my sailing away

I think I already told you my mother and I pulled together my grandmother's memoir and self-published (well, she paid) it as My Sailing Away. Last night I was bundling up copies to send to important repositories like the NLA, British Library etc. I have no idea what they do with these things when they get them but I assume they get hundreds every day, it must be sorely tempting to store them perilously close to the furnace in the basement and oops... 

It's hard impossible for me to be objective, and it just occurred to me that I might have the same affliction, but really I think Marion's writing style might to some degree have been affected by the fact that she made a bit of money on the side in her early middle age by both editing crap for public consumption (she used to rewrite international romance and light fiction for local republishing) and writing short pieces for, I guess, women's magazines (amongst her papers there was a short humorous piece about the perils of getting people ringing the wrong number when you have a common last name like Miller, we had no clue if it was published or not). Late in life she wrote some actual memoir stuff she submitted to The Oldie, they didn't publish it. In her writing she would often adopt a slightly bemused, but generally genial, tone which was one side of her character but only one. In the memoir we published, which was really two memoirs which we synthesised, she was writing for her daughters not the world, so there's a slightly more 'real' Marion in there (IMO). Indeed I suspect that if she thought she was writing for strangers (and they would not read it for twenty years after her death) she would be somehow inhibited, or at least, feel the need to contextualise excessively. In this case she leapt in with the attitude that she was filling in blanks more than that she was writing a life story and I think the text is better for it. But still, I think her writer's training held her back a little in really getting into the scuttlebutt but maybe that's actually a good thing - hard to tell. 

We laughed one time when, a few years after my grandfather died, Marion was in hospital with something and had a near-death experience (?) where she hallucinated all the men in her life came to see her, except my grandfather, who she seemed not even to notice she had omitted from the cohort, except of course she must have. Similarly he is quite an absence from this book, which is mainly about her life before she met him, although there is a little bit we contrived to squeeze in because it concerns the Petrov Affair, and he is mentioned in the diary section from the 1960s. Also, there are some great pictures of the two of them. But when it comes down to it it presents interesting problems, about whether she might really have preferred him to be kept out of her story, although I think she might understand that now she's dead her concerns or preferences no longer really matter and it's enough for us to acknowledge them. She can't deny she married and lived with him for over fifty years, and no-one's insisting they enjoyed it. I remember when I was a child and she was telling me about her coming from the UK on holiday and staying, I asked her why she stayed and she said she was swept off her feet by a dashing young journalist and I confusedly asked who that was. She laughed and said it was my grandfather. It was the 'dashing' bit but more importantly the notion that they once liked each other that surprised me. 

What does bother me is that he didn't write his life story, which was surely just as fascinating as hers, but would of course be even more infected by journalese. However, just yesterday my mother relayed a story from a friend who had read the book who told her that her son interviewed my grandfather for a school project and he refused to answer a question about Petrov. So, you know, there were some things we were never going to get. He did, however, answer a lot of questions on that when he went before a royal commission on it... and the answers weren't that interesting (they read like the answers of a man with a family caught up in something completely accidentally; he had Russian friends, etc). 

I really loved both my grandmothers and they had an unbelievable amount of impact on me. Actually it was my father's mother who I was closer to in the sense that she looked after me a lot when I was very young, so we had that kind of a bond, whereas my mother's mother had a job and things to do. But my absolutely favourite story about Marion which to me says a lot about her, is the story she herself told probably in the late 80s. She was waiting in line in the milk bar and getting agitated about being served, and the woman behind the counter told her a smile cost nothing, to which Marion replied, 'fuck that'. She enjoyed getting a rise out of the milk bar proprietor but what she also liked was (her words, paraphrased) 'this sweet old lady' using the second worst swear word to cut through a mealy-mouthed fool's bullshit. There's enough of that in this book, I think, to make it a credible and rewarding read.