Doll House

In the few years between my father’s drinking himself to death and his decision to find another way through sobriety, he built doll houses. Dutch style double storey boxes with a heavy door alongside elaborate windows and curtains in the front, and its rear open to the elements and the small hands of children who could fossick inside and rearrange the furniture my father crafted with his own hands. 

Why he chose to build doll houses I cannot say. They spoke to his childhood story, his memories of home, in those twilight years when he had retired from the paid workforce of his suit and tie job at Cooper Brothers Accounting because he knew he could no longer perform at the standard required. He could no longer go to work without a drink in the morning to fire his feet.

After several weeks of detox in Delmont hospital where they also seared his brain with a burst of Electro Convulsive Therapy, my father came home changed. A sober man, and a man chastened by life’s demands.

I never saw him at work, only the end product, the large white box with its sloping roof and generous windows. The mock roof tiles sloped down to eaves that fringed a kitchen wallpapered in Delft Blue wrapping paper my mother once bought on a trip back home to Holland. The stair bannisters were of thin sticks of dowel, which my father stained brown with his soft squirrel brush. And the rear end sat exposed as if a clockmaker had peeled off the protective metal to reveal the cogs and pulleys of an interior life. 

Did my father make doll houses in a gendered way to please his granddaughters specifically, or did he imagine all his grandchildren might play with them regardless of gender. My grandson plays with the one remaining doll house today. He lines up his cars in the bottom rooms through the front window and calls the house his garage. 

He is not gentle with the furniture which is made of thin plywood and glue that has lost its ability to adhere after some forty years. So my daughter has moved it away for protection which suits my grandson who prefers an empty garage and more room for his cars.

Would his great grandfather be distressed by this. The father I knew would be. He’d be annoyed at this misuse of his construction, but the dead one in my imagination who looks over us all from some remote place of memory is not so troubled. This one welcomes any creative urge even if it does not meet societal expectation. 

In 1934 Dorothea Brande wrote her book Becoming a Writer in which she describes our need as writers to integrate our emotional and the instinctive sides, alongside the intellectual, the rational the sides of discipline and restraint against the capriciousness of our desires and comfort. If we wait for inspiration we might never move. 

When I was learning to become a writer, if such is possible, my novel writing teacher urged her class during the summer break to spend at least one month writing first thing every morning. And the following month to choose a fixed time each day – I chose 4.00 in the afternoon – to write again, for a month. For at least twenty minutes or a full page. To practice the art of writing is a discipline, something you sit down to do whether you want to or not. I managed both,worried all the time should I fail it was proof as Brande suggests I would not become a writer. 

Writers write. They do not spend days weeks months and hours thinking they might like to write. They settle in and write, whether they want or not. Bum glue or the 99 percent dedication to which the writer Janet Frame refers. She who dedicated her life to her craft once they let her out of the mental hospital in New Zealand where she lived for several years before deciding to pull the plug on the leucotomy they had decided was necessary to fix her brain. The doctors gave her a diagnosis of schizophrenia as if it was a gift, the gift of classification, one to account for her excess sadness and flights of fantasy, a child gifted with words whose way of speaking left some convinced she was mad.

But I digress.

It rankled that I did not write everyday as so many writers had urged. Write every day or you will dry out the juices of your imagination and disarm the skills available to those who like a musician practise their instrument several hours a day ready for their public performance with the Royal Philharmonic. 

I worked as a therapist in those days and began each session as early as seven am. How could I get up even earlier? I was also tired out by the mothering of four small children. How could I ever write every day. Therefore, I was not a real writer. 

Then one day I met MJ Hyland in the days before her second book Carry me Down was shortlisted for The Man Booker when she was teaching creative writing part time on weekends in Melbourne while working as a lawyer each weekday. 

‘I write every Sunday,’ she told me. ‘From late morning till the end of the day.’ This gave me heart. I too wrote on weekends regularly, first thing on Saturdays and Sundays. I edited my work in the nooks of crannies of my working week. I went on occasional weeklong writing retreats to get a feel for what real writers do when they dedicate their lives to the craft but for the rest I could eke out a writing life in dribs and drabs.

As the years have passed, I’ve come to see that every moment spent writing is practice. However unstructured. Every book I read is writing practice, every set of words I move around as editor is practice. And all the hours of practice I have put in, all those moments swatting at the keyboard, head down, noise cancelling headphones over my ears, all these moments are practice.

What comes out in the end, what reaches the pages of books for others to read, what gets published, is something else again.

Writers write. Whether they do so in a neat and formal way, every day, every second day, every Sunday afternoon, or whether it’s more haphazard, but nevertheless reliable. Writers write. 

We build doll houses of sorts, like my sad father who finally found a link to his creativity in the four years before his death. 

Filthy fingernails and green leaves in fishbone

‘My truth doesn’t travel in a straight line, it zigzags, detours, doubles back.’ Abigail Thomas.

When she was eight, an ambulance took my eight year old sister to the Fairfield Infections Diseases hospital which was then a quarantine facility to guard against polio and tuberculosis. These diseases floated around my childhood consciousness in words I overheard on the lips of grownups. The way they took people from their homes, disrupted lives and whole families implicated in the contagion. 

At least rheumatic fever did not spread from person to person in the way of polio, but it erupted in overpopulated areas and unhygienic places. With hints at the contagion of dirt, even as we knew a modest amount built up resistance. 

Thomas Embling hospital for the criminally insane has replaced the infectious diseases hospital in Melbourne today. When you walk through parkland close by the Yarra River you can see the old buildings in their higgledy-piggledy glory, as if they are still trying to keep people at arm’s length. 

For many months my mother struggled to visit my sister in hospital, not only because of restricted hours but because her youngest still needed a pram and my mother had to endure a long walk beyond our primary school to the bus stop near Cotham Road and from there the yellow bus all the way to Ivanhoe.Then more walking. An eternity’s worth of time, so many houses to pass, so many strips of grassland, so many foreign sights before green pastures and eucalypts surrounding row upon row of wooden buildings came into view. 

Me and my sister among the hydrangeas before they hauled her away.

It comes back to me now during this most recent Covid pandemic alongside memories of my time at Heatherton psychiatric hospital, which was once used as a sanatorium. 

And all these places, these sanatoriums and quarantine stations bring to mind Janet frame’s Owls do Cry in which she writes about the fictional Withers family: Francie, Daphne, Toby and Chicks, dirty children. To be dirty was to be spurned and set aside like so much rubbish in need of removal.

‘Look at your fingernails,’ Mother Mary John said to me in my tenth year when she inspected my doily for needle work. A lace edged piece I had chosen; it was covered in deep crimson red poppies and blue cornflowers. The stamens were buttercup yellow. The colours sent thrills through me, so much I failed to notice the smear of grubbiness that inched its way into the linen gaps every time I stitched my corn flowers and poppies into place. Chain stitch round the edges, stamens in French knots, and green leaves in fishbone. 

I hid my hands behind my back as Mother Mary John scolded me for the dirty child I was. How was it most other children in my class had pink fingernails with white moon crescents at the base and clear white lines where the nail ended? None of them had the thick pencil line of black that sat as stubbornly as a bitumen road under each finger. 

Filth amazed me, the way it built up over the course of each week. From Saturday night when we each had a bath – our only bath – all the way through to the end of the week when I noticed other lines of black on my legs and arms, like ants crawling in disorder. My socks which started the week a dull white from too many washes, by the weeks end were brown with a build-up of dirt that crept through the gaps in my blue plastic sandals and turned to mud whenever it rained.

These things were a problem at school. At home with my sisters and brothers no one cared. No one checked my nails for the black lines, as my older sister dragged my long hair into tight plaits that sat on either side of my head. 

‘Hold still,’ she said as I fidgeted from one foot to the next and she tugged at my head to keep it in place. Her hands were firm and deliberate. She only hurt when she encountered a snag of tangles, which happened often enough but less often once she had wrangled my hair into braids. I slept in them at night so that in the morning when my sister unravelled them to begin again, the only tangles were in the superficial stray hairs that fell out of place by day.

This could be a metaphor for my life in those days, a metaphor for my life now, only I do not know how to use it beyond the thought of life as unruly, and unpredictable. And even though in my head I’m steeped in Murakami’s notions of fate, the way all seemingly random events come together to create an order that makes some sense. In my life the patterns which become evident when I step back and cast an eye over past decades, once upon a time seemed as random as the weather. 

My admiration for Murakami pales by comparison to Janet Frame’ s writing. A woman who speaks to my childhood like no other. 

One of my literary supervisors once complained that although the character of Mrs Withers in Janet Frame’s Owls do Cry was said to be based on Frame’s mother, her actual mother was nowhere as slovenly as the book suggests. 

Does this matter? 

Frame’s story is of a mother, like her own, a woman of elegant words, and strangled hopes who tries to survive against the odds. Who fears her husband and is terrified of things going wrong. As they do. She cannot wrangle her children into shape any more than my sister could. My sister pulling my plaits into order only to have their strands fall loose. A thick strand falling across my eyes in class, and my teacher, who could not abide dirty children, whose presence offended her eyes, scowled. 

We were a blight on the landscape like the people in quarantine facilities and infectious diseases hospitals who must be kept separate from the rest of us for fear of contagion.