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Fiction, Faction and Family History extracts from The Godding of Alice Lear "I have asked myself why I must live to be almost one hundred and I seem to have the answer for the more I lose touch with this reality the more I am able to see pure spirit." Mrs Skomerosky Mary's Grange Nursing Home,1989 The Godding of Alice Lear is a novel and, as such, a fictional work. However, within the novel I have woven the stories of family members as pen portraits, each one of them appearing as a character within the main thesis of the novel. These pen portraits are factions i.e. they are true anecdotal accounts but the names have been changed and the setting fabricated to fit my fictional purpose. The stories, however, of each of these grandparents I have heard many times and from several different members of the family - for instance my grandmother fainting in St. Kilda Road when my grandfather returned from the war was one of my mother's favourite stories. She, of course, was there and witnessed it, aged nine. This work, which is still in progress, was conceived after the death of my mother and was, to begin with, essentially my own attempt to come to terms with my mother's life and with the family members, past and present, that affected and, in some cases, imposed upon that life. The main thesis could be described as dementia versus mysticism. A synopsis and the prologue to the novel, if your care to read it, appears on my Bookshelf page. The extract that follows, Members Of The Wedding, is a fairly exact representation of my parents wedding as they described it to me - or at least the church wedding. Due to the fact that my maternal grandmother would not consent to the marriage, my mother and father had previously eloped and married secretly with the help of my mother's Aunt…here appearing as Aunt Ida, which is not her proper name. When my maternal grandmother did consent, under pressure from her sister -that same aunt - my parents, too afraid to front my grandmother, went through a second marriage in the church. The wedding took place in the Presbyterian Church in Royal Parade Parkville on the 10th of March 1928. My mother was already pregnant. Members of the Wedding Later, in that same hot autumn, over sixty years before, young Alice Lambert, pale as porcelain in her off-white copy of a Paris original, climbed out of her Uncle Austin's hired Daimler and, clinging tight to her father's arm, trailed her veil across the carpet of leaves to the door of the little church. In the porch her aunt Ida, glorious in a dress of deepest blue, picked the leaves from the veil and arranged it, ordered her daughters, the bridesmaids, into position and ran a critical eye over her niece's figure. Smiling reassuringly she told her, 'All's well, my dear. You look beautiful.' 'Yes,' agreed Arnold, grinning at his daughter. 'It would be a lot easier to give you away, my darling, if you could look more like a bag of spuds.' And Alice, for the first time since the incident with liver, laughed. The wedding march sounded. Louisa, the flower girl wanted a wee-wee. 'Tell them to play it through again,' hissed Ida, bundling Louisa off. Twice through the wedding march and everyone was turning to stare at the door. 'Come on' - mouthed her mother from the front pew. Ida came back and pushed the flustered flower girl into her place. 'Go,' she said. 'Go!' But Arnold didn't move. He stood as if transfixed staring ahead of him down the body of the church. Arnold and the spirit armies N.B. Arnold is the fictional name of my maternal grandfather, Harold Johnston, who died in 1942, a few months before my birth. Like his mother (Cat Granny in the novel) he was a Spiritualist and, as a pacifist, he enlisted in WW 1 as a stretcher barer. He spent the years of the war in the front line in France, carrying a stretcher with his next-door neighbour who had joined at the same time. He never carried a gun. The neighbour was killed; my grandfather was gassed, twice and according to my mother he had as well shrapnel in his body, which finally killed him. On returning from France he worked for the railways but was never again well. Since the war, and in spite of the faith that he shared with Cat-granny, his mother, Arnold hated to see bodies in orderly rows. The pews, the orderly rows of them, unnerved him. As a pacifist he'd enlisted as a stretcher-bearer, without fuss, for his beliefs had never been a platform or a cause, nothing to stand on or state. He simply enlisted as a stretcher-bearer and spent of years of the fighting in France always in the front line, carrying the wounded, but never a weapon. Moving down the trenches with a stretcher nudging the back of his knees, or tacking fast through no-man's-land, the worst of it, boots clogged with mud, he'd tried to move smoothly, dodging the gun bursts and craters, tried not to stumble or to jerk, for the load, the dead weight on the stretcher was, though it neither looked nor sounded so, precious. At back at the edge, hardly safe, the stretchers were emptied and their burdens of groaning rags and flesh arranged in orderly rows. He'd enlisted with Jack who lived next door. 'I'll bring Jack home, love, safe and sound,' he'd told Mavis, Jacks wife. But he hadn't. Jack had disappeared for Mavis forever in a poinsettia burst of flames. But he hadn't gone form Arnold. Many a conversation he'd had with Jack since, over the back fence, just like the old days, and there he was now, beside Mavis, if only she knew, his elbows resting on the back of the pew as he turned and grinned. Most of the chaps who had passed over dropped in on Arnold from time to time. Pointless to tell any one. Besides, it would only frighten Lilian. No sense in talking about it, how it really was. Arnold came back with Jack's medals for Mavis. And Jack had come back too, freed of his bloodied rags, but only Arnold knew. He'd said to Jack, over the tomato plants, 'Look, mate, I could never have stood it if I hadn't been able to see you all, those spirit armies marching away from their bodies when it was done.' He'd tried to introduce Lilian to his faith before they were married. He and Cat-granny had taken her on a Spiritualist Church picnic where she'd been happy enough, until the group photograph was developed. When she noticed there were almost twice as many people in the photograph as there had been at the picnic she was puzzled. 'Who are all these people? They weren't there. I can't remember any of them being there.' He'd tried to explain the shadow people in soft focus among the others, a brother, a child, an aunt, members of the congregation who had passed over. Lilian shrieked. She said it made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Peculiar and unnatural, that's what it was! She made him promise never to go near that church again. It made no difference to Arnold. The church was mainly where the living met, the others came to him; but he never spoke of them to Lilian, who felt safer when death was final. Or at least when the pearly gates were locked and bolted to keep the inmates in. When she married him Lilan believed he was cured. She saw what she preferred to see in Arnold, a calm, silent man, nothing much to say for himself, even rather dull. Her sister, Ida, for all her troubles had made, she considered, the brilliant match. Not she. Arnold looked down the pews. They were all there, in body and in spirit. How they turned up for weddings! Some he knew and some he didn't - his long dead father and his brothers sat chatting to Cat-granny, and Cat-granny was chatting back. Lilian's parents were there, stiff and proper as they'd always been, and Lilian's brother who had gone with the Light Horse. On the other side of the church there were all the Lears shadowing in around George's mother - he wondered if she knew. At least four generations, in spirit, packing in among the fleshed, were there at the wedding in that little church. 'There are generations waiting for you, dear,' said Arnold. Ida gave them both a shove. Louisa took off at a gallop. Arnold stepped forward smiling and nodding, and slowly past the assembled generations came the bride. Lilian was only ever superficial N.B. Lilian is a portrait of my maternal grandmother, Alice May Johnston nee Dunn. Born in 1881 she died in 1963. I was 21 when she died and I have strong and fond memories of her. In the front pew on the bride's side Lilian was filled with sentiment. Sentiment frothed in her bosom as fancifully as her ruffled blouse frothed over it. Full frontedness was her only breech of fashion. A tremulous heart, a luxuriant sigh was to great and asset to be bound flat. She'd chosen a wide brimmed hat, too, in navy straw from which a fal-lal of net skirted her eyes, a veil that served no purpose except to impose a criss-cross pattern on everything she saw. From time to time she raised a white kid-gloved hand, inserted a white lace handkerchief under the net and mopped a tear. Lilian was known as a pretty woman, neat waisted and elegantly ankled. She wore her hair pinned smoothly back from a rounded face in which only the lips lacked amplitude. The thinness of her lips was not helped by her habit of clamping them tightly together, and in the mornings, after she patted her face with glycerine and rose water and applied a light dusting of powder she would draw her lips tautly across her teeth, scrub at them with a red tube and smack them together several times so that when fully dressed her mouth resembled a crimson inverted pleat. Her moods were full of sudden and breezy shifts. She could shout, slam doors, take a bad turn or faint with the ease of a silent screen belle. Just a whiff of a mood was enough to render her household obedient. She lived in a world of whim, musical evenings with Ida and Austin and new hats. In the world she moved without Arnold, taking off for days at a time to her sister and brother-in-laws big house where there was always something going on. But sometimes something real would overwhelm her. Then, if she could not dilute, erase or lie to herself about it, she'd promptly change role, displaying the steadiness of a warhorse and the strategy of a General. Any feelings, any wounds, she'd stitch up tightly and label not to be discussed. Her expression of anything at all, therefore, was only ever superficial. The war was real. It was Lilian's boast that as a lady she'd never had to work a day in her life. That boast made nonsense of the prevalent for of genteel slavery. Her father was in business, making fine shoes for the feet of the rich, and the young Lilian was a dab hand at working the cutting machine and stitching the soles. This she would do for long hours, sitting in the window of her father's shop, her prettiness and skill an attraction, and the fact that she was never paid for this work was her pride. It was in the window that Arnold first saw her, and it was in her father's store that Arnold, like so many young men, spent more money than he could afford on fine leathers. She knew his shoe size and the shape of his foot long before she knew his name. It was his solitude, which she mistook for masculine strength, and the far away look in his eye, which she mistook for romance, which attracted her. As it turned his calm silence was an advantage for it left her free to bubble and manage; and as war approached and she knew he would go, it was her idea to take over the mixed business specialising grocery items, fine chocolates and fruit. This she ran from behind the scenes with a steely bright efficiency. Arnold departed, in a flutter of handkerchiefs, from wharf still not really knowing if Lilian's tears were for him or for display. Left in full control, Lilian rolled up her sleeves. Before dawn, bathed and neat, she would harness Nelly, the horse, to the market cart and clatter the miles through the sleeping streets to the South Melbourne market for the freshest buys in fruit, vegetables and cut flowers. If she delighted in the bustle of the stallholders, in the smells of the produce fresh from a hosing, in the noise, in the jokes, in the sweetness of early morning, she never said so. Or if she felt a dread of frost before dawn, the harness brittle, cold cutting her hands, the horse skittish, or was frightened by the solitude, a woman alone, through the dark streets, she never mentioned that either. Home before the day could wilt the lettuces and cabbages and Iceland poppies, she opened the doors promptly at eight. Every day except Sunday the woman who had never had to work a day in her life chattered brightly to the customers and assured them that the war would soon be over and the boys would come back heroes. On Sundays she cleaned the house, the shop and made hers and Alice's clothes - frocks and frothy blouses and straight skirts for herself, dresses with matching pinafores for Alice. But afterwards it was as if it never happened. He sent her embroidered sweetheart cards from France. She never faltered. And when the letters came, two brothers dead in the infantry, another in the light horse, she would shut herself in the bedroom above the shop, pick at the edge of her handkerchief and stare out at the remains of Arnold's tomatoes, dried and curled like tobacco, in the straight back yard. When little Alice said she'd seen her light horse uncle standing beside her bed one night, smiling the way he always did and wearing funny clothes - bit boots and a hat with a feather - Lilian clamped her lips in fear. Nonsense! She said it was nonsense. But then, when the letter came of her brother's death, she shut herself in her room and whispered, 'Arnold? You are not here, are you? Please don't be here, please don't answer me - so I will know you are still alive.' And when she heard he was coming home she made herself a barathea skirt and one of those bosomy blouses she was fold of, pintucked this time, with insertions of lace. She loaded the brim of her wide felt hat with cloth roses and packed half a dozen lace handkerchiefs for the tears. They stood in the crowd along St Kilda road, beneath the European trees, watching the trucks pass. Trucks loaded with men, men singing, moved slowly down the avenue towards the barracks. Lilian, her lips compressed, stood quietly until little Alice shrieked, 'Daddy! I think that's Daddy. There he is. That's Daddy!' Then Lilian fell unconscious, sprawling among the feet. Alice bust into tears. Arnold jumped from the back of the truck. A man beside them in the crowd, thinking that he was helping, splashed a full bottle of lemonade onto Lilian's face. She gasped up into Arnold's arms, her blouse spoilt, the felt brim drooping, cloth roses limply dripping down. 'What's this, love?' said Arnold. 'Another fine display?' She pushed back bedraggled roses, dusted off her skirt, clung to his arm and pressed her lips together. 'About time too,' she told him. 'The garden's gone to wrack and ruin.' And nobody, nobody would suspect the truly flooded singing of her heart. Emma Lear and the absent Fredrick N.B. Emma is the fictional name for my paternal Grandmother, Emily Walton, nee Holmes. She died in 1952 (?) in the Brighton Home For The Blind. Fredrick Lear was, in reality, James Fredrick Walton, my paternal Grandfather. There is a closer portrait of him later in the novel where Fredrick appears in person. On the groom's side of the church Emma Lear, George's mother, sat alone. Not that Fredrick Lear, George's father, was dead, he was just left behind, long ago, on an impoverished little farm in the shadow of the Grampians. Fredrick Lear, Georges father, said Emma, who was never an easy woman to live with, had gone completely mad when her seventh child was born dead. She never recovered from the shock. Instead she started to imagine things and blamed him for everything. In the end she filed for a divorce. Emma was, according to Lilian, many terrible things, but worse of all, disastrously out of fashion. Her spreading for was encased in brocade which had done for Myrna's wedding - her eldest - and for most notable occasions since; strands of salt-and-pepper coloured hair escaped around her face and her hands, folded in her lap, were gloveless. She'd done her best with the hat, covered buckram with a scrap of silk left over from some ball gown she'd made for someone else. Sewing it at night she'd attached a low bow over the left ear where the edges of the silk didn't quite meet, but in the daylight on the morning of the wedding she was dismayed to see a puckering of uncomfortable stitches. For although she refused to admit it, Emma was losing her eyesight and some days she saw only a milky world with foggy edges. As it happened, the day of the wedding was a good day and her sight was almost clear. Isolated and bored, she sat rotating her thumbs and testing her vision by gazing up at the flakes of colour reflecting in from a high window. She could se, she reassured herself, perfectly well. She could even see a sparrow perched in the corner of the rafter, and she entertained herself for a time happily imagining that the sparrow might suddenly wake up - and poop in someone. Emma had been married in a crimson wedding dress herself. With her dark hair a polished knot and her veil merely a token worn like a mantilla she'd startled Fredrick Lear. He, with his gentleman's silver handled cane, which he carried even as a young man, had turned with a smile of greeting for his bride already arranged beneath his waxed moustache and had seen her enter the church, so proud, so dark and so aloof. Emma had filed for divorce, eventually, on the grounds of cruelty and when her girls were young women she told them terrible things about their father. He was perverted, she said. He'd chased her into the woodshed once and tried to make her put his thing in her mouth, and when she wouldn't, he'd held her on the ground and put it in her backwards and gone at it hell for leather. 'Men are sick,' Emma told her daughters. 'Men are all the same with a bag over their heads.' She advised her girls to always carry hatpins even if they weren't wearing hats. 'Men are full of hot air - stick a hatpin in them and they go down like balloons.' Thus she engendered in her daughters a suspicion of men that makes for cool wives and amenorrhoea. But in the courtroom of the little country town where she'd gone for a divorce she'd been dismissed. A wicked, malicious woman, the judge said, not granting the divorce. It was quite awful the things she'd said about poor old Fred. The judge had known Fred for thirty years, grew up with him, played cricket with him on the local side. People like the Leers had built the town, good, solid, pioneering folk. Fred's father had owned half of the first goldmine that had opened there, and he'd built the general store and the pub. Yes, they'd done well, the Leers. Lost it all at the end of the boom of course, but the judge wouldn't have a word said against them. And Fred? Well, you couldn't wish for a nicer bloke. As for her family, little more than riff-raff. Her mother was something foreign - black Spanish - and Emma had that same foreign look. Poor old Fred. Emma took the six children and ten pounds in cash from the canister in the kitchen, left the dry little farm and caught the train to the city. George, the youngest, was left ever after with the memory of his polished boots swinging with the movement of the carriage, of horsehair from the broken seat biting the back of his knees and of a loss - the loss of a playground of old tailings and red dust, the smell of peppercorn trees and dog wattle, sweet evening digging dumpty-ups with his father in the garden, a watch on a fob button, a moustache which brushed his forehead, pipe tobacco, and a rolled shirt sleeve against his sleepy cheek. Fredrick Lear, left alone on the farm at Magpie Creek with one farthing in cash to his name wondered how in all those years he and Emma had never come to understand each other's primnesses and passions. He'd tried to love her, but what did she want? George was the only child who ever visited - and not till he was grown. Fredrick said, 'When I saw your mother coming down the aisle in that red dress, well, I knew I was in for trouble.' Therefore George didn't turn, didn't look at Alice until he could hear the rustle of her there beside him; and Alice, in her first disappointment, knew he'd never have that view of her in his memory, framed fresh in the doorway of the church. Emma hadn't been in church since her last daughter's wedding, although as a girl she'd attended regularly finding even in the depressed rituals of the small country chapel some outlet for confused and strident passions. On a Sunday she'd arrive at the church bareheaded and her boots covered with mud or dust - and she always carried a shotgun. It was a five-mile work from the stumpy sclerophyll farm where her family scraped and existence and if she could pot a rabbit on the way home then they would have a baked dinner. God would mind what she looked like, she reasoned, but the congregation did. Emma and her mother were dark. Spanish. And ancestral indiscretion with a Spanish lady, a Miss Don, when her grandfather was young. Don what the family never knew, and there were those in the town who said it was just a cover up - Spanish be blowed, it's a touch of the tar, her mother was half gin. As evidence they would point to her mother's half brother, Uncle Johnny. He wasn't dark but he was mad. He'd gone native. Up there in the Grampians somewhere beyond Halls Gap, stripped naked like an aborigine, he'd built a one roomed shack. There, he panned for gold in hidden creeks and babbled in foreign languages at the top of his lungs. The young Emma was know to visit him, going out alone on the dray with a sack of flour and half a side of salted beef on the back. Visiting a naked man! Sometimes she'd return with half a bottle of river gold, which she'd exchange for sugar or grain or tools at the general store. A dirty old miser, that's what the townspeople said of Uncle Johnny - and she was no better than she should be. In defence Emma developed a haughty reserve - which was later to attract the poetic sentiments of the silver handled Fredrick - and she continued outfacing them in church, growing in beauty as strong as a cliff against an uncharitable sea, until she discovered, after several years of marriage, that matter how deeply you believed in it, or how much you desired it, love was a sordid thing. Then she decided that a good cooked meal for the children on a Sunday was an act closer to the God she knew than boring her backside off on a church pew, so she tied on her apron and left off church permanently. With the demise of her liking for any physical expression of affection Emma turned her ardour to notions of diet. At a time when a leg of mutton or a nice piece of salted beef boiled with 'taters and turnips was considered good wholesome fare, Emma, having read the works of Doctor Sung Woo, a quack who performed remarkable cures among sick Chinese on the gold fields, forced raw carrots, raw turnips and dates on her offspring. She boiled up wheat, which was usually only fed to chooks and mixed it with seeds, which were usually only fed to parrots, and served them this mixture with molasses and honey. She made her children eat their eggs raw and insisted on an apple at every meal. She inquired religiously into the satisfactory working of their bowels and she kept them polished and brushed and starched supervising elaborate rituals of hygiene; but she never mentioned love, and unless she couldn't help it, she touched them not at all. Emma would have been quite incapable of comforting the six-year-old George even if she'd known how his small soul hurt for the loss of his father. He'd watched the trees through the train window run out as they approached the city and, in time, his father and the memory of that scene became the one thing, an ache for trees, for great, grey, limpid gums and sticky wattles. With her ten pounds Emma rented a shabby but roomy house next to a school. At lunchtimes she would set up a stall on the front veranda and sell molasses toffee and ice cream made from a custard mixture stirred in a vat of dry ice. Inside, the stockpot bubbled constantly on the stove to feed the borders she took in. Before the children were up in the mornings she had the fire lit under the copper for the washing, and in the afternoons she heated the flat irons on the stove. At night, while the household slept, she turned the handle of her singer sewing machine making dresses for customers she often said had more money than sense. But she delighted, nevertheless, as the cool brocades and warm velvets slid beneath her hands. Sometimes she would touch the fabric to her cheek, or stroke her own breast, dazed by too much work and too little love, until the approach of dawn and the thought of another bare day blared at her that this was nonsense - and an embarrassment as well. She was aware that she was regarded at an oddity, six children and no man, but she refused to gratuitously claim widowhood. She knew, too, that the speculation of others was made worse by her pride, the straight spine, the high chined and candid gaze. When war broke out, though she bled for the pity of it and despised the stupidity of it, cried in anger at the madness of men and refused absolutely to take in part in the war effort, she was, at least, less visible, able to hide among so many women without men. Several more family members appear in portraits throughout the novel, perhaps one of the most interesting being Great great uncle Johnny Field…but more of him later. …to be continued, oh yeah…!