Foreign Correspondence (6 page)

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-garde 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.

Sonny and I couldn’t have been more different. But somehow we eked out a correspondence of equal parts dreams and dailiness. When she wrote to me excitedly that she was to make her television debut, I rushed home from school in time to see her, decked out in a cloud of tulle, dancing the role of White
Bird in an adaptation of an Aboriginal legend for an afternoon children’s program. To me, it might as well have been a lead role in a Broadway hit. Sonny was on her way!

My progress toward my dream was more incremental. By then I was in better health and going to school regularly. My mother’s one-on-one tutorials proved more than compensation for the months of classes I missed. I found that rather than being left behind I was embarrassingly ahead in all but mathematics, in which I continued to show a distressing lack of aptitude for a would-be scientist.

Sonny and I had one dream in common, and that was travel. It was the dream on which all the others depended. Sonny and I were members of the last generation of Australians who grew up knowing that one day we would have to go away. For those who had ambitions, Australia in the mid-1960s looked like a very small place. The Big Trip Elsewhere was a rite of passage and a test of nerve.

Sonny and I both knew the ritual of the International Terminal where the big white liners left for overseas. We had been to the docks to see off our sisters’ friends, headed to England. The ships would carry hundreds at a time away from their country, and it seemed that thousands—the friends and families left behind—stood on the pier to say goodbye. We’d throw streamers to the travelers pressed against the railings of the departing ships. A riot of colored bands would loop from ship to shore, the travelers clutching one end, those remaining behind holding the other. Finally, the deep foghorn would groan and the ship would draw away. We sang “Auld Lang Syne” as the streamers pulled taut and finally snapped, wafting to rest for a moment, gaudy stripes on dark water, before the weight of the wet paper dragged them out of sight.

By then, the big ship would have disappeared, too, a patch of brightness passing through the Heads and away into the Pacific. It was the reverse of the First Fleet, the British ships carrying
the outcasts no one wanted to the jail at the ends of the earth. In return, we sent back so many of our best—writers, scientists, actors, artists and entrepreneurs.