Susan Green

Recently I was invited to give a short talk at the Castlemaine Word Mine (have a look at castlemainewordmine.wordpress.com/ to see what it’s all about). I got the title of my talk from a book (of course). The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford is a hybrid of, amongst other things, memoir, literary history and criticism and biography, and a record of the children’s books that ‘grew’ the author.*

I began my talk with the key books of my early childhood. When I was four I began school and encountered  John and Betty (the Victorian Schools 1st reader). In grade 2, I started to read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Yes, I did. No, I was not a child genius. I’ll explain.

All sorts of things grow a person. There are the real experiences and events, the rock-like solid structure of your life – your family; where you live; how you live.  Rock-like? Solid? I only have to talk to my siblings to find out that there are many subtle and some gross differences in the way we experienced those. And then there are the unreal experiences – the dreams and nightmares, the fears and fantasies. I can probably point the finger of blame at my father for the fact that I’m still scared of the dark. It wasn’t the Hobyahs for  me – it was the Swarbies. The Hobyahs came out of the bush but we lived by the sea-side and the Swarbies, according to Dad, lived in the nearby Carrum Swamp. I vaguely remember that they had pointy heads and were bluish-greenish and rustled in the reeds and rushes. The moral of the tale was and has always been  – little child, don’t wander off and get lost or drowned or stolen.

The pointy-headed Swarbies, Rat and Mole and Mr Badger, Snow White, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, Max and the Wild Things, Little Red Riding Hood…before I could read, I was already enmeshed in the world of story. Not only was I was read to, but I was  allowed to free-range on the bookshelf.  I spent hours with art books, looking at reproductions. Before I was five, I had a favourite dying saint – Saint Sebastian; my adult self sees him as  kinkily homo-erotic, bound to his post not very well-covered with gauzy cloth, six-pack and multiple piercings –  but more to the point, I had images of heroes and heroines galore from secular portraits of the great and glorious; from paintings of history and myth and legend; from the many juicy Old Testament tableaux (head on a platter, anyone?) plus of course the pietas and annunciations and nativities… My imagination seethed with details – jewel-encrusted sleeves, a ferret bright eyed in a woman’s arms, billows and folds of silken cloth, men with pointed ears and goat’s legs, winged babies with fat pink bottoms…so it’s perhaps no wonder that, after all the wonder and magic and splendour and excitement of that world, to be thrown into the cold water of ‘learning to read’ John and Betty at Bonbeach State School with Miss Benson came as a bit of a shock.

 John and Betty. It was a kind of torture. I didn’t get it. Perhaps I didn’t want to get it. John can jump and Betty can jump went on and on and on, miserably, bewilderingly, like the school day itself with its Cuisenaire blocks and folk dancing to scratchy records and finger painting and those powerful, unknowable runes on the blackboard.  Just looking at it, with its orange cover and illustrations of disturbingly bland fifties suburban conformity, gives me the chills to this day. I started school at four, and was far too immature and dreamy for the whole project. I wasn’t a bright child bored. I was a dopey child mystified.

But…when finally I could read, I could read ANYTHING. This time I free-ranged the novels in my parents’ bookshelf, trying Ulysses and Oblomov, understanding some of the words but not penetrating much beyond a page or two. Then I picked up Orlando. I think I must have read twenty pages. Again, without understanding much but – and I remember this clearly – finding words that skimmed, hummed, glittered and shone.  I discovered delight in words. I fell in love with language.

But, not being a child genius, I couldn’t go on. And thank goodness, not long after that, my mother gave me The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett to read. And followed it with Seven Little Australians and the Edith Nesbits and the Laura Ingalls Wilders and The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. School libraries gave me the Billabong books and the Secret Seven mysteries. I was immersed in Children’s literature from classics to crap. None of what I read  had quite the brilliant humming-bird language of Orlando ( I had to wait till Form 6 Literature and The Leopard for that) but some of it approached it… and by the way,  bless you, Saint Enid, for the bliss and balm of Popular Fiction.

I was launched and running, back on track, reading as if my life depended on it. John and Betty and Orlando were the starting points, and and I have never looked back.

*One of the Castlemaine Word Miners has loaned me a great little UK publication called Slightly Foxed which deals with people and their Significant Books. It’s great fun.

I did promise myself that I’d be a more frequent blogger this year, but now into the third month of the year, and with only one post to my credit, it seems that I was misleading myself. I have, however, finished the novel I have been writing for the past three years.

It’s called Anything Worth Keeping. What’s it about? The short answer is; Oh, the usual thing, a dysfunctional family. A slightly longer answer is a little story. Four or five years ago, a friend told me about her stepmother. Not long after he was widowed, her father met an Englishwoman on board a ship. They married. The stepmother was a difficult person; the children, still grieving for their mother, resented her; it was not Happy Families when they settled back in Melbourne. My friend’s father died first, and when the stepmother died, she was intestate, which meant that her father’s money went to the stepmother’s nephew. The family contested this settlement, and won. There was a small detail that fascinated me. The family knew practically nothing about the stepmother except this one thing – she had been the mistress of a high-ranking British diplomat or politician.

So. I hatched a story. It was about the children and how their lives had been all but ruined by this Evil Stepmother. But something happened as I began to write this story – the stepmother took over and I fell in love with her. Her name was Bliss. She hijacked the story and at times I felt she was almost it. Her story – and why she never told it – form the centre of the novel.

So, for three and a bit years I’ve been living for a lot of the time with Bliss. And with the children Paula, Anne, Tom and the ghost of Caroline, with Alec, her last husband and a few husbands and lovers in between, and with Rob and Judith, her  good friends who…but that would be giving the whole thing away. I have been living in London in the early 1950’s – it was still Austerity Britain then, with the city slowly being re-built after the ravages of the Blitz, and some items of food still on the ration, but nevertheless London was a magnet for young Australian artists and writers eager to expand their horizons, to explore art and culture and history, and of course to take off into Europe, to France and Italy and beyond. I’ve been mentally dressing in New Look suits and frocks with their wide skirts, tiny waists and strenuous corsetry; I’ve been eating reconstituted eggs and drooling over Elizabeth David’s inspirational cookery books; I’ve been dreaming on the top of double-decker buses and stuck in the smelly Tube. I’ve been living in 1950’s Australian suburbia, too, and incidentally re-living some of my own personal history, my growing-up days in one of Melbourne’s beach-side suburbs. But that’s all over now Time to call it a day because I can’t go on revising forever. Time to call it quits, write The End. Time to say goodbye.

Ah. (That’s a big sigh) A relieved sigh, a sad sigh, a somewhat exhausted sigh… Yesterday afternoon I went into my workroom and tidied my desk. I put all the books about 1950’s art, fashion, politics, social history and literature up onto a high shelf. Printouts of the various drafts I stacked up neatly to recycle. The sheaves of handwritten notes to myself went into the bin, and a few photocopied references about odd subjects (the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works being one) I filed away just in case I need to verify some date or fact… The decks are cleared, ready to start the next book, which is a sequel to The Truth About Verity Sparks. I’m keen to get going on it, I’ve got lots ideas and Verity is a feisty girl who just about writes her own lines. And she may need to, since my deadline is 1st August.

But still. And yet. Not really ready to let go. One door closes and another – Yes, I know all of that. If I didn’t have Verity to get on with, I’d probably spend a lot of time moping and moving commas around, so it’s probably just as well. It feels a lot like moving house. You know – emptying it of furniture, cleaning up, closing the windows and doors on the echoing and empty rooms for one last time, and finally, knowing you can never really go back again, saying goodbye.

My New Year’s Resolution is to be a More Frequent Blogger. Which will probably mean short and pretty much off-the-cuff posts. My weekly pile of library books is always a good start. But also, this week, my swanning about with authors. Last night, I had dinner with a quartet of teriffic YA, junior fiction and picture story-book writers. They were Simmone Howell, Kirsty Murray, Martine Murray (the question was asked, and no, not related) and Lee Fox. We ate Thai food al fresco and pretty cold it was too, out on Barker Street. An Age photographer was out and about snapping for yet another story on Castlemaine, and he snapped us. ‘We’re all writers!’ we called merrily, and you know what he said? ‘Who do you write for?’ and pricked up his ears. Which went back to normal when we revealed that we weren’t journos, we were only novelists.

And a sweet little story. Kirsty Murray visited my son’s school last year to give an author talk about her latest, India Dark. He was so galvanised by this that he asked me to order it for him. Waiting was impossible, so he borrowed the book from the library and read half of it before the order came in.  Yesterday, when I told him who I was dining with, he asked if I could get her to sign his book. I told her this, and she was impressed (he’s a sporty fifteen-year-old boy, after all!), touched, signed it beautifully and said how lovely it was to have that kind of response. AND IT IS! Speaking for myself now, it is abolutely heart-warming and wonderful to find that you have done what you hoped to do when you wrote the book – connected with someone.

Which takes me neatly to a well-known quote from E.M.Forster – ‘Only connect‘ (and I will admit right now that I haven’t read any Forster even though I have seen the movies of Room with a View and Howard’s End) –  to my pile from the library this week.

My pile from the library this week included a book of essays by Zadie Smith. She is a great admirer of Forster and her most recent novel, On Beauty, was written (mind you, I only know this from the reviews) around themes from Howard’s End. The book I borrowed is called Changing my Mind: Occasional Essays and the puffs below the title say ‘Stimulating, original, vibrant and witty’ and ‘Reading for Smith is a mind-changing, life-saving, soul-saving affair‘. The first of these rather put me off, because for many years now, ‘vibrant’ has been one of my least favourite words, with repulsive New Age and alternative health connotations of being endlessly energetic, glowing, fulfilled…but enough of my prejudices. However the second sounded really, really good.

But I had a problem. Reviews. Now, Zadie Smith is the famous author of White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty  – none of which I have read. There are reasons, and probably not good ones – they all seem quite long and I am a bit faint-hearted about the investment of time required by a long book; the adjectives used by reviewers are things like ‘dazzling’, ‘dizzying’ and ‘complex’; also ‘ambitious and hugely impressive’, which though a resounding thumbs up also sound a bit demanding, like cross between a fireworks display and an IQ test.

But these essays are wonderful! It’s like sitting with a very wise, witty, informed, intelligent friend – emphasis on friend, for they are accessible essays, no fireworks or tests – telling you about writers, books, films, places she’s been, her family. She’s made me think about things I haven’t thought about before, like what it’s like being a black girl reading English literature and what it means when I (usually unconsciously but sometimes not) calibrate my accent or my vocabulary depending on my company. She’s encouraged me to read authors I’ve never got around to like E.M. Forster and Kafka; avoided, like Nabokov; and never heard of, like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I will re-read Middlemarch, and I might even try to like Katharine Hepburn a little better.

But most of all, I will stop being afraid of Zadie Smith, nip down to the library and borrow whatever there is of hers on the shelf!

I’ve borrowed a library book called The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books edited by J.Peder Zane. The editor asked 125 writers to list their favorite books, and then made more lists of the lists. The Top Top Ten were;

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

9. The stories of Anton Chekhov

10. Middlemarch by George Eliot.

I’ve heard of all of those authors and titles, and have actually read six of them, which I suppose isn’t too bad, but (since we are listing here) when I looked at the writers who actually made the lists, I found I recognised only 46 names. Worse, I’d only read books by 19 of those authors. I excused myself a little by saying that the ones I didn’t recognise were mostly American authors and since there are just so many whose books published in the US that don’t make it here… Perhaps the truth is, I don’t read widely enough.

I thought I would have read a lot of the books on the 125 lists, but actually, when I was really really honest, and didn’t count books I’d skimmed or started and not finished (or even just seen the film) it was only a miserable 69 out of the 546 books.

Then I found myself almost agreeing with Annie Proulx, who said ‘I find this list of ten books project to be difficult, pointless, and wrong-headed… One could of course quickly go on to put together list after list after list. Moreover the lists would change from week to week as ones tastes change and one reads more widely.’ If I was asked to list my 10 favourite books, it would really depend on why I was reading. And also when I was reading. So here are some of my categories. By the way, they’re all fiction, and no poetry or plays.

I Thought These Were Great, by Somehow I Don’t Want to Re-read Them

1. Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald

2. Madness of the Seduced Woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

5. Lady Oracle by Margaret Attwood

6. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

7. Possession by A S Byatt

8. Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

9. The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin

10 The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

I Thought These Were Great, I Re-read Them and I Still Think They’re Great 

1. The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

2. Middlemarch by George Eliot

3. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

4. Cat’s Eye by Margaret Attwood

5. the Claudine books by Colette

6. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

9. Persuasion by Jane Austen

10. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Authors I Re-Read When in Need of Comfort

1. Jane Austen

2. Barbara Pym

3. L.M. Boston

4. Colette

5. Michael Innes

6.Elizabeth Goudge

7.Kathleen Norris

8. Raymond Chandler

9. Mary Roberts Rinehart

10. Georgette Heyer

Books I Loved in Childhood

1.The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

2. The Midnight Folk by John Masefield

3. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

4. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

5. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine l’Engle

6. Mistress Masham’s Repose by T H White

7. Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner

8. Little Women by Louisa May Allcott

9. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

10. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

In October, Sisters in Crime are celebrating their 20th anniversary with a HUGE convention called SheKilda. It’s on from 7-9th October at Rydge’s Hotel in Melbourne, and there will be heaps of women crime writers from Australia and overseas, plus – hopefully – heaps of readers as well.  The link is www.SheKilda.com.au – check it out and you’ll see that there’s an amazing line-up of crime-writing talent. And one delighted but slightly puzzled participant – me.

I’ve been invited because of my new children’s novel, The Truth About Verity Sparks. Well, there’s crime in it all right (murder, arson, kidnapping, assault – rather a lot of crime, really, for a kid’s book!) and detection, so I guess I sort of squeak in. It’s funny, in a way – I’m not a crime fiction buff by any stretch of the imagination, but my late mother was, and often when I was looking for something to read I’d wander up to look at her shelves and take something from her collection back with me. She didn’t just collect the latest, or the most well-known, either. She was interested in the Victorian prototypes like Wilkie Collins ‘The Woman in White’ and Fergus Hume’s Melbourne-set ‘The Mystery of a Hansom Cab’, as well as many early 20th century examples. The famous ones like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as well as the not-so-famous – a genre I categorize to myself (and it’s rather twee, I know) as “forgotten best-sellers of yesteryear”. That’s because though on the covers or inside the title page there’ll be the boast “20th thousand” or ’16th printing’ or whatever, the books and authors will often be almost completely forgotten.

Take the case of  Mary Roberts Rinehart. I’m having a bit of an MRR binge at the present, thanks to Mum’s collection. (When Mum died, more than thirty boxes of crime fiction  were sold to a second-hand dealer, but I saved a few favourites.) MRR was an American writer – sometimes called ‘The American Agatha Christie’ – who lived from 1876 to 1957, and in the course of her long career published what Rinehart afficionado Michael E. Grost calls ‘a mountain’ of short detective fiction in magazines plus over forty novels, plays and collections. Her first big success, ‘The Circular Staircase’ published in 1907, sold 1,250.000 which was an astonishing best-seller for those days. She’s credited with inventing the ‘If-I-Had-Known’ school of mystery writing (you know – ‘Had I but known the significance of the button in the garden bed, perhaps…etc etc) and the one I’ve just finished, ‘Haunted Lady’, does have a fair bit of that. It’s also got a delightful heroine, Hilda Adams, a nurse who her policeman friend (and just at the end, love interest) calls ‘Miss Pinkerton’ after the famous private detective agency. She’s neat and a bit prim, middle-aged and grey-haired but cherubic when she’s all pink after after her bath, very observant and very very sensible. Rinehart was a trained nurse herself, and married a doctor, so the medical aspects to her plots ring quite true. ‘Haunted Lady’ features a rich family with lots of dirty secrets and there’s much creeping and spying and being knocked out and found stabbed and so on – the usual happy family stuff – in a creepy old urban mansion. Loads of fun.

Before I read ‘Haunted Lady’, I sat up the night before till late with ‘The Wall’ – murders among the idle rich by the sea. Before that, it was ‘The Swimming Pool’ – ditto, but among country estates of New England – and ‘The Yellow Room’ – same again, during WWII. That they’re dated goes without saying, but there’s plenty of intrigue, suspense, deception and insanely complicated family machinations around money and inheritance, not to mention adulterous dalliances and of course, murder. 

 

I’ve only got one more of Mum’s MRR’s to go now – it’s called ‘The Great Mistake’…and then I’ll need to get onto the second-hand book sites on the internet to see if I can find any more.

Today’s ‘Sisters in Crime’ are part of a long tradition of female crime writers, some of whom – like MRR – are almost forgotten today but still really worth a read. And I think my mother would be tickled pink to know that with my children’s novel, I’ve been admitted to the sisterhood.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see ‘From Time to Time’, a movie based on a children’s novel by L.M. Boston. I was eager to see it, and I suppose it’s always a danger, seeing the film of a beloved book…and yes, I was disappointed and left wondering, how could they get it so wrong? But then the film is not the book, and will be soon forgotten while the spell of those Green Knowe novels is still strong for me. In fact, I immediately re-read the first couple of them – ‘The Children of Green Knowe’ and ‘The Chimneys of Green Knowe’. Green Knowe is a strange old house, part Norman, part Elizabethan, part Georgian, where the past is alive in the objects and pictures and furnishings of the house, the trees and plants in the garden, the stones and beams of the place. Ghosts are part of everyday life, but so are meals and gardening and the weather. It is both real and un-real, enchanted, magical and also down to earth. I still enjoyed the stories, but I found even more than that, I was gob-smacked by the writing. As a teenager, first reading these books, I never realised just how beautifully written they are, how ‘literary’, and I suppose that the beauty of the writing must always have been part of the spell. Here’s the section of ‘The Children of Green Knowe’ where little Toseland – later called just Tolly – first enters his great-grandmother’s house.

The entrance hall was a strange place. As they stepped in, a similar door opened at the far end of the house and another man and boy entered there. Then Toseland saw that it was only themselves in a big mirror. The walls round him were partly rough stone and partly plaster, but hung all over with mirrors and pictures and china. There were three big old mirrors all reflecting each other so that at first Toseland was puzzled to find out what was real, and which door one could go through straight, the way one wanted to, not sideways to somewhere else. He almost wondered which was really himself.

There were vases everywhere filled with queer flowers- branches of dry winter twigs out of which little tassels and rosettes of flower petals were bursting, some yellow, somw white, some purple. They had an exciting smell, almost lieks oemthing to eat, and they looked as if they had been produced by magic, as if someone had said ‘Abracadabra! Let these sticks burst into flower.’

“What if my great-grandmother is a witch!” he thought. Above the vases, wherever there was a beam or an odd corner or a doorpost out of which they could, as it were, grow, there were children carved in dark oak leaning out over the flowers. Most of them had wings, one had a real bird’s nest on its head and all of them had such round polished cheeks they seemed to be laughing and welcoming him.

(The illustration that goes along with this – of the carved angel with a nest in its arms –  is also very beautiful. All the illustrations for the books were done by Lucy Boston’s son, Peter.)

I think ‘entranced’ is the right word, back then when I first read the book, and now, re-reading after many years. I had remembered the story – stories, really, for layered along with the story of Tolly discovering the house are the stories that Mrs Oldknowe tells about the 17th century family of  Linnet, Alexander and Toby – and the atmosphere. Books do form part of your understanding and experience of the world, and I realise that whenever I visit old houses I am primed to seek that sense of past lives she created at Green Knowe.

I also read L. M. Boston’s memoir about the model for Green Knowe (the Manor at Hemingford Grey) called ‘Memory in a House’ and started another memoir ‘Perverse and Foolish’ but oddly found that I didn’t like Lucy Boston very much. Or rather, found her prickly and a bit cranky and thought if I had met her, I probably would have been a bit afraid of her. And last, but most interesting in this Lucy Boston jag, I read her novel for  adults, ‘Yew Hall’, which is, frankly, weird – but I read it all in one go. Again, I was astonished – or enchanted, or amazed; taken right out of myself is what I am trying to say – by the beauty of the writing. Really really good ‘nature’ writers, like Annie Dillard , do this to me too. Here’s a description of roses.

One was a single rose of an open splendour like an assembly of planets. The other was the Painted Damask, which opens as a cup packed with cream petals in concave whorls, every one edged with crimson; then with the engaging habit of many roses it turns itself inside out and takes the shape of a bubbling spring, one curled dome above another, pearl in the centre and arabesques of crimson lines around the circumference… I imagined the raiser who first found or hybridized it, perhaps in the seventeenth century, and the gardens in which it grew, the novelty of the day. It went well with the looped and ribboned clothes of the time. It was obviously once a sophisticated rose, but now encased in the density of time like moss in amber. The single rose was one that I wished had never grown in any garden but this, it seemed to have sprung from the necessity to be here, the mark of the house. These were too precious for picking. I left them on their trees and browsed round the better established treasures, trying to see each one for the first time, and amazed at the stupidity and blindness of my habit-dulled eyes.

After reading that, when I went out into my garden, I was so  – sorry, but there’s another extravagant word coming – intoxicated that I was quite crazy with seeing. And was rewarded with a plum tree full of white blossom and birds. A flock of greyish-green silver-eyes was chirping and hopping from branch to branch among the flowers and petals were falling all around them. I wish I had Lucy Boston’s pen to describe it.

Finding time is the key to a life filled with happy work. Kenneth Atchity

A friend has loaned me a book called A Writer’s Time by Kenneth Atchity. The subtitle is Making the Time to Write. Even though I have found ways around the time problem (all will be revealed later), I have to admit that when I started to read it, I did harbour a secret hope that I’d find THE answer.  There are days and weeks when I don’t get it right, when there simply isn’t enough time, and I’m ashamed to say this even though I work only two days a week. My writing time is missed, too short, rushed through, cut off, chopped into tiny segments and of course, wasted or frittered with little tasks and digressions that are writing-related but not actually writing.

Alas, Kenneth Atchity was quite clear that there was no easy way. Finding time, he says, ‘begins with an act of the will.’ It also begins with knowing yourself; knowing how your mind works, knowing how you work best.  For me, there is no real trick to it. It’s a bit like losing weight – if you want to weigh less, you have to eat less. Well, if I want to produce more writing, I have to write more. Simple as that, and simple doesn’t mean easy. Kenneth Atchity has all sorts of handy hints – and I mean that, some of them really are – but there’s no magic.  In the past I have devised all sorts of different plans to find more writing time for myself.  I have commanded myself sternly to get up at dawn and finish all the household tasks before breakfast; I have blocked out slabs of time on a planner or a diary; I have even made graphs of my time use and discovered a shameful amount of time lost to unproductive slacking about for ten, twenty, even thirty minutes with a cup of tea and the weekend papers.

What I’ve found works for me is simply this; the more productive I want to be, the lower my standards have to sink. Which may mean I leave the dishes in the sink, washing piled up in the laundry, dust kitties breeding under the couch and the garden morphing into untamed wilderness. None of this is because I hate or despise housework – I’ve  inherited the domestic gene from my father, who was a house-husband and stay-at-home dad – and in fact, I actively enjoy keeping house, especially since the housekeeping methods I absorbed from my father involved many shortcuts (he did actually sweep things under the carpet), a sincere appreciation of the contentment that a well-run house produces, absolutely no obsession with germs and, most importantly, lots of lovely food.  I never stint on cooking, so we don’t live on baked beans, although cake production does take a dive when a working spree is on. I have discovered that, just as you can spin out housework to take up the whole day, it is amazing what you can achieve in a frenzied half hour.

In about ten days, however, all that – finding time, baking cakes and frenzied half hours – will be academic, because I am going to Varuna. Varuna is a house set in a lovely wild-ish garden in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. It was built for the novelist Eleanor Dark, author of ‘The Timeless Land’, and her husband, but now it’s ‘The Writer’s House’, and operates as a retreat for Australian writers. I’ve been awarded a Varuna Publisher Fellowship which means six nights at Varuna and a couple of mentoring sessions, as well as a commitment by ‘my’ publisher, Scribe, to consider the finished ms for publication. I’m excited and happy, because I’ve been before and I know that at Varuna, there is absolutely no time problem at all.  No cooking, cleaning, taking anyone to sport or getting anyone off to school, no anything but writing, reading, thinking, walking, eating delicious meals brought in by the caterer every evening, talking to other writers… and more writing.

With no time problems, you get to discover your ultimate writing routine.  Mine was; start work at 9am and work until around 1pm, have lunch and a walk and be back at the desk by around 3pm, then write till 6 and that’s it until the next day. I wonder if it will be the same this time?

No, not best poems about the underground – political movement or home of worms and tunneling creatures – but best poems on the London Tube.

When I went to the UK with my mother in September 1986 we travelled everywhere by train, and I got to feel quite familiar with the London underground or Tube as they call it. I loved the iconic signage (the circle with a bar through it), the vaguely thirties type-face, the radically simplified maps with their different colours for different lines. I loved the station names, too, familiar from the Monopoly board – Liverpool St, Picadilly – and names with roots deep in the past like Blackfriars which was where the Dominican friars (called black freres for their black hoods) had their house in the 1300’s, and the Barbican which was part of the old defensive wall of the city and goes back to Roman times. I loved watching the exotic  mix of people (well, to me from very Anglo central Victoria it was), noting their clothes, listening to their accents and eavesdropping on their conversations. And I also loved the poems. I even scribbled one of them down.

STARS AND PLANETS

Trees are cages for them: water holds its breath

To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus

Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground

Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.

They seem so twinkle -still but they never cease

Inventing new spaces and huge explosions

And migrating in mathematical tribes over

The steppes of space at their outrageous ease.

It’s hard to think that the earth is one –

This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters

Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters

Attended only by the loveless moon.

Norman McCaig (1910-96)

Why did I write it down? I think what I liked then – and I still like – was Norman McCaig’s see-sawing between beautifully poetic and timeless words and images – ‘trees are cages for them’ – and the brash 20th century of  ‘Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters’. But also, with all the overload of sensation (London was the biggest city I’d ever been in, and everything about it was new to me), amid the noise, sights, sounds and smells of the Underground, it was a lovely surprise to have a small window into a quiet private interior space while reading the poem. And that is probably why I remember it so clearly.

I didn’t know then that the scheme was new. It was the idea of three friends who were all poetry lovers and users of public transport.

In their introduction to their anthology Best Poems from the Underground (Pheonix 2010), the editors, Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert wrote, ‘How pleasant it would be, we thought, if poems could be scattered among the adverts on Underground carriages. Encouraged by far-sighed Tube managers, we put together our first selection of poems, and the project was launched at Aldwych Station in January 1986.’  So the Norman McCaig poem I liked was one of the first five that rode the rails. So far 450 poems have been displayed, and the editors say ‘It is strange to think that a project that began so causally is now part of urban history,the subject of academic theses and government surveys of ‘Great Art for Everyone’.’

It was a great pleasure for me, anyway, to read poems and even try to memorize them on the Underground – more than a pleasure; a very useful distraction from the thought that we were a long way down underneath roads and buildings with tons and tons of earth and masonry on top of us. All that crushing weight, bearing down… The next time I visited London, on my own, I discovered buses. It was bliss for a claustrophobic traveller to be on the top of a double decker bus even though they moved so very slowly through the Monopoly board streets. But no poems.