All Is Given Read online

  Linda Neil is an Australian writer, songwriter and documentary producer. Her first book, Learning How to Breathe, was published in 2009 to wide acclaim. She has a PhD in creative writing and has taught creative writing, cultural and media studies, and film and television at the University of Queensland. Trained as a classical violinist, Neil has performed with orchestras and rock bands, and recorded and toured with some of Australia’s leading independent artists. Her radio documentaries have been shortlisted for the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Awards (The Asylum Seekers, 2004) and awarded Gold and Bronze medals at the New York Festivals (The Long Walk of Brother Benedict, 2011, and The Sound of Blue, 2008), and her script for The Long Walk of Brother Benedict was also nominated for best documentary script at the 2011 Australian Writers’ Guild Awards.

  http://lindaneil.bandcamp.com/releases

  Praise for Learning How to Breathe

  ‘Neil writes with her mother’s gift for song and her father’s gift for poetry … A talented storyteller.’ The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘A fine and sensitive writer … Linda Neil has honoured her mother with exceptional storytelling, and set a high standard for future Queensland, and Australian, literature.’ The Courier-Mail

  ‘In a substantial and musical memoir, skilfully orchestrated and beautifully cadenced, Neil explores the lives of her family from grandparents to grandchildren … Often angry, Neil’s memoir is nevertheless both engaging and informative, written with tenderness, imbued overall with love.’ Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘This memoir is distinguished by a dignified and consistent voice … a sharpish sensibility that never falters and, what’s more important, never dissolves into mawkishness.’ The Age

  ‘A virtuoso performance.’ Amanda Lohrey

  ‘Finely crafted, subtle and tender, Learning How to Breathe is a beautiful tribute to the loving complexity of family. It reminds us that inspiration lies at the heart of both intimacy and art.’ Gail Jones

  ‘A superb memoir – moving, transporting, unforgettable.’ Marion Campbell

  With love to all my family and friends

  at home and around the world

  Contents

  Prologue: Songbook

  Spike and Me: A Fantastic Adventure

  Bahut Acha in Bharatpur

  The Flower Lady of Zhongshan Park

  Singing Love Songs in Kathmandu

  My Summer of Peripheries

  Revolution at the Peace Hotel

  Wild Strawberries in Mongolia

  Garbo Laughs in Paris

  On Kindness in Kolkata

  Notes from the Musical Frontier

  Epilogue: All Is Given

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: Songbook

  The woman with the blood-red lips stood in front of me, hands on hips, blocking my way into the kitchen. I didn’t feel like talking. At least not till after I’d eaten. And I usually didn’t eat till after I’d finished singing. As my house concerts sometimes ended at 11 pm, I often had dinner just before midnight.

  It had been one of those evenings and I was starving.

  The woman looked colourful and determined. Her voluptuous, well-nourished body was draped in crushed velvet, her earrings were shaped like pink cherries, her hair was the colour of chocolate. In my famished state I could’ve taken a bite out of her.

  I leaned forward, squinting at her necklace, which consisted of tiny lettered cubes strung together. They spelled out a name: Luciana.

  Tell me about your loves, Luciana purred. Your many, many loves.

  The host of that evening’s concert waved a drink and a plate of food at me from across the room. I nodded gratefully, wondering how I could politely excuse myself, find a quiet spot and eat.

  Your Indian love, your Jewish love, your French amour. Luciana ticked them off like items on a United Nations shopping list.

  I could tell she wanted to start an in-depth conversation. But I’d been singing and telling stories for nearly three hours and I was exhausted.

  Concerts can be like that – they can leave you spent, but at the same time they energise the people who’ve listened to you. The intimacy of house concerts, what I call lounge-room concerts, heightens that relationship. Without a stage or a microphone to separate the singer from the audience, a concert of love songs can feel particularly autobiographical. Less a performance than an embrace.

  My host finally came to my rescue. He introduced me to Luciana – no, she laughed, that’s not my real name – who hugged me and thanked me for the concert.

  Mind if I sit with you while you eat, she asked. I want to find out the real stories behind the songs.

  We found some cushions and lounged on them beside the glowing fire. In the orange light I noticed that Luciana had the kind of beauty that once would have made me collapse with envy. But since I’d started writing my own songs, my own music and lyrics, I’d realised that beautiful things also came from within and it was better to spend time excavating those things than dwelling on what I lacked. In that way making music made me move easier in the world.

  I prepared to offer excuses as to why I didn’t feel like giving any more of myself while I ate. I needn’t have worried though. It wasn’t discovering the details of my life that Luciana was interested in, but the telling of hers. What I had shared had only temporarily focused attention on me and my stories; this had in turn stimulated her memory and reflection.

  It was one of the gifts – and surprises – of these concerts: to experience the spirit of another as it wakened and found a way to be articulated. So as I munched on garlic bread and a variety of dips and spreads, Luciana shared with me the stories of her life, her travels, her growth and transformations and all her loves, as if she were the singer of a hundred marvellous songs and I were her hungry audience. I never thought to ask her if all her stories were true. I just enjoyed her pleasure in their telling.

  People often think songs, especially love songs, are autobiographical. In my experience, they may well be inspired by real people but the form of a song means that, from this basis of fact, changes need to be made. A bass line is added perhaps. Something high is included. A man becomes a woman. A five-letter name expands to eight, night becomes day. A memory becomes a melody, a moment of potential becomes a love song.

  As my wise friend Sophie says, the facts may not all be true but the feelings certainly are. And if some events depicted did not happen exactly the way they are described, perhaps they should have. A fantasia and a theme and variations are other musical forms that improvise and embellish simple melodic phrases. JS Bach did it most famously in the Goldberg Variations, and he was also famous for his prowess at royal gatherings, where he would improvise a dozen variations on a theme designated by his royal host – in record time.

  So think of this collection of stories as a book of songs that contains improvisations and variations on themes of truth. If you listen closely enough you might even be able to hear the fabric of facts and fiction as they are stitched together. What they create when integrated may not be entirely fact or fantasy but something exploratory and hybrid – factitious or fictual – and writing them has been as delightful as making a song. I hope you can listen as you read and hear all the harmonies and overtones that surround music, the same way I have listened as I write.

  Spike and Me: A Fantastic Adventure

  It all started in Brisbane and ended up across the other side of the world. Stories can be like that. If you wait long enough, they start to unfurl with the rhythm of Greek myths. If you look closely enough, you can almost see the paper they’re written on as a map of words; one tiny scratch marks the humble begi
nnings of a long, sometimes magical tale that traverses countries and oceans. Journeys always seem to take you out of the small, into the large, and then back again. Not that I thought Brisbane was small – well, actually I did; everyone did at one time or another. But these days I like to sing its praises; to see, in its tiny, seemingly insignificant local events, the roots of greater, more fabulous possibilities. That’s how it turned out in my life anyway.

  I once read to a blind person. She lived down the road from us in Warren Street, St Lucia, during my last year at school. Her name was Mrs Featherington, although, in the teenage tradition of shortening everything, I referred to her as Feathers. Feathers was studying law at the University of Queensland and also learning singing from my mother.

  One summer, during a particularly vocal discussion with my siblings around the dinner table, Mum suddenly leaned towards me and said: If you like the sound of your own voice so much, go down the road and read to Mrs Featherington.

  I found out later that Mum had already volunteered me as one of Feathers’ small band of readers, who called at her house to read law books, legal briefs, university texts and the Bible.

  Oh God, I remember pleading. Don’t make me read the Bible! I’ll do anything, just not the Bible!

  So I was put down on the list marked ‘miscellaneous’, which meant I was reading for entertainment and not educational or religious purposes.

  My father suggested I choose reading material with some literary merit and handed me a book by Katherine Mansfield. Mum countered with the offer of a biography of Dame Nellie Melba (or was it Joan Sutherland?), which she assured me was a ‘jolly good read’. But I rejected any notion of highbrow pursuits during my holiday and chose instead a copy of Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall by Spike Milligan.

  I can’t say I looked forward to visiting Feathers in my allotted time. She’d always struck me as a crabby sort of woman. And even though Mum would ask me how I would be if I couldn’t see, when it was hard to get a civil word out of me even with all my faculties intact, I still thought it was a tiresome chore. So I rocked up to Feathers’ doorstep and entered her dark but tastefully furnished residence, with a lot of resentment and very little hope of having a good time.

  Two pages into Milligan’s book, though, Feathers and I were in fits of giggles. By the fifth or sixth page, the giggles had turned into guffaws and snorts of laughter. This symphonic hilarity continued throughout Spike’s story. I can’t recall much about the content of the book now, or even the tone. What I do remember is that by the time I had finished reading the book, which coincided with the completion of my rostered duty as a volunteer, Feathers and I had bonded in a way no amount of talking one on one could have achieved. It was as if our shared laughter had bridged the chasm between our personalities. As if every time Feathers had stopped me mid-sentence and spluttered no, no, read that bit again because the sound of her giggles had drowned out the previous words, we had become members of some secret society of laughers.

  A few years later, while I was living in London, I switched on BBC Radio and suddenly there was Spike himself, or should I say Spike’s voice itself, on a program called In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. I’d never heard Spike speak before, except for on the old Goon Shows my dad used to chuckle over on Saturday afternoons. I was surprised by the sadness and resignation in his natural voice. And if, as the cliché says, your heart can go out to someone, that night my heart went out to Spike as he talked about his breakdowns, his manic episodes and the catastrophic effect his illnesses had had on his family.

  I don’t know whether it was the mood of the midnight hour or just the pain in Spike’s voice, but I found myself in the early hours of the next day writing him a letter about my reading adventures with Feathers. I remember stumbling over some strange observation about how books are sometimes more than just formations of words organised into coherent communication, and can become things that pass between people, like happiness or love.

  The next day, still buoyant from the previous evening, I walked down to the post office, happy that I had enough follow-through to finish and mail Spike’s letter. The London sky, usually threatening rain, was startlingly blue that day; it sent down through my body that little ache which coldness and brightness can produce in Antipodean flesh.

  I’d addressed the letter to Spike care of the BBC and released it to the Royal Mail with little expectation that he would ever receive it, let alone read it, but satisfied that I hadn’t left my thoughts unsaid (or unwritten) as I had left so many things undone in my life up to that point.

  For some reason, I wasn’t surprised or even that excited when, two weeks of London life later, I received Spike’s reply. There was a sense of fait accompli about my reaching out to Spike and his replying. The tone of the letter was one of kindness and a sort of exhausted gentleness. He said how much my letter had meant to him. Not just that I’d written it, but how I had written it. Not as a fan, he said, but as another human being, responding not to his achievements but to his suffering. I wasn’t aware that was how I had responded to him. Reflecting on it now, I think Spike was looking for something and he thought, through my letter, that he’d found it, no matter what my actual intent had been. Perhaps I was looking for something too: a connection with someone I admired – a writer, a comic, an inventor – whom I never dreamed it would have been possible to meet back in Warren Street. Receiving Spike’s letter seemed to signal a change in my destiny and I was ready for that change.

  *

  Further correspondence followed. Our contact seemed natural to me. So when he suggested we meet for dinner, the only counter-suggestion I had was that, as my experience of eating in London was limited to the cheapest, nastiest, greasiest takeaway available, namely the Chinese diner down the road where you could still get egg fried rice for one pound, we rendezvous at a restaurant of his choosing.

  We met at one of Spike’s favourite Indian restaurants, a little out-of-the-way diner in a side street of Notting Hill, called The Tandoori Traveller. During dinner, as we shared dishes of rogan josh, chicken korma and dal saag washed down with Heineken and Foster’s lager, our conversation ranged over a wide variety of subjects. Spike himself had made some kind of list on his serviette, to which he referred every now and then. I don’t know why he felt the need to take notes, although once or twice he confessed to a fear that he was a potential candidate for Alzheimer’s. But to me, despite, or perhaps because of, the small quantity of food that he spilled onto his chin during dinner, he seemed as carefree and buoyant as a young man. In fact, at times I found his dishevelled appearance, even his sadness, strangely attractive.

  From what I can recall, here is a small list of some of the topics we covered during our spicy dinner.

  1. The Goons

  2. Goonishness

  3. The listing of Goonishness in some future dictionary

  4. Some future dictionary of Goonishness

  5. Dirty English cutlery

  6. Woy Woy

  7. Wyong

  8. Woop Woop

  9. Doo-wop

  10. Doolittle

  11. Do as little as possible

  12. Doing too much

  13. Breakdowns

  14. Things that make Spike sad

  15. Things that make me sad (which included things making Spike sad)

  16. The erotics of strong curries

  17. Cricket

  18. Things that aren’t cricket

  19. Stiff upper lips

  20. Rogan josh

  21. Things that make you go gosh!

  22. Past life experiences

  23. The difficulty of sending books through the post vis-a-vis sliding the packages through the slits on the Royal Mail boxes

  24. Highbrow

  25. Lowbrow

  26. No brows at all.

  Spike told me that he had no brows at all. T
hey’d been singed off permanently in a small house fire that he’d started during one of his hallucinating periods. The tangled white bushy things above his eyes looked real enough to me. But when I threatened to give them a good pull and prove his story wrong, he shook his head and muttered sadly:

  Once I had high, magnificently arched brows. People said they were a real feature of my face. And now look at me. Nothing. Nothing left at all!

  By the time dessert came around he seemed almost completely drunk, even though the waiter had assured me during one whispered consultation that Spike was mostly drinking ginger beer. Apparently Spike’s doctor, an Anglo-Indian called Dr Hydrabad, had enlisted the help of most of Spike’s favourite restaurants in cutting down his drinking. He had since discovered, with the covert assistance of some of Spike’s most sympathetic head waiters, that years of the hottest rogan josh had so severely burned Spike’s palate that now he could hardly tell the difference between the stiffest hard liquor and weak apple cider.

  Apparently Spike’s drunkenness, the waiter informed me solemnly, was all in his mind.

  Did you know, Spike divulged to me between dessert and coffee, that Groucho Marx and TS Eliot were pen pals?

  No, I didn’t, I replied, knowing that, in inimitable Spike fashion, I was about to be relieved of my ignorance.

  Now, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that Groucho would have been the pursuer in this particular case, genuflecting at the feet of such towering genius. Oh, shake your head if you want, but we’re like that. We always think the serious minds are more important than the comic ones. Even most comedians themselves aspire to tragedy. Anyway, to get back to the story, one night they finally did meet. Eliot was over in London to give an important lecture at a university that had just given him an honorary PhD. After dinner, Groucho takes Eliot into his library and prepares to acquit himself well in any literary discussion that might take place. When they get in there, Eliot, with a conspiratorial whisper, says: ‘Thank goodness we’re alone. Now we can get down to business.’ And what do you think happened next? Mmm? Can you guess? Well, all Eliot wanted to talk about was what he said he’d been waiting years to talk about: Animal Crackers and Duck Soup. You see my point?