Women's History Month: Alyson Hill

My sister and I come from a long line of extraordinarily ordinary women. Well, that’s what they’d all have you believe anyway and is, most likely, what they all believed as well. But the women in our family are tough old birds and marvellous at keeping secrets - they are collectively the antithesis of Drama-Queens. In their small town histories, it was important that anything out of the ordinary was brushed under the carpet, locked in the closet or stuffed under the mattress. I know this now, because I remember when eavesdropping on particularly interesting chat, I would inevitably hear that “The Walls have ears..” and then chat would stop abruptly or change to the color of the knee-rug that Aunty Gwen was crocheting.

Once I became a girl of a ‘certain age’ (i.e. pregnant) the walls no longer had ears when I was around, and it was then I discovered more about the blood that ran through my veins through tidbits and stories given in agonisingly brief details. I learned to corner the story-teller at a later stage and tease more interesting bits out slowly and casually to get a proper story, but the imagined shame of scandal always weighed heavily on my Aunts and Nan. And so it was that I discovered the convict ancestor sent to Sydney for murder: she’d been out walking with a companion (boyfriend) when a man jumped out of the bushes and bashed her companion with a plank (he died), she very quickly twisted a rock in her hanky and hurled it slingshot-style at the attacker, it hit him on the head and he died some days later!

There was a Great-Great-Great Tyrant Grandfather who had a harem of women: his wife, her sister and a couple of Indigenous women who had moved in as Nannies. The resulting baker’s dozen children were brought up altogether and only two birth certificates were ever recorded.

Nan once walked next door and decked her neighbour ‘once and for all’ as she was sick of him coming home drunk and belting his wife. And once I asked if Bushranger Ben Hall was any relation to Granny Hall - the silence was suffocating and the looks could have cut glass! The lives of the women in my family, retrospectively, were better than soap operas to me but my female relatives showed great disdain for my fascination. They valued the good, the shiny, the new and couldn’t understood how wonderful their crazed glazed lives were to me.

It’s only now - with the passing of so many of our elders, that I get secret letters from my Aunt with all the details I longed for. She still thinks she is an ordinary woman but she recognises my love of stories, and I seemed to have passed some secret test, so she would like me to know ‘our family’: a ‘perfectly normal, ordinary family, though there may have been some nuts’. What I learned from these women, is how important it is to look behind the curtain; there is no ordinary.

Matthew Hughes To Hell and Back. The Damned Busters.

Time for another Angry Robot book. I really wanted this book to be about pilots doing a dam buster job on Hell - I've not seen that novel yet, and I was looking foward to it. The Damned Busters didn't have a single pilot in it, however. I might have to wait for the Damn Busters.

This isn't a long review because The Damned Busters isn't a long book (also, because I'm short on time right now - 3 more weeks of term and then life slows down a little). It may not be a long book, but it's sparkling and fun and somewhat actuarial in tone. I've always thought that one of my sisters would have been happy as an actuary. Now I'm certain of it. Demons and contracts and talk show hosts who fail to get their guests angry on prime time TV. And a Strike. Must not forget the Strike. Or the superheroishness. There is much superheroishness (although no spandex).

An actuary gets involved in the interests of various angelical and demonic beings and has to calculate his way out of it, finding his true love (or not) along the way. It all comes down to an old, old storyline…

This is one of those books where it's possible to say quite clearly "If you like so and so, you'll like such and such." It's very much in the Tom Holt model, humorous fantasy that riffs on matters religious and mythical. Even the underlying themes are similar. This is not a negative comment, by any means. There can never be too many deft and quirky fantasy novels. Reading for wet days. Reading for bad weeks. Reading for messy journeys. Its pace and style aren't quite as good as Holt's, but it's still, as I said, a lot of fun.

Women's History Month: Lauren Roberts

Mother’s Day in the U.S. is not that far off, but it’s a holiday I’ve always disliked for its falsity. As if there should be one day that we acknowledge what for most of us is the biggest influence—for good or bad—in our lives.

Fortunately, for me, it is a good one. I couldn’t always say that, of course. We fought during my teen years. As the oldest of five children, I got the unlovely experience of breaking away into adulthood first—oh, those times of angst!—when confusion, anger, and misunderstanding ripped our love into tatters of tears and frustration.

It wasn’t easy to repair those ribbons of love, but as I entered my thirties, forties and beyond they were repaired. And every day, sometimes minutes at a time, I give thanks for someone I think I am going to lose this year. My mother.

When Gillian first asked me to name my heroes I came up with two names: Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Cavell. And they are heroes. Personal ones, but public ones as well. I admire them for what they accomplished. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized my truest hero is Mom. Not because she is my mom—though I am fortunate in being able to say she is—but because she has run her life in accordance with the social dictates of her generation—becoming a wife and a mother, supporting her husband and raising her five children, all without complaint despite the fact she would have had a lot of legitimate complaints.

Mom was born in 1923 and brought up in the era of predetermined societal roles for women. Despite the interruption of World War II when she became a Rosie the Riveter for Douglas Aircraft Company, she followed those dictates closely.

She and Dad had been high school sweethearts, and when he returned from the war they married. I was born a year later. Because they were Catholics, my four siblings (plus two miscarriages) followed in rather close succession. Dad worked at AT&T, and for a number of years a second job at night at a gas station in order to make ends meet.

For Mom, making ends meet was no less hard. Today, there is so much more opportunity for connections and support for mothers but back then in the 1950s and 1960s you had only your neighbors to talk with—when you could get away from the endless rounds of meals and diapers. But I don’t think it was the tedium as much as the small humiliations that I didn’t learn about until just recently. The time she was taking on a housecleaning job to earn needed money and the woman of house wanted her to use her bare hands instead of a brush to clean the toilet bowl. (She refused.) The time the small neighborhood grocer commented to her that she only came to his (more expensive) store when she needed credit to buy food. (She elected to serve oatmeal for dinner rather than take the credit any more.) The time the family was using her brother’s vacation cottage at Lake Arrowhead and accidentally sat at someone else’s picnic table and were confronted with a woman who screamed that she didn’t know my uncle and to “get out.” (She and Dad offered a heartfelt apology for the misunderstanding and shepherded us to the sandy beach.)
I only found out about those from her sister, and I also found out this: never once during any of those awful times or other difficult times did she lose her temper or strike back. She may have felt terribly humiliated or embarrassed but she never responded in anger. She stood straight and tall—at least as tall as her 5’2” would allow her—and looked life in the face. She had dignity.

Today, Mom is 87 years old and increasingly frail. She is physically bent because of lifelong asthma but in my eyes she still stands tall and straight. Mom is one of my heroes not because she is related to me but because someone who can accept life without being defeated by its difficulties is a hero of magnificent proportions. And someone upon whom I base my own life.


Lauren Roberts is the founder and editor-in-chief at BiblioBuffet, an online literary salon. Her passions include books (and more books), reading, cats, swimming, occasional gourmet meals, friends, and quiet times. One of her few regrets in life is not yet winning the lottery because she has her eye on darn near every Penguin Classics book available and can't otherwise afford them. She can be seduced with quality champagne.

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This week is a bit of a delicate balancing act. Last week's emotions have caught up with me, but I can't put things off any longer. This means, of course, that I'm back to making lists.

I definitely had a list for today, but I've lost it. In its place, I've got four new review books and three of them are utterly gorgeous (one is merely not half bad at all). My crystal ball tells me that there will be reading in my near future. Also forms. One tonight and one tomorrow. Or two tomorrow. Three this week?


PS If you want to know what the test post was all about, just watch this space...