From roses to safety pins

Mother and daughter Kate and Miranda Harcourt take their relationship to the stage.

When actor Kate Harcourt went overseas in her early 20s she took memories of "the flowers from my mother's garden. Bunches of violets, sprigs of boronia and daphne, baskets of camellias or roses."

When Kate's daughter, Miranda, went overseas she travelled, according to her mother, "wearing safety pins in peculiar places and no underpants."

In

Flowers From My Mother's Garden

- first a play written by Miranda Harcourt and her husband Stuart McKenzie in 1988 and performed by Kate and Miranda, and now a book of the same name - the myths of a family history are exposed, and often re-embellished along the way.

Flowers From My Mother's Garden

is at the Sky City Theatre from today.

The following extracts are from the book - an elaboration of the stage play.

Swearing and being artistic

Kate

We always encouraged you to go to the top of the slide. It was just our policy of exposing you to anything and everything. Take a risk. Go higher. See what happens.

Miranda

You sent me off to life-drawing classes up at the polytech.

Kate

I've still got some of those drawings.

Miranda

I'd trot along in my school uniform, wearing my school hat and there'd be all these punks with safety pins in peculiar places, swearing and being artistic.

They thought it was hilarious having this 12-year-old kid in the class, drawing nude men.

Kate

I can still remember the gooseberry bush where I was born. I can still see it. Down this sort of concrete path outside the back door.

Miranda

Who told you you were born there?

Kate

I suppose my mother did.

Miranda

What do you think she was trying to say?

Kate

Trying to avoid any discussion of sex, Miranda, I would think, don't you?

Miranda

This was in the middle of the 70s and my parents worked in the theatre and were very committed to being liberal and open to the modern age. One day, when my brother and I were about 6 and 10 and heading off to school, Mum and Dad stood on the front steps and said, "Now, Gordon and Miranda, before you go off to school this morning, we just want you to know that when you grow up we don't mind whether you want to be homosexual or heterosexual." We said, "Oh, Okay, thanks."

Considering that we didn't even know what sex was yet, we were completely confused to be given the option.

Kate

Rubbish! ... But I think choice is very important in this world.

The Glass Eye

Miranda

Winifred Harriet was a feisty spirit who had high hopes for her youngest. She wanted to see her own ambitions realised in her daughter ... it was only Kate, she felt, whom she could influence and see climb to the top of the world.

[But] Kate was desperate for the love and attention of her father. But Gordon Fulton never seemed to see her. He had a glass eye, though no one ever mentioned it. Nobody knows what injury caused him to wear a glass eye.

Kate would sneak her father's mirror from the bathroom and hide herself away to practise making the faces she saw in books in hope of reaching the notes she heard on the radio. One day, her father caught her singing in the woodshed. He was furious. He stood there with only one eye and the other socket hanging empty. Kate crawled up the pile of wood to get away. "How dare you borrow my shaving mirror," he cried. "Give it back!"

He needed his mirror in the bathroom so that he could change his eye. But backed into the corner, Catherine Winifred Fulton, aged 10, said, "No!" - and clung to the mirror, which was owned by her father, reflecting her face. God knows where she summoned the will to resist. Maybe that was the first stone she laid down of her own sense of self. Her father quietly closed the door and walked away.