Roundabout at Bangalow (18 page)

Men students are a minority because of the war and live in a series of guest houses around the city. They can play up and get away with it; we can't. By play up I mean the harmless pleasures of the time, for instance a few beers after the footie. They are allowed to smoke but not to drink, warned by the principal that, if seen in a pub, they will
catch the next train home, and soon.
He has also threatened to sew up all the trouser pockets of those who slouch around hands-in-pockets. These eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds are known as
the men
. To me they seem handsome and sophisticated, gathered outside the side door of the college in breaks between lectures, smoking and laughing. I go out to the pictures with one or two, but my heart is elsewhere, even when I attend the customary Saturday night dance in the gymnasium. Here we have our own jazz band which plays the current hits — ‘Elmer's Tune', ‘In the Mood' and, when it finally reaches Australia ‘Lily Marlene' — as well as our own sentimental waltz ‘Will you be there Tonight at the Dance in the Gym'. Jitterbugging has just swept through the dance halls of Australia thanks to the American soldiers, and we have our own showy and exuberant experts. These are golden days and golden nights, but we don't realise at the time how controlled our lives are.

Women students live in a hostel, S. H. Smith House, named I discover later for the brother of Sir Grafton Eliot Smith, the Egyptologist who donated the mummified head of an Egyptian princess to Grafton High School. Smith House once housed the New England Ladies College, a boarding school for the daughters of the gentry, after which it became a popular guest house. In preparation for its new role as a student hostel, care has been taken (the records show) to fumigate it against
insect pests, bedbugs, rodents, and consumption.
It fronts onto Armidale's Central Park where a visionary nineteenth-century Italian priest, Father Francis Gatti, has planted a selection of exotic trees, one from each country in the world, and now at their best. This Catholic diocese has a history of Italian priests including, as Bishop of Armidale in the late nineteenth century, Eleazer Torreggiani, one of the few Australian bishops to defend Mary MacKillop when the Irish-Aus-tralian bishops attempted to disband her order. Mary MacKillop and the Josephite sisters will have some importance later in my story.

Next to the hostel and part of it is Southall, previously home to a succession of Armidale doctors and the scene of an astonishing drama in August 1927 when I was just one month old. The occupant at the time, Dr James Samuel Frederick Barnet, was skilled in the new electrical therapy. While using it to relieve his own severe attack of lumbago, he was distracted by the ringing of the telephone and, unthinking, picked up the receiver to become, like Michael Browne earlier in my story, a human conduit. I try to imagine him in his last living instant, right hand applying the devilish apparatus to his lower back, left hand reaching for the phone, and wonder who made the fatal call and effectively murdered him.

The doorways of S. H. Smith House are guarded by two oversize marble statues of bare-breasted women, but this is no hothouse of female sexuality; it is as repressive as any boarding school. The warden is Miss E. May Roulston, an imposing woman with an iron-grey moustache, who is determined to turn out models of virtue and deportment, and especially virtue. Our clothes first of all, and it is no accident that our formal dress is a virginal white. We are forbidden to wear cardigans with summer frocks — the height of vulgarity — and counselled against red, a colour which, according to Miss Roulston, is likely to inflame male passions. We must always beware of male passions which are, it seems, always on the brink of
arousal,
and we're given a series of instructions to avoid what must be a painful spectacle. Slacks are unfeminine and suggestive; they are to be worn only in the privacy of the inner rooms. Sleeveless frocks are also banned. We are warned by Matron against sitting on cold surfaces
(bad kidneys and no babies)
and are forever being ordered to our feet. We are, of course, forbidden to smoke. There is no drinking, no
men
further in than the front hallway or lounge, and a strict curfew after college dances and the pictures: fifteen minutes after the last waltz to walk briskly home from the Saturday dance in the gymnasium, and just seven to come back from the pictures. We have to almost run to keep to this, but I know of no-one who protests, and certainly no-one is sent home pregnant. This doesn't stop couples bidding a tender farewell, clutching one another in the shadows by the statues, nor does it stop the statues' breasts being painted bright blue with a blue bag on festive occasions. Eventually their marble breasts and nipples are covered by two cypresses, planted to screen them as quickly as possible.

Perhaps I should pause here and explain our prevailing state of innocence. First of all we don't have the words to convey sexual organs or sexual activity. We would never use a simple three-letter word like SEX to describe something of such great mystery that it can't be named or even imagined. If a thing is not named, it can't exist in the mind, and can only exist in the body as a yearning or lack of
something-or-other.
Nevertheless we spend a lot of time trying to cultivate what we call
sex appeal.
Those who have it are comfortable and self-assured in their bodies, but many of us, full of false modesty, are ashamed and self-conscious. Boys who take liberties — a hand sneaking around under the armpit towards the breast, or a too deep kiss — are quickly labelled
wolves;
they have
wandering hands
and word soon goes around. The opposite are called
drips.
These are the boys who can't stammer out an invitation to the pictures or get up and dance without embarrassment, and whose hands sweat with terror when they do manage to lead us onto the dance floor. Between the two, wolves and drips, we seek the ideal. We guard our virtue with our lives, for girls are divided strictly into
those who do
and
those who don't,
and nobody respects the
girls who do.
Nobody will marry them, and in particular the boys they
do it with
will never marry them. No woman teacher in a country town could possibly be one of
those who do
. So we are in every way, never mind Miss Roulston, our own chaperones.
Virgins we come and virgins we depart
.

I am doubly protected. I am
going with
a cadet journalist on the Grafton
Daily Examiner
whom I've met on one of my holidays at home. He's seventeen and we have promised to
be true to one another,
which means never going out with anyone else, or even holding hands with another. This discipline is practised for over a year, interspersed with time at home sitting hand-in-hand on the autumn-toned lounge by day, and by night locked together under the jacaranda tree, kissing and hugging, yearning for something more. My father casts a baleful glance on this young man, but doesn't say, this time, that he is like
dog's vomit
or
something the cat dragged in
. The affair peters out when I return to Grafton having remained
true
, to find that he is leaving for a new job in Sydney and, not only that, while I've been
true
to him he's been taking out another girl, one who not only has sex appeal but wears red high-heeled shoes.

Our lecturers are benign and helpful. In a biology exam we are required to draw and label a segment of a tapeworm, interesting in that it's a hermaphrodite — that is it has both sexes in one. I don't know how we're going to explain this to the schoolchildren of New South Wales. Carried away, I label the
testes
of the tapeworm as
testicles
but the lecturer, nicknamed Tommy Wog, doesn't even blink as he hands the paper back. The geography lecturer doesn't blink either when her panties fall down during her lecture. All elastic is weak during the war and there are experiments with all sorts of plants, poinsettias for instance, to find a substitute for Malayan latex, now unavailable to us. She simply scoops them up onto the lectern before her, and gets on with the lesson. I stand behind the music lecturer, Cam Howard, in church the Sunday after we arrive and, forgetting that I'm tone-deaf, join in the singing. A few quiet words after the service and my voice is silenced forever. His aversion is girls who knit in his lectures. I knit a whole dress of cornflower blue (three-ply, Bluebell crepe, intricate pattern) hiding adroitly behind a portly girl at the back. This knitted dress is my only musical accomplishment at college. I hate it as soon as it's finished and wear it only twice.

Our training is unashamedly vocational, with only enough theory to be familiar with such concepts as
motivation
and
positive reinforcement.
We have a smattering of pop psychology and talk with authority about
sexual repression
(which we find diverting) and
introverted
and
extroverted
personalities. We study sociology, geography, enough biology to teach nature study, and lots of enjoyable literature, music and art. Speech is considered as important as deportment and virtue. The ideal is known as Standard Southern English, the mellifluous diction of the ABC, and we have regular speech training sessions to eradicate those supposed Australian failings — slovenly vowels and nasal diction. These ideals persist until the early seventies when I'm teaching at a high school and the English master, whose chief distinction is to have played the lead in
A Man for All Seasons
with the local theatre group, the Pelican Players, suggests that I should take elocution lessons to remove my Australian accent!

Our training is based on observation and practice. Each week we observe model lessons at the demonstration school. Despite the saccharine speech of some of the infants' teachers who address the children as
little people,
and the self-consciousness of children so used to being observed, we learn much. We also have six stints of practice teaching during our two years' training. My first practice is at West Armidale, a school dreaded by all because of the rough manners of the children who gather at the gate to chant
stewed ants! stewed ants!
as we make our trembling way through. We are closely observed most of the time but best of all are the times when we are left alone with the class and can make our own mistakes unobserved.

It's useless to imagine that while I'm enjoying myself so much things will go well at home, and one part of me is always alert to the drama being played out there. The first crisis is when my mother has a gruesome operation for an ectopic pregnancy, her second during these years and life-threatening, especially in a small country hospital. She haemorrhages badly and needs an urgent blood transfusion. There is no blood bank and my father's blood is incompatible. Rushing out of the hospital to find a blood donor in a hurry, he meets one of the local ministers in the hospital corridor, no doubt there to comfort the sick. The minister, a large and burly man with the plumped-out features of someone who enjoys his food and has plenty of it, astonishes my father by refusing point blank to give blood. His ministry, he says, is far too important for him to be weakened by its loss. The meatworkers pass the hat around for the medical expenses and one of them, not afraid of being weakened, acts as a donor.

She is barely recovered from this when she leaves home in response to some of my father's more intolerable behaviour. She intends to get a job in Sydney and is sad and bitter. When I get my father's letter I break down completely; it seems that I've only been kidding myself that I'm out of the family morass. I cry torrents to the astonishment of my two room-mates, who are much saner than I am. Then I sit up in bed and write a sodden letter begging them to get back together again. I feel guilty, then and always, for every happy moment that I spend away from them. My father also writes, begging her to come home. The pressure on her from all sides to do what she probably wants to do anyway is too much and she returns. They patch it up and so ensure another fifteen years of misery.

It is 1945 and the war is coming to an end. The big war map of Europe at the college shows the D-Day landings, the advance towards the Rhine, the Battle of the Bulge and the final victory in Europe, but we are still intent on the war in the islands to the north. The map of the Pacific, showing the final battles for New Guinea, New Britain and Borneo, the Philippines and Iwo Jima, is updated and explained to us almost daily. Then suddenly we are stopped in our tracks by the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb and the abrupt ending to the war. We realise with astonishment that a new power has entered the world; that nature itself has been harnessed, not only to incinerate people and cities in one blinding flash, but to alter the genetic basis of life itself. A tidal wave of joy sweeps through the country. The days when the atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki are among the happiest of the war, and I can't be hypocritical about this. The relief is indescribable. There has been so much cruelty, so much suffering, that we don't give a thought to the unimaginable casualties among Japanese civilians, but turn our minds immediately to the post-war world. We are selfish and see things only in relation to ourselves. We imagine that with victory and peace all problems will disappear. The men will all come home; we will no longer go to dances where the only partners are seventeen-year-old beardless boys or ancient dodderers; we will meet all those soldiers and airmen we have been sending
love and kisses to, we will find romance
.

This coincides with the end of our training. We have our final examinations, go to our graduation ball decked out like debutantes in white organdie and tulle, have our portraits taken at Solomon's Studios in Beardy Street and pack to leave. Our results are sent direct to our fathers for, according to the principal, our fathers still own us, and hence they own our results. At our final assembly he announces that those like myself who are just eighteen are being sent to our homes and the protection of our families because of the danger posed by thousands of women-hungry ex-servicemen being demobilised. So I am to go to Grafton where there will be a great surge of women-hungry men returning, while my older friends are sent to places like Trundle and Comboyne where they'll see scarcely one. We have a stirring final lecture where we are reminded of our high purpose. We must, according to the principal,
cherish hopes and see visions
and, most important of all, must
face the moral imperative in all its awful majesty
(his words). We won't be wearing any red dresses after that! The principal also issues a special warning to his girls, for he's protective to the end. We mustn't marry the first farmer who asks us for, according to him, they're only looking for someone to milk the cows. I'll spurn his advice and marry a farmer, but I never learn to milk a cow.