Chapter 21 — Germaine

The music nun, the repeated piano lessons of my early childhood, the ritual of getting out silently, and the effect those experiences may have had on my relationship with music for decades.

The Music Nun

Germaine comes back to me through music.

I remember her as an elderly nun. She probably had ordinary duties around the convent or school as well, but that is not how she has remained in my memory. Germaine was the music nun. She was associated with the piano and with what was described, or what I later came to describe, as my being given “special treatment.”

I was very young when it began. I had previously placed Germaine somewhere around five or six years of age, but I do not want to make the boundaries firmer than my memory permits.

I now have a stronger sense that Germaine overlapped with Vincent as well as with the earlier period involving Ursula. I feel that Vincent was sometimes the nun who sent me across to the convent for the music lesson.

My childhood did not divide itself conveniently into one nun ending and another beginning.

There were the smaller grades and later the bigger grades. I associate Ursula and Germaine strongly with the earlier years and Vincent more strongly with the later ones, but there was overlap.

Looking back, I think the periods with Germaine became strangely disconnected periods for me.

They happened repeatedly, yet they do not sit naturally inside my memory of ordinary school days. It is almost as though the music lessons became a separate compartment from the rest of what was happening around me.

That may be one reason I have found Germaine difficult to place precisely against the other nuns. The experiences were there, and were repeated for more than a year, but they seem to have become detached from an ordinary sense of sequence.

The Lesson

For more than a year, as I remember it, I was sent to the convent for music lessons three times a week, sometimes four times or more.

Calling them music lessons gives quite the wrong impression of what I learned.

After all that time I had so little actual practice that I could barely pick out God Save the Queen with one finger on each hand.

The lessons followed a pattern which became remarkably repetitive.

Germaine sat on her stool at the piano and I sat on a chair beside her. She would strike the keyboard and loudly count:

“one, two, three, four.”

She would continue like that for a while.

Looking back, I have sometimes wondered whether the loud piano and counting were intended to ensure that anyone within hearing distance would assume that an ordinary music lesson was taking place.

I cannot know that this was her intention. I can only describe how the routine appears to me now.

After a time she would make me stand, lower my pants and underwear, and sexually fondle me.

She would then sit beside me and continue touching me while striking notes on the piano with her left hand.

At this point she could become very animated.

I remember her almost jumping up and down on the piano stool. Her eyes would be closed and it was as though she was no longer looking at anything around her.

Then she might become quite still for a while.

After that she could begin playing loudly again before eventually moving away from the piano to the lounge chair.

She would have me play a scale while she lay back in the chair and masturbated beneath her nun's habit.

Eventually she would shudder, become still, close her eyes and fall asleep.

There is a strange detail in my memory of this.

I was relieved that she did this herself. I was not required to touch her intimately.

In the circumstances of a small child being sexually abused, even that distinction could feel like something for which to be grateful.

That is difficult to write now, but it reflects the logic available to the child I was.

I was not comparing what was happening with safety.

I was comparing one form of abuse with another.

The Repetition

I think Germaine became accustomed to the routine.

The individual occasions do not stand separately in my memory because there was so little to distinguish one from another.

She sat at the piano.

She counted.

She touched me.

She played with one hand.

She became animated, sometimes almost bouncing on the stool with her eyes closed.

She might become still and then begin playing loudly again.

Eventually she moved to the lounge chair.

She masturbated.

She fell asleep.

I got dressed.

I got out quietly.

Then another day came and I was sent back again.

When I later tried to talk about Germaine, I found that I had surprisingly little narrative to give. There were not dozens of clearly separate stories.

There was one experience repeated over and over.

Something does not have to contain a new dramatic event each time for its repetition to matter.

In Germaine's case, the repetition may itself be one of the most important parts of the story.

Getting Out

Once Germaine had fallen asleep, another routine began.

I waited until I thought it was safe.

Then I pulled my clothes back into place and prepared to leave.

At first I was too small to reach the high door handle.

I would quietly move a little footstool across to the door and stand on it so that I could reach high enough to open the door.

Opening it was only the first problem.

The part that frightened me most was closing it again without allowing the latch to click loudly enough to wake Germaine.

I had to get down, move the little footstool out of the way, slip through the doorway and then somehow reach the handle from the corridor side.

For a period there was a dresser in the corridor.

I could climb onto it so that I could reach the outside handle, turn it, pull the door closed and release the latch as quietly as possible.

Then somebody moved the dresser.

After that I began getting a chrome-framed chair with a green-covered seat from the kitchen.

I carried it quietly to the doorway, climbed onto it, reached the handle and closed the door.

Then I returned the chair to the kitchen before leaving the convent and sneaking home.

Eventually I grew tall enough to reach the handle without using furniture.

Even then, closing the door silently remained the difficult part.

Most of these lessons occurred before school finished for the afternoon. My recollection is that there was usually nobody else around the convent.

Being discovered while I was moving furniture, trying to close the door or leaving therefore felt like another danger to manage.

The objective was not simply to escape from the room.

I had to leave without waking Germaine and, as far as I could manage, without leaving obvious evidence that I had gone.

Once outside, I sneaked home.

I did not tell anyone what Germaine had been doing to me.

More than half a century would pass before I could speak about it.

The Click of a Door

The movement required to get out remained somewhere in me.

Decades later it surfaced during an assessment with Dr Georgiana Antoce. I have described elsewhere in this book how I found myself repeating the movement towards a door and how the sound of the consulting-room latch brought me suddenly back to an awareness of where I actually was.

I do not need to tell that whole episode again here.

What matters in Germaine's story is what it revealed about the original experience.

The memory had retained not simply an account of something that happened. It had retained an action.

Get dressed.

Reach the handle.

Open the door.

Get through it.

Reach the outside handle.

Close the door without allowing the latch to click.

Get away.

I cannot remember deciding that I needed to be silent.

There was no discussion in which somebody taught me the safest way to leave the room.

I simply knew that I must not wake her.

That is one of the difficulties in writing about childhood experience. Some knowledge appears in memory without an accompanying explanation.

The body knows where the door is.

The hand knows how high it has to reach.

The child knows that the latch must not click.

Much later I can ask what those things mean.

At the time there was simply a task: get out and do not wake her.

What Happened to Music

One consequence of Germaine which I have hardly written about is what happened to music itself.

Music was not something that brought me much pleasure or enjoyment.

I never became someone who closely followed popular music, collected performers or routinely sought out concerts.

For a long time I simply accepted that this was part of my personality.

Later I began to wonder whether the piano had acquired another meaning before I had ever been given a chance to discover music for myself.

More than a year of supposed piano tuition had taught me virtually nothing about playing the piano.

What it had repeatedly joined together was music, sexual abuse, waiting, vigilance and escape.

More than a year of piano lessons had taught me almost no piano.

What they had taught me was how to leave a room and close the door without making the latch click.

My Son's Piano

Years later, when my son was learning piano, I sometimes found somewhere to be by myself and cried.

At first I did not fully understand why.

His playing was not doing anything wrong.

In fact I enjoyed watching him learn and listening to him play.

But somewhere alongside that pleasure was another piano, another room and another child.

One of the genuinely magical changes came around the time I bought him a competition piano.

I enjoyed watching and listening to him play it, and somehow I feel that helped me in my relationship with music.

It did not erase Germaine.

It gave the instrument something else to mean.

A Few Exceptions

There were always exceptions to my lack of interest in music.

In my twenties, while working at Falls Creek after returning from Canada, I found particular music that was distinctive enough to reach me.

I liked the Alan Parsons Project, some J.J. Cale and some ELO.

Much later I heard Yanni on SBS.

His music became one of the relatively few kinds of music I would deliberately return to, and I still listen to it when I am in the right frame to do so.

My first, and for a very long time only, music festival was in Vancouver at an Easter gathering in Stanley Park near the Lions Gate Bridge.

What I remember most vividly is not the bands.

There were performers there who either were already well known or later became so, but they held remarkably little interest for me.

I joined some people near the water instead.

We flew kites, shared their picnic and sat looking at the scenery.

I remember the squirrels that seemed remarkably unafraid of people, the birds on the water and the extraordinary setting of Stanley Park.

The people I had joined introduced me to what they called BC Bud, cannabis which they described as being among the best in the world at that time.

I remember sitting quietly with them after smoking it and becoming absorbed in the scenery and the animals around me.

It was a rather dreamy experience.

What is striking to me now is that at a music festival it was the park, the water, the wildlife, the kites and the people I had met that stayed with me much more strongly than the music.

Crowds

I did attend a large concert in Melbourne which I remember in connection with Brothers in Arms.

I enjoyed the loud music, but I did not like being packed among hundreds of other people.

I had experienced something similar at a hockey game in Vancouver.

Crowded shopping centres could produce the same response.

I wanted to get out as quickly as possible.

Even now, if a supermarket or shopping centre is very busy, I have sometimes gone home and returned later when I hoped it would be quieter.

I do not assume that this reaction came from Germaine.

Crowds and music are different things, and there are other experiences in my childhood which may be relevant to my discomfort around large numbers of people.

But it helps explain why simply asking whether I “liked music” does not quite describe my experience.

“Special Treatment”

In earlier notes I used the words “special treatment” when trying to place Germaine among the other women at the convent.

It is an uncomfortable phrase because adults often use words such as “special” to make attention towards a child sound generous.

A child being taken aside can appear favoured.

Private lessons can appear to be an opportunity.

From inside my memory, Germaine's special attention was not a privilege.

That difference between the public explanation and the private experience has appeared repeatedly in my life.

Institutions possess ordinary words: lesson, treatment, discipline, care, assessment.

The person receiving what those words describe may be experiencing something entirely different.

With Germaine the ordinary word was music.

Separate People, Separate Memories

It would be easy now to combine the nuns into a single story because they occupied the same religious environment.

I do not think that would be accurate.

Ursula, Vincent, Germaine and Genevieve occupy different places in my memory.

Their names do not simply identify four members of the same institution. Each name opens a different set of surroundings, sensations and events.

There was also overlap between them.

In Germaine's case, I increasingly have the sense that Vincent was present in the surrounding period and may sometimes have been the person who sent me to the convent for the music lesson.

That does not make the experiences one story.

Germaine means the piano.

It means being very small in relation to an adult and to the furniture around me.

It means sexual contact presented inside something outwardly called a music lesson.

It means loud counting and notes struck on the keyboard.

It means watching Germaine become animated, then still, then begin playing again.

It means waiting for an adult to fall asleep.

It means moving a footstool, climbing onto a dresser, later borrowing a green kitchen chair, and eventually becoming tall enough to reach the handle myself.

Most of all it means closing a door without allowing the latch to click.

Other memories may connect with those things, but I do not want to import them simply because they occurred in the same convent environment.

Keeping Germaine separate is one way of protecting the accuracy of what I can remember.

A Name I Had Already Given

There is another layer to Germaine which belongs much later.

Memory difficulties have sometimes been interpreted as though I had been unable to identify the women involved in my childhood.

Yet records from years earlier show that Germaine was one of the names I had already given.

By 2014, a counselling report by Andrea Lockhart recorded Sister Ursula, Sister Vincent, Sister Germaine and Sister Genevieve.

That does not mean my access to every memory was continuous.

It demonstrates almost the opposite problem: a person can successfully retrieve and state a name at one point and still have difficulty accessing the experiences connected with that name at another.

Memory is not a filing cabinet in which opening the drawer once guarantees that it will remain open.

Looking back now, I think the periods involving Germaine may themselves have become disconnected periods in my memory.

The routine survived.

The piano survived.

The room survived.

The problem of closing the door survived.

But placing those repeated experiences neatly into the surrounding days, weeks and school years is much more difficult.

What I Still Do Not Know

For some reason the lessons eventually stopped.

I do not presently remember why.

I do not know whether somebody intervened, whether Germaine's circumstances changed, whether I became too old, whether another arrangement was made, or whether there was some entirely ordinary reason which I have forgotten.

I do not want to manufacture an ending simply because a chapter appears to require one.

For more than a year the lessons repeated.

Then at some point they stopped.

Germaine's part of my childhood ended.

The piano remained.

So did the door.

And for a very long time music itself seems to have carried something of that room with it.