Purple Prose

by Liz Byrski

  The Long Awaited

  When did Mary come to me? Or when is it that I needed her? It was in that hinterland of starting and stopping bleeding – the ‘painters and decorators’ in/out, out/in – a buffeting. The residue in public toilets of other women’s menses would bring tears to my eyes. It was pathetic in the truest sense. I needed something, someone to get me over this hump. I started to notice older women as if truly for the first time: their dress and habits, their survival tactics, their public kindnesses to one another. Once I bumped into an older woman with my shopping basket at the supermarket and apologised. She turned and grasped my free hand with her own that was piled with rings. You don’t have to say sorry.

  There is a list of disjointed facts that I know about Mary Coade (nee Tindale).

  She was the second daughter of ‘the Bolter’, Margaret Thompson. I guess every family tree has one or two. In Love In A Cold Climate the character is simply referred to as Bolter. Being esposito, I am rather fond of economical reasons being given for mysterious origins. My paternal grandfather, with his heavy Irish accent, always said Ach, dere was an impediment. In a trajectory from Ireland to Newcastle-on-Tyne and then on to New Zealand, Margaret married her employer, Robert Tindale. They moved as family, Margaret, Robert, Mary and her elder sister Bess, first to Victoria and then to Western Australia where Robert set up the Perth Modelling Works.

  Mary met Ted Coade in a shop in Victoria. They shared a birthday. Someone had called out to greet one or the other of them with a congratulations for the day and they both answered. It is thought that the gold rush may have brought them west.

  Later they would run a haberdashery business in Newcastle Street, Perth. Renee, a daughter, came along quite quickly. Ted managed the social aspects of the shop and Mary, the finances. Through her shrewd management, business expanded. They bought farms in the Wheatbelt and opened other businesses around Corrigin and Wickepin. Tom Hewett, a building contractor recently returned from World War I, met Renee Coade in Wickepin where she was living with her parents and working as the postmistress. They were later married and had two daughters: Dorothy in 1923 and my mother Lesley in 1925. Ted and his son-in-law Tom, my maternal grandfather, would eventually coown and run Lambton Downs, the Wickepin farm on which my mother and her sister lived idyllically until mid-childhood. It was this country, this particular place, and the people in it, that were to shape Dorothy Hewett’s work for a lifetime.

  My mother remembers her maternal grandparents, Ted and Mary, as loving, hard working and unpretentious. In her recollections they are already old and set in various routines. Ted played billiards with Tom every Sunday night. Mary came over to Renee and Tom’s every afternoon and sat on the sofa. On Friday nights they went to the Regal. They summered in an old weatherboard place at Como with a retainer called App. Ted loved the garden at Cathay and kept it up. Mary practised her Christian Science lying on the bed at the farm with her lessons, having ‘the right thought’ for those she felt in need, the tracts printed on pale pink and mauve paper. When Ted died and Mary’s memory was failing she would ask the family for her husband. The answer, He’s just in the garden, satisfied her.

  There is a sculpture by Patricia Piccinini called The Long Awaited. A preppy young boy who looks like he might have walked out of a Spielberg movie cradles the head of an ancient woman whose bulky body morphs into a tail. It recalls that branch of work on early peoples which held to the idea of marine origins. She is no svelte sea nymph but solid as a dugong. When I stand in front of it I think of Mary and all of the ways that she walked towards me, or I back to her.

  She came to me through that sea of material. She came to me through my mother’s stories. She came to me through the upside down plaster brick in the café near my work with the words Perth Modelling Works carved into it in beautiful Gill Sans. Sometimes to see a woman’s story it is best to look upside down, arse about etc. And she came to me through a newspaper clipping that one of my colleagues showed me. It announced the estate she left her daughter Renee, the estate that would trickle down to my mother, my aunt, and finally to my sister, my cousins and me.

  A friend clutched my hand beneath the upside-down Perth Modelling Works brick and said, much like the song in the movie, You must follow this! But it was not explicitly or only pecuniary, this estate. It was also the estate of ‘may I’ versus ‘can I’. It was the estate of great wild gardens and physical freedoms, a mother who could only bear to hit you through an eiderdown. It was an estate of places belonging to three women in a row – safe places you could skip to, one from the other, spaces that held their own particular light and dark, aromas, domestic routines – beloved as the house in Howards End or the lady house in Lolly Willowes. And ghosting these abodes, always that expansive childhood lived on farms with largely indulgent adults, at least for most of the time.

  The Big Row

  There is a poem of Dorothy’s about the big row.4 Why wouldn’t there be? For years after the girls, my mother and aunt, went to bed and prayed that there would not be another row like it: please dear jesus make the quarrel stop. It was a row over ‘can I leave the table’ versus ‘may I leave the table’. It was a row between grandparents and parents of the worst kind. Let her do as she likes. No, not until she says ‘may I’. But my aunt left the table anyway, causing in my mother’s mind, the baby sister, an indelible sense that some form of excessive rebelliousness had been practised and that nothing would ever be the same again. And perhaps she was right. A may/can scenario sounds like the worst kind of petit-bourgeois hairsplitting, hardly worth a fuss, but it must have been (or became) emblematic of a deeper rift, a recognition or acknowledgement of my aunt’s difference and a signal to her that it was okay, or even encouraged, to begin on a path of defiance. How many grandparents are complicit in exactly this? Many no doubt. After years of playing hard corners with their own children, they are free to get subversive with the next generation. Now, I think of the family bolshiness, particularly in the female line, all being anchored back to that may I/can I split. And I think of Mary’s resourcefulness, her creativity and everything it gifted to her descendants, female and male. There’s a poem about that too:

  nobody said You’re girls

  You can’t do these things

  So we did them

  fragile as cabbage moths

  our white dresses flicking in sunlight5

  A Day Dress

  I married a man who wrote a thesis about what happens to the plots of nineteenth-century novels when the heroine inherits property. It seemed about books then and yet now it seems close to life as well, to Mary’s life and her matrilineal legacy. I can imagine the unfinished purple silk garment would be most suitable as a day dress for a Dorothea or a Little Dorrit or indeed just our Mary. Mary in transit from Ireland to New Zealand, from Victoria to Perth, or just across the road from Cathay to the sofa. Mary with her tiny waist and her curls and her Irish chin; who, when she hugged you, bristled with dressmaker’s pins.

  Casa Materna: A Coda

  … is the mother house with the ghostliest coordinates in my family tree. I can’t begin to tell its story here because that would be to deviate from Mary’s line. It is the name of a large house by the sea at Portici and concerns my sister, another Mary … Maria, who was sent to this American-funded orphanage as a girl. It is a story, not unlike a nineteenth-century novel, about a family trying to stay together. And it concerns a seamstress too.

  Years later, years since Mary, years since the orphanage, Maria and I are finally together. We’re together in the house that is awash with cloth, sorting this and sorting that. We have projects and energies that seem to come from somewhere beyond the present. Windows are redressed, cushions recovered, clothes mended. We trawl through Mary’s great cloth estate. What is this, honey? And what is this?

  Even so, even then, the unfinished purple silk garment eludes me. I’ve learnt to love the potential granted from its unlocatable, partially made state. Things are nothing. They
lie doggo, they can tell us something about the people in proximity to them but not everything. Some things persist but they are just little scraps and hints.

  Purple is also the colour of some wild thing overlooked, a violet by a mossy stone, the skin beneath my second child’s eyes, the insides of cockleshells, and the jacaranda bells falling and falling. The slide to summer – l’estate.

  With thanks to Lesley Dougan, Josephine Wilson, and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.

  The Trouble with Purple – Annamaria Weldon

  The ship was suddenly there: 2,700 years since it sailed, thirty years after I had left the Mediterranean to live on the other side of the world in Western Australia, and just as I was drafting this essay. The image glowed from my iPhone screen. A Phoenician trading vessel surrounded by turquoise water off the coast of Gozo, my grandfather’s native island, in the Maltese archipelago. My inner poet wants to write that it floated on my Facebook news-stream, but floating was not what it was doing.

  The pictures were submarine, for I was looking at freshly discovered wreckage in pristine condition. The discovery and its location had been kept secret for the past month, during which the find was added to the Inventory of Cultural Treasures of Malta. When announced, it made world headlines. Three countries became engaged in the recovery effort and ensuing research. Because Malta was a significant dot on the historic purple trade route, about which so little is known, expectations are high that this ancient vessel and its cargo will prove to be a kind of Rosetta Stone.

  I was born in my maternal grandpa’s home on the main island, which was so central to the Phoenicians’ seafaring trade in purple dye. When he was a young man, my paternal grandfather had crossed the channel from Gozo to live in Malta while he attended university. He was the first of his family to do so, eventually became Chief Justice of Malta and was knighted by the late King of England. But to us he was just Nannu Turo, who remained proudly ‘Gozitan’.

  Gozo, overlooked by the chain of colonisers who conquered Malta, had retained its traditional agrarian and fishing culture. This hilly little island produces an abundance of fruit and vegetables and its bread is the best I have ever tasted. As our family’s second home, its history was ours: my parents honeymooned there during World War II, and my London-based brother, now in his sixties, still holidays on the island every year. When we were children, each June at the start of the summer holidays, Nannu Turo and my grandmother Nanna Nusa returned to their tiny Gozitan beachfront home at Marsalforn Bay. The flock of cousins which followed them across the channel for this annual migration included us.

  On the island we spent all the hours of daylight outdoors, in the sea, by the sea or on it in small boats. After dark, youngsters were allowed to roam the fishing village, where all the families knew each other. We congregated along the sea wall, or in side streets wherever anyone was playing a guitar on their doorstep. We made sorties to the only shop (no bigger than a bathroom), which sold ice-creams and fizzy drinks. The adults were at café tables playing cards, or strolling along the seafront, stopping from house to house to greet friends resting on wicker chairs or the low walls of the small tiled area outside each front door, called the ‘parapet’. It was too hot to stay indoors in the late 50s and early 60s, as there was no air conditioning or even fans in remote, rural Marsalforn. I remember oil lamps, my grandmother’s lighting ritual each evening: that dramatic flare of bright and shadow they threw on the uneven surface of interior stone walls, and bedtime’s acrid smell of extinguished wicks.

  I had never before been part of such a great amorphous crowd of relatives and friends. After spending a decade overseas, mostly in London, my family had just returned to live in Malta on the cusp of my teen years. Those first summers – when I was an outrider fish, skirting the school of youngsters as it darted and dived through the dark streets – felt like the beginnings of belonging. As the only daughter of strict parents I was unaccustomed to the social freedom that blessed our summers in Gozo, where I was part of the large sub-group collectively known as ‘the Mercieca cousins’, some who had their own family summer houses in the bay, others like us who always headed to Nannu’s home for meals and to sleep. There were often times when eight of us shared the room which served as a dormitory in the two-up, two-down sandstone terraced house. I remember lying in bed late at night as we whispered in the dark, while moonlight reflected on the shiny beach pebbles we had set out on the windowsill – and I remember the embarrassment of having to use the toilet, where the ancient chain-pull made such a crashing sound. I remember the fascination as I watched the gutting of fresh fish caught by neighbours, and my excitement as I waited for the chinking bells which heralded a small herd of goats arriving each afternoon to be milked into enamel jugs at our kitchen door.

  Nannu had always seemed very old and venerable. When I was nineteen and he was in his late nineties, he became gravely ill and, typically, eschewed hospital care for the ministrations of his devoted wife, mother of their eight children. As summer came in that year and his illness progressed, he seemed to live merely on the salted breath of his beloved Marsalforn Bay, so his bed was placed across the open balcony door, where he could feel its every caress and see the Mediterranean if he opened his eyes. When he closed them for the last time, the island’s two main (and fiercely rival) band clubs argued over who would do the funeral honours and escort his cortege to the ferry, for burial on the main island. Eventually they settled on a very Gozitan solution: Nannu’s hearse would be driven up the hill from his home to the capital Rabat, not once but twice, giving each band club a turn at leading his farewell procession.

  The discovery of a Phoenician wreck in those shallow Gozitan waters was announced on the international news just ten days after I had shared these memories in the multicultural session of last year’s Perth Poetry Festival, together with poems I had recently written about Gozo’s coastal place names, and photos to illustrate them. Images of the buttery sandstone fortress walls round Rabat’s ancient fortress capital Medina, on the island’s highest hill; the turquoise bay waters; cerise and purple wildflowers growing in the shallow soil deposits of the island’s craggy garigue. The timing of this marine discovery seemed doubly synchronous. I had just begun to write about my ‘ancestral’ connection to purple, so my first thought and question was: how long will it take for investigators to discover which amphorae had contained purple dye? Survey photos of the wreck, where it lay 130 metres deep, showed fifty amphorae still intact and scattered in the surrounding sand. These containers were of diverse shapes, each a distinct signature indicating that the ship had visited many different harbours and was indeed a trading vessel.

  My imagination soared beyond this essay as I pictured possibilities for a book-length poetry project. I already had plans underway to visit Gozo in the new year after an absence of almost a decade, following an invitation to deliver a paper at the University of Malta. Perhaps that would provide me with an opportunity to meet some of the Phoenician wreck research team … Before long I was daydreaming about an island writing residency.

  And then I remembered that a clairvoyant had once offered me a swatch of coloured cards, or fabric (the details are fuzzy) and I picked purple, which is when she told me, That colour will bring you nothing but trouble. The prediction seemed overly dramatic. But it did suggest an image to me, a coloured thread running through the tapestry of my life, only occasionally visible on the topside of the fabric. Could I, should I, avoid purple in the future? As the White Queen remarked to Alice, It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.1

  Early in adolescence I had learned of the link between my Maltese heritage and the Phoenician trade in purple dye. I promptly adopted the colour. The phase survived unkind remarks (a schoolfriend’s observation that I was possessed by purple and the summer party where my aunt’s friend said to me, too loudly: Few people can wear that colour, Anna, and you are not one of them). I wonder, now, whether purple became my opium for the pain of non-entity? The experience of re
turning to my birth island after a nomadic childhood in Africa, the UK and Central America had equipped me with exotic memories in which nobody was interested, and left me totally ignorant of face-saving local knowledge. A foreigner in my own culture, ignorant of the vital sequence of feast days with their associated foods and customs which shaped island life, illiterate in Maltese, the local language which still permeated everyday discourse, although ‘out of fashion’ in colonial Malta where fluent English speakers were privileged (my one advantage), I muddled the names of my sixty-four first cousins and the twenty aunts and uncles to whom I had been so suddenly introduced and who were now central to our family’s social life. What meagre sense of belonging I had mustered came from religion.

  Being a Roman Catholic was a kind of citizenship: no matter where we lived, my family were devout churchgoers and I was educated by nuns. In those days of a universal Latin liturgy, the sense of shared sacred history and symbolism was as powerful as a tribal sense of place. It gave me known terrain, enriched by poetry remembered by heart; its seasons were easily distinguished by their prayers, music or ritual colours; its archetypal characters and stories patterned my imagination. The most transformative times in the church calendar, the traditional observances which reinforced our identity as Catholics were Lent and Easter, Advent and Christmas. These were magical and emotional events. Passages of transition and waiting, dread and longing. They were always celebrated in purple, that colour between hope and uncertainty. Silken purple. Brocaded purple. Opulent purple. Priests robed in purple vestments, the interior walls of high cathedral and village church alike entirely hung with purple cloth. Tabernacles sheathed in purple. Still significant to this day, it is a colour code from ancient times, when cathedral stained-glass windows were storybooks for the illiterate, and a change of vestments signalled the beginning and end of sacred seasons.

  To the devout, the long weeks of Lent and Advent exist in ‘time out of time’. They are not, in liturgical parlance, ‘ordinary time’. And although, in this post-Christian era, Lent and Advent are invisible to the secular world, back then I was not in the secular world most of the time. Throughout high school I spent the scholastic year in a convent. Obliged to wear what I thought was a particularly ghastly winter uniform and assigned a cubicle barely big enough for my bed, chair and washstand, I compensated with purple striped sheets, a purple bedcover and purple plastic water-jug and bowl. This gesture of individualism was a whim my mother indulged. She had no say in where I was schooled but she understood my resistance to conformity, detested convents and loved colour. As it turned out, the convent shaped me for life and also, I think, for the better. I made lifelong friendships, fell in love with literature and learned to live with less. But that realisation only came with hindsight.