Wicked Sisters

Confession time: I love the Mitfords with a passion. For the last week I've been utterly lost in this mammoth book of letters between the six sisters, spanning almost eighty years of hilarious, poignant and always fascinating correspondence.

For those who aren't familiar with the Mitford family, a quick summary:

1) Nancy
Witty, biting comic writer; author of The Pursuit of Love and Love In A Cold Climate, lightly fictionalised and screamingly funny accounts of her own youth as a daughter of a shabby, quite mad English aristocrat (he used to hunt the children with hounds). (These were the books that made me fall in love with the Mitfords.) After an unhappy marriage, moved to France to be near the love of her life, Colonel Gaston Palewski. Tragically, he didn't love her back as much as she loved him.

2) Pamela
Known as "Woman." An accomplished cook, she could recall in smallest detail meals she had eaten fifty years before. Became an expert on chicken breeding.

3) Diana
The acknowledged beauty of the family. Left her first husband in a huge scandal to marry Sir Oswald Mosley, then leader of the British Fascist movement. When war was declared, they were both thrown into prison for years (Diana's baby was only eleven weeks old). After the war, more or less ostracised from public life, they moved to France, where they became friends with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, also exiles.

4) Tom
The only brother. Killed in the last days of the war (sob).

5) Unity
Gawd. Big, bold and generous, she developed a huge crush on Hitler of all people (!), and pretty much stalked him until they became friends. When war broke out, she went to a park in Berlin and shot herself in the head, but didn't succeed in killing herself. Brain damaged and much altered, she was nursed by the Mitfords' mother until she died a few years later (sob).

6) Jessica
An avowed communist (she scratched hammers and sickles on the nursery windows; Unity scratched swastikas), she eloped with her Spanish Civil War-fighting cousin Esmond at the age of 17. They moved to America after the death of their baby (sob), Esmond joined the Canadian Air Force and was killed in the war (sob). Jessica remarried and became a civil rights activist and very effective muckraker, writing exposes of the funeral industry (The American Way of Death) and prison system (Kind and Usual Punishment), and also a memoir, Hons and Rebels. Often feuded with other members of the family, especially Diana, for obvious reasons. (Jessica regretted that she never took the opportunity of going with Unity to meet Hitler, whipping out a pistol and assassinating him -- she could have done it quite easily.)

7) Deborah
The youngest sister and the only one to be always on speaking/writing terms with all the others. Married the Duke of Devonshire, restored his gigantic ancestral home, Chatsworth, and ran it as a business. Hobnobbed with JFK (his sister married her brother-in-law). Amazingly, she is still alive at 89, the last surviving sister.

What fascinating lives!! Though all of them knew misery and tragedy, the predominant note is one of amusement; sentimentality is sternly banished and all their writing is lively, witty and utterly engaging, the greatest fear that of being a BORE.

They are so English, so repressed, hardly ever saying how they truly feel. The letters are peppered with slang and in-jokes, salted with wicked humour and stabs of glorious bitchiness. And yet, the enduring bonds of sisterhood can't help shining through (how they would all loathe such a sickly sentiment). Oh how I adore them all.

But all the same, I'm quite glad that they aren't my sisters.

PS If the person who stole my two volumes of Nancy's letters from my East St Kilda flat in 1998 is reading this, I would like them back -- no questions asked.

Call Me Old-Fashioned

I remember when school book clubs sold, you know, BOOKS.

Back when I was a kid in New Guinea, the book club was practically the only way to get new books. I'd spend hours agonising over my selection, and then when the parcel of three or four books arrived, exuding that special new-book smell, it was better than Christmas.

But now there seem to be hardly any actual books in the catalogues. It's all kitty pendants, and movie tie-in calendars, and lockable diaries with "free" electronic pens, and puppy posters, and spy kits with voice changers, and mosaic makers. I get that all these add-ons are probably intended to make kids excited about the books. But it seems to me that ultimately what all these bells and whistles do is make the books themselves appear less exciting.

Bah humbug.

Grandfather William

One of the unexpected joys of having children has been watching my father flower into a superb grandfather.

He was always too busy working to spend much time with my sister and me when we were growing up, though I do have cherished and vivid memories of building Lego, doing jigsaw puzzles, and listening to the Goons together.

But as a grandfather, he has come into his own. Now he has plenty of time. Infinitely patient, he will spend hours stapling and transcribing miniscule picture books with Evie. He explains the principles of flight to Alice and teaches her the controls of light aircraft. He will watch them throw a glider in the garden all afternoon, and retrieve it from the roof when it goes astray. He understands clouds, and coins, and model trains, and gravity, and how clocks work. He can mend broken toys with his special glue. He will help them build houses out of toothpicks. He picks peas, nets the apple tree, digs caverns under the house. If you have a job that's fiddly, or complicated, or painstaking, Papa is your man.

"Papa knows everything," sighs Evie contentedly.
"Yes," Alice agrees. "He should run the government."

I always knew my mum would be a wonderful grandmother. But Dad has been more of a surprise. He seemed almost shy of my sister and me when we were little.

But now I know he was only practising.

Not JD Salinger, Actually

Catcher In The Rye wasn't one of my favourite books. Maybe I was too young when I first read it, and too old when I read it again. Maybe I was never a rebel. For whatever reason, it wasn't the novel that pierced my heart and made me gasp, this book is all about ME!

For me, that book was The Millstone by Margaret Drabble. A slim volume about a twenty-something student in 1960s London who finds herself pregnant and decides to have the baby on her own, it may have been an odd choice for a 15 year old Australian girl who'd never even kissed a boy, let alone gone further. But Rosamund Stacey spoke to me in a voice that I recognised as if I'd known it through a hundred lifetimes. Despite all the superficial differences between us, I knew Rosamund; she was me.

Diffident, bookish, always tightly controlled, Rosamund would almost literally rather die than ask others for help or be a nuisance. One of the themes of the novel is how the arrival of her baby, Octavia, splits open the shell of determined solitary independence that has grown up around Rosamund. Babies have needs that cannot be denied; she has to ask for help now, she is forced to rely on other people, to beg for favours, to hand over control, for Octavia's sake.

At the very end of the book, Rosamund is briefly reunited with Octavia's father, another diffident solitary type (almost certainly gay), and recognises that whatever vague yearning she might have felt for him is dim and wavering indeed, compared with the radiant pearly all-consuming love she feels for her daughter. I was a long way off being a mother then, but the truth of that acknowledgement stayed with me. The Millstone told me that ultimately it's impossible to preserve your isolation from the rest of the human race; having a child is the quickest and most devastating way to learn that lesson. But all that didn't mean much to me at 15; I was focused on the way Rosamund was in the world, delighted and a little bit shocked with the recognition.

Rosamund Stacey's story was written just before I was born; I could have been baby Octavia myself. But Rosamund remains my very favourite literary heroine, because she helped me understand myself before I even really knew who I was.

Thank you, Margaret Drabble.

Schoolgirls

Alice presented herself, fully dressed, in the kitchen at 7.30, then took Evie off to her room to help her get dressed, too. This enthusiasm is unprecedented. I'm pretty sure it won't last. There was a (pedestrian) traffic jam outside our gate as all the parents and kids hurried along the street for the first day of school; I've never seen the schoolyard so crowded.

I didn't shed a tear, I swear; but I do feel a little wistful. Now it's Evie's turn to enter that big wide mysterious world without us; to begin the slow, certain process of leaving us behind.

Three More Days, Three More Days...

The alert reader of these musings may have noticed not much talk about writing lately. Particularly since the summer holidays started. Even as I type this, a child is calling impatiently for me to play Go Fish with her. But frankly, the whole of last year (apart from Swoosie of course!) was a bit of a write off (ho ho) on that front.

But THIS year is going to be different. Oh, yes. Child no 1 and child no 2 will both be at school. A-aaall day. That's right, from 9 till 3.30, my time is my own. Okay, from 9.15 till 3.15, to allow for drop off and pick up travel time. So say, six hours. Subtract 45 minutes for yoga, that leaves 5 and a quarter hours. I guess I will have to do some minimal housework - just the usual bed-making, laundry, shopping, tidying up, washing the dishes, cleaning the toilet - not cooking - I can cook when the kids get home. Let's say half an hour a day?

That leaves 4 and three quarter hours for work. Oh, wait, what about a lunch break, better give myself 45 minutes for a sandwich and a cuppa. Okay, four hours a day for writing.

Oh, hang on, there's all that businessy stuff I usually do while Evie is playing in the background - answering emails, blogging (ahem), googling myself (ahem). Hm, I can fritter away a couple of hours a day on that stuff normally. But the New Me will cut it down to half an hour. So I've got three and a half hours for creativity.

But I will need to feed my brain as well as wringing stuff out of it, won't I. That's the joy of being at home, right, the freedom to read and think, uninterrupted? Is an hour a day reading time too much to ask? But that only leaves two and half hours for writing...

And what if I want to chat to my mum on the phone, or walk down to the shops, or hear the preppies reading, or cover some books for the school library, or go to the library myself? What if my friend makes good his threat to find me a part-time paid job this year? What if I want to go out for coffee with my husband, or join a choir, or a book club? Where's that time going to come from?

Suddenly my long free day doesn't feel so luxurious after all.

(Ha ha. Just kidding. It's going to be great. I have three books to work on this year, and I'm itching to get started. Three days to go, three days to go.)

Through The Wardrobe

I just finished reading this delightful book about C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, and it reminded me just how much I adored these books as a child (and still do). From the first thrilling, eerie moment that Lucy steps through the wardrobe and finds snow, not mothballs, crunching underfoot, I was enchanted. I didn't own them until later, but I read and re-read the copies from the Mt Hagen library until they became talisman books - to be borrowed and stowed under my pillow at night, without any longer needing to be actually read.

My particular favourite was Voyage of the Dawn Treader, with its sublime ending where Reepicheep the chivalric mouse paddles his coracle toward the green glassy wall of water at the edge of the world. The one book I loathed was The Last Battle, which seemed to strike false notes from the opening scene and ended, unthinkably, with the destruction of Narnia. Tears streamed down my face as I read it and I slammed the book shut, vowing never to reread it, pretending that I'd never read at all. Because as long as that story remained unread, it meant that Narnia still existed... didn't it? It was the equivalent of shoving my fingers in my ears and shouting "La, la, la!"

Many years later, reading about C.S. Lewis's philosophy, his spiritual vision, and his faith in the unique power of the imagination to grasp, and communicate, great truths, I can discern a straight line running from my deep and wordless love of Narnia to what I try, in my own feeble way, to achieve as a children's writer. To write books that aren't just about the surface story; to write books that comfort and inspire, that provide a glimpse of the mysteries of the universe; to write books that have a spiritual dimension, however deeply buried; to write books that might be loved, and stored in the heart forever.

Adventures in Hair

My hair has had many incarnations. It's been white-blond and curly, straight and mousy-brown, pony-tailed, plaited and cropped super-short. It's been orange and frizzy, black and bobbed, and poodle-permed. It's been hidden in turbans a la Simone de Beauvoir, fringed, scraped back with combs, and piled in a messy bun on top of my head and secured with a thousand bobby-pins.

Ultimately, nothing could disguise the disappointing genetic fundamentals of thin, limp texture and boring brown-ness, and I settled for a no-nonsense, no-fuss bob.

Then, a couple of years ago, my hair took control. It decided to turn grey - inexorably, steadily, irrevocably grey. And to my surprise, I'm rather liking it.

My head is turning slowly silver, in slender streaks. It actually looks kind of stylish. I've always loved the look of proud silver-haired women: Helen Mirren, Betty Churcher, Robyn Nevin, Judi Dench, two mothers at our school, one of the yoga teachers at the ashram. They look strong and confident, unapologetic and serene. Unashamed grey hair is becoming rarer. I always notice other women with grey hair; I feel drawn to my silver sisters. I don't mind looking my age, I hope I'm comfortable in my skin. I don't want to rub out the lines I've earned in my forty-something years with Botox, I don't want to pretend I'm still twenty when I'm clearly not. Not that I've transcended all body anxieties, I have plenty of other imperfections to fret about.

I've been thinking about this issue a lot lately, as I'm planning to write part of a book set in the 1970's. That decade might have been the last time in Western culture when women were truly encouraged to celebrate the huge variety of natural beauty we're endowed with - buxom or skinny, hairy, fleshy and glorious, we could let it all hang out, whatever shape we happened to be. "Natural" was gorgeous. (Of course it couldn't last because no one could make any money out of "natural.") How wonderful it would be if we could all feel comfortable and confident with our bodies. How much energy we would free up for creativity and action and enjoying life, if we didn't spend so much time worrying about what we look like. Hardly an original observation, I know, but one that's on my mind.

Our Holiday



All photographs by Alice (except the one of her smiley-sunscreen legs, which was taken by Evie)

Lost

A sad thing happened on our holiday: we accidentally left these little guys behind on the front beach at Sorrento. Though Evie has a vast collection of Littlest Pets, these two were special, her "babies." They were called Sugar and Nuttlex.

We were all culpable. It was Alice's fault, because it was her idea to bring them to the beach; Evie's fault, because they belonged to her, and she should have looked after them; Michael's fault, because he arrived with kites at a crucial moment and we think that's when they were dropped in the sand; and my fault, because I'm the mum, and it's my job to keep track of everything, isn't it? Anyway, I feel really bad about it. Ridiculous, I know, but it does feel as if Sugar and Nuttlex were part of our family, and I hate the thought of them, so small and helpless, abandoned on the beach, as we gathered up our towels and strolled away forever.

It's absurd to single out the loss of Sugar and Nuttlex when you think of all the toys that drift out of our lives - left behind, broken, thrown away, lost in the garden, sifted to the bottom of the toy drawer, marooned in the attic. I remember other objects which were once precious and have now disappeared from my life - a ring, a book, a photograph - and I mourn them vaguely, but because I can't pinpoint the exact moment of their loss, the grief is blunted. I can let them go. But I almost felt Sugar and Nuttlex slipping from my grasp, and the pain is small but sharp.

Evie cried. I said, don't be disappointed if Daddy can't find them. She said, are you kidding? I'll disappoint my head off!

Daddy couldn't find them.

So we hope that means that some other child has picked them up and put them in their pocket, that they've been carried away into a new life, with a new family and a whole set of new adventures. They won't be Sugar and Nuttlex any more. But we hope that someone loves them.

It Was Meant To Be

When Penni and I first met six years, we realised that we had certain things in common. First, and perhaps quite significantly, we were both short. This meant we could look each other in the eye as we conversed; this is unusual for me and I assume for Penni too. It made us both instantly at ease with each other.*

Secondly, we discovered that we both wrote YA fantasy. Thirdly, we lived on the same tramline (alas, I wish this was still true!) and so we were able to ride home together chatting.

We found out we each had one daughter (now we each have two) and husbands whose names started with M.

As we got to know each other, weird connections emerged.
1) We used the same moisturiser.
2) We wore identical runners.
3) Both our Dads were born in England.
4) Both our Dads were in the Navy.
5) We each had an aunt who was a professional ballerina.

And most freakily of all...
6) We had each independently, without knowing each other, written a novel with a character named Trout.

Now, Trout is not exactly a common name. And most bizarrely, Undine Trout and Tremaris Trout were almost the same person, despite living in totally different kinds of fantasy worlds -- sceptical, practical, loyal, sweet.

Obviously something fairly freaky was going on here. Over the years we have been forced to submit to Fate and accept that we have some kind of bizarro Bobbsey Twins thing going on. The only sensible response was to take it one step further and actually write books together, to merge our writerly selves and become one super-author, able to leap impossible plot points in a double bound. Look! Up in the sky! Is it a Little Bird? Is it a plane? Is it a Taste of Lightning?

No! It's Dear Swoosie!!!

Described by Australian Bookseller and Publisher as "the perfect young adult novel"!! Out on 4th January in all good bookstores!



* One day I will write a thesis about how our physical bodies influence our relationship with the world. Tall and short people experience the world in utterly different ways; ditto thin and heavy people; the beautiful and the plain. Even left and right-handedness affects how we interact with others and our environment.

Wrapping Up The Year

The pattering of gumnuts on the roof sounds like hail. I only wish it was...

We're getting ready to set off on the holiday round - Christmas Eve with Michael's family, Christmas Day with my parents and sister, friends for New Year, a week at the beach. It's been a busy, mostly happy year.

I knew I wouldn't get much writing done in 2009, because it was Evie's kinder year and the days are so chopped about; but I surprised myself. Penni and I dashed off Dear Swoosie together (it's due out on 4th January, folks!). I've written about 20,000 words of my New Guinea book (though I think I'll end up discarding nearly all of them). And Pen and I have grand plans for a super-duper fantasy collaboration next year which we're both hugely excited about. Crow Country won't be ready for next year, but we're all hoping it will be published in 2011. It's nice to have that up my sleeve!

Winter of Grace was published at the start of the year, and picked up the Children's Peace Literature Award. Cicada Summer came out in May, and has been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award -- both tremendous and unexpected honours.

Evie had a busy, happy, social year at kindergarten, and is jumping up and down at the prospect of school in 2010. A big contrast to her elder sister, who still hates school -- but maybe not quite as much as she did a year ago. Huge thanks to Trish, her literacy intervention teacher, who has worked wonders this year. Reading is never going to be easy for Al, but it is getting easier, and most importantly, she's now willing to try.

Some awful things happened this year -- the Black Saturday fires, the death of Michael's father -- and the world seems to be sliding, slowly but inexorably toward destruction... But hey, the Bulldogs nearly made the Grand Final! My beautiful girls and my lovely husband are all safe and well, and more or less happy, and we have a lot to be thankful for.

Happy Christmas y'all, and stay safe over the holidays.

My Place, and Our Place

We've been loving My Place at our house. (Actually it's a bit sentimental for Alice, though she likes the historical aspect, but the rest of us are lapping it up.) Michael even rushes home from cricket training to catch it, and both of us have cried. I'm longing now to watch it forwards as well as backwards in time, to pick up the connections I might have missed.

It would be fascinating to somehow get a snapshot of our own house every ten years. We've only been here for five and a half years, so our family barely registers so far.

Ten years ago the previous owners, a couple called Colin and Stephen, were living here. They were making the mosaics that adorn our tank stand and laundry splashback, the stained glass in our back door, and painting the clouds-and-flowers ceiling in what is now Evie's bedroom. Perhaps they were building the bungalow that they used as a studio, and which is now my study and the guest room. They remodelled the bathroom and extended the kitchen. They were planting all the wonderful trees in our garden, which have transformed it into a slice of bushland in the inner suburbs, and attract all the parrots and honey-eaters we see every spring.

Twenty years ago, if I remember what Colin and Stephen said correctly, a grumpy old woman and her grown up son lived here. They painted the insides of the cupboards lurid green. Their backyard was a spartan lawn with a Hills hoist and a lemon tree.

And then it's a big blank, except for strangers' names on the title deed, all the way back to 1927, when the house was first built. All the houses around here were built around the same time; it was a Californian bungalow housing estate. It would have been as grim as most new estates - no established trees, dusty roads, no gardens, all the houses raw and ticky-tacky. The school over the back fence wasn't even finished yet; it was probably a big muddy building site, rather like it is now, with a new "stimulus" building going up. There were probably lots of little kids in the street, just as there are now.

I wonder about all the people who lived in our house before it was ours. Who slept here, wept here, kissed here, dreamed here, died here? Was anyone born under this old roof? What secrets did they hide? What pets did they keep? Were there chickens in our garden? What pictures hung from their walls, what rugs lay on these old pine floorboards? What children whispered and giggled and quarrelled here, before Alice and Evie? Was Evie's room the sitting room, or a bedroom, then? How many kids shared Alice's little bedroom? Was there a sleep-out? What colour was the house before Colin and Stephen painted it blue and white?

Alice says she saw a ghost in our kitchen. I wonder whose ghost it might have been. And I wonder what they think of us?

A Bit More Skiting

Cicada Summer is a finalist for the Aurealis Awards, in the children's long fiction section. Hooray!

The other finalists in this category are Deborah Abela, The Remarkable Secret of Aurelie Bonhoffen; Jen Storer, Tensy Farlow and the Home for Mislaid Children; and Gabrielle Wang (who I had the pleasure of meeting properly for the first time the other day!) for A Ghost In My Suitcase. Congratulations to everyone.

It is a great honour to be short-listed. But I was possibly even more pleased to discover, the same day, that my eleven year old friend Marcie (who hasn't been reading much lately) has read Cicada Summer three times and lent it to all her friends. Good on you, Marce.

The Children's Book, A. S. Byatt

This book is taking me a long time to read; I started it at the ashram two weeks ago and I'm still only just over half-finished. Perhaps it's unfair to comment before I reach the end. But I'm having a complicated reaction to this novel.

I should start by saying that I've always loved A.S. Byatt's writing. In my twenties, I adored Possession; I devoured the Frederica Potter quartet in greedy gulps (though by Babel Tower I was guiltily skimming some pages, and by Whistling Woman, not-so-guiltily.)

The Children's Book is crammed with detail: precise descriptions of what everyone wore to a party, and another party; what everyone saw at an exhibition and how they each reacted to it; moment by moment descriptions of puppet plays and lectures and what Tom saw in the woods. There are what seem like hundreds of characters, all with complicated relations to each other, those relations laid out in minute detail.

Once I was entranced and hypnotised by this dense layering; now, perhaps because I'm more pressed for time, I can't help thinking, oh just get on with the story! The story is solid and interesting; it doesn't need all this laborious research weighing it down. I'm glad and impressed that she has, obviously, done a great deal of research, and there's no doubt it's a rich book because of it. But I don't need to see it all laid out on the page (all 615 of them). Far be it from me to advise A.S. Byatt, but there are times when the author needs to know stuff that the reader doesn't need to know.

There's also (and Byatt has been quite explicit about this) an undercurrent of nastiness toward children's authors that I can't help resenting. (Weirdly, and as Misrule has noted before me, this nastiness has been echoed more than once on Radio National's The Book Show.) Now, I've met quite a few writers for children and young people and they all seem to be lovely, perfectly normal people. I'm sure they have their flaws, but none of them appear to be psychotic, or trapped in a perpetual irresponsible childhood, or exploitative and oppressive toward their own children, or escaping from reality, or driving their offspring to suicide.

Why is there this assumption that there's something inherently strange or dangerous about writing for children, or that we "can't grow up"? Have these authors and book-lovers forgotten that they themselves were introduced to literature by children's writers? Is it just pure snobbery?

This has turned into a rant, and I didn't intend it to be. I am truly torn between loving The Children's Book and wanting to hurl it across the room in frustration. Perhaps by the end I will have made up my mind. I'll let you know.