The Black Dress

  To Stephen

  THE BLACK DRESS

  The first time I looked death in the face, I was three years old. It was the day my brother John was born, 64 years ago...

  I remember sitting near the fire in our farmhouse at Darebin Creek, next to my little sister Maggie. It was morning, a grey, howling day. The chimney was smoking, as it did in bad weather. Papa had told me to keep Maggie near the warmth of the fire.

  Papa was standing in the doorway, dressed for riding in his big oilskin coat. He was waiting for one of our station hands to bring his horse around.

  Granny MacDonald was holding the door and arguing. ‘Och, Margaret and I can do all she needs, man. There’s no need for some fancy midwife!’

  ‘It’s not going well,’ Papa said. ‘It’s taking too long.’

  ‘Bairns don’t come to the clock!’ my grandmother protested. ‘She’ll be fine. She’s a good, strong girl. It’s not like it’s her first.’

  ‘I’m not taking any chances,’ Papa said. As young as I was, I understood that he acted out of love for Mamma. I had known always how much they loved each other. When they were together, they seemed to brighten up and become more alive. I would wait for Papa to come in from the farm in the evening, just to see Mamma’s face light up and to hear his familiar greeting to her, ‘My love, how was your day?’ That moment left me feeling strong and safe.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he told Granny.

  The horse appeared out of the gloom, led by our unhappy Irish station hand, his shoulders hunched against the rain. Papa began to leave, but Granny put a hand on his arm.

  ‘And where are you going to find the money to pay this midwife?’ she demanded.

  Papa shook her hand off impatiently.

  ‘I’ll find it somewhere,’ he said. ‘I’m not putting Flora’s life at stake for the sake of a few pounds!’ He ran out into the rain, swung onto the horse, a bay gelding called Dancer, and rode off.

  Oh, I thought he was glorious! I didn’t understand why Granny had tried to stop him. He was riding off to help Mamma, like a hero in a story. Everything would be all right—I had great faith in my father at that time.

  Now I realise that his ride to get the midwife was entirely typical of him. Impetuous, pigheaded and with a total disregard for money.

  I trusted my father would bring a midwife to help Mamma and that everything would be all right but then noises erupted from my mother’s room. They were so frightening. Sighs and sobs and choked screams. I felt a knot of fear tighten in my chest, making it hard to breathe. What if the midwife didn’t arrive in time? Would Mamma die?

  No child raised on a farm is unaware of death, but at that moment, for the first time, I realised that my parents—all of us—were vulnerable. That Mamma might die. In my long life I have almost been killed on a runaway horse, sailed around Cape Horn in a raging gale, and walked unprotected into the presence of a violent and angry murderer, but I have never been as frightened as I was at that moment. My heart was beating so hard I thought it would burst.

  Maggie started to wail and Granny picked her up and soothed her. I didn’t want to ask, but I had to know.

  ‘Is Mamma going to die?’

  Granny spun around so fast that Maggie nearly overbalanced.

  ‘Och, no, gnothach miadhail. She’s just having a baby. Your father’s gone for the midwife.’ She sniffed. ‘He doesn’t think your aunty and I know enough to help her.’

  But Granny knew everything. And she didn’t seem too worried. Surely Mamma will be all right now, I thought. My heart slowed down, but I was still afraid. I cuddled my doll, Flossie, for comfort.

  Granny peered out the window after Papa. It was the only glass window in the house and the rain banged against the glass and seeped in at the edges. The other windows were covered with wooden shutters which kept the rain out better, I think, as the window-frame was a little warped—but glass windows were very expensive. The man who had sold us the house had been proud of that window. My father used to joke that the window had cost us as much as a couple of good arable acres.

  ‘Yesterday it was a heatwave, today it’s the middle of winter,’ Granny muttered. ‘Och, it’s a weird country this.’

  Maggie tried to stand up in Granny’s arms and Granny patted her bottom and jiggled her. ‘Quiet now, bairn.’

  Granny was my mother’s mother. My father’s mother, Grandmother Ellen, was at home at my grandparents’ Merri Creek farm, a few miles downriver from us. She suffered from colds and lung complaints in the winter, so perhaps she was not well enough to be with Mamma. Maybe that was why she had sent Aunty Margaret, my father’s sister, in her place. Perhaps she thought a woman’s own mother was the right person to see her through childbed. I did not know Grandmother Ellen as well as I did Granny MacDonald, so I hesitate to make a guess that might be uncharitable.

  ‘Will Papa return soon?’ I asked. I was sitting in my favourite corner of the parlour, near Mamma’s sewing basket. I had been picking bits of thread out of the basket and trying to tie them around my doll’s hair as ribbons.

  ‘I hope so, lassie,’ Granny said. She put Maggie down next to me. ‘Here. You look after your little sister and I’ll go in to your mother. All right?’

  I nodded and took hold of Maggie’s hand. Independent as always, even as a baby, she snatched it away and began to suck her thumb. Her big grey eyes were dark and worried, but Maggie never turned to anyone except Mamma for comfort.

  The noises from Mamma’s room grew louder. Surely it couldn’t be my quiet, gentle mother making those sounds? It sounded like a cow bellowing, at times like a wild beast roaring. Since then I’ve helped at my share of childbeds. It always comes as a surprise the way women forget about social niceties, and just let go.

  It seemed like a very long time that we sat by the fire, listening. In the end, Maggie even held my hand.

  Finally the door crashed open and my father swept into the room, followed by a woman in a big blue cloak. The rain was so heavy we hadn’t even heard the horses come into the yard.

  ‘Through there,’ he directed the woman, who removed her cloak and went straight to Mamma’s room.

  Papa closed the door and stood on the hearthrug, water dripping from his hair. The fire accentuated the touch of red in his hair and the blue of his eyes. He looked worried. Then he saw me looking at him and smiled. It’s a vivid picture in my mind, Papa smiling at me in the light of the fire.

  ‘Don’t look so solemn, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Everything will be fine now.’

  I knew it would be if Papa said so. How comforting that certainty was. I can feel it clearly, a warm circle around my heart. He seemed so tall to me, splendidly tall and strong, his eyes bright and alive. His words seemed to dance from his lips.

  The realisation that your parents are mere mortals is one of the great griefs of childhood. The truth that they are not all powerful, not always just, not always right can be a bitter pill to swallow. Even now I feel the disillusionment and anger that I experienced just six years after my brother’s birth.

  ***

  Later that day, after the rain had stopped, my grandfathers, John MacKillop and Donald MacDonald, arrived. Granny banished them to the verandah to smoke their pipes for, she said, ‘We’ve got enough to do without you men getting underfoot.’

  Maggie and I darted from the verandah to the fire where Papa sat with his rosary beads and back again all afternoon. Finally my Aunty Margaret came out of the bedroom and said, ‘Well, Alexander, it’s a boy.’

  Papa picked her up and swung her around.

  ‘She’s all right?’ he asked, as he set Aunty Margaret back down.

  ‘Och, aye, she’s fine,’ Aunty Margaret said, laughing. ‘No need for that midwif
e. She did naught. You can see Flora and the little one in a wee while.’

  ‘A boy!’ Papa said. ‘Mr MacDonald! Father! Come in and have a dram! I have a son!’

  My grandfathers both came in from the verandah, alike in their height and the strong Highland bones in their faces, but one with red hair and the other with black. They slapped my father’s back and said, ‘A boy! Congratulations, man!’

  Granny came out of the bedroom and watched them, smiling but shaking her head. ‘Just you remember the old saying, Alexander MacKillop, “A son’s a son till he gets a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all of her life”.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, swooping down on Maggie and me and catching us up into his arms, ‘and aren’t I lucky to have the most beautiful daughters in the whole colony?’

  He tickled us and we clung to him, laughing.

  ‘A dram!’ he said. ‘We’ll all have a dram to celebrate. Even the little ones.’

  So I drank a tiny bit of the golden whiskey, even though it tasted awful. Later they let me look at my new baby brother, John. It was the first newborn baby I could remember seeing, and he was something of a shock. So red and wrinkled, as they all are.

  ‘His head is pointy,’ I said dubiously and everyone laughed.

  My mother kissed me and whispered, ‘You can help me look after him, if you want to, sweetheart.’

  I glowed with pride and responsibility. Oh, yes, I was the big sister. I would help look after the little ones, just like Granny and Mamma said.

  ‘So we’ve got another John MacKillop in the world,’ my father said. It was the custom among Scots, then, to name the first boy after his father’s father, and the second after his mother’s father.

  I looked around. The rain pelted down outside again, but we were warm and happy. There in the firelight were Mamma and Papa sitting on the bed, his arm around her and her head leaning on his chest. Granny and Grandfather MacDonald stood arm in arm. Grandfather MacKillop, a whiskey glass in hand, stared proudly at his little namesake. Finally, there sat Aunty Margaret, Maggie, and me—the big sister, who would take care of the little ones.

  I was so pleased with myself! That’s a sin of pride, I suppose, but looking back I find it easy to forgive that little girl. She was so full of love for everyone in her life—love comes so easily to a child. As we grow older we have to work harder at it.

  ***

  I’ve been looking after other people ever since that day—and enjoying it, I have to say. It’s hard to give up. Now all I can do is lie here. I’m dying, but instead of feeling the fear I felt that howling grey day, I’m rather bored.

  There’s nothing in this little white room to look at except the crucifix, and even that is hard to see in the dimness. They have closed the shutters because the light hurts my eyes. I lie and listen. I hear the trams, the tugboats on the harbour, the children’s voices in our school next door and the bell ringing the angelus.

  I pray, of course. By myself, and when the sisters nursing me say the rosary I mouth the words along with them. They are pleased I can still pray; they smile and nod to each other, the dear things. They treat me as if I’m the Holy Mother herself. It makes me want to laugh. I want to say ‘Boo!’ to them sometimes, to remind them that I’m just a woman like them.

  One of the little novices has just been in to kneel by my bed and pray. They’re bringing in all the sisters, a few at a time, to hold my hand and say goodbye. I winked at that one—I can just manage to wink—and she looked as startled as if a statue had come to life before her.

  ‘Mother Mary!’ she exclaimed, and I pressed her hand. She began to cry, and I couldn’t comfort her. Dear things! They are all so sad, so lost looking, as though they’re losing someone they really need, when I know they’ll be just fine without me. I want to say, ‘Be joyful!’ but my poor old body can’t quite manage it. All I can do is lie and remember.

  ***

  I was born in 1842, in Melbourne, Australia. But my life was shaped much earlier than that, in the Highlands of Scotland, in the oppression of Scottish Catholics by an English king. My childhood was full of stories of those distant hills, my mother Flora’s soft lilting voice telling tales of all kinds: romantic, familial, terrible. Flora MacDonald, her name was—the same name as that of the woman who helped and loved Bonnie Prince Charlie. As a child I thought that my mother had actually been that daring, courageous girl. It was confusing, but thrilling, to hear of the escape from the English, the flight to Skye, the prince smuggled to safety dressed as Flora’s maid.

  My mother sang the ‘Skye Boat Song’ to us for a lullaby. I lay in the hot dry Australian dark and believed I heard a heroine sing of her success. But I never believed that Flora MacDonald, my Flora MacDonald, had ever really loved the bonnie prince. It was so clear that my mother could never love anyone but my father. About that I was entirely right.

  I remember asking my mother at the dinner table why everyone thought she had been in love with the prince— didn’t they know she loved Father? I got into quite a huff when everyone laughed. Though my father explained it to me, I could not see the humour. In later life, that memory of adults laughing and my bewilderment made me a better teacher than I might have been otherwise. When a young student asked a silly question, sometimes a laughable question, I schooled my mouth and answered calmly. I admit that sometimes I laughed heartily at night, into my pillow.

  So where did my story begin, I wonder? In Scotland? In the change in farming practice and law which allowed Scottish landowners to enclose the commons and drive hereditary crofters off their land? In the new town of Melbourne where my parents met, which drew settlers from all over the world? My story is entwined with the stories of Scottish settlers and Irish settlers and with all the stories that make up this new country of ours. My story is my grandparents’ story and my parents’, and my sisters’ and brothers’ as well. Perhaps particularly my father’s.

  There are a hundred starting points, but one is the moment when my father, a seminarian almost ready for ordination to the priesthood, decided to leave the seminary and rejoin the world. I have often wondered why. It wasn’t something he spoke of, nor was it something we children could ask about—for although he was kind to us, kinder than many fathers of the time, he had strict views about a child’s place.

  Mamma told us some details, and Aunty Margaret many more, especially later on, when I went to be governess to her children in Penola. I think she was proud of his brains, even while she was exasperated with him. ‘Och,’ she used to say, ‘there’s no denying Alexander is a verry, verry clever man, for all he’s a fool!’ But that was mostly said to her husband, not to me.

  Papa had been a brilliant seminarian at Scots College in Rome. He had excelled in theology and disputation. Forty years later, when I visited the Holy See, I met monseigneurs and bishops who told me that my father had demolished their arguments in open debate; that he was considered the brightest and most formidable of his generation. No-one doubted his passion for the gospel and for spreading the Good News. Yet not long afterwards, at the age of 19, when he returned to Scotland because of an inflammation of the lungs, he left the seminary.

  Uncle Donald, my mother’s brother, once speculated that the priests in Scotland hadn’t given my father the respect he thought he was due and he’d left ‘with his nose fair out of joint’. But I thought it more likely that Papa had gotten into a war of words with someone—probably someone senior. Because he was always unable to apologise or back down if he thought he was right, Papa may have felt it was impossible to stay. Or maybe he was asked to leave for the same reason. My brother Donald thinks it was because the prior of the seminary in Aberdeen would not allow my father to have a fire in his room, despite his lung complaint, and that my father complained to the bishop. That may be so. If my father thought he was right, he would brave hell itself, even if Our Blessed Mother asked him not to. I suppose that is admirable.

  I suppose, too, it must have been a difficult time for him upon his
return. Suddenly cut off from the career he had so successfully been crafting for himself, suddenly returned to the family he had not seen, except in short visits, since he was 12—a family which had adjusted itself to his absence and must now adjust itself to his intensely alive presence.

  Papa’s return to the family fold was not successful. Still, perhaps Papa emigrated to Australia—instead of America, which most Scots at the time were choosing—because affection remained between him and his family. He had known of their plans to immigrate to Australia, which they did a year later. So, unlike the children of most immigrants, I was lucky enough to have both sets of grandparents around as I was growing up. God alone knows what would have happened to us without them.

  Too many questions remain unanswered—you would think I would know more about my father, wouldn’t you? I was told stories—by him and by his parents—but even as a child it seemed to me that there were things unsaid behind the stories, family secrets and passions that were hidden behind simple explanations, fit for a child’s ears. By the time I was an adult my grandparents were dead and my father and I rarely spoke at any length. So the story of my life—tightly bound up in my parents’ lives and the decisions that they made—is partial, in both senses of the word. It is seen through my eyes only, with almost certainly too little compassion and too little understanding.

  Now that all I can do is lie here and remember, I must try to be just, and not let old anger or grief or despair colour my thoughts. If I succeed it will be due to the grace of God.

  OCTOBER, 1845—MELBOURNE

  There were times of pure joy, in the early years. My family was happiest when they were together praying or worshipping God, especially if there was singing.

  In 1845, when John was eight months old and I was three-and-a-half, the Catholic community in Melbourne finally completed a church—St Francis’s.

  ‘It’s a party for God,’ my mother said, and held me up so I could see the blaze of candles, the choir, the procession of priests clothed in rich colours winding up onto the altar. ‘It’s the first time this church has been used and we’re celebrating.’