And of course, Byron. He took up residence in the Villa Foscari, as the rundown property with the plaque was once called, and from there he wowed society with his wit and charisma, and wooed ladies with a mere blink of his liquid blue eyes.
Being so close now to the places where Byron’s sexual conquests were their most prolific, I couldn’t help but think about my dad. And my mum too, because if there was one person most affected by my dad’s philandering, it was, of course, her. He had lovers and Mum had kids, six of them. Lord knows how many lovers he had.
But my mum was not the kind of woman you would have looked at and said, ‘There goes a mother of six.’ She was the flame around which moths dance. She was dramatic and sensual. She was steely strong and intensely cunning, an astounding survivor who never left us wanting for anything, really.
Though my dad was one of those men who spent his income outside the home, we had new dressing gowns when we needed them, and clean albeit well-used towels and sheets. We had food in our tummies, though often it was mince meat or a mix of egg and tomato on toast, of which we happened to be very fond. The house was cold and damp, but we had briquettes for a fire to huddle around until Mum got an oil heater on her account at Walton’s. We had parties and good times and Mum had good friends. We had hugs and laughs and a warmth, as a family unit, that I understand now is rare.
But my mother had a way with a wooden spoon or a hairbrush that if we misbehaved was frightening. If you came home late for dinner, it was the most ferocious. I believed her true feelings about my dad’s behaviour came out during those sessions when we would be bent over the bath, pants down, receiving our beltings. Coming home late for the meal she’d scrimped for and managed to get on the table for numerous mouths with everything else she had to do on her own due to his absence, that was a disrespect that pushed her buttons mightily.
I was ten or eleven and going through a phase of pulling sick days from school so I could stay home with her or go to the Dorset Gardens Hotel, where she worked after Dad left. She was outside, hanging some washing before we left for the pub. I don’t know what possessed me. I knew she hated being called Gabby. Her name was Gabrielle. Only our father called her Gabby. For whatever reason, I stood on the back steps and yelled, ‘Gaaaaaa-beeeeee!’ She flew around the corner with an enormous stick in one hand, grabbed me with the other and beat me repeatedly around the legs before she crumpled at the horror of what she was doing.
Even then, I understood. I always understood with her. I knew what she had given up. I loved to look through the suitcase of old photos of her during the war. She looked happy and vigorous. She was a WAAF wireless operator and she did air force revues and plays, singing and dancing, the world before her. She was attractive and smart. And then he came along.
He was good-looking and clever, the best-looking boy in Hobart. Both my mum and dad, like Lord Byron, had dominating and perhaps unhinged mothers. In fact, Dad’s mum was as controlling as Lord Byron’s. She was a spectre in our lives, the tough Irish matriarch who had money that she would help us out with occasionally. She cut Dad off because of his waywardness. Her patronage of us saw us through some rough times but it was not without hooks. We were never allowed to forget we were the poor relations.
When I think about my dad and his total lack of suitability for parenting, I think of her, his mother of legendary toughness and unattractive eccentricity, and the death of his beloved sister Patty, two years older than him, when he was nine. I also think of him as a tail gunner flying missions in World War II. They didn’t call the tail gun the death seat for nothing. And of him surviving a plane crash during the Korean War. No therapy, no counselling afterwards. I see his story. I feel for him. And I get him.
And then I see my mum, an only child whose mother had dementia, and whose father was a postmaster who fled Hobart and his family after embezzling to feed his gambling addiction. She never saw him again.
Her story amazed me. The resilience of the woman. Her extraordinary zest for life. But I never heard her say, ‘I love you.’ She did say it with hugs and kisses, scones, cakes and soup, though. That she did.
My dad died when I was in my mid-twenties, my mum in my thirties. The worst thing about the death of my parents was not being able to ask the questions that came up when I was trying to understand myself and unravel my myths. It was beyond me how or why there were six of us, their kids. The first three I got, in quick succession, spanning five years or so. But then there was a gap of six years and then another set of three kids, six years between them from start to finish. I did not get that. Not at all. Because by the time I came around, I assumed the writing was on the wall. I had also always thought that theirs was not a big love. But why would I assume that, when they were together for long enough to have that many children? That’s a good twenty-five years of togetherness, more than most people achieve these days. Because of the unbridled hatred my mother would unleash about my father, and the lack of palpable attachment he had for us, I guess that was a logical conclusion.
Five years before I began following Lord Byron, I decided to write a book about my dad’s life, to try to make sense of it. I did one interview for that book, with a journalist mate of Dad’s. He was a good man and an honest one, an acclaimed beacon of his profession. He said he’d thought long and hard about it, and the time had come when he thought we should know: there was another sibling, a half-brother, born somewhere around the same time as Erin and me. To the woman who was the love of our father’s life.
This was what he said. Not Dad’s second wife, who had no children with him but who nursed him through cancer to his death. Not our mother, who knew him from childhood and was intimately part of his family, who moved to the mainland from Tasmania with him, set up house around him, bore him six kids. It was some other woman.
This journalist mate of my father told me the woman had been the secretary to a famous Melbourne architect. When she fell pregnant, Dad got her married off to a Polish man who needed to be married to stay in the country.
I didn’t know what part of the story was more shocking. At any rate, I never pursued the book. This was clearly a can of worms I was not ready to open.
So many questions. And ones I could not and probably never would answer.
But I was also coming to know that there were questions I could answer. Questions about what had kept me from the love I sought. Out of my growing willingness to look at where I had come from and what made me what I was, a confidence was arising. This proximity to Lord Byron’s haunts had very quickly indeed begun to give me a new perspective on my life. I was only beginning to ensconce myself in his world, but already I could feel the power in that. I was removed from my everyday. I had given myself permission to think creatively about the sum of my experience. And I had chosen the marvellous map of Byron’s world to guide me in doing that. What a great gift I had given myself.
I did not yet have the answers to any of the questions, but I could feel them coming towards me, now. I felt as if I would not need to seek them. They were preparing to find me.
7
School Days
‘… I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain became,
In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:
And thus, untaught in my youth my heart to tame,
My springs of life were poison’d. ’Tis too late!’
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III
Life is nothing without its moral ropes and emotional padlocks. Even the great prophets and saints had them. They descend on us in our first dealings with the world at large and they do not change of their own volition, leaving the choice ours as to whether we tighten them or loosen them.
Lord Byron, I think, was too consciously fond of his. They fuelled his fire. His strange ancestry was one thing, his parents’ terrifying relationship another. But to say his school days at Harrow were formative is to say Hamlet saw dead peopl
e—the mere surface of the matter. For an emotional, highly-strung imagination, they were as intense and dramatic as the lives of the Greek classical heroes in which he was educated and his whole life from there on was a series of reactions to the experiences of a very young man.
His life in Venice was so indicative of that. The partying, the sex, the utter abandonment to hedonism; he sought obliteration of those memories. In his writing, he wavered between glorifying and demonising his past. Either way, he was always, at least in part, still back there at Harrow where, as a child of precarious means and noble lineage, boarding with boys who had both breeding and money made him proud and determined for greatness. The bullying he received because of his lame leg would turn him into a willing pugilist, both in the school sporting ring and in more ad lib situations. Above all, the relationships he forged with other boys in an atmosphere of fags and masters, submission and adulation, would give him permission to express his most taboo desires.
It was during his Harrow days, though away from the school, that he would also fall for Mary Chaworth, a neighbour in Sherwood who was related to a poor unfortunate murdered by the Wicked Lord Byron. At eighteen, she was three years his senior when these feelings of his arose.
He would, as time went on, idealise both Mary—who in the end did not return his affections and spoke derisively of him—and Harrow, enshrining them as remnants of a golden time when the basic yearnings of his soul were neither judged nor punished, but where he learned that the romantic love of a woman was fraught.
Sometimes the paths of great men show us lessons in what not to do. Lord Byron’s never-ending reacting to the slights and sublimities of his past would, in the end, contribute to killing him at the age of thirty-six.
But his passion and exuberance, his commitment to his life’s expression no matter what the subject matter, the courage in his creativity, left an example to admire and aspire to, despite his negative traits. That to me meant his death was not in vain.
The backstreets behind Byron’s Venetian palazzo, Mocenigo, were quiet save for a soprano doing vocal exercises somewhere nearby. I had been walking in Venice for practically five hours straight when I found the small lane that led to Mocenigo’s back door, or as near to it as I was going to get. It was fenced off with an elaborate, expensive-looking confection of iron. I stood my side of the gate and breathed in my closeness to the place most synonymous with his legend. It was so still there. I heard the gulls and smelled the salt from the nearby Grand Canal. A man leaned out a window directly above me. ‘Buongiorno,’ he said, astonishing me. He was friendly, welcoming. It was such a stark contrast to what I had thought of the Venetians: by and large, a jaded, exhausted, blasé, unwelcoming bunch.
I had discovered, though, that if you took one street away from the tried and true paths between Piazza San Marco and Santa Lucia station, you found something truer, quieter. More local. And infinitely more gracious. I looked at my map again, the infuriating map which caused me to pull out my reading glasses and take off my sunnies each time I needed to refer to it. It was so damned intricate, Venice’s streets and canals and bridges so tightly entwined, they were a bamboozling puzzle, especially for someone as long-sighted as me. Yet here I was, a mere five hours into my first day in Venice (mere—yeah, right), at Lord Byron’s back door. It had served me in the end.
A silver-haired bella donna wearing a kaleidoscopic scarf over black elegance came out the gate and didn’t see me till she was on top of me. She started.
‘Mi dispiace, signora,’ I said, sincerely sorry to have frightened her. ‘Io scrivo un libro a Lord Byron.’ I’m sorry, I had said. Then, I am writing a book about Lord Byron. Two of my very few phrases of Italian; two, I was discovering, very useful ones.
‘Ah, Lord Byron. I am sorry but I am on my way out so I cannot invite you in,’ she replied in perfect though accented English and with a warm smile. Was she the current owner? The gate seemed to fence off a number of palazzi. If only she had been coming home rather than going out, I thought. Again I was not expecting such openness at all. But I did want to see his view of the Grand Canal. Oh well. I looked at the confounded map again. There was another minuscule laneway just a short distance from where I was, and it came out at the Grand Canal. It looked to open onto that famously fabulous body of water only about three doors down from where Lord Byron would have come and gone on his gondola.
I doubled back from his back door, did a U-turn to my right and walked down this lane with barely any shoulder clearance, pigeons flapping indignantly as I disturbed the cool, dark dankness. And then I came out on a small pier, affording me an uninterrupted Grand Canal view. His view. Except for the San Tomà vaporetto stop directly across the way, where a hive of tourists bustled like worker bees to get on the crowded boats running up and down the canal, it might have been almost identical to how it was in his time. To the left was the great sweeping bend in the canal known as the Volta, and the Byzantine-Gothic palazzo Foscari, dating back to the sixteenth century, now decorated with a banner for abstract artist Bruce Nauman’s entry into the upcoming Biennale. Across the way were egg-yolk yellow and apricot manses, their green shutters bolted against the glaring heat of the afternoon. Another large palazzo like Mocenigo faced off directly across the way, its crimson and gold curtains billowing out the window, waving at passers-by.
I sat on the pier and let nothing come between his view and me. I felt his presence there. A school of tiny fish gathered at my feet. I watched them weave among the seaweed. I didn’t notice the approach of a man, who now was mooring his boat next to me, as if he was parking his car, which he essentially was.
‘Scusi, signor, parla inglese?’ I asked him.
‘Of course.’
‘Grazie. Is it okay that I am here?’
‘Is it okay for you?’ He twinkled in that playful Italian way.
‘Very much so,’ I laughed. He was the sandy, blue-eyed northern Italian, craggy and brown from the sun, in the uniform of pastel polo shirt, designer jeans and loafers. And wedding ring. Yep, the flirtatious Italian uniform, all right.
‘Then it is okay for me. You like the view?’
‘I do.’ I paused and watched him tie ropes and shuffle bits and bobs into lockable compartments on his little runabout. ‘I am here because of Lord Byron,’ I continued, though he didn’t seem to be questioning why I was there at all.
‘Oh yes? A lot of ladies have been here because of Lord Byron.’
I laughed. ‘I guess so.’
‘Well, he did have a good taste for ladies, I believe.’ He stepped off his boat and onto the pier. ‘He would be happy such a beautiful lady as you is here for him. Ciao, signora.’ And off he went down the laneway.
I’m one to look for signs. I took this as one. It, and the nice lady at the back gate of Mocenigo: signs that I was on a good path, one of which Lord Byron himself might approve.
Later, on my way back down to the bus station from San Marco on the vaporetto, I passed the front of the Palazzo Mocenigo. I waved. At who? At what? Well … I just felt compelled to. I could still feel Lord Byron’s presence there. And I thought I should go with that.
Alessandro Dal Corso invited me to the family’s other property, the Villa Franceschi, for dinner. It was not far up the road, I could have walked, but Alessandro came and picked me up in his large luxury SUV. He was wearing an apron. ‘My brother and I, we work in both properties, doing what has to be done,’ he said. The Dal Corso boys had taken over the two hotels from their parents, but unlike so many second generations of successful business people, they weren’t squandering their inheritance. Rather they were working as hard as, if not harder than, those who had built the business.
At the Villa Franceschi, twice as glamorous as the Villa Margherita and infinitely busier, Alessandro ushered me into the restaurant where Dario was also aproned and waiting tables.
‘Where would you like to sit?’ asked Alessandro.
‘Oh, maybe outside?’ I said. There was a b
ig, inviting terrace overlooking the lawn, the nearby church clock tower and a pink and yellow sunset.
Alessandro set me up at a table in the corner of the patio. I was the only one out there. Strange, because the restaurant was full and the evening divine. Why didn’t anyone else ask to sit outside? He poured me a glass of prosecco and I let it sit in front of me for a while.
It soon became apparent that the reason I was the only one out there was because the al fresco area was booked for a function. There was a surprising and quick gush of company and I was surrounded by a very large, extended German family, nibbling finger food and drinking cocktails. There was me, an island at a table, in a throng of family reunion: awkward. While at least some of the Germans seemed to find it highly amusing, the rest gave me unsure sideways glances, then chose to pretend I wasn’t there. It could have been worse. I drank my prosecco, not out of wanting to, or even discomfort, but because Alessandro insisted. He kept buzzing by with the bottle, eager to please.
I ate quickly, then, hoping not to seem ungrateful, stopped Alessandro. He attempted to fill my glass again. ‘No, grazie,’ I said, putting my hand over the glass. ‘I’m just a bit tired. I think I’ll go back to Villa Margherita soon.’ He looked upset. ‘It’s okay. You don’t need to drive me. I can walk,’ I reassured him.
‘I have an idea,’ he said, his face lighting up, and raced off into the darkness. Shortly, I heard the trill of a bicycle bell. Alessandro, in his apron, came pedalling across the lawn.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 7
