Sitting with an ancient and tiny Russian lady...She is quite blind, and wears big, cushiony slippers on her feet. She talks about the war, all the while smoothing a paper tissue onto the head of her walking stick. I wish I could remember every word she said, and how she said it.

- Tell us, Mama, is it true? her kids would ask, after watching some war movie on TV...Is it true, what they say about the war?

- It is true! she said, nodding her head. - It makes me so mad, she says to me.....when Australians complain. We are so lucky in this country! I say to them, you are so lucky. You have never been hungry! When I walked with my kids, and I saw bread that someone had thrown on the ground, I would say: If you ever see bread that someone has thrown away, pick it up and bring it home. No, you don't have to eat it, but you can bring it home, cut it up into little squares, and put it out for the birds to eat...So they did that...

I was only seventeen. My Mama would look out the window, and I would ask, What is it, Mama? She would say: I cannot tell you now, but I will tell you soon, when you are old enough...One day soon. Because she knew what was coming.

- What was it like when they dropped the bombs, my kids would ask...

-They would fly over, they would circle, and they would look at their maps, then they would open up underneath the plane, and they would drop the bombs, just like that. I would get the people in my building down into the shelter. First, I would go to the fourth floor. It was hard. They were old, and it was dark. They had to feel their way. When I got them all own there, they would ask me: Will we be okay? I would tell them, We will be okay! but what did I know? I was only seventeen. Then Hitler sent all of the young people to Germany, and he sent the German young people to Russia. I did not want to go. I knew if I went, I would never see my mother and father again...

- Did you see your mother and father again?

This time she whispers...- No, I never saw my mother and father again.

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Li(ber)ation

 Fiction by Philomena van Rijswijk – Locative Magazine

You're not a real poet...

 You're not a real poet until the words frighten you so much that you can't write them down...

(Journal,

22/10/24)

The Smell of his Room that Year

 

I think I believed he was a Martian for about a year.

I must have been four,

aware, as I was, of the polished dining-room floor.

I remember I was very close to it.

And he must have been five-and-a-half.

And it was the only thing he ever told me that wasn’t true.

 

There were other things that I didn’t want to know:

that an Atom Bomb might blow up the world;

that the lounge-room fights, every night,

were not all Daddy’s fault.

 

He explained osmosis for me,

and I got into trouble at school, when I already knew

that three take away five is minus two.

In his sleep he would recite A squared plus B,

and he told me that popular was just another word for phoney.

He told me how love was a kind of decision you made, right or not.

His Teilhard de Chardin books at the head of his boy-bed, and he wrote…

Life is a blank page, and you are my dot.

 

The Day of the Triffids was juvenile, he said,

lying in bed with his arm broken in three places,

a tiny transistor radio always within reach.

I remember the close smell of his room that year-

it was the smell of a man taking a boy’s place

inside a chrysalis of plaster.

 

And I wonder, sometimes, whether even the story of being a Martian

was not a lie, but an attempt to describe

his inexplicable arrival in such a foreign place-

like when Baby Superman was wrapped and sent

in his interstellar baby capsule

to end up living with Mr and Mrs Kent.

Nearer My God to Thee

 Awake at 3am with my cat, Lucy, purring on my chest, and reading Tim's book "Beyond the Seventh Gate". I've just been reading about the ghost in the cemetery who sang "Nearer My God to Thee". Finally, I switch off my bedside lamp, and, as usual, choose a podcast to listen to. Oh! Cool! A new episode of Strange Familiars! Some time in the next ten minutes or so, I fall asleep, and wake in fright just before 5am to a ghostly voice singing (you guessed it!)... Nearer My God to Thee...

This is not the only weird synchronicity, but the culmination of many. Reading about Toad Road, Pennsylvania, I'm fascinated by the stories about a mythical "asylum" where inmates were kept by a cruel doctor since, in a town in Southern Tasmania (where I live) there are the remains of an ACTUAL asylum with stories of cruelty and dreadful conditions attached. Originally called "The Asylum" at New Norfolk, the mostly empty buildings still remain. These days, there are Ghost Tours run by a preservation committee, but there are records of the terrible circumstances endured by "patients", some of whom were reputedly the offspring of incestuous couples living in the hills thereabouts. The last patients who are still alive are residents in a local nursing home.

Tasmania was colonised by Britain as a prison when America first ceased importing Britain's felons. One of the worst places was called Sarah Island, in Macquarie Harbour, on the wild West Coast, where convicts deemed uncontrollable suffered unimaginably. Many preferred to die. One convict stabbed another in order that he be executed, rather than have to stay there.

The only access to the island was from the sea through a hazardous strait named "Hell's Gates".

The most infamous convict was Alexander Pearce who managed to escape to the mainland twice, both times cannabalizing his fellow escapees. There is a belief, amongst some Tasmanians, that the descendants of Alexander Pearce lived and live near New Norfolk, the site of the aforementioned Asylum.

Some years ago, I wrote a short story inspired by a true story told to me by a nursing home resident who grew up in Lachlan, just outside New Norfolk. The ancient lady's father had worked at the Asylum. She told me how there was a woman who had lost three children who'd drowned in the black river, and that she walked out to Lachlan every Sunday to the cemetery. The old lady's father had told his three daughters to hide if they ever saw the asylum inmate. It was only when she was older that it came to her why her father was afraid for her and her sisters.

The thing that most haunted me about the old lady's story was that the woman who had lost her children would sing "Nearer My God to Thee" every Sunday, when she visited the cemetery. Thus, that was the title I gave to my story.

It may be a stretch, but many Tasmanian convicts were Irish political prisoners. Imagine if one, or some, carried stories of Hell's Gate, the Asylum, and the dark history of Tasmanian colonisation to Pennsylvania. Apparently, 14% of Pennsylvanians are ethnically Irish. Or, even more weirdly, what if stories like these are part of our collective unconscious????

Mama

 Maria was a tiny El Salvadorian lady who I saw four times a week in one of the nursing homes where I worked. She was about four foot tall, with long, grey hair in a bun, and a giant skirt that exploded out from underneath her breasts. I don't mind admitting that Maria was probably my favourite old lady. She had quite advanced dementia.

Maria spoke only in Spanish, so I started calling her "Mama", and the name was soon taken up by some of the carers. Having a smattering of Spanish, I could inject a word here and there into our conversations, backed up with exaggerated facial expressions. Every time I saw her, Mama would ask about "tu esposo" (my husband), and I would shake my head and sadly tell her "no esposo", to which information she would look suitably sympathetic.

Mama's own esposo had died some years before, but she had a photo of him on her bedside table, and she would feed him with her dinner. Consequently, there was a permanent smear of mashed vegetables on the glass that cleaning staff would wipe off every now and again.

Mama loved to draw, and her walls would be decorated with her pencil and crayon creations. Eventually, the activities staff covered the walls of her room in large sheets of butchers' paper, so that she could continue creating what I imagined to be rainbow-coloured angels and the Virgin Mary.

The worst times for Mama and for staff were the days when she had to have a shower and a change of  clothes. Staff, understandably, dreaded the drama of trying to undress her and get her into the shower. Screams would ensue, and Mama would accuse carers of stealing her clothes. However, after the fracas, she would be clean and tidy and settled in her chair. 

There were five daughters who visited often, although it was painful for the youngest, who had been born years later than her sisters, with a different father. Mama would not, could not, acknowledge her. This was obviously very upsetting for that daughter. 

I really miss those old people that I saw every day of the working week. There was such a "nakedness" between us, at times, that it was transcendental. I suppose she is probably dead, now.

Unbecoming a Writer

 It's about a year since I've done any serious writing. I decided to detox myself from the phony literary world of publishers, prize-winners and book launches. I realised how much, since the age of seven, when I first stood on my father's bed to type a story on Aunty Molly's old Olivetti typewriter, I had been groomed and lured into the Cult of Literature. 

My father's room, "The Little Room", previously and euphemistically referred to as a "sunroom", was off our narrow galley kitchen. Originally, there was a plank door, but it ended up with a curtain across the doorway. I don't remember when that happened. I have a few memories of it before it was my father's bedroom. I recall mounds of fresh washing lying on the single bed, waiting to be ironed or folded. And there was the old cane basket that was my mother's only laundry basket. I had it for many years, when my own children were small. I remember the creak of it. I ended up setting fire to it, one afternoon. Lucas had been away somewhere, and we had a small birthday tea ready for him on his return. I had already hung the old basket from the central pole of the house and had thoughtlessly lit a candle on the tiny ledge underneath it. It soon caught fire and ended up with a burnt gap under one handle.

My brother slept in the Little Room when he was very ill with gastroenteritis ("tincter-tincteritis", as he referred to it). We must both have been very young. Our childhoods were plagued with various tummy wogs, most likely due to the can toilet down the back that was not enough for a family of six. 

The Little Room was unlined. There was one single bed on the left, and the aforementioned wardrobe on the right. The big, old, black typewriter could be reached by standing on the edge of the bed and leaning across. Above the doorway, there was a shelf that held miscellaneous boxes and things that seemed mysterious to me. I often dreamt of it as a passageway or portal. I think that notion went far back into my pre-verbal days. 

Being unlined, the walls of the room were pimply grey asbestos. Beside the wall joist that was halfway along the bed, there was a hole that had, possibly, been punched or kicked in at some stage. The window consisted of mottled glass louvres, and outside the window was the crimson-leaved plum tree, though it never did produce plums, so it may not have been a plum tree at all.

So, it was at the age of seven that I would lean across that abyss, pushing down the letters of the ancient typewriter with great force, teaching myself how to use caps and how to go down to the next line, how to indent, and how to go from red ink to black, that I wrote my first short story entitled "How the Red Sea Got Its Name". It was a Biblical kind of story, gory and prophetic. Likewise, my first poem, "The Weeping Willow", was very earnest. "As I watch you, weeping willow, your branches hand down straight; they fall to make a pillow for the man who opened Heaven's Gate"...I took that poem to school and my teacher read it out. At that age, I was oblivious to my peers' hatred.

And so it was at that age that I started to think of myself as a writer. In high school, my English teacher referred to me as "the Professor". I was deep and introverted. I got to read the part of Laura when we studied "The Glass Menagerie". It was my use of language and my depth that made me special, and that little kernel of the extraordinary planted itself firmly in my self-concept.

It was just like a religion! I see that now! Writing would be the means to my salvation...my immortality. Every rejection letter would be the lash of the torturer...every success of other, less thoughtful writers, my Crown of Thorns. Perhaps it was merely age, or the fact that a close friend had left a visible cult, that I started to see the reality of "the literary world". How did I ever fall for such a crock? I asked myself. 

I did not like the person that literature turned me into. I did not like the bitterness and rage I felt when I realised the feet of clay of the literary world. I started scrolling past online news of others' success. I glowered at authors spouting tired cliches on arts programs. I saw how being an ex-writer was not unlike being an ex-Jehovah's Witness. I realised how religious trauma might expand to include the trauma of aspirant authors in the DMI. 

Perhaps I exaggerate. 

I decided, about a year ago, to de-tox from the Cult of Literature. I hope I have regained some perspective. Perhaps I feel a little less wounded. The struggle continues.