Barley Patch (2 page)

I seem to recall that I was disappointed by the similarity between the plain English of the phrase
ten beeches
and the would-be quaintness of the word
Tanbitches
, however its origin may have been explained in the text: that I wished the hill—if it could not have a plain English name—might have been known by a word so outlandish that not even the author could explain its occurrence. I may not be exaggerating if I claim to recall that I preferred the hill in my mind to remain nameless rather than to bear the name assigned to it by the author.

The author in question was named Josephine Tey. The book was
Brat Farrar
, which was published in monthly instalments in
The Australian Journal
in either 1950 or 1951. At the age when I read
every piece of fiction in every issue of the
Journal
, I was not at all interested in authors, and yet I recall myself speculating sometimes about Josephine Tey or, rather, about the ghostly female presence of the same name that I was sometimes aware of while I read
Brat Farrar
. I would not have enjoyed speculating thus. I would much rather have read the text of
Brat Farrar
in the same way that I read other works of fiction: hardly aware of words or sentences; interested only in the unfolding scenery that appeared to me while my eyes moved past line after line on the page. But the word
Tanbitches
would cause me to stop and sometimes even to suppose that Josephine Tey had erred: she had failed to learn the true name of the hill and so she had given it a name of her own choosing—
Tanbitches
was only a word that an author had imagined.

I had another cause for thinking sometimes about the personage named Josephine Tey when I would rather have been admiring the image of the two-storey house or the image of the green field rising to the wooded hill, or when I would rather have been feeling towards the images of persons who seemed to live in that scenery as though I lived among them. I seem to remember that
Brat Farrar
was called a mystery novel and that the plot turned on the return to the family home of a young man claiming to be the long-lost heir to the estate. The claimant, so to call him, was invited to live in the family home although none of the persons already living there was yet sure of the truth of his claim. I recall three of these persons. One was the claimant’s brother, who may have been named Simon and who may have been a twin; another was the claimant’s sister, or perhaps half-sister; the third person was an older woman known always as Aunt Bee. The three siblings, if such they were, had no parents that I can recall. Aunt Bee was the oldest of the chief characters and by far the most powerful of those who lived in the two-storey house. Whether or not she was their aunt, she seemed to have authority over the three purported siblings. The young woman especially confided in Aunt Bee, consulted her often, and almost always followed her advice.

For as long as I had the text of
Brat Farrar
in front of my eyes, and often at other times, I did as I was compelled to do whenever I was reading much of what I read during the 1950s or whenever I was remembering the experience of having read it. I felt as though I myself moved among the characters.

I was unable to alter the course of the narrative: anything reported in the fiction was a fact that I had to accept. However, I was free to take advantage of the seeming gaps in the narrative. The text of a work of fiction, as I seem to have understood from the first, reports in detail certain events from certain hours in the lives of the characters but leaves unreported whole days, months, years even. A narrative would often include, of course, a summary of a lengthy period of time, but a mere summary hardly restricted my freedom.

I was free, first of all, to observe and to admire. I could watch openly while my favourite female character rode on horseback to the far side of some landscape described in the text and even further, or while she fondled or fed her pet animals or birds, or even while she sat reading some work of fiction and while she felt, perhaps, as though she herself moved among the characters of that work. I was free also to influence the life of my favourite female character, but within strict limits. In 1953, for example, while I was reading
Hereward the Wake
, by Charles Kingsley, I was distressed by Hereward’s abandoning his wife, Torfrida, for another woman. From my standpoint as a shadowy presence among the characters, I knew I could never reverse Hereward’s decision. And yet, I was able in some mysterious way to add to whatever remorse he might have felt from time to time: I became, perhaps, one more of the lesser characters whose disapproval conveyed itself to Hereward. More to my satisfaction, I seemed able wordlessly to convey my sympathy to the cast-off Torfrida and even to suppose that this was of help to her.

In my life as a ghostly fictional character—as the creation of a reader rather than a writer—I could say and do no more than my creator was able to have me say or do, and my creator was a child. He was a precocious child in some ways: in his reading of adult books, for example, and in his curiosity about adult sexuality, so to call it. In other ways, he was an ignorant child. When he sent a version of himself into the scenery that included the hill with the trees on it and the two-storey house, he wanted no more than to have that version fall in love with one of the female characters and she with him. And although he could have said that he himself had already fallen in love with many female persons in what he would have called the real world, he knew about girls’ or young women’s falling in love only what he had read about it in fiction.

A reader of
this
work of fiction may be wondering why I had to insinuate a version of myself into the scenery of so many novels or short stories when I might have chosen from the male characters in each work a young man or a boy and might afterwards have felt as though I shared in his fictional life. My answer is that I had never met up with any young male character with whom I could feel the sympathy needed for such a sharing. And the most common reason for my failing to sympathise with young male characters was that I could not comprehend, let alone agree with, the policy of those characters towards young female characters.

Sometimes I tried to live in my mind the life of one or another male character of fiction. I believe I tried, while I read the first of the monthly instalments of
Brat Farrar
, to take part, as it were, in the fictional life of the young man who had arrived at the two-storey house claiming to be the long-lost son. I recall my having suspected from the first that the claimant was an impostor and, therefore, no kin of the young woman. This would have left me free to fall in love with the young woman, who had attracted me as soon as I had begun to read about her. At the same time, my representing myself as her brother or half-brother would have obliged me to disguise my true feelings for the time being—or, if my claim was accepted, perhaps indefinitely. Far from being a hindrance or a hardship, this would have been much to my liking; for me, the process of falling in love needed much secrecy and concealment and pretence. To fall in love with a young woman who had to allow for the possibility that I was her brother or half-brother—such an event would have prompted me to set going all that I considered necessary and appropriate during a courtship: the young man’s confiding in the young woman day after day for month after month, if necessary, until she had learned every detail of his life-story, of his daydreams, and of what he might have called his ideal female companion, and until she had come to understand that he was different indeed from the many coarse-minded suitors that she would have read about in fiction who could hardly wait before they tried to kiss and embrace their girlfriends; the young woman’s responding to the young man’s confidences by reporting in equal detail her own history, especially those periods of her life when she believed herself to be in love with one or another boy or young man; finally, the young woman’s falling into the habit of asking the young man, whenever he took his leave of her, where he was likely to be and what he was likely to be doing in his absence, thereby allowing the young man to suppose that the young woman daydreamed about him while he and she were apart, so that he did not deceive himself whenever he seemed to feel her presence about him while he was alone.

Before I began to write the first of the six previous paragraphs, I had intended to report more of what I recalled about my feelings towards the character of Aunt Bee, as she existed in my mind, and more about a further reason that I had for thinking sometimes about the personage known to me as Josephine Tey when I would have preferred simply to look at the unfolding scenery that appeared to me while I read. I had intended to report that I was jealous of the influence that Aunt Bee had over the young female character that I looked forward to courting in my mind. If the young female had a fault in my eyes, it was her unquestioning admiration of Aunt Bee.

I sensed that Aunt Bee disapproved of my interest in the young female character and that she contrived to keep me from being alone with her. Even though I conducted myself towards the young woman with unfailing seemliness, as though I truly was her brother or her half-brother, still Aunt Bee seemed to suspect me of wanting to make advances to the young woman if only I could arrange for the two of us to be alone together. Of course I wanted to be alone with the young woman, but for the time being I planned only to have long, serious conversations with her during our meetings.

The publication in serial form of the whole novel surely took at least six months, during which time I would have seen myself often in my mind as a version of the character of the claimant, and even more often as a version of myself inserted into the scenery of the novel. During the two weeks while I was writing the previous two thousand words of this text, I recalled a number of my experiences as a child-reader of the text of
Brat Farrar
, but not once did I recall any scene in which any version of myself was alone with the young female character. I attribute this to the influence of Aunt Bee. Not only did the young female character consult the older woman at every turn, but I believe that I, whether as reader, seeming character, or intruder-into-the-text, was afraid of Aunt Bee.

If only I had been able, in spite of Aunt Bee, to spend some time alone with the young woman, I had prepared beforehand not just the substance of what I was going to tell her about myself but also the scenery in which I was going to tell it. I have little doubt that Josephine Tey would have described in detail more than one view of the countryside visible from the two-storey house, but all I recall today is the distant hill with the clump of trees and the name that I could not accept. The scenery mentioned two sentences ago was of my own making. As soon as I had understood that the two-storey house stood among green English countryside, I would have felt free to arrange throughout that countryside my own preferred distant views or hidden nooks. I recall more than fifty years later that I hoped often to sit with the young woman in an upper-storey room that had been fitted out as a parlour and the windows of which overlooked a distant moor or fen. I cared nothing for what might be called geographical veracity: I wanted to have the young woman see in the distance the sort of place where she and I might have strolled together as innocent friends if only we had known one another during childhood. Five or six years before I first read
Wuthering Heights
, I had decided that a moor was a most suitable place for a male and a female child to be alone together and to talk together until the image of each became in the other’s mind the trustworthy companion that he and she had always longed for. As for the fen, I thought of it as no more than a shallow swamp that two children might have walked around in complete safety. I believe I might even have decreed—I, the wilful reader—that the inexpertly named hill with the coppice near its summit was the source of a tiny stream that trickled downwards in rainy weather until it became, if the rain kept up, what English persons called a brook, which I understood to be a watercourse shallow enough and narrow enough for a child to be able to wade across or even to jump across. Since my early childhood, I had been afraid of large bodies of water or of fast-flowing, murky rivers and drains but much interested in shallow ponds or swamps or small creeks that filled or flowed only during seasons of rain. Walking with one of my uncles across his dairy farm during many of my summer school-holidays, I would have liked to inspect certain green places among clumps of rushes where the soil might have been still spongy and damp, but my uncle always reminded me that such places were infested by snakes. The equivalent indoors of my interest in shallow or trickling water was my longing to have access to an upper-storey window. At the time when I was reading
Brat Farrar
, I had never been inside a house of more than one storey, although I had often daydreamed of watching unobserved from an upper window not only persons close by but also distant landscapes. At least five years before I read
Brat Farrar
, I had been taken for the first time to a house where one of my mother’s older sisters lived with her husband and her four daughters in a clearing in the Heytesbury Forest, in south-western Victoria. My mother and my aunt, and even the four girls, my cousins, often amused themselves afterwards by recalling in my hearing that I had walked into one after another room during my first minutes in their house and had looked behind the door in each room. In reply to their questions at the time, I had said that I was looking for stairs. Their house was hardly more than a cottage, but something about the angle of the roof must have suggested to me as I approached that a few upper rooms or even a single attic might have looked out over much more of the forest than I could have seen if I had stood among its nearer trees. I found no stairs, of course, but I found later on the back verandah something that caused me to forget my disappointment. My two oldest girl-cousins, one of them of my age and the other a year older, were the owners of the first doll’s house that I had seen anywhere but behind shop-windows. The house was of two storeys, and seemed to be fitted out with items of tiny furniture. I could not inspect the house; its owners would not allow me or my younger brother to approach it. I tried to explain that I wanted only to look into the house and not to touch it, but the girl-owners were unmoved. My brother and my mother and I were to stay overnight. One of the girl’s beds was moved from their tiny bedroom onto the back verandah so that my brother and I could sleep head-to-toe in it. I can only suppose that my mother slept in one of the girl’s beds in their room and that two at least of the girls had to sleep head-to-toe, which might have explained in part why the older girls seemed to dislike their visiting cousins, especially me who begged to see into their doll’s house or, failing that, to join in their games or their conversations. During the early evening, I felt sure that the owners of the doll’s house would take it to their own room at any moment, but the house was still on the back verandah when my brother and I were preparing for bed. I could not believe that the owners had forgotten it. I supposed either that their mother had forbidden them to take the thing into their crowded bedroom or, more likely, that they, the girl-owners, had left it on the verandah in order to entrap me: they knew I was anxious to inspect the house and, probably, to handle some of the items in it; they knew also the rightful position of every bed and pillow and chair; in the morning they would find proof that I had handled certain things; they would convey this proof to their mother and, even perhaps, to my own mother; I would have to defend myself against the collective anger of my aunt and my mother and my girl-cousins. Having foreseen these possibilities, I became cautious. I forced myself to stay awake until half an hour after I had heard the owners of the doll’s house going to their room for the night. Then I slipped out of bed and knelt beside the doll’s house and tried to look in through an upper window. A certain amount of moonlight already lit up the back verandah, but while I knelt my head and shoulders kept the upper storey in darkness. I hesitated but then dared to slide the whole doll’s house far out onto the verandah, hoping that nothing inside had been moved. Then, while the moonlight shone through the windows on one side of the upper storey, I stared in through the windows of the other side. Moments before I applied my eye to the first of those windows, which were mere apertures and not glazed, I had intended to insert soon afterwards through another window one or more finger and then to touch one after another of the objects in the upper rooms. But in the event, I merely looked, although this was only partly because I was afraid I might leave some trace of my intrusion: some chair overturned or some bed-quilt turned down.