This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

  The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

  A writer with an ear for the rhythms of Australian speech, Melbourne-based Alan Marshall published in the dominant social realist tradition of the 1940s and ‘50s. The author of short stories, journalism, children’s books, novels and advice columns, he is best remembered for the first book of his autobiography, I Can Jump Puddles (1955). His work is marked by a deep interest in rural and working-class life, with an emphasis on shared experience.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  ALAN MARSHALL

  This is the Grass

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Australasian Book Society Sydney in 1962

  Copyright © Alan Marshall 1962

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 486 9 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74343 182 5 (ebook)

  To

  My Friend

  Dr Ian C. Macdonald

  These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.

  If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing.

  If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing.

  If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

  This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

  This is the common air that bathes the globe.

  —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

  Contents

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Book One

  1

  I sat facing a man across a polished table. He was a heavy man who filled his padded swivel-chair as if moulded into it.

  His face was loose and full and revealed no bone structure beneath the flesh of his cheeks and chin. His blue eyes had the steadiness they had acquired from their constant use as instruments of observation. They had lost their power of friendly communication. They had been used too long to look at men and women as parts of a machine dedicated to his advancement to retain what I was seeking.

  He wore a tailored grey suit, and a white shirt, washed and starched in some exclusive, suburban laundry. The cuffs of the shirt, fastened by gold links, extended just the right distance beyond the sleeves of his coat. The skin of his pale hands was as thin as tissue paper. Across the backs of his hands it had loosened into a multitude of wrinkles though his palms were young.

  For six months I had been meeting men like him.

  He was looking at a letter he held in his hands. He was not reading it; he had already done so. He was searching his mind for words to say to me, words he found distasteful but which his conditioned mind demanded.

  I knew the contents of the letter he held; I had written it. It was dated 5 December 1920.

  ‘Dear sir,’ it said, ‘I see by this morning’s Age that you are advertising for a Junior Clerk to fill a vacancy in your office and I hereby apply for the position.

  ‘I am 18 years of age and am an accountancy student studying for the final examination. I have already passed the Intermediate.

  ‘I enclose copies of four character references. I have no references as to my clerical ability since I have not yet held a position in an office.

  ‘I would appreciate an interview with you, when I could furnish further particulars.

  Yours sincerely,

  Alan Marshall’

  A year before, when I had begun sending this letter to business-men advertising for a clerk, I had included another paragraph:

  ‘Unfortunately, through having contracted infantile paralysis in my childhood, I am forced to walk on crutches. This in no way impairs my ability as a clerk, nor does it prevent my carrying heavy ledgers.’

  I did not receive replies to this letter with its revealing paragraph, but failed to understand the reason until my father, worried over this lack of response, read one of my applications.

  He held the letter in his hands for a long time, then turned it over and looked at the back as if this blank side, too, were important. He returned it to the table and stood looking out of the kitchen window to where, beyond the sloping orchard that surrounded the house, the blue Dividing Range walled the horizon.

  He had come to a home in these timbered foothills twenty miles from Melbourne in order that I might study accountancy. I had won a scholarship at a Melbourne business college when we lived in the bush and this achievement seemed to my father evidence of a future in which important business-men would clamour for my services.

  Now he was experiencing the reality, a state he had reached with disbelief and shrinking reluctance, since it had been forced upon him without preparation from past experience. The outback values of equality and mateship upon which he had been nurtured and which he regarded as permanent aspects of human relationships were being threatened by the attitude of people towards his son. He had missed little of the implications inherent in the stories I told him of my experiences.

  He turned to me now and said: ‘I’d leave out that bit about your crutches if I were you. You see . . . Well . . . If you get an interview you’d be set, I think.’

  It seemed dishonest to me and I told him so.

  ‘They’ll have to find out sooner or later,’ I argued. ‘Why shouldn’t I tell them at the start so they’ll know? If I went to see a chap and I hadn’t told him I’d feel crook.’

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘What have you done? You’re all right; you tell him in the letter you’ll give him all the particulars about yourself when you see him. What’s wrong with that? If a bloke wants me to get him a horse that can pull, I’ll get him one that can pull. Say it’s blind now. Well, I tell him that after he has a look at the horse. One of the best horses I ever had was blind. You don’t have to tell them everything till you see them.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  I began to get answers to my letters. Men wrote asking me to come to their offices for an interview. I became familiar with the quick look of surprise that came upon their faces when I entered the office, the lowering of the head to my letter which they studied while adjusting their minds to this unexpected development. Then the indrawn breath of decision that lifted their shoulders a little, t
he meeting of our eyes. . . .

  ‘So you are on crutches, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I explained why.

  ‘Hm! Yes . . . Unfortunate . . .’

  The reasons they gave for rejecting my application were generally clothed in expressions of sympathy, softened by platitudes or unconsciously directed to feeding their admiration for themselves.

  So there were some who gained happiness and a feeling of pride in their excuses, and some who avoided my eyes as I rose to go.

  There was the breezy man with the watchful secretary:

  ‘I know how it is. You can’t tell me anything about crutches. I spent three months on them—ski-ing accident. I had to get driven to work for months.’

  He looked down at his hands that for three months had grasped the wood of crutches, and he was smiling.

  ‘Don’t you get sore under the arms.’ He was proffering information, not asking a question. ‘Very few people realise that about walking on crutches. I was red-raw under the arms.’

  Years before, so far back it seemed like an unpleasant dream, I had been ‘red-raw’ under the arms. Now my armpits were as tough as the soles of feet.

  ‘Yes, that is one of the problems,’ I said.

  The tall man with the military bearing and the grey moustache was more direct:

  ‘I know you won’t mind me mentioning your—er—well, physical disadvantages. They are obvious and it would be foolish of me and unfair to you to gloss over them. What is important is that they render you unfit for office work of the type that is demanded today, and there is nothing I can do about it. If I may offer a word of advice, I think you should learn to make baskets—something like that. I understand there are institutions that teach such things. They are organised to help people like you and they do a lot of good.’

  My father was standing beneath an apple tree when I told him what this man had said. He heard my story through, then clenched his eyes and twisted his face as if suddenly seized by some internal violence he sought to suppress. He raised his face to the sky, brought his two fists up beside it, then jerked them downwards as two explosive words burst from him: ‘Baskets! Jesus!’

  I found it was useless to argue with the men interviewing me. They resented my efforts to persuade them I could do the job.

  ‘It is very difficult for me to be frank in a case like this,’ pronounced one man, gazing at the finger-nails his thumb was testing on the hand curled in front of him, ‘but I know you would be a person who appreciates both frankness and honesty.’

  He turned from his nails a moment to look intently at me over his glasses as if a sudden doubt of my right to the claim demanded a still and merciless warning.

  I felt an answer was expected of me, a plea for mercy, maybe; a wringing of hands. . . .

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Being crippled, of course, is the trouble.’ His nails again engaged his attention. ‘The work here involves carrying heavy account books from the strong-room to the desks.’

  ‘I can carry ledgers.’

  ‘Yes, yes . . . That’s all right. But there are stairs.’

  ‘I can climb stairs.’

  He was becoming irritated. Loud and angry words were his method of strengthening a cause weakened by argument, but he controlled the impulse to shout at me, and said slowly and distinctly: ‘You don’t understand. The work here demands a strong, healthy body in those I employ. I’m sorry.’

  He rose and opened the door.

  The door . . . The door . . . The door . . . Doors that were held open and closed behind me—a long parade of doors like shields, held by men barring the way to independence, fulfilment. . . .

  Though the attitude of these men towards me varied according to their characters, they were bound by a common object—the preservation of their business. Their business was profit; their means of attaining it, efficiency. My crutches suggested inefficiency, a burden that profits would have to carry rather than a promise of their increase.

  But the words they said to me gave different reasons.

  I wondered what reasons this man would give for dismissing me, this man with the polished table upon which rested an onyx penholder with its two upright pens like horns protecting him. On one corner, framed in polished wood, was a photograph of a woman and two little girls. The woman was dressed in white and she sat on the stone wall of a sunken garden with the little girls leaning on her shoulders, their arms around her neck. It would be difficult to walk to that spot from the big house, a portion of which one could see towards the top of the picture. Crutches would slip in that steep garden.

  The man behind the table was finding it difficult to formulate suitable excuses. He returned my letter to the pile beside him. He riffled the letters with his thumb, his head bent sideways to watch as if the height of the pile interested him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, as if encouraging a decision rising reluctantly from uncertainty. ‘Yes . . .’

  He suddenly patted the pile of letters as if dismissing them, then turned to me and said crisply, while resolve was still strong: ‘I’m afraid you are not suitable for this job.’

  Having delivered himself of this judgment, to continue in such a tone must have seemed to him unnecessary. The axe had fallen; why continue to strike?

  ‘I wish I could employ you,’ he said in more normal tones, ‘but you just couldn’t stand up to the work.’

  I could usually face these men, observe them almost in a detached way fumbling for the right phrases, but I hung my head before this man.

  My father once told me about a horsebreaker he knew who sought to break the spirit of his horses. When he was breaking in a spirited horse he would say: ‘I’ll take him for a long run to get the fight out of him.’

  I felt like such a horse. A score of men sitting at tables had taken the fight out of me.

  A tired man in the street had said to me: ‘When a bloke’s got a job he owns a bit of everyone he sees; when he’s out of work they’ve all got the knock on him and all he wants to do is to get away from them.’

  I wanted to get out into the street, away from this man paying lip-service to generosity.

  He was waiting for me to speak; I had nothing I wished to say to him. But I spoke. As if to myself I expressed the thought then beating in my mind: ‘I need the money.’

  I think he was suddenly pleased that he could now reveal the generosity and kindliness he felt marked his character.

  ‘Oh!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes . . .’

  He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out two shillings, but I had raised my head and he put it back when he saw my face.

  I could have told him I already had two shillings in my pocket.

  An hour before, while waiting to keep this appointment, I had been standing in Bourke Street, my back against the concrete of the Myer Emporium. I was tired and drooped upon my crutches in what was to me an attitude of rest. I watched the people pass—the girls in cloche hats, bobbed hair and short, formless dresses; the blue-suited men with their starched collars and Borsalino hats. On the roadway cable-trams clanged warnings and strong horses pulled brewers’ wagons laden with barrels. Everything that moved had purpose.

  Some people looked at me, then glanced away. The glance of one stooped old woman was arrested by my appearance and she stepped out of the stream of people and stood in front of me, fumbling with her black bag. It was fastened by the grip of two little nickel knobs and these she clicked apart.

  While her thin, mottled hand searched within the bag she looked at me with eyes that age had not quite robbed of a youthful candour. Her face was no longer firm but had shrunken into folds and lines of character.

  She smiled and said gently: ‘It’s sad that you have come to this but I had a son once and he was crippled and I know all about it.’

  She placed two shillings in my hands. ‘It’s not much but it will help.’

  I felt the hot blood in my face. Some people had paused to watch us. I wanted to di
ssolve into nothingness, to remain hidden for ever from people. I put the two shillings in my pocket, then took her hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Maybe you will never realise how much your kindness has helped me. I wish everyone were like you.’

  ‘God bless you!’ she said, and she went away.

  I stood up. The man behind the table was suddenly relieved that the interview was over and he assumed a friendly manner. He rose quickly to his feet and hurried round to my side of the table with outstretched hand.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘No, thank you. I can manage.’

  2

  I received a letter from the secretary of the Donvale Shire Council in answer to one of my applications.

  The Shire Office was in Wallaby Creek, an isolated settlement twenty-eight miles from Melbourne. The hub of the settlement consisted of a general store, a blacksmith’s shop, a hotel and the Shire Office. This group of buildings was huddled together on the top of a hill, one of the many forming the foothills of the Dividing Range which lay a few miles to the north.

  Around the settlement the cleared paddocks of farms were open to the sun. Beyond them the untouched bush stood guarding the mountains, a barrier of brooding messmate, ironbark and red box trees awaiting the advancing axe.

  The Shire Office wanted a junior clerk at twenty-five shillings a week. The difficulty of getting board in such a place, of living on the wages offered, was all in my favour, I thought. Not many would apply for such a job.

  ‘Is it possible for you to call at the Shire Office for an interview?’ asked the secretary in his letter.

  Our house was eight miles away across the hills from the Shire Office. Father drove me over in the gig. We rocked together over rough dirt roads and talked about the job I felt sure I would get. Father was not so sure.

  ‘Take care you face him in the right way,’ he advised me. ‘You can tell how long a man’s been out of work by the way he asks for a job. A man just out of work holds his head up. He’s confident. The horse hasn’t kicked him yet. The bloke that’s been out for months is licked before he starts. He walks in like a cattle pup that’s been knocked about. Don’t do that. You’re just as good as he is. Walk in smiling. If he thinks you’ve been out for a long while he’ll just think there’s something wrong with you. What’s his name, by the way?’