All things bright and beautiful

‘All right girls,’ Miss Bright said, ‘Let’s begin with the way you sit.’ She stood above us on a dais to one side of her desk and lifted her chair without scraping the floor. Then rested it gently into its new position. Next she straightened and placed herself between the chair and desk. Lifting her feet slightly, with ballerina toes, her back ramrod straight, she lowered her behind onto the seat. She perched there on the edge as if she was ready to get up and leave at any minute. Miss Bright looked uncomfortable but the expression on her face, a faint smile of tranquillity, never left her for one moment.

‘Now I’d like you to try.’

Chairs scraped as twenty adolescent girls stood to adjust their seats beside their desks and each tried to tiptoe first then place their behinds neatly on the edge of a chair. Miss Bright walked around the classroom, her stilettos clacking on the hard wood floors. 

‘That’s right,’ she said to Bernadette Tuohy. 

‘A little more centred,’ she said to Rosanna Tochetto. And every girl was seated in minutes in the same strained awkward pose.

Miss Bright worked for the Elly Lukas School of Deportment and visited because the nuns at our schools had decided we girls needed to learn better manners – ours was a convent for ladies after all. I should not have attended but a week before Miss Bright arrived, Mother Ursula spoke to me after class one afternoon. 

‘There’s a subsidised place to this course in deportment, and I think you should have it.’

I was flattered to be given the chance to join the other lucky girls whose parents were prepared to pay extra money on top of school fees to enable us to learn how to become ladies. But I chafed at the idea that Moher Ursula might have offered me the place, not only because my family were too poor to afford it, but also because I needed this type of help more than most. My torn pinafore. Buttons missing from my blazer. My worn shoes. Deportment was all about appearances and appearances were not my forte.

Miss Bright’s classes ran for six weeks, a lesson each week for an hour during which she taught us the basic elements of sitting, walking, standing and saying ‘hello’. She taught us about personal hygiene, to use deodorants down below, preferably in spray form so that we might keep our bodies at their freshest best. She taught us that we must prepare our wardrobe each evening before a major event and preferably for any day so that we did not waste precious time in the mornings on our dress. 

Being prepared was the essence of her bible. Prepared for whatever might lie ahead. Stockings darned. Shoes polished each night. Everything designed to look our best for when we would take our place in the world as the bright and shining secretaries of tomorrow.

From six weeks of classes there is not much I remember other than Miss Bright’s insistence we always look our best, even late in bed at night. All of it designed to keep our men happy. Our men who expected us to be like Stepford Wives, perfectly coiffed at all times, while able to cook excellent meals, clear dishes with minimal fuss, keep a tidy house, keep children quiet, well behaved and good mannered. All of it with the aim of keeping the man in our lives happy and satisfied. Unharried in his important work in the outside world where he needed his wife to be an attribute. 

Is this where the idea of Trophy Wife or the wife as handbag came into being?  The wife as handbag. Husband as handbag. Partner as an extra limb on our bodies to give the impression we have it all.

I was an ungainly girl, my body misshapen on boarding school stodge and yet Miss Bright offered the possibility of a life as one of the characters from television land, an Audrey Hepburn or Ava Gardner, Julie Andrews. All of them beautiful and able to move around as though the strings that controlled their every movement were invisible. As though they were in charge of their lives. Only we know now they were no more in charge than I was as an adolescent schoolgirl coerced by a society that sheltered under the shadow of fierce patriarchal attitudes, which sought to keep women and men polarised and in their places.

In 1968, the year of revolution, when the world was shifting under the weight of rebellion, an insignificant schoolgirl at a Catholic convent in Richmond, I dreamed as much of my future, firstly in the stereotype of secretarial work in an office somewhere among the grey building blocks of the City of Melbourne, or secondly, as a lay missionary in some place like Papua New Guinea. My brother had joined the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart to convert ‘the heathens’, though the nuns had stopped talking about indigenous people like this. 

The convent

I knew what it was like to feel lesser than, and to aspire to more than. Along several dimensions. The spiritual dimension where I wanted most of all to be like a saint and receive a visitation from Jesus or the Blessed Virgin Mary. This aspiration waned once my hormones kicked it. It turned into a desire to join the nuns and hide behind a full-length habit. At least this way I could shift from the protective features of my school dress and tunics into the layers of fabric that hid the nuns’ bodies from view. The convent seemed a great place to be. In contrast to the next layer of expectation. To look as good as I could for a man. To please any future husband with my svelte and lovely appearance. 

Most of my fellow students aspired to this, or so I imagined among the popular ones who were hell bent on raising their school dresses to above the knee whenever we left the convent walls. Those two layers of expectation: inner godliness and goodness, and outer beauty and cleanliness became the corner stone of my expectations even as in less than three years I decided to chuck the good inside stuff out, gave up on joining the nuns, the uniform and habit and slipped into a different type of uniform. A woman of the seventies, who might try to free herself from the shackles of gender polarities into a sense of herself as a person. But I could never get away from being a woman. And it irked me. 

On giving up religionCatholicism,

My father built a grotto at the front of our house in Greensborough, a small indentation in the side wall where electricity boxes typically sat for ease of inspection. Ours was not for electricity, but a cut out shoe box size, into which my parents placed a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

She stood sentinel, like a mezuzah on the doorpost of Jewish people’s homes. They pay their respects on arrival, with a pat of their hands on the small metal piece that sits on the right side of the door jamb, two thirds up from the floor and then kiss their fingers in a sign of respect. 

There was a mezuzah on the front door of a flat my husband and I rented over forty years ago in Camberwell. It suggested previous tenants had been Jewish or maybe even the landlord, keen to safeguard their home. But when I was a child, my family used the Blessed Virgin, in her blue robes, arms outstretched, foot placed strategically on a snake’s head. 

A much larger grotto from my old school.

The first time I thought twice about my family’s religion it occurred to me that not all people believed, as did my family, in Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

‘You’re a Roman Catholic,’ the red-haired girl said. A stranger to me, I had befriended her as we explored the disused rail crossing from Camberwell to Deepdene. She asked where I went to school and when I told her OLGC, she laughed as though there was something funny about my parent’s choice of schools.

Hers, Deepdene Primary was an ordinary school. Mine was an aberration, or so she implied. 

I was troubled by the word ‘Roman’. Rome was in Italy. My parents were Dutch. We had nothing to do with Italy, so why the association? 

‘The Pope lives in Rome,’ my brother told me later when I asked. ‘We’re called papists. We believe in the infallibility of our pope. Protestants don’t like popes. They only go as high as archbishops.’ 

My mother was a fan of religion, of the popes and the saints, rather like some of the girls in my school loved the Beetles. She kept her eyes fixed on the television news where images of smoke rose about the parapets in Vatican City after the cardinals met to elect a new Pope. One of the Pauls. 

I was on the lookout for someone to adore beyond Jesus and the saints. Beyond my mother whom I loved beyond all others on this earth. My mother whom I feared might one day die and leave me behind. Even though my mother was fit and strong. She was never sick. She was first out of bed in the morning, up before anyone else and she was the last person I saw at night beyond my sister with whom I then shared a room. 

My sister and I played a game of who could be the last to say good night. 

‘Goodnight,’ my sister said. 

‘Goodnight,’ I said.

 ‘Goodnight,’ she said again, and I repeated a final greeting. So it went on until one of us stopped responding and we were both asleep. 

This was on the good nights when our father was not drinking. On those nights and the many nights between, sleep was something you went into without too much thought. Too much thought and you might lay awake far too long listening for the noises of the night and fearful at what might happen in the shadows. 

On Canterbury Road where it turns in a wide arc on its way to the bridge that runs over the old unused railway line, I gave up my religion. in Secret.

I was only eleven years old, but I remember it because the news came that someone had assassinated John Kennedy, the American president. My mother’s eyes were again glued to the television screen, and this time filled with tears. 

The only time I saw my mother cry happened when archbishops, popes and certain presidents died. My mother worshipped authorities in the form of men who ran the church and some countries. Though she also had a deep love for the royal family in Holland for Beatrix and Juliana. Their names she spoke of as though they were beloved sisters.

My mother did not otherwise cry much. Not in my memory. But she exuded a terror at times that took the form of an obsequious desire to please my father, even when he behaved in ways that should have sent her roaring at him. When he told her how stupid she was. How pathetic her cooking. How much she belonged back in Holland with her beloved family. The family she had left behind to humour him, or so she told me many years later. She knew my father was jealous of her family, of her connection to them, of their loving ways and she imagined if she took herself far away it might help him feel less tortured by their connection. 

Only trouble, three of my mother’s brothers followed my father to Australia. They decided that he, of all people, would make the right decision after the war and so they copied him. My father was never free of my mother’s family. While his own family disappeared behind a wall of invisibility. 

I asked him once, ‘Where are they, your family? Where are your mother and father? Your sisters and brothers?’ 

‘I have no family,’ he said. ‘Look into my eyes. They’re black, evil, and empty.’ I burst into tears, five-year-old that I was, at the idea that my father should see himself so and that I might then be connected to this man who was evil and had no family.

By then he had also given up the religion he adopted when he married. We kids went off to Mass on Sunday mornings with our mother, and he stayed home. He sat alone smoking cigarettes and stared into space. 

My father stopped believing well before I stopped. The day I realised I loved going to church simply for the singing. I found the sermons boring. The priest droned on, and I daydreamed or counted the flowers on the hats of the women in front. I did not pay attention to any of the things I should take seriously. Underneath I was a failed Catholic. A Catholic in name only. And in that I was a hypocrite, who did not deserve to belong to the church. 

As the priest said one Sunday before I tuned out. ‘You people who complain about the goings on in our church, you talk as though you are not part of this church. But it is still your church, and it is you who deserve the criticism.’ 

He glared at his congregation, and my face flushed.  ‘In other words,’ he said, ‘look to yourself for the criticism, do not look outwards.’ 

It struck me then, if I wanted to be critical of this religion then I should not belong, but I was too young to leave. 

Besides, what would my mother say?