BIFF WARD In My Mother’s Hands: A disturbing memoir of family life. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
A family haunted by a tragic death and terrorised by a disease they couldn’t name.
Families are as defined by their secrets as they are by their blood ties. The secrets Biff (Elizabeth) Ward’s family kept united them, tormented them and ultimately divided them. Biff and her brother, Mark, always knew what had happened to their older sister, Alison – she drowned in the bath when she was four months old. Their father, Australian historian Russell Ward, told the children that their mother Margaret said she’d fainted while bathing the baby. Biff and Mark knew their sister was buried in a cemetery across the city from their Sydney home, but the family never visited the grave.
As the children grew, they realised Margaret was different from other mothers: it was almost as though she didn’t see or hear the world around her; she clothed and fed the family but was often ‘wafting in the background’. Russell, too, was different from other fathers: his style of hands-on parenting and membership of the Communist Party set him apart at a time when Red was the worst thing a man could be, making the family a target for anonymous attacks:
The inside world, the life of our family, I kept sequestered in a dingy corner of my mind, the place of secrets. We had no words for talking about Mum’s strangeness, and the things she had done in Sydney had congealed into one large secret. There was also the Communism, knowing it was not safe to speak of it anywhere … Yet sometimes one of the secrets sneaked out and spilled over.
Russell, Biff and Mark pulled together to present as respectable a picture as they could to the wider world, as Russell studied for a PhD, taught high school and managed Margaret’s ‘compulsions’ and odd behaviour, including an obsession with the ‘rash’ on her hands. The stress of living with such unpredictability and dread took its toll: Russell indulged a sex addiction, Mark developed a sleepwalking habit and Biff closed herself off emotionally from her mother:
One incident at a time, we were developing ways to live with this nameless hobgoblin in our midst, ways we spoke to each other about it, or didn’t, a shorthand …
For us, ‘she says’ was the giveaway, our code for ‘it’s not true’. What else could we say? How to describe what you can’t believe?
In My Mother’s Hands is an extraordinary memoir. Ward hides nothing from her readers, neither her own seesawing emotions nor her mother’s increasingly frustrating and dangerous temperament and her father’s sense of self-preservation. Sympathy, pity, confusion, anger and love radiate from her prose, as fresh and raw as they must have been 60 years ago. Here are all the author’s selves – the frightened and confused little girl terrified of losing her mother; the resentful teenager who dreams of escaping; and the damaged woman who can’t stop running from the mother who lives hundreds of kilometres away – evidence of a lifetime of damage wrought by a disease society thought best kept out of sight. Here, too, is a portrait of life in mid-20th-century country towns, where disorder and disharmony were kept behind doors, to be whispered about after the children had gone to bed.
Ward has drawn on her father’s autobiography (A Radical Life, 1988), the letters he wrote to his family in Adelaide, and her own memories, as well as her brother’s, to explore the mystery at the heart of her childhood. Conversations with family members, friends and neighbours uncover a wider tale of community helplessness and the knowledge that, no matter how hard the Wards tried to conceal Margaret’s illness and the tragedy of baby Alison, those around them were never entirely unaware of the situation. The result is a gripping, disquieting account of a family held hostage to mental illness in 1950s Australia.
Biff Ward In My Mother’s Hands Allen & Unwin PB 280pp $29.99
Kylie Mason is a freelance book editor based in Sydney. www.kyliemmason.com
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