Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  Grandma, though, knew that there was a heaven on earth. She had heard it singing through the strings of a violin. It caught her breath in a little gasp. Like heartbreak. Like love. She understood why I loved Michael Franklin. She had only ever loved a violinist in her dreams. It was up to me, I suppose, to love one for real.

  There is a picture I still have of my two sisters and me sitting at a piano beside our mother. Our little fingers are curved over the piano keys and Mum’s face is unlined, fair and beautiful as she smiles serenely at the camera. A photographer from the Courier Mail had come around especially to photograph Mum, who was just beginning to earn recognition and roles with touring opera companies from overseas. There had been other accomplishments before she married Dad. Winner of special awards for typing, first aid and tennis, the Queensland finals of the Mobil Quest singing competition, then a finalist in the nationals, a commendation from the famous Australian tenor Donald Smith, as well as a chuck under the chin for being so young and pretty. Later, with two young babies in tow, she was invited to sing in the chorus of the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company when they played in Queensland – as well as a special request to join their national tour, an opportunity she turned down because of a new pregnancy and Dad’s concern.

  There are other photographs in Mum’s house that chronicle the period in her life when she was at the height of her young woman’s beauty. These photos celebrate her days of dancing at Cloudland. She loved going to Cloudland, but this, however, did not stop her voting for the man – Premier Johannes Bjelke-Petersen – who ordered the early morning destruction of this cherished Brisbane landmark. These photos show Mum in a variety of lovely gowns sitting next to an equally various assortment of young men. Friends of her brother Neville Cottrell, young Rugby Union star and future Wallaby captain, these young men had names like Kevvie, Dezzie, Wally and Brian. The dances were always innocent; if any secretly drunk boy let his lust get the better of him, Nevvie was there to keep an eye on her and if necessary perhaps step in and warn the unfortunate culprit that if ‘you lay another hand on my sister there’ll be another laying on of hands outside’. There were gatekeepers even at Cloudland, surely as close to heaven as a girl could get in those days.

  By the end of 2000 Mum finds it increasingly difficult to sing and play the piano. The muscles in her tongue have become frozen by the Parkinson’s, and her medication makes her rasp and wheeze. Breathing will not come as easily as it once did and she now faces life without the things that give her joy.

  Joan: It was a tragedy for me. Not only did I lose the piano, the singing, and the teaching, I found out that what I thought I could do, I can’t do anymore. I just can’t do it. For instance, the other day I walked down to the beach, singing all the way …

  Linda: But you said you couldn’t sing.

  Joan: Well, it’s hardly what I would have called singing before.

  Linda: That must have been nice.

  Joan: It was really good. I didn’t care who heard me, didn’t care who heard how awful I sounded. And then I sat down on the benches in the shade. Still singing. It was a lovely day.

  Linda: What were you singing, Mum?

  Joan: I sang ‘One Day When We Were Young’.

  Linda: Oh, you used to sing that with Dad, didn’t you?

  Joan: Yes, I sang it to him on our wedding day.

  Joan starts to sing:

  You told me you loved me

  That gorgeous day in May.

  He loved me singing, your father. Just loved it.

  Book Two

  LEARNING HOW TO BREATHE

  OUR FATHER WHOSE ART WAS HEAVEN

  My father, born Arthur (‘bear-like man’) Gerard (‘brave man with spear’) Neil, but known throughout his married life as Ben, loved telling stories. The story was his song, and his voice, quiet, mellifluous, lilting, not typically Australian, was his instrument. One of his favourite stories was of how he met my mother. I remember this story more clearly than I remember any other story that I read or listened to.

  It begins like this: one day in Brisbane, my mother, who has golden hair and rosy cheeks, is sitting on the banks of the West End side of the Brisbane River. It is a silvery spring day and she is dragging her nets out into the water. She loves the solitude of prawning, even though she is only twelve, and her brother is up at the house making a racket with his footie mates. Dad, who looks like a young Montgomery Clift, is on his way to Mum’s house to tutor this rowdy brother. He stops and talks to the pretty child who tells him about prawning, about throwing the nets out wide and dragging them in slowly, about waiting, about the wash of the waves from the ferries that chug between the banks of the river. As the beautiful man smiles, the sun glints off his perfect teeth, and whatever serendipity existed in the skies above West End that day beamed down on my future parents.

  Dad had a habit of embellishing all his narratives so I can’t say that I particularly believe in the story he used to tell about his first meeting with my mother. But I remember it because it was told to me. I remember it because of how it was told to me, simply, poetically, musically, with a reverence for its details. There were always specific words used to describe things; for instance, Mum’s prawning net was always ‘handwoven’ and Dad’s hair always ‘crinkled in sooty black waves’, as if the story’s details could prove, or at least preserve, its veracity. And despite the fact that my parents’ relationship was scarred by difficulties, the story of the beginning of their romance still lives as a strange heightened fiction.

  Mum told Paul that when Dad came to visit again years after they all first met, Grandma said: ‘You’d do well to hold on to that one, Joan.’

  Paul: Mum always reckoned Gran was sweet on Dad, long before they all met up again. He was actually much closer in age to Grandma than to Mum. You’ve got to remember that the first time Mum and Dad met, Mum was a twelve-year-old up to her knees in mud with her skirts all pulled up. Dad was her brother’s teacher. If you’d seen them all – Mum, Dad, Grandma – that day Mum and Dad first met, you’d never have thought ‘oh, he’ll end up marrying that woman’s daughter’. But he did. And you know it might seem unusual, but there are a million stories like that out there. People do all sorts of unexpected things.

  According to Kym, Paul’s wife, Dad’s sense of humour and his stories were ‘really out there’. Paul is like that too. He tells these funny stories, Kym divulges to me, that sound incredibly truthful and then you’ll see the expression on his face and you’ll suddenly realise he’s been having you on the whole time. It’s like part of your genetic code – the storytelling.

  I wish I could say the storytelling was the Irish in my father, but he was born in Manchester, England, had Celtic ancestry, and arrived in Australia by boat when he was eleven. At thirteen he was offered a scholarship by the Christian Brothers. He officially entered the order at sixteen and was known from the day he took his full vows as Brother Benedict, the name he later retained as the shortened, secular ‘Ben’. Towards the end of nearly thirty years as a Christian Brother he was appointed head of the Strathfield seminary in Sydney and became, in effect, the head of all the young religious men in Australia, until he walked out one evening, leaving his charred dinner burning in a saucepan.

  According to Aunty Kath, the wife of Dad’s brother, Charlie, Dad then spent six months walking the cliffs from Bondi to Bronte wondering about his place in the world, and the breakdown he had as he entered secular life would not be his last. Dad never mentioned to me that he had already lived nearly a lifetime before he began his other life with us. I only found out about his other life by accident at the age of twelve when I discovered an old black and white photograph of a vaguely familiar dark-haired man in a robe and collar. It took me a while to realise that this handsome young man with the movie star profile and sensual lips was my father.

  Joan: He never talked much about it, even to me. All he said once was that he
used to have issues with how the young men were treated. How they were made to sleep outside on the verandas even in winter – apparently to build up their character. I don’t really know what else he saw going on in there, but he never spoke about it. I think he just felt he couldn’t support them treating the boys how they did. I guess he remembered how it was for him, taken away from your family and thrown into the cold.

  Aunty Kath told me that in those days the Catholic Church was terrible to people who left. There was no follow-up and no support as the ex-religious person tried to reintegrate themselves into the world. She told me they gave Dad nothing but a blue suit for all his years of service. He stayed with her and Uncle Charlie at Bondi after he left because he had nowhere else to go. Afterwards, there was a to-do with the authorities in Rome, because he’d been one of the top-ranking brothers in Australia. There was some question about his mental state. Of course, according to Kath, not even his mother spoke directly to him about what was probably perceived as his ‘religious failing’. ‘Those old English migrant matriarchs were as hard as nails. They had it all worked out for their children,’ Kath told me. When Dad walked out on his vocation, his mother took it as her own personal failure. The Catholics often gave one of their children to the Church as a trade-off for their place in heaven. Perhaps she wondered if that place was still secure.

  Arthur Gerard had been the most intelligent of her children, so he was marked out for the scholarship that came with a religious life. One of his other brothers, my uncle Bill, was a young scrapper so he went into business. And according to Kath, ‘Poor old Charlie got offered the same scholarship as your father but his mother knocked it back and said he had to stay behind and help his father milk the cows. I don’t think Charlie ever got over that. He got into the drink and never got off it.’

  Kath once showed me a photograph of the youngest son, Frank, a big-boned smirking boy leaning back on his motorbike like a movie star, his leather jacket gleaming as brightly as the Brylcreem in his hair. Kath called him ‘the cocky one’: ‘It probably killed the mother when Frank died in the bike accident, but if you were looking down on it from up there in heaven you could have seen it coming because those types can’t last the way they are. You could have seen that one was marked for an early exit. I never heard her mention him once after he was gone. It was as if she just shut the door on him and never opened it again.’

  The fate of my father’s family can be told in shorthand: one brother an alcoholic, one a businessman, one ‘wild boy’ dead in his twenties, one ‘fragile’ sister, Edith, dead before the age of forty, and one ‘normal’ sister, Flora, who lived quietly and without incident in North Ryde for the rest of her life. And my father, a beautiful ex-religious man who scored the ultimate prize in the outside world: a blonde, devout and devoted young wife.

  After a honeymoon period that perhaps Dad wished had gone on forever, there we were, the five of us, one after the other, not exactly tumbling out, but born after dignified periods of time during which my father would perhaps woo my mother all over again. The offspring of an ex-religious parent are sometimes referred to as actualised prayer. In Dad’s case, the word really was made flesh five times. There is another school of thought, though, that would have called us penance for our father’s sins made flesh.

  Throughout 2000, Cathie continues to visit regularly. During each stay, we both understand better how to pool our strengths and tolerate our weaknesses, how to step forward or back depending on what is needed at the time. She is eager to participate with me as I collect and record family stories, and her memories of Dad in particular are acute, detailed and full of affection. We’re drinking tea together at the kitchen table one afternoon late in 2000 when I record one of her stories about sitting at the same table talking to Dad ten years earlier. Her brilliant blue eyes water as she speaks.

  Cathie: He was talking about someone we knew when we were kids. It was quite a long, in-depth story. Of course, I was just fascinated. I really believed that it had happened. Then, after about twenty minutes I looked him in the eye and said: ‘You’re having me on, aren’t you?’ The whole thing had been a complete and utter fantasy, but he’d interwoven enough facts into the story to make me believe it was true. He takes you on a long journey where you think you know where you’re going – but then you find out you really had no idea at all.

  Nothing about our father was quite what it seemed. Another peculiar story involves the matter of Dad’s two birthdays, as well as his sometimes confusing abundance of names.

  Cathie: We always thought Dad’s birthday was November 9. When I applied for my British passport, I had to get a copy of his birth certificate and when it arrived we discovered that it had November 14 recorded as Dad’s birthday. His own parents must have forgotten exactly when he was born. And his name was recorded as Arthur Gerard Neil. I remembered then the time we went to Sydney to see Uncle Bill after he had a brain clot. All our cousins were calling Dad ‘Uncle Gerard’. And Uncle Bill and Aunt Lal called him ‘Gerard’ too, or even, sometimes, ‘Arthur’. I was totally confused and I had no idea who anyone was talking to because I had only ever heard Dad referred to as ‘Ben’. That was when Mum told me he had been a Christian Brother and had taken as his religious name ‘Benedict’. Even after he left the Brothers he always signed his name ‘Gerard Benedict Neil’, out of respect, perhaps, for his years in the brotherhood and to honour and recognise, I suppose, his two lives.

  During our exchanges we also remark, not for the first or last time, on the different nature of our memories. When we swap stories, which we often do during her visits, Cathie is lively, emotional and readily moved, while I ponder and puzzle more. Cathie remembers Dad’s fondness for inventing tales and confusing his audience, for instance, but she doesn’t worry or wear away at the benign surfaces of his inventions as I do. She doesn’t wonder what lies beneath his fondness for tricks and games or the secret narratives, those that were untold, of his other life.

  In an old photograph Dad’s younger sister, Edith, is as beautiful as my father, who is standing beside her. She is smiling brightly; he is not. He has a dimple in his chin – something I don’t recall him having when his face filled out with age – and a side part in his curly black hair and he wears a black suit with a white clerical collar. Edith has a centre part and has flowers at the top of the ruffle that cascades down the front of her dress, which, by the look of the creases in its fabric, must have been made from cotton or linen. They could be twins with their sensual mouths, dark-eyed gazes and similar high, wide foreheads, which are white, unmarked and ‘full of brains’ – ‘too many brains’, as Grandma would remark while shaking her head mournfully. The difference between this brother and sister is indicated only by the tiny markings of stress around Edith’s eyes, and the particular shine in them. I have looked at this photograph many times and seen in my ‘poor Aunt Edith’ a woman who perhaps hungered for touch, for adventures that her need for survival denied her, who perhaps escaped into a fantasy world of hairdos, fine clothes, and makeup when real life proved disappointing for her.

  When Edith died one day from a combination of diet pills and sedatives, it was called ‘an accidental death’. Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the Church, and so if her passing was mentioned at all it was as a terrible, unforeseeable accident. For years Mum was under the impression that Edith had died a natural death, although what death, she sometimes asked herself, could be natural in a childless woman not yet forty who had hardly worked since her marriage and who had no identifiable disease.

  It pulls at me like an ache to look at this picture of a woman I didn’t know who took her own life. Did she use up all her breath? Or did she no longer believe that release was possible? In the photograph, her piercing gaze seems to search for something outside of herself, in the distance, in her imagination or her increasingly fevered mind, but never inside her body.

  Her widower, Norm, was somehow blamed for her su
icide and shunned by the family. Mum was expected to boycott him too, but a few years later she went, without Dad, to visit Norm and his new wife. He remained wistful, Mum told me, but happy to receive her, this unexpected reminder of old trauma. His new wide-hipped wife bore him children and he had settled, happily enough, in a quiet Sydney suburb. Apparently he was never referred to again by Edith’s mother, old Ma Neil, who also never spoke to anyone about her losses. Perhaps her priest knew of her grief for the two children she had buried, but like a pragmatic Catholic she had borne enough children to have a few spare to support her in her old age and so she moved on quickly to the remaining few to help her reach the paradise she prayed every Sunday to be allowed to enter.

  IT’S A GREAT LIFE IF YOU DON’T WEAKEN

  Joan: I don’t understand women saying they don’t like having their babies. I loved all my babies and I loved being a mother. Of course, your grandmother always came after each new baby and helped. There wasn’t a lot of time and I admit that some of you might have benefited from having more one-on-one attention. But in those days you just got on with things and didn’t think too much about it all. I’m not sure even now whether there’s any use in thinking too much. I remember your grandmother used to worry about you and all your brains. It’s better to be a clod in this world, she used to say. Better to be a clod and just plod along. And in many ways, I think she was right. I was never very bright but I knew how to work hard. If I was really smart, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so happy with the things I had. You learn to appreciate the little things around you when your mind is occupied and not too restless and curious about the rest of the world.

  One of Mum’s favourite sayings was: ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’ I heard Grandma say these words many times as well. They impressed upon me that the ability to endure was one of the most desirable assets in life. Mum told me that despite her five babies she never once suffered from post-natal depression, but I know that she endured a lot for the sake of her marriage and her children. The mantra of strength and tenacity was a constant throughout my childhood. Difficult things were never considered a problem. They were ‘challenges to be faced’ and hopefully – with the help of God – you came through them with a little more wisdom than you had before they began.