I was speaking with the woman who was my origin story. She met my mother 25 years before I did. I wanted to sit across from her and talk for weeks. I hadn’t seen my grandmother in 18 years.
My grandmother’s six brothers died not knowing their niece – her lost daughter – had found her. Only four of them knew their sister had a girl adopted out. A secret hidden, but heavy: passed around the dinner table in keep quiet glances between the brothers who held the secret to keep it from the ones who didn’t. These strangers tied by blood to me knew the shadow of my mother’s existence but not her substance.
I’ve put Heather and you in the timeline now, my grandmother said.
I hadn’t travelled half a world to hear these words but they mattered all the same. My grandmother had researched and recorded her Welsh genealogy. In the table-sized printout of her work my mother and I were initially left out of the family tree. According to the records, we didn’t exist.
I’d travelled to Wales because I wanted to sit across from my remaining matriarch before she died. At 89, she was sharp. During our three days of conversation at one point I couldn’t find the word for the musical instrument my brother from another mother, Alexei, had played the day before in his family’s Devon home. You mean pianola? she’d said without pause.
The question I wanted an answer to most was, Who was my grandfather?
I didn’t get the answer of his surname, but I got others. Jim went to complete his leaving certificate with the RAF in Brighton during World War II, which is where he met my grandmother, who was doing a secretarial course. Together they created my line, but all trails of him have grown cold.
At one point, I walked up the winding, single-width stairs onto the landing outside my grandmother’s own bathroom and bedroom with its view of slate, sleet and silence. Her six brothers’ photographs lined the whitewashed walls. All of them were in their uniforms, young and handsome: RAF captain, second lieutenant in the army, wireless officer on tankers to a Merchant Marine. They were all dead. The last brother to die had been alive a year prior. He’d published his swansong about his journalist work as a travel writer, The Road to Fleet Street, just before he died. My grandmother was the last one standing of her once large family.
I am forever grateful to that police doctor. My grandmother looked down into her cup of tea.
I too looked down into my teacup, thinking about what face had been reflected back at my grandmother. I imagined a pot-bellied straight talker. Gruff in manner, but with a kind heart. A police doctor doing what he thought best for this young woman across from him. He would have served in the war only three years prior.
You’re a fit, healthy young woman and you shouldn’t think about an abortion, he’d said. Go ahead and have the baby, but take more care with your love life in future.
My grandmother and I also talked about her brother, who was in the Metropolitan Police Force himself, arranging for her to consult this doctor about obtaining an abortion in the early stages of the pregnancy. I owe my life to his words and my grandmother’s decision. In 1948 abortion in the United Kingdom was illegal unless, according to the Preservation of Infant Life Bill, it was detrimental to the mother’s health.
Returning to the UK was another victory lap, similar to the New Zealand trip that B, Celso and I took after my chemotherapy finished. This time my head of hair was back and I’d survived the crucial five years post-diagnosis cancer free. Chemicals maintained my body. The current wisdom on the oestrogen suppressor Arimidex was women should take it for ten years. I had three years to go with it in my veins every day, leaching my fat of oestrogen.
At the ten-year mark you’re not cured but you join the rest of the population’s chances of developing the disease – approximately one in nine for women in ‘developed’ countries like those in North America and western Europe. The rate in Australia is actually one in eight.
As the age of people in developed countries increases, so too does the risk of getting cancer, due to the normal process of the body’s genetic integrity failing. But there’s more behind the higher incidence: women from low-risk countries emigrating to high-risk countries develop similar cancer rates.
Those first standard questions Dr Wilkinson posed on meeting me – Do you smoke? How much do you drink? What’s your diet like? et cetera – always gave me pause.
I clearly wasn’t obese, but it would have been a red flag if I’d walked into his room fat. I did play with my reproductive life, though, by taking those white pills to keep my breast milk in, and taking the contraceptive pill for years before going off it. The answer to whether the enormous oestrogen and progesterone surges during pregnancy had combined to wake up my dormant biology and genetic predisposition to develop breast cancer remained unknowable.
For women, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer worldwide – 25 per cent. Close to two million new cases are diagnosed per year and this appears to be rising. So too are survival rates. When I hear of this I remember that survival is often judged in terms of five years and sometimes ten. Most women diagnosed in Western countries, like Australia, have over an 80 per cent chance of surviving it – for five years. In Australia, it’s the fourth-most common cause of death for women.
Breast cancer is also the most common cancer affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. Even though their incidence of it is lower than that of non-Indigenous women, so too are their rates of survival. This could be due to later detection and poorer outcomes in rural settings –
