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 had become an orchardist when he migrated the small family to the island of Tasmania from India, from their home in Coonoor, in the Nilgiri hills. He 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 large attic accessed by a ladder. I always loved the 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 – 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.)

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.