I remember my mother steaming vegetables, the way the windows would fog up, the way she would use her finger on the window to draw love-hearts, and write our initials inside them, all together—A.B L.B J.B R.B C.B I.B M.B—and how we would stand next to her giggling, and I would copy my older sisters, drawing shapes that seemed to make people laugh, although I didn’t know why: two big balls, and a banana sticking out the middle. And how Mum would try not to laugh, would say, ‘Now, now, none of the yucky stuff. Just nice stuff, please.’ Butterflies, rainbows, crosses.
I remember waking up on my birthday, and finding a special birthday chair waiting for me, all pretty and decorated with flowers from the garden, and streamers too. On the walls, Mum had hung paper honeycomb lanterns that she had had sent over especially from Holland. This was one of the traditions from her childhood—that on your birthday, you got your very own birthday chair, all decorated, just for you, and no one else was allowed to sit on it.
I remember how we would make tapes for our relatives in Holland, and how I loved to sing into the portable Sony tape recorder that my mother gave me: one where I could use my little fingers to press ‘play’ and ‘record’ at the same time. I remember making long dream-like soundscape tapes of singing and talking and telling stories and walking around the house with Sam the dog; how I carried the tape recorder with me from room to room; how I told the tape recorder all about the world I saw—made up songs about the vacuum cleaner and the hot-water bottle; and how I listened back to them afterwards, delighted. Anna and Lisa and James and Rowena also made tapes. I still have them. On them, Mum and Dad encourage us to sing together, mostly in English but sometimes in broken Dutch.
I remember knowing how much my mother missed her family in Holland. She had moved here when she was nineteen, not so much for a holiday, she says, but to find herself, to find out the meaning of life. She was a philosopher, you see, a rebel, a self-taught scholar, still furious about the Holocaust and how God could allow such a thing to happen. She looked like Audrey Hepburn, although more beautiful, or so said my father. Mum told him she was just ‘putting it on’. Clearly, Dad bought it. He said he didn’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t met my mother at that party back in 1962. She wasn’t even meant to be there. She had wanted to go to Paris but her father forbade it, said it was not right for single women to travel like that. Instead, he allowed her to visit her sister who had migrated to Clayton, in Melbourne, Australia. Back then, Clayton was just a suburb of paddocks and new houses. Mum found Australia confusing at first. She couldn’t understand why nobody seemed to live in the centre of the city, for a start. Nor could she work out what it meant when you were asked to bring a plate to a picnic.
On the tapes, I can hear my mother’s voice, speaking singsong Dutch, so gentle and sweet. Like I said, I don’t usually hear her Dutch accent at all when she talks to me in real life, but on these tapes there it is, plain as day, as she tells us kids to go ahead and sing for Oma Annie, her mother, who would go on to live until she was a hundred. When I listen to those tapes now, I hear James and Rowena singing songs together about minnows and fleas, songs that make my chest go tight with feelings so precious that I don’t know how to keep them safe, even today. Maybe that’s why I have always had the urge to write things down: to keep a record, somehow, in case my mind forgets.
On the tapes I can hear Dad too, Mr Baritone, who surely had a voice for broadcasting, as he recites ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ by heart, saying, ‘Hey, now,’ gently when we—Anna Lisa James Rowie Clare—argue over who gets to press the buttons on the tape recorder.
I remember Lisa skipping, and James reading, always reading. I remember Anna doing my hair and putting flowers in it and taking photographs of us all. I remember hiding with Rowena under a black-and-red-and-white doona cover in our bedroom, flapping it up and down and making wind. I remember the feeling of her elbows knocking into me, and the sound of her husky voice, and understanding she was the boss, and how good it felt to know my place. I remember following her, and being half dragged by her, and I remember her hair half up in a bun, although I can’t be sure if that’s my memory or a photograph I saw.
I remember planting red and blue pansies with Mum in the front yard of our family home in Heath Street. This was the house my parents built. It had heated tiling and a massive backyard. This was supposed to be the time in their lives when, finally, everything came together.
I remember singing ‘The Quartermaster’s Store’ in the back of the old Toyota HiAce stick-shift van—‘There was Clare, Clare, sitting in a chair, in the store, in the store’—and how we’d go through every single person in the family, one by one, Mum, Dad, Anna, Lisa, James, and then, when it came to Rowie, how we would sing for her too. I remember how hard my parents tried to keep
