Amy's Children Read online

  OLGA MASTERS was born in Pambula, on the far south coast of New South Wales, in 1919. Her first job, at seventeen, was at a local newspaper, where the editor encouraged her writing. She married at twenty-one and had seven children, working part-time as a journalist for papers such as the Sydney Morning Herald, leaving her little opportunity to develop her interest in writing fiction until she was in her fifties.

  In the 1970s Masters wrote a radio play and a stage play, and between 1977 and 1981 she won a series of prizes for her short stories. Her debut collection, The Home Girls, won a National Book Council Award in 1983. It was followed by a novel, Loving Daughters, which was highly commended for the same award. Her next books, the linked stories A Long Time Dying and the novel Amy’s Children, met with critical acclaim. This brief but highly prolific period ended when Masters died, following a short illness, in 1986. She had been at work on The Rose Fancier, a posthumously published collection of stories.

  Reporting Home, a selection of Masters’ extensive journalism, was published in 1990. A street in Canberra bears her name.

  EVA HORNUNG lives in South Australia. Writing as Eva Sallis, she won the Australian/Vogel and Dobbie awards her first novel, Hiam. Mahjar won the Steele Rudd Award and The Marsh Birds won the Asher Literary Award. Her most recent novel, Dog Boy, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction and, in Sweden, the Stora Ljudbokspriset.

  ALSO BY OLGA MASTERS

  The Home Girls (stories)

  Loving Daughters

  A Long Time Dying (stories)

  Amy’s Children

  The Rose Fancier (stories)

  Non-fiction

  Reporting Home (ed. Deirdre Coleman)

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © the estate of Olga Masters 1987

  Introduction copyright © Eva Hornung 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by University of Queensland Press 1987

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147080

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148162

  Author: Masters, Olga, 1919–1986.

  Title: Amy’s children / by Olga Masters; introduced by Eva Hornung.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Drifter

  by Eva Hornung

  Amy’s Children

  OLGA Masters believed in the innate goodness of people. Yet her clear-eyed engagement with the failings, mistakes and harm that we do is a touchstone of her writing. Goodness, for Masters, is not a trite or universally shared concept. It has great breadth. To be human is to be good; and to be human is also to be limited, and to do harm to oneself and others. This fraught and tormented goodness underlies her crueller sketches as much as it does her richly developed main characters.

  Masters explores in her fiction the lives of the women she observed around her. These women—children, teenagers, mothers, daughters, sisters, spinsters—are the core of her work, more so than her fine portraits of fathers, brothers, sons and lovers. Throughout her novels and stories we sense a keen interest in the lives of ordinary people. Much irony in her writing derives from the interplay between the mores and expectations that hem us in, and our inevitable amoral striving for self-fulfilment. She understood the effect of intellectual poverty in blinding young women to themselves and their world, and late in her life she observed with wry humour:

  Not only were we naïve by today’s standards, but downright ignorant. Jogging was something we did when the butcher was selling sausages without asking for meat coupons. Heroin would have sounded like the name of a bird. We never knew of a child dying of cancer. The pill was taken for constipation. Gay was the way we felt most of the time, even while twenty-two thousand Australian men and women were prisoners of the Japanese.

  As an ignorant young woman myself, I absorbed the news of Olga Masters’ death in 1986 through the gossip of academic corridors. I had no idea she was sixty-seven. I thought of her as a young woman my age, with my own aspirations and literary ambitions, and I avoided reading her. What delight was mine when I finally discovered The Home Girls, A Long Time Dying, Loving Daughters and Amy’s Children.

  Masters wrote later in life, after raising seven children. She worked as a journalist from the age of fifteen and went on to write a column for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1982 she published her first book, the short-story collection The Home Girls (it too is now a Text Classic), having won several awards for her stories. Amy’s Children was published in 1987, not long after Masters’ death from cancer.

  She did not publish many works, but in a sense they were a lifetime in the making. Her son the renowned journalist Chris Masters has said that Masters’ career began ‘not when her first book was published, but when she started taking an interest in her neighbours’. He describes growing up ‘in a house full of words’, serving, with his brothers and sisters, ‘an apprenticeship in storytelling’.

  In his words, Olga Masters had the ‘ability to get people to talk’, a ‘genuine curiosity’. Her style, sharp and translucent to great depths, offers us a fresh, sometimes startling understanding of everyday lives. She is as crisp and deft in dealing with child-hatred, incestuous desires, violence and our most suppressed motivations as with sibling rivalry, envy and love. This is part of the charm of these books.

  Amy’s Children is, in my view, the finest of them: polished, subtle and sustained, a rich portrait of inner-Sydney life. This classic Australian novel gives unique insight into wartime Australia, a period that is now the stuff of national myth and legend. However, Amy’s Children is not merely about that time, or any time: as with all enduring works, it has the specific tactile connection with its world that makes the past live on in the present.

  The novel is light and spiky; witty, wry and compassionate. We experience the small lives of its characters without judgement, yet with a keen awareness of how repelled we might have been by them had the book invited us to activate rather than circumvent our prejudices. Amy herself does much for which she would have been condemned, then and now. At the beginning of the story she leaves for the big city, abandoning her three children, which the title highlights as the action that defines the book.

  She denies her eldest, Kathleen, a parental relationship; resents the intrusion of her children’s needs and demands on her independent life; rejects and is rejected by her youngest daughter; and then embraces in hope and mysterious maternal feelings an impending arrival. All along, Amy, with an innocent animal selfishness, struggles for tiny and heartfelt material joys, little achievements in independence or lifestyle. Times are hard, and just making do is fraught with pitfalls. There is no room for the children she had while still barely out of childhood herself.

  ‘Whatever’s that?’ Daphne cried, coming down the hall. The little drawers answered her, running eagerly out and back as Peter tipped them. He laughed and set the chest do
wn and stood back to admire it.

  ‘Was it alright to buy it, Aunty Daph?’ Amy asked, pleased with their faces.

  In her bedroom Amy set it against the wall opposite the foot of her bed. Admiring it she backed until she sat on the bed.

  Daphne was in the doorway. ‘More for a little girl’s room. But lovely.’

  Amy was about to tip the contents of her suitcase, in which she stored her underwear, onto her bed to transfer them to the drawers. Instead she went with bowed head and put her fingers into the open parts of the plaited cane that made a frame for the mirror. They did not easily fit but the fingers of Kathleen and Patricia would have. She turned away and smoothed the bed where she sat. Someday I’ll have them with me, she thought, and it’s a good idea to start getting some things together.

  Amy abandons her children, yet genuinely loves them, intermittently. She holds us—holds our empathy—regardless. Despite all her attempts to find firm footing and the furniture of a secure life, she drifts at the mercy of her circumstances, subject to the whims and pressures of her employer, her eldest daughter, her aunt, her two dreadful lodgers, and most of all her emotions and slowly maturing womanhood.

  This drifting quality in Amy’s motivations is for me the novel’s most poignant element. She falls in love with her cousin; she finds her oily boss repellent, but ends up attracted to him. Her three daughters barely register in her thoughts, except as guilt, until they present themselves and make demands. Her life is precarious, derailed by the slightest pressure one way or another, at the mercy of her own inchoate feelings; yet she holds herself with a hope and naïve pride that make her compelling.

  And we know, at the end of the book, that her struggle will continue. Kathleen’s blind anger and disgust, infused with her own unique arrogance and self-interest, leaves them both vulnerable. Amy’s choices are curtailed, and her only assistance will again be her hard-bitten family. At the same time, we believe in Amy’s instinctive strength. The conclusion, in which she defines her relationship with each of her offspring, is moving and deeply ironic.

  Amy is a wonderfully drawn character: someone who is, in the most complex sense, innately good; someone in whom we recognise our own unacknowledged fickle, driven selves. It is about time we had her back.

  For my children

  1

  Ted Fowler left his wife Amy and the children when the youngest, another girl, was a few weeks old.

  The infant was sickly. The Great Depression was in a much more robust state. Ted told Amy he was going to walk south to Eden where there was reported to be work on fishing boats.

  Ted and Amy had been married for only three years.

  The first child was born three months after the wedding. Eighteen months later there was another and fifteen months after that a third.

  Amy’s parents, Gus and May Scrivener, and her brothers Norman and Fred lived on their farm a couple of miles outside Diggers Creek where Ted and Amy had their first and only home.

  Amy got herself with child at seventeen.

  May’s anger, disgust and disappointment were tempered just slightly by her liking for Ted. He had a way with his eyes of making May feel more Amy’s age than her own, showing a willingness to fetch and carry for her at dances and cricket matches and picnics, most of which she organized.

  Whether officially in charge or not, May tended to take the lead, impatient with those of lesser energy, and this, aided by the sharpness of her tongue, earned her a reputation for bossiness.

  Diggers Creek, on the outskirts of the little town of Tilba Tilba, was a hamlet of school, post office, public hall, general store and All Souls Anglican Church.

  Not all the Anglican souls of Diggers Creek attended the services conducted by a visiting minister from Tilba Tilba.

  Sometimes all the pews were empty, and when this happened the sermons and the hymns were of necessity bypassed, and the minister said a few prayers, his eyes on the starlings’ nests in the rafters above the altar. He was not discouraged by the sight, for the gaps letting in the birds grew wider each time he came to Diggers Creek. The time should not be too far off when the roof would cave in and there would be an end to the fruitless visits there.

  But the church came to life (the starlings’ nests swept ruthlessly away by May’s broom) for Amy’s wedding.

  May and Amy went to Tilba Tilba to make the necessary arrangements. They talked with the minister around Amy’s swollen belly, Amy believing her condition was not obvious to him and May half believing it too.

  “A very nice man,” she said on the way home, indulging in a little dream that Amy married him, not Ted, in a bizarre turn of events in which Ted died suddenly (though painlessly), and Amy gained respectability which sealed forever the gossiping lips of Diggers Creek.

  But the minister lost ground when the marriage ceremony was over and he told Amy and Ted he expected them back in the church for the child’s christening.

  “It was his job to do the joinin’ and he was paid for that!” May said at the house afterwards. (She had paid the ten shillings marriage fee without Gus knowing.)

  Everyone at the wedding breakfast was impressed by her optimism and good spirits. With an apron over her brown crepe dress, she was setting food out on a long table on the back veranda shaded by a grapevine.

  For Ted was out of work and Gus not speaking to him or Amy. He refused to go to the wedding and was now digging a new garden by the back fence, visible to the wedding guests through the grapevines. The round country faces expressed neither concern nor surprise at the spectacle of the spade flashing silver when it parted from the black earth, and Gus’s old working coat flying halfway up his back with his constant bending and straightening.

  May’s words brought a degree of comfort to the wedding guests. Many, though of Anglican faith, went to church only for weddings and funerals, and were pleased to hear a dark side of the minister’s character exposed. They could now dismiss any feelings of guilt occasioned by their wayward habits and get on with the fun of the breakfast.

  “The joinin’ had been well and truly done, anyway,” one whispered to another, sneaking a look at Amy’s belly from a fresh angle.

  May’s mood changed when the guests were gone. She was left with the cleaning up, for Amy went immediately to her bedroom, throwing off her wedding dress and following it with her pants, since Ted came in after her and shut the door.

  May went into a fury of rattling plates and cups and flinging off the cloth from the table, dodging about, using her knees to send the chairs skittering across the boards, half encouraged, half infuriated at the sight of Gus outside, spading with an energy threatening to outstrip hers.

  “Everything left to me!” she cried aloud, feeling an urge to break the quiet of the house, for the boys had gone to bring in the cows for the afternoon milking.

  “No movement from in there!” She raised the broom she had seized and aimed it like a gun at the front of the house where Ted and Amy were. “Bang, bang, bang! Then sleep it off. Bang, bang, bang! There we go for a dozen more!”

  She flung the broom away at last, like a child worn out with temper, abandoning all hope of attention, and went and sat by the kitchen door to watch Gus, who seemed shrunken now beside the great mound of weeds and grass and bruised and tangled vines.

  “Well he might!” May said. “There’ll be extra mouths to fill and if it doesn’t come from the ground or out of a tree, there’s nowhere else and nothing else but to go hungry!”

  Her eye caught the leftover food from the wedding feast—a ruin of corned beef, firm in the centre, the outside shredded, as if it had been cooked with a ball of string, and half a very yellow cake, iced in strong pink. A pile of rock cakes was pressed against the cut side of the cake.

  The Scriveners would have that for tea. The food and the cleaned-up kitchen and veranda pleased May, and her expression had softened by the time Ted came from the bedroom, trying to look innocent of the act of removing his clothes and putting them on again.
May ran her eyes over him and Ted’s eyes followed for a check on buttons.

  “Not too much of that from now on,” May said. “It could bring on a miscarriage.” Even Ted nearly smiled, since a miscarriage was what they had hoped for. And May snapped the door shut on the dresser and her secret dream for a natural end to the pregnancy.

  She had thought the wedding a big enough hurdle to overcome.

  “We’ll get this over and done with first,” she said to anyone within earshot. Now there were hurdles, she could see, of even greater height. Ted was without regular work, there was no money for furniture if they found a place to rent, and Gus was intolerant of having them under his roof.

  She tucked a chair smartly under the table, resisting an impulse to sit, surprising Ted who was expecting an extension of the homily on restricting intercourse (which he would not do whatever she said).

  She charged down to join Gus, who had by this time dug a width of earth like a giant chocolate bar by the back paling fence. There was little else to the Scriveners’ backyard—a few ragged rosebushes with tough whitish coloured grass wrapped around the roots, a scarred and thorny lemon tree and a peach, the trunk grey and scaly like the skin of an alligator.

  May stooped and shook dirt from the grass as the sods left Gus’s spade. She was there to berate him, but the earth in her hands was soothing. The thought of the new vegetable crop was soothing too, and its nearness to the kitchen, for their pumpkins and beans were normally grown between the furrows in the corn paddock. But Gus’s digging had been inspired solely by his contempt for the wedding, and she was not ready to offer outright forgiveness.

  “You humiliated me as usual,” she told him, taking a rake to drag together some heaps of grass and weeds. “A wedding for your own daughter and you don’t come near it!”