Between The Wars Part 3

By Greg Tuck

In Part 3, Mary Evans is about to graduate from secondary school and enter into university which was not a very common thing for young women during the late 1930's in Melbourne, Australia.She is still living with the Hansens where her mother works as a live-in maid and companion in the affluent suburb of Hawthorn. Australia is just coming out of the Great Depression but war looms on the horizon in Europe. Mary has grown up a lot and matured beyond her years. She is slowly building relationships, in particular, one has become very strong and that is with her boyfriend Michael who is also on the way to university.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greg Tuck
• Release date: Jan 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463945919

Greg Tuck

I am a former primary teacher and principal, landscape designer and gardener and now a full time author living in Gippsland in the state of Victoria in Australia. Although I write mainly fictional novels, I regularly contribute to political blogs and have letters regularly published in local and Victorian newspapers. I write parodies of songs and am in the process of writing music for the large number of poems that I have written.

Book preview

Part 3

By Greg Tuck

© 2019

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, photos and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Photographs are used with permission from the State Library of Victoria.

Chapter 1

How strange was this? Ten years earlier I was a waif living on the streets with my mother and my little brother. Now at the ripe old age of seventeen (happy birthday to me eight days ago), I was going to be one of the graduate students of Rosehill Private Girls School for 1937. Well, I would be if I put my nose to the grindstone for the next nine months. Oh, how my life had changed. 

A fortunate set of circumstances that had begun with my mother's and my honesty and knowledge of what was right and wrong when I spotted a would-be thief attempt to pick the pocket of a gentleman at Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market. Then followed a spate of events that saw us move in with the same well to do gentleman and his wife in their magnificent property, Cloverdell, in Hawthorn where my mother was to be employed as a maid and a companion to Mrs Hansen some ten years her senior. 

I don't know how to best describe the relationship between the Hansens and us because almost from the beginning it was never employer and employee. We all became family members. Mr Hansen was a mix of a grandfather and father. My own father had returned home in 1919 from the war in France supposedly victorious, but he had been badly beaten. He had lost his leg and in the end his will to live. When I was only six and my brother just four, he finally found peace, but we then had no income and found ourselves on the streets scrounging for food and seeking warmth and shelter in doorways and in public buildings on the north-west fringes of the city of Melbourne. 

Now I was living in a quite affluent part of Melbourne and had just celebrated with friends and mentors my wonderful journey thus far. Miss Watson, who’s scholarship prize I had won, had been there. She was a regular at the Hansen’s now, enjoying the Friday night soirees which had begun as a quiet get together and a glass of wine. Now the wine was consumed far more readily and the conversations were no longer quiet and went on into the early hours. Miss Watson had offered her scholarship to the private girls’ school that Mr Hansen had generously offered to pay to send me to. Each year someone in grade five or six, usually six, won it. I created quite a stir when as a grade three student I had outperformed everyone in the school and all other outside candidates. Miss Watson had wanted to know more about me and my situation and thus a ten-year friendship had blossomed between her and my broader family. Her scholarship had paid for all my fees and uniform and school costs to the end of grade twelve, if I chose to go that far. She had also introduced me to six wonderful people, women who had battled against the social norms and mores to graduate with degrees and were top people in their fields. They had my back and gave me quiet encouragement, so the least I could do was offer to share some of the birthday feast that Cook had prepared. Cook was her surname and that aptly described her position in the family, but she was so much more. Her external grumpy demeanour hid a heart of pure gold. Personally, I thought that she should have changed her name to Chef with perhaps a middle name of Nosey-eavesdropper.

Some school friends, my boyfriend Michael and his sister also came. Yes, I have a boyfriend and yes, my mother knows and grudgingly approves. We have kissed a couple of times but, because we are both doing our final year, everything except for the odd game of tennis is on hold this year.

Speaking of tennis, Michael and I played a game this morning at Grace Park in Hawthorn. David is really good and I have improved a lot with his tuition. He was the one who spotted that, although a gifted and talented artist with pen or brush in my right hand, I needed to play tennis with my left hand. I don’t fully understand why even now, but it made a huge difference and instead of being a hopeless clutz I was able to at least give him a game. The dark clouds hovered above us as we played. In February this was rare. If there was to be rain, normally what would happen was that the clouds would build during the heat of the day and then unleash their fury late afternoon. Today they must have set their watch wrong. Grace Park wasn’t very far from where I lived and I had walked down. Michael had walked, a little bit further from his house in Kew where he and his mother and sister lived while his father ran the family sheep farm in the Western District. Just as the first raindrops hit the ground, we heard a toot and there parked nearby was Mr Hansen and my little brother. When I say little, he was now two inches taller than me even though he was only fifteen. Mr Hansen had seen the storm front coming and had driven to our rescue. Michael and I threw our racquets into the back and jumped in after them. David sitting in the front seat turned around impishly and started making kissing faces at Michael and me, until he saw the look that indicated that he had not very long to live once I got home.

People would look at David and feel a mix of sympathy and joy. His almond-shaped eyes and perpetual grin had come about when he was born and he had struggled to breathe. Academically he wasn’t strong, but what he could do to a car and any machinery was astounding and belied his lack of intellectual capability. As a brother, he would tease me unmercifully, but it was all in good humour. No-one could stay mad at him and he never bore a grudge either. He had already learnt some swear words from the place where he was an apprentice mechanic. Mum was annoyed, but he soon learned when he could and couldn’t say anything. His social graces were pretty good except for this morning in particular.

As we dropped Michael off in Kew, David let rip with an enormously loud fart and seemed immensely proud of it. Michael was trying to both smother a laugh and exit the vehicle as quickly as he could. I admonished David severely, only to brazenly hear him say to Michael, Mary may tell me off, but she is no angel. Her farts may not be as loud as mine, but they go on for longer and they smell twice as bad.

Michael just looked at me and his eyebrows rose. I was so, so embarrassed. He turned and rushed through the rain to his front veranda where he waved. I think I saw him doubled over with laughter, but as Mr Hansen left in such a hurry, I wasn’t sure. His driving skills were awful in the dry and he took no prisoners with either other cars or pedestrians in the way. In the wet, he saw that as an even greater challenge and sped up. I wondered whether David was hoping I would be distracted, hanging on for grim life and forget about his comments. To use one of his now favourite sayings, ‘Not bloody likely.’

Rosehill, my school had changed so much since I first started there. It had been called Aldershot back then and, though it was 1927, the school was run like some nineteenth-century relic or perhaps even a Dark Ages one given the attitude and teaching practices of the women who ran the school and taught there. At the beginning of the Depression, in 1930, it financially foundered and was taken over by a group of benefactors and business people, two of whom were Miss Watson and Mr Hansen. Now with two very progressive headmistresses, one in the primary and the other in the separate secondary school, it was now one of the leading girls’ schools around. I had chosen a weird combination to study in my last year there. I was talented in Art. I loved History. English, we had to do, but that didn’t matter as I excelled in that. My main area of talent, strangely enough, was in Mathematics and the first ever male teacher to grace Rosehill, last year had convinced me to continue on in that. Mr Baldwin had the knack of being able to explain to me how my mind was working when I was solving complex problems in my head. I had no idea how I just knew the answer without writing down things on paper. He challenged and extended me in eleventh grade and when he was given the opportunity to stay on full time and teach grade eleven and twelve, I decided that I would stick with mathematics and chose to do two types of mathematics in my final year. Perhaps I should have invited him to the party too, however, I knew that he was sensitive about the calliper he had to wear on his leg because of the polio he had contracted. My life was full of a variety of people and to think ten years before all I had was Mum and David. I didn’t know that people actually lived the way I was living now. Back then I just assumed that most people lived on the streets and scrabbled for food as best they could. On days like today ten years ago, Mum would have to seek shelter much earlier and we would huddle miserably and she’d fill our days in with stories she’d make up. She’d never whinge and complain. She accepted her lot in life and didn’t have time to even contemplate any reason why she was where she was. In survival mode, thinking was a luxury.

After I had yelled and screamed at David and tickled him till tears ran down his face, we went and had lunch and then I settled into the hard slog of studying. I was not the greatest fan of Shakespeare, but at least in history classes, I knew the background of Antony and Cleopatra which we were studying this year. We had been told we were actually going to see it performed in Melbourne so it would make more sense; but that Sunday afternoon as I read and as the rain poured down, the hot desert sands of Egypt were hard to conjure up.

Chapter 2

So, did the girl who waited on Cleopatra hand and foot, Charmion have a family? What is her history or is she nowhere near as worthy as Cleopatra to have more than a mention in the big scheme of things? The slaves who built Cleopatra’s tomb and the foot soldiers of Marc Antony probably had names and lives, but who knows them? The more I read about famous people, the more I wondered why so many others will never be remembered and that includes me, unless I do something absolutely outstandingly good or, as history has shown, something outstandingly bad. In the fifteenth century only two women stood out for vastly different reasons and their names conjure images today. Joan of Arc who united France against the English was later burned to death for heresy only later declared innocent. On the other hand, Lucrezia Borgia is also well known, but for far less saintly reasons. To establish her and her family’s position in politics, she seemed to find her way through difficulties by leaving a lot of deaths in her wake. Even at the tender age of seventeen, I was wondering how I would make my mark on history and perhaps even whether one has to do so. Maybe life was there to be lived and not there as a stepping stone to immortality. Having watched my father die and seen Mr Hansen’s near-death experience of a heart attack, maybe I should just make the most of what life offered.

Mr and Mrs Hansen deserved more than a footnote in history. They had started a business as landlords, buying properties and houses and converting them so that more people could live in them and rent cheaply. They made enough to get by and their tenants were so grateful. When things got tough in the Depression, they employed people to dig up an acre of Cloverdell and turn it into a market garden. The produce of the garden was given as a donation to the Salvation Army who distributed it to the old, poor and the most in need. They should get more recognition than some of the criminals that were notorious at the time, but they would never receive it. Their attitude was that it didn’t matter. They knew, and that was enough for them. Antony and Cleopatra were famous as lovers and for the amount of political influence they had. Henry and Gladys Hanson had already done more to help others than those two did in a lifetime. Such is the way of the world I guess, but it seemed so unfair.

I raised this issue with my English teacher, but she was more interested in the poetry that Shakespeare wrote, than the philosophical question I raised. To get good marks and a possible scholarship, I knew which side my bread was buttered on. Mrs Warmsley also taught English literature, which I was not doing, and she sometimes strayed across to that side in her lessons. Like Chaucer whom I’d studied before, I wished he and Shakespeare spoke normal English. Maybe after we saw the play, I might agree with Mrs Warmsley, but until then Shakespeare would remain a mystery to me. I could only take so much at a time and opened up my beloved My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin. Oh, what a joy I felt when I found that it was to be studied this year. I had nearly worn out my own copy before I was forced to read it this year. When I say ‘forced’ that isn’t the correct word. Yes, everyone in grade twelve had to read it and this would make it my eighth or ninth time. I couldn’t remember which. I imagined myself to be Sybylla, young defiant and very capable. All the other characters were just bit players and like Harold Beecham readily dismissed. As Mrs Walmsley would eventually point out later in the year, all characters in the book were important and you needed to be able to stand in their shoes and see things from their point of view. But that was later. Today, having dispatched Antony and Cleopatra to the deep recesses of my brain where boring things went, I lay back on my bed and morphed into Sybylla Melvyn.

I guess from the very beginning I was a free thinker, one who doesn’t always accept someone else’s opinion simply because they are older, because they are male, or because they are more forceful with their ideas. If their argument is logical, properly put and filled with facts, I will take on board their ideas, but not necessarily change my opinion. Sometimes I’ll agree to disagree, although I rarely say that aloud, especially to Mum and Cook. I know how tough it has been for Mum bringing up two children on her own. She always puts herself last and rarely do I get the opportunity to pay her back for all that she has done. My biggest joy was to teach her to read and she now has a voracious appetite for books. But now, when she says something, I don’t argue with her. I have learnt to take criticism and direction from her without fighting back. Cook, I don’t fight with because she is big and scary and my tactics are to distract her by changing the subject. She is getting pretty wise to my tactics though, however passing a compliment to her gets her every time. Mrs and Mr Hansen, I owe so much too and they rarely need to tell me anything. We have a simple bond and understanding and discussing matters with either of them is like a slow beautiful dance.

My philosophical reverie was disturbed by a cry of pain and some swearing and I rushed to the laundry. There was David holding Mum’s hand under cold running water while he told her off for swearing. Mum had obviously slipped whilst ironing. Ironing was one of her duties for the Hansens in her role as a maid. I reached down and carefully picked up the iron from the stone floor, tested the heat of it and returned it to the stove. I retrieved another one and finished off the last few items of clothing while David took Mum to the kitchen for a cup of tea, the Evans family cure-all. I heard Cook fussing around organising things and then Mrs Hansen came in the back door. She saw me ironing and raised an eyebrow and continued on into the kitchen with a bunch of beautiful flowers from her garden.

Ida, are you all right? Mrs Hansen asked. Mum must have nodded because Mrs Hansen continued, What a clever young man you are David. Cold water was a great idea.

Butter is much better though, Cook began to argue, but she was politely ignored. This was typical of both women. Cook thought she knew best and Mrs Hansen was not going to let her get in the way of David receiving praise for his quick actions. David, if you wouldn’t mind, be a dear and ask Henry to come down and we’ll all have afternoon tea together, Mrs Hansen said.

David must have scampered off because I heard the footsteps racing down the hallway. Mrs Hansen came into the laundry and suggested that I stop and join the family. When we first came to Cloverdell, afternoon tea was always served in the parlour whether there were guests or not. Now the kitchen had become the focal point for us all to get together and the parlour remained unused along with the adjoining dining room. The parlour also contained the piano. Mrs Hansen and I still took lessons there and its other main use was for the examination of the bottoms of empty wine bottles that had arrived full on a Friday night. As Mr and Mrs Hansen had no children and no other family, they generally sought us out for company and thus the centre of the household had moved to the back of the house.

I loved Cloverdell. It had been my home for the last ten years. We had lived on the street for eighteen months rather than lived with two estranged great aunts who ran, as I found out later in life, a number of brothels. Mum had her suspicions after a few months living with them that all three of us were being groomed by them to be unwilling participants in their business. Before that, it was a rented house that was in a sad state of repair and had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a lounge room. However as a very young child, that tiny house looked huge. It is amazing how age changes your perception of things. Cloverdell was huge. It had wide verandas all around and twelve-foot ceilings. Each of the rooms was very spacious and the whole house must have been almost ghostly when just Mr and Mrs Hansen lived there. Cook lived on site and had her own room and rarely ventured beyond that and the kitchen. David and I had the run of the house and our own separate bedrooms. The only places we needed to be invited into were Mr and Mrs Hansen’s bedroom of course and Mr Hansen’s den where he did all his business dealings. Lately, he had moved some of his paperwork out into the main part of the house. I think he liked having people around. I had never been into Cook’s room. Sometimes I figured we needed to be invited into her kitchen. It wasn’t the furniture, the elegance of the design of the house or what for many would seem as opulence that attracted me to Cloverdell. It was the people and the warmth that they brought with them.

Well, Mary, what nefarious schemes have you been planning this wet afternoon? Mr Hansen's voice echoed down the corridor as he saw me in the distance. I smiled at him. He wasn’t back to the hale and hearty man I had first met and who had become a big part of my life. His portliness had disappeared when he recovered from his illness along with some of his exuberance and joy of life it seemed; but gradually, oh so gradually, it was coming back and that made me smile even more broadly.

Chapter 3

History had always fascinated me. We never learned from it and as such, we were always destined to repeat it. The only difference I had found in the case of wars was that we were just getting far better at getting more countries to join in. There was still the lack of justification for them and the people who made the decisions and controlled everything never actually fought. History in twelfth grade was to be an eye-opener about those sorts of people, because we were covering all of Queen Victoria’s reign, from over one hundred years ago to the beginnings of this century. Already my history teacher, Miss Carpenter had shown her colours and thought that this period of time was the most exciting and wonderful period of history. I had my doubts even as she regaled the wonderful scientific advances, the spread of civilisation and the major arts movements. I could counter each of those, pointing out that the improvement in the science of killing humans was not a good thing, that the spread of civilisation was more about colonisation and killing of other societies, and that the arts had entered one of its most staid periods. The Egyptian, Greek and Roman expansions made greater fundamental changes to societies. The Renaissance was the greatest of all arts periods. As for scientific inventions, the basic machines, like the lever, the wheel, pulley etc invented anonymously years before made the greatest difference, as nearly all the Victorian inventions relied heavily on them. I didn’t say anything like that because Miss Carpenter was a force to be reckoned with in the classroom. If I was to challenge her, I would need to back up my assertions with cold hard facts. Besides I was interested in people, not dates and so-called advancements. I did, however, point out to her that medicine had come a long way too. She quickly agreed but even then, I didn’t point out to her that a lot of medical advancements were born on the battlefield. She wouldn’t have liked that.

The more I learned about Queen Victoria, the more I realised that she was a person of her time. Caught between the constraints of being a woman, being of royal birth and forever being told what to do. Things happened around her and despite her using her influence to make some of those things happen, she was given scant regard by historians. She had been forced into a marriage with her first cousin and her children and their progeny went on to rule a lot of Europe and in the end, these spoilt children and grandchildren began the Great War. Somehow, she was seen to blame for what was really a family spat long after she had died.

Within the first three weeks of school, I had read a lot on the background of the royal family of England and it was a convoluted mess of in-breeding and liaisons that were made for political advantage rather than emotional wellbeing. I wondered what it would have been like to have married for love which our former king, Edward the VIII had done. Behind all that finery and regality there were people with feelings that probably could not be expressed. They couldn’t move a muscle without the whole world knowing. I thought that they must have felt like caged animals at a zoo. And all around them, the wealthy were making millions and the poor, as illustrated by Dickens, were treated with contempt. It was the way of the world and always had been, but every generation thought that they were new, superior and different.

Miss Carpenter wasn’t interested in parallels in history. She was interested in the average person, only the history makers. She didn’t realise that everyone has their own history, but very few people have their story told and celebrated. My father’s story would never be told because no-one except he knew what he had experienced on the Western Front and that was what had defined and destroyed his life. In a way, Queen Victoria had a part in his downfall. Her family had been at the centre of why the war started in the first place. With no war, my father would have probably not died as young, but then again, he would not have travelled down from Dimboola to enlist and never met my mother. David and I would never have been born and that was an awkward thought to comprehend when you are only seventeen. My whole existence was due to Queen Victoria’s spoilt petulant grandchildren.

Art in sixth form or grade twelve, was a matter of reading and drawing and painting. I had experimented with clay and sculpture in previous years, but discovered that was not something that I gravitated to because of enjoyment. It was something that you endured because you had to, I was more than happy with sketching and painting and it was safe and comfortable which is what I needed if I was going to do well this year. I guess some people found release in music, dance or drama, but for me, it was art and