Somehow Victoria coaxed a pot of tea from amid the stacks of books on her kitchen bench and we sat around the table late into the night talking about family and literature and politics, and admiring Nick’s paintings which were vigorous, abstract and bold. I’d ignored family for so many decades. Who knew all this warmth and fun was on offer? How bad did I feel that Victoria had patiently waited for me to re-establish contact, to resume my role as her cousin? How foolish had I been?
The next day, Victoria cooked a bountiful lunch for the family. Her mother, Audrey, arrived, followed by Vic’s sisters and then the sunshine. It was the first sunny day for weeks, as if even the British weather was conspiring to make me realise the joys of family. My two other cousins, Louise and Gabbi, were brilliant fun and we had an afternoon of sun-charged frivolity. None of this, though, was helping me with my quest to find out more about my mother. For that I needed Audrey and her memory. She was the only person I knew who’d been around when my father and mother met. I had so many questions. Had my mother developed her aristocratic claims before she met my father, or were they adopted to suit the stratified colonial scene of Port Moresby? Was there something about my grandmother and grandfather that explained why my mother turned her back on them? And what about the two sisters who’d been brought up with my mother, the self-proclaimed only child?
After lunch the two of us settled down at the kitchen table. I made tea, brought out my notebook and asked first about my father’s side of the family. Audrey, my father’s little sister, was in her eighties, graceful and smart, and eager to talk. She had a school teacher’s urge to provide precise information.
‘We were lower middle class. Your father went to Blackburn Cathedral School. That was a cut above elementary school, but a cut below a grammar school. Ted was always a go-getter. He met your mother right after the war. He’d just been demobbed and he met her on the train from London to Blackburn. He came home and said: “I’ve just met the woman I’m going to marry.”’
‘So you got to know my mother straight away?’
‘Yes, I’d visit her quite often. She lived behind a bakery in Nelson in two rooms shared with her friend Peggy, Peggy’s mum and Peggy’s mum’s boyfriend, Jim. There was no bathroom; when you wanted to wash you’d strip down and wash at the kitchen sink. It was quite basic.’
‘And did my mother have a job?’
‘She left school early, she would have been fourteen, and then she worked as an apprentice in a hairdresser’s shop on Preston New Road at Blackburn.’
‘Did you like her?’
‘Yes, I liked her.’
According to Audrey, my mother and her friend Peggy would travel in the first-class carriage between London and home. Their aim was to meet military officers, who at the time were given first-class tickets.
‘So that means she put on airs and graces right from the start?’
‘She was like that when I first met her,’ Audrey replied. ‘I remember getting dressed to go out one night and we were taking turns using the iron. I complimented her on her ironing and she said: “Oh, the nuns taught me how to do that at the convent.” It was a strange thing to say. There was no convent and no nuns. I knew that, and she knew that I knew, but she still said it.’
Audrey reported that my mother had already changed her name – from the Alice she’d grown up with to the jolly-hockey-sticks Bunty. Her Sudall surname had also changed. While others in the family introduced themselves as Sudd-el, the ‘sudd’ rhyming with ‘dud’, and the ‘el’ short and flat, my mother elongated the name until it became Sue-dell. So Alice Sudd-el became Bunty Sue-dell.
‘Did my father understand that it was all an act?’
‘Yes, but he went along with the story. He was obsessed with her. He also wanted to go up the social scale himself.’
‘So the social climbing was a joint project?’
‘Your father was besotted by her,’ Audrey repeated after a moment. ‘He was a very talented musician, did you know that? He had a band and played trumpet, but also clarinet and cornet. Your mother thought that was all a bit common so it had to stop.’
As Audrey spoke, I remembered a scalloped note advertising ‘A Grand Dance’ in Blackburn that I’d found among my father’s papers. I’d assumed it was kept as a romantic memory of meeting my mother; more likely, I realised, he’d kept it because his band had provided the entertainment. Another thought came: my son Joe had developed into a fine harmonica player, good enough to win occasional professional work. His ability had always been a mystery in a family in which I’d never been able to locate any musical skill; well, now I could. I was starting to see the appeal of this family history stuff.
‘What about the wedding?’
‘It was in Nelson. All the men had to wear their uniforms. That was your mother’s idea. Your father had been demobbed so he had to get special permission to be in uniform. The guests who had military uniforms were invited to be part of the photographs, but not those without uniforms.’
She mentioned Frank, the third sibling in the family alongside my father and Audrey. ‘Frank was in the merchant navy and was asked to stand aside. He wasn’t happy about this, so when the photographer arrived from the local paper, he took it upon himself to make sure they had the names right. The bride’s name, he told them, was “Alice”, not “Bunty”. He also pronounced the “Sudall” in the way it was normally said. Your mother would have hated it.’
Audrey allowed herself a smile at this. Frank would have enjoyed his small act of revenge.
So did my mother’s family really stand in the rain throwing confetti? Here the story changed slightly from what I’d remembered Audrey telling me when I was nineteen.
‘Molly didn’t come, but her sister Bertha came and so did her mother. They hadn’t been invited but they came anyway. They just sat up the back, the two of them, crying. We didn’t talk to them because we didn’t know who they were.’
Later, Audrey said, she invited the pair to her own wedding in an effort to make up.
Audrey pulled out an envelope of photographs from her handbag and placed the contents on the table. There was a photo of my parents’ wedding, a photo of my father as a young navy lieutenant, looking fresh-faced and hopeful, and one of Frank in his merchant navy uniform. Looking at the photo reminded her of a story. Frank, while in the merchant navy, visited my parents in Sydney in the late 1940s. He planned to stay with them for a week or two, but they sent him packing after a couple of days.
‘That seems a bit mean.’
‘Well, Frank would have been deliberately winding them up. He would have been bunging it on, extra working class. It would have been “Ee, by gum” and “We only used to bathe once a week.” He probably said it all in front of their friends, just to make a point, and that’s why they sent him away.’
Over the years there’d been moments of contact between Audrey and my mother, but often they’d been problematic. She recalled sending a T-shirt for me to wear when I was six or seven years old, and my mother sending it back with a note, explaining it was too small. ‘All Australian children have chests two inches bigger than those of English children,’ was the way Audrey remembered my mother’s note. My parents had also returned to England for a visit sometime in the early 1950s and behaved so pompously that the family rapidly tired of their company.
Audrey had told me plenty about my parents, but nothing about my mother’s family background.
‘So, what about her parents – Annie and Harold? What do you know about them?’
‘Nothing really. Although there was a rumour, but only a rumour, that the father had been in prison, crime unknown. Whether that was true or not, I really don’t know.’
I had already made an appointment to visit Nick Barratt at the National Archives in Kew. Nick had been an advisor on the TV show about family history Who Do You Think You Are?. I wanted to ask him about the idea of a fake past and how often he’d come across such a thing. He would also be able to tell me where to
begin my search for Harold.
The Archives are contained in a huge steroidal building, built as if to resist nuclear attack, in suburban parkland west of London. Nick was in his mid-forties, donnish and handsome. He bought us both tea at the staff cafe. As we settled in, I explained about my mother and her ‘aristocratic’ past, her change of name and the denial of her sisters. I expected him to say, ‘I hear that story all the time, especially from Canadians and Australians.’ He didn’t. Instead he crinkled his forehead.
‘That’s not so common,’ he said. ‘What’s common is for people to “big-up” their background, but only a little. You see marriage certificates and people have written “manager” as their father’s profession, or “independent means” when the truth was a bit more ordinary. But creating a totally different past . . .’
I pushed him, perhaps not wanting my mother’s oddity to be revealed as truly bizarre: ‘But wasn’t that the point of Australia or Canada, you could go there and be anything . . .’
Nick paused and sampled his tea. ‘Well,’ he finally offered, ‘I did help one family in which legend had it that the grandfather had received the Victoria Cross, but somehow the medal itself had been lost. The reality was that the fellow had been court-martialled for being drunk and disorderly.’
I feverishly took notes. This was a bit more like it.
‘Anything else?’
Again a pause and another sip of tea.
‘When we were doing Who Do You Think You Are?, the fourth series, there was a program with John Hurt, the actor, and he was convinced he was Irish. He’d been told that his great-grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Sligo. We checked it all out and there really was no Irish connection. We presented it to him on camera and he was quite upset. It changed his idea of who he was.’
So phew, at least my mother had some company. Although, to be fair, Hurt’s imagined past was generations back. And he never claimed to be an aristocratic only child.
‘Have you ever heard something like my mother’s story?’
‘Not really. To be honest, in my experience Australians are mostly proud that they came from nothing.’
Before I left the Archives, I headed upstairs and spent some time in the main reading room, feeding the name ‘Harold Sudall’ into various online forms. Whether due to my incompetence or a lack of documents, everything came up blank. That fitted what Nick had told me: only selected court records had been sent to the National Archives. If Harold had been a criminal, as my aunt had suggested, the proof would lie in the County Archives for Lancashire, held in the small city of Preston.
I was heading north anyway. I was about to meet the family I’d been told didn’t exist. Who knew what a day or two in the records office would reveal?
Chapter Sixteen
Debra and I were in the north of England, on the way to visit my cousin, Dorothy – my closest living relative on my mother’s side. Debra turned towards me from the passenger seat of the hire car.
‘What are you feeling?’
‘Well, nothing much. I haven’t met her yet.’
‘But you are about to meet her. This is the only person you have ever met on your mother’s side of the family.’
‘Other than my mother.’
‘Yes, other than your mother.’
‘I did actually meet my mother, you know . . .’
‘I have a fair understanding of that. My point is that, well, you must be feeling something . . .’
We’d had versions of this discussion ever since we’d met. Debra often asked me to analyse my feelings towards my strange mother and my difficult father. I always replied with variations of: ‘Well, I don’t really feel anything much. I just want to be dutiful so no one can say I wasn’t dutiful.’
And then she’d say: ‘You act like your relationship with your mother is a job you have to get through – completing the task, doing it well, but not really caring about it. As if you are a worker in some business you’re forced to cheerfully endure. There must be a deeper level of feeling. It’s not possible that you don’t feel more.’
Maybe Debra was right to prod me. For years, writing my newspaper column, I’d tried to kill off the stereotype of the unfeeling, insensitive Aussie male. The ‘me’ character in the columns was often foolish and annoying, but he was emotional and loving. That aspect of the ‘me’ character, I’m proud to claim, was drawn from life. Perhaps I’d inherited my father’s gregarious spirit; maybe it was the heart-on-your-sleeve influence of Canberra Youth Theatre. For whatever reason, I am an emotional person, sentimental even. I cry freely. I am demonstrative.
Except for one thing. My parents. On that score I’m the Shutdown Australian Male Exhibit Number One. I bottle everything up; I’m unwilling to study my feelings; I’m uncomfortable when people – this means Debra – start prodding. My feelings about my parents had long before been placed in quarantine.
Debra’s concern about this – her fear that it was doing me damage – was part of the reason she’d encouraged me to make this trip, wondering if it might crack something open. I was unsure about that ambition. Cracking things open can sometimes leave nothing but mess. I didn’t want to be one of those people who wasted their existence focusing on, and thus giving power to, the worst people in their lives. I’d talked to plenty of others who were obsessed by their past – preoccupied with bad parents, with predators who’d sexually abused them, with so-called friends who’d made them feel worthless – so much so that they missed out on living their actual, available, and possibly useful lives. Part of me wanted to create a new aphorism: ‘The overly examined life is not worth living.’
Then again – I had to admit this – Debra might have a point. Not understanding what happened to you is a different way of giving power to whoever it was, whatever it was, that hurt you. I also didn’t want to become one of those people who die unhappy, alcoholic, drug-addicted, alone, his children hating him, never really understanding why he’d never been happy.
We were driving along the seafront of Lytham St Annes – a northern seaside resort close to Blackpool. There were some Victorian hotels of the Fawlty Towers type and a beach fringed with sand dunes. Inland from the seafront were streets lined with tidy bungalows. After a few turns, we pulled up at the address I’d been given and Debra leaned over, giving me a searching look.
‘Take a moment.’
‘Okay, I’ll take a moment.’
For once, I did what Debra suggested and considered the strangeness of what was about to happen. Most people grow up with their cousins. Even if they live overseas, cards are sent and presents are swapped. I could have met this woman – the daughter of my mother’s sister Molly – thirty-five years ago, when I first came to England. Except back then I didn’t know she existed. How could she exist when I was – to use my mother’s perpetual phrase – ‘the only child of an only child’.
After a few moments, a fit-looking older man in a tie and jumper opened the front door and walked towards the car in greeting. Debra and I clambered out to meet him.
‘I’m Stanley. Dorothy’s husband. She is so excited.’
He directed me to park the car in the driveway. By the time I’d finished, Debra was inside, both hands being held by Dorothy. My cousin was beaming at Debra in the way you might beam at someone who’d just arrived from the national lottery office with a cheque for a million pounds. As I walked through the door, Dorothy’s gaze shifted to me. She had piercing eyes which were damp with emotion. We embraced. Tea was offered and served. After some joyful chatting, I asked Dorothy what she knew about my mother and her early life with her two sisters.
‘The three girls didn’t live with their parents. They mostly grew up living with their grandparents.’
‘Why was that? What was the problem with their parents?’
‘Their mother was Annie; she was a lovely woman, very kind, very caring and generous. You would have loved her. The grandparents were from her side of the family.’
> ‘Yes, but why didn’t the mother live with her own children?’
‘Maybe Annie lived there too, at least sometimes. I don’t think anyone ever explained that. I know Molly always used to say that she’d been to twelve different schools, so the children must have moved about.’
‘What about the father? What about Harold?’
‘We saw a lot of Annie, but not much of him.’
‘Someone told me about a rumour he had a criminal record.’
‘Not that I know of. But they didn’t really talk about him much.’
Dorothy brought out two Christmas cards dating from the mid-1950s, both sent from New Guinea. The first was addressed to Molly and written by my mother. It was quite formal in tone, wishing the family a happy Christmas. There was a friendlier one the next year, sent by my father. And then there was a photo of me in Port Moresby, aged three. The year would have been 1961, which seemed to mark the end of the contact between my mother and her family.
Around this time, Bertha, the middle sister, bought a seaside business in Morecambe called the Sunshine Hotel – giving employment, and accommodation, to both her older sister, Molly, and their mother, Annie. According to my cousin, Bertha was tough and ambitious – requiring maximum work from her sweet-natured mother and pliant older sister.
‘And, over the years, did any of them ever mention my mother?’
‘Oh, yes. Annie used to talk all the time about “our Alice” and the fact that she’d gone. She was heartbroken by it.’
‘And Molly? Did she ever mention my mother?’
Dorothy paused and seemed to struggle with her emotions, then she talked about her mother’s death, and how it was preceded by a period of dementia.
‘I would go and visit her and she’d say, “Oh, you’ve just missed our Alice. You know how she likes to come and go.”’
At the end of the afternoon, we hopped back into the car. As we drove off, Debra reached over and rubbed the back of my neck.
Flesh Wounds Page 15