Susan Green

If you were at our house, you would have just heard a very angry rant, full of expletives and delivered at higher volume than necessary. In other words, I was shouty and sweary and cross. Why?

Searching for a front-cover image of the fantastic book I’ve just finished, I came on a review of such gob-smacking stupidity that I just exploded. As my husband calmly commented, there are people out there who just don’t understand. They don’t realise that what makes fiction so wonderful and so valuable is that it can do the impossible. It can get us inside someone’s head. Inside someone’s life. Thoughts, feelings, experiences; the whole catastrophe.
This reviewer, probably a perfectly competent person in her field (which, by the way, is dementia), just didn’t get it. So literal-minded, that she objected to the first person narrative on the grounds that there is no way a woman with dementia could have written it down. She suggested a device for getting around this problem – it could be presented as an audio-taped interview. Yes. She did. I am going to resort to this – !!!!????
But perhaps now I should calm down a little, forget the silly review and tell you about Elizabeth.

My good friend KK – a voracious reader, if ever there was one – pressed Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing on me more than a month ago.  “You’ll love it,” she said. And every time I spoke to her, she asked if I’d read it. I just hadn’t got around to it. So at last, when it was a rainy weekend and I couldn’t get out into the garden, I started…and  found that it is one of those rare beasts, the un-put-downable book. It’s a genre-bender, too. Another rare beast, and booksellers and publicists love them because they scoop up two different camps of readers.  This one is both an insight into the fragmented mind of a dementia sufferer and a murder mystery set in post-war England.

The heroine, Maud, is convinced that her friend Elizabeth is missing. She is determined to find her.
The thing is to be systematic, try to write everything down. Elizabeth is missing and I must do something to find out what’s happened. But I’m so muddled. I can’t be sure about when I last saw her or what I’ve discovered. I’ve phoned and there’s no answer. I haven’t seen her. I think. She hasn’t been here and I haven’t been there. What next? I suppose I should go to the house. Search for clues. And whatever I find I will write it down. I must put pens in my handbag now. The thing is to be systematic. I’ve written that down too.

Elizabeth lives near the  neighbourhood where Maud grew up. As Maud returns again and again to look for Elizabeth, finding clues, writing herself notes, she revisits her past.  Memories – fresh, intact and full of detail – show us Maud’s life just after the war with her parents, their lodger Doug, sister Sukey and her new husband Frank. They take us back to the terrible time when Sukey went missing. And against the odds, Maud solves the 70-year-old mystery of her sister’s disappearance.

Healey gets us inside Maud’s damaged mind.

When I reach the creamy wall I find that dust swirls here too, but it rises in the light and the air is cooler. I pull up a sitting thing, for sitting on. In a minute I’ll have to go back. There’s something I must do. I cant remember what it is just now, but I know it’s important; someone will tell me if I ask. The filled breads, the stuffed and buttered breads, are cut into squares, and my stomach growls, but I can’t work out what I’m to do with them. I watch a man take one and bite into it, his fingers crushing, his lips sloppy. I feel queasy, but copy him all the same, cramming the things into my own mouth. It slips against my tongue, cold and sharp and foetid at once. Someone comes at me, smiling, and I move hastily out of the way, into the kitchen, where the oven’s on, humming its own low, laughing comments, wearing its own hot black clothes.

Elizabeth is Missing is moving, heartbreaking, funny. Astonishing, fascinating. And it’s a first novel. Read it!

I’m finding that autumn is like spring. After this recent rain, all over the garden plants that died off over summer are poking their heads up and starting to live again. Like Mary in The Secret Garden, I’m excited. I keep heading outside to scrabble around in the mulch and dirt to see what’s happening.

She kneeled down and leaned out of the window as far as she could, breathing big breaths and sniffing the air until she laughed because she remembered  what Dickon’s mother had said about the end of his nose quivering like a rabbit’s.

‘It must be very early,’ she said. “The little clouds are all pink and I’ve never seen the sky look like this. No one is up. I don’t even hear the stable boys.’
A sudden thought made her scramble to her feet.

‘I can’t wait! I am going to see the garden!’

She had learnt to dress herself by this time, and she put on her clothes in five minutes. She knew a small side door which she could unbolt herself, and she flew downstairs in her stocking feet and put her shoes on in the hall. She unchained and unbolted and unlocked, and when the door was open she sprang across the step with one bound, there there she was standing on the grass, which seemed to have turned green, and with the sun pouring down on her and warm sweet wafts about her and the fluting and twittering and singing coming from every bush and tree. She clasped her hands for pure joy and looked up in the sky, and it was blue and pink and pearly and white and flooded with springtime light that she felt as if she must flute and sing aloud herself, and knew that thrushes and robins and skylarks could not possibly help it. She ran around the paths and shrubs to the secret garden.

‘It is all different already,’ she said. ‘The grass is greener and things are sticking up everywhere and things are uncurling and green buds of leaves are showing. This afternoon I am sure Dickon will come.’

The long warm rain had done strange things to the herbaceous beds which bordered the walk by the lower wall. There were things sprouting and pushing out from the roots of clumps of plants and there were actually ehre and there glimpses of royal purple and yellow unfurling among the stems of crocuses. Six months before Mistress Mary would not have seen how the world was waking up, but now she missed nothing.

For most of Better Than Before, I really enjoyed Gretchen Rubin’s company. She’s chirpy, cheerful and positive. She reads children’s literature. We share  a genuine pleasure in de-cluttering. We find stationery shops blissful and like nothing better than a list compiled in the morning with all its items crossed off at night.  “Me too!” I kept thinking. “Gretchen, you’re my new best friend.”
Well, up to a point. And this was is it.

One night, Eliza and I had a long conversation about homework. She lay on her bed while I prowled around the room in search of clutter to clear. I stashed blue nail polish, threw away empty gum wrappers, put books on the shelves and put away clothes as we talked. (I find light clutter clearing very relaxing. Eliza tolerated this activity).

But Gretchen, that’s not your nail polish. Not your room. Not your space.

I too have done my fair share of ‘organising’ other people’s belongings. My son, like Gretchen’s daughter Eliza, had to tolerate my raids on his bedroom until he was old enough to protest and resist. My husband has always resisted, but nevertheless he’d had shelves, files, boxes, bags, magazine holders thrust upon him in my quest to streamline his stuff. Until I realised that it was my problem, not his. I still drop the odd heavy-handed hint about how nice it is when you cleanse your wardrobe of worn-out and rarely worn clothes, but I don’t steamroller any more. It’s easy to imagine there is some kind of moral high ground in orderliness, but there isn’t. And there are better ways to use my energy and reforming zeal.

For  instance, working on my next novel.

Every now and then I torture myself with a self-help book.

Usually I borrow them from the library, but this one I actually bought, on a whim, in Dymocks in Collins Street when I was in Melbourne last week.

Actually, I’ve just realised that last time I was in Dymocks I bought a self-help book too: a book about what I should be eating  called Eat Real Food.  I really needn’t have bought it  – the title says it all. And I eat very well, anyway. What was I thinking?

I know that if self-help books really worked, there would be no new crop of advice each year. There’d be no need. Everyone would be vibrant and healthy, fit, mindful, cancer-free, happy, rich, blissfully wedded, empowered and spiritual and all the rest of it. I see self-help books all the time at the shop where I work and manage to resist their siren song very well, thank you. All that aside, Gretchen Rubin’s exploration of habits has been thought-provoking and even a prompt to action. When I first started this blog, I promised myself that I would post on my blog once a week, on Sundays. I haven’t kept that promise. Too busy, too tired, forgot, nothing to write about, uninspired…

Posting on Sundays needs to become a habit. So here goes!

 I’m reading:
Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

It’s Anzac Day. Red poppies. Parades. Talk of sacrifice and death. A recording of the Last Post and the solemnity of “Lest We Forget.”

On Anzac Day itself we were never at school, but I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor in the prep/1 room, listening to Mr Taylor, the grade 6 teacher (and an ex-serviceman) tell the story of Simpson and his donkey. I started to cry.

That was in 1963. I am old enough to have had a grandfather who fought in WWI and a father who fought in WWII. My mother’s father, Harold Goddard Harris, was an Englishman who emigrated to Australia with his family to farm at Kilmeny in Gippsland. He joined the Australian army and fought in France. He was gassed at Passchendale and was never entirely well after that. He died in 1939, when my mother was 16.  She adored “Daddy Harold”, never got over missing him and talked about him often.

My own father was 18 when WWII broke out. He was rejected the first time he tried to join up – at the medical, a heart murmur was detected – but he was able to find a chemist who supplied some kind of drug and the second time was lucky. If you can call it that. He served as a cartographer and was in the army for five years. He used to tell us funny stories about camp life but not much more than that. He was an artist and after his death his trove of wartime watercolours, painted mainly in Far North Queensland, the Northern Territory and New Guinea, were donated to the War Memorial in Canberra.

My brother and sister-in-law, Charles Green and Lyndell Brown (yes, I know) were official war artists in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. I opened the Age arts pages this morning to find a large colour reproducation of one of their paintings, Portrait, Corporal Dianne Cuttler, Kandahar 2007 and an interview with Lyndell. In it, she says that in taking up the commission, it “…felt like we were completing a circle of family history.”

I have just finished reading the last two books in the Montmaray trilogy and I’m gobsmacked at how skilfully Michelle Cooper has woven so much social and political history into these involving novels. They’re the journals of Sophie FitzOsborne, a member of the royal house of tiny (fictional) Montmaray, but Cooper’s research is marvellous and so with a light hand and a gift for an exciting story, we’re immersed in the tribal rites of aristocratic society in the late 1930s, the effects of the Spanish Civil War, the British flirtation with fascism, appeasement, the League of Nations, espionage, rationing, the blitz, the Kennedys, the RAF…and, this being after all a novel for young adults, love, longing and sex.

Funnily enough I’m (still) reading this.

Lord Berners was the model for Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and the story of the Mitford sisters is a part of Sophie Osborne’s Montmaray journals…

I’m reading:
Greatly Daring by Brene Brown

Here is the cover for the new Verity novel, which is due to be released in August this year.

I’ve just finished The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. I wish I’d read it when I was a child, along with Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. Because most of it – the most interesting part – like those books, is about a the childhood and young adulthood of a girl with talent.  And unlike Jo March and Anne Shirley (and lot of the other talented young girls in fiction whose stories I loved when I was in my early teens) Thea Kronborg and her gift are taken seriously.

Thea’s gift is music; she plays the piano; she sings. More than a gift, it’s the core of her being. So music is not something she does, it’s something she is. Her first teacher, the alcoholic failed old German Wunsch, ponders.

What was it about the child that one believed in? Was it her dogged industry, so unusual in this free-and-easy country? Was it her imagination? More likely it was because she had both imagination and a stubborn will, curiously balancing and interpenetrating each other. There was something unconscious and unawakened about her, that tempted curiosity. She had a kind of seriousness that he had not met with in a pupil before. She hated difficult things, and yet she could never pass one by. They seemed to challenge her; she had no peace until she mastered them. She had the power to make a great effort, to lift a weight heavier than herself. Wunsch hoped he would always remember her as she stood by the track, looking up at him; her broad eager face, so fair in color, with its high cheek bones, yellow eyebrows and greenish-hazel eyes. It was a face full of light and energy, of the unquestioning hopefulness of first youth. Yes, she was a flower full of sun, but not the soft German flowers of his childhood. He had it now, the comparison he had absently reached for before: she was like the yellow prickly pear blossoms that open there in the desert: thornier and sturdier than the maiden flowers he remembered; not so sweet, but wonderful.

At the end of the book, she is a famous opera singer. Her story isn’t romantic; there’s no overnight success. It’s work – sometimes joyful, sometimes slog and struggle. Through her childhood in the harsh and beautiful mining Colorado mining town of Moonstone and her unhappy, lonely student years in Chicago Thea works, works, works at her music. It’s like oxygen or food. She can’t not.

She’s lucky, too. There are people around her who see the intensity of her desire.

She is talking to her second teacher, Sandor Harsanyi.

“…what you want more than anything else in the world is to be an artist; is that true?”

She turned her face away from him and looked down at the keyboard. Her answer came in a thickened voice. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“When did you first feel that you wanted to be an artist?”

“I don’t know. There was always – something.”

“Did you never think that you were going to sing?”

“Yes.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Always, until I came to you. It was you who made me want to play the piano.” Her voice trembled. “Before, I tried to think I did, but I was pretending.”

Harsanyi reached out and caught the hand that was hanging at her side. He pressed it as if to give her something. “Can’t you see, my dear girl, that was only because I happened to be the first artist you have ever known? If I had been a trombone player, it would have been the same; you would have wanted to play trombone. But all the while you have been working with such good-will, something has been struggling against me … (He tapped the piano) … your gift, and the woman you were meant to be. When you find your way to that gift and to that woman, you will be at peace. In the beginning it was an artist that you wanted to be; well, you may be an artist, always.”

Willa Cather was a literary writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize, for goodness sake! and so perhaps she’d have been insulted to be grouped with Louisa May Alcott or L.M. Montgomery. Grouped only in “Subject Matter – Talented Girls.” For, as I said, Cather takes Thea seriously. She allows her to to become the artist she was meant to be  – and to succeed.

I’ve been reading:
Goodbye Sweetheart by Marion Halligan
The FitzOsbornes in Exile by Michelle Cooper

I’m damaged at present – but it’s my left arm and only temporary. I fell over in the garden whilst trying to move some rocks – by jumping on them. I thought that the two rocks would fall straight forward but instead, they parted company and sent my sprawling onto yet another rock. This was very stupid and I probably don’t deserve the outpouring of sympathy I’ve been given. Though that may be because I’ve had a perverse pride in displaying the grotesquely swollen and multi-coloured thing hanging off my elbow. No one has actually vomited or fainted, but most wince and avert their eyes.
“It looks painful.” is the usual comment.
“It is,” I reply. I’m not even attempting to be stoic. But – as happened when I had a baby in a pram – it gives you an insight into what it would be like to have a disability.
A very, very tiny insight. Once, at an inner city railway station, I saw a young African man with both arms missing from just below the elbow…

Anyway, on the bright side, I now know that I must have good strong bones. Which reminds my of my parents saying, when I was little and cut myself, “Good red blood – that means you’re healthy!” in a cheering tone. I didn’t know then that  blood only came in red.

I did get my husband to photograph my damaged arm but really it’s too revolting to post. So here are a couple of marble hands from the beautiful lake-side gardens in Ballarat. And a foot, too, complete with moth.

I’ve been reading:
The House in France by Gully Wells
The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
The Desert Pilgrim by Mary Swander
 

…a lot, as usual. Scrappy and disorganised hot-weather reading, for the most part. Pictures are good when the temperature is high, and so there have been lots of gardening books.

After years of yearning for beds full of flowers – roses! roses! roses! – I thought I’d got real at last. Mediterranean climate…Mediterranean garden… I devoured gorgeous coffee table books and dreamed of olive, quince and pomegranite, potted lemons, a pair of dark sentinel cypress trees, and everywhere aromatic clumps of rosemary and lavender and thyme.
But after serious study, I realised I had to get a bit more real. This is not Provence or Tuscany. It’s Central Victoria, our garden is mostly sited on reef and made from rubble and dry sandy soil with a huge old grey box sucking up all the moisture it can get its roots on. In the last few year, I’ve ripped out so many dead and dying plants (including lavender and rosemary – the thyme is hanging on) that there are dusty bare patches everywhere. This Autumn, I plan to go on a planting spree. I will get a pomegranite and a quince, but I’m going to try something I’ve never really fancied before. Native. Local. Bird and insect attractors. The library’s copy of Indigenous Plants of Bendigo; A Gardener’s Guide to Growing and Protecting Local Plants has become very well-thumbed. I’m planning on Violet Honey-myrtle, Slaty Sheoak, Sweet Bursaria, Billy Buttons and Lemon Beauty Heads. The names aren’t as evocative or poetic to me as olive, quince and company, but perhaps they will be, in time – if they grow.

Penelope Lively has long been a favourite of mine. An inspiration, too. A writer of children’s and adult novels, exploring again and again the themes of past and present, memory and time, history and biography large-scale and small that fascinate me. She’s 80 and still working. This not-quite-memoir was published in 2013.

She writes that in old age,
…I find myself thinking less about that happened to me but interested in this lifetime context, in the times of my life. I have the great sustaining ballast of memory; we all do, and hope to hang on to it. I am interested in the way memory works, in what we do with it and what it does with us. And when I look around my cluttered house -more ballast, material ballast – I can see myself oddly identified and defined by what is in it: my life charted out on the bookshelves, my concerns illuminated by a range of objects.
These, then, are the prompts for this book: age, memory, time, and this curious physical evidence I find all around me as to what I have been up to – how reading has fed into writing, how ways of thinking have been nailed.

The curious physical evidence… how reading has fed into writing…
That’s something to explore. Maybe my theme for 2015?

Walking around my dry garden this morning, I found some parrot feathers. Mine were blue, but they reminded me of Lorraine Marwood’s poem, ‘A Gift”. It’s from Guinea Pig Town and Other Animal Poems (Walker Books Australia 2013).

I found a gift in my garden,
a feather
fresh from a parrot –  a small, grey, fluffy section
growing close to the skin flesh,
then the yellow middle
and the tip dipped in brightest orange
to show all the world
that every day has its own sparkle.

I have little collections of such gifts all over the house and garden. I rarely come back from a walk empty handed; something usually catches my eye. It may be rocks and pebbles, or shells and beach glass. There are fragments of broken pottery (blue and white always seems to stand out), seed pods, leaves and feathers.

I think I inherited this habit from my parents, who were both great picker-uppers (they  had a tiny jug in which they placed fallen cat’s whiskers from our old cat Andrew!). I have a few fragments of Roman glass that they found when they were on their honeymoon in Italy in the 1950s.  My early childhood was spent in a house by the beach, so beach-combing became part of my nature and even though I am very short-sighted I am very good at spotting things on the ground.

Dad had a life-long fascination with gum leaves. After he died, we found some on which he’d drawn little faces. When I am out walking, and a beautifully coloured or oddly-shaped leaf flutters down in front of me, I always whisper under my breath, “Hello Dad.”