Mum again

The day before my mother’s funeral in early December 2009, I bought a new pair of socks. I am not quite sure why I did this, except that it seemed wise to look my best, and these socks were snappy. I am wearing them now. They have broad horizontal black and purple stripes, which seemed somehow appropriate, with the added touch of bright fuchsia heels and toes, which, of course, are invisible when wearing shoes, but a rather liminal hint towards the kind of cheerfulness that I am sure Mum would have bravely urged upon her grieving sons, but without necessarily displaying it. The socks are wearing out, alas, for the heels and toes are fraying, and I am no darner—Mum was. This gives me a little pang for three reasons, because (a) I suppose it is yet another indication of the widening distance in time that continues to open up between us and her; (b) I still miss her very much indeed, and (c) I am ashamed to say that when Mum darned my socks, a labor of love that held, I am sure, absolutely no appeal to her—and, to be fair, I never once requested the intervention—I was rather inclined not to wear the sock in question quite so much as before. Still, I have kept one such pair, which I never wear but cannot now bring myself to discard. How strangely these little emotional tics reveal themselves post hoc, and how I wish I had said, you know, do please, please save yourself the bother. This, I am sure, would have vexed her. Helen was a firm believer in mending. No garment, implement, or appliance was thrown out if it could be repaired, and the extension of the usefulness of anything at all Mum regarded as a minor victory in the dogged battle for domestic economy, and a point therefore of mostly secret satisfaction. The dishwasher, however, defeated her. At some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s the dishwasher gave up the ghost. She was, in any case, disinclined to use it, preferring instead a scarifying procedure involving boiling water from an ageing electric kettle, a soap-saver, a rather grimy dish-mop, and an ancient chipped enamel grey mixing bowl (to save water, because the kitchen sink was larger than she felt necessary for doing the washing up). Detergent was anathema; she used just soap and scalding water. Nothing too terrible seems to have happened as a result. The oily grey lukewarm washing-up water afterwards went onto the garden. For larger gatherings she did permit herself the luxury of the dishwasher, but when it died she went back to the old method and she never bothered to go through the upheaval of replacing it. I am sure she thought that would be an unnecessary extravagance. Most other labor-saving devices were regarded with similar skepticism. However, there was one exception. After Dad died, and after much consideration, Mum spied at one of the motor shows in the Royal Exhibition Building a gleaming white Citroën C4 (or a model very similar) rotating on a podium. Somewhat unexpectedly she liked the look of it, and, with Simon’s enthusiastic encouragement, at length decided to buy one. It took many months of patient waiting before this new-model vehicle was eventually delivered, and she loved it until the very end of her life. I am sure those distinctive chevrons on the bonnet reminded her of Dad in his heyday, for he was for decades a committed Citroën-ista. Through those last ten years Nick, the nice young man at her local Citroën dealership—Cars of France—became something of a rock and a stay, and Mum trusted him completely with every aspect of the maintenance of her buoyant little car, which, like the prototype, was snowy white. In many respects, I think, she probably trusted his advice rather more willingly than she ever sought it from us, her younger sons, not for any particular reason other than that her attitude towards us as adults was never entirely untethered from her overriding concern for the slightly vulnerable child. I am now in a cold sweat wondering, hoping, that one of the others got in touch with the dependable Nick of Cars of France after Mum died. I expect he would have appreciated the gesture.

Who we are, part 1 (Mum)

At last I am able to dilate upon my remote ancestry, thanks to the National Geographic Society’s Geno 2.0 project, which I described earlier. The results of their analysis of my mitochondrial DNA and my Y-chromosome arrived when I was in London a few weeks ago, and I have been gradually absorbing the implications ever since, most of which are simply awe-inspiring. On the whole I am thankful that my mother never lived to be vexed by the idea that it is thanks to her, and her distant relations, that my brothers and I are 2.7% Neanderthal, although my beloved Lyolik says with firmness that he reckons that this figure is far too low. Whichever way you look at it, however, there can be no doubt that approximately 60,000 years ago one or quite possibly more of my mother’s female ancestors turned the head of Hairy Slobodan of the Caucasus, some no doubt fetching Neanderthal, and that this was far more than a brief dalliance; evidently it involved a sustained period of gleefully horizontal folk-dancing in the flickering light of a fire, perhaps in a cave or escarpment, or in the lea of some convenient, mossy bank (for privacy). Intriguing.

Let us go back to the beginning, however. The common direct maternal ancestor to all people living today was born in East Africa around 180,000 years ago. Obviously she was not the only female hominid alive at that remote time, but hers is the only line of posterity that has survived into current generations. This woman represents the deepest root of the human family tree. She gave rise to two descendant lineages known as L0 and L1’2’3’4’5’6, each of which is characterized by a different set of genetic mutations carried by their respective members. Current genetic data indicate that indigenous people belonging to these groups are found exclusively in Africa. This means that, because all humans have in a common this female ancestor, and because Africans are the oldest groups on the planet, we know our species—each and every one of us, the entire human family—originated there. The more historically-minded might choose to think of this as a distant but satisfactory premonition of gins-and-tonic on the verandahs of suburban Nairobi or the polo fields of Happy Valley, but in truth we are looking at hairy hominids busying themselves over tens of thousands of years with the task of basic survival, and the quest for controllable flame—fire! the earliest glimmer of the pre-dawn of human civilization—at around the same vital moment as the earliest discovery, or evolution, or invention of language itself, those guttural love cries with which in due course Mum’s people evidently beguiled certain Neanderthals of the Caucasus.

L3

Eventually, by a process of gradual genetic mutation, L1’2’3’4’5’6 gave rise to L3 in East Africa. While L3 individuals are found all over Africa, L3 is important because of its movements north. Our L3 maternal ancestors were the first party of Homo sapiens to leave Africa, and therefore represent the deepest branches of the tree found outside that continent. Thenceforth, members of this group went in different directions. Many stayed on in Africa, dispersing to the west and south. Some L3 lineages are predominant in many Bantu-speaking groups who originated in west-central Africa, later scattering throughout the continent and spreading this L3 lineage from Mali to South Africa. Today, L3 is also found in many African-Americans. Other L3 individuals, however, our ancestors, kept moving northward, eventually leaving the African continent completely. These people gave rise to two important haplogroups that went on to populate the rest of the world.

It is likely that a fluctuation in climate may have prompted our ancestors’ departure from Africa. The African Ice Age was characterized by drought rather than by cold. Around 60 to 50,000 years ago the ice sheets of northern Europe began to melt, introducing a period of warmer temperatures and moister climate in Africa. Parts of the inhospitable Sahara briefly became habitable. As the drought-ridden desert changed to savanna, the animals our ancestors hunted expanded their range and began moving through the newly emerging green corridor of grasslands. Our nomadic ancestors followed the good weather and plentiful game northward across this Saharan avenue, although the exact route they followed remains to be determined. Whatever the cause of the exodus, it is also clear that when it occurred (a) there were barely 2,000 individuals of the species Homo sapiens left alive, so we very nearly became extinct before the long human migrations even began. We survived only by the skin of our teeth; our civilization might never have developed at all. (b) Those 2,000 shivering, frightened, increasingly desperate specimens were evidently huddled in and around an area of Ethiopia known as the Asaf Depression. And that was the point of departure for many tiny groups of the survivors, of whom a handful actually stayed put.

N

Our next crucial maternal ancestor is the woman whose descendants formed haplogroup N. Haplogroup N comprises one of two groups that were created by the descendants of L3. One of these two groups of individuals moved north rather than east and left the African continent across the Sinai Peninsula, in what is now Egypt. Also faced with the harsh desert conditions of the Sahara, these people apparently followed the Nile basin, which yielded a reliable supply of food and water in spite of the surrounding desert and its frequent sandstorms. Descendants of these migrants eventually formed haplogroup N. Early members of this group lived in the eastern Mediterranean region and western Asia, where they apparently co-existed for a time with other hominids such as Neanderthals. Excavations in the Kebara Cave (Mount Carmel) in Israel have unearthed Neanderthal skeletons as recent as 60,000 years old, indicating that there was both ample geographical and chronological overlap between us and them. This accounts for the presence of Neanderthal DNA in those of us who live outside Africa—between 1% and 4% of the whole of our DNA is Neanderthal.

Be that as it may, after several thousand years in the Near East, members of our group began moving into unexplored neighboring territories, following large herds of migrating game across vast plains. These groups broke into several directions and made their way into territories surrounding the Near East. Today, haplogroup N individuals who headed west are prevalent in Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean. They are found farther east in parts of Central Asia and the Indus Valley of Pakistan and India. And members of our haplogroup who headed north out of the Levant across the Caucasus Mountains have remained in southeastern Europe and the Balkans. Importantly, descendants of these people eventually went on to populate the rest of Europe, and today comprise the most frequent mitochondrial lineages found there.

R

After several thousand years in the Near East, individuals belonging to a new group called haplogroup R began to move out and explore the surrounding areas. Some moved south, migrating back into northern Africa. Others went west across Anatolia (roughly corresponding with modern Turkey) and north across the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia and southern Russia. Still others headed east into the Middle East, and on to Central Asia. All of these individuals had one thing in common: they shared a female ancestor from the N clan, a recent descendant of the migration out of Africa.

The story of haplogroup R is complicated, however, because these individuals can be found almost everywhere, and because their origin is quite ancient. In fact, the ancestor of haplogroup R lived relatively soon after humans moved out of Africa during the second wave, and her descendants undertook many of the same migrations as her own group, N. Because the two groups lived side by side for thousands of years, it is likely that the migrations radiating out from the Near East comprised individuals from both of these groups. They simply moved together, bringing their N and R lineages to the same places around the same times. The tapestry of genetic lines became quickly entangled, and geneticists are currently working to unravel the different stories of haplogroups N and R, since they are found in many of the same far-flung regions.

U

Descending from the R group, a woman gave rise to people who now constitute haplogroup U. Because of the great genetic diversity found in haplogroup U, it is likely that this woman lived around 47,000 years ago. Let us call her Granny Ugh! Her descendants gave rise to several different subgroups, some of which exhibit very specific geographic homelands. The very old age of these subgroups has led to a wide distribution; today they harbor numerous particular European, northern African, and Indian components, and are to be found in Arabia, the northern Caucasus Mountains, and throughout the Middle and Near East.

One interesting subgroup is U6, which branched off from haplogroup R while still in the Middle East, moved southward, and today is found in parts of northern Africa. Today, U6 individuals are found in around 10% of people living in North Africa. However, other members of the larger haplogroup U descend from a group that moved northward out of the Near East. These women crossed the rugged Caucasus Mountains in southern Russia, and moved on to the steppes of the Black Sea. These individuals represent movements from the Black Sea steppes west into regions that comprise the present-day Baltic States and western Eurasia. This grassland then served as the springboard for subsequent movements north and west.

Today, this line is part of populations in Europe, West Asia (including Arabia), North Africa, India, and the North Caucasus Mountains. In Europe, this lineage averages 7% of the population. In Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc.) it is between 9% and 16% of the population. In England, it is about 12% of the population. Toward the Mediterranean, this line is between 10% and 12% of the population in Croatia and Greece.

U5

The most recent common ancestor for all of us U5 individuals broke off from the rest of the group and headed north into Scandinavia. Even though U5 is descended from an ancestor in haplogroup U, it is also exceedingly ancient, and thought to be around 30,000 years old.

U5 is quite restricted in its variation to Scandinavia, and particularly to Finland. This is probably the result of the significant geographical, linguistic, and cultural isolation of the Finnish populations, which restricted geographic distribution of this subgroup and kept it genetically isolated. The Saami, reindeer hunters who follow the herds from Siberia to Scandinavia each season, have the U5 lineage at a very high frequency of around 50%, indicating that it may have been introduced during their movements into these northern territories.

The U5 lineage is found outside Scandinavia, though at much lower frequencies and at lower genetic diversity. Interestingly, the U5 lineage found in the Saami has also been found in some North African Berber populations in Morocco, Senegal, and Algeria. Finding similar genetic lineages in populations living thousands of miles apart is certainly unexpected, and is likely the result of re-expansions that occurred after the last glacial maximum around 15,000 years ago. Humans who had been confined to narrow patches in southern Europe began to move outward again, re-colonizing ancient territories and bringing new genetic lineages with them.

In addition to being present in some parts of North Africa, U5 individuals also live sporadically in the Near East at 2%—about one-fifth as frequent as in parts of Europe—and are completely absent from Arabia. Their distribution in the Near East is largely confined to surrounding populations, such as Turks, Kurds, Armenians, and Egyptians. Because these individuals contain lineages that first evolved in Europe, their presence in the Near East is the result of a back-migration of people who left northern Europe and headed south, as though retracing the migratory paths of their own ancestors.

U5B

Today, this line is present most often in Finland (15%) and Latvia (12%). It is between 6% and 9% of maternal lineages in Luxembourg, Northern Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia. It is widespread in western Eurasia, particularly to the north. This spread began with the expansion of haplogroup U5B-bearing populations out of West Asia during the Upper Paleolithic, prior to 12,000 years ago, and like other branches of U it reached Europe during the Paleolithic. Despite later waves of migrants from other lineages, it remains common there.

Insomma, we can now conclude (not very surprisingly) that Mum’s distant relations down to approximately 10,000 years ago were only 45% Northern European, and that that component of our ancestry is found at the highest frequency in Britain, Denmark, Finland, Russia and Germany (oh!). While not limited to these groups, it is found at significantly lower frequencies throughout the rest of Europe. This component is probably the signal of the earliest hunter-gatherer inhabitants of Europe, who were the last to make the transition to agriculture as it moved in from the Middle East during the Neolithic period around 8,000 years ago—Hairy Grandmother Margaret on her wee Shetland pony, as Hamish rightly predicted, galloping headlong across the land bridge into the vastnesses of the Scottish highlands at almost the very earliest time that this was possible. Is it any wonder therefore that on my first visit to Edinburgh some years ago I had the strongest feeling that I had been there before?

On the other hand we of the line of U5B are also 37% Mediterranean, a component to be found at the highest frequencies in southern Europe and the Levant—people from Sardinia, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia. While not limited to these groups, it is found at lower frequencies throughout the rest of Europe, the Middle East, Central and South Asia. This component is also probably a sign of the Neolithic population expansion from the Middle East, beginning around 8,000 years ago, likely from the western part of the Fertile Crescent.

We are also 17% Southwest Asian. This component of our ancestry is found at highest frequencies in India and neighboring populations, including Tajikistan and Iran—and it is probably just as well that Mum never lived to learn this, although I am quite sure that she would have looked askance with her customary pursed-lip skepticism. Nevertheless this component is an undeniable fact of our mitochondrial DNA, and it is also found at significantly lower frequencies in Europe and North Africa. As with our Mediterranean component, it was most probably spread during the Neolithic expansion, perhaps from the eastern part of the Fertile Crescent. Individuals with heavy European influence in their ancestry will show traces of this because all Europeans have mixed with people from Southwest Asia over tens of thousands of years, something that was not lost on Grandfather Borthwick and his slightly crude allegation that there was, at least in the Borthwick line, a “touch of the tar-brush.” Putting it in a slightly more positive light, Mum carried a modicum of the culture of primitive near-eastern philosophy, mathematics, jurisprudence, and the root of writing itself, and no doubt this expressed itself in the skills she duly brought to The Times cryptic crossword puzzle, and to the bridge table. 

For all of this we must be grateful, and now to Dad and the Y-chromosome.

The Norway spruce

One of the reasons I fell in love with my house in the first place was the Norway spruce. It must be at least as old as the house, and is now more than twice the height. If the Forest Road (west) side of my house is comparatively horizontal in emphasis, the spruce hoists a delightful exclamation mark on the right. In so many respects they fit together perfectly. (This view is from the north.)

However, two arborists who know what they are talking about lately broke it to me that my tree is seriously ailing, and will eventually need to be cut down. There are certain things in the short- to middle-term, in other words over the course of the next few seasons, that can be done to improve the health of my fine old tree, but I am told none will alter the long-term prognosis. There is also the possibility, however remote, that should we experience another storm as severe as Hurricane Irene my tree could snap in two, and the potential consequences of that are unthinkable.

Mum loved trees, and I think I have inherited that rather endearing quality from her. Much of her life was devoted to protecting various trees at Metung from the ravages of relentless westerly gales, the poor soil (little more than a sand dune, really), the possums, and other enemies. In the circumstances she accomplished much. I can only think of one occasion when Mum accepted that one of her trees, or indeed any tree, really needed to be cut down. That was the enormous, rather squat cypress that stood directly in front of the house, entirely blocking the view of Bancroft Bay—though I am quite sure that was not the reason why it was cut down. I remember also how wistfully Mum regretted the loss of the wonderful old liquid amber that the new neighbors felled to make way for the house they built in 1979, right after flattening old one at 18 Denham Place. Now, barely eighteen months since I took possession of my very own, for the first time in my life I am faced with the unwelcome prospect of having to cut down a tree, and not just any old tree—a mighty presence, an old soldier, a stalwart veteran of a hundred storms, still standing ramrod straight but these days with a discernible stoop. It just isn’t fair.

Mosquito Point

Mum again:

It was a really tricky business for my mother to feed us at Metung. Meat was ordered from the butcher in Bairnsdale and came on the boat until later it came on the mail car. This was an ancient vehicle with an extra seat so that it took about 10 passengers. Passengers from Melbourne by train caught the bust to Lakes Entrance at Bairnsdale, got out at a house in Johnsonville which was also the local post office, waited there with the Metung mail bags, assorted parcels, etc., to be collected by Mr. Howlett in the mail car, driven across on the punt at Johnsonville, and eventually to Metung. By the time of WW2 we were living in Geelong and the journey for my mother must have been appalling—up at daybreak to catch a very early train from Geelong to Melbourne in time to get the Gippslander (changing from Spencer Street to Flinders Street with several kids and mountains of luggage through platforms absolutely packed with train travelers—petrol rationing put everyone onto public transport—what a good thing for the environment but ruinous to Mum’s nerves), the long slow trip to Bairnsdale, the bus, the mail car and finally Metung by about 5 p.m. if we were lucky, then unpacking, making beds, feeding us. We spent the entire summer holidays at Metung—10 weeks. Before we went to Geelong we probably went from Raeshaw for longer, I don’t remember. We had a chook pen and used to take hens down with us for the eggs, and Anne’s pony. Also, I’ve been told, in the very early years, a house cow. The block included that which is now the Weymouths and extended on the other side to what is now occupied by the motel. Later we bought milk from the Casements, whose cows kept coming in and eating such trees as Mum was able to keep alive (no town water, only tanks and none to spare for the garden except the occasional bucket of bath water). We didn’t have electricity connected until 1939 (I think that was the year). The oak tree had to have a wooden guard round it to protect it as the cows continually chomped it. Probably why it developed the root system which sustains that giant now. I think the Casements’ cows must have been more or less (rather more) free-range then, as the Casements lived over on Mosquito point. I can remember the Misses Casement rowing across in a heavy, narrow dinghy which seemed to sit low in the water, in all weathers to (a) milk the cows, and (b) deliver to milk. There was an Italian market gardener who used to come round in his motor boat selling vegetables. I can remember going down to the jetty with Mum and thinking how lovely he looked, dark hair, olive skin, the array of colourful vegetables in the trim wooden boat. I wonder what happened to him.

The Misses Casement—Ethel, Meanie, Maud, Dorrie, May, Savina, and Roberta—and their brother William were first cousins of the Anglo-Irishman Sir Roger Casement, who was tried and found guilty of high treason then hanged following the Easter Rising of 1916. The case was especially traumatic in its wider, imperial context because Sir Roger Casement had earlier distinguished himself in the British Foreign Office, specifically by bringing to light the appalling atrocities perpetrated in the Congo by the administration of King Leopold of the Belgians—hitherto in effect a vast and vastly profitable personal fiefdom. Sir Roger Casement’s grandfather Hugh sailed to Melbourne much earlier, in the 1850s, and in 1894 his son David (Roger Casement’s uncle) bought land and built a house on Mosquito Point at Metung for his enormous family of eight children. Somewhat incongruously, he named it Dingle Dell. The Casements evidently swam their cattle across from Shaving Point—and clearly from time to time back again also. It is unclear whether the scandal of their famous kinsman’s trial and execution touched the Metung Casements during or indeed after World War I. It must have had at least some impact, though of course on Mosquito Point they were just about as isolated from any damaging fallout as they could have been. As far as I can remember, Mum never once mentioned it.

The mighty oak beside Balmadies at Metung was grown from an acorn prudently harvested by Gran from the tree at Kilmany Park that was, in turn, planted on his visit there for a day of shooting in May 1901 by the Duke of Cornwall and York, the future King George V.

Pocket or Nasal?

Today I made a sudden discovery, that stopped me in my tracks and took my breath away. Nothing especially major, but it was as if I was hearing her voice. On May 19, 1992, Mum turned her notebook upside down, and started writing. I have never before noticed the resulting page and a half because of course until now they remained hidden at the very back, and the book is otherwise less than half filled.

Anne’s birthday. I have just read Hazel Holt’s biography of Barbara Pym which I enjoyed v. much. She says that B. P. always kept a notebook & jotted down all the funny/peculiar things she heard as she went about her life. This got me thinking & I realized I had heard/seen three strange things today & one the last time I went to the Prahran Market, viz. two women looking in the wondow of the chicken shop in the meat arcade—“I’m not a pie person.” Today. 1. When asked the whereabouts of men’s handkerchiefs, the girl in David Jones snapped “Pocket or Nasal?” 2. While waiting at the OPSM for someone to sell me new spectacle frames. The salesman in the next booth suddenly said quite loudly, “Wine, Women, and Song, and a good sex life…” Didn’t hear the rest, but he sold the customer several frames including wraparounds for skiing. When the customer walked out past me he was such an ordinary looking chap. I do hope his new specs fulfill his dreams. 3. Driving in Glenferrie Road I saw a small old woman in a battered straw hat & man’s raincoat carrying an enormous toy rabbit—nearly as big as she was. It was dressed, more warmly than she, in a fisherman’s white jersey & waterproof jacket (human sized). She was obviously nearly exhausted—the rabbit kept slipping & she was trying to use her umbrella without dropping everything. Where on earth was she taking it?

“Pocket or Nasal?” is even better with a broad Australian accent, but I too was unaware of the existence of any such distinction. Mum could be so wonderfully, sublimely funny.

The fairy ring

Mum again, at around the age of eight or nine:

We always went for a walk with the governess in the afternoon, usually along the railway line which ran in front of Raeshaw. There was only one train a day. Sometimes we would see some rail gangers on a push-me-pull-you trolley riding along the track to check the sleepers. In the spring it was a good place for wildflowers: bachelors’ buttons, egg and bacon, bluebells, etc. If we walked back towards Melbourne we would come to wattle and sheoak trees planted by Dad I think to where I was convinced there was a fairy ring. I was very fairy ring-minded right up to the time we left Gippsland and went to live in Geelong. I used to write letters to them and leave them at the ring and some kind person (probably Mongie) would leave replies written on gum leaves on the step outside the sleepout where we younger ones slept. David had his own room in a small hut outside the house, approached through the vegetable garden I think. The smell of Cootamundra wattle still takes me back to those walks. The ring was formed by toadstools spreading spoor ever outwards and had a mossy floor. Very authentic to my way of thinking!

And again:

I used to write letters to the fairies and leave them presents of cups made out of silver paper. They used to write back on gum leaves which was terribly exciting. I remember clearly finding one such note outside our sleepout door on the step one morning. It said that the fairies were going away for a holiday but would return some day. Funnily enough our dearest aunt (Mongie) who had been staying with us, left that day too, but I never twigged.

There is a reason for these two versions. Twice Mum went through the exercise of committing her childhood recollections to paper, beginning in the early 1990s. Because she mislaid the original notebook, with characteristic patience and determination she sat down not so long before she died and wrote it all again. The two books are remarkably alike, in both content and arrangement. She must have had a very clear memory of what she wrote the first time, or else she followed similar processes of retrieval that led her in essentially the same directions. Still, there are telling differences. The second book contains much that was prompted by conversations with Uncle John, who was by then living back in Melbourne and ailing. It is also more squarely addressed to Nick, who supplied the new notebook. And there are occasional hints that by then Mum was aware that she did not have much time left. The arthritis in her hands was giving her trouble, so the entries are briefer. When the family went for the interment of Uncle John’s ashes under a tree on the edge of the oval at Geelong College, Mum was reluctantly persuaded to take that opportunity to re-visit Raith and 188 Noble Street, the two Borthwick family homes in Geelong:

The day was very successful and I felt that John would have felt at home where he was buried. I hope so. On the whole, though, the hunt through what is now suburbia to find Raith confirmed my belief that, on the whole, it is better not to go back. 188 Noble Street was bad enough, but Raith was quite depressing. It looked so different to what I remember. It was no use asking me for street names as there were very few streets and our address was simply Raith, Herne Hill, Newtown, Geelong. The cypress hedge was intact to protect the house and garden from the tearing westerlies. The cement works at Fyansford was very much smaller and invisible from the garden.

Poor old Mum. She was quite right. It is better not to go back, yet despite her better judgment I usually do.

Mum

I have been re-reading Mum’s reminiscences, written about twenty years ago in her neat, self-disciplined longhand. Mostly they concern her childhood in East Gippsland and Geelong, but make for pretty painful reading. This is not because the contents are other than delightful, though from time to time a measure of wistfulness and melancholy does creep in, but far more because they remind me how much I miss her, now more than ever. She’s funny, of course:

Much later during the war when Mongie lived with us for quite a while at 188 Noble St., Newtown, she organized John and me and our friends David Salmon and Janet Nicholson in a pretend radio show. We had hours of fun and it still makes me laugh to remember Janet, well padded with a half-full hot water bottle concealed on her knee being interviewed as a visiting European operatic star with a bad case of indigestion.

Mum was mighty tough also. At Raeshaw, when she was no more than nine years of age:

One of our great pleasures was to watch Matt the Italian handyman cut up a sheep. We never witnessed the killing but were allowed to watch once the animal was hung up to be skinned and gutted. I can still remember the colorful sight when all the innards gushed out, steaming in the cold air. It made Anne keen to be a doctor.

She was also very good at using plain objects to put her recollections in order:

Searching in a cupboard for a thermos I find an old green jug, decorated with the figures from a story by an American (I think), Florence K. Upton—The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg.” The spout is broken but I have kept it because it is a link with my mother who first read to me the rhyming adventures of Mr. Golliwogg, etc. I experience a minor pang when I realize that there is no one, now that my sister is dead, who would experience the same affectionate reaction upon seeing the jug as I do.

Mum’s minor pang gives me a major pang, for I am quite certain that after she died the old green jug with the chipped spout must have gone to the Salvos, the Brotherhood, or the tip, unless Nick intervened. I remember the jug, and I also remember wondering why on earth she held onto it. Now I know. Having now tracked down the Upton book, I recognize the cover too, so her copy may still be at Metung. Or perhaps I saw it in Myamyn Street or even at Balmadies, though I recall absolutely nothing about the text or the plot. I presume it is now banned.

Anniversaries

Anniversaries are peculiar, because aside from a mere accident of the calendar there is no particular reason why Mum should seem any more absent today than she was this day last week, the week before that, or through recent months. Yet one feels it keenly: It is two whole years almost to the day since she died, and not quite two years since we buried her. Memories cluster in, all of them happy—above all of Mum’s elaborately rationed sense of the ridiculous, and her infectious laughter—especially the galloping timbre of an unrestrained chuckle, followed by the swooping, follow-up sigh that said: “How silly,” whatever it was. I think, I hope that my brothers and I have inherited this quality, though I also like to think that we ration it rather less than she did—perhaps that is due to the part of us that devolves from Dad. Self-discipline was probably her most admirable quality, that and thrift. She would never think of replacing something if it could be repaired, or of indulging in any luxurious extravagance for herself, more’s the pity because she could easily have afforded it. She took pleasure in The Times crossword puzzle, a cup of tea, her pretty garden, a game of patience, and a good book. She had had a serious respiratory illness in the late 1950s, which left her lungs severely scarred, and therefore vulnerable to respiratory trouble in old age. This combined with serious anti-inflammatory medications for rheumatoid arthritis seem to have destroyed her health in the last few years of her life. After she died, her doctor remarked to me that she had simply exhausted all her reserves of strength. Quite so, but I often wonder whether those reserves might have been better preserved by us, by him, and by her, because she was a stubborn and stoical old lady, and clearly lived with a greater measure of discomfort than anyone really understood. But she soldiered on to the very end, and mercifully the end was as swift as can be. She was spared the distress of leaving her house, losing her garden, the indignities and ugliness of aged care, and the misery of dependence, decrepitude, and senility. Perhaps this is enviable, however I cannot but wish that she was still en poste in Melbourne, for a newsy phone call every Sunday night (Monday morning her time), and regular doses of stern but shrewd advice. In melancholy moments I am reminded of what my old friend Kelly Read remarked just after Mum died: Your parents don’t really vanish so much as move in with you. It is as if they are quietly pottering about in the next room, or in your head. On the whole, I think this is true.

Excellent Women

In London over the weekend I picked up a copy of Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952), and devoured it. Notwithstanding Alexander McCall Smith’s remark in the new introduction—“One does not laugh out loud while reading Barbara Pym; that would be too much. One smiles.”—I think it’s one of the funniest novels I have ever read. Perhaps this is because there is so much of Mum contained in the voice of the narrator Mildred Lathbury, everything from a profound distaste for being addressed as “dear,” through all forms of sharp observation, treating seriously what others too distracted by self-importance regard as trivia, to an extremely well-developed and healthy sense of the ridiculous. Mrs. Gray, William Caldicote, Mrs. Bone, Sister Blatt, and the mysterious Miss Jessop are delightful exempla of the middle-class urban grotesque then flourishing in postwar London. Following last week’s deeply shocking riots, I suspect the metropolis is beginning to re-acquire something of the same bleak atmosphere, though admittedly free of shared bathrooms and smoke from dismal coal fires. Certainly Mum had a complete run of the novels of Barbara Pym neatly arranged on the shelf above the phone at Denham Place, and I have a vivid recollection of her quietly chuckling to herself whilst reading one, propped up in bed with a cup of tea. Why did I not follow the prompt while she was still alive? No doubt part of the answer is contained in the question, but I am sure it is better late than never. I hope she would be pleased; I am simply grateful:

Rockingham! I snatched at the name as if it had been a precious jewel in the dustbin.

The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.

There can be no exchange of glances over the telephone, no breaking into laughter.

Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.

Men love messing about with paint and distemper.

I felt it was not a very suitable remark for a clergyman’s widow to have made, though it was certainly amusing in a rather cheap way.

I supposed that Dora and I, who had both been fat as schoolgirls, could now stand side by side singing “Frail children of dust, And feeble as frail,” without a tremor or the ghost of a smile. It was rather sad, really.

“Hullo! You look like a wet week at Blackpool,” Sister Blatt’s jolly voice boomed out of the dusk.

“Do you think they have jumble sales in Belgravia?” asked Mrs. Gray; “that hadn’t occurred to me.”

The room seemed suddenly very hot and I saw Mrs. Gray’s face rather too close to mine, her eyes wide open and penetrating, her teeth small and pointed, her skin a smooth apricot colour.

“Do you think Mrs. Gray will marry again?” I asked craftily…/ “I don’t know…widows nearly always do marry again.” / “Oh, they have the knack of catching a man. Having done it once I suppose they can do it again. I suppose there’s nothing in it if you know how.” / “Like mending a fuse,” I suggested, though I had not previously taken this simple view of seeking and finding a life partner.

“I wonder if they have any picture postcards of this garden?” / “Oh to send to William, you mean?” / “Yes, perhaps to William, but I’ve already sent him one.” / “Oh, you mustn’t overdo it, or he’ll think you’re running after him.” / I agreed that I mustn’t and imagined William’s beady eyes, round and alarmed.

She did not look like the kind of person who could possibly do anything for which an apology might be demanded.

Miss Jessop made a quavering sound which might have been “Yes” or “No” but it was not allowed to develop into speech, for Mrs. Bone broke in by telling Everard that Miss Jessop wouldn’t want any sherry.

Everard Bone was at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society. It sounded like a joke.

“Miss Jessop and I are very much interested in the suppression of woodworm in furniture.”

Birds, worms, and Jesuits…it might almost have been a poem, but I could not remember that anybody had ever written it...

The engagement ring

Dad kept everything. Tucked inside the back cover of the earliest of his many scrapbooks is the receipt for Mum’s engagement ring. He bought it on March 2, 1948, from W. M. Catanach of Catanach’s (est. 1880), who then occupied premises on the corner of the Royal Arcade and Little Collins Street. Incredibly they are still going strong. The item is a “W[hite] G[old] & platinum 3 st[one] Diamond and Sapphire Ring,” and the price was high: £68 10s. When in 1949 Dad began work as a lowly law clerk at Mallesons his salary was £10 a week.

Forever Mum

On Ash Wednesday, February 16, 1983, fanned by hot winds of up to nearly 70 miles per hour, about 180 wildfires burned over more than a million acres of land stretching right across Victoria and South Australia, many of them merging to produce conditions of frightening savagery. Seventy-five people were killed, seventeen of them volunteer firefighters, and over 340,000 sheep, 18,000 cattle, and innumerable native birds and animals. 3,700 buildings were destroyed in the firestorm, including Mum and Dad’s weekend place at Upper Beaconsfield. The process of cleaning up and rebuilding took years, but by the time Dad took this photograph in November 1985, a few months shy of Mum’s sixtieth birthday, they had managed to deal with the worst of it. Local contractors felled this enormous gum tree; I presume it was beyond salvation because she loved her trees, but Mum took over from there. Methodically, patiently, indomitably she built a succession of carefully controlled bonfires that eventually consumed the whole damned thing, just as Aunt Anne did some years earlier (come to think of it) at their pretty place on the right bank of the Tambo, upstream from Swan Reach. In each case those tough sisters were as proud as punch, as well they might be, but Mum’s Farmer-Giles pose is characteristically good-humored, even self-deprecating, but quite obviously real also. She was simply amazing.

No solicitors

I’ve been looking through the albums. How very lucky we are to have them.

Whenever they traveled to the United States of America, which was not often, Dad rarely lost an opportunity to have himself and/or Mum (as in this instance) photographed inspecting those little signs on the front door of Upper East Side apartment and other buildings that say “NO SOLICITORS.”

Dad was a solicitor, but not the kind that bother us here. In the British legal system from which the Australian was derived, solicitors were attorneys who dealt with any legal matter, including certain minor court proceedings. However, by universal convention solicitors engaged learned barristers to argue their clients’ cases in the higher courts, and until recently defendants or litigants had no choice but to consult a solicitor in the first instance. It was very much a two-tiered system: suave barristers above, and humble city solicitors below. Indeed before the First World War it was not unusual for Australian solicitors not to have a law degree; barristers invariably did. When our grandfather was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of Victoria, the law in Australia was in the process of rapidly professionalizing. Thenceforth solicitors invariably took law degrees before being articled to a senior solicitor. They then had the option of reading for the bar (to become a barrister), or not. Judges were almost invariably chosen from the pool of senior barristers. Dad graduated from the University of Melbourne on December 18, 1948, was shortly afterwards admitted to practice as a solicitor, and did so for the rest of his professional life.

In America, the sign “NO SOLICITORS” is meant to ward off door-to-door salesmen, hawkers, canvassers, etc., but Dad and Mum were always tickled by the notion that this could be read as an outrageous rebuke aimed at respectable partners of the old Melbourne firm of Mallesons. God, how I miss them both!

Loose ends

After she died nearly sixteen months ago, Mum left behind very few loose ends. Helen made a lifetime’s habit of throwing things away, and although it fell to Nick and Simon, mostly, to dispose of the contents of her house, when the time came to do that ghastly job it was reasonably straightforward. Yet anyone who has dealt with the estate of an elderly parent will know that matters small and large continue to crop up for many months, extending some considerable distance beyond the canonical executor’s year: the melancholy card or telephone call from a distant but affectionate country cousin who for some reason flew under the radar screen; Dad’s apparently missing Pacific campaign medals that eventually turned up in the bottom drawer of an old desk, raising the further question as to what on earth to do with them; a dry cleaners’ docket carefully tucked into Mum’s purse, behind her driver’s licence—still current but somehow overlooked. Last week we discovered that docket. It relates to two good quality woolen blankets, part of the last spring clean, which, only a matter of days before she died, Mum took up to the dry cleaner near the corner of High Street and Glenferrie Road. It must have taken some considerable physical effort, and that she carried on so heroically with such humdrum domestic chores is entirely characteristic of her sterling, undaunted personality. Anyhow, we decided we should probably inquire about the blankets, knowing that, having been unclaimed for so long, in all probability they would in all likelihood have been disposed of.

Mairse rang The Elegant Dry Cleaners (9509 3718), and to our amazement the proprietor still had them. Her name is Janine, and, it turns out that after Mum failed to collect them promptly, as was her habit, Janine sensed that something must have happened to her. Mum was a good customer for many years, businesslike and formal and well-organized. There was no small talk. There are dry cleaners that are nearer and cheaper, but they don’t do as good a job. Mum definitely preferred The Elegant Dry Cleaners. At the time, Janine started ringing selected Trumbles in the telephone directory, and even contacted Telstra, who declined to make further inquiries, but hers is a busy concern, the weeks sped by, and the matter drifted, as such matters do. Still, she held onto Mum’s blankets. Last Tuesday I went to collect and pay for them, and Janine leaped from behind the counter, gave me a hug, told me the whole story, decried the unhelpfulness of Telstra, and asked me to convey her condolences to the rest of the family. She fetched the blankets from somewhere distant, and told me how to peel the plastic off so as to protect them from the layer of sixteen months’ accumulation of dust, a good deal of which ended up down the front of her red sweater. Presently they’ll go to Metung, and replace a couple of the ancient, sixty, seventy, eighty year-old stained monstrosities in the middle bedroom. These days we hear a lot about customer loyalty, as if the concept is an exciting invention of the modern retail trade, but with Mum it was ingrained, just as for all those years and years she bought meat from nobody other than Mr. Matthewson the butcher. But what you don’t hear quite as much about is the corresponding loyalty the good customer earns from her hard-working local dry cleaners. I thanked Janine, and shook her hand. This felt strangely final, especially because only a few days earlier, the previous Sunday, after the 8 o’clock service, we deposited Mum’s ashes not fifty paces away, under a fine cherry tree in the Memorial Garden at St. George’s in Glenferrie Road. Final, yes, but what more could I do, except to commend to anyone who is prepared to listen the outstanding worth of The Elegant Dry Cleaners of 1274, High Street, Armadale?

The snuff-box

For as long as I can remember Mum used this kidney-shaped Georgian brass snuff-box to store pins inside her sewing basket. I am not quite sure where it came from, except I have an inkling that Uncle John may have given it to her—simply because it so exactly reflects the monkish side of his taste. He could easily have picked it up for no money at all in the Portobello Road, or else on one of his sweeps through the junk shops and country auctions.

It is brass, with a lovely soft patina, and the hinge is rather fine. I have lately seen several others like it. These days the type is generally referred to as a Welsh miners’ snuff-box, though obviously the inscription provides a completely different point of reference. I doubt if we shall ever identify E. L. Bull, but I presume he was a sailor aboard H.M.S. Terrible, and also responsible for turning down the nose of the lid, presumably with a hammer or mallet, to create a sort of clasp. It is pretty effective. Was he, I wonder, the ship’s carpenter?

H.M.S. Terrible was a 1,660-ton, 170-foot, 74-gun Culloden-class ship of the line. She was ordered by their lordships of the Admiralty in December 1781; her keel was laid down on January 7, 1783, and she was launched on March 28, 1785. During the 1790s, she saw action in the Mediterranean under the command of he who rejoiced in the name and rank of Captain (later Admiral) Skeffington Lutwidge. The Terrible joined squadrons harrying the French, at different times under the direction of Rear-Admiral George Hotham and Admiral Viscount Hood, and a little later she transferred to the Channel fleet, then finally via Plymouth, Madeira and the Canaries, to the West Indian station—for essentially the same purpose. On October 15, 1800, a court martial was held aboard the Gladiator at Portsmouth at which James Keating, a Royal Marine, of the Terrible, was found guilty of disobedience, and of striking a serjeant. He was sentenced to 200 lashes. E. L. Bull may well have known the man, however this wobbling, but nevertheless reasonably well-spaced and carefully punctuated, stamped inscription on Mum’s snuff-box is his only surviving private statement. I fancy E. L. Bull was proud of his ship, as literate as he needed to be, and far cleverer than to be insubordinate.

The table

In the midst of preparing to move house, I unfolded Mum’s card table—for the first time since it arrived here last February. It is a pretty splendid piece of furniture, and I wanted to take some photographs so that it can be appraised for insurance purposes, along with everything else. I have an idea it came from Gordon Grove after Nan died.

The carved scrolls, tapering pedestal, shapely platform base, and the scalloped “bun” feet on casters, are I suspect an overweight Edwardian homage to an Empire or Regency prototype. I wonder if it is Australian. I had forgotten—if I ever knew—that when you swivel the top ninety degrees but before you unfold it, a shallow compartment is revealed. And there, in the compartment, I was startled to discover four pens, four pencils, four Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia Bridge Scorers, and four spares (from the “Cottage By The Sea” children’s charity at Queenscliff), all primed and ready to go.

Win. Lose. We. They. It was like feeling her hand on my shoulder, and hearing her voice: “Ango.” “Darling!” I gasped, and had to sit down. Then the tears came. It was the suddenness and unexpectedness of the discovery, I suppose, and the absolute Mumness of that bit of Mum that was waiting for me there: Characteristically neat and tidy. Carefully organized. The used pages carefully removed, but ghostly columns of indented penciled or ball-pointed numerals just visible on the fresh page.

In other words supreme order was still maintained inside the card table, despite its having been shipped across the Pacific, and by truck from Seattle, right across the continental United States to New Haven, Conn. Only two sheets left in one, the one sitting on top, but that’s two more games: Waste not, want not. God, how I miss her!