‘Be yourself, for everybody else is taken.’
Those are words she’d heard her father use through her growing years.
Her mother wrote poetry; quietly, at the kitchen table while the potatoes were roasting or a cake was being baked; waiting for the timer to emit its shrill beeps, reminding her it was time to return from the land of verse before the smell of burnt offerings forced one to. Gentle, observational rhymes for children, about a frog that dreamed of being an Olympic long jumper, or an antlered stag with such unique courage that one day, while being pursued ruthlessly by a cheetah, it stopped in mid-flight, whirled around and, horns lowered, took the about-to-pounce cheetah completely by surprise.
Her father was a tradesman — a whistling tradesman — who repaired other people’s roofs so that their own could be kept safe over their heads. His expertise lay in shingle roofing. The garage and the outhouse could have been tile museums. They contained an endless variety of shingles in terracotta, cedar, concrete, composition shingles of fibreglass and asphalt, shingles in colour variation, green, brown; clay tiles, slate tiles.
By the time she was ten, she knew as much about rhymed meter and verse as she did about weatherproofing a rooftop. For example, while rubber shingles could have a life span of nearly 50 years, shingles of ceramic were known to guarantee a duration of more than double that time.
In the evenings, after work was done, he’d return home whistling as he got his stuff out of the car. Then, after a shower and a quick smoke on the back porch off they went — he and his wife — for a spin in the car. To the park nearby, to the supermarket, to Dan’s Eatery for a light snack, for something quiet to do together. It was ‘their time’. Just him and her.
Her mother would have put away her poetry. She’d have showered and dressed and been waiting, dinner would have been cooked ready for when they returned. She’d have been seated in the sitting room waiting for the crunching sound of wheels on the gravel drive outside, informing her he’d returned. Her husband.
“It was their very private time together and it became their incurable habit. It was just them, the two of them locked in a moment as if saying in all these 24 hours although we’ve had to go our separate ways, you to your work and me to my housework, these precious moments we are not going to share with anyone else but ourselves,” said Jean, their daughter, now in her 70s herself.
“I was their only child, I know, it sounds selfish of them, but I don’t see it that way at all. I was never included but you know what, I never felt left out. I guess it’s because when they returned, when they burst back out of their little private bubble, they gave me all the attention I needed and sometimes more than I could cope with.”
Jean’s a writer.
“I guess I took after my mum in the end,” she says, adding, “although that’s not quite true. In many ways I reckon I’ve inherited more of my father’s genes. He was the extrovert. And I’m a bit of an extrovert writer — now there’s an anomaly for you!” she laughs.
Jean recently ran in a mini-marathon for the over-60s. A week before that, she was bravely pitting her self-confessed limited cooking skills against experts in a charity drive. What makes it all worthwhile, I wondered.
“If I tried to answer that, I’d probably do it badly,” she replied, “but I’ll tell you what. There’s a quote by William Purkey that sums it up best: ‘You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching, love like you’ll never be hurt, sing like there’s nobody listening and live like it’s heaven on earth.’ In a way that links perfectly with what my dad always used to say: ‘Be yourself.’”
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
