was crying. My father’s touch in the night had ceased since coming to Australia and I had been freed of a horror I had grown used to. The night-time visitor never returned—I had been used and discarded, and now I felt empty. I had lost my father’s attention and so I wasn’t his special girl any more. Even though I retained no waking consciousness of his nocturnal visits, my body missed his closeness and I felt strangely abandoned. I wailed even more loudly. The other children took no notice whatsoever. What could they do anyway? They could see that if I wanted to come down it would be not very difficult for me. The mystery was too much for them to handle.
The upshot was that my parents, understandably, felt humiliated in front of the other family by their queer child who wailed for attention instead of having a good time like all the other kids.
My emotional state was all too difficult for my parents, who were going through their own adjustments as best they could. I would soon be a teenager, their first one. What were they going to do with me?
NEW WINE IN OLD SKINS
OUR LADY OF Good Counsel, that was the name of our parish church in Holland. Its side wall held a magnificent Byzantine mosaic picture of the mother of Jesus with her child snuggled up against her, and hopeful little candles constantly burned there in her honour. People prayed to her, and then they went away and did what they wanted.
We had travelled for six weeks across the world and, by some uncanny karmic coincidence, ended up in a parish of the same name 12,000 miles later. We were in a strange land, in a different culture, but, incredibly, the picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel was the same, though not in genuine mosaic. It gave me the feeling that in some strange way nothing had changed. She had followed us to Australia, Our Lady, who was supposed to give us good advice. Why didn’t I find the omen particularly comforting?
On our first day at the parish school, our mother dressed us up the way she had always done in Holland: she put big satin bows in our hair, and we wore the shiny lace-up shoes our father had made. The bows made us look conspicuous but it wouldn’t have mattered what we wore: the Australian schoolchildren, Catholic or not, despised the newcomerssimply because we were different. They couldn’t understand us, so they ridiculed us.
They had derogatory names for migrant people. Dagos was reserved for the Italians who arrived in droves after 1950. We were called Clogs, quite a benign word compared with the one they used for their own indigenous people, who were also different. If we wanted to be cheeky, we would ask them what their grandfather’s prison number was. After all, these children were nearly all descendants of the English and Irish sent to the penal colony for their misdeeds only two or three generations ago. The insult was lost on most of our classmates until our English improved.
I was eager to learn this new language and found it surprisingly easy. The roots of English, like Dutch, are in Latin, so guesswork paid off many times. As for trying to speak it, I listened to the broad accents of the local children, compared them to the educated newsreaders from the ABC and decided that I would never speak ‘strine’ but would opt for the King’s English. My speech ended up a peculiar mongrel version of the official language, but I thought that at least it had class.
The nun in charge of our class taught three grades at the same time in the same room. Her name was Mother Mary Luke, FCJ. (FCJ was short for Faithful Companion of Jesus; all the nuns had these initials after their names.) Mother Mary Luke had seen a thing or two in her life, which had given her some sense of reality. She read out our written work and praised our unusual ways of putting things as imaginative.
The words of Keats’ poem, written in huge calligraphy on a yellowing poster on the classroom wall, delighted me: ‘Season of mists and mellow
The upshot was that my parents, understandably, felt humiliated in front of the other family by their queer child who wailed for attention instead of having a good time like all the other kids.
My emotional state was all too difficult for my parents, who were going through their own adjustments as best they could. I would soon be a teenager, their first one. What were they going to do with me?
NEW WINE IN OLD SKINS
OUR LADY OF Good Counsel, that was the name of our parish church in Holland. Its side wall held a magnificent Byzantine mosaic picture of the mother of Jesus with her child snuggled up against her, and hopeful little candles constantly burned there in her honour. People prayed to her, and then they went away and did what they wanted.
We had travelled for six weeks across the world and, by some uncanny karmic coincidence, ended up in a parish of the same name 12,000 miles later. We were in a strange land, in a different culture, but, incredibly, the picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel was the same, though not in genuine mosaic. It gave me the feeling that in some strange way nothing had changed. She had followed us to Australia, Our Lady, who was supposed to give us good advice. Why didn’t I find the omen particularly comforting?
On our first day at the parish school, our mother dressed us up the way she had always done in Holland: she put big satin bows in our hair, and we wore the shiny lace-up shoes our father had made. The bows made us look conspicuous but it wouldn’t have mattered what we wore: the Australian schoolchildren, Catholic or not, despised the newcomerssimply because we were different. They couldn’t understand us, so they ridiculed us.
They had derogatory names for migrant people. Dagos was reserved for the Italians who arrived in droves after 1950. We were called Clogs, quite a benign word compared with the one they used for their own indigenous people, who were also different. If we wanted to be cheeky, we would ask them what their grandfather’s prison number was. After all, these children were nearly all descendants of the English and Irish sent to the penal colony for their misdeeds only two or three generations ago. The insult was lost on most of our classmates until our English improved.
I was eager to learn this new language and found it surprisingly easy. The roots of English, like Dutch, are in Latin, so guesswork paid off many times. As for trying to speak it, I listened to the broad accents of the local children, compared them to the educated newsreaders from the ABC and decided that I would never speak ‘strine’ but would opt for the King’s English. My speech ended up a peculiar mongrel version of the official language, but I thought that at least it had class.
The nun in charge of our class taught three grades at the same time in the same room. Her name was Mother Mary Luke, FCJ. (FCJ was short for Faithful Companion of Jesus; all the nuns had these initials after their names.) Mother Mary Luke had seen a thing or two in her life, which had given her some sense of reality. She read out our written work and praised our unusual ways of putting things as imaginative.
The words of Keats’ poem, written in huge calligraphy on a yellowing poster on the classroom wall, delighted me: ‘Season of mists and mellow
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