Susan Green

A few weeks ago FOCAL (Friends of the Castlemaine Library) asked me to talk at their Annual General Meeting. I was happy to accept the invitation for all sorts of reasons. One is that 2013 has been (and is still, for a few more weeks at least) My Year for Saying “Yes”. And another is that I have a long association with the Castlemaine Library. I’ve borrowed hundreds and maybe even thousands of books since had my first library card in 1967.

And there’s a family connection, too. My mother was one of the movers and shakers behind the establishment of  FOCAL. That was back when that evil Premier of Victoria, Jeffrey Kennett, decided to wave the magic wand of economic rationalism over our fair state and even libraries had to submit themselves to a farce called Compulsory Competitive Tendering. Castlemaine people were and are fiercely protective of their library and FOCAL still thrives twenty years on.
When ill-health kept her housebound, Mum remained (through me and the visiting ‘book lady’) a keen borrower. When she died, my brother Michael had the wonderful idea that, instead of flowers, people donate to our library. Over $1000 was given, and it has been used to buy a subscription to the London Review of Books. I do get a little lump in my throat every time I see the little label saying “in memory of Helen Green”.

I began my talk by saying that, for a proper talk on public libraries, listeners should go online and find Neil Gaiman’s Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Day-Dreaming. He says it all, and better than I ever could. My talk was purely personal, about the libraries in my life, and how important they’ve been.

I was a reader before I was a writer, but I took a while to get going. My early struggles with literacy were compounded by the general unattractiveness and tedium the first ‘reader’ –  John and Betty. I wasn’t allowed to skip ahead or move on until I mastered each page and so the whole enterprise took on the feeling of a terrible punishment.
However, thanks to my mother I did finally crack the code and when I did, I thought I could read anything. There were a few false starts, with attempts at Ulysses by James Joyce (it had a nice cover) and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I was no child genius and couldn’t understand any of either of them. But the breakthrough to avid, bated-breath, addicted reading came from the classroom bookshelf at Campbell’s Creek PS.  It was there I discovered The Secret Seven. I will have no truck with those who have a go at Enid Blyton (and Neil Gaiman has a thing or two to say about her as well). She served to get me hooked on reading, primed for further adventures and other authors.
The first real library of my life was also at Campbell’s Creek. It was a kind of inner sanctum; dark and dim, with lots of wood, a musty smell. My memory’s a bit faded, but = perhaps there was also an Honour Roll or a display of sporting cups. It was there I had the Billabong Revelation.

The Billabong books by Mary Grant Bruce, a dozen or so of them, were set on a pastoral property in Victoria belonging to the Linton family. Norah and her brother Jim, their father David, Jim’s friend Wally, plus the family retainers – fat and comfortable cook, Irish stockman, Chinese gardener, Aboriginal roustabout… It was my first real taste of children’s novels set in Australia. Not just Australia, but Victoria, my home state. And country Victoria, too. I could readily imagine myself there.  I wanted to live there; I wanted to be Norah.
Years later, when I had to re-read a couple of them for my Graduate Diploma of Children’s Literature, I realised that the books were racist, sexist, chauvinistic, jingoistic and – even worse – that Norah was thick as two short planks and a thoroughgoing Philistine to boot. Sometimes, you really can’t go back again.

In 1967 my family moved from Campbell’s  Creek into Castlemaine, and I joined the library. There, I had my first taste of how tactful and non-judgemental is the ideal librarian. There were no comments about my borrowing and re-borrowing and re-re-borrowing of Billabong’s Daughter (that’s the one where the sexless and almost romance-less romance of Wally and Norah comes to a head). The same with the library’s small stock of sex education books. Were the two connected? Probably.

IN 1969 we moved away from Castlemaine; in 1970 I started High School in Frankston. I joined the Frankston Library as a Junior Borrower. So while I could and did borrow all sorts of saucy reading material from school, I had to remain Junior at the public library until I was 14.  Perhaps this enforced junior reading is a factor in my becoming a children’s writer. I read all the fantastic authors of 1960s, and it was a golden era of children’s literature. Joan Aiken, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Patricia Wrightson, Ivan Southall, Eleanor Spence, Hesba Brinsmead, Nan Chauncy… I had an abundance to choose from. That’s the wonderful thing about libraries. There’s none of the anxiety of choosing a book to buy. Borrowed books can be returned, with no hard feelings, if they’re not right. You can take a chance. You can compare and contrast, work out your likes and dislikes, follow an author or a theme or choose by cover. What a luxury that is.

Then of course, when I turned 14, I was able to move into the adult section. This enabled me to take home bizarrely assorted reading matter. A typical weeks borrowing could be a couple of Country Life magazines, a massive compendium on witchcraft and demonology,  the filmology of Joan Crawford and a couple of gothic novels by Victoria Holt.

A word of explanation here. Gothic novels were Jane Eyre-ish numbers where a governess/poor relation/innocent bride comes to a creepy mansion on the moors/castle on the edge of a cliff and discovers a horrible secret or two, nearly loses her life but finds true love with the brooding, moody, terribly good-looking/craggily masculine hero. Yes, this is escapist fiction. It’s romance. And – as with Enid Blyton – it seems some people just can’t stop themselves sneering. Neil Gaiman (again!) has something to stay about escapist fiction, too. How wonderful it is that a low-tech, hand-held device is able to transport, divert, or console. It can take you to a better place than the one you’re in…or simply another place. And we all need that sometimes.

After I finished school and left home, there were libraries to join wherever I lived. I’ll skip over Carringbush in Richmond, Glenferrie in Hawthorn and the tiny little outreach branches in Clunes and Creswick and gallop full speed ahead to the Castlemaine library. And here we are!

I am not as eloquent as Neil Gaiman, but I’d like to say a general thanksgiving for public libraries. This one nurtures my creativity and indulges my curiosity. It’s a place for ideas, pleasure, relaxation, culture high and low, diversion, information. A place for a weekly ritual of choosing books, checking them out at the desk and going on my way with a basketful of possiblities. Though apparently we are shortly to have self-serve kiosks in the library. I’m not sure about that. It will change the atmosphere, I think – and add one more bar-coded transaction to our lives. Books aren’t groceries!  I will continue to go up to the counter so I can chat to the librarian. For what would libraries be without librarians?

Last year, Dennis Commetti, commentating an AFL match, described a particular player as “…creeping round the boundary like a librarian”. I have been longing to use those words, and now I can. He was obviously referring to the fact that librarians are multi-taskers, helpful, considerate, and always in the right spot when they’re needed.

A good year for the roses in my garden.
And here’s Lucy Boston from An Enemy at Green Knowe. Mrs Oldknow is looking at the roses in her garden. I couldn’t have put it better.

The roses opened willingly as the dew evaporated out of them. As soon as they opened, the scent spread around them so pervadingly that the flight of the birds fanned it to her.
    She walked among them in very great contentment. If she herself was old, the sun was not, and the earth would do these wonders for him again and again.
    A passing neighbour called to her over the wall, “Your roses have never been better, Mrs Oldknow. They really are divine.”
    Not a bad word for them, she thought, smiling to herself. The word Rose has lost its old meaning. Now it only means something glossy, that you have, along with cars, washing machines and lovely plastic table tops. It’s only a status symbol.

But the old-fashioined roses have always been a symbol for love, and like all ecstatic things they die and come again. And the flower is simply a cup for the scent and the scent is an offering. But these thoughts she kept to herself.

This stone lion reminds me a little of the lion in The Wizard of Oz. Not scary at all. He’s in the gardens beside Lake Wendouree in Ballarat.

I’ve been sorting and throwing out again. Notebooks, this time. Notebooks – you might call them journals or even diaries – are a habit of mine. I like buying them; I like starting new ones; I like the idea of writing every night or even every week, but it seems my grand days of diary keeping are over. As a teenager I rarely missed a night, and right into my thirties I was a diligent diarist, especially when I was travelling. For several years now I’ve hopefully begun a notebook in the New Year but run out of steam by February or March. Spring has been here for a while, but only now am I spring cleaning, and as well as bags of clothes for the Op Shop – most of which originally came from the Op Shop in the first place – I have been ripping out the used pages from these unused notebooks and re-purposing them. Nearly everything has been put into the fire, but I thought this was worth sharing. I wrote it on the 15th of January this year.

Today, when I took Gus for a walk around the park. I was thinking about the book I’ve been reading. It’s called The Old Ways; A Journey on Foot and it’s by Robert MacFarlane. It is about old roads – so far, I have travelled with him on the Ickneild Way, and along the coast on ‘the deadliest path in England’ (quicksand, tides) and then on ‘sea roads’ in the Hebrides and up a mountain on another Scottish island. I think the writing is beautiful. It’s clear – limpid and lucid are two other (much poncier) words that come to mind – and detailed and discursive and knowledgeable and informed. And in love with words. Perhaps that’s what I’m responding to the most. I’m not sure. I remember when I first read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and fell in love with that kind of nature writing. Adam Nicolson comes to mind, too; and E G Sebald.

Anyway, I thought I would try to apply some of his ideas to this familiar ‘old way’, which I do at least a hundred times a year. And what do I actually see? I often use the time (and I did, a bit, today) to work out ideas for my writing. But I don’t look most of the time – or look only glancingly. Robert MacFarlane could write a whole chapter, I’m sure, on the path around the Gardens. What did I see today?
Most vivid is a part of the walk when two brown butterflies (and I shall try to find out who they were) fluttered in tandem along under the oak trees that line the walking path, in and out of the shade, at times casting a pair of dancing shadows on the ground. The path was crunching with acorns and twigs and leaves lying on the ground after the parrots or cockatoos had raided the trees. That was my experience today – the crunch, and the butterfly dance.
Coming back through the grounds of the old hospital, I saw blackberries making a net over the border garden. Sinuous, prickled, a clever opportunist.

This brought me back to the other book I’m reading, which is Get Yourself Some Headspace by Andy Puddicombe. It fits, doesn’t it? Mindfulness, noticing. Being there. Actually seeing.

The copy I read in January I borrowed from the library – it had the cover pictured above. A few weeks ago I bought a copy for my brother’s birthday – it’s now a paperback, with  a new cover. Now, re-reading my little review, I think I will buy a copy for me. And maybe do some more walking while actually seeing. And maybe start another notebook.

There’s a new bookshop in town – antiquarian and second-hand – called Mount of Alex. Very exciting for the book-hounds of the area. A week ago I called in and asked about Joan Aiken books, because I stupidly gave away or lost all the ones I had bar The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. The owner still had boxes to unpack and said he’d give me a call when he found some more. Lucky me – on Sunday I picked up Black Hearts in Battersea, Nightbirds on Nantucket and The Stolen Lake. I’m not over-the-top about matching sets, but I would have loved to have had Black Hearts with the original Puffin cover (see left) that I had back in the day. Never mind. The story’s the thing.

I had a trip to Melbourne yesterday and my travel time needed beguiling. I started  Black Hearts on the 8.06 train, read it on trams and suburban trains all day and finished it on the Bendigo train before Woodend on the way home. What a roller-coaster ride of a read! What a romp through history!

It’s ‘historical fantasy’ rather than historical fiction – and what fun the writer must have had. I probably haven’t read this or any of the other books (called The Wolves series in the trade, the bookseller told me) for more than forty years and it hit me with a bit of a shock how much they have influenced me as a writer.

It’s the romp thing. I actually set out to write a romp with the first Verity. Define romp? The dictionary says it’s rough, energetic or boisterous play; also ‘an easy victory’ or ‘to proceed without effort’. My definition is a plot that just tumbles along with lots of things happening and doesn’t stop until the last page; a story that’s as full as a Christmas cracker with odd words and funny facts and snippets of information. I felt I could tell that, like me,  Joan Aiken adored her research, treating herself to little games with language and names and historical events and people. Not to mention an insanely complicated plot!

My Verities are for an older age group, and the the characters are deliberately more rounded. They develop along the way, and Verity in particular grows and changes and reflects on her life as her story unfolds. But what a debt I owe to Joan Aiken for my love of the romp. There are more books in the series than I knew – the Mount of Alex bookseller is on the hunt for me – but for the next day or so, I can look forward to the adventures of  Dido Twite (how I love Aiken’s names) in Nightbirds on Nantucket.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time in here because I have another Verity book to write. Deadline is April 2014. I began in earnest on the 1st of the month. I always like to make a new beginning on the 1st of the month (I am eating chocolate and hot toast with lashings of butter while waiting for the 1st of next month to start to Fast Diet)and have clocked up around 11,000 words and 4 chapters so far.

And a sore neck. Lucy at the Artist’s Market made me a long, segmented (so the filling doesn’t migrate to one end) wheat bag/heat pack thingy and on Friday I wrote with comforting heat on my neck and shoulders. Lovely.

I am trying to be organised and well-planned. For once I’ve gone to the trouble of writing a detailed synopsis but I’ve already deviated from the plan. But that’s OK. Stories have a life and a logic of their  own – they’re organic, living things –  and there’s no point trying to force something alive into a box. Now that I’m back into writing world I realise yet again how much I love it.

Trash. Rubbish. Disposable or disposed of. Your trash could be my treasure – or vice versa – but we all know sometimes it’s just what you need. What you have to have, along with soft-centred chocolates in the afternoon. Trashy movies can be so bad they’re simply bad, but also so bad they’re good. But it’s no good when there’s nothing offering. Changing channels and all I can find is cooking shows and infomercials…what am I to do?

It’s obvious. Read. Thank goodness for  the Opp Shop and its shelf of $1 bargains.  I passed by Lace and Scruples and Destiny and others of that ilk. Only the best of high class trash for me. I remember as a teenager devouring Georgette Heyer novels and running out of titles; a friend suggested I try Barbara Cartland. Well, I read one or two but quickly realised that I just couldn’t do Cartland…she was too trashy.

So, my day has been devoted to sinful novel-reading. I started with The Two Mrs Grenvilles by Dominick Dunne. Here’s the first paragraph:
The room was filled with the heady scent of roses past their prime. Pink petals fell from swollen blossoms in a Chinese bowl onto the polished surface of an ormolu escritoire…
(Isn’t that fantastic? Say it out loud – ormolu escritoire – and don’t even bother about what it actually is). The book continues for a lush, luscious and totally fabulous 375 pages of decor and name-dropping. Not to mention sex, scandal and socialites and of course, murder. The thing is, this is trash but so well-written, so perfectly done, it’s like watching a movie only better.

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne de Maurier.Please, don’t anyone get insulted if I say de Maurier wrote trash. I think she’s a wonderful writer and the biography by Margaret Forster reads like a novel. Would it sound better if I said she wrote ‘tosh”? Or ‘tripe’? ‘Cos this is amazingly, wonderfully, seriously ripe and ridiculous. First-person narration by an unwordly misfit a la Rebecca but this time it’s a male. Sense of doom from page 1 (uncle makes child look at decayed body on gibbet, for starters). Dripping with detail and description. Takes itself seriously (absolutely no laughs). Femme fatale. Suspicion, obsession, madness and murder…or is it? I saw the movie once – Richard Burton played Phillip and Olivia de Havilland was Rachel – but as above, the book’s the thing to immerse yourself in when you’ve just got to have high-class, fabulous rubbish to read.

When your part of the country is drought-prone, it seems all wrong to wish the rain would stop.

But oh, I’m so tired of grey skies! A few days in a row of sunny weather had me tricked into believing that wintery days were gone for the rest of 2013. I got out the T-shirts, the summer skirts, the sandals… I started thinking about our beach holiday with our wonderful family friends at Port Fairy. Last year, on the day we arrived, the temperature was nudging 40 and the tar on the roads was melting. Right now I’m huddled by the fire and such heat seems impossible.

A favourite book from my childhood was Anthony and Antimacassar by Mary and Rowland Emmett. It was first published in 1943; one of my parents must have bought it. Perhaps when they were in England in the early 1950s. Rowland Emmett was a well-known illustrator and during the Festival of Britain created a bizarre and whimsical fantasy railroad. Trains and railways must have been his thing. Anthony and Antimacassar is about how Anthony, a china pig just sitting, sitting and bored on the mantelshelf  takes off on a wild adventure by train, meeting pirates and highwaymen and strange rogue locomotives.
One of the bedrooms I slept in had a mural (painted by my father) with images taken from this book all around the walls. It was magical. I have a few small b&w photographs but I don’t know where they are. I wish we’d pulled the panels off and kept them! I’ve got most of the books I loved as a small child, but not this one. I think maybe it was my brother’s favourite, too – he’s got it. I’ve been looking for it on the internet on second-hand book sites. I don’t have a lazy 175 pounds to spare, but  perhaps I’ll get lucky soon.