Before I Sleep (14 page)

Mavis also carefully balanced our financial books which was not easy despite my reasonable salary, for one-third went in tax and there were mortgage repayments in addition to the costs of raising a family. Each Christmas we all returned to Adelaide by way of an eighteen-hour drive. This could become very boring, and Mavis helped entertain us all by getting us to sing campfire songs and other old tunes.

When each of the children were in their Matriculation year, Mavis would spend more time than usual helping them with their assignments. Her knowledge of French and maths was most valuable. If the children appeared stressed, she would provide comfort by just being available to listen or by making a cup of warm cocoa in the cold Canberra weather. She was a most resourceful mother to our kids.

All three eventually matriculated, but Ian was the first to leave home. He was interested in becoming an engineer and so enrolled in an Adelaide University course and boarded with his grandparents. He was seventeen when he left. Although Mavis encouraged him to go, I know that his departure left a large ache in her heart. She had “lost” me for four years, but I had returned. I think, somehow, she sensed that Ian would be leaving for good. But several times, Ian, feeling homesick, returned from Adelaide unexpectedly, driving his old car. He would arrive in the early hours and just go to sleep in his old bed. I can still remember how Mavis, absolutely delighted, would tell me “Ian's home”. He could only stay a few days each time but they were most happy occasions for Mavis and me. Andrew left when he married, and a little later Ruth went into residence at the Canberra Hospital to train as a sister. Our once busy, active, comfortable home was now mainly a place of memories. Both Mavis and I kept up our active interest in scouts and guides, but now they were all other people's children.

About this time I had completed my Economics degree at the Australian National University, which had taken me six years of evening lectures and time at the libraries, and had started on a part-time Master's Degree in Sociology. I was lucky in having very good lecturers at the ANU. George Zubrzycki and his team made me welcome. We had been in Canberra some ten years, and while I had been to a number of overseas and interstate conferences, Mavis had stayed at home. I talked to her about the possibility of undertaking a postgraduate course in Criminology at Cambridge. We found that we could manage this financially if I went on a year's leave without pay, taking all my long service leave in a lump sum to pay for the boat fares. We would also need to swap our Canberra residence for one in Cambridge, and it would be necessary for Mavis to secure a casual teaching job in England in order to meet our everyday costs. These were big challenges for a fifty-six-year-old mother who had left teaching twenty-six years earlier, and who now was morally entitled to a long, non-working overseas holiday.

Carl Jung has a theory of meaningful chance — in other words, not all events happen at random. Somehow we were able to meet all of the necessary conditions, and left Sydney for England on a cheap passenger liner. Ruth made a special trip from Canberra to see us off and, from her meagre savings as a first-year student nurse, bought Mavis a magnificent opal ring and me a most serviceable fountain pen. She inspected our little cabin and tearfully said: “Bon Voyage — You have it all wrong. It's children who leave their parents not vice versa.” I was most upset. If I could have reversed the program I would have done so. I am sure Mavis felt as homesick as I did, but she consoled me more than I comforted her. Our loved daughter's remark made me feel guilty. We were failing her in that her familiar place of security and support would not be available for a year and we would be on the other side of the world if she needed us. We need not have been so concerned. During the year we received a cabled request from a future son-in-law for permission to marry Ruth. Mavis was delighted that Ruth had followed her own example and asked her intended to seek parental approval. We told Ruth that we sent our sincere congratulations to them both.

I had prepared for the four-week voyage by taking a new textbook on criminology with me to study. Mavis purchased a typewriting manual and each afternoon spent two hours in our cabin practising touch typing on an old portable machine I had brought with us. Mavis became a competent touch typist. She would have been the only passenger with a serious study program.

As soon as I met my fellow students at the institute, I knew my postgraduate year at Cambridge would be an interesting and useful one. About twenty people had enrolled. They were mainly English, recent Honours graduates in law, but there were psychologists and social workers as well. About half of the students would have been about twenty-five years old, but there were others in the group who were older and had some practical experience. I was the oldest and I soon chummed up with the next oldest, Ian Barsby, the headmaster of a junior borstal. We would spend afternoons taking long walks along the Cam, swapping life histories. He had been a fifteen-year-old London Sea Scout who had helped man a small yacht that had sailed to Dunkirk to pick up survivors. I think he approved of my two RAF tours but, with traditional English understatement, he only hinted at it. He was most knowledgeable in the areas of juvenile delinquency and education techniques, two of my weaker subjects. We would arrange our walks to allow time for a pint of bitter and a discussion of the material presented to the class, before returning for the twilight lecture. I liked Ian very much. He invited Mavis and I to stay for a weekend at his borstal and there we met his charming wife and two tall sons. I discovered we had much in common. I had never been in a borstal before; this one was more like a residential country high school than a prison. There was no high fence around it. On the crisp Sunday morning of our stay, we all walked as a group warmly clad to the little Anglican Church nearby. Ian was on good terms with the young vicar whose sermon, I thought, was better than most I had become accustomed to back home. I thought I could have fitted into that environment if I had been single and had had a reasonable job.

For work experience during a vacation, Ian and I went to a self-governing junior boys' borstal near Glasgow where we lived in, as did the borstal supervisor, George Wilson, and his wife. This borstal only contained about thirty lads (Ian's had about a hundred) and here they were locked in. It was fascinating. We sat in at one of the “trials” of one of the fourteen-year-old inmates who was found guilty by his fellow inmates of recklessly damaging one of their precious canoes. They awarded some penalty (the nature of which I have now forgotten) and the offender appealed to the supervisor because he thought it excessive. I did too. George reduced the penalty. He told us that the boys were very hard on each other. He often had to soften an inmate-imposed sentence, a task that usually put him in a good light with all the boys. I found the week very demanding. A number of the boys were apparently not seeing much of their dads on visiting days (if, indeed they ever saw them at all) and were hungry for adult male company. Ian and I were quickly accepted and I told them tales of Australia. In the evenings, a night duty staff came on and we were free of responsibilities. George Wilson was a connoisseur of single malt whiskies, and he would drive us around to little pubs whose shelves boasted a fine array. These were pre-breath testing days, luckily. George had advanced ideas for his borstal, but I heard some years later that it was closed down by public demand after one of the boys had murdered a small girl.

Another time, I spent a week with Tommy Koh, a lecturer in law from Singapore, and A1 Moreton, an American attorney, at the then recently opened Grendon Underwood Psychiatric Prison for lifers. During the day we had the run of the prison, but at night returned to the outside world. We were well received by the prison staff and participated in their morning conferences. Grendon Underwood was conceived as a therapeutic community in which everybody was involved: prisoners, warders, medical staff and anyone else who had gained access to the gaol. Several of the lifers were there because of the killing of young homosexual boys. They tended to be more intelligent than the average prisoners and we had a number of useful discussions with them, both as a group and in one-to-one unsupervised sessions in the cells. We were told that many of the prisoners were pleasant blokes to talk to, but could take offence easily and were known to have “turns”.

“Don't worry,” we were told. “We will be within reach.”

Tommy and A1 confided in me separately that they were scared while inside the walls. I did not let on that I didn't feel all that comfortable myself.

In the third term, A1 Moreton and I went to Blackfriars Shelter in London. We were supposed to spend a working week living in the shelter, a home for homeless men. The place was dreadful — it was near the Thames in an area of total urban decay: broken-down, rat-infested, deserted warehouses and slums. It was still winter, so the shelter was full to capacity, the summer exodus to the country not having begun. The shelter smelt. The drunks and derelicts smelt. A1 and I were meant to dine with the men in the soup kitchen. We arrived on Monday, but by Wednesday we were both fed up. A1 Moreton was an assistant district attorney in the United States; I was the head of a national police force: we decided there were limits to participant observation. We discovered a pleasant pub where we spent many happy hours and ate decent meals, although we still slept in the shelter at night. But even though A1 and I wagged it a lot of the time, the experience was a good entry into a world that I had only known from the point of view of a cop.

For the year, Mavis and I had an upstairs furnished flat in central Cambridge in exchange for our Canberra house. Mavis obtained a casual teaching job at a small village, called Melbourn, some 20 miles (30 kilometres) away. Every cold, bleak morning she rose at six-thirty. We would have breakfast and then she would trudge off some distance to catch a bus. She arrived back home at five-thirty and set about preparing our evening meal.

Mavis found the return to teaching, after an absence of twenty-five years and in a different system, a challenge. She never complained, and somehow managed to provide her class with stimulating education and a wider vision of the world. The English education system didn't impress Mavis very much; the custom of allowing teachers to apply for jobs in any school they fancied meant that some schools attracted a very competent body of staff, while others, in less attractive locations, made do with the also-rans. During term breaks, other students in my course went home but Tommy, the Chinese academic lawyer, and Eric, a Ugandan reform school head, had nowhere to go and little money. Neither of them was then married. Mavis warmly invited them to our flat for meals which she specially cooked for them, and we shared our stories of homesickness. I watched with interest how they both succumbed to Mavis's charm in the same way that I had done nearly thirty years beforehand. Somehow, quite naturally, she had bridged two different cultures and a generation in obtaining their friendship. We called ourselves “remnants of the British Empire”. Eric said to me one day, “Ray, back home I would give not one cow, but two, for a woman like Mavis.”

Lest you think I make too much of Mavis's conquests, I recount the following. In 1969 we were in Papua New Guinea. A newly arrived Indian academic joining the Waigani University called on us. She said that she had heard the Whitrods were in Port Moresby. For many years she had wanted to meet us. She explained that she was a friend of Professor Kibuka in Uganda. He had confided in her that he hated all white people — all except Australians. He knew Australians were different because he had met the Whitrods.

One afternoon, Tommy said to me that he had been asked to pass on a request by one of his countrywomen students that I spend a little time in dalliance with her. I had never met the girl. She had said to Tommy that she thought his Australian friend was “interesting”. I was a bit flattered by this request but Tommy advised me not to make too much of it. Tommy said that in his culture, having sex was a more casual affair than the British style. Reluctantly, for the following reason, I didn't take up the invitation. I still have an occasional nagging thought that I missed a great opportunity to do some important fieldwork — important to trainee navigators, that is. When we were being taught how to swing an aircraft's magnetic compass, we were told there were three factors to manipulate. These were A, B and C for Chinese. When one of the squad had the courage to ask why “C for Chinese” the instructor scornfully answered that it was a reminder that this was a factor operating athwartships on the aircraft, and was unlike A and B, which were fore and aft. When the trainee still looked puzzled, the instructor said, “Everyone knows that Chinese vaginas are horizontal and not vertical.”

Our squad was stunned. As far as I know, we were all Adelaide lads and none had as much as spoken to a Chinese girl, let alone explored such mysteries. It didn't make biological sense, but then in films that we had seen in peace time there had been some very bandy Chinese girls, and prewar the RAF had been stationed for many years in Singapore, and so … If I agreed, I thought, I would be able to write to Doddy, the only other survivor of our squad, and say, sort of offhandedly, “You remember that we were told …” But now I will never know until I get to Heaven. Judging by the movement of Angels, gender doesn't seem to be important. But how will I recognise Kerry, and Sandy One and Sandy Two, and Reddog and Bluedog, if they are neither dog nor bitch? The Bible is uninformative on this point, but then the clerics who wrote it were unlikely to be doggy people.

It is interesting, although probably not relevant, that clerics chose for their icon, a crooked piece of dead wood, whereas one would expect “shepherds” to select a sheepdog. Perhaps the idea was too controversial — maybe the Presbyterians wanted a Scottish terrier (“Jock”) and the Baptists a retriever (“Splash”) or may be the “crook” was simply an artifact from history. But a dog in the pulpit could provide some entertaining diversion if the sermon was boring.