It was always just 'Minnie's Ring', an insignificant gold band with five small diamond chips. Mum kept it with her other treasures; a fake ruby necklace and earrings, a jade brooch, an artificial emerald necklace, and sundry baubles, bangles and beads. When Mum died, I was tempted to throw the ring, now minus a couple of its diamond chips, into the rubbish. It had no commercial or, as far as I knew, sentimental value. But Mum had referred to it often enough to cause me to pause.

I am standing in the kitchen of our house at Black Forest. I am about twelve years old—old enough to be able to move around the neighbourhood unsupervised. Mum and Dad are obviously away somewhere because I am asking my Aunt Chrissie if I may go to the movies in the afternoon with friends. She is my mother's maiden aunt, a short, chubby woman of about 60 with grey hair who has lived with us for as long as I can remember. Her facial features are thick and she is beginning to sprout bits of hair from her chin. In my child's eye, she is plain and unattractive, offering none of the warmth and tenderness of my mother. I am wary of her sharp tongue.

She is crying and doesn't want to give me permission. Unused to displays of emotion other than a sort of grumbling criticism from her, I am discomforted and look down at my feet, mumbling 'Oh, I'll be alright.' She tells me that her brother Alf is dying. I have had no experience of death, so I have no understanding of what feelings are shaking her and I am surly and stubborn. I want to go to the movies and to escape from the sight of her tear-streaked face. Whether she relented and allowed me to go, I cannot recall, but this was the only time I saw her cry.

*******************

Twentyfive years later, I am seated in one of the small chapels at Centennial Park cemetery. A minister assigned by the funeral parlour is rolling out the familiar phrases that encourage us to believe that Chrissie has passed into some heavenly realm where she will be eternally at peace—at least until the Last Judgement. There are five mourners; Charmian, an aunt and uncle, a cousin and myself. A few days earlier I had stood with Mum at her bedside, listening to her laboured breathing. Her body was a small mound in the bed, her sparse hair a straggle of grey on the pillow. Did we speak of her life? I can't recall. We were both sharply aware that in another hospital a few kilometres away my father's life was also at the ebb. Chrissie, who had lived with my parents for most of their married life, at least had the decency to predecease my father, if only by a few days.

The minister's voice is finally silent and we watch the coffin lowered into the floor. The minister blesses us and we leave the chapel. A few tributes of flowers have been offered—my mother, aunts and uncles—and among them a single long-stemmed rose. The funeral director collects the cards from the wreaths and hands them to me. The card from the single rose reads 'From your unknown daughter'. It is unsigned.

********************

Twenty years after the funeral, Charmian and I are in the car one Sunday afternoon. Mum, and her good friend Marge, are in the back seat, and we are driving around the Port Adelaide area where Mum lived as a child. The talk turns to family members and Chrissie's name is mentioned. The conversation is full of oblique references and hints, the listeners left to draw the threads together and weave their own story. Mum and Marge are recalling a boat trip to Ardrossan to visit Alf and and his wife Minnie when she and Marge were children. How young were they? Five years old perhaps? Chrissie is there and 'Gran Scott'—Chrissie's mother, a midwife. The sea is grey and choppy. A cold wind whips seaspray across the deck. The boat rolls and dips. Chrissie is seasick. The story is impressionistic, shapeless, a child's memoir, but the undercurrents are palpable.

**********************************

It was my mother's cousin, daughter of Chrissie's sister Emma, who brought the story out of the shadows.

'Minnie Hayes had a younger brother,' she told me a few years after Mum died. 'A dark, good-looking lad so they say. It was him who got Chrissie pregnant. Minnie was also pregnant at about the same time. But Minnie's baby was stillborn. So Gran Jarvis took Chrissie to Ardrossan either to have her baby, or after the baby was born. I guess they thought Ollie and Marge would be too young to know what was going on, but they obviously picked up enough to put two and two together and get close enough to four. So it was Gran who delivered Chrissie's baby, a daughter, and Minnie and Alf took her on and reared her as their own. A neat solution for all concerned.'

'Did—what was the daughter's name …?' I ask.

'Elsie.'

'Did Elsie know that she was adopted?'

'Not until Chrissie had died.'

'So all her life, Chrissie was just her "maiden aunt".'

'That would have been the way of it.'

************************************

Nearly thirty years after her death, ninety years since she sailed to Ardossan, either cradling her on daughter, or huddled in an overcoat to cover the shame of her swollen belly, I have to reconstruct my image of Chrissie. The few faded black-and-white photographs that remain are unflattering and it's hard to see her as young and spirited. Yet somewhere in her early twenties a spark of passion leaped the gap between Chrissie and Minnie's brother. Within what I remember as a dumpy old woman pulsed not only the memory of youthful passion, but also the twisting pain of watching her own daughter grow up calling another woman 'mother'. I have always seen her as a frustrated, virginal old maid. But she had experienced some form of loving, and had been denied its full expression. The values of the times would have laid a burden of guilt on her, and the presence of her daughter within the family circle would have only made that heavier.

Fifty-five years ago, as I pleaded with Chrissie to allow my own selfish needs to be with my mates, I had no understanding of or compassion for Chrissie. How could I know that the tears spilling onto her cheeks were not only for the pain of losing a loved brother, but for her the sense of loss she had had to carry for her whole life. And the only remaining symbol is a slim gold band with missing stones that, like her daughter, had belonged to someone else.

Olive Quintrell: the Canadian connection

Footnote: Chrissie (born Ellen May) was the tenth of thirteen children born to Edwin William and Carolyn ('Carry') Pearce (nee Lang). If Mum's memory is correct—that she was about 5 at the time, Chrissie would have been about 24 and Alf, 29.