Barley Patch (15 page)

I got hints sometimes of personages much more remote from me than my patroness but perhaps not wholly inaccessible if only I could have discovered the means of access. In a certain corner of a garden behind a spacious house that my father sometimes visited, I found a fish-pond full of shaggy water-plants and overhung by ferns. In another part of the same garden, an ornamental grapevine grew over the frosted-glass panels of a wall of the garage. Whenever I stood alone in these places, I felt nothing more subtle than a child’s anger and helplessness, and yet the cause of those feelings was too subtle almost for me to explain nowadays. I wanted to see or to hear or to touch some or another being who was able to comprehend and to enjoy and perhaps even to express in words what I was only vaguely aware of in those places. It seemed to me impossible that what I was caught up in consisted of no more than myself and a pool of water or panes of glass and a few garden-plants; I was one small part of a mystery that I myself could never hope to explicate. If only I had been granted as little as a glimpse in my mind of one of this remoter sort of personage, I would have devoted myself to her (she was much more likely to have been female than otherwise) as I never devoted myself during childhood or afterwards to the personages recommended to me by my teachers and priests.

There were personages even less accessible to me than those mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Those impossibly remote beings probably seemed as they did because the scenery they lurked beyond was itself distant from me. In a coloured booklet advertising the scenery of Tasmania, I found, when I was ten years old, an aerial view of Elwick racecourse in Hobart. Each curve of far-off white-railed fencing was perfectly graduated, and yet the whole racecourse had a tantalising asymmetry that brought into being a goddess of racecourses, even though I had scant hope ever of catching sight of her. And when, as a young man in my twenties, I finally travelled through the landscape that reached northwards from the view that I had never seen from the upper floor of the convent mentioned much earlier, far from being disillusioned, I often became aware that some or another barely perceptible being might have presided over the view ahead of me of mostly level grassy countryside with a line of trees in the distance. I was unable to envisage even the merest outline of the being, but I was able to ascertain that she was at least as well-disposed towards me as the remembered image in my mind of the brown-robed nun who had once made a pet of me in her parlour and had later sent me a certain holy-card.

I met with the nun, my father’s friend, only once after my visit to her convent of two storeys in northern Victoria. My father died suddenly when I was only twenty. After his funeral service, I was standing among a throng of relatives in the grounds of the church when the persons around me stepped aside in order to open a passage for two nuns who were striding towards me. The two were my father’s friend and a travelling companion. I stood awkwardly while the friend reminded me of what a fine man my father had been. As she left me, she expressed the hope that I would one day do something to make my father proud of me.

I have never since seen the nun, who is surely no longer alive. However, I have in my archives several short letters from her and a copy each of my equally short replies. She wrote chiefly to tell me that she had recently come across one or another of my books of fiction and had read it but had been, on balance, disappointed by it. Only once was she more specific.

My published books of fiction comprise many more than half a million words. Of all those words, no more than 150 could be said to report an act of sexual intercourse between two characters. Of those 150 words, only two refer to any part of the human body: the words are
hands
and
knees
. Most of the remaining 148 words report the impressions of a male character who seems to imagine himself as a jockey during the latter part of a horse-race. The act in question results in the conception of the chief character of the book in question, which character is a boy who devises elaborate games to do with imaginary horse-races. In one of her short letters to me, the nun wrote that the passage mentioned was unworthy of me.

The boy who hid all afternoon among clumps of rushes in a swampy area was the youngest of nine siblings: five females and four males. Four of the females died unmarried. Three of the males married, but none before his thirtieth year. One of these three, six years after his youngest brother had hidden all afternoon from a buggy-load of visitors, became my father. The male who died unmarried was he who had hidden in the swampy area one Sunday afternoon in the early 1930s. The man who became my father had become at some time previously the husband of a young woman who had been one of the far-off females in pale-coloured dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats whose approach in a horse-and-buggy had caused their youngest step-cousin to flee to a swampy area. I am unable to imagine any details of the courtship of the persons who became my parents. I was never told when or where they were married. And yet, my mother liked to tell the story of the Sunday afternoon when she and three of her sisters visited for the first time their new step-cousins and when the youngest of them disappeared into the paddocks. My mother and her husband’s youngest brother always seemed friendly towards one another, although I never heard my mother mention in his hearing the day when she and he would have met for the first time if only he had not run away.

My father’s youngest brother courted at least three eligible young women, as his sisters might have described them. One of the three was a nurse, one was a teacher, and one was a private secretary. All three were church-going Catholics. Each courtship, so to call it, lasted an unusually long time during the 1950s, when my youngest uncle, as I intend to call him henceforth, was aged in his thirties. My youngest uncle, being the owner of a dairy farm, would have been a good catch for any young woman, so I heard
my mother say more than once. But none of the courtships came to anything. My youngest uncle’s friends, my own parents, and certainly my uncle’s unmarried sisters would all have been hoping for a different outcome, but each courtship ended with my uncle’s announcing that he and the young woman had parted good friends.

Each of the three young women came from a country district and each married a farmer no more than two years after she and my youngest uncle had parted. This only went to show, so my mother said, that each of the three had been on the lookout for a husband when she and my uncle had been seeing one another. As for my uncle’s claim that he had parted good friends with each young woman, I can only report something that he told me at a time when we confided somewhat in each other—when I was nearly twenty years of age and he nearly forty. He told me that he still wrote once each year to one of his three former girlfriends and that she wrote in return a long letter telling him things that she could never have told her husband. As for the sort of courtship that my youngest uncle undertook with each of the young women, I can only report something that he once said to me as an aside when we were discussing what we considered the undue influence of American films and television programs on our society in the late 1950s. He told me as though it was a matter to be deplored that even young Catholic women of those days seemed to want no more than to be mauled as soon as they were alone with a man in a parked car after an evening together.

During my boyhood and my teenage years, I shared much more with my youngest uncle than with his oldest brother, my father. During my father’s last years, I hardly saw him. He was working at two jobs in an effort to pay back a large loan from five cousins of his: three bachelors and their two spinster sisters who owned a large grazing property on the edge of the western plains of Victoria. Whatever story my father might have told his cousins, the loan was needed in order to pay his debts to bookmakers. My father would have been called nowadays a compulsive gambler.

But even in earlier years, when my father was at home on most evenings, I seldom approached him. In his free time, he pored over form-guides or made telephone calls to his racing friends or pencilled rows of figures on scraps of paper. I seldom approached him, and yet I was probably more interested in horse-racing than even he was. Like my father, I daydreamed about successful bets; but betting was only one of many aspects of horse-racing that was endlessly interesting to me. And all through my boyhood and youth, I knew only one person who understood not only my father’s craze for betting but my own love of everything to do with horse-racing. That person was my youngest uncle.

My uncle liked to bet, but he rarely backed winners. He was influenced by too many whimsical factors when he made his selections. He told me often about the only big win that he had had. The horse was at odds of fifty to one. My uncle had not been interested in the horse until he had seen it parading in the mounting-yard. He had for long been interested in racing colours: the many-coloured silk jackets registered in the names of owners or, sometimes, trainers. He thought that too many people designed complicated sets of colours in the mistaken belief that such colours would stand out from all others and would suggest the unique qualities or claims of the owners of the colours. My uncle thought that the reverse was true: that the most noticeable colours and those that reflected best the discernment of their designers were the simplest combinations. Although he had never owned even a share in a racehorse and never would, my uncle had designed his own colours: white, yellow braces and cap. The design was simple;
the colours came from the flag of the Vatican City. (Even when I was still an unquestioning Catholic, I was disappointed that my uncle could draw on no more peculiar source of inspiration than the religion that he had been born into. My own colours, which existed only in my mind against one or another view of one or another image of a racecourse in the background of my mind, were at that time a complicated arrangement of lime-green and royal-blue. These two colours were seldom used by owners of racehorses in the 1950s. I had chosen the colours as my own on a certain Sunday morning when I was sitting in the largest Catholic church in the coastal city mentioned several times in this piece of fiction. Instead of following the service or trying to pray, I had been searching for likely combinations among the colours in the large window of stained glass above the altar. I had taken the royal-blue from certain parts of the cloak worn by the image in the window of the personage who would have been addressed in their prayers by most of the congregation as Our Lady. The lime-green I took from the robe of a minor angelic attendant of the blue-robed personage. I chose the two colours not because of their setting in the stained-glass illustration but because of what I thought of as the background of the illustration. The wall behind the altar was at the northern or inland end of the building. If, by some preposterous means, I had been able to look outwards through the coloured glass, I might have seen, as though it comprised part of the background behind the personage known as Our Lady and her angelic attendants, a view of the southern-most district of the western plains of Victoria, which view would have comprised mostly level countryside with lines of trees in the distance. Even without any means of looking outwards through the glass, I was still able to see in my mind a semblance of that view. Whenever I looked at an image of my racing colours in my mind, I looked through the lime-green at mostly level grassy countryside and through the royal-blue at lines of trees in the distance.) When my uncle had looked at the parade of horses in the mounting-yard, he had seen, among the many-coloured spots and diamonds and Maltese crosses and crossed sashes, a simple livery: yellow, black sleeves, and cap. Not only were the colours strikingly simple, so my uncle used to tell me, but the jacket and cap were obviously new; both the yellow and the black were resplendent; and when the jockey flexed his arms or bent or straightened his torso, the silk arranged itself in creases or folds or bosses, so my uncle said, exactly like those that had so often taken his eye whenever he had studied one or another famous religious painting in the foreground of which were divine or saintly personages draped in hills and valleys and shimmering expanses of rich fabric. My uncle was always a cautious punter, but on that memorable day he put three times his usual stake on the horse carrying the yellow and black and being quoted at fifty to one. He watched with no great surprise while the horse won, and afterwards he collected as winnings the equivalent of two monthly milk-cheques from the butter-factory that he supplied from his dairy farm.

My uncle was interested in the naming of horses and would send me often through the post pieces torn from newspapers showing details of cleverly chosen names. The nearest he ever came to telling me a dirty joke was his telling me that he planned to buy one day a filly and a colt, to name the one On Fire and the other Fundament, to mate the two eventually, and to name the first foal Scratch Below.

My uncle often told me that his best friend during his teenage years had been a man he had never seen. Jim Carroll is said to have been the first person in Australia, and probably in the world, to describe the progress of horse-races for the benefit of listeners to radio, or listeners-in, as they were called in Jim Carroll’s time. Nowadays, Jim Carroll would be called a race-caller, but in the mid-1930s there was no name for his occupation, so new was it. Jim was employed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to comment on Melbourne races for the benefit of listeners in many parts of Victoria. He did not chant or intone as his successors learned to do; Jim talked to his listeners about what he could see and what they could not. He talked as though he was sitting in their lounge-rooms and able to see, far beyond the range of their vision, a field of horses on a far-away racecourse.

During the mid-1930s in Victoria, the price paid to farmers for butterfat fell to sixpence per pound. And yet, my father’s father and his family survived the so-called Great Depression.