On first reading of 3 Musketeers ...
Okay, it was listening. SHOCK!
My mother gave me a copy of The Three Musketeers as a birthday present. She was serious as she presented it to me. I was mystified, yeah, thanks for the book (I always got books as presents) but never really considered my response because I was not in any frame of mind to think about much in those days. She might have told me I would learn something from it - I seem to remember something like that - or perhaps I might find something of interest in it - but her seriousness always struck me as odd. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she’d been prescient enough to say something like, ‘This will come in handy,’ or, ‘You’ll thank me for this one day’?
I do recall attempting to read it. It was one of those small ‘classic’ books with a faux leather cover and tissue-thin pages. It had tiny little print and of course, was filled with foreign ideas, not only French names but also a completely different time. I didn’t get very far. I carried it around with my collection of books for years, from Dunedin to Sydney until losing it when I went to Melbourne some fifteen years later.
I do wonder what Greta, my mother, would have made of Milady’s plight. I have no idea. She was generally a great defender of equal rights and the underdog. I remember her going into warrior mode when we lived in Hong Kong. My father was in advertising and the Australian company he worked for, Jackson Wayne, was branching out into Asia. We lived on the island, in a block of flats in Bowen Road (now a kind of park and fitness trail) overlooking the harbour.
After years of suburban life in Sydney, Greta glittered in a cosmopolitan setting, mingling with ex-pat Australian and New Zealanders. She had been raised with international drive. Her father was highly respected New Zealand politician, Sir Thomas Macdonald. He was the High Commissioner for New Zealand in London for seven years in the sixties and my mother had swum in high circles through his political career in parliament.
In Hong Kong, we had an amah, Jean, who adored my mother. Missy, she called her. ‘I tell Missy!’ I heard that a lot. ‘I see you, I see you, I tell Missy!’ Anyway, one day I was hanging around with one of the other children in the flats called Sharon. She was from England, about nine or ten years old, I suppose, and Sharon was extremely rude to Jean. Maybe some swearing was involved?
Greta overheard her and shouted at her. ‘How dare you speak to anyone like that?’ She was furious. ‘You’re a disgusting little girl. You’re no better than anyone else. In fact, because you think you are better than Jean, you are less. Everyone has feelings. How do you think Jean feels? Apologise to Jean right now.’
I was impressed. Sharon wasn’t. We didn’t hang around together much after that.
We went to Macau for a holiday around that time. My father took us to the public swimming pool. I would have been nine, and my sister seven years old. We had a great time. We both swam very well having learned in the Lane Cove (Sydney) pool for years and jumped around playing and splashing contentedly. On our return to the hotel room Bob reported to Greta we’d been the only white people in the pool. I was shocked. I hadn’t noticed. We were just a pool full of humanity. I think Greta would have said something like, ‘We’re all pink inside’.
By the by, Greta was the same about sexuality. She felt that she had no business knowing anything about people’s private lives. If she did not need to know, she would never judge someone else. She was a reasonable person in her heyday.
She was in her element in Hong Kong. She worked for a charitable group, which I suspect was probably more social than effective and she was, as usual, the perfect company wife. She told me later she was on the verge of leaving Bob then. She’d even packed her bags. But she organised their separation in a different way later.
My father liked women. Loved my mother’s mother. I don’t think he would have approved of the way d’Artagnan treated Milady. If she’d thought about it, I know my mother wouldn’t have. I don’t think many would if they thought about it.
But who thinks about it?
When I heard it - for I was listening to the Audible Book version at the time (Tantor AudioBook Classics, read by John Lee) I really was shocked.
I was walking our little dog on the lead in Boroondara cemetery. Tracy was better in the cemetery because she was a racist, or rather, species-ist dog. She was not a defender of equality. She hated all white fluffies, anything with a drop of poodle blood or a spec of Schnauzer DNA. She would not stop to chat. She would go them. I know the dogs in her past who had caused this attitude: two large poodles called Felix and Giles, and a schnauzer called Taxi. Poor Tracy had had a tough puppyhood in the playground. Then my sister bought her dog Lucky over to visit. Lucky was a poodle-schnauzer cross. Never going to be friends. Lucky had to stay across town with Uncle Tim’s family.
Anyway, there I was, walking peacefully through the maze of paths in the Boroondara cemetery, crooked, broken and illogical, when I heard that penultimate scene, in which Milady is cornered in the little house in Armentières.
As the men list her so-called crimes a great feeling of anger burst in me. This kangaroo court was so unjust! D’Artagnan had effectively raped her by deception and suffered not even the slightest pang of guilt for his behaviour. She was unable to defend herself against any of the charges, most of which were vague, unproven and very much, ‘what he said’.
I loved that scene, though, for the transformations. I replayed it again and again. I wanted to see it. I wanted that moment to live. My first impulse was to make a puppet show where, using shadows perhaps, Milady would transform into the lioness, wounded panther and snake, tigress, wild beast and monster just as Dumas described (through his hash?)
I am not well versed in history nor puppetmaking. I doubted my ability. This was not my area. I do not speak French. But the idea would not go away.
Milady began to live. It was 2014.
And I began to search.
I loved this piece. Your mother sounds like a fascinating being. I hope you will write some more about her. Nadine
Brilliant!