Nance was a week short of her sixth birthday when she and Frank were roused out of bed in the dark and lifted into the buggy, squashed in with bedding, the cooking pots rattling around in the back, and her mother shouting back towards the house: Goodbye, Rothsay, I hope I never see you again!
When Kate Grenville's mother died she left behind many fragments of memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change. In many ways Nance's story echoes that of many mothers and grandmothers, for whom the spectacular shifts of the twentieth century offered a path to new freedoms and choices. In other ways Nance was exceptional. In an era when women were expected to have no ambitions beyond the domestic, she ran successful businesses as a registered pharmacist, laid the bricks for the family home, and discovered her husband's secret life as a revolutionary.
One Life is an act of great imaginative sympathy, a daughter's intimate account of the patterns in her mother's life. It is a deeply moving homage by one of Australia's finest writers.
A brilliant read
“It was different for Nance. She wasn’t dependent on a man. In fact, she thought that might be part of the problem. She’d been running her own life for so long, she was used to shaping things as she wanted…….She was like those girls who learned to dance with other girls, taking turns to be the man. They never got the hang of following, once they knew what it was like to lead.”
One Life is a biography of Nance Isobel Gee, written by her daughter, popular Australian author, Kate Grenville. Nance was born in 1912. Against the odds for a woman of her humble background, Nance attended Sydney University, became a registered pharmacist and owned her own pharmacy. But this simplistic summation of her life is completely inadequate, for Nance did much, much more with her life. As Grenville relates the incidents and events that punctuated Nance’s life, she takes the reader back to another era, one on the cusp of major change. Schooling, work, war, sexual discrimination, motherhood, political affiliations and even building a house feature in this interesting and entertaining memoir: “Why shouldn't a woman lay bricks? The world would never change if someone wasn't prepared to be the first.”
While this may be a memoir, Grenville still manages to treat the reader to some wonderfully evocative prose: “They woke to a day so hot and still the air was like something solid. All morning a cloud gathered on the horizon and by afternoon it filled the sky, dark with a dangerous green underbelly like a bruise. Then one great blast of wind, and the hail starting all at once, like someone spilling peas out of a colander” is just one example. Many of the images on the twenty-four pages of photographs will strike a chord with readers of a certain vintage, who may well have similar photographs of their own family.
Grenville explains: “Her story is unusual in some ways, but in other ways it’s the archetypal twentieth-century story of the coming of a new world of choices and self-determination” Those who knew her have described Nance Gee as a remarkable woman: this is a description which Grenville’s biography proves is certainly very apt. Once again, Grenville treats her readers to a brilliant read.
Marianne, 25/03/2015
