Unmasking Aunt Bella
The words will not come. He stares blankly at a laptop screen. If he had pencils, he would, at this point, begin sharpening them. He must write, he wants to write. But the words are trapped inside him. Creative constipation. The wheels on his writing stool whir backwards across spotted-gum floorboards and he stands to commence stomping aimlessly around his writing space. Perhaps, like sensors for lights, inspiration will switch on when motion is detected. He peers at his calendar, noting he hasn’t changed the month. It’s August now, not May. Beyond his studio window, juvenile bower birds compete with king parrots for grass seeds. Peewees harass a pair of courting magpies at the bird bath. Perhaps his home in rural Dorrigo is gifting him writing prompts. But again, he is procrastinating. Should he take his axe to the pile of wood downstairs? Light a fire?
His eye catches Aunt Bella’s diary hiding silently between two boisterous Trent Dalton novels on the bookshelf in his studio. It had been handed down through the family; found its way from Dundee, Scotland, to the Dorrigo plateau, NSW. He hadn’t looked through Bella’s diary for a long time but was always enamoured with her penmanship, the dance of her stylish cursive handwriting. He slides it out from the clutches of the Trent Dalton sandwich and returns to his desk. Perhaps Aunt Bella, Scotland in the 1870s, or even the pleasant smell of an old book, will serve up the inspiration he seeks.
Referred to by his family as Aunt Bella, Isabella Bruce was his great, great aunt. On her tenth birthday, according to the 1869 inscription on the inside cover, she was given a notebook which she meticulously utilised as her diary for the succeeding ten years. It is fascinating to watch, through words and deeds, thoughts and secrets, Bella’s journey from a ten-year-old to a twenty-year-old. As a pre-teen, Bella speaks enthusiastically of her sisters Annie, Tweedie and Wee-Mattie. Favourite books, favourite foods (neeps and tatties), school, family picnics by the River Tay or in the rolling hills of Fife. She describes lavishly the thrill of her first steam train ride down to Edinburgh and devotes pages to sketches of the locomotive, Holyrood Palace and Edinburgh Castle. There are pages adorned with pressed flowers. Things of importance to a bonnie wee lassie in the 1870s.
Immersing himself further into Aunt Bella’s youth, his own pressing need for a prompt is subsumed. He re-visits the angst of her teenage years - her underlying fear that the family may emigrate to the Southern Hemisphere in the near future. Bella’s father, a draper and tailor, felt there were great opportunities in the colony of Queensland. He was also convinced the climate would be more conducive to the wellbeing of each family member’s lungs. Tuberculosis had already claimed the life of her brother in the wet chill of Dundee. Bella records trepidation at being dislocated from the comfort of her known world in Dundee, to be thrust unwillingly into the heave and roll of the elements aboard a sailing ship for months.
In her nineteenth year, Bella’s diary assumes increasing cheer. There is less teenage disquiet, more light underpins her words. And she writes poetically of humanity and relationships. Her words bob around on a sea of warmth and hope. The name Duncan Fletcher, twenty-two year old son of a local family, appears more frequently. Bella talks easily, giddily of hope and a future. A future which might possibly include Duncan who, though working in Edinburgh, returns regularly to the Tay Firth and Dundee.
Bella enthuses about the planning of her family’s Burns Supper in January. Celebrating Rabbie Burns’ birthday is a regular occurrence in their household. And she gushes about Christmas day in 1879. Three days later, on the 28th December, 1879, her diary entry barely disguises her excitement that Duncan Fletcher will return from Edinburgh to Dundee on the train that night, despite the ferocious weather. He has hinted this return is specifically to see her. She writes of rising hope for a proposal.
And that’s where all entries cease.
At his laptop three hours later, with nothing yet written, huge questions gnaw away at him. A romance was kindling in Dundee yet her diary stopped dead. What happened? Why did Bella cease writing at twenty years of age? Family history records that Isabella Bruce, single, aged 22, arrived in Brisbane by sailing ship with her parents and siblings.
Seeking answers the diary doesn’t disclose, he summons Google and types the search parameters of ‘Dundee’ and the date ‘28th December 1879’. He navigates to Wikipedia and is confronted with the Tay Rail Bridge Disaster. The article outlines the unimaginable. The accident when the iron rail bridge suddenly collapsed into the River Tay during the storm on the night of 28th December, 1879. Two miles from Dundee Railway Station, the river swallowed up the entire six-carriage steam train, with the loss of the lives of everyone on board. Many bodies were never recovered.
He dabs at a thin tear coursing lightly down his cheek. The writer aches to reach through the diary, through the 146 intervening years, to wrap his arms around the great, great aunt he never met yet now knows so well. Opening a blank Word Document, he types the heading, Unmasking Aunt Bella, and begins hunting and pecking at the keyboard. He has his story….
Footnote:
The Tay Rail Bridge disaster remains a significant historical event in the psyche of Dundee’s community and, indeed, the whole of Scotland. Cairns were erected on both sides of the bridge, and the event prompted this ballad by C. Horne in 1880:
‘In Memory of the Tay Bridge Disaster’
The train into the girders came,
And loud the wind did roar;
A flash is seen-the Bridge is broke-
The train is heard no more.
"The Bridge is down, the Bridge is down,"
in words of terror spread;
The train is gone, its living freight
Are numbered with the dead.