'Completing the set'

  On an early February evening in 1959, I drove into my parents' driveway, switched off the motor and sat for a time trying to compose the words for the news I had to break to them. I wondered if they had noticed the level of tension I had been carrying for the last few weeks as Charmian and I waited first for the overdue period and then for the doctor's verdict. Now, the pregnancy confirmed, Charmian's parents told and our decision to marry made, I had to tell my parents. I knew that they would be disappointed on at least two accounts. The decision to marry would mean that my plans to accompany them on their trip to my brother and his family in Canada would have to be abandoned. More than that, I would have significantly blotted my copybook in my mother's estimation.

         'You were the golden boy,' my cousin Miriam told me many years later as we recalled the time. 'Your Mum was so proud of you. Head prefect at school. Star student. University graduate. In her eyes, you could do no wrong. But boy, did she let the family know that you had let the side down over this!'

         I sat in the car that night, trying to focus my attention on the task before me, experiencing a jumble of emotions. 'Shame' is too strong a word, but certainly embarrassment at, in the parlance of the time, 'having to get married'. Some sadness, because I knew that I would be causing my parents both disappointment and trouble. Excitement tinged with apprehension at the prospect of having to set up home and become the provider for a family. But the dominant emotion was that strange and foolish pride men feel at having a woman carry 'their' child.

         I took a deep breath and walked into the house. I paused at my parents' bedroom and knocked timidly.

'You awake?' I asked softly, half hoping that there would be no response and I could avoid the confrontation until the next day. But my mother was still awake.

'Can I talk to you?' I asked, entering and sitting on the end of the bed. My father stirred into wakefulness. The words I had rehearsed flowed out easily enough. Charmian was pregnant. We were in love. We wanted to marry as soon as possible.

My mother's response was as I expected. The descending cadence of the 'Oh Neil' betrayed her feelings. My father murmured something placating. I suppose we talked of possible arrangements, but all I remember is the tone of disappointment.

To their credit, they never expressed this to Charmian and threw themselves with typical vigour into arrangements for the wedding. Dizzy with love and the expectation of marriage, driven by the need to establish regular employment and housing, preferably at a reasonable distance from the immediate scrutiny of others, I was blissfully unaware of my parents' needs. They were, as ever, generous and diplomatic—except, as Miriam says, of Mum's conversations with her sisters and brothers!

         The brides of my great-great-great grandfather Richard Quintrell, my great-great grandfather John Quintrell, my great-grandfather Stephen Quintrell and my grandfather Stephen William Quintrell were all pregnant on their wedding days.

         'Well,' I thought. 'Dad could have done more than murmur platitudes when I came up with the news! I know we weren't as close as either of us would have liked, but it seems that it wouldn't have been too hard for him to take me aside and say, "Don't worry, son. There's a lot of it in our family!'

         Not long after, putting together my mother's family tree, I noticed that her mother Lily was married at the age of 16 years and five months and gave birth to her first child the day after the wedding. My grandfather Fred Scott was only 20 at the time and may have escaped some unpleasant legal proceedings relating to under-age sex by marrying Lily.

         'Well, there you are,' I thought. Maybe it's in the genes!'

         But wait, there's more.

         Just a couple of months ago, in conversation with one of Charmian's cousins, we discovered that Bert Brown and Tilly Atkins, Charmian's mother's parents were also well under way with their first child on their wedding day.

         'I wish Mum was here now,' Charmian laughed. 'I'd like to have a word in her ear about her response to my situation!'

         'All we need now,' I said jokingly, 'is to find that your Wilson grandparents were similarly compromised and then we'd have a complete set of grandparents pregnant at the altar.'

         So the next week, in the Public Library, we got out the records and traced the dates of the wedding of Eusebius Wilson (28 years) to Caroline Lemaistre (26 years) at the Baptist Manse in Adelaide on the 26^th August 1898. Avice Clare was born on 5^th December 1898.

         So, here's to our four sets of grandparents—Fred and Lily, Steve and Edie, Bert and Tilly, and Eusebius and Caroline. We've completed the set. And don't we wish our parents were here to sock it to them! 

 

Neil Quintrell

September 2005

        

Creative Writing