The man I married tells a story. When he turned eighteen he drove one day from Monash University campus to the Ringwood police station to undertake his driving licence test.
Even then it was illegal to drive without a licence but everyone he knew did just that, he told me.
He had driven to the university regularly from his home in Croydon from the time he first went to university after leaving school and needed to legalise his driving.
He had learned to drive through watching others, especially his father. And on the farm of his childhood home, he had plenty of opportunities to practice in paddocks.
To secure his licence he took a few paid lessons with an instructor who showed him the ins and outs of the licensing procedure and then took himself off to be tested.
Unlike me.
In my early twenties I was a bundle of nerves who failed her licence almost three times. Only on my third failed attempt to parallel park, the instructor took pity and gave me my licence against the rules.
Rules were not so strict in those days.
Whereas my husband to be blitzed his test.
As they returned to the licensing depot the tester issued a final instruction.
‘Now back into the yard.’ My husband to be took this literally and went into reverse.
‘What are you doing?’ the examiner asked
‘As you instructed.’
‘I meant, drive back into the yard,’ the examiner said, without deducting any points.
In fact, the man I was to marry believes this was the icing on the cake, clear evidence of his readiness to drive, and so his licence was granted.
I was twenty-two when finally I received my licence after a year of lessons with an instructor who told me once as we pulled off in his turquoise Datsun 180 Y, ‘You’re phobic about driving.’
Was I phobic or just plain terrified? The need to coordinate this and that, when in those days even more so than now, I lacked coordination. The practical skills needed to get the clutch into gear, my left foot from brake onto accelerator and then apply pressure enough to take off.
There’s something confronting about the blank page, paralysing even, writes Magda Szubanski in her memoir Reckoning.
I’m two thirds through this book and love it for its lyricism and the story with which I resonate. Her European father, an arrogant one at that. Magda was born in the UK to a Scottish mother and Polish father and came here with two older siblings age five.
Such a colourful person and her book so compelling. And now I feel the distress of many that she’s in stage four of a rare form of cancer, and although she’s upbeat about recovery online, it’s a worry.
She who is so clever and funny.
Magda went to Sienna alongside other dignitaries . A friend of mine as well, to that school on the road not so far from where I live now and over the way from the blue stone of St Dominic’s Church. She’s younger than me by what looks like almost a decade. And too young to die.
How often we think of someone being too young to die?
When her sentence on the blank page began I had imagined she’d write something about its power. The idea that you the writer will soon fill this space with words you had not anticipated, but for Magda initially the blank page led to a paralysis until her brother told her one day,
Don’t think too much about what you’re writing. Just write. Just keep going. It will be crap at first but soon it will improve.
He was right. As the Canadian writer Barbara Turner Vesselago tells us, write without editing. Just get words onto the page. Irrespective of what you think and feel. Do not check over what you write as you write. Just let your words stand. Spelling mistakes and all. Editing is for later, once you finish your first draft.
But I have friends, including the lovely Carrie Tiffany, who tells me she does not write like this. Nor Gerald Murnane. Both have told me they write sentence by sentence, perfecting each sentence before moving onto the next.
Now this would cripple me.
But while the process may be painstaking, it works best for them. Whereas for me the other process of just getting words down works best.
I love the thought, even as I write and imagine as I often do, this stuff is drivel, that when I read back over it I will find more than drivel. I might even find gems.
You never know when you read back over words written a long time ago what you might find.
This is the way in which I tell my story day after day. Mainly on weekends when I have time. My practice of recording a life lived now for three score and ten.
An older brother who told my older sister recently after he had turned eighty-two. “Who’d have thought I’d reach over a decade more than my allocated three score and ten.’
Three score as in three twenties plus a decade.
Who says that’s our allocated time?
Perhaps the bible, or the catechism we were forced to rote learn as children.
The catechism loaded with instructions, or corporal works of mercy.
My husband wrote these out for a friend the other day, both the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy. The Catholic’s guidebook to behaviour when we were children. I include them here.
The corporal works of mercy are a set of seven actions that address the physical needs of others.
They are rooted in Christian teachings and emphasise caring for the vulnerable and marginalized.
The seven corporal works of mercy are:
to feed the hungry
to give drink to the thirsty
to clothe the naked
to shelter the homeless
to visit the sick
to visit the imprisoned
to bury the dead.
Just as the corporal works of mercy are directed towards relieving corporeal suffering, the aim of the spiritual works of mercy is to relieve spiritual suffering. They were codified in or before the Catechism of the Council of Trent of 1566.
The seven spiritual works of mercy are:
to instruct the ignorant
to counsel the doubtful
to admonish the sinners
to bear patiently those who wrong oneself
to forgive offences
to comfort the afflicted
to pray for the living and the dead
See what you think. Most are reasonable injunctions to be kind and thoughtful of others. To care for the vulnerable but the spiritual ones require more. To pray for the souls in purgatory requires a type faith.
You must believe those souls are waiting there, desperate to get to heaven.
You must believe in heaven and hell, places I abandoned long ago along with the idea of fairies and Father Christmas. Places of the imagination that might help some to imagine a better future if they lead a good life, while for others the promise of the worst retribution for living a destructive life.
I sit in the camp of people who, like Phillip Adams, reckon death is a place of mystery and no more. Once our bodies are gone, our spirit travels with them into nothingness and we are left only in the memories of those who might hold fast to us.
There may be photographs, black and white or coloured images, of us as we age, and our words recorded, or even our voices, but that’s it. Traces of who we once were.
It was hard to bear this knowledge as a child with my wonderful belief of going on forever. Like Magda Szubanski I, too, was full of the idealistic belief the world would improve on my watch.
But life isn’t like that. It goes on for good and ill. Somethings seemingly improve while others deteriorate, but none of us go on forever.