Mother of Ten (12 page)

There
must have been some sort of cut off point in our ages when a good hiding was no
longer considered appropriate punishment because Bobby was around eighteen or
nineteen when he missed out on a hiding despite having committed what in my
parents’ eyes was a disgraceful transgression.

He
was working at one of the local sawmills and took his cheque to a local shop to
cash it. It was not unusual in those days for a shopkeeper to cash a wage
cheque for someone they knew. In Bobby’s case it was more because they knew
Dad. Anyway, on this occasion Bobby, who was by now tall, dark and handsome
like his father, saw an opportunity to get some more money. Australia’s
currency at the time was ‘pounds, shillings and pence’. Bobby had a cheque for
nine pounds but he made some simple alterations to the words and figures in the
cheque, so that when he presented it at the shop it had miraculously
metamorphosed into a cheque for ninety pounds. He might not have intended to
keep the money for himself; it is possible that it was a naive effort to get
money for the family.

I
am sure he thought it was a foolproof plan without serious consequences.
 However, being his first attempt at forgery, Bobby’s efforts were easily
detected. The shopkeeper called the police and they contacted our father. I can
only imagine the shame that Dad must have suffered. He did not have money or
status. The one thing he did have was respect. His family on his mother’s side as
well as his father’s side had been in the area since the late 1800s and were
respected and well known. Dad had carried on the family tradition of respect
and honour.  His reputation in the community was dear to him. The
shopkeeper, probably as a courtesy to our father, did not press charges but
Bobby was not home free. He still had to endure Dad’s rage.

“If
you weren’t too old, I’d give you the biggest thrashing you have ever had in
your life. You wouldn’t be able to stand up afterwards for days.”

Those
were the words that began a fierce and degrading tongue lashing for Bobby. If
my father had only realised the power of his verbal punishment he would
probably have used it more often. He had the ability to express the full force
of his anger in his eyes and to make his tone so cold that you suddenly felt as
if he had cut you out of his life and had never been your father. Bobby hung
his head and cowered like a frightened animal. Later, I heard my father talking
to my mother about the incident.

“It’s
a good job he got caught,” he said. “It’ll teach him a lesson. He’ll think
twice before he does anything like that again.”

I’m
not sure that getting caught and having to face the police was the stronger
deterrent in this case. My father’s wrath, scorn and contempt for his actions
probably had a deeper impact on my brother.

The
worry of his teenage children growing increasingly recalcitrant, the anxiety of
his own illness and the added concern of knowing his mother was ill must have
created overwhelming stress for Dad.

One
day in April 1963, Nan became so ill that Mum called the ambulance to take her
to the Orbost Hospital. Unfortunately, Nan passed away before the ambulance
reached its destination. Although Nan’s ill health was a strain for both my
parents, they mourned the passing of this kind and generous lady.

Myrtle
was still grieving the death of her mother-in-law and trying to cope with the
responsibility of seven lively children while burdened with the knowledge that
her husband was unlikely to recover from his illness when she received an
unexpected visitor.

By
this time, her first three children Bertie, Audrey and Noel were adults. 
Bertie was 24 years old, had moved out of home and started work. He had dreamed
of one day being a surgeon or a pilot. Unfortunately, the family did not have
the money to help him realise his dreams. Instead, he had been enrolled in a
technical college.

Like
his brother, Noel also had dreams for his future which he was unable to pursue.
He wanted to be a scientist but was told by the superintendent at Ballarat
Orphanage that he had to attend the local technical college. Noel stuck it out
for eighteen months but eventually left to get a job at Myttons Ltd, a local
cutlery manufacturer. Ballarat Orphanage was no longer his home as he had moved
into a hostel at the age of fifteen. He still had no inkling that he had a
brother and a sister and no knowledge of his mother and seven half-siblings who
were living in the same state of Victoria.

Audrey,
now twenty two, had also left the orphanage where she had grown up. At the age
of fifteen she became a mother’s helper with the Rodgers family in Albury. She
looked after the babies and did the housework but was not treated like a slave.
They showed her the same respect and love as any other member of the family.
Not surprisingly, Audrey was happy living there.

When
Audrey’s term as mother’s helper to Eileen Rodgers came to a close, Audrey did
not want to leave the Rodgers family and return to the orphanage. Had she been
sent back she might have stayed at the orphanage as part of the staff for the
rest of her life as some of the girls did. Instead, she continued on with the
Rodgers family where she remained for approximately four years.

Eileen
Rodgers, who was the closest Audrey came to having a mother, earned a warm
place in her heart. However, Audrey’s burning desire to know her family, which
had been with her all her life, remained strong. Through her paternal
grandmother, she found out her father was living in Ipswich. The Rodgers family
did everything they could to help Audrey become reunited with her biological
family. Eileen Rodgers’ brother drove her from Albury to her father’s house in
Ipswich, a distance of over 1300 kilometres. Here, Audrey was reunited with her
brother, Bertie, after more than fifteen years. Neither of them knew about
their younger brother, Noel.

Audrey
stayed with Henry Bishop and his second wife in Ipswich although she was not
entirely happy there. After a couple of years, she made her way to Sydney in
NSW. She was an attractive young woman with an interest in fashion which was
reflected in her elegant dress style. No doubt these attributes helped her land
a job with David Jones Ltd, a well known Australian department store. In the
1960s, Audrey worked in their glove department and in later years in the shoe
department before moving into the hospitality industry. During this time,
Audrey intensified her search for her mother. Eventually, she found out
Myrtle’s address from Etti Webb and began writing to her in Orbost although
Myrtle did not reply to her letters.

When
Audrey set off to travel around Australia with a boyfriend she decided to
include the small township of Orbost in their itinerary. Myrtle did not know
that her eldest daughter was about to knock on her door. Orbost has only one
main street where the shops are located so it was not difficult for Audrey and
her boyfriend to find their way around. They asked for directions from the
local shopkeepers and arrived at 61 Salisbury Street, which was only 500 metres
away, sometime after lunch. I am sure Audrey’s expectations of this meeting
were high. All her life she had yearned for a mother. She was about to be
reunited with the woman who had given birth to her and nurtured her through her
first tender years.

The
conditions were not ideal for this meeting. Apart from being unannounced,
Audrey had her boyfriend with her. Perhaps this was a conscious choice to
provide her with support for a meeting that must have filled her with
apprehension and anxiety. What do you say to your mother after so many years of
separation? Apart from the awkwardness of not knowing how to relate to her, she
might have feared her mother would reject her. That would have been too great a
trauma to face alone. As it turned out, her mother did not reject her. Yet
their reunion must have fallen far short of Audrey’s expectations.

Myrtle
invited Audrey and her boyfriend in.

“Would
you like a cup of tea, love?” she said.

Offering
a cup of tea was the usual ice-breaker in country areas and it was familiar
ground for Myrtle. I suspect this was her way of coping with what must have
been quite a shock. Separated mothers often cannot face the trauma of meeting
their children years after they have been taken from them.

Murray
Legro from Ballarat whose mother was forced to give him up for adoption at six
weeks of age spent years searching for his birth mother. When he finally
located her, the idea of meeting her estranged son as an adult was too much for
his mother.

 ‘We
had four letters, two phone calls,’ he writes on the website
ABC Open:
Separated
, ‘then her sister rang up and said she can't handle it, so I
backed off.’

Despite
the potentially unfavourable conditions, Myrtle and Audrey spent a pleasant
afternoon together although no serious issues were discussed. Audrey told
Myrtle about her work and her plans for the future. Myrtle listened and laughed
and joked with her. It was getting close to 3 p.m. when Myrtle stood up and
hinted that it was time for Audrey and her boyfriend to leave because the
children would be ‘getting home from school soon’.

I
can only imagine the hurt Audrey must have experienced when her mother said
this. She could never have envisaged that the joyous, yearned for reunion with
her mother would end in such a way. It also shocked me to discover that Mum
could have been so apparently insensitive. I was even more bewildered by the
fact that she had not taken this opportunity to welcome her daughter back into
her life. I remained mystified until I started to research the lives of other
women who had had to give up their children.

One
of the many publications that helped me to understand how Mum was able to cope
with her situation was
Silent Violence: Australia’s White Stolen Children
,
a thesis by Merryl Moor of Griffith University.  I was interested to read
the following quote from ‘a Sydney birthmother and researcher’ in Moor’s
thesis: ‘...The loss of a living part of oneself creates in the mother a level
of trauma and anxiety so great that the mother must manifest a false self in
order to survive. The experience essentially becomes ‘something that happened
to someone I used to be’.  The mother blocks the experience ... She
remains suspended and, therefore, silent unless a trigger event occurs and
forces her mind to face her loss.’

This
fits very well with what happened to my mother. The loss of her first three
children became something that happened to someone she used to be. With her
other self locked away in some lonely abyss, her false self was able to live a
full and productive life as a ‘normal’ mother.

This
might also explain why Myrtle discontinued her attempts to keep in touch with
her children when they were young. She would not have known where Bertie was after
he moved to Queensland and she probably did not know where Noel was but she did
know where Audrey was. She was an excellent and regular letter writer. Why
didn’t she write to her daughter? Was it because that part of her life had to
remain locked away in order for her to cope?  

When
the first letter had arrived from the adult Audrey, Myrtle must have had to
face her past and the secret she had kept under psychological lock and key. I feel
sure that she would have done some soul searching. Her false self must have
been threatened. The thought of having to face her loss and having to reveal
her secret would have been too traumatic to bear. She would have had to
confront the shame and guilt and possibly self loathing she felt because she
had not been a mother to her three children. Her feelings would have been
similar to other mothers forcibly separated from their children who, in the
words of a mother quoted in the Moor thesis, ‘suffered feelings of never being
a good enough person or mother to my other children’.

Another
mother, Jenny, whose story is recorded in
Releasing the Past: Mothers’
stories of their stolen babies
, reflects that she was ‘Burdened by a deep
sense of worthlessness, of not deserving or belonging in my own good life, my
constant fear was that of losing those I loved — a fear that they, too, would
be snatched away.’

This
is a fear Myrtle would have lived with; the fear that revealing her secret
might result in the loss of her new family. She risked losing the love and
respect of the children she now had. Like Jenny, she probably also had a fear,
irrational but nevertheless real to her, that her children would be taken from
her as her first children had been. A deep rooted fear of losing her subsequent
children was something a separated mother often had to live with.

Also
on the website
ABC Open: Separated
, is the story of Julienne; a mother
whose baby had been taken from her at birth:
‘
I lived in constant fear of critical
neighbours and teachers who might be instrumental in the removal of the
children of my marriage.’

For
all of these reasons and perhaps more, Myrtle changed the word ‘Mother’ to
‘Aunty’ on the letters and postcards Audrey sent her. I found several of them
in her papers after her death. Audrey had addressed them as ‘Dear Mother’ but
Myrtle had written over the word ‘Mother’ and altered it to ‘Aunty’. This
simple change meant that she was able to keep her false self intact without
actually rejecting Audrey. I believe that in her mind she became Audrey’s
aunty. When Audrey arrived at her home that afternoon, Myrtle met her not as
her mother but as her aunt.

On
the day Audrey arrived to be reunited with her mother I was at Orbost High
School, only a block away from our house. Yet the sister I did not know
existed, had come and gone without me even knowing. Once again, Myrtle proved
to be an expert at keeping her secret. My father, by now only doing light
duties, was at work the afternoon Audrey came. I suspect my mother did not tell
him about her daughter’s visit given his state of health and the fact that her
secret was probably never discussed after they left Albury in 1944.

Audrey
continued to write to Myrtle but her mother did not respond even though Audrey
pleaded with her to write back. However, when I went through Myrtle’s documents
after her death I came across the photos Audrey had sent of herself as well as
several slips of paper with Audrey’s various Sydney addresses written on them
in Myrtle’s handwriting. Did she intend (or want) to write to Audrey or did
keeping her letters, photos and details of where she lived help Myrtle to
maintain a connection with her daughter from a safe distance?