A Certain Light: A memoir of family, loss and hope

by Cynthia Banham

Overview

'Life is not defined by the bad things that happen to us. It certainly isn't for me.'

Written for her young son so that he would know what had happened to his mother, Cynthia Banham's inspiring family memoir uncovers a true picture of what survival means:

'This book tells a story that I tried to write many times before, but couldn't. For a long time, it was too painful to tell. It is also one I hadn't known how to tell. It had to be more than a story about surviving a plane crash, a random event without intrinsic meaning.'

Unable until now to write her own story, Cynthia found that the lives of her Italian grandfather, Alfredo, and his intriguing older sister, Amelia, resonated with her own. Discovering their sacrifice, joy, fear and love, from Trieste to Germany and America, and finally to Australia, their stories mirror and illuminate Cynthia's own determination and courage in the face of overwhelming adversity.

From a remarkable writer, and told with unflinching honesty and compassion, A Certain Light speaks to the heart of what really matters in life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781760635824
Publisher:	Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited
Publication date:	03/21/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Cynthia Banham is a writer. She grew up in Sydney and worked there as a solicitor and, later, a journalist. Cynthia completed a Doctor of Philosophy and a Master in International Affairs at the Australian National University. In 2015 she was awarded a UQ Fellowship at the University of Queensland to research and teach in the School of Political Science and International Studies. Her first book, Liberal Democracies and the Torture of Their Citizens, based on her doctoral thesis, was published in 2017. She is currently a Visitor at the ANU's School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet). She met her husband, Michael, while reporting for the Sydney Morning Herald in the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery. Michael introduced her to Australian Rules football and she is now an ambassador for the Sydney Swans Football Club.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Boxes

I

I LAY ON MY BACK ON THE HOSPITAL BED, under a dark blue, speckled blanket, as a male orderly steered me towards the familiar swinging doors. Another operating theatre. Another surgical removal of a piece of me.

Although this time it was only a minor part — a bone spur from the end of my right tibia that was preventing me from walking on prostheses — it would be taken while I was unconscious, with no control over what was being done to me, over how much of my leg bone would ultimately be taken. The thought of losing more of myself this way was, in this moment, overwhelming.

A young woman doctor directed Michael where to wait, so the medical staff could find him when I was out of recovery.

'Follow this red line,' she said, pointing to the floor.

Michael smiled at me. I could see he was reluctant to go; he didn't leave until I was out of sight.

In the operating theatre, the anaesthetist searched for a compliant vein. He was experienced, but the first effort failed. I don't have many places for a cannula to go; the only accessible veins are in my right arm.

Outside was the Canberra winter. It was minus five when we arrived at hospital earlier that morning. In the operating room the air was hot. I heard the beeping of the monitoring machines that, to me, always signal personal peril. The room was filled with doctors and nurses. I could hear some of them discussing antibiotics.

'Just one gram?'

'Well, she's only small.'

With no lower limbs, I suppose I was.

The vascular surgeon must have seen my tears, though I tried to be discreet, and he reassured me. 'Think of this as happy surgery,' the surgeon said. 'This is not sad surgery like the first time, this is happy surgery to fix a problem.'

I forced a smile, appreciating his compassion.

With two cannulas inserted into my hand I was wheeled around so that my bed lay alongside the operating table. The lights were bright. I stared at the clock in front of me: 11.55 am. The room was buzzing with the voices of people I could not see. Someone, a nurse maybe, was sticking plugs all over my body, reaching down my hospital gown. A young doctor put a rolled-up towel under my head. The big operating theatre lights loomed overhead, waiting to be pulled down into place when the cutting started. I was to lie on my stomach for this surgery and would have to be turned over, but, before any of that happened, I lost consciousness.

One minute I was trying to answer questions about my career —'Yes, I was a journalist, but I'm not anymore,' I told the anaesthetist — the next I was opening my eyes, on my back again. Two hours had passed.

'She's awake!' the anaesthetist called, startling me in my newly conscious state.

I struggled to remember where I was, to shake myself out of a dream which, though vivid, had already vanished. Why was my throat so sore? A breathing tube had been inserted down it, the anaesthetist told me.

Later, I asked Michael about his reluctance to leave me that morning. 'Why did you look so sad when they wheeled me away to theatre?'

'Because in Perth, when they wheeled you away, I never knew whether the doctors would come back and tell us "Sorry — we did everything we could for her", and you would be gone.'

It was June 2015. Eight years had passed since my legs were amputated to save my life after a plane crash in Indonesia. My career as a journalist officially ended in 2012, the year my son was born. I finished a five-year PhD thesis on human rights and the 'war on terror' in October 2014.

Then, my life substantially rebuilt, I opened the boxes.

II

How to describe the boxes? There are two kinds; a set of boxes for each set of difficult memories.

First, there are the boxes from the crash. They'd been stored in the garage for over seven years. They held all the documents from my time in the Royal Perth Hospital Burns Unit, where I spent nearly three months, and the rehabilitation hospital, another three months. Cards, emails, letters, notebooks, newspaper clippings, phone messages, photographs that covered a wall of my hospital room, CDs, small gifts, books of poetry, religious icons, postcards, children's artwork. All the well-wishes and thoughtful sentiments people sent me during that period. Among them was a bright red lipstick; an olive-green shawl that somebody, a stranger, knitted for me; a painting of a beach scene from Stradbroke Island.

For years I was conscious these kindnesses were there waiting for me to engage with them but, for now, they were safely contained in their cardboard vault, out of sight. I felt guilty that I had not properly read them. Their authors had been moved to write to me, to knit, to paint. How could I not read their missives, reply to them, thank them?

In the burns unit I could not bring myself to read them, though my family did. During those (almost) six months in Perth, I could not read at all. It wasn't just that I couldn't physically hold a book for the wounds and splints and bandages. A nurse brought me a special book stand. It didn't help. I love books but I couldn't make it past the first sentence, no matter the subject. It was as the French writer, Charlotte Delbo, wrote about her discouragement with books after her own wartime trauma: I could see through the words. I had 'lost the faculty of dreaming' and books could offer me no escape, no solace.

Nor could I write. Indeed, much of the time I could barely speak — certainly not about what had happened, what was happening, to me. I couldn't speak to friends or colleagues, nor let them visit. Some understood that, some did not. I could be with no one apart from Michael and my immediate family: those people who would love me no matter what they saw, no matter what I told them, how grim, how desperate. Those who demanded nothing of me except that I live. I could be anything, I could be nothing. To them, I would still be Cynthia. My world closed in for that terrible time of suffering and loss. It would open up again when I was ready, and not before.

When that period ended, those months in hospital, I returned home to Canberra by train, on the Indian Pacific (via Sydney) — I could not conceive of flying again at that point — and the boxes came with me. But, still, I could not open them. Every time I did I was overcome by terrible sadness, an overwhelming grief. They were so full of hurt that, had I read their contents, the pain would have paralysed me. And I wanted to live.

There was another smaller box that had also been awaiting my attention. Its contents were nowhere near as confronting, but just as brimming with meaning. It was the box containing my Italian grandparents' papers that I salvaged after Nonna, my mother's mother, died in 2009. A precious collection, it included Nonno's papers from the Second World War, when he was held as a prisoner of war by the Germans.

I had not examined the box's contents since claiming them from my grandparents' house. But in there, I knew, was my grandfather's POW tag. I first saw it when I was studying history in the middle years of high school. We were learning about the world wars. This prompted Mum to tell me her father had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp (as she called it). Nonno retrieved the metal tag from its place in his cupboard to show me one Saturday afternoon following lunch. I remember his pale blue eyes filling with tears. When Nonna died, having survived her husband by sixteen years, the tag was the one thing I wanted to find and keep.

There were links between the two sets of boxes, though it took me years to see them. The boxes contained my family's stories, ones infused with trauma and survival, stories that were untold.

Nonno's story, as I knew it at that point, was this. Alfredo, aged nineteen, was bound for war in 1943, following the armistice in which Italy changed sides and joined the Allies, when his train was captured by German soldiers. He was taken prisoner and sent to various POW camps in Austria and/or Germany, where his captors starved him. His sister Amelia, older by seven years, was a wild-spirited young woman, a dancer. Somehow, she managed to get food to her younger brother in the camps and, by doing so, helped keep him alive. In 1945, Alfredo was liberated by the Russians and repatriated to Italy. Two years after the war ended, my mother was born. Amelia departed Italy for America in 1951. Nine years later, she died in the United States in troubled circumstances.

I had carried the bones of this story around with me since I was fourteen, when Nonno showed me his tag. I learnt about the intriguing role of Amelia on a visit back to Trieste many years later, in 2001 (I was 29 by then). I was a little like the wilful, freedom-loving Amelia, relatives told me, and I was happy to believe them. Amelia had chased adventure and refused to settle down. I suppose they saw a likeness in my restlessness, determination to see the world, and independence. When I returned home, my mother told me about Amelia's diary. Mum had read it as a teenager following her aunt's death. She told me it contained disturbing details of Amelia's life in America, including the physical abuse she endured there. Nobody knew where the diary was now.

Amelia's life had an allure and romance about it. She was a figure who was only distantly connected to my life, yet her story gripped me in a way that I still find hard to explain. Knowing more of it today, I doubt I was anything like Amelia: a woman who took huge risks and defied the social norms and conventions of her day. She was an outlier, unlike anyone else in our family.

I resolved, after that 2001 trip, to write a book about Amelia, my grandfather's resourceful sister, his brave protector during the war, whose life ended violently and too soon. However, things — career, travel, love — meant I kept putting it off.

Then 2007 happened.

I was foreign affairs and defence reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, and that March I travelled to Indonesia with the foreign affairs minister. En route from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, where I was meant to meet the minister and fly back to Australia in the government VIP jet, I was in a plane crash. I survived (one of 119 people to do so). Twenty-one others, including five Australians who were travelling with me as a part of the same group meeting up with the foreign minister later that morning, did not.

Now I had another story, one publishers clamoured for. From almost the moment I woke from a week-long induced coma, everyone — publishers, agents, colleagues, doctors, friends, strangers — asked me: was I going to write a book about it?

I couldn't do it. A book about the plane crash seemed utterly pointless to me. What would it be? A voyeur's account for those people who, as one publisher put it, 'have always wondered what it would be like to be in a plane crash'?

I refused to let this completely random event define who I was. Most of all, I was not going to write a book that caused me further pain at a time when every part of me, every exertion, every thought, every effort I could muster, was being channelled into rebuilding a life worth surviving such an event. If I wrote a book, it would have to come much later. It would have to be something else.

The American memoirist Eileen Simpson was an orphan who lost her mother as an infant and then her father aged seven. She only mourned the loss of her parents after the death of her second husband, when she was in her fifties. In writing her memoir, the publisher wanted her to begin with this moment: this explosion of the feeling of being an orphan that followed her husband's passing. Simpson couldn't do it. Anxiety gripped her, and she realised she wanted to put the material about herself at the end of the book, 'because I didn't want to examine what had happened'. So instead she decided to 'back into the book'.

'I would start by doing some research on how orphans have been treated historically,' she wrote. 'That would be easier than writing about my own childhood because it was more objective.'

I think, unwittingly at first, this is what I was doing too: backing into my book. I could not face the trauma of the set of boxes about the crash without immersing myself in the other box, in Nonno's wartime story of survival.

That I had Nonno's story to tell at all was thanks to a salvage mission I had undertaken some years before.

III

How do you visit your grandparents' house for the last time, the house where you spent every Saturday of your childhood, knowing they are both gone forever?

It was a childhood of Saturdays spent eating my grandmother's lunches of spaghetti, schnitzel and radicchio salad; of listening to my mother and her sister conversing across the table with their parents in the Trieste dialect; of learning, gradually, to drink coffee, which Nonna made in a small pot on the stove, disguising its bitterness with lots of milk and sugar.

Every weekend we'd take the number 492 or 494 bus to my grandparents' house in Campsie, in Sydney's south-west, us four children and Mum. It was a winding, interminable trip through the back streets of Five Dock, Ashfield and Burwood, that was always worse on the return journey with a full stomach.

I passed through the rickety front gate of the Fletcher Street house for the final time in late 2010. Nonna had died in Concord Hospital the previous year; her funeral was on my birthday. The house had been sold. Now its contents were being packed up, picked through for memories and keepsakes her children and grandchildren couldn't yet let go of, the remainder donated to the Salvation Army, or just thrown away. My sister took a rolling pin and Nonno's double set of red-and-green, tartan-patterned Triestine playing cards. I took a pair of chipped ceramic cats and Nonno's heavy, battered Italian dictionary. Mum took the old Parkinson-Rinnai gas heater that reminds me, when I see it now, of cold Saturday afternoons in winter playing with my younger cousins in our grandparents' living room, as we waited for word that it was time to go home.

The Campsie house was the only one my grandparents ever owned. Alfredo and Anna arrived in Australia with their daughters, Loredana and Marina, aged nine and six, in 1957. They lived with other Italian families in terraces in Paddington and Newtown before purchasing their house in Campsie in 1961. For a deposit they used compensation money Nonna received after losing a fingertip in a work accident in a tobacco factory in Waterloo. (The remaining nail grew back curved over the top of the shortened finger, a jarring sight.) My grandparents couldn't afford the loan repayments on their high-interest solicitor's loan at first, so Nonna's sister and her family rented a room in the two-bedroom semi-detached house. Loredana and Marina slept in a fibro annexe connected to the house. During inclement weather, the sound of rain pounding the tin roof of the annexe was unbearable. When my mother was fifteen, she left school and got a job that helped pay off her parents' mortgage.

I pushed my wheelchair up the cement path to the front door of the red-brick house. It was neatly lined with white gardenias and Shasta daisies when Nonna was alive, but was now unkempt. Nonna hadn't lived in the house for the twelve months before she died. Fiercely independent, or unwilling to let go of the home she had spent 50 years in and that was filled with memories of her family, my grandmother refused invitations to move into a 'granny flat' at the back of my parents' house. Then she had a stroke, the first of two, and went into a nursing home operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor, in the street parallel to my parents'. Nonna tried to run away from the Little Sisters, but only ever made it as far as my parents' house.

I must have offered little consolation to Nonna in the final years of her life. Preoccupied with my own injuries, I had no reserves of comfort for anybody else, and our talks were brief and strained. I spoke with her only once during my hospitalisation. I was at the rehabilitation hospital by then, and we talked over the mobile phone. I was lying in my hospital bed; I don't remember if she spoke in English or Italian.

'I knew you would be okay, Cinzia, because it was you,' she told me.

I remember Nonna's last thoughtful Christmas gift to me — a hamper. She would have seen the baskets of seasonal goods in the shops and noted they were a popular gift. But this was one she put together herself. The basket was filled with such an odd collection of items it makes me smile to recall it: among them was a green oven mitt with a picture of a parrot and a bottle of Cougar Bourbon.

After the strokes, Nonna had trouble finding words and forming sentences. I remember one visit to my parents' house. Nonna, who was there for the day, sat on a chair in the sunroom. Her silvery-blue hair was styled with rollers into large curls, as always. She tried to smile at me but her eyes were sad and she didn't make a lot of sense. I didn't speak Italian with her as I'd done in previous years and which she always appreciated; it required more effort of me than I felt able to muster that day. Nonna died a few months later.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Certain Light"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Cynthia Banham.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Prologue: A Letter to My Son,
1 The Boxes,
2 Trieste,
3 Searching,
4 Alfredo,
5 Michael,
6 Loredana,
7 Crashing,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,
Bibliography,