Historian’s daughter uncovers her family’s dark secret

RUSSEL Ward wrote Australia’s history but kept an awful truth from his own past hidden — until his daughter Biff Ward uncovered it.

Delusions: Biff Ward’s mother, Margaret, in the 1960s.

THERE is in my ­family a grave that was never visited.

When I was a child I knew that somewhere, over several hills in another part of Sydney, there was a cemetery where the baby had been buried. Buried and left. My ­parents never went to it, as far as I knew. And the one time I tried to, I was quickly put right.

I was eight, and off school with a cold. My mother and I got talking about the baby who died before I was born and about the grave. It wasn’t that far away, so we became excited about visiting it. “Do you want to take flowers?” she said. “Oh, yes,” I answered. “Violets.”

We collected my brother Mark from the Infants’ School and then waited across the road for Dad. “Dad,” I called. “Look, I’ve got flowers.” He crossed the road, his face a mix. Delighted to see us so unexpectedly? Perplexed as to why we were there, his little family, waiting in a bunch? “We’re going to see the grave,” my mother, Margaret, said. She was smiling, her lips all wobbly. As he took it in, he glared at her and thunder broke over our heads. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous,” he snapped. “We’re going home,” he said, taking her arm, his knuckles white, as he turned us back. We set off, a silent troop, my violet posy drooping, pointing to my trudging feet.

As it turned out, I didn’t get to see the grave until 40 years later.

My father, the historian Russel Ward, always told us the same two facts: before we were born, there was Alison; and, secondly, she had drowned in the bath in their rooms in a house at Woolwich Point in Sydney. Aged five or six, I asked, “How?” And that’s when the third piece of the story surfaced. But it was ­different from the first two; it kept sliding ­sideways, it was a slippery kind of fact. “Mum fainted, or something,” he said. “She said she fainted.” There was a rasp to his voice and his eyes fell to the floor as he looked into the past. There was a crack, a fissure in the story.

Alison died when she was four months old, on July 29, 1941. Over the years I searched for clues as to how my parents reacted to the shock of her death. In Dad’s autobiography, written 45 years later, there’s one paragraph in which he deals with Alison’s death, their grief and his final shift to atheism as a result of the offensive platitudes of a local Anglican minister (“God will not mind that the baby was unbaptised”).

I set out to find the record of Alison’s death 65 years after she died. In the library in Canberra, I peered at the microfiche screen, brow screwed tight as the slightest pressure of my fingers on the lever caused 10 pages to fly past. Back and forwards I went, muttering foully. Suddenly, I was in the right section: 1941. There was her name! Alison Russel Ward.

The details had been entered in handwriting, black ink cursive. My eyes scanned the columns; then I reached the one headed “Cause of Death” and I gasped. It had four, five, six lines of writing — except that one had been scratched out so thoroughly that the words couldn’t be read, and there were other words squeezed in below that weren’t clear either. The handwritten words insinuated confusion and doubt; they reminded me of the catch in Dad’s voice when he talked about how Alison had died. A blown-up view of the original document read: “Asphyxia from drowning, accidentally caused when her mother [was bathing her in a bath tub] fainted and became unconscious.”

So there was no great revelation or scandal: just the agitation and overflow in the black ink. The crossing-out on Alison’s death certificate was a symbol of what coloured the atmosphere, the very air in which we were raised. Events had occurred and, as we got older, continued to occur, which were beyond the realm of language. Dad, who was very good with words, was stymied. We lived in sheaves of silence, sheaves which stacked up around us and solidified into the walls of our life, muffling what we might have said.

When I was in first grade and Mark in kindergarten, Mum failed one day to meet us at the school gates and we walked the mile home on our own. The kitchen door was wide open, so we came in calling. Silence. I know it was one of the first times I felt the sense of doom which later became familiar. “She’s not here,” I said.

The sun was nearly behind the trees when we heard steps. Dad. We ran to him. “She’s not here. Mum’s not here!” He bent over and squeezed us each to him, then put us down, straightened his shoulders and went inside. “I have to go and find her,” he said in a heavy voice. “Will you go into Dorothy’s and wait for me there?” It was dark when Dad came back. I heard him mention a police station to Dorothy, our neighbour. I asked, where was she? “It’s OK, she’s back now. Don’t worry,” he said.

When I was in bed, nearly asleep, their voices rose. “I had to do it!” she shouted. “I had to go there!” “Giving yourself up to the police is mad,” he said, trying to control his voice, trying not to yell. “I should be in jail,” she said. “Oh, God,” he groaned.

How had he known where to find her? What took him to the police station on Military Road, with its bricks the colour of dried blood? Maybe she’d done it before.

In the 1940s and 1950s, there was only one phrase available to describe my mother’s state: a nervous breakdown. Those two words were not sufficient to describe what we lived with yet there were no other words. We were afloat without language.

We’d moved to Canberra, where Dad had won a scholarship to do a PhD, when I first heard her say it: “I did do it! I killed her.” My parents were in the hallway of our home and I was in bed. An argument had started and she was following Dad to the toilet, which was why they were in the hall. She didn’t just say it; she shouted it. My heart stopped. Dad let out a terrible groan and slammed out the door and away into the night. She went back to the kitchen, to her cigarettes and coffee. Silence.

Some days after that outburst, Dad came to my door to say goodnight. “Dad. How did Alison die?” I whispered. I knew I’d been told, but what I’d heard Mum shout told me there was more to the story, just as I’d feared since I was four or five and had asked the question and his answer had left question marks hanging in the air. He took a deep breath. And then he told me the old story, the story he’d decided to live with. She drowned in her bath. “That’s what happened, darling,” he said, holding my hand. “Mum fainted and Alison drowned.” I could see he was trying to make it all right for me, to scratch out those words he realised I’d heard.

Once, I found Dad crying alone. I’d burst into the living room to ask him something and saw him standing at the fireplace, his head on his steepled hands with his elbows propped on the mantelpiece. His shoulders were shaking. Finding him crying like that is linked to that summer and autumn of 1955, the year I started high school, a season of looming disaster.

He wrote in a letter around this time: Poor Margaret is really getting madder and madder lately — or at least harder to bear in some ways ... However she’s much less violent than she used to be.

I didn’t know this was one of the words our shorthand was covering up: violent. As the summer faded and the nights grew long and cold, she did something to me that even our truncated shorthand could not encompass. I never told Dad about it.

It happened when I was lying on my back in my narrow bed with its bedspread the colour of Granny Smith apples. Mum came into my room. She sat on the side of the bed, as mothers do, as she had done before. Maybe I sensed her in my sleep but I did not wake up. She leant forward and placed her hands around my neck. She started to squeeze. Perhaps I turned a little. She squeezed more, her thumbs into my windpipe. She squeezed harder.

I woke suddenly, rolling my head from side to side, trying to free myself. I found the hands and I grasped her wrists and pushed. I shoved her off me, away from me. She didn’t resist. She let me push her away and then she stood and walked out of the room. Neither of us had ­spoken. I don’t recall the rest of that night. Next morning I went to school.

Reflecting on it decades later, I learnt that psychological shock is caused by a rush of ­hormones which affect the ability to think. I chose the avoidance path, the common way. I found a way to keep my mind deliciously occupied: I was obsessed with boys, dreaming perfect fusion, filling my mind with desire; I became a daredevil, and I had fervent friendships. At nights I slept lightly, and was often awake; I rushed forward into my days, never still.

The vivacity of Mum’s younger self, and the fey beauty that had captivated Dad, disappeared utterly in the Canberra years. She turned into a grey wraith, someone he was looking after. She couldn’t help how she was, but her delusions dogged our days. We lived in a heaving sea of madness and sadness.

Over the years Mum had shock treatment and periods in hospital. Dad once told me that the doctor, our bland family doctor, had said that he was surprised she hadn’t knifed us all in our sleep. “What is it? What’s wrong with her?” I asked Dad. He answered: “The doctors told me long ago that she has incurable paranoid schizophrenia.” His voice was flat and tired as he added: “And they said, ‘You’ll be better off if you leave her now.’” We sat there, letting these hopeless pieces of information from long-ago doctors clump on the floor at our feet.

Many years later, I finally found a system of therapy that worked for me. It was based on allowing the old pain to surface and then to leave the body through the natural expression of crying, shaking, gibbering. To begin with, I did session after session of raging and crying and shivering about Mum being so absent and mad throughout my childhood. During the third or fourth year of therapy, I reached the layer of terror about the night she tried to strangle me. “She tried to murder you,” my counsellor said. I gasped. Such a shocking word.

Then, right on cue, Alison came back into our lives. Or, to put it more accurately, she came alive to us, to Mark and me, in a way she had never been before. I had been talking in my counselling sessions about what had happened to Alison, who she might have been, how our family might have been if she had lived. I mentioned it to Mark, told him what I was doing, in one of our monthly catch-up phone calls. “I’ve been doing the same,” he said. “Well, not the same exactly. I’ve been writing all my memories of Mum. And I keep thinking about Alison.”

Meanwhile, other people were finding words for what had happened in our family, too. In bed one night in 1990, I hunkered down with the literary journal Meanjin. I noticed Gwen Kelly had written a story, so I turned straight to that. Gwen was one of the Armidale university women who came to know our family when we moved to the city in 1957 after Dad became a lecturer at the University of New England. [The following year his seminal work The Australian Legend was published, and he went on to become deputy chancellor.] Gwen’s husband had been a classics academic and while they were not among Dad’s closest circle of friends, they’d often been to our house.

Gwen’s story was called Friends in Perspective. By the second paragraph I realised it was based on my family. Russel, my dad, had become Gordon. One sentence read: I wanted to keep alive the fantasy that Gordon loved his wife, Helen, even though I remembered dinner parties where she had served her husband and his guests in total silence while he ignored her. The next paragraph was a description of our front room, including the glossy portrait of Mum. It had the lot, including the Helen character, my mother, having killed the baby. And the climax was the explanation of what happened when I was 16: Mum buying a gun, and Dad having to have her certified. I realised that news of the gun must have shot around the university in a flash. They probably didn’t know about the hammer and the tomahawk.

And she then had another character say: He is committed to her care for life. Till death do us part. He takes it literally. He is deeply religious, of course. Dad would have recoiled at the “deeply religious” comment but it’s true he was profoundly moral and that he provided for her until he died in 1995. Even though she got it mostly right, I felt invaded by Gwen’s story, begrimed by her using our life as art, as entertainment. But now, when I re-read it, I am struck by Gwen’s compassion and, more startlingly, by the fact that if she knew that much, then dozens of other people did too.

When Mark and I talk about our past, about Mum and Dad, it’s as though we’re catching the same wave. Talking about Alison was a new beach altogether, with waves in shapes we’d never surfed before. We couldn’t prove Mum had killed Alison — we just knew. Our childhood memories of shouting in the night and the unutterable depth of Dad’s despair were explained by this, and this alone.

When we finally went to her grave, on a cool autumn afternoon in Sydney in 1991, 50 years after Alison’s death, we took oranges from his fruit bowl and I picked some camellias from the red-dotted tree in front of his house. Mark took only a couple of minutes to find the spot among the sporadic headstones. There, among the mown buffalo grass, was a piece of marble the size of an A4 sheet folded in half lengthways with the upper right-hand corner snapped off. It had one word on it. Alison.

Mark picked it up and I smoothed one finger along the bottom of it. We sank to the grass above where her four-month-old bones lie deep down. The marble lay between us, a cryptogram saying, “I was here”.

Edited extract from In My Mother’s Hands, by Biff Ward (Allen & Unwin, $29.99), out May 29.