How does it feel to hit jackpot. Thousands of letters in digital form, dad must’ve pasted and typed them all into MS-Word files, each with a separate name for easy reference (see image below). Thankful for his obsessive completism, I can imagine day after day:
- Writing ‘Growing’, his memoir in MS-Word
- Writing correspondence on MS-Word
- Typing received correspondence into MS-Word
- Making family trees in MS-Excel
- Looking after finances (MS-Excel/MS-Word)
- Planning trips and buying tickets
- Arguing with people over property (see relevant blogpost)
- Eating and swimming
Shopping cleaning cooking laundry
There’s even a special Word file with addresses in it, hundreds of them all maintained and updated as circumstances changed so that he could ALWAYS keep in touch with correspondents, friends, companies, banks, lawyers, accountants etc.
Eight things to do every day
Item nine mum’s job alone, apologies for the mistake. But even so, what a busy happily married man he was! Pity about the children! All those files (see screenshot below). All those sheets of A4 given to mum so she could check his terrible spelling. Mum for her part busy being a live-in maid. But they’re PRETENDING to be Mrs Simpson and Sergei Diaghelev on the Cote d’Azur. Yes, dahling we MUST tell John, Eduardo, Celeste, Peter, Joan, Robyn, Trish, Ursula, Geoffrey, James that “You can never be too rich or too thin” – a favourite saying of dad’s when he wanted to go the full-1925. Born a mere half-decade later, dad wouldn’t outgrow a need for reassurance, any demonstration of self-respect a threat to his identity. It was personal. A Depression baby to the end, he kept his financial cards close to his chest.
Honolulu, Maroochydore, Florida, Southern Portugal
Mum joined in enthusiastically. She corrected the proofs of dad’s letters and his memoir which grew to a length of 150 A4 pages, ending its narrative just when I was born in 1962 when the family escaped the hated city of Melbourne which had been the source of such suffering for both of them, but especially for dad. “Words, words, words,” as Shakespeare has Hamlet say. She would have been contributing to the process of writing letters, calling out suggestions across the living-dining-kitchen area of whichever luxurious apartment they were staying in wherever the sun and jet engines had taken them.
I haven’t gone through all the letters, it’s almost too much for me to bear doing in a systematic manner. I will dip in here and there and pick out passages for inclusion in these blogposts. Reading them I relive the suffering of 2000 and the memories of horrors of a type that many people could not survive return to memory. Then there was 2008. In both of these instances I was saved by the very things that got me into trouble in the first place, my empathy, my obedience, my cowardice.
They saved me from death. They brought me close to death.
Here’s mum on 6 Sept 1999 – 6 mo before a crisis at the point where I left my family in Yokohama to go and live separately in a run-down apartment I was nevertheless lucky to secure being nothing but a foreigner – here’s mum I say happily playing secretary (she enjoyed dress-ups as a kid) for dad’s benefit, contacting her aunt, Edna Kewish. Note that the says she’s doing the research with her brother, not that she’s doing the research on dad’s order.
I am trying to work with [brother] Geoff on a Kewish family tree, and would love to probe your memories of various relations. I remember that Betty (Elizabeth) Kewish married Heinz Altschul, and went to live in Vienna, and that her sister Patty married an architect, but can’t recall her married name. She may still be around and contactable. I also heard that cousin,(Uncle?) Perce did some Kewish family research in England and the Isle of Man, and someone in the family may have that material stored in an attic someplace. As [spinster aunt] Reba aged I spent my infrequent Melbourne visits with her and gathered some stories, but as I wasn’t so concerned with my project then, didn’t bother to probe further. I think everyone starts this search for family about the age of 60.
Edna (nee Dupont) was the wife of Noel Kewish, a man who was long dead by this time. Mum fattens out her demand by talking about Noel’s beloved photographs (he was talented).
[Husband] Peter and I have been traveling to the northern hemisphere during the Australian winter since 1992. Peter needs to swim, for exercise, daily, and is actually physically allergic to cold, so after [Peter’s mother] Phyllis died in 1996, we sold the house, which we’d really kept for her benefit, and moved to Queensland. After spending a month, in an apartment, at a different location over seven summers, we decided on Maroochydore, which is flat estuary country, has a great heated Shire swimming pool, and a Franklin’s Big Fresh Food supermarket, plus a large Shopping Mall nearby. We sold or disposed of all our worldly goods, except Photographs and some paintings. The photograph of [Edna’s late husband] Noels that Geoff gave us is in an apartment we use in Florida, where we go for the summer hurricane season. It’s a black and white study of two painters and their scaffold against the hull of a ship, a naval vessel. I’d say it was taken at the naval dockyard at Williamstown, during or shortly after the war. There are wonderful cast shadows. Perhaps you remember if he did a sequence at that time, and I can note the provenance correctly.
I went through the Microsoft file diligently looking for any sign of a correction from Edna or a corroboration, but found nothing. I had always thought that these photos of ships being cleaned had been taken by mum’s aunt Madge Johansen. I actually sent one of the prints to Japan. Feeling particularly aggrieved by mum’s concern about “provenance” (she might’ve thought the photo might be worth something in a financial sense) I assume they were tidying up things and wanted to put another issue to bed along with yet another name in a spreadsheet. Collecting people. People who hadn’t become divorced or been separated from their families.
I have other photos of Noel’s, hanging in my bedroom, photos I had framed so that they would be preserved. Mum and dad never spent any money to conserve them, so it was up to me to grab the ball and run. She did get family photos framed herself but only after dad died (in 2011). The following shows her peripatetic style, a cast of mind that is probably responsible for her making nothing in the form of painting or drawing, during her life, apart from a few sketches dating from the early years of her marriage. Easily distracted.
Next week I go to [niece] Clare Dean’s wedding to James Warwick Rourke. In the Green Cathedral, a clearing in a rainforest on Wallis Lake, near Pacific Palms and Bluey’s Beach. It’s between Taree and Newcastle, and if it rains there’s a little church nearby. The safest and most feasible way for me to travel, (Pete couldn’t handle the trip) alone is by 3 buses. From Maroochydore to Brisbane, 2 hrs. Then by McCafferty’s to Newcastle, overnight, 14 hrs. Then by the Great Lakes Bus Co. back up to Bluey’s, where the bus stops outside the door of “Blueys on the Beach”, my hotel, 2.5 hrs. That’s 18.5 hrs and I hope I don’t get travel-sick. We had our 1st and last cruise this year, and I was unexpectedly nauseous most of the trip. Perhaps it’s a latent Kewish gene showing up! I remember Noel was cursed with the problem. Up here they swear by Ginger to calm the symptoms, but this is Ginger Country. Do you still fancy Ginger? I seem to recall you and mum solemnly exchanging decorative jars each Christmas.
Here she starts with the wedding, then goes on to talking about a bus trip she facilely dreads undertaking, because she relishes having an opportunity to talk with someone about it, and ends with the entirely unrelated subject of Buderim ginger! God dad must’ve hated it when mum burbled away happily like this about completely unrelated things. For myself, I particularly like the reminiscence in the final sentence, it gives the entire paragraph a sort of tail that loops back toward the subject of celebration (the para started with a wedding).
The files
There are about 800,000 words in variously hysterical and light-hearted prose in these Microsoft correspondence files. Sentences that curl and barbs that bury themselves deep in the flesh of my self-esteem. They are full of life. I become a kind of St Sebastian reading the lame boasts of a couple damaged by their short-sighted search for material wealth and nothing but material wealth.
Yes that’s right you read it correctly, 800,000 words (see image below).
Just to underscore the point of how similar I am to my father, I made that graphic in MS-Excel. Open up the Word doc, see the word count, transcribe it into the spreadsheet. Ten minutes’ work. But them? How many cups of coffee, how many comfortable conversations, conversations between a married man and his wife, conversations about people they didn’t care a fig about, but in whose affairs they play-acted an interest. People who didn’t know the first thing about them. There they are in their nice apartment overlooking this beach or that river. Right there, in the living room or, to be more correct, him in the living room and her in the kitchen. And she asks him if he wants another cup of coffee. “Would you like another cup of coffee?” “Why yes, my dear, that would be nice.” And then he goes back to entering a received letter into the MS-Word document, obediently filling up the space in the file, he’s turned into a typing machine, a sort of literary mechanism. Churning out tens, hundreds of thousands of words over the period of about a decade, a decade during which, separately and entirely unassisted by anyone, I crashed.
Loss of a mind
Letter of 6 Sept 1999 to Edna Kewish. You remember, I quoted from it before. Yes, I never met Edna but that’s quite another story. What happened in my world at that time was that things were heating up. Three or four months later I’d have left my family home and the stress of living alone, travelling further (bus/train instead of train only), cooking, cleaning, doing laundry (I bought a washing machine it had to be installed on the balcony outside there was no room for it in the apartment) was too much. This is mum on 4 Feb 2000 from Maroochydore.
You don’t say when Matt moved out; or if he is alone or with a new partner.
She had to blame someone, why not blame the messenger?
We know nothing about “Divorce “or “Separation” which have seldom occurred in either of our families.
Ie “Don’t trouble us with your problems”. Note the quotation marks. VERY important.
Peter is an Engineer and I a decorator of sorts, and we have no legal training or knowledge to advise you.
“Don’t trouble us with your problems” (take two, just to hammer home the point).
If you want advice on your legal position, go to the Australian Consulate in Tokyo. You were married under Australian marriage law, and Adelaide is Australian by birth. Your children need to be supported.
Ie “Clean up your own mess”.
I am still very disturbed by Matthew’s appearance and attitude to us last May, it may be that he is ill, and needs help from someone from the same cultural background as himself.
Ie “We never wanted our son to go to Japan he’s not looked after properly there”. Pathologise where you cannot understand or offer any real solutions.
I felt then it was useless to write, as whatever we said seemed to enrage him. This is why we feel so helpless.
It’s almost incredible to me. This is a woman who greedily consumed crime dramas for years after dad’s moving to a nursing home (in 2009) allowed her to watch crap TV freely. There’s no way he would’ve allowed her to consume such innocent nonsense as ‘Father Brown’. When living near her in Maroochydore from 2009 to 2014 I’d go over to cook our dinner every night and on Friday nights her housekeeper G would come over to keep her company, sit with her and chat about ‘Midsomer Murders’ or ‘Poirot’, and then stay overnight in the spare room. We all got along like a house on fire, me, mum, G and Poirot. Four musketeers!
We have learned that nothing we may say will influence either you [daughter-in-law] or Matthew.
It sounds like the Bitch Mother-in-Law from ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ right? But I think this is dad talking, I can’t be sure. There are indications here and there that mum and dad had fixated on some random statement from my then-wife about moving back to Sydney.
So they could see their grandkids.
But I loved my job.
Until Yamatake fired me
They actually asked me when they did it if I wanted them to change the official internal record to say I left voluntarily. I demurred. Yamatake couldn’t influence me. They thought lying would help me. Dad was a good corporate man, so therefore by definition good at lying. In any case “nothing we may say will influence … you” – I can hear dad insisting on that “may”, calling across the room to make sure she puts it in the letter – a pretty extraordinary thing to say in a case where what’s needed is someone to just LISTEN. Help two struggling young people, half their age, work out how to live. Two children under ten, rent to pay every month, a 9-5 job in a country with a strange language (I never learned to read and write Japanese), and no desire to be part of the patriarchy at all.
Yes they were monstrous and cold. Icy, indeed, betraying an inability to feel real emotion. Finding it in others they felt nothing but revulsion. Here’s dad some months before, in May 1999, writing from their apartment in Honolulu in order to express something like regret to an Australian correspondent, a family member:
How I wish I was Matthew’s lovely Dad instead of whatever he thinks of me.
This inability to feel emotion worked both ways, as you see. Unwilling to acknowledge actual feelings in other people, they craved the ability to feel it themselves. In a glaring absence only sadness held sway. If I wanted to be uncharitable I’d say that it’s more like he’s embarrassed he’s got no news of his son’s devoted adoration to communicate to friends and family. It makes him LOOK BAD. Some months before that, on 3 Oct 1998, in a letter sent to Australia from Florida, to the same family member:
I would never intentionally draw a debate with him. Too many chances that he may say something that he might regret and sadden me. Strange how he looks like my father too.
Sadden.
He should have said I was terrified of his tongue. He wouldn’t be sad, he’d just get short and turn away with a sharp comment to make the point that I should look after my own affairs. He looked after his. He never wanted to hear what I thought even when I was a teenager. Teenagers much too difficult, they answer back, have moods. Troublesome. I even looked like his father. Well what did he think about Joao Luis? Here’s dad to a different family member on 15 Mar 2000 from Maroochydore:
I rarely thought of Melbourne, except in the context of visiting my wacky Papa
Perhaps he said this because by that date I’d moved out of my family home and he felt some aggrievedness linking his experience of the present with the distant past. Funny though that dad went to Melbourne, picked up his mother, dragged her up to Sydney, in 1962, the year I was born, deliberately took her AWAY from Joao Luis so she could work on what dad called his “favourite charity”, the family business, Miss Phyllis Caldicott’s Home Accessories, corner Petrarch Ave and New South Head Rd. Mum designed the shop and when I was 18 and old enough I went to uni and studied Italian, reading Petrarch in the original. The building with keyhole shaped windows.
What was the key?
The street was named by a prominent Sydney statesman and politician of the 19th century, one of the university’s founders.
Must be funny in a rich man’s world
The building is still there. Like much else relating to mum and dad’s life, including the fond memories of their children, the business is long gone. Not much remains for that matter apart from a dozen or so MS-Word files and some paintings and drawings that I have taken care to conserve.
What dad thought of me is now sort of irrelevant, but then again that’s not true because if I want to understand who I am I have to nut out a puzzle. To what extent was my otherwise perfectly normal mother turned into a fascist. Was it under dad’s tutelage. Was she forced to adopt his views on the world in order to coexist in the same dwelling with him? I find it difficult to believe that she would simply on her own instigation just come out and baldly say, “Sorry this is too hard”, walk away from her own son.
I didn’t walk away from her when she needed me. What follows is mum when she was being “normal”; I joyously include below a passage from earlier in this blogpost, if you remember.
I remember that Betty (Elizabeth) Kewish married Heinz Altschul, and went to live in Vienna, and that her sister Patty married an architect, but can’t recall her married name. She may still be around and contactable. I also heard that cousin,(Uncle?) Perce did some Kewish family research in England and the Isle of Man, and someone in the family may have that material stored in an attic someplace.
Busy, happy, happily married people.
A dream. THEIR dream. I got into difficulty in a life they had chosen. I didn’t want to go to uni to get a degree, they had insisted. I didn’t want to read Petrarch in the original. This was all their idea: “childhood > school > uni > job > property > marriage > happiness”. In the eyes of BOTH parents. Apart from the fact that they never or rarely saw their grandchildren, the patriarchy had worked for THEM so why wouldn’t it work for EVERYONE? It signally didn’t work for me.
Brought me low.
