Sweet Surrender (11 page)

The 1950s was a period of social repression. In the decades between the war and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, family life was portrayed as neat, clean and harmonious. A woman's place was in the home, and her role as a mother and homemaker had saintly overtones. It's easy to look back and laugh at the innocence of those days, but there was a dark side as well. Women were clearly subservient to their husbands, economically and in every other sense. I can remember in vivid detail how difficult life was for my mother when I was a child, and how she grasped the nettle to change her lot. She was ahead of her time.

Every week, my father handed my mother ‘housekeeping' money that was intended to provide food for the table, buy clothing for the family, and pay a few small bills. After the rent he kept the rest of his not inconsiderable pay packet entirely for himself. It was his responsibility to pay the more substantial bills, such as telephone, gas and electricity. Sometimes he did, but if he lost at the races on a Saturday afternoon the accounts were shoved into a drawer and forgotten until the debt collector or bailiff banged on the front door early Sunday morning.

By the time I was seven my mother decided the family unit could no longer survive unless she got a job. In many ways, working probably saved Muriel. She had some cash flow and could pay the bills. She bought a car to get out and about in, and work provided an escape from her embattled domestic life.

She didn't manage money well, nor did she enjoy housework. Both she and my father smoked and drank heavily, which meant that although there was always plenty of food – and good food at that – there were rarely any new clothes for her or for us children. My father, on the other hand, spent lavishly on his wardrobe. He was a vain man and a dapper dresser. He could easily justify this expenditure because of the nature of his job as a newspaper editor, but in truth his appearance was important to him because he also enjoyed the company of women. It was hard for Mum to address his selfishness with him because he had a fiery, irrational temper and was violent when cornered in an argument. Feisty Muriel was not cowed by his outbursts, but I certainly was. And I have remained nervous of confrontation all my life.

These days, few women would tolerate a situation like my mother's. But in the 1950s, divorce was rare and carried a social stigma. I cannot remember any of my friends in primary school having divorced parents, but by the time I reached high school one or two were being raised by a mother alone. Divorce was mentioned in hushed terms. The women and children involved were pitied and, to some extent, scorned.

A neighbour of ours had four children; one day her husband simply disappeared. At first she spread the story that he was working interstate, but when he failed to rematerialise, even at Christmas, she took to her bed and the family situation became grim. No shopping was done, no cooking, no housework, and the children ran wild. The women in my mother's circle of friends discussed her situation but nobody tried to intervene or to offer assistance. They were either too polite or too inhibited to confront her with the reality that she had been deserted and needed help to raise her family. Eventually a relative came to the
rescue and life for this family improved. Even years afterwards the fact of this woman's separation and possible divorce was never publicly mentioned. It seems almost unbelievable today.

There are now more avenues of escape – supporting mothers' benefits and women's shelters – that didn't exist then. Our society is much more understanding of women in this difficult situation – if perhaps still not as supportive as some would like. The courts generally favour women financially and in child custody, and although this is not always entirely fair, at least it means that women are no longer trapped in desperate or controlling marriages. There is a way out. For my mother there didn't seem to be any escape. She was emotionally tied to my father in spite of his awful behaviour and was frightened of being seen as a failure, by her own family in particular.

Once again, there it is: that terrible fear of failure. Just one of the things I've inherited from her.

My parents' love of alcohol and tobacco was more than just a reflection of the social mores of the time. My father had long bouts of depression and undoubtedly suffered from bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it was called then. He was born in 1910 and died in 1972, and the condition, although medically recognised, was not commonly diagnosed during his lifetime. Bipolar usually manifests in young adulthood with uncontrollable mood swings and soaring and plummeting energy levels that can often end in suicide. Untreated it can be a crippling disease that shatters the lives of sufferers and those who love them.

My father, I now believe, managed his symptoms by self-medicating with alcohol from a very early age. When I was younger, I assumed his obsessive drinking was a result of his job. It was almost mandatory for journalists to drink to excess – it went with the occupational territory. Hilarious anecdotes about the antics of drunken journos, here at home
in Australia, or in London's Fleet Street or in New York, were legion in the mid-twentieth century. These characters, mostly male, seemed like romantic figures. Intelligent, risk-taking, charming and witty. They liked women and they enjoyed the adventure and the kudos of their work. The association of alcohol with this glamorous lifestyle was a heady and appealing mix. It obviously appealed to my mother who, as a beautiful young woman, leapt into this orbit and joined my father in a wild drinking spree in America where he was posted as a newspaper correspondent during World War II. So many of the photographs of them during that period testify to their hard drinking – puffy faces and bleary eyes. My mother told stories of reckless weekend parties and socialising. I'm amazed their livers made it back to Australia intact.

It always surprised me that my mother fell in love with a boozy, unreliable journalist because her own father, Augustus James Angel, was exactly that himself, and you would hope she might have learned to avoid the type. I'm not sure that Augustus rose much above the level of a court reporter, but he certainly enjoyed a drink or two and was unemployed (or unemployable) for long periods, much to the shame of his gentle wife, Ellen.

I was named Mary Ellen after my two grandmothers, who couldn't have been more dissimilar. My father's mother, Mary, was a hardworking, eccentric woman who ran a successful pawnshop business in Melbourne, and kept the family going financially in spite of her husband's failings. My father's father was a bit of a shady character. Mum told stories about him which she must have heard secondhand from Dad. He wasn't a very lovable man – certainly not nice to Mary and their five children – and he died at the age of fifty-three of cardiac failure and tertiary syphilis. I wonder how many generations back this legacy goes?

I don't believe I ever met our paternal grandmother in person, but in the days when she could remember such details from her childhood, my sister Margaret told me amazing stories about her. Mary didn't sleep
on a conventional bed, but on a pile of newspapers and old clothes in the corner of a room above her shop. There was no bathroom and no toilet. Like other tenants of the slum area where they lived, she squatted over a hole in the ground in the courtyard out the back. During the war, when the city was teeming with drunken and sex-starved servicemen on leave, she carried a couple of pistols strapped to her waist. She was a force to be reckoned with, that earlier Mary Moody!

My mother's mother was quite the opposite: gentle and sweet and non-confrontational. She was, however, quite stubborn and proud and possibly, I believe, a bit of a snob. She cared very much what her neighbours in Haberfield thought and was deeply embarrassed by their poverty, going to great lengths to hide the fact that they often survived on food vouchers and other handouts. Mum was a cultured young woman for someone from a lower middle-class western suburb of Sydney in the 1930s. The fact that she studied ballet to quite a high level was amazing, given the family's fragile financial status. She went to symphony concerts and balls in elegant frocks that Ellen, a tailor, fashioned out of old curtains. In our black and white photographs she looks a million dollars, but I know that she gave most of her weekly wages as a secretary and later a trainee journalist to her mother. I suspect my attractive father was an escape from this depressing situation.

Attractive he was. A slender, handsome widower with two unhappy children who needed mothering. A fairly irresistible cocktail for a warm and sensitive young woman. I'm not sure if Mum already enjoyed a tipple when she met Dad or if she gave in and joined him in his daily libations. By the time they returned to Australia after the war she was, by all accounts, a seasoned drinker.

There is a difference between a drinker and a drunk, between a person who is fond of a social drink and an alcoholic. Much depends on the drinker's ability to continue functioning. If someone can drink every day and still hold their life together – still hold down a job and pay the rent – then they can't be an alcoholic, can they? I suspect that's
what my father thought as he dodged and weaved his way through life with a glass in his hand and a flagon under his arm. He was a highly successful professional. Mum constantly reminded us of his elevated status, his high income, the respect that was afforded him in many circles. Then why did we have no money? And why didn't we own a house or car? Why did my parents run out of cash before week's end and need to pawn various household items to buy food and grog? Simple. My father was an alcoholic and it impacted on his life, the lives of his children, his marriage and, ultimately, his health.

I am not sure how much Dad drank as a younger man, but I expect it increased as his income did. I know that when I was a child he always had a ‘heart-starter' around 8.30 am – a couple of shots of whisky on the way to work. He topped that up with beers during the day – a couple mid-morning, a couple at lunchtime, a couple mid-afternoon and a few more on the way home from work. Then he switched to claret, which he drank from a sturdy tumbler from the time he came home until he fell into bed quite early. He never looked very drunk to me – I was used to his florid face and quick temper – but he did look terribly hungover on a couple of occasions, usually after family get-togethers. His reputation at such gatherings was much talked about. I don't understand why he felt it was okay to get uproariously drunk and make a scene at these social events. I was told in hushed tones, decades later, of the night he gave my mother a black eye at her niece's twenty-first birthday. He wasn't welcome at family parties after that. Then, at my cousin's wedding, he managed to get drunk before the ceremony and bop some hapless friend of the family on the nose. Disgraced, he was sent home in a taxi – at vast expense – and next morning discovered he had managed to lose his glasses and his false teeth in transit. In social situations involving his work he was generally better behaved, but I have heard rumours of him throwing a fellow journalist down the steps of the Journalists' Club late one night. The story goes that the man was a dwarf, so I can't even begin to imagine what was going on there!

Mum drank too, but quite differently. She never imbibed during the day, except at the weekend. On Saturday mornings she and Dad would have a beer at the pub in Mosman after doing the shopping. On Sunday morning she would enjoy tumblers of sweet sherry while doing the ironing. Dad would be cooking the Sunday lunch and our small flat would be filled with the delicious aroma of the roasting food and the strains of Beethoven or Brahms could be heard from the stereogram. The atmosphere would be quite cosy – unless they decided to have a brawl after lunch, which was not that unusual. My brother, Dan, and I would retreat to the beach.

I grew up thinking that drinking was just a normal part of everyday life. Somehow I didn't associate it with the fact that we were always broke and that our parents fought constantly and made each other's lives miserable. I associated drinking with coping, with feeling better. If something went wrong, you had a drink. If you felt sad or depressed or worried, you had a drink. If someone made you angry or caused you frustration, you handled the situation by having a drink. In most households when there is a crisis someone makes a nice cup of tea. In our house, a bottle was opened.

Mum used to drink until she got drunk. Sometimes falling-down drunk or walking-into-the-wall drunk. Instead of being mortified, we treated Mum's drinking as a family joke. She was such a fantastically bright and engaging person that her weakness for alcohol wasn't just tolerated, it was celebrated. Instead of worrying about her daily consumption (although I did worry, terribly, in the last decade of her life) we gave her tacit approval by either ignoring it or applauding her outrageous behaviour. Her drinking meant that her beauty faded and she had a raddled, unkempt appearance that was in keeping with her lifestyle.