The Sparrow Garden

by Peter Skrzynecki

  25 February 1997

  Anzac Day

  25 April 1997

  Today, Judy and I meet at 10 Mary Street to give the place a good cleaning and mow the lawns. We have arranged this beforehand. We figured, it being Anzac Day, there would be little traffic on the roads and we could work at our leisure, without it mattering what time we finished.

  When I arrive at half-past nine she is already there, mopping the veranda as she used to do when Mum was alive, turning the dusty tiles into a mirror of red and orange glazes. Mum’s transistor plays from the sideboard; it is the ABC, with Richard Glover, and the program is about the history of Sydney’s suburbs.

  Exactly two weeks after my mother died I had my first dream of her. She was getting on the train at Strathfield station, on Platform 8, as we both used to do — she, returning home from one of her places of employment — me, returning from school at St Patrick’s College. She was wearing her brown corduroy dress and carried a shopping bag over her arm. When she died she was seventy-nine, yet in this dream she was considerably younger, probably in her forties. Neither of us spoke but she appeared content, her features almost perfect, without blemish. In the months ahead, whenever I dream about her, alone or with my father, she will look like this, very much younger, and nearly always she — or they — will be travelling, moving on to somewhere.

  Hi, Dad, Judy greets me.

  Hello, daughter, I reply.

  The formality of my greeting belies the love, the strength, the closeness that I feel for her, and I will never be able to explain to the world what a tower of strength this child has been to me since my mother died, especially those first twenty-four hours when I didn’t sleep at all. Next day she drove me to Labor Funerals at Bankstown, to the Commonwealth Bank at Regents Park, to the stonemason at Lidcombe to arrange the lettering on the headstone, then back to 10 Mary Street, where we sat and talked, had some refreshments, tried to make sense out of the unexpectedness of death. My body needed sleep desperately; my eyes felt like they were on fire. I kept nodding off, but a voice in my brain would sound a warning, No, no, you can’t fall asleep! All this time, it felt as if my mother was in the kitchen with us, giving us strength to cope with the funeral in four days’ time.

  I’ll go around the back, I say, otherwise I’ll leave marks on the veranda … You’re doing a great job.

  She says nothing and continues intently with her mopping, head down, as a hockey player might stand before striking for the ball.

  The house has been opened up.

  The front bedroom curtains flutter in the breeze.

  I can smell the garden’s freshness.

  Sparrows fly up from the brunfelsias and roses, from where I know they have dust baths. The soil there has several small hollows, each one’s diameter about the size of a tennis ball. The sparrows lie in these and dust themselves, especially when the sun is on the front garden, as it is now, because the house faces the east.

  As I turn the corner and face the backyard a similar scent of freshness rises in the air.

  The lawn that was once so spotless, so smooth and green that visitors used to congratulate my father and say, You could play bowls on this, needs to be weeded and cut. Before entering the house I go down to the chookshed, drag out the hose and connect it to the tap. The immediate garden area next to the house needs soaking.

  The sparrows that flew off from the front have followed me to the back. Or are they different ones? They perch on the gutters and fence, heads cocked, like the zebra finches did that morning when I stopped in to see my mother. They might well be asking, What are you humans doing here?

  The laundry is open.

  Under the louvre windows the old copper is empty, as are the two concrete tubs. My mother’s red peg bag hangs over the edge of one and adds a brightness to an otherwise bland setting, even though the walls were originally painted an attractive pale blue. The peg bag resembles a piece of clothing and seems out of place. She made it from a wooden coathanger by sewing material over it, making a slit in the front and edging that with green. I bump against the bag and the pegs rattle with their unmistakable plastic sound. Black hoses run from the washing machine over the sides of the tubs and up to the taps like snakes. A pink baby blanket covers the top of the washing machine. My mother did that for years, as a precautionary measure, to protect the enamel.

  On the other side of the laundry are the overhead and bench cupboards; most of these are empty now but at one end they contain a collection of shoes that my mother kept in boxes. The cupboards also contain an assortment of jars, insecticides, sprays, poisons, fertilisers that my parents used for the maintenance of the garden: Defender Snail Pellets, Malathon, Baygon, Aquasol, blood and bone. Anything too big for these cupboards was kept in the garage. On top of the benches were the soaps … Sunlight, Lux, Omo, Persil … and even as I turn around it’s the smell of soaps, rather than insecticides, that fills my nostrils, warm and soft. In one of the cupboards my parents kept the kerosene primus that was one of the “luxuries” we brought from the migrant hostel in Parkes. The drawers are full of nails, screws, pencils, bits of string, coils of copper wire, tap washers, spanners, screwdrivers, old door handles, some studs from my football shoes, last worn in 1963, my last year at St Patrick’s College. So much old stuff that I will spend weeks emptying it into the Otto bin. My mother’s washing basket sits regally on top of the red lino bench; the cane is thick, strong, and has been woven tightly. Where it has broken or the weave come undone, it has been repaired. Beside it lies a piece of 2 x 2 timber, about a foot long: this is the door jamb that’s used to prevent the door from swinging shut, as it does when a wind blows. The light cord has been the same since I can remember, like a long shoelace, worn smooth by three pairs of hands. The cement floor is a worn, faded green. When my father painted it we were warned to keep away until the paint had dried one hundred per cent. He took such pride in whatever he created manually, whether it was painting, digging a potato garden, building a fence or cementing a footpath. His son, on the other hand, can’t hammer a nail without bending it.

  A willy-wagtail dances in the lemon tree and tempts me outside with its “Sweet-pretty-creature” song. Somewhere, beyond the backyard fence, from the winding distance of Duck Creek, another replies.

  Judy has also come outside. How are you going, Dad?

  Okay … Just having a stickybeak in the laundry.

  I keep seeing Babci next to her peg bag whenever I go in there, I say.

  Babci was like that, Dad … You know, she liked colour. What about her embroidery, all those blouses and tablecloths she made?

  And I know straightaway that I’m wrong — that the bag belongs precisely for the reason Judy suggests, and it’s not out of place, that it was my mother’s way of expressing herself and her life without making a formal statement about herself or her life. It’s good to hear her refer to her grandmother as Babcia or Babci, the Polish word that my three children have used since they were able to speak, just as they still refer to my father, their grandfather, as Dziadzia.

  It does not take long to mow the back lawns, such as they are now, the weeds proliferating. My father’s efforts to keep them “clean”, as he used to say, are vanishing after nearly five decades. For years after he retired from the Water Board at the age of 70, he would sit on an empty wheat bag, weather permitting, hat on, head down, and diligently weed the lawn with a small knife. When one blade wore out he would replace the knife. The pile of weeds next to him would grow and he’d move on to the next patch, and so on. By day’s end, the mounds would be collected and thrown into the reserve behind our house. By week’s end the back lawn was free of weeds. He would get up regularly for meal breaks, have a drink if it was hot and return to the yard — working steadily, methodically, never varying his routine in spring and summer when the weeds were at their worst. He would take out his handkerchief, dab his face, wipe the sweat from his eyes and brow, then continue working — as if hot weather and the act of wiping
away sweat was unimportant compared with the weeding itself. When the back lawn was finished he would start on the front. Many times I would go out to speak to him, to bring a message from my mother or ask if there was something he needed from the supermarket, and I would stop, back off, leave the message or question for another time. He would be lost in a world of his own, seemingly oblivious to time and place, totally focused on the job at hand, and I knew it would be wrong to interrupt him, to awaken him from that state of mind or soul that he’d withdrawn into. You would find the dog next to him, or nearby in the shade of a tree, keeping him company, watching over the backyard of what could have been the mightiest kingdom on earth, such was the loyalty the dog displayed to his master and such was the reverence that the master exhibited towards his small plot of land, which he had worked since 1951. While he worked, my father had a phrase that summed up his attitude towards work: moja slużba, “my duty”. He didn’t believe in taking days off work, or “sickies”. Come what may, coughs, colds, a sore back or the ’flu, he went to work. In 1968 when he had to go into hospital for the removal of a cancerous growth on his foot, there was no getting out of going to his job. Years later, in his retirement, though he was too old to dig and plant, he regarded it his duty to keep the lawns weeded and cut, tidy. I have tried all my life to appreciate and respect my parents’ love of gardening, of growing vegetables, fruits and flowers, which stemmed from their farming backgrounds in Europe and, such as it was, continued in suburban Sydney. Gardening was their way of perpetuating their European traditions in Australia, and giving their lives a meaning over and beyond what a daily job had to offer. Emigration had changed their lives externally, yet essentially they remained themselves.

  I dump the grass cuttings into the chooks’ enclosure, clean the lawnmower and store it in the garage. After my father died in 1994, my mother killed the remaining two hens and the chook yard was allowed to fall into further ruin. Today, overgrown with weeds, its wooden posts are half-rotted and the chicken wire sags between them. The stump of a giant oak is all that remains of the tree that fell during a hailstorm in 1991 and had to be cut up. The oak was grown from an acorn brought home from a tree in the garden of Dr and Mrs O’Brien, in Malvern Crescent, Strathfield.

  Why don’t you come inside now, Dad? Judy has come out with a drink for me. Let’s watch a bit of the Anzac march.

  How did the veranda come up? I ask.

  Okay, she replies nonchalantly — with that same air of abstractness that my mother used to have when the question seemed to be of no significance.

  Inside the house it is cool. I realise that I have not even been inside since I arrived. The laundry, garage and lawns took my interest. I have paid no attention to the house or what Judy’s been doing. Besides cleaning the veranda, she’s swept and vacuumed the house.

  The Anzac Day march is under way.

  My parents used to sit on the same couch that we’re sitting on and watch this spectacle year after year. The names that the TV commentators read out are the same … Borneo, North Africa, New Guinea, Vietnam, Gallipoli, World War I, World War II, Great Britain, the Commonwealth, United States of America … Flags and bright banners, marching bands, old men and women, middle-aged men and women, grandchildren, very old ex-soldiers in jeeps and taxis, regiments, divisions, battalions … A sense of déjà vu fills my head, an awareness of something other than seconds and minutes ticking away.

  As a child I used to be impressed by such displays, by the nobility of great causes that we were told about at school. Soldiers saved countries from an enemy and one never questioned who that might be. Whatever parents, teachers or grown-ups said made sense and I acknowledged their superior knowledge. It was not until I went to Sydney Teachers’ College in 1965 and had to study Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year that I started to question the validity of war, the purpose and senselessness of killing, no matter what the war or the country or who the enemy might be.

  That year I also discovered the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Somehow, mysteriously, wondrously, the argument against war made sense. Poetry taught me that lesson: there is no argument to justify war. It was not one of the Ten Commandments that drove that lesson home, not a sermon from a pulpit, not hearing a parent or politician speak, but the voice of a poet, who himself was to die in war, who said plainly and simply, war is waste; it is wrong.

  When I read “Strange Meeting” with its lines,

  “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”

  “None,” said the other, “save the undone years,

  The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

  Was my life also; I went hunting wild

  After the wildest beauty in the world,

  Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

  But mocks the steady running of the hour,

  And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here …”

  I knew that I had made a personal discovery, had stumbled across an important human truth, yet it was something so basic, so elemental, it was almost absurd. I knew that I could never support any war, ever again, no matter how glorious or noble the cause might sound, no matter what nations were at war, no matter how majestic the panoplies on display might be.

  The early 1960s were years of conscription in Australia, introduced by the then conservative Coalition government. Nineteen-year-olds were called up for military service; many were sent to Vietnam and died there. I was in the first ballot and was called up for a medical. When I failed, I was relieved, but at the same time angry that my rights were not considered in the decision to call me up; it seemed that the whole deal was made by politicians for the expediency and benefit of politics itself.

  The veranda has dried and shines like porcelain. My parents would be proud of the work that Judy has put into the house, a duty she has performed before and does so without being asked. Nothing is too much for her when it comes to helping me look after the house.

  My parents helped me raise my three children by minding them when they were little. Judy, being their first grandchild, without being more spoiled than Andrew or Anna, made the initial impression on their lives as grandparents. No sacrifice was too big, no effort too much for them where she, or the others, were concerned. Maybe in them, I would like to think, they found a little of their own lives from the Ukraine and Poland.

  In 1994, when my father was dying, Andrew and I gave him a bath. This “refreshing him”, as my mother referred to it, included trimming his fingernails and toenails. It was a Friday. The day before, after examining him for chest pains, the doctor had offered to put him into hospital. My father refused.

  I was there, next to him, but I gave the refusal no serious consideration. He’ll get better; he’s pulled through before, I thought. The next day my mother rang and requested that Andrew and I come over and bathe him.

  During the trimming of his toenails my mother spoke to him, explaining what Andrew was doing.

  That’s not Andrew, he replied, that’s little Peter’s little boy.

  He spoke in a clear voice, totally coherent, as if he’d walked in from somewhere else. Earlier in the day, he talked to my mother about the rye fields in Poland that he was running through, on his farm, when the Germans arrived in Raciborow and captured him.

  It would be too easy to say that he was regressing, that his mind was already returning to its infancy, to “that other place”, whatever people mean when they use that phrase. Yet I know that for my parents it was a reference to the Old World of Europe, with its inclusion of family values that contained the meaning of life itself — life as only they understood it. “Three for one and one for three.” We lived by that motto after we moved to Australia. Now, decades later, it was my responsibility to pass it on, into the lives of my children. Love. Sacrifice. Self-denial … A list of do’s and don’ts that was as prescriptive as the Ten Commandments. After all, the journey to Australia had been done for my sake as well as theirs, for a future in a country that hadn’t experie
nced wars the way Europe experienced them. My responsibility was now towards my children and their future.

  You look sad, says Judy.

  Nope. I’ve just remembered I was going to tidy up the garage.

  Want me to help?

  No, no … Stay and watch TV or relax. Whatever you want. Make yourself another cup of tea. This won’t take long. I’ve let things pile up there. The palms need watering and I’ll put them outside for a while.

  A coldness passes through me as I enter the garage. This is a different feeling than standing in the laundry and fossicking through cupboards. This was, essentially, my father’s domain, the repository of all his tools, garden implements, a collective of old pieces of timber, glass panes, hoses, saws. At the far end, under a window, is his work bench, loaded with hammers, files, tins and small boxes, jars of nails, screws, tap washers. There are stubs of old pencils, pieces of chalk, crayons, whetstones, tangled clumps of string, copper wire, old paint tins, bottles of mineral turps, machinery oil. On another table is his collection of hammers, a tomahawk, screwdrivers, chisels, a hand broom and dust pan, garden clippers and hand shears, a Stillson wrench, a rubber mallet.

  I take my two raphis palms outside and water them. They never grew well in my house so my father agreed to take them and see if they improved here. They did, as if both plants knew automatically what was expected of them. Within a year they had doubled in size. Their foliage deepened to a darker green and the leaves broadened. When I quizzed him about his success he simply said they were in the right place, that he gave them plenty of water and the garage must have had the right combination of sun and shade.

  If my mother had any claim to the garage as “her territory” it was in the three clotheslines that had been strung from wall to wall. What was hanging there when she died is still there. A piece of green feltex, an old towel and a small quilt. Among them, coloured plastic pegs are spaced like distance indicators.