Tag: MJ Hyland

Doll House

In the few years between my father’s drinking himself to death and his decision to find another way through sobriety, he built doll houses. Dutch style double storey boxes with a heavy door alongside elaborate windows and curtains in the front, and its rear open to the elements and the small hands of children who could fossick inside and rearrange the furniture my father crafted with his own hands. 

Why he chose to build doll houses I cannot say. They spoke to his childhood story, his memories of home, in those twilight years when he had retired from the paid workforce of his suit and tie job at Cooper Brothers Accounting because he knew he could no longer perform at the standard required. He could no longer go to work without a drink in the morning to fire his feet.

After several weeks of detox in Delmont hospital where they also seared his brain with a burst of Electro Convulsive Therapy, my father came home changed. A sober man, and a man chastened by life’s demands.

I never saw him at work, only the end product, the large white box with its sloping roof and generous windows. The mock roof tiles sloped down to eaves that fringed a kitchen wallpapered in Delft Blue wrapping paper my mother once bought on a trip back home to Holland. The stair bannisters were of thin sticks of dowel, which my father stained brown with his soft squirrel brush. And the rear end sat exposed as if a clockmaker had peeled off the protective metal to reveal the cogs and pulleys of an interior life. 

Did my father make doll houses in a gendered way to please his granddaughters specifically, or did he imagine all his grandchildren might play with them regardless of gender. My grandson plays with the one remaining doll house today. He lines up his cars in the bottom rooms through the front window and calls the house his garage. 

He is not gentle with the furniture which is made of thin plywood and glue that has lost its ability to adhere after some forty years. So my daughter has moved it away for protection which suits my grandson who prefers an empty garage and more room for his cars.

Would his great grandfather be distressed by this. The father I knew would be. He’d be annoyed at this misuse of his construction, but the dead one in my imagination who looks over us all from some remote place of memory is not so troubled. This one welcomes any creative urge even if it does not meet societal expectation. 

In 1934 Dorothea Brande wrote her book Becoming a Writer in which she describes our need as writers to integrate our emotional and the instinctive sides, alongside the intellectual, the rational the sides of discipline and restraint against the capriciousness of our desires and comfort. If we wait for inspiration we might never move. 

When I was learning to become a writer, if such is possible, my novel writing teacher urged her class during the summer break to spend at least one month writing first thing every morning. And the following month to choose a fixed time each day – I chose 4.00 in the afternoon – to write again, for a month. For at least twenty minutes or a full page. To practice the art of writing is a discipline, something you sit down to do whether you want to or not. I managed both,worried all the time should I fail it was proof as Brande suggests I would not become a writer. 

Writers write. They do not spend days weeks months and hours thinking they might like to write. They settle in and write, whether they want or not. Bum glue or the 99 percent dedication to which the writer Janet Frame refers. She who dedicated her life to her craft once they let her out of the mental hospital in New Zealand where she lived for several years before deciding to pull the plug on the leucotomy they had decided was necessary to fix her brain. The doctors gave her a diagnosis of schizophrenia as if it was a gift, the gift of classification, one to account for her excess sadness and flights of fantasy, a child gifted with words whose way of speaking left some convinced she was mad.

But I digress.

It rankled that I did not write everyday as so many writers had urged. Write every day or you will dry out the juices of your imagination and disarm the skills available to those who like a musician practise their instrument several hours a day ready for their public performance with the Royal Philharmonic. 

I worked as a therapist in those days and began each session as early as seven am. How could I get up even earlier? I was also tired out by the mothering of four small children. How could I ever write every day. Therefore, I was not a real writer. 

Then one day I met MJ Hyland in the days before her second book Carry me Down was shortlisted for The Man Booker when she was teaching creative writing part time on weekends in Melbourne while working as a lawyer each weekday. 

‘I write every Sunday,’ she told me. ‘From late morning till the end of the day.’ This gave me heart. I too wrote on weekends regularly, first thing on Saturdays and Sundays. I edited my work in the nooks of crannies of my working week. I went on occasional weeklong writing retreats to get a feel for what real writers do when they dedicate their lives to the craft but for the rest I could eke out a writing life in dribs and drabs.

As the years have passed, I’ve come to see that every moment spent writing is practice. However unstructured. Every book I read is writing practice, every set of words I move around as editor is practice. And all the hours of practice I have put in, all those moments swatting at the keyboard, head down, noise cancelling headphones over my ears, all these moments are practice.

What comes out in the end, what reaches the pages of books for others to read, what gets published, is something else again.

Writers write. Whether they do so in a neat and formal way, every day, every second day, every Sunday afternoon, or whether it’s more haphazard, but nevertheless reliable. Writers write. 

We build doll houses of sorts, like my sad father who finally found a link to his creativity in the four years before his death. 

Locked inside the past

And so the days move on. My mother has bounced back from the brink of death and although her heart continues to fade the medication has kicked in and seems to have given her a new lease on life for the time being at least.

I have a new rhythm now when I visit. First I make her a half cup of tea – half cup only as her fluids are restricted to at most a litre a day – and then I settle myself down on the floor near her feet, peel off the support tubing from her legs and massage in a thick paste of Sorbolene cream on both legs, one after the other.

My older sister was the first to undertake this ritual but since she has been away these past ten days the task has fallen to me. I find it strangely soothing.
‘You’d make a good nurse,’ my mother said yesterday as I dipped my fingers back into the white cream.
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ I said to her. ‘I’m not so patient.’ But it’s true I prefer to be doing things and somehow smoothing Sorbolene cream into my mother’s dried and thin skinned legs comforts me as much as it comforts her.

Again this reversal of mother and child, this sense that I might now do things for my mother that she once did for me, though I have little sense of my mother from those early days when she would have attended to my physical needs. Who does?

My memory of my mother is one of a gentle presence, a somewhat preoccupied presence, maybe a vague presence but someone I could love with all my being. It distressed me as a ten year old when my older brothers spoke harshly of our mother, when they called her names.
‘How can you talk about our mother like that?’ I said. I needed to preserve an image of my mother in those days as a beautiful woman, saintly in her manner.

In those days I did not object to saints, not as I do now. Today I am troubled by the notion of sainthood. It borders too much on the masochistic. Self denial can become perverse as much as it is necessary often times to put ourselves second to others, but not all the time, and not in that awful self effacing way as did some of the saints from my childhood memories.

When I was little the saints were the equivalent of movie stars. I followed their fortunes with the same vigour young people today might follow the fortunes of a celebrity. I attached the significance of each one of our saints’ name sakes to every one of my sisters and brothers and tried to draw links between the personalities of each sister and brother with the saint after whom they were each named.

My own patron saint was altruistic, a holy woman who performed countless works of mercy. Or so my mother tells me. We share names, my mother and I, with our patron saint, Queen Elisabeth of Hungary.

Elisabeth of Hungary loved the poor. Strange, to love the poor. I always hated being poor. I even hated the so-called poor. The little black boy on the desk at school with his red bow tie and metal tongue hanging out begging for a penny was a constant reminder of the miseries of being poor. Unlike other girls I never had a surplus penny to offer him and the starving poor in Biafra. Any surplus pennies I’d have kept for myself.

My mother says our patron saint was married to a tyrant. Not so strange that. My father was a tyrant and he married a good woman. He often said as much.

In my mother’s version of the story Saint Elisabeth went one day, as was her custom, to visit the poor with a basketful of food. She had taken bread, freshly baked from the palace kitchens (Elisabeth was a queen) and fruit, green apples, yellow pears, purple plums plucked from the palace orchards and vegetables from the gardens, broad beans, potatoes and squash. A riot of colour and a cornucopia of smells, neatly tucked inside her huge basket and covered with a heavy, lattice cloth, normally used by the cook for cleaning and mopping up spills.

The poor family, a widow and her four small children, urchins in rags, were huddled together around an open fire in the centre of the thatched cottage when Elisabeth made her entrance. Before she had a chance to make her offering, horses hooves could be heard in the background and moments later Elisabeth’s husband, the king, the tyrant, the wretch swooped in through the door and ripped off the cover. He had forbidden her to give to the poor and was about to lambaste Elisabeth her generous folly when he was stopped in his tracks. Roses, blood red, blush pink and sun yellow, spilled out across the dusty floor, their perfume overtaking the sooty fumes of the fire. Elisabeth had been spared her husband’s rage. He now was the one humiliated and she vindicated through the intervention of God’s miracle. Elisabeth’s sainthood was guaranteed, the roses a clear sign of her beatitude.

My namesake’s story offers a message on how I must behave and whom I must marry. Alternatively, I suspect I might fare better not marrying at all. Instead I might become a nun and forego the tyranny of such a husband, believing, as I do, I have no hope of such miracles.

I met the writer MJ Hyland once in the days when I was trying to scratch out a complete memoir of my life up until I was eighteen years of age. She had read and edited some of my earlier chapters. We met in a café in Carlton in the days when MJ Hyland went by the name of Maria and when she still worked as a lawyer for Clayton Utz.

She was generous with her time, though I paid her for it, and her fees were not slight. It mattered not. I had met her in a CAE workshop on fiction writing and I enjoyed the way she taught and the way she thought.

Maria suggested then that I play around with the saints’ names as they attached to each of my sisters and brothers. In her mind’s eye she could see each of us in bed and above our beds a framed portrait of our respective saints.

I do not have a fiction writer’s imagination, at least I do not have Maria Hyland’s imagination. At first in my imagination I saw a row of children in beds lined up side by side, like sardines in a can, one sardine can after the other, but that was not how it was, nor is it the way I want to see us.

Still the idea has stayed with me, and it becomes problematic. To identify the names of the saints after whom each of my siblings was named is to identify my siblings by name and I am wary of such an undertaking, as if I presume too much in speaking their names out loud. It is as much as I feel safe to do in identifying them as an older sister, a younger sister, an older brother, a young brothers.

In this way I can only identify my siblings in chronological order relative to me. I do not identify them as ‘real’ people living in the world because I do not have the right. They are real people and yet in my writing they become more like fictional characters locked inside the past.

When I was little my father took photos of each one of us, separate portrait shots which he developed within a tiny dark room that was once the pantry in our old Camberwell kitchen. He developed the photographs first as tiny proof shots which he then laid out in the bath room and spread against the bath wall to dry. From these miniature shots my father made decisions about which photos he might develop to normal photo sized dimensions.

The sheets of proof shots he then discarded as useless, but I retrieved them from the rubbish pile. I took these tiny images of me, my sisters and brothers and cut them into miniature squares and then lined them up in age from oldest to youngest in my homemade photograph album. I have the images still.

My siblings mattered so much to me then. They matter to me now, but in a different way. We have grown distant. Our lives have diverged. We have produced families of our own and live far apart, but my memories of their significance remains. They were once my best friends however much we fought. They remain so today in my mind like pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is my life, as I am perhaps a single piece in the jig saw puzzle of their lives.

We each take up only a small space in each others lives and yet if one or other of the pieces goes missing the whole thing is incomplete, like a hole in an otherwise full set of teeth.

Our parents frame us and soon that frame will be gone completely and the individual pieces of the puzzle will be less well held but hopefully they will stay together even in the absence of the parental frame. Hopefully my mother’s soon and inevitable death will not cause the whole jigsaw puzzle to fall apart.