tales of long-dead rellies

The yellow wing chair with the scratchy linen cover was next to the sandstone fireplace. I held his hand and led him to the yellow chair. He was my blind Uncle Geoff, who would die soon. He was thirty two years old. 

My Mother’s younger brother. Lovely person, they all said. He had diabetes, a rare complication. I held his big hand because it was my job to guide him. I imagined he saw only grey or maybe brown. I was four years old, or  maybe only three. In my good Sunday dress that I wore when I led him across the lounge room when he came with my  grandparents and Great Aunt Dorothy. On Sundays. Across the Bridge, Across the Harbour. 

Grandma Julie and Great Aunt Dorothy wore little hats with nets; and briskly unbuttoned gloves. They were powdered and perfumed and came in the big Oldsmobile, and Mum said we had to look nice for them.

I led Uncle Geoff very carefully to the yellow chair. I was too young to be sad, or to think about how it was when he died. He was the only son, the only brother, the only uncle.

Then his mother, Grandma Julie was gone too, of a brain tumour, six weeks later. 

Then my parents were gone, away on a grown-ups’ holiday to look after Grandpa because he was sad. A hushed, important  holiday, by the Sea, in Queensland. There were photos of Mum in her red car-coat against a late-afternoon dark blue Kodachrome ocean. And Grandpa, his hair parted in the middle, ruffled in the sea breeze.

I wasn’t sad, and nor was my little brother. We were left with a plump, placid girl called Denise, who moved into our house. She gave us boiled sweets and made macaroni cheese. She gave me a miniature plastic kitchen set, a magical thing with tiny pop-up toaster and mixmaster and rolling pin. I lost myself in its wondrous shiny pink world. 

It wasn’t until decades later that  the grief from that time washed over me, and I thought  about how it  must have been for my mother, for Grandpa, for all of us, the survivors.

(These recollections came out of an exercise for the writing group. We wrote about the memories we had from before the age of five. Early memories are so intensely sensory - colours, tastes, feelings. fragments of words or  music, images from time when we experienced things directly; a time before we started to interpret or to construct narratives from our experiences.)

These morning-after-the-night-before photos must have been taken in the early 1950’s. That's my young mother at her parents’ kitchen table with her new boyfriend - my father-to-be.  She's wrapped up in a sheet and my father is in a borrowed kimono of Grandpa's. And that's Geoff with his pyjama-clad girlfriend on one side, his sister on the other. And only a few more years to live.  They look so at ease - I recognise, I think, the mood from my own past, those sexy, dreamily hungover  mornings in our early twenties.