The Earthrise Diary (August 2014 and Spring 2014)

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (August 2014 and Spring 2014)

DON DIESPECKER

© Text, Don Diespecker 2014; guest writers retain ©. This Diary incorporates some writing drafted initially for an August (2014) posting).

In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring.

Lawrence Durrell: Justine

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or 10 years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That’s what you wanted to write about, about what you didn’t know.

Ken Kesey

CHARIVARI

After queer ‘false starts’ the weather wintry one day and summery the next, spring is certainly here now. This time it’s the real deal. Spring started weeks ago really but didn’t last: it came and went. Spring is like that but this was different. I’ll stick my neck out and say there were overtones and undertones of global warming and climate change and who can prove me wrong? Spring has now arrived.

September 24 2014. Walking thoughtfully through the grass and bracken in front of the house I think of the season’s imminent snakes and almost immediately see a small goanna lurching away from me. No harm done.

September 25 2014. Through the bathroom window at dusk I see the first fireflies of spring flashing in the damp air.

September 26 2014. Staring out moodily from an upstairs window I note the old ridge capping along joins of the lounge roof, the capping soon to be replaced. Then I move along further to see that area of the same roof next to the slow combustion heater’s chimney: a young python is curled lazily across the corrugations, its head tucked strangely beneath the capping. My gaze narrows: there seem two distinct lumps midway along the snake’s body. A trick of the light perhaps or the snake’s first feed after a cosy winter sleep in the roofing?

September 30 2014. As Bruce Furner arrives at the carport I start out the door and two goannas one large one small dash the grass and weeds either side the house steps and I shout, ‘Watch out there’s a goanna your side!’¹ thinking of the Jack Russell but all’s well and Meg’s on her lead. I’m reminded of correspondence with Herman Labuschagne whose house in the Lowveld was next to Kruger National Park: his Jack Russell regularly chased elephants from the veggie garden. Now I’m reminded of how my dogs Henry and Eartha when pups long ago would for fun chase snakes and goannas till Eartha was gut raked by a no nonsense goanna: she came close to being disembowelled and thereafter showed reptiles greater respect [1 above: “your side” means your side of the usually dry flood channel that becomes “Earthrise Creek” in very heavy local rain and flooding, a fast torrent 2- 3-m deep and impassable].

October 3 to 5 2014. After months of relative quiet in the house at night I hear a late- night fluttering in the wall next to my bed: this suggests micro bats either returning early from hunting and slipping into a new space not used until now, or a bunch of bats drunk on something and blundering into the wrong location, or possibly something more sinister. I’m betting on bats, but I’ve been known to make grievous errors in the past… Intermittent noises from within the wall a metre away ensure a noisy night and insufficient sleep. On Saturday I decide that a spell of high-pitched shrieking (acoustics from my Singing Rake) might be useful in discouraging any new residents in the wall and I fetch up the rake… Dear reader, the fantasy is easy to imagine: lightly lift your rake and lightly drag the tines downward over the pine wall boards: the shrieks and squeaks will set your teeth on edge and, it’s to be hoped, set too the furry jaws of micro bats thus discouraging plans of squatting in the house walls… That’s the theory, anyway. To my surprise Saturday night was soundless except for nearby crickets singing and I slept, but Sunday evening (the rugby league Grand Final evening and following the first full day of this season’s daylight saving), was strangely noisy… It was as if a bat or two or perhaps a big moth was rapping at the window a metre or so from me. The top of the outside wall I should explain is sufficiently open and unsealed (my fault entirely) that it enables small creatures to push their ways inside the spaces between the outside and inside walls. The spaces are formed by internal framework of the walls, the vertical studding the horizontal nogging. Each such space sealed on the inside and outside walling is thus a compartment with only the one entrance and exit. I find a suitable long weapon and the small LED light torch and slide open the glass door to step outside on to the dark deck (no lighting here): all is clear and bat-free. A horrible suspicion grows as I switch on the torch and move to the corner and shine up to the top of the outside back wall. I suffer a collective of Indiana Jones moments: a slithering armful of new-looking shiny snakes, night tigers so-called locally, twists and waves menacingly in the light. Two heads at least and one of the bodies thick as my arm. I could insanely hold the torch in my teeth and maybe dislodge the serpents and likely be chomped on by no-nonsense multi-tasking venomous serpents or discretely leave them writhing. It has been a hot day here, almost 30˚, and the evening too is anything but cool and snakes chilling out while possibly also snacking on micro bats aren’t obliged to accommodate me in any ways nice. One hangs its head lower from the sawn rafter end to peer down disapprovingly. I smile thinly and very discreetly walk slowly back to my door… I watch much of the Grand Final and check old entrance points by torchlight and I glance at the window occasionally: perhaps the snakes are hanging lower to see the Grand Final too? And where do old snakes go to die, I wonder, if not to ‘their’ country estates, their retirement hangouts, their cool TV spots, their Grand Finals seen through the glass darkly? 

   

Among the pictures and photos in the many-windowed big lounge room downstairs where I do most of my writing I have, just over my shoulder, a postcard photo of Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro shaking hands in Cuba, and another pc showing Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. I’m also reminded that more actors and entertainers recently have died: Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Robin Williams, Lauren Bacall, Richard Attenborough, Joan Rivers have all shuffled off the mortal coil. GG Marquez has gone now, too. The passing of writers, actors and entertainers reminds me of an important notion: writings of others (in any genre) deserve acknowledgement and information about them ought always to be carefully checked and even double-checked. I recently wrote a few words for friends Pete and Dee Thompson about to read Lawrence Durrell’s work and mentioned the Villa Cleobolus in Rhodes (‘In Rhodes the days drop as softly as fruit from trees,’ LDs words). Though Pam and I knew the island and town well in 1954/55, a recent check via Google indicates that the little house where Durrell once wrote was only a ‘gatehouse’ to the old Villa and that in this era the site is occupied by a casino… Everything changes.

Some Diary readers may recall the obsessive struggle to wean myself from regularly posting Diaries (every month for years usually without fail). Because I’m a creature of habit this turning away from conformity to the reckless adventures of now posting blogs at irregular intervals has been a difficult choice. Old conformists will recognize the malady. The older we grow the more we may experience pangs of remorse, feelings of guilt and a general malaise mysteriously arising from imagined duties of service, from self-imposed notions of being reliable, being loyal. I’m laying it on a bit thick because I’m currently in the throes of revisiting some aspects of family history. There’s nothing quite like family history or the merest traces of it, to inspire my conformist to run those old images of childhood in my head and to again see in reflective moments those scenes that increase nostalgia, trigger emotions and even inspire one to do a range of things somewhat differently. Thus the writer that lurks within begins thinking of some aspect of the family history that can be further written about: perhaps a non-fiction memoir (“I’m reminded of a time when…”) or a new slant on an old mystery of history (“How else can we explain that long voyage to a new land…”) and even a fiction, a roman à clef, a “key novel” based on true events (“A draft of the Secret Agreement was sent to Queen Victoria…”). If then I add to that the effects of climate or weather, or seasonal shifts and especially ‘the inventions of spring,’ creative writing has again sparked imagination, excitement, and a heightened sense of wellbeing. Similarly such heightened sense will feed back to stir anew my imagination further, increase creativity and please me greatly. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking along these lines; besides, exercising the big muscle between the ears is good for overall health…    

All this by way of suggesting to the unwary reader that writing is more than a therapeutic experience: at seasonal cusp writing may become so enjoyable and exciting that we can’t get enough of it: we write fast, we write single-mindedly, we write while forgetting the time of day or when we last ate a proper meal. When writing moments combine with creativity and imagination writing is a labour of love.

Such thoughts whirl now in my mind because there are again good opportunities of reconsidering ways of deepening our family history knowledge and understanding. A larger element of (our) ‘greater family’ now lives in North America, particularly in British Columbia where I was born. This Diary includes a short piece of non-fiction writing a vignette by my cousin Jill Alexander in Vancouver, B.C. Some members of her family (my cousins) are now either writing in one way or another or are proto writers young enough and creative enough to pursue writing as being more than an ambition or a hobby. Writing for some of the youngsters seems increasingly likely to perhaps becoming a career choice. Technically Jill’s piece is a non-fiction essay or memoir in which she remembers a time when she and her brother were children of ten and eleven and her prose reflects some of that. “The Trunk” is also about a lost collection of documents, icons and memorabilia. What could be more inspiring and concerning to a writer than important relics that might now be forever lost? The probability of any such materials ever being found is very low, but not impossibly so. A three-step task likely to be enjoyable begins with imagining what might have ‘happened’ to lost items. The second step is to imagine ways of searching for the lost items many years later and to start searching anew. The third step is the pleasure of writing about the imagined possibilities and the new search.  

Some of my writing time has recently been spent in drafting a document that might assist family historians and writers (young intending ones, particularly) to search and perhaps find, to study and to then write about historical documents and to report or discuss or speculate on any findings. Their bonus might be to then use some of that research as ‘useful information’ required to write relevant non-fictions and fictions: essays, historical articles and books as well as (fictional) short stories, plays, or novels. Modelling from facts may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but those who love writing and history need never be bored: pleasure or happiness is only a written thought away.

 Returning to an earlier point about writing: I’ll attempt an argument here suggesting that a little pressure is a good thing when there are deadlines, either self-imposed or set by others. A little urgency of urging helps me to finish this, complete that and begin working on whatever’s coming next. And if you’re still reading this the reason I’m banging on about self-imposed pressure and deadlines is that I so often wrestle with priorities, most of them also my choices. When recently I was obliged to respond to a Governmental dictum to complete and submit a form the Government requires I obliged, but with teeth clenched because the task took most of two days of searching, finding and filling in. As a personal experience it was maddening and time-wasting (I’d rather have been writing fiction). Filling in forms is never an enjoyable writing path to pleasure and satisfaction. Here’s a relevant punch line: being an ageing member of my greater family is a constant reminder for me to write what I (selfishly) choose to write and to do that competently in the time that’s available.

Writing fiction is my top priority and also is the most self-indulgent of the choices available. Writing documents that might be useful to the younger members of our greater family are also priorities. Collecting and composing materials I can include in this Diary is yet another important priority. And then there is my considerable email correspondence. Priorities require juggling and choosing. Ordering the priorities according to my commitments, household chores, electrical storms that knock out the power, floods and umpteen other factors is more often that not, a little difficult. Although these priorities and associated demanding factors vie with one another daily, that jousting is also an element that makes life so interesting. Everything else, from dish washing and laundry to the gleeful pleasure of reading in my garden is invariably becoming auxiliary and of secondary interest: pursuits and duties that now are slipping away from major importance. It’s almost as if my priorities each day are decided for me! 

It was certainly Late Winter when I began this Diary, sketching with notes and single words: indeed it was August and now, shock, horror, wince, having arrived at breakneck speed at the end of September, early October has aggressively presented itself. Spring has established without any interference from me. Just between us, you and me, this is the first time ever I’ve allowed the deadline to come and go although I distinctly remember mentioning this in an advisory email: I intended to break this old habit, this notion of the deadline, this conditioned response to my writer’s rule, this old decree that’s existed only in my head for many years.

And now I like the freedom that goes with that (the freedom that I’ve always had, anyway). The reason for this dramatic return to the future re-think is that I know that I’m running out of the time I selfishly want to spend writing my own stories. Some of the ‘work in progress writing’ in my Earthrise house is in note form, some exists as typescripts (TSS) only, novels, stories, plays that have been written or drafted but that now require to be properly completed, finished and published if possible. There is nothing quite like the urgency of time passing to keep me tapping the keys of the Mac, a weather eye out for lightning, for fires, for flooding rain, or for big old trees falling on the house while I’m working inside…

Although I’ve previously mentioned this, I’ll repeat it again: the New York City publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux produce (free) a regular ‘anthology’ of reproduced writings titled Work In Progress, The Latest from the Front Lines of Literature.’ Many of these articles, essays, stories and poems and new book excerpts represent the best of fine writing. If this interests you, track down and explore the FS&G website and sign up. I highly recommend Work in Progress to all writers and apprentice writers and to all who love reading. And it’s free!

MONOLOGUE

WALK

DD

Ten past six. Will leave a bit earlier this morning. The day’s coming up clear no it’s not it looks hazy already but just a guess. Can see a couple of pink clouds distantly. Wind predicted. Cool before sunrise and almost quiet sundry birds excepted. Slowly at first along the lawn-edge-riverbank-top passing the Pool below. Fish jumping. Stop to see. Fish rising a rare sight these days. Remember when we saw rises through lantana and sundry weeds and the caravan window. Thirty years. The Pool’s part covered by foam and something else presumably winged insects or why else would local fish rise so pleasingly like trout in early light? Won’t ever see trout here rising or otherwise: too warm the water. Press on. It wasn’t a platoon of platypus either though could see biggish swirls. No bubbles however. They always leave bubble trails if anything. Not any pooled platypus now. Come to think of it haven’t seen one for ages. That last big flood February 2013 must have done them harm. Remember Bru visiting yesterday and both remembering times he did morning Tai Chi watching platypus and maybe platypus watching him. Bend to pull token ragweed en route the road the lawn grass dewed. Crunching walking briskly now the metalled road. Not aiming to crack the record though not today anyway. Leave it to Kenyan marathon guys. Carl to run the Chicago marathon is it called and meeting Nick in New York sounds good sons far and wide. Brothers meet in faraway places. Keep to routine here walking fast pounding the rural road and no demanding marathons. Some swirls in the river next the bridge but no fish seen. The dead river oak angled over the flow by the bridge hanging by the still standing river wall. Small orchids still thrive the dead branches. Tiny yellow orchids in flower now. Warm to hot weather probably aided. Rest of the big tree looks dead as doornail as Mom used to say. Grace had quaint sayings probably heard in her Scots family. Was long ago in the old Transvaal well before my arrival.  What was it like the present for her then following 1898? No early handwritten letters by her though. That photo of her in the deck chair in Grandpa Singer’s garden at Pilgrim’s Rest about 1938 one of my best. Should have been a photographer perhaps. The river’s low again. Could have been photographer perhaps if not a moviemaker thinking in images always. Why didn’t Dad stay with photography his first job as 12-year old 1908? Cool again today early the sky uncertain. Clear air. The Deer Park gate open the Dexter cattle gone.  Across the bridge a turn around to look over seeing the house the new whiteness of new-look paint the blue trim. Mykonos Blue the colour name on the paint can. Often think of Mykonos Pam and I that sunny winter 1954. And Rhodes especially too a kind of base for nautical rambles the Dodecanese the Cyclades the Aegean. A Greek-looking house here in Darkwood! Set off nicely by rising sun lighting high trees over the house lighting my trees was thinking though they’re not really mine since they were here first. Merely the caretaker the steward here a minder till I leave. Must snap another photo of the now old green house thirty years green now going white. The White House will call it not because there’ll be plenty of blue. Nice. Remember Byron’s crudely deep chiselled name on white dressed stone was marble surely lapped by waves at Sounion in Attica long ago. Temple of Poseidon once was. Bloody vandal. What was he thinking? Everything changes. Briskly up the rise away from Plain’s bridge and the dream house a better autograph than the poet’s. On past the neighbour’s past their golden bamboo that’s also been there for years and then hugely big the other giant clump of green bamboo and a just right window cleared now allowing passers by a view the beaut new garden big park-like the big bamboo clumps splendidly framing. Well done it looks a picture also heartening green statement. Increasing pace a touch now walking faster cockatoos flying over their raucous chit chat then see the horses look up questioningly. Oh it’s only the old predictable two legged one. Safer on four legs surely? And now nearly flying at warp speed can hear the birdsongs various never mind naming them all would be too much not needed anyway. Birds sing interesting songs everyone knows. Heard a radio program about that. Don’t horses ever sing? Why not? We do birds do even dogs can sing why shouldn’t horses too? Hold on watch out pull over more on the verge the vehicle’s coming up from Richardson’s toward me almost at me. OK the driver seeing me slows. We exchange waves no idea who is. It’s maybe a tradie an early morning contractor. Civilized chap slows down making hardly any dust at all. The wild peach blossom’s all gone now. See the new short green grass sprouting the verges close to road as can be. And the tiny quails if that’s what they are Painted Quails maybe running by my feet. Two maybe three groups these small ground birds running the verges most mornings. See the small finches bouncing topmost fence wires diamond dewdrops flying ahead as if for fun and see the paddock grass awaiting the sun the grass frosty-looking though really only silvered the nightly dew. Glancing up admire straight trunked flooded gums seem so atop knobbly knoll high above road the trunks so white so straight as if drawn against drawing board set squares sun lighting them up to their crowns those small painted tops seemingly lacking their thin support twigs their powder puff end branches dabbed against blue sky. Deadwood left by slashing and sawing roadside overgrowth loads of firewood or if we prefer lots of fuel for wildfires. Our fire season comes closer. We see warm days growing this hot spring weather up here. Recent rains nice though insufficient rain got most everything green and growing like mad. See roadside weeds and dock flowering or seeding now some two metres high stately over that fine green grass new for running quail. Can see a ginger-looking cat hunting the paddock not far from unsung horses feral perhaps or maybe someone’s domestic moggie practising dark side arts inside its worldly paddock? There’s Richardson’s now and Council’s warning signs marking blatant that walkway gap. Turn at bridge’s end to briskly walk back again beneath sun lighting now those big white riverbank cedars greenly by jacarandas still bronzing. Twin silver wires the landline too low over the river and the higher power lines not bright enough to easily see. Low flying aircraft would miss but only in my novels. And thirty-four minutes door to door my tempting breakfast to come!   

WRITING REALITIES

DD

Remembering that I used to be both psychologist and psychotherapist I’m sometimes tempted to imagine I can competently muse on several things more or less at the same time. Although I doubt that’s truly possible I fancy that doing several things more or less at the same time is perhaps slightly more possible than entertaining several thoughts (if not quite simultaneously) together in one package. I’ve also been reflecting on the ways in which I write. I often ‘get’ ideas or notions about a current story being worked on. I really don’t know how ideas are received or ‘got’ and how it is that at least one of a competing bunch of newly arriving ideas hits the target (me, Don Central) and struggles its way into one bunch or another of restless neurones hanging about listlessly about ready to be used or discarded without service or possibly shunted off to storage in a kind of cerebral and cognitive warehouse. I have a well-established imaged scene in a Paris hotel; it’s there when I want it to muse on and when there’s time I see it more reflectively, see more of the detail that’s already there for the story.  I just don’t know, but somehow I imagine, I visualize that kind of magical process taking place within my central nervous system (CNS). The odd thing about that is that all of the relevant and appropriate CNS processing and functioning is apparently under my steely gaze, my tight-lipped caring control all the master switches and wheels and levers somewhere inside me ready to move at my nod, yet a great deal of all that latent work seems somewhere else entirely and quite beyond me, far from and decidedly apart from my everyday awareness. It is as if that kind of CNS activity inside me is on automatic is functioning separately and is also beyond my conscious control. Is that weirdly odd or what? I certainly think it odd and oddness is precisely why I’m so hesitant about getting or having several ideas at the same time. There is now an image screening in my mind’s current collection of larrikin images clamouring to burst in through some aperture. The images are bouncing up and down for attention in my Ideas Department, these eager neurones, and I don’t know where that Department is and neither do I know how any of the ideas are triggered. Either that or there’s an autonomous department or two that manages very nicely without any interference from me and even without my awareness of the ideas forming softly or perhaps in safe little staccato bursts… How may I be in charge of me and yet not have a working model either of idea getting or of how I do it all?

Similarly when I watch a film or a movie or a doco there are aspects of me monitoring what I see from umpteen angles and doing that so well that it takes only seconds for an appropriate neural committee to manifest in the anteroom of my mind and the Chair to salute with a thump or two to his or her chest and “We have seen enough. This movie is lamentable, a Class One Stinker you might say.” I thank my committee and change channels. These are My Top Advisors and they’re working for nothing! For example, I enjoy watching thrillers especially old movies or the best of modern ones and prefer that these days to be via television, it’s so much easier, and one doesn’t have to dress up or go out. Movies as talking pictures have been available for only a year or two longer than I’ve been. “The Jazz Singer” I’m pretty sure was the first talkie commercially available to all and dates to 1927 I seem to remember and I arrived in 1929. And there were fewer of all of us in those days: less than two billions: now there are more than seven billions of us and there are cities too in South and Central America and in Asia each with populations greater than the total population of Australia! I’m pleased to say that I predate almost all the stuff that now comprises television (if I remember my TV facts the first commercial telecast was of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race in 1936).

Sorry, I diverge. I wanted to explore briefly the strange phenomenon of failing to comprehend much of what are surely thrillers of particular kinds: I’ll call them political and crime thrillers. Whereas British examples like Silent Witness or the recent serial The Tunnel are well made and produced and the acting is fine, the photography is invariably gloomy and alas, I have great difficulty in trying to figure out all the fiendishly clever twists and turns that make each of the episodes so very clever.  Exceptions are the Jason Bourne movies: everything about these superbly made films is wonderfully clear and unambiguous. Strangely, I understand best or almost as well as I comprehend the Bourne movies, similar dramatic or thriller films and serials (like “Borgen” and “The Eagle” produced in Denmark or the Norwegian “Headhunters”). Although Pam and I visited Denmark and Sweden years ago I don’t speak any Scandinavian language. How is it that their Scandinavian thinking, their acting, their body language works better for me because I don’t speak Scandinavian languages?

 

CREATIVE WRITING

THE TRUNK

JILL ALEXANDER

The trunk lived in our basement. It belonged to Uncle Denny even though Uncle Denny didn’t live with us. He lived in a small suite in a house on Rockland Avenue in Victoria, BC. Government House was also on the same street that made Uncle Denny’s apartment seem larger and more important. We had a very big basement and this is where we stored Uncle Denny’s trunk for him.

Our house was characteristic for its day. My dad built it in 1935. My brother was born the next year and I came along 21 months later.

Our large basement had space for two cars as well as various other small rooms my father had created. One of these rooms was called the Store Room and was a place for all the canning and jams my mother had made. A workroom for my father contained every tool imaginable. He was often referred to as Mr. Fix It. Two smaller rooms were made into playrooms, one each for my brother and me. My brother put a lock on his door with a sign that read, No Girls Allowed. Our furnace lived here too and beside it a huge pile of wood to fuel it. After some years the wood was replaced with a pile of coal. There were packing crates, suitcases, a chopping block, garden tools, fold-up lawn chairs, our bicycles and Uncle Denny’s trunk tucked under the stairs leading to the main floor of the house. It remained there relatively unnoticed until one day it was opened by my father and his two brothers, Uncle Denny and Uncle Dick. We were told that Uncle Dick was writing a book and that the trunk had some old and valuable papers that he needed to write his book. At first my brother and I went downstairs to join them but we were not welcomed in the way we usually were. After a while we started creeping partway down the stairs very quietly and sat watching them and listening to their conversations. Sometimes they laughed together as they found something funny to read. My brother and I were able to go down the stairs and get a little closer to them without them noticing. At other times they seemed very serious and spoke very quietly, moving closer together while reading something as if they didn’t want anyone to hear. We wondered what it was they were reading and tried to hear what they were saying to each other. After a while we were told not to come downstairs anymore and to go outside and play. We were a little hurt I remember because we loved our uncles almost as much as we loved our father and wanted to be around them especially as their interest in the trunk contents had a sense of mystery that made us very curious.

After a week or so Uncle Dick left and went back to Vancouver. It was 1948. Later that year our Uncle Denny died suddenly in Victoria. There was great sadness. He was only 56 years old. He had been gassed in the first war and people said that his lungs finally gave way from all his coughing. I remember towards the end watching him struggle up the front steps of our house when he came to visit and stop before he reached the top, gasping for breath. This was my first experience of a death in the family and I felt it deeply. My brother and I were very fond of our uncle and perhaps because he never married, he was very good to us and took us with him on many Sunday outings.

Then two years later there was great excitement. Our parents told us that Uncle Dick’s book had been published. It was called Elizabeth and it was a story about her life. Elizabeth was their mother and our grandmother. My uncle Dick was a radio broadcaster who wrote radio plays and even read the news on Radio CJOR. Also, he was a journalist and poet as well as an author and now his name became even better known. My brother and I reaped the benefits of this notoriety and were frequently asked if we were related to Dick Diespecker because that was our family name too.

We never paid much attention to the trunk after that but one day when the two of us were looking for something to amuse ourselves my brother and I decided to go down into the basement. We looked around for a while before our attention was drawn to the trunk. It was still in the same place tucked under the stairs. We carefully opened it and began digging around inside. Suddenly we discovered something that looked like a wooden leg. We felt a strange feeling come over us. We felt scared and at a loss for words. We looked at each other and quickly retreated upstairs. We hid in the den behind the sofa for a while unable to grasp what we had just seen. It was some time before we were able to talk. Then we slowly started whispering to each other about Uncle Denny and the wooden leg he had all those years we knew him. We became obsessed with this new revelation and felt it must have been a deep dark secret in the family.

 A few days passed before our mother noticed that we had been very quiet and were acting rather peculiar and not at all like our usual selves. She asked us if something was wrong. We then broke down and told her that Uncle Denny had a wooden leg and that it was in the trunk in the basement. She looked sceptical and followed us downstairs. We lifted the trunk’s lid. “There!” we said as we pointed inside the trunk. Our mother made a careful examination while we watched her, hardly daring to take a breath. Then she looked at us and smiled and told us that it was just a special boot stretcher for Uncle Denny’s army boot and that there was probably one for his other boot somewhere in the trunk. We all left and quickly went back upstairs with no interest in doing any further searching.

The trunk continued to languish in the basement of our family house. My brother and I eventually left home to attend university in Vancouver. Then two years later my father died of a heart attack. He was just 60 years old. My mother stayed on in the house for another ten years and we went home frequently to visit her. The trunk stayed tucked under the stairs.

My brother and I moved even further away and were unable to come home as often as before. Then our mother wrote to say she was selling the house and moving into an apartment. We both offered to come home to help her with the sorting and packing but she strongly rejected the offer saying that she did not want anyone around to get in her way.  We discovered that her method of coping with this huge task was to call in auctioneers and junk dealers to cart away anything that would not fit into her new apartment. And so sadly the trunk was taken away and never again seen.

The next generation of the Diespeckers has been busy with the daunting task of piecing together our family history as well as trying to make sense of it all. The contents that once were in the trunk have not just taken on a new importance but are being seen as a possible source for solving some of the family mysteries and providing missing links for us.

What were the conversations of the brothers when they met together those many years ago and spoke in serious and hushed voices while reading those papers from the trunk? Did they make a discovery about the family that they felt was necessary to keep to themselves? We may never know the answer to this mystery. For alas, our trunk has gone, lost to us forever.

jillionalexander@gmail.com

Jill Diespecker Alexander is retired in North Vancouver, BC, after a career as a nurse and spa owner and is now writing vignettes of her fascinating life.

MY EBOOKS

For those readers who browse for eBooks, here again are descriptions of the first of the online books: they can be found on Amazon/Kindle sites. E.g., see

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Don+Diespecker  

(1) Finding Drina is a light-hearted sequel to my two print novels (not available as eBooks) published in one volume as The Agreement and it’s sequel, Lourenço Marques. Finding Drina is written in three parts and in three different styles that also are intended homage pieces (to GG Marquez, Ernest Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell); thus this little book is also meta-fiction (novella, about 30-k words).    

(2) The Earthrise Visits is an Australian long story set at Earthrise (about 20-k words): an old psychologist meets a young literary ghost from the 1920s (his girlfriend meets her, too) before a second old literary ghost, unaware of his spectral state, arrives unexpectedly.  

(3) Farewelling Luis Silva is an Australian dystopian long story partly set in Australia, Portugal and France (about 23-k words). A sniper meets an Australian Prime Minister, an old lover and a celebrity journalist; three of them meet a terrorist in Lisbon where there is a bloody assassination.

(4) The Selati Line is an early 20^th century Transvaal train story, road story, flying story, a caper story and also a love story sequel to The Agreement and Lourenço Marques, lightly written and containing some magical realism. A scene-stealing child prodigy keeps the characters in order (novel, about 150-k words).   

(5) The Summer River is a dystopian novel (about 70-k words) set at Earthrise. A General, the déjà vu sniper, the Australian Prime Minister and the celebrity journalist witness the murder of a guerrilla who had also been an Australian university student; they discuss how best to write an appropriate book about ‘foreign invasions’ (novel, about 70-k words).  

(6) The Annotated “Elizabeth.” I examine and offer likely explanations as to why my uncle published a mixed prose and verse novel in which his mother is portrayed as the principal protagonist and I suggest why the book Elizabeth (published by Dick Diespecker in 1950) is a novel and not a biography, memoir or history (non-fiction, about 24-k words).   

(7) The Overview is a short Australian novel set at Earthrise (about 32.5-k words) and is also a sequel to The Summer River.   

(8) Scribbles from Earthrise, is an anthology of selected essays and caprice written at Earthrise (about 32-k words). Topics are: family and friends, history of the Earthrise house, the river, the forest, stream of consciousness writing and the Earthrise dogs.   

(9) Here and There is a selection of Home and Away essays (about 39-k words). (‘Away’ includes Cowichan (Vancouver Island), 1937 (my cabin-boy year), The Embassy Ball (Iran), At Brindavan (meeting Sai Baba in India). ‘Home’ essays are set at Earthrise and include as topics: the Bellinger River and floods, plus some light-hearted caprices.

(10) The Agreement is a novel set in Mozambique and Natal during December 1899 and the Second Anglo-Boer War: an espionage yarn written around the historical Secret Anglo Portuguese Agreement (1899). Louis Dorman and his brother, Jules, feature together with Drina de Camoens who helps draft the Agreement for the Portuguese Government. British Intelligence Officers, Boer spies and the Portuguese Secret Police socialize at the Estrela Café (about 62-k words). 

(11) Lourenço Marques is the sequel to The Agreement. Mozambique in September 1910. The Estrela café-bar is much frequented and now provides music: Elvira Tomes returns to LM from Portugal and is troubled by an old ghost; Drina and her companion return with an unexpected new member of the family; Louis faints. Joshua becomes a marimba player. Ruth Lerner, an American journalist plans to film a fiesta and hundreds of tourists visit from the Transvaal. Drina plays piano for music lovers and plans the removal of an old business associate (novel: about 75-k words).

(12) The Midge Toccata, a caprice about talking insects (inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories). This book has a splendid new cover designed by my cousin, Katie Diespecker (fiction, caprice, about 26-k words).

(13) Happiness is a short novel set at Earthrise. The ‘narrator’ is again the very elderly ex-ATA flier who unexpectedly meets and rescues a bridge engineer requiring urgent hospitalisation: she gets him safely to hospital in his own plane. She also ‘imagines’ an extension to her own story, one about a small family living partly in the forest and on the riverbank: the theme is happiness. Principal protagonist is a 13-years old schoolgirl, apparently a prodigy: she befriends a wounded Army officer and encourages his plans. Her parents are a university teacher and a retired concert pianist. The family pets can’t resist being scene-stealers in this happy family (novel, about 65-k words).

(14) The Special Intelligence Officer is part family history as well as a military history and describes the roles of my late grandfather in the Guerrilla War (1901-1902) in Cape Colony. The Guerrilla War was the last phase of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The title of the book is taken from Cape newspapers of the time: Capt Rudolph Diespecker was a District Commandant; his responsibilities included intelligence gathering that led to the capture, trial and execution of a Boer Commandant who was wrongly framed as a ‘Cape rebel,’ when he was legally a POW (Gideon Scheepers was never a Cape rebel, having been born in the Transvaal (the South African Republic,) one of the two Boer Republics (non-fiction, about 33-k words).

(15) The Letters From Earthrise, an anthology of my columns and other essays and articles written for the Australian Gestalt Journal between 1997 and 2005 (fiction and some non-fiction, about 70-k words).

(16) The Darkwood is a dystopian novel set at Earthrise in the not too distant future (about 80-k words). Earthrise is again central to other themes.

(17) Bellinger; Along The River is an anthology of personal essays relative to my home and the property, Earthrise, and the river at my doorstep (aspects and descriptions of the river, including flooding) (nonfiction, about 28-k words)

(18) Reflecting: an anthology of personal essays about the gardens, butterflies, a caprice, and other motivating factors at my home, Earthrise: mostly non-fiction (20,300 words)

(19) Idling: is a collection of personal essays about seeing; a military history essay; a speculation about lawns; a working visit to Griffith University; periods of enforced idleness as “Don’s Days Out” in Coffs Harbour (mostly non-fiction; about 35,600 words).

Thank you to my guest writer, Jill Alexander.

Best wishes to all the Diary Readers from Don.             don883@bigpond.com