Free Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker

difficult for us now to imagine what this could have meant to both of them, especially my mother, and the date of their marriage was carefully kept secret from me until I was an adult. The stigma of such a marriage could stay with a woman all her life — people assumed that her husband had married her under duress (a shotgun wedding) and that he was the victim. A proportion of each female generation went to the altar not allowed to call themselves a bride or wear a white wedding dress for this, they were told, would be lying to God. I can think of no more cruel or humiliating experience for a woman, and am reminded of all the instances in novels of young women, like Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, who are tormented simply for loving and acting as their hearts dictated. Hester is cast out by the community and forced to wear a scarlet A (for adultery) and Tess, after a life of suffering caused by her seducer, is hanged for killing him. Tess’s comment that this world is a blighted star, was certainly true for her.
    Here all eyes were on a young wife, and the days between the marriage bed and the labour ward were carefully counted off by the matrons of the tribe. What a pity you couldn’t have waited just one more day! was the comment of one of these when my aunt gave birth the day before the nine months were up. Meanwhile my mother never referred to their courtship or wedding, there were no wedding pictures or presents, and from the moment of her marriage no friend or acquaintance was ever allowed to call her by her Christian name, and even my father soon began to call her Wife or Mum. Certainly no-one recalled her earlier identity as Eileen Alannah, her father’s favourite.
    Dead letters
    I come now to my father’s letters, which I hadn’t read when I wrote the first chapter, the account of my early childhood. My mother was an obsessive hoarder of all sorts of things, refusing to let go of any aspect of the past or face up to the present. After her death I found a collection of my father’s letters but, busy with other things, I stowed them away. I only bring them out when it’s time to write about their past, the reason why they were as they were. Nothing has prepared me for the fact that she had saved every single letter he had written to her, from the first love letter in January 1925 to those from Tasmania long after he had left her.
    There is no way that I can reproduce, in cold typeface, the tone, the variation, the changes in handwriting that the yellowed originals convey, or even the impact of the envelopes, with their penny King George V stamps. I read them in one sitting. It’s a shattering experience to see again his familiar handwriting, so like my own, to hear in my mind his familiar turn of phrase, experience for the first time his point of view and realise at once the unbridgeable gap that has always separated me from him. The clover chain is not simply a bond of sympathy passing down from mother to daughter, generation after generation. The push-me-pull-you chains of love and resentment which bind all mothers and daughters will always, to some extent, exclude the father. Perhaps these letters, his direct statements, will redress the balance.
    Between their meeting and their marriage there is a period of about five months, during which he writes continually, even if they are apart for only a few days. These letters are private: a mixture of tenderness, anxiety and self-doubt when he is, as he puts it, assailed by grave doubts. This is quite understandable considering that he is just nineteen, she eighteen. He addresses her as My Dearest Eileen and then, within a short time, she is My Dearest Wife and he always concludes with Best and Fondest Love, except when he feels neglected. There are occasions when she hasn’t written or rung, she hasn’t come when expected. Then he closes with a stiff and formal