My grandfather, younger then than I am now: a romantic, who wore a heart of New Zealand greenstone on his watch-chain; a chameleon, who hid behind a uniform, blew a silver whistle.

He had a Bible with pictures at the back: smudged pink and buff views of the Brook Kedron, the Mosque of Omar, the Wailing Wall. There were plump Dianas with lemon-drop breasts, Chaldean temples, Sennacherib’s prism, the sun-god (Shamash) in his shrine — but only black and white.

He painted drummer-boys framed by garlands of roses; read Byron, Longfellow, Mrs. Hemans bound in calf. He printed ex libris: c. e. goodridge on each fly-leaf, drew a profile that brooded by ‘On Leaving Newstead Abbey’, penned on Mrs. Hemans in Gothic that was wobbly:

From

Mother

May xix mdccccxiii

Being the 24th. Anniversary

of my

Birthday

Adam Lindsay Gordon, who had been in the South Australian Police Force too, was important to him, and on the first page of his Collected Poems he wrote:

May the Devil with a fiendish yell,

With toasting fork and sulphur smell,

Burn the churl in hottest Hell,

Neglecting to return this book TO:

followed by his signature, underneath.

After his death Iris went back to the bakery; became the dutiful daughter, served in the shop, looked after Reece. Perhaps she still dreamed; read novels called The Scarlet Kiss, Pink Purity, The Wild Widow; played her piano diminuendo in the dusk; sighed over Valentino; waited for her Sheik.

He came.

She married the station-master at Outer Harbour.

(Other than his name, Hugh, there was little more I knew, for my grandmother and mother refused to talk of him. He buried for ever Iris, the lusty girl. He cast a pall over the childhood of my mother. He was perverted, sadistic, cruel.

‘What did he do?’ I asked.

But it was hopeless: they said that some things were best not talked of — it doesn’t do any good, you know, to bring it up again — least said, soonest forgotten. And besides, it still hurt. My mother, when pressed, brought herself to tell that he drowned puppies and kittens and made her watch; that he trod on her fingers when she played at his feet. Then her voice trailed off; she refused to probe deeper. I did not ask again.)

The station-master ran from marriage to Murray Bridge, taking a young girl with him — pursued by Iris, her sister-in-law, the young girl’s parents.

With the divorce, the fiasco of my grandmother’s second marriage was forgotten. Charles Ebenezer’s picture hung in the dining-room at Rose Street with the coloured reproduction of the Bluff at Victor Harbour and the dear little thumb-in-mouth girl, lost for ever on the sands of Dee. I stared at him high above the sideboard. I could not link his silver-buttoned perfection with the Iris I knew.

Gone, were the nainsook petticoats and the rose-bud bandeaux. Gone, was the Iris who rode the horse on the sand, who painted ox-eyes on the tea-cup, and combined weaving-stitch and crochet with the point de Venise.