Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey Read online

  One of his columns, called “The Follower,” describing Little Nell’s futile pursuit of Theodora and a visiting friend, could have been written about me and Darleen:

  “ ‘They’re mean!’ she said. ‘They’ve locked me out of their room because they’re trying on their bras.’ ”

  Like Little Nell, I seemed to spend half my life trying to get a toe into the glamorous wake of my eighteen-year-old sister. Darleen conjured style out of the unpromising air of Concord like a magician producing a bunch of flowers from a sleeve. She seemed to have been born elegant, emerging from the womb with a porcelain complexion and silky hair, while I came out with a head pushed into the shape of a tomahawk and bits of discolored skin hanging off my face. She had actually prayed for my arrival, heading to the church for nine weeks to say a novena to Our Lady to send her a baby sister. I suspect the hapless blob that arrived wasn’t what she’d had in mind. For the first ten years of my life, her attitude to me was one of benign neglect. Our worlds were separated by so much time that we had very little to do with each other.

  In the oldest of our family photo albums, there is a rare childhood picture of the two of us together, taken at my sister’s sixth-grade Christmas concert. It is a black and white photograph, but when I look at it I can remember exactly the fairy-floss pink of our matching party dresses. Each of us has a satin bow in her hair—my sister’s pulling back a cascade of long, perfect ringlets. Mine sits askew on a basin-cut bob with a rat-gnawed asymmetry. My eyes, in the photograph, are round and luminous with excitement but my hands—twisting a knot in the skirt of my dress—betray nervousness edging on nausea.

  The photographer, of course, isn’t in the picture, but I can still see him as he loomed in front of us, a young man in a dark suit, flash gun in hand. “Point your toe,” he said. I didn’t have the faintest idea what he meant. Darleen did. The camera captures her, in all of her twelve-year-old composure, toe turned out like a prima ballerina. And there I am, my foot flopping spastically, frozen in time as a gawky four-year-old.

  The camera loved Darleen. By the time this sixth-grade portrait was taken, she’d already had several years’ experience as a child model. I grew up thinking it was normal to open a newspaper and find a picture of my big sister posed with a phony mother in an ad for children’s wear or cake mix.

  We have grown older together, trapped in the aspic of our age gap. No matter what difficult things I may master in my separate life, in my sibling life I remain the klutz who can be counted upon to spill the claret on my sister’s cream silk upholstery or to be so assiduous in turning off appliances before I leave her house that I unplug everything, including the freezer. When Darleen is eighty and I’m seventy-two, the four-year-old will still be there somewhere, forever failing to point her toe.

  But while it was hard to be kid sister to Darleen’s dazzling presence, the eight-year gap in our ages cost her far more than it cost me. It meant that she came of age in an Australia still stifled by conservatism and misogyny. Women were invisible in Australian politics, rarely running for so much as a local council seat. No woman dared to enter that sanctum sanctorum of Aussie male social life, the public bar of the corner pub. At parties, the sexes divided almost as thoroughly as in Saudi Arabia, with no self-respecting Aussie male prepared to concede that a woman might have something to say that would interest him.

  In retaliation, women concocted “bloke jokes”: What’s an Aussie bloke’s idea of foreplay? Answer: “You awake, luv?” Why do Aussie blokes come so quickly? Because they can’t wait to get down to the pub and tell their mates about it. The very existence of these jokes signaled the stirrings of women who knew that something was wrong. But it would be several more years before Germaine Greer came home to Sydney from Cambridge University, wielding words like an avenging sword and arguing almost everyone in my generation into embracing feminism.

  Meanwhile, in neighborhoods like ours, girls didn’t go to university. Only a rare, derided “bluestocking” aspired to anything but a makework job to fill up the interregnum between school and marriage. A 1960 study showed that less than one percent of the daughters of our social class went on to university. Instead, the girls in our circle became nuns, nurses or teachers. If none of those careers appealed, they became secretaries. Darleen had a gift with words, but she was bored stiff by our school’s limited, conventional curriculum. In art, her innate talent was obvious but, to the nuns, art remained a Jane Austen-esque “accomplishment”—not a viable career option. When they gave Darleen a B for work that clearly merited a higher grade, my mother demanded to know why. “Mrs. Brooks,” exclaimed the art teacher, “you know what bad types she’d meet in the art world! Surely you don’t expect me to give her an A and encourage her?”

  As soon as Darleen left school, her creativity expressed itself in dazzling clothes she designed herself. In the mornings, as I shrugged on the blue shift, scratchy navy sweater, felt blazer, gloves and hat of St. Mary’s British-style school uniform, Darleen dressed in hot pink mini-skirts or narrow-jacketed suits and matching caps that sat fetchingly on her splendid hair.

  Everyone seemed to have a crush on her, including the baker. He delivered our bread every morning, running from door to door in high-cut shorts that showed off his tanned, muscular thighs. He sped up and down the street as if trying to make a pressing deadline, but if Darleen came to the door, he lingered, rummaging among the loaves in his deep wicker basket to find the perfect one to present to her. One morning, as she paid him, one of her just-glued false eyelashes fell off and drifted gently into his basket, lost among the whole wheats and the crusty whites. The two of them knelt there in the doorway and riffled through the neighborhood’s bread supply until they found it, at rest on a raisin bun.

  I bathed in Darleen’s reflected glitter when I could, stewed in childish envy when I couldn’t. Then, gradually, she began to take an interest in me, perceiving needs that our parents missed. She made sure I got a bra before it became a schoolyard issue. She took me shopping for my first non-little-girl outfit: navy culottes with a ribbed sweater. And then, in January 1966, she brought me my first pen pal.

  Darleen came home one night from her job in the Telegraph newspaper’s circulation department with the news that her coworker was Theodora—the columnist Ross Campbell’s eldest daughter, whose real name was Sally. Little Nell’s real name, Darleen told me, was Laura. “Sally says her dad just picked the ugliest names he could think of to call his kids in the column.”

  Soon, Sally came to visit. She was as dazzling as Darleen, but in a wild, bohemian style, with huge looped earrings and tangles of untamed flame-red hair. I yearned for a fascinating friend like Sally—somebody different, who didn’t live in a house just like ours and go to the same school and same church every Sunday. I thought about Nell, or Laura: how exciting to have an assumed name, an alias, a nom de guerre, or de plume, or de something. That was the kind of person I wished I could meet.

  From my bedroom, I could hear Sally and Darleen laughing together over things too sophisticated for me to understand. Instead of getting on with my homework, I doodled in the margins of my notebook, over and over again, in different handwriting:

  Nell/Laura

  Nell=Laura

  Nell Nell Nell.

  My father was always writing songs and poems for people he admired—Einstein, Churchill. I decided to write one for Laura Campbell:

  Now I know your name’s not Nell

  It doesn’t seem the same.

  But I still like you anyway,

  I know you’re not to blame.

  When my father came in to say good night, I showed it to him. He laughed. “Why don’t you send it to her?” He’d written fan letters to Ross Campbell over the years, and always received charming replies. In the morning, before I had a chance to change my mind, I asked Darleen for the Campbells’ address and put the letter in the mail.

  The reply lay in the yellow mailbox, buried under the bills and the supermarket fliers. />
  I put my school bag down on the hot concrete pathway and slit the envelope, and in that moment I found the opening I’d looked for to the wider world.

  “I had a brainwave the other day, thinking you might like to be my pen-friend.”

  I held the letter as if the offer it contained was an admission to Harvard. “Actually,” she wrote, “my name’s not even Laura, it’s Sonny.”

  I was enthralled. I wrote back immediately, trying hard to sound like someone worthy of a pen pal with three names.

  Sonny wrote that she had another pen pal, a girl in Manchester, England. But that correspondent was about to be jettisoned. She had earned Sonny’s disgust by expressing surprise that an Australian knew who the Rolling Stones were. “What does she think we are, kangaroos?” A Sydney pen pal mightn’t be as exotic as an English one, but at least I wouldn’t make gaffes like that. And the stamps would be cheaper.

  Sonny lived just across town—ten miles as the crow flies. Her home was across the Harbour Bridge, on the side of the city known as the North Shore. Watery inlets and fingers of bushland full of bellbirds and cockatoos embraced its neighborhoods. Most homes there sprawled graciously on large lots set back from tree-lined avenues. In Sydney, North Shore signified affluence as surely as West End in London, or Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, although the wealth represented there was far less, and less ostentatiously displayed. From his columns, we knew that Ross Campbell took the train to work, worried about how to carve a single roast chicken into sufficient portions to feed family and guests, and resented the musical jingle of the ice cream truck because treats for his four children stretched his scarce cash supply. Like most Australians in the 1960s, Campbell, with his large family, portrayed himself as “an Aussie battler” striving to make ends meet. It was years before the rapacious decade of the 1980s would open up wide disparities of wealth.

  Still, class existed, and announced itself in a dozen subtle ways. A North Shore family lived close enough to the best beaches to pop down for a dip, burdened by nothing more than a towel. For us, a trip to the beach meant driving over an hour through traffic. We went only on heat-wave days, when the temperatures became unbearable. My uncle would arrive in the pickup truck he used for his secondhand furniture business, and my cousin and I would ride in the back with the heavy paraphernalia—coolers, beach chairs, umbrellas—of those who have to “make a day of it.” By early afternoon my skin, unaccustomed to beach glare, showed the first pink symptoms of the sunburn I’d carry home. It was in a series of such small distinctions that Australia’s class lines were drawn.

  But much more important than any geographic or class divide between Sonny and me was the difference in our ages. Sonny was just about to turn thirteen—making her more than two years older at an age when two years might as well be a yawning generation gap. At school, the idea of a sixth-grader approaching me, a humble fourth-grader, would have been as unlikely as a Brahmin consorting with an Untouchable. Somehow, pen-friendship magically erased these issues of caste and opened a window to Sonny’s different world.

  The extent of the difference was apparent in her second letter. Sonny Campbell didn’t want to be a nurse or a teacher, and certainly not a nun. She would be, she informed me, “in Musical Comedy.” What, she wanted to know, did I want to be?

  This harmless question for her was a loaded one for me. I’d already learned that stating one’s ambition could be a risky business.

  • • •

  “I wonder what it’d be like working at the hairdresser’s,” says Ann, peeling back the white bread of her sandwich to examine its contents.

  It is lunchtime in the playground at St. Mary’s. We cluster in the puddle of shade provided by the towering facade of the church. At the other end of the playground, high gates open onto the roar of Parramatta Road—six lanes of exhaust-belching cars, trucks and buses—the main artery westward from the city to the Blue Mountains and the endless Outback beyond. In between the road and the church is a treeless expanse of black asphalt marked up with a basketball court and rimmed with painted benches.

  We sit in a little knot by the basketball hoop so we can talk to our friend Margaret, the team’s goalie, as she shoots her prescribed one hundred daily practice goals. The rest of us unwrap the waxed paper contents in our Tupperware lunchboxes. The unlucky have sandwiches with Vegemite—a yeast-extract paste that looks like axle grease. The lucky have meat pies with dribbly brown gravy purchased at the “tuck shop” for one-and-a-penny (the equivalent of eleven cents).

  “Hairdressing’s a stinky job—all old ladies with blue rinses and perms,” says Maureen, who wants to be a nurse. “You won’t meet any boys.”

  “Well, the only people you’ll meet’ll have sores all over them or be chundering all the time. Imagine kissing someone after you’ve emptied their bedpan!” says Ann. We hoot at this, no one willing to raise the really awful part—that nurses see men’s “privates,” and even have to touch them.

  “Dummies!” says Maureen. “Everyone knows nurses marry doctors, not patients.”

  “Why do you have to marry a doctor? Why not be one?” I say. The others stare at me as if I’ve pulled a rotting fish from my lunchbox. Undaunted, I carry on. “I’m going to be a scientist. I haven’t really decided the field yet, but most probably biochemistry.” This doesn’t seem out of the question to me. My mother has told me I can do anything. I believe her.

  There is a hush first, as the others look at me, then at each other. Then they all explode in the raucous, untamed cackle of ten-year-olds.

  I haven’t yet learned that when you’re in a hole you should stop digging. Flushed and hurt, I blurt out my retort: “All of you won’t be laughing when you see the headline: ‘Sydney Scientist Discovers Cure for Cancer.’ ”

  To my fourth-grade classmates, I am hilariously out of line. Japanese have the saying that “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” The Australian equivalent is the “tall poppy syndrome”—any Australian who rises above the crowd risks being cut down by a storm of derision. I have committed the cardinal sin of “having tickets on myself,” or, more crudely, “being up myself”—an expression we use without knowing what it means.

  Across the playground, the girls spot our teacher and run off to share the joke with her. This young nun is the best teacher the school has. In English class, she has set aside the tedium of parsing and analysis and allowed us to try our hand at writing our own poetry. Recently, she has begun introducing us to “nature study.” These proto-science lessons are basic stuff to me—her chalk drawings of cells on the blackboard are a feeble reflection of the bright world I’ve explored through my microscope lens. I know the oozing form of the amoeba, the whimsical thrusts of its pseudopodia as it slinks across a slide. I’ve studied the matter of my own body; cells scraped from the inside of my cheek and the drop of blood squeezed from my finger. When she draws a simplified cell with nucleus and cell membrane, my hand shoots up. “Sister, you’ve left out the vacuoles and the plastids.” My know-all demeanor must have driven her crazy. Whatever the reason, she joins in my classmates’ laughter. I stand alone in the playground, my eyes stinging, my cheeks hot with the blush of humiliation.

  After thinking about it, I decided that it would be safe to confide my goal to Sonny. At Sonny’s school, no one made fun of ambition, or gave girls poor grades for art because of “bad types” in the art world. Most children in Sydney attended free government schools staffed by teachers well enough paid to make the career esteemed. My schoolteacher cousin was our family’s most conspicuous material success, living in a big house with a pool, traveling abroad every other year. Catholics paid modest fees to attend our own schools, a little more disciplined, a little more personal than the government option.

  And then there were a handful of schools like Sonny’s: expensive and unabashedly elitist. Abbotsleigh was known for its excellence. Its alumnae, such as Jill Ker Conway, had made their marks in many fields, from traditional academics to avant-g
arde art. To announce that one wanted to be “in Musical Comedy” would have been certain social death at St. Mary’s. But at Abbotsleigh it was a dream to be encouraged.

  Like me, Sonny had missed a lot of school during a childhood illness. In her case, a bout of hepatitis when she was ten years old had kept her home for three months. She had spent her invalid days watching midday movies and had developed a taste for musical extravaganzas.

  Her theatrical flair imbued every letter, turning the small businesses of childhood into high drama. She used punctuation decoratively, throwing in clusters of exclamation points like bouquets of flowers, to brighten things up. A trip down a storm-water drain became an epic trek to the heart of darkness: “We were half way through when a man through a bucket of water down!!! It’s pitch black the whole way but the good thing is, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get stuck, suphercate (or however you spell it) drown or anything else.”

  A week at camp was transfigured into a series of near-death experiences of perilous hikes and buses careening down mountains. “One day we hiked for MILES to the beach and when we got there, it was closed! We also hiked for miles to Church, but of course, it was open.” Her world was full of experiences, ranging the streets in a clot of neighborhood kids, going to pajama parties—“boy! was it beaut! We talked ALL night (sorry, a bit of exajuration (or however you spell it) there we got to sleep at 1.30 AM!).”

  Even her handwriting was dramatic, changing from cuneiform spikes in one letter to flamboyant curvaceous scrawls the next. “For my birthday,” she wrote, “Sally gave me two divine garters. They’re black lace with colored ribbon.”

  For my birthday, I got The Student’s Book of Basic Biology—an illustrated tome I’d longed for. I racked my brains to make my letters as interesting as hers. My life had more to do with thinking than doing. It was solitary, full of books and the imaginary journeys they took me on. I had just discovered science fiction. I was devouring John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet as fast as the library could order them. I spent more time than ever staring at the stars from the sun-warmed roof of the back veranda, imagining the unseen planets out by Alpha Centauri.