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| The Text Publishing Company, 2012 |
'I don't suppose you mean to make a career in the retail trade?' said Miss Cartright.'Oh, no!' cried Lisa.
Miss Cartright laughed.
'It's quite all right, Lisa. It doesn't suit everybody. But as long as you are working here, you will be expected to work hard, and as if it were your permanent job. Do you understand that?'
'Oh, of course,' said Lisa, desperately. 'Of course; I do understand. I'll work very hard.'
And Miss Cartright, thinking it might be rather quaint to see the girl in such a context, decided to put her in Ladies' Cocktail, where she could give a hand to Magda in Model Gowns now and then because, although she looked so childish, she was evidently bright as well as willing, and might be quite useful, all things considered.
She is sent, by the indomitable Miss Cartright, to work in the Ladies Cocktail department on the store's second floor, where she ably assists Miss Fay Baines, Mrs Patty Williams and Miss Jacobs –– its alterations specialist who has worked at Goode's 'since before the War' –– in their efforts to fit and clothe the bustling female hordes who descend upon them each sale time like swarms of bargain-hunting locusts. Thanks to the whimsicality of Miss Cartright, Lisa is also called upon to occasionally assist the exotic and formidable Magda –– a newly-arrived immigrant with an unpronounceable Slovenian surname who also speaks fluent French –– otherwise known as the 'guardian of the rose pink cave of Model Gowns.' Only the city's richest, most fashion-conscious (and silliest) women can afford to shop in Model Gowns, where they are sold one-off haute couture creations –– suitable for any cocktail party or similarly well-to-do social occasion –– by this enigmatic, ever-tactful and perpetually unflappable 'Continental' salesperson.
Magda is unlike anybody the quiet and bookish Lisa has ever encountered before. She speaks differently (because she is 'a New Australian'), dresses differently –– she is permitted to wear her own clothes to work, as long as they are black, rather than being forced to wear the unflattering black frock the store provides –– and discusses novels like Anna Karenina and French clothing designers with her as though she considers the newcomer her social, cultural and intellectual equal. Magda more or less adopts Lisa during her time at Goode's, encouraging her in her ambition to become a poet (or an actress, Lisa has not yet quite decided which it will be) and inviting her to boisterous, fun-filled parties held at her tiny Cremorne flat. In addition to sampling her first glass of wine and first slice of salami at one of these parties, Lisa is also introduced to Magda's husband Stefan and their livewire friend Rudi, newly arrived from Hungary via Melbourne, and to a clever boy her own age named Michael.
But Magda does not confine herself to broadening the horizons of this yet-to-blossom school leaver. She also invites Fay Baines –– twenty-nine years old, unmarried, a former would-be showgirl who has an unfortunate habit of falling in love with the wrong sort of men –– to her New Year's Eve party, introducing her to Rudi as per his request that Magda should find him 'a nice healthy Australian girl to marry.' Even the unhappy home life of Patty Williams, childless and married to the taciturn and uninspired Frank, takes a turn for the better after Frank leaves her, only to return a fortnight later to discover that he no longer calls the shots in their new, sexually exciting marriage. Only Miss Jacobs –– stolid, uncomplaining, solitary –– fails to be drawn into the spell that Magda's refreshing forthrightness appears to have cast over the lives of her delighted but somewhat flummoxed co-workers.
But the spell, like all such spells, is quickly broken. Lisa receives her Leaving results, which are excellent and promise a bright future for her at Sydney University if only she and her mother can persuade her stick-in-the-mud father to let her attend this hotbed of libertine sinfulness. Happily they do, meaning, less happily, that Lisa must give up her job at Goode's. Meanwhile, Fay becomes engaged to Rudi ('the nicest man I've ever met' is how she describes him to a disbelieving friend) and Patty, childless and miserable about it for so long, learns that she is finally pregnant. Only Magda is left, biding her time in Model Gowns until she and the ever-charming Stefan can save enough money to allow her to open a shop of her own in swanky Double Bay.
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| André Deutsch Ltd UK, 1993 |
The Women in Black is a slim little gem of a novel, a charming modern update of the Cinderella story that manages to be witty and positive while never losing its ironic edge or becoming crassly sentimental. It captures the time and place in which it is set –– a quieter, far less pretentious Sydney doing its best to survive the Christmas/New Year 'retail rush' of 1960 and 1961 –– in a way that is wistful, engaging and at the same time elegantly satirical. For anybody who grew up in Sydney in the 1960s (or even the 1970s or the 1980s) it will bring back fond memories of a time when the city's department stores seemed like treasure-laden palaces and the act of shopping itself was a perplexing, wearying but generally far more pleasurable experience than it often is today. The world of FG Goode's Department Store –– based on the still-existing David Jones' Department Store that has been a beloved city institution since 1838 –– is a vanished world but no less appealing or intriguing for having been relegated so irretrievably to the past. The Women in Black recreates a time when life was not necessarily better or easier but was certainly a lot simpler and, it might be ventured, a bit more fun for a variety of reasons.
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| MADELEINE ST JOHN, c 1993 |
The Writer: Madeleine St John was born in Sydney on 12 November 1941 but spent most of her adult life in London, the city in which three of her four published novels are set. 'I was brought up,' she once told a friend, 'on the idea that England was where I came from, in a deep sense where I belonged. Australia was a deviation of one's essence.' England, she added, '…was everything one had hoped for and continues to be so.'
St John (which she pronounced 'sin-jin' all her life in the supposedly 'true' English style) grew up in the genteel northern Sydney suburb of Castlecrag. Her father Edward St John was a Queen's Councillor and a well-known Liberal politician who was considered something of a renegade by his party for speaking out against apartheid and in favour of other radical ideas like nuclear disarmament. (He also gained attention for exposing the somewhat convoluted sex life of John Gorton, Australia's nineteenth Prime Minister). Her mother Sylvette, born in Paris, was of Romanian-Jewish descent and unfortunately took her own life when Madeleine, who adored her, was twelve. This event, she later confessed, 'obviously changed everything.' Her father remarried and St John would live in what her half brother would call 'self-imposed exile' from him and his 'new' family for the remainder of her life. She rarely discussed her family and only then, according to friends like Bruce Beresford, to draw attention to their alleged (but never conclusively proven) ill treatment of her.
After becoming a boarder at St Catherine's School in Waverley with her younger sister Collette –– an experience she likened to attending Lowood, the grim educational institution featured in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre –– she went on to obtain a Master's Degree in English at Sydney University, where her friends and fellow students included Clive James, Germaine Greer, Les Murray, Robert Hughes, Bruce Beresford (who has just directed what was, for more than twenty years, his unproduced screen adaptation of The Women in Black retitled Ladies in Black) and the future maestro of Australian Shakespearean actors, the great John Bell. She graduated in 1963 and almost immediately married a fellow student named Chris Tillam, moving first to Los Angeles and then to San Francisco with him so they could be together while he studied filmmaking.
In 1968 St John relocated to London, fully expecting that her husband would join her there once his studies were complete. Tillam chose not to do this, so she lived a semi-bohemian existence in flats shared with a succession of her fellow Australian emigrés before finding a permanent home in what was, at that time, the seedy and somewhat down-at-heel suburb of Notting Hill. During this period, while supporting herself as a bookseller, a clerk and sometimes as a secretary, she became a follower of an Indian mystic named Swami Jr, wore Indian clothes and, for a time, called herself by an Indian name. But this flirtation with Eastern mysticism proved, in the end, to be a passing fad. A devoted churchgoer all her life, St John soon began attending services again each Sunday as she had done, very unfashionably, throughout her university days.
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| The Text Publishing Company, 2009 |
Firmly settled in London, St John spent eight years attempting to write a biography of Madame Blavatsky, the Russian-born co-founder of the spiritual system known as 'Theosophy,' before permanently abandoning the project some time in the early 1990s. She wrote her first novel, The Women in Black, in six months –– she claimed that none of it was autobiographical, modestly explaining that she lacked the ability to 'pull off' such a feat –– and it was published by the UK firm of André Deutsch in 1993. Three more novels –– A Pure Clear Light (1996), The Essence of The Thing (1997) and Stairway to Paradise (1999) –– followed, the last of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, making her the first Australian female author to be nominated for the award and a bugbear for certain members of the British literary establishment who took offence at her honest outsider's depiction of English mores and manners. Her own reaction to the nomination was anything but self-aggrandizing. 'There are squillions of books out there,' she told a reporter. 'Who knows what the best six are? It's not about me being brilliant. It's about me being lucky… We won't know for a hundred years the truth about whether it's any good. It's one of the things about literature; you just can't tell until you're dead.'
A heavy smoker all her life –– her tin of Virginia Gold tobacco remained within arm's reach on her night table right until the end –– Madeleine St John died of emphysema, in her beloved London, on 18 June 2006. In addition to four well-regarded novels, she also left behind her Notting Hill flat, a few dozen assorted paperbacks, one hundred handwritten pages of an uncompleted manuscript and a will stipulating that none of her work should ever be translated into any foreign language. She remained a mysterious, somewhat elusive figure even to her closest friends, a writer who seemed to value her privacy to the point of making a recluse of herself in order to protect it.
Last updated 16 March 2021
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