Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  ‘Surely,’ he said gravely as he handed it back to me, ‘it cannot be midnight yet?’

  The very idea of entering the Children’s Session offices delighted me. I never knew whom I might find there, maybe an admired actor or that other imponderable, ‘a personality’. For radio was the only alternative to theatre work, and sooner or later all the stars played radio. Once I found a young man with his face muffled in a curtain, practising being a crow. Peter Finch his name was. At the time he was as yellow as a smoked fish with atabrin, the anti-malarial drug. He was either going to Darwin to be bombed by the Japanese or had just returned. Later D’Arcy became close to him. Peter always said they had been copyboys at the Sun together, but this was not true. Peter had long preceded D’Arcy there; he was several years older than he admitted. I wouldn’t say we were all good friends; I find it difficult to know who an actor actually is. Peter Finch was a complex, secretive character with whom one had to be careful. He was adept at the old actor’s habit of inviting one to lunch and then leaving one with the bill. (Robert Helpmann did it to me once, and at a costly restaurant too. But that mischievous little troll had been so entertaining, told so many outrageous tales of his dancing life it was worth it.)

  Peter Finch was multi-talented. His was the most heart-stopping Mercutio I ever witnessed, and Laurence Olivier said the same. He could also write well, and his painting was said to be excellent. He was supposed to have had a bizarre childhood, but who could say when the sinister tales came from such a fantasiser?

  When he was playing radio his face could change eerily; so could his body. Within a year or so he played the lead in a play I had written about Abel Tasman, the brutal cattleboat captain who preceded James Cook round and about the Australian coasts.

  ‘I played him as a big man,’ Peter said.

  ‘How did you do that on radio?’ I asked with a smile.

  ‘I made myself a foot taller.’

  Now I could say I knew Elizabeth, Mac and Joe, whose voices I had first heard on the north-west plains of New South Wales, while I dried dishes for the Chinese cook, in a smoky homestead kitchen. Those laughing voices had laughing faces to go with them. Mac looked like a youngish Ronald Colman. Dear tubby Joe had survived the same Napier earthquake in which my runaway Auntie Willy had so sadly been banged on the head with a bit of cathedral. I felt this a great bond.

  Then there was Elizabeth - Ida Osbourne - whom I admired more than words can tell. When I looked at her I always thought of the goddess or nymph in one of the classic Greek tales - ‘a fair and lightly-sparkling girl’. She was capable and composed, her clothes always perfect. I imagined her living in some heavenly apartment overlooking the Harbour, probably with a housekeeper. As it happened she, too, had had a struggle to find lodgings in houseless Sydney, and her salary was adequate and nothing more, for the ABC was never princely in its remunerations to employees. But her delight in her work, her friends, in life itself made her golden, and I longed and longed to be exactly like her.

  I dreaded her finding out that we were living on the lick of a fish bone, in a place where rats looked in the bedroom window and murderers came to the street door to ask that their coats be mended. These things, I felt, did not add to the persona I wished to present, that of the successful young writer.

  It was a great shock to me years later when Elizabeth published some reminiscences of her work at the ABC and I found out she had known all along.

  Nevertheless, my instinct was correct, though it did not apply to people like Elizabeth. Long before we married, D’Arcy had written a gag script for Jack Davey, a famously successful radio personality for two decades.

  Jack Davey was originally a New Zealander; he had comedic wit, a remarkable voice, and all the hubris in the world. In times when self-promotion was considered lowlife, Mr Davey excelled at it. He did spectacular things and was forever in the headlines. He drove fabulous cars; bought a city building and painted it bright red; was constantly arrested for illegal gambling in the various underground baccarat clubs and was as mean as catsmeat.

  For three months D’Arcy chased Jack Davey for payment. He stood outside his office door, he telephoned him, he accosted him in the street.

  ‘That cow owed me five guineas, which was the arrangement, and I was determined to get him if it took two years.’

  At last he managed, this threadbare kid of seventeen, to catch the great man as he was getting out of his Porsche (a car then scarcely heard of in Australia) and said, ‘You owe me five guineas, Mr Davey, and I want it.’

  He added, fatally, ‘I’ve just lost my job at the Sun and I really need it.’

  Jack Davey put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a pound note. ‘That’s all you’re getting. But here’s four quids’ worth of good advice – never cry a poor mouth, it ruins your chances.’

  ‘He threw the pound note at me, and strode off, the lousy bastard. And he was wearing a silk suit!’

  Nevertheless, Jack Davey’s advice was worth a great deal more than four pounds, five shillings, and I pass it on to all those in a tight corner. In need, which so often translates as defencelessness, there is some mysterious component which brings out the worst in many people; regrettably too, in all races. It is as if defencelessness, no matter the cause - poverty, age, gender, physical weakness or anything else - instantly marks you out as an appropriate victim.

  Jack Davey had it right. Never appear in need of what the other person owes you. I think that Christ’s statement that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ is a mistranslation slavishly followed. The meek inherit nothing. They get rocks dropped on them from a great height. Unless, of course, human nature changes, which it shows no sign of doing.

  It was after one of these lifesaving half hours with the Children’s Session staff that I came close to being filleted by a plate-glass window. Happily hurrying down to Pitt Street to wait for a tram, an Austro-American riot broke out under my very nose. One second there was a street full of traffic, shoppers, lunchtime dawdlers, and the next Pitt Street from Market to King was a roaring berserk mass of people, all, in the recognised manner of crowd madness, struggling violently to reach the centre. The noise was deafening – police whistles, rebel yells, cooees, screeches, barracking, and frenzied bell-ringing from trams caught embattled in the middle of it all.

  Having been in other wartime riots, I knew what to do. Get out fast. I scurried for Woolworths’ front entrance, which, had I but known it, the well-drilled staff had already locked and barred. But in a second the crush of panicky people charging from both directions pushed me up in the air against the window. My feet were at least a metre off the pavement. Certainly from up there I had a remarkable view. Over the heaving mass of combatants I noticed the frenzied staff of Farmer and Co. (now Grace Bros), struggling to put up wooden bomb shutters to protect their expansive windows. Shutters and staff were borne away like flotsam.

  One huge US military policeman leaped to the top of a tumble of sandbags - there were sandbags all over Sydney - and in an orderly manner hit every head that passed him. Crash, crunch, yelp! Then he too was dragged down, and there was a short dogfight, all fists and boots and hoarse caterwauls. I often wondered whether he survived.

  All at once the Woolworths’ windows pressed against my back began to give, bulging and trembling. At the same time the steel frames that supported them emitted a long thin yawp. One of the upper corners had given way.

  ‘My God, my God, the windows!’ someone shrieked, and the crowd shoved all the harder, in all directions, in the mindless rage of panic. I was pushed so far up in the air that a man’s head was level with my waist. I suppose I screamed ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ Heaven knows what one screams in these circumstances. And suddenly he collapsed. For a moment I thought I’d murdered him, but I think he had already fainted or lost his footing with some tidal eddy of the crowd.

  Did I care? I jumped on his prostrate torso - his legs were already being trampled upon - scrambled into a fleeting clea
r space and around the corner into Market Street. There I pressed into a doorway, convinced I was going to have that baby on the spot.

  Later I heard that the Woolworths’ window had cracked but not fallen. Still, it was a formidable few minutes. I much preferred another inter-ally riot I saw on Manly Wharf when a large group of wandering Australian soldiers, out of money and things to do (the Australian troops received approximately half the pay of the Americans), met a carefree band of US sailors and marines, plus girls, as they disembarked from the Sydney ferry. Again firepoint was reached as suddenly as a flash of lightning. People were tossed off the wharf like fleas; the air was full of flying servicemen. As for me, I jumped down on the beach and was away to the bus stop like a champion.

  However, the impression one had of these affrays was that both sides had the time of their lives.

  Sydney was never as openly violent as Brisbane, Perth or Townsville. Many an old digger have I heard speak nostalgically of the Battle of Townsville, when two troop trains, going in different directions, carrying Aussies one way and ‘Yanks’ the other, stopped at the same station.

  ‘Ah, she was a bobby dazzler, love. She was a bloody beaut. Me mate had his nose broken twice.’

  The Battle of Brisbane was even more spectacular, beginning at a United States canteen, which was besieged by drunken Australians, and spreading in an uncontrollable rampage throughout the city. Some deaths occurred in that engagement. In the interest of international relations, no publicity was given to these events.

  It was obvious to all that no racial hatred, not even dislike, was involved. In a tense, unfamiliar atmosphere, with invasion or death always tomorrow’s possibility, it is no wonder that men of both armies trailed their coats from both mischief and nervous aggressiveness. They were young, fit, and toey. The marvel is that there were not more punch-ups than there were.

  As a civilian I found the Americans courteous, friendly, generous to the children, and more easy-mannered than our own boys. One of D’Arcy’s young brothers owed his life to a G.I. He was ill with pneumonia, the family kneeling around saying the Rosary, when the elder girl came in with her American boyfriend. In a moment he had sized up the situation, wrapped the sick boy in a blanket, and carried him out to a taxi and the hospital.

  The poor mother ran after him, weeping and tugging at the blanket. Perhaps she thought her boy was being abducted.

  Even after D’Arcy arrived and explained how grateful they all should be to the quick-thinking young American, she was resentful and indignant.

  ‘The cheek of that fellow, interfering like that! We were saying the Rosary – God would have looked after Joe.’

  ‘He did,’ said D’Arcy. ‘So he sent an angel. In a uniform.’

  She didn’t see this at once. She was Irish but differently Irish from my grandmother and her family. Unlike them she could not snatch a flying word like a butterfly, comprehend it and its ramifications in a flash, pull off its wings and flick it back towards its originator. She seemed to come to any resolution ponderously and passively, like an old heavy tree settling defensively into its roots at the twitch of a breeze.

  I came from a family of lively, romantic thinkers, full of passionate likes and dislikes and brief though noisy enmities, so I couldn’t get the hang of her at all. Equally, she could not find any common ground with me. I didn’t look right, ‘sort of foreign’; I talked ‘like a Pom’. Certainly the New Zealand accent of fifty years ago did not resemble today’s, but my speech was not that of an Englishwoman. I think my non-Australian speech and manners flustered her. She felt she had to bite someone and the stranger seemed the logical person.

  The name of this woman, large, low-voiced, soft-faced, with a skin like yesterday’s rose, was Barbara. She gave me eighteen months of what was effectively a groundswell of loneliness and unhappiness. Nevertheless, in many significant ways, she was one of the best women I have known.

  • 4 •

  At Mrs Cardy’s house began my lifelong habit of insomnia. I have often wondered whether sleeplessness, discontinuous but prolonged, frequently total, has a significant effect upon the creative faculty. It seems that a certain degree and quality of dreamtime is essential for the mental stability of humans, but this is not available to the habitually sleepless. Certainly when one is deeply involved in writing, curious mental states are observable. Is it possible that the dreaming of the sleepless is done in the daytime, and translated into literary material? I do not even know whether insomnia is a common burden of writers and other creative people. D’Arcy Niland did not know what it was until his last few months of life when he was very ill.

  He often worked all night, but invariably he compensated for it next day, his head on the typewriter. Inkstains from the ribbon often decorated his forehead. Or he would fall down for five minutes upon the sofa. ‘Resting my eyes,’ he called it, but he was as soundly asleep as an exhausted dog. During these periods he liked to have something on his stomach, usually a sleeping baby, his fingers hooked in the back of its pants. In later years when we had dogs, it was often a puppy.

  My husband originated my curse of insomnia. Until I married I slept as soundly as any other young girl. He changed my sleep style. No matter what time of night it was, he would creep up the stairs from Mrs Cardy’s kitchen where he had been writing in longhand, for we had a typewriter curfew of nine o’clock. More likely he had just returned from his mother’s house, which he visited several times a week to try to solve the family’s myriad insignificant problems. He still felt responsible for his family, and of course they loved to see him.

  Arrived in the bedroom, he shook me awake. He wanted to talk right that moment about an idea for a new radio play, or how his Dad had thrown his dinner at the wall, and the hilarious way the sausages had slid majestically down the wallpaper. Or he wanted me awake for what he called a bit of a cuddle.

  What he really needed was company. He could not bear being alone. Also he had no idea that other people, once they have gone to sleep, like to stay that way. I had trouble enough with broken sleep, having to get up four or five times a night to trail downstairs to the lavatory to be sick.

  One morning at 1 a.m., after he had made a lightning dash to the post office to get some hopeful manuscript on its way, he shook me awake with the excited announcement that he had just seen the most extraordinary Chinaman. There was nothing nearby with which I could murder him, so I seized his shaving mirror and threw it at the fireplace with such force it not only shattered into crumbs but scarified a tile.

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  He was absolutely, innocently shocked. Not a whisper from his rich imagination suggested a reason. Years afterwards he confessed he thought I had gone dotty; expectant women sometimes did, his mother said.

  ‘If you ever, ever wake me up again to tell me about a weirdo Chinese or anything else for that matter, I shall kill you.’

  ‘But I thought you’d like to know.’

  As I became sicker and sicker in the months before my child’s birth, the kitchen became my night refuge. There was no point in returning to bed, to be sick again in another half hour. So I sat there, wrapped in a blanket before the cooling stove, where nightly Mrs Cardy ‘smoored’ the coals with the little prayer to Sts Michael and mighty Gabriel her grandmother and mother had recited long before. In New Zealand we had called this nightly ritual banking – placing a lump of hardwood at the back of the firebox, and carefully covering the red embers with fine ash; lightly, lightly, don’t smother them, fire needs oxygen.

  In the morning, with any luck, all one had to do was to blow up the embers, feed them with kindling, and put on the kettle for the tea.

  I remember the kitchen very well; it was a comfort against the hardships of that time – ‘the narrow anxious bed, the brief apprehensive sleep, invocations frequent and early,’ as the Irish poem says. I sat there half drowsing, wondering now and then what was in store for myself and my daughter. For I was sure my child was a girl.
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  Sometimes, while I was crossing the backyard, always watching for rats, I looked up at the sky. The yard was the size of a bedsheet; it was like peering up through a chimney or from the bottom of a well. Often I saw the scissor blades of searchlights clipping at the darkness. Sometimes I perceived a star or two, which might well break into fiery splinters through my tears.

  Yet I would not have the reader think that I had any regrets about leaving my home and country, my dearly beloved family, to enter upon a life I knew very well would be difficult. My tears were because of physical discomfort, the animosity of my husband’s people, whom I wanted to be my people too, and the times. Australia was under siege. I emigrated in the worst and most dangerous year in its history, and though in this story I do not mention the war overmuch, it is because the abnormal had become the norm, so to speak. We took it for granted that times were bad, and were grateful that for us they were not as terrible as for others.

  Somewhere I have read that sin is falling short of one’s own totality. With love, one rises above it. Certainly, in the moments of awareness I have had, whether through my ancestral occasional second sight, or the awareness I was sometimes to attain in later years through the practice of Zen, I recognise that this is so. To rise above one’s own totality is to realise that there are no boundaries to one’s own totality; one is not separated from the whole, the gestalt, whatever that may be. And I had always been a child rich in love, both giving and taking. As a writer, love is what I have always written about. Not man-woman love alone, for that is but a small thing compared with love of life, or love of the planet. It is love itself that matters, that lifts the spirit above totality – the capacity to give it, and take it. That was what made my world one I had not only chosen, but could make golden.