Whatever Remains

by Penny F. Graham

  The lasting impression I had of that large homogeneous group was of a family who showed real affection for each other. They were one of the closer knit groups of Emersons that I had the pleasure of meeting.

  After that first meeting in 1993, Gwen and I became firm friends. We have visited her and her family on several occasions when we have been in England and have kept up a lively correspondence in the intervening years. A few years after our first visit, Gwen sent me a small exquisite porcelain dish, white with pick roses scattered round the edge. I have used it as a soap dish ever since and each morning as I wash my face, I think of Gwen. Gwen died on 20 April 2007 aged 84 years. I am so glad I had the opportunity to meet and talk with her and to become close friends. Although we lived in different hemispheres, I miss her sorely.

  Our stay in Britain was now nearly over. We needed to return the borrowed car to our friends in Essex, then pick up the bus from London to Holyhead on the North West coast of Wales, where we were to catch the ferry to Dublin, Ireland. We had more family research to do, but this time on Lindsay’s side of the family. We thought the rest of our trip would be relatively unexciting but a nasty shock was waiting for us just around the corner.

  It was raining when the cross channel ferry docked in Dublin, and it drizzled on and off during the whole of our stay there. We still loved Dublin, wet or not, and we spent a great few days getting to know the city, its many parks and gardens and, of course, its lively noisy wonderful pubs.

  Situated on the east coast at the mouth of the River Liffey, Dublin is one of the fastest-growing towns in Ireland. From a tourist’s point of view, I can see why. It has a vibrant nightlife, there are buskers playing wonderful music on many of the inner city streets, the shopping is good, the inner cityscape is architecturally interesting and the pubs are legendary.

  Lindsay’s family history search was to start in central Ireland. So after our short but enjoyable stay in Dublin we rented a car, another ‘rent-a-wreck’ from a cheap-as-chips car rental firm and headed west. On our first night out from Dublin we stayed in a bed and breakfast place near Castlepollard in County Westmeath. Castlepollard is a very small dot on the map of Ireland, and a village in decline. For Lindsay it was an important starting point. It is the village where his maternal grandfather had been born, grew up and worked before becoming a Church of England missionary in India. We are not sure how or why a Protestant family had settled in the heartland of Catholic Ireland. But settle they had and Edward (Pat) Walker, Lindsay’s grandfather, was supposed to have earned extra money to put himself through theological college by selling Protestant Bibles in the southern counties of Catholic Ireland. A very hard sell, we thought.

  That night we rang Margaret, Lindsay’s mother, who lived not far from our home in Kambah. It was Mother’s Day and Lindsay wanted to speak with her as we had not been in touch for a few weeks. It was to be a very significant phone call. She was at home, glad to hear from us and had some very exciting news. My brother Derek had rung her to ask if she had a contact number for us as he wanted to speak to me urgently.

  I was flabbergasted, as I had not heard from either of my brothers since Denis had put the phone down on me after I had challenged him on his version of his childhood. That was over two years ago. Why did Derek need to speak to me now? All sorts of terrible things were racing through my mind — a death in the family, a grave illness? What?

  None of these things apparently — Derek had been contacted by a friend of his who lived in Perth, Western Australia, who told him that I had discovered a half-sister who lived in England. Where did that information come from? Who had told Derek about Pat’s existence and why? I was in total shock. Margaret did not know the source of Derek’s information, just that he was anxious to speak to me. How could he know who I was in touch with, and which ‘friend’ had rung him from Perth? I had not told anyone in Perth about our new family in England. Then I remembered. Yes, I had. I had told Jacky — one of my ‘Russian’ cousins to whom I had become very close and who I phoned regularly when at home. And, I remembered, she had a friend — a solicitor who had been doing some legal work for Jacky. I knew that this woman had been at law school with my brother and they had been ‘an item’ during their student days. Had Jacky told her and was this the so-called ‘friend’ who had alerted Derek to my discovery of a whole new family?

  We spoke with Margaret for a while telling her of our arrival in Ireland and our plans for the next few weeks. I gave her the number of the bed and breakfast where we were staying and asked if she could pass on the number to Derek so that he could ring us the next day.

  We had been standing in the hallway to make our phone call. When we got off the phone, we moved to a small sitting room and sat together quietly digesting the turn of events. It was early summer and even though it was early evening, it was still light enough to see the pretty cottage garden through the lace-curtained window. I sat watching, hoping the pleasant rural scene would calm me down. It didn’t. When I recovered from the shock of the news, I became furious. How dare this woman ring Derek behind my back? I had asked Jacky to keep the information to herself but she had obviously not realised that her friend was still in contact with Derek. It all seemed so unfair — why should I not have the right to let my family know of this whole new family in my own time and in my own way? I had had no intention of telling them of our discovery and my meeting with Pat until we arrived back in Australia in a few months’ time. I was the one who had spent years sifting through the lies and deceptions to reach the truth. It had been our sons who had had to suffer the hurt of rejection from a suddenly absent grandfather. Lindsay’s comforting presence and reassuring words finally calmed me down. In the end, what else was there to do but accept the situation and go to bed?

  Derek rang the next evening. We had not spoken for over two years and our last words had been acrimonious. He had accused me of disloyalty and disrespect to our father. In his view, it had been not up to me to challenge anything Denis had said and even though both brothers acknowledged that our father’s version of the facts was demonstrably untrue, it was not my place to dispute them. I felt very differently.

  Our conversation was pleasant enough. Yes, he said, he’d had a phone call from his one-time girlfriend Anne-Marie who lived in Perth. She had rung him to let him know that we (Lindsay and I) were visiting newly discovered relatives in England and a newly discovered half-sister as well. Even though Jacky had cautioned her to keep the information to herself, Anne-Marie had apparently felt more loyalty to Derek than to her friend Jacky. I seethed inwardly.

  Derek asked about the finding of our English relatives and I gave him a very abridged version of how it had all come about. I told him we had a charming half-sister and that we had stayed with her and her husband while in England. I gave him Pat’s full married name and told him where they lived. As we talked, I felt my anger seep away. There now seemed no point in holding on to my annoyance — he, and obviously Denis, now knew that I had uncovered a past life that I was not meant to know. So I told him what a nice group of people I had met and how thrilled I was to have found a sister. I explained that we were on the move the next day and we would not be easily contactable for the next six weeks or so. We agreed that when we arrived back home in Australia we would meet and I would tell him in detail all I could about our new set of relatives.

  After putting down the phone, Lindsay and I talked as we walked arm in arm along the country lanes surrounding our bed and breakfast cottage. Mercifully, the rain we had struck in Dublin had cleared and the quiet Irish countryside was bathed in a soft evening light. Tensions evaporated as I realised that it was now out of my hands as to how and when I told my father and brothers of my meeting with Pat. I had promised Pat I would — it had just been a case of when. Now the die was cast and I had made a commitment that, when we got back to Canberra, I would tell them all I knew and share with them the information I had and the photos I had been given. And they, my two brothers and father, would,
I hoped, be once again on speaking terms with me.

  We rang Pat and Albert to let them know what had transpired. ‘Well,’ they quipped, ‘Australia must be a small place indeed if news can travel across the continent at such speed.’ It was good to make light of the situation and have a laugh.

  The next few weeks flew by. We travelled here and there as Lindsay researched his side of the family. Sometimes, as in Castlepollard, we had little success as we could find no record of Lindsay’s grandfather’s early life. No gravestones of his forebears, no church records or local knowledge of the family. It all seemed very familiar to me! Or sometimes with greater success, in the parish of Leckpatrick in County Tyrone, where we not only found the Presbyterian church where his paternal great-grandparents were married but also saw the actual records of their marriage, retrieved by a friendly sexton from the local bank vault. Genealogical research is like that: win some, lose some — the common ingredients are perseverance, patience and luck.

  Ireland is a beautiful country, and we found it, despite the political ‘troubles’, full of friendly people. Most of our travels were in Ireland rather than Northern Ireland, but we did visit Londonderry briefly and saw the devastation in a city divided by religion and bigotry. Shops with prison-like iron shutters, and graffiti that made our heads spin.

  After Lindsay finished his research in County Tyrone, we made our way back to Dublin via some of the wilder parts of the north-west Irish coast through County Donegal and County Sligo. We took a side trip to the Connemara National Park where I was stunned to see whole hillsides covered with various shades of purple rhododendrons and Lindsay just had to pull the car over and climb the spectacular Ben Lettery, one of the Twelve Bens of Connemara. The Bens, or Pins as they are sometimes called, are a group of twelve small mountains that dominate the surrounding low-lying countryside.

  Then, hugging Galway Bay, we made our way into Galway and on through central Ireland back to Dublin.

  On our arrival back in Dublin, we sadly said farewell to our little rust-bucket rental car. She had done us proud. Through the peat marshes, boggy side roads and the winding stretches through the Connemara, she had never let us down. Bar a few throaty hesitant starts on particularly cold mornings, she had taken the mud and rough gravel on the back roads in her stride. Cheap as chips she may have been, but reliable, she certainly was.

  We had promised Pat and Albert that we would ring them as we were leaving Ireland. There had been an upsurge of violence in Londonderry not long before our visit, and they wanted to be sure we were leaving Ireland unscathed and all in one piece. So before we caught the ferry to Le Havre in France, we put through a call.

  Once again, I was in for a shock. Derek had rung them a few days beforehand. For someone who felt we should not dig into Denis’s past without his say so, he had done a sharp bit of detective work to find Pat’s phone number and then make contact. I had given him Pat’s married name and the name of the town where they lived, but that’s all.

  The phone call had been friendly, and Derek had asked for their address so he could write to them to introduce himself more fully and tell Pat something about his life and his family. Pat was happy to oblige. He did write at length some weeks later, and Pat has given me a copy of that letter.

  Pat and I had agreed that it was now up to my brothers and Denis whether they wished to continue and expand the relationship with their new-found family on the other side of the world or let it wither on the vine.

  Life is for living and our journey through parts of Europe was just beginning. After leaving Ireland we spent some time in the south of France. Then we took the fast train to Belgium where we stayed for a few days at a youth hostel before moving on to Cologne in Germany to visit a good friend of ours. On to Prague, in the Czech Republic, where we fell in love with the beautiful ‘Old Town’, with its historic square and street markets on the Charles Bridge.

  Then it was on to the newly created Slovakia where we enjoyed long and adventurous walks in the High Tatras mountains that separate Slovakia and Poland. Another long train trip took us through Vienna to Tuscany in northern Italy where we stayed in Volterra, an ancient hilltop village renowned for its alabaster goods and archaeological sites.

  Our time in Volterra was mainly spent marvelling at the amazing Roman theatre and Etruscan ruins, drinking the rich red and ridiculously cheap local wine and tramping the many dusty country roads between the hilltop villages of that region. After a wine-rich evening meal, we would wander home through the narrow winding streets and watch the sky slowly changing colour and wave upon wave of sparrows swoop and swirl above us before coming in to roost before dark.

  Sadly it was once again time to move on. We planned to spend a week on one of the Greek islands and then head for Turkey, our final destination before flying home from Istanbul. We were getting pretty good at negotiating our way around foreign railway stations, making use of an overnight journey to save on accommodation, and finding a cheap hotel or pension when we reached our destination. We were, we told each other proudly, travel savvy!

  From Volterra, it was a bus trip back to Sienna, then a 5 am start from our hotel (we scorned taxis as being only for softies) to walk the 2 kilometres to the railway station to catch the early morning train to Rome. There was a hair-raising train change at Rome’s main railway station to negotiate, where we had 10 minutes to get ourselves and luggage (thank goodness we were back-packing it in those days and didn’t have to deal with unwieldy suitcases) off the train, find the next platform and get on our train to Brindisi before it left. We made it, just.

  If we loved Volterra, than we were to fall just as much in love with the island of Samos. Samos is part of the north-eastern Aegean Islands and the closest island to the Turkish coast. It has an ancient history going back to Ionian times. It is also a popular tourist destination. With its beaches of pure white sand and crystalline aquamarine waters, olive plantations and vineyards, distinctive architecture, busy night life and a pleasant Mediterranean climate, more and more people are flocking to the island to find their piece of paradise.

  Hiring a Vespa motor scooter, we chugged slowly (with two of us on board, we weren’t going anywhere quickly) around the island discovering its many little beaches, villages, olive groves, hidden-away tiny white and blue churches and, of course, places where we could have a wonderful meal for very little cost with magnificent views.

  In one small village, set high on the rocky spine of hills dividing the island, we stopped to ask directions from a young boy of about 13. He was sitting on the steps of an old stone house in the village square, shelling peas into a large ceramic bowl. I was preparing to resort to sign language as my Greek was limited to hello, please and thank you, but he beat me to it by asking in a strongly nasal Australian drawl, ‘Lost, are youse?’ He, it transpired, had been born of Greek parents in Fitzroy, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. He and his younger siblings had gone to school at the local Catholic primary, and he considered himself an Aussie through and through. He had not been happy when his father had decided to uproot the family and return home to the ancestral hamlet in Samos. He told me he was determined to return to Australia to see his ‘mates’ once he was old enough. We laughed at the probability of two Aussies meeting in such an un-Australian setting and then went on our way leaving him to his pea shelling and a ‘guess who I just spoke to’ story for the family’s lunch table.

  Blue seas, blue skies, deliciously different food flavoured with the musky scent of rich local olive oil washed down with smoky glasses of ouzo or red wine. We had planned to stay a week. That stretched easily into two.

  The last country on our overseas adventure was Turkey. Because we had tarried an extra week in Samos and had been slowly slipping our time line ever since we left England, we were now a few weeks behind our schedule. We arrived by ferry in the small sea port of Kusadasi on the south west coast. It was busy, noisy and crowded. We needed to make up time so cut our stay there short, but before leaving t
ook the bus to Ephesus to see the magnificently restored Roman ruins. It was 42°C in the shade that day but, despite having to rest under the occasional shade tree when we became dizzy and faint with the heat, we were fascinated by the place. Part of a city from another time, another world; it was living history.

  Our next port of call was Fethiya, a pretty, less touristy village on the shores of the Mediterranean. Our stay there was marked by a momentous event. We actually bought something other than food! After walking past a carpet shop in the main street half a dozen times, we were drawn in by the splendour of the rich colours and fine designs of the many rugs and carpets on display. We became captives of commercialism. We could not resist the temptation to own such loveliness. It took hours to decide between the intricate patterns and choice of colours. In the end we walked away with a kilim hand-woven by the women from a village deep in Turkey’s hinterland. Yes, we ended up having to carry home a carpet with our backpacks and haven’t for one moment regretted it. Like a pool of glowing fire, it hangs on our lounge wall to this day.

  Our plane home left from Istanbul’s International Airport, a short internal flight from Fethiya. Our last few days in Turkey were taken up by the traditional sightseeing that Istanbul has to offer, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, spice markets and, of course, the many hundreds of carpet shops in clusters on almost every city street. But we had been away from home for five fantastic months; and it was now time to head back.

  We arrived back in Australia in late August. The house was in reasonable condition after being let for the last five months, but the garden was a disaster. A few days determined cleaning had the house back to normal — the garden would take a little longer. It would cause broken fingernails, backaches and sunburnt faces and arms as we cleared weeds, dead shrubs, and broken tree limbs together into piles before carting them off to the rubbish tip. Even with the unaccustomed workload, it was good to be back in our own home.