Barley Patch (5 page)

At every Sunday tea, after the main course of cold meat and salad, we were served a sweet called a trifle. I never saw a trifle being prepared—the ingredients would always have been placed in a large bowl early in the day and put aside to soak. Children such as myself were served only small portions of trifle, because one of the ingredients was sherry. I might have identified the other ingredients merely by looking at what was on my spoon while I ate, but I always ate my trifle by gulping at it and I always kept my eyes averted from the stuff in my plate or on my spoon. The main ingredient was some kind of cake, but after it had been soaked all day its texture often suggested to me that I had in my mouth such a pulp or mush as my aunt would have removed from her rear teeth whenever she scraped them with a finger.

The aunt mentioned hereabouts could well have afforded to visit a hairdresser whenever she so wished and to have come away with a different hairstyle after each visit. I cannot recall that I ever took note of her hairstyle, but whenever an image of my aunt has appeared in my mind for many years past, that image has been of a certain face beneath what I call an upswept hairstyle: exactly the sort of hairstyle worn by the image of Aunt Bee in my mind whenever I recall my having read
Brat Farrar
.

In the image that I see of my aunt’s face I can find no detail to explain the sternness and disapproval that seem to emanate from the image. However, I have for long recognised that time has no existence in the image-world. I am therefore able to suppose that my image-aunt, during her wanderings among my image-landscapes, has come upon certain image-evidence from the years during the early 1950s when I masturbated often. That image-evidence would have included image-details of her image-nephew spying on his image-cousins, her image-daughters, during certain image-picnics on image-beaches during the early image-1950s, whenever one or another of the image-cousins leaned so far forward in order to reach for an image-tomato-sandwich or an image-patty-cake that the upper parts of her image-breasts were exposed or whenever she reached down to pick up some image-object from the image-sand and so caused the lower part of her image-bathing-costume to be stretched upwards, thereby exposing two image-rolls of image-flesh at the base of her image-buttocks. I am even able to suppose that my image-aunt may have come upon one or another image of a woman with an upswept image-hairstyle and an expression on her image-face of image-tolerance or even image-sympathy for the image-nephew and his image-spying, although I have never been able to suppose that my image-aunt would not have been sternly disapproving of such an image-image.

Not long before I read
Brat Farrar
, or it may have been not long afterwards, I read in
The Australian Journal
one after another instalment of the novel
The Glass Spear
, by Sidney Hobson Courtier. I knew about the author only that he was an Australian whose previous published works had been short stories set in New Guinea during the Second World War. (During the late 1950s, when I had decided on a career as a teacher in a State secondary school who would write poetry and perhaps short stories in secret at weekends or during the long summer holidays, I learned that Sidney Hobson Courtier was a senior teacher in a State primary school about five kilometres from the south-eastern suburb of Melbourne where I then lived. I was prepared to write always in secret and to use a pen-name because I knew that teachers employed by the State were forbidden to undertake paid employment outside their working hours. Sidney Hobson Courtier made no secret of his being a writer. He had got special permission from the Education Department to write in his free time after he had presented the Department with a medical certificate stating that he needed to write in order to preserve his health. During the early 1960s, when I was teaching in a primary school and writing poetry and short stories in secret in a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, my head-teacher had been a colleague of the man he referred to as Sid Courtier. I never questioned my head-teacher about the author of
The Glass Spear
, partly because I was afraid of revealing that I was a secret writer and partly because I preferred not to learn that the author was other than I had surmised during my reading of his book.) While I read the early instalments of
The Glass Spear
, I surmised that the author was a person I might have confided in: a person who might have listened with interest while I explained that I read books of fiction in order to see landscapes in my mind and to meet up with young female personages in my mind. While I read the later instalments, I read also in order to learn how the plot, so to call it, would unfold and what would happen to the characters, so to call them. But my interest in these matters was only a passing interest: I was anxious to have done with them so that I could turn my attention again to what I considered the true subject-matter of the book.

If I could have met up with the author of
The Glass Spear
in the house where I saw him as living—in the sprawling house with the long return verandahs looking across park-like countryside towards a distant road somewhere in the western half of Victoria—I would have complained politely to him that his sort of book always came to an end too soon after the chief events, so to call them, had taken place: after the murders had been solved and the lovers had become engaged to be married. I might even have dared to tell Sidney Hobson Courtier, while we sat in a shaded corner of his verandah, that the chief fault of books such as
The Glass Spear
was that they came to an end when they might have gone on for as long, or longer, than I could have read them. I could not reasonably have asked of any author that he or she should write a book so long that I could never read to the end of it, but I might have dared to suggest to Sidney Hobson Courtier that he might have written as the ending of his book at least one more chapter like the early chapters so that my last experiences as a reader of
The Glass Spear
could have been sights-in-my-mind of room after room in a sprawling mansion surrounded by grassy countryside, or feelings such as I might have felt if I had been one of the persons who was to go on living in that mansion for long after the book had come to an end.

At least one murder was reported to have taken place in
The Glass Spear
. I forgot long ago who the victim or victims was or were and, likewise, who was the murderer. The murder-weapon, I seem to recall, was a spear such as an Australian Aborigine might have made. The tip of the spear was a piece of sharpened glass from a beer-bottle. When I first learned this while I was reading one or another serialised episode, I was disappointed. Until then, I had supposed that the words of the title of the book I was reading referred to a spear made all of glass and perhaps even lying on dark-coloured velvet in a glass display-case in the hall of the large house described in the early pages of
The Glass Spear
. Or I had supposed, against all odds, that I might read in due course that one or another room in the large house was a chapel or an oratory, or even a library, and that the windows of that room were of stained glass and that one of those windows, late on every cloudless afternoon glowed with a many-coloured design at the centre of which appeared a spear of a rare shade or tint.

I had only a passing interest in the murder or murders and hardly more interest in the chief male character or even the chief female character. These were two young unmarried persons and distant cousins, so I seem to recall. The man seemed dull and predictable; I had no wish to share in his life as I sometimes seemed to share in the life of a young male character. I gave to the image in my mind of the young woman a face that I would have called attractive, but I found her much less interesting than another female character who will be mentioned shortly.

My not having to take part in the life of the chief male character left me free to have a version of myself wander through the setting of
The Glass Spear
, which setting was a huge sheep or cattle property in the west of New South Wales. The name of the property was Kinie Ger. I spent hardly any time in the paddocks, partly because they were too arid for my liking and partly because I preferred not to meet up with any of the many Aborigines who lived on the property. Some of these worked as stockmen or labourers or kitchen-hands and lived in quarters not far from the homestead; others seemed to have no other homes than a row of humpies beside the creek. The white persons in the homestead referred to these humpies as the blacks’ camp and to the tall woman who seemed the leading person there as Mary, preceded by an epithet that I cannot recall.

The homestead known as Kinie Ger has stayed in my mind more clearly than any other building I have read about in fiction for the reason that the author of
The Glass Spear
took pains to include in his text details sufficient for the reader to be able to draw an accurate plan of the building. During my conjectured meeting with Sidney Hobson Courtier on his return verandah, the question I most wanted to ask him was whether or not he considered himself such a person as I considered myself: that rare sort of person who cannot be content in any district or any building unless he or she can refer to a map or a plan, even a map or a plan that the person has devised in haste in his or her mind. I was mostly content while I was a ghost-character of
The Glass Spear
because I mostly wandered through the homestead known as Kinie Ger seeing in my mind my whereabouts on the plan in my mind.

The homestead, as I see it now, nearly sixty years since I last read any reference to it, was shaped like an upper-case letter E. A person approaching the homestead saw the three arms of the letter pointing towards him or her. The central arm comprised the dining-room and the living-room. The outer arms each comprised mostly bedrooms. The long arm from which the three shorter arms projected comprised kitchen, pantries, storerooms, and the manager’s quarters. I seem to recall that Mary and some of her tribe spent much time in the yard behind this arm of the house.

The persons living in the homestead numbered perhaps ten, many of them being members of what would be called nowadays an extended family. I forgot long ago whatever I might have read about most of them. I remember today that one of them was named Ambrose Mahon. I remember also a great deal about Huldah.

As I approach yet again in my mind the three-pronged building that I first read about in the early 1950s, I keep my eyes fixed on the windows of the nearest room in the prong or wing at my left. Behind those windows, the blinds are always drawn. The nearest to me of the rooms in the wing on my left is the furthest room along the corridor for someone standing inside that wing and also the most remote room in the house from the main living areas. The door to that room is always locked, just as the blinds are always drawn in the windows. In the dim, locked room lives Huldah, one of the several siblings of the older generation of the family who live at Kinie Ger. Huldah has lived in her room since she was a child. Her siblings, presumably, know why she hides from the world and perhaps even visit her in secret late at night. The younger persons at Kinie Ger have never seen Huldah and can only guess at her story. They mostly guess that Huldah has some hideous disfigurement that she wants to keep hidden from the world or else that she has an illness of the mind that causes her to live her life in secret.

From the moment when I first read about Huldah, she was for me the chief character of
The Glass Spear
. I often disregarded the facts of the novel, so to call them, and thought of her as a young woman of marriageable age rather than the middle-aged person she surely was. Given that the version of myself who stepped easily into the scenery of books of fiction was a young man of marriageable age, it was inevitable that I would spend much of my time as a hanger-on at Kinie Ger in trying to attract the attention of the unseen Huldah. I did what little I could think of doing. I walked past her windows several times each day, always with a book in my hands as a sign that the world in which Kinie Ger stood among vistas of arid grasslands with trees in the distance—that world was not for me the only possible world. When I had tired of so walking, I would sit with an opened book in front of me in the living-room, in the central wing of the house. I was far from Huldah’s room, but one of her trusted siblings might have reported to the hidden young woman that the newcomer who had found his way across pages of text into the dim rooms of a remote homestead was a reader; that even in a place I had only read about, I still read about other places.

If it had been possible, the trusted sibling might have reported also that I was a writer. The sibling could not have told Huldah that he or she had seen me writing for hour after hour during some or another hot afternoon at the table of the living-room. As a child, I supposed that my sort of writing could be done only in secret. However, I am able to report that my having read about Huldah and her locked room in a fictional homestead drove me to begin to write the first piece of prose fiction that I can remember having written. As I recall, I wrote during 1950 or 1951 the first few hundred words of a story set on a large rural property in inland Tasmania. Most of what I wrote described the homestead on the property and some of the persons who lived there. I wrote in secret and I hid the finished pages each morning before I left for school. I hid the pages under a loose corner of the frayed linoleum in my bedroom, but after I had written the first few hundred words my mother found them. She quoted several of my sentences to me one afternoon as soon as I had arrived home from school. She took out my pages from the pocket at the front of her apron and she questioned me in the way that many a person would question me at writers’ festivals and such gatherings thirty and more years later. My mother wanted to know how much of my fiction was autobiographical, so to speak, and how much was imaginary, so to speak. She was especially interested in the origins of the two chief characters, a young man and a young woman each of marriageable age whose rooms were at diagonally opposite ends of a huge homestead, which was shaped like an upper-case letter H. The young man’s given name was the same as my own, and my mother seemed to have divined that the young woman’s given name was that of a girl at my school, although she, my mother, could surely not have supposed that the name belonged to a girl in an upper grade who would have been three years older than myself. I spent much time in observing this girl, although she had never caught me at it and may well have been unaware of my existence.