Mrs. P.

Mrs. P. invariably signed her letters “Yours very sincerely, Mary D. Park.” That “very,” inserted so deliberately between “Yours” and “sincerely,” was a kind and thoughtful nuance that has now almost completely vanished from written correspondence, though at times I know my own grandmother certainly practiced it. The locution was, I think, a sign that the salutation extended affectionately beyond mere epistolary convention, while retaining a degree of formality that was not distant so much as careful, in the best sense, certainly stopping short of anything that might be taken to presume too great a degree of familiarity: hence the full signature with that appealing middle initial, which, incidentally, stood for Davis. There was an added inflection, too, when at length the “very” gave way to the sprightly “v.” Alas, e-mail is busily sweeping these things into the dustbin of vanished usage, but that is neither here nor there.

I have been going back over her letters and some of the photographs, jogging my memory, because I knew that there was a dimension to Mrs. P.’s surprise two-week visit to Government House for Jean and Davis’s golden wedding anniversary in September 1990 that I had completely forgotten. What on earth was it?

Writing afterwards from Moyrath House, Belmont Road, Belfast, Mrs. P. rejoiced in “how well the surprise worked.” She went on: “I think almost the best aspect of it was that no one knew who else knew!” And that’s the missing link that lifts this little story to a higher plane of exquisiteness, because with Karla-level ingenuity over many months beforehand Mrs. P. contrived to recruit willing collaborators, by airmail, both among her nieces and nephews but also scattered throughout the Office of the Governor, none of whom were aware of the role played by each and every other, or even their identity. In lesser organizations a cat might well have been let out of the bag, but at Government House, Melbourne, discretion was everything. It was as if Mary D. Park were busily planting moles, and with remarkable success. Clearly she was a missed opportunity for MI6. What I do recall, however, is for weeks beforehand being eaten up with curiosity about who knew what, and when, but Karla’s recruitment process took account of every potential foible, based on the wisdom accumulated over the course of a lifetime as the doughty widow of a Northern Irish Presbyterian minister. Fortunately on this, our secret mission nobody ever discovered the consequences of failure.

Here we are, a few days later, Mrs. P. and I, consoling each other in defeat following another epic struggle against Jean and Davis on the croquet lawn at Government House—the dream team, Irish rules this time, and not Moscow.

The conspiracy

I cannot now remember who conceived the surprise for Jean and Davis’s fiftieth wedding anniversary on Thursday, September 6, 1990. What I do recall is that there was a number of carefully-briefed conspirators (purely on a need-to-know basis), and that watches were synchronized, all contingencies covered, with military precision. Forget vice-regal service, we really ought to have been in counter-espionage. My small role was to rendezvous with dear Mary Nicholson at Tullamarine, collect the merchandise, under cover of pre-dawn half-light, and to smuggle her into Government House so that she could make a deus ex machina entrance just before lunch.

Patrick had flown in from Hartford, Conn. Davis’s brother William had come over from Ireland. Most if not all of the other McCaughey children were there. Brigid operated the photographic equipment, so I hope she will not mind if I post this portion of her dossier. The merchandise, in this case, was the late and much lamented Mrs. Park. Mary D. Park, Davis’s widowed sister, was a frequent visitor from Northern Ireland, usually accompanied by her old pal Dr. Margaret Haire, though not on this occasion.

Everybody loved Mrs. Park. Apart from being a whole lot of fun (and funny), she had the Irishwoman’s knack of discovering shared connections in the unlikeliest of places. Wherever she went Mrs. Park knew someone who knew someone… even in Australia, where she had never lived. She was shrewd. She was tough. She had a vast memory bank, and the gift of excellent story-telling. She was also pretty good at croquet (Irish rules, of course), but no match for la maîtresse. 

Certainly no party to our conspiracy was more meticulous or better prepared. I shall never forget my first glimpse of Mrs. P. in that bleak, early-morning setting of suitcases and bustle in the arrivals concourse at Tullamarine. She was wearing a slightly flamboyant, patterned silk head-scarf and large dark-glasses, channeling Jackie Kennedy, lest she be recognized—which, in her case, seemed not an unlikely prospect. So Mrs. P. was in that moment the ne plus ultra of furtiveness, clutching her British passport, stealing glances left and right, her already sharp reflexes operating at the level of a coiled steel spring. I have never seen anyone derive quite so much pleasure from traveling incognita.

We made the drop. Headquarters were notified. Half an hour later, as we glided through the front gates Mrs. P. (still wearing the scarf and specs) physically sank in the back seat—as if Jean or Davis might be prowling the grounds with a pair of binoculars at six o’clock in the morning. We stole up the back stairs, and delivered her to the Hopetoun Suite, where she lurked impatiently for several hours, receiving secret visitors. Three short knocks, followed by one slightly louder. Everything went according to plan, and when in due course Mrs. P. appeared at the top of the stairs—an entrance worthy not so much of Norma Desmond as Cleopatra—Jean said afterwards that she really did think she was seeing a ghost.

Upon much reflection in the early hours of this morning, I wonder if one can fully understand Davis and Jean without having known Mary D. Park also. She was, in a sense, the strongest, most enduring link to their life before Australia. With Mrs. P. Jean shared the double bond not only of being devoted sisters-in-law, each to the other, but also of having been for many decades the hard-working wives of Presbyterian clergymen—perfectly positioned, as dear Naomi reminded me overnight, to observe at the heart of their respective communities that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

How fortunate we are that none of these truly amazing people led hidden lives, quite the opposite.

Further Jean

Giving careful consideration to strategic matters

It occurs to me that among the most important of Jean McCaughey’s achievements while Davis was Governor of Victoria, was the significant part she played in strengthening the fledgling sister-relations with Jiangsu Province and the city of Tianjin in the People’s Republic of China. 

Davis and Jean made at least two official visits there in the late 1980s, possibly three (I cannot now recall), and, twenty-five years on, it is difficult to grasp how much less routine such trade missions were then than they are today. Jean and Davis were sanguine about the fact that being well into their seventies helped enormously, because of the Chinese veneration of old age. Yet they genuinely loved their visits to China. I have no doubt they endeared themselves to their hosts. It was mighty hard work. All this was just prior to the trauma of Tiananmen Square.

I think they stayed with the Governor at Government House, Hong Kong, on their way in and out. During their tour on the mainland they were given many lunches and evening banquets consisting of innumerable toasts and courses, the staging posts in an already very full program of day-long visits to new businesses, factories, and educational and cultural institutions. They were fortunate in having cast-iron constitutions. There were many excellent stories upon their return to Melbourne. One in particular made Jean laugh and laugh. 

It involved the practical arrangements. 

Davis’s official secretary Charles Curwen traveled with them, together with the intrepid Jeff Fitzgerald of the Premier’s Department, a China trade specialist, and I think possibly several others in the Victorian department of protocol. Wherever they went there was a bewildering number of Chinese party officials to meet, and an equally enormous entourage of locals assigned to escort them from place to place—interpreters, guides, officials, minders, and helpers, all jumping in and out of a long line of sleek black official cars, a sort of continual diplomatic rugby scrum with Davis and Jean poised serenely at its epicenter. No doubt it was a sobering task to keep track of everybody. 

Indeed, Jean’s abiding memory of their first visit to Suzhou was the sight of Jeff Fitzgerald’s slightly sweaty brow appearing suddenly outside the rear passenger window of Davis’s limousine as they were about to move on to their next official engagement. What Jeff then said, craning through the plate glass and leaving behind a little cloud of condensation, improves considerably if you imagine his sense of urgency, together with the broad-ish Australian accent, and, of course, Jean and Davis’s complete powerlessness in that moment to render him any assistance at all: 

“What have you done with Madame Wu?”

With the laughter there was much seriousness also. Jean introduced me to Marguerite Yourcenar, Francois Mauriac, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. She regularly re-read George Eliot and Tolstoy, and I shall never forget her account of being a busy young mother in wartime London, somehow managing her coupons like everyone else, and in between-times immersed in War and Peace, when the action of the last quarter of the novel—Napoleon’s ill-fated retreat from Moscow—ran eerily parallel with the collapse of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, in real time. 

If her laughter was infectious, from time to time one also became familiar with the shrewd, pursed-lipped, eye-narrowing, no-nonsense look with which Jean greeted a proposition she obviously regarded with deep suspicion, usually but not always relating to Mrs. Thatcher. By instinct, as deep as it was resolutely partisan, Jean always sided with the underdog. She was deeply opposed to queue-jumping, except very occasionally when, for example, Sandy the dog required urgent veterinary assistance, in which case she saw no reason not to fight like a lioness. To my knowledge, Jean never bore a grudge, and in moments of difficulty or exasperation or plain fatigue she used to quote from the Sermon on the Mount, with a sigh, and in the sing-song Irish accent she always retained:  “Ah well, Davis, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’” and she meant it.

Jean

Overnight I received word from Melbourne that Jean McCaughey has died.

I have been sitting here for quite a while, brooding over my early-morning cup of tea. So many memories are crowding in. All of them are happy, and most hilarious. A good number (though not by any means all) relate to the beautifully manicured croquet lawn at Government House, Melbourne. 

Some people play croquet to stretch their legs, get a breath of fresh air, keep the children occupied, mess about, or else to engage in light banter before the cocktail hour. Mrs. Mac was not one of those people. To say that she was a committed player is a dangerous understatement. She was not content with mere victory, but rather set herself the task of totally annihilating her opponents, who were often decades younger—cheerfully, and always with impeccable courtesy. Nevertheless the air of sharp concentration and of seriousness with which, eyeing the lawn, she approached this objective brings to mind a steadily wheeling falcon who, fastening upon a small rodent snuffling obliviously in the undergrowth far below, swoops, seizes, and instantaneously dispatches in one seamless motion—a sudden flash of feather and talon, the superb result of millions of years of natural selection. 

In other words, no-one was safe when confronted by a sweet-natured but determined assault from Jean on the croquet lawn. The cunning curve ball. The harmfully obstructing dribble. The choppy short stroke. The long, gracefully arcing croquet shot of quite breathtaking power and accuracy. “Clack!” Without the slightest hesitation Jean drove a wedge of tempered steel between members of the opposing side, and summarily banished them to the Outer Siberia of the baseline in one direction, and the top corner in the other, restraining them there, toying with them I daresay, while calmly proceeding with an effortless five-, six-, or seven-hoop rally, gallantly bringing her partner pro tempore along for the ride—and quite often, I am proud to say, that fortunate person was me. Women of the bedchamber, certain middle-level Commonwealth governors-general and prime ministers were not immune from the full treatment, and nor were recently retired chairmen of the Australian joint defense chiefs, who, if they were not yet aware of the caliber of their opponent, might have given the impression beforehand that they could easily win the contest. Jean was magnificent.

At times like this it is hard not to resort to clichés, however it is certainly true that Jean Middlemas McCaughey touched, as indeed she made a huge difference to, the lives of many, many people. And this was by no means restricted to Ormond College in the University of Melbourne, or to Davis’s period in office at Government House, to which Jean made a contribution that is impossible to overstate, or through her pioneering work with computers in the 1960s on the systematic statistical analysis of poverty in Australia when she was a research fellow at the Melbourne Institute for Applied Economic and Social Research. Her books were excellent. I have A Bit of a Struggle here in front of me; the prose style is admirably spare. One also thinks of her many years of service on the board of management of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and as chairman of the council of St. Hilda’s College, and as inaugural chair of the Key Centre for the Study of Women’s Health in Society—the list goes on and on.

Mrs. Mac was also a superb story-teller, in this respect no less than in many others, I think, a proud daughter of Ireland. My favorite, because it combines those familiar elements of simplicity, absurdity, and harmless fun, with a tiny soupcon of mischief, is the tale of Blanche.

It was customary for warm-hearted persons, alerted ahead of time by mutual acquaintances in Britain, to make contact with migrant families bound for Melbourne or Sydney, but temporarily arriving by ship at Fremantle, and there to extend generous hospitality by taking them out for their very first day of sightseeing in Australia. Such was the case with the McCaughey family on that bright morning in 1953. However, in this case neither Jean nor Davis had the faintest idea who the mutual acquaintance was. They knew only that her name was “Blanche,” for that is what their Western Australian hostess indicated in the note she delivered to the ship. Blanche. It is an unusual name in any case, but was especially so in post-war Britain—with a hint of Edwardian cosmopolitanism. Could she be a parishioner? An impossibly distant relation? A neighbor in Golders Green? The well-meaning mother of one of the boys’ school friends? In due course breezy answers from the steering wheel to each and every tactfully phrased, and increasingly desperate query—“How is Blanche?”—stubbornly resisted any form of elucidation, and consistently withheld even a single clue. The longer this went on, gliding past the Swan River and through the leafy suburbs of Perth, the greater was their hostess’s presumption that Jean and Davis were on terms of easy familiarity with the mysterious Blanche, and therefore the more impossible it was to make a full confession (to James and Patrick’s exquisite pleasure, giggling in the back seat). Naturally, also, the risk of embarrassing exposure increased correspondingly as that long day wore on. At last delivered back to the ship—“Do please remember us to Blanche”—they were none the wiser, and as far as I know the identity of the thoughtful Blanche remained a mystery.

Until, perhaps, this morning.

Successive premiers and governments of the state of Victoria, along with innumerable charitable organizations, have good reason to be thankful for the immense contribution Jean McCaughey made to the national life, as do the rest of us. May light perpetual shine upon her.