Herstory

You were born in 1919, the year women were finally granted the right to vote in the Netherlands. Such a year of promise.

The first daughter of parents who were then considered too old to bear children, both in their early to mid-thirties. But children they had. There soon followed five sons, including one set of twins, one of them a sister. 

You were not to know you would have five sons, yourself, and four daughters. You were not to know you would also lose two babies, both girls, one at four months of age during the Hongerwinter of 1944 and the other leven los, still born.

Your forty-three-year-old placenta could not hold out long enough to give her nourishment, or so you were told when they pulled the dead baby out. 

Your childhood you described among the tulips, clogs, windmills, frozen ponds and silver skaters – stereotypical of Dutch life – as endlessly wonderful. Though your adolescence maybe not so. Not that you ever complained.

Everything about your life in Holland, apart from the horrors of war was wonderful. 

You never told us how much you hated being pulled out of school at fifteen so you could take the place of your mother’s house maid to save in expenses as your brothers’ educations, with two in a seminary and others at the Lyceum was too much for your father to manage on his physical education teacher’s salary. 

You thought it a good idea.

Your parents offered a small payment for doing the work. And they called on a char woman to do the heavy stuff, mopping the floors and the like. So, it was easy enough. Besides you could save up and go on a hiking trip to the Black forest when you were seventeen years.

A year later in Luxemburg on another holiday you soldiers in formation and although something told you it wasn’t a good thing, you still managed to enjoy your holiday among friends. 

Then the war hit.

Whether it was because he wore a unform that made him more handsome in your eyes, his height or stature, you fell for our father against all sense. He not baptised into the Catholic church after. He did not come from as respectable a Haarlem family, as your own.

Still, he charmed you into marriage despite the signs, those red flags we recognise today as precursors to family violence.

His moody outbursts, the times when he would not speak to you for days because of some slight your part, which you could never understand.

He would not explain what you had done wrong. You could only guess. And as unpredictably, he forgave you and went back to talking to you as though nothing had happened.

Even so, you considered those early years happy. Your first son born a year after your gorgeous wedding. When your cousin loaned you enough apricot taffeta for your wedding dress even as fabrics were hard to come buy halfway through the war. 

When I was a child you never mentioned the German invasion, but you told me in later years about the spies in your midst and the struggles to conceal your husband and brother in the roof of your parents’ house so the German soldiers would not ship them away to work camps. 

You knew about hunger then, too, and although you told us about eating soup made of tulip bulbs towards the end of the war and in vivid detail about the death of your infant daughter whom you named after your mother according to Dutch tradition, you never made out how hard it was for you. 

How pained you were by your first years in those early days of marriage.

You never let on you might have made a mistake. You did not want to come to Australia, but your husband convinced you it would be for the best. So, you went along with his plans to start a new life here. 

You went alone on a ship, pregnant with your fifth child, four little ones in tow, leaving your dead baby daughter buried in Heilo.

You only got to visit her grave once again in your sixties. So long ago but never forgotten. 

You came in the boat after your husband had arrived six months earlier. He had managed by then to buy a plot of land and would build a house.

In the meantime, a farmer in Greensborough had offered his old chook shed where you could locate your family until the house was built. It took forever. 

He built the house single handedly with a little help from one of your brothers. Two brothers followed him to Australia.

He was persuasive, the man you married. He could talk other people into doing things with the promise of greater good, but he lost their respect over the years once he fell into alcohol abuse. 

All this you kept to yourself through another four pregnancies, one which culminated in the still birth of your last child. 

Book ended by dead babies, your married life was one of hardship and struggle. But you held onto your faith in God and rarely complained. 

Fear oozed from you on weekends when your husband drank most, fear you passed onto your children, at least the younger ones. Not intentionally, but you were not equipped for the life you inhabited here in Australia. 

You thought you were destined for great things, or so your father had led you to believe, his first born darling, the mutual apple of one another’s eyes. Though your father lost his sight in his final decades not long after he lost his wife, your mother, to stomach cancer.

You took the call from Holland on a telephone that hung against a wall in the holiday complex your husband had bought with another one of your brothers. Again, he dreamed of huge success. But it was a struggle.

The business failed. No one took holidays in Healesville anymore and all your savings turned to ash when you sold again a year later. 

By then he had diabetes and you nursed him through ill health, his emphysema from all that smoking, none of it helped by his drinking. But he held down a respectable job as accountant with the firm Cooper Brothers in the city and you dreamed one day of his becoming a partner. 

He earned good money but much of it he spent on his hobbies, his photography and his drinking. There was never enough for groceries and house-hold expenses, and you spent those years worrying endlessly about the pull to budget, you were never able to keep in the black.

Always in debt, this life of poverty with so many children to care for, no time to read left you hankering for more. It was not till you joined Al Anon in your late fifties that you could see some way out of the mess of your marriage.

Not that you’d ever leave him, though your two eldest sons arranged for this at one point, setting you up in a rental in Parkdale with your four youngest children once the others had left home. 

You couldn’t bear to be away from him so long. You worried for him, and you convinced yourself within a year that another miracle had occurred. He stopped drinking. He had promised you faithfully, and you believed in miracles.

My mother in her late forties. All of her treasures. A photo of her beloved father on the dresser. A crucifix. Her hope.

 

Within months he was back to drinking and the abuse. It took another two years, losing his job, because he could not face a day without a morning’s drink, and a spell in Delmont hospital where they zapped him with ECT to shake his depression, before things changed.

A few years later he was dead, and you were 63 and soon you would marry a man who was Australian by birth despite all your scepticism on the value of Australians when we were little.

This man gave you much joy even though we perceived him to be patronising of you. He was not abusive like our father. 

You adopted his family eagerly after you watched the mother of his five children die of emphysema. You two married and the rest of your story I was largely absent from.

You wanted regular lunches with your daughters. You plugged for them. But we were not always available will and able. Nor so keen to blot out the past as you would have us do.

We had lives of our own, with children of our own. And your life continued apace until your second husband died and you spent your last decade alone, much of it in a retirement community, which you disliked but accepted as inevitable. 

You preferred the isolation of your lovely room once you needed extra care. Where you sat for hours on end, a book on your lap. Your bones gave you trouble, your arthritis ached and in time your heart gave out.

You lasted all of 94 years, not the last of your seven siblings to die, but not the first either. I saw more of you in these final years, lured back by a guilt I carried from childhood. How much I had wanted to rescue you from our father. 

I think of you now, lost in my memory. In your mind you’d be up there in Heaven looking down on us.

I doubt this, but it helped you to imagine going on forever. 

How wrong you were. 

Fodder for fools

‘The knowledge of your own redundancy has a keen tooth.’ Niall Williams

These words from the musings of Williams’ narrator Noah, known in his family simply as Noe, in the novel, This is Happiness. They have the ring of truth.

Only this morning as I sat at my computer ready to work, I thought yet again of the mountains of words I have amassed during my lifetime and of how redundant they will become once I am gone. 

Wiped clean, no doubt, when someone clears my computer before sale or offering it to recycle yards. 

I thought, too, of my long-time correspondent Gerald Murnane with his 18, presumably more by now, filing cabinets, filled to the brim with his musings, copies of his correspondence with others, including me, and our letters in return. 

A treasure trove, if only someone is prepared to go through it.

Murnane refers to this person as his Future Creature. A young female researcher whose heart is bent on discovering as much as possible of the world of the so-called reclusive, Gerald Murnane. Fifty years after his death

But Future Creature might be a long-time materialising. And my hunch is, she’s more likely to be a ‘he’. It takes a particular sensibility to idealise the writings of someone like Gerald Murnane, and I suspect his work might appeal more to males in our mix. 

But who am I to pull out the gender card? After all I spent a decade writing to Gerald, until he sacked me, as in he wrote what he described as his last letter to me, believing we had said all we needed to say to one another. 

My suspicion, he sacked me because he was offended at my suggestion his wife Catherine, before she died, might have suffered the lot of many women, ‘chained to the sink’. 

She was not, Murnane insists. Not at all. Instead, he was the one chained to the sink, while she underwent a series of psychoses that left her in psychiatric care, and him with the bulk of childcare. 

I don’t doubt the accuracy of this, but it doesn’t take away from the idea that a marriage to the great Gerald Murnane could not have been easy, however difficult Catherine Murnane’s childhood might have been and whatever else might have happened to drive her mad. 

‘Imagination is not to be scorned,’ writes Williams in his book, which also brings me back to This is Happiness. I came across the title in the ABC books section online. People were asking for books written and read by Irish writers. So many love the Irish inflection, the lilting cadences, the way Irish words rise and fall. And several people recommended Niall Williams, read by Dermot Crowley.

What a treat to immerse yourself in Noe’s (for Noel) world. His eccentric, but highly relatable grandparents, and the indomitable Christi, who comes to visit on the pretext of ‘bringing the light’, as in turning on the electricity for the backward town of Faha.

When his intention is, we discover, a pilgrimage of reparation to atone for his sin of leaving the lovely Annie Mooney at the altar. Jilted. 

He could not go through with it at the time and although Annie married another man sometime later, a chemist in another township, and the two could not have children. She was eighteen years younger than this man, and who knows how this sadness came about, but Christi befriends the seventeen-year-old Noe who is staying with his grandparents, following his decision to leave the life of a priest in a Dublin seminary. And the story unfolds.

Ah me. Leaving the priesthood, such a familiar trope. Just as entering the priesthood, or the convent for that matter, was as familiar to me as crossing the street. It was a constant in our conversations when we grew up. 

Two of my brothers spent time in seminaries and my eldest sister seriously considered entering the convent, too. But the nuns of her choice, our nuns at school, the Faithful Companions of Jesus, would not have her. They had had heard from a local Catholic doctor that our father had a drinking problem, and the nuns considered the daughter of such a man, likely to be unstable.

They could afford to be picky in those days. Now they have fewer options to choose from, likewise the priests. 

I toyed with going into the convent myself and discussed it at least once with my favourite nun before I left school. But even as I spoke to her in earnest, and she appeared to take me seriously, I knew my only reason for wanting to enter was to be closer to her, and that was no reason to go into religious life.

Neither my sister nor I made it into the novitiate. My sister fell pregnant at nineteen to a priest and I went to university where I discovered a world of men and also joined the newly instituted  class of Women’s Studies and realised the unfair lot of women within the world. 

To enter a convent under the sway of the pope and his priests would not do at all. 

The younger of my two religious brothers went to the Redemptorist seminary in Galong in his mid-teens. At his request, I understand. Though I suspect my parents were keen because he lacked academic prowess and life as one of those preaching priests who travelled from parish to parish in Australia, spouting warnings of hell, fire and brimstone might do the trick.

This brother loved music and art, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. He loved to air guitar and drum like Ringo Star. He drummed every surface imaginable, including his sisters’ bodies.  

He lasted only a few months into a year, while the eldest brother who entered as a nineteen-year-old after a stint as a lay missionary in New Guinea, was more dedicated to his vocation with the Sacred Heart Missionaries. But he, too, went to university as part of his religious training and there he met a woman. 

Sybille, of the raven black hair, marble white skin and dark eyes. They married within a year and separated within another. For reasons that defy me, though I heard stories, my brother had such a leaning towards to the poor and downtrodden, he invited homeless men into his house at all times till his new wife could stand it no more.

I think of her often. This lovely young woman who was at least a decade older than me, and still alive somewhere, I believe.

The ordination of Franciscan brothers, two uncles among them, in 1947 or thereabouts, when the Catholic Church in Holland still had plenty of takers.

When I write the stories of my siblings, in shorthand form, I’m taken with a sensation I will get into trouble for speaking about other people, as though it isn’t any of my business. 

And when I reflect on Niall Williams’ story, and the way he covers the lives of so many citizens in the town of Faha, all of them, I suspect fictionalised versions of real people he has encountered throughout his life or amalgams of them, I’m left yet again with the wish I could hide behind a fiction writers’ façade and say, it’s all made up.

But fiction like ‘imagination is not to be scorned’, as Williams writes. And ‘truth is best revealed when exaggerated’.

The other voice in my head tells me it’s okay to write as I do because these people about whom I write are no longer with us. At least not in the sense their younger selves have morphed into older versions of people who, might not even recognise their younger selves. And these older people might also have different perspectives from me on what went on in those days.

As Hilary Mantel reckons, facts are not the be all and end all. 

‘Evidence is always partial. Facts are not the truth, though they are part of it. Information is not knowledge. And history is not the past. It is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It is not more the past than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.’

When Williams writes of the nuns as a ‘type of aristocracy’ my heart skips a beat. Nuns were indeed aristocracy. So regal, so powerful, as they walked the streets of Richmond when I was a younger person and shop keepers gave them bread for free, flowers for the altar for free, and offered them hospitality whenever possible. Their handyman skills, their taxi driving, anything they could offer, but only if they were Catholics. 

The rest of the world looked on in awe. And children skittered hither and thither at the sight of the black robed crows, but not the Catholic kids. We learned to bow our heads, to speak in hushed tones, to speak politely when addressed. And to stay alert. 

A nun might have been in second place behind the priests, but they were still powerful. And though less inclined to the physical cruelty of the brothers and priests in the church and school yard, the nuns could also wield the whip of their tongues. 

There was one nun at my convent school who especially terrified me. Perhaps because her subject was science and I had no aptitude in the world of facts, the world in which things happened, in the spheres of physics, chemistry or mathematics. 

I could only play around with words in my mind and imagination. I preferred books and languages.

One of my brothers once told me, if I was good at languages then I should be good at mathematics because it, too, is a language. Only to me maths is an orderly language I could never grasp. 

I can only think now, like many a female of my vintage, when we were young we were schooled in the knowledge that women lacked all fortitude for mathematics and the sciences. 

These were the sexy subjects though never referred to a such. They were the superior subjects that required superior intellects. And girls, being of the second sex, could never grasp the intricacies of such formulations. 

When you grow up, told often enough that because you’re a girl you can’t do maths, you take it to heart. And whenever sets of numbers appear on the page in front of you, your mind does this funny thing of closing over. 

The letters on the page become a blur and even as you concentrate hard to grasp the concept of long division, or, in year nine, how to use logarithms, the knowledge only sticks on the surface. Barely enough to scrape through your exams before it’s gone forever.

Knowledge that stays with me includes the words of poets, the tones of playwrights, lines from novels. Words you repeated again and again in your brain till they became part of your vocabulary and you became the writer you are today. 

All because the words offered a chance to go inside yourself and escape the tedium of life. Even as it sometimes got you into trouble for speaking out of turn. For seeing things in ways others disliked. 

Still the words were yours alone. And when you put them down on scraps of paper and filled the blank pages with your images and ideas, you were the master of your own destiny. And for a woman raised on a diet of inadequacy and failure, the idea of mastery is a joy indeed.