Eager cupped hands

Having started my memoirs at age four, the sensible direction to go is backwards, till I have explained how I got to be born at all: you know, how my parents met and all that, which might involve telling their life stories too. I hope it won’t be too boring. The aim is to write my story in 500 words in each instalment.

The photo is written on the back in my grandmother’s hand:

Ian, aged 3½ Sept ’45, Perth. (My middle name comes from her husband Vincent.)

I can remember it being taken. The clothes were bought specially for the occasion. My mother slicked my hair down with water when we arrived at the studio. Don’t be deceived by the rosy cheeks. In those days the stylish thing was to order hand-painted sepia prints: at least it was still stylish in the colonies.

We had gone by bus to the office district of central Perth, and climbed up narrow staircases to the top, where I was astonished to hear a nearby public clock chime the hour. The photographer wanted me to look eager and smiling, never easy for me in front of a camera. He held a soft ball and said he would throw it for me to catch. That is why I look expectant with my hands in that position. The camera was on a tripod and he stood beside it squeezing a shutter release cable to get the shot. I left the building frustrated that he broke his promise: he never threw the ball.

I can understand why my mother went to the trouble and expense of the clothes and the portrait. On August the 6th, the Enola Gay had dropped the bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima. Within days the war was over, and my mother had no more reason to seek sanctuary in Australia. Her husband was missing presumed dead. She had last been “home” in 1935, on her honeymoon visit to England, proudly showing off her six-foot-seven Dutchman. Now she wanted to prepare her parents for her imminent return to England, with her piece of excess baggage.

It was nine months before she could book her passage. Blame the disruptions of war. Every available ship was “bringing the boys back home”, one of the boys being my own father, but that story will have to wait. I wasn’t told who he was and have no memory of him. The concept of father had never been put in my head.

The eager cupped hands in that photo remind me of an earlier occasion, where the fixative of memory was also disappointment. I was at a farm. Perhaps my mother had left me to be cared for whilst she went on one of her trips.

In this memory, a “big girl”—perhaps she was seven—took me to a big open-fronted shed, filled with bales of hay, where chickens roamed free. The shed was so dark and the yard so bright, that your eyes had to adjust from one to the other. She took me to find a new-laid egg, still warm, and placed it in my two eager hands. We were to take it up the stony little lane to the house. I was proud and excited as if I had laid the egg myself. After only a few paces, it bounced out of my hands and broke. She refused to get me another. First I was furious and then I cried bitterly.

PS, May 2018: that farm must have been my paternal grandparents’. My father wouldn’t have been there. He’d enlisted, gone to fight the Japanese army.