#545 - three flakes fell

 

30.vi.21

545

2.178

three flakes fell

(for  a book of mother)

 

mum always said

that in 1929, three flakes of snow fell in Martin Place

(when I say ‘always said’ I don’t mean that she was constantly saying it

but it was certainly something she said often enough

– something she would say – if you know what I mean)

 

of course it has to have been something she’d been told about

she would have been a one year old at the time…

but I think it was something she truly believed

(it must have come from an authoritative source)

 

snow happens to be the first thing my father remembered

I mean it was the earliest thing dad could remember

looking up and seeing snow flakes falling…

these are I believe independent phenomena

though less remarkable hardly-coincidences

have been known to bring people together through time

 

of course dad wasn’t in Australia yet, when the putative three flakes fell

 

still, later (late thirties) dad was helped out (immigration wise)

by one Sir Sydney Snow, who was a sports enthusiast

(and though more into the gigis, obviously had a profound respect

for the celluloid ball and the athletic tricks that went along with it)

… Sir Sydney just happened to be in a passport queue dad was in,

docking in – where else but – Sydney … I think he’d only just been knighted

… maybe he was coming back from a meet with the king

… and which one, one wonders? … ambiguous moment

time of the abdication and all

I make nothing, mind you, of these coincidences

(clearly they are no more than that)

 

surely those three flakes were an ill omen though? 

it was before the Wall Street Crash, that southern winter…

they must, nevertheless, have later been taken for foreshadowing

 

and the way mum told it you knew it couldn’t have been true

snow doesn’t fall in Martin Place

it had the mythlight telling about it

so long before social media

 

if you think about it, a trinity of snowflakes was near biblical

a quasi-religious experience

statues might weep for that kind of thing

with the woes of the world run so deep

(or about to)

these things run in families

 

the horse drawn snow

and a T-model putt putt

 

naturally, I felt the need to look into all of this

and discovered that there have been a number of reported snow events in Sydney

the most famous of which fell on knowing convicts and amazed Eora people in 1836… much more recently though, a snowdrift was reported

at Wynyard during a cold snap in 1941

(when mum was thirteen and should have known)

 

I have to admit to a sense of relief no one else knew about my mum’s private snowfall of 1929, something clearly passed down through the family

 

‘three flakes fell’ sounds like a title of a song from those times

or more likely ‘the three flakes fell’ (little family romance)

sheet music sixpence from Palings or Nicholsons…

of course a piano score but chords for ukulele and/or guitar

 

mum would have brought that singing with her though

like the washing, as in  

Monday’s washing – is everybody happy?

if there had indeed been a song

she didn’t make that sort of thing up

 

even nonsense like

mares eat oats and does eat oats

and little lambs eat ivy

 

that code the Japs could never break

and tangled that sub in a shark net too

should have bought harbourside then

but nobody had any money

 

a kid’ll eat ivy too

wouldn’t you?

 

those three flakes, harbingers of the watered milk

of the steaming dung behind the cart

the washing lifted from the line

 

the roaring twenties turned to shit –

mum’s sense of where she was from