The Missing Story.

I started watching the film Australia tonight. The presence of aboriginals reminded me of the story of Mrs Buxton’s mother which I thought I’d told on the blog some years ago, but no search term finds it so maybe I didn’t. OK.

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Mr and Mrs Buxton were a couple my parents met on holiday in Devon (through me, actually, and my pathetic attempt to use freshwater fishing tackle while fishing off the breakwater at Brixham. Mr Buxton took me under his wing and kitted me out with the sturdier stuff needed for sea fishing. I was ten at the time.)

Mrs Buxton came from Wales and they had her aged mother living with them. Old Mrs whatever-her-name-was came straight out of a black and white silent movie set in the Valleys before coal was discovered there – darkly dressed and darkly visaged, with a face lined like the Taff estuary and supported by legs bowed in a manner long out of fashion by the time I met her. But she was a kind old lady, and when my parents and the Buxtons went for a few drinks in a pub somewhere in the vicinity, she stayed in the car with me (children weren’t allowed in pubs in England in those days) and told me stories of the old times.

One night she recounted her time spent in the Australian outback where she had much contact with the local aboriginals. She said that they had taught her a lot of secrets about the mysteries of life, things about which most people had no knowledge. My interest was piqued immediately, but she said I was too young to understand such matters. If we were to come back to Devon the following year, however, she would tell me then.

Well, we did go back to Devon the following year, and we did arrange to meet up with the Buxtons again, and I was naturally champing at the bit to hear what the old lady had to say. And then I was told that she had died.

Can you imagine the frustration and disappointment I felt? By the age of eleven I was convinced that there was much esoteric knowledge to be learned, and Mrs Buxton’s mother was going to give me a foothold in the mysteries. When I learned that she had died it felt like somebody had cancelled Christmas. And even now, all these decades on, I still think about it and feel that there’s an empty space in my mind which is waiting to be filled.

And then I wonder whether I was not supposed to have that knowledge for some reason. We can never know, can we?