Return to My Soul

 

 

My mother had a dream. Sitting upright in bed with outstretched arms, she called out, ‘Where’s the baby? There’s no baby. I’ve gone through a whole pregnancy and a birth but there’s no baby.’

We were driving along Canterbury Road while Mum told me about her dream.

I was fifty-eight years old. Mum was eighty-one.

‘I didn’t have a baby,’ she said. With tears in my eyes, I put words to a feeling I had never dared to express: ‘I didn’t have a mother.’ Mum’s response was instant. ‘How could you have a mother when I didn’t have a baby?’

***

I grew up in Melbourne in the fifties and sixties. My parents were descendants of immigrants who had arrived in Australia from various parts of Great Britain during the 1800s, as free settlers at the Swan River Settlement in Western Australia, from Scotland via India and New Zealand, and from England via Africa.

There was also a convict among them. My maternal great-great grandfather, Ben Taylor, was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment at the Port Arthur Penal Settlement, Tasmania, in 1845 for stealing eight shillings from a Mr Owen in London. Ben arrived at the penal settlement in 1846 but was released after serving fifteen months of his sentence.

He later married a well-to-do Scottish woman called Katherine Stewart and lived a respectable life in Clunes, north of Ballarat. But according to my mother’s cousin, Paula, the family didn’t talk about Ben because of his past. My father, Edward, was the second youngest of six children brought up in a strict Baptist home.

His father (my grandfather, Laurence) spent long periods of time travelling throughout Australia searching for oil, gas, opals and gold. This meant that my grandmother, Maude, had to raise the children mostly on her own. Dad grew up largely without an adult male figure with whom he could identify and relate.

With his father virtually absent, Dad’s early years were coloured by the women in his life. In photos of him as a child he has long golden curls and is dressed as a girl. I always thought this odd, until I learnt that it was normal for mothers to dress their sons in girls clothing during the Victorian era and that this custom was still followed in the early twentieth century.

When he was five, Dad contracted scarlet fever. He was sick for two years, and was nurtured back to health by a nurse, Jane, who lived in the family home. Photos taken of Dad and Jane together show there was a close bond between them. I think the combination of a strong female presence and a weaker male one during my father’s early childhood had a direct impact on his sense of identity.

Reflecting on his life during his later years, he told me he didn’t know he was a boy until he began to play football at the age of eight. Upon finishing school, Dad joined the Royal Australian Air Force and trained as a fighter pilot. He wanted to fly for the Allies during the Second World War, but the war ended just before he completed his training.

Disappointed, he left the air force and followed a new career. He earned a Graduate Diploma in Music at Melbourne University. The eldest of two children, my mother, Rose, grew up in a troubled household. An underlying resentment gnawed at her parents’ marriage. Her mother, Clara, loved another man. Clara had wanted to marry him, but her father didn’t approve so she married Mum’s father, Henry, instead.