At nineteen, on my first trip outside Australia, I didn’t really care about the social standing of my mother’s parents, nor whether my mother was a poshie or a non-poshie. It all seemed rather arcane, nowhere near as interesting as the fact that my cousins were about to take me horse-riding at a farm down the road.
This lack of interest will sound weird, I know, to anyone who comes from a vaguely functional family. How can you not care about your parents and their antecedents? Maybe there’ll be others, though, who’ll think it sounds normal. Caring about your parents can hinge on whether they cared about you. My mother, in all the important ways, had disappeared from my life by the time I was fifteen, and even in the years she was present had been disconnected, self-interested, otherwise engaged. I’d always considered myself self-raising, like flour.
It was only years later that other questions began to press themselves forward. Can you really be self-raising, like flour? Or is that just a glib way to pretend that bad parenting doesn’t hurt? Is it possible to be a good parent yourself if your own parents were not what you ordered? And is the personality of the ill-parented person, both the good parts and the bad, really nothing but scar tissue, grown around this elemental hurt?
My attitude at nineteen – ‘I’m just not that interested’ – may have been healthy, in a self-protective, let’s-get-on-with-things way, but it was an attitude that became difficult to maintain as the years went by. And so, more than three decades on, I decided to discover where I came from.
This is where my memory starts: me as a self-sufficient child, distant from my parents. It was the early 1960s; my parents had just returned to Australia from New Guinea, where they’d spent twelve years helping establish a daily newspaper, the South Pacific Post. Both had good jobs in Sydney. My father, Ted, worked for a local publishing company and then later for the Reader’s Digest. He was handsome, with jet-black hair swept into place with Brylcreem, rather like the Don Draper character in Mad Men. My mother, who called herself Bunty, worked as an arts publicist, mainly for The Australian Opera and The Australian Ballet. She was blonde, vivacious and would dress stylishly in bright designer clothes. My mother and father didn’t really behave like parents to me or as partners to each other. It was more a case of two self-involved individuals who happened to rent a room to a boarder of mystifyingly modest height.
They – or rather we – lived in a two-storey house of normal size, with a circular drive squeezed into the front yard as a nod to feudal grandeur. It had a pool out the back and a long, bright sunroom for entertaining. The sunroom had a bar at one end, decorated to an Hawaiian theme. A pair of over-sized salad servers, embellished with frangipanis, was mounted on the wall behind the bar, presumably to celebrate Hawaii’s famous love of salad. A glass bowl held packets of motel matches – ‘Stay at the Sea-Breeze on Queensland’s Gold Coast’ – and there were several large lighters, embedded in lumps of marble, which I’d occasionally be required to carry around, igniting the cigarettes of guests. In this household, there’d be no problems if a visitor craved either a drink or a smoke.
My parents worked hard and enjoyed a busy social life. They’d arrive home just before dinner and then, quite often, would head to a party or the theatre, clambering their way up the social ladder, leaving me with a teenage babysitter. Or they’d host elaborate dinner parties – a clatter of music and conversation floating up the stairs towards my bedroom.
At such events, my mother spoke loudly in a posh, strangulated accent. She sounded like the Queen Mum – if the Queen Mum had been required to instruct a group of slightly deaf workmen standing on the other side of a noisy road. It wasn’t only the manner of speaking, it was the words themselves – words, I now realise, which were chosen to prove her aristocratic standing. It was never a ‘toilet’ but always a ‘lavatory’. ‘I’m just off to the lavatory,’ she’d announce at high volume, almost constantly, to whole roomfuls of people, so frequently that her guests must have worried about the state of her bladder. In the same spirit, it was ‘napkin’, not ‘serviette’; ‘sofa’, not ‘couch’; ‘pudding’, not ‘sweet’; ‘spectacles’, not ‘glasses’; and ‘drawing room’, not ‘lounge’. My childhood was a blizzard of these terms, my mother never more pleased than when she could work several into a single sentence:
‘Let’s head into the drawing room for some pudding, if you’re all sure you don’t need the lavatory.’
‘Leave your napkin behind; you won’t need it once you’re sitting on the sofa in the drawing room.’
‘The lavatory is just through there, past the sofa; you’ll see the way through your spectacles.’
When I read autobiographies I’m amazed by people’s ability to recall their early childhood. The film star Diane Cilento, for example, wrote about the music teacher she had when she was eight or nine years old, and remembered everything – the teacher’s name, personality, even the state of her teeth. ‘Theodora Benson was a dark-haired melancholic with chipped teeth and moles all over her face.’ Was Diane just making this up? Do most people retain this stuff? I try to recall my own piano teacher but can’t get a picture to form, either in terms of the moles or the name.
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