by Janet Frame
It is so hard to judge. Peter Fraser, Mickey Savage. South, north, the world.
Grace felt suddenly depressed, annoyed by her muddled insular thinking, tired of the ‘World’ and its problems, lacking the energy to spread her emotional net so wide and the power to pull it home unaided to her heart. She felt lonely; she would sit on a tiny island beach in the sun, or perhaps, after all, she would join the Life-Guards in their march; the massed bands would cheer her, yes, yes, it would be fun to march to the band, and not nearly so uncomfortable now that they had arranged to kill all the sandflies. Sandflies were a nuisance. It stood to reason.
—It stands to reason, her father shouted. What a wonderful phrase that was, what quelling power was contained in it!
—Excuse me . . . I . . . I’ll go upstairs for a time - to switch the fire on . . .
—Of course, of course.
Grace escaped upstairs. For a while she huddled over the gas fire, then drawn to the bookshelf and the few books which Anne’s father had chosen to bring from New Zealand, she found the History of the Rifle Brigade, sat down by the fire and began to read the chapter headed War in the Trenches, and while she read she could hear her father singing defiantly, trembling with fear, with disbelief that what was so, was so.
‘I want to go home,
I want to go home,
I don’t want to go to the trenches no more
where the bullets and shrapnel are flying galore.
Take me over the sea
where the Allemand won’t get at me,
Oh my,
I don’t want to die,
I want to go home.’
17
In the clear white-painted cold room which the gas fire could not even begin to warm, Grace read and thought about the First World War, reliving the squalor and terror of it, for though she had not been born until six or seven years after the end of the War, by the convenience of Hollywood, and by the quiet more obscure imaginings gained from her father’s talk of war, and the songs he sang about it, she had believed, as a child, that she lived during it, that she had, in fact, ‘been to the War’, fought in the trenches, suffered wounds by gas and shrapnel.
Nearly every Saturday afternoon at the Majestic Theatre, with her acid drops and aniseed balls in the crisp rustling bag, mixed fairly by the obliging Mrs Widdall so that neither acid drops nor aniseed balls would be left in a monotonous clump at the end of the bag, Grace went to the War, sometimes on the German ‘side’, sometimes on the side of the ‘Allies’. She could not think, without a stifling experience of horror, of the afternoon when she had been trapped under the sea in a submarine shelled by a torpedo. She and her sisters and brother had watched the serial, The Ghost City, and although they realised that cowboys and rustlers were ‘pretend’, they had been given their following week’s quota of nightmare by the ending of the day’s episode where the ‘goodie’ entered the shed of a deserted quarry while unknown to him the ‘baddie’ set in operation the huge stone-crusher; slowly, slowly it began to descend on him; he could not escape; the episode ended in a crash of music and hooves and it was time for ice-creams.
Then the lights were put out and Grace and her sisters and brother found themselves under the sea in a submarine, in danger of being suffocated or drowned. Every time they tried to forget their danger the picture reminded them by showing the water gradually rising and the other members of the crew gasping for breath, collapsing, going mad with panic. Suffocation. It was a terrifying word. Grace could never forget the yellow gleam of the underwater light, not the colour of sunlight, for it lay so far from the sun that light had never touched it; a yellow sulphurous glow which reminded her of the last day of Pompeii - another catastrophe experienced and real in the confusion of remembering, knowing, dreaming, which seem to funnel all events read, heard or known, drop by drop into the containing pool of a child’s memory.
When the picture finished, and Grace and her sisters and brother trooped out, blinking, into the harsh sandpaper daylight so different from the soft secret gleam beneath the sea, they knew, or rather Grace knew, and she took it for granted that the others knew also, that the world had changed; it would never ever be the same. Grace looked at the people spilling out of the Exits; she almost felt that she could not breathe for thinking about their doom of suffocation and death. Although she had never noticed it before, she knew as she watched them that they were finding difficulty in breathing on and on and on, yet they were not under the sea, they were up here in the world, on the earth, with the sun shining, the daylight twinkling and birds singing and the leaves on the trees turning yellow and brown and gold and in the garden of the big two-storeyed red brick house where Miss Peters lived, the three sycamore trees leaning into the street were also turning gold.
—The sycamores are ripe, Grace thought, springing and skipping suddenly.—The sycamores are ripe.
That meant they were ready for windmills. On the way home from the pictures they made windmills from the sycamores, running along the street with them, but every third or fourth skip they remembered and knew that making windmills and running along in the wind couldn’t change the fact that people, even those walking about with plenty of air in the sky and all the world, were growing more and more frightened of not being able to breathe, of suffocating in a secret place withdrawn from the sun where the light, though softened by water, gleamed yellow as the volcanic fire on that last day of Pompeii . . . Pompeii . . . Grace remembered that her mother had been there too, how she had called their attention to the rumbling of the volcano, and then stood quite still, holding aside the curtain of the kitchen window and saying in a voice shrill with disaster,—Pompeii. Pompeii.
But the War, the First War . . .
Outside the Red Cross shanty hospital the wounded were arranged in neat rows, like schoolboys in dormitories under the sky, but they were nowhere, really, except on page fifty-three of the History of the Rifle Brigade. Grace could have turned the pages quickly to be rid of them. Why should she worry about soldiers wounded in the First World War when there were so many soldiers and so many wars?
The General was making his inspection. See, his bones picked clean resembled the bones of all other men, but take pity on him, restore his carpet of flesh, wrap him in it, erase all wounds; he is the General.
He addressed the men,
—If you are captured by the enemy what is the procedure?
A chorus from the wounded, their voices quavering like those of old old men,
—Name rank number, name rank number.
Grace was about to turn from page fifty-three to page fifty-five when one of the wounded, lying with his companions, so neatly arranged and lion-stamped, tucked into their narrow grey stretchers like supplies of standard eggs fitted into cardboard containers, wriggled himself up on his elbow, jerked his head high, dared to draw attention to himself.
Grace was powerless to turn the page until she had heard him speak. He said, in a cringing tone from which all pride had gone, strained, as it were, through the final perforations of reality,
—Notice me! Notice me! Tell the General to notice me, how badly wounded I am. Promise!
—I promise, Grace said.
As she was closing the book she heard him singing in a voice of hysterical gaiety,‘I want to go home,
I want to go home,
I don’t want to go to the trenches no more
where the bullets and shrapnel are flying galore.
Take me over the sea
where the Allemand won’t get at me,
Oh my,
I don’t want to die,
I want to go home.’
Replacing the book on the shelf, Grace switched off the gas fire and went downstairs to the sitting room. Philip and Anne looked up as she entered. Philip’s eyes showed a mixture of sympathy and alarm, and Anne said hurriedly,
—Would you like a cup of coffee?
—Yes please, Grace said, and then explaining her absence, —I got caught with y
our father’s book, The Story of the Rifle Brigade. I’ve been reading for about an hour.
—You had the fire on, I hope?
Grace wanted to say, Why, no!, to make Philip and Anne believe that she was either too timid or too absorbed to turn on the fire, but she was a passionate seeker for Truth, whatever it may be, even in little things, and she would have the world without and the world within stripped of all deceit, in the way that the birds, flying down to seize the flakes of gold that covered the Happy Prince, had stolen his clothes, then his limbs, his jewelled eyes, his ears, his flesh until only his heart remained . . . one had to begin, carefully removing deceit layer by layer . . . there fore Grace answered,
—Yes, I turned on the fire.
She had not been too timid, too absorbed; it was an act, because she felt she did not measure up to their expectation of her; they had expected a witty, wise, intelligent guest; instead they had this Grace-Cleave, as hyphenated as her name when it was spoken (intuitively) by little Sarah.
Yet she was indeed afraid, chiefly of thresholds and the human beings who might cross them; continually warned, she gave forth an offensive cloud of emotion and dream - timidity, absorption.
—Yes, she repeated boldly,—I turned on the fire.
She saw that, secretly, Philip and Anne wished she had not been so bold. They had been concerned for her - going to her room and staying there an hour or more without a word of explanation. They had wanted to be able to say, anxiously,
—Oh you should have turned on the fire to warm the room. You must use it at any time, Grace.
She observed their disappointment, their cautious pruning from their words of the anxiety that was not, after all, necessary.
—I’m glad you were warm enough, they said together.
—Was your father in the Rifle Brigade? Grace asked Anne.
—Yes. Look, I’ll make coffee.
When Anne returned and they had drunk their coffee, Grace pulled a book, Modern Architecture, from the shelves, and sprang with quick courage to her feet.
—I think I’ll retire. Goodnight.
—Goodnight, Philip and Anne said together, Philip adding, again as if there were some doubt about her appearing in the morning,
—See you in the morning.
—Yes, she said formally.
Dear Sir, with regard to your statement on the matter of Sunday morning, this is to confirm . . .
She would never learn; communication with people was more than a business letter; why could she not make it so? There were tears of rage in her eyes, rage at herself and the World, as tripping over insts, ults, res, and heretofores, she went upstairs to bed.
As on her first night at Winchley, her pillow was wet with tears before sleep came.
18
She woke during the night. Her mouth throbbed. Is it words or toothache?
Toothache starts and is stopped with violence masked or revealed.
—Smell the pretty towel, the dentist said to Grace, and obligingly she lifted her head, sniffing at the pretty pink towel; then choking with the deceit of it she struggled, bit, kicked, but it was no use, the dentist won, by telling lies he had won, and soon Grace was asleep, and when she woke the tooth was gone, there was a ragged hollow in her mouth and a taste of blood, the special taste that you know is blood and that makes you say, while you see it in your mind red, flowing down wide wide stone steps into the sun and the market-place,—It’s blood, I can taste blood. When the tooth was gone there was no more crying in the night and smacked bottom at night because she cried, there was only the new discomfort - Grace was getting too big for her cot, her legs went against the bars when she tried to stretch them. She was four now, and her favourite music was the bagpipe music played by their father as he walked up and down the passage in the evening.
—Play me to sleep, Dad. Bagpipe me to sleep. Quick, I’ll get into my cot and you bagpipe me to sleep!
And their father played them to sleep, mostly with the full bagpipes, squashing the bag rhythmically with his arm as he walked so that it made a faint wheezing sound, like Grandad under the music; other times without the bag and the pipes spread like fingers and the hanging tartan fringes, the kilt, the sporran, only in ordinary home-from-work clothes, standing still, playing the chanter; explaining, with a resignation that seemed frightening, there was not even the stir of a struggle in it, that one day he’d never be able to play the bagpipes again, he’d only be able to manage the chanter, and then, gradually, not even the chanter.
—Some day, he said, I won’t have the wind.
How strange to pass from the brilliant paraphernalia of bagpipe and kilt to the shorn, drab chanter which never captured the full gurgle and skirl and wail of Highland glens and hills; and from the chanter to go, very quietly, almost not caring, to nothing; a valve of life closing, sealed for ever.
And it happened as Grace’s father had predicted. A time came when he no longer played the bagpipes and when the chanter lay disused in its box in the sideboard; the kilt went astray on one of the many ‘shifts’, and Grace and her sisters and brother played beards and Santa Claus with the sporran.
—Bagpipe me to sleep!
He sang to them, too.
‘Come for a trip in my airship,’ he sang.
And,‘Underneath the gas light’s glitter
stands a little orphan-girl . . .’
Who?
Not me.
Not me.
‘I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town.’
‘He wheels his wheel-barrow,
through streets broad and narrow,
crying cockles and mussels alive-alive-oh . . .’
And the song which made the little sister, Dots, who was nearly three, run to hide under the table, sobbing and sobbing, while the others watched in pity for her; their hearts turned to ice when they heard the song but only little Dots was moved to tears. Supposing . . . supposing . . .
‘Don’t go down in the mine, Dad,
dreams very often come true.
Daddy you know it would break my heart
if anything happened to you . . .’
Oh why did their father torture them by singing it? He wasn’t a miner, he was a first-class engine-driver, locomotive engineer he described himself in his time-sheets and when there were papers from school to be filled in, saying what their father did; yet perhaps he was, after all, a miner? Everything was so possible. Possibility was not a bag or box that could be closed and sealed, it was a vast open chute which received everything, everything; one could not choose or direct or destroy the powerful flow of possibility.
—There’s no such word as can’t! their father would say to them sternly, and although they tried to understand, to reason the matter, they could only grasp that he spoke the truth; they learned, also, that there was no such word as isn’t or wasn’t. Apparently, everything was. Dragons? Even dragons. And God.
So their father was a first-class engine-driver, yet at the same time he was a miner going down the mine to his death because his little daughter, Dots, with the fair hair, had dreamed it all, had dreamed that he died.
When their mother sang to them at night she seldom sang unhappy songs; sometimes they were puzzled and confused by words which were meant to make them laugh, but they did not laugh, they frowned, saying Why? Why? How can it be? How can Grandma’s uncle die with the pip? Which pip?
‘Grandma’s uncle died with the pip,
you tell Dinah that.’
Their mother disapproved of sad songs. She reproached their father for making the children cry with fear when he sang The Wearing of the Green.
‘They’re hanging men and women at the wearing of the green.’
Hanging men and women! Their mother said,—Never mind, kiddies, don’t think about it, it’s only a song, think of fairies and angels and God in Heaven . . . But angels were beings so difficult to think about, their life seemed silly, they weren’t men or women, they didn’t eat, they didn’t go to the lava
tory or speak, they merely flew around in the clouds or walked on earth in disguise . . . now that was more interesting . . . one never knew . . .
—Why did they hang men and women at the wearing of the Green?
—Don’t sing it, Curly.
—Sing Ragtime Cowboy Joe, Dad!
This was an action song; their father had to get up to dance to it. He was Ragtime Cowboy Joe.
‘Way out in Arizona where the bad men are,
the only thing to guide you is an evening star,
roughest toughest man by far
is Ragtime Cowboy Joe.
When he starts a-shooting on the dance-hall floor
no one but a lunatic would start a war,
wise men know his forty-four
makes men dance for fear,
he always sings
raggy music to the cattle as he swings
back and forward in the saddle on the hoss
he’s a high falutin’ scootin’ shootin’
son-of-a-gun from Arizona,
Ragtime Cowboy Joe . . .’
—Now Dan Murphy, Dad.
That was their special song, because a Mr Murphy lived over the road, and his doorstep was a stone doorstep with green moss growing on it.