MEMOIRS:
CHAPTER 1 CAMPERVAN IN THE SNOW
Nobody likes to think of their parents as sexual beings.
Parents
Don’t
Have
Sex.
In fact, parents don’t even have sexual organs… well, ones that do anything anyway. Parents have sexual organs like nuns have sexual organs.
Of course, deep down everyone knows that in reality the very reason for their existence is that at one specific and all important moment in an unimaginable world way before they even had two cells to their name, their mum and dad had a nice dinner, a few wines and a bath together before they started kissing and rubbing each other’s shoulders and then they lit some candles and… uurgh… it’s too hideous to even think about…
And so parents remain in the conscious mind like those sexless Roswell aliens with their silvery bodies, big eyes and no defining groinal features. Thus we live in the deluded truth that we are the product of an immaculate conception and can therefore get on with our lives without the constant sensation of nausea.
Growing up, however, I did not enjoy the luxury of ignorance.
From the earliest of days, my parents tortured me with the tale of my own conception.
I came to being in a world that in an almost indefinable way, I can never know. Like all of us, life on the planet Earth begins with our own existum. Anything before that is a surreal cross between faded photographs and old black and white newsreels.
I only ever have known my parents as… well… as parents… but of course, before I came along to turn their partnership into a family, they were an ordinary married couple. Hilda was an Aussie girl from the bush who married Stan, a Yorkie from the slums.
They were living in London and on any Saturday night they would put on their coats and hats and walk through the grey drizzle and smog to the local “picture house” to see Yul Brenner in The King and I or perhaps the new action hero by the name of James Bond in his second film, From Russia with Love. As they trudged through the icy Clapham slush they were singing the “hottest new tune on record vinyl”, She Loves You by a new and promising band called The Beatles.
I imagine them in those pre-me years sitting around a little gas heater in their one-bedroom flat, drinking tea and watching Coronation Street each night, probably with no idea that there were things going on all around them that would define their generation.
Not far from their flat, the 14 year old Prince Charles had purchased a cherry brandy from a hotel, an event which sent the press into a frenzy. Far to the north, Ronnie Biggs and some of his buddies were stealing millions of pounds in what would from then on be known as The Great Train Robbery. High above their heads, the American Gordon Cooper, was zooming around the earth at 8000 kms an hour in a tin can called a Mercury capsule. Somewhere up there was also was a Soviet woman, the first female in space. Fortunately, they didn’t crash into each other.
There was a lot happening on the other side of the world too. In Berlin, John F. Kennedy in a fit of linguistic misunderstanding proudly declared to an international television audience, “I am a donut” while back in Washington, more than 200 000 people stood to hear Martin Luther King declare “I have a dream”.
And in Australia, the valves were shut on a new 80 foot dam on the Molonglo River. Over the next six months, the waters would rise to create a new body called Lake Burley Griffin, thus giving Canberra arguably the most stunning urban inland waterscape in the country.
But excuse my aposiopesis… this is just the backdrop to my narrative.
Where it all really began for me, where I entered the scene as a stitch in the tapestry of life, was in an anonymous small European village in late 1963.
My parents, like many tourists heading for the continent, had bought a Humver Campervan at the street-market outside Australia House. Weeks later they were crawling through Switzerland in a van I am told looked like an aluminium sculpture entitled Two Snails Mating.
I like to think of that anonymous Swiss village as one of those quaint post-card places with narrow cobbled streets lined with gabled roofs, lead-light windows and distant views of snow-capped mountains. I like to think that my parents were dining in a fondue restaurant, served by a buxom valkyrie wearing a red and green apron, while an oom-pah band played in the background and some fat Herr jiggled about ridiculously in a pair of lederhosen.
But such fantasy is the price you pay for watching too much television. To be honest, I have filled in the detail with my imagination. For all I know, they were dining that fateful night on steamed-cabbage-in-a-bun in a neon-lit petrol station surrounded by cranky lorrie drivers.
The point of the story, however, remains true. At the end of their meal, they fronted up to fork out their franks, and on their way out the door back into the icy air, the cashier asked them in broken English if they had heard the news.
The American President… Kennedy, I think… he has been shot… he is dead.
At that single moment, my parents joined with millions of that generation who for years afterwards would be able to recall the precise moment when they heard the news that Kennedy had been assassinated. (For years, this would remain a mystery to me… for years, that is, right up to the time where driving home from picking up Thai take-away one night, I sat at a set of traffic lights and turned on the radio to hear the news. At that moment, I became one of millions of my generation who for years afterwards would be able to recall exactly the precise moment when they heard the news that in Paris a few hours before, a Princess by the name of Diana had died in a car crash.)
They drove to a lookout above the town and somehow, huddled in the front seats of their Humver under every blanket and doona in their possession, managed to find a radio station that confirmed the horrible truth. In Dallas, Texas, the 34th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy died twenty-five minutes after being shot supposedly from a single rifleman perched in a nearby building.
I don’t quite know why my British father and Australian mother in a campervan in the snow in Switzerland would even spare a second thought for an assassinated American statesman.
But the point is, they did.
Which was lucky for me.
Family legend has it that my mother was quite upset by the whole situation, and my father showed her comfort the only way he knew how. I’ve never quite worked out the logistics of this, given they were both wearing every single item of clothing available and as such were buried under six inches of wool, cotton and brightly coloured parkas.
It must have been like a sumo wrestler trying to be intimate with the Michelin man.
But passion and determination obviously prevailed.
And there you have it. I was conceived in a blizzard in the back of a truck in the Swiss Alps.
One moment I didn’t exist.
A few moments later… I did.
I’ve never been quite sure how to feel that I came into being as the result of the horrific death of one of the greatest orators and leaders of the free world of the twentieth century.
But in all honesty, I can’t say I’m sorry to be here.
Parents
Don’t
Have
Sex.
In fact, parents don’t even have sexual organs… well, ones that do anything anyway. Parents have sexual organs like nuns have sexual organs.
Of course, deep down everyone knows that in reality the very reason for their existence is that at one specific and all important moment in an unimaginable world way before they even had two cells to their name, their mum and dad had a nice dinner, a few wines and a bath together before they started kissing and rubbing each other’s shoulders and then they lit some candles and… uurgh… it’s too hideous to even think about…
And so parents remain in the conscious mind like those sexless Roswell aliens with their silvery bodies, big eyes and no defining groinal features. Thus we live in the deluded truth that we are the product of an immaculate conception and can therefore get on with our lives without the constant sensation of nausea.
Growing up, however, I did not enjoy the luxury of ignorance.
From the earliest of days, my parents tortured me with the tale of my own conception.
I came to being in a world that in an almost indefinable way, I can never know. Like all of us, life on the planet Earth begins with our own existum. Anything before that is a surreal cross between faded photographs and old black and white newsreels.
I only ever have known my parents as… well… as parents… but of course, before I came along to turn their partnership into a family, they were an ordinary married couple. Hilda was an Aussie girl from the bush who married Stan, a Yorkie from the slums.
They were living in London and on any Saturday night they would put on their coats and hats and walk through the grey drizzle and smog to the local “picture house” to see Yul Brenner in The King and I or perhaps the new action hero by the name of James Bond in his second film, From Russia with Love. As they trudged through the icy Clapham slush they were singing the “hottest new tune on record vinyl”, She Loves You by a new and promising band called The Beatles.
I imagine them in those pre-me years sitting around a little gas heater in their one-bedroom flat, drinking tea and watching Coronation Street each night, probably with no idea that there were things going on all around them that would define their generation.
Not far from their flat, the 14 year old Prince Charles had purchased a cherry brandy from a hotel, an event which sent the press into a frenzy. Far to the north, Ronnie Biggs and some of his buddies were stealing millions of pounds in what would from then on be known as The Great Train Robbery. High above their heads, the American Gordon Cooper, was zooming around the earth at 8000 kms an hour in a tin can called a Mercury capsule. Somewhere up there was also was a Soviet woman, the first female in space. Fortunately, they didn’t crash into each other.
There was a lot happening on the other side of the world too. In Berlin, John F. Kennedy in a fit of linguistic misunderstanding proudly declared to an international television audience, “I am a donut” while back in Washington, more than 200 000 people stood to hear Martin Luther King declare “I have a dream”.
And in Australia, the valves were shut on a new 80 foot dam on the Molonglo River. Over the next six months, the waters would rise to create a new body called Lake Burley Griffin, thus giving Canberra arguably the most stunning urban inland waterscape in the country.
But excuse my aposiopesis… this is just the backdrop to my narrative.
Where it all really began for me, where I entered the scene as a stitch in the tapestry of life, was in an anonymous small European village in late 1963.
My parents, like many tourists heading for the continent, had bought a Humver Campervan at the street-market outside Australia House. Weeks later they were crawling through Switzerland in a van I am told looked like an aluminium sculpture entitled Two Snails Mating.
I like to think of that anonymous Swiss village as one of those quaint post-card places with narrow cobbled streets lined with gabled roofs, lead-light windows and distant views of snow-capped mountains. I like to think that my parents were dining in a fondue restaurant, served by a buxom valkyrie wearing a red and green apron, while an oom-pah band played in the background and some fat Herr jiggled about ridiculously in a pair of lederhosen.
But such fantasy is the price you pay for watching too much television. To be honest, I have filled in the detail with my imagination. For all I know, they were dining that fateful night on steamed-cabbage-in-a-bun in a neon-lit petrol station surrounded by cranky lorrie drivers.
The point of the story, however, remains true. At the end of their meal, they fronted up to fork out their franks, and on their way out the door back into the icy air, the cashier asked them in broken English if they had heard the news.
The American President… Kennedy, I think… he has been shot… he is dead.
At that single moment, my parents joined with millions of that generation who for years afterwards would be able to recall the precise moment when they heard the news that Kennedy had been assassinated. (For years, this would remain a mystery to me… for years, that is, right up to the time where driving home from picking up Thai take-away one night, I sat at a set of traffic lights and turned on the radio to hear the news. At that moment, I became one of millions of my generation who for years afterwards would be able to recall exactly the precise moment when they heard the news that in Paris a few hours before, a Princess by the name of Diana had died in a car crash.)
They drove to a lookout above the town and somehow, huddled in the front seats of their Humver under every blanket and doona in their possession, managed to find a radio station that confirmed the horrible truth. In Dallas, Texas, the 34th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy died twenty-five minutes after being shot supposedly from a single rifleman perched in a nearby building.
I don’t quite know why my British father and Australian mother in a campervan in the snow in Switzerland would even spare a second thought for an assassinated American statesman.
But the point is, they did.
Which was lucky for me.
Family legend has it that my mother was quite upset by the whole situation, and my father showed her comfort the only way he knew how. I’ve never quite worked out the logistics of this, given they were both wearing every single item of clothing available and as such were buried under six inches of wool, cotton and brightly coloured parkas.
It must have been like a sumo wrestler trying to be intimate with the Michelin man.
But passion and determination obviously prevailed.
And there you have it. I was conceived in a blizzard in the back of a truck in the Swiss Alps.
One moment I didn’t exist.
A few moments later… I did.
I’ve never been quite sure how to feel that I came into being as the result of the horrific death of one of the greatest orators and leaders of the free world of the twentieth century.
But in all honesty, I can’t say I’m sorry to be here.