Other People's Houses

Angus

1

To Amman

WRITING NOW, MORE than a decade on, there was always going to be more to it than met the eye. Or so I was told when I first confided the complexities—the impossibilities, even—of finalising the Second Book to an experienced chronicler of the Middle East, who’d written a brilliant account of another branch of the Hashemite family. The mothers and daughters will always win , he said. Then, when I began to speak more publicly about that time, mindful of the secretiveness that surrounded and followed me home, a journalist emailed from North America saying she had been asked to produce something similar years before me, and there had been others.

She sounded angry or hurt or misled, or all three. I wasn’t—or maybe I was deluding myself. I had been plunged into another world’s politics, power plays, moral universe. That changed me, at least. Sharpened my wits; saved me, even.

Now I find myself struggling not to see it all as a trap I could not have avoided. Undertaking to make a book for someone whose work had been at the centre of a part of the world I had always yearned to return to and to know more about, and that was, by then, under siege by the remorseless coalition of the willing, was an escape into an adventure that I could not have resisted.

The years before I was first contacted had been tough for many, including my extended, blended family. My father-in-law’s long illness; my ailing mother going in and out of hospital, then into rehab twice, and home again. I went up and down the Geelong Road to the south coast, with food for her freezer, stayed with her for weeks on end, to help her shower and dress, and learn to cope again. At night, after she was safely in bed, I would listen, sick with horror, to reports on my radio, turned down low so she would not wake, of the carnage in Afghanistan, and the rage of the Iraqi people as war escalated in the Middle East. Strategic experts pontificated on military solutions, and bleeding hearts like me saw only massive retribution for 9/11, and the calamities about to rain down on the Iraqi people and their children.

Then came the bombardment of Baghdad, that beautiful ancient city on the Tigris, the television footage of unsecured treasures in the National Museum of Antiquities; and glimpses of the great Mesopotamian archaeological sites, and the ancient archway across Haifa Street where the US would establish its Green Zone. As fighting spread to the Sunni provinces of Al Anbar and Salah ad Din, then to Fallujah, where the insurgents dug in, reports in the western media stayed brutally optimistic. Suicide bombings and car bombs spread. The exposure of the US’s treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison led to a string of beheadings and kidnappings in Iraq, while President George W. Bush was claiming liberation for 25 million Iraqis, and handing sovereign power to the Interim Government of Iraq by way of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The news was unbearable and I was listening to it alone in the dark in 2003, in my mother’s safe and beautiful coastal retreat, so quiet that the thunder of the surf at high tide invaded my dreams.

One Melbourne spring afternoon, later that year, a woman contacted me. Did I remember her from the Colac Battlers, a hockey team we had played in together as high-school girls, more than forty years before? I didn’t, but I remembered the thrill of the thwack of the ball, and girls tackling each other in the mud, our hideous maroon tunics with pink cords wrapped tight around our adolescent middles. But when we met in Fitzroy for coffee a few days later, I recognised her straight away—same curly hair, crooked grin, fierce determination, and old-fashioned country-town conservatism.

The shorthand versions of our lives since the late 1950s were packed with husbands, kids, employers. She had been working for some years as a personal assistant or an office manager, sometimes both, in a palace in Jordan, returning to Australia whenever she could, to see her now grown-up children, or flying them in to visit her. My life had been focused on publishing; a heavy stint of politicking and reimagining the Australia Council from top to toe, battling creeping bureaucracy; then Melbourne University; a book, occasional columns and opinion pieces—tough enough gigs, but a safe, monochromatic leftie life compared with hers.

We spoke of the war, of Iraqi refugees who were on the move into Jordan, where they were accommodated in UNHCR camps outside Amman. But the real point of our meeting, she wanted me to know, looking around at the crowded tables in Marios and lowering her voice, was that I might hear one day from someone in Amman about a writing project. She wanted me to understand that she was merely forewarning me. Nothing might come of it. But the head of the Majlis might be in touch, or even a member of the Jordanian Royal Family. I might be invited to Amman. Nothing more could she tell me, except about her special boss, who she described vividly with her face alight and adoring, and who was apparently called Sidi Hassan.

I knew next to nothing about modern Jordan, except that it was about the size of Tasmania, and shared borders with Iraq, Syria, Israel, the West Bank of Palestine and Saudi Arabia. I’d watched news footage of desperate Iraqi families fleeing Baghdad in cars and trucks belching smoke, piled high with children and mattresses, trying to cross the borders into Syria and Jordan. I’d seen films of Jordan’s decades-old Palestinian refugee camps. Sixty per cent of Jordan’s population were displaced Palestinians from the West Bank, now being joined by thousands of Iraqis. Jordan, I recalled, had no oil, and had long provided bases first for the British and, since the 1950s Suez Crisis, the Americans.

I knew rather more about Jordan’s past, from the writings of the great imperial archaeologists: Richard Burton; Charles Doughty; and especially Wilfred Thesiger, whose book about the Ma’dan people, The Marsh Arabs, documented their ancient reed-based culture, on artificial islands in the marshes of southern Iraq.

I’d even seen those marshes long ago, in the mid 1960s. As a young woman, recently married, dreaming of becoming an archaeologist in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, I stood at the rail of a cargo ship, the SS Chakdina, in those same Amara marshes where the Tigris and Euphrates met. We had been woken before dawn by the ship’s engines being cut on the captain’s instructions, so he could show us, his only passengers, the Shatt al-Arab, the ship sliding silently through the channel, not risking a bow wave damaging the man-made islands in the reeds.

We saw the small barrel-vaulted huts, and the curved guest houses made of reeds. Close enough to see the sun glinting on bunches of dates high in the palm trees, we watched the white robed Ma’dan poling their boats, their children playing on the banks. A few decades later, Saddam Hussein would destroy these people and their islands, poisoning the water and draining the marshes.

But I knew little about the small nation state on the East Bank of the River Jordan, and even less about Arab kingdoms—about any kingdoms, in fact. Monarchies were anachronisms. I was a republican. My hockey-playing school friend clearly wasn’t, awarding Their Royal Highnesses capital letters, reluctant to be more expansive, looking around before she spoke. Maybe one shouldn’t speak freely of Kingdoms? She’d been working for many years for the boss and his wife, as she called Their Royal Highnesses affectionately, and was suitably vague when I tried questioning her. Maybe if I did manage to get to Europe later that year, as I faintly hoped, someone from the Palace might be in touch.

That evening, I went online, searching for the Jordanian Royal Family, and up came the former Crown Prince of Jordan, El Hassan bin Talal, in establishment colours of blue and gold, with a coronet. There were handsome family photos, potted biographies, and details of the ancient lineages of the Hashemites, going back forty-two generations to the Prophet Muhammad. El Hassan bin Talal was the younger brother of the former King Hussein, who spent money on fast cars, private jets, and beautiful wives in designer clothes, beloved of colour magazines in the West. The website featured a list of the Crown Prince’s publications, with titles such as Palestinian Self-determination, Search for Peace and Continuity, Innovation and Change and, just the year before, To Be a Muslim: Islam, Peace, and Democracy. A Hashemite former Crown Prince named Sidi sounded unlikely, and the Majlis was mysterious. ‘The writing project’ sounded more unlikely still, and I forgot about it.

The following year, my mother was finally admitted to a nursing home, not far from where we lived in Melbourne. I’d visit her most mornings, on my way to the medical archives of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, where I had started researching a ‘Body Book’, as I called it. I was spending the rest of the day reading about the perceptions and treatment of the bodies and minds of women, my grandmother’s and mother’s generations, born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only half aware I was shielding myself from the baleful face my slowly fading mother now turned to me, her only daughter. She wanted her sons beside her, not me.

I had been given a peaceful room, with a big table and leather chairs, in the library of the college’s Victorian house, with a view of leafy trees and the Fitzroy Gardens. I had access to reports and minute books, letters and diaries, and medical artefacts from private collections, all in the charge of a kind and knowledgeable librarian who shared my passion for social history.

The archives were rich in colonial and twentieth-century rural Australian and New Zealand records. Its cabinets contained teaching tools and medical instruments, handwritten case studies, in stiff medicalese, of women’s tribulations during pregnancy and childbirth, reflecting the midwifery and medical systems of the day. I would read the almost unbearably calm case notes in spare language by young nurses, such as R.N. Howard in 1934, with red ink marking changes in the record when a mother died of obstetric shock following a forceps delivery, or when ‘the case ended with a favourable maternal result and a dead baby’. What became of the 13-year-old mother of ‘small stature’, whose shoe size and pelvic measurement were carefully recorded but who was discharged ‘into no one’s care’ with her full-term baby once breastfeeding began? Perhaps she went back to the country on the train? Perhaps a mother or a sister was waiting for her?

I’d done some research into my father’s family, who had arrived from Skye in the Hebrides in 1854, and found, in the Euroa museum, a photo of the family when John McPhee was the patriarch—bearded, prosperous, stern looking. No longer the splitter, fencer, bullock driver, wattle bark stripper or anything I can make money at of his own description thirty years before.

His wife, Martha, is standing beside him in the photo. She’s small boned, dark haired, unsmiling, with her youngest daughter, Mary, who’d have been about ten in 1906, when the picture was probably taken. Martha had had eleven children. She was forty-seven years old. Her daughter Mattie had died, aged seventeen, at the start of the year of the photo; Martha’s own mother six months before. Three sons—William, aged one month, Norman, aged two years, and Donald, aged seven years—had also died. I was starting to piece together her life from headstones and my imaginings. Rural midwives left no case notes.

For relief, I’d read the Ladies’ Home Journal’s advice for new wives; the ‘Government Reports into Fresh Milk’, where the cows were all named; or issues of UNA, the journal of the Royal Victorian College of Nursing, with its reprimands about ‘idle words and evil gossip in wartime’. Glimpses of women’s lives, stories I had waited too long to collect from my own mother. I’d had three marriages and three reticent mothers-in-law whom I had loved but failed to quiz about their experiences of giving birth.

The first, a widow, fearful of Australia as a ‘dangerous place full of snakes and black people’, who followed her sons here, had had local midwives deliver her babies in the London council house she’d lived in all her married life. My second mother-inlaw was flown by her brother in an autogyro from King Island to the mainland, to have her only child when she was in her mid thirties, and went on to start the island’s first hire car service and to produce prize-winning cattle year after year. And the third had given birth to four babies in Gippsland. As I slowly found myself accepted, the family stories began over the washing-up and led sometimes to the box of old photographs being emptied onto the dining table, and to stories about the men and horses that went to war, the land they cleared and the farms they worked. I could only imagine the lives of the women.

It was the Tasmanian births of my maternal grandmother which became the stuff of family lore, with bush nursing, unmade roads, and a local midwife with a taste for the bottle well-established details. The births themselves were easy, it seems, which was just as well, as there were risks attached to having a chloroform mask held to your face. Why didn’t she give birth at home? I never asked but there may have been a shortage of midwives willing to travel the unmade roads and, maybe, nowhere for them to stay. Kettering, opposite Bruny Island in southern Tasmania, had no electricity when my grandparents arrived with two small children in 1920, so there were woodstoves, chip heaters, and outside dunnies that had to be emptied. My grandmother’s housekeeping was slapdash and spasmodic, so there may have been a reluctance to introduce a midwife to a household that was already chaotic enough.

Or maybe my grandmother was regarded as a high-risk mother by then. She was, after all, in her thirties, having her third and fourth children. Her doting older husband knew she was safer in the bush hospital. The third pregnancy left her severely anaemic, which suggests having had a haemorrhage after giving birth, or so I read in the medical archives. We children were sometimes regaled with lurid tales of the cure she was prescribed. A whole fresh lamb’s liver from the butcher, put in the mincer on the kitchen table, splattering blood and gore everywhere, she’d say, and then it had to be eaten each day for a month. We were transfixed with horror. No iron tablets in little bottles. No weekly injections. How much blood must you lose to bring such a treatment upon you?

It must have worked because my grandmother went on milking the cow, splitting the kindling, and making black puddings from pigs’ blood the boys in the family would bring her in a bucket. I never asked how she learned to do these things—a young girl from Edwardian England, whose life had been about singing lessons and French conversation at school in Avenches in Switzerland, and learning the art of flirting (putting men first, she called it) from her mother and her mother’s mother. I never asked how she came to marry a rather phlegmatic-looking, much older man, who thought her honeymoon hat too rakish, and who forbade her the public life of a singer of leider for which she’d already begun training.

Such strong women I had as elders—and how rarely I thought to question them in ways that might have had them telling me what the doctors’ reports I was reading in the RANZCOG only hinted at. Sex and suffering. And often lonely mothering.

I am not sure, from this distance, why I so badly needed to know. As a blended and somewhat scattered family, we were doing okay. My daughter and two sons visited whenever they were in Melbourne, and my stepdaughter stayed with us sometimes. My husband, a writer, was on the East Coast of the US, covering Hurricane Katrina. He telephoned every few days, describing the turmoil there, before travelling on Amtrak and driving the highways and backroads for his next book. My mother, in her nineties, could not be easily left but I held to a vague hope I might get to New York for Christmas with him or to London for a week, to spend time in the Wellcome medical collection. I wanted to follow up some of the sexologists and visiting eugenicists I had spotted in the RANZCOG archives.

In early December 2005, just three weeks after my mother’s death, still tearless and benumbed, I flew into Heathrow, where Helen Wire, an Australian friend who had lived in England for many years, was waiting to drive me to Gloucestershire.

She and her eldest daughter lived in a freezing old apartment in a Georgian mansion near Stroud, with a walled garden and views across the south Cotswold Hills. I had stayed there many times, relishing the fact that the crumbling house and vast estates had been acquired by a merchant whose money had come from slave ships requisitioned for the convict run to Van Diemen’s Land. The house was beautiful but derelict, a kind of imperial metaphor, slates missing, cornices collapsing, patches of mould in the corners, maintained only spasmodically by their landlord, an eccentric local farmer who had inherited most of the nearby farms. I intended to spend a few weeks here, then in London in the medical library of the Wellcome Institute.

Helen ran me a steaming bath in a huge old tub with a view over the valley, and, in a bed stuffed with hot-water bottles in hand-knitted covers, I slept and woke, and slept again. Then we spent the next week walking along old tracks through the bare woods, talking of difficult mothers and lovers, in the way of women who have long been friends and confidantes, and have brought up their children on opposite sides of the world.

Just in case, I’d emailed my hockey-playing school friend in Jordan, letting her know I would be in London en route to Vienna, then to India. Then my departure was delayed so I could attend the funeral of a distinguished old journalist friend. This was in a parish church, with a real graveyard and yew trees, opposite his house in an Oxfordshire village, its history stretching back to before the Reformation. Everyone followed the coffin out of the church, and stood in dark clothes under black umbrellas as it was lowered into the freezing ground to the comforting sounds of familiar prayers and hymns.

How different it was from my mother’s coffin, hand-painted with roses by my daughter and her partner in our big front room only weeks before, being driven away from the local church to the crematorium, I think, unaccompanied. My husband had flown back from America; my Tasmanian uncles, my brothers and their families were all at a large wake at our house. Could her hand-painted coffin really have been driven off in the company of strangers? Driving back to Helen’s from Oxfordshire, I began to weep, for the first time.

The next day, back in Gloucestershire, a woman with a posh voice, identifying herself as the personal private secretary in the London office of His Royal Highness, Prince El Hassan bin Talal, contacted me. Would I detour to Amman on my way home through Dubai, to discuss an autobiography? A formal invitation, and a sample of the Prince’s writings and transcriptions to date, would be sent to me. I should keep this strictly to myself, and read and report on it only face-to-face. Their Royal Highnesses had seen some of my writing, she said. Tickets, first class on Royal Jordanian, would be arranged, and be waiting for me next week in London, at the Goodenough Club, where I was staying.

I didn’t take her seriously. She sounded like a British publisher or literary agent who had confused me with someone else. Helen, a freelance editor with a desk overloaded with projects from publishers in Europe and London, was as puzzled as I was. My occasional writings were unrelated, and mainly for the Melbourne Age prior to Prime Minister Howard committing Australian troops to the coalition of the willing in Iraq. The military strategist who’d replaced me on the paper was a fine one, advocating caution—but my being told to