Up out of Egypt

Chapter One

‘. . . I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into the land . . . a land flowing with milk and honey’.

—Exodus 3:17

In December of 1987 my husband Wally and I lay in bed listening to the ten o’clock news before retiring for the night. I was disturbed by the report of a new law which had recently been passed. It would allow the birth mother of an adopted baby access to information which could lead to a reunion with that child — this meant that I could search for the baby who I had given away so many years before.

I said to Wally, It’s not fair that they should make this possible because it is too tempting for me to search for my baby.

But I knew I wouldn’t be tempted. I was now a mother of four and a wife of twenty-eight years. Although my husband knew of my past, it was hidden from everyone else including my children. Yet the real reason I had determined not to search for my first born was that I believed it was my sin that caused my loss so many years ago. Giving up my first born was the consequence of that sin. There was no way I was about to enter into her life now and interfere with her stability just to ease my pain.

Where did it all begin? What caused me to seek out compromising situations in my early teenage years to gain friendships and acceptance? What had caused me to be the kind of girl who searched for love in all the wrong places? Why did I become a liar just so I could go out at night to the movies or hang around on the streets with my less than desirable friends? Deep in my heart I knew it was wrong, but the pull to be accepted as ‘one of the crowd’ was far greater than the desire to do what I knew was right. Where did all this rebellion stem from? Was it a seed in my heart from birth or was it the feeling that I didn’t count ... that I was more of a nuisance than a joy to have around? I had always been well cared for. I wasn’t beaten or abused by my parents so why did I feel this lack in my life?

I was born on a cold, wet August night, to parents who worked hard on their Gippsland farm in Victoria, in times that were hard and returns were small. They made just enough to provide their family with the bare necessities of life.

Ruby, my mother was in labour and should have been on the way to hospital but the milking had to be finished. Finally Will, my father, wrapped her in a warm eiderdown to protect her from the cold, snuggled her comfortably into the front seat of the old Whippet, the 1927 car with a soft top, and Perspex windows where the wind whistled through. They headed off along the dark country road in the buffeting wind and driving rain. All the while Mum’s contractions intensified. Five miles from the hospital Dad stopped at the doctor’s house in Drouin to tell him the baby was coming. The doctor phoned through to the Warragul hospital to warn them of the imminent birth — but my parents didn’t make it to the hospital. Instead, as my mother’s waters broke I made my grand entrance into the world in the family car somewhere between Drouin and Warragul.

That was 28 August 1943 during the Second World War; a time when food rationing had just been introduced, and the year the great classic film ‘Lassie Come Home’ hit the box office.

Being born into a family where my siblings were so much older than me, I grew up feeling like I didn’t really belong. It seems I was active, noisy and moody, a difficult little girl to have around and even as a small child I wondered, was I loved? I didn’t feel it.

My first happy memory was when I was about three or four years old. I was sitting on my little cane chair in the lounge room. The chair toppled over backwards with me on it, and everyone laughed. I felt so good that they laughed because I didn’t think they were laughing at me, but with me. I felt connected to my family. They were taking notice of me and I felt included in their grown up world. That moment brought with it a feeling of warmth and love but as the years went by that memory was tinged with an element of sadness because there were so few times where I felt that inclusion and love.

Selling our farm when I was four years old, Dad bought a small farm-let in Lardner Road, on the outskirts of the township of Drouin. By the time I started school at Drouin State School in the February of 1948 my siblings seemed to me to be all grown up. Allan, 16 years older than me was engaged to be married, Mavis, ten years older had started work at the local weaving mill and Harry six years older was ready to enter High School. I wanted to be all grown up too. I simply felt like the little kid that didn’t fit in and was a bother to have around.

Right from the very beginning school life for me was spent trying to impress. Why did I always feel like I failed to please? If only I was pretty or smart . . . but I wasn’t either. Comments by my parents’ friends like Isn’t she a big girl for her age made me feel more of a misfit.

I must have appeared bright enough when I started school, for the teacher decided I didn’t need Prep year (or Bubs as the first school year was called then) and after attending school for a short while I was put up into Grade One. This proved to be a big problem for me as throughout my school life I was always younger than my peers. Once again, I felt different from those around me.

I hadn’t been at school long when I fell in love for the first of many times. The best looking boy in the class kissed my hand while we sat in the playground rocker. I was all of five years old. All I wanted was to be loved. ‘Liked’ was really the operative word. I didn’t feel loved but right then being popular, being liked was what I really longed for. I know now, as I look back, I was searching for identity; for someone to affirm who I was, accept me for who I was and in that to say, You’re okay!

Maybe my singing would bring me that affirmation! Our Grade Three teacher Miss Tomasetti called for items for our school concert. I decided I would sing a song. Overconfident, I stood before my class singing one of the radio hits, ‘If you loved me half as much as I love you, you wouldn’t worry me half as much as you do . . .’

It doesn’t sound too bad, I thought.

The problem was that I couldn’t remember where and how to end the song and continued to sing until our teacher Miss Tomasetti had to say, Okay, that will do, and the whole class laughed. Humiliated, instead of elevated my ego shriveled once more.

My parents didn’t attend a local church as their beliefs didn’t coincide with the mainstream church doctrines, but they thought it would be good for me. I was sent to the Methodist Sunday school each week. I walked the couple of kilometers by myself and I thought, Why couldn’t my parents go to this church like the other kids’ parents did?

One particular day I met a school friend who was going to the Church of England Sunday school. She said, Why don’t you come with me? The invitation was too much to resist. Going to church with a friend was really special. Even though I knew I was going against my parents’ wishes I went anyway. I was given a little book and a sticker with a Bible verse written on it with the assurance I would be given one each week if I came back again. I didn’t, and one day the Sunday school teacher who was also one of the teachers at State School asked me why I hadn’t attended again. When I told her that I usually attended the Methodist church she said, Oh, you should have told me and I wouldn’t have given you a book! I felt guilty that I had wasted one of her books and I had that awful sinking feeling that I had done the wrong thing again!

That was the story of my life.

On 29 November 1952 as my family sat around the breakfast table we heard the morning news on the radio, news that shocked us and would change our lives forever. It reported that a man had died of a heart attack while driving his car across the Geelong Bridge. His partially blind wife was a passenger in the car, which stopped just before it descended an embankment. By law the names of a deceased person were not to be released on the radio until the immediate family had been notified. But not this time! The radio announcer declared the driver of the car was my dad’s father!

My parents quickly prepared for the hour’s drive to Melbourne to be with Dad’s stepmother Annie, and to help make the funeral arrangements. The day of the funeral was the only day I saw my father cry until his beloved wife Ruby died many years later.

Chapter Two

OPENING THE DOOR

TO MY TEEN YEARS

‘He who brings trouble on his family will only inherit the wind’.

—Proverbs 11:29

Things changed dramatically after my grandfather’s death. Our farm in Drouin was sold and another of 56 acres was bought in Springvale North, an outer south eastern suburb of Melbourne. This would be closer to my 16 year old brother Harry’s new employment and also Dad’s widowed step-mother and the church fellowship my parents were aligned to. Mavis now 20 years old decided to stay in Drouin.

I was ten years old when we moved to Melbourne in August of 1953. The farm Dad bought was an L-shaped acreage, with a narrow frontage widening towards the back of the property. It had modern buildings including a dairy suitable for milking cows, and a large hay-shed, but no house. Always the innovator, my father partitioned off the hay-shed and used half for our living quarters while he built the family home. As I snuggled in bed at night I could smell the hay stored a short distance away and I listened to the soothing sound of the heavy rain on the tin roof. But it wasn’t my Drouin. It didn’t have those lovely green rolling hills. My beloved country life and all that was familiar to me was left behind forever.

Starting Fifth Grade in August, in a strange new school and making new friends was a fearful thing for me. The students in my class had grown up together and I felt like an intruder. I made friends with an older girl but she wasn’t much of a friend as she sometimes turned on me and told me she was going to bash me up on the way home from school. Afraid and humiliated in front of the other kids, I ran home another way crying; petrified she would catch me and carry out her threat.

When I reached high school and was separated from the new friends I had finally made in State school, I experienced further insecurity. I didn’t do well academically and was always getting into trouble for talking in class. Common remarks in my report were, Helen would do better if she concentrated. I used to think, I would concentrate if I could. To add insult to injury, Harry loved to tease me and call me a ‘dumb blonde’.

It was many years before I would feel secure in a relationship of any kind. Although I had friends in school, I didn’t feel secure in those friendships. If I saw a group of girls talking together in the school yard I would presume they were talking about me. I wanted so much to be popular and have lots of friends. Instead, my constant companion was fear of failure and rejection.

I would do anything for a bit of fun and excitement. From 12 years old I often stayed at the house of a friend who was younger than I was, but allowed to go out at night alone. It was exciting to walk the two kilometers in the dark to the picture theatre and back, returning home at 11pm. Of course this was always without my parents’ knowledge. I just wanted to do what everyone else was allowed to do, and my parents wouldn’t let me!

The 1950s heralded in a new way of life. It was a time when society was emerging from the fragments of war. Women had been welcomed into the workforce during the absence of men away at war. The innocence of life had disappeared. It was a time when teenagers developed a force of their own, juvenile delinquency became a household word and I joined the ranks of the new society of Bodgies and Widgies!

After I flunked Third Form (Year Nine) at the age of 14, I left school and began a course at Bradshaw’s Business College in the city. This was really my downfall. I now had a certain amount of freedom. I seemed to feel more comfortable with ‘bad’ kids and soon made friends with two girls who were older than me and had ‘been around’. We’d know them as ‘street wise’ today. They introduced me to a number of new friends and through them I met the Malvern and the Ormond boys, gangs that hung around the streets. It was fun to be in the ‘in-crowd.’

By this time I was sexually active, and had a reputation as an easy target for boys. Mum once said, You are boy mad. You chase anything that has pants on! (Women and girls didn’t wear pants as often then). Even though it was true, her words really hurt me but funnily enough that was my only vice, apart from plenty of lies.

Although the crowd I mixed with offered me alcohol I hated the taste, so I would take a sip, pretend to drink it but leave the drinking to the others. That wouldn’t stop me from giving the impression I was under the influence though. I wanted to look radical. I wanted to seem bad. But conflict raged within me because at other times all I wanted was to do the right thing. I wanted the approval of my parents, I wanted to be a good girl, but I wasn’t like other good girls. I wasn’t good at school or sport. I didn’t read or concentrate well so studying was out for me, so I did what I was good at, flirting and having ‘fun’.

Fun meant wanting a groovy thirteenth birthday party, dancing to rock and roll records. Fun meant looking forward to the train ride home from the city to catch a glimpse of one of my heart-throbs who caught the same train home. Fun meant missing class on a hot sunny day to take a ride to Rye surf beach on the back of a motorbike with one of the Malvern boys, or a night at the drive-in with my latest date. Fun was finding someone who was interested in me.

I was searching for someone to love me but all I found was disappointment and pain. There was no fun in finding that I was ridiculed behind my back because there was no alcohol at my thirteenth birthday party. No fun when the guy of my dreams went home with my best friend that night. No fun in discovering at 14 years old I was left ‘holding the baby’ when my life finally came tumbling down, and certainly no fun at 15 years old in having to relinquish my firstborn.

During the May school holidays of 1958 Mum and Dad took my friend and me on a caravan holiday to Adelaide, South Australia. I began to feel nauseous and sick. By the time we returned home to Victoria, I was not at all well. The doctor’s diagnosis was glandular fever and because I also had a very low blood count I was admitted to the Alfred Hospital. My eldest brother Allan, who by this time was a theological student in the Methodist College in East Kew, came in to visit me. I felt a little uncomfortable as he closed the curtain around my bed for privacy and prayed for me. I had never had anyone pray with me before, except when Mum tucked me into bed as a little girl with the rote prayer. ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild . . .’ half of which I didn’t really understand, ‘. . .pity my simplicity, suffer me to come to thee, fain I would to thee be brought . . .’ all sounded like a jumble of words and I had no idea what they meant!

While I was in hospital tests revealed that I was also pregnant; news kept from me until I returned home. I phoned my ‘street wise’ friend and told her my news and she suggested we fabricate a story to say I was raped. I didn’t realize the implications that this lie would hold. I thought my parents would accept the lie and wouldn’t find out about my promiscuous behavior, but instead they phoned the police and reported the rape to them! My friend and I were interviewed separately and made our statements but we couldn’t fool the police. Our stories didn’t match, they were riddled with discrepancies and soon I was interviewed again. The policewoman lost her patience with me and said,

You get one more chance! If you don’t tell the truth this time you’ll end up in Winlaton and I can tell you it is not a nice place to be.

Winlaton was a women’s prison and correction centre for wayward girls. I wasn’t really the tough kid I wanted everyone to think I was and her threat frightened me . . . and so the truth was revealed . . .

My parents were devastated with the news, but as sad as they were, they stood by me. Morning sickness for me was all day sickness and for the first few months of my pregnancy I spent most of my time in bed. Because of this I couldn’t continue my business studies and left the College after attending for only three months.

Chapter Three

HIDDEN SHAME

‘ . . . I was overcome by trouble and sorrow’.

—Psalm 116:3b

When I was about five months pregnant and it was beginning to show, I was taken into seclusion. Until the mid-seventies, pregnancy outside of marriage was considered a terrible disgrace, not only for the mother-to-be, but for all the family. The whole affair was shrouded in secrecy. Normally the baby was given up for adoption with the hope that when it was all over, the birth mother could resume a normal life without