In her memoir The Shining Places: From the End to the Beginning, Hetty Clews retraces a lifetime of travels, not only in landscape, but also in literary pursuits, theatrical experience, and the exploits of her much-loved family. Clews begins with recollections about a childhood largely circumscribed by war, but also sprinkled with such touching moments as sharing the top of her father’s egg on Sunday mornings and the realization that he would carry her when her legs became too tired. As she details life experiences from more than eighty years that include entrance to a university that opened an exciting pathway to an astonishing new world of books and a career in teaching, Clews also offers essays and anecdotes about marriage, family, and the uncertainties and joys that accompany any coming-of-age journey. In this compelling, sometimes humorous memoir, one woman illustrates through her diverse personal experiences how beginnings can ultimately be discovered in endings.

The Shining Places

From the End to the BeginningBy Hetty Clews

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Hetty Clews
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0074-6

Contents

Acknowledgments............................vIntroduction...............................xiiiPreface....................................xvBeginnings.................................1Childhood..................................5WWII and University........................14Marriage: An Essay.........................20From Britain to Canada.....................25New Canadians..............................39West Coasters..............................54A Smaller Island...........................57

Chapter One

Beginnings

Where to begin? Australian Bushmen speak of the "dreamtime," postulating that in the beginning a dream was dreaming us. As I retrace my own past, the process confirms that my memories are dreams in which I am both centre and sphere—in which I am myself being dreamed. And as I sift through memories in a backward journey through remembered happenstance and recalled sensory trivia, the remembrance of things past becomes a quest for patterns and an imposing of order on what is essentially oneiric. In short, it shapes itself into one long, re-dreamed dream. Thus the facts of history become overlaid by the truth of the imagination: a truth that has always mattered more to me than any factual record. In seeking to share the content of my own dreaming with those who have come after me, I lean upon the values of the envisioned, the embroidered, the imagined.

Therefore I begin the journey with Gran, the great embroiderer.

She it was who formed the centre of my childhood world, because she was present for me in ways my mother, who toiled for long hours in the factory where my father also laboured, never seemed to be. Gran looked after me when I was too small, it is thought, to have memories at all. She lived in a three-storied old house that accommodated two of her daughters—my mother and my aunt Edith—until such a time as they were able to purchase houses of their own. A third daughter, my aunt Rose, lived next door with her large and unruly progeny, only two of whom, Jean and Edith, were girls close in age to me. These girl cousins, along with the slightly older Ondar, daughter of Aunt Edith, were like sisters to me in the preschool days of a shared dinner table in Gran's kitchen. Ondar's brother Allan, slightly younger than I, was a much-loved brother figure. Aunt Rose's sons I strenuously avoided; they were noisy and boisterous and generally odious to a pampered only daughter, and too fond of chasing her with spiders in their fists. Fortunately they appeared among the rest of us only when hungry and lived noisy lives of their own away from us, being too old and too worldly-wise to play the board games we enjoyed at the cleared kitchen table.

Ondar and Allan, however, slept in beds above my bedroom ceiling and sent me nightly messages via taps on the floor. With Jean and Edith, the three of us explored the meadows at the foot of "Gorsty Hill"— so named for the fields of gorse bloom once flourishing there—and ventured as close as we dared to the "cut" (canal) with our jam jars for bearing home minnows or frog-spawn or blackberries.

We were inseparable, Ondar and Allan and I, for the first eight years of my life. It never occurred to me to ask for a brother or sister of my own, since these companions were already there, ready to join me in any exploit. Gran cooked and cared for the three of us until Aunt Edith moved out; soon thereafter my own parents had also saved enough to put a down payment on their own semidetached home, and the first significant change in the circumstances of my life began.

Gran, however, remained a fixture. She spent her days in our otherwise empty new house, preparing my father's lunch for me to take to him at midday, cooking a "tea" for us at homecoming time, shopping and washing and cooking indefatigably for her youngest daughter, my mother. If I missed the environment of the Gorsty Hill home, it was mostly the rituals contingent upon the older house I longed for: lighting the gas globe beside the mantelpiece, bathing and dressing for bed in front of the fire, standing on the table to reach the Christmas bough suspended above it and so to nibble the dangling sugar mice, awaiting my turn on the stone stairs during family parties.

These family gatherings were outstanding examples of Gran's feats of embroidery. Once she had left Gorsty Hill and come to live with us she kept them alive in my memory by continual recounting, or by herself re-enacting, the performances of others, or by herself reproducing her own favourite song, "Burlington Bertie." She would hike up her skirts and prance through "The Blasted Oak" in the manner of the soubrette Marie Lloyd. Her own mother had enjoyed a reputation as "the Marie Lloyd of Cradley Heath," and she herself had been reared among the songs and dances of the music hall. Top hat on head, stick in hand, she had been taught to perfect the male impersonations of Hetty King. As long as she presided over the family gatherings in her own home she perpetuated these learned traditions, and all her progeny joined her in celebrating them anew.

The occasion would be Christmas, a birthday, or any other conceivable anniversary. It might also be a visit from out-of-town cousins. The precise reason for the party mattered little, because the format was always the same. Uncle Sam, Gran's sole surviving son, would sit at the piano hour after hour, playing by ear whatever a performer might require. Each performer—Mom and her six sisters, every hapless husband, and every one of my many cousins—had a party-piece that never, it seemed, was allowed to change. Uncles clasped hats to their hearts as they besought Macushla to awake from her dreaming, or declared themselves loved because they were blind. Auntie Glad, the one who was a clone for Dylan Thomas's Auntie Hannah (singing as she did like a big-bosomed thrush) warbled "Ramona." Auntie Edie, a paper poppy between her teeth, tangoed her way through "The Spaniard That Blighted My Life." Auntie Pem, alone in her disinclination to sing, donned one of Granddad's dark suits, twisted one of the starched collars the wrong way round, and visited the company as the vicar, the Rev. Mr. Peabody. My mother, astonishingly transformed into his simpering wife by an amazingly bedecked hat, stood by loyally. There was one sketch I remember particularly well that encapsulates the witty banter in which my nonsinging aunt excelled. Around the group she would go, commenting on her siblings' various behaviours, until she reached Rose, her second eldest sister and mother of those noisy boys next door. How many children did she and Uncle Les have? That I don't recall, only remembering that they were many.

"Now, Mrs. Kimberlin, and how is that family of yours? I rarely see them in Sunday school these days. I seem to remember there's a christening scheduled for next Sunday. Two o'clock. I trust you'll be there on time. You were late last year, was she not, Hepzibar? [my mother would sagely nod] and you were late the year before—in fact, you haven't been on time for a christening for years and years!"

Sitting on the stairs, we cousins would wonder at the merriment about what didn't, to us, sound funny at all. Later in the evening our turns would come, and one by one we would descend to sing or recite our memorized party-pieces. As the youngest grandchild I was...