The Feel of Steel
Authors: Helen Garner
H
ELEN
G
ARNER
was born in Geelong in 1942. She has been publishing novels, short stories, non-fiction and journalism since 1977 when her first novel,
Monkey Grip
, appeared. Her most recent books are
The First Stone
and
True Stories
, and her selected short fiction
My Hard Heart
. She lives in Melbourne.
Â
O
THER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
Monkey Grip
Honour & Other People's Children
The Children's Bach
Postcards from Surfers
Cosmo Cosmolino
The Last Days of Chez Nous
(screenplay)
The First Stone
(non-fiction)
True Stories
(non-fiction)
My Hard Heart
(selected short stories)
All reasonable attempts have been made by the author to obtain permission to quote from material known to be in copyright; any copyright holders who believe their copyright to have been breached are invited to contact Pan Macmillan.
First published 2001 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Helen Garner 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
Garner, Helen, 1942â .
The feel of steel.
ISBN 0 330 36289 5.
1. Garner, Helen, 1942â -Anecdotes. 2. Garner, Helen, 1942â -Attitudes. 3. Garner, Helen, 1942â -Family relationships. 4. Women authors, Australian -20th century- Political and social views. I. Title.
A828.309
Typeset in 11.5/15 pt Granjon by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group
Cover and text design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design
These electronic editions published in 2007 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
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The Feel of Steel
Helen Garner
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TO RUTH, AND TO O.M. BOWERS,
WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE; AND TO MY GENEROUS SPIRITED NEPHEW, KARIM.
My thanks to the following publications, in which versions of most of these pieces first appeared: the
Age
,
Best Australian Essays
(ed. Peter Craven, Bookman and Black Inc.), the
Bulletin
,
Good Weekend
,
Heat
,
House & Garden
and
Women's Weekly
.
I found the poem on page 37, âLife, friends, is boring', in John Berryman's
Selected Poems 1938â1968
(Faber); the lines on page 44 from Alexander Pope's âEpistle to Dr Arbuthnot' in
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
(Norton); the poem on page 45, âFriends', in W.B. Yeats'
Selected Poetry
(Papermac); and the lines on page 72 from R.M. Rilke's âNinth Duino Elegy' in the Stephen Mitchell translation (Picador Classics).
Writing Home
I
n the summer of 1996 my parents moved from a townhouse in the Melbourne suburb of Kew to an eighth-floor apartment right in the middle of the city. One forty-two-degree morning my father and I made the final trip to the Kew place, loaded up the car with the small items that the removalists had left behind, and set out for the new apartment.
As we backed out of the drive I said to him, âHow does it feel to be moving again, Dad? You've lived here for nearly ten years.'
Looking straight ahead, he said in a defiant, resolute tone, âI don't feel anything in particular. I've never had any attachment to anything I've ever owned or anywhere I've ever lived.'
Months later I am still pondering this extraordinary statement. It can't possibly be true, of course (though I
suddenly understood why he had burnt the family's slide collection), and a whole novel could be written around what it means that an old man should say such a thing. But the fact that he thinks it's true, or wants it to be, must have something to do with
my
lack of a sense of home.
What's home supposed to be, anyway?
Is it the flat in Sydney where I live now? That's where my husband lives, the place we go back to after we've been out. It's where we sleep every night, where we eat and bathe and talk and laugh and keep our things, where we get letters, where people call us on the phone, where we can be found if someone is looking for us.
But at fifty-four can I really call home a place I've lived in for barely three years? No matter how beautiful and adventurous, Sydney is still foreign. Place names here don't chime for me. St Kilda, Hawthorn, Keilor, Thomastown â I know what they mean. But Cronulla? St Ives? Gladesville? â
Blank
.
My husband, in morbid vein, says to me, âThe minute I drop off the twig, I bet you'll move straight back to Melbourne.'
Most people think that's where I belong. But Melbourne's not mine, and I'm not Melbourne's â not in the deepest sense â not from childhood. I never even travelled on a tram till I went there in 1961, at eighteen, to start university. It became home to me, and is still the city I know best in the world, but it took me years to learn it, to stop feeling like a hick and a stranger.
To find home, will I have to go further back into the past? How far back? Could this become painful?
It's a well-known fact that as people grow older, their memories of their earliest life become clearer and stronger. Somehow I never imagined this would happen to
me
â not yet!
My childhood memories used to be narrative. Sparse, but good enough to serve as a basis for a few anecdotes and a bit of day-dreaming. They tended to centre round a small Victorian coastal town called Ocean Grove, where our family lived for a little while and which we left in 1952, the year I turned ten. Beach. Roller-skating. The flounder my father and his friends speared at night in the shallows. A cubby house where I hid to write by candle-light in an exercise book. Some pansies I planted and on which my father inadvertently dumped some sheets of corrugated iron. The path to school, playing under a row of pine trees, âloving' a Hungarian boy called Valentine, swapping cards, skipping with the long and the short ropes.
Yes, I had that stuff down.
Then, about two years ago, I was dully walking along a Sydney street, worrying about nothing in particular, when â boom! I was small. I was turning the corner past the tankstand and putting my hand out to push open the back door of the Ocean Grove house. It was made of diagonal latticed slats painted dark green and rough to the touch. I nearly keeled over with the vividness of that door. It came from nowhere. It hadn't entered my mind for over forty years.
So this is what old people mean about memory! And now it keeps happening, completely at random. Over a
couple of months, the whole Ocean Grove house hit me, blow after blow â the shape, the smell, the air. Then came the yard, the âtin garage', the hedge, the cane couch, a tree with a low branch.
No sooner had I got my breath than I was yanked back in a ten-year leap to the house my parents lived in when I was born, in Strachan Avenue, Manifold Heights, Geelong.
Now this is really home. So far away and sunk so deep that no conscious act of remembering can seize the exact feel of it. If I wait for it, it won't come. I have to be thinking about something else. It wants to sneak up on me and stab me between the ribs.
A tree with trembling leaves. A striped dress made of floppy material, must have been Mum's. The turn of the passage towards the lavatory. A secret possy behind the lounge room door, something to do with the Hoyts Suburban Theatres jingle. Some chooks? Mint, a foot crushing it. And someone holding me up to a night window packed with stars.
Was there ever such a star-clogged sky, or was it fireworks? Guy Fawkes? A bonfire? I'll never know, I can't know, I don't
want
to know. I could ask my mother and my father â but what if they've forgotten? What if their memory of that starry window has been blotted out by their five younger children? What if they don't remember that night, when in all the world there was nobody but them and me?
Is this why my father made his sweeping, defiant statement? Is this why my parents kept on moving all their
adult lives? Has life taught them that it hurts too much to have the past thrust at you again and again, when it's gone, gone, gone?