Ferguson - On Mother

Sarah Ferguson is an award-winning investigative journalist at the ABC. She wrote The Killing Season Uncut with Patricia Drum in 2016.

Little Books on Big Themes

Nikki Gemmell On Quiet

Blanche dAlpuget On Lust & Longing

Leigh Sales On Doubt

Germaine Greer On Rage

Barrie Kosky On Ecstasy

David Malouf On Experience

Don Watson On Indignation

Malcolm Knox On Obsession

Gay Bilson On Digestion

Anne Summers On Luck

Robert Dessaix On Humbug

Julian Burnside On Privilege

Elisabeth Wynhausen On Resilience

Susan Johnson On Beauty

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2018

Text Sarah Ferguson, 2018

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design by Alice Graphics

Cover design by Nada Backovic

Typeset by Typeskill

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

9780522874082 (paperback)

9780522874099 (ebook)

To Anthony

I talked to my mother throughout the summer, floating in the ocean, head tilted back in the water, eyes skyward. On days when the swell was too strong, I drifted in the tea-treestained water of the creek. There where no one could hear, I spoke out loud the words and names not used since childhood. I thanked her, as I had for the first time weeks earlier, reaching forward tentatively to stroke her soft grey hair on the pillow. I talked to her in the garden where I made my first flowerbed, for her; English flowers, hollyhocks and grandmothers bonnets, deep purple lavender. I told her how like the bed beyond her kitchen window it was. I who have never grown anything anywhere, have made a whole bed grow riotously for you in the hard Australian sun. She smiled and made a face as if to say, Thats a turn-up for the books, you in the garden with secateurs and twine. Now Ive heard it all.

I talked to her during the summer sport, the Ashes and the Open, because Marjorie was a true aficionado, with a near obsession for the Swiss tennis player. She had a similar obsession with Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan, to the point where my father would hide copies of books about him under the bed. We spent a lot of time in my childhood, she and I, watching cricket. It never seemed odd, though I realise now it might seem so. We talked seriously about the game, but the subject of those afternoons was really love, a mothers love, imparted wordlessly at a provincial cricket ground with scorecards, a thermos and tartan rugs against the English summer cold. You might say it was an English form of love, oblique, unable to be stated, but it wasnt. I dont think my generation, which expresses love so easily and so often, loves any more or provides more security by declaring it in every phone call. I knew her love was there, I knew it with complete and easy certainty, as it was in countless other scenes in the landscapes we shared.

I have lived so far away for so long, Im sorry, I tried to say. But she wouldnt allow it. She never said dont move so far, or it would make me happy if you came home, or even that it was hard for her. She understood and she didnt know reproach. She had left her own parents in Nairobi in 1959, aged twenty-three, her mother at the open door, fierce with recrimination, imploring her daughter not to leave. She took a taxi from the house, through the game park to the airport, and boarded a plane for the long journey to England. A polite, obedient young woman who had come of age in the middle-class world of postwar England was marrying against her parents wishes. She lived her own life and encouraged me to do the same. She would not accept the sorrow, even as the words formed on my lips. Hush, she said. You have nothing to be sorry for.

In early September, my husband, Tony, and I boarded a plane in Melbourne. A WhatsApp message flashed on my phone. Can you ring me immediately. Ta. An odd mix of urgent and casual, it was from my brother, Anthony, in London, where it was the middle of the night. I felt a bolt of fear and smothered it. I decided to wait till I landed. We left Sydney airport in a taxi, and as we turned the corner away from the terminal, the last thing I noticed were the billboards and a doughnut store up ahead. I called his number.

Whats up?

I dont know how to say it so Ill just say it. Mother died.

The bonds broke, snapping and uncoiling, like a thousand tiny ropes. I cried out. Tony tried to hold me, but I couldnt be held. Decades of restraint unravelled. The driver heard my cries and faced forward, head slightly bowed.

No.

On a broken line, Anthony tried to explain. She was alone in hospital. We didnt know she was there.

No, no, not by herself, I sobbed. Its so wrong.

Anthony wasnt in London. He was in Italy, driving through the tunnels in the Alps towards Milan airport. The signal dropped out.

Not by herself. Not alone. No. I thrashed about in the back of the taxi, like something animal.

The phone rang again.

I urged myself to think of him, in the dark, racing for a flight.

Im sorry you had to make this call.

I dont know much, he said. His children were on their way to the hospital.

I learned the childrens story later. Hospital staff had rung the house but much too late. My niece and nephew struggled to find their way there in the dark; so impoverished are English councils that they switch off the streetlights at night, which made it nearly impossible for the children to find their way. They dont do that in the tiny NSW hamlet where I live, population 242, where a bright light illuminates the few streets through the night, competing with the Milky Way. They incurred a fine for driving in a bus lane that had no buses at night, then in the dimly lit hospital car park, they poured money into an expensive ticket machine, thinking they would be there for hours. Inside, a junior doctor showed them to their grandmother, who had died minutes earlier. Not knowing what to do next, they went to her house and sat in her sitting room, every creak and groan of wind and wood jolting them to fear, waiting for dawn and another drive, to Heathrow to collect their parents. My mother, their grandmother, lay in the hospital, alone, dead, having spoken her last words to a harried nurse, Im clammy and cold.