Madeleine (2 page)

The poverty of a rural vicarage was alleviated only somewhat by the St Johns' sense of being special, with a heritage stretching back to the sixteenth-century Baron St John of Bletso and a succession of Bolingbroke earls. Australian society accorded clergymen and their families a certain deference, but the St Johns were stuck halfway between the aristocrats of early twentieth-century Australia—the squattocracy—and the wage earners of the country towns.

The St Johns created their own small social group ‘without being able to feel a complete identification with any of the other groups' in the country towns where they lived. It was a world in which you hung on tightly to the things that marked you out.
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In the St Johns' case that was intellect, education and a belief that while they could never afford to visit England they were still entitled to call it home. Ted's older brother, Roland, recalled that the children read their way through the Arthur Mee encyclopaedia in the long, cold winter evenings in the bush. It was their ‘window onto the world'.
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Their parents encouraged them to consider high achievement as their destiny as well as their duty.

Hannah devoured copies of
Grit
, a popular American magazine that focused on building patriotic, religious and family values.
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She was convinced that Ted would achieve great things. He was a good-looking, bright, lively and confident child, and he had been a brilliant student at Armidale High School. But he almost missed out on university because of a lack of funds. In the end a university grant, known as an exhibition, paid his fees, and a scholarship and bursary covered his living costs at St Paul's College at the University of Sydney.

In his second year of law he met fellow student Gough Whitlam. The two became friends, and remained friends even after they moved into legal firms in the city. Ted loved the legal life. He came to know John Kerr, a young lawyer already demonstrating the intelligence that would take him to the highest level of power in Australia.
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The St Johns had a sense of security about their place in Australia. Not so the Carghers, the newcomers who were expected to adopt the customs of the dominant class and culture. Sylvette's parents were Jews from one of Romania's biggest cities, Jassy, in Moldavia, but both left their families as teenagers and travelled alone to newly industrialised Paris, which offered work and a measure of safety.

Sylvette's father Yancu, or Yaakov, was the son of a rabbi, but in France he quickly shed his religion and presented himself as a Frenchman named Jean Meer Cargher. He worked in weapons and aircraft manufacturing during the First World War and learned metalwork. On 30 September 1916, at the age of twenty-four, he married twenty-three-year-old Feica Avram, a machinist in the clothing trade.
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She was scarcely five feet tall, dark-haired with brown eyes and always elegantly dressed. Feica could barely read or write, but she had a good eye and a sense of style that made her an excellent seamstress.
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Sylvette was their first child, born on 19 August 1917. They had a son, Leon, who died from meningitis in 1921 at the age of two, and a second daughter, Josette, born in 1926. Jean was successful in Paris, setting up the Cargher & Leibovitz metalwork shop and producing cots and baby cradles at 7 Passage St-Bernard, close to the Bastille Metro. Madeleine St John was well into her sixties before she discovered that her grandfather was ‘no more French than I am'.
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Sylvette, almost a decade older than Josette, was spoilt by her parents and was ‘made much of by her family in contrast to her younger sister'.
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But Cargher & Leibovitz struck financial trouble and Jean began to worry about the political tensions in Europe. He convinced his wife, now known as Feiga, that Australia was the answer and that he should head for Sydney, with the rest of the family to follow.

The details of his immigration are unclear. Madeleine always believed that her grandfather and Sylvette arrived in Sydney together in the mid-1930s, and that her grandmother and Josette followed a couple of years later. But the records suggest Jean came to Australia alone in 1929, arriving on the S.S.
Orama
on 29 August
.
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Left alone in Paris with twelve-year-old Sylvette and three-year-old Josette, Feiga worked as a dressmaker.

Sylvette saw her future in Australia. In 1934, not yet seventeen, she went to Marseilles to board the French packet boat, the
Cephee
. She had given her profession as typist and indicated she was going to settle in Victoria, but she did not disembark when the ship arrived in Melbourne on 3 June.
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In Sydney, five days later, and with a knowledge of English acquired during the two-month journey, Sylvette reunited with the father she had not seen for five years. Feiga went into business in Paris running an
atelier de couture
.

In Sydney, Jean worked as a dealer in second-hand clothes, with a shop in Oxford Street, and father and daughter moved into a two-bedroom flat in Wallaroy Road, Woollahra. Sylvette helped in the shop, found work selling cosmetics for Helena Rubinstein, and gave French lessons. She advertised in the
Sydney Morning Herald
: ‘French taught by cultured French young lady. Beginners or advanced pupils.'
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Two and a half years later, on 3 December 1936, Jean and Sylvette welcomed Feiga and ten-year-old Josette to Australia, and the Carghers settled into life in pre-war Sydney, where the locals were more indifferent than unkind to the migrants in their midst.

Australia was still a predominantly British society. The Carghers had all but erased their Romanian origins in Paris, but now they had to adjust again. Jews were often regarded with suspicion, but the Carghers had left the synagogue behind and they spent little time practising their faith in Sydney.
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Feiga was well turned out and vivacious, and her neighbours quickly granted her a special status, calling her Madame. Sylvette had already established a group of friends, some of whom lived in Kings Cross and Potts Point—the bohemian quarter where actors like the young Peter Finch hung out. Perhaps it was due to one of these contacts that Sylvette had a small article published in the
Sydney Morning
Herald
on 22 June 1937. Under the byline Sylvette Cargier, she wrote about Romanian students living in the Latin Quarter in Paris. The article suggested first-hand experience: ‘A Rumanian girl attending the Paris University explained to me…' she wrote.
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Ted and Sylvette met in 1939. Sylvette was the girlfriend of Paul Lawrence, a lawyer a little older than Ted. In August, she and Paul took part in a debate at St Catherine's School in Waverley, where two of Ted's younger sisters, Florence and Pamela, were boarders. Ted was a skilled debater and was friendly with the school's headmistress, Isabel James, who was keen to expand the horizons of her young charges.

Sylvette proved to be the star attraction at the informal dinner party held in the school's new domestic-science room before the debate, which was chaired by Gough Whitlam. Cadet journalist Ria Counsell, who was there that night, recalled: ‘Ted was fascinated with Sylvette. She was charming.' Ted's sisters noted her smart clothes and perfect makeup. She was different.
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But Sylvette seemed cautious and ‘was not such a willing participant at that stage'. Ria thought her very conscious of the class difference between them, but Ted won out and soon he and Sylvette were much more than friendly debating rivals.
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Ted and Gough sometimes swung by the Carghers' flat to collect Sylvette for a drive,
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and Ted called her his ‘sweet Sylvette'.
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By the early months of 1940, he was insisting he wanted to marry her.

This prospect caused a crisis at the vicarage: Sylvette was not seen as a suitable wife for Ted, and Frederick and Hannah made the 450-kilometre journey down to Sydney to talk their son out of the marriage. But Ted was stubborn and prevailed, and Frederick performed the nuptials in his own parish church of St Alban's at Quirindi. It was 3 August 1940, ten weeks after Ted had enlisted in the AIF. He moved in with his new wife and in-laws to their two-bedroom flat in New South Head Road. The Carghers, regarded as ‘enemy aliens' by the authorities, had recently moved there from Wallaroy Road after obtaining permission from the local police station.
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Ted was pleased with his new family. He was a man of below average height but he towered over the Carghers—Sylvette was even shorter than her mother, at four feet, ten inches—and was a powerful physical and emotional presence in their lives. He was their bridge to the new world of Australia. Sylvette had married ‘in' as well as ‘up'.

The Carghers had juggled multiple identities—Romanian, Jewish and French—but the next generation would be part of the new fabric. Madeleine St John would be Australian.

CHAPTER TWO
‘Pickled in Love'

When she looked back on her childhood, Madeleine claimed she had been ‘pickled in love' as a baby.
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At the flat in New South Head Road, her Cargher grandparents and her teenage aunt doted on the new addition to the household. But her father was largely absent in those early years.

Ted had hung about in Sydney for months after his enlistment and marriage in 1940, waiting for his artillery unit to join the fight in the Middle East. When he was finally shipped out, Sylvette was once again a free agent in a town that quickly adapted to wartime. She was a charmer who loved good perfume, parties and conversation, and her Parisian provenance went down well. In her crowd, it was accepted that even married women would flirt a little. A friend from that time, Lorna Harvey, recalled: ‘It was more or less a habit; people paired off. No one worried about it, it was very common.'
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But Sylvette resented Ted's absence and she missed Paris. After Madeleine's birth she complained bitterly to Henriette Pile, a young Frenchwoman married to Sydney lawyer Marcel Pile. The two women enjoyed speaking their native language and Sylvette sometimes visited the Piles at Cremorne. Henriette liked Sylvette immensely and, for Sylvette, the friendship was a link with her past.
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Around March 1942, when Madeleine was about six months old and Ted was still in the Middle East, Sylvette was ordered by her parents-in-law to decamp from Sydney to the vicarage at Quirindi. War had come to the Pacific and, in February 1942, the Japanese mounted air raids on Darwin. There was panic in Sydney and those who could fled to the bush or the mountains.

Sylvette was unhappy in Quirindi, bored by the routines of the vicarage and the small country town. Ted's sister Margaret was also at the vicarage. She was expecting her first child, and her husband, John Minchin, wrote to her daily. The arrival of the post was a torture for Sylvette, who rarely received a letter from Ted.

Sylvette was unsettled, but Madeleine did not lack attention: Margaret and her younger sister Pam doted on her. After John spent a weekend at Quirindi he told Margaret that he could only hope that ‘our baby is as good and happy' as Madeleine.
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Life at the vicarage was comfortable but mundane. Sylvette joined other women in aeroplane spotting from a headquarters at the local bowling green.
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But she resisted outings and seemed sulky and lazy, and she was thin and refused to eat, so much so that Hannah became concerned.
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When a local Quirindi man came home on leave, Sylvette was so upset by the comparison with Ted's absence that she scarcely spoke. She was always beautifully groomed and made-up in Sydney, but she let herself go in the country, tying her hair up in a scarf, and wearing safety pins for Madeleine's nappies in her dress. She ‘gets around all day with no makeup and no stockings and doesn't do her hair', Margaret wrote to John. One day, Margaret threatened to take a photo of Sylvette and send it to Ted. ‘The next day you could not see her for the war paint,' Margaret reported to her husband.
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By November, when Madeleine celebrated her first birthday, mother and daughter were back in the city amid the familiar warmth of the Cargher household and her friends. Sylvette was part of a Sydney set dominated by war wives who swapped and stretched their rations. Margaret Whitlam, whose husband Gough was also away, found those war years ‘hard and [yet] not hard'.
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Women with children were far from isolated. Every afternoon, they met and pushed their prams through the local streets. The pram brigades staved off loneliness and built camaraderie among the women.

In Palestine, Ted was restless and frustrated that his anti-aircraft unit had seen no action, and he transferred out of artillery to the Australian Army Legal Corps. On 27 February 1943, he came home on leave and saw his daughter, now fifteen months old, for the first time. The photographs show a delighted Ted and a smiling baby.

Soon Sylvette was pregnant, but she miscarried. And before long she was on her own again: Ted was moved to Queensland to train for an amphibious assault against the Japanese in New Guinea. In August, his unit was shipped to Milne Bay and he joined the invasion force to Finschafen before marching back down to Lae. Ted felt he had got closer to real action in six months in the legal corps in New Guinea than he ever had in the artillery.
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Back home, Sylvette was restless. With two-year-old Madeleine she moved out of her parents' flat to Mosman, on the northern shores of the harbour.
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The accommodation was basic, but Sylvette was free to run her own life. She lived with Alicia Walsh, known as Lic, a forthright kindergarten teacher who had played cricket for Australia and toured England with the women's team in 1937.
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By February 1944, Ted was back in Australia, but his re-entry into the family was not without drama. Madeleine was wary. One day he pushed her higher and higher in a swing: he laughed when she screamed, and the incident remained lodged in her memory.
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