This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  As he undressed he said to me, almost apologetically: ‘I didn’t like to butt in because I thought you didn’t want me to, but I was there all the while. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know that. Thanks for keeping out, Arthur.’

  Book Two

  1

  Our house at Warpoon was built on top of a hill. It was a small, weather-board house with a gable end and a veranda extending round three sides. At the back a fowl-yard occupied an open space amid red box trees, and behind it a three-acre paddock sloped down to a dam at the foot of the gully. This was the horse paddock where the grey horse cropped the sparse grass or stood with pricked ears looking up towards the house while it listened for the rattle of the kerosene tin that Father filled each night with chaff to carry down to its feed-box.

  An orchard partly surrounded the house. From the front veranda one could see across these trees, across the dirt road a hundred yards below to a valley squared with paddocks in the midst of which nestled a farmhouse. Beyond the valley were bush-covered hills with Warpoon Creek curling round each thrusting spur, its course marked by a line of black wattle.

  In the north was the Dividing Range, dark blue on the grey days but pale and intangible as the ghost of mountains when the air shimmered in the heat of summer.

  I was to spend almost a year in these surroundings while looking for work. Now that I was older the wages award demanded I be paid more and this made it much more difficult to find an employer willing to give me a job. Boys just leaving school were cheaper.

  I spent the mornings writing letters in answer to advertisements in the paper; in the afternoons I went for walks round the creek. I was experiencing a sense of freedom and elation that my failure to find work could not subdue. The renewing of my association with the clean world became almost an identification with tree and bird and sun. The sharpness of my pleasure in rediscovery was sometimes so intense I could have shouted and flung my arms wide or lain with my face against the earth listening to music only the enchanted hear.

  Quartz gravel, dry gum-leaves, bleached twigs and pieces of bark were rich with meaning. The floor of the bush was a narrative poem, the bush an evocation.

  Shadow and sunlight, reaching limbs of trees, the rustle of grass, shapes and colours and odours, demanded a complete absorption to uncover the heart of their beauty. I felt I had been imprisoned for a lifetime in a dungeon and now, freed, the revelation of a communicating beauty lying confined in all that I was seeing brought with it a frustrating awareness of my inability to release it so that it would surround men and women for ever. There was anguish in this unattainable desire, and tears, and a sense of deprivation.

  I wanted to proclaim my message, if not in books then by talking.

  Sometimes I had attempted, when stirred by the sight of a spider orchid, maybe, or the flight of a bird, to take adults on a fanciful journey of the spirit, in search of a truth beyond what the eye was seeing. It demanded of them an emotional response suggestive of children and this they could rarely give. They associated it with immaturity.

  Shielded by books and facts and their belief in accepted authorities, they were incapable of becoming participants in wonder, only kindly and critical observers of those experiencing it. The years of development they had left behind were sprinkled with stars—the sharp lights of remembered experiences. The same experiences in later years never created a light.

  What was once a magical experience becomes commonplace with repetition and there comes a time in the lives of most people when the eyes and ears fail to register an unadulterated wonder and excitement, but are used as instruments to revive memories that flicker like a match for a moment then die away. It had all happened before; it would happen again. But I knew that each moment contained something unknown, something never experienced before, an enchantment only it could provide.

  When with naïveté I sought to share the experience of such a moment with an adult his interest would be directed not at the object that inspired the moment, but at me, who before him was revealing the mind of a child. Men and women, almost invariably desirous of impressing, seek to suggest a past of wide experience in their manner towards those they regard as naive or childlike. They always know. The plea, ‘Reveal to me what you are seeking; my eyes have failed me,’ could only come from a man with a rare mind.

  A child is a man with his eyes open, said a wise man. I found in children the response I needed to feed my imagination and develop in me a resolve to form my own conclusions, make my own judgments and write from my own experience.

  Five children lived in the farmhouse below our place. One of them, Leila, a little girl of five, had recently come to live with us. She had fair hair bound into two tiny plaits, eager blue eyes, and faced people with the expression of one anticipating enjoyment. She ran barefooted over the grass—she had never known shoes or stockings—revelling in an action that to her was a form of enjoyment.

  When I expressed wonder that the burrs and gravel did not hurt her feet she became eager to demonstrate their toughness and she would lead me on little journeys to gravelly stretches of the paddock or where burrs lay thick in the grass and she would run over these places smiling happily while watching my face for expressions of admiration.

  ‘I can run like the devil now,’ she said to Mother when Mother bought her a pair of shoes.

  These exhibitions of her resolute character aimed at impressing me were quite unnecessary. I loved and admired her long before she sought to inspire these feelings in me by running, climbing trees, chasing hens, gathering eggs or singing ‘Save My Mother’s Picture From the Sale’.

  Each morning in the kitchen Mother removed the dressings that bound Leila’s little body in swathes of white gauze. She took them from around her upper arm, from her neck, from part of her chest and shoulder, and revealed the weeping flesh left by flames.

  Leila’s father, Jim Jackson, was working the farm for a city owner. He rose each morning at five o’clock and from our home you could hear his voice shouting to the dog as he brought the cows in for milking.

  In the winter it was dark and cold, and his wife would light the wood-stove and have a cup of tea ready for him on his return from the paddock. They would then go down to the yard together and milk the cows beneath the light of the hurricane lantern that hung swinging from a rafter in the shed when gusts of wind struck it.

  Mrs Jackson was in poor health. She was a thin woman with large, dark eyes that looked at the world in sad contemplation. She never went visiting or moved beyond the house and the cow-yard. She accepted her restricted life of hard work and poverty without complaint.

  Her five children, four girls and a boy, wore threadbare clothing that, at nights, she stitched and mended in the light of a Miller kerosene lamp suspended by two thin chains from the kitchen ceiling.

  Her eldest girl, Sally, was twelve years old, and while her mother and father were milking in the yard she would rise and light the candle in the bedroom where all the children slept, then wake them and go out into the kitchen to prepare their breakfast.

  But often they could not find their clothes, or their chilblains hurt, or they quarrelled over who was to get up first, and she would have to return from the kitchen to quieten them.

  One morning Leila upset the lighted candle on the box beside her bed as she bounced up and down on the spring mattress before getting up. It fell against her flannelette night-gown which burst into flames. She ran screaming to the kitchen where Sally threw a saucepan of water over her before gathering her up in her arms.

  She lowered her to the floor, then ran down the yard to tell her parents. In a few minutes Jim Jackson was knocking at our door asking for Mother, to whom people turned when trouble came to them.

  When I returned from Wallaby Creek a week later Mother was looking after Leila who was going through a painful stage of recovery. By this time she felt herself so much a part of the household that she adopted the role of a guide towards me, eve
n pointing out my books.

  ‘These belong to you and I’m not allowed to touch them.’

  ‘Would you like to touch them?’ I asked her.

  ‘No, I only like to touch babies.’

  On my daily walks she accompanied me, skipping just behind me, watching my leaps with envy.

  ‘You’re lucky to be walking on crutches, aren’t you, Alan?’

  I thought of Gunner and his contemptuous reaction to my crippled state and wondered if it was this little girl who saw the truth. Some horses need the curb bit to develop their action and restrain their fire. Without this discipline they are of little use in the service of man.

  When we came to Leila’s home her sisters came running out, if it was a Saturday and no school, and they always shouted their news to her when we were some distance away. Since it was always calculated to establish their superiority in experience Leila received it without enthusiasm and always met it with a counter-claim.

  ‘One of the dogs was sick this morning. Mum was the first to see it,’ shouted Sally from the veranda when we were entering the front gate.

  ‘I’ve got three pennies,’ yelled Leila.

  I was familiar with such exchanges.

  ‘I tell you times are bad,’ a man in the bar at Wallaby Creek said to a companion. ‘I’ve only got a week’s work ahead of me.’

  ‘They won’t toss me,’ said the companion. ‘I’ll be holding all right as long as the rabbits keep breeding.’

  It was fascinating, this tying up of man with child, this inter-weaving of threads from one pattern to another. The finished design of each was the work of all. Children’s hands were working on mine now and I was happy in their contribution.

  Sally was the eldest of the five. Next to her came Susan who was ten; then Nell, eight; Leila, five; and Jim, the baby, three.

  Jim didn’t come with us on our expeditions. He clutched the pickets of the gate through which he watched us go, restraining his tears at the price of the biscuit I always had ready for him.

  Sally was a thin girl with a responsive face that in repose suggested a mind in touch with lovely things. Her personality reflected extremes in feeling. She responded with distress to tales of cruelty to animals; her indignation was deeper than her sisters’, her happiness more intense, her sadness and sufferings harder to bear. The weather played a big part in her state of mind. Grey, wet days depressed her.

  ‘I feel like a sheep,’ she complained to me one gloomy morning, but when the sun shone and birds sang she skipped and danced with happiness.

  Once when the day was bright and the grass green she confided in me: ‘It’s one of those days when I feel as if I had grass in my hair. You know—like when you roll in the paddock in the sunshine.’

  The simplest things set her mood. Susan, when telling me a story about Sally, ended: ‘She happened to be in a good mood that day because we’d seen two blue wrens.’

  Susan was a practical person who wanted to be a ‘scrubber’ when she grew up. She scrubbed the floors at home with great industry, though sometimes with pauses of contemplation and intervals of happy dreaming during which she sat back upon her bent legs, the floor-cloth idle in her hand, and looked smilingly upon her work. She never forgot to post letters and always brought the right things home from the grocer’s. She did not like school where so many confident children pressed in upon her and where she had no opportunity to do things with her hands.

  Nell and Leila were the singers of the family. Nell had a voice that demanded a preliminary coughing and karking to prepare—‘Wait till I get my voice up first.’ When she finally burst into song the melody sometimes escaped her and she stopped: ‘No. Wait a minute. I’ll start again.’

  Leila sang like a bird. The words and the tunes of the songs she sang were generally of her own creating:

  I’m a bird flying.

  Don’t go, bird.

  I’m high over the trees.

  The trees, the trees, the trees.

  See Dad bring in the cows.

  Dad, dad, dad, dad . . .

  Our usual walk crossed the paddock where Leila danced ahead, watched by the cows interrupted in their feeding by her waving arms.

  ‘Alan, watch. You watch. I’m a little bird with brown wings. Watch, Alan. You watch me.’

  ‘What else would you like to be?’ I asked her this day, feeling a desire to share with her the same gaiety and seeking an image closer to me than a little bird with brown wings.

  ‘I’d like to be a fairy.’

  ‘You can’t be a fairy,’ said Susan. ‘Pick something sensible.’

  ‘A cow, then.’

  ‘I’d like to know what it feels like to be a cow,’ said Sally, looking thoughtfully at one we had just disturbed, ‘but I suppose they are like people and think they are better than other cows.’

  I was the pupil in my walks with the Jackson children and my notes began to improve in consequence. The world that the hotel at Wallaby Creek had presented was of men and women in retreat from life, a rout of people drinking while Rome burned.

  Long association with such people would tend to destroy a faith in man’s ability to rise to noble heights. Association with children who confronted a world in which great and noble deeds, joy and happiness were not only possible but inevitable restored in me a confidence in my future that failure to get a job was undermining.

  2

  One of my applications for employment brought an answer from a haberdashery warehouse, Smog & Burns, in Flinders Lane. The job was for a junior clerk capable of running an office on his own. The advertisement demanded he be an accountancy student past Intermediate standard.

  Father said that such an advertisement suggested mean people searching for a youth at low wages to fill a man’s job. He had recently bought a spring-cart, the new paint on which concealed the putty filling the cracks of age and decay. The putty fell out piece by piece during the first few days of the spring-cart’s use. The man who had sold it to Father had shaken hands with him too, and this was the final perfidy. Now Father thought all city sales-people were crooks and he warned me not to trust a firm who expected a junior clerk to run an office.

  I was interviewed by a woman about fifty years old, Mrs Rosalind Smalpeck, the owner of Smog & Burns. I was to learn that she had once been the cook of Mr Burns, a wealthy widower, then his mistress. When he died he left her the warehouse that was the source of his wealth.

  She had a nose like the beak of a hawk and eyes just as merciless as those that guide this bird of prey. Her skin was coarse and dark, and converging lines of tension met at the corners of her mouth, stitching it into a tight line of inflexibility.

  Though she gave an impression of masculinity she was bedecked with jewellery. Several rings flashed on her fingers, proclamations of her success in making money. She wore four bangles, gold ear-rings. Her taut neck was encircled by ropes of amber beads. Everything she wore clashed and jarred in vulgar acclaim of her march from the kitchen sink to the owner’s office.

  The surprise she had shown at seeing me on crutches was replaced by a calculating expression that dwelt on her face while she was considering the import of my disability. I had not expected this promising sign.

  She’s thinking of putting me on, I thought. I wondered why. She was not the type who would be content with less than complete efficiency, and efficiency to her would be demonstrated by running feet answering a bell rather than by a man sitting quietly in a chair. She wasted no time in prevaricating as most men would in her position. She had made up her mind.

  ‘You’re crippled,’ she said, then added as her eyes assessed me: ‘And badly, too. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘You’ll never get work in your condition and at your age, but I feel sorry for you. I know I will never get a man as good as the one who is leaving, but there you are. I’ll give you the job, but you can’t expect me to pay you the rates I would pay a normal, healthy man, and, besides, I will be sacrificing effi
ciency in the office. A capable youth of your age gets three pounds a week, I see by the award. I will pay you thirty shillings.’

  I hesitated, looking at the floor.

  ‘Take it or leave it,’ she said shortly, turning away.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it. But would you agree to this? If I work here for a year at that amount and do a satisfactory job, will you give me full award rates from then on? I will be twenty-one then.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course. If you work well for me for a year at thirty shillings and I decide to keep you on I will certainly pay you the full award rates. Yes, of course. You prove your worth and you won’t find me ungrateful.’

  She had dropped her aggressive attitude now that the horse-deal had been completed. The harness was strong, the animal ready for the pull.

  ‘Can you start tomorrow?’ And she was smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Nine sharp,’ she warned me. ‘Half an hour for lunch and you knock off at five.’

  She rose, and she was tall and big-boned and confident as a teamster.

  ‘Right,’ she said firmly, biting the word off like a command.

  I gathered myself, rose and moved obediently towards the door and I was already dragging the load.

  Before I took the train out to Warpoon I bought a paper and glanced down the advertisements for board and lodging. I selected an address close to the city. A sleep-out was available in East Melbourne for a man boarder and I went straight there by tram. A stout, motherly woman smiled at me then showed me the little detached room in her back yard. Since I would be away at home each week-end she lowered her charge to seventeen and six a week, lunches but no washing. I accepted it, promising to return next evening after work.

  Father was not too happy about the job, but he drove me down to catch the train next morning, confident Mrs Smalpeck would pay me full money before the year was out.

  ‘She couldn’t do otherwise once she sees your work,’ he said confidently. ‘No woman is that bad.’