KATE GRENVILLE One Life: My mother’s story. Reviewed by Robyne Young
One Life provides a loving appreciation of a woman of her time who paved the way for the women of now.
A few years after her mother died, Kate Grenville got out the papers she had left and found a number of exercise books with stories of her forebears, her childhood and adulthood. But, she writes, ‘My mother’s many hopeful starts all petered out after a few pages. What she left was a mass of fragments.’
Grenville has taken these fragments and pieced them together to tell a story and fill a gap in the history of Australia:
In the bits and piece of my mother’s written memories, I had a first-hand account of a world largely left out of those histories and museums and about which no sonnets, as far as I know, have been written.
With the consummate skill she uses in her fiction combined with a deep desire to present the story of the mother she loved deeply, Grenville brings the reader the story of Nance Russell: daughter, pharmacist, wife, mother, mature-age student, traveller and grandmother.
Grenville puts aside her own voice to bring to life Nance’s story from her birth in 1912 to Dolly and Bert Russell, farmers, grocery-shop and later hotel owners, until she learns that she is to have a third baby – ‘one last child’ – Kate.
Nance’s story opens with a memory of having her head submerged in the freezing water in the horse trough to stop her crying and of her mother’s scolding:
Always her voice high and angry, a piece of wire cutting through the room. The child’s own name came to be an accusation. Nance! Nance!
Her family’s circumstances are continually at the mercy of the elements …
They woke to a day so hot and still the air was like something solid. All morning a cloud gathered on the horizon and by afternoon it filled the sky, dark with a dangerous green underbelly like a bruise. Then one great blast of wind, and the hail starting all at once, like someone spilling peas out of a colander …
or the economy …
Nance had never heard of deflation, didn’t know who Keynes was, or how to argue about the invisible hand. But she thought about how it had been at the Cally. As soon as the guests stopped coming, Dolly and Bert had to let the staff go.
Her brother Frank, only 18 months older, is her protector. Despite being separated many times, they develop a deep relationship. Nance is bundled off to relatives, returned to her parents, boarded out with the Medways (a strict Catholic family in Temora) and then sent to a convent school where she becomes a ‘troublemaker’ and is accused of ‘sending girls to hell’. The book talks of her removal from the school by her parents and her subsequent attendance at St George Girls’ High and exposure to career women:
Spinster schoolmarms they might have been, but these women were like no women Nance had ever met. At assembly when they sat on their stage in their academic gowns you could see they were all graduates. She hadn’t known that women could have university degrees. They were all Miss, because female public servants weren’t allowed to be married. But they weren’t apologetic old maids. They were forthright and confident, spoke with authority.
The school proves to be the perfect environment for Nance, but her happiness is short-lived because her parents buy the Caledonian Hotel in Tamworth. She is forced to move and completes her schooling at Tamworth High. Her mother insists that she not become a teacher, but a pharmacy apprentice and an opportunity presents itself in a small pharmacy in the Sydney suburb of Enmore. While her first instinct is to say no, Nance sees a world for herself beyond Tamworth and moves to Sydney. She is one of only six women in a class of 80 studying Chemistry and Botany in the Pharmacy course at Sydney University.
Unencumbered by her parents, Nance starts to map her own future and live her ‘examined’ life:
Yes, she wanted to meet someone, get married, have children. She wanted to be happy. But she knew now she wanted something else as well.
Nance does all those things, but it is the ‘something else’ that sets her apart from many other women of her generation. She becomes a businesswoman, financially independent, who ends up owning two pharmacies.
Nance realises that her marriage to Ken, a Christian Socialist and lawyer, will not be a partnership of great passion. Her decision not to leave him and instead to start a family will not write a happily-ever-after version of her life. She is more pragmatic than this:
And a child could be a new start. It might even bring them together. Without the passion-killer of ducking out to put the cap in, she and Ken might learn to relax with each other. Perhaps she could make him love her. And if none of those hopeful things happened, at least she would have a child.
After she has word that her beloved brother Frank has died in a prisoner-of-war camp in Thailand, her sons, Christopher and Stephen, save her from her grief. She sees Frank in his nephews and resolves to:
… live the life that Frank has been robbed of. Live it in handfuls. Live all the possibilities, not to turn away too timid or too sad or too weary, because that was the best way to honour Frank.
For the rest of her life, until her death in 2002, Nance fulfils this promise to her brother.
Through the Postscript, where Grenville relates her earliest memories of her mother ‘… in a white coat weighing babies on the scales near the door of her second pharmacy ’, we learn more about Nance: her life as a mother, the impact of a visit to Alice Springs, her undertaking at 50 of an Arts degree majoring in French and Italian, and the further studies that saw her become a teacher.
Nance Gee (nee Russell) was not a woman ahead of her time, but a woman of her time, paving the way for the women of now. For Grenville, she was not only a mother, but a mentor:
What a great gift it was to have had her for a mother. From the solid base of the love she gave us, all three of us discovered lives of fulfilment: Christopher as a barrister, Stephen as an economist, and me, after a slow start, as a writer.
Her support of Grenville as a writer was practical:
One or two mornings a week I’d take our two young children to her house. She’d have made me a cut lunch and a thermos, as she’d done when I was at school. Then I’d drive to a nearby park and get into the back seat with one of the kid’s boogie boards across my lap for a desk.
Grenville wonders whether, given the same support, her mother would have produced more than the fragments of memoir and written her own life story. This none of us will know for certain, but Grenville has brought to the reader an important story of a woman who lived during ‘two world wars, an economic depression, and a series of social revolutions [that] had changed the lives of hundreds of millions all over the world’.
Kate Grenville One Life: My mother’s story Text 2015 HB 272pp $29.99
Robyne Young writes fiction, poetry and non-fiction, blogs at robynewithane.wordpress.com and works as the Communications Officer at Regional Arts NSW.
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