All this goes on inside me, in the vast cloisters of my memory. In it are the sky, the earth, and the sea, ready at my summons, together with everything that I have ever perceived in them by my senses… In it I meet myself as well. I remember myself…
St Augustine
You must have come to terms with your own sexuality to write about sex the way you do. Can you tell us something about this please?
How can someone who looks like you, I mean that lilac shawl, the spectacles and your hair going grey – how can you, at your age, write about sex?
How could you have written the filthy scene on page 139?
Have you had lesbian relationships? but the question was in the eyes only and came out as How many grandchildren do you have?
Sometimes other people in an audience or at a book club answer questions for me.
The washing up basin in our house, when I was a child, was sacred. One afternoon when my mother was out Françoise, our French governess who had a white mackintosh, took the mackintosh and a nail brush and the washing up basin full of hot soapy water into the garden. Until Françoise came to our house I had no idea that there were white mackintoshes. I watched Françoise kneel on the lawn beside the washing up basin. It seemed then that I had never seen anything quite like this before. The white enamel gleamed on the bed of green. Françoise then spread out the white mackintosh on the grass and began, at once, to dip the little brush in the hot water and, with a slight swaying movement, she set about her scrubbing. She scrubbed in deliciously neat little circles on the mackintosh, a bit at a time, replenishing her tiny brush frequently with quick little dippings into the basin. As I watched I longed to take the delicate brush and have a turn at the scrubbing. It seemed then to be such a nice thing to be doing. I forgot, for a time, about the basin and how it was suddenly in the wrong place, outside the house and on the lawn.
My mother would be coming home quite soon. The scrubbing was taking a long time and I became anxious. I ran out to the front gate to look up the street. I did this a few times, darting back and forth, absorbed in the little spreading circles of soap but watching the street.
I did not say anything because what could I say? And then, all at once, I saw my mother coming, walking home from the bus. I ran to and fro several times, from the washing up bowl to the street and back to the washing up bowl, not knowing whether to tell Françoise to take the bowl back to the sink as quickly as possible or whether to rush up the road to beg my mother not to be cross with Françoise. I was nine then. Ambivalence has pursued me. Indecision, the time waster and the consumer of energy – whether a child should stay in bed or be sent off to school, which dish to use to serve the boiled peas, whether to buy brown onions or white, butternut pumpkin or ironbark – the list is endless.
‘Please do not be cross with Françoise…’ I ran, breathless, up to my mother. I even carried her shopping bag for her. The result was, of course, terrible. Françoise, weeping and leaning on my father’s arm, left for the boat train that evening.
Often something prevents me from writing. There are things I would write but when I start on one of them clear images come to mind for something else. My pen then becomes half-hearted, as if unsure, not quite certain. It is impossible to write with an uncertain or an unwilling pen. Perhaps it is because of the lace curtains that I put up to hide the walls of the new house next door. Because of this new house it is no longer possible to see my own hands reflected in the green leaves. Sometimes, when I dipped my pen in the ink, it seemed as if my own hand was reaching towards me from the thick foliage immediately outside my window. For many years, until now, I looked through this tall narrow window into the deepest green. Sometimes I caught sight of the corner of a white sheet, pegged and billowing lazily on a clothes line, fresh and damp, against this green background. I have used this image to create the character of Edwin Page in the novel The Sugar Mother. He is an elderly academic given to romantic thought and quotation. He is enchanted by the image of this sheet and likes to imagine that green and white were the chosen colours of the Elizabethan court. His area of study being, together with desultory wanderings, the Renaissance.
Vera in the novel Cabin Fever, looking from the upstairs window in the nursing home during the first stage of labour, is amazed that a woman in a nearby garden can, in apparent tranquillity, in spite of the drama in Vera’s own body, hang out her washing. Vera notices the gentle rhythm of movement between the clothes basket, the pegs and the clothes line, a contrast to her own movements and feelings. She notices too that a white sheet folded and pegged to the line is beginning to billow slightly but it is in a leafy green place that is too damp for drying. The same image but used differently and showing different things about the characters. When using an image for a second or a third time I do not, as a rule, remember using it before. It is only after the works are finished that I see this repetition. A repetition with changes.
Perhaps the lace curtains, in spite of their pure clean whiteness and a delicate pattern, both of which are attractive in themselves, make me feel shut in.
The new walls of the new building do not offer me the imaginative possibilities of a magic place close to where I am sitting. And, I have lost forever the rising sun which, for years, decorated the wallpaper on the opposite wall of my room, a moving changing pattern of light and shade every morning as the new day came up through the tremulous leaves.
It is New Year’s Eve and people are at parties. Once at a party, years ago, all the husbands except mine, at midnight, kissed their wives. I felt really clumsy, not being kissed. Later I thought that these party kisses in public, after lots of wine, were rather superficial. My husband has never done the conventional thing, like putting his hand at my elbow to let me go first through a door or introducing me to people. I think this is a kind of shyness. I made up my mind to go through doors by myself and to tell people what my name was and so on. I have been nursing my husband at home now for many years. He has rheumatoid arthritis and is frail and helpless. I do not mention this in interviews or autobiographical pieces because it would be an invasion of his privacy but I will just say one or two things here because a long illness in a household affects everyone. It affects the attitudes of other people to the household. The illness has affected my whole life. Recently I was offered respite care in a nursing home for him and I was forced to understand something about myself. Apart from his not wanting to be in a nursing home, even for a short time, I realised that, unless I had some specific travelling to do, because of my work, I was absolutely unable to face the idea of having a holiday. A great big empty space seemed to lie before me. I even had dreams in which I was incredibly lonely or lost. I probably need counselling. Awful though it is, I expect it is useful for me to have had this realisation. This reflection may be of use to other people. Another thing that might be of help to someone else is that often, it seems to me, it is difficult to divorce the long illness from the person who has it so that other people, oneself included, blame the person rather than understanding it is the illness that is such a nuisance. And a nuisance most of all to the person who has it. People outside the household, not understanding, might be critical, for example, at a buffet dinner where guests are expected to help themselves. Some women, with feminist leanings, voice their disapproval at the sight of a wife carrying a plate and a glass to a husband.
There are times when I feel I lack grace. Perhaps, because of having a bit extra to do, I have lost the art of the gentle pre-dinner drink or sitting over a meal in a leisurely way. When people ask me how my husband is, I tell them, which is nearly as bad as telling people how you are yourself when they say, ‘How are you!’ I also have a regrettable tendency to tell other women’s husbands where and how to park their cars. In addition, as if that is not enough, I read in bed and at meal times and often sit with one or both elbows on the table. Most days I have champagne at breakfast, alone – and flat because of it being uncorked days before, and usually in a small glass jar of the kind used for the more precious kinds of jam. I have the idea that this is beneficial.
I have always thought of myself as immortal and at the same time I am surprised to find that, up to the present, I have lived as long as I have. It seems to me that pleasure in living must come from within. There are certain thoughts and feelings and experiences that are consoling. Over the years I have tried to put these things in particular and known places in my fiction. By giving them to certain characters these consolations are kept as if in a storehouse where they can be found at any time. A sort of scattered catalogue of consolation. This does not mean that the fiction is autobiographical. It simply means that certain truths and moments of awareness are saved for recollection at some time in the future. Memory has an odd way of giving things back to us, not in any chronological sequence and often most unexpectedly.
In my novel Foxybaby Miss Porch goes back to her house during a time when she is resident at the school where she works. The way in which ‘she comes upon’ her house is written from an experience I had myself once when, thinking I had forgotten to turn off the water main, I went back to the cottage where our orchard is. I did not drive back but approached from a place where the road curves back near the foot of the property. I walked across an old railway line and down into a gully, across the creek and up the slope of a neighbouring property – as if in a dream, as if in a strange country and then suddenly coming upon my own place from an unaccustomed direction. The cottage looked quite different. It seemed to sink in the grass (which comes up to the walls and the door) as if nestling there. It seemed to be closed up (which it was) but closed up in a secretive way like an unopened flower. It seemed in its secretiveness to not want anyone to come, and it looked as if no one had been there for years. By giving something of this to Miss Porch, in creating her character I hope I was able to show her in such a way that a reader could see all round her, make a picture of her without any judgement offered from me as the writer. (I had, of course, turned off the water.)
It is only now after many years of writing that I begin to understand something of the healing power of certain times and people and places remembered. This power goes in the opposite direction too, and moments of abrasive conflict presenting the destructive side of human life are often the material for the creation of characters, situations and dramatic incidents. Time spent in experience is never a waste of time.
Some years ago the image of a glass door covered by a lace curtain manifested itself several times together with the idea of the possibility of peering through the edges of the curtain at the lodger in the room beyond; only his back, as he sat at the table, being visible. When I was a child we played with a little girl who lived across the road. Her father was a stoker in the steam laundry and her mother was a dressmaker. They kept chickens and a lodger. My father was a teacher and we had no lodger and no chickens. The lodger, picking his teeth and reading his newspaper, sitting with something called a cruet at his elbow, was fascinating. At home we did not have a cruet either. For years I wished we had this little collection, the cruet, so neatly held in a special stand, the salt, the pepper and the sauce bottle. I wished too for a lodger.
An early editor removed the recurring glass door and the lace curtain so that the image would not be repeated after its first appearance. I know now that an image can be repeated often as a phrase of music can be repeated, perhaps with slight changes of rhythm or key, or it can be written again in its original form. An example being the freshly washed white sheet moving lazily in a damp wind against a dark green background. In this repetition the style of the musician or the writer is formed.
Once, when I was almost the last person to leave the beach at Bunbury in the south-west of Western Australia, I saw the sun go down leaving only a long red line of sky far out over the water, which was rolling up as if boiling over, dark, along the deserted sands. In this turmoil of waves, where the sea was meeting the shore, some thin white fingers reached up out of the water as it ran pouring up and out over the sand before swirling back into itself. The thin white fingers grasping the froth of the wave offered me a character that evening. I did not see the person they belonged to – only the animation expressed in the hands reaching up out of the sea at dusk. The thin white fingers, gleaming in the dark waters as the evening rapidly moved towards night, gave me more than a character; they presented a family and, in addition, this family’s place in society and its efforts towards survival.
It has often seemed to me that the fiction writer needs to examine his own place in society before attempting to place his characters. In fiction the writer is able to present reflections from his surroundings. An example of this is Ibsen’s character Gina in The Wild Duck. She is shown to be a character knowing her own place satisfactorily in a group of emotionally bankrupt people who have lost their way.
To add to the catalogue of consolation is to overcome certain weariness or a sense of futility in a world that contains so much human suffering in the face of which we seem to be utterly powerless. The Mozart piano concerto that has a certain significance (perhaps mistakenly) for me can always be found now.
‘It’s number eight,’ Daphne said, ‘number eight in C major, C Dur, the third movement, but it’s not as you said. It’s not the coming to the mistake and going back and playing over again to correct the mistake. It’s not a putting right, not a fresh start – only something going on in the way it has been going. It is the actual music; in the actual music, I should say; it is the way it was written – it’s even more inevitable that way.’
The picture I have when I listen to this music is of the pianist flipping up his coat-tails and then leaning forward, with more energy, in order to go back a bit in the music before playing it over again. I gave this idea of correction, being able to correct by replaying, to Edwin Page in the novel The Sugar Mother. The music, the phrase from the piano concerto, becomes a metaphor for the mistake Edwin might be making in his life and the possibility of going over a part of his life again to put right the mistake. Daphne, however, corrects him, telling him that the music is not in fact repeating itself in this way. The music and the imagined correction (the metaphor) offer a parallel to events in Edwin’s life.
Similarly a game of horses and carts parallels the displacement of the boy’s ageing father in the story ‘Two Men Running’. This game of horses and carts was described to me over sixty years ago. I cannot explain why, at the moment when it was useful, the memory of my father telling me about the game came to me so vividly. It was as if all those years later I could hear his voice telling how he and his sister, when they were children, had a screw-top jar full of screws and nails and nuts and bolts. They put these out on the kitchen table which was, for their game, the street. They played, moving the screws and things up and down the table dot-dot-dotty-dot up and down and to and fro on the table. The horses and carts (as they became) passed each other and turned round in the street. I gave the game to the man in the story, a flashback to his childhood. Some things in the story are shown through the progress of the child’s game.
When my father told about this I must have been about five or six. He was making cocoa for me and for my sister. My sister, who is fourteen months younger than I am, has no recollection of his telling about the game.
The above is an indication that though writing is an act of the will for me, once I have written something, the act of writing unlocks more writing, the next idea is set free. But having an idea is not the same as developing it in detail on the page. This is where persistence, the will to write, comes in.
Music can be used to show a great deal about a character. Some phrases of music belong so much to some of my characters that when I hear them it is as if I am still writing about the specific character concerned and all kinds of detail, finished with years ago, comes back to me all over again.
When a certain kind of person listens to music a change takes place in their demeanour. Hester, in the novel The Well, is one of my characters shown in part through music:
On the day of the Bordens’ party Hester, straight after their early breakfast, listened to Mozart. She knew from listening alone that while she listened her mouth took on a different shape, the lips drawn together and pursed. Once, seeing her music-listening mouth in the rear mirror, while she was driving home with a string quartet in the cassette player she understood the possibility that her whole body was, during the music, different. Without meaning to she knew that it was not only her lips; it was all the seriousness and tenderness which entered and set the bones of her jaw and changed the movement of her eyebrows and the tilt of her head. The first time, the first time while driving home, she had been taken by surprise and mostly now she did not think of it.
Hester then remembers going to a quartet from school and she recalls the players and ‘the deep concentration which was evident in the sensitive movement of the muscles of their faces, particularly round the mouth’. To me equally important as the forward-going action of the novel is the dwelling in the novel, the passages that enable a reader to look about the landscape, to study the situation and above all to see all round a character. Hester is not a particularly pleasant person. By showing her in some detail of music it is possible that a sympathetic attitude will be developed towards her. In my fiction I do not want to offer judgement. Though I want and hope to avoid plodding prose, I do not consciously, at the outset, seek to write in a particular way. On second or third or fourth rewritings I may see what I have done and perhaps will heighten the effect in some way. Fiction is usually a reflection from ordinary human life but a part of the art of writing is this heightening. On the whole I do not stop and consider these things except on an occasion like this when I am actually writing about writing. Apart from trying to avoid plodding, I do record in my fiction some things that have special meaning for me so that they will be in known places for future reference when I might need the consolation of memories. These include things like the little roundabout of painted horses which used to be on the foreshore of the Swan River at Crawley here in Western Australia; and a shop in Claremont, quite near where I live, where it used to be possible to sit on a broken chair up against the varnished wood of the counter and keep in touch with countless neighbours:
The shop was still an emporium, it belonged to a time which had gone by. Bolts of cloth were on a wide shelf next to cups and dishes and a glass case of faded haberdashery… Sacks of wheat and laying pellets stood on the floor next to a modern biscuit stand. It was possible to buy an incinerator and a birthday card and a pair of stockings without moving an inch. You could buy kerosene and candles and icing sugar and a box of chocolates all in the same breath, though chocolates were not a wise choice in the hot weather…
These things are in, for ever, the short story ‘A Hedge of Rosemary’ and the little novel The Newspaper of Claremont Street respectively. Both were written during that strange time of impact a short time after coming to a new country.
Having only recently written the novel Cabin Fever I am unable to explain my reason for keeping the character of Oliver George deliberately, it seems, vague. I made him from details of his age, expressed with some horror by Vera’s mother, from his white hair, his russet pullover, his innocent pleasure at sending flowers to Vera, a certain understood devotion to his elder sister Eleanor, fifteen years his senior, his narrow single bed which, he explains, he has always had – and then once more the use of music. He explains to Vera, before they really know each other, that he is susceptible to music which seems to contain an everlasting youth. He says too that he responds to music and feels he should not simply pass on this response to her. He says to her that she can escape from his room if she wants to. But Vera does not want to escape. She shamelessly asks him to make love to her a second time and then a little later considers her own response:
Somehow it is, just then, as if the remembered reddish colour of his pullover is blending with the glowing floor boards and the cherry wood furniture of the attic bedroom, and I wonder why I should, during the wild sweet moments, consider this woollen garment and the attic chair, the woodwork of the wash stand and the floor boards.
Before this Vera has worked swiftly in sensing Mr George’s susceptibility and talks about her own feelings over the cello in connection with a staff nurse, Ramsden, an object of her admiration earlier.
Mr George is so nice, without meaning to, I go on talking and tell him about Ramsden, staff nurse Ramsden, and how I wanted once to tell her about the downward thrust of the cello and about the perfection in the way the other instruments come up to meet the cello. I tell him that I did not feel able to tell her that I thought someone had measured the movements of the notes controlling carefully the going down and the coming up in order to produce this exquisite mixture.
I don’t, as a rule, write an autobiographical note but for some reason I remember some things which, in reality, came to my mind some time ago and I gave the two remembered things to two of my characters. I did not try then to write out the actual memory as I am about to do now.
Perhaps my mother was in hospital, or something, but I remember staying with an Aunt and Uncle who were not really Aunt and Uncle, they were just called that. I was about six. 727 Chester Road was a tall narrow house in a terrace. On the wall by the front door was a brass plate bearing my Aunt’s name and the qualification, which I read as Must Be Singing. I realise now it was an abbreviation for a degree in music with singing attached.
Aunty Mary played something called ‘Gopak’ by Mussorgsky for me on the piano. It seemed to me then, as it does now, to be very special – this having the piano played especially for me. I mean, my being the only person in the room and the piano player turning to me and smiling while she played. Not smiling only with her lips, smiling and smiling with her eyes and with her shoulders and with her hands. She said the music was a sort of little dance.
Later, in the upstairs attic room where the piano was, we sat together high up in the window and played a game. Trams did not go along Chester Road but they must have crossed the end of the street because I remember I liked hearing the grind and screech of the nearby trams and the sound of clocks chiming somewhere through the subdued steady roar of the city. The game we played was invented by Aunty Mary. She took one direction along the road and I took the other, and with pencil and paper (I was very fond of pencils) we counted the cars and lorries and bicycles each from our chosen direction. After a certain time the one with the most traffic on their side won the game. I liked this very much.
I have given the piano playing to staff nurse Ramsden in the novel My Father’s Moon and the game to Emily Vales and Little Lewis in the radio play and story Little Lewis has had a Lovely Sleep. I hope that by doing this I have been able to show more things about the characters.
Here is the little passage as it is in My Father’s Moon. The main character is nursing during the war. She has not been at the hospital very long. (She is uneasy, it being her first night as Night Runner. She has to prepare the meal for the night staff in the hospital.)
This first night it takes me a long time to clear up in the little pantry. When at last I am finished Night Sister Bean sends me to relieve on Bottom Ward. There is a spinal operation in the theatre recovery room just now, she says, and a spare nurse will be needed when the patient comes back to the ward.
On my way to Bottom Ward I wish I could be working with staff nurse Ramsden.
‘I will play something for you,’ she said to me once when I was alone and filled with tears in the bleak, unused room which is the nurses’ sitting room.
She ran her fingers up and down the piano keys. ‘This is Mussorgsky,’ she said, ‘it’s called Gopak, a kind of little dance,’ she explained. She played and turned her head towards me nodding and smiling, ‘do you like this?’ she asked, her eyes smiling. It is not everyone who has had Mussorgsky played for them; the thought gives me courage as I hurry along the unlit passage to the ward.
There is a circle of light from the uncurtained windows of the office in the middle of the ward. I can see a devout head bent over the desk in the office. I feel I am looking at an Angel of mercy who is sitting quietly there ready to minister to the helpless patients…
The game, Aunty Mary’s game, comes into the story of Little Lewis first as a game between Little Lewis and the babysitter and later on as a sinister game of chance between the babysitter and a kidnapper.
My early childhood was contained in my mother’s hats. I waited once for my mother to come to fetch me from hospital. I sat high up pressed close to a tall window looking down to the street below. In all the movement down there I could not see my mother’s white hat. My head was wrapped in bandages. She said she would wear the white hat.
‘What are these stalks of dry grass here for?’ I asked the nurse. She said there wasn’t any grass. What I thought was grass, she said, was only the frayed edges of the bandage. I was bandaged because of a mastoid operation. The white hat had a wide soft brim. There was another one, a navy blue velour trimmed with black grosgrain deepening the shadows round her eyes. It made her face fragile and increased her paleness. I thought she was sad when she wore this hat. There was too a small round hat – light-coloured, a colour as of peaches, and the colour was wrapped in silk softly round the hat. A small veil of dark, spotted gauze went with this hat. My mother’s eyes shone in the spider web of the veil as if they were pleased to be caught there.
When she came that day to fetch me from the hospital she had a new hat. It was a circle of fur all round her head low just above her eyes. Her eyes were bright with laughter and tenderness and I tried to melt into her perfume. I was five then.
My mother was an exile because of her marriage. Her homesickness lasted throughout her life. It was a longing for Vienna as it was, not for the Vienna it had become. Her father had been a general in the Imperial Army and he belonged to the great number of people whose reason for existence disappeared with the Emperor.
My father’s exile came about because of his beliefs and his ideals. He was a pacifist, and suffered brutal imprisonment in World War I because he refused to fight. He was disowned by his father because of this (in public, in front of shocked neighbours). He did not help matters by going to Vienna with the Quaker Famine Relief and then bringing back a wife with aristocratic pretensions from the enemy country.
I experienced the migrant’s sense of exile in a vicarious way before having the experience myself. I have always been on the edge, in a sense – growing up in a German-speaking household in a neighbour hood, and at a time, where foreigners were regarded with a mixture of curiosity and hostility; being sent to a Quaker boarding school and not being a Quaker by birthright. Then there was the nursing training alongside girls from ‘good’ families whose mothers kept maids – ‘county families’ in England where twin-sets and pearls were not just a joke.
Perhaps the adverse, or seemingly adverse, experience can produce an advantage. The person concerned can make for himself the herb of self-heal, as Kenneth Grahame (the author of The Wind in the Willows) calls it in his autobiography.
It would seem that all writers draw heavily on their early experience but in different ways. It would be interesting to know to what extent migration causes people to look back to events and customs in childhood. Tolstoy, Wordsworth and Traherne are examples of writers who recall and use childhood experience; Gorky and Dickens too (one might imagine that both Gorky and Dickens would have obliterated all memory of their childhood). None of these writers migrated to another country.
Nymphomaniacs and murderers, perplexed housewives, greedy spoiled children, unfaithful husbands and angry maiden aunts inhabited our dolls’ houses. Joan, a cleaning lady with loose pink legs too big to fit in any bed, sat all night on a wooden kitchen chair and later rattled her celluloid flesh and bones as she took to the stairs with a dustpan and brush, her energy mounting as she entered the day with gossip. My sister and I played with dolls’ houses for many years, an endless story with characters, dialogues, situations and incidents. When separated from the dolls’ houses, that is, when travelling in buses and trains, we drew matchstick people in our drawing books and yelled their conversations across to each other. In crowded buses, being children, we had to stand. We were often at opposite ends of a bus and had then to really raise our voices.
I always thought I came from a family of no consequence and with out inheritance. For years I did not understand how things stood with me but looking back now I remember that when I was about eight years old my father invented heat and light. He wrote two textbooks for schoolchildren; the one on heat had a red cover and the one on light was blue. As for inheritance, what fool would claim, ticking the appropriate boxes on the application form for an exclusive school of nursing, a grandpa who died of blood poisoning following severe scalding from the freshly boiled kettle he was carrying when he fell in his last epileptic fit? Then there was the other grandpa who must have owned a disease which, though not acute for himself, destroyed my mother’s mother and subsequently three stepmothers. (My mother grew up in a convent.) Aunt Maud and a mysterious cousin called Dorothy were talked about in whispers. Both were said to be mad. Who would acknowledge, with irresponsible ticks, the grandfathers, the aunt, the cousin?
Perhaps I was ‘born like it’, as people seem to be, from the cradle – swimmers, actresses, excellent cooks, good at sums, able to draw umbrellas, dogs and horses… I loved pencils and empty pages and had my wrist slapped in Mixed Infants for covering, in five minutes, all the clean pages of a new exercise book with the dots and curves which I took to be writing, before any of us had been shown how and where to make the first pot hook.
I have always wanted to write things down and I never used the box camera Aunty Daisy gave me one Christmas. My mother said I never used it because Aunty Daisy borrowed it back every summer – but I knew differently.
When I was a child I listened to the concerned voices of my mother and my father and their visitors and especially to the voices of my grandfather, grandmother and aunt (on my father’s side). It was a household of two languages, German and English. Two languages are a disadvantage when it comes to starting school.
During the 1920s many people were out of work and were very poor. The coal miners had their strikes and the Hunger March to London stretched, it seemed, the length of Britain. My father, as a teacher, always had work. In 1929 my parents took in a miner’s child. It was meant as an act of kindness… I remember my mother trying to spoon a boiled egg into the little girl’s mouth which was square with crying. My mother tried to push a toffee in with the spoonful of egg but it was no use, the whole lot fell out.
‘She’s never had an egg before,’ my grandmother said. ‘Give her a piece.’ The little girl was six like me and I could not imagine then how anyone could be six and not know how to eat an egg.
In the late 1930s and later, when Neville Chamberlain’s Britain was at war with Hitler, all kinds of people had work, in food offices, in munitions and in replacing conscripts and those who enlisted.
I was born in 1923 at Gravelly Hill near Birmingham, England. My parents moved house several times but always we lived within bicycling distance (about four miles) of the Central School for Boys in Bilston where my father felt he should teach.
In my life with my husband I have had wider moves. He was Librarian at Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham and then at the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, Deputy Librarian at the University of Glasgow and, finally, Librarian at the University of Western Australia.
I have worked at several things besides nursing. I failed in real estate and door-to-door selling (cosmetics and bath salts in plastic urns). I was good at being a flying domestic (cleaning houses). And I have been a tutor in the School of Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University of Technology (formerly the Western Australian Institute of Technology) for several years. I love my work with the students there. I have been involved too with Arts Access from the Fremantle Arts Centre. This gives me the opportunity to drive into the remote areas of Western Australia, especially the wheat belt, where I conduct drama, literature and creative writing workshops.
We liked our dresses very much. They were blue with little white spots. They were made by our mother’s dressmaker. We called them our spotted frocks.
‘What pretty dresses,’ a woman at the shops said, ‘and matching too. Are you twins?’ she asked.
‘Our frocks are from Mr Berrington,’ I said, ‘and yes we are twins,’ I told her. ‘I’m ten and she’s nine.’
It did not seem at all strange then that Mr Berrington provided new dresses for us…
In the long summer of 1938 Mr Berrington took me and my mother to Europe. I was supposed to be improving my German and my mother was pretending to be finding a suitable place in which I should study music – an ambition she retained even after the war started and even when she knew I could not sing and, after ten years of laborious piano lessons, had made only the slightest progress.
The following year, on the day war was declared, when we heard Mr Chamberlain’s voice on the wireless say, ‘Britain is at war with Germany,’ my father wept. Knowing the suffering brought about by the Great War, he could not believe that there would be another one.
‘Is Mr Berrington coming?’ I asked my mother while my father was praying in the front room. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course he’s coming to lunch as usual.’ A sense of safety and relief came over me. It was the feeling that, in the familiar shape of Mr Berrington, every thing was to be ‘as usual’. I have never forgotten this. I was sixteen then.
No one would have guessed Mr Berrington’s occupation from his quiet and ordinary appearance. He came from a long-established professional family. A barrister and a KC, he was chairman of many legal committees and was on the boards of a number of charities. He played bridge and tennis every week, belonging to exclusive clubs of both. He was my mother’s Friend. Both Mr Berrington and my father loved my mother. And both learned and spoke German.
For as long as I can remember, Mr Berrington came for Sunday lunch. My father and Mr Berrington exchanged the texts of the sermons at their respective churches during the first course and discussed the weather forecast while the pudding was served.
Mr Berrington was remarkably generous. I understand now, but did not then, that his generosity enabled my mother to re-establish her own good taste which she had suppressed in order to fit in with the dreary surroundings in which she found herself. She had her own dressmaker and Mr Berrington gave the impression, without actually saying anything, that he liked to see her in good quality clothes. I do not know if my father minded. I never heard him make a critical remark. He often paid my mother compliments, perhaps putting into words the things Mr Berrington did not say. It was some time before I came to the conclusion that Mr Berrington did admire and praise her but, of course, only when other people were not there.
That summer of 1938, in the luxury of expensive hotels and seeing for myself things only heard about before, things like the miracle of the confluence, the apparently inexplicable appearance of the brown water of the river Main meeting and flowing with the blue waters of the Rhine, that unbelievable division actually in the water, seems now to have marked the end of my childhood. I began to understand then that our household, because of having Mr Berrington, was different from other households.
Our headmaster often said he knew which boys and girls would hand in their Golden Treasury of the Bible (two volumes) on leaving school and which boys and girls would keep it as a spiritual guide for the rest of their lives.
When I was eleven I was sent to a Quaker boarding school in a small village on the edge of the Cotswolds. Earlier, because my father, in spite of being a teacher, thought that school spoiled children’s innocence, he took us away from school. We spent some partly profitable years listening to Sir Walford Davies – the returning phrase of the rondo; to Commander Stephen King-Hall – parliamentary affairs; and to Professor Winifred Cullis – germs in unwashed vests (singlets) and milk jugs – on the radio. Wireless Lessons, they were called. We had too a succession of governesses from France and Austria. Françoise, Gretel, and Marie. We chased them with spiders and earthworms. And, with my mother, they had misunderstandings. They departed in turn, leaning on my father’s arm, in tears, to the railway station and the boat train.
The journey to school was always, it seemed, at dusk. My father always came to the station. I remember the afternoons seemed dark before four o’clock. The melancholy railway crawled through waterlogged meadows. Cattle, knee deep in damp grass, raised their heads as the slow train passed. The level crossings were deserted. No one waited to wave and curtains of drab colours were pulled across cottage windows.
My father seemed always to be seeing me off at bus stops or railway stations. He paced up and down pavements or platforms to keep warm. My memory is of his white face, his arm raised in farewell and his body getting smaller and smaller as the distance between us increased.
The quiet autumn-berried hedgerows, the brown ploughed fields sloping in all directions, and the rooks, unconcerned, gathering in the leafless trees, made the landscape surrounding the school very different from the narrow street of small houses at home. At the end of our street was a smouldering pit mound; the coal mine and the brick works were close by and we could always smell the bone and glue factory. I was unaccustomed to being in a class with other children. But after the bitter homesickness of the first year I liked it very much there. I still have the friends I made at school. Until their deaths recently I corresponded regularly with my music mistress, known affectionately as the Hag, and with my English mistress, the Bug – also with affection. I think of their teaching with gratitude. I realise too that they can’t have been much older than I was.
My sister came to school later. She ran away three times and was brought back from the outskirts of Banbury, eight miles away, by the Bug in her little car. One of the boys, equally unhappy, sent a piece of meat home in a letter to demonstrate the awfulness of the food. The village postmistress brought the envelope, dripping with gravy, back to school where it was displayed at Morning Meeting. The whole school had to send their sweet allowance to a charitable institution that week. The postmistress also took responsibility for a telegram I tried to send to my father on his fiftieth birthday – but more of this later.
The village was said to be the coldest place, next to Aldershot, in England. It was a point of honour never to wear overcoats except on Sundays to Meeting. (Consequently many of us were obliged to go on wearing school overcoats for many years till they wore out.) There were three springs in the village, water bubbled and flowed cold and clear over pebbles at the side of the street. Villagers fetched their water every day. Later the springs were covered and green painted hand pumps were placed there. Once, during the mobilisation, some soldiers camped by the pump immediately outside our school. Though told not to we could not resist going out after dark into the freezing evening to stand by their fire and to exchange stories and trophies with these handsome men in their new uniforms. We took our supper, slices of dry bread, out to them. They accepted the offering with well-mannered gratefulness though it was clear they had plenty of nice things, like baked beans, which we did not have. They wrote, in their best writing, in our autograph books: It’s a grand life if you don’t weaken and Fight the good fight but don’t fight too hard. One of them gave me a button off his coat which I still have. I had no idea then, in spite of the ideals of pacifism, just what pain and mutilation I was to witness in the course of my work not much later on. These men were on their way to the devastation of the war.
Because of the strong pacifist attitude, which I shared and still do share, in the school, those of us who had defied authority were subjected to the All Day Punishment the next day, supervised by the music mistress, the Hag. The routine began at 7 a.m. with an icy strip-wash. Our free time before lunch and before tea, usually given to rollerskating, was occupied by two more of these freezing washings. Pent up hilarity was in evidence along the row of unprivate wash basins. We were not allowed to speak. Being on silence all day was the chief form of punishment at the school. We developed the ability to use the ‘deaf and dumb’ alphabet with an efficiency that proved useful in my work later. Other punishments for both boys and girls were cleaning windows with wet newspapers, digging weeds out of the tennis courts and helping the headmaster’s wife to make marmalade.
Because it was a small school there was always the chance to be in the school play even if you could not learn by heart or act. And to get into the First Eleven hockey team was not impossible. We played matches at country schools and against Village Ladies. Once, in order to avoid showing gaps, we sewed our brown woollen stockings to our knickers. As we ran about the field the result was disastrous.
There is not space to elaborate on my Golden Greetings telegram to my father. The postmistress hovered with her freshly sharpened pencil and crossed out all my best words – congratulations, venerable, half a century, jubilee, beloved – reducing the message to loving birthday wishes followed by my name.
My first editor? Perhaps.
I still have my Golden Treasury of the Bible, two grey nondescript books, Part I a fat book of the Old Testament and Part II, slim, the New Testament. There is a pencil drawing of Shirley Temple, or rather her ringlets, in the back of Part I. Part II has pages The Good Samaritan and The Prodigal Son marked for one of my children in 1950 so I must have looked at it fairly recently…
Until now I had forgotten completely Shirley Temple’s curls.
When the time came to leave school we all went either to work or to some further study or training. Our headmaster reminded those of us who were leaving that he wanted us to go out into the world with the deepest responsibility for standards and judgements. He wanted us, he said, to believe in the nourishment of the inner life and the loving discipline of personal relationships. He said too that we must always be concerned with the relentless search for truth. After six years of boarding school I left, an idealist, at the end of 1940.
My mother felt that nursing was vulgar in some way and my father said it was God’s work. My mother said the striped material for my uniform was pillow ticking. She said she had other things in mind for me – travelling on the Continent, ‘Europe,’ she said, ‘studying art and ancient buildings and music.’
‘But there’s a war on,’ I said.
‘Oh well, after the war.’ A letter from the matron of the hospital saying that all probationers were required to bring warm underwear comforted my mother. She said the matron must be a very nice person after all.
My school trunk, in my room at the hospital before me, was a kind of betrayal. When I opened it books and shoes and clothes spilled out. Some of my pressed wildflowers had come unstuck and I put them back between the pages of the exercise book, remembering the sweet, wet grass near the school where we searched for flowers. I seemed then to see clearly shining long fingers pulling stalks and holding bunches. Saxifrage, campion, vetch, ragged robin, star of Bethlehem, wild strawberry and sorrel. Quickly I tidied the flowers – violet, buttercup, kingcup, cowslip, coltsfoot, wood anemone, shepherd’s purse, lady’s slipper, jack in the pulpit and bryony…
I had no idea of what could go wrong with the human body either from birth or by illness and accident later. At the age of seven teen I had never seen a badly crippled or a really ill person. At the start – an air raid in London, arriving at the hospital late (the stations not being marked, I missed the one I needed), then to going on a ward for the first time at half-past five in the afternoon, when badly burned men from a nearby aircraft factory were being brought in – I thought I would leave the hospital straight away. But I had no idea how to get my school trunk with all my possessions away from there so I stayed…
I have used as landscape and setting my own experiences during and immediately after World War II in the two novels My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever, though I am not the character, Vera. Without knowing it I suppose I banished those years and it has taken me a long time, about twenty years, to write these two books, while writing other stories and novels. On the whole I prefer to write the imagined rather than the autobiographical. I have to understand that the one cannot be written without the other. Imagination springs from the real experience.
Perhaps there is something invisible which a person is given early in life, a sort of gift, but the giver of it, not expecting any thanks, is never given it.
My father liked what he called a splendid view. He would dismount from his high bicycle and, parting the hedge, he would exclaim on the loveliness of what he could see. We would have to lean our bicycles up against a fence or a gate, scramble across the wet ditch and peer through the rain-soaked hedge at a sodden field or a dismal hill hardly visible through the rain mist. But first, something about his bicycle. This may seem irrelevant but perhaps it is necessary to say that the bicycle was enormous; twenty-eight-inch wheels and a correspondingly large frame. He collected the parts and made it himself, and once, when it was stolen, he went round the barrows and stalls in the Bullring marketplace in Birmingham and bought back all the parts as he recognised them and rebuilt it. I mention this because it shows something of the kind of man he was.
We had to ride bicycles too. When I was six I had a twenty-four-inch wheel with hand brakes, left and right, back and front respect ively.
‘Never use the right hand brake before you use the left,’ my father said. Excellent advice of course but my problem then was that I was not sure about my left hand and my right. The back mudguard had small holes in it for strings which were meant to keep a lady’s skirt from getting caught in the spokes. I was terribly ashamed of these small holes and wished I could fill them in with thick paint or something…
The reason that I mention all this is because I believe that my own love of what my father called scenery or a splendid view comes in part from the bicycle rides he insisted upon. We had to go with him. The bicycle rides through the rural edges of the Black Country in England were his relaxation and pleasure. We stopped frequently while he studied gravestones in small overgrown cemeteries and explained about lychgates. He told us about turnpike houses and about towing paths and locks – those mysterious sluice gates so powerful in altering the water levels in the canals. My own love of the quality of the air comes too, I realise, from my father, who often simply stood at the roadside enjoying what he declared was fresh air, unbreathed air. He marvelled at the beech trees in the fenced parklands of the wealthy. He paused before fields and meadows, explaining about the rotation of crops and about fallow fields. He was inclined to make a lesson out of everything. To him, health and learning were the means to a particular form of freedom and the bicycle was the way in which to achieve these.
I developed the habit in my letters to my father of describing in detail the places where I lived and through which I journeyed. Wherever I went I was always composing, in my head, my next letter to him…
My mother, who loved order, cleared up her house as she moved steadily into old age. Before she died she had, in a sense, tidied up, thrown away and burned up her household so that nothing remains of my descriptions posted home every week during all the years.
In 1959 my husband, who was Deputy Librarian at the University of Glasgow, accepted the post of Librarian at the University of Western Australia. We made this tremendous move by ship with our three children – Sarah, thirteen, Richard, six, and Ruth, four. We brought most of our furniture, the children’s bicycles and almost all our books, which I packed in twenty crates.
I came to Western Australia from Britain in the middle of my life. I never thought of myself as a migrant but that is what we were called. Migrants. I realise that the freshness of my observation can distort as well as illuminate. The impact of the new country does not obliterate the previous one but sharpens memory, thought and feeling, thus providing a contrasting theme or setting.
During the initial voyage, while the ship was in the Great Bitter Lake waiting to go through the last part of the Suez Canal, I remembered, quite suddenly, my father’s hands. Sorrow lay below the wide colourless expanse of water. The picture I had of his hands was, as they so often were, cupped carrying something to show, to describe, to tell about. It seems now, when I think about it all these years later, that he had come part of the way, part of the long journey as he used to come, when seeing off a train, ‘as far as the first stop’.
I thought about my father’s hands on the ship that day and thought how, in that way, he was, in fact, accompanying me and it was as if the lake offered from its secretive depths this sudden memory and that pain of homesickness for which there is no remedy.
‘A Hedge of Rosemary’ is the first story I wrote after arriving in Western Australia. In it there are the two contrasting landscapes, an attempt perhaps to close the enormous space between my two worlds. (The journey by ship having taken just over three weeks.)
When he [the old man] went out in the evening he walked straight down the middle of the road, down towards the river. The evening was oriental, with dark verandahs and curving ornamental roof tops, palm fronds and the long weeping hair of peppermint trailing, a mysterious profile… the moon, thinly crescent and frail, hung in the gum leaf lace… the magpies caressed him with their cascade of watery music…
On my first evening in Western Australia I went out to post a letter, a short way along the road and round a corner. I walked down the middle of the road, the evening was oriental with dark verandahs and curving ornamental roof tops. Back home again, I wrote the few lines of description and followed these immediately with a few words about the stillness and the eerie quietness. And then I wrote of my own longing for the chiming of city clocks through the comforting roar of the blast furnace and the nightly glow across the sky when the furnace was opened. Recalling the house where I had lived as a child in the Black Country (the industrial Midlands of England) I wrote that the noise and glow from the blast furnace were like a night light and a cradle song. I gave these memories to the old man in the story. I doubt that I would ever have written these things down if I had not come to Western Australia. On arrival in a new country, sense of place has to be established by a scrutiny of previous places in comparison with the present one.
I never thought of myself as a migrant. But migration, the travelling, the state of chosen exile, has given me the feeling of inhabiting several worlds. Though the same language is spoken here there are colloquial differences. The climate and the customs and the clothes are different. The bright light and the blue skies in Western Australia made all our clothes seem very shabby. In Scotland (where we lived before changing countries) the doors and windows along the street were kept closed winter and summer. Curtains and blinds covered the windows, these coverings were not intended to keep out the sun in Glasgow! All along Parkway, the little street of houses on campus at the University of Western Australia, there were always women and children moving forever on the grass verges, in and out of each others’ gardens and in and out of each others’ houses, constant visiting and exchanging of children and dishes and recipes, the doors behind the fly screens always open, winter and summer. There was a greengrocer who came to Parkway with his van, he uttered the famous words: ‘Which ever house you go to in this street the same woman always comes to the door.’
People often ask me if moving from one country to another has affected my writing. ‘What would you have written if you had stayed in England?’ is their question. My reply is that I have no idea. But what I do know is that, without being disloyal to my previous country, there are certain experiences and observations I would have missed if I had remained in England. Until I came to Western Australia I had no real conception of the importance of water and its effects in and on the earth. In a dry country, water, either the lack of it or sudden floods, can be uppermost in a person’s mind. My teaching work in the remote townships and farms in the wheat belt gave me fresh insight. A farmer’s wife once described the effects water has on the appearance of a paddock. Later I quickly made a note and gave this passage to my character in ‘Two Men Running’. He is running in his imagination through the remembered landscape of his childhood.
‘The gravel pits, the hills, the catchment and the foxgloves in the catchment. Did you know,’ I ask him. ‘Did you know that where the water collects and runs off the rocks there are different flowers growing there? Did you know that, because of this water, a paddock can be deep purple like a plum? And then, if you think about plums, the different colours range from deep purple through to the pale pearly green of the translucent satsuma before it ripens. Because of water that’s how a paddock can look from one end to the other. It’s the same with people…’
In writing the above I was trying to show something of my character’s need to recreate for himself the wholesomeness of this remembered landscape. A consolation for him as indeed I have come to understand that the earth is consoled with the gift of water – providing it is not too much water.
The ability to make changes and to accept the differences, to be at home in the new country, depends on the development of the person in the country of origin. Exile, if forced, is intolerable for most people. Chosen exile is not easy.
Some of my fiction is based on my experience of exile during the 1930s when my father and mother were helping refugees to escape from central Europe. My father would go in the night to meet trains and the people stayed in our house till jobs could be found, usually living-in work – housekeeping and gardening – for people who had never, in their lives, done this sort of work. Many of the people were only part of a family. I remember nights filled with the sound of subdued weeping and the deep voice of my father consoling.
My fiction is not autobiographical but, like all fiction, it springs from moments of truth and awareness, from observation and experience. I try to develop the moment of truth with the magic of imagination. I try too to be loyal to this moment of truth and to the landscape of my own region or the specific region in which the novel or story is set. I have always felt that the best fiction is regional. In Western Australia, in the vastness of this one-third of the whole continent, there are a variety of regions from the seacoast through to the deserts that separate us from the rest of Australia (port, city, suburbs, river foreshore, sand plain, escarpment, the partly cleared semirural, the rural, the bush, the wheat belt and the outback. In Western Australia we even have a few mountains. And we have a rabbit- and emu-proof fence separating the outreaches of the farming land from the beginnings of the desert.)
The landscape of my fiction is not to be found exactly on any map but I am faithful to the landscape and I do not make mistakes. I never have water flowing where it could never flow…
I never called myself writer till I was called writer from outside. For a long time rejection slips and letters poured in… ‘I don’t think any advice could be offered to the author. This does not appear to be the work of a novelist, or indeed of an imaginative writer of any kind, though it does show a limited talent…’ (1963)
There is an enormous difference between rejection and acceptance. I would have gone on writing in the face of further rejection. The change in status from being an absolutely hopeless case or entirely unacceptable to being accepted is a strange, unexpected experience.
For me, my character comes before plot and incident. I have always been interested in people. My work, first nursing and now teaching, has been essential. I can never understand why anyone should give up a good job in order to write full-time. As a writer I need people very much. Having enough time for writing is always a problem because writing is time-consuming. A Senior Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council a few years ago helped me to buy time in all sorts of ways, for example to teach for fewer hours a week, to have some domestic help and domestic appliances which are timesavers.
I have developed the ability to make the quick note while shopping or doing housework. This is very useful as I would not be able to write if simply confronted with sheets of blank paper and no ideas in my head!
I read a great deal. Reading and discussing literature with students has proved over the years to be the best way for me to study the art of writing. It is one thing to write and another to craft the writing to make it acceptable to readers. I think it is wise not to rush into publication too soon. It pays to write a number of stories or novels in order to discover themes and direction. I always rewrite a great deal. Of course the writer wants to be published. Who would want to build a bridge and have no one walk across it? It has always been my hope that ultimately my work would be published and read with understanding and enjoyment. While I am writing I do not think of a possible readership. To start with I am both writer and reader. When I come to the final draft, or what seems to be a final draft, I do craft the work with a reader in mind. I would like my work to reach all kinds of people. The fiction writer can offer people something entertaining but at the same time might be able to change a person’s outlook on life or their direction, I hope towards the more positive, the more loving and optimistic.
The literary prizes are highlights in a writer’s life. The writer does not write in order to win a prize. But if a book wins a prize it is a kind of measurement of success. People like to buy and read a book which has been selected for a prize. Many people do not understand that a book has to be chosen or selected in order to be published at all.
I have always felt grateful for the people who read and select the books first for publication and then later for the selection of prize winners.
Before being accepted (and I was unacceptable for a very long time) I had no idea of the business of publishing. From the time when a book is accepted for publication till it is on sale in a bookshop a whole lot of people are busy working on the production of that book. The writer, therefore, without actually meaning to be, or realising it, is a sort of primary producer. As a failing orchardist I rather like this idea.
It is thought that I have written a number of books in a short time. This is not the case. Because my work was rejected, and because I went on writing, a bank of material built up. I would have gone on writing in spite of the rejection slips, had they continued.
Characters can sometimes be embarrassing to the author. I do not like to be embarrassed by my characters either by their actions or by the things they say. If there is something which seems awkward in this way I usually change it. Awkwardness suggests a change is needed.
In the first writings of the novel Palomino I tried to place Laura and Andrea, during the deepening of their relationships, and the realisation of their sensual passion for each other, in direct confrontation. I tried to create dialogue and action for them in these encounters. The result was very wooden indeed; self-conscious conversations and clichéd actions, with one character sounding like a missionary from a hundred years ago and the other a rebellious schoolgirl in the 1930s. After many attempts to bring the two characters together satisfactorily (over approximately twenty years of writing) I tried internal monologue or thought process, as it is sometimes called. The older woman reflects on the speech and actions of the younger woman in relation to her own feelings and this is followed by the thoughts and feelings of the younger woman. Each fragment carries, as heading, the name of the person whose thoughts are offered. Ultimately this seemed the best way to present the material of the novel.
I had no sooner finished writing this novel than it happened that I was to appear on a platform with another writer; we were both to address a group of postgraduate students. The first speaker got up and started off, ‘The novel is dead and interior monologue is out…’
I hardly heard the rest of his talk – which was a nuisance because I was supposed to follow him – all I could do was to think of my dead manuscript with its outdated style lying on the table at home ready to be posted off for submission.
It was the fashion for many years for these deaths, either of the novel or the short story, to be announced from time to time.
Miss Thorne in the novel Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is a character who could be embarrassing because of her large size, her exuberance, her ability to be completely unselfconscious, her desire to initiate, or simply by her desires and her behaviour and by the use of the idiom of the eternal schoolgirl mixed with the language of an educated well-bred woman. The best way for me to get over the problem of awkwardness in the creation of this large and powerful woman and her entourage and her habit of leaving a trail of broken beds (‘It simply is not profitable to spend time wondering why hotels invest in cheap frail furniture’) across the more cultured spots in Europe, was to give her entirely to an imagined novelist, Diana Hopewell, who writes about her in a flamboyant, cliché-ridden style and, above all, in the form of letters. Writing in letters allows a great deal of freedom – repetitions, poor but vivid phrases, purple passages of description, these are all excused in this rapid and personal method of communication. I would like to write another novel in this style but the novelist is expected to come up with something fresh every time. The word ‘novel’, after all, does mean ‘of new kind, strange, hitherto unknown – a fictitious prose tale published as a complete book’. A perfect description which must not be betrayed.
My husband once made a profound remark about my father and it was this: that my father was never able to see the consequences of his good intentions. I suppose in many ways that remark fits me too. It is especially true about children and their upbringing. The mother is a tower of good intention and is not able to know beforehand the results of her efforts. I think being a mother is one of the hardest tasks with which we are faced. Being a grandmother is an unexpected blessing. I have four grandchildren, Matthew, Daniel, Samuel and little Alice. A great many things are in existence by some force beyond us. I have only to look on a newly born lamb or a grandchild to feel humble and amazed and filled with a deep sense of reverence.