4. Going to School

New neighbours moved in next door, with a little girl near me in age. We soon got talking over our adjoining front fence. A year older, she was already going to school. I envied her; her accounts of this mysterious, alluring world were so enticing. I begged my parents to let me go too. I was already reading; I wasn't mixing much with other kiddies (real live ones, anyway). They were able to make a case for me.

I think I must have been five, which would mean the usual starting age was six. I’m quite sure most schools started children at age seven, but in this one – Glen Dhu Primary School, only a little way from my home – the first class was actually kindergarten. (The school is still there, and still starts from kindergarten.) 

From its current website.

A lovely teacher

I fell in love with the kindergarten teacher, Miss Taylor. So did all the other kids. I remember a whole mob of us constantly trailing after her, begging to sit on her knee. She tried to give us each a turn, in between our kindergarten activities. I thought she was utterly beautiful.

I look back now and realise she was extremely young, probably in her very first job, and that she would have been regarded as a plain girl: fat in body and face, with dark hair cut straight across unflatteringly at nape and fringe, and wearing a pair of big, round glasses with wire rims. Her clothes were serviceable; she was completely unadorned.

We children, however, could all see her beauty; it radiated from her loving heart. What a born kindergarten teacher!

So my introduction to school was lovely, even if I did have to share Miss Taylor with others. 

An unlovely teacher

The following years were a bit mixed. There were excellent, kindly teachers who applauded and encouraged my love of reading and learning. Only a few others were not so great. Of those, the stand-out was the sadistic Miss Winter in Grade 1, who loved any excuse to use the cane on our small hands, leaving them stinging – a startling transition indeed from Miss Taylor. For some reason which I still don’t know, she took a dislike to me, so I was caned often, and it seemed to me unfairly. I remember one time when a family occasion had prevented me from doing the homework that night. My parents, who liked to be involved in parent-teacher activities and were used to good relations with teachers who were reasonable, told me to say to her, 

‘Please Miss Winter, may I be excused from last night’s homework, because …’  I didn’t get as far as the because. 

‘Nay!’ she said firmly, and I got the cane. 

Every morning there would be a group of us out in front of the class, holding out our hands for the stinging blow. I felt terrorised.

I can’t agree with any dinosaur who thinks corporal punishment should be reinstated in schools. It didn’t help me to learn, nor to develop better behaviour. I still think my behaviour was just fine anyway. And my learning too – with the exception of advanced arithmetic, and algebra and geometry later on. I was entranced by words, not numbers. (Simple arithmetic, though, was fine. Luckily that’s the bit of maths that’s useful in practical ways! I can still do mental arithmetic with an ease that many young people today don’t seem to have. Ah, but why would they need to, when computers can do it all for them?)

Fitting in – or not

School was a place to make new friends. And also new enemies. Luckily there were one to two other introverted, bookish, imaginative girls who did well in most tests and exams and badly at sport. Naturally we became friends. I was lucky they were there! No-one else was going chum up with someone who couldn’t run fast to save her life, or hit a ball accurately, and who consistently showed them up when it came to book learning. 

When I was 25 I had my tonsils taken out. The doctor said they must have been poisoning my system for years, and added, ‘I bet  you were short-winded as a child.’ Was I what! So many memories of chugging up a field, last by a mile in every race, feeling publicly humiliated over and over again. No-one realised there was a reason for it.

I was prescribed glasses when I was nine. Not before time! I finally became able to see the blackboard more clearly in class without having to sit up the front. I became able to tell who was approaching me before they were right in front of my face, so I eventually lost the reputation I had gained for being ‘stuck up’ – by not saying hello to anyone who was still some little distance away, because I simply couldn’t tell who they were. I hadn’t even understood that everyone else could see that. The glasses were a revelation.

I surely would have seen the ball in a game better with my glasses on, too; but team leaders no longer picked me for their sides in games, and I had long lost any desire I may have had that they should. For me, there was nothing to enjoy in sport.

Even worse, I quietly refused to join in with the catty girls who would gang up on someone and exhort everyone else to hate her too – whichever ‘her’ it was that day. I didn't make a big fight of it; rather, I kept aloof from those kinds of games as much as possible, wandering off instead for quiet tête-a-têtes with my particular friends, or with a book under my arm (not a schoolbook but a story). 

All this didn’t win me any popularity contests! One lunch time a group of kids surrounded me, told me to come with them, and herded me to a place behind some buildings, out of view of the main yard. I was completely puzzled until they positioned me standing astride a little ditch and then proceeded to knock me into it, laughing gleefully. They were set to repeat it, but I surprised them by changing from meek and quiet, wriggling out of their grasp and running in tears, no longer hidden from the rest of the school, to find my teacher. 

(‘Who SHOULD have been patrolling the playground to prevent that sort of thing!’ said my psychiatrist indignantly, when I told the story in group therapy years later.)

‘It was only a joke,’ the kids protested when reprimanded. Not fun for me! But I suppose I was lucky that was the only such incident.

The worst thing about school, primary school in particular, was the emphasis on conformity. Everyone had to fit in. I look back now and see that I was never going to, not really; I simply couldn’t help it. But I did try – or at least tried to avoid being too obviously ‘different’. I certainly couldn’t be mentioning friends no-one else could see or hear! That was clear almost at once.

The children themselves were the fiercest arbiters of ‘fitting in’ but soon the adults around me also started suggesting I was far too old to believe in ‘all that’ any more. I got the message: if you believed  things (and people) were real, which no-one else could perceive, then you must be mad! 

Well, no-one wanted to be mad, did they? Certainly not me. I shut ‘all that’ down hard. So hard that, for the most part, I stopped experiencing it for the next three decades or so. But some few little things did leak through.

3. Early Mentors

Grandpa

I nearly hyphenated that word, men-tors, because I am thinking specifically of two men. One was my maternal grandfather, Grandpa Holmes, mostly just called Grandpa, the husband and then widower of my dear Nana. In fact we were not related by blood. He was my mother’s stepfather. He was, though, the only father she ever knew. He treated her children, Denis and me, and our cousins, Uncle Ian’s children, as his beloved grandchildren in whom he took great interest – every bit as much as he did our other cousins, the children of his actual daughter, my Aunty Frankie. 

Grandpa lived until I was nine. He left me his Remington portable typewriter in his will, because everyone knew by then I was going to be a writer. I began using it immediately and have remained a two-finger typist ever since, because I became so proficient at it that I didn’t have the patience to start over and learn touch typing when I was older. I tried once or twice, but soon gave up. My bad habits were just so much faster and easier for me. 

I wonder if Grandpa was a touch typist? I took little notice of that detail, though I often saw (and heard) him typing away when we stayed with him at The Orchard House, or he came to visit with us. Trying to summon up the memory now, I have a notion he too used to ‘hunt and peck’ quite proficiently. A very well-read man, with a keen interest in global politics and all manner of other subjects, he kept up a busy correspondence with people all over the world. Some were relatives, some old or new friends, some famous thinkers with whom he exchanged ideas. He himself was no-one famous, but they were interested enough in his ideas to keep up the correspondence with him.

And he wrote long, frequent letters to his grandchildren. I used to write back, also at length, and we wound up discussing a lot of ideas – and also a lot of Great Literature.

He was the one who gave me many of the classics for Christmas and birthday presents over the years: Dickens, the Brontes, Alexandre Dumas; and Ivanhoe, Ben Hur, The Mill on the Floss ... all of which I read avidly, and loved, at an age which nowadays might be considered far too young for such adult books. (I was always precocious with language, and could read long before I started school.)

When I was very young, Grandpa would take me for long walks in nature, pointing out various plants, birds and insects, and telling me all about their lives and habits. He made it all fascinating for me. Needless to say, he was one of my favourite people.

Here I am with him in our back yard:

Perhaps it was having a grandpa like that, as well as some nice uncles – not to mention a father I adored, who was a fun playmate, a knowledgable advisor, and a great storyteller – which made it unremarkable to me that I also had an ‘imaginary friend’ who was not another child but a grown-up man. 

Mystery Man

At the time, I took him for granted. It was only when I looked back, many years later, that I perceived him as mysterious. It finally occurred to me only then that I never even had a name for him. Neither do I have a distinct visual memory of him — unlike those children who used to visit me, whose faces and forms come to mind clearly as soon as I think of them, and whose names I still know. I do have a vague sense of his form – tallish, and fairly slim – but his face is a blank in my mind. How strange that seems now! 

What I do remember is how safe and calm I felt in his presence. He himself seemed to exude calm, and a quiet protectiveness. I remember very well what I would now call his energy. If I try, I think I can almost remember what his voice was like.  And yet I don't think I heard it physically.

We had long talks, walking around the big back garden: a large lawn surrounded by bushes and shrubs, including raspberries, loganberries, red currants and gooseberries. When I was small enough, I used to crawl among those bushes to watch with equal fascination both the various insects going about their lives and the beings I identified as fairies flitting in and out, going about their business too. I remember trying to get one to pause so I could talk to her and ask her questions. She was quite cross at being interrupted in what she was doing, scowled at me and went back to her activity. I don't know what she was up to exactly, but she seemed very busy, doing something to the plant I found her in – with a lot of the ‘flitting in and out’ I mentioned. This was, essentially, flitting in and out of sight: one minute there, the next not, and then visible again. This makes me think that fairies inhabit both this and some other dimension, going in and out of each as easily as we might go through a gate from home to street.

Down the far end of the lawn was a small rockery covered in very low-growing plants. At least it seems small now, but it was big enough for several kids to climb up and sit on it comfortably. Next to that was a stand of skinny bamboo; and behind them the wooden lattice ‘summerhouse,’ one square room with walls and ceiling made of square holes. Beyond that separation was Dad’s vegetable garden, and just behind the summerhouse one of two big willows (the other was in the far corner of the veggie garden) from which my dad had suspended a swing for me: thick ropes and a flat wooden seat.

I did swing, daringly high at times, but most of all I liked to sit, enclosed all around by curtaining willow fronds, leaning back until my long hair almost swept the ground, pushing only very gently with my feet to get the swing moving a tiny bit, and drift and dream. (As an adult, I read in Robert Graves's The White Goddess that someone who spends a lot of time with willow trees is bound to become a poet – an explanation I was very happy to apply to myself.)

My mystery man never turned up when there was anyone else around. (Now that I think of it, neither did the children, my ‘imaginary playmates’.)

I was an only child for my first four years; and after my little brother was born he was for a long time too young to play with me outside. My parents encouraged me to ‘get out in the fresh air’ and so, between visits from the imaginaries, I often had hours of solitude, and learned to fill them with exploring the natural world, and with daydreaming.   

My daydreams were of adventure and travel, and being ‘grown-up’. I didn’t daydream the playmates or the mystery man. Although I call them imaginary here, to identify them, they were as unquestionably real to me as any other company I sometimes had, such as Grandpa and, as I got older, my visiting cousins and/or the neighbourhood kids.

Mystery Man was somewhat like a nice uncle, but one who was free to spend a lot of time with me like Grandpa – only not elderly like Grandpa. I'm vague about what age he might have been, but I had a sense of someone old enough to know a lot, and by no means too old to be fit and agile.

Another thing which strikes me only now is that, although I have a strong sense that our long conversations were both fascinating and instructive – and filled with shared laughter – I can’t for the life of me recall the content. 

I never mentioned him to anyone, back then.

Neither of these mentors, living Grandpa and unknown Mystery Man, ever spoke to me condescendingly as in any way inferior to them in intellect.

********

At some point, as I grew older, this visitor gradually turned up less often and finally stopped visiting. I didn’t really notice. In fact he dropped right out of my conscious memory until he was recalled to me decades later, when I also learned exactly who he was. 

I'll tell you in much more detail how this came about when I get to that point in my story, but it happened such a long time later that it would be a bit mean to keep you waiting for so many chapters without at least identifying him. But you may really need to ‘suspend your disbelief’!

He turned out to be the Egyptian, Thoth (aka Tehuti), whom I discovered at the same time to be my patron deity* – a concept I did not have until then.

*A patron deity is a god or goddess who takes a special interest in a particular person, group, profession, or place, acting as a guardian, protector, and guide. While historically deities were associated with specific places or crafts (e.g. Thoth for scribes), in many modern contexts, particularly in Paganism, it refers to a personal, deep relationship where the deity has chosen the individual. This relationship is a significant commitment that often extends beyond ritual work into daily life.

2. The First Death

Home and Family

My childhood, from infancy to the age of 12, happened at the first house I remember: 455 Wellington Street, Launceston, Tasmania, in the suburb of Sandhill. Launceston is a hilly town at the head of the Tamar River (which is actually a salt water estuary). The mountains on the skyline felt like sheltering guardians. 

There was an earlier residence, I was told, when I was a tiny baby, before Mum and Dad bought our house, but I didn’t remember that. ‘Four Double Five,’ as we always called it, was the place I loved as my first home. 

The smallish front yard was mostly lawn, divided (unequally) by the path curving down to the house from the front gate. The larger part of the lawn, between this path and the driveway, was edged by my father’s standard rose bushes. They bloomed beautifully, in a variety of colours, even though he was constantly battling aphids, and they smelled wonderful. The smaller section of lawn, near the side fence, was mostly occupied by a big ceanothus tree full of tiny blue flowers and lots of buzzing bees. (That tree didn’t need much looking after; it seemed to take care of itself.) A low fence, and a privet hedge the same height, separated us from the street.

Photographed on a visit in 2014 – still there, as a poorly maintained student rental (minus the rose bushes and the ceanothus):

I was an only child until I was four, when my little brother was born. When I was very small, my cousin Suzanne, who was 18 months younger than me, often came for long visits with her mother, my Aunty Frankie, my mum’s younger sister. Lovely Nana, my maternal grandmother (and Suzanne’s) often stayed with us too. Grandpa would remain at The Orchard House where they lived, in Spreyton, near Devonport.

Grandpa was an orchardist. He arranged to continue so by buying an orchard property, sight unseen, ahead of migrating the small family to the island of Tasmania from India, from their home in Coonoor in the Nilgiri hills. Mum was fifteen at that time, the middle child of three. Grandpa and Uncle Ian went ahead of Nana and the two girls, to begin building The Orchard House. This I remember as a large, vine-covered cottage with stone floors, and a big attic accessed by a ladder. I always loved the low green bathtub, sunken a little way into the floor so one could step down into it. 

The house and garden were surrounded by orchards, which seemed vast to me – mainly apples and pears, but also some peaches, apricots, nectarines and plums – and a large area of uncleared bush. Later I spent a lot of time in family visits to Spreyton, as did my brother and our cousins, the children of Aunty Frankie and Uncle Bill, and of Uncle Ian and Aunty Ella. 

Uncle Ian was Mum and Aunty Frankie’s older brother. He was a country schoolteacher, working in small schools in some of the rural hamlets in Tasmania. Uncle Bill was a radio operator in the merchant navy – and liked to visit local radio stations when ashore, which is how he met Aunty Frankie, who was a radio broadcaster. 

Dad was a car salesman, which no doubt led indirectly to his meeting my mum, as he used to travel all over the island of Tasmania in his job. When Mum was single, she worked in an apple packing shed in Spreyton. Married women usually didn’t work. 

I was born in November 1939 – ‘Just before The War began’ (i.e. the Second World War) my Mum always used to say, only a trifle inaccurately (it officially began in September). From when I was a baby until I was four, my father and Suzanne’s father, Uncle Bill, were away because of The War. (But not, as far as I remember, Uncle Ian. I think teachers must have been a protected profession, considered too necessary to be allowed to sign up.) 

Uncle Bill was seconded to the Navy on Coastwatch duty (essentially a guerilla). Aunty Frankie became a member of the WRANS (Women's Royal Australian Naval Service), using her radio skills to pick up enemy communications in Bass Strait and around the Tasmanian coasts. This may perhaps be why I have the impression that my cousin Suzanne spent a great deal of time with us without her mother – although I do recall Aunty Frankie being with us quite a lot, too.

I didn’t understand what The War was, but later I came to know it meant that fathers were absent; and that we took little tickets, torn from something called ration books, to the shops to buy our food. Mum was always worried about how much of any particular food she could get at any time.

Occasionally my absent father would reappear briefly, just for a couple of days. I didn’t know him, and he scared me – a virtual stranger, big and loud, arriving in a sudden flurry, who would sweep my mother off into the bedroom and shut the door. Then, after a brief disruption to the household, when everything centred around him (and not me!) he'd just as quickly disappear again.

Dad never went away to the actual war, I know now. He had a gammy leg from an accident when he was 10, being run over by a cart. I know he spent many months in bed, and afterwards was always more or less lame. Some days his leg pained him only a little if at all; other days it hurt a lot and he walked with a cane. So instead of being sent to war, he went to a camp somewhere in central Australia, where men not quite fit enough for overseas duty were trained to defend the country if we should ever be invaded. This probably meant his trips home were a lot more frequent than for most soldiers, but they still seemed to me like rare, random visits from some alien creature. Most of the time, we were a household of females: all three generations, more often than not.

My Nana

Nana was the great love of my early life. I was her first grandchild. Although she died when I was four, I remember her vividly. She was warm and soft, she sang and laughed, she loved to cuddle me on her comfortable big lap and sing, ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child …’ or tell me stories. I loved it too! As Suzanne went from baby to toddler, she shared the cuddles. Sometimes Nana would take each of us by the hand and we’d go up and down the passage from our front door into the house, while she declaimed: ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching!’

This is the only photo I have of her, taken long before I knew her, during her nursing career in India. As the matron of her own hospital (in Puri) she was decorated by the British Government after the First World War for her services in looking after the wounded troops. Though older, she still looked much like this when I did know her (without the nurse's uniform).

My cousin Doug – the eldest child of my dear Uncle Ian – was born before Nana took ill and died. So there was a new generation in each of her children’s families, which must have brought her joy. But Doug was too young to remember her later. Suzanne (deceased in 2009) always remembered her, as vividly and fondly as I still do. I’m sorry for my brother and my younger cousins who never had the joy of knowing her. And she would have had great joy in knowing them!

I remember, when I was a little older and The War was over, her huge, delighted smile when we arrived at The Orchard House for weekend visits. She would always be standing at the wide open door to welcome us by the time we drove up. It was a long, winding driveway from the road to that front door; she would have heard the car coming in plenty of time to be ready and waiting. 

My dad always remembered her, later, as having ‘the most beautiful voice! Not a singing voice; a speaking voice.’ 

I myself loved to remember her letting down her long, thick hair and brushing it 100 times before going to bed. (Something which, a long time later, I discovered my other Grandma did too. It must have been a ritual for women of that generation.  Certainly I was advised by various women, as I was growing up, to brush my own hair 100 times a day. I did, well into my teens; then life got too busy and interesting to take the time ... and it began to seem like an old-fashioned thing to do.)

One of the family legends about Nana was that strangers would spontaneously tell her their whole life stories, if they happened to sit next to her on a bus or something. 

‘She just had that kind of face,’ my older relatives would reminisce, and they’d repeat the tale of how she would often answer a knock on the door and not come back until half an hour or so later, when she would say something like,

‘That was the milkman. That poor man! His wife is so ill, and his children ...’

Nana died of a pulmonary embolism after a gall bladder operation. I was taken to see her in hospital before she died. It must have been after her surgery, as her sheets and blankets were arranged like a dome over a wire cage that kept them from being heavy on her body. She was pale and silent, barely awake, a lump of white bedclothes far up above my tiny height. Who was this stranger in place of my darling Nana? Instructed to let my dad lift me up to kiss her, I hung my head and silently shook it in refusal.

By then Dad was back living at home, no longer a scary figure to me. He and Mum were both there with me at Nana’s hospital bedside. I think this must have been intended as a goodbye. They must have known she was about to die, though they didn’t tell me that then. I was only four, after all. (And perhaps they didn’t want to say it in her hearing, either.)

Only a day or two later, I was told she was dead. Did someone say she had gone to Heaven? I don’t know. My parents weren’t religious, but I know I was christened in the Congregationalist Church, so perhaps they had still been paying lip service for the sake of their mothers. Both my grandmothers were devoutly Christian, and of course most people in that time and place didn’t question it. There were plenty of kindly friends and neighbours who would have been likely to console me with the reassurance that she was in Heaven now.

Mum took to her bed for 24 hours when Nana died. She too adored her mother, and was prostrate with grief. She was then heavily pregnant with my younger brother, Denis, who was born only a couple of weeks later. I remember the aunts and uncles saying over and over again, for years afterwards, how sad that Nana had not lived long enough to see him.

I was upset and somewhat uncomprehending, being told that Nana was dead. Dad shushed my crying and told me to go and play outside. ‘You mustn’t upset your mother.’ For many years, remembering that, I thought he was insensitive to my needs as a child; but I realise now he might have been afraid that Mum, in such terrible distress, could lose the new baby. 

I remember wandering down the vastness of our big back lawn, feeling strangely alone. None of the companions I usually saw there (even if others didn’t) were with me now. The lawn, which usually felt like a friendly place, was suddenly blank and empty. I seemed to drift. I was in a kind of fog.

Then it seemed to me that my Nana spoke to me from out of the sky, gently calling my name. Only her voice didn’t sound aloud; I heard it in my head. No – I heard it all around me, and in every part of my body … even though it didn’t exactly have a physical sound. And yet, it did sound just like her voice! And I did have some sense of her – er, um, essence (I would call it now) – being in the sky. 

I was only four years old – I didn’t spend time wrestling with these contradictions as I do now when trying to put them on the page. No, I simply had the experience. 

It wasn’t entirely comforting. I didn’t think Nana should be speaking to me from the clouds, or the air around the lawn, or wherever her voice was coming from. I still had in my mind the cold, white figure on the hospital bed. And I had also the very different, dear Nana who used to play with me, and sing to me, and tell me stories. This new connection was different from any of that – yet I had the absolutely unquestioning conviction that it was her. Simply put, I recognised her.

I also received the idea that she could look after me from wherever she was now. I knew she still loved me. Only I couldn’t see her, or feel her cuddles, or have breakfast with her.

I walked over the lawn slowly and quietly, aimlessly. I knew within myself that this meeting with her, if it could be called that, was a sort of goodbye. She might still be looking after me, but I wouldn’t be able to see her or touch her or hear her voice. Somehow I knew that a contact like this – unsatisfactory as it was – would never come again. Not even this.

I was precocious with language, but I couldn’t have expressed it then as I am doing now. I had instead a kind of knowing, which felt as much of the body as the mind. 

I did try to tell my dad, who eventually called me back inside when it started to grow dark, that Nana had spoken to me from out of the sky. He was outraged. He asked my mum who could have been filling my head with that superstitious nonsense.

I sucked my thumb and looked away. I had no answer for questions like that. I only knew what I had experienced. 

That was a long, long, lonely day.