It was blowing a hoolie here yesterday, perhaps not quite in the ‘force 9’ sense they use in Shetland (whence I have borrowed that lovely word)but it was fierce. When the wind hits the eaves at the right angle it screams just like a terrified rabbit. The first time I heard it I actually went outside to look for the rabbit. There were some astonishing waves breaking, wild white horses with spraying manes as tall as houses. Taniwhas * riding waterkelpies ** in a wild dash to the shore. I watched them from this beautifully solid house and marveled that nothing about it wobbled, not even the giant panes of glass behind which I lurked enfolded in a slightly tatty silk dressing gown (warm but weighing almost nothing) over the pyjamas I had still not exchanged for sturdier garments. The luxury of being “in residence” and for three weeks not responsible for making coffee, preparing breakfast (which I myself don’t generally partake of) feeding chickens, fishing errant ducklings from the water bowl, cleaning litter trays or having to read stories to a five-year old who has climbed into my bed shortly after dawn and is singing to the cat. I’ll leave you to guess which of those activities I am missing (along with my dogs).
Hearing the “scream” took me down the rabbit hole (yes, I know, Granny joke) back in time to another startling noise event. We lived for a time in Porz-Ensen, a suburb of Köln (Cologne) but on the “other” side of the Rhine. Papa was on sabbatical leave and had been invited to spend six months lecturing at the Universität zu Köln. He’d found us accommodation in one of the smallish apartment blocks that had been constructed after the war, a grey cinderblock structure with a central terrazzo staircase and grey linoleum floors. It overlooked several very interesting factories and if you leaned out far enough from the bedroom window you could just make out the twin spires of the cathedral through the smog though it dawned on us after a bag of cherries was miscaught while being tossed from the kindly neighbours across to us and plummeted the five storeys to the ground, that was not a recommended activity (the cherries were juice when we retrieved them). We children thought it was fabulous, especially as we had arrived there early in January during the lead up to Karneval. There were several brass bands practicing loudly in halls and warehouses around us, and there’d be impromptu street parades while they got their marching steps sorted (imagine a New Orleans secondline, but with everyone dressed like Mozart and much less dancing). At the end of the parade they’d toss out a few hard-boiled lollies to us children which, given we were only allowed sweets at Christmas in our family, we hid in our pockets, often forgetting them so that they became a sticky mess in the washing (which my poor mother mostly did, in the bath of the apartment). People dressed up in curious costumes in the streets, too, in the lead up to Rosenmontag (they celebrate carnival on Mondays there, not Tuesday as in Mardi Gras). I particularly remember seeing an otherwise seemingly ordinary business man wearing a pinstriped suit and elegant overcoat and gloves, striding to the tramstop…and suddenly bursting into a fit of giggling when I realised he was wearing a long fake nose.
The snow was deep when we first arrived and as we came straight from the heat of an Australian summer we children relished every opportunity to get into it. The cobbled marktplatz (market square) nearby had mounds of snow pushed into piles around the edges and it was here that I had my first personal (and thankfully thus far only) physical experience of racial violence.
Mama had sent me out to the shops to fetch a capsicum she suddenly needed in the middle of cooking dinner, while she stayed at home with my young brother. The district seemed safe enough, at home in Australia I was often sent to the milk bar (up the street and three blocks left) to fetch a newspaper or extra bread, and I was quite comfortable about popping downstairs to the baker’s every morning to pick up the semmel for the family breakfast. The capsicum successfully purchased, I was blithely swinging the shopping basket (a lovely round one that had belonged to my great-grandmother and given to us by my great-aunt Tante Rose) and idly kicking snow lumps on my way home while singing to myself and completely oblivious to my fellow humans when I found myself thrown violently into a snowbank and having a handful of the yellow variety (as in pee’d on by a dog) stuffed into my mouth while a group of teenagers yelled at me (in German) to “get out of here, you filthy Arab”. Then they pushed my face down into the snow and walked off. I don’t recall passersby taking any notice. I picked myself up, spat, spat again, retrieved my basket and capsicum and ran still spitting back to the apartment, tearfully panting up the stairs (children were not permitted in the elevator). That was not the story I came here to share when I mentioned the rabbitsquealsound, but it illustrates why I prefer female dogs to male…the smell of male dog pee is still triggering, over fifty years later.
It was a month or so after Karneval when my mother, brother and I were sitting at the kitchen table painting wooden eggs in preparation for Easter. Suddenly there was a huge howling sound that seemed to make everything vibrate and before we children even realised what was going on my mother had (in one swift efficient movement) grabbed us both and flung us under the table for protection. It turned out to be the (then still occupying) French military randomly testing their air-raid siren. My mother had spent the last years of the 1939-45 war in Germany under a rain of bombs and once even being shot at as she lay in a ditch with her sister (a British pilot on his way home from some mission or other, swooping his plane and firing bullets at two girls for a bit of target practice, happily he wasn’t a very good shot), experiences which left her with involuntary responses to sounds that reminded her of them.
What I’m trying to explain is that my family history on both sides is filled with war stories. I was raised on them. Statin’s henchmen shot my grandmother’s brother in 1938. As I understand it, they simply lined him up against a wall and eliminated him. My grandmother didn’t mention him again until the year she passed away, a memory too painful to share, so that until 1987 I didn’t know that she even had a brother. The Russians arrested my (maternal) grandfather on the street on New Year’s Eve of 1940 and sent him off to the gulags, though for a while my grandmother was left to wonder whether he had followed his roving eye and was away philandering. He had been on the run for a few months, taking my (then) toddler mother with him for some reason, moving between safe houses out in the country, but had brought her home for Christmas. Apparently a neighbour had alerted the authorities. His crime? He had been a medical officer in the Latvian army. So when the German occupiers (who invaded in 1941) were being driven out in 1944, grandmother was not going to wait around to see if she would be “disappeared” as well and took the last train west.
My German grandfather (as I believe I have mentioned in earlier dispatches) was also driven from his homeland when he and his family were endangered as a result of his protesting about the Nazis treatment of his Jewish colleagues at the University in Göttingen in 1936. He and my grandmother left the country of their birth along with my infant father, eventually washing up in Australia days before the war began in earnest. My father’s early school years were made unpleasant by teachers who had suffered as young soldiers in the 1914-18 war and regarded the small boy with the German surname as “the enemy” despite him being a refugee. In those days corporal punishment was still acceptable at schools and they availed themselves of the privilege freely, often on quite spurious pretexts. Later when he was called up for national service, they said he was medically unfit, which was funny given he was the school athletics champion. It may simply have been because he was born in Germany, but that is pure conjecture on my part. The army tapped him on the shoulder some years later and wanted to send him to Vietnam, but he reminded them that they had rejected him as unfit and so he was relieved of that obligation. I cannot imagine my father going to war. His temper was a tad volatile but he was a peace-loving man who never raised a hand to anyone in anger.
I can confirm that racist attitudes still prevailed in Australia in the 1960s (and as the outcome of the recent referendum clearly indicate, are alive and thriving today). I was born in the era when First Nations children were often forcibly removed from their families. The nurses on duty when my mother was delivered of me (a honey-coloured baby from a honey-coloured mother) removed me from her before she had even had a chance to hold me and kept me in the nursery for three days before my father eventually went and thumped on a table and demanded I be released. They had assumed I would be adopted on the basis of my skin colour. Mama had told me early on about not being able to see me after I was born, but only shared the bigger story with me when I was in my fifties. I still find it extraordinary and wonder whether being more or less alone and only held by nurses when bottle-fed for the first few days of my life has contributed to making me such a solitary bear when it comes to life relationships.
At primary school I was labelled a Nazi for having a German surname but also derisively called a “boong”, told by classmates “I can’t play with you because you’re brown” and teased because my (delicious) Latvian lunches were considered weird. The irony of being labelled a Nazi Aboriginal is lost when you’re only five. At another school I was rejected from the choir where I would have been the only brown face in a sea of happy pink ones, and thus might have unbalanced the picture. I’ve been refused service in the Balranald Hotel on the basis of my skin colour (1979)…”your kind are served out the back” and again in a take away shop in Deniliquin (1989). While shopping at a food market about thirty minutes from my home (in 1994) the gentleman behind me in the queue snarled “why don’t you go back where you came from, you Paki”. Stopping at a diner somewhere on a road trip from Monteagle to Memphis in 2010 I gained a small but not less pointed insight into racial profiling in that neck of the woods, and then quite recently at Adelaide airport, as I was stepping up to the counter to check in for a flight to New Zealand and before I had even handed over my passport, the desk attendant demanded (in response to my stating my intended destination) whether I had a visa, having clearly decided that I was from a country (probably populated by other honey-coloured persons) that necessitated more extensive travel documentation than a mere passport.
While these incidents described above are nothing compared to the treatment that so many people experience on a daily basis (I am sharing them for context, NOT for sympathy), they have been sufficiently significant to retain storage space in my memories and they have significantly shaped my character. I will also add, in response to a correspondent who enquired recently why I identified as a person of colour, that the appellation was not chosen by me, but (as my words above illustrate) given to me. A child it confused me, with age I have embraced it.
In comparison to the tsunami of vitriol that has washed my way after my stitching what I intended to be read as my hope that Palestine might again become the shared multicultural and multilingual land it historically was***, those other life experiences are mere fairy dust.
To clarify :: I do not support Hamas (or any other terrorist organisation).
The October 7 attack was horrific, the retaliatory bombing of the Palestinian people is also horrific. China’s suppression of Uyghurs, the appalling treatment of women by the Taliban and by the rulers of Iran, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the murdering of Rohingya in Myanmar, the Syrian “civil” war, the countless armed conflicts (and associated kidnappings of schoolgirls) in Africa are all horrific. I have no idea what a peace-loving individual like myself can do about any of this…and who am I to criticise anything really, I myself live on stolen country after all.
It was absolutely not my intent to offend anyone but it is clear my name is now a synonym for excrement, I have been labelled as anti-Semitic (an appellation which would surprise my those of my ancestors who were Jewish as much as it has horrified me) and several persons have even helpfully suggested I consider putting a period to my existence.
I can see easy it would be to let myself be pushed into obliging those demands, and slip quietly into oblivion especially in the dark hours of the night and when far from home, however I have no intention of affording anyone that satisfaction.
For all of us, I wish peace.
* Taniwha, (Māori) water spirits, supernatural beings that live in deep pools in rivers, dark caves, or in the sea, especially in places with dangerous currents or deceptive breakers
** Waterkelpie, shape-shifting water spirit of Scottish folklore, usually taking the form of a great horse
*** “Most Palestinians using this chant do not see it as advocating for a specific political platform or as belonging to a specific political group. Rather, the majority of people using the phrase see it as a principled vision of freedom and coexistence.” https://theconversation.com/from-the-river-to-the-sea-a-palestinian-historian-explores-the-meaning-and-intent-of-scrutinized-slogan-217491
EDIT :: In answer to some who have questioned the inability to comment here , I deliberately turned off comments on this post because it was not written for sympathy and I didn’t want to invite a bunch of “poor you” statements.