Susan Green

…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.”

I woke early this morning – just before 5 – and couldn’t get back to sleep. So after a while I got up, made myself a cup of tea and went back to bed, where I sat up and read a cookbook. Very soothing. After about an hour of that, I got up and meditated for 10 minutes (my plan is to work up to 20 or even 30, but I’m stuck on 10 for now) and then I watered the garden in the cool early quiet. The cockies and parrots who’ve been so noisy and destructive were either not up yet or busy elsewhere; the cheeping and peeping and occasional song from the small birds was a gentle accompaniment. Next I tidied the dining table which had been heaped with junk and washed last night’s dishes. I’ve just finished breakfast. Everything around me is now calm and neat and orderly. Breathe, Susan, I tell myself. Breathe.

Because for the rest of the day I know I will barely catch my breath. It’s the maddest, busiest day of the year in the bookshop. For hours at a stretch, I will be a machine – gift wrapping, scanning and using the point-of-sale computer or Eftpos machine, issuing book vouchers, searching for books. It’s exhausting but great fun, and absolutely wonderful to see all those books flying out the door.

Lost in the Christmas rush was a nice little statistic. Our shop sold its 500th copy of The Truth About Verity Sparks on 17th December. Next year I will bake a Verity cake and celebrate. But right now I am preparing for a day of happy retail madness.

Merry Christmas! Happy Reading! And all the best for 2015.

The site of an old gold mine near the main road into town. Mining equipment turned into rusty old junk turned into oddly beautiful objects.  The closer you look, the more you see (isn’t that the way of things?).

All the noise and activity of the mine finished long ago, and what’s left of the machinery is mouldering away in the sun and rain. With the passing years, trees and grass and weeds have softened the harsh red soil that was ripped up and washed down and dug and sieved and sluiced.

You hear crows and the melancholy repetitive call of a bronzewing. You look across the valley to the Chewton hills, covered in scrubby bush now but once bare and swarming with miners. Just up the road is Pennyweight Flat cemetery where many of the graves are small, child-sized. Children on the goldfields had a tough time surviving. Only a few of the graves have names and dates; mostly they’re marked by rough edgings of made of rocks. Gone and forgotten.

But the gold is still somewhere in the world.

Perhaps it’s in my wedding ring.

It’s the time of year for reptiles of all kinds to be out and about, and so I’m being very mindful that the creature rustling in the bushes may be a harmless lizard – or a brown snake. So far they’ve been lizards only. Skinks galore, and a few bluetongues. You can’t really tell, but this fine fellow was huge. I wondered if it was an old one, for I spotted another, much smaller, whose scales were really glossy and shiny and new-looking. We also have geckos – again, one large and one small – who come out at night and cling to the flywire screen at the kitchen window. They’re lying in wait for the moths that come fluttering to the light.
There’s something very endearing about geckos. They have such dear little hands, for a start, and their soft pinkiness seems less coldly reptilian than scalier creatures. Their bodies curve into a variety of graceful gecko poses and their quick dispatch of their prey means there’s no hindquarters and tail half-in and half-out and a sinister bulge as there is with snakes (I speak from experience – my husband used to keep pythons.)

After I finished Little Women, I read one of the many YA new releases that are stacked in piles in our bookshop. There’s a lot of dystopia around, but since I’m feeling fairly depressed at the state of the world as it is (I must stop reading the papers!) I chose Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar.

I was sent here because of a boy. His name was Reeve Maxfield, and I loved him and then he died, and almost a year passed and no one knew what to do with me. Finally it was decided to send me here.

Jam (short for Jamaica), traumatised by her boyfriend’s death, has been sent to The Wooden Barn, a boarding school for ’emotionally fragile, highly intelligent teenagers’.

She finds that she’s been enrolled for a course called Special Topics in English. Jam’s room-mate, DJ – who’d love to do the course – describes it as a ‘legendary’ class. The elderly teacher, Mrs Quenell, only teaches it when she wants to. It’s one semester long. You read only one writer. There are only five or six students. “It’s the smallest, most elite class in the entire school.”

When Jam begins the class, she finds that the set text is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. And that it’s a course requirement that, twice a week, the students write in the journals that Mrs Quenell hands to them. They’re red, leather-bound, very old – and magical. Jam finds that when she writes in her journal, she’s transported to another world, a world where Reeve is waiting for her. They talk, they laugh, they lie together on the grass and kiss. And then it’s over. She’s back in her room.

It’s soon clear that each of the students have been to this other place – which they eventually name Belzhar (a play on Plath’s title Bell Jar ) –  and they’re as troubled by it as Jam. Eventually the comforting fantasies and dreams, the wishes and might-have-beens collide with reality. We get to know each student’s story – the shocking events that landed them at The Wooden Barn – but Jam holds out. She only tells us what happened at the very end of the book and I’d better not spoil anything except to reassure you that, though drawing on Plath’s poetry, prose and biography, Belzhar doesn’t end in suicide but in a satisfying resolution and a surprise.

Here’s a little list of the themes touches upon – abduction, adultery, alcoholism, depression, divorce, drug use, eating disorders, obsession, porn, sexual identity… A world away from Little Women –  and nearly 150 years. I was talking to my editor about the two books and she suggested that books for young adults in Alcott’s era were often concerned with transforming yourself (for example, by conquering your faults), while most modern YA authors have a very different message.  The hero’s or heroine’s journey is to authenticity and self-acceptance. I wonder what Louisa Alcott would think.

PS I’m assuming this is the US cover. Different, eh?

More reading about reading. Last week I finished How to be  a Heroine;(Or, What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much) by Samantha Ellis and it got me thinking about the heroines of my childhood. A reader, a bookworm, living much of the time in word worlds, I naturally pictured myself as the heroine of my own story. Doesn’t everyone?

No, apparently. Years ago I made some horrible vain remark to the effect that I was glad I had my ankles are slim, for no heroine ever had thick ankles.
“What on earth are you talking about?” said my friend. She thought I was weird. “Heroines are in books. They’re not real.”

My reading project is still to read something old and something new, but some of the old ones will come from my childhood reading because I’m interested in those heroines that helped form me. This week I re-read Little Women.

First published in 1868, it’s an antique. So is my copy – pictured to the left, with cover and many lovely illustrations by Shirley Hughes. It’s the one I first read when I was around 10 or 11. I wondered if I’d find it unreadable, but I just gobbled it up, finishing the whole thing in two or three sittings. I found the language easy and readable, the characters engaging – especially Jo, of course.  It’s sometimes funny, sometimes touching, and a wee bit sentimental. I shed a little tear when Beth defrosted old Mr Laurence next door and when she caught scarlet fever. The baby died in her arms! And of course Jo, with her intelligence, ambition and wild, coltish energy, is a living, breathing delight. But…

Yes, there’s a but. According to Ellis, it’s ‘unbelievably preachy.’ She reckons that every page ‘is rammed with endless, intrusive moralising’, and writes that ‘I never realised before that in Little Women, each March sister is tamed, one by one, part from Beth, who doesn’t need taming because she is a personality-free doormat. Which apparently is the ideal.’

Not quite. The ideal, stated by Mr March when he comes back from the war, is ‘a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman.’ But I agree with Ellis that there IS lots of very explicit moralising. The Pilgrim’s Progress is mentioned over and over as the model for life’s journey.

Alcott has chapters that deal with Meg’s (pretty harmless, actually) vanity, Jo’s willfulness and temper and Amy’s selfishness. Beth, who is pathologically shy and at 14 still plays with dolls, is quiet, sweet and helpful, but even she gets a harsh lesson when Marmee decides to teach them that all play and no work is no fun either. No one feeds Beth’s canary, and she finds it ‘dead in the cage, with his little claws pathetically extended, as if imploring the food for want of which he had died.’ A bit harsh, Marmee!

What makes Little Women (and many other 19th and early- to mid- 20th century children’s books different to most published today is that Christian morality is front and centre.

But then, I read somewhere that Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was really one long Mormon tract on sexual abstinence.

Who would have thought there were so many books about reading? It’s a whole genre. Reading a particular author – you could probably have a sizeable shelf devoted to reading the works of Jane Austen. Or reading just one book, like The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, which was about reading – well, Middlemarch. I remembered reading it when I was in my 20’s. It seemed like a wonderful, huge, whole world of a novel, one you could live an entire life in, and I loved it. Lots of characters, lots of storylines, happy endings and tragic endings and paragraphs. Phrases that have stuck in my mind for 30 years. Like the one about the squirrel’s heart.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Now, read that again. Isn’t it amazing?

I’ve never re-read Middlemarch, but after reading about reading it – Rebecca Mead’s book was beautiful, moving and thoughtful –  I decided I would. And I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t. I couldn’t say exactly why. Perhaps you can’t go back again. But the thing is, and I’m almost ashamed to admit it – I really enjoyed reading about reading it.

Which led me on to Howard’s End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading at Home by Susan Hill. Hill, author of The Woman in Black amongst 37 published books, decided that for a year she would read only the books that were already on her shelves. Books she’d read once and forgotten; old favourites; books she’d never read at all.

I wanted to repossess my books, she writes, to explore what I had accumulated over a lifetime of reading and to map this house of many volumes… A book which is left on the shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object  packed with the potential to burst into new life.

I’d actually read Middlemarch, but many of the books Hill wrote about were known to me only by the titles. She compiled a list of 40 books, the ‘Final Forty’ she called it. Ignoramus that I am, I’ve only read 8 of those books. I’ve read 22 of the authors, but still…! A self-improvement project looms – or does it? Because there are always so many new books to read, too. New novels, new authors.

This is the time of year in a bookshop for new releases – as publishers hope that everyone wants to give and get books for Christmas. At the bookshop where I work, boxes of them keep arriving day after day so that the whole place is stuffed full of newness. I fear the publishing industry is like a dying tree, producing reckless amounts of blossom and fruit, one last fling at survival.

I don’t have a house of many volumes like Susan Hill, but I do have a floor to ceiling bookshelf in my study that’s stuffed to overflowing. There are old favourites, yes – but would do they bear re-reading? And there are many, many that I’ve never read. Will I ever read the collected poetry of Robert Browning? Or The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, or Lavengro by George Borrow? I still have so many books that  belonged to my mother. Classics, mostly. Plays and poetry. She read them, every one. Perhaps, next year, I might give Susan Hill’s project a try. A modified try. Say, two a month from the shelves. One I’ve never read, and one I want to re-read. That doesn’t sound too daunting, does it?

I’ve spent all morning in the garden. Perhaps I’ve done a bit too much for someone with a dodgy back, but I’ve had a wonderful play with rocks, dirt and plants. I’ve wheel-barrowed and planted; I’ve lugged pots and loads of gravel; I’ve neatened a garden bed and it’s imposed instant order and calm, rather like making the bed in a messy bedroom.

It’s a beautiful time of year to be doing these things. I’ve missed spring so far, because I’ve been chained to my desk  with the third Verity Sparks book to finish. But as of last night at 11pm, when I pressed ‘SEND’, I’m (temporarily) released. My morning’s play was unhurried and guilt-free.

The painting is called ‘In a Shoreham Garden’, and it’s by an English artist called Samuel Palmer. I’ve known it since I was little, because there was a reproduction in a book of my mother’s. It was an anthology of words and pictures called A Book of Delights. I couldn’t read but I could look, and I kept turning the pages back to this. The tree exploding with frothy blossom is spring. It’s release and joy and delight. There’s nothing like blossom. Except, perhaps, that burst of golden wattle at the end of winter.

It’s all over so quickly. A couple of weeks ago, the last of the plum blossom blew off in the wind and lay in drifts like snow all over the back courtyard. Now there are teeny little red plums among green leaves on the tree. Soon the birds will be ripping and shredding the leaves to get to the fruit.

But today there is still apple blossom on the tree in the back yard. And roses beginning to bud and bloom, and some opium poppies slyly splitting their pale green pods. All in a Castlemaine Garden.