Partly in the hope of improving her accent, and partly to leave a house where her husband was often suspiciously absent, Nance made her first trip to France in 1965. She was fifty-three. She did a short course at the Sorbonne. Her letters were exhilarated, full of ever-so-casual French. I had to go this morning to Boul’Mich near the Sorbonne and buy d’occasion a formidable looking grammar… The city here is still covered with snow, it has turned to ice on the trottoirs…
She’d nearly finished her degree when the marriage that had lasted for nearly twenty-five years came to an end. Ken was involved with another woman and she was pregnant. Nance had thought that she and Ken had arrived at an arrangement where each of them could live their own lives, within the bond created by their years together. Now, approaching sixty, she was alone.
Among her papers I found an envelope where she’d jotted down something she must have read somewhere. L’amour et le travail: if the first is lacking you have only to redouble the second. The arts degree became more than a hobby. She saw that it could offer her a whole new life. She did an honours year, then a teaching diploma and a diploma in teaching English as a foreign language. Forty years after her mother had stopped her, Nance became a teacher. She taught French in schools, taught English to newly arrived migrant children, and ran her own business teaching English to the wives of Japanese businessmen. She travelled to Europe several more times, never as a tourist but always in the spirit of the pilgrim.
One of her last trips was to Florence, where she stood in front of the frescoes that Dante had seen. A line came into her mind from somewhere in all her reading: Suffering pierces the shield of habit. It was a thought that made sense of the unhappiness she’d known, and also the happiness. She knew that ultimately it didn’t matter what happened to you. In the light of eternity, in the light of all those dead writers in whose work she’d recognised the great truths, only one thing mattered. What other people did was up to them. Your job was to live—as richly and honestly as you could—your one life.
Nance wrote a letter that was attached to her will. It started:
My dear children,
First, I want to say, you children have made my life, you are the only important thing I ever did and I want to thank you for all you have given me. Each of you is special and each of you is different which I regard as a great good. I’m like the Roman matron who said of her children: ‘These are my jewels.’
What a great gift it was to have had her for a mother. From the solid base of the love she gave us, all three of us discovered lives of fulfilment: Christopher as a barrister, Stephen as an economist, and me, after a slow start, as a writer.
Why does a person become a writer? I owe so much to my mother. She read to me when I was a child, made it clear how much literature mattered, told me the family stories that, years later, inspired the books I’m most proud of having written. When I was suddenly bored with children’s books she handed me The Blush and Other Stories by Elizabeth Taylor, and a new world of adult behaviour and beautiful writing was opened up to my half-comprehending twelve-year-old mind. When I began to write, she was supportive and encouraging in the most practical ways. One or two mornings a week I’d take our two young children to her house. She’d have made me a cut lunch and a thermos, as she’d done when I was at school. Then I’d drive to a nearby park and get into the back seat with one of the kids’ boogie boards across my lap for a desk. For a few hours I’d have the luxury she never did: time to get on with my own work, knowing the children were having a richly enjoyable time with their loving granny.
If someone had done all that for Nance Russell, might she have become a writer rather than the most engaged of readers? It’s more than possible. The memoir-fragments she left are mostly matter-of-fact, but now and then there’s a quick blaze of something more expressive. The diary she kept irregularly in her later years is full of pungent observations about the people around her. But, apart from that letter to the newspaper about prunes, she was never published. Luck and life circumstances are often all that makes the difference between someone who writes and someone who doesn’t, and—like so many women of her generation—she wasn’t favoured with either.
Ken knew more about the difficulties of the writing life than Nance, but he also encouraged me when I chose that path. He had three books published—a novel called A Maid from Heaven in 1965, a non-fiction book about the Vietnam War in 1972, and a memoir of his Trotskyite days in 2006. I was fifteen when the galleys arrived for the novel: long narrow coils of slippery paper that I helped him proofread. It was fascinating to see how the physical object of a book was arrived at, and it was a new idea that a published writer could be someone as ordinary as the father I saw every day buttering his toast and making bad puns.
I was on the last drafts of this book and full of doubts about it when, by a series of lucky chances, I met Ria Murch (‘Not diarrhoea, not gonorrhoea, just Ria’). She was a great age and, as she put it, on and off like a light bulb on the blink. I asked her, Ria, do you remember my mother Nance Gee?
Her face—still like a mischievous pixie’s despite the ravages of age—blossomed into a huge smile. Oh, she said, your mother was a remarkable woman! The switch blinked off, but that brilliant f lash of memory was a reminder of why it was worth trying to tell Nance’s story.
Writing about a real person, especially your own mother, is difficult. Unlike characters in fiction, real people’s motives are muddled and obscure, their personalities seem to shift from one day to another, and their lives are full of events that come out of nowhere. Thinking about your mother as a woman, with a private inner life, is daunting. It can feel as if you shouldn’t go there.
Still, this book is my attempt to continue what our mother wanted to achieve with those fragments of memoir: to tell her story and put it in its context of time and place. I hope it might be something like the book she might have written, if she’d ever had the right pencil.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY FIRST and warmest thanks go to Ste and Ly—all those cups of excellent coffee and the warm welcome you both gave me over the long process of writing this book were so much appreciated.
I also thank the many others who were so generous with their time, knowledge, and memories. Among them were members of the extended families of Wisemans, Russells, Maunders, and Gees—thank you for sharing your family stories with me. I’m so grateful to others whose parents, uncles or aunts knew my mother and who allowed me to use part of their own story to enrich mine. Thank you to all those who shared their knowledge and resources of old-time pharmacy with me, and the many librarians, archivists, local historians and others who went to such trouble to help me in my effort to understand and visualise the past. I’m very grateful to the friends who read parts of drafts and gave me insightful suggestions.
A remarkable series of serendipities gave me the opportunity to talk with two men who’d been on The Line with Uncle Frank. It was a privilege and a great pleasure to meet Sir John Carrick and the late Wal Ward, and hear their memories of ‘Russ’.
Thank you, Lisa Allen, Barrie Anthony, Bessie Bardwell, Helena Berenson, Suzanne Bryce, Campbelltown and Airds Historical Society, Campbelltown Public School Archives, Mary Coupe, Jean Debelle and family, Lorraine Evison, Suzanne Falkiner, Christine Frater, Jennifer Freeman, Lloyd Gledhill, Tony Gledhill, Hall School Museum, Susan Hampton, Jan Ho, Kristy-Lee Hyder, Mrs Molly Keane, Nita Kieg, Deborah Kingsland, Danny Kingsley, Glenda Korporaal, Ku-ring-gai Historical Society, Curtis Levy, Ross Lane, Bill Larkin, Judy McDonald, John Mackie, my webmaster Col Madden, Julia Mant, Don Maunder, Helen Maxwell, Tom Molomby, Deirdre and Ivor Morton, Michelle and John Murch, Moffatt Oxenbould, the late Ernie Ranclaud, Marita Ranclaud, Anna Rigg, David Roberts, John and Deborah Russell, Meg Sadler, Edna Saunders, Paul Serov, Susanna Short, Anne Stevens, St George Girls’ High Archives, Temora Historical Society, Tamworth Historical Society, and Lee Whitmore.
Thanks also to my agent Barbara Mobbs, a trustworthy voice of g
ood sense in all the uncertainties of writing a book.
In spite of all the help I had in writing this book, and my best efforts, there are sure to be errors. I apologise in advance, and will appreciate being put right.
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