On March 19 my grandmother Kathleen would have turned 100. She died 17 years ago now, aged 83. Some of her children, my uncles and aunt, had a celebration for her last week – they live interstate and it was a small and informal occasion which I wasn’t invited to and most likely wouldn’t have flown down for had I been invited. We have all been thinking about her though and I’ll talk to my cousin and sister about her when I next talk to them, my cousin already reflected in a recent email about her warmth and generosity. She had five children so the house was always full of visiting family and smells emanating from pots of stew, roasts, sponge cakes, stewed apple cakes and food like that from cookbooks like the Australian Women’s Weekly or Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union Cookbooks.
I used to go and stay with my grandparents sometimes during my university holidays and study during the day on the dining room table while being well fed and cosy at night in the small, carpeted bedroom with two single beds and their floral quilts and curtains. Grandma spoke her mind and could be quite coarse (I remember mum once being quite offended by her referring to a peninsula as being ‘like a big tit sticking out. . . ‘). And she was always busy doing something: shopping, cooking, playing bowls, going to the Probus social club, visiting friends, caravan holidays, gardening. She led a busy and full life up until the last couple of years when she had a stroke during an operation, causing significant brain damage and dementia. It was hard to see her like that and living in a nursing home that was so stripped of the rich social life she had thrived in.
I think of her at this time more often but I have always thought of her – and she is still an important part of my life. I have a photo of her as a beautiful young bride during the Second World War in our study. It’s sad to think of the decay that time caused to this slim young person as the decades wore on. It reminds me of our mortality and the importance of living life to the full as she did, while we can.
Before Grandma’s birthday anniversary I had been thinking of my other grandmother, Mavis, who I also loved very much even though she died when I was only seven. I remember her voice, and her face, and moments of being with her when we were at the beach, or in her house, which were exciting for my siblings and I because these were times when we were on holidays and we also didn’t see her very often because she also lived interstate. It wasn’t so much my Nanna that I had been thinking of though, but her mother, whose story makes me want to delve deeper in to her life.
Nanna’s mother had six children, including Nanna, and when Nanna was 13 years old her mother left her and her siblings and father for another man. She moved to another town and had two or three other children and my father says that Nanna never saw her mother again. There was a letter from mother to daughter which was never answered and dad was told that his grandmother was dead so he never met her, even though she actually died only a few years before Nanna, in her 80s, whereas Nanna died of breast cancer when she was only 63. That means that dad’s grandmother was in fact alive until he was in his mid-twenties and she was still alive when I was born, and for a few years afterwards at least.
I find this story very moving. I asked dad about it recently, and asked why he hadn’t made contact with his aunts and uncles from his grandmother’s second marriage, or with their children, his cousins. He said there had been some contact but they live in Mildura and probably wouldn’t be interested in digging things up from the past. But I’m thinking of trying to hunt down dad’s cousins and see if I can make contact (I presume his aunts and uncles are now dead). I’d like to meet them and hear whether they have any family stories about their grandmother and her life before their parents were born. I think she must have missed her other children every day of her life and I don’t begrudge her happiness or underestimate the drudgery of bringing up six children when she was young in the depression-era 1930s, especially if she found love somewhere else and it was absent with her first husband.
My great-grandmother’s trauma-inducing decision happened close to 100 years ago now, and I wonder what impact it had on my Nanna, who never forgave her even after 50 years yet I remember as an extremely warm and nurturing person. Was she? How did her abandonment affect her, and what impacts did that have on my father and aunt in turn? And hence on me?
William Faulker once wrote that ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ I wonder if there are people alive who have stories that help shed light on this story. And if I will try, and succeed, in finding them.
