| Greg's The Twelfth of Never |
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In December 1999, my father came up to me and said “here's a book with you in it”. I thought he had found some computer book, or some reference to one of my books, and I was rather surprised when I discovered that the reference was to me as I had been 40 years earlier.
I'm not the only writer in the family—indeed, I'm not even the best-known outside computer circles. My cousin Mark Doyle, who has changed his name to Louis Nowra, has quite a following in the Australian literary scene. His latest book, “The Twelfth of Never”, published by Pan Macmillan Australia, is a kind of autobiography. I say “kind of”, because he has deliberately changed some things, such as the names of living people, and he states early on “sometimes the chronology isn't exactly as it should be, and I'm sure others might disagree with my memories of certain events.” I'm left uncertain as to how he intended the balance between accuracy and other factors that go to make a book.
I have a problem with changing names. In the following, I'm using the correct names. Where necessary, I'll explain the names that Mark (Louis) chose.
The book is fascinating because it's the first time I have seen anything in print about the issues and stories of my childhood. As Mark promises, “I'm sure others might disagree with my memories of certain events.” I'll elaborate on some of them in the following.
The book starts with recollections of family stories about my grandfather, Robert Francis Herbert. He was wounded at Gallipoli Campaign and in France during the First World War, and his death on 12 December 1945 forms the background of the book. This was a rather distasteful affair: he was shot dead with a pistol by his daughter, my aunt and Mark's mother, Gloria Dunbar née Herbert. We had all hoped to be able to forget the incident, and I find it distasteful that Mark should drag this out in the open. It's possible that it really is so important to him that he built his life around it, but I'm left with a feeling that he has used it to promote the book.
Later Mark goes into a little detail about our great-great-grandfather, John Hay, who was transported in 1844. My mother told me that this was because of his Chartist beliefs. There was also a less noble story about him: while trying to convert somebody to his beliefs, by dragging him through a creek, the man drowned. John fled to New Zealand and changed his name to Herbert. He subsequently returned to Australia, and if my mother told me more, I have forgotten it.
Mark's version is less clear, but it goes into more detail about the drowning:
There are two stories about where this murder happened. One has him killing a man in Victoria and fleeing to New Zealand where he became a policeman because he thought a policeman would be the last person to be regarded as a murder suspect. The other story, and it is the more frequently related one, is that he was shearing sheep in Queensland and one of the shearers wouldn't join the unon so he pushed his head into the dam water until he agreed to join. Unfortunately, he held the man's head under the water too long and he drowned. Changing his name, my great-great-grandfather fled to Victoria where he joined the police force, as the other story also had it, ...
How accurate is this story? I don't have enough information to judge, but given the things I can judge, I can't place too much confidence in this one. It's interesting that he doesn't mention any names.
In April 1966 I was in Edinburgh and tried to find information about him. I was successful—maybe. It seems that John Hay is a very common name, and the people I was staying with—coincidentally Hays on the maternal side—had two close relatives of that name. But in the archives I only found one, transported some time in 1844 for his role in the theft of a silver watch, a silver watch key and a piece of black lace.
On page 3, Mark states
I must have been about fifteen when my mother told me this. Up until this time all I vaguely knew was that there had been a terrible incident before I was born.
It's difficult to refute this, of course, but it surprises me. I had known at least since I was ten, seven years earlier. Given that he had suspicions, it's surprising it took him such a long time to find out.
Mark chose to refer to me as Anthony, starting on page 99. He writes:
My inability to establish a close relationship with a boy must have continued to bother my mother because she seemed to be quite keen for me to get to know her sister's son Anthony, who was a year older than me.
In fact, I am a little over two years older than Mark. In this recollection, he almost completely ignores his sister Michelle (her real name), and he barely mentions my sister Beverley. I don't believe that Gloria had particular intentions for him to meet me; she wanted the kids to get to know each other. This, of course, has little to do with male-male relations.
Anthony was a boy with constantly moist lips caused by his propensity to produce spittle when he talked, and given the fact that he seldom stopped talking, to be in his presence was to be confronted with a perpetual mist of phlegmatic vapour. He was the apple of his mother's eye, egocentric and cockily sure of himself, especially as regards anything technical. Even if he only had a half-baked notion of how a thing worked he regarded himself as expert on it.
It's difficult to refute these statements, since they're matters of opinion (obviously the perpetual mist of phlegmatic vapour is hyperbole). The following section, however, is exaggerated to the point of being just plain wrong. I suspect that he heard the account of the event from his mother, who may have supplied the embellishments:
One time his parents gave him a chemistry set he had demanded. He found the instructions limited his creativity and one morning managed to create an explosion that blew off his eyebrows, burnt off most of his hair and set fire to his bedroom. Only the quick arrival of the fire brigade stopped their terrace house from burning down.
The word demand here is just plain wrong. I hadn't wanted the chemistry set, but I did find it limiting, and had soon acquired a number of additional chemicals which I kept in the open under the back stairs. One day I was playing with some of them trying to make gunpowder, which was finally successful. The stuff blew off and singed my face, including my eyebrows. There was no fire, no explosion, but when I went upstairs to have my face evaluated, my mother had a female visitor in the lounge room. Possibly it was Gloria.
I much preferred his sister, who, although she was intellectually precocious like Anthony, managed to keep her ego in check—no doubt helped by the fact that her mother had no ambitions for her. She had an alarming facility for language and although a year or two younger than me she could effortlessly spell the word `encyclopedia' [sic], a feat that so humbled but impressed me that I suggested she go on a television show of the time that featured spelling bees, only to be met with a look of withering contempt seen only in adult women who wish to put down a particularly hare-brained servant.
Well, doubtless Bev would have spelt the word `encyclopaedia'. It's certainly the first time I've heard her described in those terms. She did indeed have a great gift for language, but I don't recall her being particularly good at spelling. She is, however, only a little over a month younger than Mark. When writing the memoirs, he must have had access to our birth dates, and I'm left wondering if he found it convenient for the story to make us younger than we were.
Anthony and I had little in common and I used to bore myself watching him as he fiddled with the insides of a radio or television (the latter invariably resulting in the visit of the television repairman who would have to fix the set while having to put up with a lecture about what he was doing wrong by a spitting, eyebrow-less boy).
Round about here I have finally come to the conclusion that Mark is embellishing this story. We never had a TV, and the first time I ever saw a TV repairman was in Germany, some years later. The partial loss of my eyebrows lasted about a week, during which I'm pretty sure that Mark didn't see me. On the other hand, the story flows nicely, doesn't it?
Anthony thought I was stupid and I regarded him as pretentious and much too intelligent.
I can't recall any negative thoughts about Mark. I can't say what he thought of me, of course.
Then one day, the paths of our interests intersected. At the time there was a popular wrestling show on television compered by a lanky Yank with black-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets that seemed overly colourful even on black-and-white television. He commented on the antics of wrestlers like Gorgeous George and Killer Kowalski with a breathless solemnity that gave the overweight grunting hams an Olympian aura.
Anthony saw wrestling as a Grecian ideal and made up his mind to be both a scientist and an Olympic wrestler.
I don't know where he got this idea from. I've never been a sporting type, and the outcome of this particular incident shows it.
I saw wrestling as an essential component of school survival. Anthony was visiting our house one afternoon and dared me to wrestle him.
One fact is sure: he was visiting our house. We were living in Grattan St. in Melbourne, opposite the university, at the time all of this story relates. This particular incident probably occurred in the time frame September to November 1958, but certainly no later than January 1959, when we left for Malaya. The four of us (including Bev and Michelle) went down Bouverie St. to Lincoln Park, between Bouverie and Swanston St. We wrested on the North-East side of this park. I don't know who suggested the wrestling match, but it's possible that it was I: I was at the age where peer pressure made kids do things they didn't really want to do.
I took up the challenge and we circled one another as we had seen the men do on television. Then, with a stiff-legged gait that seemed part stumble, part an offer to dance, he lunged at me. The moment he touched me, something happened in me; in my brain, body and its blood, a sort of hormonal explosion. A dam of testosterone burst and flooded through me. I grabbed him with a strength I didn't know I had and throw him to the ground. He landed with a thump on the hard earth and looked up at me in shock and disbelief. He bounced back on his feed, demanding the best of three. We wrestled on the couch grass, moving across the lawn entwined like some grunting, panting spitting bizarre quadruped. I was relentless. He hadn't been brought up in a Housing Commission Estate playground so was at a disadvantage. I began to understand the meaning to the term `blind fury', because I saw him only as a dim figure writhing behind a viscous veil of my aggression. He barely existed except as a collection of limbs I wanted to twist and hurt. He wanted to finish the fight, as it had become, but I demanded that he say I give in before I would let him free. But he wouldn't. The humiliation of his being thrashed by someone he considered his inferior would have been too much, so he continued to squirm as I pinned him to the ground. Until, unable to get out of my grip, he yelled out, as if I were just an annoyance and not a victor, I give in. I let him go and he stood up. He saw something in my eyes he hadn't expected to see—a fury, an animal rage, that even surprised me. Needless to say our friendship did not advance.
It's hard to think of a 7-year-old experiencing a “dam of testosterone”. My recollection is that it wasn't very violent, didn't last very long, and he got me in some kind of grip from which I couldn't escape. I was glad when it was over, and certainly bore him no malice.
I wrote this review at Google Books on 15 January 2022, giving it 2 stars:
Louis calls this a "memoir", but in fact it's almost pure fiction. About the only thing pervading the book is his negative perception of almost everybody he describes. I am the "Anthony" to whom he refers round page 100, and his description of me is no exception. It's not just that it's nasty: it is like something that happened in an alternative universe.
OK, apart from that? Somehow I just don't like his style. It seems disjointed and uneven. I read it through, of course, but more out of a sense of obligation than enjoyment. Somehow it just didn't have anything to say beyond the untruth "I had a lot of crazy relatives".
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