Who will unravel the routes and reasons of my nomadic life? – though they are no more convoluted, I suppose, than the reasons which led my great-grandfather to abandon, overnight, a wife and young son and a respectable law practice in Eastbourne, that most proper of English cities.
From the window above my desk I gaze out, bemused, at the river – the St Lawrence River. Down at the bottom of my yard, it sucks away at the base of our cliffs: plucks and thaws, plucks and thaws. I live at the desiccating edge of things, on the dividing line between two countries, nowhere.
My grandfather’s face, pensive, hangs in the maples like a moon. Never, he begs, never live on the banks of a river.
This is wry high ground, I assure him. Sixty feet of limestone between me and the water.
My great-grandfather comes lurching through the trees, avoiding his son. He laughs his well-bred English laugh. He laughs his turn-of-the-century Brisbane tavern laugh. This too will pass, he promises.
* * *
After the Second World War, when my father came home from the Air Force, jobs were not so easy to come by in Melbourne. Too many returning soldiers and new immigrants from Europe, I suppose. When an offer of work came from Brisbane there was no question about whether we would go, though neighbors and relations, stunned, all said: “Brisbane! You can’t be serious?”
“When you buy a house,” warned my grandfather, “buy on high ground, and well away from the river.”
But memory is short. In Brisbane my grandfather’s advice was thought to be quaint and neurotic. Just the same, my father would not look at a house near the river, nor one that was not on high ground. He had cause to be grateful in Christmas ‘74 when the river got up to its old tricks, thrashing around like a dragon in fitful sleep.
“There’s a purpose behind everything,” my father told me by trans-Pacific phone call on the morning following the disaster. My father is a deeply religious man. “Sometimes we have to wait a long time, almost a century in fact, to know what was in the mind of God.”
“Dad,” I say awkwardly. My father and I have, for a long time now, avoided discussing many topics, especially such matters as what may be on the mind of God. “Everyone’s safe, then?”
“Hardly everyone,” he says with a hint of reproach. “But your parents and your brothers and their families are safe. We’re all pitching in with the relief work, everyone is, it’s fantastic. I thought you’d want to know we’re okay, in case you saw something on the news.” Then he laughs, self-deprecatingly: “Though I don’t suppose Brisbane … over there. I suppose we don’t count for too much in the big wide world.” There is a silence and then he laughs again. “If you could see me! Mud from head to toe. But it isn’t funny. It’s awful, it’s tragic seeing them crammed into schools and churches. They look so dazed.”
“Dad …” I say, but am awash in old places, my old schools, the university bus stop, the park on the river bank where I had my first kiss.
“The water’s receding now,” my father says. “The worst’s over. But it’ll be days … and the mud! Heaven knows how long before the mud will be cleared away. I wonder if Brisbane will ever look the same again. I wonder if anyone will stay.”
People do stay, of course.
They even – amazing as it seems – build right on the river bank again.
As for us, for my expatriate husband and myself, the mere thought of Brisbane almost ceasing to be did something to us. We couldn’t afford it, but we had to go home – come home – that summer; the northern summer, that is – though it was a mild and sweet-smelling winter in Brisbane, and the wattles were in bloom along the river.
“Since ‘ow long ‘ave you been in Canada?” asks the telephone voice from the Australian High Commission in Ottawa. It is a French Canadian voice, heavily accented, but I long ago gave up expecting the logical in matters such as this.
“Much longer than I expected,” I answer.
“Why did you come?”
“Academic reasons.” In both senses, I think. “It wasn’t planned, really. It just arrived.”
“II est arrivé?” she says, thrown slightly off course.
“C’est ga. Exactement,” I assure her. “Look, is this relevant to the renewal of my Australian passport?”
“Yes,” she says. “Why do you stay ‘ere?”
“Stahier?”
“Au Canada.”
“Ah. For the same academic reasons. I really can’t see what this has to …”
“Before we can renew your Australian passport,” she explains … (and I puzzle over that plural. Who is this French Canadian Australian we?) … “Before we can renew, you ‘ave to sign a document authorising us to conduct a search of Canadian immigration files. As long as you ‘ave never applied for Canadian citizenship, there is pas de problème.”
“How nice,” I say, cut to the quick. And hear my great-grandfather’s laugh.
Television had just come to Brisbane in 1953, though no families we knew could afford a set. For the coronation, we loaded folding chairs into family cars and drove into the city and sat outside shop windows to watch as Her Majesty arrived at Westminster Abbey. It was all very festive.
I remember the backyard parties, the fireworks, the decorations. Ours were splendid, especially on the garage, a corrugated-iron structure that slumped against the banana dump. A mango tree leaned over its rotting wooden doors, which we had festooned – my brothers and I – with red, white, and blue; with the Royal Ensign, the Union Jack, the Southern Cross. Elizabeth regina, in huge wobbly letters, pricked its way across the undulating wall. Below this, stretching all the way from the mango tree to the banana palms, was a long accordion-pleated poster (we had all been given them in school) of the Royal Coach and the horses and the footmen and the Crown Jewels and each item of the coronation regalia, especially that part of the royal hem line where the Golden Wattle was embroidered.
“Magnificent!” my father said.
He was, I recall, deeply moved, perhaps by the ingenuity and acrobatic skill that had been involved in climbing the mango tree and springing across to the garage roof in order to hang the bunting. He put his hand on my shoulder. He never held it against me (not even, I truly believe, in secret) that I, his firstborn, was a daughter. “Tradition,” he said, and I was both curious and embarrassed about the huskiness in his voice. “We have to know where we come from. My own father and grandfather …”
He went astray in his thoughts and I had to prompt him.
“Did Grandpa ever see the old king?”
“He saw the old Queen once, Victoria. He was very young, it was before his father … Your great-grandfather, I’m afraid, was a scoundrel, but still, even he … There was money that kept coming for your grandfather to go to Grammar School. All those years when nobody knew where … so even he had a sense of …”
There was a long silence.
“Well, anyway, now we belong here,” he said. “Here.” He looked at our little wooden house, and the rusty iron garage, and the gravel tracks of the driveway, and the old Bedford van and the mango tree and the passionfruit vines hanging matted over the fences. He took a deep princely breath of that damp and heavy air, and I remember thinking with a thrill of proprietary power: How rich we are!
“This is the place where we belong,” he said. “You’ll always belong here. And your children. And your children’s children.”
About me, I think, he was right. But perhaps it was only to be expected that I would be nomadic. Perhaps it was in my blood.
My son and I are walking beside the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because – for the time being – I am teaching at MIT.
“Well,” he says, “I’ve decided on the University of Toronto.”
“I’m glad,” I tell him. “I’m glad we’ll still all be living in the same country. Well,” I correct myself sheepishly, gesturing at
Boston, “most of the time, that is.”
My son shrugs and grins at me. He finds me unnecessarily anxious about separations. Movement is the norm of his life.
My son seems to me very American. That is to say, unlike me, he has an easy confidence that the world is manageable. He is not unduly bothered by absurdity. The random and irrational do not cause him anxiety. This, it seems to me, is because of his birth and his many subsequent summers in Los Angeles. He seems to me very Californian.
I have a vivid memory of walking with my Grandfather Turner in the Ballarat Gardens, not far from Melbourne. It was before we moved to Brisbane, so I must have been five or six. We must have gone walking in the Gardens quite often because there are several photographs of us – black and white, not too clear – here and there in family collections.
My grandfather does not look in the least like other Australian grandfathers. He wears a tweed suit with a vest and watch chain. He carries an elegant walking stick. He is holding my hand. I am wearing the long golden corkscrew curls which I hate but which everyone else considers adorable. I am also wearing one of the little dresses with smocked bodices which I frequently rip while climbing trees.
The paths of the Ballarat Gardens are lined with statues. My grandfather, who was the school headmaster until he retired, plays a game with me.
“This one?” he asks, pointing with his stick.
“That’s Mercury.”
“And this one?”
“That’s the Venus de Milo.”
“And this one?”
“That’s Persephone.”
“And why is Persephone weeping?”
“She misses … I forget her name. She misses her mother.”
“Demeter,” he says. “She misses her mother Demeter. And she wants to go back. Whichever world she’s in, she always misses the other one and wants to go back.”
We emerge from the avenue of statues at the shore of the Ballarat Lake. We walk out on the little wooden jetty.
“When I was little,” my grandfather says, “about as old as you are now, my father used to take me walking on the Eastbourne Pier. Just like this.”
I already know (because with grandfather all conversations are lessons of one kind or another) that Eastbourne is in England and that England is on the other side of the world, a place as easily imagined and as fabulous as Persephone’s Underworld. We sit on the end of the jetty and I swing my legs back and forth and throw pebbles in the water.
“Look at the dragonflies,” my grandfather says, pointing. But there is something in his voice.
“Grandpa?” I ask curiously. “What’s the matter?”
He doesn’t answer, but he puts his walking stick carefully down on the jetty, and takes me on his lap and holds me so tightly it hurts.
Morgan Morgan
My grandfather, Morgan Morgan, was a yodeller and a breeder of dahlias. On Collins Street and Bourke Street, I could tug at his hand and plead “Please, Grandpa, please!” and he would throw back his head and do something mysterious in his throat and his yodel would unfurl itself like a silk ribbon. All the trams in Melbourne would come to a standstill, entangled. Bewitched pedestrians stopped and stared. But this was nothing compared with former powers: when he was a young man on the goldfields, handsome and down on his luck, the girls for miles around would come running. Yodel-o-o-o, my grandfather would sing, snaring them, winding them in. The girls would sigh and sway like cobras in the strands of his voice. He was a charmer.
“Get along with you, Morg. You’re bad for business,” Mrs Blackburn would say. Flowers bloomed by the bucketful around her. She would lean across roses and carnations, she would catch at his sleeve. “Here’s a daisy for the Nipper,” and she’d tuck it behind my ear. She didn’t want him to move on at all, even I knew that. “Your grandpa,” she had said to me often enough, “is a fine figure of a man, they don’t make men like him anymore.” She’d pull one of her carnations from a bucket and swing the stem in her fingers. “A gentleman is a gentleman,” she’d sigh. “Even if he is poor as a church mouse and never found a thimbleful of gold.”
It was not entirely true. Grandpa told me, that he’d never struck it rich on the goldfields – the Kalgoorlie goldfields, he’d say, with a loving hesitation on the o’s and i’s, a rallentando which intimated that music had gone from the language since The Rush petered out.
In those exotic and demented times, men were obsessed with the calibration of luck. Not Morgan Morgan. While other men mapped out their fevers with calipers, measuring the likely run of a seam from existing strikes. Grandpa Morgan simply watched for the aura. Wherever the aura settled, he panned or dug.
“Crazy as a bandicoot,” the publican told him. “You’ve got to have a system, mate!”
But Morgan Morgan knew that gold was a gift, it never came to men of system, never had. “King David danced before the Lord,” he pointed out, “which goes to show; and his goldmines were the richest in the world, I read it somewhere, some archaeologist bloke has proved it.” Grandpa had his own methods of fossicking; in scripture or creek bed, it was all the same to him. He found what he wanted, or at any rate learned to want what he found.
He laboured at strings of waterholes that were known to be panned out. He was after the Morgan Nugget. This was how it appeared to him in a vision: as big as a man’s fist, blackened, gnarled like a prime, cobwebby with the roots of creek ferns. He expected its presence to be announced by an echo of Welsh choirs in the tea-tree and eucalypt scrub. And it was, it was. One day, with the strains of Cwm Rhondda all around him, he scratched at a piece of rock with a broken fingernail and the sun caught the gash and almost blinded him.
“Solid gold,” he told me. “And big as a man’s fist.” Not for the first time, he knew himself to be a man of destiny.
“What did you do with it, Grandpa?” I was full of awe. When he spoke of the past, I heard the surf of the delectable world of turbulence that raged beyond our garden wall. We were still at the old place in Ringwood then, across from the railway station. If I buried my face in the box-hedge of golden privet, I could hear the rush of Grandpa’s life, the trains careering past to Mitcham and Box Hill and Richmond. He would listen too, leaning into the sound, and I would see eyes travel on beyond Richmond, beyond Footscray even, out towards the unfenceable Nullarbor Plain and Kalgoorlie.
“What did you do with it, Grandpa?”
“With what?” he would ask from far away.
“With the Morgan Nugget?”
“I put it down again,” he said, “right back down where I found it, inside the vision. It’s still waiting just where I put it. Listen,” he said, “if you put your ear to the Morgan Dahlia, you can hear it waiting.”
I buried my ear in those soft salmon ruchings of petals and heard the deep hush of the past. And then pop, pop: he pinched the calyx with his fingers. “That’s the sound of the Morgan Nugget,” he said, “when it gets impatient. It’s waiting for one of us to find it again.”
“Dad!” Grandma Morgan, with a basket of eggs on her arm, came down the path from the hen house. “Don’t confuse the child with your nonsense.” She lifted her eyebrows at me. “Always could talk the leg off an iron pot, your Grandpa.”
“Pot calling the kettle black, I’d say,” he grumbled. He hated to be listened in on; I hated it too. I didn’t like the way the Morgan history drooped at the edges when other people were around.
Grandma Morgan was picking mint and tossing the sprigs into her basket. The leaves lay green and vivid against the eggs. “Came to tell you the pension cheques have arrived,” she said.
“Well, praise be,” said Grandpa, mollified. “Praise be. There’s corn in Egypt yet. And on top of that,” he whispered, as she moved off towards the house, “the Morgan Nugget’s still waiting.
“Dad! No more nonsense. That child is never going to know the difference between truth
and lies, you mark my words.”
“Got eyes in the back of her head,” Grandpa grumbled. “And ears in the wind. No flies on her, no siree.”
It was one of his favorite sayings: No flies on so-and-so, no siree. To me it implied an opposite state, an unsavory kind of person, stupid, sticky, smelling overly sweet in the manner of plums left on the ground beneath our tree for too long. I imagined this person – the person on whom there were flies to be pale and bloated, and to have bad breath and unwashed socks.
There was a man who delivered bonemeal for the dahlia garden on whom I thought there might be flies – if only one could see him at an unguarded moment. His clothes gave off a rich rancid smell. When he laughed it was like looking into the squishy dark mush of fruit I had to collect from the lawn before a mowing. Those few teeth which the bonemeal man still had – they announced themselves like unvanquished sentinels on a crumbling rampart – were given over to a delicate vegetation. I recognised it: it was the same silky green fur that coated the fallen plums over which floated little black parasols of flies.
Yet one day, when I came out to the dahlia garden just as the bonemeal man was leaving. Grandpa Morgan was tossing his fine head of hair in the wind and laughing his fine Welsh laugh. The bonemeal man was laughing too, trundling his barrow down our path, doubled up with mirth between its shafts, his green teeth waving about like banners.
“Grandpa, what is it, what is it? Why are you laughing. Grandpa?”
“Oh,” Grandpa gasped, patting me on the head in the way that meant a subject was not for discussing. “No flies on him, no siree.”
This was the best thing: I could always count on Grandpa Morgan to be outrageous. That was the word people used: the neighbours, my grandmother, my mother, my uncles. “He’s outrageous,” they would say, shaking their heads and throwing up their hands and smiling.
If I asked him to, he would yodel in the schoolyard when he came to fetch me, and abracadabra, we two were the hub of a circle of awed envy. When I passed the Teachers’ Room at morning tea time. I’d hear the older ones whisper and smile: “That’s Morgie’s granddaughter.”
Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Page 18
