Barley Patch (17 page)

My youngest aunt may well have had a so-called vocation to the religious life. She left the convent not because she lacked the will to stay there but because she was beginning, even in her twenties, to be afflicted by the muscular or nervous ailment that afflicted three of my father’s five sisters and obliged each of the three to spend her last years in a wheel-chair or a bed. My youngest aunt outlived all her sisters by many years, but I have never been able to make out the handwriting in either of the two letters that she sent me during the 1980s, each of which letter was a reply to a short letter that I had sent in order to resume negotiations, as it were, with my father’s surviving siblings after the publication of my early books of fiction had caused an estrangement between myself and them.

Even if my youngest aunt had looked out from an upper window on the day when she left the convent, she surely had more on her mind than would have allowed her to look directly westwards through the smoke and the wind-blown cinders and to hope that her only sister-in-law was safe and well. The sister-in-law, who was also a step-cousin of my aunt, was the wife of my aunt’s oldest brother. The husband and the wife lived in a room in a boarding-house in a northern suburb of Melbourne, and the wife, who was only eighteen years of age, was expecting to give birth within a few weeks to their first child, who would be the first niece or nephew of the young woman who was leaving the convent.

During the fifty-six years from the time when my mother and I were first able to talk to one another until the year when she died, my mother reported to me only two incidents from the five years between the time when she first met the man who later became her husband and my father and the time when she and I were first able to talk to one another. One of the two incidents was my bawling when I first saw the ocean. The other incident was my mother’s fearing during most of Black Friday that the widespread fires would reach the northern suburbs of Melbourne, that the weatherboard boarding-house where she lived with her husband would be burned to the ground, and that she would die before she could give birth to her first child.

I seldom saw my youngest uncle during the first years after I had left school. I had come to believe that his being still a devout Catholic and my no longer being so would have caused trouble between us. But later, in the early 1960s, I began to think of my youngest uncle as a person who might be able to get me out of the trouble that I had fallen into.

I could not have brought myself to confide in my uncle. I wanted only to see him again—to watch from close at hand his bachelor’s way of life. He was still working as a stock and station agent, but he had leased a paddock in the coastal district where he had grown up, and he grazed young cattle there and inspected them every few days. I wanted, during the early 1960s, to draw strength from watching my uncle tramp alone across his paddock of a late afternoon when the wind blew from the sea. I wanted to draw strength from my uncle because I seemed to myself weak.

In the early 1960s, when I was in my early twenties and my youngest uncle was in his early forties, we were both of us bachelors. He was what was called in those years a confirmed bachelor. I had had hardly any dealings with young female persons and I seemed to lack the skills that enabled most other young men of my age to acquire steady girlfriends or even fiancées and wives. Sometimes I would spend every evening for week after week alone, more or less reconciled to my bachelorhood, while I read or tried to write poetry or prose fiction. At other times, I would resolve to change my way of life. I would prepare a detailed plan for approaching some or another young woman at my place of work, even preparing in advance the topics that I would raise in order to promote conversation between her and me. Then, either I would fear to speak to the young woman or I would overhear her talking to a workmate and would decide that she and I surely had no common interests. After each such event, I would suppose that I was by nature intended to live as my youngest uncle lived. I would then try to console myself for having been born to bachelorhood as I supposed my bachelor-uncle must sometimes have consoled himself.

I most commonly consoled myself by foreseeing (not imagining) a sequence of events from twenty years into the future. Never having married, I could afford to own a racehorse. On a certain cold and cloudy day, my horse, which usually raced in country districts, contested a race in Melbourne. My horse was at long odds in the betting, but its trainer had advised me to back it. Something urged me to bet several times my usual amount on the horse. If the horse had won, I would have collected the equivalent of a major prize in a lottery. In fact, the horse was narrowly beaten. After the race, and while I stood alone with the horse’s trainer at the second placegetter’s stall, I happened to glance towards the adjoining stall, where the numerous part-owners of the winner were hugging and kissing and crying out. One of the part-owners, a married woman, had been, many years before, one of the young women mentioned in the previous paragraph. As soon as I had learned this, I took care to avoid meeting the gaze of the married woman, although I did not turn my face away from her. I looked at my horse and then talked with my jockey and my trainer, keeping on my face an expression such as would tell the married woman, if only she had recognised me and had surmised that I was a bachelor, that I had for long been reconciled to my bachelorhood and that my having become thus reconciled enabled me the more easily to endure such misfortunes as that which her own racehorse had inflicted on me a little while before.

On a certain cold and cloudy Saturday evening in the early 1960s, I stood with my youngest uncle in the paddock that he leased in the coastal district where he had spent all of his life. I had made a hurried trip from Melbourne to see my uncle at what seemed to me a turning-point in my life. I had left my place of work on the Friday evening and had travelled for more than four hours by railway-train to the coastal city where my uncle lived. I was due to travel back to Melbourne again on the Sunday afternoon. I had only a few hours on the cold and cloudy Saturday evening for learning from my uncle what I hoped to learn from him.

I hoped to learn from my uncle that his bachelorhood was not the result of some fear or weakness; that his having no wife or girlfriend was merely a sign of some or another higher calling. I would have been satisfied to hear from him, for example, that his being a bachelor would allow him, if he so wished, to experience the peculiar joys and disappointments of an owner of racehorses. I had no reason for supposing that my uncle had ever wanted to write poetry or prose fiction, but I would have been satisfied to hear from him, for example, that his being a bachelor allowed him to read much more poetry or prose fiction than he would otherwise have read or to listen for hours each evening to so-called classical music on his radio or to study his books about Australian birds. Sometimes I even hoped he might tell me about a project that he had previously kept secret from me: some or another unending task that would allow me to think of him as a sort of scholar-gipsy of the back-roads of south-western Victoria. I had hurried to visit my uncle because a group of men that I had lately joined up with had seemed to assert that my uncle’s bachelorhood and my own solitariness were each a variety of illness.

Six months before my hurried visit to my uncle, I had begun to spend Friday and Saturday evenings with a young man and a young woman in their rented flat on the first floor of a building of four storeys within walking distance of the central business district of Melbourne. On other nights of each week, I went on trying to write poetry or prose fiction in my rented bungalow in the backyard of a house at a distance of several suburbs from the building of four storeys, but I no longer had the strength to go on trying to write on every evening of the week. On most Friday and Saturday evenings, several other young men visited the first-storey flat. Sometimes, one or another young man would have a young woman with him, but most of the young men came alone, bringing several bottles of beer. The young men stayed in the flat until about midnight, talking together with the two persons who lived in the flat or, sometimes, watching television. On some evenings, all the persons in the flat would set out just before midnight to walk across the park at the rear of the building of four storeys to a cinema that was one of the first cinemas in Melbourne to show a so-called midnight movie. I went with the other young persons to the cinema, even though I would always fall asleep soon after the program had begun.

The young man and the young woman who lived in the first-floor flat were not married. Neither I nor any of the young men who visited the flat knew of any other young persons who lived together without having married. Even the young persons who lived in the flat knew of no other young unmarried persons who lived together. (The reader has been told already that these fictional events are reported as having taken place in the early 1960s.) The young men who visited the flat envied the young man who lived there, but the young man himself often seemed discontented. Several months before I had begun to visit the flat, the young woman who lived there had left the flat and had lived elsewhere. She had left the flat after the young man who lived there had punched and beaten her. One of the conditions of her returning to the flat had been that the young man who lived there must consult a psychiatrist for the time being.

Often, while I was visiting the flat, the young man talked to me and the other visitors about his group, as he called it. This was a group of five or six men of various ages who met on alternate Sunday mornings in the home of a general practitioner who was studying psychiatry. The young man talked as though each of us listening ought to join his group or a similar group in order to deal with his many problems.

At some time during the fourth month after I had begun to visit the first-storey flat, I consulted the general practitioner mentioned in the previous paragraph. I told him that I visited the first-storey flat on Friday evenings and Saturday evenings but that I spent every other evening alone, trying to write poetry and prose fiction. I told him further that I had seemed lately to be losing the strength
that I needed for trying to write poetry and prose fiction; that I had nowadays to drink several bottles of beer before I could begin to feel the strength that I need for trying to write. The doctor, so to call him, prescribed certain tablets that he said would be more helpful to me than beer. The tablets caused me to sleep during the hours when I would otherwise have been drinking beer and trying to write poetry and prose fiction, but I went on taking the tablets and consulting the doctor, so to call him. During the third consultation, he told me I was ready to join his Sunday-morning group.

Most of the young men in the group seemed to be reformed alcoholics, but the young man who lived in the flat told me privately that several of them had what he called serious sexual problems. I had expected that the members of the group would be continually questioning and challenging one another, but for much of their time together they did little more than gossip. The doctor, so to call him, sat with the group but seemed to follow a policy of keeping silent unless asked a direct question. Only one man in the group used technical terms, so to call them. This man claimed to have read many books by the author that he referred to familiarly as Freud.

I was asked few questions during my first session with the group, but early in my second session the man who used technical terms asked me whether or not I had a girlfriend. Having learned that I had no girlfriend, he asked me what efforts I was presently making to acquire a girlfriend. I answered that I was making no such efforts at present; that I spent all my free time at present trying to write poetry and prose fiction; that the few young women I met up with were none of them interested in poetry or prose fiction; that my leading a solitary life might better help me as a writer than if I were to acquire a girlfriend or a wife. The man then used many technical terms. I understood him to be telling me that my trying to write poetry and prose fiction was no more than my trying to find an imaginary girlfriend or wife. I understood from the demeanour of the other men in the group that they agreed with the man who used technical terms, even though most of them were unskilled in the use of such terms.

I did not try to defend myself against the man who used technical terms, but when I left the group that morning I had already decided that I would attend only one more session. At that session, I would refute the claims of the man who used technical terms, so I had decided. I would defend solitary males and bachelors against the wordy arguments of European theorists. In the meanwhile, I would make a hurried trip to the coastal city where my uncle lived. I would walk with my uncle across mostly level grassy countryside and would draw strength from the company of a man who had kept up no fewer than three long-lasting courtships with good-looking young women but was still a bachelor.

I had expected to feel much more comfortable walking with my uncle across his bleak paddocks than I had felt with the group of men in the doctor’s meeting-room, but I could not readily explain the reason for my visit. I had never told him that I no longer believed in the teachings of the Catholic Church, although he probably suspected as much. I could not even tell my uncle that I had joined a group of men who were patients of a doctor with an interest in psychiatry. I told him that I had been for a long time without a girlfriend but that I was amply consoled by the various dreams that I had of my future. One of those dreams, so I told my uncle, was my dream of owning racehorses in the future, which dream my uncle readily understood. Another of my dreams, so I told my uncle, was my dream of being published as a poet or as a writer of prose-fiction. This dream he claimed also to understand, although the only twentieth-century Australian authors that he seemed to have read were A. B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, and Ion L. Idriess.