Barley Patch (3 page)

From an early age, I had read each week a comic-strip that filled the inside back cover of the
Australian Women’s Weekly
. The title of the strip was “Mandrake the Magician.” To this day, I do not know whether the creator of Mandrake and his companions was a resident of Australia or of the United States of America. As a child, I was content to locate Mandrake’s adventures in a daydream-country where towering cities were set far apart on rolling grasslands: a country deriving in part from the few films that I had seen but also from the glimpses of far-reaching landscapes that came to me whenever I heard from a distant radio on a quiet afternoon the faint sounds of some or another hit-parade song.

Mandrake had two constant companions: Lothar, his giant Nubian servant, and Princess Narda, a young brunette woman who might have attracted me if I could have learned something about her character. In one of their adventures, Mandrake, Lothar, and Princess Narda went for a holiday to a dude ranch in a desert landscape. (This is no proof that the comic-strip itself came from the USA. I learned many years later that some of the comics I had once assumed to be American were devised by men who toiled all their lives in Sydney or Melbourne.) Late on their first evening at the ranch, when all three were preparing for bed in their separate rooms, Princess Narda, who had not drawn the curtains across her window, saw outside the window a giant human hand poised as though about to thrust through the glass and to grope towards her. Princess Narda screamed and then fainted away. Mandrake and Lothar hurried into her room, but by then the hand was no longer in view, and when Princess Narda had been revived and had told her story, the men were inclined to believe that she had imagined the giant hand. (Later, Mandrake himself found a giant footprint and had glimpses of parts of a threatening giant. Some villains had made the parts out of papier-mâché in order to frighten visitors away from the ranch. The villains wanted to buy the property cheaply and then to profit from the oil that they believed was under the property.) Even as a young child, I saw through, as it were, most of the adventures of Mandrake the Magician; I was almost always aware of the presence behind the line-drawings and the speech-balloons of a person who lived in some or another part of what I called the real world and who struggled continually to imagine. And yet, I got from certain images in comic-strips what I got from certain pieces of fiction in publications such as
The Australian Journal
: details worthy to be included in the scenery that I needed to have always at the back of my mind and outlines of persons worthy to live among that scenery. For example, I watched unfolding in my mind often as a child the following events. A huge, awkward male person, quite unlike myself to look at but of a disposition not unlike my own, finds himself one evening outside a lighted room in which a good-looking dark-haired young woman is undressing for bed. He had first caught sight of the young woman from some distance away, but when he stands beside the window he is so tall and so clumsy that he can only stoop and fumble with a hand at the lighted panes. His only means of getting past the window is to smash the glass with his knuckles. This he does so easily that the shards of glass bring hardly a trace of blood to his pudgy fingers. He is unable to see into the room, but he trusts his fingertips to be able to distinguish between furniture and fabrics and human flesh. Shortly, his fingers close around the limp female body on the floor of the room. But then he pauses. He had been going to lift the woman out; to hold her up to his face; to admire her miniscule features; to look beneath her clothing. But now, he pauses, perhaps out of pity for the doll-sized creature who lies at his mercy but more, perhaps, because the unfolding of my mind has come to an end. I have lost sight of events. I am in need of a faculty such as I have never possessed.

On the verandah of my aunt’s house, I looked into each of the two upper rooms of the doll’s house and then eased the house back to its former position. Then I climbed back into my bed, feeling foolish. I had expected that my looking into the house might reveal to me some sort of secret that my girl-cousins had been keeping from me—perhaps on some bed in an upper room lay a tiny doll with only a thin nightdress covering her female parts. In the event, I had seen in the upper rooms only neat furniture. No doll that my cousins owned was small enough or dainty enough to belong in the house. It was not only I who had no right to poke my fingers through the windows; I began to think of my cousins as hardly worthy to own the house, which I had stopped thinking of as a mere residence for dolls.

Three or four years after my visit to the house in the clearing in the Heytesbury Forest, I read a comic-book about a character named Doll-man. Some or another unremarkable citizen of a vaguely American city was able, when the need arose, to compress the molecules of his body and to become a doll-sized man. On the night when I had looked into the doll’s house, I fell asleep as though my own molecules had been somehow compressed so that I was able to lie comfortably in my chosen bed in an upper-storey room overlooking a clearing in the Heytesbury Forest and to hear already in my mind the shrieks of the giant female personages who would look in on me next morning through the windows.

I reported at the end of the fifth paragraph before the previous paragraph that I was often afraid of the character known as Aunt Bee in the work of fiction
Brat Farrar.
I reported even earlier that I sometimes resented the influence that Aunt Bee was allowed to exert over one at least of the other characters in the work. While I was reporting those matters, I seemed to recall from more than fifty years ago my having once or twice doubted whether the one character in a work of fiction should be allowed to possess so many qualities deemed admirable by the narrator as Aunt Bee was allowed to possess in
Brat Farrar
. Of course, terms such as
narrator
and even
character
were unknown to me at the time. I simply observed what happened in my mind while I read. And although I was afraid of Aunt Bee, I must sometimes have been aware that the cause of her appearing as she did in my mind was no more than that a personage known to me only as
Josephine Tey
had chosen that she, Aunt Bee, should appear thus.

I would like to be able to report here that I supposed at least once during my reading that Josephine Tey, whoever she might have been, ought to have written differently about Aunt Bee. I suspect that I had already accepted, more than fifty years ago, that no writer could be required to deal fairly with his or her characters, let alone readers.

When Aunt Bee was first mentioned in the text of
Brat Farrar
, she was probably the subject of a long passage of description. Any such passage would have been wasted on me, as all so-called descriptions of so-called characters in works of fiction have been wasted on me since I first began to read such works. For how many years did I read dutifully what I thought of as descriptive passages? How often did I try to feel grateful to the authors who included such passages in their works, thereby enabling me to see vividly while I read what they, the authors, had imagined while they wrote? I can recall my having discovered as early as in 1952, while I was reading
Little Women
, by Louisa M. Alcott, that the female characters-in-my-mind, so to call them, were wholly different in appearance from the characters-in-the-text, so to call them. I was too young at the time to know that this was not the result of my being an unskilled reader. Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it; that even while I write this present piece of fiction I am trying to read a certain text. (With writing, the matter seems to have been otherwise. Already, as a very young man, I understood that I might be capable of writing fiction without having first observed numerous interesting places and persons and events and even without being able to imagine settings and characters and plots, but not until the day when I stopped writing did I understand what I had been doing all the while when I had thought I was merely writing.)

I would have read attentively whatever Josephine Tey had written in the early pages of
Brat Farrar
in order to suggest to the reader the appearance of Aunt Bee. Perhaps some or another sentence might have caused me to see in my mind the image of Aunt Bee that has stayed there ever since, but I suspect not. Josephine Tey may have written at length about her character’s distinctive clothes or her admirable personality, but I suspect that some connotation that I have long since forgotten caused me first to see Aunt Bee in my mind as I have seen her ever since. My image of Aunt Bee has comprised never more than two details. She, so to call her, consists of a florid face and a hairstyle that might be called upswept. I am vaguely aware of a clothed body somewhere beneath the hairstyle and the face, but I have never seen that body in my mind. The florid face is hardly different from the florid face that I recall whenever I recall the woman known to me only as Sister Mary Gonzaga, who was the principal of the first primary school that I attended. I was not afraid of Sister Gonzaga as some persons claim to have been afraid during their childhood of nuns wearing long black robes. Sister Gonzaga’s robes and her florid face seemed to me appropriate distinctions for a person who taught forty and more eighth-grade girls.

At my first primary school, boys were taught only in the lowest three grades. After the third grade, boys went to an all-boys school across the road to be taught by religious brothers. At the primary school, all upper grades consisted of girls only. In the eighth grade, almost every girl was in her fourteenth year. In my first year at primary school, I knew nothing of secondary schools, let alone teachers’ colleges or universities. The girls in Sister Gonzaga’s room were the most senior students of any sort that I had ever seen. I was mostly the pet, or favourite, of my nun-teacher in the first grade, and so I was often sent by her on some or another errand to Sister Gonzaga’s classroom. No university or cathedral or library that I have since stepped into has awed me so much as that hushed classroom would awe me whenever I visited it on some or another hot afternoon. The room seemed cooler than any other in the school, if only because its windows looked between pepper-trees towards the banks of the trickling drain that I knew as Bendigo Creek or because each windowsill had on it a plant-pot from which sparse green foliage hung down. The coolness may have been an illusion, but the quietness of the room always startled me. I seemed to have entered a place where arcane knowledge lay just beyond my reach. The eighth-grade girls, whenever I burst in upon them, seemed either to be absorbing or to be recording such knowledge. Either they were reading from thick books with homemade brown-paper covers that hid the titles and the names of the authors, or they were writing with steel-nibbed pens or even with fountain pens one after another long sentence across line after line in immaculate exercise books. More than that, the girls made gentle fun of me—why, I never understood.

The girls’ teacher seemed to know me as a clever child who was not afraid to speak out. Whenever I visited her room, she would ask me, in the hearing of the whole class, what I took to be a straightforward question. I would give her a straightforward reply, but almost always my reply would cause the eighth-grade girls to laugh. They laughed not raucously and overlong, as my own classmates laughed, but briefly and discreetly. A sort of whinnying sound rose from the girls and then ceased abruptly at a look from Sister Gonzaga. I would always leave the room not only baffled by my having amused the girls but hurt by their having rejected me, because my speaking frankly in front of them had been, in its own way, a declaration of love.

Whenever I stood in front of the rows of eighth-grade girls, I was not bold enough to look at any one face. I was therefore spared the sight of some or another girl that I saw every day in the playground and disliked for her features or her manners. I looked always above the heads of the girls and towards the rear wall of their classroom, so that any one of the throng of pale blurs in the lower field of my vision might have been the face of the girl that I never saw in the playground because she stayed in a quiet corner with her few softly-spoken girlfriends or because she spent most of her lunch-hour reading in her classroom: the girl who was far too old for me to have as my girlfriend but who might have seen far into me while her teacher made fun of me, so that I could rely in future on her image in my mind. This image would have been of a tall girl, almost a woman in my estimation, who wore the same intimidating navy-blue tunic and white blouse that her classmates wore but whose face told me she did not resent my interest in her—my seeing her in my mind whenever I needed to look to a female presence for inspiration.

I understood that the connection between the older girl and myself existed only in my daydreams, but I sometimes supposed that something might have developed between us if only her florid-faced teacher had not urged her girl-pupils often to look away from their shabby houses and their dusty streets and to dwell on the images that came to their minds whenever they read their books or said their prayers. When some of my classmates told me that children from the nearest State school used the nickname “Beetroot” for our Sister Gonzaga, I pretended to be shocked but I was secretly pleased.

Several years after I had last seen the red-faced nun, and a hundred miles away from the provincial city where she had made fun of me in front of her decorous pupils, I would have been reading, in the first of the serialised excerpts of
Brat Farrar
, some or another paragraph in which the narrator hinted yet again at the virtues of the character Aunt Bee when I first gave to that character the nickname that I have used for her ever since: Aunt Beetroot.