That's what I like about the WWW - you can publish an autobiography, even if you're nobody in particular, just an ordinary Everyman or EveryWoman. What a luscious indulgence.
Where was I? ... I was born in Paris. A home birth (I was told) in the rue Victor Hugo, one of the roads radiating out from la Place de l'Étoile. I liked to fantasize about this: that I was born on a star, maybe born to BE a star. Maybe just a little star.
Apparently my mother suffered some sort of post-partum depression and it was thought wiser for my grandmother to take over my care for the time being. So it was "mum" (as I came to call her) who brought me to Australia on a ship arriving in Melbourne in May 1948.
Not long afterwards my "real" mother also made it to Australia and early the following year, she gave birth, in Sydney's Crown Street Hospital, to my younger brother. He was to be my only full sibling. (I acquired two half-brothers later when my father remarried.)
I don't exactly know what happened next. There must have been quite a family crisis. My mother had actually hoped for a boy baby during her pregnancy with me. She even called me "Mowgli" (after the Kipling boy hero) while I was in the womb. But I didn't turn out to have those extra external bits in the groin. With my brother's arrival she at last found her dream boy child. But should she take me back after all this time? Should my brother stay with her while I continue with "mum"?
In the end, it was decided to try a family reunion with my mother, brother and myself sailing up North to Indochina (as Vietnam was called then) to join my father who was then serving in the French Air Force up there. This little arrangement lasted about 9 months. She returned with us to Australia, having decided on separation and divorce. My brother and I remained in the custody of "mum" and "dad", our maternal grandparents.
Our mother met a new man and eventually remarried. We used to visit her during school holidays to give mum a break, a kind of reversal of the usual parent/grandparent roles. Not surprisingly, however, this arrangement turned out to be an emotional disaster, especially for my brother and me. Because the set up had been decided when we were too little to understand and because it was never properly clarified later, we were left in a kind of no man's land. Natural parents who didn't seem to want us, grandparents who somewhat resented the burden of a second lot of kids to bring up.
It was all a bit odd. A classic unhappy family as described by Leo Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" (the happy ones are all the same, it's the unhappy ones that differ).
Hopefully, I'll continue on a happier note when I move on to the next page in this Life thing.
For the benefit of close family, the next page will be protected from public access and can only be accessed using a password.
Private portion of autobiography.
Here are some photos of Marc (with dog) and me (with hat) taken in 1951:
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