So This Is Life

by Anne Manne

  And so she sleepwalked, year after year, through her life, and ours.

  Donald Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst, saw an essential tension in human life between the desire to be ‘lost’ and the desire to be ‘found’. Being found alludes to the longing in every human being to communicate and connect with others, the longing for intimacy, but also speaks to the yearning for recognition, of being valued, understood and loved in all one’s unique particularity. In an era dominated by Facebook, the blogosphere and celebrity worship, as the desire to be found has become distorted into Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, we understand this aspect of human life better than ever. We are perhaps less aware of the contours of another deep, ineradicable desire that exists in tension with being ‘found’: that of being ‘lost’ to the world.

  Winnicott also thought that ‘at the centre of each person is an incommunicado element, and this is sacred and most worthy of preservation’. That core self needs space, distance from others, protection even—the solitude in which to exist freely without being impinged on by others. Yet Winnicott’s idea goes even deeper than this, for this ‘incommunicado self’, the self that exists outside the social world, as the psychotherapist Judith Sarah Schmidt suggests, is also the source of creativity:

  These spaces between the lost and the found are critical to the formation of the capacity for hope and creative living in children and adults. These are the spaces into which we fall in reverie, in which we lose and find and gather ourselves, without need to act or react. These are the silent spaces in which we may begin to experience the deep pulsations of how and what our body knows beneath thought, where we open to be moved and guided … These are the spaces in which we find the faith to let things fall apart and come together in new ways.

  When my mother, early in our time in the country, took her little money and spent all of it on a horse, it was a brilliant stroke. It became a central part of our recovery, of finding ourselves in the mastery of horses. From that moment on we focused not on the past but on the present. Our lives were marked not just by school or friendships, but much more deeply by which horse we were doing battle with, the moments of victory and the moments of defeat. We became bone hard and thin as whips, capable of riding difficult animals, and learning at least as much about ourselves in the process as we did about horses.

  Horses, like so many other sports, bestowed those small moments which lift themselves out of the flow of the everyday existence that we may call grace. They taught where adults merely preached. I learned much that is worth knowing on the back of a horse: what it is to know fear and to move through it to the other side, to experience a primeval battle of wills and feel the gnawing hollow of defeat but also what it is to win, or to reach down deep inside when there seems nothing left and find courage. It is the language of the body, one that children come to know most easily. In giving us a horse, however, my mother gave us something much deeper than an identity shaped by that struggle for mastery.

  Horses also gave me the freedom of the hills, and, in that, the chance of being lost to the world. It was in those hills I felt, for the first time, a love of the world, a love for the physical shape and smell of the bush. We lived on the fringe, on the very outskirts, of the town. A few more houses and then it was pure bush for miles and miles, cut only by the highway. On one side there was no easy beauty. The bush was flatter, dusty, drier, more desolate, with rocky outcrops opening out to sudden patches of overgrazed farming land through which a railway ran. There were forestry tracks along giant electricity pylons which gave an ominous twang in the wind. On this side the horses were fearful, wheeling back in fright at the trains, ears flattened, curling their nostrils at the stench of the pig farms. They walked out slowly, and galloped home fast, tossing their heads with relief.

  On the other side was what I called ‘The Island’. It was leafy, cooler, thick bush criss-crossed by water races and wallaby tracks. When people ask me where I grew up I think not of the town or our house, but the Island. And grow up there I did, for I spent more time there than anywhere else, for ten years galloping about in the bush. I came to know it as closely as a fox knows its lair, to know every curve and cusp of the hills, every wallaby and wombat track. I followed its seasons and rhythms with the heightened attentiveness of childhood. I can, even now, conjure up instantly not merely memories but vivid sensations: the sound of the crack of hooves on frosty ground in winter, the hush of silent hoofbeats on the soft, tussocky, grey-green grass of springtime, the gum trees which shielded, then yielded, flashes of hard light from the sun, the acrid smell on autumn evenings as we looked down on the town from the highest hill, light softening over bonfires dotted below.

  On this side, in the Island, the horses walked easily, with a swing to their backs, heads lowered, ears pricked, the gentle rhythmic blow of air from their nostrils keeping time with their hoofbeats. In the middle of the Island, approachable only by wallaby tracks, in the cusp of steep hills, was a large disused dam, built perhaps for a farmer’s dream that had failed. Here we would come in the middle of summer, when heat splintered the harsh blue light of the sky. We rode bareback, after a long gallop up the last hill, and swam the horses. They would surge into the water, and to swim they would rear on their hind legs and surge forward, pause, and then leap again. Then they stood, sides streaming, on the bank beneath the trees while we swam, taking care never to touch foot to the ground where the yabbies lurked. In the evenings we walked home, for to gallop was to risk colliding with the huge golden orb spiders which spun enormous webs big enough to cross the track.

  As my sisters grew older and became immersed in the social world of teenagers, I began to go to the Island alone. At first I begged them to come with me, but eventually came to feel a sharp pang of disappointment when they threatened to intrude. Spared of their caution, I could explore further, faster, longer. The bush became my domain, my own territory. To be alone in the Island became magical. What was it, this magic? It was a kind of childhood Dreamtime, a boundlessness, an absence of industrial time. Important was the freedom from adult scrutiny, the freedom to grow up unwatched. Some part of the self protected from the compromises of the peer group, cordoned off from the social world, was able to seed, take root and flourish in the Island. It allowed a glorious emptiness and a certain kind of forgetfulness: self-forgetting. Much of what was important in the shaping of my identity happened out there. Breathing in those wide, open spaces meant the possibility of the development of inner space. Part of that inner space was to do with resistance, certain kinds of refusal. As a consequence one could, and did, grow up untrammelled. I remember the voice of an older sister, who in a fatherless household sometimes adopted the role of a disapproving father, saying to my mother about me: ‘You have to do something about her, Mum. She’s completely wild.’ Thankfully my mother saw something in me to leave alone, and did nothing.

  I often think back to the Island as if to a paradise lost. I remember the long, hot, endless summers of my childhood, doing nothing in particular, time stretching out with no beginning and no ending. I think back to the dam in the middle of the Island, the horse tied up under the shade, cooling off after a gallop. I remember floating spreadeagled, arms and legs spread wide like a star, quite alone, in the creamy brown milk of the water, listening to the sound of the hills growing older, staring into the blue that is the sky.

  At one time in my life I had permanently singed fingertips. Between my final year at school and starting university I had my first job. It was in outback New South Wales. I was, as it was quaintly called, a jillaroo, a general stationhand who rounded up cattle and worked on the farm. To this the prim advertisement in the country paper, The Weekly Times, had added: ‘Some domestic duties’. After a long, hot trip on a train, I arrived on a deserted platform, looking out over flat, red, dusty terrain stretching out for miles in every direction. The station owner finally turned up in a spanking new, white utility. He looked me up and down doubtfully through narrowed eyes, see
ing a small, slender figure, with an even smaller suitcase.

  We drove several hours to the station, with my new boss outlining the station’s history, or more accurately, its squattocracy pedigree, the private schools he and his wife had attended, the people ‘in town’ (Sydney and Melbourne) they knew and their membership of the Kooyong Tennis Club. For my part, I answered questions about my background, about what my separated father did, what school I had attended, and my university plans for the next year. I found it a bizarre conversation, puzzling as to its pattern, with a code I couldn’t yet crack. All the while he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eyes. He seemed uneasy.

  When we arrived, I met the mistress of the house. She was standing on the stone steps of the once-grand homestead, flanked by two gargoyles. On either side stretched a long veranda, circumnavigating the entire house. After a moment or two, a quick look of consternation passed between them. ‘Her father is an academic’, my boss said, his voice rising at the end of the sentence with a lilt of perplexity. I wondered what possible relevance that might have. As they showed me around and outlined my duties I felt growing incredulity and also panic. I was very used to a lot of physical labour, as those caring for horses are. Yet it was clear that I was going to be working from before dawn and until after dark. She had a youngish baby, and I was to relieve her of any domestic or household labour, as well as work the stock. I was replacing not one, but two ‘hired helps’, as they called them. I was less jillaroo, it seemed, and more live-in slave.

  When it came to showing me the living quarters, they hesitated. The look passed between them again. I suddenly realised what it was. I presented a social problem for Mr and Mrs Slavedriver (as I had quickly christened my employers). On the one hand, I had come as a lowly housemaid and jillaroo. They had no doubt where that placed me in their rigid social hierarchy, and they were used to ruthlessly exploiting those who did such jobs. On the other hand, I was also, equally clearly, a middle-class girl from an educated background, on her way to university. In that sense, I was more like one of them. Social class and its markers, I was to learn, were everything to the Slavedrivers. So what to do with me? How to treat me? My status as middle rather than working class, they seemed to feel, necessitated different treatment from those girls they ordinarily hired. Rather than let me slum it in the worker’s cottage, which I had been rather looking forward to, they decided that I would sleep in the house. It would be too risky, Mrs Slavedriver said, for me to live out there, ‘like all the other girls’.

  The plan went awry right at the beginning. They ushered me into a den lined with dark leather Chippendale couches to introduce me to baby Giles, who though not quite ready for moleskins, already had his name down, they told me proudly, for life as a boarder at Sydney Grammar. I knew I was meant to make girlish soon-to-be-mother noises, and started gathering my fraudulent resources. In reality, at this age, I had no particular liking for other women’s babies. I was motherly to animals, and then when the time was right, for my own babies I crooned and doted with the best of them, but I was never one of the gaggle of teenage girls crowding round a pram. Moreover, when the unveiling ceremony—the lengthy unwrapping of booties, lacy bonnets and silk dresses of the first-born son and male heir to Station Downs—was completed, I just stared in horror. For a moment or two, I was rendered utterly speechless.

  He was the most spectacularly ugly baby I had ever seen. There were large pink ears, it seemed a great deal of them, soft and flapping around a bald head and narrow eyes, while a long, aquiline nose topped a wide, gaping, gummy mouth, shooting towards one, propelled by the trajectory of what would certainly be, by Sydney Grammar days, a jawline so strong you could crack a stubby on it.

  Just at that moment, the scene from Alice in Wonderland, where the horrid Red Queen has a baby under her arm which turns into the ugliest of pigs, flashed into my head. There were no two ways about it; baby Giles looked like the most enormous pink piglet. As I stared at him, searching desperately for the words of adulation they were waiting for, and trying to suppress my laughter, I was struck dumb by a sudden inexplicable incapacity to lie. All of which, unhappily, was observed by the eagle-eyed Mrs Slavedriver.

  There was a long silence before I managed to say something complimentary about … his feet. I mumbled something about his feet looking like he might one day be a good sportsman. Mr Slavedriver subsided, slightly placated perhaps by a vision of baby Giles captaining the First Eleven, but Mrs Slavedriver was most certainly not. She was livid. Piglet began to cry. She sat down, sinking into one of the Chippendale leather armchairs, and opened her blouse. Piglet opened his enormous jaws and swallowed what looked like half of Mrs Slavedriver’s flaccid breast, latching on with loud, lusty, lip-smacking slurps.

  For the rest of the evening we sat listening to the ABC, while Mrs Slavedriver worked herself up over The Unions and Long-Haired Hippies and Lazy Aboriginals, before settling on Dole Bludgers who, she claimed, combined incomes in the city and then lived like kings and queens. I mildly ventured an opinion that perhaps people on welfare were poor and needed the money. She turned to me instantly and asked what party my family voted for. When I replied, she gasped, ‘Labor!’, aghast, as if we were from another species. Piglet continued noisily to work his jaws.

  With Mr Slavedriver I had a problem of a different order. On the next very early morning start, in order to beat the 40 degree heat, he was to knock on my door at 5 a.m. We needed to get the cattle into the yards before the truck arrived to take them to market at 8 a.m. I was woken, however, not with a knock, but with the sensation of being watched. I realised he had been standing in my room watching my lightly clad form sleeping. It had been a hot night and I was only just covered by the sheet. I froze, heart beating, as I realised he was just standing there, thinking I was asleep, watching me. Then his hand snaked out and he grabbed my ankle, lying outside the covers. He grasped it and held it for a few moments. Then he shook it: ‘Wakie! Wakie!’ When I pretended to rouse, he left the room.

  I made him my first scrambled eggs. I would like to claim that it was his manner of waking me that meant I burned the eggs, but in truth I had never cooked anything at home if I could possibly help it, so my culinary skills were zilch. As the yellow and blackened pellets of eggs rolled onto his toast he just raised his eyebrows: ‘Not a cook, then?’

  The rest of the morning, however, working with cattle, was what I had come for. It promised to be, and was, by far the best part of my job. We rode rough bush horses, small and nimble, cutting out stock and herding them into the yards. We finished stock work around 8 a.m., standing in the steel pens with the other stockmen, trying to persuade unruly cows that their best hope was to go into the yard we wanted rather than with their mates. Few of them agreed. Red dust coated our clothing and faces. It was dirty work, but leavened by exhilarating gallops cracking a stockwhip while charging down steep hillsides cutting out stock, or rounding up some stray breakaways from the main mob. I loved it, and decided to stick it out, if I could.

  After that it was time to begin work for Mrs Slavedriver, on what had been optimistically called ‘some’ domestic duties. Starting around 8 a.m., that part of the job went until about 9 p.m. It turned out to mean more than a full day’s work, cooking her breakfast and every other meal for the family, washing all the dishes, washing clothes, including the baby’s nappies, all the housework, tending the garden and feeding the animals. This last task included feeding the morning hay to the cows, bringing in the milk in large open basins each day, fresh from the cow, covered in a cloth to prevent dust getting into it. Then it was strained through very fine cheesecloth into huge, white, enamel jugs which were placed in the fridge. There was a thriving kitchen garden to weed, and from which to gather vegetables for meals.

  Almost all food, with the exception of crusty loaves brought from town twice a week with the mail, came from the property. They killed their own sheep and cattle to eat. The first evening meal I prepared, like every other one followi
ng, was a roasted slab of incredibly tough meat, pasted with dripping and emerging with fat leaking everywhere, accompanied by potatoes and pumpkin fresh from the garden. My very last job that night was dragging heavy kerosene tins full of bread and wet slops 100 metres up a steep hill to the cattle dogs tied up on a wire run along a bleak ridge. At the end of that first day, I thought I would never get to the top. I stood swaying, at the bottom of the hill, looking at the sharp incline ahead, feeling the tug of the tin cans weighing down on my shoulders.

  As I went through the first day, I was thinking about Mr Slavedriver’s appearance in my bedroom that morning. How to handle it? Should I confront him? Would he turn nasty and do worse? What would happen next? Was watching a semi-naked teenage girl sleep going to be enough? I had read about such things, but I had no experience of them. I was hundreds of miles from home, living with strangers and sleeping in a bedroom with a door that had no lock.

  By nightfall I had worked out what I would do. I decided to go to bed in my clothes, with my shoes on, and, tired as I was, I would get up earlier than he did. I left the curtains open, and hardly slept, watching the moon rising slowly over the hills, casting an eerie yellowy light over the vegetable patch and garden. I could hear small animals, possums perhaps, moving about, the strange guttural cry of a fox, and, on the far hillside, one of the working dogs howling at the moon. Most of all I could hear the sound of my own heart beating.

  At least an hour before we were meant to get up, about 4 a.m., I rose and prepared the kettle and tea, and got his eggs ready. I heard him go to my room. There was a long silence. Then he came into the kitchen, and sat down to eat his scrambled eggs. We looked at each other. He looked a little taken aback, maybe even a little embarrassed. I gave him a long, level look. He knew and I knew what had just passed between us.