The Dressmaker's Daughter by Kate Llewellyn Read Free Book Online Page B

baby across them. She is looking down at him. She was about fifty-five, I think.
    The decision was made to take Rob from the young family and to give him to his grandmother to rear. The baby was moved into the main bedroom and Grandfather moved out. From then on, the child was the ruling motive of Nanna’s life.
    It can be a particular tragedy for a woman when, having reared her children, she must begin again with her grandchild. After Doug married Beck in 1943, due to a housing shortage they had to live with Nanna and Grandfather. For twenty years, Beck was never allowed to help rear the child who was eight years old when she married his father, nor did her mother-in-law give her, in all those twenty years, a key to the front door.
    Beck and Grandfather, whom we called Gugga Brinkworth (probably because that is what Rob called him when learning to speak), were ushered out of the main life of the household and spent their evenings listening to the radio turned down softly, so as not to disturb Nanna or Rob.
    Life became a living hell for Beck. As only those in the confines of a domestic nightmare can understand or believe, she endured those years. Nanna was tormented with jealousy, even before this. For instance, when she and her sister, Ethel, went to India as young women tostay with relatives, they met Will Kelly. Nanna said she expected Will Kelly to propose to her. Instead, he proposed to Ethel and she accepted.
    A long time after Nanna died, one day I said to Beck that I admired her for her strength in enduring the cruelty and mockery she had borne. ‘Oh,’ she said, drawing herself up in her chair and straightening her back, ‘it’s very refining.’ Then, after expressing astonishment that I knew anything about it, she said, ‘I always felt that Nanna was Doug’s mother and without her I would not have him. And I knew he loved his mother, so I never retaliated. When I had to leave there once, because I got so ill from it all, I had some snapdragon seedlings in a punnet and, before I left, I planted them in the garden. I didn’t want to put them in the bin and waste them. Then I left.’
    On another occasion, Beck said, ‘When I used to ride my bike down Anglo Avenue [where they lived], I would begin dry-retching.’
    When Beck gave birth to my cousin Anne, Nanna said, ‘She’ll never rear her.’ The way these things are etched into family history!
    I knew about Nanna’s hatred of Beck because, when I had holidays with her, she would tell me for hours what a terrible woman my aunt was. I remember sitting on a bench munching a delicious currant yeast bun and hearing of Beck’s latest misbehaviour or of her badcharacter. Even then I knew this wasn’t right and that Nanna simply hated Beck. I didn’t exactly think that Nanna was mad; I simply knew that what she was saying was not true. I didn’t argue; I just munched on. This went on for days and days in various situations. I think it was a relief to my grandmother to have somebody to whom to pour out this venom and to vent her pent-up spleen. As far as I can tell, it had not the slightest effect on me; I didn’t love Nanna any less, nor did I love Beck any differently. I just absorbed it. But I never forgot it.
    Her sons loved her and called her Moth. My father and his brother never defended their wives to their mother, no matter what the attack.
    I do beg of you…

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Elocution
    M y maternal grandmother, Granny Shemmeld, was the fourth child of Johanne Eleanore and Johan Gottlieb Lehmann, who had arrived at Port Adelaide in 1850 from Prussia. They were fleeing religious persecution, along with hundreds of other Lutherans from Prussia, having been unable to worship in their own way because a more dominant form of the Lutheran religion had forbidden it. Pastor August Kavel, from Zullichau in Brandenburg, had been sent by their congregation to Hamburg to investigate the possibility of emigration to America. Unable to find a ship with the small