Honor Auchinleck Read online

  Mum and Dad were standing deep in conversation and came over to see what we were doing – things of natural beauty were their passion. They remarked how thick the ice was, much thicker that year than the last as it was even colder. Dad asked us not to throw stones in the trough, saying we’d need to get them out. Mum mentioned one chilly winter in England during the First World War when ducks had their feet frozen to the ice on a pond. (Mum was born in Melbourne just eight months before the First World War, but lived with her family in England while her father, Harry Chauvel – later to become a general and be knighted – served in Egypt, Gallipoli and Palestine.) Mum could always tell a story. Dad could too, but he often concentrated on factual and practical matters.

  Soon the shapes began to melt and the sky clouded over; the magical memory fades. Later Harry thoughtfully dragged me backwards against a fence to scrape manure from the backside of my corduroy trousers. He’d been trying to keep me out of trouble and we’d been running around, testing cowpats to see if ice formed on them, until I’d slipped. Fleeting though those moments were in my mind, the visions that imprinted themselves on my memory began to gather brilliance with passing years.

  Meanwhile, in my handbag, a small newspaper clipping seemed to weigh more than it should. Deciding that it belonged to me, I’d put it with my passport and ticket in my hand luggage. The cutting seemed to rob some of the magic of memory: I wished I hadn’t found it, but I had, and it was both illuminating and cathartic.

  2

  A Name Like Honor

  Naturally I have no memory of it, but I was told soon enough that my birth had provoked discord and a family rift that echoed throughout my childhood. It was all to do with the spelling of my name, though there was more to it as neither of my parents ever mentioned to me that I was nameless for my first couple of days of life – this I discovered from the crumpled, yellowing newspaper clipping from 1953 that I’d found after Mum died, stuffed in the back of a drawer in her upstairs bedroom at Towong Hill. Mum hadn’t kept up photograph albums and scrapbooks since the beginning of the Second World War, so I shouldn’t have expected it to have been preserved in any organised way, though I’d often wished she would treasure and care for family memorabilia more. Headed ‘Daughter’, the clipping reads:

  A name has not yet been decided on for the daughter born to Mrs T.W. Mitchell, wife of Mr Mitchell MLA, at St Andrew’s Hospital on Sunday. They already have a girl called Indi, and a boy, Walter Harry. He was named after his grandfathers, the late Mr Walter Mitchell and the late General Sir Harry Chauvel.

  Mrs Mitchell has written several books. Her first novel, ‘Flow River, Blow Wind’, was published recently.1

  I stared at the crumpled cutting on first finding it. What did Mum call me when I was nameless? Was I just ‘baby’? Or perhaps she didn’t call me anything at all. There was little point asking such questions when Mum was no longer alive to answer them, but I still wanted to know. Indi, who may have remembered the story, was not with us when Mum died and had not stayed after the funeral. Being the youngest of the family, John would only have heard the story second-hand, if indeed he knew anything at all, but he didn’t seem to share my interest in archives and family history anyway.

  At birth I’d landed with a bump on a busy stage in the midst of a powerful play in which all the actors seemed to know their parts well, while my name and role were yet to be defined. To end my namelessness Mum called me Honor after Dad’s beloved sister and her own close wartime friend. Aunt Honnor Lodge was known to the family as simply Aunt Hon, but she spelled her name with a double ‘n’. Mum, who was frequently firm about her opinions, was adamant that I only needed one ‘n’, though I suspect life would have been easier if I had been given two to keep Dad’s family happy.

  ‘Mummy insisted,’ Dad explained rather uncharacteristically and plaintively years later when I asked about the spelling of my name. He called Elyne Mummy – spelling it Mummie in letters – just to get under her skin. My siblings and I called her Mum or Mother and tried not to take much notice of Dad’s irritating tease. ‘I am not your “Mummy”,’ Mum’s exasperated reply would echo through the dark downstairs corridor at Towong Hill, and she’d shake her head of short, wavy, almost black hair with frustration as she strode purposefully back to her desk in the front hall. Four children were enough without a tease of a husband looking for a mother figure.

  ‘I fought tooth and nail about the spelling of your name,’ Mum told me. ‘Having just one “n” is to help you make it your own name.’ Had I listened to Mum, and if I’d felt right about it, my name could have been an inspiration.

  Mum signed my birth certificate on 15 July, five weeks after my birth. Perhaps Dad had been too busy and Mum too taken up with two children and a newborn to complete the formalities. All the same I wondered if they delayed the registration of my birth simply because they couldn’t agree about the spelling of my name.

  Before my arrival, Mum wrote about me being a baby ‘who will probably choose Coronation day to be born, when no one is interested in anything but the wireless. I’m afraid this infant has succeeded in holding up work on the next novel.’2 Mum said she was disappointed because my imminent arrival had meant she was unable to attend any of the commemorations for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June. Dad had been the local member of parliament for six years by then and consequently went to some of them.

  Mum was thirty-nine and Dad was forty-six when I was born. Perhaps because she was an older mother by the standards of the time, Mum had gone to Melbourne to stay with Granny in good time before the birth of each of us. Indi, the eldest, was six and Harry was just three, while John, of course, was still to come. Dr Rome, who was sure I was going to be a girl, was supposed to deliver me, but, after lingering, I finally arrived in a hurry in the early hours of 7 June 1953 before he could reach St Andrew’s, the tall red-brick hospital overlooking Treasury Gardens in East Melbourne.

  My birth was an easy one, which pleased Mum as she felt that giving birth was one of the most creative things a woman could do and it was immensely important to her. On 10 June she wrote to Granny M, Dad’s mother, saying, ‘The baby looks wonderful & I feel wonderful and [it] is such a marvellous thing to be able to prop yourself up & look at the babe having the cord tied and to have known all about it all the time.’ Later in the letter she added, ‘It would be lovely if we could manage another little boy soon.’

  ‘On the morning of your arrival, I left home for Melbourne early,’ Dad explained when I’d once asked what he was doing when he heard about my birth. ‘There was a thick, clammy fog and I had a slow journey.’ Towong Hill is just under five hundred kilometres north-east of Melbourne, the first third of which to Albury and Wodonga was mostly a dirt road in the early 1950s. So the entire journey probably took him most of the day. Perhaps my godmother Pat, daughter of Allan Knight, our manager, went with Dad, because years later when she visited me in England she proudly told me, ‘I drove you home for the first time!’

  At the time of Dad’s telling of the story, it had been enough for me to know that he had come to the hospital in Melbourne to meet me. Now I would like to know what he thought about having another daughter, when it was that he and Mum decided to call me Honor, and how long he stayed. I knew he was there long enough to go to the Melbourne Club at the top of Collins Street, and he probably put the birth announcement in the paper. He might also have gone to see Indi and Harry, who were staying with Mum’s mother, Granny Chauvel, nearby in Murphy Street, South Yarra

  Granny M lived in Sydney and wrote to me only once, on the day after I was born. She died in early August that year and her warm, welcoming card was the first letter I ever received. She addressed me as ‘Miss Honnor L. Mitchell’, perhaps to reinforce her opinion that my parents should spell my name with a double ‘n’. Later, Aunt Hon put in her tuppence worth, saying that the spelling of her name had done her well and she couldn’t understand why it shouldn’t suit the baby too.

  Be
fore I was born Mum had asked Aunt Hon, who was a talented artist, to draw a design that Mum, who embroidered beautifully, could use on my christening robe. Aunt Hon filled her drawing with musical instruments and notes. Although the drawings annoyed Mum, she kept them – or perhaps she just never got around to throwing them out. ‘Your father and his sister are tone deaf,’ she said once when Aunt Hon’s name was mentioned. ‘She can’t even recognise the national anthem. Someone else always has to tell her to stand up!’

  The drawings would have been done well before my arrival to allow time for Mum to complete the embroidery for the christening. But in the photographs it doesn’t look as if I am wearing a christening robe embroidered with musical instruments. Granny M and Mum’s maternal grandmother were both very musical, but perhaps Mum thought that to have musical instruments embroidered on my christening robe was like giving a baby a wish that was unlikely to come true. Or perhaps she was just too busy to do it. I have the drawing, and it doesn’t look as if a tracing was ever taken from it. Mum often left stories frustratingly incomplete, leaving me wondering and often never finding out what really happened.

  Dad usually sided with Aunt Hon as far as he could without straining his relationship with Mum to breaking point. He retaliated on the double ‘n’ by insisting my second name should be Lenore, after the wife of a family friend whom he knew better than Mum did. While the good Lenore could not have known it, Dad talked about her at Towong Hill as if she was a domestic goddess. If Mum was not sure how to do something, he would advise: ‘Phone Lenore, she will know.’ Mum hardly ever phoned her, and I don’t think ever to ask her advice, though the two women got on well whenever they met.

  My names could have been worse. Shortly after my birth, in one of the distinguished, high-ceilinged rooms at the Melbourne Club, a mischievous member suggested that my parents might name me Regina in honour of the Queen, whose coronation had taken place a few days earlier. Another ventured Corona Elizabeth. I was spared that as Mum explained that ‘the only Corona I’ve ever known was a very unpleasant girl at school’! Another worthy member suggested my parents might consider calling me Hilary after Sir Edmund Hillary, who made the first ascent of Mount Everest on 29 May, just over a week before my arrival. If they had taken up the suggestion Mum and Dad might well have argued about whether the name should be spelled with one ‘l’ or two! Later, when I went straight from correspondence schooling to boarding school at Toorak College, I could have done with all Sir Edmund’s grit, courage and fortitude.

  From my first awareness that there was controversy about my name, Honor with one ‘n’ was good enough for me. Learning to write it meant there was one less letter to print neatly and I had no intention of changing it just to keep others happy. I avoided using Lenore whenever possible, and as soon as I was able, I changed it. The double ‘n’ disagreement resurfaced within the family every now and then, sometimes in my hearing and sometimes not; it was as if my name was their concern and they didn’t expect me to have an opinion about it. Once Dad realised I was sensitive about my second name he teased me pointedly, using both names instead of just Honor. Sometimes, but not always affectionately, he called me Blacksmith on account of my dark hair and complexion, and I began to loathe it just as much as Lenore. Smacky Blither, a derivative of Blacksmith, was more embarrassing still when he used it in front of visitors.

  If I objected to nicknames, Dad’s fast-spoken words would avalanche down on me; when he was angry it was like windblown hailstones stinging on bare skin. I knew it was better to stay quiet, watch, listen and bide my time. Training for the bar in London and being a member of parliament had taught him to argue cogently, to bluff and to speak loudly and with immense authority, even if on occasions he didn’t really know what he was talking about.

  Except for Aunt Hon, none of the immediate family was entirely exempt from extra names. Behind her back Dad sometimes referred to Granny as Lady Mum. Of course Granny somehow found out and didn’t seem to mind, but Mum hated it. If Indi slept in Dad referred to her as Dormouse. Long before Barry Humphries used the term, he loved calling his kids Possums; and Mum and Dad called each other Possie before the war – Mum was Dad’s Mrs Possie. Possums were Dad’s favourite bush creatures; he’d dreamed about them while he was in Changi. If he had only called us Possum girls and boys and nothing else, I wouldn’t have minded.

  Even Dad’s pale, smokey-green panel van, Gorgeous Gussy, did marginally better than we did as it only ever had one name; there was another mustard-coloured Fargo truck called the Yellow Peril, which was used for political duties. (Dad was a terror on the roads; no wonder he needed my godmother Pat to drive him.)

  Dad mightn’t have realised or even cared that his names and remarks got under people’s skins; he had endured so much worse in captivity as a prisoner of war. He didn’t necessarily mean to be hurtful or derogatory; he might have thought that a bit of teasing toughens kids up. That was true to a point, but sometimes he went too far.

  ‘We also called you Blacksmith because you always bolted or ran for open doors,’ Dad explained when I was older. It was a play on words – at one time blacksmiths made bolts. The moment he said this that I had a fleeting vision of myself as a toddler running out of the dining room door in bare feet, feeling the splinters in the verandah before the wooden boards were replaced with practical but characterless concrete. ‘You never seemed to hear when we tried to stop you and we thought you were incapable of learning anything anyway,’ Dad said. I have always been a little hard of hearing. Perhaps he was trying to shock me out of my dream world.

  It was cruel stuff by today’s standards and even when I was quite little I smouldered with indignation, but Mum and Dad didn’t understand the connection between their remarks and my hurt and anger. Unusually, Mum agreed with Dad so I had no ally. I avoided further hurt by trying to keep quiet and not to cry or, more strategically, to be seen crying. I never knew if they misunderstood my silence as indifference, which might have encouraged them to express their feelings with even more emphasis. I was in a lose–lose trap that I desperately wanted to escape and so I became even deafer to such jibes.

  If Mum had spelled my name with a double ‘n’, it would have been even more of a Mitchell family name, as Granny M’s sister Jessie had married Timothy Honnor, who lived far away in England – they were the parents of Dad’s twin cousins Pat and Patricia Honnor. The sisters were close and Granny M missed Jessie. Naming her daughter Honnor after Jessie’s husband’s family was a compliment to Jessie and her husband, and reminded Granny M of the happy times they had spent together in Sydney, London and Paris.

  In our family, unusual names were not without precedent. Indi’s name came from the Indi River, one of the tributaries of the Murray, and apparently in an indigenous dialect it means a water plant. It is a pretty name so I never thought about it as being particularly unusual. Harry was named Walter Harry Thomas after our grandfathers: Dad’s father, Walter Mitchell, and Mum’s father, Harry Chauvel. Mum and Dad had chosen Harry’s name in autumn 1941, nine years before he was born, when they’d hoped to conceive before Dad went to the war in Malaya. I started calling my older brother just Harry, apparently because I couldn’t manage saying Walter and Harry together. John inherited his three names from Dad’s much-revered Uncle Jack (really John), Chauvel from Grandfather Chauvel, and Huon from ancestors on the Mitchell side of the family.

  Strangely, I had never thought to ask Mum about the story behind her name while she was alive. Later, in a long telephone call to Mum’s sister, Eve, in Harare, she explained that her parents had found the name Elyne (it is pronounced Ell-een) among family papers and that it is supposed to be Scottish for Ellen. ‘It was,’ Eve said, ‘a difficult name with which to saddle a child!’ As it turned out, it was an unusual name for an unusual person; Ellen would never have suited Mum.

  Perhaps it would have been politic for me to quietly start spelling my name with a double ‘n’ and defuse the squabbling. But I didn’t want to appea
se anyone and at twenty-three and young for my age – stubborn and sulky and perhaps more like a teenager than an adult – I took matters into my own hands. I would have quite happily ditched my entire name, but Honor was already part of my identity. Instead, I targeted my middle name. Rather than choosing another name from my extended paternal family, in 1976 I decided on a second name from Mum’s side of the family. I didn’t like my Granny Chauvel’s name, Sibyl, but I thought Chauvel would do fine as a middle name. Dad continued to call me Honor Lenore if he felt like it; the fact that I refused to answer had no effect on him.

  Grandfather Chauvel’s first name was Henry, but he was always called Harry. Towards the end of the First World War he asked if he could be knighted as Sir Harry rather than Sir Henry Chauvel. He had set a precedent and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t follow suit, although changing a name by deed poll signed in a Melbourne solicitor’s office was far less romantic than using a knighthood won on the battlefield to make the change.

  Mum never commented to me about my name change. It might have been polite to ask her if I could use her family name, but I didn’t think she would like it. With my jet-black hair, olive skin and shortish, sturdy legs, like Dad’s, I looked more like a Mitchell than a Chauvel. I wished my legs would grow and stretch out into elegant, athletic-looking legs like Mum’s – she had a fabulous figure.