Rebellious Daughters Read Free Page B

exam paper so we could prepare our answers. Seven questions, five to be chosen. There were 21 of us, we divided each question into three parts and each one of us researched a thorough answer, then we went out to the Student Representative Council at uni and roneoed them all off, and there we were, with 21 detailed responses. We all did well.
    A record I treasure is the group photo. There we are, out on the hockey field, lined up on chairs and benchesfor posterity. Suddenly a bloke called Sep notices a ball by the fence. Hang on, he says, and rushes off to get it. He sits down in the middle of the front row, holding a big brown medicine ball. We are all smiling and laughing at Sep, so we look happy. I like to think of later archivists looking at that photo and wondering what on earth the ball has got to do with section 401. Nothing but Sep’s fancy. Over which we were as usual united. We might have made a political decision not to be rebellious, but we weren’t going to be wimps.
    Virtuous and hard-working. I set up a precedent in the family. But my sister wasn’t like that. She wasn’t particularly academic, liked to play hockey, listen to the Top 40. My father couldn’t stand pop music. When Brenda came home from school, my mother would let her listen to the radio, turned very low, but she had to turn it off the minute father came home. My sister thought this was horribly unfair and said so. Fierce battles followed. My mother always said it was because father and daughter were too much alike, stubborn, convinced of their own rightness. They survived these, unless my mother intervened. Sometimes she thought my father was being cruel, and mildly suggested a little more kindness.
    My father loved my mother. Devotedly. He kissed her goodbye and hello on going to work and coming home. But this criticism enraged him and he wouldn’t speak toanyone for days. My mother learnt not to say anything, but didn’t always manage it. I dearly wanted Brenda to go to my school, and talked her into it. It was a bad idea. Teachers made comparisons, they did not pay attention to the differences between us. She was not dutiful and scholarly. They made her hate school and she left after the Intermediate Certificate. Did a secretarial course and got a job in an office. Every Saturday morning she went shopping and bought clothes. Eventually she moved out of home.
    Then she met Fred. He was a glamorous young man about town, an accountant. He used to go rally driving. He had an Austin-Healey sports car. I should say that Brenda was very beautiful, tall, slender, with smooth long dark hair as was the fashion then. She suited the role of the girl in the Austin-Healey. All her life Brenda looked stunning. She’d buy clothes at second-hand shops and in sales and wear them with such éclat, such panache. She died in 2014, a few months short of her 50th wedding anniversary, and her 71st birthday, beautiful to the end, adored by her husband, her two sons and their wives, her four grandchildren, her big sister. None of us will ever get over her death.
    She and my father became very good friends, when she was no longer living at home. Fred decided to stop being an accountant and get a degree, he went to university in Newcastle, full-time, while Brenda workedto support him. Rather unusually he didn’t ditch her as soon as he got his education. They went to Canada for a bit, and then to the university in Wagga.
    So, there is daughter number two. Daughter number three went to the same school and got along quite well academically. She went to university. By this time it was the ‘60s, and she took up with a lot of lively people, you’d probably call them alternative. Hippies, counterculture people. I’d left home to go to Canberra when she was 14, so I didn’t know much about it. My mother told me a little, but Rosie would have made sure she didn’t know a lot. She got her degree and went on to