In Mine Own Heart

by Alan Marshall

  I had spoken to the old man who owned the spring cart and horse, had watched him at the work he did before he reached the cafes.

  He walked stiffly and slowly. (‘Bloody arthritis, I’ve got. There’s no cure for it, they tell me. Bugger them anyway.’)

  On the nights when the market was open and the greengrocers of the city and suburbs had collected to buy from the growers, he hung around with his broom and bags collecting the outer leaves of cabbages torn from these vegetables as useless and flung in the gutters.

  Lying on the ground around the stalls were carrots and parsnips crushed by the hooves of horses that brought the market carts in from the country farms round Melbourne.

  Apples bearing brown patches of decay, sprouting onions, shrunken potatoes sat amid the sodden horse dung that had spread along the gutters.

  He swept them all into his bags, sometimes removing with a wipe of his hand the filth that clung to them. These bags of vegetable refuse were bought by the cheap cafes and tossed into stock-pots for soup or use with servings of meat in place of the unpolluted and fresh vegetables sold on the stalls of the market from where this refuse had been discarded.

  Cabbage was one of the vegetables that helped to fill the plates of every meat course supplied in these cafes. Coarse and unpalatable, it nevertheless was a serving of vegetables and justified the café’s claim that it supplied three-course meals.

  These cafes were patronised by people whose wealth consisted of the few coins in their pockets.

  I ate regularly at one of them. It had marble-top tables, cold and uninviting, and a linoleum-covered floor foot-printed with the dirt of the streets. But the meals were a little better than those of its rivals and there was no obligation to leave after your meal was finished. You could sit and talk to those who like yourself were loth to return to the isolation of the streets.

  One evening I ordered steak and fried onions. The proprietor brought the laden plate to me, sliding it across the marble table top, then holding out his hand for the money.

  One always paid before eating. So many men had robbed him by eating first then showing their empty pockets that he refused to supply a meal unless it was paid for in advance. I paid him then began eating.

  The knife was sharp. The proprietor believed that customers who found their steaks easy to cut would never regard them as tough. He kept his knives extremely sharp. Even so the steak seemed to resist with more than average obstinacy the sawing of my knife.

  I sat chewing the first mouthful while gazing straight ahead of me, my thoughts centring on the movements of my jaws which after a few minutes began to tire.

  I took the piece of steak from my mouth with my fingers and looked at it. It was a fibrous, grey ball of juiceless matter that my fingers found difficulty in breaking. I returned the shredded remains to my mouth and resumed chewing, but after a while I took it from my mouth again and placed it on the edge of my plate, unable to reduce it to a size and consistency I could swallow.

  I told myself that I had received nourishment from its juices and that the fibre could not add more to this contribution, but after half an hour when with aching jaws I gazed at a dozen pallid lumps of chewed meat encircling the onions and selvage on my plate I felt cheated. Where was the energy I needed? I sat drooping in my chair.

  The onions had grown cold and a layer of congealed fat like thin, grey ice covered them. Through this shield there projected strands of flaccid onion that curved over and lay inert upon it.

  I pushed the plate away in distaste and sat looking at it with features twisted into an expression of revulsion.

  A man who had been sitting alone at a table against the wall came over and touched my shoulder. He was not a young man nor was he old. He had sunken cheeks and tired eyes and his eyes looked into mine slowly and deeply, offering for my inspection in this space of complete honesty the suffering of all men who had experienced poverty and hunger.

  ‘Do you want that, mate?’ he asked, pointing at the plate.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve finished.’

  ‘Can I have it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He took the food away to his table and began eating it. He ate all the chewed lumps of meat I had taken from my mouth, all the stiffened onion, the fat …

  When he had finished he lifted the plate to his face and licked it.

  12

  I was learning that the ability to present a truthful picture of life and to establish living characters in writing was not developed by searching amongst the ready-made information supplied by other writers, the stored knowledge based on what experience of life had taught them, but would be developed by taking into my heart the lives of others and learning from their unwritten books.

  By merging my will to live and conquer with theirs an enlarged and more powerful comprehension of truth would be presented for my use, and from this knowledge would come an enlightening synthesis and the compulsion to express it in words.

  It was not enough to observe life as an artist whose allegiance was only to his craft. That way the product had meaning only to one. I longed to produce something meaningful to all.

  I had been reading school books on grammar, studying what all school children know but which my bush education had denied me. The rules these books demanded be observed tended to crush rather than release my capacity to express myself adequately.

  I read that I must never begin a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’, never split an infinitive, never end a sentence with a preposition. There were times when I wanted to do all these things to express what I had to say.

  ‘When the thought is arresting to speak of grammar is an impertinence,’ I read in a book of quotations. It made me feel better. But I realised that a departure from a rule demands that first it be accepted as a foundation and a guide.

  The writer blossomed not from training in his period’s rules on the sequence of words but from the experience of feeling upon his shoulders the burdens of all people. It was only then he acquired the knowledge to step forth as a trumpeter.

  Writing was an ability to live with comprehension, expressed in written words. The expression was the bursting into flower of shared experience deeply felt and not the result of training in the writing of model sentences one after another.

  The plant that flowered into expression in literature grew from a mind fertilised by emotional and intellectual involvement in the lives of people and demanded for its nurturing a renouncement of personal ambition.

  Within the soil from which it sprang was a ferment born of so intense an emotional reaction to experience that it demanded release in communication and in no other way. In its outward leap to words the intellect was its guide.

  I was reading to educate myself but I was questioning much of what I read. I wished to clarify conclusions I had drawn from association with people and sought enlightenment in books dealing with the minds of human beings.

  It seemed to me that a number of these books assumed a natural tendency to anti-social behaviour in men and women that demanded laws and social restrictions to control.

  I attributed the following of strange and tortuous paths in behaviour by many human beings to life in a society fostering conditions that distorted man’s aims and warped his mind. The victims were products of false values they imagined were keys to fulfilment, to escape and release from a purposeless existence.

  Though my notebooks were filled with pictures of life as I had witnessed it, I carried within me a stock-pot of ideas born in other minds that introduced their presence whenever I attempted creative writing, though outwardly I renounced them.

  In creating character I dipped into this collection of hackneyed ideas, cliches, pretentious dialogue left over from read novels, false ideas on what constituted literature, newspaper attitudes, a residue from what people told me to write to reach success.

  I believed subconsciously that in this stock-pot could be found the way to write, even though my notebooks lay beside me.

>   The characters I created talked as this allegiance of mine dictated. Over my shoulder as I wrote there began to appear prompting figures who kept gazing at the paper, nodding or shaking their heads, grimacing, smiling, turning away in contempt.

  These figures I called ‘The Public’ and I was being influenced, though I would not admit it, by what society told me they wanted—the objectionable soup of the stock-pot.

  Then I saw this brew for what it was.

  It was lunch time at the Modern Shoe Company. Out on the street girls leaned against the wall or sat on the kerb with their feet in the gutter.

  The curved backs of the seated girls were warm from the summer sun. They wore white blouses, yellow cotton blouses, silk blouses, a blue jumper stretched tightly across shoulders revealing between the pulled strands of wool the pinkness of an artificial silk slip.

  Around them the ground was littered with apple cores, orange peel, crusts of bread and discarded pieces of newspaper.

  I was sitting on the kerb in the midst of them with a partly eaten lunch resting beside me. The notebook I was reading contained the beginnings of a story based, now I look back on it, on ‘what the public wanted’.

  I read it with disgust, then suddenly as if I had been whisked from danger by a friend I found myself back in the world of reality listening to the conversation of living people.

  I experienced a moment of tremendous illumination, a rare sense of freedom and it came from the conversation of girls.

  Here was the unrest, the groping, the dark that a writer should reveal to the world. These girls were all girls. They talked and called out to the employees of an opposite factory. They made facetious remarks to those who passed. They sought for the removal of their fears in the assurances of others.

  A half-starved dog approached the girls, sniffing.

  ‘For gawd’s sake, look at that dawg!’ exclaimed the girl in the blue jumper pointing at the animal. ‘The poor thing’s starvin’. Look at his bones stickin’ out places. Someone’s lost ’im.’

  ‘Our dog never gets out. He’s frightened as anything,’ said Mabel, a girl with a heavily powdered face.

  ‘He’d get out if he got a chance.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t. He’s frightened. I’ve never seen a dog so frightened. He hates trams. He’s frightened people will tread on him.’

  ‘He must be a funny sort of a dawg.’

  ‘He’ll be like that till he’s had a bitch,’ said a girl with red hair.

  ‘Oh Gladys! You are awful.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. Phil told me.’

  ‘Do you still go with Phil?’ asked Mabel leaning forward so that she could see round the girl in the blue jumper.

  ‘I’m just going round with him till I meet someone else. He wants me to track square with him. To look at him you’d never think he could talk seriously. He talked for a long time about tracking square.’

  ‘That’s one thing they can talk about,’ a girl called Biddy said with a note of sarcasm in her voice. ‘They keep on that line until you believe them and let go, then they pull the same line on someone else.’

  ‘Well they’ve got to talk about something,’ argued Gladys.

  ‘Well why don’t they talk about something interesting?’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘What—motor bikes? What smart blokes they are?’

  ‘What do you want them to talk about?’ Gladys persisted.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just something … You’d keep on remembering it next day. Like that … It’d take you out of this bloody factory.’

  ‘Aw, you want to wake up,’ Mabel joined in. ‘What do you think a boy wants to take you out for—to talk?’

  ‘Well, all right!’ Biddy was annoyed. ‘That’d do me. I’m just telling you about the sort of chap I’d like to go out with. Talk’ll do me. That’s what I want. But where do you find chaps like that?’

  ‘Aw, we all start off wanting chaps like that but you never find them,’ said Mabel resignedly. ‘Not now. It’s hard for a bloke to talk when he’s got no money.’

  ‘The trouble is they can’t take you anywhere,’ said Biddy. ‘They’re out of work and they’re broke.’

  ‘Phil and I just walk up and down then park in a shop doorway,’ said Gladys bending forward and scratching the dust with her fingers. ‘We don’t talk much. He talks footy sometimes.’ She straightened up and looked at Biddy. ‘You ever tried talking about the moon in a shop doorway?’ she asked her.

  Biddy was silent.

  ‘You should see the swell line that lives over at Annie’s place,’ said a little girl busily knitting. She constantly hummed ‘Love in Bloom’. The girls called her ‘Bloom’.

  ‘ ’Im! I know ’im,’ said the girl in the jumper scornfully. ‘I met ’im at a dance. ’E’s a couple of left legs, a real lead boot. ’E trod all over me.’

  ‘He’s good-looking anyway. I don’t care if they can’t dance,’ said Bloom decidedly.

  ‘I wouldn’t go with a boy that couldn’t dance,’ said Gladys.

  ‘What’s Phil like on the toe?’ asked Mabel.

  ‘Aw, he’s not bad,’ replied Gladys. ‘The chap I was going with before though, he used to enter for competitions.’

  ‘How do you get them all?’ asked Mabel.

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ replied Gladys airily.

  ‘I’ll bet I do,’ said the girl in the blue jumper.

  ‘You shut up!’ Gladys snapped at her.

  They all laughed but it was not the laughter of happiness or even because they were amused. It was a laugh that recognised kindred pressures in the same problem and for a moment they were presented lightly, touching them with relief.

  Several girls emerged from the doorway of the opposite factory where cigarette papers were manufactured and where conditions of work were cleaner and less competitive than in the boot factory.

  They wore blue cotton uniforms and were self-consciously carrying a new basketball. They tossed it from one to another laughing embarrassedly as if they were conscious of acting childishly.

  ‘Gawd! Look at them!’ exclaimed the girl in the blue jumper. ‘Get inside, you lairs,’ she bawled across the street.

  One of the girls addressed turned and poked out her tongue at the seated group.

  The girl in the blue jumper glanced quickly at her companions. Her chin had dropped and her mouth was open with surprise. Satisfied that her reaction was justified, she raised a curved hand to her mouth and yelled, ‘Yah, ya lair! Boo hoo, ya lair!’

  ‘Shut up, Elly!’ Gladys was annoyed.

  ‘Who do they think they are anyway!’ growled Elly, withdrawing into a disgruntled contemplation of the players.

  ‘You make yourself cheap, yelling out like that,’ said Gladys looking up and down the street.

  ‘Hey, Biddy! What do you think of that new girl working next to you?’ asked Mabel. ‘Leila Hale’s her name, isn’t it? What’s she like? She’s coming down the street now with Sadie.’

  Biddy looked up at the two girls approaching them. ‘She’s all right. She seems a kid; hasn’t woke up yet. I see Ron Hughes eyeing her off.’

  ‘Him!’ sniffed Mabel.

  “Well, you went out with him.’

  Mabel was silent, some memory crushing an answer.

  ‘I think I’ll tip her off,’ Biddy added.

  Leila and Sadie joined the group. Leila was about fifteen, had soft blond hair and a figure that still clung to suggestions of childhood.

  She sat down next to me, receiving the smile I gave her with a sudden flush of self-consciousness and with what I sensed was a feeling of inability to make the response she felt was called for. She turned her head away in a momentary confusion and looked at Sadie.

  Sadie continued the conversation she had been having with her.

  ‘He was waiting at the corner for me every night for nearly a fortnight.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ asked Mabel, interested.

  ‘Is it that
chap that waits for you in a car after work, the fellow that wants to drive you home?’ Biddy joined in.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sadie.

  ‘Why don’t you go with him?’ asked Biddy.

  ‘I’d go with him quick,’ said Mabel.

  ‘Oh yair! And walk home?’ said Sadie, the knowledge gained from many such experiences giving a cynical note to her voice.

  ‘He can’t do anything in the daytime,’ said Biddy. ‘You feel safe when it’s early.’

  ‘That’s all right, but he wants to take me to tea first.’

  ‘You could keep him talking, cross your legs, light a cigarette, keep your handbag on your knee.’ Biddy would have kept on with her suggestions but Sadie interrupted her.

  ‘You can’t keep talking when you’re wondering what he’s going to do next. That’s all you can think about in a car. Is he going to swing off into a lonely place? How can I keep him from parking till we reach our gate? Can I handle him? These one-night-stand fellows know all the answers, remember that. It’s you this week and someone else the next. They’re not out to listen to you telling them how you want to learn to play the piano or something. No, they’re all the same, they hang around while they think there’s a chance of you giving in but you’re on your own when you go hunting round for some nurse in a back room who’ll do a job for you. Whose going to help you then?’

  ‘You’d have to go to your mother,’ said Leila timidly, wanting to contribute evidence of maturity and equality in knowledge that suggested the conversation had not startled her.

  But laughter greeted her remark.

  ‘Wow! What a night that would be!’ said Mabel. ‘The both of them at you—yap yap yap yap.’

  ‘If you’ve ever got to go to your mother,’ said Sadie putting her hand on Leila’s shoulder, ‘she’s already let you down. There’s no sense in being let down twice. Once you load them with your struggles in the park you’re asking for trouble.’