The year I was born, on the other side of the world in the land of my parents, the Netherlands, there was a storm. The North Sea swept in and broke the dykes built to protect the low-lying marsh lands from too much water. De Ramp inundated the land.
In 1953 the sun bore down on a weedy back yard in Greensborough, my baby self rested nestled in a cradle made of white wicker with an enamel-coloured crucifix attached by a satin ribbon. A baby, I did not know about the waters engulfing my parent’s homeland.
My mother wept. Her tears splashed down her face as she held me close, but not close enough for me. The world was unsafe. I knew there were problems in the land of my caregivers, my mother, this woman who held her flesh held in place with tight corsets riding up her thighs across her stomach. Her muscles weakened through too many pregnancies, her body was now closed off to me as she did not have enough milk for her sixth born child.
From the land of water, she had travelled to the land of sunshine and eucalypts. A world where we did not see snow unless we travelled hundreds of kilometres to the top of mountains whose winter season shone white for less than three months of each year.
My mother missed the snow and in this hot land, which was now her home and my birthplace, she could not find a firm enough footing to feel safely at home. We might as well have been in a small boat tossed on the waters of the North Sea, near the broken dykes that failed to protect the land from the sea.
Three years later I walked with my sister and two brothers to a local swimming hole. A build-up of water from the Darebin Creek which ran near our house, a tributary of the brown Yarra River that curled like a snake though the nearby fields yet to be converted into suburbs.
The locals had piled rocks in places. To create a deeper section for swimmers able to manage without a foothold too deep to stand, I jumped into one when my big sister was not looking.
She kept her wits and dragged me by my straggling hair to the edge of the pool and pulled me out. I wish she had not. If she had not I would not be here. But then others would not be here because like my mother before me I have reproduced. And I do not wish the others were not here.
The colour blue is multifaceted, the sky by day by night, the sea under clouds, under sun, in storm or sorrow.
The Dutch invented the microscope. They wanted things as detailed as possible from small art works by the grand Masters to the fine filaments of Philips lighting.
My father when sober brought home a microscope from his work. Sober in the mornings and on Sundays our day of rest when he could not access the drink.
I remember when Sundays were fun days for family drives or peering down a microscope lens to see the body of an ant.
I remember the way ants crawled over the kitchen bench after my mother made her endless cups of tea and the spilt sugar grains glowed like crystals on the Laminex top.
I remember my brother had a crystal set on which he tuned into the BBC and China.
I remember the days when we kids learned to speak in BBC English, our accents attuned to voices on the radio and television.
I remember how the television sat in one corner of the lounge room and I could squeeze behind one of the single lounge chairs and be invisible.
I remember the days when invisibility was a matter of survival.
When we survived on bowls of maizena pop, a custard made of corn flour, which we smothered with sugar.
I remember the way my mother made a well in a bowl of flour into which she poured melted butter and sugar to turn the batter into biscuits.
I remember when I stole biscuits from the brown paper bags she brought home from Mr Brockoff’s the grocery store.
My Brockhoff’s store on the corner of Canterbury Road was the best place to buy bird seed for my brother’s bantams.
I remember when the cage in which my brother holed his birds went up in flames and the fire brigade came with their long black hose.
I remember the way the hose snaked its way along the footpath into our back garden.
Right through yard with its crooked Hills Hoist, lopsided after my brothers used it as a gym ring to swing around.
I remember gym classes at my school when the physical education teacher, a man, tried to help certain girls in the class get a better grip on their knees when bending for exercise.
I remember those girls were petite and the beautiful.
I remember beauty as a thing to do with bodies, or so my mother told me.
The human body is beautiful, she said.
I remember when my father came at night hankering to touch another body.
I remember the nights when all I wanted was to go into the loungeroom and look at the details in a strand of hair,
A strand of hair can look like one of my sister’s plaited braids under the microscope.
A strand of hair can become as glorious as sugar crystal under the lens of the microscope.
A Strand of hair can take you places in your imagination that the darkness of the night refuses.
I remember hating those nights.
Microbiologist, Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, invented the microscope. I still love to wrap these syllables around his name, gentle on my tongue with the Dutch accent of my forebears.
When I was fifteen in science class, but not so interested in the material world, Mother Mary Paul introduced the microscope, and things came alive under the lens.
Again.
When I first saw a microscope after my father brought one home from his work. Not only did he bring the microscope, but he also brought a box filled with a series of slides lined up like books in a library each in the separate slot. And each slide had impregnated on its surface an object of the everyday:
A skin follicle from someone’s sunburned shoulder.
A strand of hair from someone’s head or beard,
the body of a mosquito,
a grain of sand and sugar crystals, a splinter of wood.
We kids lined up alongside my father’s chair where he rested the microscope on the tiled coffee table and we each took turns to peer through the lens and so enter the magical world of minute detail.
Each enthralled at the way these seemingly ordinary objects from our material world transformed into specimens of great beauty.
Who’d have thought the head of an ant could transpose you to a view of the universes, or a follicle of hair could look like a spiral staircase on which you might walk.
Who’d have known a sugar crystal could turn into an icy wonderland with every slither of ice, every drop of frozen water, the most glorious earrings a queen might wear with her royal robes.
Who’d have thought we could move out of the tedium of that dangerous place called the lounge room where my father held court in the evenings and once he started drinking, the room became as unpredictable as an electric storm.
Yet there we were, each of us in turn transmuted elsewhere into the magical worlds Van Leeuwenhoek bestowed upon us by grinding pieces of glass and peering through.
I learned the details of words and images, under the lens of glass my father brought home. See it there now, a microscope, as straight as a soldier in uniform with its gun shaped tube, barrel bearing down on the plate below ready to transform our world of the ordinary and everyday into the magic of detail.
The world can look very different through a microscope. Safe in the detail. Unlike the world of the everyday with all its dangers, especially in your childhood home.
