My mother was more positive and relaxed than ever before.
‘Is the food good?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, very good,’ she replied.
For the first time in her life she was eating without self-denial. She wasn’t worried about her appearance; the germ-defeating gloves had been thrown aside. She had her own room, with a television set she had going constantly. When I visited we’d go for long, slow walks around the grounds, with my arm hooked through hers for support.
With each visit, though, the dementia became more pronounced. On one occasion, I was copying out my journalists’ contact book as a present for Dan, my older son, who’d just won his first job – following his father and grandfather into the trade. He was to be a radio announcer in Mount Isa, the outback mining town. My contact book was laid out alphabetically by topic, each person selected as an expert in their field. If you required an Astronomer, or Bat Expert, or Doctor with an Interest in Lightning, then my book could supply an instant name and number. I sat with my mother as I copied it out. It was a job which would take many hours, over a few days, so it could be perfectly combined with this pre-Christmas visit. I just had to get used to the rhythm of the conversation.
Mother: What are you doing?
Me: Writing out phone numbers for Dan. He’s got his first job.
Mother: Oh.
(pause)
Mother: What are you doing?
Me: Writing out phone numbers for Dan. He’s just got a job.
Mother: Oh.
(pause)
Mother: What are you doing?
Me: Writing out phone numbers for Dan. So he can use them in his new job.
Mother: Oh.
(pause)
And so on through the day, until the conversation, with small variations, had been repeated hundreds of times.
Each night I said goodbye to my mother at the nursing home and went back to sleep at her house, with the strange swimming pool, the teddies and the coffin. I sat there, staring at all her stuff; the leftovers of a life. I thought about renting out the house to generate some income for my mother, but where would I store all her furniture, all her papers, all the framed photographs that had been accumulated, over many years of collecting, by the Dr Anna Phillipps Appreciation Society?
And how would I explain the coffin in the garage?
I felt sympathy for my mother at moments like this, but then my mind would swing in a more hostile direction. I’d find myself thinking about the distance she’d always maintained between the two of us. I’d think about the time she said she’d never held me as a baby; about the way she used me as a dumping place for her hostility towards my father; about her constant, self-serving attempt to cast me as the person ‘who found David’, thus turning me into the author of my parents’ divorce.
I compared all this to the relationship I had with my own children – imperfect in the usual ways, but always close and warm. I hoped I’d given them – by some proportion, large or small – more love than I’d received.
I know that’s a big thing to claim. My fingers object to typing it. Self-doubt intrudes. All I know for sure is that this idea – giving more love than you received – has power when you see it in others.
A few years before, I’d attended the seventieth birthday party of a family friend, Noel Franks. The birthday boy was – and is – a great bloke, and father to an endless tribe of (mostly) daughters. All spoke in turn to the gathered guests; all ended up in tears.
There was one speech, if you can call it a speech, sobbed out briefly as it was, that was particularly moving. Some speakers can reduce you to tears after twenty minutes of slow build. This speaker – Noel’s daughter Joanne – did it in her first, and only, sentence. ‘If you knew the sort of childhood Dad had, but then what a wonderful father he was to us . . .’
That was it. Speaker sobbing. Speech over. Whole room reduced to tears. And in that moment it seemed like we’d been told the meaning of life: to give out more good than you’d received. Or, to put it in the negative, to pass on less shit than you’d suffered.
In the middle of this circle of love sat Noel, the birthday boy: the man who had taken darkness and turned it into light.
If I’m uncomfortable about claiming myself as a great parent, I’m confident in claiming Debra as one. I think of a period when Joe was fourteen. He’d been playing the harmonica for a couple of years and had developed an interest in the arcane craft of customising the instrument to suit particular playing styles. It was an esoteric task in which you’d take the factory-made object and carefully file down some of the internal parts to change the quality of the note.
The craft was so obscure there was really only one man in Australia who knew how to do it: Neil Graham, a fabulously eccentric bushman and blues player. With a background as a boilermaker and welder, he now supplied his customised instruments to professional harmonica players around the world.
Neil lives in a solar-powered house deep in the forests of the New South Wales south coast, the sort of house in which the furniture is covered in the skins of feral cats he’s killed in order to help protect the native wildlife. Joe wanted to spend a week learning at Neil’s feet, and Neil was happy to have an apprentice. So Debra drove Joe down and booked into a motel in the nearest town. Each day she’d drive Joe an hour into the forest and each evening drive back to pick him up again. In between trips, she’d sit in the motel room getting on with her writing. With the exception of the cat-skin chairs, it’s an unremarkable story: most parents of our generation would have a version of it, dropping everything to help their children follow a passion. Yet devotion of this type would have been unimaginable for my parents and – frankly – for most of the parents of their time. Today’s parents are often criticised for being too involved, fearful and child-focused. They are derided as ‘helicopter parents’. They over-parent, it is said, robbing children of their selfhood.
Pandering to this fashionably negative view of today’s parents, the publishing world is now full of rosy portraits of growing up in the 1950s or ’60s when kids had their freedom, taking pot-shots with air rifles, whooshing down creeks on home-made rafts – the product of supposedly wise parents who understood risk and knew how to give kids the time and space to explore.
I’m sure such a childhood existed for many, but it’s not my memory. I had the air rifle, that’s true, and at age eight or nine I would cycle to that creek where kids had constructed a raft from old oil drums and tried to make it float. But I also remember the occasional loneliness of a ’60s childhood. Many parents were simply disengaged. They didn’t ‘give kids their freedom’; they just weren’t that interested in their role as parents. There were paedophiles in the bushes, out-of-control priests in the choir stalls and gangs in the schoolyard. And when things did go wrong, there was no culture of intimacy and trust between parent and child that allowed the child to tell and the parent to believe.
A few years ago, the Sydney Opera House staged a Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and included a speaker who attacked parents for being over-protective. It made me so mad, as this was not a ‘dangerous’ idea at all; it was the most conventional of ideas, a staple of a million talkback radio sessions and Facebook posts. ‘When we were kids . . .’ The really dangerous idea had been left unspoken: that the glorious free-wheeling past of the ’60s and ’70s had been driven by parental apathy more than anything else.
My main memory of childhood is being alone, either sitting in my room with a book or cycling around the suburb, looking for something to do. My father was a member of the Sydney Cricket Ground and passionate about the game; he’d go regularly but never invited me. The same with golf, despite his membership of a nearby country club. I do recall the two of us playing a single game of squash when I was nine years old. It’s a happy memory, but a rare one. My mother, meanwhile, would take me places – but mainly to suit her own needs. During school holidays I’d sit around her workplace – the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in Kings Cross.
As a ten-year-old, I spent a lot of time either watching opera rehearsals or walking along Darlinghurst Road, ignoring the strip clubs on my way to buy a milkshake. I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m whining; I’d have hated the cricket, while being exposed to both the opera and the outrages of Kings Cross was a privilege. My point is that this was typical of the time; kids were meant to bend to the convenience of their parents, whether that meant sitting through a production of Wagner, or – in other families – sitting in a stifling car outside the pub while dad downed five schooners, a lemonade handed through the car window if your father happened to recall your existence.
They were helicopter parents of a different sort – ones that constantly flew away from their children with barely a farewell wave.
Am I being accurate about my parents’ attitude towards me? Can my sense of it be true: that these two self-obsessed people had a baby in whom they were largely uninterested? It sounds unlikely: having the child, in the circumstances described, took some effort. I know from photographs that my mother rewarded herself with a car featuring BOY numberplates, a precursor of her later numberplate celebrating Bilbo Baggins. Maybe there is a different narrative that I’m missing. Were there points at which things were normal?
I try to form the case for the defence. I remember being in bed with my mother and father when I was eight or nine, sitting between them, reading the comics as they read the Sunday papers. That sounds like a functional family. My mother would make me breakfast, involving thick slices of Vogel’s bread, sawn direct from the grain-dense loaf, as was standard practice in this Amish belt of Sydney’s north shore. I also remember her impromptu manicures. She was very concerned about my cuticles, and would make me sit close to her on the couch, using her own fingernail to push back each cuticle in turn, promising this would give me larger, more rounded fingernails.
Of course, there was a three-decade gap in her attentiveness when she disappeared into the hobbit hole. Yet after the death of Mr Phillipps, there were signs of interest. She collected my newspaper columns, occasionally telling me she liked them and often praising them to others, including the couple who ran the Noosa newsagency. When I reconstruct her attitude to me, the really negative years – the years in which she was hostile and dismissive – all coincided with Mr Phillipps. Maybe my father’s version had at least some measure of truth: the story of a completely normal family disrupted by that bastard Phillipps.
Which is not a bad theory until you remember the alcoholic father, the fake-past mother and their virgin-birth child.
I wonder why I want to tell these terrible stories about my parents – their relatively moderate neglect; my father’s relatively moderate alcoholism; my mother’s unremarkable attempt to clamber up the social ladder. Even her sudden departure with a lover is, after all, the most unoriginal sin. Would I like it if, in twenty years time, my sons wrote a similar book about me – pointing out my failures; going through any documents I’d left; noting the nights I drank too much or told the same anecdote twice? How fair am I being? What right of reply do my parents have? Is it reasonable to blame my mother for sending me to Lionel in London? Don’t I bear some responsibility for what happened? And if I’m going to mock my father for his problems, shouldn’t I start with my own middle-aged self beset with the same issues? Drinking too much? Yes. And also a pretty good persecution complex: ‘Why are those radio listeners texting in each day on the subject of my grammar, or my politics, or my speaking style? Why are they trying to crucify me?’
And then there’s the additional complexity: is the point of these self-critical queries, so deftly inserted into the text, merely a plea for the reader to leap in to reassure the writer: ‘Oh, no, everyone has been clearly beastly. You’ve been through so much, you poor dear . . .’
Or – here’s an alternative and sunnier theory – have I been blessed with a good story and decided to tell it, hoping it will chime with others? I want to believe there’s a point to this tale – that so many of us have strange or neglectful families and yet somehow most of us survive. Here’s what I hope is true: that these things happened and I want to make something of the story, turning it into an artefact that I can toss around in my hand, passing it to others to see if they find it useful. And then, more firmly than before, I can put it away on the shelf.
But first I need to know the full story. And that will take some research.
Chapter Thirteen
It was now a decade since I looked on the net and discovered the outline of my mother’s family tree. It was also thirty-five years since my aunt first told me the real story of my mother’s past. Why hadn’t I been more curious? Why hadn’t I tried to find my relatives? I felt some defiant pride in my lack of interest. Other parts of my life had gone well – my friends, my family, my career – and so I focused on these rather than on my parents. I had turned away from the parts of my life that were not nourishing and concentrated on the parts that were. I focused on the places in which I’d found love rather than on the places where love was missing.
When my younger son turned eighteen I wrote a piece for the newspaper listing all my best bits of advice for a young person – the things I wished I’d known when I was his age. In a long list, there was one idea to which people responded strongly:
Surround yourself with people who bring out your best side – people in whose company you become fabulous, funny or wise. Avoid people in whose company you become boring or sad.
Some readers told me they’d been inspired by that paragraph to finally shake off that old ‘friend’ who’d spent decades making them feel bad. Perhaps it was also good advice in terms of parents: if they are awful, ignore them. I know this is contrary to all professional counselling – ‘You must resolve your issues with your parents before they die’ – but sometimes the parents you’ve been allocated are unsuitable for that process.
And my quest to hold my parents at a distance had been pretty successful. My weekly phone calls to my mother were an act of duty, emotionally unengaging. I’d tell her about the children and Debra, while understanding that her only real interest was herself. Each week, before she was captured by dementia, she’d talk about the late Mr Phillipps: ‘You found him for me,’ she’d say at some point. By this time I would have heard the phrase, or some variant, hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. It was the ‘Hello, how are you’ of our every conversation. The bit about Mr Phillipps would then lead on to my father and his various defects, just as it had when we visited her in the Enchanted Girdle. I would wait on the phone, sometimes lifting it away from my ear so I could hear my mother’s voice but not her words. After some minutes the voice would stop, I’d return the phone to my ear, and say: ‘So, have you been to dinner at the club?’
And yet, for all that I’d kept my distance, there was something intriguing about my mother’s story.
I decided to buy a subscription to a genealogy website to see what more I could discover about her past. Ten years on, the site was more sophisticated than the one I’d visited in that burst of curiosity after my father’s death. Within half an hour, I’d found several mentions of my mother’s father, Harold Sudall – the one she always described as ‘having worked for Sir Winston’.
A document came up showing that he had joined the army during World War I, enlisting on July 11 1917, giving a pub as his address: The Borough Arms, Cross Street, Accrington. I stared at the recruitment papers, his age (falsely) recorded in a looping script as eighteen years and six months, his trade given as ‘motor driver and engineer’. There was something intoxicating about the image on my computer. With the website’s help I worked backwards through Harold’s life. I found him at age eleven in the 1911 census, one of a family of seven living at 18 Meadow Street, Accrington. Using Google Street View, I brought up an image of the house. It was still there: a squat two-storey terrace with a narrow door. It was a world away from my mother’s tales about her aristocratic past.
Through the genealogy website, I tried to track do
wn my mother’s two older sisters. I couldn’t find anything about the older one, Molly, but Bertha seemed to have married twice. One of the marriages had produced a son, possibly still alive. How odd it would be, after all this time, to meet someone from my mother’s much-denied side of the family. Bertha’s married name, I discovered, was Hartley-Smith. I typed it into a search engine and found multiple versions of her death notice. I felt a pang of regret. She had died just three years before. If only I had attempted this a little sooner, I would have had an auntie to meet.
The death notice described Bertha as ‘a mother to Colin’, ‘a mother-in-law of Margaret’ and ‘a dearly loved grandma and great-grandma’. I’d only been at this for half an hour but my family was growing apace. I searched for my newly discovered cousin, Colin, using all my Google skills. Nothing worked, so I went back to the funeral notice, which was my only solid lead:
HARTLEY-SMITH – On 15th October 2010 peacefully in The Sands BERTHA aged 90 years. The much loved wife of the late Albert Hartley and the late Alan Smith.
It gave the name of the funeral company, the local minister and her nursing home. I emailed all three.
A few days later, there was a reply. It was from Margaret, my cousin’s wife. It was my first contact with the family who, according to my mother, didn’t exist.
Hello Richard
Well, life is full of surprises! . . . Nothing could have shocked me into silence as completely as the phone call I received from the office at The Sands this morning just as I was setting off for work. Anne, the girl in the office, was delighted that her detective work had produced results . . .
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