Upper Murray.
The time she liked this view most was at dawn in winter, when the sun rose with brilliant spears of sunlight thrusting up behind the snow-dusted mountains. If the weather was good she had a view from the south-facing windows out over the river flats and the memory-filled, bush-covered foothills to the western face of the Alps and two of Australia’s highest peaks, Mt Twynam and Mt Townsend.
These views enshrined her memories of her marvellous ski and summer expeditions with Dad before the war, some of the happiest times of her life. Then, Dad was her hero and best friend as well as her husband. Sometimes she was dreaming not only about their adventures before the war but her expeditions from the Chalet at Charlotte Pass in the winter of 1941 – back in an era before so much changed. Perhaps she also thought about her trip across the Alps in 1936, from Khancoban to the Chalet, before she could ski very much at all. Exhausted as she must have been, she must also have felt a marvellous sense of achievement. I often wondered if, during that trip, she gained the confidence and appetite for bigger challenges.
I thought of those views as being Mum’s and not mine; her knowledge and experience of the mountains were so much greater than mine were ever likely to be. There was little or no room for me or any other members of the family when she was dreaming, thinking or writing. It was some years before I understood that I too could enjoy the views and going to the mountains. I could interpret them as I wished, irrespective of my level of knowledge and experience.
For me, the unusual, pentagon-shaped room we called the front hall arouses intense and bittersweet memories. I remember it best as the place where Mum clattered away on the typewriter on her desk by the window, writing letters, articles and stories. In time, many of the stories she was typing became my bedtime stories; at her desk in the front hall she wrote and typed manuscripts for Flow River, Blow Wind; Black Cockatoos Mean Snow; the early Brumby Books; Kingfisher Feather; Winged Skis; numerous articles for the magazine Walkabout; and a number of short stories she offered to Southerly, Meanjin and Quadrant and the hardback periodical Coast to Coast. The first four Brumby books and, to a lesser extent, Kingfisher Feather and Winged Skis became part of my imaginary world.
In the first decade of the last century, when my paternal grandparents lived at Towong Hill, the front hall had been furnished more sparsely and used as a reception room, where guests were welcomed before being taken through to the sitting room. Both rooms had beautiful parquet floors made of Murray pine. Mum said it would have made a wonderful dancing floor, although nobody used it for that. I
In Black Cockatoos Mean Snow Mum surreptitiously included her feelings about entertaining. ‘All the struggle with the land during the years of War had seemed to make it impossible for [Silver] to feel much pleasure in parties, and yet lots of the men who had been to the War wanted parties more than anything, though his own brothers were not like that.’1 Like Silver, Mum had struggled with the land, and she didn’t feel she had received adequate recognition, particularly from Dad, for what she had achieved. For the most part while we were at Towong Hill, she didn’t want or indeed have time for parties. Towong Hill was a work place, but trips to Melbourne were an entirely different matter.
In a changing world after the Second World War, when many visitors came to the back rather than to the front door, the family used the front hall increasingly as a study, schoolroom and family room. Mum and Dad only used it very occasionally as a reception room and then we tidied it a bit, but never as much as Dad would have wanted. It was here in the 1950s and 1960s that Mum supervised our correspondence schoolwork. The table in the middle of the room was always laden with pencils and incomplete lessons left lying about untidily; Mum was too busy running the house and garden or writing to supervise the lessons, let alone the tidying up. Mum was imagining this room when she wrote in Kingfisher Feather, published in 1962 when I was nine, about the twins, David and Sally Dane, doing their schoolwork. It was in a room like this that Joanna, their mother, would have read them Judith Wright’s poem ‘Bullocky’, just as Mum introduced Judith Wright’s and David Campbell’s poetry to me in some of my more enjoyable lessons.
Mum was quite happy to expand the curriculum so long as it didn’t include comics or books by Enid Blyton. ‘They are bad literature and you mustn’t read them,’ she argued, thereby cutting us off from part of the culture of our generation. ‘You will learn to use grammar more accurately if you read good books.’ So there was no Noddy or Famous Five for us. When we were in Melbourne I could have asked my friend Steena Hay if she had any Enid Blyton books I could borrow, but I’d have landed her in trouble if her mother had told mine. Mum chose and bought our books on her Melbourne shopping expeditions; I only ever went shopping in Corryong with Mum, and we hardly ever went to the local library. The only ‘bad’ literature I was exposed to were the dull stories that came with our correspondence schooling, not that I read all of them. Luckily Mum found them as boring as I did.
It irritated me that the heroes of Kingfisher Feather, the Dane twins, enjoyed and were much better at their lessons than I was. I couldn’t imagine that they spent miserable hours wondering if they would ever manage to work out long division and wishing that their mother might give them just a little bit more help, instead of writing all the time like mine did. While I knew my parents wrote masses of letters, I never saw either of them doing long division. I reasoned that if they didn’t do it, what on earth was I going to use it for? I couldn’t envisage living anywhere but the Upper Murray, and if Mum and Dad didn’t use long division there then it seemed a waste of time.
I didn’t know why everything that I found hard the twins should find easy. In fact, I was jealous of the fictional characters – I thought they were the sort of children Mum wanted me to be. I wasn’t, nor was I likely ever to become, a clever-at-schoolwork goody-two-shoes (not that I knew what the expression meant before I went to boarding school). The worst of it was that I couldn’t stop myself panicking when I found I couldn’t do something, as Mum was an impatient teacher. While she insisted that we children should be nice to each other, she was often short-tempered with us. I would freeze in these situations and, just as Mum and Dad had said, I became unteachable, dreading her mercurial disapproval. She was quite a dab whacker with a rolled up-newspaper. ‘It made an awful noise,’ she later reasoned, ‘but didn’t really hurt.’ That depended – a tightly rolled Age still held together with an address label pasted around the middle certainly stung my bottom and didn’t help me learn how to do arithmetic.
In moments of deep frustration, I badly wanted to tip something onto the typewriter or beat up its keys, such was my craving for a bit more help. I reasoned I would get more attention if it wasn’t for the dreaded bloody typewriter.
‘The trouble was you wouldn’t learn your tables,’ Mum later complained.
‘But you have to teach kids what they mean so they see the point of learning them. I didn’t see the point then. It wasn’t as if you and Dad seemed to use them every day,’ I retorted.
‘If you had tried it would have been okay!’
I didn’t agree. Mum didn’t understand because she didn’t like maths either and found it a difficult subject to teach. Perhaps she also thought that since she had managed to get through life thus far without using maths very much, I might too.
Some of what Mum thought was mental laziness on my part was simply due to her standards being too high for the amount of time she was prepared to spend teaching. Despite wanting to write and not teach, she was largely unwilling to relinquish our education to conventional schooling. With no educational psychologists to mediate and advise, it would have taken someone fairly feisty to convince Mum that her methods of educating me and perhaps the others too were not working very well and that other approaches might be worth trying. Mum genuinely thought she was giving us the best opportunities that she could. Our way of life was one that she would have loved to have had herself when she was a child; she simply couldn’t see or didn’t want to admit that it wasn’t working and that the world of the 1950s was vastly different from that of the 1920s. ‘Many of the greatest writers and thinkers, like Bertrand Russell, never went to school,’ she argued long after I went to boarding school and was taking her to task about the things I should have been taught while I was doing correspondence lessons.
Problems with arithmetic seem to crowd my memories of those days in the front hall. Mum was an imaginative English teacher and she wasn’t bad at history either. She kindly and generously ensured that I had a constant supply of children’s historical fiction. Dad read me stories, and lent and eventually gave me some of his much-treasured childhood history books. He subscribed to The Illustrated London News and we pored over the articles about archaeology. Sir Francis Drake was my hero from British history, and Captain Cook held a similar fascination. Dad brought home models of an Elizabethan warship and Cook’s Endeavour and he helped me to make them.
Mum’s informal and spur-of-the-moment lessons about the natural world were fascinating. When she was gardening or out walking or riding, she always kept a sharp eye out for birds nesting and young animals. For her, a newly born bird or beast was a miracle. Her delight in the natural world, made apparent in her early writings, was well known and respected, and people contacted her if there was something in which they thought she would be interested. Thoughtful neighbours brought dead birds for her to identify. I was scared out of my wits one day when I opened the fridge door to discover the wing of a tawny frogmouth unfolding itself from inside sheets of newspaper. Surprises were part of life and learning in that wild museum.
One spring Mum and I were sitting in the sunshine on the front verandah when Mum noticed a thrush was nesting in an old wastepaper basket on top of the cupboard where garden tools were kept. As quietly as she could, Mum fetched her binoculars from the front hall so we could have a close look at the way the nest had been carefully concealed in the wickerwork. All we could see was a little grey head with a beady, blinking dark eye and a tiny beak. From that time on, nobody was allowed to remove the wastepaper basket in case Mum’s little grey friend returned to nest there once more.
Best of all was a young female platypus someone had found trapped near the Khancoban dam wall. When Mum put a bucket filled with garden worms and the platypus straight into Dad’s downstairs bath, the enchanting little lady swam around with her duck-like bill vacuuming up every worm i
Even more bizarre was the long-bodied, fawn-coloured creature with white spots, a pointed face and a long bushy tail. John and Jack Reiners caught it by accident in a rabbit trap in the bush, high above the house on one of the ridges of Mt Porcupine. Mum thought it was a ‘tiger cat’ but it was probably a quoll. Unfortunately one of its front paws was too badly damaged to release it back into the wild so they somehow managed to put it in a sack and bring it home. It was in terrible pain and very frightened. The vet came, sedated it and treated its wounds as best he could. I don’t know who was brave enough to do it, but a string was tied to one of its back legs and it was released, spitting and struggling, onto the front lawn where Mum photographed it. Later it would become a unique landmark in Mum’s rather chaotic but extensive photographic record of the natural world. She didn’t write about it because she didn’t want to bring attention to the existence of such creatures and run the risk of others being hunted and hurt in some way – the accidental injury to one had been more than enough. Eventually Mum found a home for it in a sanctuary.
Mail days brought a frisson of expectancy to the front hall when we were trying to do our schoolwork. As well as bringing the horrible corrected lessons, the mail was Mum’s vital lifeline with the outside world. Its arrival three mornings a week provided a welcome distraction from Crappy Days as I called the Happy Days – or was it Merry Days? – correspondence lessons. Once I knew that the word ‘crappy’ was derogatory, that was the word I used to describe them.