Ten Hail Marys

1

Out of a bottle

‘Who’s that lady?’ I asked, pointing to the attractive dark-haired woman next to Uncle Ringer in a group photograph.

I was about five years old and helping Mamma clean the glass on the photographs on her sideboard. The photo I’d picked up had been taken at Aunty Lorna and Uncle Bill’s wedding.

‘That’s your mother.’

‘But you’re my mother.’

‘I’m not your mother, Phyllis is.’

I just stared at Mamma, trying to understand what this meant.

‘She didn’t want you,’ Mamma said, as if anticipating an obvious question. ‘She was going to throw you over the balcony,’ she added, before gently placing the photograph onto a clean lace doily.

Phyllis was Mamma’s daughter, and at this age I was still too young to work out that this meant Mamma was my grandmother and that her youngest sons were not my brothers, as I had thought, but my uncles.

So if I am not Katie Carlton, who am I? I wondered.

At night, when the adults were sitting around talking after dinner, I’d sit quietly, soaking up information like a sponge and trying to piece it all together to see where I fitted in. From what I could gather, before the outbreak of World War Two, Mamma and Bill Gresham, her first husband, and their four children, Leslie, Stan, Phyllis and Daphne, lived in Nyngan, in central New South Wales. As the work in the bush dried up they were forced to relocate to the ‘big smoke’ and moved into Raglan Street, Chippendale, in Sydney. Bill Gresham, my grandfather, was never more to me than a photograph of a handsome sandy-haired man in a slouch hat in the bottom of Mamma’s wardrobe. Uncle Les lied about his age and followed his father into the army and they both went off to war. Uncle Stan, who was only fourteen at the time, had to forgo his calling into the priesthood and go to work to help Mamma with the younger girls.

It seemed that Phyllis was the wild child in the family. She hated school and at thirteen was declared ‘uncontrollable’ by the Albion Street Children’s Court, and sent to the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic home for wayward girls at Strathfield with a fearsome reputation.

When she was fifteen Phyllis got her father’s consent to marry Ray Howarth, a baker from Nyngan, who was more than twice her age. The marriage was short-lived and Ray disappeared from the scene.

At eighteen Phyllis became pregnant. There was always some contention in the family as to who the father was. Aunty Lorna, Mamma’s sister, told me that Phyllis tried everything to get rid of me, including sitting in a hot bath drinking gin, but I refused to budge. So she went dancing and partying for as long as she could squeeze her growing belly into a corset. By Christmas 1949 Phyllis was housebound and climbing up the walls. It was almost impossible for her and Mamma to be in the same room without pulling each other’s hair out.

‘She looks ready to drop it at any tick of the clock,’ Mamma said one morning to Aunty Lorna, who had slept on the lounge after an all-night drinking session with Phyllis.

Sydney in January 1950 was hot, humid and one of the wettest months on record. Storms raged across the city, causing floods and cutting power to thousands of homes. The rain pelted down, drowning out the radio as Mamma tried to tune in to the horse-races in Melbourne. Phyllis was more agitated than usual, pacing the floor, chain-smoking and cursing all the angels and saints for her predicament. She knew not to look to her mother for help or sympathy.

‘I’m going to call an ambulance,’ Uncle Stan, Phyllis’s older brother, said when she started screaming the house down at about three o’clock in the afternoon.

The ambulance arrived with sirens blaring. They had a hell of a job getting Phyllis onto the trolley – she didn’t want to go to hospital and tried to fight everyone.

‘Take us to the nearest maternity hospital,’ Uncle Stan said, getting into the back of the ambulance and taking Phyllis’s hand.

At first the admissions nurse at King George V Hospital in Camperdown wasn’t going to admit Phyllis because she wasn’t booked in to the maternity ward and didn’t have a doctor. Uncle Stan, who is about five feet four inches in his socks and weighs 110 pounds wringing wet, is normally a mild-mannered man, but when he’s had enough he’ll let you know.

‘You bloody will take my sister. She’s not having this baby on the street!’

Having a baby at King George V Private Hospital was a privilege usually reserved for people with double-barrelled surnames and a pedigree going back to the colonial squattocracy. God knows what the other patients and staff made of a mob of blackfellas rocking up to visit one of our own, in a private room, to have a stickybeak at the new bub.

‘She was sitting up like Lady Muck, ordering the staff around,’ Uncle Stan told me one time, chuckling at the audacity of his feisty sister.

Being tied down with a baby didn’t fit Phyllis’s lifestyle. I was nine months old when Aunty Daphne stepped in and stopped Phyllis throwing me over the front balcony. Phyllis took off that night without leaving a forwarding address. I stayed with Mamma, who, as soon as she got a good look at me, said, ‘This baby will have to go to hospital.’

That meant I was probably close to death’s door. I had pneumonia. When I came home from hospital it was still uncertain whether I would make it, and Uncle Stan was nervous because I hadn’t been baptised.

‘We can’t let this baby die with a mortal sin on her soul,’ he said, bundling me into a blanket and taking me around to St Benedict’s Church on Broadway, a short walk from Raglan Street, where I was christened and baptised a Catholic. Uncle Stan was a devout Catholic and took his role as my godfather very seriously.

By 1953 Mamma’s second husband, Fred Carlton – Kev, Robbie and Dan’s father – was gone for good. Fred was by all accounts a drunken no-hoper who liked to throw his weight around. He was last seen running into the back lane after Granny, Mamma’s mother, had up-ended a pan of sausages over his head, hot fat and all. This left Mamma with four children to support. Aunty Daphne had left home to marry Jack McCarthy. Uncle Leslie was away fighting in another war, and no one had heard from Phyllis. Things would have become pretty grim if Uncle Stan had not postponed his marriage to his fiancée, Shirley, to stay home to help Mamma look after his three younger brothers and me.

Uncle Stan was a wool dyer, and, although he worked long hours at the Alexandria Woollen Mills, he was a keen gardener. Our backyard was only small but every inch of dirt grew something. Flowers, vegetables and fruit trees were all clumped in together and thrived, and Uncle Stan even grew things in tin cans with holes cut in the side. A profusion of jasmine climbed up and over the outside dunny and choko vines twisted their way along the top of the paling fence. Surrounded by the colour and fragrance of lemon trees and roses, I’d amuse myself for hours drawing pictures with sticks of charcoal from the wood-fired stove in the kitchen onto the concrete path that ran from the back door to the gate leading to the laneway. On the hottest days the jasmine helped to mask the stench from the open-pan toilet.

When it was too wet to play outside, and if Mamma was in a good mood, we’d play a game I called horsey. Mamma would pull up a chair to the stove in the kitchen and take a breather from the endless housework. She’d cross her legs and I’d straddle the outstretched leg and say ‘giddy up’. Then slowly her leg would rock me up and down, like the carousel ponies at Luna Park.

‘Do you want to go faster?’ Mamma would say, taking a drag on her cigarette.

‘Yes,’ I’d reply, grabbing hold of her knee with both hands.

‘Where did Katie come from?’ she’d ask.

‘I came out of a beer bottle,’ I’d say, quickly shooting back my stock-standard reply.

Mamma would throw her head back in peals of laughter, causing her leg to pump up and down a little faster.

‘What’s Katie going to be when she grows up?’ she’d ask.

‘A prostitute,’ I’d jump in, barely giving her time to finish the sentence. Then I’d hold on for the ride of my life as Mamma’s whole body shook with laughter. It took all of my strength and concentration not to fall off and crash into the hot stove.

I was trained to repeat these responses like an organ grinder’s monkey but had no idea what was so amusing. For years I had nightmares about being trapped in the long neck of an amber glass bottle.

One night I went to sleep at Raglan Street and woke up in a soaking wet bed next to my cousin Jimmy, Aunty Lorna’s son, who was about my age and still wet the bed every night. Aunty Lorna, Uncle Bill, and their three kids, Elaine, Denise and Jimmy, lived in a rambling old weatherboard house in Lansdowne Street, Merrylands. Aunty Lorna’s parents, Granny and Charlie ‘Pop’ Higgins, were also living with them.

Although Aunty Lorna and Mamma were sisters, you’d never know to look at them. Aunty Lorna had warm brown eyes. Her skin was the colour of Nestlé’s milk chocolate and as soft as her best leather handbag. Mamma’s skin was almost milky white and she had piercing blue-grey eyes that flashed like steel blades when she was angry.

Aunty Lorna could swear like a trooper and had a reputation for being able to drink ten sailors under the table. She had a shocking temper and flogged her kids if they didn’t do as they were told. Even Uncle Bill copped the odd black eye, but she never so much as raised her voice to me. Sitting on Aunty Lorna’s lap was like snuggling into an over-stuffed feather-filled lounge, and when Mamma was around it was the safest place to be.

‘Leave the kid alone, she’s only a baby,’ Aunty Lorna would say, holding me close to her soft warm body.

Mamma and Aunty Lorna were not the only key women in my life during these early years. Granny had her part to play as well.

Born Elizabeth Harriet Wood, she was known to the Bogan community of Nyngan as Lizzie Higgins, but to the family she was just Granny. She was a tiny woman, shorter than five feet in heels. She couldn’t even reach the clothesline without standing on a crate. It was my job to pass her the pegs.

By 1954 her hair had turned to silver and after a lifetime of physical hard work her hands were still as soft and strong as her heart. It was Granny’s job to take care of Denise, Jimmy and me while the other adults went to work. Elaine was much older than we younger kids and was already at school. Granny was rarely seen without a duster or a broom in her hands and her kitchen always smelled of just-baked bread or fruit pies.

Like all kids of the 1950s we played outdoors and found ways to amuse ourselves with ordinary things. The junk that people threw into the stormwater drains that snaked through the backblocks of Merrylands provided an endless supply of raw material. The mulberry tree that dominated the backyard at Aunty Lorna’s was the focal point of most of our games. Even after gorging ourselves, the plump berries continued to fall like rain, creating a squishy purple carpet that stained our feet up to the ankles.

Granny never hit us, but she was strict, and a cake of Sunlight soap was always at hand to wash out the mouth of any kid using bad language.

‘Okay you kids ... it’s time for your bath,’ Granny called from the back door one evening. As usual, Denise started acting up. Granny came running down the steps, with a dog collar in her hand.

‘Right, you little bugger,’ she said, grabbing Denise by the back of her dress. ‘If you want to smell like the dogs, you may as well live with them.’

Granny attached the collar around Denise’s neck. Denise bucked like a heifer as Granny tied her up next to the kennels. Denise howled for ten minutes, setting off all the dogs in the street. Granny didn’t release Denise from the chain until she had promised to never make a fuss taking a bath again.

Granny’s fanatical cleanliness, which went way beyond being neat and tidy, had another purpose.

‘If you kids aren’t clean a whitefella in a big black car will take you away,’ she warned.

I used to think Granny said this just to scare us into taking a bath, until the day a black car pulled up in front of Aunty Lorna’s house while we were having lunch.

Granny looked through the curtains. ‘Quick!’ she said, gathering up our plates and glasses and putting them into the sink. ‘Katie, get under the house and stay there until I tell you.’

Around lunchtime, most Saturdays, a truck from the Vauxhall Inn would pull up in front of the house. Uncle Bill would help the driver roll a large wooden keg of beer around the back and set it up in the outside laundry. Aboriginal people weren’t allowed to go into hotels in those days, or even be sold alcohol at all. But Uncle Bill had red hair and freckles, so it was his job to order the grog.

When Aunty Lorna had a party we kids were allowed to stay up late. I hated the smells that came with adults, especially of beer and cigarettes, so I went to bed and lay awake listening to ‘old leather lungs’ Frankie Laine singing ‘Jezebel’ over and over again. It was only a matter of time before someone started a blue. Voices would be raised, followed by a scuffle and the sound of breaking glass.

‘If youse want to fucking kill each other do it outside.’ Aunty Lorna’s booming voice could be heard above the commotion.

Although the music would be turned down, so as not to disturb the neighbours, the party wouldn’t be over until the keg had been drained. The next morning the house always looked like a bomb had hit it. People just lay where they had fallen. The stink of stale booze and cigarettes repulsed me.

Granny was a Salvation Army officer and Sunday was the Lord’s Day. She’d put on her navy blue uniform with the burgundy trim and silver buttons on the jacket. She’d comb her hair before putting on the bonnet and tying the long taffeta ribbons into a generous bow under her chin. Checking herself in the hall mirror, and satisfied that she looked her best, she would gather up her Bible and tambourine.

‘I’m off now, love,’ she’d call out to Aunty Lorna, who’d be looking like she’d passed out at the kitchen table.

Granny would walk down the hallway, vigorously shaking her tambourine over the head of anyone blocking her way as she went out to praise the Lord.

2

The new place

Aunty Lorna’s house was about a two-mile walk to the Granville pool. In summer Uncle Bill would give Jimmy, Denise and me enough money to get through the turnstiles, and we’d pack a few peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. There was a water bubbler at the pool if we wanted a drink.

By Christmas, my skin was the colour of Nugget Brown boot polish, and the man at the pool called me a ‘bloody little half-caste’. He wouldn’t let me through the turnstile until Jimmy told him I was his cousin.

When we got back from the pool one day there was a fancy black car parked in front of Aunty Lorna’s house. We hesitated, and then figured the car was probably too flash to be anyone from the government rounding up kids.

The man who owned it was introduced to me as Uncle Buster. He was a friend of Mamma and had been sent to take me to our new place at Herne Bay. No one had told me we were moving, let alone why, but that wasn’t unusual. Mamma and the boys had moved to our new place while I was at Aunty Lorna’s. I hoped they had remembered to take ‘Cockie’, our sulphur-crested cockatoo.

Aunty Lorna had packed my things into a small cardboard box. She walked me out to the car.

‘Bye, Katie darlin’,’ she said, lifting me up and into the passenger’s seat. She pushed a button down and slammed the door shut.

As the car took off I started to feel very nervous. Granny had drummed it into us to never get into a car with strangers and I had forgotten ‘to go’ before we left. I pressed my legs together and hugged the cardboard box on my lap.

Uncle Buster lit up a cigarette.

‘May I put the window down a bit, please?’

‘It’s going to rain. The inside of the car will get wet,’ he said, blowing the smoke in my direction.

Aunty Lorna had forgotten to tell Uncle Buster that I vomited if I didn’t have a window down. She’d found that out for herself the hard way one night when we were coming home from Bullen’s Circus in a taxi.

Uncle Buster’s car rocked from side to side. Heavy rain pounded the windshield. Thunder and lightning seemed to be clashing in unison. I closed my eyes and concentrated as hard as I could, trying not vomit or pee on the nice leather upholstery.

‘Here we are,’ he said at last, turning left through a set of high wire gates.

Here we are where? This place didn’t look like anywhere we’d live. There were no proper houses. No grass or trees, just dirt and rows of strange looking buildings. Uncle Buster pulled up in front of one of them and tooted the horn.

‘G’day, Buster. Come inside, we’re just about to have tea,’ Mamma called from the doorway.

I unlocked the car and scrambled to the ground. Dodging potholes filled with muddy water, I ran for the door. ‘Uncle Stan,’ I whispered, jumping up and down like I had ants in my pants, ‘where’s the dunny? I need to go.’

‘It’s at the end of the row,’ he said, and handed me a few sheets of toilet paper.

The communal toilets at Herne Bay defied description. Human waste was smeared on the corrugated iron walls and cigarette butts floated in the pee all over the floor. It said a lot for the other people living here. I shivered with disgust as I walked barefoot in the filth. There was a cold-water tap outside the toilet block so I rinsed my hands and feet.

Back inside, the rain pounded the iron roof and everyone was shouting to be heard above the din. An assortment of buckets, pots and pans caught the water pouring in through the gaping holes in the roof of the hut. Except for the pot plants Uncle Stan had brought from Raglan Street and Cockie screeching, ‘You old bastard!’, nothing felt like home.

Herne Bay was a kind of halfway house for immigrants arriving from England and Europe as well as people like us, who were waiting for government-assisted housing to become available. We were a bubble and squeak of humanity at various stages of dislocation, all tossed into a hellhole on the edge of the swampy marshes along the Georges River, a breeding ground for millions of mosquitoes. It didn’t matter how hot it was, you had to sleep under a sheet or get eaten alive. Uncle Stan brought home some mozzie coils that filled the hut with smoke. It stank to high heaven, but at least it kept the mozzies away.

If these blood-sucking parasites weren’t enough to push the New Australians to the edge of despair, they could always count on the insults and abuse from the locals.

‘Ungrateful Pommie bastards.’

‘Bloody whingeing Poms.’

‘Go back where you came from, you bloody New Australians.’

‘Go home, stupid bloody wog.’

‘Speak English, you are in Australia now.’

These were the more kindly remarks.

One afternoon I came home for lunch and there was a vaguely familiar person sitting at the table. He was wearing a uniform with a green beret stuck in the epaulet on the shoulder.

‘Hello, Katie darlin’.’

‘Uncle Les?’ I asked shyly.

He smiled. ‘You remember me?’

When Uncle Les went away I was just a toddler. But he was the spitting image of his father, Bill Gresham, especially in the khaki uniform. Uncle Les had just returned from Korea, where Mamma said he had been fighting the ‘yellow peril’.

‘What was the war like, Uncle Les?’ I asked.

‘We don’t talk about the war,’ Mamma said sharply, handing me the cutlery to set the table.

Uncle Les unzipped his duffle bag. ‘This is for you, Katie. It has come all the way from Korea.’

He handed me a small brown paper parcel. It was so exciting to get a present when it wasn’t even Christmas.

‘Oh, thank you, Uncle Les!’

I thought I was going to burst with joy when I saw the yellow pyjamas with the little red bird embroidered onto the pocket.

‘They’re pure silk,’ he said, and smiled.

I ran my hand over the fabric. It was as soft as butterfly wings. That night, after my bath, I got into the yellow silk pyjamas. I was busy admiring myself when something reflecting in Mamma’s dressing table mirror caught my eye. I turned and stared at the hole, which was the size of a threepence. An eyeball was staring back at me. I jumped down from the bed and ran from the room. Mamma always kept a packet of Bandaids in the kitchen drawer. I used one to cover the hole.

At the end of our row of huts was a park. The long grass was crawling with snakes and if you didn’t want to step on a brown one and end up dead, it was smart to beat a path to the swings by thumping a stick onto the ground.

One day when I was at the park, a new boy turned up. He wasn’t watching where he was going as he kicked around a black-and-white ball and dumped right into me, nearly knocking me off my feet.

‘Hey, why don’t you look where you’re going?’ I said, shoving him back.

‘Sorry. My name’s John Heywood,’ he said, without taking his eye off the ball.

It was apparent from his accent and pale skin that he was British, and he had the skinniest little chicken legs I’d ever seen.

‘I’m Katie, would you like to come to my place for lunch?’

‘Will it be alright with your mum?’

There was no need to ask permission. I was always bringing strays home. Cats, dogs, kids – it didn’t matter. If they looked half-starved I took them back for a feed and Mamma never complained.

This day the front door was locked, which was unusual. And Uncle Stan was acting very strangely.

‘You can’t come in yet,’ he said in his nervous voice.

After about five minutes he called out, ‘Alright, you can come in now.’ He unlocked the door.

Uncle Stan was incapable of telling a lie or being sneaky in any way. His voice and mannerisms always gave him away. He was up to something alright.

‘Mamma, this is John, he’s a new kid. He’s from England.’

Mamma made us some Vegemite sandwiches and poured us a glass of homemade ginger beer. She was as sweet as pie and I was relieved that she didn’t tell the joke going around that the safest place to hide a quid was under a Pommie’s towel.

The next day Uncle Stan came home with a real Christmas tree, which we all helped to decorate. But we were never told the fanciful stories about a fat man in a red suit who came from the North Pole.

‘Santa Claus is a pagan story,’ Uncle Stan said.

As with most kids, curiosity got the better of us, so when Uncle Stan and Mamma went shopping, Dan and I went looking for the Christmas presents. Mamma’s wardrobe was at an angle in the bedroom and, although I couldn’t pull it out, I could see through the crack between the wardrobe and the wall. My breathing stopped when I spotted it – a child-sized china dresser, similar to Aunty Daphne’s. Never daring to imagine that it would be for me, I wondered what little girl was going to get such a wonderful gift.

On Christmas morning Dan and I raced to the tree and there was the dresser, too big to waste wrapping paper on.

‘That’s for you, Katie,’ Uncle Stan said with a giggle.

He must have known that a gift like this was going to blow my socks off. Giving presents always gave Uncle Stan such joy. He was beaming as he watched my wide-eyed reaction. I thought I was going to die of happiness as I opened the little doors and smelled the new wood.

Then he handed me a parcel that was wrapped. ‘This is your Christmas and birthday present,’ he said.

As my birthday was so close to Christmas, I always got a combined gift. But Uncle Stan still gave me a card on my birthday, so it didn’t feel like just another day.

I sat down on the floor and slowly removed the paper, being careful not to tear it for later use as drawer liners. Inside was a box. My hands trembled as I lifted the lid. Then all I could do was stare gobsmacked at the beautiful doll with dark curly hair, just like mine. Her eyes, with long lashes resting above her chubby cheeks, were closed as if she were sleeping. Her soft blue velvet dress had little white roses embroidered into the bodice, and on her