The Road from Coorain (18 page)

We acquired visible signs of our status. The first was a sleek battleship grey Rover sedan, not just a means of transportation, but a wonder of engineering and craftsmanship. Barry, now expansive with his own earnings, acquired a wonderful fire-engine red MG, a British sports car, with racy lines, a feisty performance, and a luxurious smell of new leather emanating from its upholstery. In it we made many companionable journeys exploring the countryside around Sydney, gradually comforting one another simply by being together. We never spoke about Bob, or about our mother’s worrisome state. We enjoyed the quiet, unspoken communication of two inarticulate but devoted people.

In August of 1949, my mother was galvanized by the kind of challenge she was best suited to meet. She was needed to nurse a dying friend. Eva McInness had been my mother’s partner in her small cottage hospital in Lake Cargelligo, and the witness to her wedding. Eva, in her turn, had married a grazier from the Lake Cargelligo area, and the families had been as close as distance and the restrictions of the Depression and the war would allow. The McInnesses had left their drought-stricken property to be beside my mother at my father’s funeral, and their phone calls and visits had helped sustain her in the hard months afterwards. Now we learned that Eva had come to Sydney for surgery for cancer of the uterus. The surgery had revealed cancer in several vital organs, and Eva, just fifty-one, had very little longer to live. The pair of experienced nurses conferred, and decided that she should not be left to die alone in the hospital. She would come home to live with us. My mother would nurse her by day, with special nurses to take over at night. The McInness family were to stay nearby so that her last months could be homelike and companionable.

To be needed in a critical situation called out my mother’s best self. No one could organize a sickroom better, comfort a stricken family more tenderly, or talk more sensitively about last things with the dying. She was matter-of-fact about death, sent us regularly to sit with Eva, and when she sensed that the doctor was reluctant to provide the dosage of morphine which would relieve Eva’s suffering, she confronted the doctor before us all and secured the needed prescription. I was glad to see her in charge again, but sobered by my first encounter with lingering death. I had thought of life as fragile, wiped out in a moment; watching Eva’s agonizingly slow decline, I now realized that to die in an accident while in the prime of life might be a blessing. It was a sobering thought.

One day not long after the confrontation with the doctor, I told my mother after my morning visit that I thought Eva’s condition had changed for the worse overnight. Her breath smelled badly,
and she was very restless. “That’s not bad breath,” my mother said practically. “It’s the smell of death.” My mother gathered the family and sat with her friend all day, talking quietly, keeping everyone on an even keel until toward evening Eva drew her last breath. I was amazed at my mother’s strength and energy, her directness and readiness to face hard things. She seemed so unlike the grief-paralyzed woman of a few months ago. Later I found her in her room weeping, and realized that it was her professional self which had been so strong. Whenever it was called upon she could do anything. Without it she was a different person.

Shortly after the household returned to normal following Eva’s death, my mother began to worry that we would soon face another hollow celebration of Christmas, another season preoccupied with the awareness of loss, and with our inability to disguise the sadly shrunken size of the family gathering. A woman who knew no half measures, her eye was caught by an advertisement for an eight-week Christmas cruise to Ceylon by P. and O. liner. She quickly calculated that the cruise combined with three weeks of exploration on the island of Ceylon would nicely straddle the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, returning us in time for me to prepare for school in early February. Mindful of her promise to Eva to care for her motherless daughter, she added her to the party. Before I knew what was happening, I was being taken on a euphoric shopping spree designed to clothe my unstylish fifteen-year-old form with cruise clothes and evening dresses suitable for dressing for dinner in the first-class P. and O. dining room. Hitherto I had been forbidden to attend my classmates’ dances, and I was usually barred from parties where alcohol might be served. Now I was suddenly being prepared for a much more sophisticated adult world. My choices in clothes betrayed my lack of experience and introduced me to the discomforts of whalebone and strapless evening dresses. I was five feet six, overweight, and tormented by blotchy skin. Severe tailoring and careful choice of colors might have helped to camouflage this predicament, but I settled on pink tulle, white piqué and lace, and
pale green organdy with rosebuds. The result was predictably awkward, but I knew no better. Barry, happy up to now with a tweed jacket and tie for formal occasions, was dispatched to acquire a dinner jacket and evening shoes. We became possessors of passports along with our fine clothes and began unaccustomed reading about the mysterious East. Suddenly, when I rode across the Harbor Bridge and looked down at the glittering white ocean liners lying at their moorings below, I saw them no longer as unattainable romantic symbols of a glamorous international world, but as a form of transport that I would shortly use.

My mother could not have decided upon any experience better calculated to banish our daily routine and superimpose startling new experiences on the troublesome memories of the year. They began the day our ship, the MV
Strathnaver
, sailed. Before the days of regular air travel, the departures of ocean liners were major events in Australia. Encouraged by postwar prosperity, thousands of Australians flocked aboard the P. and O. fleet of liners to make their ritual journey “home” to England before settling down in their real homeland. Each vessel was farewelled by an alcoholic crowd, its members cheering and weeping by turns, shouting advice (much of it crude references to the ways of foreigners), remembering last messages, singing sentimental songs, and waiting at the docks until the last paper streamer thrown to friends aboard had broken. The
Strathnaver
was going “through to Tilbury,” having picked up almost a full complement of passengers in Sydney. It sailed for eight days around the coast of Australia, stopping at Melbourne, Adelaide, and Fremantle, before setting out for seventeen days across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon.

Many passengers were made seasick by the swell going across the Great Australian Bight, and some were troubled by the pitching of a storm a day or so out from Perth, but we were entranced; exploring the ship, seeing our first flying fish, watching the other passengers. In the beginning, I was intimidated by the first-class dining room. The menus were enormous, remnants of an Edwardian
style of dining. I was uncomfortable in my unaccustomed finery, and totally inexperienced in polite dinner table conversation. Gradually I learned the delights of choosing between caviar and smoked salmon for a first course, sampling grouse and other English game, eating my first Stilton cheese, and entering into serious discussions with our steward about what kind of soufflé would be best for dessert. I set to so heartily as a trencherwoman that no amount of pacing the deck could atone for my appetite, and the whalebone supporting the pink tulle began to be very confining indeed.

The evenings lived up to every movie I had seen about ocean voyages. The wake glowed with phosphorescence, the sea breeze blew gently, the band played sedate dance music, and a wonderful array of older people disported themselves on the dance floor. It was fascinating to work out with my mother which couples belonged together, who was having an affair, what widow was setting her cap at what retired major. My mother was as diverted as we were by the change of environment, but she was puzzled by her children’s behavior. We were agog to find our place among the other young people on the ship, whereas she, still grieving, wanted to retire early and expected us to accompany her. My determination not to remain dutifully by her side was reinforced by our traveling companion, Eva’s daughter, a few years my senior. She was understandably determined to enjoy a shipboard romance, and more than ready to argue about my mother’s expectation that we would retire when she did. My mother could not require our presence to avert anxiety about road accidents so, reluctantly, she gave approval for us to retire when we chose. As soon as she went down to her cabin, we broke most of her carefully prescribed rules. I danced clumsily with strangers, Barry sampled more than the beer at the bar, and we began to get to know some of the other passengers.

Besides the usual Australian tourists, the ship carried Indian and Pakistani army and air force officers, families from the former Indian and Ceylonese Civil Service, the children of tea
and rubber planters en route home from school and university for the summer holidays, and numerous retired English couples who made the journey out to Australia and back to escape the English winter. Some of the passengers must have been aware that India and Pakistan had just endured two years of murderous racial strife following Independence, and that British rule in Ceylon had ended less than a year ago. But we lived on shipboard as though the great British navy and merchant marine still controlled the globe. I became enamored of the son of one British planter family from Ceylon, and freed from my mother’s supervision, I saw in the New Year at a particularly bibulous party in his cabin, where Barry came upon me, cheerfully tipsy at 1:00 a.m. This united us in a happy conspiracy of silence about our secret misdemeanors. My host and his friends seemed unaware that their world was about to collapse. Instead they gave me experienced advice about how to manage “the natives.”

Elderly men and women told me romantic stories about the glamorous Northwest Frontier of the old British Raj; Barry and I listened enthralled to the war tales told by colorfully dressed Pakistani Air Force officers; all of us were regularly regaled with lengthy sea chronicles told by the petty officer who looked after passenger entertainment. His most memorable stories were of the wild behavior of the Australian troops the
Strathnaver
had carried to the Middle East in 1940, and brought home again in 1942 to defend their homeland from the threat of Japanese invasion. For me, he was the star of all the characters gathered on our voyage. More than six feet tall, he carried an enormous beer-inflated belly with stately dignity. His talk was always slipping toward profanity, and his language was peppered with vivid imagery. He ran the horse races and bingo games expertly, calling the numbers in rhyming cockney slang with a voice more gravelly than any I had ever heard. His dissipated eyes looked as though they had seen every form of human depravity and his demeanor of barely controlled scorn softened only when he talked about his adored ship. He liked instructing me, and never
let fact stand in the way of a striking story. Ceylon, he told me, was an island so beautiful and so laden with spice trees and gardens that the perfume told one to expect landfall many miles out to sea. He had a gift for language. When he described Aden, the next port after Colombo, with its blue-grey mountains ringing the harbor and the sails of the Arab dhows reflecting the sunset, it seemed as though my life would be incomplete without seeing it with him to identify the forts and the British naval vessels lying at anchor in the roadstead. I began to understand the wonders of travel.

Once we disembarked in Ceylon, this understanding changed quickly to ambivalence. The Australia of my childhood contained only a minuscule population of non-British descent, so that I had never really seen another culture. Reading could carry me in imagination beyond the confines of Coorain or Sydney, but it could never make me experience a non-British world, let alone test the usual British imperial attitudes of superiority toward other peoples. Schooled as I was in all Australia’s class sensitivities, I was unprepared for a society of caste. Colombo was a teeming Asian city where begging was a way of life. At the Grand Oriental Hotel, an ancient “punkah boy” slept on a mat outside my bedroom door in case I called for anything in the night. I was troubled by having to beat the beggars away on the street, and by the instruction to ignore the tugging hands of the children who grabbed my skirts crying for money. I felt so disoriented by the extremes of poverty and by my uncertainty about how to behave that I could not relax and enjoy the color, the vitality, and the richness of the new sights and sounds. People told me that the children with stumps for legs, or holes where their eyes had been, were that way because they had been deliberately deformed so as to be more effective beggars. That did not help me sort out how to behave to them or what I thought about this new society.

The Grand Oriental Hotel, our base for a week in Colombo, lived up to its name. Its Edwardian splendor was fading in 1949, but its vast white marble lounge, sprinkled with cane tables and
chairs, cooled with potted palms and soporific ceiling fans, seemed very grand to me. In the afternoons, there was a thé dansant, when the band played Strauss waltzes and Hungarian gypsy music. This was the hour when the white-clad young men who worked for the British banks or insurance companies came to sip cool drinks and dance away the afternoons with women whose toilette and elegant silk dresses had clearly commanded the attention of skilled servants. One of our shipboard friendships had been with a family traveling to the wedding of their eldest daughter to a young English bank officer, so we were soon introduced to this society. Its members brooded every afternoon over gin and tonic about the decline of the British Empire and the mess the Sinhalese would make of ruling themselves. Such expectations of nonwhite people had been one of the unquestioned verities of my world, but after my first actual encounter with the way a multiracial imperial society worked, I began to be less sure about everything. I could feel the hostility of the street crowds and the ever-present watchfulness of the hotel servants. They made me uneasy.