Home Truth
Page 3
Finally, after the 1922 League of Nations mandate, they were able to return home to Israel, to their prophets, their ancestors, and their holy places from over 3,000 years in exile. They came home from all over the world, rejoining those remaining Jewish communities of Rafah, Ashkelon and, until recently, Gaza (now sadly completely ‘Judenrein’) which had managed to survive, generation after generation, despite the hostility of their neighbours, and the political changes over the passing millenia. And they’re still coming home.
In an instance of that happy synchronicity which often attends creative work, one of the notes I’d made well before going to Jerusalem was a reference to the old hymn ‘The Holy City’ with its thundering chorus of ‘Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Lift up thy gates and sing!’ The final verse contains a reference to the ‘new Jerusalem’ and notes one of the defining characteristics of what I believe creates ‘home’. It was a line that always makes my voice wobble when I sing it and still touches me whenever I hear it. More of that later.
The national home
I have an old school text belonging to one of my brothers and in it he’s written ‘Stephen Butler, St Ignatius College, Riverview, NSW, Australia, the World, the solar system, the Galaxy, Outer Space’, an idea lots of kids adopt, describing the concentric circles that surround our lives, our self images, the notions of who we are and where we live. The island continent Australia, on the planet earth, in our dazzling galaxy, is home for me, and its influence has permeated in ways that I’m not even aware of. Just as the environment creates the flora and fauna of a place, adapted to the attributes of the geophysical surrounds, it also impacts in subtle ways on the character of those who grow up in its shaping container. Although I can’t ever experience Australia in the way of the Indigenous inhabitants—their sense of belonging to the land. It’s very apparent from listening to Aborigines talk and write about their connection to the land that the landscape itself, the topography, the changing constellations in the skies above have become inextricably interwoven into their minds and lives in the ideas used by them in an attempt to explain some of the big questions that confront all human beings.
Unlike America, founded by the Pilgrim Fathers on lofty ideals (which although sometimes ignored are nevertheless still nailed to the nation’s mast, still influential) by men seeking freedom from persecution, Australia’s European history started off less nobly, as an extension of Britain’s prisons. This expediency has had its effects on the national psyche. Any writer knows that even if you don’t allude to the back story of a character in your novel, you must know all about what happened to him or her before the action of the novel—what shaped all characters so that they are the way they are, what their families were like, what events have contributed to their psychological make-ups. The past casts shadows that influence the present action and this holds true for novels, nations and the people who live in them. Australia’s past is part of her population’s heritage and can still be discerned in some popular notions around friendships between men (‘mateship’) and the alarming habit of flashing headlights to warn speeding drivers that the police (‘the traps’) are hiding up ahead. That Sydney was built on rum, paid for in rum, still plays out in the drinking culture that is one of the nation’s most popular recreations.
I was born there and have an Australian passport. That means I feel ‘at home’ in Australia. It means I have a particular sort of sense of humour, and possibly a naiveté and optimism that the inhabitants of older cultures have discarded. And yet the national character of this home is constantly changing and expanding. The Australia I grew up with in the 1950s was a quiet, homogeneous place, where a monthly ‘Chinesey’ purchased as an exciting ‘takeaway dinner’ from the Double Dragon restaurant and carried home carefully in treacherous paper bags in cardboard cake boxes was the epitome of the exotic. Something called ‘sweet and sour’ sauce! Chicken with cashews! Just imagine!
On special occasions, my parents, my brother and I, dressed in our best clothes (my poor brother forced to wear his hated school suit—a little grey number with tie and shorts) would have dinner in the Arunta Room at the old Australia Hotel while the younger siblings languished at home with babysitters. Pastel murals on the walls of the Arunta Room depicted tribal Aborigines. I’ve never heard of this tribe since. Dinner was a slightly grander version of what we’d eat at home—grilled or roasted meat, with potato, peas and carrots and gravy. In those days, men wore sports coats with their trousers when they were relaxing and crossed their legs in armchairs. Women wore hats and gloves when they went ‘into town’ to shop and have lunch at Cahills’ restaurant. On the wireless, the ABC announcers all sounded like Englishmen. I was Aegus 21 in the Argonauts Club. Our mother was considered recklessly ‘continental’ (a politer way of saying ‘foreign and peculiar’) for rubbing the salad bowl with a clove of garlic. We all howled her down when she wanted to call her latest—and last—son ‘Constantine’ after her Cretan grandfather, horrified at the possibilities of ‘Con the Greek’. There was no multiculturalism then. We urged her to choose a ‘proper Australian’ name. (I’d only narrowly missed being ‘Anastasia’ myself.) We splashed around in the surf all summer holidays, caught the tram up the hill on the way back, and bought ‘thruppence worth of chips’ hot with salt and vinegar, wrapped in newspaper on the way. Holiday amusements were picnics, watching the model aeroplanes in Centennial Park on a Sunday afternoon, the special treat of a two-bob ride on the little scaled-down train at Bronte, the La Perouse snake man, feeding the ducks in Centennial Park, the zoo and maybe once a month, ‘the pictures’.
The home of the physical body
Our most basic ‘home’ is the body. From the energetic marriage of two cells, a steady explosion of life begins, with exponential cell multiplication until a baby is ready to be expelled. The temporary home of the mother’s body becomes far too limiting and it’s time to burst out into the big, wide world.
The body is not only where we live, but also how we live. Because the condition of the body, its aliveness (or lack of aliveness as in depression) will determine the manner in which we relate to the surrounding people and circumstances of our lives; the condition of the body will determine whether we live lives of openness, generosity and tempered optimism, or instead lead lives that are constrained, cynical, perhaps even hostile. Many people, my younger self included, find themselves uncomfortable in their own skin, awkward, uneasy and anxious. Never quite sure of how to be, of how to behave, trying to pick up clues and cues from studying the behaviour of those around us—we suffer from an underlying sense that something is basically wrong—that we ourselves are somehow defective, that we have no real right to be here, but live under sufferance. ‘Anxious, irritable and discontent’ says a description of the addictive personality. At its least evil, this alienation from our most basic home—our very embodiment—can create an appeasing, servile type of person and, at its worst, a person who is constantly defensive and on the attack.
There are also those soft, fey folk who seem somehow disembodied, and who drift and float through life, never quite touching it, nor letting life touch them. Without a strong and solid sense of being ‘home’ in their embodiment, of standing on their own two feet, unease and insecurity will haunt them always. ‘I felt I’d been born on the wrong planet’ or ‘It seemed like everyone else had a manual on how to live, but I’d never been given one’ or ‘I’ve never felt comfortable in my own skin’ are some of the phrases I’ve heard over the years from people who never felt at ease within their own bodies. They don’t feel at home with themselves. I remember how this feels.
The world recently witnessed the death of Michael Jackson, a beautiful, brilliant and gifted child who, because of the distorting events of his childhood, was never able to live comfortably in his own skin—quite literally. As an adult, not only did he endure what must have been agonising surgical procedures year after year to reconstruct his very bones, but he also underwent a complete makeover of the skin he was born
with. Despite all these efforts to create a body he could wear comfortably, he was still unable to tolerate inner pain (the mind is itself another ‘home’ and it too can be comforting or hostile toward the body it seems to inhabit)—it is now being revealed that he self-medicated to a very dangerous degree. Eventually, the numbing effects of painkillers finally delivered the greatest numbness of all. His body was never ‘home’ to him, but something to be rejected.
To some degree, all addicts carry this sense of rejection and it is only when we are willing to open the interior doors to sweeping changes—changes that reach into every aspect of life, physical, psychological and spiritual—that healing can begin. Sadly, too many people would rather die—and do—than surrender to deep change. You see patients with terminal lung cancer sitting outside the hospital doors, smoking.
As I write, outside in the narrow mall that leads onto Jaffa Road, I can hear voices calling in Hebrew; the sound of cars, horns blasting, navigating the narrow, cobblestone mall outside; an occasional American drawl piercing through the other voices; and closer, the muffled sound of the Arabic television programme down the hall at Reception. All of this is punctuated at irregular intervals by a persistent voice, shrieking a high-pitched word that sounds like ‘beep!’. (I don’t identify this until much later—imagining it to be the call of a kid selling newspapers on the corner, or a spruiker, advertising his wares from his shop. Days later, I discover its sad, afflicted source.)
Being so far way from my quiet beachside village in Clovelly, New South Wales, Australia, provides exactly the right situation in which my sense of what constitutes ‘home’ can be experienced more keenly. Being in Jerusalem causes me to feel the absence of my geographical ‘home’ more deeply because of the contrasting foreignness of the sounds and smells from the street outside, so different from the salt and garden-y scents of my hometown are the shouted Hebrew in the street, the Arabic from the television.
The word ‘home’ is allegedly unique to English—other languages we are told only have words for ‘house’—not at all the same thing. A house is not necessarily a home, in fact, those establishments known as ‘Homes for Orphaned Children’ are decidedly not homes, but warehouses for unwanted or otherwise home-less kids.
Home—this strange English word, with its long, drawn-out humming sound, is the word we use for that place we grew up in, mostly with parents, and later, at another stage of life, the space we make with our partners in which to raise our own children, the place we go back to after a day’s work, or after an absence, or a holiday. ‘It’s so good to be home!’ we announce, after walking in, dropping our bags, putting on the kettle or pouring a drink. In Australia, buying one’s own home is the biggest, most financially demanding enterprise of a person’s life, and the cherished dream of most people. Ideally, home should be a place of safety, of belonging, of refuge, of familiarity, a place where masks can be taken off as well as shoes, a place of no questions having to be asked or answered; the place that in and of itself answers the question: where do I belong?1
The crime of home invasion is treated more seriously than other types of break-ins, because to break into an occupied home is to attack its inhabitants at their most vulnerable, in the place they consider safe from any outside interference. Anyone who’s come home to find their door standing open, their house trashed and valuables and personal treasures stolen, experiences a particular sense of violation. The classic Australian comedy film The Castle explores the rights a family has to their home when a powerful external agent presumes to acquire the property.
And is there a more melancholy sight than the ruins of what was once a home? In France, where complex inheritance laws and death duties sometimes make it financially impossible for the beneficiaries to claim their inheritances, it is not uncommon to see a beautiful eighteenth-century chateau mouldering away, roof tiles falling, eaves rotting, tattered, grubby curtains billowing through elegant, half-shuttered windows, and vines curling out of the chimneys. Simpler ruins such as those ancient cottages falling to pieces around the countrysides of rural Ireland and Scotland—reduced now to tumbledown stone walls and chimneys and perhaps some empty window frames—evoke sadness that the dereliction of an industrial building does not call forth. Once a woman cooked, sang and scolded here, on these now broken tiles, a man worked and drank and pulled off his boots near the fire, and children played and got in the way on the floor. Even the sight of empty birds’ nests in leafless trees can trigger feelings of sadness, images of a home abandoned, the little family long gone. ‘Lilies that fester,’ said Shakespeare in his Sonnet 94, ‘smell far worse than weeds.’ Just as homes without people seem like an affront, people without homes are also a pitiable presence. Too many people live on the streets or under bridges, homeless. Whether this is because of addictions, mental health issues, or personal inadequacies, the sight of a homeless man or woman usually brings a pang to the heart of an observer. What has happened for this to occur? What series of blows or crazy wilfulness has caused this sad eventuality?
The home of childhood
The home that we grow up in seems to be the most deeply experienced sense of home we will ever know. Most of us can remember in great detail the carpets, furniture and wallpapers of our childhood homes. Fortunate people recall the warmth and acceptance of mothers and fathers, the feeling of security and belonging that home provided. These memories are so acute and well laid down that even very elderly people whose short-term memories are deficient or lacking can recall their early childhood homes with great clarity and detail. The events and circumstances of early childhood penetrate fresh minds, undefended hearts and undamaged brain receptors with depth and precision. In later infancy and early childhood, life is lived in ‘close-up’, richly coloured and perceived.
For some of us, the piercing clarity and colour of childhood perception extends even to abstracts such as numbers. Certain words ‘come in colours’. The names of the days of the week, for instance, appeared as brightly coloured in my early childhood mind. I’ve almost lost the coloured numbers of my early childhood, but I remember that one was yellow and white, three blue and white, and nine a particular shade of solid dark green. Strangely, like a little shaman, I would ‘sing’ things that pleased me, objects as diverse as the many wide steps of St Mary’s Cathedral and a woman’s hat.
According to psychiatrists and psychologists, it is the relationships we are born into in our first home and the events of our early childhood that shape us as human beings, for good or ill, for the rest of our lives. Writers certainly know this about their characters. ‘Home’ permeates our lives long after the geographical home has gone. We try and recreate it with familiar objects possibly taken from the original childhood home. Those who are born, live and end their days in the family home must experience a sense of continuity unknown to those of us who leave the original household and create other homes during our lifetimes.
I can barely remember my very first home. It was at Bellbird, via Cessnock: a timber cottage provided for the locum doctor, my father. A huge celluloid doll on a grey, wooden veranda, a line or two from a song sung by my barely remembered maternal grandmother: ‘I lost my poor doll on the heath, dears’, and ‘I found my poor doll on the heath, dears, her paint was all faded and gone…’
There are fragments of memories of next-door’s Bantam chickens, next-door’s laundry, dark and bloody with the killing of a hen. These memories aren’t accompanied by any sense of the self I am/have now. They seem to come as impressions from an observer who was simply an agent of awareness, a being which took things in. A presence who existed simply to absorb and perceive. I’ve been told, but do not remember, that my mother had a young girl from ‘a Home’ to help her with me, her first baby.
Earliest memories of the next home, at Randwick, contain images of seating myself in an arched, painted fireplace. Beyond that were a baby brother and the busy mother. I remember being small enough to be frightened by the tall brown vacuum cleaner with its f
ront light like the eye of Cyclops, fearing it would come after me. Dark polished timber banisters on the staircase, brown carpet, pearly pink wallpaper flecked with chalky low relief stucco, which could be scratched off with the fingernails and tasted. Watching raindrops down a window pane, or heavy rain marching down the road—‘soldiers’ my grandmother called it. Music and songs—‘After the Ball is Over’ and ‘Irene, Goodnight’—replaced the haunting story of the ruined dolly. I recall having to stand on tiptoe to peer above table tops and my mother’s dressing table. Memories of raging anger and being sent to my room where I pulled open all the drawers and threw the clothes they contained all over the floor. Then sitting, mollified, watching my mother kneeling beside me, folding and rehousing everything. Memories of the tall, severe presence of the senior partner in the practice, aptly named Dr Power. Home was all-encompassing, complete, unnoticed like the air we breathed, surrounding us with its familiar routines, the ABC’s ‘Kindergarten of the Air’ in the mornings on the wireless, bathtimes, bedtimes, the quarrels overheard at night, the possibility of the Thing under the bed…
Now, when I think of living ‘at home’ I still tend to think of this period in early life in the two-storeyed brick and timber house on Coogee Bay Road, purchased by my father in 1948 for ten thousand pounds (a big mortgage) and the place where I lived a few years before boarding school. It was the address I returned to during school holidays.
I only have to think the word home and a world arises in my imagination—of bedrooms, the dark staircase, the waiting room and surgery at the front of the house, the big north-facing backyard that ran all the way down to the lane at the other end of the property and the garage there, the huge camphor laurel tree, the stables next door where horses boarded, walking round in circles in a small, dusty square, the block of flats next door but one. The word home is accompanied by a particular feeling tone, an atmosphere and an inner mood—almost indescribable for its mix of confused and distant emotions. But there is a sadness, a sense of lack that I suspect the notion of home should not convey. When I think back to my childhood home, there’s an uneasy edge to the feelings that arise; to change Robert Frost’s words somewhat, home was a place that ‘when you had to go there, they probably wouldn’t let you in’.