So This Is Life

by Anne Manne

  ‘delicately observed and beautifully written’

  Brenda Niall, The Age

  ‘a wonderful book ... Anne Manne has a distinctive voice ... [and]

  shows us things that are fundamental to the human condition.

  The characters Anne has written about will stay with me all my life.’

  Raimond Gaita

  ‘will make you laugh and cry … a very impressive memoir that

  could become a classic … deep themes of Australian experience …

  profound … marvellous … fantastic.’

  Geraldine Doogue, The Age

  [Manne] ‘suggest[s] the rich and dreamy vignettes of David Malouf’s

  autobiographical 12 Edmondstone Street or the precisely observed rural

  domesticity that is captured in

  Olga Masters’ stories ...’

  Gillian Whitlock, Australian Book Review

  ‘a real pleasure to read ... With the eye of a poet, she sees Australian

  rural life with evocative precision … It is a rarity—a book that is true,

  honest and resonates with the complexities of growing up and

  living in a small country town.’

  Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘beautifully crafted prose and deep reflection … This small book

  reaches into the heart of the Australian rural experience and sees

  it with touching intelligence.’

  Bendigo Advertiser

  ‘[a] brilliant little book … linguistic skill and the sensitivity of

  expression here create exquisite prose. Her book is not only

  a delight to read but it also provides astute and provocative social

  comment. It exhibits classic characteristics and will

  have wide appeal.’

  Hobart Mercury

  MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  mup-info@unimelb.edu.au

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2009

  This edition published 2010

  Text © Anne Manne, 2009, 2010

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2009

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Text design by Nada Backovic Designs

  Cover design by Nada Backovic Designs

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  Printed by Griffin Press, SA

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Manne, Anne.

  So this is life: scenes from a country childhood / Anne Manne.

  2nd ed.

  9780522858204 (pbk)

  Manne, Anne—Childhood and youth.

  Women authors, Australian—Biography.

  Country life—Victoria.

  306.8743092

  Sources:

  p33 Donald Winnicott, Home is Where We Start From, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1986, p40.

  p88 Permission to quote from An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ by Les Murray courtesy of Margaret Connolly & Associates.

  p105 Judith Sarah Schmidt, Hide and Seek; Thought on the Act of Creation, www.intentionalliving.com/main/content/view/27/27/

  To Rob, Kate, Lucy and Daniel

  Contents

  The Border

  So This Is Life

  Mrs Mac

  The Verdict

  Centaur

  The Principles of Life

  Mr Menzies’ Pension

  Dux

  An Ordinary Man

  Old Ma Doak

  The Continental

  Dead Woman Walking

  The Island

  The Slavedrivers

  Helga the Goatherd

  The Possibility

  Mount Disappointment

  Acknowledgements

  On a winter’s night our family stood almost mute, barely speaking, on a dark railway platform. The engine hissed and steam rose from the tracks. I could hear nearby the rumble of trains—guttural and ominous—pulling away from their platforms. The hoots of the locomotives mingled with the urgent sound of the loudspeaker directing passengers. Travellers scurried past, lugging heavy suitcases.

  It was 1962. I was seven years old. My parents’ marriage had broken down—it took a long time dying—taking my mother’s health with it. It was the strangest separation, along gender lines, men on one side, and women on the other. My mother and her three daughters were leaving the city of Adelaide, by the overnight train, to take shelter with her family in country Victoria. My brother was staying with my father. From the carriage window I could see my father’s face, frozen, rage all gone. My brother, just two years older than me, stood still and silent. As the train pulled out from the sidings, the last thing I saw in the gloom was his wan little face watching blankly as his mother and sisters disappeared from view.

  My child’s heart was tumbling with contradictory emotions: not only grief at leaving my brother, but also hope. As the train gathered speed I pressed my forehead to the window, feeling its coolness, willing the train onward, bearing us out of an ugly past and into a future where I hoped we—what was left of our family, but especially my mother—might survive. I stared out into the darkening countryside at the blurry, indistinct outlines of towns as they flashed by with such intensity that someone, misunderstanding, told me that there would not be anything much to see until we got over the border.

  The Border?

  In my seven-year-old mind The Border instantly achieved majestic, monumental proportions, but also inspired fear. The Border sounded a great barrier, an insurmountable obstacle we might not be able to make it past. My imagination immediately conjured up an image of our train climbing a long, unending mountain at the top of which was a towering brick edifice, from which we would fall back, defeated, beaten, into South Australia, into Adelaide, into my father’s house and certain disaster. If we made it over The Border, we would be on the other side, we would be safe. I was flabbergasted when later I learned that The Border was nothing one could see, just an invisible part of a flat landscape, an entirely arbitrary, nondescript point in the dusty dirt line that divided South Australia and Victoria.

  In the hard, second-class seats we slept in uneasy starts and snatches but the next time I looked out, a yellowy dawn light was creeping slowly over the countryside. I could see rolling hills and quiet, tree-filled valleys, mist hanging in their soft folds, and the quick glimpse of something I had never seen before, an iron lace veranda. ‘Are we over The Border yet?’ I asked anxiously. A sister answered ‘Yes’. Relief and joy flooded through me like sunlight bursting through cloud.

  Then our progress slowed and we stopped at a country station, Ararat or Ballarat, and my sisters were despatched for breakfast. I realised I was very hungry. Someone handed me a brown paper bag from which I pulled a greasy toasted sandwich with a puddle of melted butter on top, cheese drooling out, and my appetite vanished. But there was tea, warm, brown and very sweet, in a white china railway cup, which I drank thirstily and gratefully. I have loved tea ever since.

  I don’t remember how we got from Melbourne to Bendigo. Another train journey? It seems impossible that my grandparents would have been able to nurse their lurching, erratic, grey 1930s Morris Minor with its dicky gearstick
and top speed of 30 miles per hour all the way to Melbourne. No, it must have been by train. What I do remember is the landscape, for towards the end of the journey I could see hills both ancient and gentle, with the rounded, soft forms born of the passage of time. Clusters of grey, granite rocks, half-submerged, dotted the hillsides upon which sheep grazed lazily. Dense forests of paper-bark gums formed canopies overhead, splintering the pale, slanting light of the late afternoon. These tracts of bush-land alternated with wide, open fields, the ochre ground showing hard and cracked between stiff spikes of yellow grass. By then we were exhausted, but even through the scratched veil of tiredness, at a certain point I looked out and knew, just as one knows at the dawning of consciousness after an operation, that one is still alive, that we had finally arrived at a place of shelter.

  We had travelled not just to a different landscape, from the capital city of one state to a country town in another. It also seemed as if we had travelled across another kind of border, into a different time zone. We were returning to my mother’s family, my grandparents and the great aunts, whose lives seemed frozen in aspic since the Victorian era. No one was under sixty-five. The first thing I remember of that world we entered was the silence, only broken by the steady sound of clocks ticking. Everywhere clocks ticked, preoccupied by the quiet measuring of time, the gentle chime on the hour of the grandfather clock the only reminder that the present was slipping into the past. Occasionally, in the distance, at regular intervals, a locomotive gave a long, low hoot, before rumbling away. One could hear the soft brush of vegetation against iron lace verandas, and suddenly, startlingly, the sharp bark of a dog. Otherwise silence.

  There was a perfect rhythmic order to their lives, bound by habit and ritual, which foreclosed all kinds of possibilities, imposed astonishing limitations, but also withheld chaos. If modernity has a constant severing of the past, if much is shapeless and rootless, here were roots, for very little had changed since the last century. I felt like a child of the future flung back through time, travelling from modernity into history, from chaos into order, from the world of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts to the world of Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Our train journey had borne us from that large metropolitan city, where we had lived in that low, modern house in a flat, new suburb, and I had attended for one year an enormous, bleak, new primary school, from the family commotion and chaos, into a world of fading Victoriana but also with all the moral certainty and order of that era. We seemed to me, as a child, like refugees from the future, cast back in time in order to be healed.

  The Spanish filmmaker, Luis Bunuel, has said that ‘You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.’

  But what is memory? Why do we remember what we do? Why do some things from the past fly out at us and not others? Should all writing about the past carry some acknowledgement of the truth embedded in Clive James’s title, Unreliable Memoirs? Was the sun really shining in that last thankful part of our journey or has it been coloured differently by so many other homecomings, and, above all, by my emotions? When I remember the Midlands, it is almost always serene, windless and sunlit. It has a kind of enchantment. Yet I know we arrived in winter, that the frosts and winds can be bleak and bitter. In contrast, I remember Adelaide in much darker hues. Although I know its reputation as a beautiful, graceful city, all my memories of it are imbued with the emotional texture of my early childhood. The past rises up and engulfs it with what a psychoanalyst would call an affect storm, even distorting my memory of the climate. I spent many blistering, suffocating summers there visiting our father, my cotton dresses soaked with sweat. Yet when I conjure up a memory of Adelaide it is always cold, in a permanent winter.

  That is because my parents split in that dark winter after so many years of turmoil, and we left on a wintry night. I remember the cold, bleak winds howling over the football oval that my brother and I walked across to get to school, just before the break-up, our small figures bent against the wind, our pinched noses running with the cold, needling into the wind. I remember my brother’s grey raincoat, skies that were grey, the drab, grey houses in the dull, city suburb, and our car, an old grey Humber. The colour, everywhere, was grey. Even the sea was always grey, reflecting the colour of the sky across which clouds scudded uneasily. The waves I watched as a child did not break evenly upon the sand, in a regular, soothing rhythm, but were choppy, disturbed, whipped up by a bitter wind, with rain driving down, hissing as it hit the roiling sea. But all that greyness is because my memories are suffused, drenched, with the very particular emotions of grief. Grey is the colour of loss.

  The most famous example of the strange triggers to memory from the sensory world is Marcel Proust dipping a dainty morsel of a shell-shaped biscuit, a madeleine, into a cup of tea. The old childhood ritual quite suddenly unleashes the flood of memories which Proust then formed into the seven-volume narrative, Á La Recherche du Temps Perdu. It is so famous now as an example; more people know it and quote it than have ever read even one of Proust’s seven volumes. But Proust’s account renders something true: memory is not a simple matter of recall. Rather, we remember far better when we are in the same emotional state as when an event occurred. The deepest, oldest senses are those of taste and smell, for they are what we first experienced at our mother’s breast. It is no accident that the trigger for Proust’s remembrance of things past comes from the taste of a madeleine.

  Only a little less well known, but a rival account, and one much closer to my own experience of how memory works, is Virginia Woolf ’s Moments of Being, and in particular, ‘A Sketch of the Past’. Woolf suggests that, in every day in every life, there is a great jumble of inchoate emotions and sensations that one does not remember; what she calls, in her ‘private short hand’ ‘non being’, or a ‘nondescript cotton wool’. Each day, Woolf asserts, has vast tracts of this non-being, more than of being, for ‘a great part of every day is not lived consciously’.

  Where then does Woolf’s writing come from? From exceptional moments, of shock, or recognition, where an event and the emotions aroused by it jolt her out of unself-consciousness into a hyper-alert state of being. Then the very effort of processing, explaining and understanding what has just happened indelibly imprints it in her memory. Such ‘exceptional moments’ bring her a peculiar horror, such that she feels compelled to tell them over and over, shaping them into a story and thus forming a kind of ‘explanation’ which ‘blunts the sledge-hammer force of the blow’. She supposes that this ‘shock receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by a desire to explain it.’

  Yet that does not mean Woolf feels such experiences can be perfectly stitched into a seamless narrative. Rather, such moments of being flash out of the flow of ordinary moments, and are so intensely felt that despite being so much briefer than the vast tracts of time spent in unself-conscious states, they reveal reality with more clarity than any amount of attention to a dull sequence of events made up of life’s minutiae. Reality, then, for Woolf, in ‘A Sketch of the Past’, exists not in the strong-arming, the forcing, of a life into a conventional narrative, but in the truth revealed in these flashes of insight, in her ‘moments of being’.

  Whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking that. Always a scene has arranged itself: representative: enduring. This confirms me in my instinctive notion … the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality: and at some moments the sealing matter cracks: in floods reality: that is these scenes …

  She asks whether others do this. I think it is far more common than not. I am often struck, listening to people in decidedly non-literary walks of life, by how precise and vivid their story-making capacity can be. I often eavesdropped on conversations on country trains, entranced and moved by the perfectly formed stories people
told each other, stories refined by the telling many times over, spinning meaning of great depth out of ordinary lives.

  The stories which follow are not a conventional memoir. My sketches of the past are vignettes much closer in spirit and intention to Woolf ’s moments of being, where intensely felt episodes in my childhood flashed out from the quiet flow of ordinary moments. By virtue of their intensely emotionally laden nature, they demanded understanding and explanation, forming themselves, just as Woolf suggests, into a scene that is remembered ever after, into a story. They often contain central transitional moments in my life, where the tectonic plates undergirding the world seemed to shift and to be ever after transformed.

  My memory is peculiar. It is almost entirely an emotional memory. I may not remember practical details but I do remember conversations from decades ago, and even the expressions on people’s faces as they said certain things. It is memory orientated to the symbolic and metaphoric, to the emblematic moment. Time has never seemed linear to me, nor easily measured. Instead it seems uneven, slowing and speeding up, made up not of equal moments but of some which are infinitely more important than others. The stories presented here formed themselves—I had written them in my head long ago—because they rendered truthful some aspect of emotional life. They capture a moment in time because it carried an emotional memory so intense that it was unusually detailed and vivid.

  Such moments of being came from a very particular time in my childhood. Doubtless my memory has collapsed time, and distilled it, into frames which illuminated and revealed meaning, while all those other ordinary, cotton-wool moments are forgotten. All of life is utterly contingent, one moment upon another. Emotional states are shaped as much by what has gone before as the present moment; laughter after tension, joy following sadness. What is true, is that I could not have felt what I did if the events preceding these intense moments of revelation had not occurred. It was that juxtaposition which meant that this period of my childhood was abundant with emotions associated with recovery. It was the transformation of feeling, from the drabber hues and frozen states of loss and withdrawal, to the vivid technicolour of an insatiable curiosity and exuberant interest in the queer vitality of life as it sparked and sputtered along in this country town, full of characters who seemed as vivid as any populating the world of Dickens. It was that contrast with the past, too, which gave me an intensity of aliveness, like a child swimming under water, who then bursts through the surface, coming up for air.