Madeleine (3 page)

Ted was still in the army, working now as a legal officer at the Victoria Barracks in Paddington, but he was home for good, and he and Sylvette looked forward to building the married life that they had never really begun.

It was time to leave Lic's crowded Mosman flat and move back across the bridge. But to where? Residential building was at a standstill during the war and everyone was scrambling for accommodation. Somehow Ted talked his way into rooms at the rambling old artists' colony called Merioola in Woollahra. The house is long gone, but for a time in the 1940s and 1950s it was famous for its avant-garde tenants and its landlady, the redoubtable Chica Lowe. Lowe and her husband did not own the double-storey mansion, but from 1941 they lived in the mews stables out the back and ran Merioola as a rooming house, choosing their tenants carefully from young dancers, painters, writers and people working in the theatre as well as professionals, like Ted, who at least had enough money to pay the rent.

Sylvette, Ted, Madeleine and new baby Colette, born two days before Christmas in 1944, crammed into one room and a closed-in verandah on the ground floor and shared a kitchen and bathroom with others. Sylvette was busy with her young children, but she had the support of Valerie ‘Pom' Stillwell, whom she had known for several years when they were single women and who had also moved to Merioola, and Lorna Harvey, who was married to artist Edmund Arthur Harvey.

The young wives burned the milk, spread out their blankets on Merioola's sweeping lawns and had fun. Lorna and Sylvette took turns taking their toddlers to St Mark's kindergarten in nearby Darling Point. Madeleine was very young for the kindy and she did not enjoy her time there but she had extended family close by—two slightly older cousins, Richard and Felicity Baker, were also at St Mark's. They lived with their mother, Marion—Ted's sister—in a rented flat in New South Head Road. Often Marion would do the afternoon run from the kindergarten, collecting all three children, walking them up to the tram stop and delivering Madeleine back to Sylvette at Merioola. Sometimes she would stop for a cup of tea and a gossip with her sister-in-law.
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Madeleine, with her thick red curls, was a dazzling child, but Sylvette's focus was on baby Colette—the blue-eyed blonde.
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Looking back, Madeleine said that her baby sister was far cuter than she was. Even so, she felt secure:

I am sure that my ego was so well established…I had engulfing adoration from grandparents, especially from my grandmother, and my father at that stage just adored me, thought I was the cat's whiskers. Not that he didn't adore Colette, but really, I was so well pickled in love that I didn't need to feel that my territory was taken up.
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Ted paid his eldest daughter a great deal of attention and set about introducing her to the literature he loved, reading to her every night from the greats, including Dickens and Shakespeare. He relished the artistic atmosphere of the boarding house, where the tenants included people like Loudon Sainthill, the theatre designer, and his partner, writer and critic Harry Tatlock Miller. Merioola was always full of visitors. Dancers would pose for sculptor Arthur Fleischmann and photographer Alec Murray; artists painted sets for impromptu theatrical performances.
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Ted had missed out on years with his young family, but at least he was alive. His dear friend and Madeleine's godfather, Ian Sly, who had enlisted with him on the same day, was shot by a Japanese sniper in New Guinea in October 1943. Soon Ted was busy with his new life as a civilian: he had returned to his old job as a judge's associate, but eventually he took the gamble and launched himself at the bar.
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He had no money, but he had connections and enthusiasm.

The war had made Ted more serious in outlook, and Merioola began to seem frivolous and unsuitable. Around the middle of 1946, in a somewhat peremptory fashion and without consulting his wife, Ted moved the family to semi-rural Ryde, on the Upper North Shore, about thirty kilometres away. It was a disastrous decision. Sylvette and the children were isolated. And there was the matter of style. ‘It was unspeakable,' Madeleine recalled. ‘Ryde, bloody Ryde! My mother would know that one and a half rooms in Woollahra was a better bet than five rooms in Ryde. [It was] a thousand miles from anywhere.'
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Worse still, Madeleine was bullied at the local state school. Her wild red hair, pale skin and unusual demeanour set her apart. In the end Sylvette kept her at home.

Sylvette had found motherhood a challenge at Merioola, but Ryde threw her into a ‘state of the most acute misery'. Two-year-old Colette was ‘absolutely impossible' and Sylvette was often ‘in an extreme state of irritation and depression'. Ryde proved too much for everyone and within six months the experiment was over. The St Johns moved back across the bridge and into a rented first-floor flat in Watsons Bay. It had a wonderful view of the harbour. ‘You have to be by the water, it is part of your consciousness,' Madeleine recalled.
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The flat was a fifteen-minute walk from the Carghers in New South Head Road. Sylvette was back on familiar turf and the world was back on its axis. The family entered a period of relative happiness. Madeleine and Colette saw their maternal grandparents almost every day and the couple lavished attention and gifts on the little girls. Their futures, growing up in Australia, gave meaning to the Carghers' decision to leave Paris.

But there was already tension between Sylvette and Ted. Now he was focused on the bar and he took a hard line towards the wife he felt was spending too much of his money. He set up an account at David Jones so that Sylvette could shop but he could track her spending. Around this time, Sylvette bought a copy of a Christian Dior ‘New Look' suit. She wore it for years and it would take on an almost iconic status for Madeleine.

Ted's control of the purse strings was not the only cause of tension. Sylvette had always been able to tease him out of his tendency to become pompous, but after the war she could not stop herself from mocking this more serious husband. It was a mistake. Ted was not averse to teasing others, but he was prickly. ‘You had to take him extremely seriously and admire him,' Felicity Baker recalled.
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The Whitlams and the St Johns were still friendly. Gough and Margaret were living temporarily with Margaret's parents in Vaucluse, while their house was being built down south in the newly developing beach suburb of Cronulla. The two young mothers subscribed to American magazines—
House and Garden
and
Ladies Home Journal
—and swapped copies regularly.
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Madeleine returned to school. She was enrolled at Edgeworth, a little private school in Vaucluse. Colette, three years younger, so missed Madeleine that she was granted permission to attend the school even though she was only two. In the afternoons, Colette would be put to bed in a dormitory for a nap.
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The girls played with the Hill sisters, Catherine, Christine and Sue. And their mother Marion and Sylvette became close friends.

Madeleine showed her academic talents early. At the age of seven, according to her report for First Class in November 1948, she excelled in arithmetic, reading, spelling and phonics. Her storytelling was ‘very good', her voice ‘expressive' and she listened intelligently to the radio. She had also made a good beginning with composition. Headmistress Mary Hall noted that ‘Madeleine's work is outstanding. She is thorough in detail but can be beautifully spontaneous in expression. A delightful pupil.'
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Ted's habit of reading aloud to his daughters every night was paying off. But it was Sylvette who was the centre of Madeleine's existence.

At Merioola, Sylvette had focused on Colette; at Ryde, she had been preoccupied by her isolation. But at Watsons Bay mother and elder daughter were close. Madeleine recalled:

After we moved to Watsons Bay and she was happier, I can remember outings that we had together and I felt this bond. [One day] we were on the tram and she was telling me about the uniform and she was terribly excited and I was thrilled to bits. She was telling me item by item what I would be getting for the private school, this colossal wardrobe, so I remember that we had—not a conspiracy—that we had a sort of joint enterprise and I felt that we had something together that we shared.
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CHAPTER THREE
Sylvette's Despair

Ted St John was proving to be a man of eclectic tastes; he had married an exotic French outsider, and he had hauled his little family to the bohemian Merioola boarding house. With the war over, he made another unexpected decision, buying land at Castlecrag on Sydney's Middle Harbour.

Sixty years ago Castlecrag was revolutionary, a place filled with political and cultural meaning for a certain group of aspirational young Australians. It represented modernity and liberalism and a post-war belief that professionals, artists and academics could forge a truly open community. The suburb was carved out of the bush by architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin in the 1920s, but it had languished in the 1930s and 1940s. But after the war, many of the original planning constraints were lifted and word spread quickly of the land bargains to be had there. Ted's interest was sparked after his sister Margaret and her husband John Minchin bought a block at Castlecrag.

Ted had no funds and, with no money in his family, he turned to his in-laws. Sylvette's parents were not rich but they had recovered from the losses that forced them from Paris before the war, and they agreed to help with the deposit. By the end of 1948, Madeleine, now seven years old, found herself in a new house with a room of her own and, before long, piano lessons and a cocker-spaniel puppy.

Castlecrag was a very different world for Madeleine. Visits to her grandparents were less frequent, and she had a new school, East Lindfield Public, far bigger than the little private school of Edgeworth where she had done so well. East Lindfield meant a bus ride each way and a whole swag of new kids to get to know.

But it was Sylvette who faced the biggest challenge. Socialising in Castlecrag in the 1950s was about cocktail parties on each other's terraces, an obligatory mixing with the neighbours and, for the stay-at-home wives like Sylvette, empty afternoons in empty houses. Still, there were compensations. Some of the St Johns' friends from the eastern suburbs, among them Lorna and Edmund Harvey, also moved to Castlecrag, and Sylvette made new friends. It was a lively community. On weekends, adults partied as the kids ran freely in and out of the unlocked back doors and roamed along the edges of the harbour. Ingrid Relf, the same age as Madeleine, remembered long evenings when adults and kids would gather on the deck of her parents' house ‘waiting for the southerly bluster to come in, drinking beer and talking politics and literature, or books or music…'
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Sylvette missed Paris, but she found a number of European Jewish families who had settled at Castlecrag. She was particularly close to Friedel Souhami, a German woman who had arrived with her Jewish husband Manfred and daughter Renate in 1939 after fleeing Germany. The Souhamis bought one of the original 1920s Burley Griffin houses, and by the time the St Johns arrived, in 1948, they were local identities. The thick-set Friedel was a decade or more older than Sylvette but the women bonded quickly, and Sylvette, already seen as highly strung by her neighbours, often poured out her heart to Friedel.

But according to the standards of the time, Sylvette had nothing to complain about. She had a brand-new house with an open-plan living area and kitchen and lovely floors of local tallowwood, a husband making his way in the law, two pretty children and the freedom of not having to work to make ends meet. And the St Johns had a car—a maroon Vanguard—and enough money to decorate their modest home.

Built on the high side of the street, Number 9 The Rampart looked down to a gully and the harbour. The steep block had steps leading up to the front and side terraces made from local sandstone. A garage and playroom at the front was connected to the house with an internal stairway.

There were no fences between the houses in Castlecrag and few barriers between adults and children, who called their parents' friends by their first names and were encouraged to engage with other adults directly. Madeleine and Colette found friends close to home. Next door were Tina and Tonia Date. From the window in Tina's bedroom the four little girls could look down and spy on both sets of parents sipping cocktails on the St Johns' terrace.

The Dates were well known in the suburb. Albert Date was an economist who worked for the Rural Bank and later the Tariff Board. His wife Anita Aarons was a sculptor who used the garage at Number 7 as her studio. She was close to Sylvette but, unlike Friedel Souhami, was often impatient with her neighbour and less inclined to listen to her worries.

In the first couple of years at Castlecrag, the St John family held together. In 1949 Madeleine and Colette were all smiles when they were flower girls at their Aunt Josette's wedding to her teenage sweetheart Neville Jenkins. Their bouquets were made of gardenias and the perfume of the flowers drifted from one end of the marquee to the other.
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It was a memorable and happy day, but there were strains in the St John marriage.

In 1950, Sylvette accused Ted of having an affair with a much older woman. When Sylvette offered to divorce him, Ted was alarmed.
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Pom Stillwell thought Sylvette was wrong in her suspicions. She did not think Ted was the sort to have an affair, that the woman whom Sylvette had accused was Ted's confidante, not his lover.
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Margaret Whitlam thought otherwise. She had no doubt Ted was having affairs with Castlecrag women. She recalled that Ted had made no secret of his interest in other women, indeed he ‘almost boasted of it', and that this caused Sylvette considerable pain.
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