The New Year

Plans for the New Year?

I think they include the usual, which means finishing the memoir (ha!). I also want to write a lot more, and send it off to magazines and journals, online and print. I seem to spend too much time fluffing around on the internet, and too much time not writing and not reading books. I would like to earn more money, but that's common to most of us, isn't it? Considering I earn hardly anything, however, I really need to earn more money!

And what will I write, besides the memoir? Creative non-fiction, and whatever fiction comes. Medical matters interest me, how we cope with illness, or not; how we cope with other people's illness, or not. Parents and children interest me, and how adults become parents, and how adults behave as parents. My own experience as a daughter has shown me that no amount of well-meaning makes up for the damage done by mental illness, paranoia, emotional manipulation and a mania for control.

What is the fate of this memoir that hangs around like a bad smell? I lose heart, get bored, then become enthusiastic for a while, then that slips away and I don't write for a long time. It's the writing in a void, it's the pain, it's the pointlessness sometimes. For whom am I writing? It's to let others know what it means to live with a mentally ill parent, what my mother and I suffered, what my father suffered. It's to correct the balance, to show that behind the laugh that seems to come so easily lies the hurt that never goes away.

Many of us wear masks, it's nothing unusual. Too many of us forget, or are ignorant, that this is so.

Maternal mortality in Sierra Leone

I visited the website of Amnesty International Australia last week, and read a report on maternal deaths in childbirth in Sierra Leone. One in eight women risk dying in pregnancy or childbirth there, a tragedy of huge proportions. From the webpage:

Thousands of women bleed to death after giving birth. Most die in their homes. Some die on the way to hospital; in taxis, on motorbikes or on foot. In Sierra Leone, less than half of deliveries are attended by a skilled birth attendant and less than one in five are carried out in health facilities.

I noted there were two comments at the bottom, but that the opportunity to leave any further notes was closed. The first comment is as follows, with only the name removed:

29 SEPTEMBER 2009, 11:22AM
Thank you for this article about thousands of women who bleed to death after giving birth in Sierra Leone. I fully agree with you that the issue of maternal mortality is not only a health care issue. It’s about human rights of women and families living in poverty in Africa. By the way, I truly believe that this is a matter of a reliable transportation in Africa. The non-profit I am working with as an international business developer (Institute for Affordable Transportation) addresses the cycle of poverty by providing local people with a reliable transportation - Basic Utility Vehicle designed for developing countries. Please visit our web site at www.drivebuv.org to see how we help break the cycle of poverty. Again, thank you for thinking about human rights of those living in poverty. Good luck in everything you do!

Nothing overly objectionable about this, and an indication of support for what organisations are trying to do for mothers and babies and their families. The only thing that vaguely disturbed me was the slight hint of advertising involved in the promotion of the Basic Utility Vehicle. But it would enable health workers to get to patients, to mothers in labour, so would obviously be a useful tool for delivering healthcare to Sierra Leone. And the comment revealed an understanding, or at least an acknowledgement, of the multiple issues involved in maternal deaths: poverty, status of women, human rights generally, health care, transport etc.

However, the second comment (which actually appears above the first) caused some disquiet, and then anger:

29 SEPTEMBER 2009, 01:55PM
Providing transportation for medical needs is a crucial element to preventive health care in developing countries. Healthcare is more of a privilege than a right in my opinion. Yes, the BUV mentioned in the previous comment is a valuable asset much like Riders that provides motorcycles for health workers. The BUV Ministry at www.drivebuv.org does offer a valuable and viable solution for this need. There is a brochure on this site under BUV Solutions - titled BUV and Medical Missions.

'Healthcare is more of a privilege than a right in my opinion'. I am glad the person who wrote this comment at least expressed it as his opinion. I disagree with this opinion, in the strongest possible terms. Health care is not a privilege, but a basic right; a right that millions of people are denied because they're poor. The women in Sierra Leone who die in pregnancy or childbirth have a right to proper health care to save their lives, and the lives of their babies, regardless of whether or not they can pay for it. A mother haemorrhaging or in obstructed labour is not going to wait until she can somehow earn money to pay for obstetric care that will save her life and the life of her child. She needs that care immediately.

And whether you're rich or poor, in whatever country you live, if you are diagnosed with a dangerous infection or a malignancy, or any serious illness, you need treatment and care right away, not in a few months when you've saved up for it. Illness waits for no ideology.

To write of health care being a privilege after reading an article about women dying in childbirth in Sierra Leone is to somehow be divorced utterly from humanity.

When I look up the organisation mentioned that provides the innovative transport, I note that it is faith-based. It provides a valuable means for people to improve their lives, which is wonderful, but do they also evangelise? Do the poor have to pay for their poverty by having someone else's religion thrust upon them? I think it inappropriate in the 21st century that people seeking help from poverty, disease and death be subject to such evangelism. Unless, of course, they choose it freely, and are not denied help if they choose in the negative.

I discover that the two people who left the comments on the Amnesty website are, in fact, both associated with the organisation providing the BUV. Somehow, their words take on the less savoury tone of self-promotion of their own interests, be they religious or other.

Meanwhile, mothers and babies keep dying in Sierra Leone. Good on Amnesty International for bringing these issues to the light, and for striving to do something about them.

Taryn Simon and John Singer Sargent

In August I went to two lectures, one at the Gallery of Modern Art and the other at the Queensland Art Gallery. The first was by Taryn Simon, a photographer of things not usually photographed. Her latest project is called An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, currently on exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Her lecture consisted of a slide show of images from this exhibition, as well as an earlier one called The Innocents, with her brief comments in her crisp, clear manner, followed by a question and answer session with the audience.

From American Index we saw a collection of confiscated goods from airport inspections, the things that people were not allowed to bring into the country. Simon had arranged them to look like a still life classical painting. We saw a photo from the cryogenics laboratory, where people are snap frozen in the hope that at some time in the future we will have developed the technology to bring them back to life. There was a picture of the telecommunications cables that travel from the US to Europe, of birds in quarantine, of live HIV in a bottle. The fragility of the protective devices around these things struck the photographer, as it struck us in the audience.

The braille version of Playboy drew laughter, while the story of the breeding of white tigers drew a different response, one of disbelief. There was Kenny the tiger, severely deformed from inbreeding, posed heroically in his delapidated cage, bones distorted and face abnormal, the result of one of the less-admired qualities of humanity.
[caption id="attachment_264" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="White Tiger (Kenny) Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge Eureka Springs, Ark.: In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born in the care of a breeder in Bentonville, Ark., on Feb. 3, 1999. As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded."][/caption]


The Innocents was Simon's photography project from 2003. She photographed people who had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned, and then released when their innocence was proven, usually after many years of incarceration. These pictures needed text to explain their origin, and Simon is acutely aware of what photos cannot communicate, as well as what they can. She incorporates the text as part of the art of her photographs in American Index. The text is a part of the whole, inseparable from the image.

Later that afternoon I went to a conversation between Mark Pennings and Rex Butler at the Queensland Art Gallery on John Singer Sargent. Rex Butler is an established art historian of some note, and a modest and down-to-earth one, who waved his hand to stop the person introducing him from listing his achievements. He spoke with great passion about the paintings of Sargent, drawing us into the paintings in an easy and skilful way, so we saw what he saw, and were moved by what moved him.

I learnt a lot about how to look at a painting. Too often I find myself paying too little attention to the canvas in front of me, not really knowing what I should be paying attention to, whether there is something I am missing that reveals the key to its meaning, its secrets, if they exist. Butler took us on a journey over the face of the beautiful Lady Agnew, showing us its two moods, and how Sargent had created that effect. He revealed to us the power of technique in El Jaleo, although we all gasped when he first showed us the slide representation. Such drama! Such light and dark! But the figures of the musicians in the background, the way the skirt does not follow the dancer's legs at all, but fold and crease according to some other rules.

Who would think such exhilaration could come from sitting in a lecture?

Frustration of a wistful nature

I like to be busy, but productively busy. I particularly like to be busy writing, whether it's reviews or my own creative work. It's not happening, however, and that familiar feeling of frustration is creeping back.

Maybe I am not meant to be a writer. Maybe I like the idea of being a writer more than the actual writing work. Maybe I do not have the talent, or the motivation. The latter is a problem. I'm not ambitious enough to work steadily everyday and submit pieces on a regular basis. This worries me, because it's not what I want.

I want to write and to have what I write published. But I've had this desire for so long that I wonder if I am happy just to have the desire without the fulfillment. As if life consists of this single desire, without the need to fulfill it completely.

I could simply be lazy.

Of course, I have written vast numbers of reviews, and have a 50k manuscript sitting in my laptop (and on paper somewhere), as well as 30k of memoir fragments, and a 30k (terrible) novella that was written for my MA. So I cannot say that I have nothing to show for all this desire.

I need to turn the wistful desire into words, and send them away. What's stopping this?

The psychologist's room

What stops me from writing?

In the psychologist's room, I learn there is a triangle, with me at one point, my Dad at another, and a male friend at the third. But there is no connecting line between my Dad and the friend, not the first time it comes into my head. Why were we three all there together? More to the point, what was the friend doing there?

Turns out there were similarities between my Dad and this friend, and I have problems (how benign a word!) with my relationship with both of them. But my Dad is dead, and the friend is very much alive. My Dad is a ghost, and present everywhere.

Many things happen in the psychologist's room. The triangle links up. I feel small, like a pinpoint, while the two men are enormous. My Dad controlled more with silence than loudness; my friend is loud and aggressive and opinionated. (Why do I let him intimidate me?) I have a knot of tension in my forehead. My friend punches me in this knot, and I punch him back. We have a fistfight, then I put my hands on his shoulders, and calm both of us down.

At some point, the image of a pair of scissors appears. I snip the string (for that is what it is) that connects the three of us. My Dad tumbles off into the distance. I tie the ends of one piece of string around my friend, and we have a calm conversation. I start talking about my writing, about the memoir, and am not embarrassed.

More people come into the room, and my friend starts to fade.

At some point, my mother appears, and collects my father. They wave at me, and I wave back. It is goodbye.

The string is hard to be rid of, however. I put it in a bowl, and throw it out of the window, set fire to it, douse it with water. Finally, it becomes an infinity symbol, and I accept its presence in that form.

Now, the next day, I feel irritable and out of sorts, out of place. I want to scream and throw things around. It is, I know, an inevitable consequence of all that psychological and emotional work. I must wait for these feelings to work through me. I must write.

If only my parents, particularly my war-ravaged father, had had the opportunity to work through the scars of their sorrow too.

Travelling

She thought how strange it was to be sitting in an office with her eyes closed, thinking about something that happened twenty years ago. And then to not just think about it, but really dive into it, and imagine herself back into that moment, or succession of moments, that have never left her. To watch and listen as the self she was then, and the self her father was then, spoke to each other. They weren’t speaking, they were shouting, their mouths were making ugly shapes, their words hurt, their words flung sharp stones and ragged glass.

I need to leave this poisonous house.

You’ll end up in the gutter.

The psychologist takes her through these moments again, she is there with her, asking her to reimagine them. What would you have liked your father to say to you? What would you have said to him? How would you have liked him to respond? She didn’t think she’d be able to create this dialogue, and was surprised when she stumbled out a few words, then those words became stronger. Then she was there, her present self, with her younger self and her father; she was there, and she was talking to her younger self. What would she say to you now? What would your younger self ask you? What would you say to her?

She marvelled at the incongruous contrast of that inner reimagined dialogue, that time travel, created in that cocoon of healing and restitution, with the bustle of the shopping centre crowds, the random conversations, the smells of anonymous meat and fat, the scratched tiles. Babies in strollers. Pierced eyebrows. People who knew nothing of where she had just been.

Eggs

I hated eggs when I was a child. But my parents thought they would help me grow into a big strong girl, and so they gave me one egg every morning.

They would poach or boil it, and put tomato sauce on the plate. I would take tiny spoonfuls, and try to ignore the taste as I chewed and swallowed. Then I would try big mouthfuls, to get through the meal more quickly, but that gave me an explosion of the foulness, the egginess, the white and yellow repellant smoothness. Sometimes I would be unable to keep it down, and flood the breakfast table with my undigested horror.

My parents would also try egg sandwiches, but the bread was never enough to mask the hateful flavour. It became a battle of sorts, with my parents eyeing me defiantly, daring me to come up with another complaint, another reason to not eat such a healthful foodstuff, or another vomit.

I took to hiding the egg sandwiches behind a large cupboard in the dining room. When my mother was in the kitchen, I would silently rise from the chair, and, keeping my eyes on the door, stuff the vile matter into the narrow gap between wood and wall. Sometimes it wouldn’t all fit, and bits of egg would scatter on the floor, or stick to the painted wall. I would frantically scrape it off and poke it back, pick up the squares of bread and force them behind the cupboard with the dust and cobwebs and dead spiders, as far as I could.

When we were sitting at that dining table one evening, a movement on the wall near the cupboard caught my eye. It was a big, black cockroach, the second most revolting thing in the world after eggs, and it was heading towards the space behind the cupboard. My mother saw it and put down her knife and fork.

“Howard, there’s a huge cockroach on the wall.”

She wrinkled her nose and turned down the corners of her mouth.

“Good Lord, what a beast. I’ll get him.”

And in typical Dad fashion, he got a rolled up newspaper and proceeded to clobber the doomed creature with disproportionate violence.

“Lily, there seems to be something behind this cupboard,” he said.

I sat calmly eating my dinner of boiled vegetables and tinned ham, trying to ignore the inevitable.

Dad heaved the cupboard away from the wall enough to reveal a collection of little squares of sandwiches, the freshest at the top of course, with the layers becoming progressively greener, blacker and less distinguishable as sandwiches the further down the pile. The now thoroughly dead cockroach had obviously grown fat on my generous donations.

I tried, briefly, to lie my way out of the situation by saying I knew nothing about the decaying sandwiches, but my parents ignored me. They didn’t become as angry as I had feared, and in fact, they eased up with the eggs, whether poached, boiled, scrambled, fried or sandwiched, with or without tomato sauce, salt, or anything else.

I can tolerate eating eggs now, but occasionally the smell of hard boiled yolk and egg white takes me back to those breakfasts. My spoon pauses in the air, my stomach lurches, and I quietly put the sulphurous memory back on the plate.

The Orange

I looked down at the vast expanse of water, so deep and limitless it seemed like a gigantic shape-shifting beast, surging, cresting, foaming, throwing out spray and flying fish at whim. It merely tolerated our flimsy boat to glide through its surface layers.

Out of a porthole a pair of hands appeared with an orange. They began to peel it. Curly strips of skin fell away into the water, then, when it was fully naked, the mysterious hands withdrew, taking the tempting bright fruit with them.

My mother managed to get one for me, and I sat on the deck with my parents and peeled away curls of dimpled skin like the anonymous hands from the porthold had done. The juice dribbled down my chin, smeared over my cheeks, down my forearms. My tortured stomach gurgled and protested.

Some time later I was back in our cabin, in my bunk bed, turned to the wall. The orange had stayed down for about half an hour. This was the story with all food since the first three days on the ship after leaving Singapore; we were heading for Melbourne. The orange had been a delicious interlude, a folly, a desperate attempt to be well in a flurry of seasickness.

It was sometime after this, when my parents were in the cabin with me, I heard my father say to my mother that I was ‘putting it on’, that I wasn’t really sick, and could stop it if I wanted to. He must have thought I was asleep. Or maybe he didn’t care. I thought about this, and wondered how I could stop vomiting, and how good it would be to be able to do that. However much I tried, the nausea brought me down, again and again. If only the ship would stop moving, I would be able to stop feeling sick.

I spent most of the two week journey in that cabin. We stopped briefly in Perth, and on the way out, the ship encountered gale force winds.

“A creaking ship is a safe ship,” my father said.

And the Patris creaked and groaned and moaned, a wounded animal battered by an ocean in fury. Water beat against the porthole and leaked into the cabin, bringing strong smells of salt and things unknown.

My parents went to a ball one night, my mother resplendent in a halter-neck dress of black and silver that caught the light in hundreds of reflective threads. My father wore a white dinner jacket which accentuated his smooth olive skin. The photo of them taken as they were greeted at the entrance to the ballroom showed my mother beaming, her lips coloured red, a handkerchief tucked neatly into her watchband, and incongruous navy and white plastic sandals peeping out from under her floor-length glamorous gown. The man with whom she was shaking hands was already focused on the next guest.

Once one of the Greek stewards came into our cabin to say hello, and he pinched my cheek as I lay in bed, trying to smile, the covers pulled up to my chin.

There must have been brief interludes when I was not nauseous, as I remember beginning to write a story about Mickey Mouse in an exercise book. My father thought I was writing about our trip, and his face fell when I showed it to him.

I was afraid of the toilets, because there was a time limit to the door. It allowed you fifteen minutes, then it would open automatically. I was terrified that I would lose track of the time and be revealed, stuck to the seat, unable to move, and unable to close the door again.

When we arrived in Melbourne, we travelled straight up to Sydney, and stayed in a caravan park until my parents decided what to do. I soon adjusted to no longer vomiting at the sight of food, and no longer feeling as if the waves were inside my stomach.

My hair, which was past shoulder length, was a bird’s nest of knots, or rather, one enormous knot, at the back of my head. My mother helped me tease it out, but I don’t remember how long that took.

Twins

They can take out a diseased womb, but what about the heart? My heart is sore and aching, but there’s nothing the doctors can do about it, is there?

Can the psychologist cure me? Or the psychiatrist? What can they tell me, what stories can they weave, what thoughts and feelings can they help me separate and understand?

I sigh.

The specialist said to me yesterday that the tumour on my ovary was so large, the removal of it was like delivering twins. I have never delivered twins, not even a single child. That one you see, that girl standing there by the mirror, looking at the flowers in the vase, is the child that came to me from someone else. Another woman gave her to me. I have not seen that woman, and never will.

I do not know what thoughts and feelings she had in her heart when she gave birth to this child, then gave her away. My husband says that she was a nice young woman, but unmarried. He had that look on his face. He can be a prudish man.

That was seven years ago. I wonder where she is now, and what she is doing. I wonder where I would be now, if she had not been pregnant, and needing to make arrangements. There were other babies. We would have chosen one of them, already born, waiting for someone to pick them. Like pets in a pet shop. How much is that baby in the window, the one with the curly top hair?

My mother blamed my husband for our childlessness. She blamed him for everything, through gritted teeth. I do not blame him for everything, and he was not the cause of our inability to conceive.

Not the sole cause.

My twinning ovarian cyst and my womb had to go. The doctor said that because the cyst was so large, he removed the womb and the other ovary as well. I was past childbearing, and there was risk of other disease if he left them there. My heart beats, my heart pauses. The womb contracts and waits. It’s done with waiting. The ovaries, too, are done. No more eggs to farm, only to go to waste. Where do they go, all those unused ova? Is there some mysterious pocket in the pelvis that holds them all? Where do the sperm go, all those millions, destined never to meet their partners in life?

The surgeon is a nice man, smiling, putting his hand on mine, telling me not to worry, everything would be fine. When it was all over, he came in and asked me about the pain, the wound, the urination. He talked to my husband, he smiled at my daughter.

My daughter. She went to stay with people I hardly know. H said he couldn’t look after her on his own while I was in hospital. She seems all right, but I don’t think she really knows what this is all about. She’s too young. She seems to like the people she’s with, but there’s that look in her eyes I see too often. She wanders about this room, and touches the flowers, and sits on my bed, and gives me a cuddle, but I don’t know what she’s feeling.

H is oblivious to what she’s feeling. He loves her and cares for her, but she’s not quite there for him. Not as a real person. I think he looks upon her as something he ordered from the shop, and now she’s here, he’s not quite sure what he’s supposed to do. He’s a kind man, but there’s a lot that was taken away.

I wonder if his mother realised. They were so alike. Both as difficult as drudgery.

My husband has come back in.

“How are you dear?”

“I’m feeling more myself.”

“When are you coming home, Mummy?”

“In a few more days, darling. I’ve got to get better. Got to be able to walk.” I smile at her, this dark-haired girl.

She doesn’t ask many questions. I see her looking at me, or her father, but she doesn’t say anything.

[caption id="attachment_222" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="From my father\'s RAF log book, 1940"][/caption]

Finding my father's diary 1

It was winter.

We had been labouring for weeks to make an impression, a good one, on the house. Initially, my father had wanted to sell it. But the prices quoted by real estate agents were low, at least, low enough to surprise us. They must have surprised my father too, for he changed his mind, and decided instead to rent it.

But it wasn’t really the money that changed his mind. He didn’t want to make such a final decision. It would have signalled to himself and to us that he was moving permanently to the nursing home, rather than just paying a visit while he regained the use of his legs.

He even looked out for a housekeeper, someone who could have lived there, at least part of the week, and cooked and cleaned for him. I found an advertisement, and passed it to him, but the woman was reluctant to work just for one person. She wanted a large family to care for, with lots of hungry people who would appreciate her cooking.

There were people who came to clean, as they had done before my mother died, and nurses to help him shower, and to look in to make sure he was all right. There was a woman who organised for him to join others on bus trips, and who kept him in touch with the world. But he was lonely. And the house was too big, and reverting to chaos.

I lived too far away, and could not have lived with him. I hadn’t seen him for eight years before my mother died and we were suddenly, searingly, thrown back together.

And then he had a particularly bad fall, and fractured a vertebra in his lumbar spine. When we got the call, it was from a passerby, a woman who had seen him fall, or at least had seen him lying on the ground next to the rubbish bin that he had just put out. She had helped him back into the house, and had been trying to get hold of me by phone. I had been trying to get hold of him, as we had visited him the day before, and I was worried by his condition, and his loneliness.

I never found out who she was, she didn’t leave any details.

My father had, as well as a broken bone, a swelling as big as an egg on the back of his head. He couldn’t walk. He said, It’s up to you now. It was almost as if he felt relieved that it had happened, because it meant he didn’t have to make a decision. He had never liked making decisions.

We called the ambulance, and they thought, I’m sure, that we had abused him. They treated us with suspicion. I did not look, after all, like the daughter of an eighty-two year old man. The stocky paramedic was brusque with my father, did not speak to me.

Why is the furniture arranged like this? she asked.

Dad can hold onto it, and the walls, as he walks, I said, when I should have let him answer.

Looks pretty dangerous to me, she said, not looking at me. Should have clear pathways for you to walk. No wonder you fall over. Lots to bump into.

But it soon became clear that he had in fact had an accident, and that we had not bashed him around. The two officers took him by each arm and attempted to help him to the ambulance.

His body did not trust their support, even though they were both very strong and obviously capable. He tried to hold onto the brick wall of the house. They told him to let go, and rely on their arms. He couldn’t, I could see that. He believed he would fall. His legs were jelly underneath him, gave him no confidence.

When we got into the car to follow the ambulance, I put on my sunglasses, and said to Craig, It’s very hard to watch your father be carried away like that, so helpless.


Once my father knew he had to go into the nursing home, he instructed me to clear the house, get it ready. There were two lifetimes’ worth of belongings. The only things that had been touched since my mother’s death were her clothes, but only those in one of the large wardrobes in their bedroom. It was something for me to do while we waited for her funeral, and a way, I thought, hoped, to help my father.

The house had four bedrooms, more or less, plus a tiny room that was full of odd things. There was a bread slicer, a desk my father had made, a steam clothes press, suitcases, papers, and a plastic shelving unit on wheels that had onions and oranges in it. The onions were going bad, and the cockroaches had been at them, as well as everything else in the room. The curtains had holes in them and brown stains where they had been crawling all over them, and the desk was full of cockroach droppings and stained all over the plywood backing by them. We had to throw it out it was so ruined.

The suitcases had cockroaches, dead and alive, within them. The bread slicer had ants crawling on and around it, attracted to the particles of food.

I can’t remember now where exactly I found the diary. It may well have on the plastic shelving, or in one of the drawers of the desk. It was an old one, from 1988, and from the Medical Defense Union. It also had cockroach stains on its cover.

That year was the last year of my medical studies. By that stage, everyone seemed exhausted. At least, everyone I spoke with; maybe I was projecting my own feelings upon others. But the relentless studying, tutorials, ward rounds, exams, finally had an end in sight. It was the worst year, the year when I failed three subjects, seemed in constant conflict with my parents, and was told a secret that changed everything.

The diary was the only one of my father’s that I discovered in all of the house. I don’t know if he threw out all of his other diaries, or didn’t bother with them except on occasional years. It was a pocket slimline one, with a week to a page. It had a black cover and gold on the edge of the pages. There was a fabric bookmark attached to the top of the spine.

If you open someone else’s diary, you must be prepared for whatever you read. And you must realise that you are not committing an honorable act. Diaries are best left alone, at least until the owner has gone. I wonder if even then it is wise.

I don’t know what I expected. I’m not sure if I thought about what the consequences might be, to read this personal record. When I flicked through it, there didn’t seem much written in the spaces, so maybe it seemed innocuous. I wanted, I suppose, to find out the secrets that would help me understand my father, and my mother.

There were entries in some days, not others, and he did not write very much.

Bushfire family

In December 2006, we drove down to Victoria, primarily to visit family, both C's and mine. Many members of my birthfamily live in northeast Victoria, a land of wine and fine cheeses, snow-topped mountains in winter, magnificent trees, golden and rust shaded leaves in autumn.

But we were forced to stay with our friends in Canberra longer than we had intended. There were fires ringing the little town that housed my precious birthmother, stepdad, brother, sister-in-law, nieces and nephew, grandmother, aunt. I rang everyday to check with them whether or not we should drive in; we didn't want to be nuisances, tourists caught in the force of nature needing rescue.

We did go in, my family assuring me that it wasn't as bad as what was reported. There were fires, we saw them at night, red edging the mountaintops. The morning we left, the smoke was almost impenetrable, and the sun was struggling.

Before that, in January 2003, my birthmother described driving home from work as like 'entering the jaws of the dragon', the bushfires producing heat and smoke of fearsome proportions.

My adoptive father was being consumed by lymphoma, and would die on the 13th of that month. My birthfamily were threatened by consumption of a different kind, but came out of the jaws of the bushfire, coughing but whole.

Embroidery

The trailer was weighed down with rubbish. It seemed that my father had kept everything that was worthless and thrown away what was valuable.

My parents had single beds made of wood. When we had stripped them and removed the mattresses, we discovered the plywood of the base was stained with brown streaks. The drawers underneath were full of black pellets, and stray cockroach legs and wings.

We stood and stared at the beds. Then we got hammers and broke them up into pieces, and put them in the trailer.

A desk was the same, so covered in cockroach excreta we took it out in one piece and slid in on with the broken wood of the beds. It was a desk made by my father twenty years before, solid and plain and practical.

The dressing table in the main bedroom had also been made by my father. It had three drawers and a mirror, and was covered with grey and white patterned laminate that was lifting up at the edges. It was showing its age and we couldn’t see anyone wanting it, not even a charity, so we took out the drawers and lifted off the mirror and put it on the trailer.

As we went through each piece of my parents’ belongings, I was reminded of how much my father made with his own hands. There were rugs he had woven, thick with rich colours. There was a painting, a copy of a Rubens; there were trousers and shirts he’d sewed himself; there was a manuscript of a novel he had written years ago which I still haven’t read. He used to fix the car himself, when he was younger, and anything that broke around the house. He tried knitting, and cooked most meals. Before he went into hospital, he insisted on getting up a ladder to fix a curtain, with me hovering nervously behind him.

But with age and infirmity and my mother’s illness, he was not able to keep up with a sagging house. The kitchen was tired and grotty and we had to make decisions about its various components. The dishwasher, when opened, revealed yet more cockroaches, live ones, running around inside it. It had not been used by my parents at all, in the ten years they’d lived there. There was water in the sump, though, but we decided not to investigate any further, just manoeuvre it out to the trailer, where all the other detritus was waiting for the final journey.

My father was cross with me when he found out.

“A perfectly good dishwasher. You could have sold it at least.”

“It was full of cockroaches, Dad.”

“Oh, they never worried me. I’d just spray the inside with Baygon, then close it up again. That took care of them.”

He smiled triumphantly.

“Health hazard, Dad. And what about the dead bodies inside? Did you clean them out? That wouldn’t have been a nice job.”

“No, no. Didn’t worry about that. It was a perfectly good dishwasher.”

Cockroach soup.

We cleaned on.

It wasn’t only the smell of an ill-ventilated house with slowly decaying food in the refrigerator, and the cockroaches, but there was naphthalene everywhere, and mouldy onions and oranges in the sewing room. At least the mothballs meant that clothes were perfect, and all Mum’s linens were well-preserved. There were lots of them: we found 50 or more pillowcases, including 20 still in their packaging. There were 150 or so towels, dozens of sheets, cascades of teatowels.

Then there were several boxes of laxatives, and, sensibly, dozens of packets of toilet rolls. The cupboards in all of the rooms were overflowing with stuff. There must have been two dozen bottles of dishwashing liquid. Boxes of tinned peaches. Three microwaves, but only one worked.

When we tried out the juicer while my father was still living at home, it had something wrong with it, but he said that was fine, he had another one.

In the shed were two or three mowers, plus a ride-on.

My mother had vases of plastic flowers dotted around the house. I remembered them from long ago, and how she loved them because they were colourful and never died. But when I took off the plastic bags that protected them from dust, they fell apart in my hands. All the petals dropped, leaving only the faded green plastic stems.

Amongst the sad rubbish, there were treasures. Two cedarwood boxes held layers of manchester and photos, blankets and letters, heavy English coats and embroidered cushion covers and old diaries.

The most surprising letter lay out in the open, on the bed in the back room. My parents had built an extension onto the simple lowset house, adding two more bedrooms and a bathroom. One of these bedrooms was large, with a sliding door to the garden. The single bed had a handmade cotton bag sitting on the pillow. It was neatly embroidered in a geometric design, with a crocheted edge, and had the initials L.J.R. on the inside flap (with the J around the wrong way). Inside it were two letters. One was a newsy letter between friends, the other a letter of admonishment from a mother to a son.

The son was my father.

The date stamp on the envelope was 2 July 1956, Devon, England. My paternal adoptive grandmother wrote that she had been told of her son’s behaviour on his motorboat by one of his guests. He said he found her son charming at first (I can’t read all the words, but the general tone is unmistakable) but then realised he was working his wife (my mother) like a navvy, and being a general bully. His sister-in-law Molly and niece Patricia were on the boat, and they did not wish to talk further about what had happened, it was so unpleasant.

I found out later from Patricia that my father had forbidden her from going to a ball being held on a navy ship, even though her own mother had given her permission. She was 16 at the time. She said, with a laugh, that her father and my father were very Victorian in their attitudes towards women and sex, and a few other things as well. But she remembered her mother being seasick, my mother being sweet, and my father being domineering.

But when I first found this letter, it was a revelation. There were to be several of those during this fiery cleanout of the house. My father, who had always set himself up as the arbiter of good behaviour, of wisdom and righteousness, was independently verified as a bully. I had believed during most of my childhood and early youth that I was the one who behaved badly, who upset my father and was wrong. As I grew older I realised that there was something wrong with him too. But I had no one to talk to about his behaviour, no one to tell me ‘yes, I knew him, and I can tell you what he did back then’.

People who met my father and knew him on a superficial level always commented on how charming he was, how funny, what a nice old man. As my mother used to say, they didn’t have to live with him. When I read the words of my paternal grandmother – ‘I asked how Lilian was, he [the guest on my father’s boat] heard she had been very ill and was not surprised as she was a slave in all weathers’ – I knew the real story had been hidden from me. In that house, scattered around, lay more secrets waiting for me to stumble upon them.

The embroidered bag had been made by my mother when she was a girl, and the intials were those of her mother, Lilian Jane R. That letter lying snug in its little bag seemed to have been put there especially for me to find.

On a cloudy day, you can see everything

I sat in the living room, in the chair I always sat in. My father did the same. His chair had an anti-macassar on the back of it, a footstool in front, and a table beside, toppling with papers and a pair of spectacles and a spectacle case. He was sitting in his chair, or, really, lying in it, with his right hand on his temple, and he was asleep.

My mother was in the kitchen, cleaning up after lunch. I couldn’t see her from where I sat, but I could hear cupboards closing and drawers being opened, the clink of cutlery, and swooshing of water in the sink.

I had a magazine in my hands, and was reading an article about a film star who had just had cosmetic surgery to her eyelids, and it had gone wrong, so that her eyes looked wide open, as if she had been shocked and couldn’t get over it. Her gaze was frozen.

My mother was very quiet in the kitchen, and I listened for any sounds. I kept my eyes on the pages, but I wasn’t reading any of the words anymore.

I heard what I thought was a sigh, then saw my mother’s apron in my peripheral vision. I looked up and saw her standing by my father’s chair, looking at him. She had a teatowel in her hand.

My father was still asleep in his chair. His head had fallen a little, but his hand was still on his temple, propping up his head. His hair had turned grey, what was left of it, and he combed it back over his head. Not across his skull, in that desperate way of some wispy-haired men, but just straight over the top towards the back, the way it grew when there was more of it.

He was still handsome, my father. My mother was pretty when she smiled, and kept her hair blonded and her lips red. But she still liked to wear crimplene and shapeless blouses and skirts. They did not flatter her. She used to be very thin when she was a young woman, with crystal clear skin and a sweet smile. Her clothes draped smartly from her shoulders. Her mother was the same, looking fabulous in the few sepia photos we still had of her. Head back, hat at a jaunty slant over her eyes, fox fur stole clasped around her shoulders, she knew she had good looks and smiled at the world.

My mother married my father just as the war started in 1939. I didn’t know what my father was like then. I did know he was in the air force, and he was darkly handsome, if somewhat inclined to put on weight. I remembered, when he was in his sixties, women commenting on his good looks, and my mother looking at them with a grim smile. Or a short laugh that died before it began.

I remembered my father throwing out an empty chocolate box, the one with the roses on it, and the red ribbon around the corner. My mother had kept that, and stored her buttons in it. It had been a gift from her mother. I had a memory of my father grabbing it from a plastic bag he was holding while at the local rubbish dump and throwing this box high into the air, so it would fall in amongst the pile of refuse that stretched out before us.

My mother watched him too. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. When he came back to the car, all the bags of rubbish gone, she said to him, Why did you throw that box away? My mother gave me that. Why did you throw it away? You didn’t ask me if you could.

He shrugged and said it was only a box, we didn’t have enough room to keep such things.

My mother turned her head away and looked out of the window, not speaking during the trip back to the caravan park.

As she got out of the car, she said to no one in particular, There’s nothing left, nothing at all. Then she slammed the door.

I tried not to remember these things most of the time, but memories came whether I wanted them to or not.

My mother stood there, next to my father in his chair, as he slumbered. She was wearing an apron, a frilly one she had made herself. She sewed most of her own clothes, and mine, and some of my father’s, before he took to making them himself. She didn’t cook much, if at all, because my father did that.

I wondered what meals would have been like if my mother had cooked instead. I wondered if it had always been this way, my father doing these things that men didn’t usually do, not then. Our meals tended to be bland, as my father’s stomach would rebel at the slightest provocation. Spices, garlic and onion were not on our menu. Meat consisted of tinned ham, chicken on Sundays with cold leftovers during the week, mince and lucheon meats in sandwiches. Vegetables came in a packet, frozen, from the supermarket. Mushrooms were a treat, and were fried in butter. I didn’t know peas came in a pod for a long time, and had not heard of such creatures as zucchinis or eggplants.

My mother stood by my father’s chair, a teatowel in her hand. I watched her. I still held the magazine with its salacious stories in my hands, but my eyes were on my mother. There was something going on in her face, but I didn’t know what it was. I could only see that she was about to say something important, something that had possibly been bothering her for some time. I waited.

My father didn’t wait, he was asleep. He seemed to sleep a lot then. But he went to bed very early, about half past eight or nine o’clock, and then would spend the night tossing and turning in his single bed, making it creak and groan like a ship. Maybe if he’d been on a boat he would have slept much better. He loved the sea and ships and sailing. It was the best time of his life when he had a boat and could go out in it. But that was a long time ago.

I watched my mother’s face. I tried to think what she was thinking. Her mouth was moving, but she was not saying anything. I wondered if she missed her family, her mother. I wondered if she wanted to be home, where she had been born. Where we lived was never home to her, and she said this often. Home was in England, in Gloucestershire. Home was the bluebells in the forest. Home was the daffodils. Home was the roses in her mother’s garden. Home was anywhere in that other country, and nowhere where we were.

I thought of this as I watched her. I wondered if my father missed these things, missed his boat, missed that other life he had, so long ago. He talked of them occasionally, but he didn’t say he missed them. The boat he had was not a dinghy to go out fishing in, but a large motorboat in which he used to cross the English Channel. He wrote stories about it, inventing dangerous situations for his heroes to negotiate and escape from, with raging seas and violent storms.

I was watching my mother and my father, my eyes switching from one to the other, when my mother raised her teatowel and began swiping my father’s head with it. She raised it once, twice, three times, and he woke up on the second swipe, suddenly, with a jolt.

What are you doing? What the hell are you doing? he said.

He scrambled a little, putting his feet on the carpet and his arms on the chair, as he swung around to face my mother.

She swiped him with the teatowel twice more before stopping, then stood with it and looked at him.

I was still in my chair, watching them, the magazine forgotten in my hands.

My mother straightened a little, put her head back, but she said nothing. My father had to swivel around in his chair and close one eye to focus on her shape, standing there, looking at him.

He said, again, What are you doing?

But his voice was quiet.