Life of Kate Grenville’s mother reflected in fragments

When Kate Grenville’s mother died in 2002 she left boxes of papers that revealed a desire to write.

Nance Grenville, mother of author Kate Grenville.

When Kate Grenville’s mother died in 2002 she left boxes of papers. It took some time for Grenville to tackle them, but when she did she found something both moving and intriguing: her mother had made many attempts to write, feeling that her life had something to tell others, but she never conquered the skill her daughter commanded. She left only fragments, stops and starts, brief pen portraits of hidden aspects of her life.

Grenville, whose novels have brought the dark side of Australian history vividly to life, knitted those fragments into a narrative: perhaps the narrative her mother would have written if she could have. She has done us a service: her mother’s story illuminates who we are and where we have come from in an era that is busy shedding its past.

Grenville’s mother, Nance Russell, was born in 1912, the middle child and only daughter of restless rural publicans in NSW. Her parents, who argued bitterly, were no advertisement for marriage. Her mother was harsh, her father nice but feckless. They were too tired from their struggles with life and with each other to give their children love.

“The only place she could go to be unhappy in peace was the woodheap,” Grenville writes. “She’d sit there in the dusk, the chooks murmuring around her feet. People were always going on about orphans, she thought. How awful it was for them. She thought it would be good to be an orphan. At least you’d have the other orphans. And it wouldn’t be your fault that your parents didn’t love you, because they’d be dead.”

Nance came and went from the family home. For a time, she was placed with a foster mother; she boarded at a convent school. Her only glimpse of happiness was when she was packed off to live, too briefly, with her affectionate Aunt Rose. Grenville’s early pages are full of the minutiae of childhood: the rhythms of home and school, the puzzlements and the light-bulb moments of growing up. The descriptions are redolent of the era and framed with Grenville’s knack for showing what is ­exotic, and what is surprisingly familiar, about the past.

When Nance finished school, she took on an apprenticeship with a pharmacist in Sydney who was willing to take on a woman and studied for her degree part-time. “My word Nance, Bert [her father] boomed down the table at her, carving into the leg of mutton. You’ve fallen on your feet there, my girl!”

The next years were hard and her hours were long. At times she thought she couldn’t continue. She pondered ending her life one evening, but the moment passed. It was a turning point. “She could be dead, and she’d chosen not to be,” Grenville writes. “She was free to do whatever she chose.”

Nance gained her credentials and had an affair that was satisfying but temporary and didn’t break her heart. Trips home were torturous, but her longing for family never left her. She finally met the man she would marry: Kenneth Gee, a quirky lawyer with fiery but unstable political passions, a Christian socialist and lay preacher and a misfit in the kind of family that passed for aristocracy in Australia. He respected her desire to keep working, though he made no effort to help around the house.

She was in love when she married but quickly realised she had made a mistake. She was independent, psychologically and practically, and knew she couldn’t mould her life around her husband’s — though he, being emotionally distant, didn’t demand much of her. There were big things and small things. His political activities took him out a lot in the evening, leaving her at home alone; he didn’t share her love of poetry. She decided to leave him but, like her suicidal moment, that too passed. Then children started coming. There were three: two boys and then Kate.

Nance had difficulty juggling her own business and child-rearing. Sometimes her mother, unsoftened by widowhood, would arrive to help but then leave when restlessness overtook her. Nance hired a series of childminders and Grenville underlines their unsuitability by describing one, for example, as “huge” and “slatternly” with the “kind of nose that suggested too much of the bottle”.

Working didn’t work and she eventually gave up the fight. Ken’s income was good; they lived well. “She wasn’t interested in becoming a late-in-the-day lady or in spending money to impress other people,” Grenville writes. “She wanted the kind of small functional luxuries that made ordinary days a pleasure. Good knives and forks, the feel of quality sheets on the bed ...” Which is, unremarkably, precisely what a good income allowed people before flaunting nouvelle richesse became acceptable.

Nance also took her children to the local Church of England most Sundays, though she didn’t believe in much beyond the known world. It was of a piece with knowing Shakespeare and Keats: “Without that sense of what other people had created, without a connection to that body of tradition, you were a floating nothing.”

The story ends with the news that she is pregnant with Kate: “She felt a great flush of joy. One last child, she thought. In spite of everything, what a lucky woman I am.”

This is social history written with the storytelling skill of a novelist. The story is significant precisely because it is parochial: a welcome refresher course for anyone who fears that our history and our social idiosyncrasies — from our attitudes to our accent — are being overwritten by the transplanted Americanisms of popular culture and neoliberal ideologues.

The book has a backstory prologue and context-setting epilogue framing the central narrative. It is written in the direct, affectless style that has become Australia’s primary literary dialect. A few writers, most notably David Malouf, have raised that dialect to a poetic level; Grenville isn’t one of them. The book is a pacey read, nonetheless, for anyone interested in the way ordinary Australians were.

Locutions of the time fill the central chapters, recreating the atmosphere. The odd jarring note intrudes. Some offend the fastidiousness of our times: for instance, she describes a foreigner as “some kind of Continental, with his hair combed straight back, the way they did”. The description rings true for the era but, missing an implicit sense of parenthesis, not for a backward gaze from now. Others seem imperfectly remembered. When she refers to lavatories, which she does several times, she calls them “dunnies” — which has an amusingly colloquial flavour but surely was a man’s word in a time when “rough” was a descriptor even working-class women shrank from. Even “toilet” was a step too far in polite society in those days.

And the blurring of fact and fiction is always controversial. Some readers find it intriguing. Others, especially journalists and historians whose job it is to tease out what exactly happened, may not. Nance’s continual introspection is what makes the story her story but poses questions about how much was in the scraps of memoir Grenville found and how much is Grenville’s supposition or invention. The detached tone of the writing, what’s more, doesn’t let us forget the provenance and lose ourselves in the story.

The last chapter, in Grenville’s own sophisticated voice, closes the narrative distance. It is the one that really comes alive. When she describes her response to her mother’s life, with its startling later denouements, the pages are filled with a warmth, love and crackling ­immediacy missing from what came before.

Miriam Cosic is a journalist, writer and critic.

One Life: My Mother’s Story

By Kate Grenville

Text Publishing, 260pp, $29.99