The Most I Could Be: A Renaissance Story

By Dale Kent

'Of all the exhilarating slogans that galvanised women in the 1970s, determined to change ourselves and the world, the one that really inspired me was: 'Be the most that you can!' Even as a small girl, I was eager to be the most I possibly could. This desire drove my life.'

Raised in an aspirational Australian working-class family of Christian Scientists, in the 1960s Dale Kent embarked on a lifelong struggle to fulfil the desire of many women of her generation — to be the most she could be. Despite discrimination and self-doubt, she escaped her controlling family and established an international career as a historian of the Florentine Renaissance. But she failed to liberate herself from the crippling views of women, love and sex she had internalised in childhood.

Craving independence and sexual fulfilment, Kent left her child with her husband and started afresh in the United States on an academic road trip that took in Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton and the National Gallery of Art. Her story, both poignant and darkly comical, traces a counterpoint between increasing professional success, a desperate search for a sexual soulmate and a way back to her daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9780522877670

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Index

PROLOGUE

Handicaps of my birth

Of all the exhilarating slogans that galvanised women in the 1970s, determined to change ourselves and the world, the one that really inspired me was: ‘Be the most that you can!’ Even as a small girl, I was eager to be the most I possibly could. This desire drove my life.

I spent much of it attempting to escape the limitations of my birth. To escape the world of my parents—circumscribed by working-class prejudices and genteel aspirations to self-betterment, and constrained by the intellectual and spiritual straitjacket of the crazy, life-denying doublethink of Christian Science. To escape the dead end of marriage and motherhood, seen as the sole and inevitable destiny of my sex. I would show them I could be anything a man could be. To escape my native land; in my youth, it was taken for granted that if you were any good at, say, writing history or poetry or art criticism or performing on the stage, like Clive James or Robert Hughes or Barry Humphries, you needed to go somewhere else—to England or America—to do it. And if you were a girl, like Germaine Greer or me, you’d have to fight tooth and nail to get away.

I got away pretty successfully, or so it seemed. I rejected the fantasies of romantic love, nurtured by novels and movies, which enthralled my mother; I fell in love instead with ideas, with the history and art and literature of Renaissance Italy. I got to study these in the libraries and archives of London and Florence, where I lived for long periods. My dissertation on the rise to power of the famous Medici family was published by Oxford University Press, and put me on the international scholarly map. Subsequent studies of Medici patronage of art and of Florentine friendship and neighbourhood appeared under the imprints of Yale and of Harvard University, at whose Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence I was first a fellow, then several times visiting professor. In my early forties I moved to the United States, where I taught and did research at Berkeley and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, at the National Humanities Center of the United States, The J Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. I lectured and lived all over the United States, at home in the invigorating cultures of Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York and Los Angeles, as one of the leading historians of Florence in the Renaissance.

Compared with my mother and grandmother, I have had a wonderful life. My grandmother attended a one-room school in the Gippsland bush. She left it at eleven, as soon as she was legally allowed, to care for her seven brothers and sisters, because their logger father had been deserted by his wife, who was said to be flighty. After Grandma moved to Melbourne and married, at eighteen, she raised her husband’s numerous younger siblings, and took in washing and sewing to supplement his meagre income as a toolmaker in a Footscray metal-working factory. My mother also left school at eleven, to stay home with her mother, until she married a man ten years older than herself, with a degree in engineering. Like the mothers in Austen’s and Eliot’s novels, she was obsessed with marrying her daughters well, lest we ‘slip back into the working classes, who have nothing, are nothing, and never will be anything!’ I did and became things Mum and Grandma never even dreamed of.

But the experience of being female, and the view of myself and love and sex that I inherited from them, and internalised, was crippling from the start. By the time I was nine or ten, I was appalled by the way the men and women of my family treated one another, although it was not extraordinary by the standards of their time and class. Each generation of women strove to subdue the next with the same oppressive tactics to which she had been subjected, and they revenged themselves against the men who subjugated them, as by right, by emasculating them, and depriving them of sex. I didn’t want any part of this. I grew up hating the fact that I was a woman.

As for men, I knew nothing about them. Until I went to university I was hardly ever left alone with one. I dwelt in the make-believe world of Mum’s romantic dreams, instilled in my adolescent heart over hours with her in the dark in the red-plush depths of our local Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie theatre, or reading in bed the Georgette Heyer Regency romances she pressed upon me. Despise them as I might, I never managed to liberate myself entirely from these fantasies. I will always remember my shock of grateful recognition when, in The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer acknowledged their enduring power over even the most self-assertive of my generation of women: ‘I cannot claim to be fully emancipated from the dream that some enormous man, say six foot six, heavily shouldered and so forth to match, will crush me to his tweeds, look down into my eyes and leave the taste of heaven or the scorch of his passion on my waiting lips.’ Long before a man touched me, I was disabled from engaging with him as a real human being, or dealing with the contradictions in my own erotic nature. I was turned on by the idea of surrender to subservience, but repelled by the dishonesty of being required to conceal my own complexity and power.

In 1960 I went to university, escaping at last Mum’s all-pervasive influence, and was ambushed by the overwhelming presumption, of which I was previously only dimly aware, that boys were the natural stars in life, and girls were innately less intelligent and interesting. I was outraged. I had spent my crucial adolescent years at an outstanding all-girls school. In my family, women deferred to men to placate them, but we all knew that the women were actually stronger. The constant, casual, unquestioning discrimination I encountered at the University of Melbourne was hurtful and debilitating. Being permanently in fight mode consumed so much energy I could have used more creatively. Before I knew it, rage and pain at finding myself automatically consigned, as a female, to second-class citizenship, dominated my life. At war with a world bent on restricting what women could be, and conflicted ever more painfully over my sexual desires, I struggled to find happiness or peace.

These early-adulthood revelations were shared with my husband, whom I met on our first day at university. He understood and supported my intellectual ambitions. In many ways we were soul mates. But our marriage was ultimately doomed because my upbringing prevented me from relating sexually to a man who was my best friend. After twenty miserable years of repressing my pent-up passions, in desperation I sought escape and fulfilment elsewhere.

I had always dreaded having a child, lest it feel about me the way I did about my mother. My worst fears were realised. Although Margaret turned out to be the love of my life, I was unable to be the mother and wife she and her father wanted me to be. I left her with him when she was thirteen, abandoning her on the threshold of adolescence. She saw me infrequently during her teenage years; and in her twenties, from 1993 to 2000, she refused to see me at all. Her psychotherapist advised her to let go of me, for her own good. She did, vowing to break the awful female family chain. Eventually we broke it together, but only with a mighty effort on both our parts, and after each of us had suffered a great deal of damage, much of it irreparable.

I never got over the breakdown of my marriage and the affair that precipitated it. In my native tradition of epic Irish–Australian drinking, I sought refuge in alcohol, and a crazed pursuit of sexual satisfaction. Mum always said sex was only for men. My desire to prove her wrong, and to find a mate, led me to sleep with more than a hundred men in less than a decade, before I stopped counting. I kept track of my partners, not in any spirit of scalphunting. Quite the reverse. I would lie in bed at night and sadly rehearse the details of these encounters in an attempt to figure out why none of them had led to a real or enduring relationship; why even the best and longest-lived of them had been essentially a series of one-night stands. Was it them or was it me?

Over years of living between Australia and Italy and the United States, I got to know a great many people, and recognised that my problems and conflicts were typically those of my generation of women. After the initial shock and thrill of realising that our own lives could be freer and fuller than those of our mothers, many of us—too far along in those lives to adjust to the more radical expectations of the 1970s, to root out old attitudes and remake ourselves—subsided into partially reconstructed half-lives of broken marriages and compromised careers, or retreated into stoic, lonely professionalism. By comparison with many others, I was lucky. My career gave my life direction even when it was messiest. Even when I divorced my parents and left my husband and child, was arrested for drunk driving and spent two days in the notorious women’s section of East Los Angeles county jail.

The loss of my daughter almost destroyed me. Bereft of all else, I clung to my identity as a scholar, and it was work that saved me. I wanted to distil my profound knowledge of Florentine culture into a book that would help to explain the remarkable creativity of that small Renaissance city. I sought the key to this mystery in the urgent desire of artists and their powerful patrons, like Cosimo de’ Medici, to give tangible form to their own and their audience’s deepest and most heartfelt allegiances; to friends and neighbours, to the commemoration of lineage and self, to the honouring of their God. It took me fifteen years to weave a tapestry of words and images to convey the texture of this culture, in what became a half-millionword prize-winning book. This enterprise sustained me in the long struggle to get back to my daughter that for two decades ruled my life.

In my professional world I battled constantly to overcome the handicap of being born a woman. Most of the academic institutions where I worked were still largely dominated, especially in the United States, by conventional and highly competitive men, whose basic instinct was to score points off female players in the same game. Priding themselves on enforcing a male ideal of outlawing from the workplace all their colleagues’ and students’ quotidian human concerns, they sought to expose what they saw as the soft underbelly of women’s personal (particularly sexual) lives and feelings—to open up a chink in their professional armour that would prove their weakness, mitigating the challenge they posed, vitiating their success. Women were subject to constant harassment in an effort to cut them down to size, to reduce them to objects of male conquest. Many male colleagues acknowledged my academic achievements, but habitually addressed me in tones of flirtation tinged with condescension. They disapproved of me, fundamentally fearing what they saw as my outlandish, if titillating, frankness and freedoms. They persecuted me, impugned my integrity, thwarted the development of my area of study. A handful over the years tried briefly to woo me. They wanted to share in my excitement, but they didn’t want to stick around for the hard slog of adjusting to a woman determined to be the most she could. Especially not if it might prove to be more than they were.

Public attitudes to women, in social interaction and in law, have changed exponentially over the past fifty years. But not as much as many women, especially the young, hope or assume. Increasingly it is acknowledged that women have enhanced the workplace with the insight that our professional and personal selves are inseparable, and that people are happier—and even more productive—when accorded solicitude and respect. However, the study of past societies has taught me that the mills of cultural change grind exceedingly slow. And I know from my own experience that gender roles and attitudes internalised in childhood are not easily overcome, however hard one tries. It may take generations to breed out an ancient tradition of misogyny, as the current upsurge of accusations against past perpetrators of sexual harassment demonstrates. I doubt that many women of my age have shared the surprise of some at the Me Too revelations about recidivist males who still dominate most workplaces.

When younger female colleagues and students embrace me as a role model, I stress that I didn’t achieve anything, in the long and painful process of becoming the most I could be, by suppressing my personal problems or abandoning my personal goals and passions—the traditional male recipes for success. At the height of my professional triumphs, my personal life was a disaster. I refused to choose between life and work and, in the end, work enabled me to survive to live more fully, to achieve some reconciliation with my daughter and my own demons. After fifteen years mourning alone the loss of my family, in the first year of the new millennium I was reunited with my daughter, and now rejoice in the company of my grandchildren, and have a stake, through them, in the future. This was only possible because neither I nor my daughter was trapped in the limited world of women to which my mother, and hers, were resentfully confined. In the end, we had the chance to be the most, the best, we could be, for ourselves and for each other. And in the end, I have come to see my life as richer and more rewarding for having been born a woman.

My story begins with a long, hard look at my childhood. I believe in history. To know what happened helps to explain why; and to know where you came from is crucial to understanding who you are. I have tried to be truthful and accurate in recording my memories. Of course, these are subjective, and may have mutated with time and altered circumstances. I showed the early chapters of this memoir to my sister, whose life has been quite unlike mine. She has been everything from a primary school teacher, to a coat-check girl at the Playboy Club in London’s Soho in the 1960s; the lead singer of a female rock band; an Avon lady; and even, in latter years, a short order cook in the Australian outback. She said, ‘That’s not how I remember our childhood at all.’

If I appear to be the only three-dimensional character in this story, that is not because I did not know, or could not see, anyone else. If I often found the groves of academe to be an emotional desert, the community of those who toil in the small, intensely cultivated field of Florentine studies is a close-knit and supportive one. And before my drunken response, with a broken-off beer bottle at a staff seminar, to the cruel taunts of my former lover made it impossible to stay in Australia and grow old with them, my colleagues at La Trobe University were an unfailing source of intellectual stimulation and affectionate companionship. My whole life has been enriched by an unusually large number of wonderful friends, and shaped by an extensive cast of other characters. But in case they are less disposed than I to share our experiences, I have generally avoided naming or painting recognisable portraits of them.

Dale Kent

Melbourne, 2021

PART I

Learning

1

Growing up between Mary Baker Eddy and Doris Day

‘Self-control is the most important thing of all in life’

The most important thing I know about my parents is this. One very hot December day in 1944, my mother took the tram home from the city to Grandma’s house in Moonee Ponds. She was living there with me while my father Laurie was away building airstrips in the Indonesian jungle, and her younger brother Bob was test-piloting aircraft in the Queensland outback. As she reached the front gate, Grandma, who was standing on the veranda with a telegram in her hand, cried out, ‘Norm, I’ve been waiting for you! Bob’s been killed!’ Mum didn’t cry, although she’d usually cry at anything, like sentimental films, or other people’s dogs getting run over. She just turned quite white, and said, ‘No. He can’t be.’ And then she supposedly said, ‘If only Laurie had been taken instead.’

In fact, Laurie came home to his wife some months after the war ended, when the engineering divisions of the air force had finished dismantling their military installations. I seem to remember a couple of incidents like those that happened to young fathers returning home, all over the world, to children they had never known. I have an image of myself retreating under the kitchen table, asking why that man in uniform was kissing my mummy; and another of me dumping the contents of a chamber pot on their heads while they were stretched out embracing on the back lawn.

Since I was three at the time, these incidents are vivid in my mind only because they were part of the repertoire of tales, told and retold, with which my grandmother Nell wove her mythic image of our family. At its centre was my uncle Bob. His shrine was the framed certificate hung in the hallway of my grandparents’ small suburban house, testifying in thick black Gothic script surmounted by the red Australian crest of emu and kangaroo, on either side of a shield inscribed Dieu et mon droit, that Robert Horace Granger, of the Royal Australian Air Force, had been killed in the service of his country. Grandma wasn’t a patriot; there was too much working-class Irish in her for that. She didn’t trust the government. She was no great admirer of men, either. But Bob was her hero. For me, the certificate lent substance to the shadowy figure who, before he was tragically cut down in the flower of youth, had been the embodiment of all manly virtue. Unlike my father, of whom Grandma would observe every time they disagreed about anything at all—which was often— ‘I never liked Laurie. I don’t know why your mother married him.’

Bob, however, had been the most upright of men, and an exemplary son. ‘He was so good to me,’ Grandma used to say. ‘Not like Norma. Your mother was always thinking of herself. I remember one time we went up in the train to Benalla, Horrie and I, to see Bob, who was staying—he was on leave—with a girlfriend of his, and her mum and dad, up the country. We thought they might get married. Lorna was her name.’ She turned to my grandfather. ‘What on earth was her second name, Horrie?’ It was a Saturday afternoon, when I was about ten; my grandfather, sitting in his armchair in shirtsleeves and socks, the radio at his side and a bottle of Richmond Bitter at his elbow, was studying the racing form guide in the bright pink sports supplement of The Sun, while he waited for the next race to be called. As usual, he had a couple of bob each way.

She was talking to me while she did the ironing. During the Depression, when Horrie hadn’t got much work because the munitions factory where they had met during World War I cut back on production and staff, she took in washing and ironing to make do. She was a marvellous ironer. Unlike Mum. Horrie wasn’t listening to her. ‘What’s that, Mother?’

‘You know, that girl Bob was seeing, what’s-her-name,’ she urged, irritated. He was vaguely considering a reply, but she cut him off. ‘Oh, he wouldn’t know. Anyway, we came up from the station, and Horrie didn’t know where to go, of course, and we walked around and around, and finally there was Bob on the tennis court—he was a wonderful player, Bob, but he always let someone else win, you know, he was such a nice boy—anyway, they were in the middle of a match, and I got faint and had to lie down, and Horrie didn’t know what to do, of course, but Bob said, Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll take you back to the house, and I said, Oh no, finish your match with Lorna, but he did take me anyway. He was like that. Norma, of course, though she never thought about anybody except herself, adored him.’

When things settled down after the end of the war, Mum and Dad moved out of Grandma’s house and went to live in his father’s house on the other side of the sprawling city of Melbourne, in East St Kilda. Nell and Horrie soon followed them, so Grandma could be near us. James Charles Butler, or ‘Old Boy’, as Dad called his father, was a carpenter who had left Ireland as a young man in the 1890s, and tried to set himself up in South Africa. When he couldn’t make his way there, he got back on a ship and sailed on to Australia. Eventually he made a bit of money by joining up with a speculative builder. By the time he was forty, he had enough to build a house for himself, and to marry a rather beautiful, although strikingly sharp-nosed and cleft-chinned lady, far superior to himself in social class and education. All her nephews and nieces—my aunts and uncles, all of whom had the same jutting features I saw in her photographs and were ‘on the stage’—said she had a wonderful presence. Dying of cancer when Dad was sixteen, she converted to Christian Science, and, on her deathbed, made him promise to keep the faith.

I remember Old Boy as a short, round, rather grubby old man riding around the neighbourhood in a trap drawn by a shabby horse, with his two almost identical brothers, George and Walter; they looked like three leprechauns. He had a whole carpenter’s shed—in fact, two—at the bottom of our garden, which was full of crimson dahlias and tomatoes that he tended constantly. His sheds were stacked and hung with every conceivable size and shape of saw, hammer, lathe and vice. Sometimes he helped me build boats out of spare pieces of wood, with string wound round a row of nails for the railings, to look like the P&O liners that we saw off at Port Melbourne when Mum’s better-off friends went overseas. Usually, however, Old Boy preferred to be alone in his workshop, where he pottered around all morning until Mum called him for lunch. We ate tinned spaghetti and baked beans on toast, but Old Boy preferred bread and dripping. Mum hated him eating this. She said he didn’t have to, and asked why he couldn’t eat proper food, out of tins, like everybody else. But what she most hated was when he cut himself working on something he was making, and came to the table with the sawdust and cobwebs Irish carpenters used to staunch their wounds all mingled with the blood on his hands and on his wedge of bread.

Mum said he was a filthy old man, and Saturday nights, while we sat around the gas fire in the kitchen listening to radio serials like Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger—I was called Dale after Roy Rogers’ wife, Dale Evans—Dad would make Old Boy have a bath. Old Boy grumbled as Dad bundled him into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. Then there was the sound of water running, and steam came from under the door, and we could hear Old Boy warbling the Irish ditties of his youth. Eventually he emerged, fully dressed again, and shuffled off to bed. Mum claimed he never washed at all; just sat there on the edge of the bath in his coarse grey flannel long johns, and ran the water and then let it out again.

The whole six years I was at primary school, though the other kids brought their lunch in brown paper bags, I always had to come home. This was because our rusted red corrugated iron back gate opened onto the lane that ran down the side of the school, and I had only to squeeze through the hole in the picket fence opposite, and there I was. One day a girl in our class called Gail Woodger was walking next to me as we went down the outside stairs in twos to the playground; she had a funny look on her face, and she didn’t have a brown paper bag. ‘Where’s your lunch?’ I asked. ‘Dad forgot it,’ she said. ‘Mum died this morning.’

‘Come home with me,’ I offered. ‘My mum’ll give you some.’ We crawled through the hole in the fence together, and when I opened the back gate we saw Mum in the garden, hanging out washing on the clothes line strung from the lemon tree to Grandpa’s larger workshop. ‘Gail’s mum died this morning,’ I announced importantly. ‘She hasn’t got any lunch, so I said she could have some of ours.’ Mum rushed over and swept her up. ‘Poor little pet,’ she cried, the tears springing to her eyes.

After that, Gail and I used to play together sometimes. One day, standing under the elm tree down the bottom of the schoolyard, just near the hole in the fence, she said, ‘Would you like to be my friend?’ I hesitated. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I can’t be. There’s something you don’t know about me. It’s very important.’

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘I can’t tell you,’ I retorted, agonised.

‘Why can’t you?’

‘I just can’t.’ She stood there, scuffing the toe of her shoe in the dust, while I wrestled with the certainty that when she did know, she’d never even speak to me again. But I did want us to be friends. ‘All right,’ I said finally. ‘I’ll tell you. But you have to promise never to tell anyone else.’

‘I promise.’

‘Well …’ I said, not looking at her, fixing my eyes on the white wooden door of our red-brick school building. ‘I … wet the bed.’

‘Is that all?’ she said, quite kindly, but obviously disappointed.

My sister Meryl, four years younger than I, always fought back at bedtime as Mum and Dad smeared black bitter aloes on her thumbs to stop her sucking them, and put her arms in splints so she couldn’t reach them. I used to prepare for bed obediently, scrunching down on the rubber sheet I hated because it felt cold and clammy beneath the cotton one. Mum kissed us goodnight and turned out the light, and then I got up one last time, just as I felt myself drifting off to sleep, to wee in the potty we kept under the bed, in the hope that this time it would be all right in the morning. But usually I regained consciousness with creeping dismay, when I felt the chill of my wet sheets, and I had to lie in them until the moment Dad would march in to conduct his inspection, and find, of course, that I had failed again to control myself. He came in looking grim, and turned back the sheet, and then, teeth clenched with righteous impatience and regret, ordered me to wait while he went to fetch the Black Strap, his oldest razor strop, from the bathroom. When he returned, he sat down on the chair by my bed, and I had to lie face down on his knee, and he pulled up my nightie and gave me four or five lashings. ‘You know I don’t want to have to do this,’ he would say. ‘But self-control is the most important thing of all in life.’

After that I got up and gathered the sheets and put them in the copper in the laundry, and had my bath; and when I went into the kitchen Dad was sitting at the breakfast table talking to Mum, and they would go on as if nothing had happened. Mum served the sticky silver-grey semolina porridge that my sister and I thought was like the Clag we used to paste things at school, and we had to eat it all before we left the table. Meryl sometimes gagged and carried on so much that after Dad had gone off to work, Mum let her leave it. I never seemed to be able to get away with that. And although the Black Strap, reserved for the punishment of serious crimes, was mostly used for my bed-wetting, it was Meryl who one day dragged a chair over to our backyard incinerator and climbed up on it, and threw in the Black Strap and set fire to it with some matches she’d taken from beside the gas stove. Dad was furious when he came home, but Old Boy, whom I had to call Papa Butler, went into his room and came back with a belt he didn’t wear any more, and Dad used that instead. I hated Papa Butler for this, as the buckle was still on his belt and sometimes, although Dad used the other end, it would wind round my legs and the steel tongue would bite into my skin.

Meryl didn’t mind the old man. She wasn’t as scared as I was by his favourite radio serial, which began with the dreadful sound of a door creaking open and then a burst of suspenseful music, over which a very deep voice would slowly intone, ‘Inner … Sanctum!’ Then there was a blood-curdling scream. We couldn’t help hearing it, because while Mum and Dad’s bedroom was up the front of the house, we were in the sleepout tacked on to the back of the kitchen, next to his room, which we had to pass as we tiptoed to the lavatory in the middle of the night. I hated him because he called me ‘Fatty Arbuckle’, after a corpulent silent film comedian popular in his youth. Some of the kids at school called me ‘Captain Buts’ because I had a lazy eye and wore round horn-rimmed spectacles with a black rubber patch to cover it. Since we lived on porridge and tinned baked beans and spaghetti, with cream biscuits or chocolate éclairs for afternoon tea because Mum and Grandma considered them the height of luxury, I was round and solid and Irish like him, and like our surname—Butler—which I also hated.

‘All is Infinite Mind and its Infinite Manifestations’

Sunday mornings I went to church with Dad. We didn’t have a car, so he used to dink me on a small wooden seat, which Papa Butler had made, on the back of his bike. Sunday school was very boring, because there weren’t any pictures, like the brightly coloured felt ones of Jesus and Mary and Jerusalem and the Star that were pinned on a black cloth to illustrate religious instruction at school. There were just plain wooden tables and benches, and a lot of sandstone tablets set into the brick walls bearing texts from the Bible and matching explanations in even more difficult words, all in capital letters, by Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, from Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures. The plaques were prescribed by the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, in America, where Mrs Eddy had lived and founded her church. She was buried there in a gigantic white marble tomb that was said to contain a telephone, so she could let all the faithful know right away when she triumphed over death.

One Saturday afternoon when I was about six, Mum and I were in the sleepout and she had begun to do some ironing, which she hated, when the phone rang. She went into the hall to answer it, and talked for ages, like she always did. I got sick of waiting for her to come back, and crawled under the ironing board to get something to play with, from the big sideboard that Papa Butler had carved himself, with flowers and leaves and curlicues. The iron toppled over and fell right onto my arm, leaving a terrible triangular imprint of scorched skin. I screamed, and Mum dropped the phone and rushed down the hall to see what had happened, and when she saw my arm, she screamed too.

Dad came in from the garden and made me go and lie down, still screaming, on my bed. He sat on the chair beside me with Science and Health in his hand and said we were going to ‘Know the Truth’. Because I was a Child of God, and created in His Image and Likeness, I was perfect. My body couldn’t suffer sickness or feel pain, because it wasn’t real. If it seemed to be, that was because Error had Crept in, and by Knowing the Truth, we could banish it, and heal me. ‘There is no Life, Truth, Intelligence, or Substance in Matter,’ he read. ‘All is Infinite Mind and its Infinite Manifestations.’ By then, Mum was hysterical. ‘We have to call the doctor, Laurie,’ she sobbed. ‘Be quiet, Norma,’ he ordered. ‘You’re Aiding and Abetting Error.’

Mum disappeared, and soon came back with Bill Keane, our next door neighbour, who happened to be superintendent of St Vincent’s, one of Melbourne’s major hospitals. ‘This isn’t calling the doctor,’ she said. ‘I just yelled over the fence to ask Bill if he’d come and take a look.’

I had the triangular scar for the next twenty years, and until we moved away, Doctor Keane quite often had the chore of coming ‘just to take a look’ in response to Mum’s summons over the fence, as we worked our way through the cursus honorum of childhood diseases—mumps, measles, chickenpox—as well as everyday cuts and scrapes.

However, the day I got run over, my grandmother led the great showdown with Christian Science, and the women won. Being very energetic, except when it came to housework, Mum loved organising groups of other women to ‘do things’; her many friends admired her ‘get up and go’. One named Marge had a son with cerebral palsy, the same age as me, so Mum became president of our local chapter of the Spastic Society, and was always doing things, like ladies’ afternoon teas and picnics, to raise money for children with cerebral palsy. One early summer day when I was seven, going on eight, Marge and her husband Charles, who were much better off than we were, drove us in their big Buick up to the Dandenong Ranges just outside Melbourne, where they had a house and a few hectares of garden and bushland at a place called The Patch. Even Grandma was persuaded to set aside her hostility to Mum’s more genteel friends, ‘most of them too big for their boots’, she muttered, to attend a gala fund-raising picnic in ‘the hills’.

Mum rushed around importantly, telling everyone what to do, beginning by surveying the scene and her minions and exhorting them briskly in her fullest, most thrilling tones, ‘Clear the decks for action, girls!’ While they set up the tables and the umbrellas, and laid out the non-alcoholic punch and the cocktail frankfurts and the asparagus rolls and dips that all the ladies had made, I was banished down the long, winding drive through the gum trees to the gate. The narrow unpaved roads of ‘the hills’ were bordered by deep culverts at the edges of the bushland, punctuated every so often by paddocks and houses. The gateways to these, set some way back on the other side of the culverts, were often difficult to see, especially while negotiating all the blind curves in this densely rolling landscape. My job was to serve as a human marker of the spot where people should turn in to the drive.

I stationed myself behind the culvert, but in front of the open wire gate, and waited. Every time a car slowed down, as if searching for something, I stepped forward and waved. The driveway began to fill with cars, and the garden with people, and Mum and Dad and Grandma were fully occupied in looking after them. After about an hour, I began to think of leaving my post and going to ask for a glass of lemonade and a sausage roll. Just then a car came by, at the wheel a lady whom I recognised, but who drove almost all the way past before she recognised me. She swerved sharply, missed the drive, went over the edge of the culvert, and hit the gate in front of which I stood. My right leg was crushed between the car fender and the gate and a large rock meant to mark the edge of the ditch. The next thing I remember was lying on the road with Dad standing over me saying, ‘It’s all right. There’s no need to cry. You’re not hurt. You just think you are.’

‘I want my mother,’ I sobbed, pushing him away as he bent to take my arm.

Then Grandma came galloping down the drive and bored through the crowd. ‘Get away from her, Laurie!’ she yelled at Dad. ‘Call an ambulance!’ she roared at the onlookers. Of course, there wasn’t one that far from the nearest town, so before long we were driving to Ferntree Gully in the car that had been closest to the gate, and I was lying on the back seat with my injured leg on Mum’s knee, and my head in Grandma’s lap, while she poured forth a stream of invective against the Church and all its Works. They carried me into the hospital, and a choking mask of ether came down over my face, and all I remember about the drive back to Melbourne was that it was very long and I vomited most of the way.

Dad had to give in this time. I spent hours over the next few weeks at the Childrens’ Hospital in East Melbourne, having my leg x-rayed and treated. I was confined to a wheelchair for almost two months, and Mum claimed that at one point the doctors thought I’d never walk properly again. There was a deep gash from the bumper bar on my shin, which needed a whole row of stitches, and my ankle was covered on three sides with big, black, puffy scabs. These eventually came off in the bath, leaving large indented patches of thin, wrinkled skin with raw pink showing under the surface. Everyone agreed I’d never be able to wear nylons.

I graduated to crutches, and after I got off those, Mum tried to persuade me to leave the garden and go out into the street again. But I wouldn’t. I had lost my faith that cars would respect the footpath and stick to the road, so every time one came within cooee of me, I’d scream in terror and cling to the nearest fence. I got over this eventually, and a few months after my accident Marge and Charles, who felt somewhat responsible, invited us up to their house at The Patch for a fortnight to help me recuperate. Naturally we went out each day for the statutory country walk, and, of course, the first few of these were a nightmare for me and everyone else, as I shrieked and skittered into the scrub on the verges every time I heard a car coming up the narrow road.

Gradually, however, I began to believe that vehicles would at least attempt to avoid me, and gained a little confidence. I liked Marge and Charles and their older child Beverley; they were warm and kind and patient with Ricky, who was much bigger and stronger than I was, but staggered rather than walked, and because he was also deaf and dumb, emitted hoarse groans and howls in place of speech. I also liked the routine of their house: the games and talks and companionship, and we kids all bundled cheerfully into the bath at night and left to ourselves.

Dad stayed back in Melbourne, as he had to go to work, but he borrowed a car and drove up our last weekend to collect us. He arrived on Sunday morning, and for lunch there was banana custard. My sister and I hated custard, on account of the clotted, shiny skin that formed across its surface as it cooled. But Dad’s rule was that we couldn’t leave the table until we’d finished eating everything on our plates. After countless Sunday afternoons spent sitting for hours over lunch until either we gulped down our cold custard, retching, or Dad had to go and do something else, Mum often gave us jelly instead. But Auntie Marge served the traditional Sunday custard, and even my sister wisely gollopped hers down before it became too revolting. I just couldn’t, so after everybody else left the table, Dad and I just sat there. And sat. All the others had put on their raincoats and gumboots, waiting to walk out into the misty woodsmoke-whisped air of a declining autumn afternoon. Finally, Dad said, ‘We’re all going now. You’ll have to stay here alone if you won’t finish your lunch.’ I was scared to be left all by myself in the house, out of sight of any other, and I wanted to be with Bev and Ricky and my sister. But I just couldn’t force down the custard. Every time I tried, my gorge rose, and I knew I would be sick.

So I heard them all, chattering and laughing, crunch down the gravel already glistening with evening dew, and the house was getting colder, and it would soon be dark. And I would be there all alone. Abruptly I leapt up, dragged on my mac and gumboots, and careened in a panic down the steep drive and out onto the road. I’d heard them decide to go toward Gembrook instead of Emerald, so I took the fork to the left and ran, sobbing and gasping and stumbling and trying with all my might to catch up with them. I saw cars whizz by through a veil of terror. I was too crazed with fear even to remember the golden rule: in the country, always face the traffic. They couldn’t have gone very far when they turned at the sound of my boots scattering the loose stones into the scrub, to see my small, chubby form encased in its shiny yellow safety raincoat, lumbering blindly around the bend, my moon face streaming with the tears that fogged up my spectacles. Auntie Marge held out her arms and I ran into them and nothing more was said; and that night we went home.

The importance of being educated

Nevertheless, Dad was very proud of me—because I was clever and industrious, like him, he said, not silly and lazy like Meryl and Mum. I always came top of the class. He was proud that I could recognise Bach and Beethoven and Brahms at the first few bars, although once when a friend of his called Matt Neminov came to tea and played the piano, they all laughed at me because I thought he was Rachmaninov. Dad listened to those he deemed ‘the great composers’ every night while he worked with his draughtsman’s paper and slide rule set out on the kitchen table. Any other music was ‘rubbish’, he sneered. One evening when Meryl was about six, she turned on the old cabinet radio stored in our room, and tuned in to a pop station to hear the hit parade, which she’d heard about from the other kids at school. Dad heard it through the kitchen wall and, in a towering rage, burst in and turned the radio off.

Dad had done all right in his civil engineering course at the University of Melbourne. Before she died, his mother made Old Boy promise to go without everything else, if need be, to give their son an education. No one in Mum’s family had even heard of the University of Melbourne. Dad sacrificed everything for his studies. It took him a long time to graduate, working part time at a factory, and he liked to tell us kids how, six months before his finals, he ‘lent’ Mum to a friend of his to look after, and didn’t see her again until the exams were over. Then they got married, and very soon after that he was called up, and Mum talked him into letting her have me, for something to do while he was away. We knew from overhearing occasional words between Mum and Dad that after the war he had been offered a job building bridges in America, and had wanted very much to go. But she said no, she couldn’t leave her mother. So they stayed, and eventually he got a position with a firm specialising in pre-stressed concrete pipes, and he worked for them for thirty years, until the day he died.

Dad’s very first day with Humes Pipes Limited was the Monday following the weekend I was run over. After he started working there we were able to afford a car, in which we drove to the annual company picnic in the firm’s grounds at Maribyrnong. An industrial suburb, together with Moonee Ponds and Footscray—where most of my grandfather Horrie’s family, the Grangers, and my grandmother’s, the Hammonds, originated—it lay across the Maribyrnong River to the west of the city of Melbourne and its nicer suburbs to the south and east. The western suburbs were ugly, and smelled of the industries that supported them: the stockyards, slaughtering and tanning, and the meatworks. My grandparents moved away from Footscray, north to Moonee Ponds, and then to ‘the other side’, as it was known, in the wake of their daughter, who had married a man with a degree, to the pleasant tree-lined streets of East St Kilda and Caulfield. But most of Grandma and Grandpa Granger’s family still lived in Footscray, where we occasionally visited their more respectable siblings, like the one married to a bookkeeper, and another whose husband owned a butcher’s shop.

Mum was very proud that Dad was a junior executive, and he was very proud of his pretty young wife in the new dress Grandma Granger had made her for the picnic. Mum and Dad didn’t drink—good Christian Scientists used no stimulants, not even coffee or tea. So they strolled around with us to watch the egg and spoon derby and the three-legged sprint and the sack race, while the other executives guzzled beer from the 9-gallon barrel in the big tent, and the factory workers, many of whom lived in nearby Footscray, clustered around the other ‘niners’ under the trees by the fence, in rowdier, more untidy bunches. Mum regaled us for years with the dreadful story of her encounter that day with her cousin Ollie Hammond, a familiar figure in Footscray on summer evenings, her swollen feet stuffed into torn old slippers, escaping the stifling heat of her little row house down the end of Buckley Street, draping her huge, drooping bosom over the front fence and singing out greetings to passers-by. ‘Ollie was drunk,’ Mum would protest, ‘and dirty! When I saw her standing there in the crowd around the sack race, and she called out Hullo, Norm to me and fell on my neck, I nearly died. I’ve never