One Life: My Mother's Story

Kate Grenville

(Canongate, £14.99)

Reviewed by Lesley McDowell

As Kate Grenville says herself, "My mother wasn't the sort of person biographies are usually written about." She wasn't a public figure and she left little public record behind. But she is a highly recognisable one to many women: she had a career, she had a family, she had a marriage that was less than perfect. In amongst the daily grind, the supposed ordinariness of her life, are the glints of gold, the details that mark out something less usual.

Grenville herself is a highly acclaimed Australian writer who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her mother, Nance, would have relished all of that, harbouring writing dreams of her own. But as Grenville shows, women just didn't do that sort of thing, especially not with Nance's background. Her grandmother, Sarah, married Thomas Maunder, an illiterate cockney who worked hard enough to eventually own his own farm. He permitted only his youngest daughter, Dolly, to be educated but wouldn't allow her to fulfil her dream of becoming a teacher. Instead, she was pushed into marrying her father's champion shearer, Bert Russell, who had a secret illegitimate child.

Dolly and Bert had three children, including Nance. Dolly grew into a deeply unhappy woman, thwarted in her ambition and tied to a man she didn't love and who didn't love her. It made her a distant and often angry mother - Nance recalls her mother shouting at her, "You children! You children don't matter!" Nance herself did well at school, but in an echo of her mother's marriage, was pushed, only this time not into a relationship but into a career she didn't want: pharmacy. Her hankering may have been after poetry and authorship, but during the Depression, pharmacists were in demand, and a job was the only thing that mattered.

Grenville tells the story of her mother's 'ordinary' life in both rural and urban Australia in the early years of this century with calm precision, aware that she's responsible for someone else's story, and experienced enough to know she can't sidestep the negative stuff. She uses fragments of a memoir her mother left behind, as well as diary entries, to construct a novelistic narrative where events have meaning and some symbolic value, the way they so rarely do in real life. Does this approach lessen or add to the 'truth' in her account of Nance's life? It surely gives us psychological truth: Nance's marriage to Ken, Grenville's father, was not a success and it undoubtedly shaped her, as marriage did so many women in the days before second-wave feminism. Australia might have been one of the first countries to give women the vote, but the social acceptance marriage conferred was still crucial.

It must have been tricky for Grenville to negotiate the rocky terrain of her parents' unhappy marriage. Ken was from a middle-class English family but had rejected their values for revolutionary socialism. Nance fell for his revolutionary zeal, mistaking his political passion for other kinds of passion, which sadly for her, he lacked. They found they had little in common, Nance growing to despise the easy way her husband threw off one political belief when it didn't work out the way he expected, and simply adopted another. Ken, meanwhile, was a man constantly frustrated by his own ambitions and the lack of their success. A moderately cerebral man, he was actually happiest when building things with his own bare hands.

It couldn't have made for a happy household. In the midst of it lay Nance's own career ambitions. The war had given women like her some measure of independence but once babies arrived, that came to an end. There's little doubt that Grenville is most sympathetic to her mother's plight. She doesn't demonise her father, but her interest here is to represent her mother's feelings and thoughts, a reflection perhaps of a great army of silent women, grieving in private over the few choices life has permitted them.

And yet this is not a depressing story, nor is it a hopeless one. We see the paths Nance might have taken - the widower boyfriend, Charlie Gledhill, for instance, who left for Edinburgh to practice as a doctor and who invited a young Nance to go with him. What might her story have been, had she taken that road and not this one? Any life story is inevitably full of such speculation, but Grenville doesn't focus too much on regret. She touches lightly on her mother's brief affair with a German neighbour, shortly before Grenville herself, the youngest of her parents' three children, was born; she shows us Nance's despair when her beloved elder brother Frank dies of starvation in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, but also her recognition of aspects of him in her two sons.

Nance is a woman caught up in the web of social and family history who must wriggle and twist to get a place that fits her and doesn't suffocate her completely. Her story is the story of millions of women, of course, and Grenville almost relishes the universality of its apparent routineness, the inclusiveness of such regular living. She knows that behind every marriage and every family there is more than meets the eye, but at the same time, she knows that in few families there are really bombs waiting to go off. Nance is never a pitiable figure; Grenville gives her both grace and dignity in her everyday struggles.