Carols in the Park

Victoria Park is a place I used to take Jack when he was very small aund helpless.  It’s quiet,with only a distant  hum of traffic on the Parramatta Road.  There’s a pond with ducks and moorhens and big fig trees to sit under. In the beginning he just lay there.  I pitied him for the struggle it was to move his arms and legs.   Later he liked to finger the grass and pop bits of bark in his mouth.  I always knew when there was something in there because of the tight lipped smirk on his face. There was a bit of guarding for me to do, but by and large the park was a safe place.  An everyday place.  Even when it is galvanised once a year by  something like Fair Day – a preliminary to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras it seems safe with coiffed dogs that had their own cafe and couples holding hands happily.

So when Rachel asked me to go with her to Carols in the Park I was unpeturbed and happy to oblige.  She’s a singer and had been asked to do a number on the stage that night and I was going to be on duty while she was performing.  Jacob was about six months then, sitting but not crawling and minding him would be easy.

There was a slightly wild feeling about the park when we got there.  Kids streaking about,  groups staking out spaces with blankets.  We chose a space way back from the  stage which had a huge noise coming from it  Warming up I supposed.  I was thinking protectively from Jacob’s point of view – so different from his usual placid baby life.  He was still such easy prey and I was wary.

I was doubly disconcerted by an ex-girlfriend of my son Miles, Jack’s father, appearing in a Santa hat selling song sheets and candles with little ruffs to catch the wax.  She’d married, by a peculiar coincidence, an ex-boyfriend of Rachel’s.  It was all more than OK but complicated to respond to.

I have long since stopped liking carols.   For the most part hey have become just jingles in shopping malls and right now the crazy invocation of  mid winter on  a hot Sydney night  adds an air of madness to the evenng.  A row of portaloos and a barbecue manned by Miles  are on the right flank of the park.  On the left is a no go zone where fireworks have been set up.  We’ve all bought our candles   and groups borrow fire from one another as not many of us carry lighters now that hardly anyone smokes.  Jack eyes it all with equanimity and I wish I could too.  He’s passed from one church person to another and while I am proud of him I also wish he would just stay with me.  He’s so portable.  I tell myself these are all good people and I don’t have sole rights to Jack do I.

Rachel says she needs to go to the loo before her performance and I say no worries.

Now for a while up on stage,  in between the carols, there has been a running gag  going on.  Two little girls dressed as angels have been going up to the master of ceremonies and one says

“We’ve found the baby Jesus”

“How do you know it’s the baby Jesus?

“Look”

And the first angel would draw back and the other child would be hanging on to a baby.

“But that’s a girl” said the MC.

“Oh” and the angels would go away whilst another carol was revved up.  It was all good fun I suppose but the joke had a dark feeling too.  There was a whiff of sacrifice in the offering of the babies and a hint of rejection in their dismissal.  Were they being spared the knife or shut out of paradise?

I was musing on all this when the inevitable happened.  The two winged girls came bounding up to my blanket.

“Can we borrow your baby?”

“No” I said immediately “His mum’s not here.”

The  angels looked longingly at Jack.  He was just the right size for their purpose.  But Rachel was still at the portaloos and I was strongly on duty.  Then up came the angels’ minder, the minister who had actually married Rachel and Miles.  “Rachel won’t mind” she said.

“Won’t it be noisy?” I parried “I’ll block his ears” she said.

And so I let him go out of my sight through the candles and the horrible racket.  After what seemed a very long time I heard the little voices excitedly announcing

“We’ve found the baby Jesus”

“How do you know it’s Jesus?”

After a pause – and then in a tone of deep awe,

“Because of his eyes’

I had to smile.  He does have unusual eyes. Very dark with a little bit of gold.  When I described him on the phone to my sister Sal in England she said,

“ Hmph Rachel hasn’t been going to any witches' Sabbaths lately.”

  “Don’t tell her I said that” she added hastily.  She’s a midwife and knows all about the sensitivities of young mothers.

Well, Jack failed as a baby Jesus look alike just like the others and was back on my blanket before long.  I wondered what he had thought of it all but he wasn’t crying which was the main thing. Rachel arrived back flustered but not entirely displeased at being chatted up by a man in the portaloo queue. 

“I told him I was married” she said “but it made no difference”

I recounted the story of Jack’s abduction by the angels and she laughed and said she was sorry to have missed his stage debut.

Rachel sang her carol.  Miles came back from barbecuing and said he didn’t care if he never saw another sausage in his life and we fled  the park with the crackle and bang of the fireworks like a small war behind us.

Not exactly a silent night, holy night, I mused, but a reminder of the dark side that makes one own personal family candle burn well.  I was glad I’d gone.

Cuckoo Clock

 You can listen to me reading this on Australian national radio here

Cuckoo clocks in general are one of the things I particularly dislike.  Their kitchiness, their smug swissness, their phoniness.  So when Graham, my husband,  saw the cuckoo clock shop in Berry and said he’d like one, I said –no way, if it comes into the house I go out and all those sorts of things.

I think my loathing goes back to my English childhood and the regular visits to my grandfather who lived in the Cotswold Hills.  These visits were always horrible   I realize now that he probably had obsessive compulsive disorder.  He used to seal his woollen socks in preserving jars in the summer to keep the moths out. He married a younger woman after my grandmother’s suicide and I was taught to call her Aunty Josephine.  She had never had children but whenever I visited she had a good go at parenting me.  She gave me thorough and rather intrusive baths and interrogated me on the ways of my bohemian and admittedly somewhat haphazard widowed mother.  Somehow the cuckoo clock meant all these things to me –a saccharine sweet face but with nasty leaden pine cones hanging from chain underneath.  An interminable tick and a pokey little beaky thing. that came out , no matter what , on the hour.

But in a moment of I don’t know what – remorse at being mean – sentimental fondness, or simply having no idea whatever to get Graham for his birthday I visited the cuckoo clock shop myself.  They were expensive, they weren’t, for the most part genuine, now being battery powered with hollow plastic pine cones on the bottom of the winding

chains instead of the leaden globs at my grandfathers place.  And some of them did new things.  I bought one that played a tinny German waltz after the cuckoo came out.  That’ll teach him, I thought darkly

I did insist that the clock be  kept in Graham’s’s study above the garage at the bottom of our garden.  Not in the house.  I even offered to tell him the secret of how to disable the German waltz function but he said in for a penny in for a pound - or something like that

Actually I found to my surprise that I grew to like hearing the distant cuckoo as I hung up the washing or repotted the bromeliads.  I thought how nice it was to have the hours marked in this way especially since I’ve never got used to my digital watch which, if I’m not careful, tells me how many steps I’ve walked instead of the time.  I think it’s a shame that public clocks don’t chime any more.  It used to be good to hear the hour and think of all the others round about hearing it too and making their decisions about what to do next.  Even the faint tinkle of the waltzes has come to please rather than bother me.  I smile when I think that my disgusting present ha turned out so nice after all.

Now a new cuckoo clock thing has just begun to happen.

 I look after my small grandson on Wednesdays.  He’s just beginning to talk and I showed him the cuckoo clock one day and we watched it do its stuff.  Now whenever he comes barrelling in he demands ‘cuckoo clock” and I usually say “Later” because it is the wrong part of the hour.  But when he hits it right we go together to the top of the garage and sit on the stairs under the clock together.  “Cuckoo clock?” he queries. ”Soon”  I say and we sit quietly together “Cuckoo clock?”  Three more minutes.  Somehow we chat our way through that long stretch of time and then there is a lovely creaking and grumbling and out comes a tiny white bird with wings outstretched.  Jack’s mouth opens and his eyes grow round. “Cuckoo” and then a little faint echo “Cuckoo”   Over and over, nine ten eleven times.- in and out it goes and then snaps shut.  He laughs for joy.   And then the tune starts. I hold him and we sway on the stairs together.  At the end he’s quite happy “All gone cuckoo clock” he says and off we go.

When I make marmalade, which I sometimes do, I remember Grandpa and the darkness of his bottled socks and Aunty Josephine suspecting my mother of god knows what .  I think of the cousin clock on the other side of the world, probably even now brooding in someone’s hallway and I feel gleeful.   I am here in Australia under another sun .   I am free, I think.

But I wonder - is that really true.?   Will the pattern go on repeating itself anyway?  I wonder what Jack’s cuckoo clock will be like.  Technology is bound to have made a few changes.  Maybe the bird will be able to come out to sing and  fly round the room before popping back through its trapdoor.

And maybe from wherever I am then I will hear Jack, now bushy browed with grey curls telling his children about their great grandmother.   And perhaps he’ll say 

“ She used to look after me on Wednesdays when my mother went to her  Pilates. She taught me to call her Julia.   She was very nice but I realize now that she was actually a bit mad.  Bipolar disorder probably..  As soon as I came in the door she would whisk me down the garden   Do you know she’d make me sit for hours on the  garage steps waiting for the cuckoo clock to sing and afterwards she’d make me dance this crazy dance with her.  But she loved me very much.”

And that at least is true!  

      

A Grandmother's Tale

You can listen to me reading this on Australian national radio here

I  have Jack on Wednesdays so his mother can go to her Pilates.  We’ve been doing this for almost all his two year old life.  He and I go off with his stroller to a place of interest to us both.  That day it was the Power House Museum, which is particularly friendly to two year olds and has a Wiggles exhibition.

It was good.  Jack was awed by the steam train with wheels that were taller than him.  He was a bit bored by the demonstration of  an eighteenth century engine that was imported for a brewery when beer was safer than water to drink.  But I was  impressed – the effort and power it took to ease the mighty wheel and its cogs around.  The dignity of it.

After that I thought chips and warm milk would be nice for Jacob and a cappuccino for me so we went to the café and snacked away together. “Chips very very hot” said Jack but pelicaned them down anyway.  He’s at the parroting stage.

Then we went to the playground outside the café.  Jack’s a cautious child and it was an unfamiliar modern playground with a pyramid of ropes and various balancing things.  The most innocuous looking thing was a small green cup on a sort of stalk.  It looked as if it would go round and round.  “Hey Jack” I said “Look at me”  I sat in the cup and pushed with my foot.  Disconcertingly the cup tipped up a bit as it went round and then descended.  I missed the moment to jump out and pick up Jack to join me. Round it went.  Fun, I thought, but this is a seriously fast machine.  I missed my moment again and I realised the thing was going faster – nothing to do with anything I was doing.  My feet didn’t touch the ground.  Up and round and down with a swoop.  Faster and faster.  I could hear, but not see Jack crying.  “It’s OK” I yelled but faster and faster whirled the little cup until the sky heaved and  the colours of the scene turned white.  I was scared now and lost my inhibitions.  “Help!   Help me” I  yelled into the space around  “Somebody help me”  Nobody did.  I briefly thought of leaping out but the thought of my granny bones on impact scared me.   I began to despair.  Now I was almost used to the aggressive whirling  and it was like a pain to be borne until – when?  How could it ever slow down when it was  my weight was making it go faster and faster.  I felt alone and definitely leaving normality behind.  But I yelled again and my voice seemed tiny.  “Help me somebody.  Please help me”  Now I wonder why I didn’t scream.  I suppose I didn’t want to frighten Jack.

Finally, with surprising gentleness, like a good aeroplane landing the thing stopped and two huge faces looked in at me.  They were nice kind girls. “Are you all right?” one asked.  “We thought you were just having fun.”  I saw Jack’s teary crumpled face and made the effort.  “It’s all right love I said and I picked up his heavy little body and we hugged.  The girls offered more help but vanished when I said we were fine.  The people on a café table, quite near, I thought bitterly were watching with shock and tentative amusement.  “They’re a handful at that age” said a woman.  “Yes” I concurred though it crossed my mind that that was just what Jack must be thinking about me.

I strollered him back to the house feeling nauseous, vaguely traumatised and full of questions.

Why didn’t it slow down?  If it were that easy to get something going round could it be an energy source – just pop grandmas in green cups (they could be called that) and global warming would be fixed.  More sombrely, would it have ever stopped before it broke and catapulted me somewhere?  Was this what dying felt like?  One gets philosophical anyway when pushing a lonely stroller and I wondered if I’d spun the days of my life in that short?  I had no idea interlude.  I also thought grimly that normal coffee drinking people ignore the unconventional.  They would have rescued a child in my dilemma but a grey haired grandma on a children’s toy was not nice  Maybe mad or drunk and anyway untouchable.  I must behave with more care in future.

But I couldn’t blame myself entirely.  One expects diminished experiences from baby equipment – to have less rather than more of a thrill.

Anyway we got home and when she got back I told my daughter in law all about it.  We put Jack in his high chair for lunch and she started making me a cup of tea.  “You’ve earned it” she said sympathetically and gave me a nice hug.  From his high chair Jack began carolling “Help, help me somebody”  “You see” said Rachel “You’ve taught him a useful word.  It’s been educational.”