After a few days Adrian began to understand the work of the Teachers’ Branch. On the Friday afternoon he found himself with nothing to do. (Coldbeck was out of the room organising the weekly tipping competitions for the races and football.) He studied the list of state primary schools in Victoria. There were hundreds he had never heard of. Teddywaddy, Tempy, Traynors Lagoon—most of their names were uninviting by comparison with the places he studied each night on his map of England.
Yet on each page of the Education Department’s list he found a few names straight from England. Macclesfield, Malmsbury, Mortlake—their green fields and leafy hedgerows promised peace and poetic inspiration far from the dust and scrub of the Mallee and the Wimmera.
Suddenly there was work to do. Adrian sharpened a green pencil from Coldbeck’s desk and turned to the first page of his list of schools. When he found a name from England he put a tiny green dot beside it. He worked through page after page until five o’clock. Then he took the list home in his leather satchel and spent most of the weekend with it.
On the Monday morning Coldbeck came in and threw his newspaper on his desk and said, ‘Now, young Adrian, let’s get cracking and shift some more of those temps.’
Adrian grinned at him. He was looking forward to his day’s work. His life in the public service would not be drudgery after all.
The headmaster at Horsham needed a temporary assistant urgently. Coldbeck told Adrian to find someone for Horsham from the list of temporary teachers. Adrian paused a moment and thought of the little village of Horsham. Someone from his list was about to be transferred to the green fertile countryside of Sussex.
The first name on the list was Rosalie G. Mentiplay. She had a pleasant name that would have sounded well among the farmlands of Horsham. But she was already in England—at Blackburn, a well-situated town in the northeast, if he remembered correctly.
Adrian left Miss Mentiplay at Blackburn and considered the next name—Rodney W. Louch. Mr Louch was at present in a temporary position at Warragul. This was just what Adrian had been looking for. He would move the young man from the uninspiring haunt of Gippsland Aborigines to Horsham. With any sort of imagination, Rodney W. Louch could turn his temporary transfer into a spiritual pilgrimage from the harsh landscapes of Australia to a greener country.
Adrian made a note of Louch’s journey on his blotting pad. He wanted to think of the fellow during the next few days while he was actually travelling to Horsham. Then he took all the necessary details across the room to the typist so that Louch’s Notice of Appointment would be in the mail that afternoon. He didn’t ask Coldbeck for his approval. He planned to present Coldbeck with the notice already typed and pretend he had forgotten to show it earlier.
The next few vacancies were at schools with names unconnected with England. Adrian chose temporaries to fill them without much interest and passed the names to Coldbeck’s desk for his approval. Then the school at Penshurst required a temporary teacher.
Adrian was ready. Penshurst, he knew, was buried among the hopfields and green swards of Kent. It was a worthy destination for any traveller. Brenda Y. Epworth would welcome the chance to set out from grim-sounding Black Rock for the rural peace of Penshurst.
At the end of the morning, when Coldbeck was approving Adrian’s transfers he frowned at the two that were already typed. But then he shrugged his shoulders and initialled them and took them with the others to the officer in charge. Adrian kept a straight face, but he was overjoyed. He realised he need not have taken special precautions to get his English transfers past Coldbeck. All temporary teachers were a nuisance to Coldbeck. So long as Adrian filled the vacancies, no one would query them. Every day he could send two or three young men and women on long arduous journeys that would bring them at last to idyllic English landscapes. It was about as satisfying as planning poems or studying maps of England at night. In his poetry he was trying to describe spiritual journeys from everyday drabness to serene landscapes of the imagination. At work he was sending people to places whose very names evoked poetic imagery—but they were real people and real places.
He remembered a term at St Carthage’s when his class had spent their Christian Doctrine classes studying Catholic Social Justice. Afterwards he had written an essay on the rights of the worker. Every worker should be free to work at a task that gave him a sense of fulfilment. Adrian had written that without fully understanding it. Now, in the Victorian public service, he knew what it meant and fully agreed with it.
During the next week Adrian sent nine young teachers on pilgrimages from colourless Australian places to destinations in rural England. When the demand for temporary teachers was over, Coldbeck gave him other work to do. But in his spare time he prepared for the transfers in the third term. He prepared a list of the most deserving cases—the temporaries in suburbs of Melbourne such as Brunswick, Coburg and Maribyrnong—and made a note to give them first priority when vacancies occurred at places on the map of England.
Each day at lunchtime he walked in the Treasury Gardens. Many other public servants were there—middle-aged men strolling in threes and fours around the paths, groups of young women on seats around the lily pond, young fellows playing football with a bundle of newspapers. But Adrian avoided them all. He walked fast, backwards and forwards over the least-frequented stretches of lawn and in the shadows of thickets and beds of shrubbery. He was looking for places where he could stand and see nothing but lawns and trees in any direction, with no sight of a city building or an asphalt pathway.
His method was to find first a secluded spot where a mass of bushes hid the whole facade of the State Offices to the north. Then he would pace a little way in different directions trying to bring other foliage between himself and the city skyline to the west. Sometimes when he had got rid of the city, he looked back and found that a corner of the State Offices had come into view again. When this happened he had to move slowly backwards, one foot at a time, trying to watch the city and the State Offices until both had disappeared again. When the north and west were filled with greenery he turned to the south and tried to eliminate the Jolimont railway yards.
During his first week in the public service he found two spots from which he could see only trees and lawns and sky. He carefully noted their bearings on a piece of paper and decided they were enough for his purposes for the time being.
On the following morning before he left home he took his book The English Countryside in Colour and let the pages fall open. They opened at a picture of Symonds Yat, Monmouthshire. He read the text and looked once more at the picture to get the mood of the scene. At lunchtime that day he went to the first of his chosen spots in the gardens. He stood on the lawn and moved his feet by inches until he had turned a complete circle. He did this several times with his eyes fixed on the slowly changing vistas of greenery. And all the time he tried to see around him the landscape of Symonds Yat, Monmouthshire.
Next day he stood at the second of his spots and performed a similar mental exercise that took him to Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire. The day after, he contemplated Poynings, Sussex, from the Devil’s Dyke. There were only forty coloured scenes in his book, but if he found more of the right spots in the gardens he could combine each of them with each of the forty illustrations and provide himself with hundreds of poetic landscapes to savour.
In the evenings he drew up plans and tried to devise a title for a long poem about a man who discovered early in life that every landscape gave rise to a distinctly different mood in his heart (or soul—Adrian had not decided which of these words to use). There were sensual landscapes, landscapes suited to romantic love, religious landscapes and purely poetic landscapes. After viewing all four kinds, the man decided to dedicate his life to the fourth—the poetic. But then he made a tragic discovery—the landscapes that for him were most poetic were all in a distant country. Because it was impossible for him to visit that country he had to make a supreme effort of the imagination to recreate its landscapes in his everyd
ay world. He tried various ways of doing this, but he realised in the end that the best way was to delineate them in his poems.
Here Adrian’s rough drafts became so complex that he seriously considered abandoning rhyme and metre and using free verse to express himself more easily. Even so, he saw it would be hard to write a poem about poems containing landscapes that inspired poems. Sometimes he thought it would be easier to save up his public-service salary for a few years and travel to England and take his poetry notebook to a shady spot in Oxfordshire or Gloucestershire and look out at the hills and hedgerows and let the verses roll off his pen.
One morning when Adrian was coming down from the warm, green-muffled Cumnor hills towards the State Offices, someone behind called his name and ran to catch up with him.
It was Terry O’Mullane, dressed in a public servant’s sports clothes and carrying a rolled-up Sporting Globe. They walked together into the State Offices. O’Mullane said he had been working in the State Rivers Department since the beginning of the year. Cornthwaite and Seskis were still at St Carthage’s doing their matric.
They stopped in the corridor outside the lift. O’Mullane moved close to Adrian and said, ‘And what’s all this I hear about you running away from the monastery? Stan Seskis rang me up a few weeks ago and said he’d heard you were back in Melbourne, and you know what I told him? I said the priests probably found the poor bastard sticking up pictures of film stars in his room and kicked him out. Those were the days. We were only kids then. It doesn’t hurt to look back and have a good laugh at some of the silly things we talked about. Listen, I’ll meet you outside the building at one o’clock and we’ll have a good yarn in the Treasury Gardens. I’ve joined the Young Catholic Workers in my parish and we’ve got this colossal dance going every fortnight. There’s Catholic sheilas from miles around.’
Adrian said he would meet O’Mullane at lunchtime. Then, all morning at his desk, he worked at shifting his precious landscapes from their sites in the Treasury Gardens back to the pages of The English Countryside in Colour. By lunchtime the gardens were just a place where oafish public servants dreamed of YCW football and dances.
Adrian did not keep his appointment with O’Mullane in the gardens. He ate his lunch at his desk with his list of Victorian schools open in front of him. He wondered how to avoid O’Mullane on the way to work and in the corridors of the State Offices. He didn’t want to hear about YCW activities and he knew O’Mullane had never enjoyed a poem in his life. But it was not only O’Mullane that he had to avoid. He realised he ought to keep away from anyone who might strike up a conversation and disturb his thoughts of poetry and landscapes.
He would have to model himself more closely on the Scholar Gipsy. Each morning when he left home he would recite some of the lines that described the Gipsy fleeing from farmers or travellers whose chatter might have distracted him from his high purpose. He would look up and down the street to make sure no neighbours were in their front yards. On the way to the station, if he saw some friend of his parents he would walk slowly to avoid catching up and having to pass the time of day. He would look carefully into the train before he chose a compartment. (The train to the city passed through Swindon, and there were several boys from St Carthage’s still travelling on his line.) After he left the train at Flinders Street Station he would follow a different route through the city each day. There were lanes and arcades that he could use to dodge O’Mullane and the public servants from his own office. He would soon know the back streets of Melbourne as well as the Scholar Gipsy knew the lanes and byways of Oxfordshire.
That night Adrian recited stanzas of ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ aloud slowly while he turned the pages of The English Countryside in Colour. He paused over each line that seemed to describe his own situation or to justify his behaviour. ‘But mid their drink and clatter he would fly.’
Twice each day Coldbeck and the clerks in the Teachers’ Branch crowded together over cups of tea and chattered about football or horse races. Adrian did well to stay away from them. A poet of landscapes could learn nothing in such company. ‘For most I know thou lov’st retired ground.’
This was an encouragement to Adrian to keep to his room or the shed in his backyard after working hours.
On his new routes through the city Adrian passed several picture theatres. The Scholar Gipsy or Matthew Arnold would have scorned such diversions, but he found himself staring at the posters and the framed stills as he passed. Now that he had money in his pocket it would be easy to buy a ticket and sit through the intermediate session, which began at five in the afternoon. He could see again, after nearly two years, the American landscapes that had once ruled his life. He could even see, in the flesh, some of the women he had once known only from photographs in Pix or the Argus.
He had always kept on walking past the theatres, but a faint doubt was beginning to trouble him. Would he always be fully satisfied by poetic landscapes? Or would he have to struggle soon against the temptation that had made his life a misery for a whole year at St Carthage’s?
He looked to the Scholar Gipsy for guidance. What was the Gipsy’s attitude to women and sexuality? Adrian was struck for the first time by a passage that had previously meant little to him.
Maidens who from the distant hamlets come
To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,
Oft thou hast given them store
Of flowers…
But none has words she can report of thee.
These lines suggested that the Gipsy was unable, or even unwilling, to forgo all contact with women. It was even likely that he admired them from a distance, although he prudently declined to press his attentions on them. The important question was whether he was troubled by thoughts of female charms afterwards in the long hours while he brooded alone in the countryside.
Adrian went back to the text. If he could find some hint that the Scholar Gipsy had had difficulties with purity he would engrave the poem on his heart. It would prove beyond doubt the value of literature—that a poem written in England a hundred years before could reach across the years with a personal message for a young man in Melbourne, Australia, in the 1950s.
He pored over the poem. He drew on all the skills he had once used to find double meanings in his parents’ library books or magazines in barbers’ shops, or to supply the details in guarded reports in the Argus of serious offences against women. But he had hoped for too much. There was only one passage in ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ that could have been a veiled reference to some kind of solitary temptation:
And leaning backwards in a pensive dream
And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers.
Adrian had to admit that his favourite poem could not guide him in all of life’s problems. It was all very well for Matthew Arnold to describe his hero brooding over scenes of natural beauty. But he was apparently incapable of explaining how the Scholar Gipsy coped with the demands of his animal nature. Nevertheless, somewhere in the vast treasure house of English literature there must have been a poet or a character in a poem whose situation was like Adrian’s—some fellow whose poetic ambitions were endangered by memories of a sordid past.
Adrian remembered a book called Anthology of Catholic Poets in the POETRY section of Cheshire’s Bookshop. The next day after work he called at Cheshire’s and leafed through the anthology. It was there that he discovered ‘The Hound of Heaven’ by Francis Thompson.
While he was still standing at the poetry counter in Cheshire’s, Adrian promoted ‘The Hound of Heaven’ to a higher place than ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ because Thompson’s hero was more thoroughly human—he had sinned seriously in his youth. And Francis Thompson himself, whoever he was, became the model for Adrian’s future development as a poet.
In the LITERATURE shelves Adrian found a thick history of English literature and looked up Francis Thompson.
Born at Preston, 1859; spent some time in a Roman Catholic seminary; later studied medicine without success; moved to London and li
ved in extreme poverty.
Adrian wanted to shout aloud some triumphant cry, or preferably some great line from ‘The Hound of Heaven’. Thompson and he were fellow souls. For one thing, they were perhaps the only two English poets who were also failed priests.
He read on. Thompson had been so incapable of coping with the simplest requirements of daily living as to be reduced to lying for days on benches in public parks and scribbling his poems on scraps of paper that chanced to come his way. It was almost too good to be true. Thompson, like Adrian, saw that poetry was the only thing that mattered in life.
Adrian wondered if he would be courageous enough to model himself completely on Thompson. He was already incapable of coping with many of the requirements of daily living. But would he be game to lie for days on park benches? Certainly not in the Treasury Gardens but perhaps for a few hours in some small suburban park in a part of Melbourne where no one knew him.
There was still much that he needed to know about Thompson. What sins had made him flee from the ‘The Hound of Heaven’? Adrian felt instinctively that they were sins of impurity. And did Thompson love landscapes? The evidence here was not promising. Thompson had moved to London when he might have spent his life in the countryside around Preston. But perhaps, like Adrian, he ignored the distractions of the city and meditated on ideal landscapes among the thickets of parks and gardens. The setting of ‘The Hound of Heaven’ was a landscape more vast and affecting than any English scene.
Adrian walked to the shelves marked TRAVEL. Instead of looking vague and abstracted like the Scholar Gipsy, he practised walking like a man incapable of coping with the simplest requirements of daily living.
The travel books had pictures of landscapes all over the world. There was no obligation to confine himself to the gentle fields of England. He needed a wider, more savage landscape in keeping with the troubles his soul had endured. And it had to be as far as possible from Australia to emphasise his renunciation of his dreary outward life in Melbourne. He looked at four or five books before he chose Views of the USSR. The book itself was badly bound. The typefaces looked old-fashioned and the illustrations had a greenish-brown tint that blurred their finer details. But there was one picture that was worth the price of the whole book. Its title was simply In the Steppes of Buryat Mongolia. It showed a man, two horses and the largest expanse of empty grassland that Adrian had ever seen.
A Season on Earth Page 34