The gift

On Christmas Eve 1940, soon after my tenth birthday, my grandmother gave me a small wooden box with a lock and key. There was nothing inside it, and as far as I can remember she didn’t explain it. I’d been expecting a book: that was what she always gave to me and my brothers and sisters, and our cousins. I still have a later gift: Wilkie Collins’ classic detective story The Moonstone, given when I was 14.

From earliest childhood I remember her reading to me from Kipling’s Just So Stories and laughing so much at the Elephant Child’s persistent questions that she had to stop for breath. Books mattered to her; she could think of nothing better for her many grandchildren than the gift of words. Even when she couldn’t afford the expense, she bought a five-shilling book, usually an Everyman Classic, for each of us who was old enough to read. But the empty box: why then, and why to me?

I knew about the box, though I was too young to understand its meaning. I knew that it was part

of the story of my grandmother’s arrival in Australia in 1888. She was just 19, and she had made the long voyage by sailing ship from her home in Liverpool with her older sister and brother, Minnie and Joe. She was Agnes Jane, known as Aggie, the fifth of the 11 children of Irish-born John and Jane Maguire. Like hundreds of thousands of others in Liverpool, John and Jane had been part of the great wave of Irish emigration in the 1840s, the decade of the Great Hunger. A million starved, and those who could find the fare left Ireland for England, the United States or Australia. The New World offered more hope, but Liverpool was cheaper by far.

After some years of struggle John Maguire prospered in Liverpool, and he married and brought up his family there. By the time the three young Maguires set sail for Australia, the family had moved beyond its refugee origins and was well on its way on an extraordinary rags-to-riches journey. Aggie, who was well educated and wanted to earn her own living as a teacher, came to Australia in a spirit of hope and adventure, not the desperation of her parents’ generation. The main reason for leaving Liverpool was concern about the health of the second son, Joe, who was nearly 21. He was said to have a “weak chest”. This phrase usually meant tuberculosis or the fear of it. Leaving damp, smoggy Liverpool for sunny Australia would give Joe a chance.

The Maguires embarked on May 22, 1888. Aggie never said much about the voyage out. An ordeal for anyone, it would have been a searing experience for a teenager who was leaving home for the first time. The Trafalgar was a cargo ship – quite small at just over 1400 tons – that carried 24 passengers on this particular voyage. It wouldn’t have been especially comfortable, and there were none of the diversions that passenger ships could offer.

While his sisters amused themselves – Minnie had brought her paints and Aggie had as many books as she could fit in her trunk – Joe learnt the elements of carpentry. That’s when he made the box for Aggie. On the long days when the ship was becalmed, he worked on the project. The box, which was made of Australian cedar, shows that Joe was new to the craft. The wood was nothing special, probably oddments from the carpenter’s shop; the dovetailing on one side is uneven, and the hinged lid looks like a second attempt.

Not long after finishing the box, Joe collapsed. He had developed peritonitis, a complication of the tuberculosis. There was a doctor on board, and the captain was a kind man who “gave good care” but there was nothing they could do to save Joe. He died, painfully, five days later, one day before his 21st birthday. The ship was then about 30 days out at sea, not even halfway to Sydney. And now his grieving sisters faced another ordeal.

In The Long Farewell, Don Charlwood describes the ritual of sea burial: [The coffin] was placed on a grating at the bulwarks on the main deck and covered with a Union Jack. Often the ship’s bell was tolled… a clergyman or the captain read the service; the grating was tilted and the body was launched into the sea. One splash, and the ship moved on.

Joe’s coffin would have been made by his friend, the ship’s carpenter. His gift to his younger sister became poignant. Aggie would always think of the coffin and the box as linked to one another – one in the sea’s depths, the other for her “to keep things in” as she did almost to the end of her life. It became her memory box. Part of her private self she kept locked inside it.

The Trafalgar arrived in Sydney on August 23 after 90 days at sea. Late in this unhappy voyage there were two more deaths: an invalid and a newborn. Somehow the two young Maguire women endured the 60 days after Joe’s death. Living among strangers in cramped quarters, with no privacy, must have been an ordeal. Perhaps that’s when Aggie taught herself to meet grief with silence. Just a few months before Grandmother gave Joe’s box to me, her flat had been burgled and the box wrenched open. Papers were scattered and some jewellery was taken. At the time, she was away from home. The burglary was reported to my mother, who went to check the damage. She was distressed about the broken box, and took it to be repaired. She didn’t make the mistake of giving it a new look; a few fine scratches on the base and some worn edges still showed its age, as they do today. With a new lock and key, smaller than the originals, it seemed as strong as ever, but Grandmother never used it again. A few months later she pasted a Christmas card with my name on it inside the lid and let me make what I could of this puzzling, remarkable gift.

Now, after 75 years in my possession, I’ve turned my mind to the box as it was in 1888, to that long sea journey, and to the young woman who went teaching in a one-room bush school in Burramine, northern Victoria, and fell in love with a Riverina grazier, Richard Gorman.

If Aggie had personal papers in the box, they were lost long ago. I depend on public records, places and people for details of her life. My own memories are limited. My mother’s papers, which include a family memoir, go back only to her childhood in the early years of the 20th century. In her closely written pages, I see Aggie as a young widow, mother of seven, enduring loneliness at Galtee Park, the property left for her to manage when her husband Richard died. Choosing to put her children first, she did her best to give them a happy childhood. She made the same choice for her many grandchildren, creating a warm and lively family centre for them in Melbourne during their boarding-school years. It wasn’t a small matter. There were often half a dozen teenagers visiting at the same time, most of them missing home. Whether they came from outback NSW, Deniliquin or Bendigo, they were all hungry for her attention as well as her cooking and one another’s company. As one of the city grandchildren, I enjoyed the exuberant space she created for us all.

In one of her few plaintive moments, Aggie

said: “All my life I’ve wanted to live in a house by the sea where I could look out of the window and watch the boats coming in.” That longing was expressed in one of her small treasures: a brown and white conch shell that she kept on the windowsill beside her armchair. All her grandchildren loved the shell. “Can you hear the sea?” Aggie would say, as each child held it and heard, miraculously, the sound of waves.

In old age, she could have had her ocean view. She could have lived well within her limited means in a little house at Point Lonsdale or Queenscliff. Instead she chose a small, charmless flat in suburban Kew. The country boarders were her first concern. She knew about loneliness and displacement.

I thought at first that only those relatives aged over 80 would have much to offer me in my search for Aggie’s story. In fact, some who were very small children when Grandmother died in 1953 have retrieved surprisingly vivid memories. To this day, her grandchildren can recite the names of her Liverpool family: Annie, Minnie, Johnnie, Joe, Aggie, Edie, Bob, Dick, Bert, Percy, Clara. There’s a nice rhythm in it, like a nursery rhyme. I learnt it from my mother, Aggie’s younger daughter. My cousin Pam, living in Canberra, beautiful as always in her 90th year, sends me an email: “I loved her and I wanted to be like her.” Pam used to brush Grandmother’s hair at bedtime. Worn in an unbecoming bun by day, it was “soft and shining silver”, almost waist-length. Pam’s vignette stirs a memory of my own. I was recovering from a bout of asthma for which, in my childhood, there was no relief except adrenalin injections, which made me sick. As I began to feel better, I became imperious. “Sing to me, Grandmother,” I ordered. She never sang in company, but we were alone, and she gave in. I must have had this command performance more than once because I can still remember all the words of Silver Threads Among the Gold. This 19th-century favourite begins: “Darling, I am growing old / Silver threads among the gold / Shine upon my brow today.” Then the refrain: “Yet, my darling, you will be / Always young and fair to me.” She sang softly but with the feeling that has held it in my memory.

I feel the prick of tears when I think of her singing and I wonder what moved her to choose Silver Threads. She was only 39, with no silver threads in her dark hair, when Richard died aged 43 in November 1908. He had contracted actinomycosis, a rare bacterial disease, and endured a long, painful decline. No one else remembers Grandmother singing, though she taught music before her marriage. Come to that, no one remembers much of what she said. A quiet woman, they all agree. Silent even. But her laughter is remembered. An engaging chuckle, says her grandson Adrian. Margaret, then aged about six, recalls being sent to fetch an extra chair to the sitting room. She finds a commode and, not knowing what it is, drags it in. There are visitors, but “Grandmother laughed and laughed”.

I go back to my own early memories. I realise that Christmas 1940, when she gave me Joe’s box, was a traumatic time for her. The war in Europe still seemed a remote event to many Australians. Life in Aggie’s quiet street in Kew went on without much visible change. But Aggie must have known her family in England was facing immediate danger. The bombing of Liverpool that Christmas meant the obliteration of places she knew well.

From 1939 to 1942 she took me to the city, where the Athenaeum cinema showed British films, most of them wartime morale-raisers. I see these movies now as her way of connecting with her homeland. She wouldn’t have wanted to go on her own: women didn’t sit alone in cinemas. Because of my intermittent bouts of asthma, I was allowed to miss school almost as often as I liked, and was always available and eager for an outing. At 10, I was old enough to enjoy the films, and I looked forward to the milkshake at Hillier’s on Collins Street afterwards. I didn’t know enough to guess at my grandmother’s feelings. A reserved woman, she wouldn’t have wanted sympathy or intrusive questions. She always held my hand on these excursions, which wasn’t really necessary; there was very little traffic and I was used to taking the tram to school on my own. Was it a comfort to have a small child to hold on to? I loved those excursions with Grandmother, but I cannot remember much of what we talked about.

The sessions always began with a Gaumont British newsreel. “Don’t look, dear,” Grandmother would say, covering my eyes whenever an image of destruction came on the screen. The newsreels we watched together would have brought devastating sights. Second only to London in strategic importance, Liverpool was a prime target for the Luftwaffe. High explosives demolished much of the dockland areas where the Maguires had lived in their early days. Fires burned day and night around Merseyside. The Christmas Blitz, between December 20 and 22, 1940, killed 365 people in Liverpool and injured many more. Grandmother would have known that the newsreels were censored to limit civilian fears, and that the reality was much worse.

The timing of her gift to me of Joe’s box, after our first wartime movie excursions, now seems significant. We always went early to the cinema so as not to miss the newsreels. We saw film clips and heard Churchill’s voice praising the brave people of Liverpool. Except for her sister Minnie, Aggie had no one who understood how it felt to be so far away, no one else to talk to about the city’s devastation. Letters from home came “Passed by Censor”. I hope that the company of a happily oblivious 10-year-old was better than nothing.

Perhaps, in emptying Joe’s box in this time of destruction, Aggie was closing down her past. Perhaps she thought the box should be tabula rasa, a space for me to inscribe new experiences in a country to which she never quite belonged. Edited extract from Can You Hear the Sea? By Brenda Niall (Text Publishing, $29.99), out October 30.