Belated Memories Of Lost Sydney Childhood

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday December 24, 1988

Reviewed by DIANNE JOHNSON Dianne Johnson lives and works in theBlueMountains.

IT is a pity that this novel has taken so long to get to Australia; a hardcover edition was published in the United States in September 1987.

Returning to the milieu of Careful He Might Hear You, Sumner Locke Elliott plunges the reader deep into the heart of an Australian family during the years just before and after World War I. The Hydro Majestic at Medlow Bath is in its prime, "Clara Bow" is showing on Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross, Beard Watson's has a napery department, pianola rolls, gateleg tables and tinned cigarettes. Ladies who wear hats are the order of the day.

The staging of a formal family photograph introduces us to the Lord family. It looks like a perfect rendition of the loving clan, serenely optimistic, burgeoning with youth and good health. And heartbreakingly innocent of what lies ahead.

There are seven children in this family, two others having died in infancy- Myfanwy had been dropped by the nurse on to the stone kitchen floor, and baby Alice had succumbed to croup. There are six girls, and Fred, and each one has startling red hair running the gamut from sunset auburn to bright cerise. The father is a relatively poor Melbourne-based Church of England clergyman. The mother is a dour Victorian matron, whose "lips had been so severely sealed for years that her mouth had virtually disappeared". Despite a vast gulf between the parents, the family believes in itself, each member representing a glimpse of its potential splendour.

But things have a way of changing. Only three weeks after the photo is taken, in 1912, the father, the Reverend William Lord, dies leaving his young family dislocated, poor and bereft. And so begins the sorrowful and slow dissolution of the family.

A rich Sydney cousin intervenes and offers them what turns out to be a gloomy, decomposing old cottage in Turramurra, at that time miles from anywhere.

Widowed Annie never regains her Victorian composure, privately asserting that it would have been "better for her, for all concerned, if they had remained in a book illustration". The dawning and bitter knowledge that William no longer loved her - far back even before her eldest Lily was born -has left her sour and savage. But the children had come, relentlessly, about every 14 months. And she was never quite able to "reconcile the ferocity of her husband's lovemaking with the dull-eyed figure who sat opposite her at the breakfast table and cut off the top of his boiled egg with such precision ... ". She was barely able to cherish a child before it was snatched away from her by a nurse and she was heavy with another.

Annie had withdrawn from her children long ago, so William's death feels like a particularly cruel and severe punishment - of being left with them. She resorts to amnesia, a white cloud encircling her, as day and night merge into each other without clocks. Until, one morning, she throws herself beneath the baker's cart, fantasising that it was a carriage driven by her handsome suitor, William Lord.

And so, with a sickening thud, the girls and their brother are left to each other like tea and fruitcake in a kitchen silence.

As the life of each of the seven siblings unfurls, their outwardly conventional parents are shown in all their truly bizarre colours against the exuberant but edgy social life that characterised Australia during that period. Each sibling is quite brilliantly realised; each showing access to reserves of courage that logic cannot explain.

They separate from each other, some sooner than later, some more drastically and dramatically than others. The second eldest, Adnia, for example, in order to assert herself free from her crippled foot has to withdraw into the safety of anonymity away from the cloistered sanctity of family. "It wasn't that she didn't still love her sisters," explains the author, "merely that her survival depended on maintaining a distance between her vision and their pedantry."

For Jess, the fifth child, escape to England and a notion of a more couth society becomes her way. But after 12 years' absence, she finds herself disconcertingly back. "'Going home?' English chums had asked. No, leaving it, she wanted to say." Finding the raucousness and alienation of Sydney too great, she yearns to return, but eventually decides to stay. "It doesn't matter much where I am," she realises, "but I've got to find what's left of me."

That old sepia photograph of her family turns up in a cleaning spree and Jess confronts it, amazed at how much has failed to materialise:

Transparent as a dream, the faces of her brothers and sisters, as yet innocent of the fact that they were bereft, waiting for a childhood that had been denied them ... and, in the end they had been duped and deceived by elements beyond their imagination.

Tuck a copy of Waiting for Childhood in your bag for that long overdue holiday reading you're promised yourself. It is sure to evoke your own childhood - or lack of it.