Begin the beguine

So, first draft of new book complete, and here is the first chapter. Watch out for publication, hopefully in new year.

BEGINNING\’S END

Every new beginning comes from some other

beginning\’s end.

Seneca

What\’s past is prologue 

In February 2024, approaching my 79th birthday, I had my second stroke. Unlike the first one, which healed after 24 hours of being unable to talk, this one left after effects, turning me overnight from a young fellow I could recognise in the mirror, to an old man I couldn\’t. I was left with a wobbly unsteady gait, a speech impediment, and memory loss. Or rather a blockage in my ability to access a certain category of memories, notably the names of people from my distant and recent past, from friends and former colleagues, to tv and movie stars. Instantly I was transformed from someone who knew the cloud of ancestors that had formed me, to one where they were just unknown figures forgoten by history and now by me.

More generally this stroke came as the most recent episode of a chain of ill-health, frequently life-threatening ill-health, extending back to 2008, but especially from 2011. I feel like Yossarian-

“They\’re trying to kill me,\” Yossarian told him calmly.

No one\’s trying to kill you,\” Clevinger cried.

Then why are they shooting at me?\” Yossarian asked.

They\’re shooting at everyone,\” Clevinger answered. \”They\’re trying to kill everyone.\”

And what difference does that make?” 

― Joseph Heller

This chain of misery has made it difficult, no strike that, impossible to write for some time now. Fortunately I had done the research and much of the writing for this book 15 years ago or so, and I knew the cloud of names then. But in any case these ancestors are part of my being, part of my very core, and it isn\’t hard to believe the idea that something is absorbed in the uterus;

\”As fetal cells cross the placenta into maternal tissues, a small number of maternal cells migrate into fetal tissues, where they can persist into adulthood. Genetic swaps, then, might occur several times throughout a life. Just about every time an embryo implants and begins to grow, it dispatches bits of itself into the body housing it. The depositions begin at least as early as four or five weeks into gestation. And they settle into just about every sliver of our anatomy where scientists have checked—the heart, the lungs, the breast, the colon, the kidney, the liver, the brain. From there, the cells might linger, grow, and divide for decades, or even, as many scientists suspect, for a lifetime, assimilating into the person that conceived them…

Some researchers believe that people may be miniature mosaics of many of their relatives, via chains of pregnancy: their older siblings, perhaps, or their maternal grandmother, or any aunts and uncles their grandmother might have conceived before their mother was born. \’It’s like you carry your entire family inside of you,\’ says Francisco Úbeda de Torres, an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London\”.

I do carry my entire family inside me, inside my mind. In my previous book, \”Hammering on the mind\’s door\” I said – \”I felt like I had walked from the eighteenth century coal mines of the English Midlands and the eighteenth century farms of Yorkshire all the way to the twenty-first century farm in Australia.  Walked along with a few people to begin with but gathering more and more numbers as I travelled through the decades, until there were hundreds of relatives all around me in a virtual cloud, cheering me on.\”

So this book is a recounting, an accounting, of what created my \”mosaic\”, how my physical and mental framework was established. In \”Hammering\”, a book for which the wonderful Stephen Mathews was obstetrician, my story was individualised, a combination of education, work, achievements, interests, abilities, friendships, weaknesses, unique to me. In recounting my family history, the assimilating history that led to my \”mosaic\”, I will be painting a picture that will be familiar in its broad outlines (though not in its details) to many Australians of my generation with a migrant, especially an English migrant, background.

These people, including Charles, Emma, Robert Charles, Annie, Louis, Kate, Richard, Mary Ann, Harry, Joseph, Anne, appear in no history books, no books at all, they were forgotten after death once people who had known them had also died. Their lives, loves, work, tragedies, happiness, dreams, achievements, failures, family, friends – the whole warp and woof of a human story – all forgotten. Until now, when I try to bring them back to life as best I can. They are important not only in providing the genetic and social background to my own story, but are a microcosm of the millions of stories that make up the background to 21st century Australia. Every migrant family brought mental and physical baggage with them to Australia.

The dozens of families on a ship like the Vedic were nuclear families and individuals, but all of them had absorbed their family histories in the womb. When they arrived in Australia they didn\’t come with a clean slate, waiting to absorb the new environment, new culture, new economy. Whatever expectations they had, soon to be dashed in most cases (but don\’t blame us said the Salvation Army – \’We cannot hold ourselves responsible however for any loss sustained by Emigrants through failure to realise their expectations after emigrating\’), were tempered by the baggage they brought with them.

Not to say they didn\’t strive with every sinew to make a go of it, these were people, like Charles the miner, who were used to back-breaking work. But that the community they became part of was not composed of the idealised and bland families like the one shown in the Salvation Army brochure, a family as a blank slate waiting to have Australianess written upon it. Rather they were families with emotional (and often physical) scar tissue, who were both leaving family behind and bringing family history with them.