Category: Writing

‘She was born with the winter in her bones.’ Kate Atkinson

Aurelia, thin and angular, pulled her socks to her knees. She wore them over thick stockings for extra warmth under drill trousers. Work ready trousers so she need not worry over unwanted holes in the fabric. 

Her mother had raised her to work, beginning as a four-year-old and first-born girl in a family where babies arrived year after year. She could change a nappy and prop a bottle on her baby brother’s chest as she folded clothes with her spare hand. She learned fast to keep order and during this time came to resent the mess piling around them in this overfull house of babies and neglect. 

Whatever happened to Aurelia when she was ten I cannot say but just like that, her ability to remember stopped one day overnight. One day she was a child who could recite her times tables, wipe bench tops clean, set out knives and forks in correct order, enough for seven, clear dishes, wash and stack them away. The next day she stumbled over every movement. She dropped plates, smashed in pieces on the floor and could not remember where the dustpan and brush lived to sweep up the shards. 

School became a nightmare, a fog of ignorance and the nuns reported Aurelia must be lacking something upstairs. Best she leaves school when she hits fourteen, they said. She could still be useful at home. 

Only Aurelia was no longer useful at home. She was a burden on her parents, a child who weighed them down with her slowness. 

A disease had crept into Aurelia’s bones. Some malady of mind that left her grasping for ideas. It squashed her memory and the slower she became the more her mother pondered her fate. It was never a matter of love. 

Love was not a commodity within this family of many heads, legs and arms all pistoning in unison to get through the tasks of life, the cooking, the eating, the washing, the cleaning. The walk to school, the books to read, the tasks to be completed outside in the woodshed, the gathering of firewood for the older boys, and stitching of holes in fabric for the girls below Aurelia who had not yet lost their minds. 

Aurelia’s mother feared this might turn out to be the fate of all her daughters. One after the other when they came of age, nine or ten, overnight these girls would shift their weight in the world and disappear.

It had happened to Aurelia’s mother, too, only she managed to hold onto a few shreds of memory, enough to get her past the end of her school days at fourteen, enough to rote learn the rudiments of house care, enough to find a husband. A burly tall man who was not unkind but who did not know any more than Aurelia’s mother that small children need love if they are to burst into bright stars that glow warm. If they are to grow into minds that can think and feel, that can run, hop and skip like John and Betty in the first-grade readers. 

Aurelia’s mother knew there had been other possibilities for her, but once she married and the first seeds of a baby swelled inside, there was no turning back. 

Then there was Aurelia. And her disappearance. 

Her mother then imagined a Hansel and Gretel story for her daughter. She the wicked stepmother, for no actual mother would abandon her child, however forlorn. And she cajoled her burly husband into taking Aurelia to the government house where cast off children were processed. Leaving her there.

Aurelia in a fog in the great hall at the centre of a crumbling mansion where bureaucrats took details of children lined up like ten pins one after the other ready for life to bowl them over. 

But Aurelia had no details to report. Aurelia could not remember. She was born with the winter already in her bones and although she wore clothes that kept her warm enough, thick stockings, socks to her knees over drill trousers and all under a great coat for the out of doors, her insides were laced over in memory loss. 

Aurelia was the raw forgotten part of her mother’s life. Her mother knew this and tried to rid herself of the unknown and unremembered by casting her daughter aside.

But Aurelia would rise again like the characters in Roman myths who once abandoned on hillsides as babies, refused to die. 

Let us hope Aurelia meets a similar fate. We cannot abandon her to words on the page, to the life of our imaginations, to the skin of words and of language. Aurelia is our memory of all that is forgotten. She needs us to hold her tight. 

A short history of bread

There came a time when bread was delivered to our door daily. Fresh white and crusty. My mother ordered four loves. Not for us the loaves and fishes. In a family of eight we ran out before the day’s end.

At breakfast you could have your choice of white cloud slices from loaves that melted in your mouth under a thick layer of butter and jam. Divine. In Holland people began their day with bread and ended it likewise but given we now lived in Australia we followed the habits of people around us. Cereal boxes from the newly flourishing supermarkets were too expensive. My mother bought them only on special occasions. Bread was a staple.

At breakfast we planned for the day ahead by buttering still more slices to wrap in greaseproof paper and slide into brown bags for school lunch. When school was over and we rocked up home, tired and famished and ready for a dose of television – Simba the white lion, Davy Crockett, exports from the world across the seas – more bread, until the only scraps left were crusts, which had the advantage of being chewy and unpopular, always plenty left for me.

My mother railed against our greed but refused to buy more than four loaves each day. Besides the expense she reasoned we should manage on this number of slices per person. She did not reckon on the appetites of her children, especially the ones who grew fast like me, my two older brothers and my younger sisters. 

During holidays when we kids were home together all day, the bread rations finished too soon. We ate the lot by lunch time. So, my older sister, sixteen by then decided bread was fattening, for her at least, and therefore needed to be eaten in moderation. She set a limit of two slices each for breakfast and two for lunch.

She policed our bread consumption with the ferocity of a lion tamer and stood by the bread bin counting out slices. I was twelve and fixed on my life as a poet. I took my small notebook and a biro from my sister’s stash and walked through the back roads of Cheltenham past half-built AV Jennings specials to the Farm Road Estate which abutted the golf course. I walked past the abandoned chook sheds to the stench of rotten eggs and chicken poop. You could walk inside the shell that once caged thousands of birds and look for signs of life. All you found was the stink of sadness and of death. It fed my nostrils but not my poetry. 

My poetry needed green spaces and open skies. The lofty places like where I imagined my hero, Wordsworth, walked as a child. Cyclone fencing kept outsiders out of the golf range with its manicured slopes and lush trees. On the other side of the road beyond the chook sheds market gardens sat neglected. Long sold to property developers and ear-marked for suburban sprawl. In some places roads-to-be were cordoned off but elsewhere the ground lay fallow. Rows of upturned soil covered in weeds and here and there a clump of carnations, as if someone had forgotten their children at a bus stop. 

In the distance the Lombardy poplars lined the horizon. They pulled my eyes skywards. Drawn to a poet’s lofty thoughts, and inspired words, I wrote knowing even then they were empty but hoping against hope that something might emerge to help me join hands with Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. 

It did not occur to me then that I might write about my life as I knew it. My small life in the family of my birth, among a tribe of kids who were forever hungry and squabbling. 

My stomach rumbled. The two slices of breakfast bread went nowhere, and words on paper lacked nourishment. I snuck back into the kitchen. My big sister was elsewhere folding washing or sweeping the front garden, my little sister reading a book, my brothers on their paper rounds. I was free in the kitchen.

Bread was off limits. My sister had counted every slice and parcelled it away in anticipation of lunch when we were allowed another two slices for the girls, four for the boys. 

Hunger gripped my stomach as if a hollow space had opened inside, swirling around in protest. I took a chair to reach the top cupboards where my mother hid the sweet biscuits and took a handful to stow away in my pockets. All that was left from our Sunday visitors. Arnott’s Nice with their glitter of sugar and a handful of ginger nuts. I preferred butternut snaps but there was only two left in the pack, and it was too obvious to snaffle them.

I slid the chair back in place once I’d filled my pockets and returned to my journey through the outback of Cheltenham, back to the lonely carnations and poplars, the blue skies of my poet dreams and nibbled on biscuits until my mind forgot the heavier happiness that came with several slices of bread. The way it filled your belly with bliss but also left room for more.   

The bliss of a book and sandwiches.