Can You Hear the Sea? Read online

  Aggie also became a teacher, but without leaving home. When her primary-school years ended she became a ‘pupil teacher’. This meant an apprenticeship of about five years, from the age of thirteen, teaching under supervision in the classroom and attending a study centre where her own education continued.

  During these years of teaching and learning, Aggie came to know and admire the work of the Catholic priest and social reformer, Father James Nugent, an activist who set up a ragged school, a refuge for homeless boys, shelters for ‘fallen women’ and for women just released from prison. Aggie didn’t merely observe from a distance; she had a family connection in her mother’s sister, Isabella Thomas, who was a wardress in the prison where Nugent was chaplain for twenty-two years.

  James Nugent was the founder of Liverpool’s Northern Press (later the Catholic Times). He drew crowds to his Saturday-night concerts, devised as an alternative to drinking in the pub, and to his vigorous lectures on temperance. His achievement in Liverpool has been compared with that of the rescue work done in London by Angela Burdett-Coutts with the backing of Charles Dickens. Nugent was an abiding influence on Aggie, but she didn’t see herself as a social worker. Nor did she want to teach in a Catholic school, because there, she said, ‘the nuns did all the interesting work’ and a single woman was just a hanger-on, unless she had a special talent as Minnie did. Teaching the basics to Liverpool children in the public system was worth doing, she thought, even if it wasn’t very exciting.

  In literature, as in life, Aggie had strong views about the role of a governess. She lent me her own copy of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. It was not nearly as good, I thought, as Jane Eyre. I was surprised that it was my grandmother’s favourite, and I asked her why. She thought that, as a governess, Jane Eyre had an easy time. Jane had only one pupil and a housekeeper who was ‘as soft as butter’ to look after her. It was a fairytale, Aggie said. She preferred the realism of Anne Brontë’s account of living in someone else’s house, neither a servant nor an equal, teaching a set of arrogant children whose rich parents encouraged them to be rude to their governess. And she loved the scenes in Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, where she had once spent a few days and visited Anne Brontë’s memorial.

  When I re-read the novel, I could see why it resonated with the young Aggie Maguire. More directly than the novels of the other Brontës, Agnes Grey confronts the class system, not only through the ambiguous role of the governess, but in a blistering attack on the exercise of self-indulgent upper-class ‘charity’. Agnes Grey’s young pupils think of themselves as ‘angels of light’ when they take alms to cottagers on their father’s estate. In fact, they are uncivil, patronising and incapable of seeing the poor as individuals.

  For Agnes Grey, the sea at Scarborough is freedom. Walking on the beach in the early morning, she exults to see that her footprints are the first on the white sand. Later, as the waves come ‘bounding in to the shore, foaming and sparkling…’ she longs ‘to go out in the world, to act for myself, to exercise my unused faculties, to try my unknown powers’. Aggie didn’t know what her own powers might be, so she kept her doubts and dreams to herself. Her family thought she was placid.

  For her time and place, Aggie’s level of learning is surprising. When she was teaching in rural Victoria in the early 1890s Aggie gave Latin lessons to a local boy, James Lawless, who wanted to become a priest. Reading many years later in the Melbourne Catholic Advocate about a Monsignor James Lawless, she exclaimed: ‘Oh, I taught that boy Latin!’ Unusually, for she never boasted, she sounded rather triumphant about having given Lawless his start. I wish I’d asked where she had learned Latin.

  When Aggie was born, in 1869, the Maguires were no longer poor. Respectable and hardworking, they were moving into the middle class. Living at a distance from the docks and getting closer to the beach with every change of address, the young Maguires had a relatively secure childhood, with primary education at their local parish schools. They couldn’t afford family holidays, but in summer they often took a day excursion by train to the nearest coastal resort. Annie, the eldest sister, visited cousins in Dublin. Minnie went to Paris. But, except for Scarborough, Aggie hadn’t been far from Liverpool.

  The Maguire sons started work at fourteen in the match business. Newspaper reports on the ‘romance’ of Bert Maguire’s career, from factory hand to wealthy industrialist, state that he was educated at Waterloo College, in Liverpool, an establishment that prepared boys for commercial or industrial employment. It taught clerical skills, bookkeeping, chemistry and mechanics. He entered the workforce as a clerk in his father’s match factory. His brothers Bob, Dick and Percy also joined the family business. Preparation for university was beyond their reach. Stonyhurst, the Jesuit boarding school, near Clitheroe in Lancashire, or the Benedictine school, Downside, would be for the next generation.

  Because the Maguire fortunes had changed so rapidly, Aggie wasn’t sure where she belonged. As the third of five daughters, she expected to earn her own living. She had good prospects as a teacher. With compulsory education in force and an expanding middle class, there were more schools and pupils. But, as her father’s business flourished, it seemed likely that she could give up teaching and be a young lady of leisure. That wasn’t what she wanted. She loved her father and was proud of all that he had done, but with Annie still unmarried at twenty-six, Minnie restless and unhappy at home after a frustrated romance, and the two younger sisters growing up, Aggie felt trapped. Joe’s illness and the idea of going to Australia with him offered an escape and new possibilities.

  When Aggie, Minnie and Joe set off in 1888, they were hopeful about Joe’s chances of recovery. The long voyage would be worth it, though, even at best, it would be tedious. Sometimes there was luck in wind and weather. Some ships gave first-class passengers good meals and entertainment. It wasn’t like that for the Maguires, who were travelling thriftily on a cargo ship. While his sisters amused themselves—Minnie had brought her paints and Aggie had as many books as she could fit in her trunk—Joe learned the elements of carpentry. That’s when he made the box for Aggie. On the long days when the ship was becalmed, he worked on the project. The box, which was made of Australian cedar, shows that Joe was new to the craft. The wood was nothing special, probably oddments from the carpenter’s shop; the dovetailing on one side is uneven, and the hinged lid looks like a second attempt. Not long after finishing the box, Joe collapsed. He had developed peritonitis, which in his case was a complication of the tuberculosis from which he suffered. There was a doctor on board, and the captain was a kind man who ‘gave good care’ but there was nothing they could do to save Joe. He died, painfully, five days later, on the day before his twenty-first birthday.

  The ship was then about thirty days out at sea, not even halfway to Sydney. His sisters, grieving his loss, faced another ordeal. In The Long Farewell, Don Charlwood describes the ritual of sea burial:

  [The coffin] was placed on a grating at the bulwarks on the main deck and covered with a Union Jack. Often the ship’s bell was tolled…A clergyman or the captain read the service; the grating was tilted and the body was launched into the sea. One splash, and the ship moved on.

  Joe Maguire’s coffin would have been made by his friend, the ship’s carpenter. His gift to his younger sister became poignant. Aggie would always think of the coffin and the box as linked to one another, one in the sea’s depths, the other for her ‘to keep things in’ as she did almost to the end of her life. It became her memory box. Part of her private self she kept locked inside it.

  The Trafalgar arrived in Sydney after ninety days at sea. Late in this unhappy voyage there were two more deaths: an invalid and a newborn baby. Somehow the two young Maguire women endured the sixty days after Joe’s death. Living among strangers in cramped quarters, with no privacy, must have been an ordeal. Perhaps that’s when Aggie taught herself to meet grief with silence.

  They had to face another loss. On arrival in Sydney, the two young women were met at the wharf by their uncle, William Thomas. He held a cable from Liverpool telling them that, while they were at sea, their older brother Johnnie had died suddenly in Montreal from typhoid. He was nearly twenty-three, and he’d been buying timber for the match factory. It seemed even worse than Joe’s death. Johnnie had died among strangers and none of his family had witnessed his burial.

  Taking in this new tragedy, Aggie and Minnie went on by train to Melbourne with the uncle who was to be their main support. William Thomas, their mother’s brother, had migrated to Australia in 1863. Coming in as a labourer, too late for the big adventures of the gold rushes, he might well have struggled, but good connections smoothed his way. William worked in, and later managed, a grocery store in Flinders Street, in the central business district of Melbourne. The shop, which operated in considerable style in the era of Marvellous Melbourne, belonged to Robert Garrick Wilson, landowner, entrepreneur and philanthropist, and a kinsman of the Thomas family. Wilson didn’t have much to do with the shop’s day-to-day operations: he left that to Willie Thomas. Under the trade name R. G. Wilson, the shop sold the best quality goods. Customers were greeted at the door by a supervisor in white tie and a tail coat. It wasn’t Fortnum and Mason’s but it did its best. It had a smart delivery van, drawn by high-stepping horses, and it became famous for its hams and for Christmas puddings in willow-pattern basins, ready to be steamed and served. All through my childhood we had an R. G. Wilson pudding at Christmas. I still have one of the willow-pattern bowls.

  By the 1880s, Willie Thomas, his wife Isabella and their six children were living comfortably in The Avenue, in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor, well placed to help their nephew Joe Maguire to begin an Australian life with his sister Minnie and Aggie to housekeep for him. The Maguire trio might have gone north for a sunnier climate than Melbourne’s. More likely, given a Liverpool mindset that saw sea air as a cure-all for bronchial trouble and an escape from city heat and dust, they’d have chosen a coastal town. The healthy ‘ozonised breeze’ from the Southern Ocean at Sorrento was recommended in 1880s tourist brochures, while the ‘mild invigorating air’ of Queenscliff was pronounced by a medical practitioner as ‘admirably suited for invalids’.

  Aggie loved the sea, and whenever she thought of a holiday it was always at the seaside. So, perhaps it would have been sea air for Joe. But with his death, the sisters had to think of their own future. And that meant Melbourne, where they had the Thomas family to help them plan. Despite the tragedy of the voyage and the two deaths that they mourned, Australia was a big adventure for the two young women: a chance to reshape their lives.

  None of the novels that Aggie read so avidly showed her the way to live. The standard plot began with a loss of family fortune followed by the heroine’s battle with poverty. After temporary independence came marriage and a return to middle-class security or upper-class affluence. Aggie’s story took the opposite direction. Her father’s rise to fortune wasn’t a blessing. It threatened her freedom. Rather than be a bored young lady in Liverpool, she would see what the new country might offer.

  CHAPTER 3

  Independence

  The story of the ninety-day voyage out, and Joe’s death, shaped the idea of our grandmother as a venturesome young woman. Yet we assumed that Minnie, five years older than Aggie and seemingly the stronger personality, was the one who made the decision to stay in Australia. At home, Minnie, with her French experience, had eclipsed her older sister Annie and was an enlivening influence on the younger ones. A stirrer might be the word for Minnie. She was said to have ‘a Spanish look’. Brilliant dark eyes, dark hair with a natural curl, fearlessly outspoken, Minnie was always noticed. When she was asked to play the piano in company, men gathered and admired her. Some potential suitors found her intimidating.

  Minnie was the centre of a major row in the Liverpool family when she formed an ‘unhappy attachment’ to one of her cousins. Marriage between first cousins was almost unthinkable, and second cousins were frowned on. The royal families of Europe took the risk of inbreeding and many of them, like Queen Victoria’s haemophiliac descendants, suffered for it. Minnie’s frustration may help to explain why she was willing, perhaps eager, to go to Australia in 1888. She was twenty-four; her chances of marriage were shrinking, and with her three younger sisters growing up she was in danger of dwindling into ‘one of the Misses Maguire’. Her sojourns in Paris made her an exotic in the genteel circles to which the Maguires had progressed. Because Jane and John Maguire had so recently moved out of the working class, they were anxious for their daughters to be ladies and sceptical about Minnie’s wish to become a professional painter.

  For Minnie, then, Australia offered escape and freedom; and if she wanted to marry, there were better chances in the new country than at home. Looking after her brother Joe would come naturally to her; quick and decisive, she always took charge. I can see why Minnie set sail in 1888. But Aggie? Was she a compliant deputy or did she have ideas of her own?

  At nineteen, Aggie wasn’t on the matrimonial shelf. An early photo shows her as dark haired like Minnie, with a fair complexion, brown eyes and a steady gaze. She doesn’t smile for the camera; no one did in those studio portraits. She has an air of challenge; even at this young age she looks strong willed. She has had a very good education. Unusually for a young girl of her time, she excelled in maths and Latin. By all accounts she was even tempered, reserved, keeping her thoughts to herself. She was a favourite with the four young brothers she left behind. Minnie was bossy. Aggie let them do what they liked. Quiet, clever, a great reader: compared with passionate Minnie, the young Aggie Maguire isn’t heroine material—unless life changes her, as perhaps it will.

  Staying in Australia without Joe was a big decision for the sisters. When they thought of the two brothers they had lost, they must have longed to be back in Liverpool, sharing their grief with their parents and their younger brothers and sisters. But perhaps they didn’t feel needed. Annie, who didn’t marry until 1889, was still at home, and seventeen-year-old Edie was old enough to be a support. Bob and Dick were already working. Bert and Percy were schoolboys. Clara was only six. To lose Johnnie and Joe, and to have Minnie and Aggie on the other side of the world, would have been hard on the family. Why wouldn’t the sisters go home? They had expected to keep house for their brother, on an income provided by their father. Now, they had no obvious reason to stay. But stay they did.

  ‘If we had gone home, we wouldn’t have been allowed to work,’ Aggie said, many years later. She knew she would hurt her father if she insisted on working once her teacher training was complete. He might even forbid it. She remembered his words: ‘If all goes on well, my daughters will not have to go out to work.’ He was proud of being able to give them a comfortable home and a secure future whether or not they married.

  To abandon that security and face the new country without Joe suggests a steely resolve for independence that is surprising given the bonds of affection between the brothers and sisters. Their father would have maintained them as young ladies in Liverpool, but not in Melbourne, nor could they stay too long with their uncle and aunt. With four daughters and two sons, Willie and Isabella Thomas had a houseful already. If the Maguire sisters decided to stay, they would need to take charge of their own lives. And that, it seems, was what they both wanted to do.

  For Minnie, the aspiring painter, Melbourne in 1888 was a place of promise. It was the year of the Centennial Exhibition. A dazzling display of creative talent at the Exhibition Building in Carlton showed her that this city at the end of the world was truly Marvellous Melbourne. The girls paid their threepences to climb eighty steep stairs to the gilded dome. It was the highest point in Melbourne. From here, looking south, they could see Parliament House and the Treasury building, solid and impressive in Italianate style, the Princess Theatre and the Windsor Hotel. To the west, the dome of the Supreme Court building dominated the skyline. Melbourne was a great city, as Uncle Willie Thomas told them constantly. He was closely involved in a part of the Exhibition; his brother-in-law and associate in R. G. Wilson of Flinders Street was one of the judges in the produce section. The Exhibition was all the talk at the Thomas house in The Avenue in the last months of 1888.

  Minnie was excited by the National Gallery school in Melbourne, and by the work of the plein air painters of the Heidelberg group. Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts were to become her friends. She went to the 9 × 5 Exhibition, challenged by their impressionist style and their being so at home in the Australian landscape. Paintings by Emma Minnie Boyd, wife of painter Arthur Merric Boyd, caught her attention; here was a woman who was able to show and sell her work. But Minnie Boyd had advantages that Minnie Maguire lacked: a mother whose money supported the Boyds, the backing of a prominent family, a nanny for her children. And undoubted talent. Minnie Maguire needed to prove herself and to adapt her style to the unfamiliar landscape. She spent hours in the National Gallery, copying, learning how to paint gum trees in the light that was so unlike that of Europe.

  Aggie did some quiet thinking and had long talks with the eldest Thomas cousins, Annie and Mary, who were both teachers. With two younger sisters, Phoebe and Ethel, the Thomas girls were as alert to the problems of the single woman as their Liverpool cousins, but they never quite achieved independence. Annie and Mary were successful in their profession, but they didn’t breach convention by leaving the family home. When Mary became a headmistress she bought a house at Kallista, in the Dandenong Ranges. That was her retreat, not her home.

  The Maguire sisters needed a place of their own, an income and a strategic plan. Counting their assets, they saw an opportunity. All over Melbourne and in Victorian country towns, there were little schools that took boys and girls in small classes for the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Some prepared boys for clerical jobs in which more advanced mathematics was needed. For Minnie and Aggie, the obvious strategy was to target the colony’s young ladies. As in the Old World, marriage was the goal, and French, art and music were valuable adornments.