Susan Green

My local Opportunity Shop is a great source of reading matter. I’m always amazed at the new and newish novels that people read and pass on. There’s always a good selection of large paperback crime and thrillers (the B-format ones that retail around the $32.95 mark) but they’re rarely the ones I want. My happy hunting ground is in the $2 classics shelf and among the children’s novels.
A couple of weeks ago I found Go Saddle the Sea by the wonderful Joan Aiken. I think I have written this before – and if I haven’t, I should have – Joan Aiken was one of my first models. It was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (for years one of my favourite books, and read I don’t know how many times) that started me off on a long love affair with Victoriana. Gas-lamp or Gothic, if it has corsets, carriages and crinolines, orotund language and bizarre surnames (Miss Slighcarp for the evil governess has rarely been bettered), I’m hooked.

So I was surprised to find that I’d never registered Aiken’s The Felix Trilogy. Go Saddle the Sea, the first book, introduces the hero Felix Brooke, a half-Spanish half-English orphan who, feeling unloved and misunderstood at home with his stern grandfather, runs away to find his father’s family in England.
It’s a ‘quest’ story. Felix, who tells the tale in the first person, sets off  to travel across Spain from the mountains to the sea. Along the way he has many adventures, experiences temporary triumphs and setbacks, encounters a changing cast of characters, makes friends and enemies. It’s a ‘picaresque’ novel; you could say it’s episodic, but it’s meant to be.  Ideal for sporadic reading. Ideal, too, for incorporating the marvellous, the fascinating –  or in the case, of the Comprachicos, the grotesque and horrifying –  from historical research.

Felix is abducted by the Comprachicos.
They “were a secret people, wandering in groups over the face of Europe, sometimes seeming to vanish for fifty or sixty years together, then, apparently, coming to life once  more. In the wake of wards and civil disturbances, plagues or bad seasons, when food was scarce and times were hard, then they would appear, plying their evil trade. What did they do? They supplied the raw material for fairs and peep-shows. And to do this they bought children from hungry parents – or they took orphans whom nobody claimed – they never stole, they drove hard but honest bargains – and they re-made these children, by terrible arts of their own, turning straight bodies into hunchbacks, dislocating joints, manufacturing dwarfs by stopping their growth – sometimes by constructing jars around them, it was said – grafting tails onto human bodies, making normal children into monstrosities. By their skilful surgery they could alter a child’s face so that its own mother would not recoginise it. At the end of Napoleon’s wars, when Europe was full of starving families and homeless children, there were the Comprachicos again, like refuse collectors, picking up human rags and turning them into profitable goods…”

There’s enough material there for a whole book –  a whole trilogy, even – but it’s just a chapter in this one.

I was in the Ian Potter in Fed Square a few weeks ago. In one of the upstairs galleries was this painting of schoolboys waiting in line. It’s a picture I know well, because it used to hang on our wall. And that’s because my Dad – or more properly in this context, the artist Douglas Green –  painted it.
I couldn’t stop smiling. Grinning, actually, like the Cheshire Cat. I felt like telling the other gallery goers “My Dad did that!”
But I didn’t. I did a sedate turn of the room looking at all the other pictures and then circled back again. I smiled some more, and then left, still smiling. Nice work, Dad.

My grandmother – my mother’s mother – died when I was 14. Her name was Phoebe. According to my mother, she associated her name with the cheery black maids you often saw in Hollywood films back in the 1930’s. Her ‘pet name’, the one my grandfather called her, was Tuffet. I have a few old cards, from her to him and from him to her – Harold and Tuffet, Tuffet and Harold. They were married in (I think) 1920 but he’d been gassed in the war and was never entirely well. He died in 1939.
The photographs of them at their wedding and as newly-weds show a handsome dark haired man and an extremely pretty golden-haired girl. She was the only daughter of a well-off and doting Papa.
I only ever knew my grandmother  – Nan – as an old lady. Actually, she wasn’t all that old but she’d had a series of strokes – the first before she was 50. Her muscles in her hands had shortened and they looked a little like claws but she wasn’t frightening. She was very gentle.

It’s funny, but what I remember most about visiting Nan is her things. She had lots of ornaments. There were china shells being carried by fat cupids on top of the piano; another china statue – a huge thing – of Boadicea in a chariot being pulled by two horses. The harness was made of thin leather straps. There were also a procession of ebony elephants in various sizes and a group of little red-clothed china imps. I loved those imps. Once, when I was four or five, I tried to take one home with me, but I got caught. I was in trouble, but I also remember the grown-ups laughing at me. Savage disappointment and humiliation raged in my small heart. On her dressing table she had a tortoise shell hand mirror which I have now – I still use it – and a cut-crystal perfume bottle with a  criss-cross pattern on it. Her perfume was Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass.

After she died, Mum gave me some of her things. The mirror, the petticoat Nan wore on her wedding day, a silk bridge jacket, a shawl, some jewellery, a collection of perfume bottles and a few other things. Over the past few years, I’ve started to give them away to my nieces. I have a son, but I wanted these relics to go to the female line of my family.
Most recently, I gave what used to be called a ‘toilet set’.Nothing to do with toilets – it’s really toilette, the French word which means, I suppose, something like ‘grooming’. I took some photographs – but of course since I dropped my external hard drive I don’t have all of those any more. Just a few.

Here they are. The little silver-topped jars, the scissors, the button hook and nail buffer, the tiny brush that was used to groom one’s eyebrows. They’re things, objects. For my mother, they would have brought images of younger mother, in happier times. For me, there’s the older, stroke-affected Nan.

And for my niece, there’s no real Nan at all. Nan is at a distance; she’s a great-grandmother, someone on a family tree or perhaps an old photograph. When my niece looks at these things, perhaps she will think of me.

I finally did it. I deleted my Facebook account.  I’ve escaped!

It wasn’t easy, however. Not only did  pictures of random friends appear, with the anguished (Facebook generated) message that they’d miss me, but I was required to give a reason. I ticked the box that said Facebook wasn’t useful to me, and immediately a whole lot of reasons why Facebook was useful to me popped up. One final hurdle; I was asked to log on in order to log out, but apparently my password was invalid. I tried and tried again but it was no go. After much swearing and general crossness, I decided to try changing my password. Well, the invalid password worked perfectly well this time; I made the change, logged in yet again and pushed the button. Ahhh… An extraordinary feeling of relief surged through me.
The week before I did this, I posted that in order to simplify my life, I was quitting. And while that is utterly and completely true, there is another other reason.
I’m just not a Facebook kind of person.

I found validation for my escape in a book by the American author and blogger, Gretchen Rubin. In 2009 she published a book called The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean my Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle and Generally Have More Fun.
Rubin started this on-line project not because she was unhappy – her personal and economic circumstances are, frankly, better than most and moreover, she absolutely knew it – but because she wanted to be happier in the life she was living. Each month, she chose an areas of her life such as marriage, parenthood, friendship, leisure and mindfulness – to explore. She thought and read and researched and made resolutions. And she kept a chart to track how well she kept those resolutions. The blog was a great success and turned into this book, and another – Happier at Home – published in 2012.

Now, this could be awfully twee and self-involved. Perhaps it is. I could also be critical of Rubin’s limitations. She’s not particularly adventurous; not curious about other cultures or religions; won’t try meditation; and is resolutely (that word again) her urban, middle-class, white, well-educated, professional, work-obsessed, routine-bound and somewhat obsessive, wholesome American self. But really, why ask her to be someone she’s not? And in fact, if I did a Happiness Project, it would actually be a lot like hers. I too struggle with impediments to happiness like impatience, cross moods and misguided perfectionism (and that’s only naming a few!) And I’m middle class etc etc And I’d like be happier in the life I’m living, too. And one thing I can start with is to imitate Rubin and create my own set of commandments.

Rubin ended up with 12 of them, and top of the list was ‘Be Gretchen’. Well, I’m going to start with ‘Be Susan.” And you know what? While Susan loves her friends and family, she’s not on Facebook!

Last week I dropped my little external hard drive on the brick floor. It landed with a crash –  as you’d expect – but in addition there was a rather worrying sort of cracking noise as well.
My IT genius husband looked grim, picked it up, pecked away at the keys on his computer –  a few mighty commands, I imagine, because as far as computers are concerned he is He-Who-Must-Be -Obeyed – but then shook his head regretfully.
The long and short of this story is that three years of photos have vanished. All my pictures of our family holiday in Canada, plus lots and lots of shots taken on random wanderings around the local area and on trips away.
It’s so odd. Stored on my hard drive, they were invisible and not-quite-real anyway; potential images – but now they are completely lost. It’s not the same as losing an old-school photograph album or a packet of negatives (who remembers those?). Because they were never printed, and I only ever skimmed through them and chose a few of the most appealing to export to my computer, there are lots I can’t even remember. So I know I’ve lost something, but I’m not really sure what.

Which brings me back to my current love, Paddy Leigh Fermor. I am reading the third book, The Broken Road. This one was unfinished and you can tell, for it doesn’t have the polish and perfection of the others. There is more of a sense of a very young man out adventuring, however, which makes it very appealing. But I am challenged by Leigh Fermor’s writing, to try to remember my own travels. I actually have travel notebooks (he lost most of his).

Here is what I wrote about a train trip from Inverness.

Now rolling through mist and hills, thick tangly rich green forest, farms, rivers with fishermen up to their waists in them. Saw two golden-russet pheasants sitting on a fencepost. Some of the little woods have an air of secrecy and mystery, thick and carpeted underneath, you imagine they’d be very silent. There was a nice noise of seagulls everywhere. They are everywhere – coming out of Inverness, by the Moray Firth, silver tide flats and gulls, all kinds of gulls…

That all sounds quite specific and well observed, and you’d think it might be lodged in my brain somewhere – but though of course I remember the trip, I can’t remember these sights at all. Much like my crashed and broken hard drive. I have read that memories aren’t stored or filed forever, just waiting to be taken retrieved. They only survive if taken out and looked at. But then each outing changes them slightly (or hugely!) so they aren’t snapshots of what you did or saw, they’re revisions.

I can only conclude that either PLF – while being a superb writer – had a phenomenal memory, or an amazing reconstructive imagination.
Or both.

Meanwhile, my memory – like my hard drive – is liable to crash and lose the lot.

It’s only Saturday night, but I’ve already got that gloomy Sunday feeling. Perhaps it’s because night is falling earlier and earlier – and soon, when daylight saving’s done, we’ll be plunging again into the dark part of the year. So since I’m feeling a bit sad, here are some sad things.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I went out for a drive and ended up – as one does, or at least if one is out for a drive with me – at a cemetery. It was the Maldon cemetery this time. I wandered around, taking lots of photographs. Here are a few.

From A Grave Look at History by Lionel Gilbert I found out that the wreaths made of ceramic flowers, doves, hands and other death-motif items (all wired together under glass domes and placed on graves) are called immortelles. I have a few of these little bits and pieces because I when I was young I used to scavenge them – well, yes, it was actually stealing – from broken domes. A bit ashamed of that, now. This immortelle, featuring large arum lilies, had lichen growing over the glass which made it look even sadder somehow.

There was no other information about Arthur.No dates, no parents, nothing. Just heartbreak, I suppose.

And on that note, I’m going to resolve that since I had the ‘miserable Sundays’ today (a day early) I’d better  have a jolly day tomorrow.

I’ve been going places with Patrick Leigh Fermor. He is the most delightful travelling companion; interested in history and art and architecture and plants and birds and clothes and popular songs and cloud formations and politics and cigarette cases and love and water buffalo…actually, in everything.

The remarkable story behind these remarkable books – A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road (which was left unfinished by the author’s death; it was edited by Colin Thurbron and Artemis Cooper and published last year) is…well, remarkable. In 1933 at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out from England to travel on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. More than forty years later, he published the first book, A Time of Gifts. I’ve been reading a little about Leigh Fermor (I think that’s correct, though I think of him as ‘Paddy’, which is what his friends called him) and it seems that most of the time he wasn’t working from old diaries or notes; he was writing from memory. Remembering…or recreating? Just because I can’t remember in such detail doesn’t mean no-one can, but it is a phenomenal accomplishment to (seemingly) capture the fresh gaze of a very young man so in love with life that everything he looked at – or so it seems – was turned to gold.
I have opened a page at random and copied out a couple of random paragraphs.  All  through the first volume, and now reading this, the second, I’ve kept sighing and telling whoever will listen that it is almost too beautiful to bear. Deliriously beautiful – and sometimes pretty much delirious –  and though I thought I would mark  pages or underline or copy out this or that wonderful sentence – I haven’t done it. But simply opening a page at random does the trick, I think.
This is high summer in rural Rumania, and Leigh Fermor is staying – as he did all over Hungary and Rumania – with the friends of a a friend of a friend – in their kastely (manor house) which is in the middle of farmland.

Waggons creaked under loads of apricots, yet the trees were still laden; they scattered the dust, wasps tunelled them and wheels and foot-falls flattened them to a yellow pulp; tall wooden vats bubbled among the dusty sunflowers, filling the yards with the sweet and heady smell of their fermentation…

And still at the same place, sitting up with Istvan,his host, into the small hours of the morning, smoking and drinking and talking.

Just past its full, the moon laid a gleam of metal on the river and a line of silver wire along the tops of the woods. The July constellations and the Milky Way showed bright in a sky empty of vapour and as the moon waned, stars began to shoot, dropping in great arcs, sometimes several a minute, and we would break off our talk to watch them. They were the Perseids, meteors which shower down late that month and in early August, from the bell- or flower-shaped constellation of Perseus, where Algol blinks among minor starts with a restless flash. El Ghul -the Ghoul or Fiend – is the Arabian astronomers’ word for the Gorgon, and the starry hero, grasping the snake-locks, flourishes her head across the North and shakes the fragments loose; or so we decided after a decanter or two. If we were late enough, nightingales filled in the rare gaps in our talk; the Pleiades and then Orion followed the slant of Cassiopeia and Perseus above the trees.

I am sighing again as I type. A beautiful (that word again) lost world, beautifully remembered, recreated, created… It doesn’t really matter, does it? I wouldn’t even care if it was totally invented. I just love travelling with Paddy.

I posted Rembrandt’s shell last week , before I headed off  for a beach holiday at Phillip Island (for anyone who’s not a Victorian, it’s an island connected to the mainland by a bridge, and quite famous as the home of  – take your pick – a colony of fairy penguins or a huge motor sports track). I always like to bring shells home – handfuls of them – and put them in little bowls in the house where I can look at them and remember happy days of salty air and seawater. But really they look best when wet, so they usually end up living among my pot-plants. I’d anticipated spending  hours on the beach looking for shells, but it didn’t happen this time.

I’d been collecting shells since I was a young child – our back gate opened onto the beach, so there were always shells handy. Though I’m short-sighted, I’ve always been good at finding things like beach glass, pebbles, butterfly wings, feathers, dead beetles, beautiful leaves –  and shells. People often gave me shells as presents (and they still do); I have a fine collection of cowries – but this Rembrandt etching is special to me. It makes me think of Chelsea, where I grew up, and my father.

Our back gate opened onto the beach, and nearly every day I used to walk along the beach with my Dad. We were beachcombers together. Port Phillip Bay doesn’t cast up rare and exotic shells like Rembrandt’s; they tend to be little and undramatic. I remember flocks of bivalves like pale butterflies, blue-black mussel shells, fan-shaped scallops; lots of tiny turbans with chequered patterns and rosy tips. I always preferred the mysteriously enclosed whorled ones to the simple, happy bivalves, but they all fascinated me. We used to bring them home to put in a shell garden we made along the side of the outside toilet, along with driftwood, bleached bits of sponges and sea-weed, sea-glass and bottles.

It’s not surprising that the  shell became a bit of a personal symbol for me. I have kitsch shell vases and shell-patterned china and a mirror made by a friend from reclaimed timber surrounded by glued-on shells. I’ve bought shells, too. The first time was when I was about sixteen, on a family holiday in Sydney. My Dad had found a shell shop – until then, I’d had no idea you could buy them – and I chose a flashy green snail-shell and a pearly polished turban… but they’re not dear to me as the found or given shells are. I was in my early teens when my Dad framed a postcard of Rembrandt’s shell for me. Here are some shell words – mysterious, secret world, secret self, secretive, hidden, self-enclosed, indwelling, protected, safe…

Rembrandt’s shell is conus marmoreous or marbled cone shell. They’re found in SE Africa, Polynesia and Hawaii. Rembrandt depicted this exotic thing 1650, in the days of  sailing ships, and it would have had a long and arduous voyage from its home to sit in Rembrandt’s studio in Holland. I wonder if he held it to his ear and listened to the whispering of far away waves? So more shell words – sea-voyage, sea-world, depths and deeps, full fathom five, pearl and coral, waves, tide, moon, whisper, sshhh…

I went to Melbourne on the train yesterday – well, by train as far as Gisborne, where we all had to troop off and catch buses in to Southern Cross. The bus trip enabled us to see where the weekend’s fires had been. Right along the freeway, close to homes, jumping roads. The train was back in service for the trip home; that journey showed that the grass-fire had roared right up to Riddell’s Creek station. The paddocks were blackened, still smouldering; everything seemed very still and the acrid smoke smell infiltrated the train. Tonight, too, the air here is full of bushfire smell.