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Third Age

August 2013

  • Shirley Stott Despoja

Days of Azure not forgotten

Some of us had childhoods waiting for the war to be over. I ask my friends of the same age if they remember that impatience that was our lot as children in the 1940s. Yes, they say. We were forever being told, if we dared to ask for something, that there was a war on, to eat vegetables because the starving Belgian children would be grateful for them, and we listened in to adults talking, it seemed interminably, about after the “duration” after the war, what it would be like, as though it would be as it had been before.

For me, a Sydney child, it meant looking longingly at chocolate-coated ice creams on a stick in the advertisement in Hawkins’ shop that was never taken down; there to torment me with what I was missing because of the war. I was impatient for my soldier sister to return from New Guinea, to become our resident hero. I was impatient for her to meet my dog, to hear about the English sailors we’d looked after when their ships berthed in Sydney Harbour.

Meanwhile, not realising how lucky we were, we ran free in the streets or bush, and in backyard orchards. We memorised half a lifetime’s worth of poems in our schools, along with our times ables, and learnt to write a fair hand.

My friend Jane, in a one-room, one-teacher school without heating, cooling, water or light, remembers how ‘Learning can flow with just four walls,/Desks with inkwells, backless benches, paper and pen/Maps, books and a gifted teacher….’

To those who even then had a great deal more than those amenities, she writes ‘you will never know/ How privileged we were.

And then one day we were told the war was over. We struggled to feel what we thought we ought to feel, just as, throughout childhood, we struggled to feel the right things when people died. It was tricky.

All that impatience and now… what?

The answer came quickly for Jane whose mother takes her into the kitchen (‘She’s troubled,/And needs to talk’) to tell her about Hiroshima. Jane slinks off to her thinking place by the tank stand ‘with a dull pain in the gut. For I see/That after all, the war’s not over…’

It’s hard not to shout with recognition and sharp pleasure when one reads a recreation of a childhood shared. Jane and I were together at St George Girls High School, Kogarah, until 1953, and then at university. We both lived as children in the Illawarra district of NSW. Jane taught literature and languages in Australia and overseas for 40 years. She did post -graduate research and study at the universities of Iceland and Sheffield. The girl of whom we were a bit in awe as kids, we continued to admire as we grew older, and then – as we grew old. Jane now lives in Canberra.

Days of Azure is her first book of poems. I think many of her friends have been waiting for it a long time, but it is the greater pleasure now because our old age makes us particularly receptive to a childhood recreated as beautifully as it is in this small book.

There are great treats within, whether you had a Sydney, Adelaide or Melbourne childhood. First hearing Beethoven’s 7th on a stack of 78s, the young children of the family ‘In nighties and pyjamas began to leap/Like small, striped dervishes, all about the house…’ ‘…For the few minutes it took our mother/To find the wooden spoon, we circled the planet,/Spun in space, flew into the moon,/And broke all bans…’ Later, ‘Tucked up in bed…We were still rocked and ringing/ with the golden key of A.’

Fast forward to motherhood, a grownup son now overseas… ‘his cello lies/Inert and mute. It used to fill the house/With its warm tenor voice…’ Here is that feeling so many of us share when children leave home and ghosts behind them. There is an imagined meeting with her mother that echoes a dream I have often: ‘Oh, you’re here. You’re well again!’

Jane is not sentimental. She simply writes about what many of us experience about days long past and memories worth revisiting, as well as darker times (both Jane and I had Great War-damaged, angry fathers). There is a sharp, sometimes funny exactitude that makes this Jane worthy of her namesake.

I am pleased she has been published by Ginninderra Press, which is now at Port Adelaide. And I love the title’s reference to Christopher Brennan, the Sydney poet our English teacher, Hilda Mackaness, knew and spoke to us about often. Clive James may not be a fan of his, but we thrilled to the story of Brennan’s thwarted ambition and his nohoper end.

How wrong people are who speak as though Australian literature hardly existed or was not appreciated until the 60s or 70s. Our teachers made us aware of contemporary Australian writers, even while we ploughed through English ancients for our exams. To quote Jane (almost), the young people of today will never know how privileged we were.


Days of Azure by Jane Vaughan Donnelly
Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide


ginninderrapress.com.au

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