Deborah Forster

These pieces I write are really letters to you and I thank you with all I have. Each week I write another column as I did at ‘The Age’. Then I decided to write novels. It went well for a while. But maybe I left my run too late, and you get old and other problems creep in. I miss the immersion of the novels, but the columns, slighter things, were slices of fresh air from a window. Like arrows on the wind.

I also wrote book reviews for a few years and that is something I will never do again. I recall things I wrote that were wrong and hurtful. They still clatter around my heart condemning me. It’s great when you love the book, but otherwise, the burden is heavy, and reconstruction is not your job. Everyone must decide everything for themselves, especially with reading which is intensely personal.

Because (due to shyness) I’m not one of life’s socialisers, I don’t chat in clumps down the street and don’t talk much on the telephone. I just write in journals so for me these are records for the life of the everyday and that is where writing begins. Noticing is a habit I’ve always hunted.

And you keep your treasures where you can find them, in your journal. When you keep a journal you’re slowing time from rising away, you’re anchoring things so that one day  the journal will be opened, and the words will live and tell us about our lives then.   But when you re-read, you won’t be the person who wrote them. You’ll stand beside that person, mildly critical and yet a little thrilled. And the memories the words evoke will flutter by coloured with the deep privacy of thought. And you will smile to have forgotten that lost day. And the symmetry of your memory will make sense.

I’ve kept journals since I was fourteen and was as earnest and spotty as Adrian Mole (but nowhere near as funny), and I’ve got lines of  journals in all colours in my study, mostly half-filled, some with hangman games I did with my son when he was little and bored. The journals collect messages from speaking to a stranger on the tram to notes on the exact blue/mauve of the horizon of a summer sky. They are messages to myself, and they are the things that make the recipe of days.

Both my parents kept diaries. Dad’s chronicle of days was okay for a while and then became unreadable. From early memory, he said he wanted me to be a writer. But he really wanted it for himself. He wrote some afternoons when he got home from work and barely speaks of his kids.

Mum had no such pretensions. She didn’t start till fairly late, and she kept records of our visits, how she worried for us, she wrote that she would be glad when I reached her age and would not have to look after children. She also totted up long columns of outgoings for her small dress shop. For years she didn’t pay herself a wage, she just scraped by.

So, this week I broke open a new journal. Moss green, as young as the year to come and wrote: ‘Got a sore eye and went to a new doctor in the new suburb. The doctor was neatly icy in her scrubs, and she didn’t know me. Not her fault but not being known is a kind of pain and takes time to leave. The move  from the old house affects all these small exchanges and again I miss the other life.

The sore eye was becoming red underneath. The doctor gave me antibiotics. The next day it was worse, so I went to my old doctor, Dr. L.  To see an old friend is one thing, to see someone who cares is another. He was alarmed and he checked the eye with his torch, got me to read the eye chart, and generally, he bothered a real lot.  He called it cellulitis and wanted me to get an IV drip at the hospital. My husband was dropping me off before work and we didn’t have the time, so Dr. L said, ‘How bout we whack it with really powerful antibiotics, and you come back first thing in the morning?’ We did that and I slept all afternoon. It all worked, and I once more have two functioning eyes and  I’m grateful to Dr. L.’ He is not a detail I’ll forget.

Lost details are I’m sure, taken somewhere by elves and filed in libraries of leaves, but they always want to come home to us. This next entry is about rescuing them. It’s from a small battered journal written in autumn 2001, 24 years ago:

‘Music is broken apart emotion like a loaf of baked bread, all risen and warm and crusty.

My friend walked a kilometre in the rain for her special muesli but then she likes walking.

My brother makes me cry.

Raining day, huge bubbles hitting the roof and holding like tiny domes. Curious sulphur light comes with the rain and outside, the possum is coughing.’