by Biff Ward
Dad’s parents must have liked surnames. His full name—Russel Braddock Ward—consists of three, the middle one, Braddock, from his mother’s maiden name. His signature, a flowing readable slant, was RBWard, and when I looked at it I would hear his full name, hear its rhythm and amplitude in my mind, in a way I never heard my own.
In my teens I felt weighted by this middle name, its masculinity as well as its family history, so on the rare occasions I needed a middle name, I deleted Russel and wrote or said Alison. It was, after all, a name in our family and it wasn’t being used.
After seeing Alison’s listing in the death register, I wanted a copy of her death certificate, a document I could hold in my hand. I went to the website, paid the money and clicked the form into cyberspace. When it arrived, I sat at my dining table and unfolded it slowly: what would I find?
The details had been entered in handwriting, black ink cursive. My eyes scanned the columns: her name, father, mother, yes, yes. Then I reached the one headed Cause of Death and I gasped. Its appearance had been drawing my eye sideways, growling for attention as I read the other columns. It has four, five, six lines of writing—except that one has been scratched out so thoroughly the words underneath can’t be read and then there are other words squeezed in below the crossing-out but the rewriting is so close to the scribbly bit that the new words can’t actually be read. The handwritten words under Cause of Death are a big mess, they insinuate confusion and doubt, they remind me of the catch in Dad’s voice when he talked about how she died.
Death certificates are documents of fact, are they not? Free of anything hinting at ambiguity? So what was this snarly disarray doing here? I explained to colleagues who love research that the ‘mistake’ cannot be read with the naked eye, not even under a strong light.
Oh! They all sat up and leaned forward.
You can go to Police Forensics, they told me. They have machines that can decipher almost anything.
Cliff at the NSW Police Forensic Documents Unit told me he could only help if the query related to a current crime investigation.
I hesitated, not wanting to concede that while it was current for me, it would certainly not be for him. No, it’s not, I said, with a little laugh.
Well, I can put you onto some private document examiners, he said.
I had never heard of such people. It transpired that some of them had an office fifteen minutes’ drive from my house in the down and dirty end of town, the area where Canberrans routinely get their cars panel-beaten or buy sex toys. I rang a bell and a young woman admitted me into a tangle of technical services. I showed her my document.
Mmmm. Interesting. She held the crossed-out section up to the light.
Follow me, she said, heading for the back room.
She approached a contraption which looked like a deranged microscope and turned it on. Bright eyes of yellow light appeared on the end points of two pliable metal worms and she twisted these so that the lights shone on the back of the muddle of crooked words. We both scrunched our eyes, we peered.
Took? Is that one of the words? From? Is that what it says?
It couldn’t be read this way. You need the true original, she and her boss told me, or a very enlarged photocopy. I wrote off explaining my need to NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages, enclosing thirty-three dollars. No reply.
In Sydney, months later, I went to the shop front, the death certificate copy in my hand. There was a waiting area where I joined people clutching numbers. Five of the six booths were staffed by young people from Africa or the Indian sub-continent and I was frantically constructing sentences I could use to explain what I wanted when I was called to the sixth booth where a middle-aged Anglo woman was looking tiredly bored.
It’s a bit of a story, I said, holding up the certificate. I’m trying to get a better copy of this. I want to be able to read this crossed-out bit.
She looked at me blankly.
I’m writing a book, I said, and these words, this crossing-out, is really important.
She reached for it. I wasn’t happy about it leaving my hand but this was my best hope.
The original, I said. Forensic people told me I needed the original or a very blown-up version.
You can’t have the original, she snapped.
She was punching in numbers as she spoke. She started to look closely at her screen, then she nodded and, slowly, slightly furtively, she turned it towards me.
I shouldn’t do this, she said, giving me a raised eyebrow.
There was a gap in the glass panel: I put the side of my face and one eye there. She had blown it up so that the screen was filled with just a couple of words. We started reading together as she moved the cursor.
Asphyxia from drowning accidentally caused . . . and then the crossed-out words where we deciphered . . . when . . . her mother was . . . something . . . her . . . something something . . . fainted and became unconscious.
When we finished there were some squiggles hanging and a few undeciphered words, but the bulk was clear and we were beaming at each other.
I want to give you flowers!
Well, that’s one for today, she said, with a nod of satisfaction.
Afterwards, I met my friend Sue, who will figure again in this story, by arrangement in a park. As I began explaining, she laughed.
Take a breath, she said, and led me to a seat.
Now, she said, show me.
When we reached the end of what I knew, she said, Look—in a bath tub.
It was so obvious: it fitted perfectly.
The scratch-scratch version reads: Asphyxia from drowning, accidentally caused when her mother [was bathing her in a bath tub] fainted and became unconscious.
So there’s no great revelation or scandal: just the agitation and overflow in the black ink. I imagine that halfway through the transcription, the clerk realised the ‘cause of death’ was somehow too wordy and after pausing to think, crossed out the circumstantial details in order to shorten the story. Even so, the entry spills over into the next column. Too much had happened to fit into the allocated space.
Alison’s death certificate, August 1941
The crossing-out on Alison’s death certificate is a symbol of what coloured the atmosphere, the very air in which we were raised. Events had occurred and, as we got older, continued to occur, which were beyond the realm of language. Dad, who was very good with words, was stymied. We lived in sheaves of silence, sheaves which stacked up around us and solidified into the walls of our life, muffling what we might have said.
I wasn’t consciously aware of any of this when we lived at Woolwich Point but as the years passed, vague half-questions oozed beneath the surface of all my growing up. When one slushed into the open, like my circle of violets, Dad would do what had to be done and ease it back down out of sight. But they reverberated down the years, these questions, until decades later when they came back for Mark and me. And in the end Dad even answered one of them, the key question, from beyond the grave.
TWO
The Mother
When I was three, we left Woolwich and moved to Mosman where Dad was going to teach in a state school. He finished his army days in the Psychology Unit, helping to stream demobilising soldiers into appropriate jobs. It’s also where he picked up a smattering of knowledge from the psychiatrists and psychologists he worked with which, I suspect, helped him to deal with what he encountered in the years that followed.
The import of the moving day must have filtered down to me because I have two vivid memories of that day. The first is of waving goodbye to Mum as she stood beside the truck that was going to take our furniture to the new house.
In these years Dad wrote to his parents every few days. Because his father saved most of those letters, they are now in the National Library as part of the ‘Russel Ward archive’. In one of these letters, he describes our leave-taking from Woolwich: Our good friend Don McLean helped us very vastly on the morning of the move. We hadn’t spoken to Mrs O for mon
ths, and knowing her as we did, we knew that she was working herself up to having the biggest and most harrowing scene of all time on the actual day of our departure . . . Don went into 62 Point Rd as I went out, and greeted Mrs O with all the charm and sang-froid in the world. Right up to the moment Marg drove off in the truck, he never left her for a moment alone with Mrs O (in spite of the latter’s frantic efforts) and maintained a bright and friendly conversation with her all the time. She was furious to the point of madness, but was unable to have her scene.
I don’t know what had happened for Mrs O to be regarded as The Witch. They had lived there for most of the war, they’d lived through the births of three children and one death, and Dad had joined the Communist Party of Australia, as many did at that time. Maybe that was enough—or perhaps she was reacting to events and silences that already shaped my parents’ lives.
While the scene he describes unfolded, he took Mark and me by ferry to our new house. It was a whole house to ourselves, though joined to another house—a semidetached. On our side, there was a long line of rooms with darkly varnished wooden floors, sun surging from north-facing windows into every room except the big bedroom which faced the front of the house, eastwards. The entrance door was halfway along the conga line of rooms, reached by a path up the side.
My second vivid memory is of the living room, which contained nothing but a radio—unwanted by the previous tenants, it was a dark brown box the height and width of a stove, with glass over the fan-shaped dial and a cream crepe de chine circle where the sound came out. It stood between two windows, and the floor on either side of it was drenched in squares of sunlight. Dad squatted down and fiddled with knobs until music with a woman singing filled the room. He drew us to him, one on each knee inside the circle of his arms. I have no idea how long it was thus—the two of us there with him full of hope and the sun and the music. It could have been a minute or an hour.
It stopped when we heard the truck arrive and Mum’s voice coming up the path. I remember nothing else about that day.
It was in the first weeks in this new house that I became ‘Biff’. Mum and Dad were determined that Elizabeth would not be shortened. Mum’s sister was Lib and she had an Aunt Bess, they knew a Betty and they didn’t like Liz. Elizabeth it would be. So toddler Mark, beginning to talk, tried the four syllables and came out with Biff. They joked around with it for a few days and there it was, my name for life.
We were enrolled for the mornings at Mrs Downey’s Kindergarten and Mum took us up the hill to Raglan St for the nine o’clock start each day. She collected us for lunch and our afternoon nap. We often wore matching outfits: navy shorts with bib and bright-coloured buttons, red for Mark and yellow for me, with matching shirts. Mum made nearly all our clothes as well as her own. The treadle Singer was permanently open by the window in their bedroom.
Darling, will you thread this needle? she often asked if I was nearby. I would bend over, line up the hole and slide the thread in smoothly, wondering why she couldn’t see it like I could.
I fidgeted at ‘fittings’ which required me to stand still but I loved it when she came home with packages of fabric. She’d unwrap a parcel and there’d be a bright floral or gingham for me.
A gathered skirt, I think, she would say, and short sleeves with a sash and a frilled collar.
The fingers of one hand would pucker the material and the other would touch me lightly—shoulder, waist, upper arm—to show what she meant, the dress already existing in her mind. The fabrics for her own outfits were plain, usually soft and flowing so that when I lifted one, it would fall in loops through my fingers and slide over the sides of my hands.
When I went to school, the Infants’ School where Mark joined me a year later, my world widened. In first grade, I learnt that home could spill over into this new, more public life. One day there was an egg with my lunch which was meant, of course, to be hard-boiled. Trying to eat it, I deposited swirls of yolk across the front of my pink woolly jumper. The six-year-old girls fluttered around me and the teacher on playground duty groaned and dragged me to the staffroom where I was handed a cast-off. I fumbled and sweated as I changed in the farthest corner of the coat-rack room.
A couple of years later, Mrs Bushell, a senior teacher, pulled me out of line because my hair was not brushed. She stood me with her at the foot of the stairs and told the girls, over and over, as they crocodiled upwards, that here was a messy, untidy, dirty girl who didn’t know how to look presentable. Every word made pointy with her acid tongue.
I ascribed these events to my mother. I knew they were caused by her day-dreaminess, that other focus she had which could sweep her mind far away from us, from me. While she was fond of Mark and me and never got cross with us, she’d rather be staring out a window, cup of coffee and cigarette at hand, her eyes intent on scenes we could never see. It was as though she wandered through our lives, intent on a journey of her own.
Yet even that memory is not the whole story because she also dutifully packed our lunches, constructed perfect piles of sun-dried clothes in our drawers and kept the floors gleaming. And there were areas where she excelled.
When we were sick, she gave us sponge baths in bed—blankets peeled back gently, a towel here and another one there, a basin of warm soapy water positioned so it was always accessible to her and never in danger of being knocked over, one section of the body at a time revealed, bathed with the warm washer and soap, rinsed off, towelled dry, covered again. When I had measles, she melted away the hard crust that gummed my eyes in the mornings with cloths so warm and sure of themselves I felt blessed. She created sick-trays of Vegemite fingers on fresh white bread, squeezed orange juice, a silver coaster of sultanas, all positioned on a doily her mother had embroidered for her own trousseau at the turn of the century.
She had learnt to do a sponge bath on a patient as part of her nursing training. It was as though she didn’t quite know what to do with us when we were well and bouncing around, but give her a sick child and she knew not only exactly what to do but also how to do it tenderly, to do it in a way that suggested love.
I was reminded of this when I was in my thirties, my wild period, and a lover washed my hair. We were playing with henna and my companion said, I’ll wash it out for you.
Bending over the basin in the corner of the bathroom, I felt the rush of warm water onto my head. I felt fingers sliding through my hair, fingers smoothing across my scalp. A rush of pleasure spread through my whole body, the soft depth of old old knowing. Tears swirled down the plughole. My mother washed my hair like this, washed it with me bending over the basin in the corner of the bathroom just like this.
She began by folding a towel around my neck in an efficient, nurse-like manner to stop drips and breakaway runnels creeping down my neck. The water was a delicious, perfect temperature as it streamed over me. She believed in rubbing the scalp with her strong fingers, making sure not even a tiny spot was missed. I closed my eyes, I gave myself to the warm wetting, the soaping, the rubbing, the rinsing, the divine sense of clean. Next she flopped the towel on my head and scrubbed vigorously before saying, Bend over.
She then wrapped the towel around my head, tight at the neck behind, a turban twist on top like a woman in a magazine, the way I still do today. I walked or sat carefully for five minutes until my hair was dry enough for the towel to come off. Sometimes, she then sat beside me saying, I’ll just give it a bit of a squiggle to get the curls going.
This meant she took a piece of hair and twisted it several times, and then another and another, moving all over my head. I didn’t understand her need to nurture curls, but I liked her fingers corkscrewing on my scalp.
But if that warm water had not swashed onto my head as I bent over the basin, would I have ever remembered my mother’s hands in my hair? It’s not that I’d forgotten exactly, it’s simply that the replication of warm wetness poured by someone else brought the whole memory back, the curve in my spine, my hands on white porcelain, the feel
ings. And the word ‘feeling’ obscures, in its vague generality, more than it reveals. It doesn’t name, for example, the desire, the longing that flooded me. It doesn’t name the concomitant sense of loss, of memory as a form of grief.
Much later, in my mother’s declining years, we had a conversation about what her nursing days had meant to her. She trained at Royal Adelaide Hospital in the ’30s and in those days, trainee nurses lived in Ayers House, the splendid colonial home which is now a posh restaurant, across the road from the main hospital entrance. I pictured the young women with their starched white veils flocking across the road like flighty herons. As she talked, she became animated, her voice urgent with joy.
What was it about nursing that you loved so much? I asked.
I could mix with other people, she answered instantly, her face lit by a huge smile.
This was so unexpected, so removed from the focus on actual nursing, that it sent me blank for a moment.
What do you mean? I asked.
When we were growing up, she answered, we were told that we could only play with relatives and people like us.
But, that meant . . .
Yes, she went on. That meant there was a lot of time when we just had to play with each other. The only children close by were in the village and we weren’t allowed to play with them.
She had always referred to ‘the village’ as part of her growing up. It’s so English, so eighteenth and nineteenth century, that I had always relegated it to that time long ago when one’s parents lived in a different universe.
Now I focused on it. So what was this village? I asked.
Well, it was just down the road, just across the bridge at the bottom of our place.
