by Anne Manne
When I began riding Chicken I was a very sad little girl. Almost, but not quite, beaten by life, some slim hope still hanging on by a spider’s thread. I felt I had no control over any part of life. Life was something that happened to me. The only thing was to ride it out and let it come to an end. Much like being astride the bolting Chicken.
Chicken, on the other hand, when I met her, was a powerful, ruthless, and supremely confident soul. No child had ever got the better of her. On the face of it, I was the most unlikely person in the world to do so. When I finished riding her, she was a defeated soul. Our spirits had swapped places. Both of us now had a new answer to the question: ‘So this is life?’ Life for Chicken, and for me, would never be the same.
My sister Roz held the tiny red bucket, with its precious contents of oaten chaff, aloft. Fully clothed, she stepped down the narrow, slippery path and into the swirling waters of the muddy creek and kept right on walking. We gathered on the bank, willing her on, but also fearing that at any moment she might submerge entirely in the ominously brown torrent. On she waded, down, down, through the greasy cream foam collecting at the edge and into the deep centre. She held the bucket ever higher above her head as the fast current bubbled and roared, the freezing water now covering her chest and then her neck, threatening to engulf her entirely.
We caught our breath—would she, could she, keep her feet? Then slowly, slowly, we breathed again. First shoulders, then torso, then finally all of her emerged, on the other side, triumphant, fully dressed and fully drenched, water streaming off her in wild rivulets running down her legs. She climbed the opposite bank, the chaff still safe and snug. We all cheered.
In a daily act of heroism, Roz was carrying chaff to her beloved horse, Flame. He would stand at the gate as Roz waded across the creek, giving frantic little whinnies and nickers of encouragement, licking his lips and leaning his skinny neck so far over the gate we feared he might fall over it. Flame was the first horse my mother bought. Horses were to be my mother’s reparation to us after all that had gone before. As the eldest, Roz received the first gift, of Flame. He was not my mother’s first choice; his much older, quieter and reliable mother had been. Flame was both spirited and as yet untried, scarcely taught to accept the saddle. But it was the difference between thirty pounds and forty-five that decided the matter. This was very early in our retreat to the Victorian countryside, and the survival of this new family, the splintered remnant of my mother and her three daughters, was by no means certain.
Sometimes the shadows of ruin grew longer, threatening to engulf us; at other times they receded. Those early days were continually haunted by the spectre of financial disaster. Our life, at first, seemed so bleak. If I think of this period, I shiver. We may have escaped conflict with separation, but we had lost a great deal with it. It must have been especially hard for my sisters, by then adolescents and much older than I was, for they had known a materially comfortable life. Now we rented a small miner’s cottage with rooms so damp and dark you needed a light to see. The bedrooms were tiny, prison-like cells, so small only one person could fit in the space between bed and wall. The beds were stone bunks carved out of the seeping walls. The world seemed a pinched, tight place, full of worry and lack. Everything seemed hard.
I remember the continual drip, drip, drip of financial anxiety, drizzling down on us day after day, the thin white purse my mother anxiously inspected, the sudden current of tension running through her when it came to pay at a shop. There was the day when she did not have enough to cover what she had bought, the sudden panic, then head bowed, putting the items back, to the sullen contempt of the shopgirl. One day my mother came home from the bank and laughed off the fact that she was ‘in the red’. At seven or eight I didn’t know what it meant, except that whatever her defiance, it was about money, and things were bad, very bad. Red sounded ominous, the colour of blood. Yet somehow in this period, perhaps after my mother had found work, first as a cleaner at a hospital and then as a teacher, she threw caution and reason to the winds and splurged the thirty-two pounds on a horse to ride, to care for, and most of all to love.
So, into this aching greyness stepped Flame. He seemed to me, as a child, an impossibly glorious creature. He was a bright chestnut colour with a lighter, golden-coloured mane and tail, but his face was still surprisingly soft, his muzzle like a foal’s. In springtime he turned a darker liver colour with his new coat, and grew fat and wild on fresh clover. Exuberant with youthful spirits and rich feed, he would prance and practise high jinks in his paddock, floating along in a graceful, high-stepping gait, legs scarcely seeming to touch the ground, his golden tail plumed backwards, foaming over his rump, dancing on the green, lush turf. Sometimes a car would stop, the occupants staring at this beautiful creature. On one occasion an entranced bystander rushed over and offered to buy him.
But now it was midwinter, and Flame had grown thin.
It was a struggle enough to feed us at that stage. But if we were poor, all of us would have gone without food so that the animals were fed. Roz would have risked her life to feed Flame, and regularly did. So it was not through any lack of kindness on our part. But we knew nothing at this stage in our lives of how to look after horses. We were just ignorant. Someone had told us to feed him a bucket of chaff in winter each day. So we did. But we knew nothing about quantities or what nutrition a horse needed, and so fed him from the nearest bucket to hand, which happened to be from a child’s sandpit. So it was a very little bucket. Flame grew thinner and thinner, ribs poking out of his sides, his once-handsome, glistening red coat faded and staring, sticking lifelessly to his back. His haunches grew pointy and ugly. A nasty indented line cleaved his rump; we later learned that this is justly called in horse lore a ‘poor’ line. His neck looked long and wispy as if at any minute it might be snapped off with the ease of a weedy sapling.
We did not know why, but Flame was starving.
We decided to bury our pride and risk asking a neighbouring horsewoman for her advice. Mrs Mac owned a nearby property, either with racehorses or harness horses, and we deeply envied and admired her establishment. She was an accomplished, experienced horsewoman, respected by many in the district. Her horses were rugged and well fed, the paddocks had lush sown grasses and plenty of feed, automatic watering troughs and excellent fencing. We were ignorant, but we knew this was how one was meant to care for horses. She had the money and resources and knowledge to have the well-run horse farm that we longed for.
We approached her one day in the late afternoon as she fed her horses hay in her paddocks. Roz explained our problem, full of the animal lover’s desire to do the right thing. She asked why, why would he be thin when we fed him a whole bucket of chaff every day? She held the little red bucket up, her face urgent, pleading, so wanting to be doing the right thing.
For a moment Mrs Mac looked disbelieving, regarding this tiny, child’s sand bucket full of its worthless chaff in silence. Then she looked at us. At that instant, watching her face, I had an out-of-body experience and suddenly saw us through her eyes. I saw Flame with his wispy neck and ribs jutting out, these three skinny, intense girls with their hopeless clothes and the hopeless little red bucket, their anxious, pinched faces, ne’er-do-wells around whom the whiff of deep family trouble hovered. She looked at us, our famished look which spoke to a deeper deprivation of the soul than mere hunger.
I saw it all so suddenly, and wanted to flee. I was waiting for the blowtorch of humiliation to follow. I wanted to shout ‘No, let’s leave now’, to stop Roz, all of us, being scorched. But Roz just stood there, all intensity, waiting for judgement. Mrs Mac could have been unkind or even cruel. She might have shamed us, gloried in her moral indignation and humiliated us by rubbing our noses in our inadvertent cruelty, luxuriating in her superiority, superior knowledge, superior money, superior everything. There were people enough who did that. Moralising can have an exultant aggression, even sadism, fuelling it. She might have torn strips off these scruffy child
ren already humiliated by their poverty and their ignorance and by the sense that they were one of those families across which the shadow of doom hung. The not-enoughness of anything in their lives.
But that isn’t what happened. At first she looked incredulous, her face hovering between anger and wonder. Then, as she looked at Roz, her face suddenly softened, and she smiled, and gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Then she said, quietly, with an exquisite gentleness, without any condescension, in a tone of such deep kindness I remember it to this day: ‘A bigger bucket. See, look, over there, that size.’ She pointed to kerosene tins which had their lids cut off and were used as feed buckets, about ten times the size of our toddler sand bucket. Then she briskly listed the kind of food a horse needed: ‘And twice a day. And green, lucerne chaff, and oats, not just oaten chaff.’
It is unlikely that Mrs Mac would have remembered this moment in time beyond going inside for a cup of tea. For me, however, as I trotted home behind my sisters, it had a profound effect. My mind was working quickly.
On her advice, and that of many others, over the years we gradually learned to be very good horse people, our animals cared for unstintingly, always fat and glossy. In time, we gave advice to others, never forgetting Flame and the little red bucket. Yet the deeper learning was not about that at all. This was one of those experiences which flashed unexpectedly out of the flow of ordinary moments, revealing meaning. For days and weeks, years after, I remembered Mrs Mac’s face and even the tone of her voice. Although it happened more than forty years ago, I still remember everything, the gestures we made and even the expression on her face.
What I remembered so vividly, with such lucidity, was kindness. What stayed with me was witnessing someone foregoing the opportunity to be cruel, to humiliate a child, the indulgent luxury of moral indignation. Instead, she decided to be kind. What impressed me so deeply, as a child, was that even in the most inconsequential, commonplace of moments, one could have a moral choice and make a decision. What I understood, was that even in very imperfect beings—and all of us are that—there can be, nonetheless, moments of transcendence.
It was summer. A great drift of heat simply stopped and sank, immoveable, over the town. The light splintered hard and hot in a dry inland heat, not a breath of wind to ease it. Rotund shopkeepers, little bald pates gleaming with perspiration, served in their shops slowly, thoughtfully, as if in a dream, a pencil tucked behind one ear, listening to the reassuring rise and fall of male voices describing the cricket on the radio. Children, socks wrinkled around thin ankles, slipped like still and silent shadows into tiny ribbons of shade from saplings. Fine powdered dust rose, choking, settling in eyes, nostrils, throats. The evenings brought the only relief; the moonlight would see the flickering images of television on verandas where people had brought them outside to watch, the volume turned up high to drown out the cicada chorus. The dawn would see sleeping bodies strewn across front lawns, where cool grass offered the only refuge from a listless heat. Even the lizards stopped slithering and merely lay on the roads, blinking. Everyone and everything slowly slowed, and then stopped. Waiting.
It was at about this time, in the middle of just such a heatwave, my mother acquired what I call her Lemming Look. This look signals a fateful, inexorable movement towards disaster. It means she is bent upon a course of action that she and everyone else knows will be fatal, but nothing on this earth will deflect her. The cautions and demurring—even plain bullying—of those around her will make not the slightest imprint or dent on her design. She will merely look more stubborn, determined and a little bit cunning. I was perhaps the quickest on this occasion to detect her peculiar air but in the end it dawned on all of us. ‘You know what she’s going to do’, my eldest sister said, grimly. ‘Oh, yes’, said the other one, with disbelief. ‘After the last time, too.’ A gloomy silence fell. We waited for the announcement. Sure enough it came, uttered with a slightly wilful, defiant air. My mother had decided to bake a pavlova.
The great English psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, once remarked that however many children a family had, there would be the same number of entirely different stories of that family, all of them true. To this we might add the father and the mother’s stories. This part of my mother’s story I call ‘Exile in Possum Gully’. It was a little like the period of the same title—and the same meaning—that Miles Franklin in My Brilliant Career describes while working in the rough bush shack. Yet if Miles Franklin’s brilliant career lay in the future, my mother’s lay in the past. At a time when women were under a kind of compulsory decree to be homemakers, she collected academic prizes and awards as easily as other women collected tea towels for their glory boxes. While the culture allowed her to begin what promised to be a brilliant career in philosophy, no sooner had she completed her postgraduate degree than it demanded complete renunciation. Highly educated, talented, she struggled with the invisibility born of the quiet, careless assumptions of men of that generation, that her career was naturally less important, that being a wife and mother ought to be enough. And in her case, it wasn’t.
For my mother, then, the period which in my childhood was the happiest, was different. While for all of us the decision to move back to the town of her girlhood was an extraordinary opportunity for reparation and growth, for her it also had an edge of something else; it was etched with the acid of defeat. When the council workers pruned ruthlessly and roughly the glorious sprawling limbs of the great ghost gums lining the main street, lopping them off into the neat, round shapes of a child’s lollipop, my mother would wail, anguished: ‘Those barbarians, those philistines!’ What those men did with their shears was much more than the abuse of nature. They did to those trees what she felt the old ways of country towns did to the human spirit.
Most of the time she held fast to her purpose of raising her girls, rising above the situation, ignoring the oddity of our surroundings with a sense that things could be worse. She maintained a slight haughtiness, a loftiness, in defying the expectations of convention, so deep in the country town where she had come to live, that she should have a husband, that she ought not to work, that she should value only home and hearth. More than that, something much harder, she held alive her own values and vision of things when there was not even a tiny echo whispering back to affirm it.
But sometimes it got to her. Now and then the effort of resistance was too much and she submitted. Briefly. Some sense of her own difference, the contrast between what she had hoped for and where she now was. In this mood she would tackle some sign, some symbol of the world she had come to, and try to conquer it. Men are not immune to the flaring of such desires. Watch a social cricket game, and suddenly one will notice a tiny gesture of an elderly and eminent professor. They may have the physique and coordination of a wounded stick insect but with one exaggerated swing of an arm one will see, all in a flash, the remnant of some old humiliation, an absurd hope left over from boyhood. And there it is, the attempt at repair of some childhood humiliation for being a boffin when only sporting heroes were admired. Just one odd movement undertaken more seriously than the occasion warrants and one will suddenly detect the sliver of an old story, an ancient wound, some relic of the primeval desire for belonging.
When this mood descended, my mother might invite people to afternoon tea whom she otherwise scorned. Like the wife of the local Liberal parliamentarian, who arrived driving an enormous yellow Chevrolet with large fins. She bragged loudly about her husband’s successes and gave an exhaustive survey of her new acquisitions, a kind of purchasing history of the family, while perched grimly on the edge of her chair. Her gaze swept over the sparsely furnished room and settled uneasily on the heavy, dusty tomes of Kant and Wittgenstein on the bookshelf, eyes narrowing over Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex before coming to a shocked standstill at Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. My mother shut the door firmly behind her. ‘Such a vulgar woman’, she pronounced.
In this mood she particularly would take
on some symbol of femininity, try sewing a dress, cooking a new pudding, tackle some icon of Australian country womanhood. She would bake a pavlova.
My mother’s cooking included some spectacular failures. Some of these had entered family folklore—like The Exploding Christmas Pudding. It was our first Christmas in the town, a makeshift affair, for we had just moved into the tiny stone miner’s cottage with rooms so small it seemed you could only fit one person in them at any one time. My mother had disappeared into the kitchen to get the pudding when there was a loud explosion. Rushing to the kitchen door we paused, shocked. My mother had forgotten to pierce the tin and it had exploded. Every raised surface was covered with sticky, brown, exploded pudding: the ceiling, the benches, the walls. The most prominent raised surface, however, as one sister dryly observed, was my mother. Two glistening dark eyes peered out of the morass of pudding stuck to her face. For a moment we held our breath. Was she injured? Was she weeping? But no, she was laughing, and suddenly none of it mattered.
A family is a peculiar thing. It consists of individuals but also has a kind of shared reality that has an existence quite outside, and larger than that of its individual members. Helen Garner has said of her sisters that they felt for each other feelings so deep and dark that the word ‘love’ is hopelessly inadequate. It is hard to explain exactly, but it is to do with that depth that the peculiar and painful internalising of the desires and hopes of those we are close to, however crazy, takes place. Everyone, somehow, became borne along by my mother’s desire for the pavlova to rise. Just as the creeks swollen with summer rains sweep up little eddies and cul de sacs of water, our wills and purposes, at first resistant and at odds with hers, fell in with her greater energy and were swept along. Slowly, bit by bit, it stole over all of us, till the whole household submitted and then mobilised. The various purposes and projects of children on summer holidays floating, drifting at cross-purposes, began to coalesce around my mother’s purpose until it was concentrated to one single, sharp point. A mad hopefulness descended over the household. The atmosphere was feverish. The pavlova must rise.