Vulnerability

Arriving in the country on holiday from boarding school when still a child, thrilled to be with my cousins, I let on that a water pump operated so successfully because it was aided by atmospheric pressure. No, no, no, said my formidable Uncle Hugh, it was "Suction." I was crushed because I didn't know how to argue from physics, oh so new to me from class. I must have been aware, even then, that Uncle Hugh was not going to be seen possibly bested in front of his sons.

What was really going on, but unprovable, was that he was in a fury that his mother's money, my Grandmother's money, was being used to put me in an expensive boarding school, The King's School Paramatta, which would be a drain on the inheritance he hungered for, the money he had to have to be redeemed, he hoped, in his wealthy wife's eyes, and thus rid him of the imagined stigma of having married for money. His wife's family owned the town's huge department store.

I had to take elementary school physics twice because the first year out of public school I flunked in private school, and had to repeat. That's one of the reasons, of several, that years later, in America, I was twenty before I entered college. Even today I love to read physics even though I lack higher math with which to understand.  In school I was required to memorize Archemedes' "When a body is wholly or partly immersed in a fluid without dissolving, there is a resultant upthrust equal to the weight of the fluid displaced." An elephant can be weighed by leading it onto a barge and then calculating the weight of the fluid displaced.

My Uncle, the same Hugh, was incensed that I told my cousins I'd read and found fascinating  Middlemarch the novel by George Eliot (actually Marianne Evans) an opinion I was to pay dearly for. I can't think of any reason he was so hot on the subject. Had he not read it? Perhaps he knew the story was about a brilliant woman married to a pedant who dragged her down?

Such family biography is fuel for my novel. Many of the facts will be altered to serve fiction. For example, 'Hugh' will definitely not be a blood relative. Well, for example, my mother, and Hugh look as if they couldn't possibly be from the same parents. So, I'll make him adopted, heh, the rejected child of one of my dear Grandmother's maids.  

"Writing is aggression," quoth Academic, Jaqueline Rose.

Barry