The best laid plans...

The new packet of biros on my desk includes three bullet point observations on the back, including:
• Writes for over a kilometre
The whole idea seems odd to me. Who would want to write for a kilometre? Then again the purpose of a biro is to produce ink when pressed down hard against the page, whereas the purpose of writing is to produce images and ideas that communicate. To tell stories.

Whenever I sit down to write the thoughts that pop into my mind first are based on my most recent experience, as if my mind is dominated by the here and now.

For instance, this morning my thoughts steer back to late last night when I stayed up in order to collect my daughter from a party. We had agreed I would collect her at one am. I designed my evening around this event.

I set my alarm for half past twelve. I tried to sleep from eleven but it was not easy. I cannot sleep on demand any more than I can write on demand. Even so I drifted into sleep and woke at midnight before the alarm woke me. I made myself a cup of tea in a bid to shake off my drowsiness.

My daughter rang half an hour later just as I was about to leave. She had decided I need not collect her after all. She would stay at her older sister’s house nearby instead. If I could please collect her in the morning.

I protested. She protested. She knows by now how much I hate these sudden changes in plans. I know by now how much she is prone to making them.

It is in the nature of youth, I observe: The best laid plans are cast aside at the last minute and new plans made with gay abandon. People like me, people who prefer a level of certainty in the day to day running of their lives are left reeling.

I sat in my chair gasping after the first phone call, furious with this latest change of plan, after all, had not I organised my night around it? And now I needed to rearrange my thinking and try to sleep on demand all the while worrying about my daughter and what it was that should cause this latest change of plan.

In ten minutes my daughter had changed back to the original plan and I collected her after all.

Last night as I sat with my irritation, I told myself not to write about this. It is too close to the present and too close to those near and dear to me.

As I waited for the alarm I re-read an article about the way in which the Internet never forgets. I’ve written about this before. The way that everything that is marked down in cyberspace will be forever recorded for posterity. It’s one of the reasons why writers write, Margaret Atwood argues: to stave off death by providing a record of events that can go on forever.

But this article on the way the Internet never forgets - Jefrey Rosen's The web Means the end of forgetting - paints a much more sinister picture, one that suggests other people will hold against you forever what you have written or shown about yourself in pictorial form.

When you are older and looking for that plum job, the powers that be, the folks who decide on whether or not you get the job, will be able to trawl through the Internet archives and drag up all sorts of stuff taken out of context that will invariably reflect badly on the person you once were.

They will conclude from this archival footage that the information gathered informs them of the person you are today and they will not therefore give you the job. Or let you into the country, as in the case of the sixty-six-year old psychotherapist from Canada who could not get into America because there was Internet evidence that thirty years earlier he had experimented with LSD and had written papers for his students to that effect.

An image of me in my ill-begotten youth when I'm half ashamed to say I used to smoke cigarettes.

Never fear, there’s this outfit called ‘Reputation Defender’ who will clean up your image on the Internet if need be and for a fee, recast you in a better light.

All this talk about the dreadful things that can happen to a person via the Internet when another person decides to use the things the first person has written about to bring them to account years later. It gags free speech.

And is it true or are we bloggers living in a fool’s world in which it might seem not to matter too much while we record our most intimate thoughts only to then have them held against us in years to come when the thought police get out with their stainless steel knives insisting we wash our mouths out with soap for the things we have said?

Please pardon all the mixed metaphors here. I’m on a roll and fearful of stopping in case I dare never write a word again.

I must keep my slate clean. Leave no tell take signs exist of a life not necessarily as well lived as it might have been.

My biro is nearing the end of its mile.

I sit on both sides of the fence

The council by laws officer knocked at our door again yesterday morning to complain that the roses on our fence line are getting out of hand. A sweet young woman, she asked me out to the footpath to show me how much the branches overhang the street.

She was right. Almost over night they had spread their tentacles and I could see signs of where some presumably irritated passer by had broken off a branch. The broken branch was white, like a wound bled of blood.
‘Can you let me know when it is fixed,' the bylaws woman said.
‘I’ll do it now,’ I told her.

It was a Saturday morning and it was easy to get out the secateurs and hack away, satisfying even. In the back of my mind I imagined my complainant standing somewhere nearby and observing his/her success. He/she had forced me to take notice. The thorns now pricked my fingers.

I tell myself I’d prefer such people approach me directly. But it’s probably better to hear the news from a council person. The council folk are pleasant in their dealings, at least so far they have been.

I get the feeling they’re on my side. I get the feeling they know how hard it is to keep the roses in check, especially at certain times of the year when their branches are more likely to reach for the sky. The more you prune, the more desperately those branches reach out.

Roses inside the fence.

It’s still warm here, the tail end of summer, moving into a fruitful autumn. We’ve also had a lot of rain and so the garden thrives, especially the roses.

I sit on both sides of the fence as regards the rights and wrongs of this: I can imagine myself as the irritated passer by, annoyed that her walk along the footpath has been invaded by a thorny rose branch, and at the same time, I am the person from whose house the offending rose branch points its thorns. It happens so fast I scarcely notice it. I should of course be more vigilant.

I have found the best way to deal with complaints - assuming I agree with them - is to go along with them, to apologise, and to try to rectify the fault as graciously as possible. Underneath though, there is another me who would like to rant and rave at the extraordinary nature of a person who would go about making it their business to ring the council to protest about other people’s gardens. They must be seriously offended or vexatious to go to so much trouble.

As I get older I tend towards less graciousness. I complain more myself and I let it be known more and more often when I am unhappy about something. Such as when people telephone our house uninvited in order to beg for money for some charity, or to ask a series of questions for some research they are conducting.

I resent the effort required to answer the telephone, and the fleeting expectation of someone pleasant at the other end, someone with whom I might enjoy a chat, only to find a stranger who asks before I can speak, 'How are you today?'
‘I’m not interested,’ I say without listening further and hang up.

And then there are those folks who occasionally leave a comment about my blog. 'We love your blog, especially such and such a post. We'd like to promote it.' And it is clear from the way they write, they have not even read my blog, and this assumes they are a person and not some computer generated piece of spam.

When I go to their blog to check out who should write such sweet nothings, I find they exist only as a blank profile, if at all.

After I had finished cutting back the roses I tried to ring the bylaws officer to report my good work, but the after-hours receptionist at the council told me I could not leave a message on the weekend. So I sent the bylaws officer an email:

Re: Rose pruning
Dear Eileen

I've pruned back the rose branches on our front fence, hopefully to the satisfaction of the person/persons who complain. The roses have been on the fence for the past twenty years but only in the past six months have we had complaints. Yours is the second.

We try to keep the roses in check but at certain times of the year they go berserk, as you can imagine. In any case, I've trimmed them back as far as I can. Hopefully, they'll stay settled until the gardeners return in a couple of weeks and can give them another prune. In the meantime, I'll keep my eye out for any stray vigorous and unruly branches.

best wishes
Elisabeth

Let's hope that keeps my complainants satisfied.

Roses outside the fence.

Idiotic times

Last weekend we had another family reunion, though this time only six of us managed to meet in the Quality Inn Motel on High Street in Echuca.

Of the four who stayed away – three brothers had elected not to come from the onset – two offered excuses, one said nothing and the fourth, one of my three sisters, was forced to stay away by the floods. She could have managed the trip to Echuca, she emailed, but she might not have managed to get out again.

It rained all the way from Melbourne to Echuca and we stopped for lunch at Heathcote in a place called the Gaggling Geese. It seemed an apt description, for indeed late at night as the six of us gathered together in one of our motel rooms with at least three extra spouses, we gaggled like geese, though there was less of the hostility of our last reunion to which every sibling came.

This time the angriest folk had stayed away, and yet my oldest brother and I debated the ‘facts’ of history and whether or not we had any right to speculate on what might have happened to our grandparents in prison all those years ago, on the grounds that we still did not know the ‘truth’.

We did not possess a transcript of court details and so far none of us, my brother included, have managed to secure the records.

Earlier when I told my supervisor at the university about the facts Barbara van Balen had unearthed in Haarlem, that both my grandparents had been imprisoned in 1941 for a period of time, my grandmother for embezzlement, and my grandfather on charges of ontucht, she said,
‘Sounds like they could have been running a brothel.’

I had not put the two events together in my mind. Embezzlement, I understand is theft of some sort that involves deception, while ontucht, which can be defined as vice, prostitution, lewdness suggests maybe even more than incest. But I have no evidence.

How could I find out? I spoke to my mother. ‘Were Dad’s parents running a brothel?’ I asked.
‘No. No. I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Other people would have known about it. He was in the government. He had a good job. I think maybe he got coupons. They could have played with that, got coupons under false pretences, to get more food.’ She sounded impatient.

‘It was idiotic times, not normal at all. It was not like it used to be in Holland at that time. The Germans were there, not the Dutch government. All the good judges had retired. The whole country stopped. Professors at universities stopped. Schools stopped. My own father did not have a job. Colleges were closed.

‘No. No. It could not have been that. It probably had to do with coupons. There were people willing to do work. The NSBs, we called them, Nationalist Socialists. They were with the German government, Dutch people sympathetic to the Nazis. They did the jobs, they were a small group but they were powerful and they spied on us.

‘I remember sitting next to a woman on the tram,’ my mother continued. ‘It must have been the second year of the war. We still had trams. The woman said to me,
“Be careful of what you say. There’s an NSB agent sitting on the tram."

'In that first year of the war things weren’t so bad. We still had coupons. But by the third year of the war we had nothing.

'It must have been coupons, because they had more food than others. That’s what you noticed.

'Where I lived on the second floor above a printing shop, I noticed the woman who lived below. Her husband was a seaman but I never saw him during the war. Later I understood they were NSB, because she got food too.

'In those last years the Germans had special kitchens and those people who helped them got food. After the war, the woman downstairs, her husband was put in gaol.
You had to be so careful in those years.’ My mother paused.

I told her then about my trip in 2006 through Haarlem on a bicycle with my new German friend, Heidi.
‘I didn’t know you had a German friend.’
‘I met her at the conference,’ I explained. She lives in Amsterdam and we took the train together from Frankfurt to Amsterdam.'

‘When you’re older you think more about the past,' my mother said. 'We called the prison the Parapluie. Of those things I don’t think. I don’t dwell on them but on what was nice. Otherwise you get sad and morbid, if you live alone. So I think only over the happy times. I think about my Haarlem cousins, what happened to them, how they married.

‘With your dad’s family I tried to be good to them and meet them before we married. But they were strange. We let them know when your first brother was born. We didn’t get an answer. They didn’t come to see us. They were very strange and after that I thought if that’s how they feel, I’m not interested.

'So then I stopped trying to visit. Before then I always said to your father, they are your parents, we have to try. But then I realised they are not much chop.

'After what they did with our wedding. [August 1942] His father would have performed our wedding, but he didn’t even come. We waited an hour and they just let us sit. We didn’t care about the legal part because that was not what we considered our wedding. But we couldn’t get our coupons till after the legal wedding, then we could get blankets and stuff. So after the legal wedding we could buy the things we needed and then six weeks later we were properly married. That was in 1942.

'I was lucky to get material for my wedding dress because I knew a man who managed a VD, a big store nearly as big as Myer. I asked him could he get some white silk or satin or whatever,
“Can you get me six metres?” and he got me six metres and more of an orangey taffeta which I didn’t like. I’d have preferred peach, a paler colour but it was all we could get. The manager gave it to me and said, “This is the last, nothing comes any more”.

Then later when she got married, my cousin asked to borrow my wedding dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses. And I gave them to her.

‘It was a very hard time. On the other hand everyone suffered. We still gave parties and insisted that everyone dress up. Fellows wore their ... we call them smoking, their dinner suits, because you couldn’t go out after eight o’clock till next morning at six. So we had to make the most of it. For three years we had nothing, you had to make it yourself.’



Years later at this our most recent family reunion my brother made a point: ‘Ontucht’ he said, ‘could also mean adultery.’

I did not have the presence of mind to suggest to him that they do not put you into prison for adultery, at least not as far as I know, not in the western world.

My brother also suggested that my grandfather, as the person in charge of births, deaths and marriages in Haarlem held a significant role. He could have helped people to establish their identity, and thereby rule out the possibility of Jewish ancestry, even if they had paid for it, as I imagine some might have done in order to stay safe from the Nazis.

Such a role made my grandfather powerful and it is a power he may have abused.

But this, too, is speculation, much as my mother speculated when I asked her about my grandparents’ imprisonment.

Rejoice with me

The anniversary of my father’s death falls on 27 February. I don’t always remember the significance of this day when it comes around, but this year I did.

From time to time on Monday last I reflected on the fact that thirty years earlier when my first daughter was only ten days old my father died.

Strange then - uncanny even - that on 27 February this year, 2012, I had word in the form of an email, that I have passed my PhD.

Yes folks, rejoice with me. I am a happy soul, at least for the moment until the thrill wears off. After all, one of my motives in beginning this thesis, one of my less noble motives, as I have written elsewhere, was to prove myself to my father, who in my mind did not believe that girls could ever amount to much in the academic sphere.

Boys had the brains, or so my father believed. Girls were good for making babies, keeping house and I dare not spell out the rest. Misogynistic for sure.

But I shall not belabour the point here. In any case, this part of my journey is almost done, and once I wear the floppy hat at the designated ceremony, whenever that happens, I shall be able to use the honorific, too. What fun.

I have spent the best part of my life trying to get over the idea - deep-seated in my psyche - that I am an unintelligent, ignorant soul who cannot think. There are many reasons for this view as I now understand but the little girl in the picture below did not. I have exonerated her. She stands here on the left with two of her sisters, unaware of what the future holds.

Thank you, my fellow bloggers, for all your help. There is a section in my thesis dedicated to you all and to blogging as a form of expression that connects with what I have written about elsewhere and here earlier in this blog as a desire for revenge.

I trembled at my decision to include it. Blogging is not usually considered an academic pursuit, though theorising about it can be.

And so my blog life features in my thesis as do so many other aspects of the autobiographical impulse.

I now feel exonerated in my decisions to write as I have done, experimentally in many ways, at least in a thesis, but those three good people who examined my work were happy enough with the results to give me a pass, accompanied by some useful and positive comments, and some more critical as well. To top it off I don't need to make any changes to the thesis as I submitted it for the purpose of getting my PhD, and this is such a bonus.

Now begins the difficult task of turning my thesis into a book that might be read by others outside of the academy.

The examiners' comments make sense to me, and so I go off on my day with a load lifted from my shoulders. Rejoice for me.

Just doing his job

The young man at the counter seemed pleasant enough, his dark hair pulled back in a neat ponytail. It was hot and we were in a hurry to get home. Last stop the bottle shop to collect a couple of bottles of wine and a few cans of gin and tonic, the UDL brand, the stuff I enjoy on a hot day.

‘Where’s your proof of age,’ the man said to my eighteen-year-old daughter who stood beside me.
‘It’s not for her,’ I said. ‘It’s for me.’
‘It doesn’t matter,' he said. 'No proof of age, no sale.’
‘But I’m not buying it for her. It's for me.’
‘Sorry, that’s the law. No proof of age, no sale.’

She could have been my best friend’s daughter. She could have been anyone, but because we were together they questioned my right to buy alcohol in the mistaken belief I was buying it for her.

‘But it’s for me, not for her,’ I said again.
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s the law. I could get fined $6000.00.’
‘It’s absurd.’
‘It’s the law.’
‘If I go out now and go elsewhere then come back alone later, will you sell it to me then?’ I asked. My daughter tugged at my arm to leave.
The young man shook his head. ‘Coles Liquorland is over the way. You can go there.’

We left the store. I would have battled on but my daughter was mortified.
‘You re such an embarrassment screeching at him like that. It’s not his fault. He’s just doing his job.’

She’s right, of course. He was just doing his job, but a little too rigidly I fear.

Now I don’t know what to do with my rage. I can’t believe it. It’s worse than having the supermarket staff routinely inspect your bags, as if you were a thief.

Maybe all my anxiety and rage at other things gets puddled into this pool. I am livid. Even as I understand the rules about not selling alcohol to minors. Even as I understand the need for young folk who look under twenty five to have proof of their age when buying alcohol.

‘I told you I didn’t want to go in,' my daughter said to me. ‘You’re such an embarrassment.’

My husband was more empathic. And so we went back later after work to buy said wine and gin and tonic. I saw the young man filling shelves at the back of the shop. I smiled at him. He smiled back. I suspect he did not recognise me from earlier in the day until I said to him that I’d come back, but this time with my husband who was clearly not underage.

I smiled again, in what I thought was a friendly smile, a smile to make peace perhaps. He might have seen it as provocative.
‘I can’t allow you to buy anything within the same day,’ he said.
‘You’re kidding,’ I said.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ my husband said, and called for the manager.

For the next ten minutes we argued with the young man and his manager. The young man had formed the impression that because my daughter had carried those cans of gin and tonic to the counter they were for her. She had no proof of age – she had left her wallet at home – therefore, no purchase.

I can now tolerate the notion that he thought I was buying alcohol for my daughter who had no proof of age, but that he could not then sell me anything six hours later on the premise that I would go home and give it to my daughter continues to enrage me.

The manager in the end let us buy what we had come in for in the belief that we were genuine. But next time, he said, just make sure your daughter has her proof of age.

By the look of things there won’t be a next time, at least not for a while. My daughter is too mortified to be seen in this shop with or without me.

I have not been able to get this situation out of my head. Is it the business of being refused? Is it the stuff of being made to feel guilty or bad? Sure, I have taken it personally, which I need not have done, but it is the second guessing that goes on in such a young man’s mind that bugs me.

Is it the firmness of youth that he should take things so seriously? That he cannot discriminate. The rules are the rules.

The idea that he could not serve me in the twenty four hours following that purchase. How literal must he be?

I do not know how, but this situation has leached into my consciousness and gotten under my skin in a way that I might only understand in the fullness of time.

I begin to feel like a criminal.

Is it because I was buying alcohol and alcohol is loaded for me? My ancestry?
Is it because as a child I once travelled on trains without a ticket and shoplifted lollies from the milk bar? Is the legacy of my childhood wrong-doing catching up with me? Or is it because I am sensitive to rules that have an arbitrary and ambiguous quality?