Taphophile Tragics - Hen wlad fy nhadau

The memory is easy to dredge up: a run-down shack sitting atop of road-cutting, the living room gloomy and black, in the centre a wood stove with a massive pot of soup bubbling. Bending over is a stick-figure of a woman in dark clothing, with a large nose, and a strange-sounding voice. But this is overlaid with two more flashes: throwing up in the passenger well of a 1949 Holden FX; and, visiting cemeteries. Always. Every weekend. Visiting cemeteries. I was anything from 2 years to 8 years.

And the cemetery was Point Clare, and the grave was this one: Anglican, Section 8, Row 14, Plot 3. Plot 4 was there, but not inhabited until thirty years later. Solid, isn't it? And dark. And gloomy. Margaret Olwen Selby, nee Hughes: my maternal grandmother. Dead aged 55 years, from a massive stroke.

Which takes me back to the 'land of my fathers' (Hen wlad fy nhadau). It sounds as Welsh as one can get: Margaret Olwen Hughes. From Towyn in Merionithshire, but working 'in service' in London when she meets a miniscule Australian 'digger' simply trying to survive. The Australian government ships her out on a war-bride ship early in 1920 and she marries Cecil Roy Selby in the May, my mother, Olwen Dorothy, being born in the July of 1921. Life doesn't get easier: the emphysema from the gassing in the trenches is compounded by the multi-pack a day habit (except they were Craven-A roll-yer-owns), and the genetic predisposition to imbibing the amber liquid.

Her expectations were not high: but higher than working below stairs in London; higher than not-working beneath the slag-heaps of Towyn. A son came along three years later, and a 'mistake' 14 years after that. She lives beside the railway tracks in Tempe: two brothers-in-law in the same street; and a father-in-law who shunts from house to house, a season at a time. The memorial is hard to read, covered in black mould, sans fleurs, sans attention.

I want to yell out 'But, she wasn't a bloody Anglican, she was a raving Baptist', but who am I, a mere teller of tales, to argue with the wisdom of the times. For the record the photographs are: Top: Left Olwen Dorothy and Margaret Olwen - Both known as Olie the memorial to Margaret Olwen Selby in Point Clare Cemetery Left: Cecil Roy Selby gets some height, his daughter on the right The inscription: to my dear wife and our mother Margaret's birth certificate, and a card to her newly married daughter Ode to the best organised little cemetery 'in the world'

This is my contribution to the Taphophile Tragics community.