The Road from Coorain (21 page)

The actual day of my departure from Abbotsleigh was an anticlimax. I was tired and a little overwrought for the ceremony which we called Speech Day. The afternoon before, I had returned from the rehearsal for Speech Day to find that my mother had fallen in the garden, a fall that resulted in a compound fracture of her right wrist. Barry, returning earlier in the afternoon, found her where she had fallen walking along a path edged with sharp rocks. Her wrist had hit against one jagged edge as she went down, and had borne the full weight of her body. The result was a compound fracture which she was gazing at in puzzlement as he picked her up. He took her to the emergency room of the district hospital where an inexperienced young intern set the fracture. As they came in the door she was complaining about the tightness of the cast, the swelling, and the pain. We had a wakeful night, caring for her, so that I felt unusually detached as I made my way alone to the ceremony which marked the end of my schooldays.

I looked at the happy families, fathers, mothers, younger brothers and sisters, clustered around my classmates, and indulged in a brief fantasy. What might it have been like to have my smiling father and Bob there, alongside Barry, and a healthy smiling mother? Inwardly I told them the achievement we would shortly celebrate was for them, to compensate for the shadows that had fallen over the family. No matter how many times I told myself this was so, I found my lion’s share of the prizes accompanied by an emptiness of the heart. I looked at the growing pile of prize
books, engraved with the school crest, which mounted beside my chair. Why hadn’t I realized how empty success was? I had fooled myself by thinking that covering myself with honors would be some sort of surrogate fulfillment for the promise of my dead father and brother. It was not, nor, I realized sadly, was it ever likely to be. The real satisfactions of my schooling had been the friends I had made. Panic set in briefly as I surveyed them and recognized that we would separate within a matter of hours.

I concentrated firmly on the platform and the daughter of the Governor of New South Wales, who was handing out the prizes and would shortly address us. She was the embodiment of vice-regal propriety, white gloves, navy suit, well-polished shoes, carefully composed features and smile. I noticed that when she shook hands as she presented our prizes she did it with the smooth practice of one accustomed to official parties and reception lines. When the time came for her to speak, she told us to remember our responsibility to society and to those less fortunate, and to uphold the standards of the school and the Church of England when we in our time established families, and had children of our own to educate. These unexceptionable sentiments pleased the assembled parents, but for me they slid smoothly past the immediate question of why we had been educated and what we were supposed to do with the next stage of our lives. My anxiety made my stomach hollow. Did helping the less fortunate mean that I was really meant to live my entire life caring for my mother, filling the emotional void left by my father and Bob? I took myself to task for the uncharitable way I asked this question. She was such a
good
mother. “Yes,” the thought popped into my mind, recalling Hamlet’s unhinged comments about the Queen, “Good mother is bad mother unto me.” My mother’s devotion to me, the self-denial which had sent her to work to educate me properly, her frequent references to the fact that I was her consolation for her past tragedies, weighed on me like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. I knew how well she meant but that same devotion was also a curse, a burden of guilt for ever
wanting to do other things and be like other young people. I set these thoughts aside as unworthy, rising absentmindedly with the crowd to sing “God Save the King.” Then the ceremony was over, my favorite teachers and the parents of friends clustered round with congratulations and good-byes, and shortly I was walking out the gate toward the train station for the last time.

At home, my mother was upstairs in bed, furious. Below, Barry was in consultation with the family physician. Why had she fallen, and what could be done about the badly swollen wrist? The doctor, a blunt speaker, said her dizziness might be attributable to high blood pressure, or then again, it might be the result of the tranquilizers she had become accustomed to since Bob’s death. He gave us a prescription for painkillers and sleeping pills, told us to take her back to the hospital for more X-rays in the morning, and went his noncommittal way.

As I came into her room my mother looked up and said bitterly, “Bloody doctors! Look at that swelling. Why can’t he do something about it? I think I’ll cut this plaster off.” Barry and I spent the rest of the evening trying to soothe her and convince her that it would be better to wait to change the plaster until someone was at hand to supply another. It was difficult to do because she was angry about the smallest things. I didn’t make the gravy for dinner quite right, I was clumsy in helping her change her nightgown. I was forcing her to endure more pain by urging her to keep her cast on. Her anger shook me. How could she think my motives so base? I noticed that her face looked a little mad, and then guiltily told myself I was dreaming.

The next day, we took her back to the hospital to receive a new cast, the process this time supervised by a more experienced doctor. But nothing could disperse the storm of anger which emanated from her. This wasn’t the stoic woman of my childhood whom I remembered pacing the house with a bag of heated salt held to her infected ear while I stoked the fire to keep a fresh supply heated. She hadn’t murmured when the eardrum burst, but now her complaints were never-ending. She needed to be
dressed every day, her food cut up, helped upstairs, undressed at night. I slept close to her room, ears alert for her calls, afraid her sleeping pills and painkillers would produce another fall. It was plain that her recovery would take a long time. And it was equally plain who would take care of her. The date for Barry’s departure for Coorain was already set for late January. I would be alone with her again after that. I braced myself for the responsibility, proud that I could cope, but at the same time dreading assuming the role I now saw being laid out for me. Thoughts of escape were unrealistic. Daughters in Australia were supposed to be the prop and stay of their parents. Would I ever get away? Was it wrong to want to? How on earth could I set about doing it? How could I tell this woman who lived for me that I did not want to live for her? I began to have trouble sleeping, telling myself the insomnia came from listening in case my mother called for something in the night. I often watched the Southern Cross in the night sky, but it was not just a compass bearing I needed now, it was a judgment about what would be the moral path to choose.

I
N THE 1950S, ONE’S
first vision of the University of Sydney from its main gates was of a graceful sweep of lawn curving up a gentle incline to the point on the brow of the hill where the nineteenth-century Gothic quadrangle and Great Hall commanded the surroundings. Though the shape of the buildings recalled the misty light and the grey stones of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges so lovingly evoked by the founders of the institution, the tranquil golden stone quadrangle reflected the Australian sunlight and, in the late afternoons, its leaded windows glowed pink with the declining sun. Its planners were visionaries who dreamed, in the 1830s, of a great university for the Colony of New South Wales which would educate an elite of learning and cultivation. The founders gave the University an architectural form which proclaimed their reliance on the traditions of Oxbridge and paid no heed to the local environment. The University was to be an institution which transcended Australia’s geography, a bearer of the cultural standards of “home.”

One saw the grand view of the University only if one entered its main gates by car. The traveler by public transport traveled east or west along the bustling main Sydney thoroughfare of Parramatta Road, and climbed a flight of steps up from the road to enter the University’s main east-west path of traffic. From this entry one crossed a small courtyard to enter the quadrangle on its
northern side, emerging from the heat of the day and bright sunlight to the inner view of the Quad, its cloisters providing cool paths of shade, and its warm balustrades and arches framing pools of light against dark shadow. Clusters of talkative students lounged along the balustrades. They leaned against arches, laid out full-length upon the stone embrasures, or sat cross-legged in the sun—perpetually in animated conversation. At certain times of day the griffins and other heraldic beasts which decorated the inner facade threw strong black shadows on the four inner rectangles of immaculate lawn, but the thick stone walls and paving blocks hollowed by the passage of generations of feet kept the classrooms and offices arrayed along the Quad’s four sides cool. The high ceilings and narrow mullioned windows allowed for ample ventilation, so that a style of architecture developed for another climate seemed admirably adapted to the Antipodes. The rest of the campus might be an undistinguished aggregation of brick and stucco reflecting the styles of the thirties, the permanent “temporary” buildings of wartime, and the hurried constructions of the immediate postwar period, but the Quad, which housed the Fisher Library and the offices and classrooms of the Faculty of Arts, was an architectural statement about a heritage from Europe which was totally satisfying.

In the late summer of 1952, arriving by taxi to consult the Adviser to Women Students, I felt a thrill of excitement at seeing this architectural expression of the European tradition of learning. Because I was too shy to ask people for directions, I got lost twice before I found the Adviser to Women tucked away in a small inner quadrangle adjacent to the Quad. The Adviser was the sole counselor to the entire enrollment of women students, and could not spend time learning about each of the several thousand entering women freshmen. The University of Sydney had expanded when returning service men and women enrolled in large numbers in the late 1940s. It was thus already crowded when the national government established a scholarship program in the early 1950s to expand access for regular age students.

Lacking funds for facilities or faculty expansion, the University authorities admitted all who qualified, but expected more than a third to fail or drop out during the freshman year. I was one of the seven hundred young people entering the Faculty of Arts in 1952, more than half of them women and a good percentage, myself included, holders of Commonwealth Scholarships. Given our numbers, the Adviser to Women could be forgiven for averting the worst academic blunders and waiting to see who was left to advise in the following year. She and I settled briskly on my first-year program. French, philosophy, history, and English (a full course load), with elementary German as a subject I could audit to see if my real bent proved to be for modern languages. Like most freshmen, I had no idea of how much time each course might take, or what emphasis each department placed on what aspects of the discipline in question. I thought philosophy would be about wisdom, that French would enable me to read more of a literature I found enchanting, and that history and English would be more of the subjects I had loved at school.

The week of Freshman Orientation was sunny and hot. When we began to crowd into the University’s largest lecture hall at the beginning of Orientation week, the crowd was vast and intimidating. Outside it seemed as though throngs of young people occupied every square inch of the campus. They all seemed at ease and clear about what they were doing, whereas I was in a constant state of anxiety. It began with my morning at home. Would I get everything done in the house before setting out for the thirty-minute walk to the train station? “Everything” involved seeing that my mother had what she needed for the day, that she was downstairs safely, and that the house was in apple-pie order. If it was not, she would begin trying to clean and polish things with her left hand, and be in a mood of angry frustration by the time I arrived home in the late afternoon. Once I made the train there was another cause for worry. Would it be on time? The train system was notoriously unpunctual, and I might be late. Lateness was purgatorial, because that meant going into a lecture
room after the class began. Most of the time my nerve failed me and I couldn’t do it. I could not endure all those eyes turned toward me as, dry-mouthed, I climbed up to the back row. When I was on time there was the problem of where to sit, and how to summon up easy conversation with total strangers. I wished the earth would swallow me up immediately I uttered some inanity.

I sometimes made dates to eat with my friends from Abbotsleigh, but on most days their courses and schedules were different from mine so I had to solve the problem of lunch by myself. The Women’s Union was close to the Quadrangle, but to enter it was to face a sea of tables filled with eagerly talking groups. I went through the line to find a sandwich and coffee, but then where to sit? With whom? I didn’t feel entitled just to occupy space by myself.