Everywhere I Look (16 page)

She was not confident, or quick. She did not sense the right moment to speak. She did not know how to gain and hold attention. When she told a story, she felt a need to establish enormous quantities of irrelevant background information. She took so long to get to the point that her listeners would tune out and start talking about something else. Family shorthand for this, behind her back, was ‘and then I breathed'.

Shows of affection were not done in our family. We could not even hug without an ironic shoulder pat. Expressions of emotion were frowned upon. ‘You great cake. Pick up your lip before you trip over it.' I saw her, as an old woman, have to muster the courage to hold out her arms for someone else's baby. Perhaps this is why she never knew that her grandchildren loved her. She was shy with them. Once she said to me, in her patient, timid way, ‘I don't think they like me much.'

Only last week, though, there floated into my awareness, from a cache of treasures Dad had left behind, a little tribute that their youngest granddaughter, my nine-year-old niece, had written in the week before Mum died. It is accompanied by a drawing: a roast chicken on a rug, and far in the background two figures, one large and one small, walking away hand in hand. ‘Me, Grandpa and her went on picnics in the sun, just near her house in Kew. The sun was bright and the food was delicious, mostly chicken and potatoes and sometimes delicious sandwiches. Then we would go back home and read or watch telly. But what I liked was often we would go into her room and look in the cupboards and see all theese speicial things of hers some belonging to her six children one of which is my mum. I love all six of them and give them my best dreams of Grandma, dreams of her real self, the self with no evil diaseases, the strongest part of her body and everyone should know its still here.'

Probably she was afraid of me. I went to university, the first of her children to move beyond her ability to contain, or help. In 1972 I was fired from the Education Department for answering my students' questions about sex. There were cartoons for and against me in the newspapers. She showed me a letter of protest she had laboriously written to the editor of the
Age
. The letter revealed that she had not understood the irony of the cartoons. The one she most hated was the one that most strongly defended me. I tried to explain this gently, but I knew she was humiliated. To be her intellectual superior was unbearable.

I was the eldest of six children. They kept coming. I must have been taught to change a nappy, fill a bottle, wheel a pram, rock an infant to sleep. I cannot remember there ever being a baby in the house.

The clean, simple architecture of Victorian baby health centres has always comforted me.

When my daughter was born, I was estranged from my father, who had tried to prevent me from marrying my first husband, thus mortally offending his decent and generous parents. My mother had defied him and come to our wedding, at which one bottle of champagne sufficed for the entire company; but at the time of our baby's birth she was unable to break through his veto. She did not come to the hospital. I don't remember hoping that she would, or being upset that she didn't. Years later my youngest sister told me she recalled, as a very small girl, sitting in the car outside my house with our father, waiting for Mum to come out. So she must have fought her way past him. I have no memory of her visit.

Towards the end of Mum's life, when she was becoming vague and fearful but was not yet demented, my widowed sister Marie was often harsh with her in a way that made me flinch: the grief of her widowhood had stirred up some old rage in her that I did not understand. One day Mum asked Marie to drive her down to the Mornington Peninsula, to visit our aunt. She obliged. Next time I saw Mum, she told me, without complaint and in a puzzled tone, that when Marie had delivered her home after that outing, she had brusquely put her hand out for petrol money.

Last year I went to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. I had expected dusty old weapons and dioramas of heroism. Instead I found a curatorial work of inspired brilliance and grandeur, and a chapter of my mother's life that I had never before bothered to fit into the history of the twentieth century. At the desk I told the attendant the name of my uncle Noel, Mum's favourite younger brother, who was killed in World War II. Our parents rarely spoke of him. Dad was in a reserved occupation; was the war a touchy subject? But when he was very old, he told me that Mum had been devastated by her brother's death. She never got over it; he was ‘like her twin'.

The man at the war museum turned to a computer, pressed a few keys, and handed me two sheets of paper. Flight-Sergeant. Aerial Gunner RAAF. Cause of death: Flying Battle. Lancaster crashed at Hollenstein, Germany, while returning from a raid over Brunswick on 12/13 August 1944, killing all crew members. At last I registered the dates. I had to sit down. He must have been barely twenty. When my mother got the news that his plane had crashed, I would have been a toddler of eighteen months, and my sister an infant, five weeks old. How could she have mothered us, staggering under such a blow? In her old age Mum said to me, ‘Marie was a very thin and
hungry
baby—always crying and wanting more.'

Once, while my mother was staying a weekend with me, a man I was having an affair with came to see me. He behaved sweetly towards her, questioned her about her life. He asked about her childhood and her family. How had the news of her brother's death in the war come to her: by phone, or was there a letter? She seemed astonished that someone should be interested in her. When he left, she turned to me and said, ‘
He's
nice.' ‘He's the love of my life, Mum,' I burst out, ‘but he's married.' I suppose I thought she would disapprove. But she cried, ‘Oh!' She leapt off her chair and threw her arms around me. She said, ‘Just wait.'

From what life experience, from what instinct she drew this spontaneous advice I have no idea.

She got on well with all the men in my life, and they liked her. She continued to have warm feelings for them, and they for her, years after they and I had wrecked everything and gone our separate ways.

For my work, on tram stops, in planes, I'm not afraid to question any stranger. But I never sat my mother down and pressed her about the past, her life before me, before our father.