My Mother - The Twenties Onward
Vera McKie (nee Storey) 1923- 2009
As a teen my mother was in turn freer than her mother; but nevertheless felt constrained by her mother’s control.
She went to a selective state school where hat and gloves were compulsory; talking to boys in uniform prohibited; and the local dialect was suppressed.
Until my mother’s death she was friends with another girl in Sydney from the same school. Their mothers were political foes but of course had committee memberships and the Council in common. Mary's mum was Labour and equally politically active having been Lord Mayor. Under Harold Wilson in the 60's she was made Dame Catherine Scott. Both daughters had educated English accents, Mary's a little more 'Geordie', as befits her Labour background. My mother softened hers in Australia but the full accent popped out when talking to other English women of the same generation. When I first visited England I was amazed to discover that my privately educated female cousins had strong northern accents. Speaking 'Geordie' is now in fashion. I suppose Cilla Black's terrible Liverpool accent is to blame.
While they were not supposed to speak to boys in School uniform; my mother had a mixed social group who considered themselves at least partly, intellectual. She was academically gifted and might have gone on to university but for the great depression that began while she was in primary school. She was very widely read and would have liked to have continued her education; except her mother prevented it.
At her mother’s insistence, she left school at 16 to become a contometer operator, to help out the family finances. Contometers were elaborate mechanical computers, used for ‘number crunching’ in the days before electronic computing. She got a job using this machine at CA Parsons, the Newcastle engineering company that manufactured steam turbo-alternators for electricity generation and turbines to power ships.
For reasons of class her life was not like that depicted either in DH Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ or Huxleys ‘Chrome Yellow’; but her friends had liberal opinions, smoked and met in tea houses; and to my grandmother’s chagrin one of my mother’s male friends was Jewish. Jews were particularly unpopular and blamed for the Depression by many. But despite her mother's protestations, my mother regarded her choice of friends to be her own affair.
At Parson's she met Stephen McKie, who was a cadet engineer, with a sports car and 'a bit of a reputation'. Soon after they started courting the Second World War broke out. Stephen immediately signed up for pilot training with the RAF and they made a fine couple. Vera was exceptionally good looking at 17 and Stephen who was 23 was dashing in uniform. When he got his wings and was on coastal patrol in his Hurricane fighter, he could fly in to see her, a romantic figure in his fighter pilot’s Irvin Jacket and silk scarf. But the war was not a game, many people got killed.
All Stephen’s squadron, except him and one other, were killed. He was still a Flight Sergeant and was given the opportunity to take an officer’s commission and go to Canada as a flying instructor. But he skipped the officer course and instead flew to Newcastle to marry Vera so that she could accompany him to Canada. As he told us, his choice was between keeping Vera and dining in a different mess; an easy choice. In four days in July 1942 she had a green wedding dress; bridesmaid; cake; ring; church; and a reception with all their friends. She was 19.
And so she went to Canada. Stephen went ahead and Vera made the Atlantic crossing, with a lot of other women; at the height of the U-boat activity. Unlike the return trip this was a high speed run to outrun the submarines. Then all she had to do was cross Canada. She and another girl missed their train and had adventures on the way.
There are lot of photos of the newlywed’s time in Canada. It was obviously a new world. They did a lot of horse riding and my father did a lot of flying; teaching Canadians, South Africans, Poles and Australians to fly.
They admired the Australians they met, and that influenced an important later decision. But Stephen had been in a serious ‘prang’; an aircraft crash that began the worsening spinal injury that eventually stopped his flying and had him repatriated to England.
Vera had been pregnant in Canada but my older sibling did not survive to term. She was very distressed by the loss of the child and the potential of a crippled husband and had a miserable 21st birthday, alone in Medicine Hat in Canada, waiting for transport to follow Stephen back to England.
Unlike the fast trip across in a lone ship, the trip back was in a convoy that zigzagged as slowly as the slowest ship and took 16 days.
And so at last the War was over and I was born. Apparently I was conceived in hospital as an experiment to see if ‘things still worked’. Stephen was in and out of hospital but back working at Parsons and completing his engineering thesis on high voltage insulation. Then Peter was born. They were busy renovating their 3 storey house while food and materials rationing was still very much in operation. Vera kept all this together: two small children a wounded veteran, a house in turmoil, and oh I didn’t mention Juggins, our huge Bullmastiff dog.
Then bad news, Stephen had every prospect of becoming a paraplegic. Unless they moved to a warmer climate he could not be expected to recover. They booked passage to Australia but the waiting list for a sea passage was so long he might have to pass another winter in northern England. So they sold the house and with all the proceeds they bought, three very expensive, one-way air tickets to Sydney.
My mother worked, off and on, throughout their long marriage, initially as a medical receptionist; generally when they were saving for property or a car; later to assist in my father's business.
At other times she was active in various local committees and charities; amateur theatre and so on. Through the 1950s and early 60s Stephen became the general manager of increasingly larger factories. Then he headed a research lab and finally dared to try his hand as an engineering consultant. Executive cocktail parties were attended and held. Vera was the perfect hostess. Stephen painted her portrait in an evening dress; it was hung in the Woman’s Weekly portrait competition and won one a minor prize.
She was beautiful, clever and for her sons, sometimes a little frightening.
My mother loved her father very deeply and was totally distraught when he died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage on March 13th 1958; while laying some carpet at home. He was just 63 years old. I vividly remember her distress; because she was in Sydney, on the other side of the world.
She wrote:
My personal memory of my father is very happy.
When my mother was away from home we did all the things she didn't allow like reading at the table, listening to classical music at full volume and going for walks when he would explain things like how to train a howitzer to shell a building not in sight!
He insisted on my secondary education when my mother would have had me leave school at 14 and remained calm when my mother and I disagreed as we did frequently.
The birth of my sons was a great joy and when Stephen’s health compelled us to leave England he supported our decision in spite of loosing them.
His death was the second great loss in my life after my Grandmother Gifford.
She was less loving about her mother, she more than once told me that her things at home were not private, her mother regularly went through them and didn't let her close her bedroom door. After such a search, after my mother was already married, my grandmother attempted to reprimand her for having in her possession a medically, and sexually, explicit marital manual. My father and grandfather came to her defence but it was very traumatic for her.
Because of my father's war injuries that had him in and out of Concord Repatriation Hospital, in Sydney, during the 50's, my mother's contingency plan should he die was to return to England. She was keen that I, and to a lesser extent Peter, would not become too 'ocker' . This had some unfortunate outcomes for me fitting in at at school during those early years. But once her father died, and after Grandma's visit to Australia the following year, there was a complete about-face; we were now Australians and proud of it.
Vera told me, when she was calmly expecting her death, that she had initially been desperately unhappy in Australia. She was only 25 when they arrived; with two small boys. The first Australian girls and women she met in rural Thornleigh were uneducated and quite nasty towards her; they openly mocked her strange ways and ideas.
Fortunately things looked up when the old lady next door died and the Spencers (and their parents the Stocktons) moved in. Verna Spencer had been a Fort Street High girl in the 30's, before going on to Sydney University, and her husband John was an engineer, like my father. They had two children Colin, my age, and Lyndal a baby, a third, Ian, came later. Fort Street was (and still is) a selective state school, like my mother's, and they immediately had a lot in common. Verna became her life-long friend.
Mrs Stockton, Verna's mother, became like a grandmother to me. Her retired husband was a keen photographer and gardener. This was a big task; as their block, like ours, was 100 feet wide but over twice as deep. He was mainly remarkable to us children for being repeatedly bitten by Funnel Web Spiders. This requiring several emergency ambulance trips; and for getting very upset when we trampled his plants. It's all under townhouses today.
Vera then rapidly made more friends, discovering that there were violinists (Ruth Mann, who's husband Alan is now, posthumously, world renowned for having taught some of the World's leading brass players); teachers; readers; craftswomen; ballet; opera and theatre-goers aplenty; once she knew where to look. About this time she got involved in the Australian Council for Women then because of us, in the scouting movement. John Spencer Verna’s husband was the NSW Scouting Commissioner. Then it came time for us to go to High school. Suddenly she was active in the Ladies Auxiliary at Normanhurst Boys’, where she met some of her closest and longest friends.
About half way through high school Stephen decided to leave the corporate world and begin a consulting business. With Vera's unwavering support Stephen abandoned the security of a safe employed career to establish a consultancy based on his specialised knowledge of the requirements of Australian Standards and Specifications in the electric and electronic industries. Over the next 25 years he built a world-wide connection with international companies wishing to meet the Standards in Australia in order to market in Australia.
My father's consulting business was a huge risk and again Vera went to work; for Stephen as his first secretary. But the gamble paid off, Japanese firms wanted to hire an Australian consultant to help them design western appliances. Vera learnt and excelled at Ikebana flower arranging and Japanese cooking and we all learnt to use chop sticks. She was always very handy. She could cook and sew very well and we once timed her knitting and found that she was faster than the Australian champion (as published). She had a special technique, learned on the ship returning from Canada. At first she knitted, crocheted and sewed out of necessity, later she added needle point and did it out of love or charity.
Over time they prospered. They seemed to be set to have a long and happy retirement. But then Stephen became embroiled in a patent dispute when a company allegedly infringed one of his patents. He was outraged and wouldn't settle, so they simply fought him through the courts for over a decade to his eventual financial ruin.
Fortunately, Vera had sufficient independent resources for them to buy a unit in a retirement village in 1989 where she quickly became involved in the life and politics of the Village, and such Villages in general. But Stephen was a beaten man. After a final spinal operation in 1991 he gradually became confined to a wheelchair and then bedridden, succumbing to death in his 85 year.
Values
My parents were socially liberal in comparison to earlier generations. This came mainly from my Father's side. His brother always claimed to be a communist, all the while heading the local office of a British multinational. Politically my father considered himself a professional manager, not a capitalist, but he had to negotiate with the unions and although he had time for individual representatives, as an institution regarded the union movement to be counterproductive and irrational. I don't think he, or my mother, who was his greatest confidant, ever voted Labor.
My mother's background was less liberal than my father's although her parents were not prudish in a religious sense.
My grandmother was on various school councils when I knew her. She herself had a somewhat unconventional family and was well aware of the issues of teenage single mums and other social issues. My grandfather was also quite worldly having been in a senior NCO and then an Officer in the army; managing the things that young soldiers get up to. He loved music and was a good baritone, singing in the Northumbrian Male Choir and performing in productions of the local operatic society.
As later became the norm for most families after the 60’s, my parents never had any issue with nudity; for example when coming or going to the bathroom; or on hot days in the privacy of the garden. I was amazed the learn that some boys had never seen their mother naked. My father painted as a recreation and we had several of his works, including a nude study, hanging in our living room. This occasionally raised an eye among my friends. As a family we often went to the Art Gallery of NSW where we came to admire the, somewhat better, paintings of the Australian Impressionists as well as the Gallery's large Pre-Raphaelite collection.
My mother read a wide range of literature; and through her network of friends usually managed to get hold of anything controversial like Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’, Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’, Roth’s ‘Portnoy's Complaint’ and Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’. However there an expectation that whatever it was must have literary merit. Some popular literature was deemed interesting only to be mocked as an example of trash. But I don't recall ever being prevented from reading anything. There was open discussion with us, even as children, on any topic including sex, politics or religion.
My mother wrote in my father's eulogy:
All of this was shared with Richard and Peter as they grew up, together with his broad philosophy of life, love of animals, music and art and huge enjoyment of debate on almost any subject. It was said of the McKies that what in other families would be a knock- down argument was to them a friendly discussion!!
I’m told that at the age of two, when my brother was imminent, I corrected a doctor who tried to tell me that ‘mummy was going on a holiday’ by telling him, as any child might today: ‘no, mummy has gone to have the baby that’s in her tummy’.
Nevertheless my mother had rules and limits. She was often critical of stupidity in other women. For example, she was highly critical of the wives who while travelling to Canada with her, to join their husbands during the war, had affairs during the trip. Apart from the disloyalty, adultery was a serious lapse of good taste, was likely to injure all concerned, and suggested a lack of self control.
My mother was particularly keen to ensure that my brother Peter and I could cook and sew. We both learned to cut out a pattern and use a sewing machine and Peter is, or was, quite a good knitter. In the kitchen we were taught to bake cakes and roasts; fry, grill and boil; prepare vegetables; use the oven; the pressure cooker; and the Mixmaster; and follow a recipe book. We were also required to wash the dishes and dry them on alternate nights.
My grandfather had a great love of horses, one reason he had for have joining the Territorial Army before the First World War. My parents learned to ride in Canada where it was one of their main recreations. As a result Peter and I were taught to ride and taken to riding school every weekend for some years. We advanced through early show jumping (low jumps) to dressage; so that, on a trained horse, we could turn left or right, progress to a trot, stop, and back up, without using the reins, or with reins held, but the commands invisible to an untrained eye.
We have both continued to use these various skills throughout our lives. Peter once stopped a runaway horse in Centennial Park and returned it, riding bareback, to its owner.
On the other hand we were not allowed to have pushbikes until we left home; allegedly because of the dangerous road we lived on. I did not learn to ride one until I lived in London and used one to ride to work; as I often did later when living in New York.
You can learn a bit more about my mother by reading my full Eulogy to her [Here... ]