by Helen Garner
‘Where do you go now?’ I ask.
‘I put my case inside! Don’t you know anything about schools?’
Kindly she takes my hand. The concrete floors are clean and we step over pools of water. She leads me to an old wooden locker, heaves her case to shoulder-height, and slides it, in. She turns her bare, pure-skinned face up to me and smiles. ‘Now we go outside.’
I follow her black legs out on to the sunny gravel. Has she got a friend? Does she know I think it matters? She runs to the climbing frame and pushes through a crowd of small boys. One has a sugar cigarette in his mouth; she spots it and flashes me a grimace, from behind his back. I feel big and noticeable with my overalls and chopped hair. Some children stare at me, others are engrossed in their private thoughts, standing about waiting for the bell. No one has greeted Alice. My heart starts to thump. I make quick comparisons between her clothes and theirs. She looks wacky.
‘Watch me!’ she calls, throwing herself on to the climbing frame. ‘I’ll show you! Watch me! Watch! Watch!’ She is fearless on the frame. Her limber body, taught by the grown-ups she has for friends at home, executes turns and flips. Again and again her shining forehead turns up towards me.
‘Good, it’s good,’ I say.
She lands at my feet with a confident thump, and drags me to the fence. ‘A big girl showed me how to do this.’ She spans the gap between the ground and the first rail with a tremendous straining of one black leg.
Someone shouts her name. It’s Raani, her pretend brother from the household where we live. But he’s in grade one, he belongs over there in the big kids’ yard. Alice gazes at him yearningly, through the mesh of the cyclone fence.
The bell, and they’re scattering like rabbits. ‘See you!’ yells Raani.
He’s only a blond blob among the running heads. Alice leads me to a door outside which her grade is gathering. ‘Watch me line up?’
I sit on a wooden bench among the Greek mothers in black.
Out of the chaos emerges a ritual: each child must have a partner; they march into school in pairs. I watch Alice approach the front boy in line and reach for his hand. He brushes her away without a glance. She whirls round with a skip and a terrible smile, and puts out her hand to a girl in white stockings. The girl frowns and shakes her off. Alice smiles again, flicks her hand and shakes her head and smiles and twirls to the back of the line. She comes to rest on her own, turned away from the line of perfect couples, her left thumb in her mouth, staring and searching out across the yard.
Is it a partner she is staring for? God, make a partner come spinning across the gravel for her, but the line is moving to the scratchy marching music and feet scrabble and the children march and the sun shines on the clean brown head of my lonely child with her thumb in her mouth, cracking hardy, looking over her shoulder at the yard full of purposeful pairs.
She drags along behind the others, still staring behind her, and as she disappears round the red-brick corner of the building I can’t bear it, I jump up and run after her and catch her going up the concrete steps, last in line and very small between the drinking taps and the lockers.
I grab her hand. ‘Alice!’
She spins round and sees me. ‘Where were you?’
It’s me she was looking for, in the yard. ‘I was sitting on the bench! Couldn’t you see me?’ She is holding my hand tightly. She has been at this school every day for six weeks. Is it like this for her every day?
‘Come into the classroom? Stay? Will you stay?’
‘I’ll come in for a little while.’
‘No—for a long. Stay till we go out to play.’
The teacher nods and smiles to welcome me. I sit on a tiny chair at the very back of the room, and watch them twinkle fast and slow with their fingers, and sing, and draw a spiral, each on a little blackboard.
A boy is pushing Alice with his shoulder. I see her scowl at him, I lip-read her insult. He pushes, pushes, grinning at her, twice her size. I crouch foolishly on my little chair, watching her get up and move to a different place on the mat, watching him half-crawl, half-walk after her and push, push, push. I would ram my fist into his grinning face, I would strangle him on the spot, but for all the hope I’ve got of controlling anything that happens in this room, I may as well be back in the third row of Miss Lonie’s grade in 1947 at Manifold Heights, Geelong, where I pissed my pants and soaked the shorts of the boy next to me because I was afraid to ask to go to the lavatory during lesson time.
But Alice’s back is very straight. Her face is bright and open. She is drawing, as she is told, a curvy line on her blackboard with a piece of chalk. ‘Blackboards under chins!’ cries the teacher. Alice turns her board around and flashes a sharp look at the girl beside her. She turns and waves at me over her shoulder. She is smiling.
1975
Sad Grove by the Ocean
OCEAN GROVE IS a small town, or township, about fourteen miles from Geelong. It has no real raison d’être, or not of the sort we were taught about in geography classes. It is not on a river mouth, like Barwon Heads, nor is it, like Queenscliff or Point Lonsdale, near the Rip, the gap through which Port Phillip Bay opens into the sea. Ocean Grove sits about halfway between the Rip and the mouth of the Barwon River, on a long curved beach. It is just there.
Our family lived at Ocean Grove between 1948 and 1952, that is, between my sixth and tenth years, and from then on we spent all our holidays there. I don’t know why we left Geelong for those years and then returned to it. Events of childhood have a hard shell of inevitability over them. They resist historical explanation. Why ask? They happened. Knowing why would not change my memories of the town, would it?
I told one of my sisters that I was going back there to write this. We had a mild argument about something called ‘the Sheepwash’—about whether it was a particular spot on the Barwon Heads side of the river, or whether the name referred to that whole stretch of the river, taking in both banks. Neither of us felt any desire to consult an outside authority on this point: our father, a map. Happily and peacefully, we squabbled.
Ocean Grove was an ordinary place, an ordinary town full of ordinary people like ourselves. Our parents loved us: they must have, for they kept on having more. We went to school, we read books, we listened to the wireless, we were forced to help our mother with the housework, we went to the beach, we had roller-skates and glasses of cordial and plenty to eat and outings and friends to stay. Although I am the eldest of the six, and though the last two weren’t born till after we left Ocean Grove, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t belong to A Big Family. A woman my mother did not know once laughed and said to her, watching us pour out of the car on to the beach, ‘Cheaper by the dozen!’ I think my mother probably laughed too, but her account of that event might well be different.
There is no pub at Ocean Grove, and when we lived there there was no licensed grocer either. To get a drink you had to go to Barwon Heads, two miles away.
‘That’s because the place was originally owned by an American Methodist church,’ says my father. ‘There was a strip of land a foot wide round the subdivision, past which you weren’t supposed to carry any intoxicating liquor—not even a grapevine. Each title had a covenant on it.
‘Bathing-box-type humpies people had, holiday shacks over at Barwon Heads. In the 1930s the South Barwon Council said they had to get rid of them, so people just picked ’em up and carted ’em over the river to Ocean Grove, where the Bellarine Shire was in charge—a poor outfit. That’s why there’s so many awful houses.
‘When the migrants came, after the war, they put ’em into a place with holiday shacks and little cubbyholes. There wasn’t enough room for ’em up at Bonegilla. They were putting them anywhere they could find. They can’t have known what hit ’em —they got out of here as fast as they could.’
I remember the migrants coming. They must have arrived in a rush: in my memory it seems that they all arrived on one day. At Ocean Grove School No. 3100 we sat in double desks; when the migr
ants came we were suddenly three to a double. We called them Balts. We had no idea where they came from. They were all blond. They had names like ‘Wossle’, ‘Olger’, ‘Rocksanner’, ‘Beela’, that even our teachers couldn’t say. Years later, in books and films, when I came across those mysterious names properly spelt and pronounced, I felt sobered and ashamed, as at a lesson taught too late. We had never heard of garlic, let alone smelt it. We watched them unwrap their lunches: slices of bread an inch thick encasing slabs of high-smelling sausage. The girls wore their white-blonde hair divided into sections with the top bit rolled and pinned into a hollow tube that ran back from brow to crown, while we had ours, which was plain brown, cut short behind and held in a ‘bunch’ in front by a rubber band and a ribbon.
‘Rocksanner’ sat next to me. Under her skirt she wore what I thought were her pyjama pants. I felt sorry for her: so cold and so poor that she had to wear her pyjamas under her clothes. Nobody I have spoken to remembers this. Was it a folk costume? someone suggests, now, too late. Didn’t anyone explain anything to us? Maybe our parents and teachers were like the soldiers in Ben Lewin’s The Dunera Boys: essentially good-natured but profoundly ignorant. Wasn’t it in the papers? As with the Sheepwash, I have a stubborn, sore reluctance to find out. I don’t think it’s laziness. If I poked even one rational hole in the thick skin of that closed-off world, who knows what would come squirting out.
The sea is still there, under everything else I saw and remembered. This goes without saying. There are no ugly bits of ocean. But I can’t understand why it hurts so much to look at Ocean Grove. Other people in the streets don’t seem bothered by its power lines, its desolate bareness of ground, its hideous shopfronts. They are going about their business unperturbed. Perhaps it’s not really anything special, this ugliness. Perhaps it’s no uglier than any other modernised town on that featureless coastline. Perhaps I’ve brought the ugliness with me. A clear hot day might have dispelled this cloud of sadness; or is there an Ocean Grove-shaped desolation that lives inside my head? Either way, when I get to Ocean Grove, I am not surprised to find the sky thickly covered and a fresh wind blowing, in early December.
We used to walk everywhere. So I leave the car at the motel (still no pub) and start to put one foot in front of the other. When I stick to the sealed road the colours seem all wrong: the ground should be yellow, but it’s grey. I cut into the scrub and find a dirt road, badly eroded, leading up the hill in what I think must be the direction of the school.
I get to the school just before 9 a.m. Cars driven by women half my age are unloading small children. They are driving their kids to school. What’s the matter with them? Is it too far to walk? Are they weak, or crippled? Has some danger unknown to me invaded the streets?
The old timber building is still there, but extensions have been built and stagger away down the sloping site. The dunnies, where we wiped our bums with pages torn from old copies of the National Geographic donated to the school library by parents, are nowhere to be seen.
Once I forgot something and my father had to ask the teacher to open the school building for us during the weekend. Several of my sisters came too. I was let in, and ran to get my cardie or my project or whatever it was while the others waited outside. I could hear the two men talking and the little girls shouting further down the yard. I became overwhelmed with a dreamy curiosity in the empty schoolroom by myself, and stayed much longer than I needed to. When I woke up and went to the outside door, it was locked. I ran to the side window and saw them all walking down the road. How did I get out? I forget that too.
I walk from the school to our old house. Looking Both Ways to cross Presidents Avenue, I wonder where we used to cross in 1948. Cross? We didn’t have to. We used the road. There were so few cars that we walked right down the middle of it, and it wasn’t a road anyway, it was a track.
I pass through the shopping centre. Back then it was called The Shops: Kong’s Bakery, Skinner’s General Store, Miss Dorrie Wilson at the Post Office. Now there is a kind of mall and the street has been made one-way, for no reason that I can see. There are foreign restaurants: Chinese, Mexican. Back then it was exotic to drive over to Barwon Heads for fish and chips.
There used to be a milk bar called The Doo Duck Inn. The word ‘duck’ in its title was not written but represented by a head of Donald Duck enclosed in a golden and blue circle. I loved this and thought it clever. Later, bodgies and widgies used to loaf round outside the shop. One was called Wogger Whitfield. He looked like Elvis Presley and we thought of him as grown-up.
The street is now a string of real estate agents and takeaway food shops. I go into the one I think must be the old Doo Duck, and order a steak sandwich from a Greek woman. A Greek! When I lived there the only Greeks I knew about were Theseus, Procrustes, Medusa. The woman, who looks exhausted, greets me with a beautiful, ironic smile. I sit at the formica table and eat the steak sandwich. I can hardly swallow for the lump in my throat.
Eight minutes from the school (not counting the steak sandwich) I am approaching the corner of The Terrace and Eggleston Street, where our old house used to stand and probably still does. An SEC truck blocks my view: some men are fixing the power lines. I slip between the truck and the thick tea-tree scrub, and there’s the gate. The gate is still there. It is the same gate. It is so real, so much the same, I’m afraid that if I touch it I will get an electric shock. It is a wide metal farm gate that digs a little curved trench in the dirt with its corner and has to be hooked shut with a chain and a loop. We used to swing on this gate, four of us in a line, waiting for my father to come home.
The SEC men are watching me. I feel embarrassed by the state I am in, standing like a robber with one hand on the gate post.
Something funny has happened to the house. It has become confused, and uglier. It is divided now into two parts: the left side has had a second storey built on, and the other, though still fully part of the same building, has its yard divided off from the other’s garden by a horrible brush fence, and has been allowed to Go to Rack and Ruin. Its weatherboard walls have been painted aqua and it looks hovel-like, with mean louvred windows and a low door, which I do not remember, halfway along the side wall.
The cement paths we used to rollerskate on are crumbled and overgrown. My mother’s garage is a heap of tin under a cypress tree, and somebody seems to be living in the shed: a TV antenna droops feebly on its roof.
The SEC truck drives away. There is nobody about, though the door of the house’s lower side stands open. People are going to ask me, ‘And did you go in?’ Why would I go in? It’s just an ugly old house. If I went in my father would shout, ‘Shut the flaming door!’ and my mother would say, ‘Go outside.’
So you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you that, standing at the gate, I remembered part of a poem called ‘Answers to Letters’, by the Swede Thomas Tranströmer:
Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth,
and if you press close to the wall at the right
place you can hear the hurrying steps and voices, you
can hear yourself walking past there on the other side…
Except that I can hear not footsteps but the grinding of roller-skates with metal wheels, a gritty rolling; the feel of travelling on metal containing ball bearings; skating, skating for months on end, four knobby-legged girls, totally absorbed in our traffic lanes, our rules, our clumsy arabesques, our struggles with physics, with gravity; and the particular kind of jarring caused by a fall on concrete.
1985
At Nine Darling Street
IN 1960 I BELIEVED that all Jews and homosexuals lived in New York. I was eighteen years old, dux of a provincial church girls’ school. To my eternal shame I was dumb enough to let them railroad me into being head prefect: I was a miserable, lonely boss’s stooge. I hit a tennis ball against a brick wall and despite my elevated status was always picked last in sporting sides.
I did not read the paper. I did not know wh
at the word ‘politics’ meant, and none of my teachers saw fit to enlighten me. I was foxed by the faultless aplomb of our sixth-form English teacher who declared, as we pored mystified over Byron, that ‘sensuous means of the senses: but sensual is a bad, bad word.’ I didn’t know anything.
Our headmistress, who frightened me, spoke at assemblies (after the doors to the recessed altar had been trundled shut) about the goodness of the Lord. ‘Think of it!’ she cried. ‘He made grass and trees green for the resting of our eyes. Imagine our discomfort, had He made them red.’ This Valkyrie also informed us from the dais that people with backhand writing were untrustworthy. My mother wrote backhand and was of a transparent truthfulness.
In the gloomy dining room smelling of floor wax and neanderthal sausages we fifth and sixth formers gave one dance a year. I was a frump, a breastless creature barely past puberty with hair that wouldn’t curl up at the bottom, who blushed in agony when addressed by man or beast, who was clad stiffly in cotton while others floated divinely in chiffon with the coveted shoestring straps.
Before the event the headmistress summoned us into the assembly room with its gold-littered honour boards (I always scanned them for Norah Linton, Saint Norah of Billabong, but stopped each time, incredulous, at someone called Daintry Gillett) and inspected us for commonness.
She dragged me out to the front in my square-necked, high-necked, frump-necked, flat-necked horrible cotton dress with wattle flowers printed on it, my ugly white shoes whose sandshoe polish was already showing cracks. ‘Now why can’t everyone be like Helen? Modest and plain.’
The boarders, strapping Western District girls with bosoms, sneered. I burned. I had a mole on my lip and my mouth was too small. I think that woman is dead now. Did she make us wear those long white gloves, or did we bring it upon ourselves? We were all in anguish, one way or another. Did I have a friend? I can’t even remember. Under that sort of stress, friendships could be little more than temporary alliances.