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NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE ORAL STORY OF WORKING-CLASS LIFE as told to Fisher Lavell  True story 1940s The first time old Andy came to the little house in Pretty Valley, Daisy thought it was just a regular neighbour visit and offered him tea. But very shortly, he grabbed her and she fought him, shoving and yelling and trying to wrestle away. That’s when he punched her in the face and she came to on the floor with him raping her, but she fought him even then, gouging and raking at his face. He stopped long enough to punch her another time, then he finished what he was doing.
When he was gone, Daisy dragged herself up and sat on the chair by the window, crying and holding herself. What if he came back? Her face was bloody and swollen, lip broken, and she was burning bad in the lady parts, he’d been very rough. The baby was wailing back in the room. But she could hardly move, sat there dazed and crying till Danny came home for supper. In bed, they talked about what to do. Danny said they’d go to town and report it to the constable, but Daisy said, “What good would that do? Everybody knows the family I come from, dirt poor, have-nothings. And him an upstanding citizen, it would be my word against his.” And then, talk would spread all over, she said. How could she bear for people to know… what was done to her… and judge her for it? Danny stayed home with her all week, watching the road, on guard. The fever he had had as a child had twisted his legs and bent his back and although he was only twenty-five, he was stooped like an old man and often in pain. Daisy smiled sadly. “Danny,” she told him, “what in the world would you do if he did come?” But he didn’t come and when Danny went back to his job on the Monday, they were not happy with him. “Either work or don’t work,” the boss told him. “You’re lucky to have a job at all.” The second time Andy came down the long dirt road, she grabbed the baby and shoved herself back into a dark corner behind the dresser. But she was found and dragged out, begging and pleading, “Please, no, no, no.” He was a big, muscular man and she, barely five foot tall. Gouging his fingers in her fleshy arms, he growled, “Are you gonna put that kid down or do you want to have it in the mix with you?” So she put the baby girl in the crib and he threw Daisy on the bed, laughing, saying why should he hurt his knees on the floor when there’s a nice soft bed. He jumped on her rough, tearing her clothes, and started raping her but she tried to resist, crying and begging. He stopped moving and looked her in the eye. “Do you want it nice? Or do you want to fight? Because I can fight, too.” She turned her head aside and stopped the struggle, just sobbing and flinching, while he finished taking what he wanted. When Danny came home, they talked. Again, he said they’d go to the constable in Swan River and again, she said the constable would do nothing and it would only come back on them. He said what about her brothers, could they go talk to old Andy? She knew what kind of talk he meant and she said she didn’t want her brothers to go to jail. What good would that do? “Well then, I’ll go talk to him,” Danny said. And she cried and clung to him. “Danny, no, he’ll kill you. I just know it!” She cried and wailed. “Don’t go up there, Danny, please God. Please don’t go up there.” And they cried all night and clung onto each other and didn’t know what to do. He stayed home the next day but they were almost out of flour and sugar both, down to potatoes and turnips in the bin. They desperately needed the money Danny made and she was terrified he’d lose his job. So the next morning, she got up early and made him a nice, hot breakfast. Porridge and salt and the last of the butter. Then she called him and said, “Time to go to work.” At the table, he was quiet and sad, but she said she’d be fine. “It will be alright, Danny,” she told him. “You’ll see.” It was a week later the next time Andy came. He was on the porch already when she heard him, but she just walked into the bedroom and put the baby in the crib. He marched into the room, ready for battle, but she just took off her bottoms and lay down on the bed, staring up. So he mounted her and did his thing, not even rough or mean, and when he was done, he sat on the edge of the bed, chatting all friendly while she got up and straightened herself. And that’s how it went for months when old Andy came around. Sometimes, he asked her for tea after and she would give it to him. And he’d talk about the kind of crops he had planted, or how much he missed his deceased wife, or how he had modeled his house on the sturdy, stone houses they used to build back in England. Whatever he felt like. Once he asked if she’d play a game of cribbage with him and she paused. “Well… if there’s time before I gotta make Danny’s supper…” So they played a quick hand and he left. The following spring, they got a chance to move to a place near Kenville that was closer to her mother and closer to the mill, where Danny might get work. And when the baby was born in the summer, she named him Dan Herbert, after his father. They both were certain he looked just like Danny. “Why, lookit his eyes, the curve of his little head,” Danny grinned. “He’s a spittin’ image of me.” One day, Danny came home for supper, saying he heard that Mary and Fred Halindale had moved into the house they used to be in, down the road from old Andy. They were building a big, new house, big barn, and everything. Lots of money in that family. Later, lying in bed with the little guy between them, he asked her, “Do you think Mary Halindale will be alright?” “Probably,” she said. “Her husband is tall and big, and they got them two boys, healthy big sons.” When the baby finished nursing and drifted off, she laid him gently into the little cradle, then snuggled further into Danny’s warmth. “Anyway, better her than me,” she said. *This true story from the 1940s was told to me in 2005 by Daisy’s sister, Petunia. All names changed to protect the innocent (and the guilty).
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 Dad storytelling at the table, 2004 I come by storytelling honestly; I was raised in a working-class storytelling culture. Both my mother and my father were storytellers in their own right. My father was the teller of manly stories. Tales about men and work and fighting, animal attacks, tragic accidents and gruesome death. Split-second decisions with powerful consequences. Heroism and success, or strife and payback, or tragedy unending. My mother’s stories were more the private sort that women tell out of earshot of men. Stories often focused on what she called the double standard--sexism. True stories of the dark sides of certain men; assaults, unwanted pregnancy, ruined reputations. And then women’s resistance, through speaking up, telling off, fighting back, banding together. Or, in the absence of power, sometimes a more womanly sort of come-uppance, through secret channels and covert allies. When all else failed, she chose a sort of serenity, leaving with God, or Fate, the final justice. “He’ll get his. Don’t worry,” she would say. “He’ll get his in the end.” Do not imagine us sitting cross-legged at the hearth, nodding thoughtfully, while the wise elder holds forth. An oral storytelling culture doesn’t relegate stories to performance alone; rather, storying is a way of thinking and communicating. In the working-class, rural culture where I grew up, stories were ingrained in our thought, they were part of how we talked. Rather than conversing in a linear way, polite and formulaic or with logical arguments unfolding, our conversations would naturally just veer off into stories. People might be talking together on any topic at all and then, when a point was to be introduced or illustrated or deepened, the speaker would simply tell a story. This was often followed by a story on the part of the other speaker, and that story might echo the first speaker’s point, or it might detract from it, or it might introduce another factor or perspective, and the conversation would proceed from there. An illustration. In 1995, I was away at university taking coursework in Education and Gender Studies. Home for a summer visit, I was sitting with my dad in the yard on old banged-up kitchen chairs, watching my children run and play in the big field. I was telling him about some of the things I was learning; women’s 20th Century history, the suffrage movement, sexism in the professions, women disallowed in faculties of law and medicine. “This was when your mother, my grandma, was a young woman,” I observed. Then I shared an anecdote about a professor who I felt had it in for me because I had missed an assignment deadline when my children had been sick with Chicken Pox. I said I thought the sexism towards women was still real, it had just gone underground. “But,” I told him with a chuckle, “they ain’t gonna stop me now.” There was an amicable silence, followed by my dad’s quiet chortle. “Jesus!” he said, grinning. “Sometimes, I wonder what kind of woman my mother even was.” Then he told the story about my grandmother in 1905, fighting a bull who was goring her first husband. Literally, she took the bull by the horns and wrestled him off that man.  Grandma Josephine Lavell, 1960 This is the story of Josephine that leads off the first chapter of my novel, A Seven Year Ache. I have ten-year old Rosie conveying the story as told by her big brother, Kenny. But it’s my dad’s story, and told in his voice. Oral stories can be a treasure trove of material for the writer. And stories can be ambiguous in a way that linear argument cannot. There are often multiple possible interpretations of meaning and intent. That’s as it should be. I am not saying, by the way, that every story is wide open to interpretation and can mean whatever the listener wants. No, oral stories have a limited number of possible interpretations, especially since the listener knows the speaker and so this, rightly, informs the most likely meanings and intentions of the story. When you grow up in a working-class, storytelling culture, not only do you develop your own repertoire of stories, but you also can keep a hope chest of the stories of others. I cannot express how powerful it is for me that, with my parents, grandparents, and all my aunts and uncles having left this earth, I still have their stories. At times, I feel that, having their stories, in some small way, I still have them here with me. And those stories, in actual fact, sustain me in my darkest hours. “Buck up,” I tell myself. “You are the granddaughter of Josephine Lavell, for God sake.” They are not beautiful stories in the conventional sense; in fact, they are almost always hard stories, complex and unsettling and difficult to hear. Yet in this, they guide and warn and give depth and inspiration to my life here and now. When my father was a little boy in 1937, his big sister, Eileen, then seventeen years old, was impregnated by her married employer and died under questionable circumstances. The fact my aunt Eileen had died at age seventeen was general knowledge. It was only in the 1990s, during a visit with another elderly aunt, that the whole truth came out. The truth that the women knew and quietly carried over the years. The story of Eileen became the flesh and the bone for my novel’s third chapter, Mother’s Constitutional. My father had seven sisters, my errant Lavell aunties. Their worlds abounded with every kind of abuse imaginable. They lived troubled and difficult lives, often dying young. Today, in my mid-60s, I have already out-lived six of the seven.  True Story, Eileen Lavell d. 1937 “Ever remembered, ever loved” I never met my auntie Eileen, she died so long ago. But because I know her story, she is both real and important to me. And a couple of times a year, I still go and visit her grave. I place a single flower there, my black Shepherd dog lolling in the grass, and I tell my auntie that she is not forgotten.
Oral stories, handed down, illuminate the lives of people long ago, but they also illustrate themes of social class and gender, showing how, on personal and systemic levels, people’s money, prestige, and power, or the lack of these, could enhance and privilege their lives, or bend them, sully them, and pervert them utterly. |
AuthorFISHER LAVELL IS A WORKING-CLASS WRITER. HER FIRST NOVEL, A SEVEN YEAR ACHE, IS A TALE OF LOSS, UPHEAVAL, AND LONGING. Archives
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