I was raised in a house of suspicion and superstition. We knew that the world was out to get us and took every precaution to protect ourselves. The front door of the house had never had a lock but it did have a chair jammed under the brass doorknob of a night. My mother slept with a rolling pin under her pillow and my father a crowbar. Or perhaps it was the other way around?
As children, we had mantras, fractured commandments, drilled into us on a daily basis. I would not have been more than four years of age when one of my uncles schooled me that I should never sign a police statement. My father, a retired boxer, provided me with a handwritten list of survival skills on my first day of school. His guiding principle for a safe life was “hit before you get hit”. He lived by the rule and had the scars to show for the failure of his particular brand of street philosophy.
Very little advice I was provided with when I was younger helped me negotiate life in a meaningful way. I actually forgot to hit first and, as a result, was hit. It was my nanna who provided me with the two words that would eventually sink in and guide me. I used to stay with her on a Monday night before I attended Cubs at Saint Mark’s hall in Fitzroy. She would make me a roast dinner, we would sit at her kitchen table and she would tell me stories about her childhood in Tasmania. Nan favoured ghost stories and could tell them well. By the end of one of her tales, I would be deeply afraid and would ask her had she become afraid herself when confronted by a ghost as a small girl.
“No,” she would answer without hesitation. “Why not?” I’d ask. She would then lean across the table, tap me on the nose and say, “Never weaken.”
Similar words could have come from my father but they would have been accompanied by a call to violence, whereas my nan’s words were seeped in courage and tenacity. What she said to me, words often repeated by her, didn’t register with me at the time. Their influence grew as I came to understand more about my nan’s past and witnessed her response to a series of tragedies that had an effect on all of our lives. She had grown up without family, not knowing who her parents were, and escaped from Tasmania to Victoria when she was a young teenager. She had eight children from two marriages. Her second husband, my grandfather, had killed himself when my mother was about 10. I knew nothing of the suicide until I was older but, once I’d read the details in a gruesome coroner’s report, I understood that my grandmother’s ability to survive would have been driven by those two words: never weaken.
In an era when there was little or no state support for widowed mothers with children, my nan did whatever was needed to get by economically. She ran a sly grog behind her rented house in George Street, Fitzroy. She used the pawnshop economy and later in life, along with a boyfriend of hers, Nan dabbled in the scrap metal trade. Along the way, she lost three of her own children. A son was murdered in Fitzroy at 18. One of her daughters, my godmother, died of cancer in her 20s and her youngest son lost his life to drugs in the 1980s.
In the last weeks of my grandmother’s life, I sat with her in ward at St Vincent’s hospital. She was dying and she knew it. I was 40 years old and had either lived next door to her or saw my nan regularly throughout my life. She was short in stature but big of heart. And she was a tough woman who’d stood up to the type of man who hit first before he was hit; the type of man more likely to strike out at someone more vulnerable than himself, most often a child or a woman. The afternoon my grandmother died, her family gathered around her bed. The moment she died her face relaxed. She looked 20 years younger and appeared peaceful. I was guided by her from a young age and continue to be. From her, I learned that true strength comes from within. Never weaken.
Tony Birch is the author of the novels Women and Children, The White Girl, Ghost River, and Blood
