All the Green Year

by Don Charlwood

  Near the top of the cliffs the house perched like an aged sea-bird. It had little in the way of conveniences, though I daresay it was no worse than most houses in the town. We had only a chip bath-heater and a chip copper and no septic sewerage. Ian always believed Hell to be under the little house by the fig-tree, and it was difficult to induce him to remain there long.

  Bath night was Saturdays, but I was supposed to follow my father’s example of a daily cold shower, even when the shower had to be thawed with a candle. The only way to escape in winter was to put no more than a leg under and make gasping noises.

  In my mother and father’s room and Grandfather’s room too, there were dignified-looking jugs standing in washbasins, and of course there were the other pieces of chinaware as well.

  For drinking-water “Thermopylae” had tanks, not because Kananook was without a town supply, but because Grandfather was sure the town water had been tampered with by Jennings the shire engineer.

  It was decided I would sleep under Grandfather’s window on the north veranda, which was the side of the house least exposed to the weather. Even though thick tea-tree protected it, there were nights when the canvas blinds flapped wildly and the roar of waves sounded so close that I would find myself dreaming we were out at sea. These were the nights Grandfather was likely to get up and take the helm. Once or twice on windy moonlit nights I saw him, beard and hair blowing, pyjamas clinging about him, the ghost of a captain on a ghostly ship. The only way to handle him then was for my father to run outside crying, “Ready to take over, sir.” Then Grandfather would relinquish the wheel and allow my mother to lead him back to bed.

  But these nights weren’t frequent. Usually the Bay was calm and from my bed I could hear the lapping of waves on the beach at the base of the cliffs. Sometimes on these still nights I could hear through the thin wall Grandfather debating Darwinism with himself, taking first one side and then the other. Darwin always lost.

  At the dinner table he would sometimes brood and mutter to himself and then, in the middle of someone’s conversation roar out, “He tol’ men they were monkeys, an’ by God they’ve been behaving like monkeys ever since.”

  My father asked him once if it really mattered whether God had created the world through Adam and Eve, or through a system of evolution. Grand­father glared at him and stormed, “Ye dispute then the Holy Writ?”

  I suppose my father was patient to put up with life at “Thermopylae”. Not many men, after all, could have been required in the one night to debate Darwinism and to take over a ship with no training.

  Out on the veranda the sun would wake me early. The sea then was usually so calm that a cape beyond “Thermopylae” would lie reflected on its surface. It was easy then to imagine the first explorers coming there and Buckley the Wild White Man walking alone around the beach. The only sound at that hour was the whirring of Squid’s pigeons. He kept these more for profit than pleasure; double profit often, as some always came back to him after he had sold them.

  And from the kitchen I would hear Grandfather’s mantel clock rapidly striking the hour. It was an old Ansonia with cherubs on its glass and a hurrying silver pendulum. Even now I associate its striking with sounds of the sea. All that year it marked our hours, the frustrated hours of my father, the worried hours of my mother, the final hours of Grandfather McDonald.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On the last day of the holidays my mother told me it would be nice if I were to walk to school next morning with Birdie.

  “He’s such a nervous boy. He worries so terribly over his poor freckled face.”

  I knew it was no good ridiculing him; at our place Squid was a kind of freckled saint. I suppose I looked unhappy at the idea of walking with him, because my father said sharply, “You don’t seem to appreciate decent companions.”

  I wasn’t sure what to answer to this, so I said nothing.

  “Let me tell you this.” My father put his book of accountancy down. “This year is your last chance. If you don’t do well, you’ll have no hope at all of getting a job; you’ll be out swinging a pick with your friend Johnston. There will be hundreds begging for jobs.”

  Poor old Johnno, I thought. He tried hard enough, but everyone was against him. I pictured him swinging his pick while Squid drove by in a car. Squid was born lucky. He planned to become an estate agent, or a stockbroker. There was no doubt he would do well in whatever he took up—someone else would do the work while he got the money. What a life he had! Pictures free while his mother played the piano; favouritism from Moloney; a new bike for Christmas.

  I heard my father’s voice droning on. It occurred to me that the worst of parents was the misery they caused by worrying about the future. Why were they like this? Why did they have families if it was all worry? I would never get married, that was certain. Imagine being tied to a woman for ever, and for ever worrying about money.

  My father’s nose was suddenly an inch from mine, his eyes blazing. He roared, “Why don’t you answer my question? Here I’ve been trying to help you and what do you do? You stare into space and think about heaven knows what.”

  “Yes,” I said, several times. “Yes, yes.”

  “What was I saying?”

  “About money—”

  He gave an exasperated snort, leapt to his feet and stamped into the kitchen. I heard him there shouting to my mother, “That boy will drive me to lunacy. D’ you hear? I’m damn’ sure no one in our family was ever like this. How is he going to get any further at school? What sort of dumb, good-for-nothing generation are we bringing up?”

  He slammed the door and strode outside. My mother came in to me, wiping her hands slowly on her apron, her face concerned.

  “You heard that?”

  It seemed that everyone in the town must have heard it.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I burst out. “I’m sick of life. No one except Johnno understands what it’s like. I never have any time to do what I want to do—”

  “What is it you want to do?”

  I wasn’t sure of this. As I groped for an answer my mother said, “Swim and go out with Fred Johnston?”

  I replied hotly, “That would be better than working for old Moloney, anyhow.”

  “Listen,” she said quietly, “your father sees the mistakes he has made and he wants to save you some of them—”

  I said bitterly, “It’d be better fun making my own mistakes.”

  My mother sighed and went back into the kitchen and I went to bed. I fell asleep making elaborate plans to run away.

  I escaped Squid in the morning as he had decided to ride his new bike. School was about a mile from “Thermopylae”. You could either go past the park and along beside the Mechanics’ Hall, or straight through the bush to the bottom of the school ground. All that year I seldom had more than ten minutes to cover the distance, so I usually had to go the short way.

  At the end I would come out of the bush and see the brownish brick building on its hill, looking like something designed by an architect of prisons. There were trees around it, but the ground between them was worn by the trampling of feet and their trunks were rubbed bare.

  In the unlikely event of being early I would see ahead of me the trickle of other pupils going to school, a trickle like a creek almost dried up and reluctant to flow.

  When I was late the grounds would be accusingly empty and an industrious hum would rise from the classrooms. If it was a Monday I might hear the Declaration being chanted, “I love God and my country; I honour the flag, I serve the king and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law.” “Cheerfully obey”! Cheerfully obey old Moloney!

  There he was on that hot February morning squinting through his glasses, nose screwed up, nicotine-stained teeth clenched, scalp white, moustache cut so short that you weren’t sure whether it was a mou
stache or whether he had forgotten to shave for a few days; butterfly collar making marks on his neck; wooden-handled strap in pocket.

  A blast on his whistle and Squid began to beat the drum importantly while we marched in.

  “Ah, Reeve, you have come back?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You intend working this year, I trust?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I think we shall sit you at the front where I can ensure you are awake and not merely pretending.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well stop ‘yes-sirring’ and sit down.”

  I sat at the ink-stained desk which had been carved and scratched and rubbed for fifty years or more. All the examination suffering of generations was stored in its dirty, brownish wood. On the blackboard in big letters was MERRY CHRISTMAS, left from six weeks earlier as if to mock us. Dead flowers were still in a vase, and over the blackboard our one picture was covered with dust. This was a picture of Sappho’s head, Sappho being, we understood, a goddess of Roman times.

  While Stinger Wray, the ink monitor, moved from desk to desk, Moloney set about making up the roll. He had reached the Rs when Johnno appeared in the doorway, twenty minutes late. There had been a crisis at his place because a coat someone had passed on to him was short in the sleeves. His sister Eileen had let the sleeves down, but the effect was worse. The fold lines showed clearly and the uncovered material contrasted with the rest of the coat.

  Johnno stood at the door with his large hands protruding from the sleeves. His huge chest was heaving and the usual strand of ginger hair kept falling over his right eye. At fifteen he looked too old for the eighth grade, in fact too old for school at all. He had deep-set, distant eyes, a look of patience in them, but not of much hope. Moloney left him standing there while he began checking everyone’s supply of new books. The smell of these books and of sharpened pencils hung in the air—the new uneasy, beginning-of-year smell.

  After several minutes Johnno said, “Please sir—”

  Moloney, pretending he had not seen him till then, faced round quickly. “What do you mean—‘please sir’?”

  “Please sir, I’m late,” said Johnno.

  “Well, well,” replied Moloney. “It struck me that the rest of us might have been early.” Some of the girls tittered. “You have a note?”

  “No sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “There wasn’t time, sir.”

  “Wasn’t time?”

  “My sister had to do something for me.”

  “A big man to make his sister an excuse. A big man,” he repeated, half turning to the class.

  Johnno flushed and moved his feet uneasily. No one had been told more often than he had been that he was no good, that he could never do anything. There was no boy more unsure of himself in school.

  Moloney rubbed his chin. “I think, Johnston, that since you need a woman’s tender care, we shall sit you for today next to Janet Baker—if Janet has no objection.”

  Janet was so short-sighted that she had difficulty in seeing if anyone was next to her at all, but she moved on principle to the far side of the desk while Johnno struggled to get his knees under it and sit down.

  Moloney stared at us for several moments with a mirthless smile. “This year you will be sitting for the Merit Certificate and I intend having no failures. You hear that, Reeve?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And Johnston?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I can’t imagine how you’re going to reach this standard, Johnston,” he added, “but reach it you shall. Now I propose that we have a test once a week, every Monday morning as soon as you arrive; mental arithmetic, dictation, grammar—”

  The list went on alarmingly.

  “You will correct each other’s work; but twice a month I shall take up the papers and check your marking. I shall certainly not tell you when this is to be—‘Ye will know neither the day nor the hour’.”

  A tremor passed over the class. It was hard to believe you could go so quickly from freedom to slavery.

  I glanced to one side and saw the same faces as last year—and I can see them yet: Fat Benson who each month grew heavier—probably because he lived behind Fry’s sweets shop by the Palais; Stinger Wray who was always self-important, possibly to make up for his mother’s persistent yelling at him; Windy Gale, whose mother and father hadn’t spoken to each other for years—he had to carry notes from one to the other and had to get his father out of pubs. It was Stinger’s father who had a system by which he was going to win a fortune at the races. Near the back was Pommy Ellison—not a pommy really; it was just that his parents spoke “correctly”, as my father put it, and Pommy had brought this unfortunate habit to school. And, of course, there was Squid, basking in Moloney’s favour.

  The girls were a blur of dresses and giggles and self-possession. As I glanced at them it struck me that they looked better than the previous year. Perhaps it was the way hair was caught behind ears and arms emerged from short sleeves and new plumpnesses were exhibited.

  The silence roused me. I heard Moloney’s level voice saying, “I repeat, Reeve: do you fancy yourself as a Don Juan?”

  I faced him quickly.

  “What was I discussing?” he demanded.

  “I’m—not sure, sir.”

  “Not sure. Not sure! Reeve, for as long as I’ve known you you’ve never been sure of anything—and you never remain attentive long enough to make sure of anything.”

  He took out the wooden-handled strap. “Come out here.”

  A year of this, I thought; a year of cheerfully obeying!

  CHAPTER SIX

  At lunch-time in those days Johnno and I would climb the post-and-rail fence at the bottom of the school ground and wander across a grey, sandy road into the bush. There was a grassy clearing a hundred yards in, and this was where we ate lunch and in winter had boxing practice.

  After the glare and heat that first day the clearing was cool. We lay at full length on the grass and unwrapped the newspaper from around our sandwiches.

  “What’ve you got?” I asked.

  “Two dripping and one sugar,” he said.

  Eileen was not an imaginative maker of sandwiches.

  “I’ll swap you a tomato for a dripping.”

  We ate lying on our sides enclosed by motionless trees, Moloney and the school shut away, the voices from the school ground an indistinct babel.

  We knew every track of this country. For years we had had lunch-time chases through the miles of bush, Johnno and I pursued by the rest of the grade, I the dispatch-bearer, he the escort. Sometimes we would lie hiding in the undergrowth while the searchers moved a few feet away. I would feel as tense then as if our lives had really been at stake. But this year the idea of chases seemed vaguely childish.

  When we had finished lunch Johnno said, “What about boxing practice? I’ve changed my style a bit—more like Billy Grimes.” He stood up and flexed his arms.

  “Too hot,” I said. “Let’s walk across to Lone Pine.”

  “Okay, then.”

  We started slowly, saying little.

  Lone Pine had been named by Squid after a tree from which his father had sniped during the war. The track went steeply downhill, the bush about it growing thicker as it neared a small creek. We drank at a dark pool which Squid had told me years before was bottomless. From there the track climbed steeply to the hilltop where the pine stood dark against the sky. It had been planted by some forgotten settler on the highest ground of the district.

  Johnno and I began climbing without a word, putting our hands and feet in familiar places. At first the lower limbs hid the ground, but near the top the whole country opened, from Point Nepean to Donna Buang. We sat on a board seat we had nailed there, feeling the trunk swaying us gently. I could see the narrow gap of
the Heads and the beginning of the ocean and the pale, small lighthouse at Point Lonsdale. The sun was shining on the beaches, but no sound of waves reached us and no sound from the people who were distant specks in the water there.

  “The public-school kids are still on holidays,” said Johnno aggrievedly.

  There seemed no justice in life at all. While others swam at our beach, we suffered Moloney.

  Inland, all the secrets of streets and yards were open to us: lines of washing; a cable tram which was Mrs Kelly’s sleep-out; old Charlie Rolls’ tent that his wife made him sleep in; wood-heaps; horses outside Jonas’s livery stable. A cab moved slowly down Bay Street and someone chased after it and leapt on the back step. If Dan Weekly was the driver, he would lash round with his whip and yell abuse and look angrily through the little window. In those cabs if no one called “Whip behind!” and the driver didn’t see you, you could climb in and lie on the mat on the floor and feel the sway of the cab and hear the sound of hoofs and the running of the wheels on the road.

  “If I fail in the Merit I’ll run away,” said Johnno darkly.

  “You said you’d do that last year.”

  “Last year I had one more chance; this year I’ve got no more.” He was staring unhappily towards the sea. After a bit he said, “In arithmetic, Charlie, my answers even look crazy, but I reckon I can write decent compositions.” He looked at me anxiously round the trunk. “Can’t I?”

  “I reckon you can,” I said—and this was true; in fact compositions were all either of us liked. Even when we thought we had done these well, Moloney would take half our marks for bad grammar, or split infinit­ives, or sentences ending with prepositions.

  The faint sound of the first bell drifted up to us, so far off that it seemed nothing to take notice of. All the distant sounds from the school ground rose a little in key, as if everyone had called, “We’ve got to go in!” We were too far off to hear words. We could only hear occasional separate shouts, or girls squealing, or Squid practising the drum. The clusters at the cricket pitch and playing stick fly looked like a prison camp of microbes from which we had escaped.