Mila has just celebrated her second birthday. I look at her in wonder: she is her own United Nations, embodying East and West, North and South, almost all the continents.
Her mother is Chilean, from a tiny town situated well down the strip of a country on its way to Patagonia. She is Mapuche, and Spanish. Perhaps there is a hint of German ancestry. My son teases her about the dubious morality of those who fled Europe after the war.
My son is already a wild mixture of races and religions. His father is Polish and Jewish. I was born in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, of Dutch Burgher parentage. My surname is Flemish and my father’s family migrated from the Maastricht district of Holland. My mother’s ancestor, Thomas Gratiaen, came from Brussels in the 1700s to work for the Dutch East India Company. His former profession is listed as ‘singer’. His father was a weaver who owned a tapestry manufactory, a detail of which I am extremely proud, as, centuries later, I am a tapestry weaver myself. I had a Scottish great-grandmother, Agnes Keith. And so the melding goes. And we are now Australian.
I look at Mila and hope that, if she is nurtured, she can be a shining light for the human race, an example of all that is good, tolerant and enlightened.
I am very new at the grandmother game. But what I know is that I feel overwhelming love for this small person’s spirit, overwhelming wonder at her smallest achievement. And I think with a new intensity about my own grandmother, who, with a fierce dedication to our welfare, played a significant, daily role in our lives across countries and continents. It is hard to imagine that I could be as consequential in Mila’s life as my grandmother was in my brother Adrian’s and mine.
Political circumstances in Sri Lanka prompted our migration to Australia in 1962. My brave mother, divorced and with no financial support from my father, decided to take the momentous step to leave her comfortable and substantial social life and bring a seven-year-old and an eleven-year-old and her mother, aged seventy, to a new country in order to consolidate our education in the English language. With the election of a nationalist government in our homeland, the ragged remnants of the colonising Dutch had become irrelevant to the progress of the indigenous Sinhalese, and measures were put in place not only to ensure that Sinhala became the main language of the country, but that only two per cent of university places would be given to Dutch Burghers. Our families had lived there for centuries, performing public service and contributing to the country’s cultural development, but we were actively discriminated against. And so what is now termed the ‘Burgher exodus’ began, and we were first in the queue. If being forced from your home means you are a refugee, then we were refugees.
In Australia at that time, the White Australia policy was in full swing: we had to prove our European descent, our ‘whiteness’, before being allowed to settle here. Once here, ‘assimilation’ was the catchcry we adhered to. Nineteen-sixties Australia encouraged newcomers to become homogenised, not to reveal their differences. As Ceylon was part of the Commonwealth, a ‘pink’ country (as my best friend at school put it) on the map of the world, the adjustment was easy. I had played the same games in the schoolyard, recited the same nursery rhymes and read the same books that bound us all to Mother England and created instant common ground.
My mother had worked first as a journalist and then as an advertising copywriter in Ceylon’s first advertising agency. After six weeks in our new country, she found a job in a small agency in Melbourne, where she could showcase her immense talent. Bigger offers followed and she never looked back. In those days, it was unusual to have a full-time working mother; our daily nurturing was the province of our grandmother, who provided food, stability, discipline and unqualified love.
I have to talk about her, mainly for Mila, when she is old enough to read this. I would like to imagine that she would think about me in the same way I think about my beloved grandmother.
Enid Jean Gratiaen (née La Brooy) was born in Victorian times and her morals were honed in that era. From when I was a very small child, I was trained in obedience, consideration, quietness, patience, kindness. The old English proverb ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ was my grandmother’s mantra. I can remember sitting (quietly!) on the dark, polished, red cement verandah of our Colombo house while she entertained her friends to afternoon tea—taken after four-thirty, when the punishing heat of the day had receded—and listening in silent horror to their litany of ailments and operations, which would haunt me at bedtime when my imagination ran riot.
As loving and nurturing as she was, my grandmother was a fierce disciplinarian. When we lived in Ceylon, she kept a small, hidden cane, which she sometimes used across our legs for the unforgiveable crime of ‘insolence’, or for telling lies. My brother was a much more spirited child than I was and consequently received more canings. Mercifully, the cane did not cross the Indian Ocean with us. The worst punishment she meted out in Australia was to make us sit silently in a corner for an hour, or to give us the ‘silent’ treatment over a number of days.
‘God’ and worship at the high altar of Anglicanism was also very present in our lives in Colombo and in Australia. My grandmother would take me and my brother to the three-hour-long ‘passion’ service on Good Fridays. I was dressed in my uncomfortable best clothes and was expected to ‘behave’. In retrospect, I am amazed at her confidence in me to last the distance without complaint, which I did. I was a compliant little girl.
When my parents were still married, my grandparents lived next door and a gate in the high white wall that separated the houses and gardens allowed easy access between our homes. My parents could be described as ‘socialites’, each with a brilliant career. My father was a celebrated painter and political cartoonist and they knew everybody. Drinks, receptions and embassy parties dominated their evenings. When I was eighteen months old, my father won a State Department scholarship to tour the USA and my parents set off for six months, leaving me and my brother with my grandparents. My grandmother wrote to them every week on blue aerogrammes, lovingly documenting our development. Mila? If you ever read this, listen! It was my grandmother who supervised my play, nurtured my tastes and toilet-trained me. Psychologists would say that this is the time in a child’s life when the strongest bonds are formed. I’m certain that it was during these months that my life was irrevocably linked to my grandmother’s.
Once back with my busy parents, in their house, I was fed, bathed and readied for bed by my ayah, the woman who looked after me. Then Granny would appear through the gate in the fence to read to me, a ritual that bonded me closer to her than to anyone else. Afterwards, she had to slip away while I was distracted or else the evening would end in tears.
In 1956 our lives changed forever. My parents divorced, and, soon after, my grandfather died of a heart attack. So my mother, brother and I moved next door to live with my grandmother. It was also the year that the government brought in the excluding ‘Language Act’ that eventually decided our migration to Australia.
As far back as I can remember, my grandmother ran the household. In Ceylon she supervised the servants’ tasks, wrote the shopping lists, ordered the food and managed the domestic finances. The ‘fish man’ and the ‘egg man’ used to deliver to the house and my grandmother would select the best produce from their display. I remember that each egg had to be tested for freshness by being immersed in a basin of water—if it floated, it was rejected. My favourite was the ‘haberdashery man’, who turned up once a week with shallow wooden boxes piled high on his head and filled with the most colourful sewing cottons, laces, skeins of embroidery, needles, scissors, elastic, hooks and eyes and press studs, from which my grandmother would select what she needed for the task she loved most: making all our clothes, which she created with imagination and flair—and with exquisite embroidery, hemstitching and pintucking.
In some senses, I owe my career and lifelong passion for tapestry-weaving to my early exposure to handcrafts through my grandmother and great-aunts. I spent my childhood at their feet, sorting through the coloured cottons, wools and ribbons, feeling and knowing the difference between a variety of fabrics, and delighting in the treasures of the button boxes, as my grandmother’s sewing machine whirred and my aunts’ knitting needles and crochet hooks clicked. They were truly the expert practitioners of the gentle arts, and very early in my life I learned to stitch and embroider under their patient tutelage. I can’t wait to teach these things to Mila. From the time she was an infant she has sat on my knee at my loom, tap-tapping at the weft with my bobbin, in observant imitation of the technique of weaving.
From my perspective, my grandmother’s most significant role and responsibility in life commenced with our emigration. In her seventies, she had to adapt to a purely Anglo-Saxon society and cook for her family every day. In Colombo, she had consulted the Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book and served delicious Dutch cakes, treats and sweetmeats by ordering our cook and another servant to weigh, sift, knead and mix ingredients on the marble-topped table on the back verandah. But, as she freely admitted, she didn’t know how to boil a potato when she came to Australia. It was our great good fortune that she turned out to be an interested and gifted cook in her own right.
As we grew up in our new country, our grandmother was the constant, stable presence at home, while my mother worked and enjoyed the social life she deserved at her young age. Of course, at the time, we did not even remotely think about how important it was to have someone who loved us so completely, and who could be relied upon so completely to be there at all times, even though, as teenagers, we disagreed with her somewhat narrow opinions and Victorian morals. In the wider world, her grandchildren could do no wrong in her eyes, and she expressed her pride in us in a way my mother never could. For Adrian and me, it was our grandmother who inspired our confidence to be who we aspired to be.
So what do I take of this experience into my own role as a grandmother? Part of me wants to say everything. But this can’t be true, can it? The two words that spring to mind are patience and presence. And an eye for detail. I believe that it is the appreciation of the details in all we do and experience in life that leads to ultimate satisfaction. Sitting at the feet of my grandmother and great-aunts all those years ago, sorting through all the bits and pieces that were adding up to something else, something more than just the item of clothing being created—that’s what taught me how to see.
As the mother of two sons, my heart was captured by the anticipation of a female grandchild. After her mother went back to work part-time, I was privileged to be able to look after Mila one day a week from the age of four months to eighteen months old. When she was tiny, the days were filled with comforting her, providing bottles and cuddles to lull her to sleep. I was in constant wonder at the tiny expressive hands, the exquisite little mouth, the long, dark eyelashes that finally fluttered in submission to resisted rest. Holding her close and observing her every feature gave me the most overwhelming feeling of comfort and purpose—that this was where I was meant to be; that I had arrived at the right destination in my life. Those accumulating wrinkles on my neck were there precisely for her small, searching hands to stroke as she drifted off contentedly in my arms.
As she grows, there is the fun of games. Her interaction and engagement with the world around her is total. She loves the physicality of life. Quick to laugh, she reacts to songs and music with delight and holds a tune convincingly. I want to teach her the songs that I love. She runs rather than walks, unafraid of tumbles. We create our special world, whether we’re at her house or mine.
In my sitting room is a low Korean chest that belonged to my mother, in polished wood with brass fittings and three drawers filled with small delights—carved and painted ducks, a menagerie of wooden animals, sea shells, intricate silver boxes, old coins and silk tassels. Mila unloads these trinkets over and over, examining and reconfiguring them, secure in the knowledge that they will be waiting for her every time she visits.
I can recall as a child the delight I felt at being allowed to look at and sometimes touch collections of tiny objects stored by my great-aunts in glass-fronted cabinets. Tiny Delft tea sets and figurines, Dutchmen and women dressed in felted outfits, small plates adorned with windmills. They provided endless child-sized fascination as they imprinted a visual heritage far from our tropical existence. My collection, though different in content, will foster in Mila the ability to respond to the tactility of small objects of wonder that fit into her hand, and an ability to observe them closely.
She loves the repetition of certain activities, and I participate in these with no sense of boredom. I do the simple things with her that her parents are too preoccupied to do. Slow turns around the garden on sunny days, examining every flower, commenting on their colour and variety and picking some for a vase. Blowing the dandelion puffs. Playing with pebbles, dropping them through the holes in the garden furniture on the patio. Sitting still, watching the birds flit through the trees and dance on the roof. Running the hose and filling a watering can to sprinkle the plants. Splashing her hands and placing flowers and concrete birds in the birdbath. Throwing a tennis ball high into the sky and following its wayward trajectory. Jumping in piles of dry leaves to hear them crunch. Together, we appreciate and rejoice in the simplest of things. I learn again what it is to look at life through a child’s innocent eyes.
And now her words are tumbling out, mostly English, some Spanish. Both languages have resounded in her psyche from the time she was born. How fortunate she will be bilingual, able to take both languages for granted. Her parents reinforce her awareness of manners and she finds it natural to say please and thank you in her sweet voice.
There are the things I look forward to doing with her in the future. Already she greets me with special joy every time I see her. I hope to build her awareness of the visual world through making paintings and objects, visiting galleries and stimulating her creative imagination. When she is able to concentrate for longer periods, I will read to her from my much-loved library of children’s books, which were part of my childhood and which, in turn, I read to my sons. And I will teach her to cook, to savour the tastes that are part of her heritage, and which are so much a part of my own enjoyment of life.
Mila now attends childcare, so I have lost that one precious day a week when I could look after her for an extended time. There is no doubt that she enjoys the interaction with other children and the stimulation of an environment in which she is learning new skills. But I miss not having her possession of me for those hours when we were together, just the two of us, spontaneous in our activities, with little regard for passing time.
I rejoice in the fact that she lives in a country where diversity is recognised and valued, and I trust that the word assimilation will continue to disappear from our collective vocabulary. My hopes for her in an uncertain world are coloured by the yearning I have to be present for her at all times, as my grandmother was for me, offering security and protection. As she steps out, sure-footed and completely confident, to make her individual mark upon this world, I will be right behind her.