The Long Hot Summer by Mary Moody Read Free Book Online Page A

and applied. She was a crack shorthand writer and was given the job immediately.
    This is where she met my father, who was at the time the News Editor. One of her first jobs was as a court reporter. Although she came from a well-read journalistic family herself, she had been, as most girls of that era were, quite sheltered. She told a funny story about a rape case she covered as a young and naïve court reporter. Part of the evidence submitted were sheets ‘covered with semen’. Mum was a brilliant speller, but in this case shetyped ‘seamen’ and somehow must have carried the mental image of sailors sprawled all over the bed. My father took great delight in pointing out her innocence!
    Mum was responsible for taking down in Pitman shorthand all the BBC broadcasts during the early part of the Second World War. There were no telexes or faxes or satellite links for news communications. Journalists in Australia had to stay up all night in the newsroom, tuned in to the BBC, and accurately transcribe speeches by Winston Churchill or whatever war news was being broadcast in London for the morning editions of the Sydney papers. Her accuracy was unfailing.
    My mother fell hopelessly in love with my father, who was a widower with two young children. His first wife had suffered from depression and had been unable to cope with his difficult ways. She committed suicide, and for several years afterwards their children Jon and Margaret were cared for by a succession of family members and paid childminders. Having a beautiful young wife devoted to helping with the children must have been a wonderful relief for my father, who was quite ambitious and found it difficult to juggle work and his young family.
    Immediately after their marriage, Dad was given a promotion and left for New York, where he had been assigned as foreign correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
. It was difficult to get a place on a ship and Mum was left stranded in Sydney with her two young stepchildren for six months before joining Dad in his new job. It was certainly a good way for them to get to know each other, and they seemed to get along well from the start.
    Jon remembers Muriel during this period as being fun-loving and elegant, always beautifully dressed and well groomed. Margaret, on the other hand, remembers the fights betweenMum and Dad much more vividly than anything else. Although there was rationing and shortages of various basic foodstuffs in America during the war, it appears there was no shortage of alcohol. It was in America that Mum developed her hard-drinking habits – partly, I suspect, through boredom because she didn’t work at all during the four years they were overseas, and partly because Dad had a good income and spirits such as Scotch and bourbon were readily available and comparatively inexpensive. They lived in Manhattan for a while, then on Long Island, before finally moving out to New Canaan in Connecticut. Mum fell in with a hard-drinking crowd of wealthy locals and it seems that the war years were for her a constant round of socialising. Most of the photographs from that time show Mum looking gorgeous but often bleary-eyed, though she was only in her early twenties.
    They remained in America until the end of 1947, then returned to Sydney. Curiously, my mother had never become pregnant during the early years of their marriage living overseas, but within a year of returning she did become pregnant and went on to have three children in rapid succession – my brother Dan, me, and my little sister Jane. This was the period of our family life that was the most traumatic. Although I have no memory of it, Mum drank heavily even during her pregnancies and when we were babies. This I was told by my sister Margaret when we finally met again in 2002. Mum’s drinking, together with her constant fighting with my father, were two of the factors which prompted Margaret to escape on her eighteenth birthday and make her own