Grandma Browne is getting on a bit. She is smaller and smaller every day, carefully receding from her corporeal existence… not that I would propose there is any other existence beyond (sorry Grandma).
She has liquid in her lungs, which doesn’t let her breathe. With insufficient oxygen, everything withers - and I suppose this is an effect we will all have to get used to if the industrial revolution marches on. Not that I’m any less part of this than everybody else: I flew twenty thousand kilometres to come and see her, and later this week I will fly twenty thousand kilometres back again.
Grandma Browne grew up in a town called Thevenard, well out on the west coast of South Australia, middle-of-nowhere central. She wasn’t known as Grandma Browne back in those days, and they didn’t have any electricity. They caught fish, and read at night by parrafin lamp. I guess it would have been a few days’ travel to go visit the city down in Adelaide.
Of her predecessors, she only ever mentions to me her grandparents, Charles Beswick and Julia Antonio. The Antonios had come to Austrlia from Spain, or Portugal - though we have never had many immigrants from round those parts - and among other things there is still a primary school named after the family in Morphett Vale. But apart from that the name died out here. If I didn’t listen to Grandma Browne’s stories, and write them down here, perhaps no-one would remember.
It was only when she was in her twenties that she married a man named Geoff Browne, and thus became known as Grandma Browne. He got shot in the shoulder while he was fighting the Japanese in New Guinea, then was carried by local folk all the way to Port Moresby. He made it back to Australia alright, but his shoulder was never the same again. I don’t remember him much, as he died of Parkinson’s when I was still a child. The only thing I really remember is one day when me and Grandma Browne visited him in hospital. He didn’t have long left, and he knew it. As we departed at the end of our visit, he made it clear that more than anything he wanted us to take him with us.
I am not used to thinking of people in my family as fighters in wars. I had never even heard that my grandfather was injured in WWII, until yesterday. But I suppose this is normal enough, and wars back in those days seemed to make more sense. And grandparents are your personal connection to history, so don’t take them for granted.
Post a Comment