7. Cousin-Sister

After the War was over, I saw less of my cousin Suzanne. Aunty Frankie and Uncle Bill now spent most of their time in their own home in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania, down in the south, at the other end of the island from my home town, Launceston. Nana and Grandpa’s home was in Spreyton – near Devonport, a major town on the central north coast (a little north-west of Launceston). Uncle Ian, Aunty Ella and cousin Douglas (always Doug to us kids) were, I was vaguely aware, somewhere inland where Uncle Ian taught at some country school. 

The families increased. I only had the one brother, but Suzanne gradually acquired three siblings: Sheila, Richard and Helen, while Doug got Jonathan (Jonny) and their sister Pat – a wild, tomboyish girl she was, growing up rurally with two older brothers.

In those days, on earlier roads than the highways of today, it took longer to travel from one part of the island to another. The family still got together in the Christmas holidays, usually at The Orchard House. Occasionally, in between, Dad or one of the uncles had business away from home, which would allow a quick visit to one of the other families.

Classically beautiful, naturally blonde Aunty Ella, sweet-natured and shy, with beautiful manners, was very much welcomed into the family, but of course this newer bond was not quite the same as that between sisters, although Uncle Ian was still their much-loved big brother. He was a tease, though! There was a family story that Mum had been bald for ages as an infant; then finally one curl appeared, which her parents were hopefully coaxing to grow – until mischievous little Ian cut it off! I dreaded his teasing when I was a kid (though it was only verbal by then). However I loved him too, for the interest he took in me as a person, and the long, quiet conversations we sometimes had, about books and ideas, and life in general.

He loved fishing, and when I was older begged me to write him a poem about catching a fish – about seeing the flash of silver and feeling the thrill as he hooked it. (Already the adults in my life thought highly of my poems.) I eventually did write it – but alas, not until long after he had died in middle age, of stomach cancer. I had promised I would, and eventually felt impelled to keep that promise even though he was no longer with us, so as to free myself from it.

I tried to think myself into his experience – what he had told me about it – and write that experience. (I had also witnessed my stepfather by then, fly-fishing in lakes and rivers.)

Fishing Poem

(For my Uncle Ian)

 

A rainy day

a silver lake

grey clouds

and my grey waterproofs.

 

The fish is light

but not colour,

brighter silver

in the silver lake.

Only my shining lure moves red.

 

I like to think

the fish is glad

racing after my lure,

as I am glad of lake and fish and cloud.

 

I hook the fish,

feeling with my mind

the sleek water

slide across its back

as it dives upwards into spinning air.

 

 

© Rosemary Nissen-Wade 1989

First published Mountain Views  

newspaper (Healesville, Vic) January 1990.

[Not one I would write now, having recently become Vegan!]

All through my growing up, there was Sue, closest to me in age, only 18 months younger. I had always been in her life; she had been in almost all of mine. Despite the sibling rivalry which our early, close proximity brought, we were also each other’s confidantes. Sometimes there was no-one else who could fill that role so well. As we kept getting older, spent less time together, found other friends, and developed in different directions, this lessened; but it never quite went away.

When we were still of primary school age, on visits to The Orchard House we’d take ourselves off to a space under the large, old fir trees that lined the edge of the main orchard. The barbed wire fence was set back in, some distance from the road, with a big, wide ditch between road and fence. The trees, growing just inside the fence, also provided a barrier and concealment. We scrambled up from the orchard to this considerably higher edge, into what we thought of as a glade under the trees, where a straggly carpet of grasses grew, and tiny pink bells of wild heath. 

Sue had discovered it first, on one holiday when her family got there earlier than mine. She couldn’t wait to show it to me! Although the younger, she was quite domineering when we played together, but I usually didn’t mind very much letting her get her own way, because her ideas were fun and creative, and I could happily go along with them. Of course I agreed when she decided this would be our secret place and we’d call it Paradise. She said it was full of fairies.

But she said it in a way that, while ostensibly assuming they were real, sounded as if she was pretending that – albeit pretending wholeheartedly. I was myself at the stage where I had convinced myself and the world around me that I didn’t really believe in anything supernatural – which, oddly enough, gave me licence to enter into elaborate pretence. I wonder now if the same had happened to her. She would ask me questions – did I believe this, had I ever experienced that – with that same air of playing a game of pretence in which we spoke as if we believed it all but of course didn’t really … as if at times, whilst alone, we assumed other selves. We spent hours alone together in ‘Paradise,’ sharing our secret fears and dreams. 

This faded of course, as we got older and met less often, and ‘put away childish things’ – but sometimes she would remind me, ‘Remember when we used to play in Paradise?’ Clearly, it was precious to her. Quite honestly, rather less so to me. (Fairies? Really? Oh, come on! But I played along.) 

As we were growing up, our mothers would sometimes share a bit of a joke with us and each other, to the effect that all us ‘Holmeses girlses’ were a bit spooky, a bit witchy, a teeny bit magic. They would giggle about it, and perhaps mention some flash of intuition, or even some weird happenstance with no real explanation – but again, it was as if they did and didn’t take their own remarks seriously, as if they did and didn’t think they had something of a ‘sixth sense.’ (Grandpa’s surname was Holmes, so theirs was too before they married, and Sue and I were included by right of descent. But actually, as Grandpa was a 'step’ to Mum and her descendants, it would have to have been Nana through whom any such magic came to all us ‘girlses.’) 

‘Oh, we’re all witches!’ they would say, airily. Yet I knew that if anyone else – even any of us – had suggested such a thing in all seriousness, they would have been both scornful and outraged.

I giggled along with them, occasionally joined in the remarks, and kept my real experiences hidden deep – even the ones I did allow myself to know consciously.