Tillie and the Truth

     Tillie and the Truth

                     Silke Beinssen-Hesse

                          

© Silke Hesse 2013

                 2002-2003

Table of Contents

1.  Tillie and the Truth

2.  Loving Felix

3.  From Different Planets

4.  Girls’ Night Out

5. A Diary

6. Safe and Solid

7. Falling

8. The Pariah Syndrome

9. Bushfires

10. My Christmas Tree

11. Playing

12. Body

13. Mediocrity

14. Mother

15. Writers

Tillie and the Truth

I have eight grandchildren but only two of them are girls and only Tillie lives close enough for regular visits. Tillie was the first grandchild after a ten year interval and the first girl. We have always had a particularly close relationship and it is not only I that foster it, I tend to be careful about being too possessive, but she claimed ownership of me right from the start. When she was three she lived a five hour plane trip away and hadn’t seen me for half a year and she still slipped into my bed on the first night and put her arms and legs around me like a little octopus. I had to fight my claustrophobia to savor the lovely trust and intimacy. Luckily my daughter encouraged her without jealousy, so we had a fortnight being a very harmonious couple while her little march-fly of a brother could hog his mother or join us as he wished. Both these children have unusual social skills and a bright-eyed  charm and warmth that absolutely no one can resist.

Tillie is an unusually beautiful child, the sort of pale soulful beauty that the Pre-Raphaelites went for. For the first few years she had an afro of golden-brown curls that were so extraordinarily splendid and springy that people standing beside her in a shop couldn’t help but touch them. Now they have calmed down and become lanky and long to match her slim lithe little body. She is almost seven and a serious and conscientious schoolgirl who tries to get everything right: work, behavior, relationships, neatness and whatever else schools require of their pupils. She is equally good at every subject - maths, reading, composition, art, music, Japanese, sport - and always among the first four in the class. She is also a very fast worker who gets things done so that she can help others with their work. And she is constantly running errands for the teacher. It is hard to say whether this helpfulness might not be affecting her own progress, but why should she be first if she can be fourth and helpful as well. Her mother would like to think of her as an artist and it is true she has a style and lightness of touch all her own and much daring as well, her teacher says that maths is her great gift, her extras are piano and the choir for her strong beautiful voice, she enjoys going to gym classes and swims the length of the pool, but she is also an obsessive writer of letters and stories who will wake in the middle of the night to get something down on paper in her adventurous but actually quite brilliantly perceptive spelling and I can imagine her becoming an author one day. I hope she won’t ever get jammed in the middle of her talents and our aspirations; it is often harder for all-rounders to make their way in life than for those who have one great and obvious gift. 

Tillie can sound like one of those school-ma’ams that have long been extinct if ever they existed: prim, consternated, bossy and with impeccable elocution, mythical figures stored indelibly in the collective unconscious of little girls. But at school she expects her teachers to be full-blooded humans with a good sense of humor, a lasting fascination with kids of all shapes and sizes and particularly with her, and warm motherly arms when needed. That is just what Marg, her first teacher, was like. But the teacher that took over the class at the beginning of this year was not like that; as a matter of fact, she could well have been the granddaughter of one of those mythical school-ma’ams. She was, it seemed, quite obsessed with children sitting up straight and still and never speaking out of turn. What do you do about a teacher who too closely resembles a teacher? Tillie had been quite uncharacteristically short-tempered and naughty at home since the start of school. She was clearly worried or unhappy.  Tillie’s mother got on the phone behind poorly closed doors to express her extreme concern to people who could be trusted to give advice from a distance without actually interfering. But even that was a dangerous situation that demanded speedy action on Tillie’s part. So she got up in the middle of the night and wrote a letter to her new teacher: Dear Mrs. Wissel, I love you very much. You are as best as Marg. Love Tillie. Her eagle-eyed mother found it and disapproved of both the contents and the strategy. But Tillie remained firm: this was her business and she knew what she was doing, even if another mother did make a sarcastic remark about crawling up the teacher’s whatever at this young age. It turned out that Mrs. Wissel could be wooed; she relaxed more and more in the warmth of this letter and others, or perhaps she had just been nervous about the new pack of hyenas, whom mothers of young children can certainly resemble, and had been a real human being all along. Tillie did all she could to tidy the class-room for her the moment she had rushed through her work, help the kids she couldn’t get round to and write her a booster letter every now and again. When my daughter met one of the other mothers she was identified as the mother of the little girl who is always tidying up. I met Mrs. Wissel at “Grandparent’s and Special People’s Day” and she seemed to have a lovely relationship with the children, though she was clearly nervous about having to sing in her thin voice before all those strangers. She gave Tillie leave to take me around the school while the others were in class. I like the way Tillie manages her own affairs.

Because Tillie is so warm and conscientious she was put in charge of the new girl the other day to make sure she would not feel lost at first and she did her job well, according to the girl’s mother. In the playground Tillie is part of a little clique of girls. She explained the system to her mother: Penny is the number one boss, Mandy number two, Dallas number three and Ruth left us because she didn’t want to be number five, she wanted everybody to have a say. And what are you? her mother asked. I am number six. Tillie doesn’t like conflict, but why should there be such a rigid hierarchy among six-year-olds? And why is someone with such leadership skills ranked last? Of course Tillie’s out of school training has been as an older sister to a bright, exuberant, demanding, imaginative, violent, exasperating and elfishly charming brother. There is no way you can escape Albi if he wants to play with you and have it his way, you just have to give up and that is what Tillie has always done, though without relinquishing her common sense, and she usually gets to play a fair few of her favorite games in the process too. She has become an expert at diplomacy and tolerance. And Tillie is kind; if she has money to spend at the tuck-shop she will always buy lollies for Albi and the rest of the family and keep only one for herself. All the same, she would not be human if she didn’t lose her temper occasionally and the other day it happened again. You have to understand the situation; while she was at school Albi had got hold of her very precious gold pen and had wasted it on what could only be described as scribble. When their mother came into the room to see what all the fuss and screaming was about the pen was broken and not only Albi’s paper but almost everything in the room had gold scribble on it. This was way beyond the pail and Albi, who protested his innocence, received a severe dressing down and was sent to his room. Much later in the bath that night Tillie’s mother discovered that she had gold all over her hands. It turned out that while Albi had used the pen for his drawings she must have been the one who had scribbled on the computer and broken the pen, and she had stood there and watched Albi getting into trouble without saying a word. What do you do? my daughter asked, it is not only that she didn’t own up but she let Albi get into so much trouble and didn’t say a word.

Yes, what do you do and say and think? Once, long years ago, I must have been quite a similar little girl to Tillie. Perhaps that is why we love each other so much. I was a conscientious older sister to a charming little brother who could get away with murder. I can still hear myself talking in the school-ma’am’s voice. I too tried hard to be good at everything I did and more or less succeeded. And yet I suffered from a complete lack of confidence. My identity was bound up with being good, a good girl who was good at things, and to admit wrong would have destroyed me utterly and completely. There were reasons for this. We grew up in more difficult times; there was a war on and we were enemy children whom everybody avoided like the plague. I had to prove to the world, day in day out, that I was good and not evil, otherwise I stood to be lynched - or that is what if felt like anyway. On the whole, I was so excessively good that I really could not be faulted; I would never have dared to scribble on the computer or break the pen. When I watch Tillie I secretly wonder if I might have been like her in this or that if I had had the chance. Tillie is my other self, my un-deformed self, the self that I never got round to being; I have a stake in her integrity.

I say to my daughter: It is hard to own up if your identity is so closely bound up with being good. It just destroys you. If there is a shadow of justification for what she did you have to give her some credit. - Albi would have owned up, my daughter said. - Yes, but Albi doesn’t particularly mind being naughty. He is quite comfortable with his image if he’s good one day and bad the next. Some people would say that was a more healthy approach to life but even if you think that, I am not sure whether you can prescribe somebody’s approach to life. You have to remember that it was her pen she broke and her computer she scribbled on and that she probably thinks, and rightly so, that Albi rarely quite gets his due. - But you can’t have one rule for one child and another for another. - I know; you can never get it right, you just have to muddle along and try not to do too much damage as you go. - Do you think she set it up to look as though Albi had done it? It is not the sort of behavior you would expect from a girl her age. - It is possible she did and teaching him a lesson that way would have been nasty, I suppose.

I remember an incident from my childhood. I must have been about five. It was a winter’s morning and the sun was slanting through the window making a bright patch. I had a gob of phlegm in my mouth, larger and rounder and more compact than any I had had before and I wanted to see what something like that looked like. So I spat it on the black window ledge just where the sun was coming through. It was a small transparent ball, a bit like a jellyfish, with tiny beads of spit making a necklace around it and what was most beautiful of all, the sun drew patches of rainbow or mother of pearl from it. I was quite enthralled. Suddenly an adult entered the room and I walked away and disowned my gob. I knew that spitting on things was dirty and a punishable offence, but then I hadn’t intended to leave it there, just to look at it for a moment. A little later there was the predictable cry: Who was the little pig who spat on the window sill? Hugo? Robert? My two brothers protested their innocence. I wasn’t asked; I was much too good and sensible to do anything like that. For some reason a decision must have been made not to persist. The spit was cleaned away and that was the end of it.

But not for me. What would I have done if things had come to a head? Would I have owned up to a misdemeanor I had not actually committed, for my motives had been quite legitimate? Children are allowed to be curious and they are allowed to admire beautiful things. For some reason, explaining this to an adult never occurred to me. They stood for rules and you had to live your real life behind their backs, though of course trying very hard not to break their rules. Tillie too could swear black and blue that she hadn’t done things if she didn’t feel guilty about them. And like me, she probably rarely felt really guilty because she rarely intentionally caused harm to others. Teaching somebody a lesson is a bit different. That can be necessary at times; the adults were constantly doing it. And sometimes a little child might have to harness adult wrath if it couldn’t get through any other way. When Tillie broke rules, it was because she knew that you have to distinguish between things that are important and things that are insignificant. Albi broke rules for the fun of breaking them like pirates and robbers do. Pirates and robbers also risk being caught and punished; that is part of the thrill of the game.

But of course it is not as simple as that. When I think back over my life I have to admit that I still have a problem with owning up and saying sorry. Perhaps it is the available vocabulary that is at fault. I have no difficulty apologizing for an inconvenience I have caused: Sorry I’m late, I slept in and missed the train. Then there are the times when I may have inadvertently contributed to causing serious harm. I agonize about this and pray that the person concerned may cope, that it may even lead, in the unexpected way things will sometimes happen, to an enrichment of their lives. Maybe events sometimes come about because higher powers are at play and you are merely their instrument. One rarely gets to apologize when this sort of thing happens, and you often need to untangle an impossible knot before you can work out the extent of your own contribution to a tragedy. But if you do end up apologizing, your apology is heartfelt and full of deep remorse and good wishes. German, my other language, has the word “Entschuldigung” for the first and “es tut mir leid” for the second. But we need more “sorries” for situations somewhere between the two. A sorry for the things that are right in one context and wrong in the other like my spit, a sorry that will preserve the culprit’s dignity and make allowances for different points of view. We also need a sorry for the things that went wrong without any fault of our own. An interviewer totally misconstrues what you have said and gives you credit for things you never claimed credit for. It is just too embarrassing and ultimately impossible to clear up convincingly so it hangs there from now on as a shadow between you and a colleague. Eventually there may be an opportunity for the colleague to take revenge and unfairly disadvantage you and you accept that, but revenge is a slur and the shadow remains. We need a sorry for the things that went wrong because we miscalculated, because we were stupid. And a sorry for the things for which we have to take responsibility though we had no direct input into their workings, a sorry for things that sadden us and that we hope to help remedy, sometimes by changing our own attitudes or the attitudes of those around us. If we had all these different words it might also be easier to own up and say sorry to the indigenous people of this country. Different people may want to say different sorries.

Tillie tells porkers all the time, says her mother. She wants things to be a certain way and so she pretends they are. I know, I say, she has told me some amazing little novellas about your family, with a climax and a turning-point and all the rest. Pity help you if a social worker without literary training were ever listening. That’s not what I mean, says my daughter. Tillie currently has a problem with wetting. She has a condition where she can’t control her bladder well and she gets so involved in the things she does that she forgets to go to the toilet in time. She just tries to ignore the problem and her teacher is doing the same. If you ask Tillie whether she is wet she will tell you no, says her mother. That may be because she has lost some feeling. But if you ask her whether she has been to the toilet a minute ago she will tell you she has when that is definitely not true. I am not trying to convict her of lying, but unless she takes responsibility for her problem she’ll never get on top of it. How complex this whole business of truth is. Yes, you do need to learn to be honest with yourself, however embarrassing, for your own sake. Sometimes one lies to remain true to oneself and sometimes to avoid being true to oneself.

It is a few days later and my daughter rings up again. Mum, I feel dreadful. Do you know the gold pen I told you about. When I was tidying today I picked it up and got gold paint all over my hands and on everything else I touched too. Tillie hadn’t scribbled on things. She was innocent. She and Albi probably broke it when they fought over it. I couldn’t really imagine her doing something like that; why didn’t I trust my initial judgment. And I’d better neaten up my detective work from now on. Anyway, you’ve got your old Tillie back.

Loving Felix

Yesterday Felix attacked me for the very first time. Whenever I brush against the scratch I am reminded. I don’t want to believe it was a significant moment. I should just put the incident aside and stop thinking about it. Though that is easier said than done.

We are five siblings, the four of us and then Felix, the youngest. He is now just over fifty and was born with the genetic disorder Down’s Syndrome. He has certain physical characteristics that alert everyone to his condition – mongoloid eyes, a heavy lolling tongue, long arms and short legs, uncoordinated movements, a shuffling gait – and his language is very limited and hard to understand. In comparison with this, his musical appreciation and memory were always extraordinary and his sense of location used to be much better than mine. Like most Down’s people he was friendly, trusting and socially competent; when people were unnerved by his looks he would walk up to them, shake hands, smile charmingly, introduce himself and make them feel at ease. He was always a brilliant actor; the faces he could invent for his clown act had us all convulsing with laughter, but he also pretended to be “uneducable” for several years to show his disdain for the teacher he seemed to be stuck with for life. He always had a wonderful sense of humor of the “wrong-way” variety and an equally good sense of fun. He was physically lazy but nevertheless had a work ethic; for a while his exercising job was to pick up the tails the Norfolk Pine shed on the lawn and he would stick at it, one at a time, for a whole

afternoon. Everybody who knew Felix loved him; he kept a complex, difficult, passionate

family together. But he was also a very jealous person and made our father’s last years difficult by his possessive love of “his” mother.  For by that time Mum had become a friend to us older children, the family matriarch and something like Dad’s lost love. Felix’ rivalry with Dad for Mum was classical oedipal bad temper. After Dad died, he had Mum to himself for almost twenty years and until her death three years ago, Mum was his primary carer, in the latter years helped by one of my brothers. On many occasions, however, Felix spent weeks and months with one of the rest of us and was a welcome, warm, unassuming guest. Or rather, this is how I seem to remember him, although I also remember my mother having difficulties with him, with his stubbornness, his laziness, his jealousy. And then one day, she switched to a telephone routine of hyperbolic praise of his behavior and his mental progress which was probably partly intended as encouragement for him, partly as reassurance for us, partly as a fairytale for herself. But she had actually started to treat him as her adult partner, a role in which he blossomed. Mum is a hard act to follow.

It is important to try and remember exactly what he used to be like, for Felix has changed over the last two years. We have been told that that was to be expected; Down’s people have an extra chromosome and that means three rather than two genes to create the amyloidal protein which can form those plaques in the brain that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. All Down’s sufferers apparently eventually get Alzheimer’s dementia; usually it has started by the age of fifty. For the last year Felix has also suffered from occasional seizures; epilepsy is another condition that aging Down’s people often acquire. It too can modify behavior, we are told. One of my brothers thinks Felix is simulating these seizures but I have seen ones that were definitely not simulated. Between these two conditions we can expect personality changes, loss of skills and language, apathy, disorientation, paranoia, anxiety, depression and the like. But there is also the possibility that Felix is still going through stages of the grieving process. After Mum’s death solicitous friends inquiring about him always assumed that he would be deeply depressed; but he wasn’t. He obviously enjoyed moving from sister to brother to brother to sister for the longest holiday of his life. We had not seen him so animated and cooperative for a long time. So was it just that he didn’t realize what had happened? But he had talked mournfully about death, the death of all the pets he had loved throughout his life, when his mother was ill, he had viewed her body, been shocked initially to find her cold and unresponsive, but had then said the most tender and beautiful farewell. At the church service and the interment of the urn he had seemed quite exhausted with sadness. He spoke of her being in heaven with God and I never heard him ask to ring her up or go back to her. Since he doesn’t use tenses or speak in sentences you have to do your best to construe his meaning. For somebody whose mind is slower than the average, grieving too could be a long slow process, but presumably it would still entail phases of anger and resentment and forlornness and self-pity and the like.    

Almost exactly a year after Mum’s death – Felix was still moving from brother to brother to me – his behavior started to change. He began to find it impossible to tolerate groups of people, particularly if their conversation was noisy and excluded him, which it usually did. In former days too, he often got angry if people forgot about him for too long; when we used to visit Mum we had to ask his permission to do lots of that “dreadful talking”. He now also took to hijacking strangers in public places and trying to adopt them as replacement carers; till then his behavior in public had been reliably good. Then he started to refuse his food; he had always loved food. There were problems with getting him to bed at night. This was also not entirely new. He acquired the skill of making himself vomit by getting food stuck somewhere from where it was difficult to dislodge, needing up to five hours of retching; it took us all a long time before we realized that this was an act that was put on, usually to punish us for having guests. Then Felix decided to refuse to go to the toilet for up to twelve hours at a stretch; you would eventually have to push him there with crude physical force. He became constipated, eventually aperients were prescribed, I won’t go into detail. But on one occasion excrement was rubbed into the bed and carpet of an entire room. There was a reason for this latter act. He was angry that my daughter, whom he fancied as his carer and who was staying with us at the time, shared the double bed with her husband on weekends. Jealousy had always been a problem. He now insisted the double-bed was his and wanted a partner. I could no longer have house guests for fear of provoking extreme behavior. There were weeks of complete inactivity where Felix would sit in the same spot all day and often most of the night too without moving or listening to music or drawing or putting together jigsaw puzzles or going out to play totem tennis or coming along shopping or to post letters, all activities that used to fill up the day. He was given hypericum for possible depression, then a small

amount of thyroxin to counteract some sluggishness of the thyroid. But neither made much of a difference. Then a psychiatrist concluded that he was probably suffering from Alzheimer’s dementia and prescribed Aricept to increase chemical neurotransmitters in the brain. This caused quite dramatic changes: previously memorized language returned, the fear of open spaces left him so you could take him for walks in the park again, and he could enjoy company at family occasions once more. We were warned, of course, that Aricept could only ameliorate the symptoms for a limited period; it was no cure for Alzheimer’s dementia.

For three or four months before this diagnosis Felix had been able to attend a day centre. He had looked forward to this each morning, particularly to the company of other clients, though he was even more sedentary and passive there than at home and soon had to be taken off all excursions because of his difficult behavior. He then began to resist going home and though the staff used all their imagination and ingenuity to find ways to persuade, bribe, coerce, reward, out-maneuver or humor him, they would regularly be held up until long after home time and forced to manhandle a heavy dead weight, while I would sometimes have to wait for hours till Felix put his feet in the car so that I could drive off. The placement meant that he could no longer move around between us, so he stayed with me for close to a year and a half. His very helpful social worker tried to find him one of the rare places in a communal house but as none of us were convinced that such a change would be beneficial at this vulnerable time in is life, it was just as well none was found. On the few occasions he was in respite care his behavior had been appalling. Once on Aricept, Felix modified his suite of behaviors somewhat; he concentrated on those (I realize I should not put it this way) that he knew would hurt me most, first his refusal to leave the day center and the homes of my children and friends (I can talk to my children on the phone but I really miss seeing my grandchildren), then making a point of abandoning me (the torturer) the moment another potential carer came onto the scene, and third steadfastly refusing to go to bed unless I went at the same time. There were of course also periods each day where he sat peacefully listening to music. When I gave him my undivided attention he was usually cooperative and often very tender. Occasionally my brothers provided respite, either at my home or at theirs. Felix made it difficult for them by constantly asking for my return, which of course amounted to their rejection. Why does he have to play people off against each other in this infuriating way?

At the beginning of this year we decided to go back to circulating Felix between us, in spite of all professionals warning that Alzheimer patients could not cope with change. We four siblings are all at a stage of our lives where the few years of health and mental alertness we have left are becoming very precious. This way we could rely on having some time for ourselves too. But the change of regime also meant switching Felix between family members amongst whom old rivalries and resentments smoldered; families are like that. Would we manage to support each other in his best interests?  Furthermore, the new regime entailed the likelihood of having to relinquish placements and a helpful social worker. My brothers and I live in different states with different administrative systems, none of them prepared to accommodate part time clients. The first three months worked well; Felix was kept at home with family working around him and friends dropping in; eventually one or two days at an activities center could be arranged. Apart from humiliating his carers by demanding me and annoying them by fighting each requirement made of him, he seemed content and enjoying the change. Perhaps he was just becoming more masculine and feisty, more adult and independent. His memory for people and events still seemed excellent; did he have Alzheimer’s at all? The brother who had him for the next three months went to work in a more determined manner. He took him for barefoot training walks on the beach morning and afternoon and managed to accelerate and modify his gait considerably. Felix became slim and fit. An ice-cream in the same cafe each afternoon helped to get him addicted to these walks  Convinced that most of his apparent incompetence was simulated, this brother insisted on much more participation and cooperation. Since he is stronger than Felix, which I am not, he would have been capable of enforcing commands. Felix still fought, at times foregoing food to have his way, but he went back to reasonable manners and could once more be taken out to the theatre, which he loves so much. He was proud of having the courage to tackle the surf each morning. On good days he would goof as he used to.

I have just had Felix for an anomalous week. At the airport he hardly seemed to recognize me, no smile, though he had chanted my name for the entire trip. He knew and understood that he would be with me for only a short time before flying back with brother number three and nervously rehearsed this sequence many times each day. It was quite a feat of comprehension for him. He dressed himself (with help), ate by himself, went to bed without a fuss, said formal good mornings and thank-yous but there was none of the emotional exuberance he had always had in his good moments. Adult sedateness?  I noticed that he often seemed to forget that he had just had certain foods or been to the toilet. Was that his short-term memory going or just anxiety? You somehow can’t help ticking off symptoms. Felix asked to go for walks several times a day, walked swiftly and well, but was irritated that the reward was never quite right. I took him to the theatre where he watched enthralled, clapping appropriately, and with the help of a kind lady in the audience, a side exit and eventually a fair bit of pushing and pulling got him home again, though he was furious with me for having deprived him of his beloved cinema. A walk eventually calmed him down. I took him to the holiday house he wanted to see again and only extracted him with great difficulty. He was upset that the people he associated with it were nowhere to be seen. I took him to a zoo and he walked well for most of the way without showing much interest in the animals, but the last stretch had me pushing and pulling once more, hoping to find a cafe setting for the ice-cream. I took him to visit the day center and he had a good day; at home-time he was led out unsuspecting and a little early by a carer and then decided to get into the car, in spite of himself, when I mentioned the plane next day. It all worked, though only just. Did I overestimate his ability to cope with a variety of memory-laden experiences? When family dropped by, Felix invariably discarded me. It would certainly have been madness to take him visiting. Before his departure on the afternoon of the sixth day he worked himself up to a frenzy, convinced that I was plotting to deprive him of his plane trip. That was the morning when he attacked me as I drove us home from the shopping center. Later a friend dropped by. Felix managed to escape to his car in our drive and sit there for the last hour and a half before we left; he would at least make sure I couldn’t imprison him in the house. At the airport I had the help of a strong calm grandson and needed it as Felix was quite out of control and frantically suspicious. When I said good-bye shortly after brother number three had arrived, he gave me the cold shoulder. All he wanted was for me to go so that things could take their pre-ordained course. Is he so tense because he has begun to take responsibility for his own life?       

That night, as I was fighting back tears, I came across a story in a magazine where a daughter tells how her once loving father became remote and suspicious after brain damage. ”Mourning for the living is often worse than mourning for the dead” she says. Is it brain damage that has come between Felix and me? He could of course still be upset with me for having “forsaken” him. Could he be at the angry stage of grieving? Shouldn’t we be amazed and happy that he is still almost coping with so much change? And what has my brother’s training revealed? Do we have a neurological problem at all or is Felix his old self waiting to be resurrected? Brother number three is determined to prove just that, to spite the rest of us and the medical profession. Felix has clearly made brilliant progress with brother number two but there also seems to be something missing. Is it love that is missing, because up to now Felix’ possessiveness, for all the problems it brought with it, always seemed motivated by a passionate love? Though I suspect it was a love aimed less at me than at Mum, whom I resemble nowadays. 

I have, however, noticed one significant change. Throughout this stay, Felix has been obsessed with his father; some days he would have said Dad’s name fifty and more times. I am happy to imagine him reconciled with Dad, still happier to think he could model himself on this kind, strong and chivalrous man. Felix mentioned Mum only twice while he was here, recalling her illness with pity and - perhaps this is too strong a word - disgust. I can’t stand in for our father, however dear he was to me; my brothers will have to do that and have probably done so already. Is Felix’ new focus on Dad and his masculinity at the heart of the change? What will things be like when Felix is sent to me in three months time? I am not a trainer or fighter by nature; should I be trying to retrain myself? I think back to the gentle tenderness that flowed from Felix like a river of warmth only a few years back. The most important thing now is to make sure that the love we had, Felix and I, over fifty long years is not sullied by resentments. 

From Different Planets

This is a he and she story. He was brought up to be the typical man and she to be the typical woman. What is typical? I will tell you about it. It is of course what was typical at the time they grew up.

He was the eldest of four boys, their leader, three steps ahead of the others, strong and agile enough to win every fight, impose his will, captain of the gang, foreman when it came to mischief and daring such as tunneling under the road, skating on risky ice or swinging from sapling to sapling. He was also his mother’s darling, the child she had labored hardest to bring into this world in the days where women were at the mercy of the kind incompetence of local midwives. To her he remained special with the prerogative of tidbits and waived rules, the first-born and heir. He looked different too with a finely cut aristocratic face and a thick halo of burnished reddish-gold hair, conspicuous among his brunette brothers, unforgettable. The Nazis were in power until he was fourteen; they organized young boys into hierarchical packs, accustomed them to military discipline in uniformed all-male peer groups, played competitive games, taught them to be aggressive, challenged them to strive for leadership, encouraged blind enthusiasm for a cause, used politics to inflate egos. Once the bombs started to explode in the cities and houses went up in flames, the boys were called in to fight the fires and rescue the injured, heroes in the making; it was more exciting than an adventure novel, scary, dangerous but good. When things got bad the family moved to a forest hut where  he was Robin Hood among his merry men, Armenius fighting the Romans, chatting with the vanguard of the invading Allied soldiers who threw chocolate to the boys, lucky to be young enough by a year or so to be an innocent civilian. After the war morality returned in the form of the Catholic Church, ritual and command still in the hands of men, hierarchy right up to the highest realms of the heavens, encouragement to strive to be a priest, a ruler. And if you were young, an innovator, a reformer, a savior, herald of a new order, a man of the future, who could expect a meteoric rise in the hierarchy. Higher education was still the prerogative of men; his matriculation class contained only three girls. When his school produced scenes from Goethe’s Faust, that most German of all dramas, he was cast as Mephisto the devil: cheeky, insolent, charming, cynical, crude, God’s jester, a womanizer full of contempt for the weaker sex, a destroyer of innocence and life, an exhibitionist reveling in the glee of the audience, always on the heels of the God-seeker Faust, always sabotaging his good intentions, an alternative role for a man, a role that reaped stormy applause. He became interested in chasing girls in real life, wooing them for his friends, remaining free for the next conquest. He would have enjoyed being an actor and been good at it too, but his mother was frightened by this new side of her son’s nature and passionately opposed such a career choice. So he studied physical education; it was competitive, exhibitionist and physical, it kept you young, fit and attractive, and as a teacher you were once again a leader, up in front, the focus of attention. He also studied literature, the source of roles, but was never entirely comfortable with that subject, its complexities and ambiguities.      

She had grown up as the eldest girl, sister to four younger brothers. When she was little she played with dolls, mothered them and protected them from the wild boys, taught them to say please and thank you, dress nicely, keep clean, sit still; she fed the little ones, both the dolls and the babies, changed their nappies, soothed their crying, took them for walks, just like her mother. As the oldest by a year she was cast in the role of the minder, taught to report her brothers for dangerous behavior, never to participate in it, to be an intermediary between adults and children, an offsider to the former, an outsider to the latter. She was recruited to help, pass the washing to her mother who pegged it to the line, peel potatoes, chop up vegetables for some meal over which she had no control, fold, tidy, iron, clean, an apprenticeship to the profession of housewife and mother that started in earliest years, a way out of the loneliness she felt within the family. She was so busy with her role that she never got round to developing a personality; it remained a seed within her, deep down, very precious, inappropriate and impermissible, a treasure that needed to be kept from prying eyes by a thousand wraps, something so delicate that it would have fractured in the fresh air of daily life. One birthday she was given a diary, started making the briefest and most factual of notes, but when her brothers stole it to triumph over her soul she gave that up too. Since she didn’t like being a policeman and spy she retreated to hideaways where she couldn’t see and couldn’t be seen. She sat somewhere and read, or she created presents for people, endless stitch upon stitch, things that were never appreciated. When she was eight she had made a short-lived attempt to be her brothers’ companion, but had been hauled back. For a girl, dirty clothes were out of the question. The motto of her girls’ school told her that serving was her mission in life; but she chose giving as her mission, a tiny spark of rebelliousness. She knew that her mother despised her because she was a girl, a mere girl, but she also knew that her mother was ambitious for her, she was to outdo all other girls, the brains of the class, excelling in everything, she was to rescue the honor of women and she complied. At parties her mother was sometimes introduced as the lady who had a very clever daughter. Her fame had spread, her mother had probably spread it. She was her mother’s possession. She was such an obedient child, she could even be brilliant if that was required of her. From early days on she had learned that the essence of living together as a family was dividing things up so there could be no fighting. She understood that being the oldest and having first choice did not give her a right to have more. If she was good at mathematics, it was somebody else’s right to be good at music or sport. She relinquished all but the essentials, to be divided up amongst the others. She felt guilty about eventually accepting a place at university because she knew that that would close off this option to her brothers. And it did. She had made it a girl’s thing, inferior, undesirable, unmanly. Her father, however, had always assumed she would study; he thought she was interesting and beautiful and competent and courageous and perfectly capable of doing anything the boys did. When he went out with his children they were always in a group, having adventures together. If he was with them, none of her brothers thought that strange; on those days they liked her and trusted her and her suggestions were taken up as readily as any other. But once they were with their friends again it was different; they were all part of a generation whose fathers had returned from the heroics of war, whose wives, now a little scared of them, had stepped back into their traditional role to make room for them and honor their manly exertions, fathers who had yet to learn how to make their mark on a peaceful society.

And then he and she married. He assumed, without giving it a second thought, that he would be the ruler. That had been the man’s role since time immemorial. If your wife made trouble, you fought her for the trousers, not necessarily with blows, there were more subtle ways. He could sense beneath her new veneer of independence the submissive daughter, well-trained housewife, tender mother. He was sure she could be persuaded to serve, to be satisfied with her share of the cake, she had learned all about dividing things up. There could be no doubt that it was the man who had the right to decide; even their religion should be his decision. These were rules that had never been questioned. She, however, had finally broken free from her mother’s sphere, almost, for she had excelled at university too, it had become a habit. She had begun to explore her father’s view of her as an interesting, attractive, competent and independent woman; if she was afraid, she never showed it, if she had doubts, she never admitted them. She had become a critical thinker, a woman who played down her sex so that she could be taken seriously as a comrade, a peer. She made the mistake of identifying her husband with her father, rather than with her brothers. Once the two were married her long apprenticeship in housework and motherhood was called upon; she did the jobs competently without much thought. It never occurred to either of them that all this was not her duty and responsibility. She had a helpful nature, hated conflict and was used to working hard without making a fuss. She managed to keep up her studies on the side and when it became financially necessary she was ready to work in her profession, at an advanced level. This was wanting a share of the cake not due to her; earning money was one thing, rivaling her husband, putting him to shame, another. In much the same way, caring for the children was her task, disciplining them, making decisions for them should be his. That is how things had always been divided up. He had been trained to be competitive; she just did her work and wouldn’t compete. She didn’t seem to know what that was. But others made comparisons, hurtful comparisons. It was a bit of a lark to see a woman outdo her husband, almost as bad as cuckolding him. The fight for the trousers was on and the weapon was cuckolding her. All this was not fair to her, not even fair to the children, but fairness had traditionally never been a consideration when it came to claiming power, when the rights of privilege needed to be asserted. Their marriage was not happy.

For a long time she closed her eyes to the emerging movement of feminism. She had too much to cope with, she could not risk being unsettled. Then one day he left her and she was free to look around again. He too was now free to look around. The world had changed. Privilege was out, roles were out, jobs no longer had labels on them and could be done by either partner, decisions were made jointly after discussion, the person who put in more work had the greater say, the position of head of the family had been abolished, you no longer divided things up, you shared them. They were both stunned at the magnitude of the changes. If they had happened just a little earlier the two of them might have had a successful marriage. Now it was too late; too much had happened to separate them. She put marriage behind her; she would not risk it again. This was the time to excavate the kernel of self which she had had to hide for so long. It was too delicate an operation to brook interference. He for his part felt ashamed. He could fully accept the new rules of fairness, they were obvious, why had they both thought that these rules did not apply to marriage? He married a woman of the new generation. They redistributed the roles. She became the breadwinner, he the houseman and child carer. She made the decisions, nearly all of the decisions. He suffered what his former wife had suffered; it was fair that he should pay something back. They had got it almost right; but fairness is a difficult thing, it needs to be worked on.

Girls’ Night Out

Last night we went out together to see Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. At first it was going to be just me, but eventually two of my married daughters and one daughter-in-law joined the party. For once, the husbands stayed at home and looked after the children. I had read the summary in Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and was just a little concerned about how this politically incorrect play would be handled. We all have a streak of feminism in us. I should have known better; not even Charles Lamb can “sum up” Shakespeare; he can be played in as many ways as there are people who read him. Your politics go out of the window after the first scene.

What is the play about? If I attempt a summary it will be my story of Shakespeare’s story. But why not, when I couldn’t help but appropriate it? The Taming of the Shrew tells us of a father trying to manage his two marriageable young daughters, half teenagers, half women, both of them rearing to leave home. In those days that meant finding a partner in marriage who was financially and socially compatible. This father who, in spite of his exasperation, loves his daughters, is also insisting that they shall have a say in the choice, that they must love the men they marry. He has obviously always given them a good deal of freedom and an excellent education as well. Bianca, the younger, has decided to play the part of the obedient, well-behaved and studious child; this has led to her reputation as the perfect prospective wife. When the play opens she already has two suitors and a third wanders onto the stage minutes after. In contrast Katharina, the older sister, plays the part of the naughty girl, the shrew, aggressive, rebellious, independent. How else could she have behaved? No self-respecting girl can simply duplicate her sister’s behavior! Katharina is not only a shrew but also beautiful, quick-witted and full of boundless energy. She is not entirely happy with the role she is now stuck in - all Padua knows her as the shrew - as she fears it is costing her her father’s love; however, she doesn’t mind being free of suitors.

But her father has ruled that Bianca cannot marry until Katharina has found a husband. That means, it is in the interests of Bianca’s suitors to find someone for Katharina. And someone does turn up, a young gentleman who has inherited his father’s fortune and the independence that brings, who has traveled and served in the army, who likes a challenge and who falls in love at the very mention of a woman who shares his high-spirited vitality, his unconventionality and his love of drama. Socially there are no barriers, but the hard-pressed father still insists that Katherina must give her consent. Predictably, the first meeting between Petruchio and Katherina ends in a fight. When the father turns up to see how they are getting on, Petruchio pretends they are in full agreement; so the marriage is arranged in spite of Katherina’s protests. Violation? No, not in this case, I protest, just the self-assurance of the mature lover. I want this to go my way! Initially Petruchio obviously needs to be both teacher and lover. (Two of Bianca’s suitors had actually dressed up as teachers but with no intention of fulfilling their role.)

Now the taming of the shrew begins. Petruchio has a plan of battle. For one thing, the spoilt little rich girl must be taught that she cannot always have things her way. Then this tomboy, more like a soldier than a woman, we are told, must be shown her physical limits, what the hardships of travel, hunger and sleep-deprivation, something a soldier has ample experience of, can do to you, what the men she is vying with actually endure. She must also understand what it feels like to be surrounded by bedlam and badly behaved people, by the chaos she has been creating day in, day out in her father’s house. And finally she must be taught a way of using her high-spiritedness and love of drama to good purpose.

On the day of the wedding, Petruchio turns up so late for the ceremony that Katharina has begun to suspect that she has been jilted and publicly disgraced; she is actually relieved that he has come at all, in spite of the fact that he is wearing quite inappropriate clothing and then badly misbehaves in church. He is, one might say, usurping Katharina’s accustomed role, leaving no room for her to throw her tantrums and be rude. After the wedding Petruchio insists on taking his new wife, his legitimate property, home immediately without staying for the feast; Bianca and one of her suitors have to stand in for the couple. The journey home on bad horses is exhausting; by the time they arrive, Katharina’s wedding gown is covered in mud. Petruchio pretends that the food his servants have cooked is burnt and rejects it; at night he declares that the bed has been poorly made and pulls it apart, not letting her sleep. The following day the same thing happens all over again; it will take at least two days to tire Katharina out. Petruchio makes a big show of doing all this only with Katharina’s welfare in mind, which of course he is, though his overt reasons feed into the comedy. Needless to say, Petruchio himself also gets no food or sleep, but he seems to be able to cope with this. Like the meals and the bed, a fine modern dress and hat that delight Katharina are torn apart and soiled by Petruchio, supposedly because they are not worthy of her. By the end of the second day he has managed to extract a first reluctant thank you from her, too reluctant to permit of her having the dinner he claims to have prepared for her himself. Eventually Katharina realizes that she will not see food or her father again unless she changes her approach and agrees to do things Petruchio’s way, though that means calling the sun the moon and complimenting an old gentleman on his looks as though he were a pretty young girl.  The absurdity of what is demanded of her challenges Katharina’s ingenuity; her response is no longer a grumpy monosyllabic one but a hyperbolic speech of praise for an imaginary beauty. She is beginning to play the game. This husband of hers is someone who is just as crazily unconventional and high-spirited as she is. He does not want to exploit her or humiliate her; whatever embarrassments occur he shares in; he wants to have fun along with her. When Petruchio asks to kiss Katharina in public she is now bashful, not belligerent; in spite of her shrewish demeanor, she has a girl’s sense of modesty and propriety.

In the meantime the submissive and obedient Bianca, whose various suitors had resorted to all sorts of intrigues and subterfuges, has ended up marrying the man of her choice behind her father’s back. She, just like her suitors, had been play-acting all along, a deceitful kind of play-acting that Katherina would probably not have consented to. Petruchio decides to demonstrate his success in “taming his shrew” to his two newly-wed friends and his father-in-law. He challenges them to a wager: which of the three young wives will obey her husband most promptly? Bianca and the other bride refuse to make an appearance when summoned, not because they are busy but because they have achieved their ends and now feel free to please themselves. In contrast, Katharina comes immediately, as though she had been waiting for Petruchio to want her at his side, and is later also prepared to give her sisters a homily on how a wife should behave. Once again, it is a little jewel of a speech, half playful, half serious; the precise mix is up to the actress. In it Katharina acknowledges the superior physical stamina of men that justifies their dominance in the marriage relationship and the wider world. Even Petruchio is surprised at how quickly she has learned and how well she can speak, - or play-act?  The two are becoming more and more fascinated with each other. At last they are ready to celebrate their wedding night, which we know will be a wild one in the best sense of the word.

After the performance my daughters and I sit together at home for another hour or so. We have all enjoyed the play enormously; but it is hard to talk about it, so the conversation brushes by various topics without coalescing around anything. I read out something learned and academic from the program but no one wants to hear it. We try to tidy up a few loose ends.  What, I wonder, are these modern women thinking behind their slow words of small talk? They all have husbands. One of them has teenagers on the point of breaking away from home, boys of quite separate temperaments and strategies. Another has a little daughter who is at times almost impossible to bridle; I have been witness to her tantrums, screaming fits that can last for anything up to an hour. What enviable  energy and determination! One daughter and her husband are play-actors who like to create a bit of a hullabaloo, particularly when they have an audience to watch and listen. They challenge each other to quick-witted responses and can always escape into their roles when things get a bit too personal; they have found a way of expressing their feelings without nailing each other down to hurtful words. Though they do not resemble Katharina and Petruchio in the slightest, they have, like them, understood what a help it can be to dramatize things, to act out a part, to defuse by exaggerating. One of the women in the room has a husband who would like to be a playful tease, who enjoys being eye-catchingly outrageous; I think she sees it as immature behavior. I can remember this husband, my son, escorting a former girl-friend, a budding young scientist who took herself very seriously, to a dance in a ridiculously old-fashioned suit he had originally bought from an opportunity shop for a sixties party. When she sulked about this, he inadvertently parked the car beside a sprinkler. I know that was a bit naughty, Mum, he admitted, but he had to find out whether she had a hidden sense of humor. Petruchio? Petruchio going out with Bianca? I would never want to pry into the marriages of my children; I accept them and try to support them. But when a genius like Shakespeare picks up a topic and lets it be played out on stage, we are all defenseless against insights.    

A Diary

Thursday

I have just picked up my last film from developing. The snapshots of the children at least provide a record. By pure coincidence there is one among them that I might consider framing. Children move so quickly and I am never quite sure at what moment the camera actually takes the photo. That can serve as an excuse. But the landscape, even taking into account the occasional transient breaking wave or patch of sunlight, gives you plenty of time to press the button. So why, yet again, are all my landscape photos so very disappointing. The colors I saw, those brilliant patches of violet and turquoise or the endless subtle variations of green from shrub to shrub in the scrub of the headlands, are here passed off as quite unremarkable. There are no contrasts; everything looks as though a wash of gray had been brushed over it, making it indistinct and undistinguished. - It could be the developing solution, they don’t change it often enough anymore, it doesn’t pay them, my photos get worse every time too,- Martin comforts me. Perhaps that’s all it is. Or is it more like those wallabies in the bush that you saw so clearly when you snapped them and now can’t even find to point out to the family? Is it that I keep on overestimating the camera’s possibilities, or more accurately, my camera’s possibilities, or still more accurately my possibilities as a photographer? For I must admit that I have an aversion to thinking in terms of aperture and exposure and film sensitivity and filters and the like, which is the reason why I use an automatic camera. I do not see photography as a craft but use it as a short cut, a piece of magic, a pickling solution for impressions and experiences that makes possible the postponement of  analysis and memorization, a sleight of hand in support of mental laziness.

Perhaps I should go for walks with a box of water-colors and brushes rather than a camera. Long ago when I was a girl and children’s cameras produced tiny black and white images, which became visible only if you were prepared to invest all your pocket money in the prints, I did do just that. I even sketched when hiking around Europe and those sketches have remained anchoring points of my visual memory. Small wonder, for to sketch something you have to look at it for at least twenty minutes, or even several hours if you are going to do it properly. A few such paintings have survived; they are not works of art, at best they give a vaguely accurate account of how I saw the recorded landscape or what I considered unique and memorable about the face or posture of a person, at worst they are a poor approximation to a color photograph, though the outlines of what was important to me are still clearer than on the average photo and the cloudy, crisp or dusky moods that persuaded me to get out my paint-box are more tangible, in spite of muddy colors and inept technique, than on the average photo.  

Am I then, deep down, a frustrated painter who needs to learn her craft? What would I paint? Those brilliant turquoise and violet patches in the water that some photographers manage to capture so superbly? Good photographers can certainly teach you to see. But can they also teach you to paint? I would want to exaggerate those colors, something the camera cannot do, and show up the structures in what the camera passes off as a single color. Perhaps I should try to paint the jigsaw of greens that makes up the bush? Here the differences are so subtle that they need some enhancement to capture a viewer’s attention. Or I could paint those shadows whose gray you take for granted till you stop to look closely and discover that they are a source of rich deep color that seems to pulse somewhere between your eye and the unpromising ground that reflects them. So much happens between your eye and the objects it perceives, so much at the intersection of your left and right field of vision, so much between the retina and the brain that processes its impulses. Perhaps it is these things that the camera cannot reproduce; perhaps this is the source of my recurring disappointment with the photographic image.  

Friday

On my stroll through the wild part of Jells Park today, almost drunk with the beauty of so many things, - smooth and rough bark, shadows, variations in leaf patterns, all the different grasses and reeds, boggy ponds with their weeds and ripples, the many ways bark peels and hangs from the gums, those great spreading tree giants. – I have been trying to work out what it is that I would draw or paint if I were confident enough to try and, more fundamentally, whether my inspiration is painterly or graphic. Just at the moment it seems to be graphic.

Walking down the path in the afternoon light I was startled again by the shadow across the path into which the mess of bushes and leaf canopies to my right had been amalgamated to form a single fascinating shape, - almost like the shadow on a similar path that I had tried to photograph some weeks earlier and that had come out so utterly nondescript. The shape in front of me put me in mind of a continent with its network of lakes. All the same, it wasn’t visually interesting like an aerial photograph taken at sunrise when all the waterways light up and the countryside hasn’t yet emerged. It only reminded you of something visually interesting. What was so miraculous about it was that the unstructured, visually impenetrable clump of greenery which you could see out of the corner of your eye had been simplified to a single shape. It was like suddenly having a concept for something that had been too difficult to imagine clearly, like a hieroglyph you could read once you had found the Rosetta Stone or a punch-card that would give you all sorts of information if you fed it into the right machine. If you drew or painted this shadow you would have to show it in relation to the muddle that produced it and how would you do that, how would you fit it all onto one page in a way that made the relation clear and exciting? Was I really seeing this with an artist’s eye and not as a would-be poet looking for symbols and metaphors? Or was I back to my pre-school preoccupation with trying to interpret water reflections on the study wall as an arcane magical script that could give you access to the secrets of the world once you were wise enough to learn to read it? Would I have to paint my tree-shadow looking like hieroglyphs, which it didn’t, or a punch-card, which it didn’t either, to get my message across? Would a poetic painter like Paul Klee, with the courage to embrace the realistically impossible, have found a way of putting it all on a page and still creating a visually convincing painting? As an afterthought: was it significant that this shadow was on a path, on my path? 

I walk on and notice a wattle that has outgrown its youthful feathers and formed rich green leaf-shaped phyllodes, as though trying to be more like the gums and the other bushes around it. But in spite of the bush’s effort these make-believe leaves are not arranged in quite the way one is accustomed to. In the half of the bush that is shaded they almost form rosettes while the sunny section is highlighted as though it were an army of spearheads all pointing up in the same direction. How amazing that light gives such direction, such potential movement to something that had seemed centered and symmetrical and at rest. Among the grasses light has created a different dynamic. There are the wispy silvery-gold, oat-shaped ones that seem to soak up light and become luminescent, glittering and burnished and transparent all in one, constantly moving with whatever breeze there might be, and between them a sturdier variety on finely curved stems, thin strong wires holding heavy heads, like ears of millet or miniature peeled cobs of corn, ever so slightly inclined and quite opaque and almost inflexible against the fluttering movement all around them. I can imagine drawing the leaves of the bushes onto green surfaces, the rosettes in deep blue on dull dark green, the spearheads in bright yellow or gold against a juicier green background. Each rosette and each spear would be just a little different, variations on a theme where the pattern is never in doubt, a musical composition in color and line, an anachronistic Art Nouveau piece, inspired by a love of ornamental shape, flat, denaturalized. The wispy grass, on the other hand, could perhaps do with a pallet-knife technique so that the light would bounce off smoothly sculpted surfaces and evade  the dark and roughly textured mounds of paint that I would need to represent my heads of grain. Embroidery, using both shiny and dull, coarse and fine threads and even a little bit of appliqué might do the trick too. Perhaps my inspiration is after all not that of an artist but of a craftsperson.

There at least I have a smattering of skills for like other girls of my generation I was taught to sew and knit, including lacy and Fair-Isle, to embroider and crochet and appliqué and weave and do bead-work and knotting and whatever else there might be, and I have more than once used this well-established know-how to record visual impressions. In 1972 we had recently bought the holiday house in Sorrento and were going to Germany for twelve months. For both the children and me it was a wrench to be absent for so long, so I decided to record the spots that they and I jointly designated were unforgettable and not to be forgotten, for memories do need some help to stay alive. I wove the colorful many-layered, many-textured rock wall in a variety of different yarns, used a natural cotton twine to crochet the petrified roots that had been exposed by wind and rain to form the caves and galleries of a city for dwarves just above the beach, appliquéd the streaky water in silks, dulled the sheen with stitching for the wind ruffles and used beads for the sparkles, I button-holed worm holes on the wet beach, knitted the ripples in the sand, used ribbon to recreate sea-weed, unwound and re-twisted string for the madly over-dramatic  trunks of  the local tea-trees (one of my less successful ventures) and felt, when the time came to leave, that we could pack a bit of home with our clothes in the suitcase.

Some years later Larry and Ann invited me to join them on a trip through the Simpson Desert. We drove over the Murray, through the Flinders Ranges, in that season blue with what we call Patterson’s Curse and they know as Salvation Jane, the bare red-blue rocks of Arkaroola, flat gibber desert, Lake Eyre, the red dunes of the Simpson with their sparse dry grasses and tiny creature tracks, an outback billabong with huge old trees and thousands of birds, to the Coongie Lakes with still more bird life, back along the Strezlecki Track and through Western New South Wales and Victoria with their vast yellow rape fields and dry inland beiges and deep blue hills. There was such a patchwork of different landscapes with their colors that it was going to be hard to keep them all perched in my memory. Not long after this trip I visited an elderly friend in a nursing home, bearing a bunch of what I thought to be beautiful pink dahlias. My friend’s reaction was almost a groan of disgust: pink, more pink. I had not known that her room had a pink bedspread, pink curtains, pale pink walls and the only access to color she had was a bright crocheted rug whose glare had been carefully hidden under a pink counterpane. I noticed how she kept trying to retrieve it, to hold a corner where she could sneak a look at it every now and again. Next day I brought her a colorful arrangement of dried flowers, something that I thought would last, but when I visited again it had been tidied away out of view. It was at this time that I suddenly realized that one can die of color deprivation just as easily as of food deprivation and people would be quite oblivious of what they had done to you. When I came home I knew how I must preserve the memories of these and other trips in a form in which they could eventually be smuggled even into the most Spartan of care facilities. I would knit them into a patchwork rug. One or two knitter friends donated their odds and ends, basic colors and a few interesting yarns were found on remnant tables and every night while I watched the television news I would envisage another of the many Australian landscapes I had seen and loved in the course of my life and translate it into stripes of different colors and textures. Eventually I had accumulated seventy different squares which could now be fitted together and framed with a border, blue, of course, like the sea that encircles this continent. I have slept under this warm light blanket that makes it possible for me to remember so many of the places I love ever since, as though in preparation for my final resting-place beneath these landscapes, nourishing, I would like to think, their beauty. This may sound a little pompous, but the rug itself would never arouse such a suspicion.

I am not an artist. For one thing I do not have time to put in the hours of initially usually heartbreakingly unsuccessful experimentation with subjects and techniques. But I am often pursued and possessed by visual uniqueness and the only way to free myself is to externalize it, or enough of it to locate it outside myself again, so that I do not bear the unintermittent responsibility for its survival. However, because my art is inadequate I cannot release it into the world and expect it to live on. It still needs my occasional effort, not much more really than a sidelong glance, and so it is good to find a way of making it part of my daily life by turning it into an object that does not draw undue attention to itself but blends in with the furniture, so to speak. My creations have usually been located at the halfway point between art and memento. I don’t want them to be finished pieces, I want to continue to live them but in a manner that is manageable and constructive. They are a necessary part of my life, of my personal economy. But an audience presented with these objects would shrug their shoulders, I am sure.

Saturday

Another walk on the wild side of Jells Park, a piece of nature that will haunt me till I have assigned it a place in my life. It seems to give you miniature glimpses of so many bush- and swampland areas with which you bonded at various times of your life. There is, for example, a patch of tall white-trunked skeletons among the reeds, eucalypts most likely killed by either drought or flood, probably drought. In my youth it was usually “the stark white ring-barked forests” of Dorothea MacKellar’s poem but now the cause of such ghost forests is more often than not a bush-fire or flooding in the wake of dam construction. I remember a whole mountain some years after a fire on which all the grown trees were white and bare against a stark blue sky, dramatically gesturing like actors in a Greek tragedy, each one expressing a different emotional nuance, rigid in a different stance, all stripped of twigs and bark and color, down to essentials, like marble monuments to themselves. They seemed to parade before you the whole gamut of human passion, more intensely dramatic than any opera, though they never let you forget that the plant world too suffers its tragedies, that faced with catastrophe all living beings were much the same, that for them like us basic structure, basic character traits, often previously hidden under foliage, clothing and custom, survived the longest. Would Klee paint a curtain beside such a tree skeleton to alert us to the drama? And perhaps an actor and a statue as well? I can envisage a frieze along my corridor, three dozen trees each differently expressive, just to remind me of the range of human emotion when I feel flat and stuck in my calm and quiet life. And I don’t want to make these trees up. I want each one to be authentic. To look effectively authentic they would need to be painted realistically, in an oil technique perhaps a little like that of Arthur Boyd. Unfortunately, I would never manage that! There has to be another way. Could one turn these gestures into hieroglyphs, pictograms, and perhaps even facetiously subtitle each one with “despair”, “hope”, “remorse”, “disgust”, “horror”, “yearning” and the like? Using a brush to mould the strokes? Didn’t the eighteenth century have handbooks for actors that instructed them in the appropriate pose for each emotion? You would need to be careful. Bert Brecht’s theory of significant gesture is perhaps a better guide.

It has just occurred to me that the dense coastal scrub at Sorrento, with its finely graded shades of green, could perhaps be turned into an embroidered mosaic, a different stitch for each bush to mimic the structure and growth of the leaves, tapestry wools intermixed with shinier, maybe even mottled yarns. To be used as a sofa cushion? I’ll think about it. Am I really, irrevocably, a textile worker?

On the back path at Jells Park there is, unexpectedly, a small viewing platform overlooking a shaded boggy pond that is like a world of its own. Marsh plants shaped like conifers fringe it on the sloping banks. The water itself is covered with fine green algae that give the impression of a grassy plain interspersed with little black lakes and canals. Swamp hens wade through and change the lay-out of this land like the ancestors who are said to have created the features of what is now our country in the time of the dreaming. But there is also a sunny patch where dozens of insects touch down for split seconds at the center of the silver circles that belatedly frame and exalt them. Where the insects are the weed has no control; it is tattered into tiny fragments that look like golden filigree enhancing unexpected reflections of blue and cloud-white on this otherwise dark brown surface. Here four worlds meet, that of the waders hunting in the muddy water, that of the weeds that mimic landscape, that of the insects drawing their silver patterns on the water amid sparkles of sunlight and that of the distant and quite incongruous colors that the mirror of the pond reflects. These are some of the many realms of art: art as the constant renewal of the world, the redrawing of boundaries; art as mimesis, the fluid and playful recreation of the world in miniature; art as pattern and design; and art as a vision of the remote and strange, the transcendent. Four possibilities the artist has at his or her disposal.

Sunday

It has been hot and dry for a number of days and the lawns as you enter the park are parched. There is hardly a green blade visible; the ground cover is provided by matted silver grass clippings, accumulated over the wetter months. Only the weeds flourish. But what is a weed? Released from the rivalry of the grass with its greater legitimacy they reveal themselves to be perfect little rosettes, some flatter, some fuller, some with fringed and hairy leaves, some with neat little ovals, but each one superb in its symmetry, displayed like a treasure against its gleaming background. How could these plants not resist being submerged in the uniformity of a lawn?

As I round the lake the bell-birds suddenly become louder with their disconcerting syncopated rhythms. Their calls alternate between a squeak and a mellow ring. In the background a soft-voiced bird provides a continuous treble into which stronger and harsher voices interject their notes. At times they seem to be conversing, at others simply trying, in a somewhat amateurish way, to create patterns of sound that are never fulfilled. They leave you dissatisfied, edgy and full of anticipation.

Monday

Why am I so obsessed with pattern? Is finding pattern and structure a symbolic act of mastering the world, a make-believe resolution of insecurities? Does the memory, or my memory, need this identification of pattern as scaffolding? What thrills me about the patterns of nature is that, like music, they gain their effects from being variations on a theme, each leaf just a little different in shape and angle and then suddenly one that you have to strain your imagination to identify. If I painted these leaves I would forget about the tree and have just a page of leaves, a kind of static music, in tension between the perfect leaf and the barely recognizable one.

The various stands of reeds in the Jells Park wetlands lend themselves to this savoring of pattern. There are bamboo-like clusters with leaf pennants flying in all directions; there are giant grass-like walls and there are reeds that are sunk like metal rods into the water, where the distribution of the rigid individual stems is what fascinates. I am not a musical person; I was told I wasn’t when I was too young to protest and in consequence missed out on a musical education. Perhaps my need for pattern and variation is in compensation for what was withheld from me.

When I was asked what I would like for Christmas this year the only thing I desperately wanted - it seemed like bad luck to buy it for myself - was a coffee table book The Earth from the Air with 365 photographs from all over the world by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It is a book that allows you imaginative travel to the remotest parts of the globe and that is certainly one of its big attractions. But I have always felt particularly attracted to aerial photographs and I think it is because they show up the patterns of landscape in a way that you never see them when you are down at ground level. Geological patterns, agricultural patterns, the arrangement of houses in cities and towns, water patterns, rock patterns, forest growth patterns, cracked mud patterns, even the patterns of roofs or the patchwork of newly dyed rugs laid out to dry. And this photographer was obviously as obsessed with pattern as I am: a kindred spirit. I feel exhilarated and reassured that the world is a place of such order and such inconceivable variety at one and the same time and that aesthetic laws are not superimposed but essential to it.

Tuesday

There are some magnificent old trees in the bush at the back of Jells Park, compact rough-stemmed box-trees and great spreading gums with shimmering white stems. They should be photographed in their entirety, but the scrub around them won’t allow for that. I wouldn’t try to paint these trees; Hans Heysen, Lloyd Rees and others have done it as well as one could wish. I know what such trees look like on a canvas or a sheet of paper. But what never ceases to fascinate me is the bark of trees. Australian eucalypts come in two varieties. One is the kind that sheds their bark in long strips, piled high in the forks of the more compact trees, hanging in rag-like tatters from the more spreading ones, or occasionally folding back to reveal a white stem like a flower that has burst its bud. The new skin looks so flawless and soft that you have to control an impulse to caress it.

The other kind is the rough-barked variety, chunky and deeply furrowed on the ironbarks, flaky, scaly or stringy on others. It is this bark with its patterns and textures that will not leave me in peace. I stand there wondering whether it could be woven on one of my makeshift looms from un-dyed homespun wools, for example, or even coarser materials. Although, if I am to be completely honest, it is not fabrics but watercolors I would like to use. I am just too much of a coward to start from scratch.

Safe and Solid

A few days ago, as I was sorting through papers, I came across an envelope that contained drawings I did when I was about four years old. They came as a complete surprise. But it took a while to work out what it was that I found so surprising. Over the years I have collected a lot of drawings done by my four children and my eight grandchildren and consider myself quite an expert in children’s drawings by now but it seemed these pictures from my past could not have been mine. I was such a skinny little thing in those days, a real little girl I have been told, yet the people I drew were quite extraordinarily bulky. Their bodies were square, like cupboards or chests of drawers, with short legs and feet at the edges in the way furniture usually has, and they were colored in with pencils in an even vertical stroke, as though they had a grain to them, like wood. When I showed them to my six year old grandson he commented: I usually draw stick figures because that is quicker; but he got out the textas and drew a picture of a fat man to match mine. Except that it didn’t match because his fat man was round with spindly arms and legs pointing out at angles, whereas my figures were so incredibly rectangular, even their arms and legs were rectangles, all up and down, and their heads, though intended to be round, also usually ended up a little squarish. It wasn’t that I couldn’t draw circles; my flowers and leaves are round and a Christmas tree I drew is a pyramid of balls, probably because I was impressed by the glass balls among the decorations. But my humans were rectangular. As I grew more accomplished, they started to be constructed from several rectangles, one for the chest, one for the belt, one for the skirt. Even my mouths were usually open rectangles (they were probably not intended to look as terrifyingly distressed as they did), or at best straight lines to match straight eyebrows. My rectangular babies lie at right angles to their standing rectangular parents.

On the whole, I seem to have been a good observer. The clothes my people wear are often patterned with stripes or dots or circles, sometimes quite complex patterns, on one occasion v-shapes that suggest a knitted jumper. The pants have pockets and suspenders. The Christmas table displays gifts that I recognize and remember, a doll for me, two exercise books I had requested in a letter to the Christchild that has also survived, a tricycle for my brother, also a chair and a three-sided box that could be tipped around to become a table. I drew the chest on which the baby was changed with its doors and drawers all in the correct places, though the baby had inadvertently slipped to the vertical side. 

Another characteristic of my drawings is that my people are never alone. They are usually holding hands, a mother and a daughter, our mother with my brother and me, my brother and me, one standing, one sitting in the ocean in front of our house beyond the neatly penciled grass and the patch of beach, or even our whole family. Another drawing shows my brother and me and a tiny baby, either my second brother or my doll, in front of the house which has steps for easy access leading down from the door; a face in the window is watching over us. There are also a number of drawings showing angels flying above us, a nativity scene with father, mother and baby Jesus, and a picture of Easter rabbits roaming the garden. The festivals of Christmas and Easter were of great importance in our lives. But basically my drawings stick to a very solid reality: substantial, dependable people looking after each other, reliable, hard to move like the furniture in a house.

These drawings from more than sixty years ago relate to a time about which I have only scattered recollections. I remember, one day, skipping up the road on my mother’s hand wearing a floral dress I liked and the warm wind blowing so hard that it felt I was flying. I remember trudging up the windy headland with my mother, my aunt, and my brother to have our picnic lunch of sandwiches with sand in the dunes that would soon be shoveled away into bags for the war effort. I remember squatting on rock platforms in the bush, building little stick houses and gardens on cushions of moss. I remember sitting on the step crying over my doll Wedis whose porcelain face had just been stuck together again after my brother had been rough with her. I remember wondering whether to tell on my brother who was playing down by the dangerous fish-pond again, in spite of the firm instructions we had received. In my memories I am always skipping, the wind is always blowing, I am often alone with my doll and I am sometimes not quite sure what to do: All in all, not really the world of my drawings.

My drawings were done in 1940 and 1941. The war had started a year or so ago and in mid 1940 our father was interned because of his German background. For the next two years, before our own internment, we saw him only two or three times in a prison setting, mainly Long Bay Gaol. My mother and aunt were left with us three children. Neighbors saw us as their enemies. The parents of the Australian children we came into contact with were suspicious or hostile and discouraged contact. The police arrived to search our house. My mother and aunt must have been worried about their family in Germany, in particular brothers drafted into the army, just as our Australian neighbors were worried about their men folk fighting abroad against the likes of us. People had begun to think in national rather than human terms. These were not safe and supportive times.

And yet the world I drew looks safer and more reliable than anything my grandchildren have produced. I won’t say happier; not one of my people has a smiling mouth. But safer, steadier. Why? I think the reason is simple: because it felt safe to us. In the turmoil and worry of the times my mother and my aunt succeeded in providing us with completely dependable regularity in our daily lives. Meals were always at the same time and provided appropriate quantities of wholesome food which we knew we had to eat. When we had finished our bowls, we were given a few sultanas for reward. Bedtime was always at seven and accompanied by the same procedures each night. The house was always clean, our clothes fresh and ironed. We knew the rules for everything and knew what would happen if we broke them. We had our guardian angels and before we went to bed we asked God to look after us. And, most important of all, the adults were always there for us and always the same; we never saw them distressed or crying, and even though my mother did warn us occasionally that the hand with which she could mete out smacks was more than usually slippery today, this was a bit like a joke and not something we had to fear too much. As long as we behaved ourselves we were safe. It has only occurred to me now what self-discipline it must have taken to create the impeccably ordered world in which we children lived during those years. My mother had been the same age when WWI started as I was when WWII began. She had known hunger and social disorder, her mother’s preoccupation with the fatal illness of her sister, the irritable neglect shown by servants to the unruly bunch of children whom she, as the oldest, was expected to control, and finally the divorce of her parents. She was determined that we would not encounter disorder or neglect for as long as she could prevent it. It often takes children a while to acknowledge what their mothers did for them; some people are sixty and older before the penny drops.

Falling

I am always delighted when somebody in the family agrees to accompany me to the theatre. Good plays are like people in action; they move too quickly and you are never in the right spot to keep up with them. Four eyes are better than two.

The performance in question, to which my son Martin accompanied me, was hosted by the Alzheimer Association. I am a member because my brother Felix has been diagnosed with the disease. Two years ago he was prescribed the Alzheimer drug Aricept and it made a big difference. His behavior improved significantly and it was possible to take him out for walks again. I could once more ask people over for dinner and even to stay the night. But as time went on we began to wonder about the benefits of the drug (was it causing his epilepsy?) and even about the diagnosis. Felix’s behavior was often appalling, far worse than only two or three years ago, but was this dictated by dementia or was it intentional? Had grief for his mother turned to anger of which we had become the butt? Had he discovered the pleasures of controlling other people who could never work out when he was putting on one of his acts? Was he perhaps just mildly demented and trying to disguise or exaggerate the fact? Or was it a mixture of all these things? Had the beneficial effects of the drug for some reason worn off? Against the advice of some of the doctors we decided to take him off Aricept and, to our surprise, his condition did not worsen; it possibly even improved because he seemed less restless, less pigheaded. How does medication like this work? What are you supposed to be looking out for, what criteria do you apply? The illness is idiosyncratic; in the case of a Down’s patient, none of the doctors, who rely completely on the family’s accounts for their assessment, know what to look out for either. There are moments when you feel you have lost all orientation, that you are out in a blizzard.  I decided to buy the tickets for the play on the off-chance that either the play, or the ensuing forum, or perhaps a remark by someone in the audience that was going to mingle over drinks and supper, might give me some crucial piece of information that could lead to insights.

I arranged to pick Martin up from work. As I approached town, driving rain, oil splashing onto the windscreen and a low sun combined at times to cancel out all visibility; I was travelling on a fast-moving multi-lane highway and could no longer see a single car to the right, the left or ahead, just hoping I was holding my direction. I arrived shaken.

In town Martin took over the wheel while I navigated to our first stop, a gallery with an exhibition of sculptures entitled “Birds and Angels”. The bronze birds with their opalescing burnished blues embodied the delight of flight and speed, movement so fast that it left only impressions of shapes, figures that rearranged themselves from every angle to be quintessential and for ever alive. Then there were the angels. Their gesturing wings were protective, ecstatic, cheeky or tentative, often ambiguous, the human element modifying the simple exuberance of nature. One of them seemed inspired by a penguin, another by a mopoke, a third had the fingered wings of an eagle. Angels are messengers. Here they spoke of ways in which man can rise above himself and form an alliance with nature that overcomes natural limitations. It was good to be reminded of the glory, the genius of man before turning to the sadder topic of his vulnerability.

When we arrived at the theatre the foyer was filled with a crowd of what appeared to be well-heeled professional people, surprisingly few elderly couples, and some jostling self-important men with nametags who kept to their own group. Not a setting conducive to meeting people. This was a fund-raising function. It took a while before the doors of the theatre opened. Our unreserved seats on the deconstructable grandstand eventually allowed only a limited view of the stage that was confusingly cluttered with black boxes. These would represent furniture but perhaps also emptiness and disorientation. The characters later had to balance precariously around a grave-like hole in the floor that sometimes doubled up as a bed.

Ron Elisha’s play “A Tree Falling” introduces us to a quick-witted, grumpy, disheveled, bossy elderly man, with the unlikely name of Lenni Riefenstahl, who has been recently discharged from hospital (where he was diagnosed with cancer of the liver). He lives alone in a suburban house with garden. The woman Lola, in her late thirties perhaps, has just arrived to see him, sent by the Council as his “friendly visitor”. She carries a file with information about her client, his hospital stay and diagnosis, his two marriages, the first ending tragically when his wife was killed in a car accident, his two sons who apparently ring him every day, and the like. We are told that Lennie himself has given this information to the social worker only recently; but he rudely disputes it all, claiming to remember none of it. When his tumor is mentioned, however, he is suddenly overcome with the fear of death and Lola, who has had just as much trouble finding her way through the house and its cupboards as through the file and its information, is horrified that she has inadvertently caused him grief, though relieved that he is bound to forget it again.

Lola is a brave woman to come again the following week. This time she asks for Lenni’s photo album. At first he tries to get her to borrow the neighbor’s. Eventually Lola does find an album but Lennie refuses to know the people it portrays. Next visit Lola decides to probe his memory. Her client seems to remember his parents (strangely their names are the same as those of Hitler’s parents), he comes up with names for all the teachers at school, but claims to remember nothing about university where, according to the file, he studied medicine, or about the years that followed. So Lenni’s memory has apparently cut off at a certain point. But a bit later there is a sudden tragic recollection of his first wife, the one who died in the accident; Lenni demands to be taken to her immediately and Lola has to escape with vague promises, trusting in his forgetfulness. Is that how dementia works? When Lola visits again she finds that Lenni has burnt the photo album. Why? Is it because it points to the life he has irretrievably lost or to remove it from prying eyes or to destroy the evidence of his fabrications? And the two sons who are supposed to ring him every day: how can that be when the telephone isn’t even connected.

When Lenni tells Lola, who has found piano scores, that he plays music in his head all day, she decides to lend him her son’s keyboard. After a while she wants it back, only to discover that he has destroyed it, (that dreadful whining kid’s toy). She is outraged. But  then Lennie sits down at the table and plays, the audience can hear the magnificent Beethoven concerto as he mimes it, and Lola is dumstruck. Lenni was obviously once an accomplished pianist and, strangely, he has not lost the memory of the music he used to play. Physical memory lasts longer than intellectual memory.

As the weeks and months progress, Lola, starts having troubles of her own. Her beloved father is ill. She misses a call to her mobile phone because Lenni has hidden and then broken it. She starts swearing at him, what have you fuckin done? Strong language for a friendly visitor, Lenni comments. Lola stares at him in dismay: you’ve been tricking me all this time, you haven’t lost your memory at all. Her father dies that day. Lola starts talking to Lenni about herself; you have to talk about something. He is a bit like a father. Her teenage son, she says, wants to leave school and become a cartoonist. Let him, says Lenni, why go to university when that is not what you are interested in. Lola asks Lenni whether he is happy. Sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy, he says. He returns the question. What is happy? Lola replies, I just feel that something is missing. Then go and find it, says Lenni. One day Lola arrives quite distraught. Her mother has just told her that the father she loved so much made his money from brothels. Everything she had had as a child was paid for by exploiting women. She is shattered. But it is now all in the past, says Lenni, it no longer matters. You, you can forget the past, she yells at him. But I have a  memory and I will live with this for the rest of my life.

One day Lola arrives to find Lenni in bed. He has had a stroke. When she visits him in hospital his speech is slurred; she puts her arm around him and he looks up slyly and propositions her. After his stroke, Lenni is sent to a nursing home. The noise drives him crazy; he keeps on rushing at the other clients, roaring at them to keep quiet. He has become a difficult patient. Then there is the day when Lola comes to say farewell. She has decided to leave her husband and move north to Queensland with her sons. Lenni – now our suspicions are confirmed, he is a refugee from Hitler’s Europe - gives her advice about warm clothes and the like. For him it is cold in the north. (He couldn’t have gone to school in Australia, as he claimed.) When Lola leaves he lies in bed fantasizing about travelling north with her and her sons. She has become a part of his life.

During the ensuing forum a smart young psychiatrist is asked for an assessment of the medical accuracy of the play. He is scathing. Somebody with so much memory loss could never live alone for so long. (By the way, Lenni had a ghostlike attendant who moved around him in the intervals between Lola’s visits: nurse, meals on wheels lady, cleaner and tradesman all in one). Also memories didn’t just suddenly cut out, the psychiatrist continued. And your early memories would never be so clear if your later memories had disappeared so completely. The playwright is a GP, the actor of Lenni interposes quietly. Somebody in the audience has just made a disparaging comment about  the ignorance of GPs in matters of dementia. And the names are a bit peculiar, the actor of Lenni mumbles to himself. His comment falls on deaf ears.

On the way home Martin and I discuss the play. It is strange, Martin says, everything is intact except memory. Lenni is quick-witted, intelligent and wise; he just can’t remember. I have a friend, you know her, I say, whose husband, formerly a high court judge, is suffering from dementia. He too has retained his humor, his manners and his quick-wittedness; only his memory has gone. We talk about the friendship between Lenni and Lola. It is carpe diem he teaches her, to make the best of the time you’ve got, says Martin. And he gives her the reassurance that there are advantages to losing one’s memory, I add. But I can’t help feeling that Lenni also understands Lola, intuitively, like a father would a daughter. It is not a one-sided relationship.

That night in bed I am suddenly awake and start to review the play. Lenni is old, he is sick, he has a tumor in his liver and now he has also had a stroke, but he is not demented, he is simply acting, I tell myself. He made up his name and the CV in his file to make fun of a self-important social worker. (But wouldn’t they have a record of his real name, is that feasible?) He didn’t want to remember a life that had been fulfilled and beautiful and interesting and that was irretrievably gone, so he pretended to have forgotten it. He didn’t want friendly visitors and all the rest intruding on him so he pretended not to know them; once the council woman turned human, he too turned human. Lenni was never a medical doctor, I protest to myself; he didn’t even know what a catheter was. (Could he have forgotten?) He was probably a pianist and certainly a Jewish refugee who had some chip on his shoulder about how Australians can’t distinguish between Jews and Germans, or perhaps their unwillingness to acknowledge him as a victim and who therefore adopted the names of Nazis. He kept his torch in the fridge, citing some ridiculous reason, because he had heard that demented people did things like that. Relieved that I have solved the problem, I drop back to sleep. But next morning when I wake up I am no longer sure. Lenni’s grief when retrieving the memory of  his first wife Angelica, his Geli (wasn’t that the name of Hitler’s great love?), was real, it had to be. His manner was too extreme to be normal, but it couldn’t all be explained with play-acting. He was covering up too. A bit of dementia perhaps and some play-acting. ..... I am becoming quite obsessed with Lenni, I tell myself. I have Lenni on the brain. This is ridiculous, I tell myself, get out of bed and have a shower! Don’t I have enough trouble trying to work out where Felix is at. Go away Lenni. I really haven’t time for this. Life is precious and I have to get on with it, just like Lola.

The Pariah-Syndrome

I have come to that period in my life when I am no longer treading water and gasping for breath in the rush of everyday commitments, or not all the time, anyway, but when I sometimes just float and wonder where I should be going and whether there is continuity in all those things I have spent my life doing. In this vacant and contemplative mood I have been beset more and more frequently by memory flashes of my failures. But what invariably surprises that part of myself that stands on the bank and looks on from a detached distance is what the unthinking part of me seems to regard as a failure. It is not so much unkindnesses - in my time I must have committed many -, nor is it incompetence, though there are so many skills I have never bothered to master and which I could still try to teach myself, nor is it wasted opportunities, though I have probably let these slip by at a greater rate than almost anybody else I know. What comes to the surface are my peculiarities, the many instances where I must have seemed extremely strange to the good normal people around me. I am convulsed with horror at the thought of how those who were supposed to take me seriously must have viewed me all along.  What did they notice or did they just shrug off my eccentricities as minor lapses? For no one ever said to me: what is wrong with you that you can’t behave like normal people do, go and see a psychiatrist. Why have I only recently become aware of my abnormalities? What makes them surface now? Could it be because a consciousness within me is telling me that there is still time to straighten out the knots and creases and turn myself into a well functioning human being? What has made me so twisted?

I imagine myself making an appointment with a psychologist. What is your problem? he  or she would say. And I would say: please just listen – I know that analysts are taught to interrupt their clients, to force them to abandon their preconceptions and discover things about themselves that they don’t want to face – but I would like you just to listen and put together two and two in your head and give me the answer that has so far eluded me. Then I would tell the psychologist things like the following:

One evening I was asked to dinner at the house of a colleague. She had invited another couple and I was told that the wife was co-author of a landmark study on poverty that had just been released. I had read about it in the newspapers and was very impressed; it had defined poverty in a new and very convincing way. But I can still hear myself saying to her: I am very interested in your work because my mother has been doing welfare work for many years. She looked at me with surprise; no wonder. Why was it necessary for me to qualify my interest in this way? And that when I was interested in her work, full stop. It was almost as though I had no right to be interested unless I could justify this interest with a personal link to the subject, however devious.

I have a peculiar approach to friendship. It is as though I am not permitted to invite anyone who is not either a blood relation or a friend of blood relations. This puts me in a kind of ghetto. People have commented on this.

A literary society was looking for a new president. I was approached and convinced that there was no other suitable candidate on offer. I agreed, though I knew that it was a bit of a lost cause as the original membership was ageing  and there was no new generation in sight. But I had clear strategies both for approaching younger groups and for making changes to the programs the society offered, and I was willing to put in a certain amount of work. I did feel a little out of my depth but that is normal when you are faced with something new. I was introduced to the audience as the person who had agreed to be the new president and asked to say a few words. Without having discussed this with anyone else I got up and said, to my own and everybody else’s amazement, that I would take over the leadership only until somebody more appropriate could be found. It wasn’t laziness, it was a deep and uncontrollable and till then unconscious conviction that I had no right to public office even of a very limited kind. Though I do vote in elections because I am an Australian citizen, I cannot bring myself to participate actively in the society in which I live.

When I was younger, I spoke English with a slight German accent. That was not really surprising because I had learnt my English from my mother, for whom it was originally a foreign language. All the same, most second generation Australian children very soon speak the language as they hear it spoken around them. I obviously had no desire to do this for many years. A former class-mate, who had not seen me for years, pointed out to me the other day that I had lost my accent. That may be so but I still have a problem with speaking the language. In conversation I don’t seem to get the idioms right; it is as though German was interfering, which is strange because it does not do that when I am writing. Do I still feel compelled to sound different when I am interacting with people?

I have noticed that I have an extreme revulsion to calling people by their names. It is rarely because I have forgotten these and I am generally aware that I am the odd man out or, worse, that I come across as quite rude. And yet my mental barrier to using names is almost insurmountable. Why? What makes anonymity so desirable? My own name will immediately give away my German descent. I am by no means ashamed of my origins; I am sure that is not the point. All the same, it could be the desire to interact with people as people, irrespective of their backgrounds.

In the course of my profession I had to work with groups day in day out, conducting seminars and lectures, attending meetings and the like. As long as there was a fixed agenda, I had no problems with this. But in the tea-breaks that presented the opportunity to interact with other members of the group, I was invariably overtaken by complete panic. It was impossible for me to imagine that a single person in the room would want to talk to me, worse, I felt I would be compromising them if I made the attempt. I was afraid even to approach those I knew well, convinced that they did not want to be seen with me in public. Things were worst at conferences with the many breaks between sessions. I would spend time on the toilet or rush out to get something from my car and sit there for twenty minutes till it was safe to return. This fear of meeting colleagues made no sense; it wasn’t even that it would have been difficult to strike up a conversation, for the papers we had just heard presented obvious topics. But if somebody approached and chose to talk to me, and this did happen occasionally,  I could have embraced them with gratitude.

In my undergraduate years I had a single close friend. I remember saying to her one day that it seemed to me to be the greatest of all human achievements to be completely self-sufficient and have no need of other people. She looked at me in amazement. I don’t think that is a particularly worthwhile goal, she said, I think it is good to have as many people in your life as possible. I, in turn, looked at her in amazement; it was such a strange and novel idea. When this friend was dying of cancer a few years ago her sister put together a roster of dozens of her friends who took it in turns to spend a morning or afternoon with her, keeping her company, nursing her and just being with her. If I were in that position no one but my daughters could be called on to help me. All through my youth, I never managed to have more than one friend at a time and always suspected that these friends were secretly hoping to be rid of my attentions one day. There were others waiting for them in the wings who could not come forward because of my exclusiveness, my possessiveness. If I could do without these friends I would free them up to live more interesting and varied lives. I felt guilty about the friendship I was imposing on them. I didn’t want to oppress them. As I matured, I learnt to do without close friends.

Why am I so convinced that it is an imposition for people to be in my company? I am reasonably intelligent, not ugly, come from a good family, worked in a good and interesting job, I am tolerant and helpful, I like people when I get round to meeting them and though I am no entertainer I enjoy listening to others and responding to them. There is no particularly good reason why people should want to shun me. So why is this belief embedded in me so deeply?  There are other peculiar things I have noticed about my friendships. One is that I seem to be unable to make friends in Australia. I used to meet great numbers of people in my job and many of them obviously liked me and went to some lengths to try and establish a friendship but though I was pleasant to them, I did nothing to encourage them and they eventually bounced off that buffer of thin air I had erected between us. I mourned their loss and installed them in my gallery of treasured memories but I never invited them over or arranged joint outings or rang them up for a chat. The only people with whom I keep contact here are, as I mentioned earlier, relatives and family retainers.  When I go to Germany, the land of origin for my parents, things are very different, however. I make contact with all sorts of people, happily accept their invitations to stay with them, have those intense and unforgettable conversations that tend to take place when time is short and you will not see each other for some time, and go away feeling enriched. Why there and not here? The people here are just as interesting and warm, perhaps more so. I sometimes tell myself that it is a fear of taking on too many social obligations that is dogging me and, like most people, I do need time to work. But if my children or grandchildren need me I am willing to sacrifice any amount of time at short notice. And these last years I have had time and have been able to be quite flexible. 

Another thing I have noticed about the friends I do retain is that they are almost all “lame ducks”, or rather they come to me when they need help in a crisis and disappear again when things are sorted out. These relationships are usually one-sided and not very fulfilling for me. I don’t mind taking on this role every now and again – most women do a fair bit of that kind of counseling in the course of everyday life . What is disturbing is that needy people are the only ones that I don’t discourage, that I don’t feel guilty about befriending. I suppose it is because I don’t have to suspect myself of using them for my own selfish purposes.

One of my most ridiculous eccentricities is that I seem to be completely incapable of greeting an acquaintance unless they have noticed me and greeted me first. I know who set the example for this aloofness. When my mother first came to Australia in late 1935 as the beautiful and dignified young wife of a respected businessman, she was courted by all her neighbors. She could pick and choose her friends. Four years later, when the war began, the situation was reversed. With the exception of a very few who seemed immune to war-time chauvinism, people now not only pretended not to know her but also accused her of all sorts of treasonous crimes, like rowing out at night in a non-existent boat to supply Japanese submarines. These accusations brought the police to our house; they conducted one search after the other. When she enrolled my brother and me at a kindergarten, all other parents withdrew their children in protest. The kindergarten teacher was one of those unflappably decent Australians, of whom we encountered quite a number in those war years. She simply refused to do battle against children. Eventually the other parents gave up the useless boycott. But we children knew there was something wrong with us and that our classmates had been encouraged to avoid us. It was just one of a number of incidents of this kind that drove home to us our status as pariahs. During these years my mother ceased to greet anyone who did not approach her with a show of friendship and this continued for a while after the war, for, understandably, feelings remained bitter for some time. In those post-war years my brothers still had to fight off the patriotic horde of their class-mates every day at school. Girls aren’t as physical in their hostilities but they can make them be felt nonetheless. For me, as the oldest of the children, the worst humiliation was the knowledge that Germany had deserved all the enmity it was suffering many times over, that I was somehow a part of this horrifically guilty nation and needed to make amends. But how does a child, or even an adult, make amends for something they never actually did? It was not so much the two years of internment to which our family was subjected – that was a bit like spending time on a crowded camping ground, some people enjoy that, others don’t – as this sense of exclusion and guilt that overshadowed my youth. If the imaginary psychologist is still listening, I should admit that I was a little ingenuous in suggesting that I had no idea what my underlying problem was. I am convinced that the war years have had a lasting effect not only on my life but on the lives of my brothers too.

All the same, this happened sixty or so years ago and I have long been aware of what lies at the root of my eccentricities. Understanding is supposed to obliterate problems; that is certainly the premise with which psychoanalysts work. And yet I have not been able to shake off the pariah syndrome. Why is it so tenatious? Perhaps because it was reinforced by other elements of my life. I was not only a German among Australians, I was a girl among four aggressively masculine brothers – the war years had allowed male chauvinism to flourish. In the internment camp our family differed from the others in our views and our origins. In the camp school I was the youngest in the class by a good two years and did not fit in. When we left the camp we were sent to a Catholic school where we were the only Protestant children. At work I was the only woman among men for many years. But all these things need not have been predominantly negative, they also gave me opportunities and insights I might never have had otherwise. I am convinced that they became negative only in so far as they fed into the pariah syndrome.   

I don’t want to give the impression that I am an emotional cripple. I am sure that on the whole I pass as a fairly normal, well adjusted and settled personality. And if I am vigilant enough I can keep up this appearance. My greatest enemy is depression; the moment it touches me the doors slam shut all around. I am lucky that there are now herbal remedies that allow me to keep it in check without too much fuss. But I do not believe that I will ever shake off the pariah syndrome completely. In our country where immigrants are often viewed with suspicion and their children bear the brunt of people’s insecurities, this should be kept in mind.

I think the pariah syndrome probably also affected my marriage. I never even considered marrying an Australian who would never understand my problems; instead I married a German who had spent the war years over there and did not understand them either. I made no attempt to choose my partner but let myself be chosen, just as I had never made friends with anyone who did not choose me. Once married, I lacked the conviction of having rights on which I could insist. I expected to be punished and, unsurprisingly, I was. I had no practice in sharing intimacies with other people or socializing; I had been a loner for too long. I suspect that I felt deep down that my partner was cursed with me and entitled to abandon me for others. And I was jilted and ill-treated, as I expected to be. Needless to say, my partner had problems of his own. Every human being does.

What was it I wanted to ask the imaginary psychologist I invoked? He or she would very likely agree with my general diagnosis. What do psychologists advise their clients? To acknowledge their disabilities – like one acknowledges a hare lip or an amputated leg – learn to manage them and make the best of them? There is no way the past can be changed, but when I look back I can see that even in the midst of pain there was always the challenge and richness of being alive. Perhaps the individual should ask himself, or in my case herself, whether in some indirect, even mystical way you can make amends for things imputed to you of which you are innocent in the normal understanding of that word. Where so many innocent people suffered, it may be only the innocent that can help humanity atone for the evil that is potentially in us all. Unlike so many others, I am alive to tell the tale of the harm racist and nationalist discrimination does to people, harm which I myself have been fortunate enough to experience without fatal consequences.

 

My Christmas Tree

Tillie wants to know why I decorate my Christmas tree the way I do. This is the first year she is allowed to help me, a rite of passage in our family. When my brothers and I were little we were expected to believe the tree had been decorated by angels behind the closed doors of our Christmas room. I am not quite sure whether Tillie ever believed in a supernatural Christmas tree. Probably not. At eight she is very young to be allowed to help, but she wants to so much. My tree is much like my mother’s tree was; it is our family Christmas tree I will tell her about.

In our shopping centre the Christmas trees are all decorated with great big bows, Tillie says. I ask her what ribbons and bows remind her of. Presents, she says. Exactly, I say, the shopping centers want to remind people to buy lots and lots of things to give as presents. Tillie recalls another shopping centre where the trees are decorated with little colored parcels. That would remind people even more, she says.

Do you have a tree at home yet? I ask. We have decorated a big eucalyptus branch. Mummy says she likes the idea of using an Australian tree. But you always have a pine tree, don’t you Omi.

A Christmas tree is a tree of life, I tell Tillie. Though deciduous trees do not really die when they lose their leaves in winter, they look dead. In contrast, pines and firs and spruces and cypresses look alive all the year round. Eucalypts do too. So they can represent the ancient symbol of the tree of life which never dies. The tree of life has its roots in the ground, its branches reach out to us and its tip is in the heavens. It stands for the oneness of the universe; it tells us that heaven and earth are part of one and the same reality. Conifers such as pines grow straight and high, reaching for the sky like a true tree of life. Though the symbol of the tree of life existed long before the birth of Christ, it gained a new meaning when Christ was born. While the tree of life shows us living things reaching up to the heavens, trying to make contact with the divine, Christmas is about God coming down to us from his heaven to live as a human being. Some people speak of Christ as the tree of life; he belongs to both heaven and earth, like the tree of life, and he has promised us eternal life.

And now we have to decorate this tree, Tillie reminds me. Yes, once we have found a suitable tree we have to decorate it; so let’s get going. The decorations we put on the tree are chosen to show the meaning we want the tree to have. In the first place we want this tree to show that our reaching up to heaven has been rewarded by heaven coming down to us. Let’s start  by putting the colored glass balls and the stars on the tree to make it look as though the sky with all its stars and suns and planets, big ones and little ones, red, silver, green and golden ones, has come down to our earth and been caught in the branches of this tree.  That looks beautiful, Tillie exclaims. I wish we could see the night sky up close like that. It is too far away for us to tell what the different stars really look like.

Tillie has picked up another box. Can we put these little gold pine cones on next? What do they mean? They tell us that because the light of heaven has come down into the tree of life as a result of the birth of Christ, the fruits of the tree too have taken on a golden sheen. Everything on earth now has a little of the light of heaven shining from it. That is why we have painted these pine-cones gold. They are not quite as bright as the heavenly light of the stars and suns but they have their own soft glow.

Omi, I have just found a box of red apples. Tillie wants to know why we put apples on the tree. I remind her: Do you remember the story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit they had been forbidden to pick in the Garden of Eden?  This fruit is often spoken of as an apple. When Adam and Eve did that, they made a decision to try to do things their way rather than obeying God. Simply obeying God has its good sides and its bad sides. If you obey God unquestioningly you will always get things right, but you will never learn to think and truly understand things. We learn by sometimes doing the wrong thing and then realizing why it was wrong. If humans had never eaten the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would have remained animals that follow their instincts. In eating the apple they became human; they learnt to think and to do wrong as well as right. For a while God let them make their mistakes and suffer the consequences. But because most humans want to get things right they started to ask God for help. And finally God relented and sent His son down to the earth to show us how to live. At Christmas time we celebrate the day when God’s son, Jesus Christ, was born as a human being . He would show us that it is possible to be both human and good. From that day on having eaten the apple was no longer a bad thing;  it had become possible for human beings to work things out for themselves and to do as God wanted them to do at one and the same time. So that is why the apple also belongs on the tree of life.

Tillie has found my birds. Why do we put white birds on the Christmas tree? she wants to know. They have two meanings, I tell her. A white dove was the bird that brought Noah – do you remember the story of Noah and his ark? - the news that the terrible flood was subsiding; the dove brought him an olive branch to show that there was dry land somewhere and that plants were starting to grow. This meant that Noah and his family and all the animals would soon be able to leave their ark and live normal lives again. The white dove meant that God was no longer angry with people for all the things they had done wrong, that He had decided to stop the flooding rains and make peace with them and help them. So the white dove with an olive branch has become a symbol of peace for people all over the world. The message of Christmas is also one of peace. When the angels came to the shepherds they said to them: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.” If God helps us to be loving to each other all fighting should stop and there should be peace on earth.

And what is the other meaning of the white dove? The white dove also stands for the Holy Spirit. After Christ died he sent his Holy Spirit to us. This means that we can have God’s spirit in our hearts so that we are able to understand deep within ourselves what it is that God would like us to do. The Holy Spirit could come to us because Christ came to us at Christmas. So the dove that represents it also has a place on the tree.

We’ll put the angels on the tree now, Tillie decides. There are quite a few of them. Do you think angels really exist, Omi? The word angel simply means messenger, I explain to her. They are beings that bring us God’s messages. Often it is other people that tell us things that we know God wants us to realize and understand. That is why angels are often shown in human form. Most of the time the people themselves will not be aware that they are giving you an important message from God. Can you give me an example, Tillie asks. Okay, I’ll try. Someone may say to you: I really have to ring Anne tonight. That reminds you that you too should ring a friend of yours called Anne. And when you do so you discover that she has had some very bad news and needs to be helped and comforted by you.  In this case the person who gave you the idea to ring your friend was an angel, a messenger. All sorts of people can be angels. Angels are always depicted with wings because it is the thoughts that they pass on, thoughts that have flown down from God as though they had wings, that are the important things about angels. Having lots of angels floating down the Christmas tree also reminds us of the angels that came to the shepherds on the night that Christ was born, Tillie says. When we set up the nativity set we’ll have to make sure the shepherds can see them.

Is there anything else that needs to go on? Tillie is trying to remember last year’s tree. Lametta and candles are always the last things you put on the tree when all the branches have been weighed down and their position will no longer change. What is lametta?  Tillie wants to know. Lametta comes from Germany, I say. It is hundreds of thin strips of silver foil. When it is on the tree – and you have to put it on carefully, strand by strand, so that it hangs straight - it looks like silver rain falling from heaven to earth. Without rain there would be no life on earth. There would be no tree of life. But lametta does not only stand for real rain, which we need too, but also for all the good things that come from heaven to make our hearts and minds live. It stands for the love of God that rains down on us and keeps us alive.

Now we only have the candles to go, Tillie says, but we need to be really careful where we put those so that the tree doesn’t catch fire. Nowadays many people think that lighting candles on a tree is too dangerous, I say. They put little electric lights on instead. But if the tree is fresh and green it won’t go up in flames; what will happen is that a few pine needles just above the candles start smoldering and spreading a beautiful scent of incense throughout the room. Incense is still burnt in some churches when people come together to pray. In the olden days people who wanted God to answer their prayers would often burn something that they thought was of particular value, believing that the smoke would take their gift up to God. They felt that if they were asking for help from God they should be giving something to Him too. So the candles that we light and the pine needles we burn also stand for the gifts we would like to give to God in return for His love. And they stand for the light of God which we ourselves can now kindle in the world by doing what God wants us to do.

Now we have finished decorating the tree, we have to set up the nativity figures under it, don’t we Omi. We’ll put the shepherds and their sheep on the left and the wise men on the right and the children and the animals can come close to the baby. A bit later Tillie wants to know: Did things really happen just like that, with Jesus born in a stable among the animals, angels appearing to the shepherds and the three wise men seeing the star and coming with gifts? Only one of the gospels tells us this story, so it is hard to say whether these things happened literally. But we do know that throughout his life Jesus was poor and slept in lowly houses, perhaps also in stables or out under the stars. We also know that it was ordinary people, mainly fishermen, who became his disciples and spread his message and were the “shepherds of his flock”. Shepherds are caring people who look after their sheep and protect them from harm and Jesus often likened himself and his disciples to good shepherds. So shepherds too deserve to have a place in the story of Jesus. And the three wise men?  In the days when Jesus was born it was common for learned people known as astrologers to look at the stars and try to work out what they told about things that were happening on earth or would happen in the future. The story of the wise men tells us that people who understand the importance of the birth of Christ would want to give him presents to welcome him and in gratitude for what he was about to do for us. The presents they gave were gold, a gift for a king, incense, a gift for a priest, and myrrh, a bitter herb that was used to embalm the bodies of the dead. The gifts recognized that Christ was like a king and like a priest and that he would die for us. It is quite likely that the nativity story too is a symbolic story that tells us the meaning of events rather than what actually happened. That makes it true in a different kind of way.

What else is there to do, Omi? We have been working for quite some time now and it’s getting late. Normally Tillie would have been in bed long ago but this is a very special night for us. And we still have to set up the tables around the room and cover them with clean white cloths, so that people can place their presents on them. For presents are important, I explain to Tillie. Through the presents we give to the people we love we can show that we understand what they need and what will give them pleasure and what will help them to fulfill themselves. Giving good presents is a worthwhile thing in itself. But when we give them for Christmas it is more. Jesus once said that whatever we do to other people we are also doing to him. If we are kind to other people we are being kind to him too, and if we are nasty to them then we are being nasty to him too. So giving presents to other people gives us the opportunity to give presents to Jesus, the birthday child on this day, and to show him how much we love him.  – And now I think we have just about finished our work, I tell Tillie.

But Omi, you have forgotten something. The plates with all the different biscuits you baked, and the nuts and dried fruits and the lollies and chocolates! Fancy forgetting those! They’re very important. One of the greatest gifts that Christmas brings with its messages of reconciliation and peace and love is the ability to enjoy everything the world has to offer, all its sweetness, all its many different tastes, all its shapes and colors. That is what the plates are there to tell you. Come, we’ll do them right away.

Do you think that everyone who sees your Christmas tree should know what it is all about?  Tillie wonders. I don’t think it matters if they don’t, Tillie. Giving good presents to other people is already a step towards living the way God wants us to live.  And being able to enjoy them and say thank you to other people is just as important I think Christmas trees mean different things to different people. I have told you what our Christmas tree is about. Now you have to go and ask other people about theirs.

Tillie is in bed. Tomorrow she will probably have forgotten many of the things I told her tonight. But her question “do you think the story of Christmas is really true?” sticks in my mind. In a few years time her question will be “do you think Jesus was a real person who actually lived?” and I will have to answer: there is no incontrovertible historical proof that Jesus lived, though it is likely he did. I can see Tillie looking at me and asking: then why do you go to so much trouble decorating your Christmas tree? What will I say? Even if there was never a man called Jesus, what he stands for, what he embodies, is in my view of the utmost importance. Tillie, I will say, no religions can be proved the way scientific propositions can be proved. But there are three things you should keep in mind. First: For as long as we have historical and pre-historical records, people have had religions and have usually considered them the most important thing in their lives. It is arrogant of modern people to think they can just discard religion as foolish and primitive superstition, the way they often do.  Secondly: To be true to yourself you have to trust your own deepest convictions. Many people all around the world have a very strong faith in what they call God. They would completely lose touch with themselves if they gave that up and nobody has a right to make them feel uncomfortable about this. Thirdly: Religions can be and have been misused. People have waged wars and persecuted other people in the name of religion. Just because you believe something, that does not give you the right to force these beliefs on others. You can tell them about your beliefs, but that is all. If you find that a group of people are using their beliefs to tyrannize others, you should have nothing to do with them. But religions contain deep wisdom and you will understand yourself and the world better if you study this. And religious practices can help you to be thoughtful and understanding and compassionate and appreciative of what the world has to offer while religious communities can help you to meet like-minded people. The Jesus religion, which we call Christianity, tells us some very important things. By telling us that God made the world it allows us to look for the perfection in every aspect of life. By describing the exemplary life of Jesus – and it remains exemplary even if it is just a story and there was no real Jesus – it teaches us how to live a good life. And by telling us that the spirit of God can be in our hearts and guide us, it allows us to listen to our intuitions and our conscience. I don’t think any of these three things can lead you astray. It is worth trying to live as a Christian simply because you will very likely be a better human being. One day you may also truly believe in God. Sometimes that happens suddenly when you least expect it. If it happens to you, you are very lucky. But remember it is a gift which God can give to anyone He chooses but that can also be lost if you don’t look after it.

Playing

I have never been good at playing. When I was really little, my mother told me, I used to carry all my favorite toys around with me in my skirt. To keep them there required both my hands so I suspect I never really got round to playing with them. One might say, I carried my potential with me but didn’t use it. Later, holding my doll, I seem to remember spending all my time wishing I was a real live mother with a real live child and only half-heartedly imitating my mother, never practicing for adulthood, certainly never trying to outdo the adults or improve on them. Many years on, my little son was a brilliantly creative parent to his monkey puppet, putting his father and me quite to shame. I, however, always just wanted the game to be replaced by reality. Perhaps I thought it was safer to be an adult because they always knew what to do. On the rare occasions when I was with a group of children, for I was always a solitary child and was encouraged to be so, I played ball or chasings or skipping or hopscotch with the others but I never initiated such games. I was also never a player of team sports in later years. I can remember being surprised when a family friend called me a snob because I said I thought playing tennis was stupid, just wasting your time hitting a ball from one end of the court to the other. There was a brief episode when my brothers and I played cave children; we had been read a book about children – I think they were survivors of some catastrophe – who had to learn to live in the way their Neolithic ancestors had. I can remember cutting up bits of unripe fruit with a stone and offering the mess to my brothers when they returned from the hunt with their bows and arrows but, once again, it was a fairly passive role I played. I didn’t really get into the spirit of the game.

Why? Was I simply a very unimaginative child? Throughout my childhood I can remember feeling that the adults disapproved of imaginative play; they thought it was silly, beneath the dignity of serious children, and they laughed at us behind our backs. Was I so unplayful because I wanted to come up to their expectations and be truly like them rather than just pretending to be like them? What made me so anxious for their approval? For I was always receptive to imaginative reality and definitely dissatisfied with the everyday; this was the frightening and unpredictable world of war during my youth. But it never seemed to occur to me to attempt to change things by playing them differently. Perhaps it was because I understood so little about what was wrong with the world. When I was old enough I sometimes wrote stories about better worlds, but they were stories, wishful thinking, and ultimately a waste of time; I never tried to turn them into the reality of play. At school, nevertheless, I had the reputation of being a particularly good actress; we played scenes from many Shakespeare plays, imaginative ones like Midsummernight’s Dream and realistic ones like Richard II, and I always had a main part. This sort of play was legitimate because Shakespeare was a serious playwright; I enjoyed playing such roles tremendously. Perhaps I did have potential as a player, unused potential.  

What are children supposed to do when they play? They practice, a friend of mine who is a kindergarten teacher says. They practice physical skills – throwing, catching, running, jumping, climbing, sitting still -, they practice alertness, cooperation, learning to accept good luck and bad luck, winning and losing, they practice household and construction skills, artistic skills like painting and modeling, they practice roles like those of the policeman and teacher and parent and doctor, they practice remembering, and solving problems, they envisage lives they could lead, that of the pirate on the high seas or of the Eskimo in his Igloo or of the fairy looking after flowers and people, they practice being a leader and a follower. They are preparing for all the challenges and opportunities of adult life which still seems so marvelously full of opportunities. The more children play, the better they are equipped for adulthood, she says. 

My own children were good at playing, by themselves or with each other. Though they occasionally asked for dress-ups or implements, they didn’t seem to want me to participate in their games. I was a facilitator; that was my role. But my grandchildren belong to a different generation, perhaps a more egalitarian one. They do expect available adults to participate in their games and that can be quite daunting for someone like me. There I am alone with a three-year-old boy. With the help of cushions and towels and a broomstick the sofa has been turned into a pirate ship. I am not too bad at that sort of thing. But then for the next three hours – who says that children have a short attention span? – I am expected to envisage storms at sea and ships in pursuit and treasure islands and mutinies and handle them competently. My mind keeps straying and I need to be lectured and reprimanded. I am simply not as interested in these things as he is. I am the one with the short attention span. Thank goodness I am not a professional child-carer.

One night one of my daughters rings. She and her husband have just changed jobs and houses and have a few days to prepare for their new work. The area where they now live is remote with very few permanent residents. Mum, could you help us out by coming up and looking after the children till we have the baby-sitting sorted out. It would make all the difference to us. When I arrive in this highest of Australian villages I am surprised that the move has almost been completed in a single week; the house is appropriately furnished, there are pictures on the walls, the pantry is well stocked and everything seems to have found its place. How hard they must have worked. Don’t worry, I am only too happy to have some time with my grandchildren. You go off and forget about us, I say.

William is just four and Tina not yet three. Tina’s arrival was a bit of a shock for William; for the first two years he would have happily murdered her if the adults had let him, there was no want of trying, and he has only just begun to wonder whether she mightn’t be of some use as a playmate after all. The situation is volatile. I had hoped the two would play together and I could retreat into my role as facilitator but most of the time more active intervention is required. I have to remember that the children too are tired and unsettled and uprooted and I mustn’t expect too much of them. With all the fighting, we can count ourselves lucky if we get round to playing at all. When things are quite out of hand I turn on a video and the thumbs pop into mouths and there is quiet for a while. I need a game that will separate the two and allow them to play together at one and the same time. I try ships on two sofas with their favorite toy animals as crew but William knows all about pirates and his little sister is defenseless against his raids. At mid-day when the ice on the road has melted I let them ride their bikes on the road and try to prevent them running into each other. Is it incompetence or intent? I am never quite sure. One morning it is warm enough to play outside and we find a cubby house for each of them and furnish these with all sorts of things. That works; they have just witnessed the furnishing of a house and have plenty of good ideas. But they play best in my little green car. I think it is because they know that they are not really allowed to play in cars and if they are not on their best behavior I am likely to invoke the rule. But the car also allows them to think about their move and envisage returning to what still feels like home. I am beginning to understand a bit more about child’s play; it can be therapeutic. We are having some good days now and I feel that the children have begun to like me, not just as their grandmother – grandmothers have to be liked, you have no choice – but as their child-carer who has almost reached the professional standard these young employers have come to expect.  

But once the parents are home everything falls in a heap. Irrespective of where they were at in their game, the children start screaming. It is as though they needed to make it known to their parents that I had been ill-treating them all day, and I feel hurt and resentful. I try to be of some help in the general pandemonium of evening but whatever I do I am greeted with: no, go away, I want Mummy to do that for me or I want Daddy. Both children seem obsessed with letting their parents know how much they need them, with making them feel bad about abandoning their darlings for the entirety of a working day. They couldn’t care less about me. Babysitters ought to go home once parents are back; they have no business to intrude on the life of a family. But the best I can do is go for a brisk walk in the icy night air or lock myself into my room which is also the study and leads to the downstairs toilet. Both parents are tired; they have other things on their minds and feel a bit guilty too. They would also prefer me not to be around to witness all this. Like the children they want me to disappear. Sometimes I am on the verge of tears and it takes all my strength to start the new day, just like the children always do, as though nothing had happened. I sleep restlessly; apparently one dreams more vividly in this altitude for I wake up each morning with unsettling memories of rambling stories with the strange transformations and sudden changes of setting characteristic of dreams. I am often so engrossed with trying to remember all the detail that I forget that these dreams can’t possibly be of interest to other people and begin to recount them.

My daughter asks me whether I would do some craft with her children. There is no kindergarten for them up here and she is worried about them missing out on pre-school skills. Tina is good at threading beads but the moment she runs out of thread she pulls them all off again. She wants to play at threading beads, not at making necklaces as I had anticipated. I suppose that’s alright. Mother’s Day is coming up. I suggest we make crackers for Mummy. We find two toilet rolls, fill them with chocolates, wrap them in paper, tie the ends, and the children glue stickers onto the paper, any old way, their glitter seems to be all they notice. I thought they might combine them to a scene or a story. I suppose it’s alright if they don’t.  I then try to make a crepe paper garland with the two children. I show them how to push out the corners of the little squares, though I have to tie the middles myself. Tina gets stuck on the idea of presents and keeps on turning squares into balls to wrap them in other squares. I should have known this would be too diffficult. William would prefer to watch me knit and try to work out how I do it. As I am demonstrating the complicated procedure to him I see out of the corner of my eye that Tina has pulled open her cracker and is sampling the chocolates. I am sure this is not how pre-school should work. All I can hope is that it is not counter-productive. I need to do a course in child-care before I come up here again. Being the mother of four children has obviously taught me nothing.

The children pester me to take them to the playground. We find a towel to bring along because all the slides will be wet with melted snow. It is a small playground and after you have climbed up the steps and slid down again a dozen or so times you get bored. William wants me to play shops with him at a little window. I give him bark coins for bark goods but that too gets boring. Tina feels left out and climbs in through the window, scattering the bark goods. I’m a burglar, she says. William grabs me and we run off in terror. The burglar goes to sleep on the shop counter. We take our courage in our hands and sneak up to him, but when we are almost there the burglar wakes and we have to run off screaming again. I wonder what Tina imagines a burglar might be? Perhaps a poisonous spider?

Now William takes over. Watch out, there’s a great flood coming, he warns and starts pulling us up the steps. We have to get to the topmost turret to be out of danger. We scramble up but somehow we keep on sliding down again and falling into the water from where we need to be rescued. However, the emergency services embodied by William are excellent and we are saved again and again. That in spite of the fact that the boats ( the lower platforms) are now also under water so that it is quite a procedure to rescue our multiple selves so many times and get them all up to the turret. Luckily William is now a doctor and can put bark band-aids on the drowned people. And we all survive.

We rest for a moment to catch our breaths after all these narrow escapes. We need a story. William tells us about a huge and very scary giant living in a big castle. And suddenly William is the giant. He has seven-mile-boots with which he can take enormous steps. Tina and I run away in terror chased by the giant. But just as we have both reached the point of exhaustion the giant turns into a nice person and invites us to his castle. He shows us everything, including his two beautiful blue swimming pools in which we all have a swim. He also encourages us to try out his superb slippery slides. Tina suddenly turns into a little dog whom the giant has found by the roadside after its mother was run over and whom he is now looking after very tenderly. Later she changes into a kitten.

We stay on for a little longer with the three stories becoming more and more intertwined. At last the children have begun to play their own games and what a burst of creative energy and joy and reconciliation this has brought with it. Where did these stories come from? What were the threats that we all so successfully overcame? Is this the moment William has decided that he does love his little intruder of a sister, that he will be a kind and caring giant to her, particularly now that she has made up her mind to be a kitten rather than a dog to him. After all, both of them are motherless children for much of the day? I have spent so many mornings now pondering the emergencies and sudden transformations of my dreams that I can’t help trying to interpret this afternoon’s games. Perhaps that is what play should really be about: facing your fears and making decisions that will take you a giant step further in life.

Body

I love looking at Olga. She is not beautiful in the ordinary sense of the word. She carries that little bit of extra weight characteristic of women approaching seventy. Her hair which used to be dark red has now become a light burnished blond but it is still long and healthy and she can wear it pinned up or in a plait. She has beautiful large slightly bulging blue eyes, like most redheads a pallid skin, her face is relatively flat and round and molded more by the flesh than the bone structure, her uprightness is not labored and she approaches people with a self-assured openness and warmth that is at the same time dignified and held back. If the word pride did not have unfortunate connotations, one might describe her bearing as the epitome of pride, the pride of someone who knows her worth and neither over- nor under-estimates herself. People who meet her must know they are encountering someone who will be important to them. Olga loves food and wine and travels partly to explore tastes. She also loves walking, in the wind and the sun, and barefoot on the beach. She has her own style of dressing, no-one I know dresses quite like that. The colors are mainly off-white, supplemented with touches of buff and yellow ochre, the shirts are of loosely cut heavy unbleached cotton jersey, she always wears a bracelet, a wide sculpted mosaic of yellow-white bone when I saw her last but she has countless bracelets, she picks them up in the opportunity shops she visits. Olga speaks in a slow, deliberate, considered way and will usually introduce herself with a story about something she has experienced, little gems of well observed detail that give any new acquaintance the confidence to skip the small talk and offer a gift in return. Conversation with Olga is like a ceremonial exchange of gifts; you leave enriched but also proud of the unsuspected wealth of your own thoughts and experiences.

I love my body, Olga says. I have rung her up to say good-bye, a long good-bye chat that must do instead of a visit, and we are talking about the daughter she will see in two days time. Eve has incurable cancer; operations and the terrible bone marrow treatment have bought a little time, how long nobody knows, but now scar tissue is causing her severe pain. I love my body but I sometimes wonder what one would feel towards it if one had an incurable illness, if there was this enemy, this poison hidden within it, Olga says. A few years ago Olga too was very ill. For three months she was not even allowed to read because that would have consumed too much energy. She listened to radio and when that became tiring she looked at her flowers; she made sure she always had some beside her. It sounds silly, she says, but I lived in these flowers. I tell her the story of my uncle who was critically wounded in Russia. Because of the great numbers of casualties and his hopeless condition he was put aside in a little wood-shed to die. While he was lying there among the spider webs he remembered a poem, a ballad he had learnt as a child, about a gipsy boy who had been sent out to steal and on his way found a hyacinth. Its beauty enraptured the boy so that he forgot everything else and was hardly aware of the beating he received when he came home empty-handed. Suddenly, my uncle said, he had seen the hyacinth and smelt it; from then on nothing else had existed for him until he was flown out two days later. He too had exchanged his body for a flower and had survived because he had been spared having to fear and hate it at a time when it was so vulnerable. His sister, my mother, had cancer for four years before her death, two major operations, and yet when I was asked to tell her that the tumor had now grown into her spine and she did not have long to live she looked at me with amazement. What cancer, I have never had cancer, she said. She had been able to live normally because she had simply ignored the illness within her. But my mother did mourn her youthful body; she was repelled by the changes age brought about. My mother had a classical ideal of beauty; she had been a very beautiful woman in her youth. I, in contrast, who never considered myself a beauty, often find the faces and even the bodies of older people more interesting, faces and bodies that have been lived in for a long time, that tell stories. I have a theatre subscription that seems to have been taken up mainly by the elderly and the interval is as fascinating to me as the play; I just sit and watch the people. One can love older people just from looking at them; so much can be read into their faces, whereas younger people more often strike you as attractive strangers.  

I wish I could affirm, like Olga, that I love my body. I think I can say that I like living in it, but I don’t like looking at it and although my daughters now sometimes say, Mum you were beautiful when you were a girl, and I remember a teacher, who didn’t realize I was near, once saying how lovely I had looked on stage, I was not even in those days fond of whatever youthful beauty I might have had. In the first place I knew that I had flaws, my mother had pointed them out to me, scimitar legs (the bones of the lower legs were curved out a little), and a heavy neck at odds with my otherwise slender figure, and irregular teeth because one top incisor had never come up, a genetic oddity I shared with others in the family. Even as an adult I was so self-conscious about my really fairly inoffensive legs that I went to great lengths to hide them.

But I was also actively discouraged from liking my looks; it was considered vain to study yourself in the mirror, or dress up, or like jewelry and other pretty accessories, or have opinions about the clothes that were bought for you or that you were told to wear on a given occasion. Most of our youth was spent in school uniforms anyway. That is not to say that my mother did not buy beautiful and often quite pricey clothes for me; she certainly did not neglect me. But I had no experience dressing myself, assessing the positives and negatives of my appearance, wearing make-up or trying out hairdos and I did not miss these things because I never questioned the standards underlying my upbringing.  Why I was raised with such puritan values when my forebears and even my parents had always taken pride in their appearance, I do not know. Perhaps it was the period in which I grew up, for my husband later had the same austere views about the frivolity of all but natural beauty which, it was claimed, had no need of care or enhancement.

When I reached my later teens my father occasionally pointed out my good looks to my mother. He would discover shades of the Giaconda in me, in late winter when my hair was darkest I reminded him of an Indian beauty, sometimes it was a Madonna he could see or my resemblance to his youthful mother, who had been a renowned beauty. My mother shook her head about the inappropriateness of such comments and I understood that they came from a biased though well-meaning observer. It was a game that I quite enjoyed all the while I knew that beauty was not important. For a brief period my father gave me something like pride in myself. But very soon I was also to find out that good looks could be a liability, a handicap; men with whom you had nothing in common were attracted to your appearance. You had to go to lengths to avoid them so you would not  be caught against your will. You appeared to have become a doll rather than a human being, someone to waltz or smooch with, not to talk to; even the men whom you would have liked as friends could no longer see you as a companion. There were dramas, men going crazy, men distraught, and it was supposed to be all your fault. I prayed earnestly for the loss of whatever it was that put me in these predicaments. For decades I managed to brush my hair without glancing at the rest of me. I really had no idea what I looked like, nor did I care. Clothes were for protection or modesty; it was good if they didn’t attract attention. I was quite shocked when, during an overseas stay, the son of a neighbor, whom we had asked for help, pointed out that I did not dress appropriately for my social rank.

Nowadays, when I look in the mirror, I am horrified at what I see. How does one hide a neck of such grotesque proportions? Or should I concentrate on concealing the blemished skin? I must have walked head down, bowed by depression, for years to develop such a widow’s hump. How could I have ignored all this for so long, why did nobody ever point it out? I feel I need to shield the world from ugliness of such proportions, of such obscenity. And yet the people I meet don’t seem repulsed. Are they as good at overlooking things as I was all those years?

Even so, and this is a strange thing, I have always felt comfortable with the body in which I live, the body that allows me to walk and touch and eat and drink and think and feel and even have sex. It has accompanied me through good and bad times and adjusted to them in its own peculiar way. The sickness I developed was my sickness; it allowed me to withdraw from the world in which I felt ill at ease by making me bloated and unattractive, too fatigued to take an active part in life, allergic to so many foods that most hostesses gave up on me. But it sharpened the senses I needed, the spiritual senses, that mysterious sixth sense that defies most of the laws of nature we have come to take for granted, and it allowed me just enough strength to live my daily life. And when I had seen enough and had come to the end of my strength there was a cure, an almost instantaneous cure that seemed quite miraculous because it had eluded the doctors for so many years. I never felt that this illness was my enemy in the way that most of those who contract cancer probably do. It was my friend, a difficult and exacting friend, but one that had my best interests at heart. And I never lacked the instincts I needed to manage it. I was able to trust my body, even its illness, and be grateful to it. With respect to this my inner body, I have no hesitation about declaring my love for it, my deep intimacy with it.

Olga and I are talking about ageing. I say, I love the look of old people, even their creased and patterned skin, I feel I want to draw it, and I also think that the restrictions ageing tends to place on our activities can be beneficial, can help us to concentrate on what is important to us, what is essential. People waste so much of their lives racing about, trying to get things done, afraid they will miss out. Olga is not quite so sure. I hope this is the way we will experience old age, she says. I know, of course, that I am talking for myself, for a person who is not passionate about sport, or travel, or physical work, or sex, or even social standing, for a person like me whose wealth lies in the abiding memory of experiences about which he or she will continue to think, daily drawing new meaning from them. This is what used to be revered as wisdom; nowadays it is youth and potential which tend to be favored. But obviously my paean to old age is relevant only to those for whom this stage of their lives is not debilitating, who are not confused, or wracked by pain. Will I be lucky enough to escape these scourges? Am I trusting my body more than it deserves to be trusted? Am I tempting fate?

Am I even serious? I have just come back from a day at the beach and in the bush with my grandchildren, the two-year-old walking up cliff-like steps through the dense prickly scrub, indefatigable, racing along the beach, along the sand, through the water, away from the thunderous break of a wave and straight back again into the swirling foam. For a moment he had stood there bouncing from one foot to the other, shaking himself, letting the enjoyment, the joy, surge into every part of his body, living in every part of his body and loving it. How can you claim not to mourn for a body that was once so competent, so receptive to the world, so incredibly alive and perhaps so beautiful too.

Mediocrity

The other day, as I turned on the television for the nightly news, I caught a fragment of the preview for a forum discussion. An excitable gentleman in the audience was asked what it was, in a nutshell, he was objecting to and his somewhat priggish answer was “mediocrity”. It always gives me a little stab to hear that word mentioned derogatively because I suspect that mediocrity could be exactly what I have spent my life trying to achieve. My husband used to say to me: “What is it that attracts you to the lukewarm?  You don’t like the heat, you don’t like the cold, you want it somewhere in the boring middle.” That is the temperature that I don’t have to cope with, where I can just be comfortably myself, would be my reply. I wasn’t born a fighter. My children say to me: “What is it with you that you persist in living in this nothing area, among these nothing people, when you could afford a beautiful place with interesting people as neighbors? Around where you are is neither nice nor horrible, it is just plain boring. And you grew up in beautiful houses.” That is true; I grew up in houses that outshone all those around them and my identity is bound up with these houses and gardens. But, all the same, I would not want to live in one of them now. I answer my children: “I am twenty minutes drive from each of you, twenty minutes from the city, from the beach, from the hills, five minutes from the library and the bike track, ten minutes from a park where I can walk for hours.” “But what are you close to,” they ask, “nothing!” Tillie once drew my house as the place where all roads come together and all people meet. And she is right, my house has long been the meeting place for family and friends. They come to this boring place in spite of themselves. In ancient times there was a goddess of the crossroads; the crossroads are an important place to be. And my neighbors? Most of them leave me alone because they have nothing in common with me and those that don’t, need me because they have no one else. I like being left alone and I probably also like being needed, whereas I don’t like neighborly niceties and I don’t like feeling crowded in. Friends say to me: “You have had the chance to meet so many interesting people yet you always seemed to avoid them and settle for more mediocre acquaintances. Why?” Perhaps it is, I could answer, because they don’t need me. I don’t want to admire; I want to interact.

All this is surprising, even to me, because my father, from whom I have taken over my values more than from anyone else, liked the tropics and the snow, chose beautiful houses to live, sought out exceptional people for friends and was someone who passionately preached man’s ability to surpass himself and achieve the extraordinary. How could he have a daughter that favors the nondescript. Not that he was ambitious in the normal sense of the word; he never lusted after power or high office or general recognition, but he believed in the ability of the individual to do almost anything he set his mind to and do it well. He was inspired by Renaissance ideals of all-round man, also by Nietzsche’s call to raise the human species a step higher on the ladder of evolution, by his ideal of the “superman”. But the all-round man rarely excels in any one area. He is an amateur in the best sense of the word. My father did many things well and he made a point of doing whatever he did well; he was a good sportsman, a brave officer, an intellectual and philosopher, an explorer who endured hardship and coped with all sorts of difficult situations, an innovative farmer, an intelligent businessman with the nerve for risk, a writer of letters and fiction for both adults and children, a drawer of portraits, he tried his hand at journalism and making films, he intervened in politics, he produced and wrote plays, he was a devoted father, husband and friend, a great teller of jokes, and so the list goes on. But in any one area my father’s achievements were, I suppose, what one would call mediocre; he broke no records and never gained fame or glory. Few would consider it a loss to mankind that most of his writings were never published. Perhaps I am, at least to some extent, my father’s daughter after all, even though far more timid. Of course I was also born a girl.

Being female is, surprisingly, relevant in this context. My generation of girls knew they had to be careful. The Second World War had given their mothers a foothold in the public sphere; they had had a taste of a life beyond domestic duties or the subaltern and caring professions of secretary, teacher and nurse. But once their men returned, they had had to make way for them again; it wouldn’t have been fair to exploit their absence in the affairs of the nation to stage a takeover. My generation of women, tutored by their mothers, knew that there were all sorts of things they would be capable of doing if society could permit this; but they also knew that they had to step back and be tactful and bide their time and always appear to be a little smaller and prettier and more helpless than they actually were. They had to speak with, if you can put it that way, Jackie Kennedy’s little girl’s voice to hide formidable personalities, capabilities and intellects. For us, mediocrity was a survival tactic, a camouflage that became a way of life. We worried about our men, knew how fragile their egos were and would have done anything to avoid undermining their self-image and confidence and thereby risking our marriages. If we stepped out of line there was even the risk of stirring up memories of only recently officially sanctioned violence that we certainly did not want imported into civil society and our nice homes. Mediocrity was thus a social skill women had to develop so that they would be loved and never discarded. They had to think of their families. And we all had families; it was the normal thing to have in those days.

As the managers of families women practiced the skill of dividing things up fairly. Favoritism was a mother’s greatest crime. Though you were probably aware that some of your children were more gifted and promising than others, you had to make sure that this was not obvious to the children themselves, that they all perceived themselves as equally valuable and loved, that they all had the full range of choices and that you spent more time helping the incompetent than you did furthering the young geniuses. The gifted ones would hopefully be promoted by their schools and teams. Fathers might occasionally pay special attention to their gifted children. But mothers were there for all. Their homes were places where everyone was to feel relaxed and accepted; they were havens of peace and mediocrity. These were the typical families of the forties, fifties and sixties as I remember them, the cells of our democratic society here in Australia with its laid-back life style and its ethos of “near enough”. “Never mind, you tried,” was the reaction to even the most feeble of efforts and that certainly didn’t spur anyone on to try harder.   

My father had read Tocqueville’s treatise on American democracy and shared the Frenchman’s concerns that democratic society, commendable as it might be in respect of its fairness, was constructed upon the lowest common denominator and fostered mediocrity. It did not, he believed, create the conditions where originality flourished and where great men with great ideas pointed the way to new horizons. My father was a son of the early twentieth century. He wanted progress, novelty, uniqueness, great men with great ideas who could lead the way. Later he would be horrified at the abysses into which those who posed as great men could lead a nation. While the egalitarianism of democracy settled for the common humanity of people, the many things we all share with everyone else, it often ignored or even repressed the few things that raised an individual above all others. For my father it was these things that were important, that opened up new vistas, brought solutions to intractable problems and rescued people from the mire of ordinariness.

How do democracies attempt to achieve the extraordinary? Australian society does so, for example, through competition. Young people sacrifice their lives to running or swimming a second or two faster than other competitors. They train in the early hours of the morning and late at night, they diet and forgo the pleasures and interests and rewards of a normal life for the purpose of breaking a record. When they succeed, their country and the world make a huge fuss of them. In spite of all the effort this costs, my father would have rejected such victories as little more than the achievements of a robot. In his view they were worthless when it came to furthering humanity, just as worthless as the celebrity status achieved by film stars and pop singers. Celebrity was not greatness. Celebrities were ordinary people put on pedestals so that we could worship in them our own ordinariness.

According to my father’s formula great men had to develop their humanity in all its aspects; a genius needed to be as versatile und universal as Leonardo da Vinci, for only the complete human being could serve as a reliable guide to humanity. In this respect I am my father’s daughter. Some time ago I met up again with a man I might have considered marrying many years earlier. In conversation he stated that what he wanted more than anything else for his children was that they should each excel in one particular field. It didn’t matter what that was, whether it was chess, or high-jump or Chinese. Perhaps it was just as well that I did not marry him. It is my view that the glorification of the sprinter is a cover-up set in place to hide the paucity of real greatness in our society. I prefer my father’s anachronistic all-round mediocrity – anachronistic because we do, of course, live in the age of specialization, in the machine age – to the one-sidedness of the Olympic hero. That does not mean to say that I do not recognize the discipline and effort that goes into an Olympic victory. Discipline and effort are obviously things that should be encouraged. But effort, I must insist, for worthwhile things, and effort that does not put your genuine nature and purpose under strain.

I have never been quite as much of an all-rounder as my father, though I am a do-it-yourself person and one who prefers to lead two or three parallel lives reasonably well rather than putting all efforts into excelling in a single project. But for me the most crucial thing has always been to remain true to myself and I am worried that too many enterprises, given that I also have inescapable duties, will put me out of touch with what I consider to be the purpose, or mission, or fulfillment of my life. Consequently, I am quite happy to leave many things untried if that gives me the time for what I deem to be important. I don’t mind being surrounded by nothing people that want nothing from me. And it is irrelevant to me whether society officially acknowledges what I do or considers it insignificant. I don’t need to belong. For the individuals I meet, what I have to offer will, in any case, be part of a dynamic and complex encounter that eludes judgmental assessment. I like standing in the middle where roads meet; I like being centered in myself; I like democracy; I like being a mediator; I even like being mediocre. It is a quality that allows me some intimacy with the widest range of people and I like people.

Mother

There are unexpected magic moments when some sensation opens floodgates of memory and you feel the surge of an earlier time pass over you with all its crisp cool reality. Sometimes smells can do this, the pungent smell of lantana as you walk up the sunny bush path leading to the lighthouse. Or, when I was given my first pair of glasses as a teenager and I could once more see the world with the brilliant distinctness things had had for me in childhood. Amazing how the fuzz of adolescent uncertainties had suddenly dispersed and my eyes had widened, my mouth opened and my skin had felt as though it was grass under a breeze. But nothing restored me so intimately to my early life as the kiss I gave my mother just after she died. It was quite unexpected to experience the full sensuality of the young child again at this moment. For many years past my mother and I had kissed fleetingly, as adults do. I had simply forgotten the cool softness of her cheeks, a softness beyond all description; olden day poets might have compared it with rose petals but there could be no comparison anywhere in the world. I kissed my mother again and again as the warmth gradually left her face and sadness at the death of this body which I had once owned as though it were a part of me, to whose touch I had had passionate access all through my childhood, seeped through me as though I was drowning. It surprised me how much in love I had always been with her. 

Even in childhood, of course, my mother had also been a person of her own, one of the adults who had control over us children, someone whose outlook on life differed from ours, whom you did best to please, whom you had to be on your guard against because she might want to bend you in ways that you shouldn’t and couldn’t be bent. She was a mother who brought up her children as she thought best, who didn’t want her children to reflect badly on her and themselves, and who envisaged a future for them that seemed desirable to her. In that respect she was like other mothers.

But attached to her like her shadow, or maybe it was the other way round, was this different mother, the mother whose flesh I shared, who was as much a part of me as I was of her. When my mother’s sister who had lived with us and kept her company for years of my childhood eventually left for a life of her own, it was I who became my mother’s companion and confidant. She would talk to me about her own childhood, her lost family consumed by the war, and the countryside where she had grown up whose meadows and forests had become integral to her being. Her childhood was often more real to me than my own. I seemed to grow up with her, as her, through her, her twin and her other self. When my little sister and brother were born I also shared motherhood with her. It was sometimes confusing and disappointing to be her on one level and then be confronted by her on another. We were so close and yet we had to be on our guard too so that we didn’t get lost in each other’s lives.

Eventually we parted ways as both of us took up professional pursuits. When I married my mother might have felt betrayed. I had made the decision without her. We once again had to face up to inescapable differences made obvious by our separate lives. For me a hollow yearning remained, also some sadness about the opportunities for individuation I had missed and a little resentment at what seemed to be a broken promise of eternal companionship.

Then my marriage started failing and this barrier was lifted. I had a tense and brilliant period in which I seemed to live in a supernatural world; she too had a visionary episode that changed her. Our similar experiences allowed us to regain our closeness.  It once more became possible to talk at the deepest and most intimate level. Our minds seemed to be linked over great distances. When my mother picked up the phone to ring me, I would have my hand on the receiver to ring her. There was what one might call a telepathic line between us; I knew what she was experiencing and thinking in accurate detail long before she had spoken to me. I was still affronted whenever she threw off the bond that joined us and stood before me as my mother. Even after her death I am torn between detached criticism of the way she handled our mother-daughter relationship and a sense of union and unity and communication and love and mutual wisdom that will, I now know, survive our troubled mortality.

Writers

I have just been through an experience of anger so extreme that it has shaken me to the roots. My whole personality, my most intimate self, became distorted and ugly and it seemed unimaginable there could ever be anyone in the world again who would be willing to associate with me, still less to love me. In the wake of this fear, my anger was flooded with an annihilating grief which I dared not control lest it allow the anger back to the surface. I could see myself walking into a cold, murky, choppy, directionless sea under a heavy grey sky and disappearing forever. That almost seemed a necessary act to restore innocence and purity to the world.

What had aroused such anger? I probe and probe and what I dredge up seems ridiculous, trivial. But nothing else presents itself. Where did this anger come from? What gave it its devastating force?

I had only just returned from ten days in and about the intensive care unit of a hospital, the third stint up there, standing beside someone, it was my brother, who would, we had been told, be quadriplegic if he survived in turn the horrific operation, then the induced coma, the intubation, the pain, the onslaught of pneumonia, the cruel attempts to strengthen paralyzed  breathing, the likelihood and fear of a life on the ventilator, weeks without being able to communicate, episodes of hope and hope dashed, resignation, renewed effort, exhaustion and so on. All this had been tempered by the combined force of people who could now show him a love they had perhaps not known existed in such force, people who had been given the opportunity - that rarest of opportunities - to make up for past failings, people caught between mourning and celebrating who turned to each other with an openness and solicitousness that is reserved for the high moments of life, people who were willing to make disproportionate sacrifices in their determination to bribe fate. I had also spent many hours in the little crowded waiting-room where those whose various lives had been hurled into catastrophe supported each other, made far-reaching decisions, welcomed strangers into their lives with great kindness, and always, it seemed, preserved the beautiful dignity of humanness.

An accident of the kind my brother had becomes a topic of conversation. People are aroused by the sensational; some are eager for more information, others enquire as a courtesy, commiserate, attempt to be empathetic, while still others, for whatever reason, avoid enquiring. Back at home I have a boarder staying with me, Mira. Not that I ever wanted a boarder, but I have tried to be supportive where necessary and at other times civil and, I think, friendly. That has cost time, resources and mental space for she has many problems. When I returned home, Mira too asked me how my brother was. At that stage promising periods were alternating with dismal ones in seemingly endless succession. I tried to say: For the last three days, things have seemed a bit better. I had not finished the sentence when she struck in with an effusive ‘Wonderful, wonderful, that’s brilliant, brilliant’. Had she actually said ‘What was all the fuss about’ or ‘See, I told you things would be fine’ or  ‘Now you have no excuse to put your concerns ahead of mine’? Probably not. People don’t normally say such things. 

What was it I objected to? Simply that she asked a question that implied interest when she obviously had no interest whatever? People do this all the time: the conventions of small talk, and you shrug it off.  Was it that she should have known how raw I felt? Or was it that I had caught her stealing my story and turning it into hers, worse, parodying mine, trivializing it, negating all those weeks of hope and despair so that a good outcome would now appear to be nothing but the obvious outcome she had always predicted?  Next night when I was leafing through the telephone book to find a repairer for the broken TV she said patronizingly, alluding to the continuing ‘good news’: ‘See, having a broken TV is not that bad, is it.’ I have never had an attachment to TVs; I hadn’t expressed annoyance either. Broken ones need to be fixed. I was dumbstruck. After having first trivialized the accident, she was now implying that I considered a broken appliance to be a greater evil than my brother’s predicament. At that point I snapped into uncontrollable anger. I walked out. In the course of the next days I could not bear the thought of catching as much as a glimpse of Mira; I started drawing the curtains in the rooms I was using. I felt overcome by waves of nausea at my own potential for violence. I became terrifyingly ugly; I could see it every time I passed a mirror. It seemed to me that people had long been looking on me with horror and disgust. Even at the time, I knew this was all a gross overreaction.  Mira’s nastiness, or jealousy, or insensitivity, or awkwardness or whatever it might have been should in any case have been her problem, not mine. Why did I find it all so disturbing?

Did I feel my generosity betrayed? That was nothing new, nothing that couldn’t be passed over. Did I worry that I had at various times exposed people and things dear to me to Mira’s distorting intervention, her takeovers, potentially even her blackmail? This has been a long-standing worry, also nothing new, and I have started to become cautious. So what was it that had sparked off such anger in me? I am, I know, not the only one Mira has provoked. Her daughters are now so enraged with her that they have refused to see her for many months. The family friend who sent her to me also seems to want little to do with her these days. Is it her utter self-centeredness, her inability to see anything through the eyes of others, her witticisms at the expense of others, her naive and disorientating belief in her own extraordinariness underpinned by her status as a published poet that turns people off? Her skill with words is not in dispute. But poets will shamelessly read out poems on the most personal of things, using them to compete for glory. They do not ask their scantily disguised models for permission but proclaim absolute ownership of their creations. The laws against plagiarism support this claim; it is the words that are owned. Poets (I know the generalization is unfair) have made a choice and according to it the people in their lives come second. I am sure it is the power of words to remodel you, to hijack you, force you into a straitjacket, into a glass coffin, to dispossess you of your most intimate stories, to turn you into an artifact, - that creates this almost metaphysical dread with its anger. As a writer, even an unpublished one, I can feel the accusation, the barb, turning back on me. I am at the same time wounded and indicted, outraged and guilty. Mira’s little quips were words cleverly crafted to dispossess me of very precious experience. Have I done that sort of thing to others?

I write. And I often write about the people in my life (I am doing it at the moment). Sometimes it is to honor and celebrate them but it can also be, as now, to come to terms with my emotions towards them, to help me hold my head above water when I am afraid of drowning in anger and hurt. I need to write to stay sane (perhaps Mira does too). And I need to have recourse to these writings whenever I feel vulnerable and insecure. It is not an option for me to destroy what I have written; my stories are evidence that I am capable of mastering my life, that I have used my time on earth well. They hold the triumphs of my life. I am even immodest enough to believe that my stories could be of value to other readers; they are without doubt a small part of the great saga of human survival. But I am also aware that they may wound and confound the people I write about. If only I could destroy the trails that lead back to real life! Is it honest to hide such writings and walk around with a friendly smile when I know full well that I have created a ticking time bomb? I would, of course, not be capable of a smile, and the kindness and forbearance that go with it, had I not written these stories.

How can I resolve this dilemma? A prophylactic strategy is changing the names of my subjects to signal that what I say is really not so much about them as about my reaction to them. But would the wounded be comforted by this? Would they hate me for my crooked interpretations and my intrusions into their sanctuaries? It is often only one moment in our relationship that is recorded, typically a difficult moment, a moment that can potentially stand between us for evermore. People will say to me: this is why real writers prefer to write fiction or at least pretend to write fiction. (‘All characters in this book are freely invented.’) But I cannot write fiction. For me that would amount to a betrayal of basic honesty. In some ways my stories belong to the genre of autobiography and biographers have to be truthful (though most of them do censor their writings so as not to cause trouble for themselves and others. There are libel laws.) But mine is not what one would call objective biography either. My stories are, if anything, an autobiographical study of experiences, their impact, their resolution and their achievements. Other people live their emotions, give free reign to them, set them to work. There can be a lot of shouting until things settle down over rift or reconciliation. I am not good at that, perhaps because my mind moves too slowly to be competitive in a battle of words, or because I am too fussy about nuances and complexities, or because I don’t trust myself, or because I don’t like hurting others. I am also, and perhaps this is crucial, physically allergic to emotion; its adrenalin paralyses me, it works like a poison. I can’t afford to allow emotion to gain a hold on me; I have to understand and control it. My very survival depends on this. On one level my stories are simply a cripple’s crutch; on another they are a cure.

I think I did sometimes hurt people in earlier years when I was still quite confused about the ethics of writing. If I had published, I would perhaps have hurt more people, though fame is for many some compensation for pain. But even today I occasionally make small experimental sorties into the world of possible readers. I lent a batch of my stories to a former classmate who would have known none of the people alluded to. She was shocked. Though she found many of the texts interesting, she was adamant she would never divulge secrets in the way I had obviously done. She even became superstitiously afraid to make good her offer to have me stay with her. I showed some to a few of my children. They were interested and uneasy. Would it be better, they discussed amongst themselves, to be included or omitted and came to the conclusion that they didn’t like the idea of either. I gave some to a good friend who lives so far away that we are in danger of losing contact. She asked why I had not used people’s true names, why I had not been open. A little later she lent my stories to her ex-husband and was surprised that he found them very moving. I showed a number of them to somebody who has always taken an interest in my life, as ‘background briefing’ so to speak, and didn’t allow him to comment. That is the extent of my indiscretions. I have now almost resigned myself to secrecy and loneliness, to seeing my stories as a punching bag or a bottle of Vodka (I don’t drink real Vodka and I don’t own a punching bag) that help me cope.

There is Mira’s way and there is my way. She has chosen her life and I have chosen mine. Perhaps in consequence, she has lost her family and I still have mine, she has some little successes as a writer and I have none. If I have made sacrifices, I tell myself defiantly, she is not going to exploit them. I will fight to keep my family, to keep all that is dear to me out of her clutches. 

Then why all the anger on my part?  Presumably because things are never as straightforward as one would like them to be. In my years as a lecturer I worked with colleagues who broadly held the view that the only justification for literature could be the general good of society. This can, of course, be defined too narrowly, too politically, and often was by leftist academics. If writing helps me to control my anger or understand and communicate my emotions and values, that can surely be of benefit to society. If people are shown how to recognize beauty, if they learn to be playful, if they are seduced to take an interest in the new and original, that can also, I believe, be of benefit to a science-bound, workaholic society. But I agree with my colleagues that fame and celebrity status are worth nothing if they are not used in the interests of people. If Mira publishes, she has to have that in mind. If I decide not to publish I must also have that in mind. I have no right to withhold what could be beneficial. That is the dilemma, the excruciatingly difficult choice that none of us writers will ever make with complete confidence.