Unconditional Love Page 3

  I only remember Grandma Wood panicking once. I was having a bad asthma attack and trying to climb onto the back of the couch, then the windowsill, to get more air. I thought if I could just climb high enough, I would be able to breathe. I could hear Grandma talking on the phone, in tears. Then I was in her steamy bathroom as she calmed me down until I could breathe again.

  When I was ten or eleven a doctor arrived at our house with a powder called Intal and a blue puffer that dispensed an aerosol called Ventolin. These two medicines changed my life.

  Sometimes we took Mid on an outing. When the National Gallery of Victoria opened on St Kilda Road in 1968, Mum decided Mid would love it. I remember being terribly excited when I saw the giant wall of falling water at the gallery’s entrance. Mum said we could touch it, as many other visitors were doing, so we put our hands against the enormous window and the water streamed down over our fingers.

  Inside, we headed straight to ‘The Pioneer’, a triptych by the famous Australian Impressionist painter Frederick McCubbin. Mum told me the story of the three paintings. In the first panel, a man tends a campfire, while a woman sits beneath a tall gum tree. She looks exhausted and maybe a little fearful. Mum told me she loved the painting because it reminded her of Taberatong. Grandma Mid said her parents had bought their own land and started out their married life just like the couple in the painting.

  The second panel shows the man sitting on a felled tree, his axe resting beside him. He looks up at the woman standing next to him, who is holding a baby. They are talking, it seems. Mum pointed out that in the background there is a cottage, probably the family’s home. Grandma told me that her father had built the Taberatong homestead out of wattle and daub; as the family grew, he simply added more rooms. Denis Tobin felled trees and cleared his land at Limekilns, just like the man in the painting. Grandma told me how her own grandma had also grown up in the bush. On Sundays, her father would hitch a couple of felled trees to his bullock, Ebenezer. The family would sit on the branches of the trees in their Sunday best while Ebenezer pulled them into town, before stopping outside the church.

  The final panel of ‘The Pioneer’ shows a young man studying a grave, the city of Melbourne, circa 1905, visible in the distance. I assumed the man was looking at the grave of his wife, but Mum disagreed. She thought too much time had passed, given the city on the horizon, and that the man was a stranger, passing through, knowing nothing of the pioneers who had come before him. So many possible stories in three images. I loved the mystery, and the feeling of isolation, but most of all I loved the colours, that particular misty grey-green of the Victorian bush.

  Soon after we returned to Melbourne, Dad changed. It might have been the death of his father, or something else I may never discover, but he seemed irritable and on the verge of anger all the time. Tall, with a booming voice, he was very frightening. He would have such rages that Greg, Kathy and I would avoid him when he was at home. Almost anything could provoke his yelling and cursing. I remember feeling confused about my feelings for him. When he went away on a business trip for ten weeks, it was as if we were on holidays. The atmosphere at home relaxed, and Mum seemed more playful. She would take us out to restaurants for surprise dinners, and she didn’t mind if we made a mess. When Dad came back from his trip we became nervous again.

  I remember trying to talk to Mum about it. I waited until I was with her in the car. I rehearsed what I was going to say over and over, but when I opened my mouth, it came out wrong.

  ‘Mum,’ I said casually from the back seat, ‘sometimes I think I love Dad more than I love you.’ Oh no. I meant to say the opposite: that Dad scared me, and I was upset when I thought about this. How did I get my words so mixed up? Before I could blurt out a correction, Mum stopped the car and took the keys from the ignition.

  Without turning around, she said, ‘That’s perfectly okay, Jossy. You don’t have to love me as much as you love Daddy. Your dad loves you too.’

  ‘No!’ I protested. ‘I said it wrong. I meant to say I love you more than I love Dad!’

  ‘It’s okay, Jossy,’ said Mum.

  She didn’t believe me. I could not unsay my words. Now she would always believe a falsehood, even though I was so close to Mum that we sometimes felt like the same person. I should never have opened my stupid eight-year-old mouth. Words fail sometimes. This bungled conversation has haunted me my whole life.

  In primary school, sporting ability seemed to be what mattered most. In a running race, I was immediately out of breath and would have to stop. Or I would fall over. I was uncoordinated, which also made me unpopular when it came to relay races. In netball, I could throw the ball, but never catch it. Yes, I was one of those kids who was always the cause of exasperation or disappointment for the other kids on the team.

  One girl in my year was worse at sport than me. Her name was Sian Pretty. (She was very pretty, actually.) She was pigeon-toed and couldn’t see well. We were always the last two kids chosen for any event and we always came last and second-last. We bonded over our sports-deficient status, soon accustomed to the public humiliation of sports carnivals.

  When I was in Grade Five, Heatherdale Primary School School decided to introduce walking as a sport. Sian and I were picked for the inaugural walking team. If we competed in the walking races, we would no longer have to participate in any running sports. That was the deal. Finally! Every lunchtime a sports teacher would make us train: we speed-wobbled around the playground. The other kids found it hilarious. My sister Kathy jogged alongside me, cheering me on. She was desperate for me to win this embarrassing race.

  On the day of the sports carnival I tried to feign illness. Mum knew I wasn’t sick and forced me to go to school. My best friend, after Kathy, was a feisty girl called Anita MacDonald. She was a week older than me, lived next door and had curly red hair and a dramatic personality. She and Kathy were so excited about me competing in the walking race, it was all they could talk about. I just wanted it to be over. The race began: twenty ten-year-old girls waddled like speedy ducks along the track. One of the sports teachers called the race through a megaphone. No doubt he was amused by our performance. Before I knew it, I was inexplicably in front. Me! This was bizarre. I remember thinking that I may as well stay in front and win. I waddled as fast as I could.

  Soon, I noticed that Kathy and Anita were jogging beside me, along the outside of the track. ‘Oh no!’ they were shouting. ‘Look at Jossy! Her face is all red! She’s going to die! Please God, don’t let her die!’ Were they joking? Or did they really believe I was going to die? On my left appeared Sharon Williams, a sandy-haired tomboy. She was one of the girls who bullied me, always coming up to me in the schoolyard and poking me hard in my chest. It hurt! I felt a hitherto unknown competitive streak stir inside me. I decided I had to beat Sharon to the finish line.

  Miracle of miracles, Sharon tripped and face-planted on the track. I swear I didn’t trip her up. I was in front again! The kids who usually laughed at my ineptitude were now cheering for me. It was amazing. I was being cheered on! I crossed the finish line as the winner of the inaugural Heatherdale Primary School Walking Race. Kathy and Anita collapsed to the ground with relief. The next thing I knew a teacher was pinning a blue ribbon to my sports uniform. Kathy was more proud of my blue ribbon than of any of the ribbons she had won over the years.

  Feeling like an outsider influenced my world view. I accepted I was different from a lot of kids, but I didn’t let it ruin my life. So what if I wasn’t sporty and didn’t look like a Barbie doll. I had a brain, ideas and a strong imagination. And before too long I discovered I was good at music.

  According to Mum, when I was four, I threw my toy piano across the room in a rage. When Mum asked me why I hated my piano, I told her it was not working. The piano didn’t have the right notes. Mum didn’t understand at first; the piano was not missing any keys. She soon worked out the problem: I was trying to play a melody by ear, a melody with a lot of semi-tones (black notes). The
toy piano only had full tones. My musical attempts were being thwarted. So Mum bought me a toy piano with black keys and decided I should have piano lessons. I loved learning to play the piano. I practised all the time, and even enjoyed theory lessons. A whole new world was opening up to me.

  When I was about nine, I came home from school to find a strange black box in the lounge room.

  ‘It’s surprise for you, Jossy,’ Mum said with a secretive smile.

  I walked over to the box, which was curved, with a handle. It was the size of a small child. The size of me. I crouched down and opened the lid to see smooth, honey-coloured wood, steel core strings, and black wooden pegs. It looked like a big violin.

  ‘It’s a cello. A three-quarter-size one, a kid cello,’ Mum explained. She pulled the instrument out of the case and unscrewed the pointy metal rod at the bottom so she could adjust it to my height. I sat on a chair. Mum showed me how to position the cello between my legs, then how to place its smooth neck against my left shoulder.

  I was excited. I didn’t really know what a cello was, but a few days later I was having lessons. My teacher, Mr Hillman, a short man with glasses and a strong Scottish accent, came to our house once a week. He told me he was born in the Shetland Islands. I imagined Mr Hillman as a boy, living with hundreds of Shetland ponies. I wondered why he had ever left such a wonderful home.

  I had to learn how to use the cello’s bow. It was made of black wood and horse hair. When Mr Hillman told me this, I imagined Shetland ponies donating their hair to make my bow. I learned how to apply amber-coloured resin to the bow hairs so they could get a grip on the four cello strings. After a few weeks of practising, the fingers on my left hand had grown callouses from pressing down on the strings. If I squeezed the ends of my fingers, I could make them pointy and convince Kathy I was a demon.

  After a year or so of playing the cello, my neck started hurting. Mum took me to see a chiropractor, a quiet, stern man. She might as well have taken me to see the bogeyman. The walls of his treatment room were covered with strange diagrams of skeletons. I had to strip down to my singlet and undies. Mum was always close by, but I was frightened. His hands were cold and he kept commenting on my spine. He told Mum I had mild scoliosis either caused by, or predating, my cello playing. I had to return every week to have my spine prodded and crunched. I dreaded the moment when the chiropractor would crack my neck. I was convinced that one day he would break my neck. Sometimes I would beg him not to crack it, but Mum calmly explained that I would be all right. Crunch! My head was yanked at an odd angle, then I was allowed to leave. To this day I refuse to see chiropractors.

  Once I could play the cello reasonably well, Mum told me I would be joining the orchestra at Vermont High School, where she was a teacher. I was still at Heatherdale Primary, but Vermont needed an extra cello and Mum volunteered me. Even a baby cello would work. At first I was nervous about playing with the big kids, but soon that didn’t bother me. I discovered the joy of making music with a group of musicians. I loved playing the bass notes and melodies, while the violins and woodwind instruments provided the higher melodies. Playing my part with forty other students, all contributing to the creation of something beautiful, was an unforgettable joy.

  I also became transfixed by our conductor, Janet Osborne, a shapely, golden-haired teacher (think Adele). At school concerts she always wore a fabulous black dress with pleated bat-wing sleeves that flapped and shimmered dramatically when she waved her arms. Somehow, she kept her eyes and ears on all of us. She always knew if we were not playing at the correct tempo, or out of tune. Studying clever Mrs Osborne became my favourite thing about orchestra practice. Later, in high school, she taught me music theory and basic composition.

  Around this time, I used to see a dramatic figure on our black-and-white television, an orchestra conductor named Hector Crawford. In his mid-fifties, Hector had a hook nose and an impressive mane of white hair. There was something of an eagle about him. He had tremendous charisma. I started thinking that perhaps I would become a conductor when I grew up. A job where you got to tell people what to do seemed appealing to me. My family nickname was already ‘Bossy-Jossy’.

  A couple of years after we returned from Lae, Mum began yearning for a bush block, a bit of nature. She felt stifled in the suburbs and persuaded Dad to buy twenty acres near Kinglake, fifty kilometres north-east of Melbourne. Sitting on the property was the shell of a never-finished one-room cabin, a wooden skeleton of a dwelling, greyed with age. We kids would dare each other to walk on the floor beams, always in fear of falling through to the ground. Mum and Dad set about hammering fibrocement sheets onto the wooden structure. Next came a corrugated-iron roof, a chimney, and finally floorboards. They installed an old pot-belly stove and let me paint pictures on the fibro walls. We loved our cosy cabin.

  Soon we were going every weekend, all piled into one room. We kids woke to the smell of bacon and eggs on the pot-belly stove and hot cups of tea in enamel mugs. During the day, Kathy, Greg and I wandered around the property. Greg made slingshots out of the bendy young gum trees. He would climb up a sapling until his weight pulled it towards the ground. Then he got Kathy or me to grasp hold of the sapling. ‘Hold on tight!’ he reminded whichever sister he was hoping to turn into a projectile. Then he let go of the trunk. The sapling sprung upright, pulling the trusting little sister with it. We giggled and squealed as we bounced around among the leaves. If we didn’t hold on tight we would go flying through the air. It was great fun. Once I slammed into a nearby tree and got a black eye. Dad joked that I looked like I had been in the boxing ring with Lionel Rose.

  Down by the dam, there was an area of partially cleared land. Mum and Dad spent all day there, digging out the bracken ferns. Mum experimented with burning off. After one small fire almost grew into a large fire, she decided not to try it again. Dad became a bit of a woodsman during this time. I found it hypnotising, watching him cut down trees. First he cut triangular chunks out of the trunk with his axe, deeper and deeper into the wood until only a small section of trunk was holding the tree upright. Then he gave the trunk a mighty shove. With a loud crack and a whooshing of leaves and branches, the tree came crashing down. We all dragged the tree over to a pile that grew larger every weekend. Kathy and Greg and I loved playing on the pile of trees. We would balance on top, sometimes slipping and plummeting into leaf-filled holes. We never thought about spiders and snakes. Only fun.

  One day I found a little hatchet that Dad had bought to trim off branches. I thought it was an axe for children. I had a kid-sized cello, so why not a kid-sized axe? I asked Mum and Dad if I could try cutting down a tree. To my surprise, they said yes. Mum later told me it was a sure way to keep me occupied. She suggested I start with a sapling, as a tree would take someone my size a week. So I chose my victim. It was a slender thing, its trunk the circumference of my forearm. I followed Dad’s technique, chipping away chunks from the tree. After what seemed like a couple of hours, I had not made much progress. I suspect the hatchet was blunt. But I was determined. I remember thinking, My parents are so sure a little girl cannot cut down a tree on her own. They think I will give up. They think I am weak. Well, I’ll show them. Family members came and went, checking on my progress. Mum brought me drinks. Dad brought me lunch. I was halfway through the sapling, my hands blistered, my face covered in sweat, when Kathy ambled along.

  ‘You must really hate that tree,’ she remarked in a bemused tone.

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘Then why are you torturing it?’

  I looked at the half-chopped tree and felt a rush of shame. I put down the stupid hatchet. Poor sapling.

  ‘Can we go and plait Cousin It’s hair?’ asked Kathy. ‘Cousin It’ was our name for a type of long grass tussock, in honour of the hirsute creature in The Addams Family TV show. Our favourite group of tussocks grew in a part of the property we called the fairy glade, where there were lichen-covered boulders and carpets of green moss, like something out of a chi
ldren’s book illustration. We found some Cousin Its and set about braiding the grass. Kathy couldn’t really plait, so she just twisted the grass and declared she was making a French roll. Meanwhile, I was hoping the sapling would survive my burst of destructive megalomania.

  One weekend, while Mum and Dad cleared bracken, Kathy and I were stomping back through the knee-high grass with water for them. They were standing stock-still. Mum’s face was full of fear. ‘Don’t…move,’ she said in a quiet voice. I knew to obey that tone. Kathy and I froze. Something was wrong, but we didn’t know what. Then we saw it. A black snake, its head and red belly swaying a couple of feet in the air. It was waiting for Dad to move, preparing to strike. We all stayed motionless; Mum, Dad, Kathy, the snake and me. The bush was silent, but for the high-pitched buzzing of cicadas.

  After about a minute, the snake lowered itself and slithered away into the grass. Mum and Dad quickly herded us back to the cabin, where Mum told us that if the snake had bitten Dad, it would have been almost impossible to get him to the car before the venom killed him. ‘It’s a good idea to stomp when you walk through the bush,’ she said. ‘Never surprise a snake.’

  While Greg, Kathy and I wandered through the bush, finding new ways to hurt ourselves in the name of fun, Mum and Dad were fencing off paddocks. It was all part of Mum’s grand plan: she wanted to become a donkey-breeder. She had heard that pet-food companies rounded up Northern Territory feral donkeys, camels and horses for cheap meat, and trucked them to Melbourne. Mum wanted to rescue a few of the doomed donkeys. She bought four of the bedraggled creatures cheaply and they came to live on our block of land in Kinglake.

  The donkeys were completely wild and would not come anywhere near us. Mum was patient. She had watched her grandfather and father tame wild animals, and she was going to teach us how to do it too. One weekend she told us to sit by the fence, all day, where the donkeys could see us. It was boring, but fascinating. We gave each donkey a name. The big grey jenny was Dolly, and the chocolate-brown one was Lollipop. Then there was Sebastian, a young, headstrong Jack, and a grey gelding, Kismet. The next time we visited we brought lucerne, hay, apples and carrots. We sat a short distance away from the food, and waited. After an hour, the donkeys came over to eat their treats. If we tried to move closer they galloped away, but returned soon enough to eat the food. We would inch closer. This went on over many weeks until Mum had the donkeys eating out of her hand. Then she was putting rope halters on them, and leading them around the paddock. Mum taught us how to brush down the donkeys’ coats and get them used to our touch. Next came leather bridles and saddles. We realised that Mum expected us kids to ride these donkeys.