House of Kwa by Mimi Kwa

Author:Mimi Kwa [Kwa, Mimi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2021-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

WOMBLES AND GOOSEDOWN

I HAVE A FEW FRIENDS AT SCHOOL – I’VE WORKED HARD TO make them – but I’m not often allowed to have them over. Meanwhile, Dad has been renting out our next-door duplex to a string of temporary tenants, and he says their kids ‘have to’ play with me because I am the ‘landlord’s daughter’, so I share my swing set and trampoline with these children passing through. Sometimes they seem to like me, sometimes the opposite, and I try not to get attached either way because they always leave me.

More reliable, I find, are characters in books and on TV shows. They are always there for me. I’m particularly fond of a grey-haired bunch of chilled-out mole-like creatures who walk on their hind legs and forage through rubbish, having wonderful adventures wherever they go. The Wombles is my favourite show; I have the picture books too. They are a happy part of my life – the opening soundtrack has me running to the television every time.

I was born into a kind of Womble family, with pathological hoarders on both sides. Yes, pathological, I’m talking TV documentary level. Hoarding will one day be recognised as a psychological disorder, but in the 1980s we call this extreme behaviour ‘eccentric’.

The local council’s hard rubbish day is a special event for Dad. Anything kerbside is fair game – bad luck if you rested something against your front fence while you went inside for a moment, because it won’t be there when you come back if Francis Kwa was driving down your street.

I help Dad hook up a trailer to our station wagon, and off we go, bobbing up and down on the vinyl seats, on the lookout for stuff, any stuff. You just never know what will come in handy when you’re a Womble. ‘Keep your eyes peel,’ Dad says. His favourite cautionary tale is that if we don’t keep our eyes peeled, who knows what precious junk – I mean gems – we will miss.

Scraps of metal, broken microwaves and kettles, toys and bikes beyond repair, and building materials – especially building materials – all get loaded onto our trailer. Dad has a meticulous mad-scientist sort of way to classify nuts, bolts, nails, pipes, poles and planks, so he can keep them forever, ‘just in case’. He also collects old furniture: couches, dressers, drawers, even skanky mattresses. ‘You never know,’ he says when I protest about having to haul items three times my size onto the trailer, ‘we may need them one day.’

Our property is about four and a half thousand square metres, amply sized for excessive storage.

I help him haul steel pipes and splintered wood in from the trailer as I wonder if this is a metaphor for some major void in my father, a hole in his heart, perhaps a result of the years lacking love from his parents or of the childhood he had, what he saw and what he lost. A chasm in a dragon, so hungry that no pile of loot can ever be enough.

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