Susan Green

PLAINNESS

The garden’s grillework gate
opens with the ease of a page
in a well-thumbed book,
and, once inside, our eyes
have no need to dwell on objects
already fixed and exact in memory.
Here habits and minds and the private language all families invent
are everyday things to me.
What necessity is there to speak
or to pretend to be someone else?
The whole house knows me:
they’re aware of my worries and weakness.
This is the best that can happen –
what Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not be be wondered at, or required to succeed
but simply to be let in
as part of an undeniable Reality
like stones of the road, like trees.

Jorge Luis Borges
translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni

A few weeks ago, I tried to go home again.

To my childhood home, in the bayside suburb of Chelsea. I thought that I was prepared for the changes wrought in 35 years (it’s that long since I’ve been there) but I wasn’t. Even though I’d even had a sneaking look at my old street on Google and knew that our house had been pulled down, I guess on some level I thought there’d be something left. Maybe the back gate, or the ti-trees along the boundary fence. But no. Nothing. And the phrase ‘You can’t go home again’  got stuck in my mind.

Ignorant me, I didn’t know where I’d got it from. So to Google and then Wikipedia. It was Thomas Wolfe, from a  novel of the same name, published posthumously in 1940.

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

I think that old things, in general, are time machines. Especially if you can handle them, pick them up. Things that have been used by successive generations down the years are especially powerful. Heirlooms, we call them, but they don’t have to be valuable to be valuable. I have a chipped casserole, older than I am, that’s actually more precious to me than my grandmother’s gold watch, because of the years of family meals that came out of it.

Poets can put things into the perfect words, and here’s a little nugget from DH Lawrence. I realise that I’ve quoted it before, but another time won’t hurt. I do love it.

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

Women, too, of course. I have nanna-knitted rugs that I hope will go down to children and grandchildren. And this quilt,  made by a woman in my mother’s family, sometime in the 1860s.

Because I write mainly children’s fiction, I think a lot about the child’s view of history. How to give children a sense of the past. Not facts, not dates, but feeling, a sense that the people who lived in this place before them had lives that were similar but also very different. What those differences were – transport, technology, social mores, how those things effected the day-to-day functioning of households, schools, shops, businesses – can be shown in stories, not as the subject of the story, but incidentally. And, incidentally, I often think that’s the best way of learning.

History’s subject is change. We’re here now, looking back to then and we have to use not just our curiosity, but our imaginative power to try to see. I guess that’s where I, as a creative writer, come in.

Not that any of this has been uppermost as I’ve worked. The three Verity Sparks novels are intended for readers 9 to around 12. They appeal mainly to girls. They would be shelved with Junior Fiction in libraries or bookshops. They’re meant to be entertaining rather than instructive, but I think most writers would agree you can’t help involving your own preoccupations, the bees in your bonnet, in your work. The bees in my bonnet are, and always have been, three things – the past, time and memory. In one word, history.

At primary school, I was taught Australian history according to the fashion of the day. It was dull. Episodes that could have interested me, such as the stories of inland exploration, were inexplicably drained of life and excitement. And there hardly ever seemed to be any women! I’m afraid that I grew up thinking that Australia was definitely a loser in the history stakes; Europe with its queens and castles and wars was infinitely more fun. Which is sad, in a way. This is my country.

I certainly hope things are different today and that in the hands of teachers, the undertaking of history will come alive. Though the rationale for teaching history, according to a document put out by the Victorian Government, speaks of fostering ‘curiosity and imagination’, here are the actual stated aims.

AusVELS History aims to ensure that students develop:

• interest in, and enjoyment of, historical study for lifelong learning and work, including their capacity and willingness to be informed and active citizens
• knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the past and the forces that shape societies, including Australian society
• understanding and use of historical concepts, such as evidence, continuity and change, cause and effect, perspectives, empathy, significance and contestability
• capacity to undertake historical inquiry, including skills in the analysis and use of sources, and in explanation and communication.

This, to me, sounds disappointingly dry – history rendered ‘useful’. Interest and enjoyment, yes, but in the service of learning and of work and civic duty. I suppose an education service has to make explicit the value of what it is providing, especially to adults who are suspicious of anything that smacks of ‘play’. I am a life-long subversive in the service of ‘play’. Work can be play, you all know that; they’re not mutually exclusive.

My research can be completely goal-oriented – I know what I want to find out, I have a plan, I stick with it and get results. And it can also be a form of play – which I define as an activity that’s open-ended, when you’re not sure what you’ll end up with, when the process is as valuable as the outcome and moreover, you’re not particularly invested in that outcome. You can allow yourself to get side-tracked and led along unexpected and exciting paths, you find hidden treasure, you find out that the junk is actually treasure after all… It’s alive.

I grew up in Chelsea, one of Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. Our back gate opened onto the beach and I spent a lot of time there, beachcombing. I learned early to look down. Looking down and finding things to pick up is a habit I’ve kept with me all my life.

We moved to Castlemaine when I was seven and the things that I looked down at and picked up changed dramatically. Early on, I was told to watch out for snakes! No more seashells and dead crabs; I saw sparkling quartz rocks; I saw old broken bricks and glass and pottery and rusty bits of metal. When we walked through the massively overgrown cemetery and up into the bush beyond, I saw graves made of different kinds of stone, but also of timber (they’ve been burnt now, and destroyed) and even tin. I was able to pick up old bottles, some made of intriguing purple glass, white doves and clasped hands from the smashed imortelles (those ceramic wreaths under glass domes) and in the Chinese section, a broken terracotta bowl with dragons on it.

( A little aside here. Old Mr Jim Sheehan, who owned the house we rented in Campbell’s Creek , told me that he and his friends used to hide in the cemetery while a Chinese funeral was going on, and then when everyone was gone, nick out and take the roasted pork from the ceremonial oven, and eat it. Isn’t that a great story? Every time I look at this structure, I think of little Jim Sheehan stealing the ancestor’s pork! )

Back to the broken crockery and bottles. These fascinating findings didn’t make any sense to me. I knew they were old, but I didn’t understand what that meant.

I have a vivid memory of the day the penny dropped. My dad and brothers and I were walking in the bush out in the back of Campbell’s Creek and we came across the wreck of a cart. It wasn’t in a creek bed or on a track, it seemed to be sitting all by itself in a little dip in the ground in the middle of nowhere. There were two big wheels made of metal and wood. The metal was rusted, the wood was mostly rotted and fallen away, but it was really impressively big. My dad explained to me that the cart or dray would have been pulled by a horse or bullock, and it must have got bogged. The ground where it sat, unlike the areas around it, had lots of reedy grass and tussocks; this was a soak, dad told me; the water didn’t drain through the soil but just sat there and made the ground soft. The fully loaded dray would have been really heavy; the wheels would have sunk down and got stuck; the people couldn’t pull it out, and so they had to just leave it.

Suddenly, there was a story. A dramatic story. Several dramatic stories. In fact, the possibilities that sprang from the abandoned dray filled my eight-year-old mind. Whose was it? Where were they going? Why? Were there any children? What happened to the stuff on the dray? What happened to the people? Where did they go next? Was it night-time? Did they get lost in the bush? Did they wander away from their cart and fall down a mine-shaft (I’d been warned repeatedly about this) or just keep going until they died?

The old dray was not just a piece of junk, but a time machine.

We’ve had exquisite birdsong – liquid, melodious, varied –   around our place for the past two or three weeks because a pair of Grey Shrike-Thrushes have taken up residence in our street. They swoop between gardens, but are especially fond of our elderly neighbour Margaret. They perch on the sill outside her kitchen  and serenade her; they wake her up at dawn by singing at her bedroom window. The other evening, while I was visiting, one of them was tap-tapping at the glass as if to say, ‘Notice me.’
And this Sunday morning, at about half-past seven, when I was having an early cup of tea out in the garden, birdsong spilled out of next-door’s trees and started my day on a note of delight.
We were unsure at first about the identity of the bird but the handy Simpson and Day Field Guide settled it for us. The Shrike-thrush is, appropriately, of the race harmonica.

The singing this morning reminded me of a poem in a book* my mother gave me when I was little.  I reached it down from a high shelf just now, and found what I was looking for.

ONE SUNDAY MORNING EARLY

One Sunday morning early
I heard the blackbird sing;
From out the olive thicket
His song took wing
What silver coin he had to spare –
The sudden wealth lay everywhere.

It’s a pity it’s ‘blackbird’, not shrike-thrush. Not only are blackbirds a pestiferous introduced species, they scatter my mulch all over the place and besides, they are of the race Turdus.

*One Sunday Morning Early by Irene Gough, illustrated by Noela Young: Ure Smith, Sydney 1963

We were at Southern Cross station after dinner in town, so with a bit of time to spare we went in to the WHSmith bookshop there. Lots of best-sellers on the shelves, but I’ve got enough to read at the moment. Just thought I’d take a peek at the children’s books…
And there was Verity on the shelf. So exciting! Am I a bit pathetic?

This was another score from The Book Grocer. Also $6.00. Like Holloway, it’s a hard cover,  high quality publication from an English imprint (Weidenfeld and Nicholson) – and also right up my alley. While the sub-title does give the reader an idea of  what it’s about,  ‘England, Archaeology and the Imagination’ isn’t the most inviting description. It even sounds a bit stuffy and potentially dull. Or is that just me? I jumped on this, however, because I’d read a great review of it in 2012 when it first came out.

The author is a distinguished British archaeologist, lecturer at various universities and an OBE for his services to archaeology. This book is a wonderful mash-up of memoir, biography, geography, history and poetry as well as an exploration of the archaeology of England.

Here’s an example:

On his very first professional dig, as a member of the team excavating underneath York Minster, Morris helped remove some Roman tiles. Apparently Roman tiles are a dime a dozen. But he took a close look.

The tile bears a stamp: LEG IX HISP – legio IX Hispana, the Ninth (Spanish) Legion. Near the stamp is the paw-mark of a dog that wandered across the tile stack before the tiles were fired. The mason and the dog lived around 1,780 years ago. In these plain traces they are so close. I remember a poem by D.H Lawrence.

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

I wonder if there is a book like this about Australia? I’d love to read it.

I bought this beautiful book at The Book Grocer for $6.00 (!!!!) It’s a Faber and Faber hard-cover, with a lovely stiff paper dust jacket, illustrated end-papers and black and white illustrations by Stanley Donwood and beautiful text – prose that reads like poetry –  by Robert MacFarlane and Dan Richards.

A holloway is a hollow way, a sunken path. A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll and rain-run gave harrowed deep down into the bedrock.

…by the side of high old ash tree, we found a way back down into the holloway & so there we passed through that hole in the hedge and descended into the holloway’s depth, using ivy as a rope to abseil down the sandstone sides and into the shade.

The bright hot surface world was forgotten. So close was the latticework of leaves & branches & so high the eastern side of the holloway that light penetrated its depths only in thin lances. We came occasionally to small clearings, where light fell & grass grew. IN the windless warm air, groups of flies bobbed  & we, each dancing around a set point like vibrating atoms held in a matrix.

Robert MacFarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks.

I have had an excellent weekend. A really, really excellent weekend. Perhaps it was the sunshine. The birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees are all singing as one with The Beatles – ‘Here comes the sun...’

Warm weather at last. Sunshine! I’ve been dragging the chain with my weeding but over the weekend I whipped the side garden into shape in record time; I think the sunshine was cheering me on, making me work faster.
I went for a drive over to Trentham and discovered that there’s a bookshop there, only recently opened, called Dr B’s Bookstore, in High Street. It’s not large, but the books are really interesting and good and well chosen. I’ve seen the word ‘curated’ used in relation to a small stock of carefully selected merchandise, so perhaps it’s well-curated, too. Anyway,  between us, we bought a swag of books and went away delighted to find such a treasure of a place.
A walk around the town under the still shining sun, and we saw blossoming trees, and new leaves, and masses of bright blue muscari (grape hyacinths), the biggest, fattest ones we’ve ever seen, and ducks on the pond and lots of people out and about enjoying the sunshine (there’s a theme here, isn’t there?) at cafes and the beer garden of the pub or just wandering about like us.

And yesterday I worked on my novel and went for a walk with my husband and dog in the park in the sunshine. Later, we had a friend around for afternoon tea and the pineapple upside-down cake I made (sorry, no photograph, and all but a tiny piece gone down the red lane) was a triumph. Sunshine on a plate with pineapple from the Sunshine State.

And I found out from our guest that the teeny-tiny forks I’ve been using as cake forks are actually OYSTER forks. As you can see from the picture below, an oyster fork (top fork) is sort of trident-shaped – my goodness, a reference to Poseidon, god of the sea? – and a cake fork not so. Our friend told us that our oyster forks were part of 19th century middle-class obsession with gentility – actually touching food was thought to be vulgar, so there were stabbing things to pick up pickles, and tongs for sugar, and racks for toast, and cake servers and fish knives and cake and oyster forks… All made of silver or EPNS (electro-plated nickel silver) to show that not only were you genteel, you were rich as well.  I can well imagine that naughty oysters with their aphrodisiac reputation were not for the pale fingertips of respectable ladies and gentlemen. Not in public, at any rate.

Is the sunshine responsible for my reading, too? It’s absolutely on a roll. I finished The Jane Austen Book Club in a day. It was fun but not a patch on We Are All Absolutely Beside Ourselves; with that one, Karen Joy Fowler has gone to another level.
I’m still going on the John Minton biography; it’s research for my novel. I want to know what kinds of things artists in London in the 1950’s would have talked about.
I picked up a reading copy from the bookshop – the sales rep said it was going to be BIG –  and that it was terrific. The book was Spinster:Making a Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick – and like Kath from Kath and Kim, I’d have to say, ‘Interesting, but I don’t agree.’
Perhaps it’s just too American for me. And though I understand that Bolick’s intention is to reclaim the word ‘spinster’ for independent single women, her models – or ‘awakeners’, as she calls them –  (Edith Wharton, Edna St Vincent Millay, Neith Boyce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Maeve Brennan) all except one seem to have been married women. ‘Spinster’ does seem to imply singledom and even solitude. Definitely a break from the boys. The very gorgeous Bolick seems rarely to have been without a boyfriend – she says of herself, that at one time she couldn’t walk down the street without being asked on a date! –  and I think I enjoyed most the parts of the book that read as memoir rather than manifesto or biography. Her family, her relationships with her mother and father, her friendships, her working life… these were much more alive than the stories of the five women.

With that out of the way, I started a new book –  My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I’m only forty pages in, but it’s brilliant. It’s such a wonderful secure feeling having a good book to read.

I AM READING:
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante