Take, for example, the year I turned twenty-one, the year I could not for the life of me seem to remember the fact that despite what happened, perhaps even because of what happened, my childhood was often happy, and fortunate, and good.
Which is perhaps why, as an act of minor rebellion against the part of my brain that once forgot to remember its own happiness, I am going to lead with that story here.
I was born the youngest of five, each of us one and a half years apart in age—perfectly spaced, like beads on a rosary. I guess you could call our family a rare triumph of the rhythm method. My parents deserve a medal, I think. A ribbon, at the very least.
My mother and father met by chance, at a party in Melbourne. Mum was from Amsterdam, just here for a visit. Dad was a local boy. He was studying law; she went on to study nursing. They started off as friends, then they began writing each other letters, and then, through the words, they fell in love, and eventually settled just a few kilometres from where Dad grew up, in a sleepy bayside suburb called Sandringham—‘Sandy’ to the locals.
First of the children was Johanna (Anna, the Leader), then Elisabeth (Lisa, Our Sparkle), James (the Boy Genius) and Rowena (Our Rowie, the One and Only). I am the baby, which explains a lot.
My first memory is of sitting propped on my mother’s hip in church, singing along to the words of hymns I didn’t know yet, thinking how much better this would all be if the priest would only hand me the mic. I must have only been two or three but I know this memory is my own, rather than one described to me, because when I think of it I can still smell what I will later recognise to be frankincense burning, still see the golden light streaming in through the stained-glass windows, still feel the warmth of my cheek on my mother’s shoulder, feel the vibration from her chest to mine as she sang. She always had such a sweet voice. Pure and true. Quick to harmonise. I remember my father singing along with her, one octave down—his glorious, booming baritone. I loved, more than anything, to copy him—copy the way he lowered his chin as he piped out those churchy tunes. And I also remember the thrill of copying the priest, putting on my opera voice, mimicking the funny way he sang the words ‘Holy Spirit’, and how the people around us, including my parents, tried not to laugh. And this, I now see, is one of the moments in which my identity as a joker, as a seeker, as a singer, as a Bowditch, was fused.
I remember the first time I watched The Sound of Music, the first time I used my pretend opera voice to sing ‘Edelweiss’. I remember telling my mother how much more fun it was to sing words instead of speaking them. I remember asking her why we even bothered with talking when we could all just sing, the way they did in musicals, and she said I was welcome to sing as much as I wanted. So I did, I sang all my thoughts, for what felt like a year; sang everything from ‘Pass the salt’ to ‘Go away, you silly knob-knob’. My sister Lisa was the first to crack; the first to say, ‘If you don’t stop singing like that I am going to be forced to thump you on the head.’ And, oh, what pleasure I took from singing even louder after that, knowing that she would never really thump me, because, as I sang to her at the time (perhaps in the tune of ‘Morning Has Broken’):
I am the baby,
You know you love me,
Can’t help adore me
For I am God’s gift.
It is still in me, this memory of the thrill of being chased by my sister, being scared at an age when fear felt like being on a swing, like flying.
I remember my very first wish, one made on a sweltering summer’s day as I hopped from foot to foot, heat shimmering up ahead on the concrete ramp, all the way from Sandy Beach to busy Bluff Road. I picked a white dandelion, blew hard on it, watched the white puff break, each seed parachuting away as I made my first wish to Dear God and all the Fairies to please, please, give me a daughter when I grow up. I have always wanted to be a mother—a mother like my own mother, the middle of eleven, children born healthy and at home in a narrow, three-storey, multi-generational house next to a canal in the heart of Amsterdam, in the middle of World War II, opposite the very same church where, on the day of her birth, my mother’s father walked her across the road to have her baptised.
I remember swimming in an above-ground pool in someone’s backyard, running in circles with my friends to make a whirlpool, being so small that the water was up to my neck, and in my stomach I still know that delight of the moment I broke into my first-ever dog paddle. I remember yelling out, ‘I’m doing it! I’m doing it!’ Back then, in the water, I felt so powerful, so magical.
I remember Dad’s shed—full of tools, and electrical cords, and old pieces of car engine. On the wall, in the dust, hung his silver fencing costume and two rusty swords—hisépée and foil. Strikes me as odd now, but for much of my childhood I thought being‘a fencer’ had something to do with building actual fences. Not until much later did James explain to me very patiently that, no, fencing was a sport, and our dad was a champion fencer. An Olympic fencer. One day, hiding in his cupboard, looking for
