Susan Green

I’ve just finished the Philip Larkin biography and I’m left with a sense of cramped Englishness, a quality of ‘life lived small’. His parents weren’t very good at being happy  – and there’s a famous and much quoted poem about that – and neither, really, was he. His working life was spent as a librarian – for many years at the University in Hull in the north of England – he never really travelled, he generally stood apart from the literary circus, he never married or had children. He died at 63.

A previous biography by Andrew Motion apparently caused a bit of an anti-Larkin uproar by revealing him to be racist and sexist as well as a duplicitous and grumpy old git. This biography tries to tilt our perception of him the other way, by explaining, excusing, demonstrating that whatever yucky things he might do or say or write, he could also be likeable, kind, generous and…well, human. Do I really need to know that he collected pornographic photographs and wrote, as Brunette Coleman, stories about lesbian school-girls ? That at times he affected a rather nasty Tory intolerance? Or that he had two and at one point three mistresses on the go but was never going to marry any of them?
Poor man! Though this is a sympathetic book, I can’t help picturing the private and self-contained poet spinning in his grave. Though at least he was dead when the biographers got at him. Imagine what it must be like to be alive and read your life –  with all its mistakes and inconsistencies and not-so-pretty parts – laid out for everyone to gawp at.

Photo by Peter Symonds

I don’t actually care about the naughty school-girl tales and the tangled love life and the nastiness. After reading this life of ‘The Hermit of Hull’ (isn’t that a great nick-name?) I went back to the poems. There are defeated and bitterly funny and pessimistic poems, but there is also An Arundel Tomb. In 1986, in the UK with my mother, I visited Chichester Cathedral. I didn’t know about Philip Larkin’s famous poem,  but there it was, displayed near the tomb itself.

Side by side, their faces blurred
The earl and countess lie in stone…

These effigies of knight and lady are not uncommon; what is unusual is that he is not wearing his mailed glove.

One sees, with a sharp, tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

Perhaps they were known to have loved each other deeply; perhaps the sculptor thought it was a nice touch; we don’t know.

…The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Happy New Year! I am off and running with my 2016 reading.

I have just finished reading Siri Hestvedt’s What I Loved. I raced through it as if I was reading a thriller. Because it was thrilling.

I bought it at the Op Shop months ago, but only started it on the train to Melbourne on Wednesday. I was immediately captured and just read until I finished, close to midnight, the same day. I haven’t done that for a while, probably not since I read The Goldfinch.

Actually, in some ways it’s very like The Goldfinch. Not only does it range far and wide in the New York art world but it’s a big, serious novel with a huge scope and great intelligence. What’s it about? Oh, the usual – it’s about thinking and feeling; about families and marriage and sex and desire; about how we perceive and think of and order our shifting, changing worlds; about art and ideas, memory and grief, trust and truth and love. And so beautifully written.

As I read, I did something I’ve not done before; I underlined the passages that caught me. Vandalism? Maybe, but I’ve recently become frustrated by my inability to remember where I read what. There was so much in this book that was witty or wise or well-put, so why not try to catch it as it flies? (And the grumpy kid in me mutters, “Anyway, it’s my book and I did it in pencil.”)

 I suppose we are all the products of our parents’ joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

Lies are always double: what you say coexists with what you didn’t say but might have said. When you stop lying, the gap between your words and inner belief closes, and you continue on a path of trying to match your spoken words with the language of your thoughts, at least those fit for other peoples’ consumption.

Useful objects, like chairs and dishes, passed down from one generation to another, may briefly feel haunted by their former owners, but that quality vanishes rather quickly into their pragmatic functions. Art, useless as it is, resists incorporation into dailiness, and if it has any power at all, it seems to breathe with the life of the person who made it. Art historians don’t like to speak of this, because it  suggests the magical thinking attached to fetishes and icons, but I have experienced it time and again…

I got stuck two thirds of the way through My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. At the start I read eagerly and with a kind of thrilled recognition – I, too, was a little girl with intense and complicated friendships. The child Elena’s Neopolitan world was so real and highly charged, I could feel myself with her in the sun-baked, squalid streets, the neighbourhood staircases and cellars and balconies. I could feel too the poverty, ignorance and struggle, the constant undertow of violence. In the end, it was so claustrophobic and  stifling I just didn’t want to read any more. The good book at the wrong time! I put it aside, and moved on to one of my favourite times and places, cold and stitched-up 1950s England.

And now I am well into a biography of Philip Larkin; Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth. Here is what the poet has to say about being with people…

Viciously now, I lock my door.

The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside

Ushers in evening rain. Once more

Uncontradicting solitude

Supports me on its giant palm;

And like a sea anemone

Or simple snail, there cautiously

Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

Booth comments that Larkin was ‘determined to resist the intimidation of his socially responsible super-ego, and live life rather than allowing life to live him.’

A New Year’s Resolution?

A week or so before Christmas, my local Opportunity Shop closed for the holidays. Not only were all clothes only $1 an item, but there were other magnificent bargains to be had as well. Magnificent? Bargains? I guess it depends on your perspective. Anyway, I staggered off with around 70 copies of Country Life magazine  for $10.

 Country Life is a weekly English magazine that has been going for about a million years (actually, since 1897); originally it had an emphasis on country sports of the death-dealing kind (foxes, grouse, partridges, deer and fish, beware!) but that later extended to gardens, great houses, antiques and collecting, livestock and agriculture, and other aspects of – well, of country life.

I first encountered it at the Frankston Library in 1970. My mother, who was the Deputy and later Principal of the High School I attended (yes, it was hell, but only until Form 4 – after that the bullying stopped) was a very very busy woman but she made the time, once a week, to meet me at the library, borrow books and then have a slap-up afternoon tea at the Svendborg Coffee Lounge.

I don’t know why we started borrowing Country Life. It was certainly not for the hunting, shooting, fishing content, which we glossed over fairly quickly. However we didn’t skip the real estate advertisments; we got much pleasure from the many pages of houses, illustrated with grainy black and white photographs and with evocative descriptions.

At that age – early teens – I was in love with the idea of The House. I loved Gothic and historical novels (Daphne du Maurier, Victoria Holt, Dorothy Eden, Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton, Elizabeth Goudge, Jane Aiken Hodge, Catherine Gaskin) and in these, the house was often a character in its own right… just think of Manderley. I still have the Gothic I wrote as an English assignment in form 2 – it is called Burnt House. I got the title from the Country Life real estate pages and the style from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

The real estate pages are still a feature of the magazine, only the pictures are now full page and full colour, styled and glossy, fabulous fuel for those Escape to the Country fantasies. How about an Exquisite 18th century hall standing amidst breathtaking private parkland, 10 miles from Alderley Edge. With hall, 4 reception rooms, games room, snug, breakfast kitchen, 9 bedroom suites, 2 additional bathrooms, wine cellars, pool, jacuzzi, gym, steam room, garaging, office, chapel and helicopter hangar? Not sure what the price is, but on the facing page, a superb Italianate country villa with 7 bedrooms is  around 2.5 million pounds.

I don’t remember the 1970s prices. Perhaps the Escape to the Country dreams weren’t quite so expensive then. What I do remember is our imaginings, our romantic alternate existences in Elizabethan manors, Queen Anne rectories, Georgian village houses and Scottish castles. When, in the late 1980s, Mum took me to England with her for 3 weeks, we bolted around the countryside and managed to fit in amazing number of such places. I remember walking (it was with a tour group, but nothing could take away the sense of embedded history) up the staircases at Knole, and seeing how the wood of each step was worn down from centuries of footfalls…and now my foot, too…

My pile of Country Life is proving to be a bargain already. With the solar-powered air-conditioning blasting away, I am sitting in the cool, imagining myself in mansions, manors, rectories and castles. In Itchen Abbas, Meysey Hampton, West Wittering, Ulcombe, Inkpen, Guilden Morden, Michelmersh, Southrop, Pitlochry and Carlton-in-Cleveland…

As the old joke says, “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”
My trip to Chelsea was a rather melancholy pilgrimage. My old house is gone, almost every house I knew in the street is gone, the playground and bluestone wall at the end of the street are gone, the way down to the beach through the dunes is gone. Everything is shabbier except the boatsheds, which have been tarted up with bright colours and new paint, and at first even the beach itself didn’t seem the same; was it really that narrow?  Perhaps it was time to get that gnawing nostalgia of my system. Though I lived in our family house (deduct three years spent in the country in the middle 1960s) until I was 19, and then again for about a year in my early 20s, it’s my first 7 years that are most strongly imprinted.  My child’s eye view is gone because the child is gone. Almost.

I guess I expected the house to go. It was always a bit of a dump; a family holiday home that grew, bit by bit, from the 1920s to the 1970s. A rabbit warren of a place, with odd doors and passages and steps.  was the kingdom of childhood, a land of adventure – many lands, in fact, for there were different zones – the dusty, spidery narrow behind the bungalows, the overgrown sandpit under the tree, the path at the side lined with orange-flowered cliveas thriving in the dry shade, the lavatory wall covered by a passionfruit vine, the pincushion hakea and the wattle in the back courtyard, the sweep of tough grass where I’d run under the sprinkler, the cubby house, the eyrie built by my father for the express purpose of viewing sunsets, the path up to the beach gate made of rejected marble slabs (my great-grandfather was a marble and gold-leaf importer), the twisted, witchy ti-trees along the back fence, and the gate itself, opening onto sand-dunes and sea and sky.

It was only when I saw the drifts of tiny white shells, like flaked almonds, that my Chelsea self began to awake, but it was walking barefoot that really filled me with silly joy. As if a memory was held in the soles of my feet. It was the firm, crunchy sensation of those particular crushed shells, that specific gritty sand, the hard surface underfoot at the tide-line softening into sinking sand a few steps up from the shore. And then seagulls and sky and clouds and blue and waves and the breeze on my face and I was seven again, running like the wind along the sandbar chasing gulls and making them take off and fly in front of me, and feeling like I myself was flying…

I’ve put my remembered Chelsea beach into a novel.

February. The hot brazen disc of the sun, the arc of the bay, the faint shapes of the You Yangs in heat haze across the water. Judith and I would stand ankle-deep in the sea watching the cloud banks change colour as the sun sank lower and the last gulls, crying, winged home. Under our feet the sand was gritty with shell fragments and marked with corrugations left by the waves. Wading out, we would go up to our knees, thighs, and then step up onto a smooth sand-bank. The neighbours, Dutch immigrants, all tall and blonde, would pass by in their little boat, calling our names.

A heat wave. When it was dark, mothers carried fretful babies down to the sea’s edge to catch the breeze while the men and children took torches and spears out for flathead. Later, whole families arrived with pillows and bedding to sleep on the beach.                   

            ‘Like we did in the Underground,’ said Judith.

            ‘No, Ju, not the same thing,’ said Rob.

            ‘Sleeping in public,’ she explained. ‘The Henry Moore drawings.’

            ‘But we’re not in danger, are we?’

            How could they even think in this heat? I paddled away from them and their talk. When something moved under my foot, I screamed, lost balance and subsided into the water.

            ‘Bliss? Are you all right?’ Rob and Judith splashed after me, but I just laughed and lay back with my wet dress billowing out and they each took one of my hands and towed me along, Rob singing Roll Out the Barrel, and Judith harmonizing. I was giddy with the dark, the moon, the heat, the cool, the love.

Near Rob and Judith’s house, there was a rest-home for nuns. They walked in pairs in the early evening, ominous and black-clad, their habits and veils flapping in the breeze. When I read in the local paper that one of them had drowned, I was surprised. As I wrote to Felix, I could not imagine a nun in a bathing suit.

Some mornings a kind of jungle telegraph would draw us down onto the beach with buckets ready to buy fish. The fishermen pulled their boats up onto the sand and from the full squirming nets they first threw back what they didn’t want. Into the shallows went the bony, the undersized, the puffer fish all stuck with poisoned spines and stingrays that flew immediately away from the shore, dark and demonic on their undersea wings.

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