Rebellious Daughters Read Online Free Page B

is a baby reindeer. Who’d have thought it?
    When she gets home, daddy tells her the baby dolphins stuff is complete nonsense. She believes him. Daddy is perfect and always right, and she dotes on him.(I’ve doted on him for 46 years but am aware of occasional flaws.) Sometimes he is obliged to tell her off, always saying she has done a bad thing, not that she is a bad girl. She pulls back, bursts into floods of tears, and has to rush in and cuddle him to comfort her for being reproved. An orgy of tearful hugs follows. I don’t know what this will do for general rebelliousness. But it makes for a happy daughter.
    Virtuous and hard-working, I describe myself. A dutiful daughter. And a prig with it. I agreed with my father about the badness of the Top 40, and reproached my sister for her interest. Now I am grateful to Brenda; what scraps and rags of fifties’ popular music I am pleased to know came from that involuntary listening to her radio. Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. The twelfth of never. The itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini . These give me a tiny credibility where popular culture is concerned.
    I often think about my parents and my attitude toward them. I regarded them as a bit clueless, but gallant and brave, as innocents who had to be protected. A bit as Bianca regards me. I could know things but they mustn’t. I think my son James often felt like that about me when he was young. Even now, as he moves through his forties, I discover odd things, because he lets them slip, about what he was up to then, what I was saved from.
    There’s another daughter in my life, mine, whom I haven’t talked about. She died 11 years ago. I am writing a book about her, a memoir, called Words for a Dead Daughter , but who knows if that title will stick. That takes up all my thought about her. You might look back over my life as a landscape of loss, but that’s actually not true. Much is lost now, but when I had it, it was marvellous, and that stays with me. The past is another country, but when I lived there I was very happy. As now I am.

WUNDERMÄRCHEN : A RETELLING OF MY GRAND MOTHER
    KRISSY KNEEN
    Once upon a time my grandmother won the lotto.
    But is this really the beginning of the story? There are actually several beginnings to several stories about my grandmother.
    Once upon a time my grandmother fled the former Yugoslavia and lived happily ever after in Alexandria in Egypt.
    Once upon a time my grandmother fled Egypt with her two daughters and lived happily ever after in England.
    Once upon a time my grandmother migrated to Australia where she lived happily ever after with her two daughters and her two granddaughters.
    You see, my grandmother was obsessed by fairy tales. She collected different versions of these stories – by Perrault, the brothers Grimm, Anderson. She liked the tellings and the retellings, comparing one against the other. I am not sure what she was looking for. I wonder if she was trying to find the definitive version. The actual truth.
    The problem with fairy tales and real life is there is no truth, no definitive version of events. There are just multiple iterations. In the version I am going to tell here, the ‘once upon a time’ part is the night my grandmother won the Lotto. In my grandmother’s version, this very moment would be her ‘happily ever after’. Winning the lotto and, as a result, moving to Queensland to open a tourist attraction called Dragonhall was to her the happy end of her tale of displacement, migration and struggle. But for me it was only the beginning.
    I was 14 years old, about to turn 15. The three generations of my family lived in Blacktown in NSW. My grandmother, my mother, my aunt, my sister and I all crowded into a relatively small suburban house. My grandfather, the only man in our house, was silent, absent. He was the sound of his piano, muffled from behind the closed door of his room when he