BOOK REVIEW: MOTHER COUNTRY

MOTHER COUNTRY
Elisabeth Russell Taylor
London: Peter Owen: 1992

CHANDA A BHIDE, Bangalore, India
moonstream@rediffmail.com

‘How did you break your arm, little girl?’
‘I fell’, I lie. But I keep my head down.
‘How did you come by this burn?’
‘I brushed against the fire.’
‘How did you get these bruises?’
‘I bumped…. I fell...’

Antonia Sinclair’s battered childhood comes back hauntingly with its animal-like cry of pain, when she visits her dying mother several years after leaving home.
The daughter of a German Jewish mother and an aristocratic English father, Antonia remembers childhood as a penitentiary, where her egoistic mother inflicts torture on her. As a three year old she is locked up in a broom cupboard for hours, for no apparent reason. At nine she is accused of cutting up her mother’s best clothes and smashing their antique buttons, for which she is taken to an occultist who calls himself a psychiatrist, and declares her a schizophrenic.
At the beginning of the Second World War she is packed off to a boarding school where she receives no letters, birthday cards or gifts. No one visits her, except, her mother’s lover: Walter with his silk handkerchiefs, Seville-row suits and suave manners, showers attention on Antonia. He takes his ‘liebchen’ to the zoo, concerts and pantomimes. Her happiness in his company engenders the only true love she ever experiences, but her turbulent childhood has left her emotionally mangled. Walter’s death leaves her in a permanent state of brinkmanship.
As an archeologist, her interest in the ancient ritual of child sacrifice makes her accept an invitation to Israel. Returning to England, she is ambivalent about settling down in Israel by accepting the offered ‘Right to Return’; but an article she reads about an abused child who takes revenge on his abuser, makes the decision for her. On returning to her Mother Country she finds that she cannot escape her past but has ‘re-entered it through another door’. Israel, like many an abused child, has become an abuser. Gradually, Antonia thaws emotionally. She gets killed by an Arab who becomes suspicious of her friendliness.
Mother Country moves back and forth in time, skillfully weaving a cruel past with a decadent present. Russell Taylor’s first person narration leads one through the mental labyrinths of the abused as well as of the abuser. She compares Antonia’s torture with a sacrifice of an impure child.
Antonia is cynical while describing her mother: ‘a witch, if she had a conscience, it never reproached her’; her father: ‘a man with all the subtlety of a spur and a whip’; her sister: ‘all imaginative possibilities were bleached from existence by her mere presence’. Her life with Walter is described with lyrical sensitivity, around a liebchen rosebush..
In a world where child abuse has become passé this book may not leave a gaping wound in one’s heart. It does, however, leave in one’s throat a painful lump which refuses to dissolve.