Kookaburra in a Tree

Like many of the vanishing treasures of my childhood, lie the Women’s Weekly magazines in crumbling heaps in the room that was once a kitchen, but now locked up perpetually. There is a mosaic sink in the corner, which, to everybody’s surprise, leaked water, and right next to it, on the concrete slab, are stacks of yellowed issues of Women’s Weekly and Soviet Woman in Bengali. Dated in the months of 1972 to 1981, most of them lacking jackets, and several pages, with pictures scissored off for Home Science projects, they are cloistered, shallow, ‘warmified’ worlds which introduced me to beef casseroles and Crown Imperial Fritillaria.

Imbued with a tinkling, wispy quality of fairytales, yet rooted to very contemporary English aspirations, the stories which ran in the issues were rather unimaginative, but to a child’s consciousness, not yet exposed to English niceties and seasonal blooms, it was a treat to be savoured. The way a girl sucks on candy and swirls the taste in her mouth, biting it in eagerness, yet sorry when the candy disintegrates and sticks to her teeth, I tried to enjoy the laughing advances of hedge-flowers and the imperious autocracy of pruned roses. The story lost itself in the rich worlds which the English found exotic, and which I exoticised in a very English way. Authored by women with fragrant names, very like the heroines in their stories, frozen in the summer of 1972, they were stories about English women, with fair hair, or sun kissed auburn, even glossy brunettes, with pale skin, slim legs and long, shapely fingers which were un-weighted by the opulence that was the hallmark of their romantic contenders or adversaries. There was a Hollywood gloss to their descriptions, like musicals shot in bright studio light- but never too much of it. Now it is customary to sneer at Hollywood gloss, but I don’t know, it’s eminently lovable at certain ages. To read is to relive the experiences of the unburdened and sometimes foolish heroine; sometimes you can forget what the story is about, and whether Gisela manages to capture the tall widower’s fancy, or whether the kiss is at an inopportune moment, but just absorb the descriptiveness of the narrative, alone, and wander in borrowed worlds.