Flesh Wounds
Contents
- Epigraph
- Dedication
- Please start here
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen
- Chapter Eighteen
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Praise
- Also by Richard Glover
- Copyright
Guide
- Cover
- Contents
- Chapter One
- i
- ii
- iii
- iv
- v
- vi
- vii
- viii
- ix
- x
- xi
- xii
- 1
- 2
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‘Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humour to console him for what he is.’
Sir Francis Bacon
For Dan and Joe
My father and mother on their wedding day, Lancashire, 1946.
According to my mother, I was the first artificial insemination baby in Australia. The claim is not as unlikely as it sounds; the dates work out. She wasn’t talking about IVF or test tubes, just about sperm and a turkey-baster. Old-style. So her story makes some sense. It was her reason for needing help that was strange. She and my father were having trouble conceiving, which is not surprising when you consider she’d never slept with him. Not once. They’d been married twelve years and still the marriage was unconsummated. And even in 1958, it was hard to get pregnant without having sex.
They were living in Papua New Guinea where medical facilities were scarce, so they came down to Sydney to see an infertility specialist. My father gave his sperm and my mother submitted to the procedure. And, according to my mother, it worked. She was both pregnant and a virgin. So, at this point, you may wish to call me Jesus.
My father had a different story, but only slightly different. Yes, my mother refused to sleep with him, and yes, they’d booked into an Australian hospital to see if artificial insemination could be the answer. In my father’s version, though, the procedure didn’t work. They went back to New Guinea and she was forced to finally have sex with him, just the once, in order to have me. I don’t know which story is right. Either way, I find it hard to think of myself as a love child.
A few years later, we moved from Papua New Guinea – first to Sydney and then to Canberra. In all that time I never felt like the favourite, which is hard when you are an only child. My mother was distant, both from me and my father. She would tell anyone who listened about the unusual circumstances of my birth, as if it made the two of us a little bit posh: a child produced without recourse to rutting. Her tone was the one you’d use when your child has won a competition.
Some years on, having finished school, I travelled overseas, hoping to meet my English grandparents. By then my parents had split up – my mother moving to a country town far away. I rang her to request contact details for her side of the family. There was a disapproving sigh on her end of the phone. She wasn’t in a position to put me in contact with her family. Frankly, she refused. When I asked her why, she told me a story I’d heard growing up, without ever really taking it in. It described the cause of all that followed: her hasty but loveless marriage to my father, their escape to New Guinea, and the way I’d never had any contact with my maternal grandparents.
As she explained it, she was a child from an upper-class family.
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