by Anne Manne
Mine was not an uncomplicatedly happy childhood. But it was often joyous. Joy, however, is not happiness. Happiness is about a global state, whereas moments of joy are more like the sun’s rays breaking unexpectedly through mist, feeling states of sudden, piercing intensity. The strongest emotion in childhood I felt was gratitude, to the people, the hills, the bush, the animals, especially the horses, above all to this place, where just briefly, my mother’s nickname at her workplace was ‘Happy Jack’, where she, along with this fragment of the family, not only survived, but began to flourish. And, alongside gratitude, the slow dawning of an irritable kind of love.
‘So this is life!’
I remember precisely the first time I thought those words. I was seven and a half years old and a nurse was aiming an enormous needle into my arm and then pushing it in very hard. She seemed to be puffing and her face was red with the effort. I was having a tetanus shot. My face must have been very grim because the nurse shook her head ruefully and laughed uneasily at my expression.
‘She looks like she’s facing the gallows,’ she said to my mother.
As we walked out, injection over, I looked back. The nurse was still staring at me.
The phrase ‘So this is life’ was symbolic of that period of my life, carried around in my head like a talismanic emblem. It spoke to a very particular emotional state. The phrase did not come from someone who has only known unhappiness. My very early childhood, infancy and beyond, I think, was good. A photo shows my mother and me, in the family group, with me riding high and content in her arms, looking down on the world—calm, interested, but very self-contained. We are within the family, but in a way separate, just the two of us. It shows our closeness. That photo awakens some old affective memory in me, and the emotions associated with it are quite serene. I got a sense of easiness between us, when I once asked my mother about my early life and she said straightaway, ‘Oh, I was an old hand by then’, and that ‘We understood each other very well’. My mother by that time had four children. ‘And you,’ she said, ‘were very easy at that age, open, trusting and very affectionate’. No child is like that unless things have gone well.
If things began rather well, they then went rather badly. Our ‘time of troubles’ lasted, I think, several years, until I was seven and a half. It was followed by our flight into the Victorian countryside. It was very early in this period that the phrase ‘So this is life’ would flash into my head.
‘So this is life’ was a verdict, a judgement about life, about what life had become. It was imbued with a certain shock, of thinking that life was one thing, but discovering that it was another. The world had proved as fragile as an eggshell, its smooth, pearly surface deceptive, looking as hard as a stone, yet concealing just how frail it really was, and the sordid mess inside when it was cracked open. The expression was drenched with an overwhelming sadness for the family that had shattered, and the brother I had left behind. It also carried, however, another inflection: anger. Our time of troubles had swept out of life like an ambush. There seemed no reason for it, or at least, I did not understand the reasons until I was much older. In the deepest reaches of my seven-year-old soul was a grey inland sea of sadness in which was buried, somewhere, a volcano of anger, from which an inchoate protest, if things went well, might erupt. So this, after all, is life.
In Adelaide, as our family teetered towards the brink, there were periodic efforts to achieve normality and cheer us all up. It was this impulse which saw us attend Thomas’s Riding School, where at five, I rode my first horse. It was for my eldest sister Roz’s sake that we likely went. Her passion for horses was so great that she wore jodhpurs every day, even without a hope, in Adelaide suburbia, of ever having a horse. I can’t honestly say— strangely enough given how profoundly important horses were to become in my life—that as a very small child I wanted to ride horses. I don’t even think I liked them particularly. But youngest children do all kinds of things simply because older children want to. One tags along.
Like most of the efforts to cheer us up, things went rather badly. Although I was ignorant—all of us were—even at five I could see that Thomas’s Riding School was a seedy, run-down affair. There were some yards, a dusty ring, sawdust perhaps, the dank smell of manure ground fine into dust, and stringy, sour beasts whose lives were made unbearable by the endless stream of hopeless beginners thumping and tugging at them. So, hardly surprisingly, these horses got their own back. I was placed on a mean-looking, oversize creamy horse, my legs at five barely touching the end of the saddle flap.
I was pleased with myself, just momentarily, for getting the knack of posting, or rising, to the trot straightaway. The pride I might have felt was squashed instantly, however, by the instructor who scowled, ‘Oh, a natural’, as if accusing me of something. It was one of those multitude of moments where adults were so puzzling, for I at once knew it was something good, this being ‘a natural’, but was simultaneously aware of her resentment of me for it, from which might come something nasty. I also had an awareness of a sense of existential unfairness, something like guilt for the fact that somewhere in that dismal yard, the Jodhpured One lurked, so full of yearning, to whom those words would have meant so much more.
Before I had time to cogitate on this dissonance, the creamy with the nasty face swerved suddenly and violently and galloped back to his yard, skidding to a halt, with me clinging on grimly, my mother’s face pale with fear in the corner of my eye. The instructor was unapologetic, even a little disappointed perhaps that I had not fallen off. The creamy repeated this trick every time he got half-way round the ring. Another sister fared even less well. I heard the soft thud of a body landing and then smashing glass, and looked around to see Lea thrown by her beast into a stand of Coca-Cola bottles.
Amazingly, we went back again and again, like lemmings to a cliff face. No one thought there was anything wrong with it. Our visits were to distract us from our troubles at home, and it sounds nice enough, on paper—‘going riding’. Just the reality was very different. It was so sordid and fearful an experience that it somehow fused in my mind for a time—horses, riding, all those out-of-control beasts bolting or spilling us, sprawling, onto the ground—with what was happening at home, as if they were the visceral, living symbols of a life careering violently out of control.
So this is life!
In a strange way, even though I was frightened, there must have been the stirring, very faint, of something else. Sometimes one must wait for desire to strike. I remember feeling pride, because even the sour instructor noticed how easily and lightly I moved with a horse, but also the sheer, vivid physicality of it. The smell of the horse sweat and leather, the pounding rhythm of the stride, the sound of hooves striking the ground, the mane flying, my eyes streaming as the creamy sprinted back to his yard, even the terror—all stayed with me.
According to my aunt, as a very small child I had been quite fearless, performing loop the loop in the swing with my brother, swinging it all the way round. I couldn’t remember this at all. I would have liked to think of myself like this. There was one wild girl photo of me, about age two or three, with my legs planted wide and sturdy, hair and dress askew, my face dirty, an insouciant expression, and my dress bunched in one fist, held up in the air. But when my aunt told me the story of the swing, I felt incredulous and rather sceptical. Perhaps she had confused me with another sibling? I didn’t remember feeling brave. I felt about as brave as a newly squished mosquito.
In fact, the main emotional memory of this part of my childhood, apart from sadness, was fear. In the schoolyard, it was crucial to conceal fear. They used to sneer ‘Chicken!’ at anyone who showed it. Deep down, I felt chicken. I felt chicken about the whole of life.
It was at this point in my life that I first met ‘Chicken’.
Chicken was a small, brown Shetland pony, owned by a kind woman who ran the local pony club. My sisters now both rode horses of their own, and she had generously offered to lend me her pony. P
erhaps she knew my mother could not afford two horses, let alone three.
How Chicken came upon her name was a mystery, for she was anything but chicken. Perhaps someone thought she was small and cute and fluffy, or perhaps it was the terrified children on her back, turning chicken and refusing to ride ever again, which created the nickname.
It was arranged we should meet her. I was very small and thin and someone had found an oversize pair of jodhpurs and school shoes (I felt this as an acute humiliation, the absence of proper riding boots on my feet). I stood there in a stinking yard with horse shit ground into the straw overflowing across my shoes and soaking into my socks. There was a stench from Chicken’s piss steaming off the yellowed straw as I walked, the rank fumes of ammonia in my nostrils.
Everyone present was staring at me. Someone said in that special, high falsetto voice used to patronise children: ‘Aren’t you a lucky girl!’
I stared at the small, brown Shetland who flattened her ears, swung her hips towards me and flashed the whites of her eyes. I didn’t know then a horse’s body language but in a primeval child way I knew a threat when I saw one. I didn’t feel lucky at all.
‘Don’t you want to pat her?’ Indignation was growing in the voice and the high, indulgent falsetto was slipping down the scale a little towards a growl of disapproval. Ungrateful child, I could hear being thought.
I stared at Chicken and felt dread. She stared back. It was not an encouraging glance. It was a warning. ‘Won’t you have fun riding her!’ A quiver ran through Chicken’s body and I was sure she was laughing.
A child is much closer than an adult to creatureliness. When Chicken and I looked at each other, it was two animals in a herd sizing each other up, working out their place in the hierarchy. What I divined instantly and instinctively was not only a creature who was dominant over me, but a Killer Pony.
I remained silent, much to the disappointment of my mother, who later quietly chided me on seeming ungrateful.
But I wasn’t grateful. Inside I felt nothing but fear. About this fear, I told no one.
Now, looking back, I am amazed that I raised no protest. But somehow this, too, was tied up with, ‘So this is life’. When adults, those mysterious arbiters of an anarchic universe, present you with a Killer Pony, there is no alternative but to climb on and do your best to survive.
Every time I was terrified. Is it possible to die with fright? I thought so. Stomach curled into the sickest of knots, almost but not quite paralysed, I would slide a leg over her back and take up the reins.
It was an experience of utter, utter, powerlessness. Chicken could do anything with me on her back and she regularly did. Unhappily, ‘the natural’ in me meant I was only rarely dislodged. That will sound a boast but it isn’t—fate would have been infinitely kinder if only I had flown off at the first sign of a pace beyond the walk. Instead, wherever Chicken went, I went too, and at whatever speed.
As time went on one thing was clear. Of all the vices, Chicken had chosen hers with diabolical care. Care to strike maximum terror into the heart of any child on her back. Chicken was a bolter.
That meant the ordeal only ended when she felt tired, or arrived back home at her feed drum. Nor did one ever know when it might take her fancy to bolt. We would be walking, just poking along, when out of the blue, a sensation like an electric current would run through her. At that moment, she seemed not to have legs so much as the hydraulic blasts of a small, brown, furry rocket. People watching later swore they saw no legs move, she was so fast. ‘Her legs just disappeared’, they said, baffled. ‘They were only a blur, a brown blur.’ A missile streaking through the air bearing its white-faced, terrified cargo.
Me.
In one memorable incident, Chicken bolted straight down the main highway into town, weaving and dodging the speeding cars as they peeled off the road trying not to hit me. To this day, I remember men’s faces alive with horror as they suddenly saw a small child and pony bob up in front of the windscreen and swerved violently off the road, brakes screaming, to avoid running us over. As we hurtled between them, right in the middle of the highway, I remember thinking bitterly, ‘So this is life!’
I have never before or since felt so completely in the power of another creature. If Chicken returned home without bolting, I would quickly slither off the small pad saddle with the hard, leather clogs grazing my legs on the way down, quivering with relief. She would flatten her ears and show a brief flash of the whites of her eyes. I knew what that mean expression meant. It meant ‘Next time … you won’t get off so lightly’.
And I didn’t, either.
My whole being was consumed by what seemed to me this epic struggle with Chicken. Nothing else was as vivid or as preoccupying. I was afraid of her, and ashamed of the fear I felt. Battling with myself to conquer it, I clambered on, time and again, willing myself to go on until I had a ‘win’ over her, as the confident riders around me kept promising would happen any day soon. Her presence lurked darkly in my life, shadowing me, all the time.
One day Lea and I were out for a ride, walking quietly up a hill on the other side of which lay a busy highway. As Lea trotted forward, I suddenly felt that telltale vibration, the current moving through Chicken, and the sickening feeling as she gathered her small form together, which in a second or so meant launching into her gallop. Then she bolted. She had never gone faster. Hearing the rat-a-tat-tat of Chicken’s hard little hooves on the dirt road behind her, Lea turned around; her face was full of fear. She swung her own much larger horse square on the road, trying to block the way. Chicken shot past with the merest shrug of one shoulder, barely pausing, before opening up, full throttle, flattening out into a lethal ribbon of speed.
Suddenly I felt an absolute conviction that this time I would not survive. Ahead lay the crest, on the other side of the hill lay a busy road, and beyond that an even busier highway. I was eight years old, clinging to this bolting Shetland, feeling that at any moment I was about to die, smashed to pieces by an oncoming car. Fear swept up and paralysed me and I sat there swaying in the saddle as Chicken hurtled onward, bearing her small frozen rider towards the crest and then the highway. I was done for.
Then it happened. I still don’t know why it happened. Despite a lifelong fascination with all matters psychological, I have no real explanation for what happened next. If I was a religious person I might invoke a minor miracle. Instead, all I can do is to describe it as a moment of life-changing epiphany. In a split second I changed. One moment I was one person, the next another. In the instant of time that Chicken took one galloping stride, I was someone to whom life happened. The very next stride I was someone who could act upon it, seize it, change its direction. In the movement between flight and fight there was no feeling of transition, no struggle, just the sensation of being a different person. Suddenly I felt powerful. I knew I could stop her. For a few luxurious moments, I actually let her gallop on, allowing the unfamiliar but delicious feeling of extraordinary strength to course down my arms.
Then I sat up, and with one easy twisting movement pulled her up. She skidded to a halt.
I looked back and Lea cheered, her face breaking into a huge grin, and she punched the air with her hand. ‘Yes!’
We walked home together in silence, a sisterly solidarity, savouring my glorious triumph.
To truly surmount fear, you must first have truly felt it.
After this epiphany, things changed for me in the profoundest way. Ever the extrapolator, even as I was riding home that day, my mind was ticking over at a furious rate. So this is life! I could hardly begin to comprehend the enormity of what had just happened, but I felt as if two worlds had collided and I had passed from one to another. If I could master Chicken, anything was possible. It was as if something, some spirit, had passed irrevocably from Chicken to me. I began to joke and laugh at school. A school photo shows me brimming with life. One of my teachers described me as irrepressible. I was often defiant, difficult at school and wilful at h
ome. I said ‘No’ rather too much for anyone’s liking. The wild girl with her dress in the air had made a re-appearance.
Chicken’s spirits, meanwhile, sank. She was down. A new listlessness settled on her. I would like to report that I was magnanimous in victory, but unhappily it isn’t true. I wasn’t cruel, but I dominated her and relished it. There was a vengeance in the new will to power I found. Once Chicken had ruled supreme. Now I rode aloft, head high. Hers sank low, bowed and obedient. She did whatever I wanted. As things turned out, I wanted rather a lot. Before, if she wanted to eat some grass, no amount of tugging would persuade her otherwise. Now, she walked right on by, or was made to stand glumly over a particularly appetising clump, held by a tight, forbidding rein. After I had gone down a hill, I wanted to go up again— many times. Chicken hated jumping, but now there was a limitless number of logs and ditches to heave her fat little body over, and puddles to waddle through and do whatever, whenever, took my fancy. We galloped, too, only this time entirely on my terms. Galloping when you feel like it and your rider doesn’t is exhilarating. Galloping when you least feel like it and want your dinner and a nice rub-down is awful. But Chicken had to do it. And then do it all over again. Like a slave, she was joyless.
Chicken never got over being beaten. If horses change hierarchy in a herd by the addition of a new boss, the old boss, the new underling, can get depressed. Chicken became depressed. She lost weight, and was taken back by her owner, who thought perhaps she was pining for home. Only I, in my eight-year-old heart, knew the true story.