Home Truth

by HarperCollins Publishers

  I also played up at school, and was caned twice by my father. Or so I remember. But how reliable is this; how reliable is any of this? I have a mental picture of him stopping the car at a swamp en route to Adelaide, leaping from the car, and cutting canes from the rushes. I can see it clearly—but when I put it to him, he told me it was nonsense. What rushes? His canes came from central education supplies. I must have been dreaming.

  In an attempt to counteract my delinquencies on various levels, and to remedy my obsessive and rapidly narrowing reading tastes, my father became my new book supplier. Birthday and Christmas brought parcels of books, a new unlucky dip. I remember waking in the small hours of Christmas morning, and groping in the half-dark, trying to discern through the pillowslip what Santa had left. I immediately knew from those squared-off, riffly shapes it was not what I wanted—a new Erlenmeyer flask, say, or a Kipp’s Apparatus. Instead, at thirteen, the complete works of VS Naipaul tumbled out, of which there were then only two; a year later all the novels of EM Forster, save, perhaps, his gay novel, Maurice.

  Yes, I read them, and perhaps, like The Poky Little Puppy, their rhythms stuck, and the burrs of their deeper narratives embedded themselves, more pieces of pearl-grit, accumulating layers as the years passed. But I read them without passion.

  5. Darwin

  The last last-minute uprooting of my childhood came two years later. We arrived at Darwin Airport in the small hours of a monsoon, and entered a strange, exotic world; I would never forget the heavy, fecund air of the Wet, the warm rains, the sweating skin, even at 2 am.

  The house was another box, this time on stilts; as I wrote later in my novel Maestro, there were moths the size of bats that thudded against the flyscreen, and there were bats in the mango trees the size of foxes. Under every leaf there seemed to be insects the size of small mammals.

  I loved the Wet; and I loved my own personal Wet which soon followed. For me Darwin was a coming of age. A time of profound physiological changes as well as profound geographical changes.

  I had my first wet dream in Darwin. I discovered the joys of masturbation for the first time; but also, not all that long afterwards, had my first sexual experiences with someone other than myself.

  I forged great friendships again; I made term-long enemies. I suffered embarrassing infatuations; I felt murderous jealousies. The music I still love most I first heard in Darwin, in adolescence. No doubt it is the same for everyone: the music that parallels the passionate emotional swoopings of our teenage years, the music that is the soundtrack of adolescence—all its angers, frustrations, lusts, jealousies and loves—sticks in our heads all our lives, as if melody is the stickiest burr of all, stickier even than the urgent lyrics that accompany it. We Got To Get Out Of This Place. Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. Why Don’t You All f-f-f-fade away!

  There were school-texts to match: Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, and (talking about my generation of rebellious young men) Hamlet.

  After school I read through the Darwin library, an old four-roomed un-airconditioned weatherboard Queenslander on the esplanade. The books were at the mercy of the Wet season humidity; I read them for two years, even as they fell apart in my hands, dying of monsoonal mildew and damp.

  But it was a quiet place, as if there were few readers in the pre-cyclone Beer Capital of the World. After school, I almost always had it to myself.

  Among the yearnings of my adolescence, the vagueness of which is matched only by their intensity (the word inchoate springs to mind, even if I still don’t understand its precise meaning), was a yearning for deeper explanation. Science had released me from my Methodist upbringing; I was now a zealous, evangelical atheist. With time, and sympathetic expert coaching, I would even try fucking standing up. But science had carried me only so far; I was looking for why not how. I wanted an answer to the fundamental question: why is there something rather than nothing? I read Plato, and Bertie Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. I say Bertie because I felt on first-name terms with these writers. I didn’t know what Plato’s first name was—Con maybe. There were a lot of Greeks called Con in Darwin. I read Fred Nietszche—now he was a character. I also read religion. I read the Old Testament and found a lot of genocide, an angry childish god, and any number of contradictions. With a friend I started a Freethinkers Club at Darwin High; in one of our lunchtime meetings we impeached God, and found him guilty of numerous war crimes. In my reading of the Bible I did find one joke—in Jonah. I read the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. Of course I read the Kama Sutra; I thought I could make a workable religion out of that. But the most interesting thing that happened was the day I plucked the Koran out of the shelves. It seemed as silly and wicked as the Old Testament—in many ways it was the same book—but I ploughed on through its nutty suras. As usual I thought I was alone in the library, but as I read a woman with dark Scheherazade eyes and a scarf over her head materialised at my side.

  ‘Are you interested in the Islamic faith?’ she asked, breathily.

  ‘Very interested,’ I told her, and we talked about Islam for some time. Or rather, whispered: for although no one else was present, we were in a library, and kept our heads close together, in a zone of intimacy. For a few minutes I felt the Koran was the most profound book I had ever read. And the sexiest since the Kama Sutra. Had she been sitting in a corner all day, every day, watching the spine of the Koran, waiting for someone to pluck it out? This explanation seemed too prosaic for such a magical experience: I preferred to think that by brushing the mildew from that book I had conjured a genie out of Arabian Nights.

  If she had offered me three wishes I know what the first would have been. It occurred to me that I had entered some magical library, where to pluck a book from the shelves was to bring the world of that book to life. And if it worked with the Koran, might other characters materialise? Where were the biographies of Audrey Hepburn?

  In fact, the next book I touched was by Gertrude Stein. Perhaps I was lucky she didn’t materialise. The book was Stein’s autobiography, the one called The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. Before she moved to Paris to write books, Stein studied medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. She also studied philosophy with one of the great philosophers of the day, William James, and the best story in the book was her account of her final philosophy exam, which took place on a sun-drenched summer day.

  Cooped up in the examination room, Stein wrote one sentence only on her paper. It went something like: ‘Dear Professor James, it’s too nice a day to be studying philosophy. I’m going out into the sun.’

  With that, she walked out. And when the results were posted, William James awarded her the top distinction.

  This story appealed to me no end. Not so much for its encapsulation of what philosophy is for (to know and not to act is not yet to know, as a Chinese proverb has it) as for its more smart-aleck, Wise-Child elements.

  In the mid-year English examination, opportunity knocked. No, opportunism knocked. I don’t remember the exact question—Hamlet’s Inchoate Irresolution, Discuss, 250 words, or some such—but I remember my 25-words-or-less answer. Shakespeare was writing sword-fighting spectaculars for Elizabethan audiences who couldn’t even read or write. He never intended there to be this kind of analysis.

  With that, I slapped my pen noisily on the desk and walked out into the sunshine feeling pretty pleased with myself.

  I wasn’t exactly expecting the top distinction—but neither was I expecting the mark I did get, which was zero.

  Of course, that was the mark I deserved, because I was wrong. I had known all along that I was wrong, but style won over substance during the exam.

  My mother no longer read to me each night, but there were other stories to be heard, told aloud. Around the corner from the Darwin library was the old Darwin Hotel, since razed to the ground. That year the pub hosted the World Talking Championship, sponsored by the local paper, the NT News. This was a knock-out competition, like Wimbledon, in which yarn-spinners w
ent head-to-head, or mouth-to-mouth, until finally there were only two talkers left standing. That year the finalists were a local tattoo artist called Talking Tex Tyrrell, and a famous writer from the south, Frank Hardy.

  The final got me out of the library for a few afternoons—you could hear stories rather than read them. The two contenders took turns telling stories, like competing Scheherazades. They alternated for three days, until Talking Tex was storied out, and Frank Hardy was declared the undisputed Talking Champion of the World.

  And would wonders never cease: the next day there he was—an Author—on the front page of the News, elbowing LBJ and Princess Margaret and Grace Kelly into fifteen minutes of obscurity.

  5. Epilogue

  In 1969 I left the last of my family homes and moved to Adelaide to board and study medicine, although the first book I bought was not Gray’s Anatomy but my own copy of History of Western Philosophy. My literary hero that year, and for many years after, was not an Author but a character: Socrates, who I knew not from Plato or Thucydides but only from my friend Bertie. Socrates, I read, was put to death for polluting, or corrupting, the minds of his students.

  Irony was my own first pollutant. Or perhaps the first irritant—so much of who I am seemed to grow like a pearl around the grit of the ironies of The Happy Lion, and the later irreverences of Mad magazine. Just as my love of story grew around the kernel of the dark mystery at the heart of a single Arabian Night, and what it told me about my own stupid heart. Or from listening at the door to Frank Hardy and Talking Tex Tyrrell slugging it out, pub brawlers using words instead of fists in a front bar in the Beer Capital of the World. Or is this just another story itself? Which were the fingers and which were the gloves: the stories or me? Would I have found the stories that suited me, that already were me, even if they had not accidentally found me first, lucky-dipped from brown paper parcels or Christmas stockings or the long shelves of libraries and the deep shelves of town dumps?

  I do know that the most constant furnishings in all the homes sweet homes of childhood I had now left behind forever were the books, and their stories. The most durable and lifelong friends I made, in that gypsy childhood, were authors, often dead authors, which made for one-sided, posthumous friendships. But in whichever home we lived, their books were the best windows, smaller than those made of glass, but offering the best views.

  And if each book was a window, then the libraries, my sweet homes away from home, were great cathedrals of stained glass, as jewelled and bright as any Reckitt’s Blue or green angelica or Mikado’s handpainted fan.

  Distance Looks Our Way Marion Halligan

  Recently I went back to New Zealand, again. We arrived in Christchurch very late at night. We—who is we? you might wonder. Once I used to call John my gentleman caller, but circumstances spoiled that name, whose ironies were perhaps not always observed. He was a widower, I a widow, ten years ago and more it is now, and we have got together. There isn’t a good word: companion, partner; sometimes I say husband but that’s not true. We is best. The occasion was the Christchurch Writers’ Festival. Once there was another we, Graham and me, innocent untravelled Australian that I was then, newly married, going to visit new relations.

  So, this second we arrived in a Christchurch hotel very late at night, and when I went out the next morning and looked at the city, at the Port Hills and the distant jagged snow peaks of the Alps, at Cathedral Square with its limestone buildings, at the brown river winding between green banks, I felt how it still all belonged to me.

  I first saw it when I was that young woman and new wife, twenty-three years old; it was my husband’s city and I thought it was quite likely to become mine. I passionately wanted it to be my home. I longed to live in an old white-painted wooden house, with bay windows and leadlights, with panelled walls and odd angles and attics, with a plate rack at picture-rail height, a garden full of fruit trees and a green sward of lawn sloping to a creek across the front like the house he had grown up in. Graham told me narratives of the city and his place in it, as child and student, as new couples do; he took me to dark little coffee shops and narrow pubs, we walked through the university that wasn’t any longer and he mourned its departure to the suburbs.

  Going to live in New Zealand never did happen. It nearly did, there was even a job, not taken, for various at the time good reasons; the children weren’t keen, for one thing, and there was less money, even though the job was a promotion. And perhaps an unwillingness to leave the home we had, that we all loved, that I still live in, here in Canberra. But somehow that passionate looking, on that first blissful visit and on later occasions, shaped by my husband’s seductive stories of his life, had given the city to me. Had given it a presence in my consciousness, as though it had actually been home for me. As a writer I did know that what if is often more potent than it came to pass.

  On this last occasion, after the festival was over and we were staying with her, my niece Jill drove us out to the estuary of the Avon River. My niece: she is not of my blood but she is family. My husband is dead, but his family is still mine. You see there the potency of marriage and its creation of new and indissoluble bonds. She and her mother are not of my blood but they are of my children’s blood and they are my family. Jill drove me and John and my sister-in-law to see a cousin who lives on the water at Redcliffs, in a house with a sea wall that is lapped by the high tide. The house had been a shack where the cousin’s parents had retired, a fisherman’s cottage with a long back garden to the street; there’s a picture of my son as a small child catching a fish from the front veranda. When her parents died the cousin pulled the shack down and built a new house on the same footprint, with windows looking over the water. We had tea and cake; tea and cake are a habit with my New Zealand relatives. As we were driving home along the edge of the estuary John glanced out the car window and said, What are those birds? Those long-legged water-birds.

  But it was too late by the time the others looked, they were beyond a turn in the bay. There were a lot of water birds in New Zealand, they said.

  That night watching the television news we found out. There was a picture of the cathedral in the Square, this imposing nineteenth-century stone building, and you heard its bells ring out tumultuously, in the glorious way of bells. It’s the godwits, said my sister-in-law, the godwits have returned. They always ring the cathedral bells when the godwits come back in the spring. That’s what you saw, she said to John, those water birds, they were the godwits. Her eyes shone, she was very excited that he had caught that glimpse of them.

  If you Google godwits you find that they fly south from Alaska every year: five days it takes them to fly eleven thousand miles, without stopping. They are the bar-tailed godwits. The route they take is not coastal but over the open sea, and they use storms to speed them with a tail-wind. But I did not know any of that then; what had told me about them was a work of art, Janet Frame’s novel Towards Another Summer. This was published in 2007, though she wrote it in 1963; she wanted it to come out only after she died. Although some of its material will be familiar from her autobiography you can see why she wouldn’t want it read while she was a young woman: in it she is naked, skinned, raw. She is coming to terms with herself, her writing, her nature, and it is painful. Particularly with her fear of having no place, of not belonging, not fitting, of having no home anywhere.

  In the first pages of the novel she tells us she has discovered her true identity: she is a migratory bird—‘warbler, wagtail, yellowhammer? cuckoo-shrike, bobolink, skua? albatross, orange bishop, godwit?’ They are the birds not just of her homeland but of the rest of the world. They inhabit the poetry of her country, which is an essential part of her mind’s furnishing. The evoking of the birds is a litany that runs through the book. The title of the novel comes from a poem by Charles Brasch, one of the country’s beloved poets; I am struck by the affection New Zealanders have for their poets. Part of this poem is the epigraph of the book. The last lines read:

  Re
mindingly beside the quays, the white

  Ships lie smoking; and from their haunted bay

  The godwits vanish towards another summer.

  Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring

  Shadow of departure; distance looks our way;

  And none knows where he will lie down at night.

  This is the image Janet Frame had of herself: the writer as migratory bird. I think she was trying to come to terms with her fear she was at home nowhere, but it seems to me the bird is at home in both places, it needs both places, it skilfully and even incredibly navigates between the two. Its life is a series of returns. It departs from one home in order to arrive in another. As the writer does, between the places of her heart.

  It is from not-at-home that one can more clearly see what home is. I have said that Christchurch is my what-if home. From there we took a trip to the west coast; the great sounds of Doubtful and Milford, in the uninhabited area now known as Fiordland but called Shadowland by Maori, who didn’t actually live there but travelled in it in search of greenstone. They were thoroughly other, there was no home however potential there, and as I sailed on their deep cold tea-coloured waters, I thought about Janet Frame and the godwits and it seemed to me that the two places of the writer are her home and her imagination, where she also lives, and which in its turn can make its own place of unlikely habitations. When you travel in New Zealand you find Janet Frame’s footprint in a lot of places. In Oamaru the house where she lived is marked on the tourist mud map, though in the street it is not identified, and the library has an exhibition of her typewriter and manuscripts; the motel has a little flyer telling you so. Imagine a frilly old-fashioned motel on the highway into town supposing you will want to go to the library and look at an exhibition of Janet Frame memorabilia. (I wondered, as often over the years, what would my career have been like had I been a writer in New Zealand? My friends there do not feel especially valued, but I think Australia might be a shock to them; I have this argument often with Fiona Kidman, who is a dame—that’s being valued. They have wonderful feuds, which suggest that writing matters, and ordinary people get angry with them.)