Sunday, May 10

It's a double celebration today, being both Mothers' Day and Jamie's birthday.  Every now and then, the events fall on the same day and that's always the excuse for a special celebration but, with the Covid-10 lockdown still in place in Tasmania, we are reduced to a chat on the telephone.  No matter, at least we're alive and well. 

The writing topics this week were a little limiting but I've chosen to write a piece on 'Waiting for Robert'.  Funny, all my classmates thought it was based on fact, but I had to reasure them there was not a word of truth in it.

We’re not a close family. Oh, as children, we were well looked after and were never neglected but, looking back I get the impression our parents saw nurturing as an obligation rather than as something they enjoyed.  It’s not surprising, I suppose, that we became very self-centred, thinking only of ourselves and only considering how situations would affect us personally.

Even as children, we followed our own paths, finding our own friends and our own individual interests. One of my sisters became obsessed with ballet, another wanted to be a musician and experimented with one instrument or another until she settled on the clarinet.  Robert, my older brother, played football.   I was the studious one, absorbing myself in books, and I joined the local Cub pack after reading The Jungle Book.  

On winter evenings, when it got dark early, my parents decided that I shouldn’t walk home from Cub meetings on my own, so it was arranged that I would go to the local football ground where Robert was training and wait for him to finish so that we could walk home together.  It wasn’t unusual for me to be left in Robert’s care; my parents didn’t see that their responsibilities extended  to going out of their way to pick me up.

I didn’t really mind but I had learned very early that Robert had no concept of good time-keeping. Like everything else he was involved with, his training sessions never seemed to finish on time so I found myself, night after night, sitting for what seemed like hours in a cold and draughty football ground, waiting for Robert to decide it was time to go home.

As we became older, we moved gradually away from the heart of the family.  A couple of us went off to different universities, others moved into their own places as soon as they could afford to.  We got together, of course, on significant but rare occasions, and a pattern started to evolve.  No matter what the occasion, Robert was always the last to arrive.  My wedding was delayed because Robert was late in picking up my parents.  He showed up late for the christening of my first child even though he was to be a god-parent.

The only regular occasion when the family invariably met together was for our mother’s birthday.  I have no idea when this day took on special significance but on the Sunday closest to April 16^th each year, the four siblings and their own families would gather with my mother and father for the celebration of the anniversary of her birth.  I suspect that everyone there would have preferred to be elsewhere but we were dutiful enough to accept that it was reasonable to set aside an hour of our time if it gave our mother some little pleasure.  But, of course, bloody Robert was always late and none of us could leave until at least an hour after he arrived.  

Our lives might have continued for years in this stilted way, each of us in our own little silo, meeting only on rare occasions, but the day came when we received news that Robert had died.  He had been running to catch a train, late again; he tripped and cracked his head on the platform, dying in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

We gathered as a family in the church to say our farewells, then set off for the local crematorium.  We should have anticipated what would happen next.  The hearse carrying Robert’s body broke down on the way to the crematorium and there was a delay while a replacement vehicle was sent.  We had always joked that Robert would be late for his own funeral, and he was.