Fate Accompli

By Rosemary Dawn Northover

“Fate Accompli” is a story is about a girl – The Girl. She is living a perfectly normal life of a country-turned-city teenager until a devastating event shatters her dreams. She becomes known via an entity designated as Fate, who speaks to the reader as the Girl’s turbulent life unfolds. When born-again, she experiences beautiful revelations that fulfill her poetic nature with new understandings and wisdom. An intriguing read, especially about the loves of her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inspiring Publishers / ASPG
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922618399

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

For want of a better name, call me Fate, and let me be your guide through this rambling narrative of prose and ethereal poetry. I do not exist, in your understanding of the word, and because I stand outside what you know as Time I can observe and understand the inter-connection of all things, the incredibly complex warp and weave of what you call life, where the smallest and most seemingly inconsequential of actions can lead to immense repercussions. This is the story of the Girl. I call her that because at this moment in time she does not have a name.

Where is her beginning? That’s a difficult question. Should we begin with the Girl’s grandparents? Without them she would not have come into this world. Her great-grandparents? Her more distant ancestors? All the way down through countless centuries the seemingly chance meetings and movements of people and combinations of objects and events have led us to this one particular moment in time and space.

A tale of a Kanga tail

The time is the late nineteen-thirties and the place is the Australian bush, near the border between Victoria and New South Wales.

In Europe, Hitler is in full blood lust. Holocaust, hell and damnation have been cranked up by a Second World War German machine. The nations of Europe, Britain and countries across the world have mobilised. All hell has broken loose.

Down in the Antipodes, undisturbed peace still dozes over Australia’s scorched plains where the Murray River and its tributaries seep greenness into the sepia wilds. Here, prickly willy-willies blowing in hot winds are usually the only disturbances in the scrub-ringed stillness. There, the Girl’s father-to-be, Chas, and friends are fishing and hunting

One day, years later, the Girl is told a hilarious story about the circumstances of her conception.

Actually, this is her Dad’s story, and it could be pulling your leg as he is wont to do. In other words, spinning a yarn. Judge for yourself whether this is a true-blue tale or not.

Chas is great company, the kind of young married bloke who enjoys adventures in the bush with a bunch of best mates. No women. Who knows what they get up to? A cold, frothy beer in hand and plenty of sly digs at one another is a good bet.

This particular day, cooking on the campfire is Chas’s turn. The men have caught more than enough fish from the nearby Edwards river in New South Wales, beyond the Victorian border, so Chas decides something different is the go. He apparently thinks the next best thing to a succulent steak is a rare meat close by. Off he goes, rifle in hand, into the greyish-green leafy scrub of this country’s great Outback.. Late afternoon sees him trudging back with his long-tailed trophy – and so begins the tale of kangaroo tail soup.

After he gets the soup bubbling and tantalisingly savoury smells swirl in the air, Joe Edwards, the raconteur of the group, ever ready to spin a convincing yarn, says he’s heard rumours about the efficacy of kangaroo tail soup.

What do y’ mean Joe? asks Jim, Chas’s brother-in-law.

Well, if a man’s not having much luck producing nippers, Joe replies (having produced two strapping sons himself), they say kangaroo tail soup does the trick.

Chas looks up from stirring the pot. That true Joe?

Yeah. Come to think of it, Chas, you and the Missus have been married for about five years, and no nippers! Well, this is your lucky day! Here in the bush, our indigenous people know how to produce kids! Just a drop of the soup ‘ll do ya.

Mind yer own business, Joe, growls Chas – by now beginning to ladle out the soup into tin mugs, accompanied by slabs of buttered bread.

They never forget the potent taste of that soup. Chas certainly doesn’t. It wakes his sleeping ... er ... virility. Ahem.

Soon, down in the green, irrigated paddocks just below the New South Wales border, a hoped-for event, five years in the making, is realised. Chas’s wife falls pregnant. A baby is on the way at last.

In my designation as Fate, I want to point out to you that the Girl doesn’t consciously remember her time in the womb. (It was a shaky time indeed.) But I do, of course. I think the experience lives on in her subconscious. Perhaps her time of gestation played a part in her subsequent life, skewing her potential and setting up a sense of insecurity.

Let’s see ...

Serious morning sickness is today known as Hyperemesis Gravidarum, as distinct from the much milder normal type. Like Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge today, the Girl’s mother suffers dreadfully, but without access to modern drugs and expertise.

By the time her pregnancy nears the end of that critical first trimester, the expectant mother is hospitalised in a sorry state; bones protruding from her skin, dehydrated, and unable to keep a morsel of food down. Obviously, the Girl-to-be is a foreign body her Mum is rejecting. Dr Stewart fears for the foetus, as well as his patient.

By now the tiny babe is alive, inasmuch as the quickening has occurred; tiny legs are kicking, and the heart is beating away. Does the child sense a threat circulating in her warm womb?

Worse, at that crisis point, Dr Stewart, a Scot, decides he will have to abort the pregnancy to save the mother’s life. Perhaps you can imagine the little creature’s sensibilities. The fearful jolt to her sensation of aliveness and developing mental and physical processes. *Scientific research suggests so today. Apart from trepidation for her very life, her upper lip may have stopped a little short at this juncture.

Immediate abortion is a foregone conclusion– until, out of the blue, a nice nurse offers a glass of pineapple juice. The patient sips it and-- and keeps it down! Soon she can take food. So, instead of the child’s life being snuffed out, the first trimester ends in both mother and babe continuing in renewed health.

And the Girl gets born – soon after midnight on January 11. She is a home-town celebrity! Yes, she is the first baby (with a mop of black hair like a little monkey) to be born in Doc Stewart’s pristine new Argyle hospital, beating a boy baby by an hour or two. The Doc wants Argyle in her name, to commemorate the town’s just-opened facility. Fortunately, the parents resist and name her something else quite pretty. Today she still has a lovely little silver eggcup engraved with her name and birth date.

The Girl always feels her mother deserves a bigger cup for herself.

Sounds like an auspicious start to life. But the child is not spoilt. The almost overweening love and encouragement parents give their children today is taboo in her babyhood. Dr Spock’s strictness and non-pampering methods are adhered to. The Girl’s developing emotional nature could have done with a touch of today’s cuddly pick-them-up when-they-cry. But an almost perfect mother like this one does not want to spoil her little charge.

During the formative years of the Girl’s schooling, Australia still lives under an unfortunate backward view – later called "The Cultural Cringe," when the Arts were not encouraged as today. It did not help the Girl’s future talents at all.

Fate speaking - "Remember the time she was a three-month old foetus?

Her unborn life about to be nipped in the bud?

Well, it seems the tiny mite’s top lip stopped short during that touch-and-go time in the womb Toothy-pegs were forming in her baby gums."

Ugly Duckling morphs into Swan

A few years after the Girl’s birth, the tooth fairy takes her milk teeth away and leaves her sixpences. And a gummy smile. Well, as you know, we all need to be armed to the teeth to survive. So, the girl begins growing her second set to last a lifetime... hopefully. By the time the toddler grows to be a little schoolgirl, well, the