by Carmel Bird
The floor of the church is wooden, ancient. Faces I have not seen for thirty years speak to me, and as I look at them, in the sunlight of the funeral, their years dissolve; I know them, and they are young again.
A machine has dug a deep hole in the orange clay of the cemetery and the coffin fits perfectly into the space, which is edged with green carpet. Next the carpet is removed and the machine dumps earth back into the hole. The mound is covered with flowers, which are by now slightly damaged because they have been handled.
I go back to the airport where the floor of the toilet is the same as the floor of the viewing-room. I fly home. I take the film to the chemist to have it developed and printed. A few days pass and I am so busy I don’t get back to pick it up. I think of the photograph I took in the viewing-room. It is in its orange envelope, standing on edge with all the other orange envelopes.
The chemist has recently had new red carpet laid on the floor of the shop. When I pick up the prints, I get two of each, and a family photo album.
I sit by the river and peel back the plastic film from the sticky pages of the album. Then I place the photos on the cardboard and cover them with the plastic. Here and there ridges and bubbles form and will not be smoothed away. The first picture is the one of my father in the coffin. His eyes are shut. I realise that the night in the funeral parlour was the first time I ever stood and stared at his sleeping face. Now I can look at it whenever I want to.
As I watch the water, I imagine peeling back the plastic from the first page, picking off the picture of that dead man, tearing it into four pieces and dropping them into the water. They will float on top of the ripples for a little while, then separate. Then they drift back together, forming the image just beneath the surface. They undulate, sink.
It is getting dark. I sit on the damp grass and stare down at the water until, by the interplay of light and shadow, a fleet of bobbing ducks moves across the ruffled surface.
Woodpecker Point
Named for the legendary Tasmanian woodpecker, which nests only on the northwest coast, the town of Woodpecker Point is the site of the first settlement in this part of the island and is classified as an historic town. Many of the early buildings can still be seen, including the ruins of an imposing gateway which originally formed the entrance to a deer park. The most striking and most photographed feature of the rugged Bass Strait coastline at Woodpecker Point is the Blowhole, leading to which there is an easy walking track. Excellent beaches, good fishing, and some of the finest agricultural land in Tasmania make Woodpecker Point one of the most interesting tourist centres on the coast. Of particular note are the hawthorn hedges so reminiscent of old England, and the tiny church of St Mary-in-the-Fields is as fine an example of the architectural traditions of Europe and Britain as the visitor could hope to see. Other attractions include the old Part and Parcel Inn, and the Den of Antiquity where locally collected period furniture can be bought.
Trekking Tasmania, Carrillo Mean, Bedrock Press, 1985
Ralph Germaine Peacock
Gardener at the Morning Glory Mansion
Begins the Story August 1986
I like to think I am descended from Hugh Germaine, who named such Tasmanian towns as Bagdad and Jericho when he travelled about in the bush. We have much more than our name in common, Hugh and I, for, like him, I always carry a copy of the Arabian Nights and a copy of the Bible. I have never felt the need for any other books. In the evenings, when I have finished my work, I light the fire in the cottage, have my supper, and read from each of my books before tackling my real work which is a collection of sermons I am writing.
I am called to live alone and to labour in the vineyard of the Lord which I take to be, at this time, Alice Morning Glory’s garden. My sermons will be illustrated with photographs, and I have recently been fortunate enough to purchase, for a very reasonable price, a fairly new Nikon FG–20 that turned up at the local antique shop. I have made a photographic study of the inhabitants of Woodpecker Point as they go about their daily lives, and I will use some of these pictures in my book. My great and perhaps unrealisable ambition is that people should listen to my sermons on cassette and watch at the same time a continuous live television broadcast of daily life in Woodpecker Point. The words would be timeless, but the illustrations would change and develop from minute to minute, from day to day, and would also be recorded. It would be like a full, permanent, animated photograph album. It is stream-of-consciousness television. The programme, like the book, is called ‘The Eye of God’. I want people to see the world as the Lord sees it, and to hear the Lord’s interpretation in my sermons, simultaneously.
‘Thou God seest me,’ reads the text that hangs on my wall. There are 387 references to the eye in the Bible.
And, ‘Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.’
George Glory was killed in Egypt during the war, leaving Alice a widow and childless. She has never recovered from that tragedy, but has found consolation in the Gospel, and in her garden, and in the running of the Morning Glory cake shops, famous for miles around for their fruit cake which they sell by the pound or by the slice. The recipe is no secret.
MORNING GLORY FRUIT CAKE
(domestic quantity)
8 oz self-raising flour
4 oz sugar
12 oz mixed raisins, sultanas and currants
2 beaten eggs
4 oz softened butter
3/4 teaspoon mixed spice
scant 1/4 pint milk
pinch of nutmeg
pinch of salt
Mix the flour with the sugar and dried fruit. Stir in the eggs and the butter. Add the milk and the spices. Beat all together until thoroughly mixed. Turn into a cake tin lined with greaseproof paper. Bake in slow oven for 2 hours.
1986
Muriel Plum Recalls Events from the 1940s
I was standing with my twin sister, Iris, in the lane, clay and dandelions under our feet, blackberry bushes nearby. There would be snakes, or at least a blue-tongue, living in the blackberries. And just behind the cowsheds there were pigeon-lofts, cooing, always cooing, in the close distance. Crying pigeons with broken hearts from the glinting green of caverns hollow under sea behind the tormented dark of the blackberry bushes.
Mad Mick, who milked the cows, was not dangerous but smelled of cowsheds, was yodelling to the milkers. Keep them happy. They like music. They give more milk. And cream.
The cows are the colour of gillyflowers, soft as pansies, smelling like Mad Mick.
We stand under the cherry-plum tree, holding the yodel in our ears, holding in our hands the fairies we have made from shuttlecocks covered with a down of purple thistle, fluffy with puffs of dandelion clocks. It was evening then, and sun came slatted through the fence, drifted in spangles through the leaves of the cherry-plum.
Mrs Morning Glory lives at the top of the hill. Windy trees, dark and smelling of dust and cypress and rosemary. Behind a white white wall, high as a convent, in that Spanish Mission house, pink as dolls’-house ham, sits and eats and walks and sleeps, sews and laughs and talks on the telephone, Mrs Morning Glory. She is so glorious. Her whole back fence is covered with morning glory. (A noxious weed of course you know, but she—the likes of her—thinks she can get away with anything and everything, and does and did. And take what you like and pay for it, says God, the great Comeuppance). And she wears, on some afternoons, a vast and spreading mushroom of a hat which is blue, morning glory blue.
There is a peacock gleam of sapphire in her eyes. A spark of garnet darting from her heart.
She looks at us, at me, at Iris. Who are we? Who could we possibly be, Iris and me, our ears full of sad pigeon-whispers sifted through the prickles of the blackberry bushes, lurked in by blacksmiths and scarlet glittering snakes with eyes no sooner said than done.
But Mrs Morning Gl
ory has no children. It is the tragedy.
She will not understand us. Will not think that we are here, standing at her fancy iron gate, painted white with a bell like in a convent. She is a mystery to us. But you can imagine, can you just ever imagine! What a terrible puzzle, mystery, riddle, cowshed blackberry clackberry we are to her?
There we are, Iris and I, folded up in the sweet dark pink of Mother, top and tail (Mrs Cherry Plum is having twins), waving to each other, little kicks and punches and an elbow in the stomach, swimming now and then and discussing the noises of the pigeons and the terrible blindness of the baby kangaroo. Then remember, Iris, how Mother split suddenly and we were dragged out to sea in the current, and the waves were pulling and pulling, and there was such thunder and firebird-danger-lightning, frightening with a dragging groaning earthquake uprooting, and we flew? I flew so suddenly into the splashing light, the cold air on my anemone-old face, and you followed me at once, for fear, I suppose, of getting left behind, getting stuck, shut in, lost, and even dead back in there in Mother, gasping for breath and crying, howling like the cow.
Mad Mick will yodel for you at the christening. I don’t want that silly fool at the christening. Time enough to think of all that when we have severed the cords that connect the ties that bind. Two thick beating twisty cords like the cords of telephones, purple and shiny and slimy with words. Then, two kangaroos, we found our way to Mother’s milk and she was sweeter than a cow, much, much sweeter than a cow. We cried. We cried and cried and cried so that Mrs Morning Glory could hear us at the top of the hill. There she sat on the blue velvet chair like a chair in a convent, smelling of gold, smelling of gold, and also of frankincense, but most of all there was a smell of myrrh, so bitter and so sad, a smell of cypress and yew tree and rosemary and even lavender, but more of cemeteries.
I looked into the garden, and, just beyond the snowball tree, I saw the most beautiful thing. Tiny-weeny little pink rosebuds. Buds there were, folded and darker like kisses in the centre. And open pink roses, open with curling feathers like chrysanthemums. The smell like strawberries and pepper and roses, pink and mysterious as incense in the dark. Iris used to wet the bed. I only did it once.
There we were, folded in the swinging swimming dark when Mother went walking in the lane, went to get the milk in the billy, up the lane, past the cowsheds among the dandelions and thistles and blackberries, listening to the weeping of the broken-hearted pigeons. Sobbing their hearts out. Mother walked past the high white wall, and when she looked through the gate she could see up the gravel drive, edged, you know, with the most fabulous polyanthus, bright as blood, and she could see Mrs Morning Glory at the doorway of the house, which had been photographed many times for Home Beautiful and written up in the Weekly Times. Spanish Mission, every luxury, black marble in the bathroom, a refrigerator in the kitchen, a maid in the scullery and Mr Glory dead in the war. He went off singing into the sunset over the hill, waving his rifle, his rising sun glinting on his hat so very new and khaki. (What an Urdu word that is.) He was wounded in the leg, a leg wound in the desert, and could not get to water and he died of thirst in the dust like a fly—I think it must have been like a fly—in the desert. He looked like a currant, one wrinkled little currant on the surface of the cake of Egypt, a very old place to die.
He was a pastrycook in civilian life, owned half-a-dozen cake shops and always took the prizes at the Royal Show.
When Mother looked through the gate, and we were rocking nicely in the bag, Mrs Morning Glory was also roundly inhabited by her unborn son. But no, oh no! The dry and aching demon shock of the currant on the cake, the fly in the dust, caused a thin and smiling Turkish weapon, something like a scimitar—Oriental curved sword usually broadening towards a point, of unknown etymology (the French is ‘cimeterre’—ominous word)—to come slicing through poor little Mrs Morning Glory’s heart and belly, and, eventually through her brain. The loss of her husband and the miscarriage of her baby, as we understand it, turned her mind.
Somehow she could never speak to Mother after that.
Mother wheeled us yodelling in a navy-blue pram up and down the hill. Slow up, fast down. ‘This is a War Savings Street,’ it said on the notice on the electric light pole. And Father was away in the navy on the safe wet seas with all the water in the world to drink and Mr Glory was only a currant on the Egyptian cake. We were a terrible reminder of baby Georgie Glory (named after the king in defence of whom Mr Glory had fallen in battle). He was minute, perfect, dead, the image of his father, baptised in a very sad ceremony, and buried in a hallowed section of the garden, where later the gardener and Mrs Morning Glory wept and planted an almond tree.
She could not see us. She looked right through us as though we were ghosts or the yodelling mad.
‘This garden,’ I said to Iris, ‘this garden looks like the garden of the Selfish Giant.’
Mother was very clear that we were not to worry ‘the poor soul’. She had everything that woman, everything that money could buy. She had, don’t forget, a refrigerator. Stay away from there. But the other world beyond the convent wall was pale and sweet, the air spangled with butterflies, the trees glowing with waxy lemons and red apples from the tree of Mrs Morning Glory’s Knowledge. She was guarded by a dog and a gardener with a purple face. With a basket and scissors, wearing gloves and the blue organdy hat, she drifted around her garden, snipping and sniffing, and taking roses inside to arrange in the crystal bowl that she was given as a wedding present.
I reached the iron curls of the gate and cupped my hand, warm wet living child hand, around the pale-green globe of the flower on the snowball tree. I tugged. The snowball came off the tree and lay full of green-and-white air in my palm, stray florets drifting onto the path.
I felt the shock of guilt dash wildly through my veins. We ran home down the lane past the pigeons and the blackberries and the cowsheds. The snowball was crushed to tatters in the hand of the thief.
The roar of the gardener’s roaring wide-open mouth. ‘If I catch you I’ll ram it down your bloody throat.’ The thin and jagged wail of Mrs Morning Glory’s anguish swirled in tarantella through the sparks of all the stars. They have stolen my flowers.
They have taken my glory.
My baby will never come back.
The Morning Glory Story
I lost the baby after I heard George had died. First he was missing, and then they said he had perished in the desert. Like a piece of elastic. Perished. The news went through me, through my soul, like fire. I knew the only thing left for me in the world was the baby. I prayed that it wasn’t true about George. But it was. I prayed hardest of all for the baby. But he died of grief inside me.
That’s what they said. He died inside me. I died inside. Lost inside me and nowhere left to look for him. George was dead in the big world desert, and the baby was lost inside me.
It was midnight. The telegram was under my pillow. I was lying in bed in the big bedroom at the corner of the house. You can look out of that room into the rockery, across the spikes of the lavender, across the tops of the fruit trees, and right out to sea. There was a distant sighing and moaning and the telegram was under my pillow. My thoughts kept swinging from George, so young and beautiful, his eyes like sunlight. I loved him. Kept swinging back and forth from George to the baby, rocking like a cradle back and forth, back and forth. And my tears rained like the sap from the bark of a wounded tree. I lay in bed, my head on the pillow, the telegram under the pillow, and I prayed for George and I prayed for the baby, and with my hands I caressed the baby inside me.
Then I felt fire darting hot and sharp through my body. A blob of blood slid out of me. I stopped crying. My hands were still. I was as still as a stone effigy in my bed. The stars outside the window ceased to move. The moaning and the sighing of the waves was silenced. Then the hot blood gushed out of me into the bed and I lay there, perfectly still, my mind arrested with the stars and the waves.
For hours, all night, I lay there as life
flowed away, and I was flowing with it, going with the baby, going out of life.
But in the morning someone came and found me. I went to the hospital and when I was just becoming conscious, I heard a voice saying, ‘Yes, she lost the baby.’
Lost. Lost. Where can I search for him? In my mind, in my heart, in my weeping soul, I searched for him. High on the tops of bright mountains where clouds of glittering butterflies drift over the rocks; deep, deep in the beds of gurgling streams, spangled with sparkling fish; far, far down in the rainbow caves of the secret earth where spirits glide and chant in low mysterious chorus—I sought him.
‘Perhaps we had better let her see him then,’ said the doctor. ‘Perhaps that would be best.’
They brought him to me, cold and perfect, pale as a pearl. He was wrapped up in a white lace shawl. He was the smallest doll. For some reason I had not expected him to be naked. I sat up in the hospital bed with the baby in my arms, and I turned back the shawl. His legs were folded up, his wrists crossed under his chin. The tiny globe of his head. The kiss of his lips. I kissed his lips, afraid he would dissolve. And he was naked. His toes were like buds of orange blossom, and, like the Christ Child in a painting, he was naked on his shawl. Made from flesh and curled up on his shawl.
Sometimes I can’t believe all that has happened. It is a long time ago, and yet it is still as clear and sharp as now.
And the child was naked.
Somebody came to visit me in the hospital. They brought flowers, and a paper bag full of mushrooms. I left the mushrooms under the bed. I have never forgotten them.
Muriel Writes to Iris
Woodpecker Point, October 1986