Samuel Daniel
*
THE BOOK OF THE ROAD
Out on A 61 for Ripon
Left at Ripley on B 6165
to Pateley Bridge
Pateley Bridge through Grassington
on B 6265, to connect
B 6160, through Kettlewell, Starbottom
and Buckden
Turn left at Buckden and follow
Langstrothdale Chase to Hawes
(not numbered)
Hawes-Bainbridge on A 684, cross to
Askrigg and on (no number) to
Castle Bolton
Have lunch there?
Castle Bolton, over Redmire Moor to Reeth
Reeth into Arkengarthdale
Turn right beyond Langthwaite over
Scargill High Moor to meet A 66
Right again, to B 6277, there left to
Barnard Castle
Allow time to see castle, medieval bridge and
inn where Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby
(so the Treasures book says) and esp.
Bowes Museum (if open??)
From Barnard Castle backtrack on B 6277
Watch for turn off (unnumbered) to
Egglestone Abbey
(Have tea there or in town?)
Then follow River Tees to get back to
A 66 for Greta Bridge (isn’t that Dotheboy’s
Hall?)
Carry on A 66 to Scotch Corner, down A 1
to turn off on A 59 through Knaresborough
NOTE: Roman road beyond Oughtershaw on way to Hawes and site of fort at Bainbridge From Greta Bridge A 66 follows a Roman road (no name)
*
We may not read the same map twice,
especially where sands are on the move.
I speak loosely because thinking
not of a map’s ineptitude but of
some shiftless nature which is prior.
Maps merely feign to represent the case.
Shiftless? A shifty case, more like,
unsure in its election as well as
in its origin, in its ground
of being as well as in its becoming—
neither works any way too well
for this instance. Are we not assuming
that what one has here to purport
to use as an example will survive
scrutiny? Somehow, has survived?
You follow me: I talk of what we have
and have not, of a sandhill lake
which comes and goes. Or maybe, came and went
since when I was last probing there
forestry men and engineers intent
on reform were then debating
how best to right an aberrant nature.
Their maps could not properly cope
with it. It was offence to natural
justice, natural right, and law.
It came and went. Worse, it was essential
when not existent. Boundaries
tentatively it had, often flouted.
It had? Check my legal fiction.
Rather, they had. Sometimes three lakes flaunted
themselves, sometimes two, or only
one, or none. Not only sands were on the move,
the lake dissolved, moved, reappeared,
will dwindle, again quicken. In remove
a presence, in presence a fact
substantial, insubstantial form
no less? This play with arid words,
dry as lake beds where cloudy midges swarm
until extinguished, the dunes made
to conform to rational order and
rabid, but useful, their surgent pines
established turn to increase wayward sand.
Something we know lost, gained by that.
Then how, best right aberrant nature?
Terms of reference not precise,
you guess, we may not read the same map twice.
(1985)
Bill Manhire, ‘Zoetropes’
A starting. Words which begin
with Z alarm the heart:
the eye cuts down at once
then drifts across the page
to other disappointments.
*
Zenana: the women’s apartments
in Indian or Persian houses.
Zero is nought, nothing,
nil—the quiet starting point
of any scale of measurement.
*
The land itself is only
smoke at anchor, drifting above
Antarctica’s white flower,
tied by a thin red line
(5000 miles) to Valparaiso.
London 29.4.81
(1984)
The Front Lawn [Harry Sinclair and Don McGlashan], ‘Tomorrow Night’
She loves Wellington, she was born there,
She grew up out in the Hutt Valley,
Then she left home looking for something,
She thought she’d find it in the city.
She’d go dancing in the weekends,
Her friends were starting up new bands,
Tight black dresses and hairspray,
Talking about
Tomorrow night,
About 8 o’clock,
Tomorrow night
When the town starts filling up,
Tomorrow night about the time when the pubs start jumping,
And the drunks start fighting,
We’ll start dancing.
She went to London to find work there,
To claim her colonial birthright.
Cleaning hotel rooms in the mother country,
While people trudged to work in the dim light,
She’d go dancing in the nightclubs,
On the underground she’d ride,
Talking loud in a kiwi accent,
Talking about
Tomorrow night,
About 8 o’clock,
Tomorrow night
When the town starts filling up,
Tomorrow night about the time when the pubs start jumping,
And the band starts playing,
La la la la la la la,
We’ll start dancing.
La la la la la la la,
We’ll start dancing.
We’ll start dancing.
She flying over Wellington harbour,
Oriental Bay is standing there in the sunlight,
And they’re playing a tape for the landing,
Speed bonny boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward the sailors cry,
No, she didnt want to stay there,
She’s on her flight,
She’ll be standing on the same ground as we are
Tomorrow night,
About 8 o’clock,
Tomorrow night
When the town starts filling up,
Tomorrow night about the time when the pubs start jumping,
And the band starts playing,
La la la la la la la,
We’ll start dancing.
La la la la la la la,
We’ll start dancing.
Tomorrow night about the time when the pubs start jumping,
And the drunks start fighting,
We’ll start dancing.
(1989)
Reading the Landscape
Yvonne du Fresne, ‘Astrid of the Limberlost’
Our school was divided into many groups, like the nations of the world. Some fought great battles against each other and then made loud treacherous Peace Treaties. These groups were the Gangsters. They spent playtimes and lunchtimes crawling through thickets of hydrangeas and shrubs seizing victims. Cherry Taylor was seized once. Anna Friis crawled into the hydrangeas and grabbed Cherry by her other arm.
‘Release your victim, you nincompoop,’ said Anna Friis in her cold, still voice. And the Gangsters, confused by Anna’s long words, let her go. The Gangsters were always confused by long words. Inside school they drooped and died
when it came to the Journal readings. We read in turn, one sentence each. A bumpy road it was; first one Gangster—then another—stumbled on in their poor hoarse voices. The first Gangster announced ‘Angela’s Cold.’
‘At first you could hardly tell it was a sneeze, it was such a tiny one.’ He dropped into his seat as if he had been shot. Then another Gangster clambered to his feet.
‘Angela tried hard to think it was not one; but when it came again, it did indeed seem like a sneeze.’
He too dropped as if he had been shot. Then the biggest Gangster stood up with hunched shoulders like Pretty Boy Floyd. He growled—
‘Just then Mother came in and pulled up the blind. “Good morning, Angela,” she said, “slip on your dressing gown and run along to the bathroom.”’
The Headmaster watched from his table by the fire. The strap lay by his hand. I leaned back and admired the scene. It was straight from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo—the flickering light from the fire, the high windows, the grey winter afternoon and a distant sound from the road outside of somebody breaking stones ….
After the Gangsters had stumbled into silence, a representative of the next group stood up. This was the Grown-Up Girls’ Group. She balanced on her high heels, bit her lip and tossed back her Ginger Rogers’ hair-do. She wore a great many bits of her Moder’s jewellery and pink fingernails made by colouring them in with a red pencil. She read in a wonderful, highly offended lisp:
‘An-ge-la began to say some-thing, but a ….’
‘Middle-sized,’ grated the Headmaster.
‘Middle-sized,’ lisped the Grown-Up Girl, ‘sneeze stopped her.’
She tinkled some bangles on her arm.
I regarded her through half-closed eyes. Anna Karenina. A head crammed with pretty trifles, and that railway track at the end. At breaks I hung around the Grown-up Girls, observing them. The Grown-Up Girls longed for their last day at school. And until that day came, they practised. They wore stockings and shoes with highish heels, so they could not run. They spent the breaks slowly writing, in fancy letters, ‘By hook or by crook I am first in this book’ in each other’s autograph albums, and they did each other’s hair, absorbed in combing and fluffing, with hairpins clenched savagely in their teeth.
The rest of us, who were not Gangsters or Grown-Up Girls, ranged around looking for something to read. We tried the school library, a small grim storeroom, where the barred windows had ivy growing over them. There were two rows of thick black books. When we picked them up they fell open with a sigh of years and dampness, letting fall small, dead, transparent spiders. My book had on its opening page—
‘What’s your name?’
‘Diggory Trevanock.’
The whole class exploded. This incident, one of the little pleasantries occasionally permitted by a class master, and which, like a judge’s jokes in court, are always welcomed as a momentary relief from the depressing monotony of the serious business in hand, happened in the Second Class of a small preparatory school, situated on the outskirts of the market town of Chatford, intended for the sons of gentlemen.
I shut the book.
But at home, Tante Helga had a little surprise: a whole box of books someone had given her.
‘Girls’ books,’ said Tante Helga, ‘of the Colonies, the Antipodes and so on.’ Already she was deep in a book. She waved vaguely at the heap, while I peeped at the cover of her book. The Family at Misrule said letters cleverly constructed from branches of a tree. There was a picture of a gentleman in boots striding out of a house on fire. He had a beaming baby in his arms. Did that baby not know that its house was on fire? Underneath, more tree branches said: by Ethel Turner.
‘Try that one,’ said Tante Helga in a vague, drugged voice. She gestured at a khaki book with black irises on it. The Girl of the Limberlost, said flowing, scarlet letters.
‘What is Limberlost?’ I asked.
Tante’s eyes raced along the lines of her book, her lips moved. She surfaced only enough to give a taste of the family at Misrule.
‘Nell is letting down her muslin,’ said Tante mysteriously. ‘Too young. She is but fifteen. Meg is distressed. Nell walks up and down. Frou-frou go the muslin frills above her shoes. The Cook likes Nell’s new long dress.’
‘Who is Cook?’
‘They are English aristocrats,’ said Tante. ‘A lady cooks their food. She says things like “La Miss Nell.” Now please read your Limberlost ….’ Her voice trailed away. She would read without breathing, without food, without sleep, until the book was finished. Then she would be the heroine for two days. Then she would be Tante Helga again.
I started my Limberlost saga. I read of a white-faced girl, forced to go to school by her cruel Moder, wearing thick boots, a shabby black hat, and a skimpy calico waist, whatever that was, and carrying a tin bucket with her lunch in it, to a new high school in some place called the city. My eyes raced along like Tante Helga’s. The girl, Elnora, white-faced, but crowned with shining dark red hair, walked blinded by tears, climbed a snake fence and went along a trail worn by feet of men who guarded the precious timber of the swamp—with guns.
‘Tante,’ I quavered.
‘Mmm,’ murmured Tante.
‘Tante ….’
Helga raised blind eyes. She murmured, ‘Meg has been left to look after the whole family. She teaches the little ones and wrestles with the Cook.’
‘Fighting!’ My heart stopped.
‘Nej, nej,’ said Helga impatiently. ‘Disputes. About the food that is to be cooked.’
‘What did they eat Helga? What did they eat?’ Helga looked brighter.
‘Lots of meat—boiled meat and roasted meat. The heat in Sydney it is not to be borne. The blow-flies get at the meat. The Cook is angry. Meg is distracted. Then they had ….’ With animation, Helga flipped through the pages. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Beef-steak pie, sweet potatoes and a Cabinet Pudding. No greens!’ said Tante Helga, scandalised.
‘In my book,’ I said excitedly, riffling pages, ‘there is a dainty lunch baked by her kind aunt to make her respectable before her new classmates who wear dainty dresses and hair-ribbons and scorn the Girl of the Limberlost. In her new leather lunchbox. Listen!’ I read, getting hungrier and hungrier—
‘Half the bread compartment was filled with dainty sandwiches of bread and butter sprinkled with the yolk of egg, and the rest with three large slices of the most fragrant spice cake imaginable. The meat dish contained shaved cold ham of which she knew the quality. The salad was tomatoes and celery and the cup held preserved pear, clear as amber. There were two tissue-wrapped cucumber pickles.
‘And then she says—Tante Helga? Tante Helga? Listen! This bit says,
‘She glanced around her and then to her old refuge, the sky. “She does love me!” cried the happy girl. “Sure as you’re born my little Mother loves me!”’
I went to get a drink of water to offset the thought of the cucumber pickle, which would undoubtedly burn the mouth. I read on, leaning against the sink, swigging great gulps of artesian water. Elnora did chores after supper. It was ten o’clock when the chickens, pigs, and cattle were fed, the turnips were hoed and a heap of bean vines was stacked by the back door …. At four o’clock next morning Elnora was shelling beans. At six she fed the chickens and pigs, swept the cabin, built a fire, and put on the kettle for breakfast ….
I felt so tired that I went into my room and lay down on my bed to give me strength for the next bit. Worse was to come. To get dress-goods, shoes, hat and books for school Elnora had to comb the swamp, and find moths, butterflies and arrow-heads. These she sold to somebody called the Bird Woman who lived in the city, but the Indian arrow-heads she sold to the manager of the Bank of America. The money gained thereby, Elnora stashed into a hollow log, and brooded a little upon the swamp which was lying in God’s glory about her. That night, saying her prayers, she noticed lights flashing by her hollow log, far off in the muck and ooze of the swamp.
I looked at those wor
ds, ‘muck and ooze,’ and went to find my Fader.
‘Far,’ I quavered, ‘where is the Great Swamp?’ Fader straightened and swept an arm from horizon to horizon.
‘Aw,’ he said, ‘all around us really. What a time they had!’
‘Time?’
‘Draining it, and so on,’ said Fader cheerfully. ‘But those Danes, my word, how they worked ….’
‘Far.’
‘Ja?’
‘Will we have enough money for me to go to High School in the city?’
‘Mmm,’ said Fader, ‘well—you’ll have to work your fingers to the bone, be a model child and laugh at all my jokes ….’
It was enough. I trailed to my bedroom and read a little more. Elnora was weeping to her uncle about her cruel Moder. Her uncle explained—
‘You see,’ said Uncle Wesley, ‘I was the first man there, honey. She just made an idol of him, your father, I mean. There was that oozy green hole, with thick scum and two or three bubbles slowly rising that were the breath of his body. There she was in spasms of agony, and beside her the great heavy log she’d tried to throw him. That’s why she just loses control of her soul in the night, and visits that pool, and sobs and calls and begs the swamp to give him back to her ….’
I shut that book so quickly, and lay and looked at the ceiling. Tante Helga drifted in with The Family at Misrule slackly between finger and thumb. Tante Helga was sated with goings-on and happy endings.
‘What happened?’ I asked glumly.
Tante Helga said in a tired-out voice, ‘Ja, well, Nell went to dinner unlawfully at the home of a new-rich neighbour when Meg said Do not go. They are vulgar. Their cook had diphtheria. The only ornament poor Nell wore was a knot of wild-flowers tucked in her bosom. She carried the diphtheria home. Little Esther caught it, Meg caught it. Poor Nell wept in the moonlight and prayed to God that the crisis would come.’
‘The crisis was still to come?’
‘The crisis,’ explained Tante Helga with dignity, ‘is when the body throws off the poisons of the fever and the skin gleams with sweat. Then they hug each other and praise God. Bunty the boy did not break the school window or steal the five sovereigns and was found months later, washing dishes at a low eating-house in Sydney. The family is happy at last and thanks God yet again.’
‘Ah,’ I said, and rolled on to my stomach. Tante Helga arose. ‘Dinner now!’ she said, and went. I noticed she had a small bunch of wild flowers tucked into her bosom.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 113