God's Callgirl (11 page)

Everyone must have heard, including the adults inside the house. I glimpsed my mother’s head at the back door briefly. She must have gone straight inside again. I imagined her announcing that Carla had thrown a tantrum and it was best to ignore her. The hot humiliation brought on by that assumption made me truly desolate. I had no clear idea why I was crying. My father’s touch in the night had ceased since coming to Australia and I had been freed of a horror I had grown used to. The night-time visitor never returned—I had been used and discarded, and now I felt empty. I had lost my father’s attention and so I wasn’t his special girl any more. Even though I retained no waking consciousness of his nocturnal visits, my body missed his closeness and I felt strangely abandoned. I wailed even more loudly. The other children took no notice whatsoever. What could they do anyway? They could see that if I wanted to come down it would be not very difficult for me. The mystery was too much for them to handle.

The upshot was that my parents, understandably, felt humiliated in front of the other family by their queer child who wailed for attention instead of having a good time like all the other kids.

My emotional state was all too difficult for my parents, who were going through their own adjustments as best they could. I would soon be a teenager, their first one. What were they going to do with me?

NEW WINE IN OLD SKINS

OUR LADY OF
Good Counsel, that was the name of our parish church in Holland. Its side wall held a magnificent Byzantine mosaic picture of the mother of Jesus with her child snuggled up against her, and hopeful little candles constantly burned there in her honour. People prayed to her, and then they went away and did what they wanted.

We had travelled for six weeks across the world and, by some uncanny karmic coincidence, ended up in a parish of the same name 12,000 miles later. We were in a strange land, in a different culture, but, incredibly, the picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel was the same, though not in genuine mosaic. It gave me the feeling that in some strange way nothing had changed. She had followed us to Australia, Our Lady, who was supposed to give us good advice. Why didn’t I find the omen particularly comforting?

On our first day at the parish school, our mother dressed us up the way she had always done in Holland: she put big satin bows in our hair, and we wore the shiny lace-up shoes our father had made. The bows made us look conspicuous but it wouldn’t have mattered what we wore: the Australian schoolchildren, Catholic or not, despised the newcomers
simply because we were different. They couldn’t understand us, so they ridiculed us.

They had derogatory names for migrant people. Dagos was reserved for the Italians who arrived in droves after 1950. We were called Clogs, quite a benign word compared with the one they used for their own indigenous people, who were also different. If we wanted to be cheeky, we would ask them what their grandfather’s prison number was. After all, these children were nearly all descendants of the English and Irish sent to the penal colony for their misdeeds only two or three generations ago. The insult was lost on most of our classmates until our English improved.

I was eager to learn this new language and found it surprisingly easy. The roots of English, like Dutch, are in Latin, so guesswork paid off many times. As for trying to speak it, I listened to the broad accents of the local children, compared them to the educated newsreaders from the ABC and decided that I would never speak ‘strine’ but would opt for the King’s English. My speech ended up a peculiar mongrel version of the official language, but I thought that at least it had class.

The nun in charge of our class taught three grades at the same time in the same room. Her name was Mother Mary Luke, FCJ. (FCJ was short for Faithful Companion of Jesus; all the nuns had these initials after their names.) Mother Mary Luke had seen a thing or two in her life, which had given her some sense of reality. She read out our written work and praised our unusual ways of putting things as imaginative.

The words of Keats’ poem, written in huge calligraphy on a yellowing poster on the classroom wall, delighted me: ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…’ It was this piece of poetry that invited me to appreciate the dreaded English language.
It often perplexed me; why, for example, pronounce ascertained as
ascertained
when certain rhymed with curtain?

All of us excelled in maths that first year, because the levels in Australia were way below what we were used to in Holland. Mother Mary Luke made shining examples of us by inviting us to do sums on the blackboard. The prestige helped—we began to be respected. Within a few months, we would join in reviling new migrants from other countries, and so we became part of the fabric of school society.

In the classroom next door my brothers did not fare quite so well at the hands of Sister Bartholomew. She always carried a long wooden ruler with a metal edge to it, and beat her pupils’ hands and legs until big welts appeared. Sister Bartholomew was the boss of her classroom and children had to know it; she was a woman born in the bush and had a strong hand. When all the boys—Markus, Adrian and Willem—came home with welts on their hands and legs, our mother decided to march up to the school to remonstrate with Sister Bartholomew, in spite of her broken English. Nobody could make out her words, but everybody knew what she meant.

Sister Bartholomew was loud in her own defence. In those days, it was next to a sin to disagree with a nun and my mother was brave indeed to risk both ridicule and the nun’s self-righteousness. We were all ashamed of our mother’s poor command of English, but proud of her pluck. Our ‘us and them’ attitude now included our mother in ‘us’ and Sister Bartholomew in ‘them’. The stakes were higher and life had become more exciting.

Mother Mary Luke, who had a conciliatory streak, assigned my sister and me tasks with a certain amount of
responsibility, like looking after the flowers for the altar in the church. Our classroom was separated from the church by a wooden concertina room-divider; on Sundays, the concertina wall was shoved aside to accommodate the large number of parishioners, who sat on our desks. It was a cosy sort of feeling, being so close to Jesus in the tabernacle. I was promoted to the great responsibility of preparing the altar for next morning’s Mass, which had to be done after school. I also had to make everything ready for the priest in the sacristy, where he got dressed up. I learned the words chasuble, alb, maniple, cincture, amice and stole—the essential wardrobe for the priest-craft.

Every single morning I attended Mass, and even acted as altar boy when the official one did not turn up. More and more frequently he failed to turn up, knowing I’d be there to take his place. I felt privileged to be so closely involved with the rites of the Mass. My devotion to Jesus grew.

My classmates were not so devotional, especially Jill, my sister Liesbet’s best friend. She and my sister burst in one afternoon and caused mayhem by knocking over the box of white hosts kept for the communion rites. Once on the floor, the wafers could no longer be used and had to be disposed of, so Liesbet and Jill filled their mouths with them, laughing loudly and being very naughty. Then Jill decided to try the wine as well. She got hold of the wine bottle and a chalice, and declared the stuff very good indeed. Curiosity got the better of me and I tried some too. It was a special kind of port, truly delicious, and it made us feel very happy and bold. After lifting every cassock and examining every drawer, the irreverent whirlwind disappeared out the sacristy door.

I was amused but also aghast; after all, I had participated and had got a surprising lift from sipping the port. After
that, it was never quite the same for me in the sacristy: temptation was always with me, and from time to time I quietly indulged it. After all, there was confession to make it all right again—only this type of thing you confessed in another parish.

Mother Mary Luke was a good sort, if a bit old for her job and a bit cranky because of her constant migraines. She appeared to have lost all her own teeth, but her thinnish smile was nevertheless genuine. Mother Mary Luke had a wisdom born of considerable teaching experience and dealing with parents and children. She was always in a hurry, never walking but always running, shoulders high and veil flapping as she covered the distance between the classroom and the staffroom several times a day. It was on one of those lightning runs that she flashed me a smile and said: ‘When are you going to wake up, Carla?’

I was stunned. Something about the question stopped me in my mental tracks. She hadn’t said, ‘When are you going to
grow
up?’ but ‘When are you going to
wake
up?’ My English was good enough for me to notice the difference. The implication was that I was asleep; that there was something to be woken up
to
. What could it be? I didn’t know what the world looked like to people who were awake. Her words haunted me, but there wasn’t much time to indulge in pondering this conundrum, as the next two years of school were to be interrupted.

WE CAME HOME
from school one day to find my mother in bed. She was lying in a pool of blood, moaning and delirious. We knew what to do and ran to the convent for Sister Victoire, the infirmarian, a trained nurse. The title ‘Sister’ distinguished worker sisters from the ‘Mothers’,
who were teachers. Sister Victoire dropped everything and hurried over. She wasted no time and called an ambulance, which arrived promptly and took Mother away to hospital. On her way out, she opened blurry eyes and told us not to cry. She was weak with loss of blood from a miscarriage at a late stage of pregnancy, but so concerned that we should not worry about her. It broke my heart to see her so weak, so vulnerable and so thoughtful.

Sister Victoire didn’t seem to think the situation was all that serious. She was a thin able woman with a heart of absolute gold and a steady bright nature that was healing in itself. Her smile made us feel less tragic. Sister removed the bloodied sheets from the bed, as if she did this every day, and talked animatedly to us while she bundled them up and took them away with her. That evening, dinner arrived for the family, cooked by the considerate nuns.

For several weeks I had to look after the family while my mother slowly recovered. She had been given a transfusion of the wrong kind of blood, which had nearly killed her. Being ‘mother’ at the age of thirteen for six children, and looking after our father as well, was no mean feat. My cooking skills were minimal, so I bought a cookbook and some new utensils and started to experiment on our Kookaburra gas stove. Someone could have warned me that it wouldn’t work as the door of the stove didn’t quite shut. There was no temperature gauge either, so I was up against it. But I was determined and didn’t give up for a very long time.

My brothers didn’t seem to mind at all and ate whatever came out of the oven, no matter how burned it was. I loved them for that, but I still developed a complex about my cooking. I fell back on staples: pancakes with slices of apple and covered in treacle, soups, and boiled vegies from the garden.

My father cooked all the meat, as I had no idea whatsoever and still don’t. I can make meatballs in celery soup, though, which was my mother’s speciality. She showed us girls how to make it with great pride, but somehow she always made that soup better than I, or anyone else, ever could. She just had a special knack for celery soup with meatballs.

I wanted to educate my brothers—who slept in bunk beds in a lino-floored room—to make their beds in the morning and go to bed clean at night so that their sheets wouldn’t get dirty straight after being washed. But it was hopeless. They were used to doing the male chores, like getting the wood ready for the chip heater, and making beds wasn’t one. As for washing their feet before bed—well, they might have done that once, but with no shower in the house it was asking too much. All we had was a weekly bath and a daily wash by hand at the sink. There would be no unmade beds in ‘my’ house, however, so I kept up a rigorous routine. If my emotional self was in constant chaos, at least I could bring order into my immediate environment!

At night, I put the little ones to bed. Often I would read stories to my two youngest sisters, who were nine and ten years my junior, or I would just make them up. I frightened them to death with stories of Bluebeard—the same stories that horrified me when I first read them—but when thunder shook the skies, I reassured my little sisters, telling them it was a display of the power of God and our angels were there to protect us.

Eventually my mother returned, but I continued to stay home from school while she convalesced. School didn’t seem to matter an awful lot to me because I had already gone beyond the level we were being taught, and I continued to learn English from books and avid listening to the radio.

LIVING IN A
cottage in the convent grounds, we were fairly isolated from normal contact with the neighbours. The convent, set in one of Melbourne’s most exclusive suburbs, was flanked by large mansions mostly occupied by older people whose children had left home.

Directly opposite our humble gate onto the side street was a modest house with only a few bedrooms but lots of stained glass and high ceilings. In it, there lived a very old lady and her comparatively younger daughter. They had no family whatsoever and were very lonely. Their husbands had died, there were no children from the younger woman’s marriage, and no family left in England, their country of origin. But Mrs Greig and Mrs Taylor had class and a little bit of money, and it was they who gave me my first taste of English elegance and sensibility. My sister and I were invited to go over for afternoon tea and hear the marvellous stories the two women delighted to tell. We were introduced to Winnie the Pooh, to Beatrix Potter, to Alice in Wonderland, and to cup cakes. We were even invited to stay over a few times, and slept in large comfortable beds, a radical change from having to share a bed with my sister, which I did until I left home.