Free Moving Among Strangers by Gabrielle Carey

that meant she gave birth alone. So there weren’t enough nurses on night duty then. But where was my father? Presumably fathers were not allowed in to maternity wards in those days; I doubt that he was pacing up and down in the waiting room. He wasn’t that kind of father. In June 1953, when the baby was three months old, Stow wrote from St George’s College to his mother in Geraldton:
    I found a letter from Joan waiting here when I got back. She is leaving in September, unless someone leaves them a fortune, in which case she will stay. Alec has nearly finished I think, but she didn’t say if he was coming too.
    My father had almost completed his degree in psychology at the University of London. With the baby, my mother could no longer work, so surviving in London was clearly difficult.
    In July 1953, Stow wrote again to his mother:
    Joan came home today. I rang her up, and she sounded very tired, said she had had a terrible trip, and had been waiting around the Customs for four hours. She said she wasn’t too keen to come home, but now she is here she is quite happy. The baby is called Catherine Michelle, all of it. While she was on the boat, she had a cable that Alec was following her in about three weeks. She thought he was going to Canada or somewhere. I suppose he will turn up in the Psych. department here. I hope he can coach me on statistics.
    Joan was met on her arrival by my aunt and her husband.
    â€˜She’d had a dreadful trip!’ Rachel recounted later. ‘She looked terrible. There had been an awful heatwave and of course she was only in steerage so she had to find a way of getting up on deck so she could keep the baby cool. And then there was a storm and almost everyone on board got sick so Joan – when she wasn’t attending to Catherine – was nursing everyone else.’
    My older sister Catherine was named after the heroine in Wuthering Heights . I sometimes wonder about choosing such a namesake, but my mother had always been fond of tragic nineteenth-century heroines, her favourite book being Tess of the d’Urbervilles .
    Having their first child clearly didn’t bring the closeness my parents might have hoped for. They separated again several times after Cathy’s birth. Indeed, the voyage back to Australia might well have been another separation. I can only wonder what the cable my mother received on the boat really implied. Had she left London with her newborn thinking her marriage was over? Had my father decided to pursue career opportunities in Canada? Had he then repented and decided to come back to his wife and family? Did the cable come as a complete surprise to my mother? ‘She thought he was going to Canada or somewhere.’ Is this Stow’s expression – meaning he wasn’t sure where Alex was headed – or my mother’s words to Stow when he rang her? Were my parents so estranged that she was even vague about which country he might be setting off to? Was my father’s life so utterly dominated by indecision?
    No one can tell me. Everyone involved – my grandparents, my mother, my father, my sister, Stow – are all dead and silent. So I am compelled, as Atwood says, to attempt that risky trip to the Underworld in an effort to bring something or someone back. The only way down is via imagination.
    When my mother came back to Western Australia with her firstborn, her mother, Mary, must have been delighted to see her, although perhaps not so delighted by the husband who had allowed her to return unaccompanied. I imagine my mother staying at Oakover on the Swan Valley vineyard, and I imagine it might have been slightly scandalous, a married woman returning from England on her own with a baby. I imagine Donald Ferguson, her father, shaking his head, because he rarely spoke, and wishing his eldest daughter had had enough sense, like her younger sister, to marry a proper farming man and not this upstart of a