Around the Dining Table

Yes, we had one of them when I was growing up – a big, rectangular wooden one – and a dining-room too. 

 The dining-room was in the very centre of the house. One door, a corner door, opened into the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, overlooking the big back yard from high up. On a sloping block, the house was one storey in front, two at the back. Up the hall, at the front of the house, opposite my parents' bedroom, was the lounge-room, with sofa, armchairs and fireplace. 

My little brother's bedroom and mine were in the middle. His opened off the dining-room, and was always called The Sunroom, from a time before there was a little brother, as it got the afternoon sun. It was a playroom for me then, for quiet play involving blocks or coloured pencils, and a sewing room for my mother.

My bedroom was the other side of the house, across the hall. I got the morning sun and the rising moon. I got our next-door neighbours' yellow roses showing above the fence.

The day was fine

With bright sunshine

And as I looked from out the window of my room

I saw a golden rose in bloom

... I wrote when I was eight.

We used all the rooms. Meals were indeed around the dining table. There was no television then, so no eating on laps in front of it – though sometimes on cold nights we might have soup on our knees in the lounge-room, in front of the fire. When Grandpa was staying, which was often, we played word games around that fire. Sometimes we roasted chestnuts. They were special occasions. When, as usual, we sat around the dining table to eat, we played word games there as well.

The bathroom was at the back of the house, behind my bedroom and opposite the kitchen. There was a passage between bathroom and kitchen, across the back of the house, with the big dining-room window looking into it. It was wide enough for a built-in bench where my Dad had his pot-plants. (No, not THAT kind of pot. This was the 1940s.) I remember the primulas most of all: delicate, pretty and profuse.

Alongside the passage, at the very back, under a row of high outside windows, was the stairwell going down to our lower storey. That was only half the length of the upper. It housed a woodshed (also opening onto the outside), the laundry, and a small spare bedroom where Grandpa stayed on his long visits after Nana died.

When other visitors came, more briefly, my brother moved into my big bedroom and the visitors took the sunroom. That was also where Nana used to sleep when she stayed with us before my brother was born ... before she was dead. 

My brother arrived when I was four. That was the other thing, besides my Nana's death, which made four such a crucial year for me – the year when everything changed. He seemed to me pale, miserable and boring, and he took up a lot of my parents' attention. He was born with an extreme squint in one eye, necessitating a longer stay in hospital after the birth, and going back for medical visits later. He had glasses at eight months, the youngest child who had ever been prescribed them at that time – 72 years ago – and possibly since. 

I had been the adored daughter, the firstborn, the focus of all the attention, whether good or bad. Too much attention, my psychiatrist thought, 20 years later. 

I didn't like my little brother. 

The Crime

I was four when my brother came.

Only weeks before that, my Nana –

with her warm, gigantic lap,

her long hair never cut,

her soft brown laughing eyes,

her voice like dark honey –

became quiet and pale and still

and gone, forever gone.

"A death, and then new life,"

I heard a grown-up neighbour say

as if it was a good trade,

as if it was cause to rejoice,

as if we could at least

take some comfort in it.

The babe too was pale.

He came from the same hospital

where she had been, where I last

saw her blanketed in white

and speechless – the hospital

where my mother too disappeared

in a sudden flurry one night

and only my father came back.

But my mother did return. Finally.

She carried this bundle.

Everyone acted glad.

I only stared

at its meaningless face

protruding from the white shawl.

There must have been pleasure

I suppose, for my Mum and Dad.

I remember it cried a lot,

and the way they shrugged

and made helpless faces at each other

in the long nights of wailing

that  nothing would appease …

until exhaustion won.

"Good enough to eat,"

an aunt cooed over the cradle.

And I remember the hot taste of flesh,

my mother screaming behind me:

"You bit your little brother!"

and the purple marks on his arm.

© Rosemary Nissen-Wade 2007 

I didn't like myself either, for doing that. I felt mean and hateful. But I didn't want a brother; I liked the playmates I already had. 

For one thing, there were the nature spirits. That's what I call them now. Then I called them fairies. Most people, I soon found out, didn't see them, or even believe in  them. Or said they didn't – which I in turn found hard to believe, though I only saw them briefly myself; one minute there and the next gone, then back again, then gone again.... By now I have reached the conclusion that they flit back and forth between dimensions. 

They played with me in the garden, naturally. That big back yard was mostly taken up by a huge lawn, and around the edges of that were flowers and bushes as well as some berry vines – raspberries, loganberries, red currants and black currants. Up near the garage at the end of our driveway were some clumps of gooseberries, as well as a big black wattle just right for climbing. I could use the railings of the back fence to start my way up, then almost immediately arrived in a big, comfortable fork in the branches where, all through childhood, I could sit and read my books. Reading was always my favourite thing.

At the far end of the lawn were a rockery with flowering cacti growing among the stones, a stand of (rather small and thin, I now realise) bamboo, some man-ferns, and a trellis summer house. Just the other side of all this was my Dad's veggie garden and strawberry patch. 

There were two great willow trees at opposite sides of the veggie garden. From the one behind the summerhouse hung a swing made of two thick ropes and a flat wooden seat. My Dad made it, and if I was lucky he would come and push me in it. Mostly I swung in it myself, surrounded by long curtains of willow fronds. I swung and dreamed, in a private haven with pale green walls. They were particularly pretty in Spring, when the new leaves were lightest green and tightly curled.

As well as the fairies there were some children who came to visit. Other people couldn't see them, either. They not only joined me in the garden but also in the house. They liked to sit up at the dining table with us, and I was so keen for my mother to set places for them that she did. My parents called them my imaginary friends, when they thought I wasn't listening. 

Sometimes my Dad pretended he could see them. He talked about them as if they were real, and even spoke to them, but it was obvious he was just pretending. He would say things like, 'Maudie's finished her toast,' when we hadn't given her any; or would address a particular chair by name, but it would be the wrong name for the child sitting in it. 

I saw them perfectly well. But now, decades later, I wonder – was it just like physical seeing, or did I perceive it as being ‘in my mind’s eye’?