From the bestselling author of The Radio Hour comes this charming but pointed look at the tumultuous extraordinary decade of the 1960s, and the effects of the pill, rebellion and new ideas on ordinary Australian women as alongside shorter skirts and the Beatles, they embrace freedom…
1960s Adelaide: The Langley family – Olive, Len and their two daughters, twenty-year-old Cathy and ten-year-old Evelyn – live a peaceful suburban life, although Grandma Langley turns up each Sunday lunch like a bad fairy to castigate them for their dubious morals.
Cathy, training to be a teacher, thinks women have it tough. No sex until marriage, then no work, child after child and the sacrifice of their desires to church, husband and family. Cathy is determined not to marry right away. Once married, it’s all over. A life no longer her own. Young Evelyn wants to be a fairy princess … until she sees for herself the price women pay for such dreams.
When the new contraceptive pill arrives women can suddenly sense freedom. But powerful forces are aligned against women’s reproductive choice and a fight begins. A fight that takes on their own doctors, the might of the Catholic church, and the outdated morality of previous generations.
Mrs Olive Langley checks the time on her marcasite watch—it’s so delicate she has to squint to see the position of the hands—and then clutches the handbag on her lap with nervous fingers.
How much longer will the wait be? She would never say it out loud—she believes herself much too respectable for that—but she has much better things to be getting on with than waiting in the doctor’s surgery first thing on a Monday morning. For a start, she has to get the washing on because everyone does the washing on a Monday and if it’s not all neatly hung out by midday the neighbours might talk.
Their appointment is already forty-five minutes overdue and she tries to suppress her impatience. She can’t even rely on the magazines sitting in piles on the coffee table to distract her because she’s read the National Geographics from 1948 three times over. Would it be such a burden to have Women’s Weekly magazines there instead? That way she could pass the time and catch up on all the news from the Royal family at the same time.
Olive glances at her ten-year-old daughter, Evelyn, the youngest of five, unmoving in the chair beside her. She doesn’t seem bothered at all by the waiting. Evelyn’s favourite place is the library and her second favourite place is anywhere she can read a book. No matter how much Olive has tried, because Dr Spock says fresh air and exercise is so good for growing children, Evelyn is simply not the outdoorsy type. Olive has spent many a night fretting that her youngest doesn’t turn cartwheels on the back lawn like other children or play cricket in the street or hopscotch on the footpath. Instead, Evelyn plays with words.
Everything Evelyn has ever read has been tumble-turned and pondered and kneaded and raked over and then stored in that brain of hers. How on earth does that girl settle her mind enough to sleep at night? Olive doesn’t know where her daughter got her smarts from but there’s no doubt she has them and Olive is mostly grateful for it, except for the times she fears her daughter will never find a husband because no man likes to think his wife is cleverer than he is, even though most wives are.
Evelyn carries a book with her wherever she goes and is presently halfway through yet another Agatha Christie borrowed from the council library. Someone’s murdered someone in a grand country house or some such and poison may or may not be involved. Olive has got out of the habit of reading, after having five children and a household to run, doesn’t have time for reading and, anyway, if she did, it wouldn’t be murders. It would be Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer. Something to take her away from the nitty-gritty of life, not plunge her right into the evil heart of it.
Olive pushes her horn-rimmed glasses back up her nose and sighs and waits.
Sitting across from Olive is a youngish woman she recognises from church, a recent new worshipper. Judging by her pale, unlined skin and her smooth hands, Olive assesses her to be perhaps in her mid-twenties. Olive spots a wedding ring on her finger. A new wife, perhaps.
The woman coughs and clears her throat, covering her lipsticked mouth, then straightens her back. She stares intently at the wood panelling but her eyes occasionally flick to the wicker Moses basket on the linoleum across the room. Every time she looks, she blinks away tears.
Across from her sits Mrs McGillicutty with the red hair. When Mrs McGillicutty glances up suddenly from her magazine, she and Olive exchange polite smiles. Their eldest children went to school together, but unlike Olive, Mrs McGillicutty didn’t stop at five children. Last Olive heard, she had ten. All redheads. Olive wants to cross herself again at the mere thought. Mrs McGillicutty sits at an awkward angle with her weight on one hip and then winces as she repositions herself to the other side. Olive sympathises. The things having babies do to your body, you can’t imagine.
Next to Mrs McGillicutty sits a woman with olive skin and black hair, cradling her swollen belly in her hands. She is wearing a gold crucifix at her neck and gold hoops in her ears. Olive suspects the woman might be Italian. Or Greek? She finds it hard to tell sometimes. There are lots of new Australians in the area, working the market gardens around Fulham Gardens, and Evelyn has a few of their children in her class. Evelyn says they bring interesting things to school for lunch.
And the lady with the Moses basket? She is small and pale and blonde and clutches a handkerchief and nibbles at her bottom lip. When she looks up from her sleeping baby and glances about the room, Olive sees her eyes are bloodshot. The poor love. Those first few months with a baby? When you feel bone-tired and you forget your own name and your breasts swell and leak and parts of you ache that have never ached before? She wants to get up from her seat and pat the young woman on the shoulder with a reassuring ‘There, there’, but she doesn’t. She minds her own business like everyone else in the waiting room.
On this particular Monday morning, the women sit side by side in silence in the inky dim surgery, staring straight ahead at the wood panelling and the framed mountain landscape, as if wishing themselves invisible. No-one says a word. Olive might nod politely at someone she recognises from church or school or the post office or something like that. Olive is quite busy enough with her own business, thank you very much.
Olive doesn’t want anyone else to know what might—or might not—be bothering her or her daughter and she knows no-one else wants anyone to know their business either. It’s only proper to be mindful of your maladies, discreet with your diseases and careful with your conditions. God forbid your neighbours should find out something about you and chatter over their back fences. It would be mortifying. When Olive was expecting each of her five children she didn’t so much as breathe a word of her confinement in the early days lest it somehow put a jinx on her and cause her to lose a baby. Bodies are private and so are the things that afflict them. She would no sooner lean over to ask the lady next to her why she is seeing the doctor than she would fly to the moon.