girl guides – Sixth in Line

‘Beyond the fixed stars and variable suns…’ James Joyce Ulysses

Last night the wind howled, and it took energy to convince myself, the tall oak in our garden, with its high and crooked branches, would not drop one onto our roof.

In the particular lies the universal, or so I’m told. And I can believe it.

For isn’t it so, these howling storms and the bleak weather with which we’re faced mid-autumn in Melbourne, Australia, while on the other side of the world people roast, is also a reflection of the volatility of our times.

The worst of times and the best of times, only who’s to say.

In 1992 we hired a houseboat on the Murray, three small children, one husband and two adult friends, a long married couple who chose to stay childless and enjoyed the company of our children in small doses by way of remembering their own child selves. If they ever took the opportunity of reflecting deeply.

On this boat, I read Janet Frame’s memoir, Angel at my Table. Stretched out after lunch while the other adults slept and the children played, on one of the pull out beds in the living area cum kitchen area.

And wept when I came to the part where a sister died drowning, first one sister then another. Dickie hearts, which no one knew about until they died, and in the aftermath, Frame’s life is turned around towards even greater desperation.

I was grieving then too, much as I tried to maintain a cheerful demeanour. The analysts had only months earlier decided I was unsuitable for their training, and I could not see how I might go on in my chosen career beyond putting one foot in front of the other.

We took turns to steer the boat across the slow river, which at a time of receding drought was shallow in places, such we got stuck. We needed to drag tall poles to ease us out of the mud.

If only it was as easy to tug myself out of my hidden despair. If only I knew then that time would pass and the pain ease. That I would find other ways of using my mind to manage my life, that over time I might find even more rewarding than wearing the title, psychoanalyst.

It was to be a medal of honour, like the coloured badges I collected as a young girl guide. A badge for being able to set up a tent. A badge for making a telephone call from a street phone, coins in the slot, dial the number and pull on the receiver in that order, then speak to your mother or sister or brother at the other end. A badge for sewing on your badge, in neat whip stitch. To stop the edge from fraying. Small marks of development.

I knew this was how a person grew. You learned to do things you were previously unable to master. You absorbed new forms of arithmetic. Division, multiplication, and fractions. You learned to spell long and obscure words. You rote learned the dates of wars and kings and queens from the past. The date of Federation in Australia, easy because it happened at the turn of a century. You learned the colour of your nation’s flag, and the mysteries of the rosary, the joyful and sorrowful mysteries, the luminous. You scrolled through the stations of the cross, and committed the Credo, (the I believe), to memory. You repeated the ten commandments, only those had protestant ring. You rattled off the Our father who art in Heaven, whose final sentence differed from the Our Father they recited at Girl Guide camp one Easter time when where you were the only Catholic child present.

Small differences between the ways people peeled their potatoes, some under running water. A waste. Others in a sink filled with water which grew murkier by the minute as each potato was robbed of its dusky over coat.

So much to learn in childhood, and much of it I managed, always on the edge of amazement as if I had learned words by rote and could hold onto them only if I recited them out loud and from the beginning.

I did not understand the things I learned. Just the words. It left me with an uneasy sense of fraudulence. As if I could recite swathes of knowledge by rote, but if you prodded me, stopped me mid-stream and interrogated the meaning of what I was saying, I would lose my place. A type of stage fright and I could not speak or think or understand the mysteries of the world.

I felt this way when I first read Sigmund Freud. The case histories of Anna O and Little Hans. On the page, these stories simple, but the voice of the great man had an old-fashioned tone. It took time to absorb and even then the ideas he offered floated in the air like so many dust motes I could rote learn, but not corral.

I went once to an evening lecture conducted by one of the newer members in the 1970s, a Lacanian analyst from South America who spoke non-stop for over an hour. Not one word made sense to me. Granted I was new to this language, and he was of Lacanian extraction.

Jacques Lacan’s writings translated into English are not for the simple minded. They are dense and opaque. Belonging to universities and in need of interpretation before you can grasp something of their essence.

Even today, decades later, my eyes glaze over when I read Lacan’s writing. Not so Freud’s but then, it was all gobbledygook, and even more veiled than the words of the bible.

Mid-afternoon on the Murray after we stopped somewhere for lunch and tied our boat at anchor to one of the many jetties along the river’s edge. I watched the overhead sun illuminate the skies. Best at twilight when we were again at anchor and readying for the night when the sun danced across the red cliffs looming over the water. They threw reflections as though someone had folded a sheet of paper in half. Each side carried a replica of the other. Mesmerising.

And Janet Frame took me to the ice cold of New Zealand and that room at her aunt’s whose walls were lined above the picture rail with the chocolate boxes of her dancing career. Her trophies. And at night after Frame’s sister had joined her, the one who later died, the two ate their way through every single chocolate putting back the empty boxes on display.

Imagine the aunt’s horror when she discovered they had been scooped out. Those chocolates would soon be inedible but no matter to her. The shock the scandal, the horror. And Frame’s shame.

And it reminds me of the times when as a child I stole lollies and was duly punished. It reminds me of the top tier of our wedding cake, which still sits in a tin, sealed with silver masking tape at the top of a kitchen cupboard.

Nearly fifty-years-old now, this cake will only be opened after one of us dies. I would not chance it ahead of time. Or maybe I would. Superstition says, it’s dangerous to open it ahead of the death of one of the partners, unless you open it when you should. And we missed that event because we never baptised our children, in the Catholic way.

So, there were no milestones other than anniversaries when it was once okay to open the tin.

In my mind’s eye, I open it and see maggots. Though they could not survive for long, or get in. I see saw dust. The cake crumbed to powder. I see a perfect cake dulled by time, the once white marzipan icing, now yellow, but inside who knows.

And in this night of blustery winds, the tree branches stayed in place for now at least and the world as we knew it, at least here in Hawthorn it continues.

Because I lost the green notebook in which I kept the thoughts of my adolescent self, I do not have a record of my early written words. Only a memory of sitting in the back of the chapel at the convent school where I spent six years from the time I was twelve until I turned eighteen.

On those pages I journaled my interiority.

The passions of a fifteen-year-old who fell in love with her teacher. One who wore a habit of black after taking her vows to become a Faithful Companion of Jesus, when she was still a young woman, not much older than her student.

I did not long to touch her or be touched by her. I longed only to be near her, to be in her presence, to hear her voice, to receive her words written on slips of paper which she passed onto me after I had sent my first messages to her during the holidays when I could not see her at school.

This then was my first foray into letter writing. My first attempt to put my hand into that of another and share my innermost thoughts in the hope of a warm response.

The nun wrote back letters and over time they held greater weight.

These letters came to feel as if she had me in her mind but when my younger sister a year behind me at school began to fall in love with my favourite teacher, too, something began to sour.

By the time I left the school with its green garden beds and high fences to keep out the sooty factories of Richmond and hide the smells from the brewery further up the Yarra River and close to the city, I had eased my way out of this love.

It is best to ease your way out of love. Best to let the glowing warmth in your heart, the hope and desire to be with another, fade away into a trickle of affection that barely lights your sky at night, rather than hold fast to the deep pain of lost love.

Or so it was for me with this teacher, this nun, this young woman who first taught me desire beyond the passions I once felt for my mother.

I am wary of the word love, of the depth of its charge. I use it freely to mark an affection for others whom I hold close, but the passions I once felt as a child and adolescent, as a young woman are harder to reach.

As when I fell for a young moon-faced man who tended towards heaviness and walked with an easy restlessness, as if those two opposites could co-exist.

Those loves have bypassed me. Filtered down to something gentler, more centred on the ground of the familial and of friendship.

Loretta Smith was three years older than me but, despite the disparity in our ages, she became my friend. She lived with her huge family in a ramshackle house at the end of our street and held the distinction of being in the girl guides.

Loretta urged me to join her and after much pleading my mother relented. My mother did not object to her daughter joining such a movement, given various of my brothers had taken to the boy scouts over the years, but she baulked at the cost of the uniform.

There were no hand-me-downs available from my older sister. who took no interest in the guides. No one among my mother’s extended family who could hand over the clothes their daughters had outgrown. I was the first girl in my family to join the guides.

Once a week after dinner I walked with Loretta, who collected me from my front door. Down the hill on Canterbury Road and through Shierlaw Avenue to the scout hall, a rectangular weatherboard box with large double front doors on top of which the words: Canterbury Scouts and a Fleur de Lys.

My skirt and blouse were crisp with their newness, something I had not known before.

In my family new clothes belonged only to firstborns. And the pleasure I felt was soon offset by a chafing sense of guilt when I remembered my mother’s unease in the Girl Guide shop in the city when she looked at the price tags she needed in order to be properly fitted out.

A year later when my younger sister wanted to join me and Loretta, the thought of buying another such uniform again for me (my younger sister could take over my, by then, too small uniform) was too much for my mother. And too much for me.

What is it with younger siblings admiring us so much they want to do exactly as we do and then we’re left with a sense that our achievements are taken from us?

Or so it was for me. My favourite nun, my girl guides and later still a boyfriend.

But I did not factor in the way my sister paved the way for me with some of her friends.

That because we were only one year apart at school, because we were thrown in together in our family as the little girls, we spent hours of time together and formed the closest bond imaginable.

Why do these bonds fray? Why do these loves go cold? Why not endure the test of time?