My Turquoise Years Read online

  MY TURQUOISE YEARS

  A MEMOIR

  M.A.C. FARRANT

  My

  TURQUOISE

  Years

  GREYSTONE BOOKS

  DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE PUBLISHING GROUP

  VANCOUVER/TORONTO/BERKELEY

  Copyright © 2004 by M.A.C. Farrant

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books

  An imprint of Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Canada V5T 4S7

  www.greystonebooks.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Arhives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-037-9

  ISBN 978-1-92681-219-9

  Editing by Barbara Pulling

  Copy-editing by Robin Van Heck

  Cover design by Jessica Sullivan

  Cover photograph by Cynthia Diane Pringle / CORBIS /MAGMA

  All inside photographs by M.A.C. Farrant, except as follows: Billy Gibson; Natural Photographers, New Zealand; Doreen Jones; “Souvenir Photo by Ralph King,” Victoria, B.C.; Elsie Sexton; Victoria A-Go-Go; unknown.

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  In memory of Nancy & Billy

  For Elsie (1905–2003)

  And for their grandchildren,

  Anna & Bill

  Contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty - one

  twenty - two

  twenty - three

  twenty - four

  twenty - five

  twenty - six

  twenty - seven

  twenty - eight

  twenty - nine

  thirty

  acknowledgements

  Marion and Rip

  [

  one ]

  MY AUNT HOLLERED from the kitchen. “Marion!”

  No answer.

  “Marion!”

  No answer.

  I was a few feet away, lying sideways across my bed. When she flung open the bedroom door I said delightedly, “You sound like Aunt Polly.”

  “Who?”

  “Tom Sawyer’s aunt. In my book… ”

  “A book,” Elsie said crossly. “I might have known. When there are supper dishes waiting. You’ve been in here for over an hour.”

  “It’s a good book,” I said. “You’re just like Aunt Polly. And I’m like…”

  “Never mind that,” Elsie said. “It’s time to do your chores. Time you came down to earth.”

  Thud. She swept from my room.

  Earth, according to my aunt, was a place I was frequently trying to escape. She claimed I liked nothing better than to get on my high horse and stick my nose in the clouds. My high horse. A lovely image, I thought, picturing myself astride a magnificent white mare galloping serenely towards the heavens.

  AT THIRTEEN EVERYONE said I was an overheated child. That I made mountains out of molehills. That I was too smart for my own good. That I was a Miss Know-It-All. That I did too much thinking. That I was too easily influenced. That I had ants in my pants. That I always had to have my own way. That I had eyes in the back of my head. That I was a little pitcher with big ears. That I read the dictionary just so I could use big words that no one else would understand. That I was always doing harebrained things like putting on plays for the neighborhood or building tree forts for wild rabbits.

  And these, I liked to insist, were some of my good qualities.

  The list of my bad qualities—alleged, of course—was just as long.

  That I was spoiled and willful. That I believed the sun rose and set on my head. That I was high-strung. That I was secretive and sneaky. That I lied. That I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. That I could be read like a book. That I had to be browbeaten into cleaning my room. That I was a sore trial. That I cared for no one but myself and, worse, that I thought of no one but myself. That I’d spoiled my dog, Rip, to such an extent he’d turned vicious and knocked a woman off her bike and now had to be chained to his doghouse like a criminal. That I was always overacting.

  “Everyone” was Elsie—Auntie Everyone, the aunt who was raising me. She sprayed her opinions about me as casually as she sprayed Raid around the house.

  I had a list of Elsie’s best qualities, too, and never lost an opportunity to tell her. That she was bossy. That she never talked, she yelled. That she was without understanding. That she was a gossip. That she was two-faced, because she talked behind people’s backs. That she was a monotonous, mediocre, humiliating hypocrite. (“A what?”) That she was boring. That she was a cold fish.

  Now and then a teacher would confirm Elsie’s prevailing view of me.

  In Grade 7, the vice-principal, Mr. Booth, phoned home to say I was too sophisticated for a schoolgirl. What he said was: “Wearing knee socks in January violates the dress code. Girls are supposed to wear ankle socks or nylons to school, unless it is snowing. Then they can wear pants underneath their skirts. But it’s not snowing now. Marion is wearing knee socks to get attention.”

  “See?” Elsie said. “What did I tell you? Anything to get attention.”

  In Guidance class the teacher asked us to list our bad qualities, the things about ourselves that needed improvement. Since I’d rejected Elsie’s list, I couldn’t think of any. The Guidance teacher said this proved I was infested with them, like worms. She phoned home. “Marion is too self-satisfied for a thirteen-year-old.”

  “See?” Elsie said. “Think you’re too big for your own britches.”

  That year I was accused of giving Miss Wylie, the p.e. teacher, the finger. She was a tall, pale, nervous woman, like a female Ichabod Crane, and she couldn’t get our group to take showers. But I hadn’t fingered Miss Wylie. During her overwrought bawling out of the class I’d scratched my nose at the wrong moment. No one believed this action was innocent, and there was another phone call home. I got an “Unsatisfactory” for Behavior in P.E. So I joined the grass hockey team. It seemed the sensible thing to do, since Miss Wylie was the coach. Next report card I was back to N for normal.

  “See?” I told Elsie. “It’s no big deal.”

  Minor things. Actually, most of my school behavior was N for normal. “Within normal bounds,” a statistician might now say. “Smack in the middle of the bell curve.” Invisible.

  At school, in those days, your personal history stayed personal. “It’s none of their bloody business,” Elsie would say, turning into an unexpected ally whenever teachers asked probing questions like: “Where is your mother?” “Why do you live with your aunt?”

  “Tell them nothing,” Elsie instructed. “Or tell them: ‘My mother’s on a long vacation. I live with my aunt and uncle. My father visits.’ ”

  ELSIE AND ME. We were like a pair of athletes playing a special kind of domestic dodgeball. Or like dancers performing
a weird, love-hate pas de deux in one of Miss Blythe’s, my dancing teacher’s, recitals. By the time I was thirteen it seemed we didn’t know how else to get along. We were constantly fighting. I’d get angry over the dumbest things. If Elsie said, “Drink up your milk,” I’d say, “No!” Even though I wanted it. If she asked, “How was school today?” I’d scream, “Terrible!” Even though it wasn’t. She’d yell back, “You’re nothing but a time bomb.” And “You never listen! Why don’t you listen?” And “What did I ever do to deserve such trouble?”

  It seemed I had forgotten she loved me. Had taken me in when I was five, almost a foundling. Had replaced my mother and taken over the slop and sweet anguish of child-rearing.

  At thirteen I was endlessly crashing against her. Her energy matched mine. She never wavered, never gave in, never backed down. Never crumbled before my onslaught. She was the wall, the corral. And I was the wild horse, hysterical for… what?

  I didn’t know what.

  Like any thirteen-year-old. I didn’t know what.

  Marion, Billy, Nancy

  [

  two ]

  THERE WAS JUST the one of me. I was my parents’ only child. And when I was five, they separated for good. It was, everyone said, “a rocky marriage.” Nancy was Australian and Billy was Canadian and they’d met in Auckland, New Zealand, when Billy was first mate on a freighter that traveled between Canada and New Zealand. According to the stories Elsie told, Nancy married Billy because he was an officer and she thought his family had money. “Hah! Was she ever wrong!” Elsie would laugh. “We were ordinary people. We even made our own clothes!”

  Nancy and Billy were married in New Zealand in 1946, when Nancy was thirty and Billy was thirty-nine. I was born in Sydney, Australia, a year after that. Billy, at sea at the time of my birth, received the news—dramatically, I thought—by trans-Pacific cable. There’s a picture of me as a newborn being held rather gingerly by Nancy’s mother, Marion Whitehouse, a woman I would never come to know. My grandmother has short hair done in waves, and she is wearing a checked wool suit. I am wrapped in a white blanket. The caption on the back of the picture reads, “Two Marions.” My middle name, Alice, was for Billy’s mother in Canada. Neither of my grandfathers was alive at the time.

  Nancy, Billy, and I lived together as a family only once, in a large, rented house in Vancouver for six months when I was three. I played in the street there with other kids, all of us on tricycles like some terrible infant motorcycle gang, and celebrated Halloween for the first time. This was something new for an Australian mother. I was given a small bag for trick-or-treating and sent outside without a costume to join an excited group of pirates, witches, and princesses.

  “That whole time in Vancouver was a disaster,” Elsie would later claim. This was because Nancy cried much of the time. She hated the rain. She missed Australia. And because, it reputedly got back to Elsie, my father and his family were so boring. Not only that, Elsie would hasten to add, Nancy was restless, wanting things she couldn’t find in Canada with my father.

  I traveled with Nancy to Australia by boat three times during those early years, leaving Billy in Canada like lost luggage. We lived mostly on cruise ships, but also in Fiji and Tasmania, where Nancy had been born and where her mother and brother still lived. And then finally, when I was five, the story goes, my father—and here Elsie would say with relish, “Billy put his foot down”—declared that my traveling days were over. From now on I’d be living in Canada with him.

  There was no fuss the night Nancy handed me over. We were in the tiny cabin of a cruise ship that was docked in Vancouver; the boat was the hms Aorangi. Nancy was sitting at a small table and I was beside her. And there was a skinny man wearing a felt hat standing in the narrow doorway before us. He was smiling at me. I’d forgotten what Billy looked like. Nancy pushed me towards him. “Go on,” she said. “That’s your father.”

  Soon after I went to live on Vancouver Island with Billy’s sister Elsie and her second husband, Ernie Sexton, in an area outside of Victoria known as Cordova Bay. Billy couldn’t look after me because he worked on docks up and down the West Coast supervising the loading of lumber; he’d “come ashore” the previous year. But from that time until I was eighteen years old, he visited every other weekend. He never remarried, and, to my knowledge, was never involved with another woman; once was enough.

  Cordova Bay house

  [

  three ]

  IN JUNE OF 1960, two months after my thirteenth birthday, a parcel arrived from Nancy in Australia. It was there on the kitchen table when I got home from school.

  Elsie was baking at the kitchen counter, making pastry for the meat pie we’d be having for supper. Her arms were covered in flour and she was grinning. “Look what came for you!” She sounded amazed.

  I was amazed, too. We hadn’t heard from Nancy for what? Two years?

  “It came right out of nowhere,” Elsie said with awe. “When I opened the mailbox I was so surprised.”

  It was a soft, square parcel, and it was sitting innocently enough in the center of the Arborite table. Yet I hesitated approaching it. It seemed strange being there, at startling odds with the benign and familiar surroundings, like some science-fictiony thing from another world, which, once undone, would begin its malevolent work. Days earlier I’d watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers on TV: It all started out innocently enough. No one expected the tiny pods that suddenly appeared to turn into vicious killers… In the movie, the one scientist who knows the truth tries uselessly to warn everyone about the pods, hollering in alarm—“Don’t touch them! Destroy them immediately!”

  This is exactly what I was feeling when I looked at the parcel—alarm, dismay, foreboding. Invasion of the Body Snatchers had an eerie lesson, and it was this: anywhere, and at any time, the most ordinary-looking things can turn out to be something else, something horrible and merciless that will ultimately drain the life from you. Like alien pods. Or parcels from Australia.

  “What’s the matter?” Elsie asked, impatient. “Go on, open it up. Looks like she’s finally remembered your birthday.”

  Still I hesitated; I had become used to—even comfortable with—being forgotten by Nancy. I hadn’t expected this. You hurry home from school on a sunny afternoon thinking only of your waiting dog and a peanut butter sandwich and, perhaps, a swim down at the beach. Mindlessly happy is what you are, oblivious of danger. Your returned Social Studies test with the large red A is clasped in your eager hand, a top mark, and you’re proud and excited—can’t wait!—to show everyone, gloat, bask in the praise you know will be coming as surely as you know the sky is blue. But what happens? There’s an unexpected parcel on the kitchen table from a mother you haven’t seen in eight years. And suddenly your world threatens to become Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with all the predictable and grisly components.

  “I’m scared to,” I said, glancing at Elsie.

  “Scared?” she hooted. “Scared of the parcel?”

  “It could be radioactive.”

  “What?”

  “Radioactive. There could be lethal pods inside for…”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! It’s that horror movie you’ve been watching, isn’t it? Well, stop it. This instant. Don’t be so ridiculous. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. Like you always do.”

  “But… ”

  “But nothing. Open up the bloody thing.”

  I glared at her.

  “Go on.”

  I was acting an early scene from the movie when I finally approached the table. I was the trembling, beloved, virginal, beautiful daughter of the hero scientist, about to unleash God knows what.

  “If you don’t hurry up and open it, I will,” Elsie said irritably.

  “Okay, okay!”

  The parcel was dotted with Australian stamps that had pictures of kangaroos on them, and the brown wrapping paper bore Nancy’s strange style of handwriting: all her m’s looked like w’s. So the address
, instead of reading “Miss Marion Gibson,” read “Wiss Warion Gibson.”

  “Go on,” Elsie insisted, again. “It won’t bite.”

  There was no help for it: I opened the parcel. Elsie watched my every move. First I undid the knots in the thick string and removed the outer wrapping. Inside was a present wrapped in pink tissue paper, and there was a card attached. No envelope, just a card with a koala bear on the front and writing that said: “Greetings from Down Under.” Inside Nancy had written: “Happy Birthday to Warion, Love frow Wother.” There was a p.s.: “One day you’ll get a nice surprise.”

  Tearing off the tissue paper, I pulled out a long, purple see-through nightgown that was slit up the front and had black feathers—something Elsie called marabou—attached to the plunging neckline. It was a nightgown like the one my cousin Doreen had worn for her wedding night, a negligee. I screwed up my face and held it at arm’s length as if it were something smelly. When I did this, another present, unwrapped, dropped out. A pair of red bikini underpants lay on the turquoise tiled floor. Across the bum, stitched in blue, were the words, “Hi Sexy!”

  “What on earth?” Elsie shrieked.

  I jumped back from the underpants as if they were something alive, a rat, or a huge red maggot, the kind of thing you’d need a long stick or protective clothing to handle.

  “Well, I never!” Elsie said, coming closer, peering at the thing on the floor.

  Suddenly I felt like crying. But I wasn’t sad. I was hot, angry. Because (1) it was a boring and useless present meant for a grown-up woman. And (2) my mother didn’t know how old I was. But I wasn’t going to show I cared. “It’s another stupid present from Nancy,” I said dismissively. “Like that stupid koala bear book and that stupid wooden bowl from Tasmania.”

  But Elsie had gone deaf to me and was shaking her head and laughing, little hiccupping laughs, little guileless tickle-your-fancy kind of laughs. She had the underpants in her hand and was holding them up to the light; they were transparent like the negligee, and the light shone through them warmly onto her hand and cheek. It made me think of stained glass windows in a church.