
photo credit: bernat…
The folks at
dotdotdash held an excellent series of events last week as part of their Subscribeathon, and if you are a writer or a reader, you should totally go to their subscriptions page and jump on board. It’s only $35 for four issues and you get to act smug and say “That? Oh, that’s dotdotdash, it’s a literary magazine, you know, like what smart people read?” when they point to it on your coffee table. Anyway, the marvellous man that is S. J. Finch (who, after having comprehensively beaten me at Super Smash Bros., departed from running the mag to work on his Ph.D.) invited me to speak at the ‘Home’ themed event, asking that I write something about my childhood home, and childhood in general. I found it again this morning, and it went down well enough with the crowd to think that maybe others might like to read it. Anyway, here you go.
———
While preparing for tonight I foolishly asked Twitter how I should go about writing something about home and childhood without falling into a giant pit of nostalgia. I got two responses, one of which was “Make sure you had a terrible childhood”, while the other was “Write about someone else’s” [Edit: that advice coming from Sam Twyford-Moore and Steph Convery, respectively.]. As I am ever a slave to the Internet, I decided to follow the advice of my somewhat cynical friends.
So the first thing I had to do was weigh up whether or not I had a terrible childhood. And while rummaging through the pile of dirty laundry that is my memories, I realised that the moments I remember of my childhood are somewhat unfairly dominated by my father. The reason for that being that my parents split when I was six, after my father essentially walked out on us. But we did still see him regularly at the insistence of Mum, and so my time was split between my home and a succession of houses, units, and apartments that my Dad occupied in the years following the split. My father was quite an angry man during that time, and that anger resulted in a number of incidents throughout my childhood which are still affecting my siblings and I to this day. And my feelings regarding him are the subject of a few of my stories and memoir-ish pieces, one of which you’ll find in the upcoming Gambit issue. Which is why, tonight, I don’t really want to talk about that side of my childhood. Because I think that while the days that we spent with him were damaging and awful, it shouldn’t eclipse the fact that, at the same time, I had a wonderful, loving environment created by my Mum at what I considered to be my true home. So instead of going over the bad stuff, I wanted to celebrate that place: 12 Priory Road, out in a suburb called Maida Vale.
I think I’m in the statistical minority in that throughout my childhood I lived in the same house. My siblings and I all went to the same primary school and high school, a fact that wasn’t lost on teachers who would take every opportunity to compare me to my predecessors. My brother and I played on the same sports teams at the same club five minutes down the road, and we have known all of our neighbours to varying degrees–one of whom spent a very determined afternoon trying to play kiss-chasy with me. So we grew up having a very well-defined sense of community and place, which I think may be a rare thing nowadays anywhere that isn’t a country town. My Mum actually still lives there, which means she’s been in that house for about 35 years. If you were to visit, you’d see a white wooden-clad house, built up on stumps that keep the insects out and provide cover for the occasional wandering echidna. You’d see the front half of a garden that she spends most of her weekends nurturing, while around the back there’s a wide strip of lawn that we spent most of our weekends destroying. Almost every bit of green on the property belongs to native plants, whose gleefully shed pollen never failed to make me hate them for what they did to my sinuses.
Once inside, you’d immediately be aware of one of the main reasons why I always felt, and still do feel, safe and loved in that house; and it’s something that I believe comes from my Dutch ancestry. My mother is Dutch, she emigrated to Melbourne with her parents when she was quite young, and moved over to northern W.A. and then Perth once she’d completed her nursing training. So despite having lived here for most of her life she does still keep up the Dutch habits, and one of my favourite ones is the fact that Dutch houses are typically filled with a carefully curated collection of crafts and knick-knacks. Shelving overflows with seashells, daggy photographs, books from all stages of our reading careers, lolly tins, unironically decorative cutlery and crockery, framed embroidery, handmade runners and bowls, every woodwork or metalwork project that my siblings and I ever completed, wooden sculptures from overseas trips, and so on and so forth. There are no clean lines, no brushed steel, and certainly no minimalism: at last count there were five different clocks in the living room alone. Up until very recently above the kitchen bench there hung a cardboard fish coloured in with pastel crayons that my sister made when she was in grade two. My sister is now 32, and insisted that Mum finally cut the damn thing down when the kitchen got renovated [Edit: I have since discovered that it is still up in the house, it's just moved to my old bedroom.].
If you were to open up any of the drawers you’d find exercise books from every primary school class we ever had, along with yearbook photos and newspaper cuttings from our occasional excursions into local fame. It sounds redundant to say this, but it’s a very homely home. You know how you go to some people’s places and it feels almost like a hotel? Mum’s isn’t like that. The whole place just so perfectly represents the way that our Mum loves and lives for us kids. If there hadn’t been that feeling of warmth and safety that my home provided after visits with my Dad, I don’t think that I would have turned out nearly as well-adjusted as I have. And while my definition of home has changed over the years to encompass my girlfriend and a certain feeling to a place, I know that 12 Priory Road will always be my first home.
So after all that I think I can safely say that I had a pretty good life growing up, with only the occasional terrible-ness sprinkled on like chunks of licorice on an otherwise perfectly baked childhood cake [Edit: I interrupted myself during the night to declare this an absolutely abhorrent metaphor, and so it is]. And I think that, having reminded myself of that fact, it’s helped me to realise that I do have a tendency to cling on the bad stuff and relegate the good stuff to the background. So I’d like to thank the dotdotdash folks for prompting me to appreciate how lucky I really am.
Anyway, still following the advice of my Internet buddies, I am now going to play a game of a ‘Who Am I?’ with someone else’s childhood, and I’m challenging you guys to yell out when you think you know who it is that I am describing.
I was born by immaculate conception into slavery in the desert. It was a very hard life, but I made myself indispensible to the slave masters by quickly picking up the finer details of machinery. By age nine I was a gifted engineer, building engines and machines out of spare parts and eventually earning my freedom in a race [Edit: it was at this point that Liz Tan yelled out the answer, she's sharp that one!]. Recognising my ability, a wizard came to visit me, asking that I come with him to the city of wizards, so that I could be trained in their ways. With an automaton of my own creation by my side, I left my mother and travelled with the wizard to where the others of his kind lived. But when I finally got there, they refused me on the advice of a fortune teller within their ranks, who saw my future to be a dark one. However, when an army invaded, I proved my worth to the wizards by using my engineering skill and quick reflexes to route their most important forces. After the battle, an especially courageous wizard offered to tutor me, and the rest agreed, although reluctantly. I spent the rest of my childhood in training, until my masters sent me to investigate an assassination attempt on a queen.
[Edit: The answer, of course, being Anakin Skywalker.]