Where the wild things aren't

Some friends of mine are enjoying a project called 365 Things in My House. They take a picture of something each day, and they add whatever stories, associations, well-told anecdotes, bits of fractured family history or whatnot are built into them. Things and what we think they are are such fabulous, messy, pretty, crazy, layered, portable microcosmic cameos of their nearby people. It is a delightfully warm and fun game in telling people about oneself.

I considered my flat. Thing I bought last week from Ikea. Another thing I bought last week from Ikea. Thing I bought two weeks ago from Ikea. Thing Dr Heartbreak brought me last winter from England. Thing Dr Heartbreak brought me for my birthday. Thing from Ikea ...

Sigh.

Not so much with the things. I need my coat and my mixer and my Ravilious and my typography and the picture of my grandmother. I need my stories.

Scout

In 1924, my grandfather (not this one, the other one) went on a trip to England with his scout troop: the First Toorak, one of the first in Victoria. In those days, of course, one went to England on a steamship, so going meant being away from school for more than six months. However, his headmaster, the redoubtable Dr Littlejohn, opined that he would learn more in six months abroad than in two years at school, so off he went.

That is he in the foreground, on the deck of the ship.

I knew that he'd gone, of course -- the trip was part of the family storytelling -- but I didn't know about Dr Littlejohn. I heard that today from my uncle, the eldest of my grandfather's sons (with my own father occupying the noble Number Three spot) who has transcribed my grandfather's diary from the trip. He knew that my grandfather's stories of the journey were some of my favourites, so he emailed it to me. Top notch avuncularity if ever there was! The diary is so crammed with gems I barely know where to start. He recounts trips to chocolate factories, newspaper presses, light-bulb manufacturing lines, drapers, clothiers, castles, cathedrals, museums and all the other Evidence of Great Empire to which the wee Australian boys must needs be exposed, naturellement. Ditto tours to Oxford and Eton. And not a little bit of parading for the better element, I must say:

" ... then we all got into charabancs and were driven to the Palace. After waiting for some time in the Riding School Room, Sir Alfred Pickford gave us our instructions about what to do when the King came in. About ten minutes afterwards the King and 4 of his attendants inspected us. Then he gave us a speech. Then BP gave 3 cheers for HM. Then HM took us his abode at the entrance and we marched out with “Eyes Right”."

The King himself! My grandfather always said that his impression was that he looked "just as he did on a penny".

I think, though, that my baby grandpa's affections really lay with the Prince of Wales. Something about the postscript to this is exquisite in its adoration:

"This morning we all went over to the stadium and practised for the march past and got back in time for lunch. This afternoon, we march past HRH the Prince of Wales as Chief Scout of Wales. In the middle of it all down came the rain and we all got wet. After tea we had an enormous meeting round a rather small camp fire. The different contingents gave different songs and the night went off very well. We got back to our tent and turned in. P.S. The Prince attended the camp fire."

Did he, indeed.

How much more fun could a boy in 1924 be having? Wait until I tell you about my grandfather's wide-eyed reportage on the employees the Osram Electric Lamp Works!

"It is a tremendous place and only 500 out of 4-5,000 employees are men. "

Heavens alive!

There is so, so much more. Thank you, thank you uncle J.

Head of a pin

I had a notably godless childhood. Or maybe a God-less one, because although there was barely a frankincense-scented whiff of religion, there were plenty of gods around. My mother's world -- and the top of her dresser -- was a metauniversal jamboree of bhagavats, emblems, archetypes, goddesses and totem animals. Candles and flowers and tiny resin-cast foxes at the feet of a little brass Shiva. A foot-long reclining Buddha loomed over a plastic figurine of the Evil Queen in Snow White. No, really.

And her guardian angel, of course. Bringer of parking spaces and protector against ills we know not of. She didn't live with the others, but all by herself on the bedside table. A tiny conical wooden shape for angel raiment, blue, daintily painted with flowers, with a teeny-tiny wooden head and teeny filagree brass wings and the teeniest-tiniest expression of beatitude ever managed by a 000 brush. Even to my five-year-old hands she was light as a feather and smelled like the drawer my grandfather's handkerchiefs lived in. She had been sitting on mum's bedside table, wherever she went, since long before I was born. I think she was from Mexico.

The angel in the picture, though, is mine. Mum made her for me out of Fimo and two little gold-effect fans and some foil moons and a tiny gold shell for her halo. Mum's thumbprint is on her left sleeve.

She stands next to my pencil-cup and my memo-block with the silver X paperweight on it and my Penguin of Death mug, which holds a Great Bustard feather and a crackly, fractured bit of honesty and a magpie feather and an otherworldly, snow-white puff of goshawk down.

Another little talisman clambake, on the other side of the world.

Sprout

Inspired by a wonderful shot at Scrivenings, this is my first day of school. It is February, 1978, and I am four years old.

I am so tiny. I know it, even then. Everyone is taller than me, even my baby brother, who is two and a half. My miniaturity is such that all the other school blazers--even the smallest of the small ones--have three buttons, but mine only has two. My wee checked dress, light as air in cotton and polyester for the Australian summer, balloons at the bottom with its inch-upon-inch load of hemmed-up fabric. I long for something in the shot to provide some contrast for the enormous piece of luggage in my hand, the smallest schoolbag they had.

I remember the photograph being taken. We are in the tiny paved courtyard in the front of my house, through the French windows into the sitting room where there are a pair of scratchy brown couches that my mother covered with a pale lemon-coloured sheet for me when I had the chicken pox, and a tiny little bar behind a special door underneath the record player. It opens down, unlike any of the other doors in the world, and it has two tiny brass struts which pop out and hold the door straight out like a table, where my dad puts glasses and pours whiskey. I love the special door. The courtyard is behind the high white wall that is at the front of the house, where the number is, but not where the front door is. Our house is on a corner, and the street where we are numbered is not the street where the door is. Another wonderful and mysterious thing about our house, not like other houses. Another special door. It will take me many years of adulthood to get out of the habit of adding door-finding instructions to my address.

I fizz with nerves. I am completely, completely overwhelmed by the importance of what is happening. Especially the little forest green blazer, which is crispy and flat and stiff-fuzzy on the outside and has silky material inside it and it has buttons where everything before seemed to have zippers or nothing at all. Mum stands a little away, and her expression and the camera tell me more things about what is happening, her mobile eyebrows and crooked smile speaking of the need to capture me, because this is not the everyday, it is a part of the story that must be written down, like the appearance of a magical creature or the discovery of another door.

What I remember most vividly is the bag. It is so big, and it has two handles, and my hands are tiny, tiny, and my fingers are being squished together in a bunch from holding it. I look down at my fingers, because I hate this sensation. I still hate this sensation. Thirty years later I see my fingers, impossbly tiny, and I am back on the paving, and I can feel that I am not going to put the bag down, even though I want to rearrange my fingers, because mum wants me to hold it for the photo.

So I look away from my fingers, and up at her. I feel the bag lean against my knee, cool and vinylly. She crouches to get in line with me, folding up gracefully, as she always does, and I see her lovely, angular, precise pianist's hands prop the camera delicately at the edges as though it is already a negative.

I am so scared. Everything is so important. What if I don't find the right doors?

Roots 3

Alfred, Lord Nemesis

My maternal grandfather, the one married to this beauty, his lifelong love, was an engineer. He loved engines and gadgets and tinkering and building. His hands were never grimy or oily unless they were actually handling the parts of something. The rest of the time they were soft and warm and square and dry, like folded brown paper in the sun. He had dark, iron-coloured hair side-parted like a cartesian axis and smelling so comfortingly and deliciously of his hair tonic. In my mother's family (and mine) Christmas stockings were hung for everyone, no matter how old. My mother and grandmother bemoaned, by tradition, the difficulty of stuffing one for my grandfather. He was temperamentally immune to the ribbon-and-trinket excitement of Christmas. He had crumply, alert blue eyes that could be liquid or pebbly, depending on what he was thinking. When I was about eight, we sat together on one of the dining room chairs. They each had a tapestry seat stitched by my grandmother with a petit-point eagle in the centre. The windows had long, moss-coloured velvet curtains, and the sun was shafting between them onto the table, illuminating the airborne dust. My grandfather was telling me about atoms. "Do you see these?" he said, casting a shadow through the motes and onto the french polish with the cuff of his coat. "If an atom was standing in front of one of these, it would be like the most enormous skyscraper the atom had ever seen!"

One Christmas, my mother put a tiny roll of very small-gauge copper wire into the toe of my grandfather's stocking. No eight-year-old with a new bicycle lit up that brightly. He coiled and uncoiled the little roll like miniature tinsel on his tree-hands. For months afterwards, each time we saw him he'd tell us where a part of it had been put to use. I imagined tiny coppery fragments glinting secretly everywhere. My mother still laughs that the best present she ever gave her father was an impulse buy for seventy-five cents.

Actually, he wasn't really an engineer, because poetry made no sense to him.

He started the degree. They'd made special allowance for him, because he'd failed English in his final year at school, and a pass was mandatory to attend university. But he had a giant geeky brain full of numbers and diagrams, so they told him he could start reading for his degree on the condition that he get a pass in English that year.

My grandmother tutored him. (She was also reading for a degree, in English, a very unusual happenstance down to my very unusual great-grandfather, more about whom in some other post). But he failed again that first year. But since he was an exhibitioner in physics, he was allowed to stay on for the second year.

It was the Tennyson, they said ever afterwards. Patiently, and every night (or so the family story goes), my grandmother would read from the dog-eared Everyman edition that's next to the line of Austen in my bookshelf. But ...

At this point in the story my grandfather would raise his spare, dark brows and purse his lips, like a negative reverse-out of the expression he made when he was working on a machine. He'd hold up his lined, soft palms with a matte gleam on them like a well-loved paperback, and he'd shrug theatrically. Or as theatrically as my grandfather ever got, which wasn't very at all, which just made it that much funnier.

We'd all laugh, and his eyes would go crinkly and pebbly and then liquid. They kicked him out after the second time he failed, so he never got his degree.

He was the first person to tell me that a light year was something about how far, not something about how long. And I still see atoms gobsmacked at the dust.

Roots II

In my grandmother's house, this was My Teacup. I would come to visit in the afternoons, often after school, and she would make tea. A pot, three cups, a silver bowl of sugar, and a tiny saucer with a fish painted on it for the slices of lemon, all perched on a doily. Honestly, a real doily, from the vast recesses of her manchester collection, piled like slubbed, lacy snow in the linen cabinets. In the sitting room, there was a nest of tables next to the couch, and she would bring out the smallest one and spread something wonderful on it -- perhaps a little cutwork cloth or one with embroidered bees or daisies. "The way you know good embroidery, dear, is that it looks as good from the back as the front. But know the difference, because you must always iron needwork on the reverse."

I took one-and-a-half spoons of sugar in my tea. Perhaps when I was ten, I was discerning enough to have a definite feeling that one spoonful was not enough and two was too sweet. Or perhaps I just thought it was grown-up and refined to be very particular about how much sugar went in one's tea. She always asked. "One-and-a-half, please."

My grandfather had tea, too, sitting quietly in his armchair in the corner reading the paper and smelling faintly of the lovely French tonic that he combed into his hair that came out of a bottle that looked like something from a movie with Lauren Bacall in it.

"Just like your grandfather," my grandmother would say. She smiled into the tray with the doily on it and my grandfather smiled into his newspaper.

She could make perfect half-spoonsful.

Roots

This is my grandmother. Glamorous, n'est-ce pas? We think this shot might have been taken to mark her engagement, which would make it 1936 and her about 22. My grandfather was the literal boy-next-door and they were utterly devoted until he was taken by cancer in 1986.

My grandfather was Catholic, gentle, methodical and quiet. My grandmother was Church of England, formidable, articulate and you might have thought she was full of whimsy and spontaneity, but actually she was as methodical and systematic as my grandfather and twice as flinty. The whimsy was part of the glamour, which was both effortless and considered, making it utterly, utterly impenetrable. Or put another way, it was completely real -- she really was like that. She really did have kitten-heeled bedroom slippers with a white feathery puff on the toe. She really did always have perfect nails, gleaming coral. She was the sort of person who could actually address a cab driver as "driver" -- as in, "Driver, Little Collins Street please" -- and make it sound both polite and respectful.

She always wore gloves. She taught me exactly how to angle a hat. She taught me how to get in and out of cars depending on what you're wearing, and my girlhood was peppered with baffling pronouncements like "Don't walk like a Parisian". She could take two white gardenias and a fragment of ivy and put it into the most kitsch miniature horn-shaped bud vase you ever saw and somehow make it the one thing you want beside your bed, every night for the rest of your life. Her taste made rococco look spare. She had a completely matched bedroom suite that was I think walnut veneer with brass beading all the way around the edges. The dressing table was seven feet long (I know this because my mother is now using it as a sideboard in her hall) and had a marble top. Over it was a triptych-style gilt arched mirror as wide as the table and taller than my father which showed you both your profiles as well as the front of you. The table had many tiny drawers, each one delicately beaded and with a tiny brass pull. As she sat on the matching stool (tiny, spindly turned legs with a striped gold cushion on the top) and "put her face on", she would let me look in the drawers.

When I was a child these seemed like an endless sequence of wonders -- because they were. Everything was in a tiny box or soft drawstring bag, many lined with felt or padded with cotton wool. Amber worry beads. A chocolate box from the 1920s containing hundreds of different buttons. Carefully stored boxes of her favourite perfume, brought back from Hong Kong. Tiny shells which my mother had found as a child, inside boxes only a little bigger than their occupants. Embroidered bags from China with loose beads inside. A miniscule, 3" square leather-covered traveler's Italian dictionary with phrases in the back like "Porter, please be careful with the hat-box."

In the kitchen were canisters marked "Tea" and the inexplicable "Sago" and there were silver calling-card trays in soft yellow drawstring bags printed with red ink like a postmark.

Boxes and bags, jars and baskets. They are both magic and reality, safe and adventurous, inhabited by things both found and waiting to be found.

I can never have too many.

Moonsick

It's very early in the morning. I'm not asleep, because there's a full moon. If there's a full moon, I don't sleep. Neither does my mother. Apparently lunacy is genetic. I'd question it if it weren't true, or if anything important hung on whether or not it was true. But all that really happens is that every now and then, bedtime will arrive, and I don't go to sleep. Hours and hours go by. I wonder idly why I'm not sleeping. I wander the house rearranging the kitchen shelves and ordering things online. At some point, I glance out the window, and there it is in full phase, hanging lustrously in the sky like a pearl button on a dusty black overcoat. Tada! You're a werewolf.

It is high above my window, rusting the edges of a milky puddle of clouds.

I love the moon. I love its fervent, reflected light and the spectacular, heartbreaking romance of Earth's grip on it. And it suggests the moment, long ago, when my father explained parallax to me when I asked why the moon followed us home in the car.

One of the loneliest things in the world is looking up into the night sky and finding that it isn't there. Not the night sky that ought to be there, but another one. The dark has been ransacked. Worst of all, the moon. The soft, friendly luminary of all your nights is gone and replaced by a stranger who is all the more terrifying for being almost exactly like the moon you have lost, and yet somehow ...

One day, walking under another full phase, I mentioned the great grief of my moonsickness to Pluvialis, who understands such things. She stood in the wet autum street and considered. What's wrong with it? she inquired. It can't be that we are seeing the other side, because the same side always faces us. So ...

Light dawned. Standing there in my overcoat, I put my head between my legs and looked up, upside down. And there she was, my old friend, smiling at me. She'd just stood on her head all this time.

If I rest my head on my desk just so, I am home again.

Childhood hero

This, dear readers, in case anyone needs a primer, is Linus van Pelt, friend to Charlie Brown and Peanuts' resident philosopher.

My childhood home contained a complete and warmly dogeared collection of the paperbacked Peanuts anthologies from the 60s, accumulated by my mother, and Peanuts was an inextricable component of the vernacular of our family. Our language and humour was larded with references to it. There is an immortal photograph of my father in the early 70s, perched naked in a tree with his knees against his chest and his eyebrows beetling fabulously. Sometimes I worry that an anthropologist of the future will find this photograph and have no idea what he is doing up there, and there will be no-one to tell her. Naturally, he is doing an impression of Snoopy's impression of a vulture.

Linus has always been my favourite, and sometimes I wonder if my identification with him wasn't hopelessly foreordained. My mother knew she'd spawned a tiny Linus before I could even read, much less understand the comic genius of Miss Othmar and the eggshells.

Linus quotes DWMs, endures his parent's high expectations, wants to be outrageously happy when he grows up (or maybe a great philanthropist with someone else's money) yearns for love, and notes that sometimes it is easier to keep things in the language of the layman. He knows that he is never quite so stupid as when he's being smart. And in perhaps my mother's and my most favourite strip of all, his heart sarcastically bleeds for the Snicker Snack Company. Linus loves to think himself into a puddle, but he's never at all sure that he can think himself out of one. Linus, my hero.

As it happens, I wasn't thinking about Linus when I was inspecting the de rigueur chic baby section of one of the terminally tasteful homeware-vintage-beads-cards-and-Cath-Kidston type of store we have around here. It contained a selection of security blankets. Yes, indeed. Just like Linus. They were inspired. Soft and creamy coloured and with nubbly bits and fringy bits and creatures embroidered on them and really just exactly the sort of thing you'd want to wrap around your nose if you were feeling a little freaked by, oh, I don't know, life in general.

I played with them, nonchalantly not wrapping one around my nose. I cast around in my mind for likely infant suspects of my acquaintance, and came up blank. No zwanger homegirls, either. Curses! I wandered away and toyed disconsolately with silly coloured-glass candle holders and faux rustique herb pots. And then, criminally slow on the uptake for a lifelong Linus-lover, it comes to me like a snowball to the side of the head. I can have the blanket for myself.

Mock if you will. But this here Linus worshipper and stressed-out dissertation writer went to sleep twice as fast that night with her blanket wrapped tightly around her nose.

Use your egg

During my last trip to Sainsbury's, I was inspecting the pretty new displays of Easter merchandise. (For the record, Good Friday this year falls on April 14, which is eight weeks from today. But that "what? already?" horse was flogged and dead about ten million expressions of consumer shock ago, so moving on).

On the beautifully arranged tiered display, there was a box marked "Easter Egg Hunt for Four Children". It was made like a cardboard case, with little paper handles and pastel-hued depictions of bunnies and overly euphoric-looking kidlets on the front.

WTF? There are people whose Easter will be made more efficient by the provision of a kit? Good Lord.

When I was really small, my family had the traditional hunt on Easter Sunday, at our tiny weatherboard house down on the coast. We'd be corralled somewhere, and my mother would go outside and hide little chocolate eggs all over the garden. Then would come the thrilling moment of release and my brother and I would rush out into the garden and HUNT. I still remember the thrill of the bright glimpses of jewel-coloured foil in the crevice of a tree stump, peeping through some pine needles or flickering from under the frost-crumpled green of a avocado vine leaf.

My brother is almost two years younger than me, but that wasn't the trouble. The trouble was that he would rush out the door and be overtaken with excitement, rushing from one corner of the garden to the other, looking everywhere, everywhere, everywhere! Up, down, around, at the clouds, at his shoes, anywhere you can look while you're dashing at full pelt on your delighted little feet. He is still (at 30, married and with kid) a person of this kind of headlong enthusiasms. Though now he keeps them rather more to himself, with a secret smile that tells you he's still shouting with excitement ... on the inside.

I too was seething with excitement and the thrill of the chase, but I was methodical and systematic. I spent a lot of time standing in one place, imagining myself into my mother's head and thinking about where she would hide things. I didn't know it then, but I was thinking about which places she would find especially satisfying to hide an egg, because she too was enthralled by the way a glimmery egg could hide in a twist of bark on a eucalypt, or perch nonchalantly on top of a fence post. I was incredibly successful. (It's at this point in the story that my old friend Pluvialis laughs at me when I say that there is nothing about my early life that prefigures my later dreams of academic philosophy).

I'd come back to the deck with a huge haul of tinselly treasures, and my brother would be practically dying of excitement, but have only a handful. Mum always kept a stock of extras aside to make up the difference, but eventually something had to be done. In a stroke of genius (and of love, because the commitment is awesome) she developed a system where my brother and I would run concurrent but independent hunts -- with clues, written on paper. With each clue was an egg, and that clue led you to the next egg.

Initially, my mother relates, the clues were really simple ... stuff like "we eat here" ... and there the little egg would be, resting on a dining room chair. A little pink egg nestling on the pillow of "Mummy and Daddy sleep in this", a green one partially planted in the pot of roses that proclaims "I grow things that smell lovely". And, of course, she could tailor the clues to make them exciting for each of us ... and we'd both end up with the same number of eggs.

As time went on, the clues became more and more complex until eventually my mother brought in my father, the Times crossword nut, to develop cryptic clues, clues that involved baroque family in-jokes, clues that required stop-offs at the dictionary or the atlas. When I was 15, I found a praline-filled striped egg perched precariously on the beak of a fake taxidermied kookaburra we had on the wall after puzzling for some time over a clue that read "Ha ha ha! I'm stuffed."

What was your egg hunt like?