Month: October 2025

The thousand yard stare

Reading Szubansky’s memoir, Reckoning, so many resonances emerge from my childhood.

Magda spent her adolescence in Croydon while I spent mine in Cheltenham, And although her parents sent her to Sienna in Camberwell and mine to Vaucluse in Richmond, there were similarities. Catholic Convents for girls, for starters.

Magda is younger than me by a decade, I reason, and yet our lives cross. Every time in the book she makes a trip to the Camberwell Junction, my heart sings. That’s one of the lovely things about reading, the way it can jog your memories for similarities and even for differences.

I remember the era of the sharpies, as Magda describes their hell-bent reign of terror, but I never encountered any sharpies except to look at on trains or the street. Magda tried to become one, but the point at which I resonate most is when she describes falling in love with Sister Agnes, a nun who took to issuing her charges work the while their heads were bent and she took to staring, the thousand yard stare. 

Young Magda, whose burgeoning lesbianism was only then awakening, stared at the nun. Sister Agnes seemed sad – left the convent sometime later – at the time Magda surmises to marry. While my favourite nun left the convent, too, and she entered a relationship with a woman who someone told me was one of the Crowe girls though I shall never know and many of the Crowe girls became nuns. 

Magda, like me wondered about the nuns and why they chose this life. Their marriage to Jesus. He was such a bigamist if he endorsed all these marriages, but no one ever said as much. It was okay in my day to be married to Jesus, even to wear ‘his’ ring on the correct ring finger.

I did not suffer the agony of recognising I was gay, not like Magda, but other agonies of adolescence followed me around, as they do for most young people. 

The torture of searching for and never quite finding your identity. And Magda’s father, a man obsessed with tennis and sport to exorcize what his daughter describes as his killing muscle, his extreme competitiveness, to kill or be killed given his formative experiences during the Second World War, as a young assassin appointed by the resistance in Poland to deal with those who were collaborating with the Nazis. 

What a man. Different from my father but both tormented by the wrath of war. As others like Ruth Clare who writes about her experience as daughter of a Vietnam Military Veteran were as detailed in her memoir, Enemy. These men, especially Ruth’s father who were cruel beyond measure because of war trauma. It wrecks families, some more so than others.

I understand today Magda is suffering a rare form of cancer that sounds likely to be fatal and it saddens me to think this bright light in our world, the woman who played …in Babe, the story of a pig, should leave us soon, or maybe not. Magda’s father had cancer, too, and he survived for over five years after diagnosis and was ultimately considered cured. The same might happen for her.

This morning in my dreams I have flickers of memory many people in my dream had cancer. And I feared it might be a sign,

When I was a child the advertisement on television with their Grim Reaper words, ‘A lump or thickening in the breast or elsewhere could be an early sign…. And the thoughts of this monster crawling under your skin, a lumpy presence that like a tick or ring worm or lice might burrow away, spreading its malevolence, haunted me day and night.

At one time, I could not sleep for any twitch in my stomach which left me convinced I had cancer of the stomach. Even as our mother insists our lot enjoy high levels of immunity. From where I do not know, but it should preserve us all. Even as her mother in her 69th year developed stomach cancer, during her trip to Australia. 

When she returned to Holland after a year away helping my mother with her little ones, including me and my younger sister, she went to the doctor. It was too late. She died not long after. 

A memory stays with me. My mother at the telephone which was cradled on a wall stand on the wall of the log cabin house in which we lived. In tears. She had just received news of her mother’s death and could not even afford to go to the funeral. No one expected it of her. Such pain. To miss out on the level of closure a funeral offers. Ceremonies designed around the concept of self-care. Of allowing ourselves to grieve and not bypass the necessity of acknowledging our loss. Otherwise, the loss, like cancer, eats away at us and won’t let go. 

Feathered determination

‘The dying defy all clocks’. Niall Williams

When my family lived in Camberwell, their lives overshadowed by memories of the Second World War, like most houses in our street, our back yard contained its own incinerator. The aromatic stink of burning autumn leaves brings back the memory. 

On weekends in my memory my mother filled the huge drum with rubbish. And tossed in a match. Smoked curled along the horizon from almost every house before they included burning-off curfews to ease the pollution and in time banned them altogether. 

The story goes, one of my older brothers kept bantams. He bought his birds at the Camberwell pet market. They roosted among the cages and rabbit hutches, near puppies in kennels and rabbits in baskets in the days before anyone regulated the sale of almost anything. 

Once home, my brother’s bantam pecked grain at the base of his makeshift cage while high on a perch he added butter yellow finches and sky-blue budgerigars. They streaked within the confines of their prison. 

I can’t over work the sensation of watching my brother’s birds in their home each day. I did not love them as he did but I admired their gallantry, their feathered determination to feed and the success with which my brother multiplied their number almost monthly until we had three bantams pecking grain and five or six rainbow-coloured birds on high. 

As with all stories this one has an ending. 

I came home from Our Lady of good Counsel primary school, where the Virgin Mother rarely offered counsel, while my brother attended the Marist brothers for his instruction. He alone of all my older brothers traipsed off to the Redemptorist school along Canterbury Road while the other three joined the Jesuits at the more magisterial St Patrick’s College in the city where the academically gifted did their thing. 

My brother of the birds was more artistic and less inclined with words and numbers. Though he knew his birds and was well able to find ways of working to find them.

This day a fire truck sat on the curb in front of our house. A black snake like hose weaved its way through the front gate round to the back yard where my mother’s incinerator sent sparks into the wooden planks of the bird cage and sent their residents onto bird heaven.

My brother never kept birds again, at least not in my memory. My memory can only entertain my imaginings of his face streaked with tears and the joy of the dog in our garden, a black mongrel with long hair and floppy ears, short legs and a loud bark who went by the name of Peta.

Peta fed on the bantam carcasses, or so I imagine, given the firemen put out the fire and left the clean-up to my mother.

Did my brother find a way to forgive her, assuming it was she who lit the incinerator that fateful day? He was unable to forgive her other misdemeanours, her marriage to my father for instance. This criticism of my mother for her choice of partner seems misguided. Without our father, my brother and I would never exist.

It’s a funny thing to realise that as much as we might be critical of our parents, we are made of them. They made us from their beings, their genetic make-up and whatever else a parent puts into a child over the course of their lives. 

I wrote to a relative in the Netherlands, one I only know through Facebook and all because of her name, the same as my father’s name and therefore I assume a relative or married to one given the unusual nature of my father’s name. Its convoluted cadences, Schooneveldt.

When I was a child I wore my name with pride. It spoke to me of difference, unlike the Kellys, Murphys and O’Briens, the conventional names in my Catholic primary school.

Even as the other kids in my class struggled to pronounce it, without a hard ‘Sch’ as in school, which refused to soften these consonants as we prefer to do, I still loved my name.

My father’s name. My mother was a Hooij. Many of my relatives who carry this name have anglicised it for ease of pronunciation and spelling.

So much absorption of words. And I think of Ocean Vuong’s words: ‘To write is to fight against the erosion and transformation of meaning always for better and for worse.’ 

I fear this applies in my case when so many fail to understand the words we transfer from the thoughts that rumble through our minds onto the concreteness of paper or the screen.

But still we try.