Boy, Lost: A family memoir

Praise for Boy, Lost

‘A powerful memoir. Olsson’s prose is lyrical and heartfelt.’ Books + Publishing

‘[An] engrossing, affecting family memoir.’ Weekend Australian

‘A compelling story of a family torn apart by poverty and abuse, evocatively told by a gifted writer.’ Courier-Mail

‘An intelligent and deeply serious book about lives full of pain.’ Australian Book Review

‘A shatteringly beautiful read, one not easily forgotten. I can’t recommend it highly enough.’ The Newtown Review of Books

‘The writing is beautiful and Olsson’s ability to capture a person or a moment is stunning – but it’s the fierceness and restraint she demonstrates in this memoir that makes it so moving.’ The Conversation

‘Olsson uses perfectly balanced prose and enormous compassion to weave breathtaking beauty into this family memoir. Highly recommended.’ Readings Monthly

‘A harrowing yet beautifully written tale.’ Good Reading

‘Exquisitely written and achingly intimate, this is a significant book which sets a new benchmark for memoir.’ Judges’ comments, Queensland Literary Awards

‘A compassionate and sensitive entwined narrative of a lost son and lost mother, this book – by virtue of Olsson’s writing – soars above the conventions of its genre.’ Judges’ comments, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

‘Much of the power of this book lies in the way that it reflects the fates of all children lost to a parent or parents, and that lifts it beyond the level of merely personal memoir to give it some of the force of fable and folktale.’ Judges’ comments, Stella Prize

Kristina Olsson is the author of the novel In One Skin (2001) and the biography Kilroy Was Here (2005). Her second novel, The China Garden (2009), received the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award for its empowering depiction of women in society and was also shortlisted for the Kibble Literary Award. Kristina’s non-fiction work Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir won the 2013 Queensland Literary Award, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, the Western Australian Premier’s Literary Award, and the Kibble Literary Award. It has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, Stella Prize, Australian Human Rights Commission Literature Award and The Courier-Mail Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. Kristina’s journalism and non-fiction have been published in the Australian, the Courier-Mail, the Sunday Telegraph and Griffith REVIEW. She has worked extensively as a teacher of creative writing and journalism at tertiary level and in the community, and as an advisor to government. She lives in Brisbane. Her latest novel is Shell.

Also by Kristina Olsson

Fiction

In One Skin

The China Garden

Shell

Non-fiction

Kilroy Was Here

For my mother and Peter

For my father and Sharon

For Lennart, Ashley and Andrew

Cairns railway station, far north Queensland, summer, 1950. A girl with fugitive eyes and an infant on her hip. She is thin, gaunt even, but still it is easy to see these two are a pair, dark-haired and dark-eyed. She hurries down the platform towards the second-class cars, slowed by the weight of her son and her cardboard suitcase. It holds everything they own, everything she dared to take.

She finds a seat in one of the last cars – perhaps it feels safe, perhaps she is already getting as far from this place as she can – and settles herself. She has some food wrapped in paper, a dry sandwich, arrowroot biscuits – there was nothing else in the flat. Peter – that is the boy’s name – is tired, fractious, out of routine. Somewhere in her own weary brain she knows he is echoing her, responding to her own fear, her own curdled mix of terror and sorrow and the adrenalin it has taken to get her here. She talks to him quietly, she hopes he won’t cry. She doesn’t want anyone to hear him.

This is the scene as I see it, sixty years later. It is sepia-toned, like the photographs I have of her then. Nineteen years old, with a face people compared to the young Elizabeth Taylor, and fine-boned limbs. But the fineness apparent through her thin shift that day had nothing to do with her natural build. She was malnourished, starving. Later, when she stumbles off the train in Brisbane she will be taken away to hospital. No one will know until then – no one could tell – that the new pregnancy she’d protected and kept secret was now well advanced.

But that is days later. Whole days and a lifetime from the minutes she waited on the train, willing it to move, to take them to safety. A lifetime because surely that is how long the journey seemed, how long she’ll have, later, to recall over and over a single moment. The man appears at the door of the carriage, walks towards her – a twisted smile – and roughly pulls Peter from her arms. Later, in memory and dream and conversation, she will wonder what else he said to her, apart from those few chilling words. Don’t move – the Greek accent was heavy and cruel; the baby whimpered, reached for his mother, a biscuit in his fist – Don’t move, you bitch. Stay on the train or you’re dead. Him too. She knew from the brutality of the past months that he meant it.

He waited then, his bulk blocking the doorway, until a whistle blew and the train shuddered. Did she plead with him in those minutes, beg, tell him she’d stay? Did she try to strike a bargain, some pathetic deal? I doubt it. In the parlance of the poker games he was addicted to, she had nothing to bargain with, no cards to play. She had only herself, her own bruised and flimsy body, her poor bullied heart. He didn’t want her.

This is the story my mother never told, not to us, the children who would grow up around it in the way that skin grows over a scratch. So we conjured it, guessed it from glances, from echoes, from phrases that snap in the air like a bird’s wing, and are gone. Fragments of a legend, that’s how it seemed, and it twisted through our childhood like a fiction we had read and half-forgotten; a story that belonged to others, not to us, and to another, long-ago time. As if the woman at its centre was not really our mother but a stranger, an unknowable version of her, not the woman who made our school lunches, plastered our cuts, grimaced daily over the washing tub and wringer. Smiled as we came in the door.

We knew questions were off-limits. The story had its own force-field, our mother’s sadness as effective as any electric fence. So we learned to live alongside it, or rather, beneath it, conceding to its terms as we conceded to anaesthetic for our various childhood maladies – tonsils, ears, teeth. Learned not to notice – not consciously – the fierceness of her compensations: the pull and push of need, the nearness and distance of love. We learned, as children do, to behave in ways that might make her, if not happy, then less unhappy. We were still doing this when she died, too young, twelve years ago, and in some ways we haven’t stopped.

In the years before we’d learned some of the facts – the earlier marriage, the cruel husband, the stolen baby – but the flesh and bones of her life were buried with her in autumn-damp soil. What she left was a fine, opaque pattern like the ones she pinned over fabric to make our clothes, a movable outline that refused to be fixed. We began to ask questions then, wanting the answers she’d never have given. But our knowledge was partial so our questions were too; with every answer the lines shifted, and with them the shape of her.

This is what we didn’t understand, not then: that the past had gripped and confounded her, stalked her dreams. That every day of her life after her son was taken, she would sift through the memory of it, every terrible second. Turning each in her hand, looking for ways she might have changed them. But always she would be stuck at the image of the man, her husband, the terrible smile as he entered the train carriage, walked towards her, pulled Peter from her arms. When she dreamed of her lost son she would dream of his father. He would always be walking towards her, wearing that smile.

In my head, it happens like this: she is standing behind the high glass counter of The Palms Café in Queen Street. It is lunchtime and busy, but she is momentarily still, flicking at a drift of flour on her apron – or perhaps she is tucking back a lick of wayward hair and checking her lipstick – quickly, covertly – in the mirrored panel behind her. At sixteen she has the celebrated curves of a movie star, 36-24-36, and is told she is just as beautiful. Of course, she doesn’t believe it – though she’d like to. She doesn’t want people to think she is vain. Her father, especially. He’d be disappointed, she knows, at any sign of vanity, any sign of conceit.

As she leans into the mirror she touches a forefinger to her lips – they are full, crimson-tinted – and sees suddenly she is being watched. It is the same man, the same eyes she had felt on her earlier that week as she carried trays with cups and teapots and scones between tables. He is darkly good-looking, and well dressed – pressed trousers, a starched white shirt. He is not a boy. A smile lurks at the corners of his mouth and it is the smile of a worldly man. A smile of intent. Her stomach flips like a fish on a hook.

Her hands move once more to her apron, she smooths imaginary creases, then turns to the serving bay. She has to remind herself to breathe. But there is safety in the plates of piled food; she risks a glance from lowered eyes. This is what she sees: his dark beauty. That it has made him dangerous. His eyes. Charisma and the possibility not just of vanity but of toughness. Of passion. She sees all this now, but seeing is not knowing. Otherwise, why would she risk that glance, a faint movement of her eyes and lips, a telltale dip of long lashes? She slides plates onto a nearby table and as she spins away he appraises her legs, her fine ankles.

This is what she doesn’t know: she is an ingénue, an innocent. From this perspective, sixty years on, and even then. Even then, though she has lived through depression and the effects of a war that didn’t quite come to her. It has been her luck to be born and to live in this half-forgotten town in a country on the edge of the world’s consciousness. Everything is far from here – the shattered cities of Europe, her father’s beloved English fields, the queues of the hungry and the homeless. Until now. The world of adults, of ravaged cultures and displacement, of sex and power, has just walked into her life in the shape of Minas Panayotis Preneas. Michael, or Mick, to his friends. He has come from the war-weary Greek island of Kythera to make his fortune and his life. At thirty-four he is literally twice her age, experienced, hardened, hungry. She is a naively beautiful girl from the poor and unformed outer suburbs of Brisbane. She doesn’t stand a chance.

There are pockets of modern Brisbane that still retain a sense of the older town, the subtropical British outpost it was in the beginning and the ‘big country town’ it was when my mother grew up here. That phrase – big country town – was how her generation described it, and until about ten years ago there was still enough of that quality for me to understand why. Weather, geography, history, circumstance: they all contribute to a certain attitude – Brisbane’s was a bit brash, a bit slow, a bit defensive. Hothouse too: everyone had links to everyone else through school, work, family. Up until ten years ago, we could joke that reading the social pages of The Courier-Mail was like going through the family album.

My mother’s Brisbane, in my mind, is the Brisbane of her youth – roughly, I suppose, between 1944 and 1960 – and though she grew up on its dusty outskirts, I can see it and feel it most in its inner-city streets. No matter that the town has been cavalier with the wrecking ball and careless of the fragility of tongue-and-groove and iron lacework. If a street boasts even a semblance of aged sandstone or an arched façade or a verandah more than fifty years old, then it retains for me the air my mother breathed.

It’s there around the Treasury building and the Lands building facing each other across the park and its soaring statue of Queen Victoria; it’s in the arcades – Rowes and Brisbane, with their marble and mosaic tiling and wood-panelled shopfronts; it swirls around the Story Bridge and the old streets of New Farm, where jacaranda and hibiscus and palm fronds still stray across iron lacework verandahs. It has a sound, that air: a tram and its metallic lurch, a bell on a pulled cord, paperboys on corners. And a smell: buttery slabs of soap, malt in a milkshake, hops boiling in the brewery at the northern end of the bridge.

I follow her figure through all these places now; a brush of full skirt past the bank at the top of Queen Street; a tap of high heels near the shops in the Valley where the tram stops. A flash of dark eyes, the turn of wrist or ankle as she boards a bus, lifts a cup, steps into the dim cave of a cinema. Tantalising glimpses of the woman she was before she was my mother; the shape of the life she had planned before Michael appeared with his version of it.

These flashes of her from a shadowy Brisbane have always been the easy ones to construct. It is early in 1947; I know how the town was shaped, the line of it, the way girls and women dressed. My mother looks like so many other girls hurrying to work or pausing at Bayard’s window, checking the line of her stockings or hem. She might have stepped from the tram fully formed, without background or history or family. Her olive skin and her eyes, her shapely limbs, her bearing, utterly her own and not inherited from others. She is just her singular self.

But of course there is a father and a mother in the life she has outside these streets, and a home loud with siblings and money stretched too tight. She is the eldest and already there are five more – soon there will be six – in this thin-skinned wooden house at Cannon Hill. It crouches among other wooden homes near cow paddocks recently occupied by the US Army; she and her closest sister, Evelyn, have been warned by their father to stay away from the camp, from the servicemen with their easy smiles. Now that the soldiers have gone, the sisters miss the frisson of danger – even though, fearing their father’s wrath, they’d rarely ventured close.

My mother’s younger self lives here, or that is how it seems: after work she steps through the door and becomes a girl compliant and almost undifferentiated from her siblings and their scramble for space and air and enough to eat. She is part of them. Perhaps this is why I can’t see her here, in the clamour and crush of her family. She blends with them immediately, helping her mother in the kitchen, seeing to the other children. The younger ones adore her. She shares the chores of bathing and feeding and entertaining them; from her they get the gentle attention they crave from their mother, and they cherish her. As adults they will talk about it endlessly: how she mothered them. Their voices yielding, soft.

But despite all this I can’t see her childhood face, or the shape of her among them, I can’t see the clothes she changes into after work or what she does with her hair. It is true there is not one photograph of her as a child in this house or the others the family lived in – no baby or school photo, no carefully arranged family picture, no informal snap. Nothing. In this family there was no money for such things, they would have been an extravagance, unthinkable.

Still, some families found pennies for photographs. I think of my father’s Swedish childhood, provincial and far from rich – he too wore cast-off clothing and ate what was grown in the yard – but it is all recorded in black and white and carefully preserved. There they are in the album: random images of boys at play, posed pictures of his mother with her sons. I can look at these photographs and animate them, see the burst of action or laughter that follows – my father breaking free of his mother’s arm or chasing the dog across the cobbled yard or elbowing his brother off the front step where they’ve been made to stand and smile.

Not so my mother. I can’t animate her here in her home, so for me, she does spring fully formed from that tram in the city, as though she was born sixteen. From the outset I’ve known certain things about her childhood – the poverty, the truncated education, her love of books and learning – but this knowledge alone gave me no hint of her spirit, of the child she had been. Was it because of the absence of photographic evidence? Or because she was born in 1930, a decade in which childhood might have been arbitrary, especially among the poor?

Just twelve years after the Armistice, Australia was a place uneasy and staggering between two world wars: loss was still thick in the air, and the absence of young men in houses and streets still a shock, to the eye and the heart. So perhaps there was no inclination, when she was a small child, to commemorate anything other than terrible loss, and survival that was nearly as terrible. I don’t know. I sit at my desk and I’m surrounded by images of family and friends that remind me I am tied not just to others but to other times, that remind me of who I am. So to me, the lack of childhood pictures of my mother suggests an equation: no pictures = no childhood. In a life that would come to be defined by absence, this is an absence too.

There is only one photograph of my mother that she let my father hang in the house. Apart from their wedding portrait, which stood on the duchess in their bedroom; or the occasional snap someone would frame from a birthday or a picnic, Mum with her sisters or holding a grandchild, that she’d frown and prop on the sideboard for a few weeks before tucking it away. She hated being photographed, hated the results. I look terrible in that, she’d say, dismissing the latest print with barely a look and walking off towards the kitchen. Now I can see the camera might have perpetuated the suffering, the residue of pain she could scrub from her