By the Book Page 3

  Home Management: Volume 1 was edited by Alison Barnes and published by George Newnes Limited of London. It’s undated but I believe it came out early in the 1950s, using illustrations and photos from decades before.

  Confidently it told me all about the perfect family in the perfect home, how to make sure you have one and how to keep it humming. ‘The housewife’s best weapon against moth and other pests is a spray gun of DDT used generously and often,’ it advises under a photograph of a woman with a bobbed dark helmet of hair, an impossibly white apron and sleek high heels, wielding said gun.

  From making old scraps from the larder really appetising (‘diced cold meat takes on a new lease of life set in aspic jelly with a few peas and egg slices for colour’) to planning a funeral (‘if, for any reason, a disinterment is necessary, permission must first be given from the Home Office’), the book has everything. But it was the section on Sex Education that I was driven to after the Kama Sutra. It made no mention of exotic animals or the practices of courtesans, but advised that, ‘Adolescents should be taught that sexual desire is normal, that no harm can come from continence, and that it is advisable to engage actively in recreational pastimes, while trying to avoid consciously thinking about sex.’ I was disturbed by learning that ‘children from unhappy homes seldom make happy marriages when they become men and women’ and that ‘no human instinct is more liable to distortion in early life than the sexual instinct’.

  But then I happily found that ‘a woman is only as old as her feet’ and that ‘a goat will quickly learn to jump up on to a bench about 14 inches high, which makes milking more comfortable for both’. I saw how to lay out a herbaceous border, and discovered a recipe for nettle beer. Duck-keeping for profit sat beside an article on growing your own smokes—and blending the tobacco to suit your own personal tastes. As one who is always on the lookout for massive catastrophes, I have hung on to Home Management with its arcane but handy hints despite several house moves and many book-culls.

  I sometimes wonder why it was abandoned in that crummy boarding house. Maybe it had been a wedding present to a hopeful blushing bride, and the room she found herself in fell far short of the perfect home in the perfect dream. No lily pond with arbour, no pantry, no training everyone to ‘use a clothes brush morning and night on outer garments of all but the finest fabrics’ and helping the drill ‘by keeping good brushes at all strategic points’. Home Management came to me on a wave of irony long before I developed an appreciation of the form.

  But, as has been the case all my life, whenever I had a question, or even before I could formulate one, the right book arrived to offer answers. I had begun to discover that books could provide all kinds of confusing information about sex. Now I was about to learn what books could teach their readers about love.

  CHAPTER 3

  The ferocity of love

  While Mama read her way through banned books, and books about social and political change, I was becoming a dutiful student of literature, and worked my way through the reading lists for my year levels at high school.

  I studied The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, his 1895 American Civil War story of bravery, cowardice and the making of men, Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, the 1939 thriller set in the wilds of the English countryside, Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, and other books too. Nothing, however, spoke to me in such a monumental way as a small book of two collections of stories, My Mother’s House and Sido, by a French writer with just one name—Colette.

  I think I was enticed by the point of view of the young child who had been christened Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, as she remembered her childhood house in the village of Saint-Sauveur. Colette lived with her mother, Sido, and her father, Jules-Joseph Colette, her mother’s older, gruff second husband, who had lost a leg fighting the Austrians at Melegnano, in the Second Italian War of Independence. He was passionately in love with Sido. She called him ‘the Captain’; the children—Colette and her older brother Leo (who was conceived when Sido was still married to her violent, drunken first husband), as well as the two children of her first marriage, Achille and Juliette—were ‘the savages’.

  In this book, surrounded by the sensuality of her home and garden under Sido’s care, and affectionately called Minet-Chéri by her mother, Colette tries to fathom everything she can about the adult world.

  Throughout her life Colette was aware that her beloved mother had dominated much of her work:

  Any writer whose existence is long drawn out turns in the end towards his past, either to revile it or rejoice in it. As a child I was poor but happy, like many children who need neither money nor comfort to achieve an active sort of happiness. But my felicity knew another and less commonplace secret: the presence of her who, instead of receding far from me through the gates of death, has revealed herself more vividly to me as I grow older…I am not at all sure that I have put the finishing touches to these portraits of her, nor am I at all sure that I have discovered all that she has bequeathed to me. I have come late to this task. But where could I find a better one for my last?

  Our home was nothing like Colette’s. Sido was always stopping in the garden to ‘crack a dry poppy head with her finger-nail, rub the greenfly from a rose shoot, fill her pockets with unripe walnuts’, but my mother had come from a farming family in the Polish countryside, and sometimes when we drove out into the hills on a Sunday she remarked on the richness of the soil or the smell of the air.

  Sido was also a study in grown womanhood for Colette, as was my mama for me, although my mother was far more silent and mysterious. Perhaps in my thoughts about Colette and Sido I was trying to project myself into my mama’s country childhood and imagine my grandmother, Rivka, after whom I was given my Hebrew name. Ramona was a name my mother had heard in a song on the radio when she was pregnant. ‘Ramona, I hear the mission bells above / Ramona, they’re ringing out our song of love.’ She thought it was safer to name me something not immediately identifiable as Jewish. Just in case.

  Why else would a young girl relate so strongly to the wistfulness of the first story in My Mother’s House? To Colette describing Sido calling into the garden over and over:

  Where are the children?

  Two are at rest. The others grow older day by day. If there be a place of waiting after this life, then surely she who so often waited for us has not ceased to tremble for those two who are yet alive.

  My mother’s father died when she was two months old. At fourteen, in 1942, she was sent by her mother to Warsaw, where the family knew people who would arrange forged identity papers. From this time, she was on her own. After the war Mama discovered the rest of her family had been murdered. I imagined her mother, Rivka, as Sido, waiting for her and worrying about her in an afterlife.

  I have just re-read the chapter in My Mother’s House called ‘Jealousy’. It summons another memory. Sido is off to the butcher to buy meat for their dinner, still in her apron, while her husband fusses and glares as he looks at his watch, waiting for her return. When she does he accuses her of dallying with a view to making eyes at the young men in town:

  Indignantly my mother folds her hands, pretty still though ageing and weather-beaten, over a bosom held up by gusseted stays. Blushing beneath the bands of her greying hair, her chin trembling with resentment, this little elderly lady is charming when she defends herself without so much as a smile against the accusations of a jealous sexagenarian. Nor does he smile either, as he goes on to accuse her now of ‘gallivanting’. But I can still smile at their quarrels because I am only fifteen, and have not yet divined the ferocity of love beneath his veteran eyebrow, and the blushes of adolescence upon her fading cheeks.

  It was the last sentence I puzzled over. The ferocity of his love and the blushes of adolescence upon her fading cheeks were completely unfamiliar to my fifteen-year-old self, not because I could not respond to such things at that tender age, but because I knew there was no such passion in my home. So it was like that, the passion be
tween a man and his wife, that does not fade, that survives the years of domesticity and the missteps of living?

  My parents didn’t talk about how they met or why they were together. They fought about money and didn’t seem to have anything in common. Years after my mother had died and I was planning a trip to Poland to make a radio documentary, I asked my father to explain where in his birthplace town of Siedlce they had met, and subsequently married. He told me that in 1945 he had been helping with a survey of the surviving Jews in the town. When the Russian army had liberated Warsaw, my mother had gone east to her village to find her family. Having learned they had all been killed, some by villagers and the rest at the death camp of Treblinka, she tried to kill herself. She was taken to hospital in Siedlce to recover.

  When she was released two months later, the war was over. She was sitting, as she had told me once, ‘in the gutter’, when my father came by and asked if she was Jewish. She was seventeen. He was nine years older. She said, ‘I sold myself to him for a stale roll and half a pint of milk.’

  But he told a different story. He said that when she found out that he had a book in his digs, she started to visit him. The book was Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero by the Polish writer and Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, a historical novel of which she never spoke. I wondered why she had never told me about the book. I sought it out when I remembered my father’s story.

  As I read the opening chapters I imagined Mama at seventeen, alone, war-ravaged, just out of hospital and absorbed by this story of devoted love between the beautiful Christian convert Lygia and the young patrician and tribune Marcus Vinicius. He rescues her from death in the Coliseum, and becomes a convert too. I was puzzled about why this book would be a driver for Mama to connect with my father and seek him out. Quo Vadis was a classic of Polish literature, but in her orthodox family secular works would not have been encouraged. And she had left school in the sixth grade, when she was eleven, so she would not have read it there.

  I knew that she had spent six months learning to pass herself off as a devout Catholic at the house of the people who arranged her false identity papers, memorising the prayers by heart, and getting used to kneeling on stone floors. She told me that the son-in-law of the owner of the house lived with them. He was a journalist, so there must have been books to read. Perhaps she had already started reading Quo Vadis. When the journalist found out that they were harbouring a young Jewess, he insisted she leave, as it was becoming too dangerous for his family. Perhaps meeting my father and seeing the book again, she was held in its thrall. Did it connect her to a time when she thought her family was alive, and there was still hope?

  All my ideas on this are pure conjecture now, but if she thought my father would rescue her, like Marcus Vinicius, she was mistaken. He could not even rescue himself. They were two needy souls with nothing but sadness to give to one another.

  I wonder at her sense of romance. How could it have survived all the things she had seen? Was she thirsty to learn about love from books too?

  In a chapter of My Mother’s House called ‘My Mother and the Books’ Colette herself learns that love is ‘complicated, tyrannical and even burdensome’ and that Sido was sceptical about it:

  ‘It’s a great bore—all the love in these books,’ she used to say. ‘In life, my poor Minet-Chéri, folk have other fish to fry. Did none of these lovesick people you read of have children to rear or a garden to care for? Judge for yourself, Minet-Chéri, have you or your brothers ever heard me harp on love as they do in books?’

  But books were exactly where children like me looked for instruction about love and how families worked, or more to the point how other people’s families—normal families, happy families—worked. I kept an eye on the people across the road, for example, who had four children and were Catholic. Every Friday night the father would get off the tram from the city (he worked in the tax office) carrying home a great big parcel of fried fish and chips and potato cakes.

  We could see him wearing his hat with the warm parcel under one arm and holding a bouquet of flowers for his wife in the other hand. Unlike my parents, the tax official and his wife slept in the same bed, but my mother once told me that his wife didn’t like to have sex with him. She had told my mother, ‘He knows he can have it if he really needs to,’ which sounded rather begrudging, even to me, who knew nothing at all of such things.

  And while my mother indicated that fish and chips and flowers may not tell you much about what is really happening in a marriage, she didn’t give away any clues about how a happy marriage might work. At fourteen I wanted to go to a dance at the local town hall, and she forbade me. When I said I’d never fall in love if I never met anyone, she said I’d only need to meet one person and that when I fell in love I’d know it. I shouted at her, ‘What would you know about love?’ and she hit me with such ferocity that I had a big black eye by the morning. She said to say that a cricket ball hit me, if anyone asked about it at school. I was no wiser about happy marriages.

  Colette wrote about all kinds of love—between women, between young people, between husbands and wives, between older women and young men. Later I read Cheri and Claudine at School and The Vagabond. She used her experiences in the demi-monde of the theatre and the literary salons to make some very quotable statements that I suspected were the kinds of things my mother might know if she were inclined to tell.

  For instance: ‘You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.’ And: ‘If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.’

  Mama did quote a Yiddish proverb once: Az me est chazzer, zol rinnen fun bord. Literally, if you’re going to eat pork, make sure it drips on your beard, or, if you’re going to be bad, make sure you enjoy it.

  There is a photograph of Colette, taken on her eightieth birthday in 1953 by Walter Carone, in which she sits up in what could be her bed, and on a table shelf in front of her the candles on her beautiful creamy torte light up and burst into flames, as if all the brandy in the cake has ignited at once. It captures a moment of dangerous excess, and represents all the mysterious and succulent elements of my Colette phase.

  But while I delighted in and even envied the garden and the passions that Colette wrote about in those first stories, nothing surprised and affected me more than another book I read at school, The Man who Loved Children by Christina Stead.

  Until then, all the families in the books I had read were happy, or at least they were not riven with fault lines and historical tragedies like mine was. I never saw one skerrick of affection between my parents, not a kiss, not a touch. Every day we would steel ourselves for meal time, when, at best, sarcasm would be served with dinner, at worst, shouting and swearing in Polish.

  But the complexities of the Pollit family (Sam and his second wife Henny, his fourteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Louisa, and the six little ones from his second marriage), the chasms between what Louisa imagined and her reality, helped me understand that the unhappiness of my family was not an experience I was having on my own. A writer was allowed to write about unhappy family life and I was allowed to read about it too.

  Sam Pollit is a cruel, brilliant and narcissistic scientist who uses words as weapons to wield power over his exhausted wife and their children, especially Louisa, who falls short of his standards of beauty and grace. The keen eye of Stead, as given to Louisa, was proof that a child/woman could correctly evaluate a situation and make a fair critique of the actions and motivations of her parents. She could be right and the parents could be so wrong. It was revolutionary. And liberating, though my family life was nothing like Louisa’s. And, despite the novel’s Baltimore setting, I knew it had been written by an Australian woman. It felt close to home.

  My French teacher set Madame Bovary for us (in English) and at the age of sixteen I dipped my toe into the world according to Gustave Flaubert. Emma Bovary, like Henny, is another unhappily married woman but she tries to solve her need for romance t
hrough adultery. Her rebellion against the expectations of her provincial surrounds leads to her downfall, and that of her child. I wrote an essay on the novel and called Emma ‘a woman ahead of her time’, paraphrasing my mama, who had read the book in French. I was the only one in the class who didn’t think Madame Bovary was a bad mother and wife, only that she was a disappointed and bored woman.

  Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was experiencing was love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words ‘bliss’, ‘passion’, and ‘intoxication’, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

  Reading about the fictional lives of Emma Bovary and Henny Pollit and observing my own Mama’s life I could see that the road was not necessarily happy for women, no matter where they lived or even when.

  I re-read Madame Bovary recently and was surprised by the way the story begins, with the description of Charles Bovary, Emma’s husband, as a new boy in a classroom of mean children, and his unwaveringly contained responses to their taunts. I realised that Flaubert wanted us to see things from Charles’ point of view too, and that Emma’s unhappiness was a sadness for him.

  It was disconcerting for the novel to seem so different when I re-read it. Of course we are a different person each time we open a book to read it again; we can never really experience it in the same way, just as we can never step into the same stream twice.

  This time, reading Madame Bovary from the vantage point of age and experience, I was aware that my life of reading had attuned me to all of the things that Flaubert wanted me to understand by the way he told his story. And yet, partly because she reminded me of my mama, with her disappointments and her head always in a book, I willed myself as an adolescent to understand Emma Bovary.