Author: Elisabeth

The shattered glass of dreams

‘Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.’ Tove Ditlevsen

Long and narrow like a coffin, childhood, the beginning points to the end, as do all our beginnings, to death.

But I’m more taken by the notion of escape from the clutches of childhood, than death. How much we can’t do it on our own. We need help.

One Sunday I nibbled on a lettuce leaf. Fresh and green it had arrived from the greengrocer’s van the day before and no one had bothered to unload it yet. There were apples underneath, and pears resting alongside leeks, potatoes, and greens but I did not dig down for one. 

Early morning and with Mass ahead I knew I should not eat. Not for three hours before the priest rested a round host on my tongue and I was free to return home and eat as I wished.

Most likely toast or even an egg, given it was Sunday and on Sundays we each ate an egg. One cooked in whatever way we chose. Boiled fried or egg white separated from yolk and whipped up with sugar to form meringue mixture which we ate with a spoon. A sweet cloud of deliciousness.

We fasted to honour the host on our tongues, the arrival of Jesus into our bodies, on the holiest day of the week. A sacred day, a dress up day. A day for visitors in the afternoon. And cake, if my elder sister was inclined to bake. Our day of rest when my father did not drink, leaving calm and peace to fall over us all. 

I tried the way I often tried in these childhood days to rationalise away the lettuce leaf. I did not dare to ask my brother, ‘Is lettuce food?’ I suspected it was and he would only confirm the knowledge.

I had otherwise to convince myself that I was a rabbit nibbling on greens like Peter Rabbit from the story books in Farmer McGregor’s paddock. Food for rabbits perhaps but not for humans.

If it was a leaf I had nipped from the garden but not from the greengrocer’s box which was filled with food, but food only once cooked, or so I reasoned, trying to shake off the idea I had interfered with my fasting ahead of communion.

To eat ahead of time within the three-hour fasting period was to risk mortal sin if I took the host onto my tongue or else to do the unthinkable.

When the line of people who rose from their seats one row after another from left to right from front to back, snaked its way up the aisle to the front altar step and each of knelt ahead of the priest and his altar boy -the priest with gold chain firmly held beneath a snow while lace bordered cloth – I should stay behind and seated. While others scrambled over to get to the aisle. My mother nudging me to move, unable to understand why I was not joining the queue. And worried that I must have sinned, or worse, I was rebelling against my religion. 

How could I do such a thing? What would they think of me. Ten years old and already in a state of mortal sin. A sin so great if I entered my coffin of death right then and there, I would go straight to hell, those burning flames, for the rest of time. 

How does a child wriggle out of such dilemmas? How find a way beyond impossible choices?

In my family we did not admit to sins unless discovered by another.

My brother once caught my sister and me stealing lollies from the front room of our house in Healesville when I was five and we were punished after he dobbed us in.

The humiliation of my father’s hand slapping my bare behind. Punishment far greater than the fires of hell which I did not then understand.

Five years later I understood them well. 

The flames that licked around your cheeks. The unbearable heat. The way your toes were red raw with pain. The punishment was merciless and there would be no escape in a death and oblivion. This was an eternal fire that raged while you recoiled under its heat never able to quench your hirst, soothe your skin or comfort your aching head.

Eternal damnation. And it was mine for the taking if I let the priest put a snow-white host on my tongue that morning. 

The latest Mass was at 11,00 am and this was where we were headed. I nibbled on a lettuce leaf at 9.10 am. I looked at the clock. Ten minutes later and I began my calculations.

Communion happened towards the end of Mass. The priest must run through all the liturgy. In Latin, a mystery to me. I could only tell where we were by the bell ringing and the positioning – sitting or standing . But the movements of priest as he raised the chalice high in the hosanna chorus, by the shuffle of bodies at communion time. And it was Sunday. 

The priest would spend at least twenty minutes, if not more, on his sermon. By the time we made our way to the communion altar rail, like so many ants lined up for labour, the clock would be close to midday.

My skills in numbers were limited but I could add and subtract any under twenty. My salvation was close by. I was within the window of safety and need not worry if I resisted the temptation of any more nibbles on lettuce, or bites into apples, spoonful’s of sugar. Anything that might tempt me, as my stomach rumbled in that long slow empty wait for Sunday Mass.

You don’t get out of childhood free of charge.

Even when you grow up and escape the narrow confines of your coffin, the residue of such feelings remains.

The stuff of rules, of needing to adhere for fear of punishment, the police siren at the red traffic light if you slip through too late and leave yourself in peril of being squashed by another car, of killing yourself or another or almost worse still of taking on the anger of a court of law for your unforgivable misdemeanour, these are elements that dog me in my dreams. 

After a day of heat to match the fires of hell several days ago, a storm came through and cleansed the garden of its despair.

Our house was spared though others elsewhere lost power when power lines broke down and suffered from fallen trees and the horrid outcomes of wild storms. 

My daughter lifted the window, one along a line of windows in our kitchen living room area to let in fresh air and cool the place down. It’s one of two windows in a line of seven that can still open.

Most were stuck fast forever when another daughter’s boyfriend helped us out for pocket money by painting the architraves and window ledges. He did not know the trick to painting window frames. You most leave them open and move them up and down when the paint is drying so it does not stick fast.

The paint stuck fast and although there might well be another way to force open the resistant windows, for the last thirty years we have settled on the opening of the two free ones as a source of fresh air after hot summer days when night comes and the atmosphere cools. 

Halfway through dinner there was an almighty crash. It came down with one of those adrenaline forcing thumps that sets your heart pounding, and your underarms get wet.

The one open window had snapped from its inner cords and fell shattering into a thousand tiny pieces, all in one piece. 

No harm done other than a shattered window. Safety glass, so no chance it would smash everywhere and get splinters in our feet, but still we put a safety barrier around it to protect the dogs until we could get it fixed.

The cracking glass in the window clicked for several minutes after its fall, piece by tiny piece until it had finally found its place as a glass silver mosaic so beautiful to see but ever so fragile.

When I was a child I broke a pane of glass by accident with my bouncing ball. My parents had ordered it to replace another broken pane.

This was a sin I could not hide. An accident. It was one of those moments when hell felt like nothing compared to my mother’s rage. My mother who was never angry with me, grew white and the frown on her forehead deepened. The flash in her eyes fiercer than the fires of hell or the cracking of broken glass on concrete.

How did I get out of the coffin of childhood?

How did I learn there was a way out?

I reconciled myself to rules that make sense and abide by them up to a point and then try to forgive myself the shattered glass of my dreams? 

It’s never enough.

Nostalgia, Carnation Milk and a woman’s body

At the height of summer when our back yard grass was yellow and dry, my sister made ice cream from Carnation evaporated milk. Thick and creamy, it came in tins, pinky-red with a cluster of white, pink, and red carnations on the label. 

Some used Carnation in place of milk in coffee, others in place of cream, but my sister used it to make ice-cream. Frozen in slim rectangular aluminium trays, lined like ice block trays in the freezer when space allowed.

To some batches she added cocoa powder to give the illusion we were eating chocolate ice cream, but in the main she made up trays of white smooth vanilla. 

To describe the taste is to re-enter the past. It was nothing like the shop bought ice-cream I craved. Nothing like those blocks of Peter’s Neapolitan, strips of pink for strawberry, pure white for vanilla and pale brown for chocolate.

Shop bought ice cream was delectable. We argued over who might get the thickest slice whenever my elder sister carved the block into nine. 

Home-made ice cream was not worth fighting over. But it was passable. In the same way Carnation milk became a substitute for the real thing. Condensed milk was another matter.

It travelled in tubes already sweetened and came out glistening like tooth paste, only sticky. A mouth full of the stuff clogged your mouth with such intense sweetness even I, who loved all things containing sugar, gagged. 

Substitutes for foods that hung around until the 1960s and beyond but disappeared in my teens. I have not looked for Carnation Milk in supermarkets today, but I expect it’s still around.

The point is familiar food can be a comfort. Riding on our nostalgia. Or it can become rancid in memory. Rancid to taste, overflowing with cruel associations.

My father took this photo of my mother. How she felt performing it, I will never know.

When I was thirteen and bursting out of my clothes faster than I could keep up with, I first understood the allure of the female form. Something that as a younger child bothered me, Calendars full of naked women in mechanics workshops; a naked bronze Atlas holding the world on his shoulders in a print in my parents’ bedroom, alongside the half-naked Jesus carrying his cross on the way to crucifixion. 

Why all this nakedness? I could not understand. Why were my father’s art books, and his photography journals filled with naked bodies, especially women. The light angled to shine the outline of their breasts and belies, their most often pink and sturdy thighs. 

Why did people want this? To me, bodies were repulsive. Ghastly things that covered our insides, hid our supposedly pure white souls, though I knew mine was pockmarked with black, given all my sins, even after a series of novenas to cleanse it. My soul, as grey as my father’s lungs, given all his smoking. 

One day I borrowed my elder sister’s black turtle necked jumper, ribbed and tight, it fitted her perfectly and would soon fit me at the rate I was growing with breasts that bulged bigger every day. 

At first I hated them. The way they stuck out, nipples like tiny pink plums of flesh with a cherry on top. But on this day I wanted something of the admiration I saw other women receive in the movies. And the boy-man further up the street was the perfect audience. I had seen how he looked at me across the street from his garden where he worked on his parents’ vegetables. Italian migrants, I knew. Only Italian migrants used their front and back yards for vegetables. Tomato plants reached for the sky. Pumpkins trailed the ground, and green beans on lattice stands took the place of otherwise gentle green lawns, standard rose bushes on stalks and flower beds in other people’s houses in our street.

When I walked past, head high, my silhouetted breasts in black thrust forward he was there, pitchfork in hand routing the soil in which to plant Zucchini seeds. I wanted him to see me. To admire me. To long for me, the way I longed, though not yet for someone. Just something outside my reach. Something that could quench the pain inside whenever I walked the streets alone and wondered what would become of me. The pimples erupted later, on my face, back and chest but for now I could forget my face and concentrate on my body for once out of school uniform.

It became a weekend ritual. A secret to me only. Every Saturday afternoon I walked up the street and back down again, on my side of the road opposite his. He stood tall and I could see him look my way. 

Did he cat call? I think not. I hope not. Only now have I learned the problem of cat calling. The problematics of this so-called masculine admiration of women’s bodies that is a claim to ownership via approval ratings. As Kae Manne argues, ‘Cat calling is about surveillance. A man’s approval or otherwise of a woman.’ I did not know this then, but I have been reading Kate Manne’s book Unshrinking on fat phobia and I can see the ways in which already as a thirteen-year-old girl I was exploiting my body for the benefit of others. I was falling into the trap of the objectified woman, admired for her body, for the desires she stirred up in men and enjoying second-hand a sense of false pride. Soon enough it would fade when my body grew disproportionately large, and I entered another phase where I wanted only to hide from view.

‘I shall have nothing to do with boys until I leave school,’ I told my mother one day and basked in her approval. She liked this idea. She wanted me to steer clear of the world of men and sexuality. To be more nun like than the nuns. It relieved her of the burden of worry attendant on any mother whose daughter enters the world of men and misogyny. Not that my mother thought this. Nor did I, not then.

By the time I was fourteen we left inner suburban Camberwell for outer Cheltenham by the beach and my promenades up Wentworth Avenue to catch the eye of the Italian boy of dark skin and brown eyes were over. 

In my memory, he wrote me a letter one day. One which I found in our letter box. Lucky I found it and not someone else. Addressed to the girl in black jumper or some such. But how?

Memory plays tricks on us. Maybe he handed it to me. Maybe I let myself move over to his side of the street or he bolted across to give it to ne. I treasured this letter. It spoke of wanting to meet. 

I put it under my pillow but not before I made the mistake of showing it to my two years younger sister who hated it. She hated the way I was changing. Not just in body. Now at the senior school while she was still at the primary school with other younger siblings, and I had joined the ranks of the sophisticated. 

She would soon join me and excel in the beauty and objectification stakes while I pulled away and hid behind my uniform more and more. But then she was jealous. She took my letter and tore it into pieces before I had a chance to savour its contents. Then we moved house. And the boy became a memory along with that time in my life when I first tingled with the allure of the female form and felt momentarily good about my body, until it became too much.

Kate Manne writes about the sense as women we often feel we are too much. The complicated mix of trying to get our bodies right for the male gaze by adjusting what we take on to a minimum for fear of getting fat. And we get caught up in notions of our bodies as proof of our moral virtue. The moralism of fat phobia crowds our thinking minds, and we become objects to be valued or devalued as befits our audience. No longer a person of value.

And the Carnation milk of my childhood, on the list of things we should not consume for fear of what it might do to our already too much, too fulsome bodies, no longer features on the shelves of supermarkets. It’s preserved, not fresh, with all the vilification that goes into things that can linger too long on the shelf.