Boydtown Blues

 We are in a lovely place, Boydtown which could have been the capital of New South Wales if Ben Boyd, entrepreneur extraordinaire, had had his way.  He ran properties, an offshore whaling outfit and had shares in the Pig and Whistle shipping line.  (It was called the Pig and Whistle because when the whistle blew to announce departure all the pigs squealed)  The line ran from Sydney to Melbourne until 1952 when roads were better.  It must have been such fun to live here then with whales in the bay and ships going back and forth.  Ben Boyd though ran into debt and tried a bit of blackbirding to get cheap labour for his farms.  He was very properly stopped by humanitarians and disappeared in the Solomon Islands, assumed murdered by the local inhabitants.

This is the first campsite where I feel totally content.  There is hardly anyone here.  I gathered wood and lit a fire last night even though the wood was wet. It blazed cooperatively and the smoke went straight up.  I sat in a canvas chair and had a gin.  The stars came out.  Some kookaburras cackled their evening prayers.  Grant was sitting in the van with the lights on.  “Come out, I said “It’s so lovely”  But he wouldn’t.  “We are different people” he said.  I guess so.  We shared my wood fired potatoes and he began to get the tacos ready.

Van life

We have been on the road for three days now.  It should have been four but when we got to Durras it was bucketting down and dark and murky and our spirits failed within us so we lit a fire and waited a day.  Sailors need a fair wind we said to ourselves and so do we.
Our first stop was Bermagui in a place called Walaga Lake.  I have discovered that I don't like lakes.  They get me down - so flat and passive- specially this one with a single bored pelican on it.  But we had plenty of excitement in the van learning to crab past each other and do all the things you need to do.  If you are tubby campervanners like us you need to be very good friends.  At least.  we can get past each other so far.  We had to learn about hooking up to the lovely power which gives us warmth and light and pumps the water into the tap.
The nice bits of campervanning - waking and peeping out into the caravan park and seeing fishermen and other early risers, having breakfast in bed before dismantling it. The morning gossip about the other people in the park.  There are very few because it's nearly winter.  We are awed by a couple older than us who put up a tent in the rain.  We wonder about the solitary man with a dog.  The other nice time is the evening when we draw the curtains and make our dinner and break out the wine.  Bed is good too after we have assembled it.  It's just boards and cushions but I find it more comfortable than our bed at home.
One other lovely thing about travelling in your own shell is not having to go back.  In a car there is always the return journey.  With us now there is only forwards and it feels free.
The grimmer bits of caravanning - losing things so we have to crab past each other again and again on our little quests.  Emptying the toilet cassette which is not for the faint hearted.  I had a peculiar taboo feeling not unmixed with melancholy as though it were our ashes.  Finding that we hadn't got the right key to fill the water tank and Grant swore in his usual way and broke the lock.  But still it is all good.
Perhaps the oddest thing about travelling this way, and I know I will get over it, is the feeling that only our van is real and the world outside is a stage set.  The last time I experienced this was when we came to Australia from England by ship and went ashore at the ports.  It was fascinating but transient.  Like a slide show.  Real life began again when we set sail and were snuggled in our cabin. Anyway enough of all that.  We are in Eden today and have been to the Killer Whale Museum where I learnt that killer whales used to work with whalers to catch Baleen whales off the coast here and they all had names like dogs do-Tom, Cooper, Curly and soon.  Must go as the Sprout Cafe and its internet are closing in a minute.  talk soon. JJ

Getting going

Morning of departure and it is difficult to prise us and our bits and pieces of luggage out of the house and on to the road. Shall I take the vegemite? Shall I take my little loom in case of  boredom in the bush evenings?  Why am I uprooting myself at all?  Will I get even fatter eating too much as we drive our miles and miles? Will Grant and I madden each other?

Tonight we are having a goodbye meal before setting off in our campervan to go to Perth across the Nullarbor.  There is a certain amount of scepticism about whether the two of us will survive each other's company for five weeks. Let us see.

Jacob and Ethan, Julia and Sarah

Jacob and Ethan, Sarah and Julia

Ethan is three months old now.  The pure mystery of early babyhood is giving way  to the sparkle of sociability, easily elicited and radiant smiles.  A silly adult tongue poked out, a bit of tongue clicking and he comes to the party with a beam of delight.  Conversely he shoots looks of piercing blue reproach when he’s hungry or inexplicably uncomfortable.  He belongs to this world now and the shades of where he was before he came to us seem to have lifted.  He has become a good baby with no more wild unreasonable crying.

         It has taken me a while to feel close to my second grandson, perhaps because he came to us with so much less trouble.  His birth was well managed and left his mother ready and able to pull him into her maternal orbit.  Jacob, on the other hand was hauled into the world by forceps after a long labour.  I shall never forget the blind wonder that filled me when  I saw him looking with black eyes at Ruth’s pale and exhausted face.  He looked wise and exceptional and I felt oddly subordinate to him.  Ethan, on the other hand, seemed to slip into his role quite quickly and be just quintessentially baby and he had his mother’s blue eyes as well. Until quite recently my love for him was simply that of an experienced grandmother who knew all about babies.  And then things changed even though nothing really happened.

         I went to lunch at Mungo and Ruth’s house this Sunday.   

Ethan was in his baby bouncer and Jacob was loving him in his own ferocious way, lunging at him, squashing his little cheeks until the smiles collapsed into indignation and Ethan began to cry.

“He’s not liking it Jacob.  Be gentle”  His mother and I reproach in chorus.

Other humorous suggestions from Jacob like “Let’s put the baby in the stinky rubbish bin”  have made us all wary of ever leaving the pair alone together at this point in their  relationship.

 I was feeling very low on Sunday, having just returned from visiting mum in England again. Jetlag was part of it but mostly I was wrestling with grief  at mum becoming simpler, without much memory and with impulses that belong in early childhood.  The journey home to Australia was imbued with unholy joy at getting away from having to witness it all and guilt at being so relieved to leave the mother who still loved me, but in such a different way

There is always a measure of guilt too, at leaving my sister Sarah to do all the visiting when I’m gone.  Curiously though, she doesn’t have the difficulty that I do in dealing with mum’s changed state of mind.  She, maybe rightly, sees mum’s diminishing intellect as a natural way to bow out of life and nothing to be grieved over.

“And she’s much nicer to me now.” Sarah says.  Certainly Mum and Sarah have a rather jolly combative time when they are together these days.

“What are you doing Sarah?

“Nothing” she says as she abducts mum’s limp old bras from the cupboard and substitutes nice new ones from Marks and Spencers.

“You’re doing something”

“Well, mum” Sarah has decided to come clean, “Look at these new bras.  Really pretty.  Pretty pink” she puts on a speaking to a child voice.

“Yes, it’s a nice pink” concedes mum “And what’s that?”

“It’s your old one. It’s not comfortable any more” She drops the grey undergarment in the bin.

“You can’t do that!”  There’s a bit of a ritual bicker but mum forgets and it’s all OK.

Sarah seems to grow in stature from her victories over our little parent whereas I feel, fool that I am, a childish sense of abandonment belonging more properly to a funeral.  

I try, when I’m on my own with mum to catch the fragments of the person I once knew and I often ask

“What is it like to be in your head now?”  She tries to tell me.

“Its uneasy” she said one time.  I find my instinctive need to empathise takes me on strange journeys.  I don’t know if it’s really like this in an amnesiac mind but it seems like outer space with debris floating about.

“Can you tell me something?” she says after we’ve been sitting in companionable silence for a while.

“Yes-“ I prepare for an emotionally challenging question.

“What exactly is Passover?”

I’ve brought my Ipad with me and it is a godsend with its huge branching store of knowledge and rubbish too.  It’s just what we need but every time I open it I need to try and explain what it is.

“What’s that?”

“It’s like an encyclopaedia”

“How does it know everything?”

“It’s all in the atmosphere and it pulls the information out – like a radio if you think about it – it pulls the noise out of somewhere”

Together we ponder on the miracle of my Ipad and I learn more about Passover and its rituals than I ever would have done were it not for mum’s question and Wikipaedia.

Another day

“What’s that truly awful song.  It’s an awful song”

I reach for the Ipad.  She says musingly

“Little man you’ve had a busy day”

“It does sound awful” I agree.

It seems unlikely but I type the words in and to my amazement it’s a Paul Robeson song and mawkish beyond belief. It went on…”someone stole your kiddycar away”

We move on to his more famous songs “Swing low sweet chariot” and “Nobody knows the trouble I see”

“That one always seems a bit silly” says mum.

Another day she’s restless and angry

“I want to hear about something really nasty” she says.  I think its probably bath day and the chivvying has put her in a bad mood.  Ian Brady, the child murderer has been in the news this week.  He wants to be moved from a psychiatric hospital to prison where he hopes he can starve himself to death more easily.  I look up Ian Brady and read it all to her.  We move on to  Jack the Ripper and the black and white photos of all the people who might have been him.  I ask mum what it is about real life murders that has always fascinated her.

“It’s so extreme” she says “It’s the most extreme behaviour there is.”

A carer comes in then with cups of tea and little scones with jam and I am relieved to be back in the less extreme world of the care home.  I leave soon after and go back to my B and B.  I know I should get something proper to eat but I can’t summon the energy.  After a day with Mum surfing the space of her mind the reality of Waitroses seems dwarfish and pedestrian. I want minimal human contact.  Fortunately husband Grant has sent me a bottle of gin in a spirit of supportiveness.  I mix it with some pink grapefruit juice I have and settle in to munch on a chunk of cheese until my own mind blurs enough to let me sleep.

We had many beautiful, batty afternoons enhanced by the flowers that bloom outside Mum’s window – huge red poppies and lanky foxgloves, plump English roses.  While I longed for wattles and tough gum trees I couldn’t help but be newly amazed by these flowers from my birth country.

I have always maintained that amnesia is catching.  Maybe it is a consequence of rapport.  Mum has for many years  been maddened by not being able to remember the names of actors.

“What is his name? And I loved him so much.”

I know who she’s seeking but I too have lost the name.

 “It’ll come back” I say and it often does, usually to her first.

Similarly, after a while, mum’s uncoordinated thoughts and occasional hair raising lack of inhibition crept into my way of being too.  I began to savour the joy of her childish impulses instead of cringing at them.  We get dropped off at the local pub one day and there’s a wait before lunch can be served.  Mum is impatient but stimulated by the different environment in which people are absorbed in their own conversations despite being in her presence.  She rarely leaves her room in the care home and if someone comes in she is necessarily the focus of attention.

“When I am in a place like this with lots of people,” she says “I feel like standing on a chair and singing a song”

“What song?” I ask.

“How much is that doggy in the window”.  I go to the loo and leave her for enough of a minute to forget the idea but the thought of disturbing the civilised ambience of  the country pub is not without its charm.  All those exclusive groups of people joking together.

“A loud laugh betrays an empty mind” pronounces mum loudly and immediately produces somberness around the bar and a glower from the landlord.

“Are those what you call skin tight jeans?” A girl looks round at us in an unfriendly way.

“That man’s shorts are much too short”

“Mum stop making personal remarks” I say

“But they are the best sort.” She laughs wickedly.

Lunch comes and we retreat soon after.

The closer I got to mum during those weeks the further I found myself from ordinary people.  Once, being tired after my day with mum I lay down on the grass in front of the care home to wait for a taxi.

“I’ll have a little nap in the sun” I thought. An anxious woman came up to me and asked if I was all right and suddenly I realized how odd it must have seemed for me, pushing seventy myself, to be curled up alone on the grass in front of an old people’s home.  Like mum I was letting my impulses have free reign. It is a curiously liberating feeling to do what comes naturally without any thought of appearances.  Just once more I indulged myself on the way back to Australia.  It was at Perth airport.  It had already been a trying morning and I was randomly selected for a body scan. I became my mother, outraged and uncomprehending of this ridiculous demand for cooperation – lift arms, spread legs etc.  I had a tantrum.

“I’ll strip naked if you like” I said to the aimiable security man. “And I’m never coming to Perth again”

“Can I help you with that?” he asked, as I struggled without dignity to get my backpack on again.

“That’s the first nice thing anyone has said to me today”  Just as with mum, the quicksilver tantrum had slipped off down a drain somewhere and I went on my way slightly appalled at myself.

         When I finally got home I rang sister Sarah, thinking to thank her for all the stuff she’d done for me.  Actually I was missing her.  We’d been together so much and though I didn’t realise it, I wanted more of her than just to accept my thanks.     Some demon of depression made me say

“Can I ask you something and will you answer me honestly?”

“Yes” said Sarah who believes honesty is a virtue.

“Were you relieved when I left?

Of course I wanted her to say no and she missed me and so on but the tangle of love that is being sisters is not like cotton wool, more like raw fleece full of barbs and spikes and it doesn’t do to clutch it to your bosom as I was trying to do.

“I did my best” said Sarah.

And so we quarreled on the phone.  We said things we shouldn’t have said and she told me how she’d spent her whole life being warned not to upset me, pinch my boyfriends and so on.  The curdle of shame and anger that I felt would have made a pig sick.

I look at fierce Jacob and little complacent blue-eyed Ethan and I can see that it’s not easy for Jacob even now and never mind later on.  I ask him

“Is it better to be a big boy or a baby”

Without hesitation he says “A baby”

Quite suddenly I’m sorry I was so horrible to Sarah on the phone.   I say to Jacob

“You know he won’t always be a baby.  One day he will be as big as you and he may be the best friend you will ever have.”

And when it’s morning again in England I think I’ll get on the phone to Sarah.

I look at Ethan and a little private recognition begins to sprout in me.  He’s just like I had been and I love him for being the second one too.  He creeps into my heart.  I pick him up and sling him on my shoulder as one does and am so happy to have two grandsons, one big one small, one brown eyed and one blue.

Don't Put the Baby in the Toy Box

The baby was a whole fortnight overdue.  It was decided that an induction was necessary and so Miles and Rachel dropped two year old Jack off at his grandparents the night before Rachel was due to go into the Royal Prince Alfred and get on with it.

Dorry thought Jack was surprisingly amenable to being dropped off.  He had never stayed the night before.  Maybe he too was finding all the waiting a bit much.  Certainly for the rest of the family it was  trying.  Impossible to plan anything, endless well wishers asking if anything had happened yet.  “I know I should be grateful that people care.” Said Rachel.

Up until this point Jack had answered all questions about the pregnancy in the family with a firm “Not yet”.

“So you’ll have a baby brother soon.”

“Yes, but not yet”

And last Wednesday when Dorry had taken him to Bondi Junction shopping centre he had lodged himself in his stroller and refused to walk or run or do any of his usual things.  Even the pleasure of standing independently on the escalator did not tempt him out.  He preferred to sail down in situ like a sad monarch.

But the night before the birth he’d perked up.  Maybe the educational picture books had done the trick because he was happy.  He breastfed his Dolly and patted his Wood Hen.

“What will you do when the baby cries?” anyone could ask and he would perform on cue,

“I’ll say there, there. It’s all right” and he made little patting movements.  He seemed to have moved from ominous ambivalence to cloying sweetness at the idea of having a little brother in no time at all.

One of the issues relating to the birth of the new baby was that Dorry was wanted at the birth.  She’s been there last time.  This time, however, it meant leaving Jack in the hands of his loving but gruff grandfather who didn’t believe in delicate ways of handling the terrible twos time.  He preferred battles of will to the more pussyfooting strategies of distraction and bribery. Despite this Jack loved his grandfather.  Nevertheless Dorry and his parents quailed a little at the thought of a prolonged stretch of babysitting by Graham.

Perhaps that was why Dorry was called to the hospital quite late.  The baby was already flailing his way out of the womb when she got there. One arm and the head were emerging amidst a cacophony of midwifely encouragement and maternal grunts.  It was a much easier birth than Jack’s had been.  The baby was quite big with long legs still a bit bandy from being squashed inside.

 “Would you like to see the placenta?”  the midwife asked afterwards and it seemed polite to say yes, and there it was, a fine thing in its way, thought Dorry. 

For some reason she could not understand, watching a birth filled Dorry with a strange sadness.  It had been like this with Jack.  Perhaps it was just that the mysterious incoming baby had a flavour of the other world which for the most part she took no heed of, not being religious.  The door that had opened to let the baby in and then closed behind him would open and close for her and every other being under the sun.  For a moment it all seemed so futile.

 Dorry held the little thing for a bit before leaving, promising to bring Jack in when the parents had had a bit of a rest.

Graham and Jack seemed on blessedly good terms when Dorry got home, though when she asked of it had all been OK, Graham answered “More or less” and looked very tired.  However all three of them were excited at going back to the hospital.  Dorry ran ahead to make sure the baby was in its cot and not its mother’s arms when Jacob went in, as this had been advised by her midwife sister in England.

Jacob wasn’t at all interested in his mother though.  He went straight over to the cot and looked in, transfixed.  Cooing voices encouraged him to be pleased with his brother.  His father picked up the baby, now named Evan.

“Better than a kitten” Dorry proffered helpfully.

Jack looked at the baby thoughtfully and then asked his father,

“Do you know him?”

To Dorry it seemed a weird but very good question.

The first time Jack and Evan came to their grandparents’ house after the birth was a bit of an emergency.  Rachel had needed to be taken to Casualty with a minor infection and Miles had catapulted in with both children, the precious baby now being handed around like a bag of sugar.

“Take him while I get the car stuff”  Miles was frantic to get back to the hospital and see what was happening with Rachel.  Jack was however in total command of the situation.  He went half way up the stairs, looked over the banisters and fixed his dark gaze on his grandmother who was cradling the baby with awe and delight, all her melancholy now dispersed.

“Don’t” he said “put the special baby in the toy box”

He went on haranguing her about baby care but she hardly heard him.  The little gargoyle face with its twisting grimaces, the legs now covered for some reason in flaking skin, had got her under its spell.

In the days that followed Dorry watched Jack walk taller, with longer strides.  The attitude he assumed to little Evan was  for the most part lofty and indifferent but Dorry knew she only had put on a  wicked grin and slowly raise the wooden lid of the toybox and Jack would scramble into defensive mode,

“No, no Grandma, don’t.  Don’t put him in the toy box!”

Developing empathy and other things

Jack’s playschool is very conscientious and sends home reports on his progress from time to time.  The last one wrote that he had exceptional language skills but something they called empathy needed development.  I was alarmed by this bit of information.  Jack had bitten his mother in the swimming pool last time we went and even though he had kissed it better on command I could see he wasn’t really sincere about the kiss.  His baby brother is due any day now and it seems to me imperative that this empathy development gets underway. 

When we set out  for the shopping mall last Wednesday I tucked Woodhen and a rag doll (Dolly) in beside Jack in the pushchair.

“Dolly’s got a tummyache” I say, “You’ve got to look after her.”

He didn’t stay in the pushchair long but hopped out and ran down the road saying “Emergency” and cuddling each traffic sign he passed like a ittle pole dancer.  I understood though.  He was being a fireman from Fireman Sam the television program.  Sometimes he called me Sam in the playground and he has adopted an endearing thumbs up sign he’d got from the program too.  As I walked and he ran it looked like being a gentle morning of play and good humour.

Toilet training has been hastily added to Jack’s developmental regime on account of his younger brother’s imminent arrival.

“Do you want to do a pee?”  I say pee and his mother says wee.  I wonder if it matters and which is best.

“No” he says anyway.

We got to the shopping mall and I let Jack stand on the escalator instead of sitting in the stroller as usual.  It seemed timely.  There’d be another baby in the stroller soon and he’d have to do it then.  It was a bit scary as we both rose rigid to the top.

“Jump, jump” I said as the stroller went sideways and Woodhen and Dolly fell out.

“Poor Woodhen. Poor Dolly” I said, but Jack was already on his way to the next escalator

We did our stuff and he was remarkably well behaved in the bank.  We went up and down several escalators and Jack soon adopted an air of casual nonchalance as he stood holding the rubber rail until it was time to step off.

“No more escalators’  I said “What about some warm milk with a straw.”

“OK” he agreed.

‘Do you want to do a pee?” I remembered to ask

“No” he said in a clipped tone.

We got to the café and I asked if he wanted to sit on the vinyl bench or have a high chair.  He opted for the bench.  I got his milk and also a little chocolate motorbike in silver paper.

“Because you’re being so grown up” I said

I suppose Jack’s focus was on airily living up to his new adult like role and not on the milk because he dropped it almost straight away.

I said “Oh shit” and went and got a handful of paper napkins but a tall stranger emerged from the milling public.

“Move to another table” he said .

For a moment I was alarmed.  What was this?  Then he pulled out a phone and I realized he was an undercover security person.  He sorted everything out and even organized another milk with a straw.  Jack said thank you to the mop up man when I prompted him to so and we got up to go.

“Do you want to pee ?”

“No

“Well I do.”  So we went to the very new toilets which open when you press a button.  Jack pressed and I provided a nice example of going to the toilet.

“Do you want to pee too?”  

Jack was, however, unmoved.

 “No” he said and shot ahead of me as I manoevred the stroller out of the Ladies.  He spotted a button on the wall that opened the Disabled toilet and pressed it. He went in and pressed it again and it locked with a clack.

“Oh bloody hell” I thought.  The door was opaque glass and there were Jack’s hands whacking away at it as he howled. theatrically .  I was just wondering how to get hold of one of those undercover security people when Jack pressed the button again and let him out before sliding closed.  He was all for repeating the adventure but I’d had enough.  I wrangled him into the pushchair on top of Dolly and Woodhen.  He pulled Dolly out  from under by the arm which ripped and slid out of the sleeve of her jacket.  “Psychopath” I thought meanly but I said “Poor Dolly” and stuffed the arm back up the sleeve.  Jack didn’t seem bothered and I thought perhaps his mother and I needed to talk about this.

We stopped at the rather good Victoria Park playground on the way home and Jack launched himself at the big rope dome.  He awed me by his capacity to climb.  “When did this happen?” I thought.  He used to be so cautious.  Higher and higher he went.  There was a Chinese family in the playground as well.  Their boys were older and climbing too, but without Jack’s reckless passion.

He was far above me when the beat of water on the rubberized ground made me look up.  A small waterfall was tumbling from Jack’s shorts.  He watched it with fascination, frozen on his rope.  “Bugger” I thought,   The older boys politely averted their gaze.

“Come down Jack.  You’re all wet.  We’d better go home”  But it seemed he couldn’t move now.  He was stuck.  I considered asking one of the other boys to get him down but I decided it wasn’t fair when he was so wet, and so with great difficulty I grumbled my way up to him.  He was wide eyed and he clung to me like a limpet as I got him down the rope rungs.  Even though he was wet the hug was nice.  Not the hug of a psychopath for sure.

We skulked home both wet and smelly and when Rachel came back I told her about our different troubles.  I was just going to get on to the subject of empathy development and what we should do about it when Jack fixed her with his big hazel gaze and began one of his incomprehensible narratives. Form seems to precede content when children are learning to tell a story and they quickly become very boring because you can only understand the odd word here and there and there is never an end in sight.

“OK Jack” I said “That’s enough.  I want to talk to mummy about poor Dolly’s arm”   hoping  perhaps for a moment of remorse.

But Jack had triumphantly reached his climax.

“You see Grandma rescued me!”

There was a complicated moment of pride – for Jack’s brilliant flash of coherence,  for his gratitude and of course for my own heroic capability as Grandma fireman Sam.

Rachel and I never did get round to talking about empathy training and maybe its just as well.  Some things happen in their own time.  Meanwhile I get out a needle and strong twine and begin to sew on Dolly’s arm.