In 1948 she was already 27; over the hill, as her American-slang-talking buddies might have said, jokingly; or not. Some of them had actually married American soldiers during the war. Years later, when I was writing a history of the college she had attended, a clear-memoried ninety-year-old who knew every stitch in her darned woollen gloves told me one or two had returned to Melbourne after the war accompanied only by a child.
Kathleen was an amateur thespian; local theatre companies, play-reading groups, poetry recitations, that kind of thing. She was tall and willowy, and had a face that smiled crookedly; she was no beauty. She lived with her parents and wrote diaries. She worked in a city office and wore fawn gabardine coats in winter on the tram into town and home again. The house was an untouched Edwardian, of the kind you expect still to be lit by gas, on a triangular corner block below the rail bridge in Ascot Vale, and from the east window of its heavy-sofaed sitting room, you could see the tops of the passing trains. I used to watch them.
Kathleen wrote verse, a common enough pastime. In 1948 she fired off ten lines to a poetry competition promoting An Ideal Husband, the 1947 film adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play. Years later, I found a carbon copy of the poem and others, in a drawer, along with an old Conway Stewart pen still in its original but tattered cardboard box.
Fair, or dark, or tall, or short?
This matter has given me serious thought
In the days when my pigtails swayed to and fro
And my ideal man was a film star—you know
what it's like, it's that certain age.
(And I had planned a career on the stage).
It was a fair effort, as good as Ogden Nash’s terrible puns, if not as cutting as Dorothy Parker, or Pulitzer-worthily emotive as Millay’s 'Harp'. She wasn't too proud to submit to a competition, and her lines paid attention to metre, rhythm, rhyme; and what is sneered at now as naïve emotion, naked yearning. The poor woman. She was horsey, and just wanted a partner. It shouldn’t have been that hard, working in the theatre. Second verse:
My tastes altered little, at sweet sixteen
My hero must really be slight and lean
With a happy face and a dimpled chin
(Not forgetting the film star grin)
I’d dream enraptured of music like wine
A dance—a proposal—ah, dreaming was fine.
She was 42 when she married my widowed grandfather, who was 59, six-four, and had that creased William Holden look. He also read Dickens and played piano. They honeymooned on the Gold Coast. She was past having children. They lived in the house in which she had grown up. Her tall, horsey features bloomed into a stature of age that often eludes finer-featured former beauties, and she died in '99. He lived a few more years. When I cleared out their house I found some wedding gifts, gift-wrap removed but packages unopened, from '64: sheet sets, boxed English crockery, silver cutlery in baize-lined cartons. No malice or ingratitude or carelessness; they just hadn't needed them.
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