Month: December 2025

‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.’ Joseph Conrad

To see things, you have not seen before. Or if you have noticed them before, to see them anew, with fresh eyes. To open your mind to other possibilities.

The possibilities of hope. Not so much optimism, which as Rebecca Solnit writes arise not from the position of people believing all be fine who then kick back and wait for it all to be fine, but from a hope full of possibility.

As Solnit writes, ‘we have a responsibility to try to realise them, and not to realise the worst possibilities.’

Even as sometimes it looks as though we’re headed there.

On this rain drenched day when the drips on the plastic covering that protects the newspaper which waits out front for collection by the people in this house who love to read their news at the start of each day, is a beginning. 

Dear Elisabeth

You take a leaf from Adrienne Rich’s book of poems and try to write letters to yourself to flush out the secrets that hide there in the back of your mind refusing to dislodge, so concealed by the detritus of the present moment of the day ahead

And if you can’t get to them you dig back further into the dusty corners and drag out an old memory. It leads you into the past, that foreign country which you once remembered with a child’s clear eye. Now it grows hazy.

You long for the days to come where memories of the past will creep on you with all the clarity of the moment it first happened. You can see it happening with your husband. This man who has locked away so many cruel secrets of the things that were done to him, we could only detect them in his occasional outbursts of rage. Now they come thick and fast and they threaten to overwhelm him. He hears the falling apart of Yeats poem. When the falcon cannot hear the falconer. 

He can no longer hoodwink himself that those events are gone. They trickle back with all the ferocity of what I imagine the falcon sees without its hood. A rabbit scurrying across a field.

Food for survival. But for my husband these memories turn him into the rabbit not the falcon, and he cowers under bushes fearing for his life.

The terror of the abused child. Why then in my dreams did three posh looking schoolboys ring my doorbell while I was home alone and insist they be allowed to move into my house? They stalked down to the kitchen living area and made themselves at home, while I, terrified, ran out to the street and tried to find someone in a passing car who might stop and dial triple zero. Cars stopped, seemed concerned for me, but no one could manage the simple task of calling the police. 

So often in my dreams I’m calling the police. The police to recuse me from these intruders. Who were in some ways harmless enough. This dream, the last of the morning, morphed into another when the schoolboys finally left and were replaced by another group of older men and a woman who were like the mafia in their accents and appearance. They parked their cars in my front garden and talked about moving into my house for a time. And again, I’m out on the street trying to attract help from someone to call the police.

I long for the sound of the police siren. Someone who will come along and arrest these intruders who have taken over my space such I do not feel safe in my own house. And I am terrified once more until I wake up.

This dream is a prelude to next week when my husband is away for two nights and I will be alone in this big house, a thing which rarely happens. Something I dread much as I try to remain stoical and not let others know of my fears.

I tell myself they are a residue of my childhood. Those times of terror with my father. He still stalks my mind when I am all alone at night. When every sound, every creak of every floorboard, the hiss of wind in the trees, the screech of night bats can terrify me into a fear I am not after all alone, but some malevolent something or someone is present who wants to hurt me. Who wants to take over my body. Insert his penis into my delicate insides and I cannot sleep for fear of the glint of a knife blade in the dark, a hand across my mouth to silence my screams, which can never come out in my dreams. And I run for the front door and out onto the street where I try to flag down passing cars desperate for help.

This is a recurring dream. The need to get out of my house to escape the intruder who is most often a man who wants to take me over. Or rob me of what few valuables I own or defile my space with his stench. To make my place no longer a haven.

Already I anticipate these nights, when I will leave on the lights that spill onto the back garden and the front so that the house is not shrouded in darkness, which I prefer when I feel safe. When I feel unsafe my preference is for darkness turned off into light everywhere so I can see what I am up against.

Like a child who fears the dark. And I marvel and the people I know, men and women alike, who live alone and do not hold such fears. They who can spend each night in the solitude and comfort of their beds. They do not fear every night for their lives against some unseen menace that visits me in dreams. The residue of a child spent in terror. 

And so, I sometimes imagine a life to come living in a community of like-minded souls, where we each have separate rooms, but are close by one another. Where we are safe and no one will venture past the front doors because the place is kept secure and there is no reason for any of the figures in my dreams to slip through my front door and invade my body and space. 

Invisible laundry

We layer the present on the past.

As Ann Patchett writes through her character Maeve in The Dutch House, ‘I see the past as it actually was, but we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we were. And that means the past has been radically altered.’

Reading an essay on the significance of laundry in our lives, I’m pitched back to a time when my sister and I boarded with a Dutch family on top of the hill in Pleasant Road Camberwell.

I was fifteen years old, and pitifully self-conscious. The ugliness of my adolescence had hit complete with pimples and weight gain. My incisors were yellowing, which led me to cover my mouth with my hand when speaking. And the Dutch family with whom we boarded headed by the formidable Mrs F, her face as wide as a plate, her hair wispy blond/grey curls around her bulbous ears, tall and angular, with might have been arthritis in her gnarled joints, spoke with the familiar accent of the Dutch but with an added bass to add to her authority over and above her husband. Dwarfed by comparison. 

Mr F was a mild-mannered accountant who wore dark spectacles and reminded me of our kind uncles on my mother’s side. Only he seemed more downtrodden. All of this I describe in retrospect. At the time I formed almost no opinion about this family other than to fall in love with the third eldest boy who had blue eyes as deep as oceans and was studying medicine. By contrast, I disliked the youngest boy who was a year ahead of me at school and maintained his sanity in this large Catholic family by insisting he live in the backyard in the family caravan. At the time this seemed reasonable but looking back I marvel that Mrs F tolerated it. 

This family now related to me by marriage – that’s a whole other story – have melded into my memory like characters from a fairy tale. The house, quaint in the manner of Dutch houses in my imagination with high pitched roof, double story, tiny rooms with low ceilings and a spinning wheel just near the front door, remains today. The spinning wheel, an ornament perhaps, as I never saw it in use, tipped the house back to a previous century.

My sister and I shared a double bed at the top of the stairs, a bed replete with white bedspread cover and coarse sheets. So white it troubled me to sleep in it. And the agony of the blood when my sister unexpectedly copped her first period while sitting on the edge of the bed in conversation with one of those brothers. The mortification. 

Reading Arithra van Herk’s essay, ‘Invisibled Laundry’ I find myself thinking of Beatrice Potter’s Mrs Tiggy-Winkel, the delightful hedgehog laundry woman who takes in the washing of the local animals and finds little Lucie’s lost kerchiefs and pinafore. 

Lily-white and clean, oh!

With little frills between, o!

Smooth and hot, red rusty spot

Never here be seen, oh!

 AArithra van Hernd she battles a rust spot that reminds me of the blood we tried to remove from Mrs F’s bedspread never once thinking to tell her. 

She disapproved, I discovered later, of our habit of washing our underwear each night and hanging it to dry at the end of the bed. From memory we did this for two reasons. One we had only three or four sets of underpants and socks and could not leave them in the laundry for too long and secondly because they had seen better days. 

We were ashamed in every facet of our lives. Ashamed to be living with this well-heeled and ordinary good Catholic family while ours had fallen apart and the inkling that Mrs F had wanted to take on two new daughters to help her around the house. She had five sons and only one daughter, her youngest, far younger than my sister and me and she was of little use in the cooking and cleaning. 

I did not understand this at the time and although we might have offered to help with the washing up after dinner, we did little else to help Mrs F with household chores. It seems she resented us.

This was a time when I decided I should concentrate on my schoolwork if I was to get anywhere in my life. So, I took off after school each day and walked to Anderson Park several blocks away. Then I sat on the swing trying to learn my Latin declensions and French vocab. Determined to impress the nuns with my intellect, which felt forced and came to me only through rote learning. I could not understand much of what I absorbed at school other than that I must cram facts in. Languages were okay but numbers defied me.

Numbers on a page swam in front of my eyes like pea soup and I was relieved to escape them when mathematics was no longer a compulsory subject.

In the park, this day I struggled with the verb to be and to have, both in French and in Latin, to get the tenses right, to understand those aspects of Latin grammar, the dative, ablative, and genitive. These words still in my head and still as elusive even as I went on to study Latin at university. How can you study something at such a high level and still not understand?

I mistook all the foundations locked inside a bubble of tortured feelings, including on this day, given my erupting passion for the third son. Earlier he had invited me and my sister to open our mouths so he could study our tongues, throats and teeth as part of his medical studies.

My sister, unashamed of her teeth obliged, but I high tailed it down to the park red with shame. I could not let him see inside my mouth for fear of what he’d find. My crumbling back molars over which I rode my tongue. Cracked like tree bark. The holes in the back of my incisors. My mouth like a decaying city.

For this reason, I was relieved my mother could not afford the dentist and since the dental hospital would no longer take our family under its roof because my father earned too much money in his accountancy work, we were stymied. I was glad even as a big part of me knew my teeth needed attention.

Shame makes you want to hide. Shame leaves you cowering behind your books. Picture me a gawky young girl, long lanky hair pulled into pig tails, a splotchy face and grubby uniform seated on a swing, trying to divide her thoughts between the blue eyes of Mrs F’s third son and French words for the everyday, the birds, the clouds, the grass. Rote learning a poem by Baudrillard. Une grenouille vit un boeuf qui sembla de belle taille. Writing it hear I can hear the sounds in my head but cannot remember their exact spelling or order. The writer tells the story of a frog who wanted to be as big as a cow so he blew himself up until he exploded, very apt for my state of mind that day only I could not inflate myself. I was so deflated I could only go home to Mrs F’s house and hide.