The Promise of Iceland

by Kári Gíslason

  Then, my mother had an idea.

  ‘Would you like a trip to Australia?’ she asked me. She suggested I could go and live with my Aunty Lee, Mum’s sister.

  ‘On my own?’

  ‘Luv, I can’t keep moving you around like this. You need to go to school. Be settled. And it’ll only be for six weeks or so. I’ll have more time to look and have a better chance of finding work. As soon as I’ve got a permanent job, I’ll send for you.’

  I was the same age as Mum was when the Diggons family had first moved to Thumb Creek. If I was looking for patterns and cycles, I would say that it seemed the right age for a solo trip. While Mum’s had been on Bluey, mine was on a Singapore Airlines 747. My travelling companions were a troop of light-footed hostesses in tight dresses who moved me every three or four hours—to the cockpit for a chat with the pilots, to an empty bar on the top deck for a sleep, and up to one of the wide, first-class seats for the landing. Like Mum’s ride on Bluey, the flight confirmed a twin loss, ones I suppose we all face at some point in our lives: your parents have to let you go, and you have to leave home.

  My Thumb Creek was the village of Cowwarr in Gippsland, Victoria, a dry, expansive region of farms and mills. There was a small school, not unlike Thumb Creek, with Mr Morcom, a kindly teacher in shorts, long socks, and a brown, short-sleeved shirt.

  ‘We have a new student, today,’ he said when I arrived for my first day. ‘He’s come from a long way away, from Iceland in fact.’ The others looked at me, each with the open faces of bush kids.

  ‘I think we should welcome him with a geography quiz. We’ll expect you to win this one, Kári. Take out a clean sheet of paper . . .’

  We did.

  ‘. . . and write down all the countries you can think of.’

  Just as at Thumb Creek School, my welcome was given the same exotic spin that Mum’s had had, in my case it was formed out of a list of twenty-two countries of the world. After class, the other kids crowded me in, asked about Iceland, and offered me visits to their farms. The McCredie boys were insistent. They were the animal collectors of the class. They would show me their snakes, and possums, and lizards, and guns. They would let me drive an old car they’d been given. The McCredies, along with my cousin Ray, also wanted to show me round the back of the shop. This was because it was the one place in Cowwarr you weren’t allowed to go.

  ‘It’s full of snakes back there,’ said Aunty Lee. But buried in the long grass was a great treasure, the wreck of a white Ford Falcon. It had wide seats and a big steering wheel, soft-worn pedals, and crunching gears.

  ‘Have you ever seen a snake in here?’ I asked Ray.

  ‘Lots.’

  ‘Are they dangerous?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Could they kill you?’

  ‘Yep.’

  The McCredies said they’d keep an eye out for us as they wanted to catch a snake.

  ‘Do you really think you’d be able to catch one if you saw it?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep.’

  Cowwarr was that sort of town. A ‘Yep’ town.

  I’m sure I seemed strange to them. When Aunty Lee took my cousins and me shopping in Traralgon, the nearest big town, I spent fourteen of my fifteen-dollar allowance for the special outing on a red, Parker 45 fountain pen. It’s the defining story of my personality, Aunty Lee had said, and she tells it every time we meet.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ she always says, ‘a ten year old spending all his money on a fountain pen.’

  Like many small towns, Cowwarr had picked a moment in history that it liked and stuck with it. It would always be the late fifties there, and this came as a shock to someone from Iceland, where everyone dealt with their sentimentality by rushing at the future. Aunty Lee and her husband Lindsay wore the hairstyles of the film heroes from their youth, and the friends who came through their screen door at the back invariably had their ciggies rolled into the sleeves of their shirts and took up a leaning position against the wall. It was the James Dean lean, I now realise. If there wasn’t a wall handy, they put their feet up on a stool and leant forward against their knees.

  ‘Do you like Elvis?’ Aunty Lee asked me.

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard a lot of Elvis songs. One of Mum’s friends has the biggest Elvis collection in Iceland.’

  ‘That must be quite something,’ said Lindsay. ‘The biggest collection in Iceland! But what about The Beatles, Kári? Lee’s nuts about them.’

  ‘Oh yes, they’re okay, too. But I really like Roger Whittaker and Engelbert Humperdinck.’

  ‘Is that what they’re listening to in Iceland?’ asked Lindsay.

  ‘Yes. But I’m not sure that Mum likes Engelbert Humperdinck as much as me.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ said Lindsay.

  ‘But she loves Roger Whittaker. She has two of his cassettes.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Aunty Lee. ‘The whistler?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him.’ I whistled a few bars of ‘Old Durham Town’. Even then, it was my kind of song, over-sentimental and all about a long-held regret over home. And it fitted Cowwarr better than Aunty Lee would have liked to admit. This village cared only for itself and the little scandals, heroics and comedies of rural life. I understood it all: the footy club, the pub, the corner shop—they were the Australian versions of the smallness I cherished in Iceland. The plot points . . . this time I saw them for what they were.

  I stayed at Cowwarr for three months, and then there came news from Mum that she’d found a permanent job at last. It was hard to leave. Melbourne Airport was treated to the Diggons’ side of the family as they embraced in a rare moment of raw family emotion.

  ‘You poor thing,’ said the hostess. ‘You’ll see your Mum and Dad again soon, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m flying to Mum now.’

  The hostess gave me a sideways look. I didn’t understand why I was so upset at leaving Aunty Lee and Uncle Lindsay, and I was too distressed to think about why going home suddenly seemed as difficult as it was when I left it. But perhaps I had begun to realise that home would never again be an automatic thought, and that instead it would always flicker like a broken light between Iceland, England, and Australia.

  My mother met me off the plane and we went to a B & B.

  ‘I’ll be working at a school,’ she told me. ‘You’ll get to go there. It’s a boarding school called “Mostyn House”. You’ll be sleeping in a dorm with the other boys. You won’t mind that too much, will you?’

  Yes, I would. I think I’d reached my limit. We had left Iceland, I had been sent on my own to Australia, and now I was losing my mother again. I threw myself under the phone table and cried, and for the rest of the evening clung to Mum’s legs, imploring her to call the school and say no to the job. She couldn’t, of course, but by the end of the night she offered as much. She’d call the whole thing off if I really wanted her to. But, she asked, what would she do instead?

  Here was another echo of Mum’s early life, how she had cried to Harold after her first day at Thumb Creek School, a signature story for their relationship. For a year, my half-day Sunday visits home always ended with me crying my way back along the bleak, long corridor of the back entrance to the school, which we used after home visits. Other boys, many younger than me, didn’t see their parents at all during term; perhaps that would have been easier than these Sunday partings. But I was one of the weak ones, or dramatic ones, or lost ones, and the weekly separations were awful.

  Strangely, they also made me less independent than I’d been in Iceland. My early friendships at the school formed quickly and became intense, needy even. I would look out for my mother whenever I passed her office and when I knew she would be on her way home after work. I thought more and more about Gísli and where he might be. And out of those thoughts I began to imagine a lif
e that I thought he ought to have.

  Apart from the Sunday visits home, there was nothing for us beyond the school gates, and any mingling with kids from the nearby state school was punished with detention. The school, rather like Iceland, saw itself as an island apart. A young teacher who had just come down from Oxford, himself an ex-pupil, yelled at us for ten minutes for talking over the fence to the ‘local fucking scum’. But, then, most signs of humanity were punished here: no hands in pockets, no dragging your feet, no talking, no eating, and so on. It was all standard boarding school stuff. Your entire world mediated through rules, conditions and, eventually, privileges—a total institution as the theorist Foucault called it. Even the depth of your evening bath was marked by a dot, and we ‘first’ and ‘second’ bathers were timed to the minute.

  Food, like hot water, was served up by monitors with the portions entirely at their discretion, and often painfully unfair. In the mornings, the unpopular boys woke to find their clothes smeared in Vaseline. On other nights, their beds were up-ended in a ritual known as the ‘lamppost’. The idea was to trap the victim at the base of his upturned bed. The only way out was for him to push the bed down off the wall, which would wake Matron and bring her up from a lair she occupied somewhere near Blue Dorm.

  It never paid to disturb a Matron, and this one was no different. Called ‘Wooden Tit’ because of her rumoured replacement breast, she had an unpredictable smack that expressed all her frustrations sharply and without pity. You’d hear, ‘Don’t eat like a monkey’, just seconds before she hit you on the back of your head. Once, when Griffiths spilt his milk and took a blow from Matron, Wilson said to him, ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk.’ He was trying to be funny to appease Griffiths, but Wilson shouldn’t have said anything; he was, after all, one of the boys routinely lampposted. Griffiths picked up a steel serving spoon.

  ‘I’m going to kill you, Wilson,’ he yelled. Matron tried to calm him.

  ‘Get away from me, you stupid fucking bitch,’ he replied. ‘Get the fuck away from me.’ Matron held out her hand, and he hit it. ‘Get away from me, you one-tit cow.’

  It was wonderful, and dreadful. And that was how it went. No-one got angry until they were ready to go completely mad. It wasn’t worth it otherwise, because only the moments of total despair went unpunished. There was always some sympathy for the ones who lost it in the way Griffiths did that night.

  I was sitting next to him and I knew, and felt precisely, everything his anger expressed: a dozen lousy farewells, weeks of homesickness, and the nagging sense that we were here because our parents wanted us out of the way. Then, when Matron hit you on the back of the head, you exploded. I had never liked Griffiths much, but after that night I liked him very much. I wanted one of his explosions for myself.

  For me, it came in the television room. I had a front-row seat and it was Thursday night, Top of the Pops night, easily the most important night of the week. The room was filling up as more and more boys came in. Owen stood in front of me and said, ‘monitor’s privilege’. I had to move back a row to let him have the seat. Then, Durant stood in front of me and said, ‘monitor’s privilege’. I looked behind and the room was now full, and I had to stand.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Get the fuck out of the seat, Reid,’ he said.

  ‘Get fucked,’ I replied.

  ‘Get to the back, scum,’ he insisted.

  I dived for him, and punched him in the hipbone, while I buried my head in his stomach. He fell over the end of the bench, and the two of us hit the wall together. He was unsettled, panicked, and he was waiting for me to finish it. It was my chance. I might kill him. I dragged myself towards his face. Hit him, I thought. And, then, for a moment at least, I stopped thinking altogether. I was at him, and he wasn’t fighting back.

  Mrs Billington, my biology teacher, stepped in.

  ‘Get up! Get up!’ she shouted. ‘You know the rule,’ she said. ‘Outside.’ I walked out of the television room and began watching the programme from the window.

  ‘Not there, either,’ Billington yelled. ‘No TV if you fight.’

  All these unnatural rules couldn’t have been more removed from the freedoms I’d had in Reykjavík and Australia. But rules produced order and rhythm, and it was a productive school—I was never idle. Rules also produced those unexpected releases, when the energy beneath became too much to contain. It seemed as though nothing would happen, but then suddenly there was an escape. The structures collapsed as the TV room became an untidy fight scene, and the insanity of order was revealed.

  Not that I thought such things then. No. Later that night, I merely worried that Durant would get back at me somehow, and that I wouldn’t be up to much in our second round. I knew that, without anger, I was a pushover. But he didn’t come for me. Instead, the next time we met, he looked ashamed, as though I’d beaten him, when all I’d really done is fall on him.

  I was no hero, no match for my namesake from Njál’s Saga. The creed of the Vikings was to act coldly—only cowards needed anger as a fuel for action. More fitting prototypes lay further south. Like Hamlet, I waited until the last minute, reflecting endlessly on my absent father until fate drew an action out of me. Or, like Odysseus, wandering from island to island, seemingly avoiding home instead of looking for it.

  Mostyn House School was where you learnt to put up with life: as in all total institutions, a great deal of our energy went into naturalising the conditions of our imprisonment, and making it seem as though nothing would change. It was self-consciously a school of systems and, of course, the first system it taught you was to get along without your parents.

  Yet there was a paradox. Despite all of the school’s structures, its approach to knowledge and, in particular, language was free and wonderfully encouraging. It was thanks to Mostyn House that I eventually went to university, I’m sure. I was the first person on my mother’s side of the family to do so. At the age of ten, I could only read and write in Icelandic but the school gave me English, my mother’s tongue.

  I was put into ‘Non-Latin’, the charming name given to remedial English classes that ran at the same time as Latin was put on for the rest of the school. A dozen of us spent an hour with Miss King and her fountain pen. She was, in fact, all about pens, as I had once been myself and would eventually become again. She was a great corrector. But it took someone like Mr Boston, who taught me geography, to later recognise my abilities and intellect, and that was because I was an oddity, his favourite type in life.

  Mr Boston was pleased that I was from Iceland and that I’d flown directly from Australia to attend the school. It meant he could defer to me on topics as wide-ranging as marsupials, volcanoes, cod stocks, Vikings, QANTAS and the Fischer-Spassky game, which, he told me, was held in Reykjavík on the year of my birth.

  ‘It was the match of the century,’ he said, ‘as I’m sure you know.’ As a matter of fact, I did. But what pleased Mr Boston even more than my complex origins was my even hand, my grace with the pen, and here he was probably indebted to Miss King and her early insistence on the proper shaping of letters. The exercise books that I left in the school desks at the far corner of the New Wing were, he said, exemplary. I had the neatest handwriting in the school, the least complex, and I was barely two years in.

  It was not the most sought-after honour in the school, but it would have to do. I was tall, big for my age, as Mum had been as a child, and that was enough to get me picked for most of the sports teams. But I was only ever competent, never fast or clean with the ball. Yet, when it came to handwriting, no-one doubted my skills, and for three years running I claimed the little-known Mostyn House School Handwriting Cup.

  I now see that my handwriting influenced the way I wrote, and what I had to say. But also the way I read. It was the shape of language on paper that mattered as much to me as meaning. Perhaps because my understanding was imperfe
ct, I found English more visual than Icelandic, as though English were really a language of symbols and shapes, not words. It outlined the world rather than saying it directly—a language of suggestion rather than expression. Why else have so many words that no-one understands properly? And, most pleasant of all, English even took you away from meaning towards a hazy oblivion, rather like my fight with Durant. The language was textured, but it was also blank. You went at it, and it kind of disappeared. Take the metaphorical way Mr Grenfell, the Headmaster, spoke to us.

  Every school morning began with an Anglican service: a psalm, a hymn, a reading, and that most English of touches, the daily announcement—normally a birthday or an achievement, but quite often a problem. And, often, the announcement contained two of Mr Grenfell’s phrases that I couldn’t ever fully naturalise: he was ‘sick to the back teeth’, and our behaviour ‘stuck out like a sore thumb’. Was he being literal? Could one look at his back teeth? Was there at some point a sore thumb sticking out?

  But I fell in love with English, and with the hours you could spend inside it, as though you were entering a series of rooms, each one taking you further from your original intention, each one a brush stroke separated from the final painting. It didn’t matter whether you understood what all the words meant, or, at least, I didn’t think so. What mattered was that there was an alternative to the Mostyn House grind, to the clarity and the precision of the school system, and it was an alternative that the school, to its credit, sponsored in very rich English classes. In its attitude to the language, the school had in fact found an extra room, a second self that was full of imagination and feeling. I became the English student, the one who loved the set texts and whose stories were read out to class. At the same time, I forgot every word of Icelandic I’d ever known.