Unconditional Love Read online

  ‘No way,’ said Greg.

  ‘I don’t even know how to ride a horse, Mum!’ I protested.

  ‘Okay!’ said the ever-fearless Kathy.

  I led Dolly around, while Kathy, wearing a new riding helmet, sat bareback. Dolly was a gentle jenny, and Kathy’s first ride was uneventful. A few months later, Mum talked me into riding Lollipop. The cheeky donkey charged for the nearest tree and scraped me off under a low-hanging branch.

  Mum didn’t confine our menagerie to donkeys, of course. She insisted that young children needed hordes of pets in order to learn empathy, so we always had at least three cats at home in Heatherdale. We had mice for a while, until the cats ate them. Our next pet shocked the neighbours. After a weekend at Kinglake, we kids were settling into the back seat of the station wagon for the one-hour trip home. Kathy and I would usually nap on the way home, unless we had to stop for Greg to be sick. He had terrible carsickness and we could usually predict at which intersection we would have to stop for him to puke. But this time he was feeling good when Dad pulled over alongside an old farmer standing at his front gate, holding a lamb in his arms.

  ‘Let’s say hello to this bloke,’ said Dad.

  ‘Why?’ asked Kathy, suspicious.

  The old man came over to the car. Dad asked me to roll down my window. The farmer showed us his lamb. It was snowy white and fluffy, with ears too big for its head. It had the cutest, silliest face. We asked if we could pat the little lamb. After watching us all coo over the sweet creature for a while, the old man smiled.

  ‘Do you want it?’ he asked.

  We gasped, and immediately began to beg Mum and Dad. They, of course, had planned the whole thing. ‘You’ll have to cuddle it all the way home,’ said Dad, in a mock stern voice.

  We named her Lambington, and her job was to mow the lawn with her teeth. Between lawnmowing sessions, Lambington lived in what Mum used to call her secret garden, a fenced area to the side of our house, overgrown with pale-blue forget-me-not flowers and mint. Our living-room window overlooked Lambington’s enclosure. She grew into a large sheep and learned to leap through the window into the house. Mum didn’t mind at all, until Lambington jumped up onto her bed one day and peed all over it. From that day on, Lambington had to remain outside.

  In 1972 Mum formed the Australian and New Zealand Donkey Breed Society, which grew to have hundreds of members. She also started the society’s newsletter, the Donkey Digest, and contributed a lot of articles herself. Kathy and I were kept busy stapling the newsletter together so Mum could post copies to the members.

  Once membership reached a hundred, Mum organised a donkey gymkhana on the local oval. Events were to include trotting, cantering and obstacle courses. No jumping, because donkeys refuse to jump (unless there is a fire or a snake under them). Mum had special ribbons printed and appointed judges for each event. She put up posters everywhere and insisted that Kathy and I take part. We begged not to, but she was a masterguilter, our Mum, so she got her way. Kathy and I knew the gymkhana would attract all the guffawing locals. Our worst fear was that local boys would witness our public humiliation in the dress-up parade. As Christmas was approaching, Mum decided that Kathy and I had to dress up as Mary and Joseph on their way to Bethlehem. She made me a fake beard. Kathy got to play Mary, with a towel on her head and a pillow under her shirt. Kathy sat looking holy on Kismet, while I walked in front. There were two other Mary and Joseph entrants. The winner was a donkey dressed as a bee.

  ‘Next year,’ said Mum, ‘we will be more imaginative!’

  ‘Next year?’ we whined.

  Mum and Dad kept their herd of donkeys for decades, until old age and ill health meant they had to sell the farm. Mum made sure her darling donkeys went to loving homes. Donkeys can live into their fifties, so for her it was like losing members of the family.

  In 1970, I began classes with a new cello teacher. This one terrified me. Peers Coetmore lived alone in a grand old house in a posh Melbourne suburb. She was tall, with very short blonde-grey hair and a permanent scowl. She always wore a turtleneck sweater and stretch pants pulled up high. Her breasts sagged, overlapping the elastic waist of her pants. Her music room was dark and spacious. At one end, the floor rose to create a low stage, on which stood a grand piano. Behind the piano was a large oil painting of a lovely young woman in a dark-pink ball gown. At the start of our lessons, Miss Coetmore placed two chairs in front of the grand piano. She and I would sit side by side, me with my little cello, and she with her bigger one. Her fluffy tortoiseshell cat, Figaro, reclined beneath the music stand. If I played out of tune, Figaro would go berserk and start scratching up the carpet in distress.

  Miss Coetmore used to chastise me: ‘If you want to keep Figaro happy, you should avoid playing the wrong notes.’

  She was joking, I now realise, but back then I was intimidated by her and convinced she was deadly serious. As I always felt my cello playing was awful, I grimaced. Miss Coetmore reprimanded me.

  ‘You must think of your audience!’ she declared. ‘They want to hear music, not look at the faces you pull!’

  She taught me to play ‘The Swan’, by Saint-Saëns, for my exams. I thought I played badly, but I got good marks. I always had the impression that Miss Coetmore was angry with me. Once she got so cross she whacked me on the arm with her cello bow. I began to fear going to her house. Mum and Kathy would drop me there and go shopping for an hour. They always returned with dim sims to cheer me up.

  Miss Coetmore decided to hold a special concert for the parents. All her students had to perform their best pieces. As I went to unpack my cello from its case, I walked past a door opening onto a den, where I glimpsed Miss Coetmore handing a bunch of flowers to a small boy. She was giving him instructions. Bemused, I scuttled off to sit next to my parents in the music room. After the last child had finished, Miss Coetmore thrilled us all by performing. Her playing was sublime, as if her cello had a voice and it was singing. At the end of her performance, the little boy she had spoken to in the den came forward. He presented the bouquet of f lowers to her, as instructed. Miss Coetmore acted surprised, and everyone applauded. I felt sad. Why did she have to pretend she was surprised? I felt guilty for knowing her secret.

  A few years ago, when doing some research for a script, I happened to read an article on Peers Coetmore. It turns out that in her youth she was a famous cellist. A feminist, ahead of her time in the 1920s, she held her own in a male-dominated field. I had no idea what an incredible woman was sitting next to me during all those cello lessons. Was she the lovely young woman in the painting? The cello she played for us was probably the famous 1723 Goffriller cello that she bequeathed to the Victorian College of the Arts after her death in 1976.

  After I finished high school, I decided not to continue studying the cello or the piano. I knew I would never be good enough to be a professional musician. I am still passionate about music and grateful for all the wonderful hours when I lost myself in Mozart, Schumann, Ravel and Debussy. I continued to play both instruments for years, until cameras and children took over my life.

  4

  I paint flowers so they will not die.

  FRIDA KAHLO

  In 1972 I turned twelve, a great age for a girl. At twelve, you are at the end of your physical childhood. You know a lot of things. You are probably quite opinionated, although you may hide that fact. You already know that boys are inferior. You might have been told that one day you will want to marry a male person and have children, but you cannot imagine how such a thing could ever happen. At twelve, you have not yet developed breasts (well, some girls have, and in their case I would change their golden age to eleven, or whenever they weren’t growing womanly bits). Before breasts, you are not yet expected to look or behave in a certain way because you are (we may hope) not yet an object of male desire.

  For me, twelve was the pinnacle of becoming myself. Becoming Jocelyn. I felt I was smart, fun and capable of anything I might want to achieve. I was good at
music, good at writing. I loved to read. I had friends, loving parents and, most of the time, loving siblings. I was surrounded by animals and nature. I was reasonably healthy, and I had become very good at riding my bicycle. I still had weird, calcified teeth (the result of many doses of tetracycline antibiotics) and thick eyebrows (which were definitely not fashionable in 1972) but I didn’t care. I hardly ever looked in the mirror, except to make sure my hair was not completely insane.

  Then I noticed I was getting strange tingly feelings in my chest. Sometimes it would get itchy. I asked Mum if she had any ointment to make the feeling go away.

  She looked at me, and became all dewy-eyed. ‘I think you’re budding!’ she whispered in a conspiratorial way.

  ‘I’m what?’

  ‘Sprouting. You know, breasts.’

  ‘That’s stupid.’

  ‘No, it’s about the right time,’ said Mum. She started examining me for pubic hair. I was embarrassed, but Mum seemed to think something miraculous was happening. ‘You’re developing,’ she said, smiling in a gooey way.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to.’ I had only just become me. Must I be Jocelyn with boobs?

  Mum reassured me that growing breasts took a couple of years, so I could still be me for a while longer. She said I would like having breasts. She also told me about menstruation. That sounded horrific. Mum said it was normal and a special sign of womanhood. Womanhood? Not fair. I dreaded the idea.

  The concept of sex wasn’t completely mysterious. I had seen the donkeys do it. The male donkey’s penis was unforgettable. I had seen cats and dogs do it. It looked quick and perfunctory. Mum always said the animals were doing it because they wanted babies, and left it at that. Babies. They were in the distant future and would require mating with a man I was probably in love with, but that came after composing symphonies and writing novels, and having as yet unimagined adventures.

  I had two very good friends at twelve, besides Kathy, my almost twin sister. One was the flamboyant Anita MacDonald. Two doors down from Anita was a shy and serious girl, Dominique Gundry. We were as close as girls can be. We formed secret clubs with elaborate initiation ceremonies (designed to scare our little sisters). We put on impromptu stage shows for our parents. We dug for buried treasure in the local park. It was heart-wrenching to leave these friends behind when, in 1972, my parents decided to move to a semi-rural suburb at the foot of Mount Dandenong. Mooroolbark. I could barely pronounce the name.

  Our new house was very old and had a mysterious name. Moonfleet. It was the house I would visit in my dreams for the rest of my life. Two storeys high, the lower half made of stone, the upper half of white bricks. Chimneys, attic bedrooms and big windows. Moonfleet was where I went through all my important changes as a girl. Moonfleet was where I went through first love, first heartbreak, where I faced the near death of both of my parents. It was where Greg saved our father’s life when he went into anaphylactic shock after a green ant bite, and it was where Mum learned to walk again after a terrible car crash.

  Local kids said Moonfleet was haunted by a boy who had died there. According to the story, he had accidentally hanged himself. The garden was marvellous: sprawling and overgrown. An elaborate stonework garden gate led to an acre of land next door. My parents fell in love with the house because of the garden gate, which was the creation of Edna Walling, a famous and fabulously eccentric landscape gardener who lived in Mooroolbark in the 1920s. Edna built an artists’ village of stone houses in Bickleigh Vale Road, a few streets away from our house.

  During the late 1960s, a local architect, Brian McKeever, had renovated Moonfleet and turned the upstairs floor into a teenagers’ retreat, known as ‘the flat’ by the previous owners. McKeever left a signature mural at the entrance to the flat. Made from brightly coloured perspex shapes, it included an inscription that declared ‘McKeever Baby does his thing, Yeah Yeah!’ And McKeever Baby did. The walls were painted blood-red and the carpet was black, underlaid with thick foam so that every step felt squishy. It was like something out of A Clockwork Orange. There were two beds, each built in under windows, a triangular, black-carpeted sitting area for guests, a kitchenette, as well as a separate dining area with an oak table, an austere church pew on either side. In the sleeping area was a poster, left behind by the daughters of the former owners. It was a psychedelic illustration of a young woman with flowers in her hair. In hippy lettering was written: ‘Have you taken your pill today?’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘No idea,’ said Mum.

  When Mum tried to remove the poster, Kathy and I begged to keep it. We thought it was pretty. We didn’t care that its meaning was a mystery. Mum let us keep it.

  Now that we had extra land right next to our house, Mum increased our menagerie. We acquired another sheep, Fleecy, a duck, Tania, and three goats. Before long, our sheep were being shorn once a year by a local shearer, and Mum bought a spinning wheel so she could teach us about carding and spinning fleece into yarn. We also inherited a dog, Fred, named after Fred Basset, the comic-strip dog. But our Fred was a beagle. We had never owned a dog before, and owning Fred was not our idea.

  Two weeks after we moved into Moonf leet, Kathy was awoken one night to a mournful howling. Her bedroom was on the ground floor in the supposedly haunted stone cottage section of the old house. Along with the howling came pounding and scratching on her door, which opened onto the outside porch. Kathy ran into Mum and Dad’s room, screaming that there was a wolf outside her door, trying to get inside. Dad reassured her that Australia did not have wolves, and put a pillow over his head. Mum, intrigued, followed Kathy back to her bedroom and heard the loud Awooo herself. She opened the door a crack, and there was the culprit—a tough old beagle. He made brief eye contact with Mum, then shoved his snout into the doorway. Acting as if he owned the place, he plodded through Kathy’s bedroom to the lounge room, where the embers of the open fire were still glowing. He plonked himself on the hearth, rolled on his side, and went to sleep.

  Mum had a closer look at the beagle. His paw pads were bleeding. After finding a name and phone number on his collar tag, she was amazed when Mrs Johnston, the previous owner of Moonfleet, answered the phone.

  ‘Oh my God. You have Fred!’ she gushed. ‘He’s been missing for two days. He must have decided to walk back to Moonfleet. Poor old thing. It’s been his home for thirteen years.’

  Fred had walked from Box Hill, over halfway back towards the Melbourne CBD, to Mooroolbark, a distance of around twenty kilometres. The Johnstons came and collected Fred, relieved he was safe. Two days later, he was back again, howling and scratching at Kathy’s door. He was taken back to Box Hill six times, and each time walked back to Mooroolbark. Kathy eventually moved upstairs into my bedroom; the tension of not knowing when Fred would reappear was ruining her sleep. Fred’s journeys home were by now famous. The Sun newspaper sent a photographer to take a picture of Fred with Kathy and me. It made the front page. Finally, the Johnstons asked if Fred could live with us. They were worried he might get hit by a car on one of his treks home. Mum agreed to adopt him. Our cats were none too pleased, but with a few paw swipes and a scratch on the nose, a peace treaty was established. Sometimes, on cold nights, the cats and Fred would gather together in front of the fire. One or two cats would even venture to sleep on Fred. He didn’t mind. Fred lived another four years. His kidneys finally gave out. We buried him beneath a plum tree in our garden. Years later, when Fleecy and Lambington died, we buried them next to Fred.

  In September 1972, Kathy and I met Angela Borelli, a girl who was to become our shared best friend for many years. One sunny afternoon, we were sitting in our front yard, talking to a new friend, Caroline, when Angela appeared on the dirt road at the end of our long driveway, near the letterbox. She was sitting on a big, black horse. Next to her was another girl, Deidre, on a smaller horse. Caroline, a gregarious girl who had wandered up our driveway a few days earlier, made the introductions. Ca
roline was the same age as me, but she had breasts and wore a bra.

  ‘Jocelyn,’ said Caroline, ‘this is Angela. She’s Italian.’ Caroline then looked at me and said, ‘This is Jocelyn. She’s the same age as us, but doesn’t have any boobs yet. See?’ She pulled open the stretchy neckline of my shirred peasant blouse. From her perch on top of her dark horse, Angela got a clear view of my booblessness. She smiled, and then she and Deidre rode away, their horses clip-clopping down the dusty road.

  Angela was a horse girl, the type of girl who could only exist in a semi-rural suburb like Mooroolbark with all its grassy paddocks. The horse girls looked down on those who were horseless. They decorated the covers of their school folders with the names of their beloved mounts. They clearly dreamed about their horses and spoke of them in awe. Kathy and I thought it was all a bit weird. It turned out, however, that Angela was only pretending to be a horse girl. As soon as she befriended the Moorhouse sisters, she dropped the charade. We were relieved, as Mum had decided to move four donkeys into the paddock next door and horse girls would clip-clop past on their superior steeds, glancing at our big-eared pets with disdain.