In an effort to prompt kinder memories of my grandmother, I dug out some old photo albums from the closet in my parents’ house that served as the family archive. The Alice pickings proved to be slim. A couple of fading colour snaps from the 1970s capture her as a kind of human scarecrow, all fuzzy grey hair and rakish frame.
One of them depicts the two of us mid-slide on the uncomfortable black leather couch in the living room of the house I grew up in. Alice is wearing a blue and white floral print dress, and black old-lady rubber lace-up shoes—which, apart from the house slippers, were the only things I saw on her feet. I’m in a signature sprawl, one matchstick leg flung out in front of me and the other over the side, a book in my left hand and my right thumb in my mouth. Between us lies the naked body of my doll, Gail.
Gail was an unlikely gift from one of my father’s acquaintances in the building trade. Until I met her I had exhibited no interest in dolls, but I had fallen hard. Wherever I went, Gail went too—including a swimming pool, which transformed her black nylon tresses into a triangular lump. Soon after that, her head was somehow divorced from her torso, so she became less than half the doll she had been; in an enduring family mystery, her body was never seen again. Gail’s dismemberment only made me love her more. Her head accompanied me everywhere. At night I spread out her matted inky halo on my pillow and laid my own head of thick brown hair upon it. I loved feeling those soft acrylic lumps against the cool silkiness of my hair. Lying in bed, my face pressed up against Gail, was the only time when my hair was free. My mother loathed freely flowing locks on any woman, but particularly on her daughter. She insisted that my hair be harnessed in either a ponytail or pigtails so tight that they never had to be redone.
In the photograph Gail was yet to lose her torso. It’s my only photo of her intact, and until recently its primary value was as the poignant Before shot of my beloved confidante. Looking at the picture again, I noticed a lot of space between my grandmother and me on that couch. Who can say whether she had been reading to me or if I had been trying to read to her—or perhaps to Gail.
Reading is something I associate with my mother, who drove me every week to the Gladesville Public Library to replenish my Holly Hobbie drawstring book bag; who read stories to me until I grew old enough to read them for myself; who volunteered to help other children at my school learn to read. Who, though she was in an almost constant orbit, shuttling between the kitchen and laundry, the clothesline and the bedroom, the school and the supermarket, could always be found, in her rare moments of stillness, with a magazine or newspaper in her hands.
Because of my intense attachment to Gail I identified strongly with Christopher Robin’s utter dependence on Pooh in When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, which my mother had bought for me and which I obsessively read and re-read. It wasn’t only the rhymes of the poems and their exotic locations that enchanted me. Christopher’s melancholy sang to me from the creamy illustrated pages, and I longed for the kind of solitude in which a poem might present itself for me to write down. In A.A. Milne’s world, children visited Buckingham Palace and scolded their nanny and sat quietly on their favourite step. No one interrupted their daydreaming to ask what they were doing or to remind them that dinner would be ready soon. How marvellous to write poetry like Christopher, I would think. But no sooner had I started down that path than I tripped over a large stumbling block that seemed impassable: what would I possibly write about? I had no step of my own, no nanny, and no chance of visiting Buckingham Palace. Who would be interested in poems about a little girl and her best friend, Gail? And with Gail now just a head with matted black hair, any hypothetical illustrations would have been a sticking point, too.
My favourite books featured a heroine solving a mystery. The escapades of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven. The neighbourhood adventures of Milly-Molly-Mandy. The Nancy Drew detective stories by Carolyn Keene, Julie Campbell Tatham’s tales starring Trixie Belden, and later Agatha Christie’s elderly sleuth Miss Marple. Together they formed a genealogy of investigative heroines. The puzzles they encountered were inevitably solved by the last page. Their every story had a positive ending; every problem, a neat solution.
But now, as I reviewed the certificates and correspondence relating to my grandmother’s musicianship, I realised that Alice’s story remained a mystery to me. What had happened to lead her in the opposite direction—geographically and professionally—of the one in which she’d seemed headed? Why had she given up a burgeoning professional life in music in Glasgow? How could she pack up her talent and experience and sail to Australia, only to settle for life on a farm?
Was my grandmother’s altered relationship to music a result of financial circumstances, boredom, disappointment—or something else? Had the relentless Australian sun bleached her of her passion for singing? If not, where did she channel her emotional attachment to music? What did it mean to lead an early life in which music had been central, only to give it up like an impossible love? I had done this myself, throwing away thirteen years of intensive piano study for a professional
