Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  I knew that when I went back up the narrow stairs my daughter and I would squeeze in beside a very unusual man, a Stone Age man in many ways, a person with self-knowledge and self-respect who knew nothing about role-playing but who possessed the greatest love of all, of humanity at large. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. What D’Arcy Niland had was complete absence of indifference towards mankind. It is the rarest of all virtues and one I have never attained.

  Night in Surry Hills was unquiet. There was the distant thin wail of a baby, the scutter of rats on neighbouring roofs, harsh bellows from Kate Leigh’s grog shop, which was only four or five doors away. What I liked best were the unidentifiable sounds from John Curtin Hing’s Chinese grocery next door. The wall of this three-storey building was also the south wall of Mrs Cardy’s house and shop, so we heard much thready soprano music, laughter and creaking beds. In the night our yard filled with pungent gusts from the Hing house; pink fuzz drifted above its chimney, Chinese curses sounded sotto voce as unseen people wrestled unknown objects out on the flat roof. The family was making pickles at 3 a.m. From my bedroom window in the daytime I often saw tiny wooden casks scrubbed and laid out to dry on the roof. Sometimes, also, the black-clad grandmother or great-grandmother would appear at the parapet, smile a toothless smile, and with many nods and jigs of head hold up the family’s youngest for me to admire. He was a perfect little buddha, with azalea-red cheeks. She had spotted I was pregnant, rubbed her stomach, pointed to her chest, indicating that if I breastfed my baby I too would bear a jolly buddha like Winston Churchill Hing.

  Occasionally this old lady dropped a little parcel of rice into the yard; it was unprocurable for us foreign devils. Expired crackers also rained down on the slimy bricks whenever the Japanese were forced to retreat. Later I heard that the old grandmother was the family’s sole China-based survivor of the fearful massacre in Nanking. Her grandson had spent a lifetime’s savings to bribe her way out of China.

  Beres used to send Mrs Cardy into gasping fits by postulating what this ancestor had rechristened herself. As is obvious, it was customary for our Chinese to give themselves new names. At last they settled on Betty Grable Hing, though Marlene Dietrich was a strong contender.

  Mrs Cardy’s house was astir with ghosts. Exhaustion brings curious creative breakthroughs. I have heard this described as a disturbance of sequential progressions in the brain’s activity. I would simplify it; I would say it is a sweeping away of intellectual white noise. Many years later, as I served hot tea to advanced students and Buddhist monks emerging from the terrifying sesshin, I was to see the same thing. They were pallid, gaunt, but their faces carried an unfamiliar radiance or exaltation. Sesshin, an attempt to crash through into awareness or enlightenment, is a rigorous Zen exercise in intensive meditation – zazen -lasting several days, the practitioner sitting in the one place, eating and sleeping minimally, still in the same place. When these people spoke, sometimes poetry came out. They had dipped water and nourishment from wells which they had not known existed within themselves.

  Alone in the cooling kitchen I often found my mind swept along on a whirlwind of incandescent dust motes, or so it seemed - a hurricane of ideas, words, memories, even titles. The title of this book was one of them, when it came to me that although many, we are told, cross the tumultuous river of the dead, nobody fishes in it. Who knows but that one might bring up a golden fish?

  The ghosts that watched in Mrs Cardy’s house seemed comfortable and many. In the early 1950s when much of the street was demolished, I pondered guiltily over the wasteland of crumbled brick and plaster and wondered whether the house and its ghosts would still exist, had I not spent so many sleepless hours in the kitchen in the dead of night.

  Come with me through Mrs Cardy’s house, for it was here that I conceived the consuming interest in Victorian social history that has been the backbone of so many of my books. It is quiet; the baby asleep in its distant cot padded with newspapers; the police have cleared out the drunks from Kate Leigh’s. Some have crept thankfully into the paddy wagon; others have stuffed themselves into any cranny or rubbish tin they can find. We can hear the nightmen running up and down the meagre lanes behind the shops and houses, for this part of Surry Hills is unsewered. But they are fairly quiet, not clanking cans over-much; their boots are covered with felt buskins.

  Mrs Cardy’s house has worn itself into the ways of human beings - five or six generations in time, and small changes occurring with each generation.

  Its ‘front room’, not much more than two metres wide, and opening flat-faced on to Devonshire Street, was in the late 1860s converted into a shop. First it served as a grog shop for the soldiers from the Paddington Barracks, then as a chandlery, a harness-maker’s, a gunsmithy, and at last a barber shop. During the catastrophic depression of the 1890s it was closed for many years, then rented as a dosshouse for a charitable society. All these permutations left their mark on the walls, the stairs; made this lopsided, that wry; a door or window swollen, shrunken or intractable so that it never shuts or never opens.

  People have died in it and their coffins have gone out the front window in a sling because of the scarcely more than hip-wide stairs. Our landlady’s husband, Owen, went out that window, hurting her feelings something terrible. To see this loved man going through his own bedroom window like a piano was not a thing you got over in a wink.

  Behind the shop, closed and empty since Owen’s death, for he was the barber, is a living room two and a half metres by three. Out of it elbows the steep staircase, making the small room smaller. All is in twilight, for the only light or ventilation comes from a handspan window at the foot of the stairs. It is propped open by a tomato-sauce bottle, black of glass and antique in design.

  ‘It was there when Ownie and I came and it’ll be there when they carry me out,’ said Mrs Cardy.

  In earlier times the parlour was the kitchen. Once when the grate was removed from the fireplace so that the chimney could be swept I lit a candle, shone it up into the sooty darkness and saw rusted nubs of huge bolts and hooks that long before had carried a jack and the suspension chains for cast-iron cauldrons and Dutch ovens. Here women for generations cooked by candlelight, or the soft illumination of kerosene or whale-oil lamps.

  ‘Hoisting around those iron pots that weighed a ton even when they were empty! No wonder they had miscarriages by the dozen,’ said Mrs Cardy.

  She looked around contentedly. ‘Me and Ownie made it a picture, though, didn’t we?’

  So it is. An etched-glass globe on the gaslight, waxed furniture, and a floorcloth of Euclidean design, washed and polished twice a week, for she is a meticulous housewife. On the wall are Our Lady of Lourdes; Owen wearing a narrow-brimmed phallic-looking hard-hitter; and Mrs Cardy herself, also in a hat though this one resembles a casserole full of pansies. Her cheeks are soft and round and her remarkable eyes beautiful with youth.

  ‘Wasn’t bad, was I?’ said Mrs Cardy in honest admiration when I first saw that picture. ‘People said I painted, but I didn’t.’

  The houses around here do not have bathrooms. Mrs Cardy’s bedroom is furnished with many things, all wedding presents of forty years ago, a rosewood dressing table, a huge bed with a marcella quilt, and a wash stand and ‘set’ – jug, basin and chamberpot, the chinaware deeply embossed with tall leaves and white irises. In the corner stands a midget oil stove; nightly she boils up a kettle of water and has a thorough all-over. Besides being sagacious and firm of manner, she is an admirably clean and tidy old woman, and her house reflects her personal principles.

  The boys and I make do with piecemeal washing in the kitchen. There is a splintery wooden sink in the corner, the water draining into a bucket underneath. The rule is to wash dishes in an enamel basin on the little table. Thus the sink is kept sacrosanct for what Mrs Cardy, in the Irish manner, calls ‘a rench’.

  She has many old Irish songs, many of which I am never to hear again. One of them begins with a long dogl
ike yip, ‘There was an old prophecy found in a bog’. Sometimes I think it refers to me, that I’ll never have a proper bath again as long as I live. But it is four o’clock, time to leave the ghosts and go to bed. I know it is 4 a.m., not because I hear a clock striking somewhere in the snoozing city. All bells and chimes have been silenced, and indeed some steeples and towers taken down for the duration. What I hear is a cyclist coming up Devonshire Street, slowly and laboriously, for the street is steep at the eastern end, and he is an elderly man, one of the many who took over their sons’ jobs while the latter served in the Forces. Every morning before dawn he fires up the boilers at Playfair’s Smallgoods Factory, just across the road.

  I often think of him entering the shadowy factory, the shrouded machines and benches, the air choking with the stinks of brine, spice, smoke, unacknowledged chemicals. Does he look up at ‘the watchman’ - the long carpet snake, two or three metres of sulphur yellow, black and chocolate in an aboriginal design? It is said it has a cold hard nose like a dog, and will sometimes unfurl behind a workman and tickle his neck in a snakish joke. Playfair’s keep it to frighten away rats.

  ‘It’s a calm old bugger,’ I heard one of the men say. ‘Quiet, too. There’s something about a quiet snake … peaceful.’

  The rats worried me greatly; several children had been bitten in their beds, and a paralytic drunk had one side of his face laid bare almost to the bone before he was found. The municipal rat catcher came and ineffectually laid poison.

  ‘They’re wise to poison,’ he said. ‘Very artful, rats.’

  Rat traps were unobtainable because of the metal spring - almost everything made of metal had vanished during the war. There was even a motor vehicle made largely of wood, incredible as this sounds. We set mouse traps, they caught mice, and the rats sneaked in and ate the mice.

  One day, as I sat typing at the little table by the bedroom window, I saw a rat sitting at his ease in the sunshine, watching me. He was an old warrior, bald blue scars all over him; his eyes were little garnets ringed with scales like those of certain birds. This was a composed, leisurely rat, taking my shouts and gestures for what they were. He was like an Egyptian granary-rat, murderous as Set, a kitten-eater.

  D’Arcy scavenged a piece of fine chicken netting from some dump, and nailed it on the outside of the window. The rat, returning, showed me his fine brown teeth in a grin; he could bite through that stuff like shears.

  All municipal services had been cut for lack of men; women swept the streets and some even collected the garbage, which was thrown pellmell on the backs of trucks in huge stinking heaps.

  ‘It’s like when the plague was here,’ said Mrs Cardy. ‘Millions of rats there were.’

  ‘What plague?’ I cried.

  ‘Bubonic.’ She went on rattling the clinkers through the stove’s firebox into the ashpan. Riddling, she called it. ‘Some of the old people around here remember it. Being evicted, and all that. Having to live in tents on the Common and in the parks. The rats brought the bubonic and the cesspits brought the typhoid and cholera.’

  She had told me before about the cesspits that pre-dated the nightsoil collection, barbarous civic cloacae where people often threw murder victims and unwanted babies.

  ‘Crikey!’ said my husband, ‘what an article, what a talk for the ABC!’

  He was all the more enthusiastic when he discovered that the plague almost coincided with Federation. What a perfect paradox! However, when I did the research at the Public Library, reading old newspapers of the time until my eyes almost dropped out, I found that bubonic plague had once been almost endemic to Sydney, as it was to so many ports.

  An appalling epidemic in South China in 1893 was the genesis of Sydney’s Great Plague in the midsummer of 1900. The scourge crossed to Hong Kong, ploughed vast furrows through the populations of India and Africa and reached the Pacific in New Caledonia in 1899.

  The Sydney I found in the old photographs could have come from the writings of Hippolyte Taine - – ‘stifling alleys thick with human effluvia, troops of pale children crouching on filthy staircases’ and ‘in the Haymarket the abject miserable poverty of the streetwalkers; it seemed as if I were watching a march past of dead women.’

  Taine wrote of the London of the 1840s and 1850s; but the odd and valuable journalist of Sydney’s 1870s and 1880s known as Vagabond told the same tales of a new green land so many thousands of miles away from London, and yet already fallen into identical dark pits of ignorance and corruption.

  The photographs were fearful. During a vast rat drive some 30,000 rats were exterminated. People with fox terriers hired them out by the day. At the same time a general sanitary cleansing of the city took place.

  ‘Do you know what they fished out of the Harbour, just the main Harbour?’ I demanded at the dinner table. ‘A thousand dead dogs and cats, and dozens of cows and horses. And human corpses …’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ said Mrs Cardy. ‘You’re almost as bad as Beres was when he was working for the St John’s Ambulance.’

  This referred to a time when Beres, overcome by enthusiasm for his new essential job, insisted on telling us at breakfast about a motor-cycle accident.

  ‘His liver was wrapped around a post fifty feet away,’ he marvelled.

  I had always been interested in housing, partly because of my observations in New Zealand when I accompanied the City Missioner, the Reverend Jasper Calder, on his rounds, and partly because of our own difficulties.

  Needless to say the ABC didn’t want any talk on the Federation Plague.

  ‘Rats,’ they said faintly. ‘Cesspits. Buboes. No, really, ABC listeners wouldn’t care … imagine the letters to the G.M. … Buboes, dear me.’

  Talks Department didn’t know I lived in Surry Hills; they thought I lived in a box at the G.P.O., which we had prudently rented the moment we had some money to spare.

  The early governors had left Sydney prosperous in a modest way, speckled with grassy open spaces, a decent village. Fifty years after Macquarie, the best of them all, left for home, photographs show it to be a city of half a million people, certainly with green and leafy suburbs, gardens and mansions to the east, where the wealthy lived, but in general a scrubby old dockside town. It was a chaos of roofs, dunnies, fetid alleys, stairways, old limepits, quarries now filled with lean-tos of turf, and doss-downs of iron and old sacks.

  The Commissioners in charge of sanitation rid Sydney of many of these squalid lanes, especially around Darling Harbour and The Rocks. Many houses were pulled down, others forcibly scrubbed with lime and carbolic, white-washed and repaired. Of the plague cases, 38 per cent occurred in the Surry Hills area, that is, around Liverpool Street, Elizabeth Street and Devonshire Street. At that time the latter bisected the vast drear treeless cemetery that lay where Central Railway Station now stands. Its original name was The Sandhills graveyard; many of the poor old brown bones hidden there had already been moved once, from another horrid, vagrant-haunted cemetery in the area where Sydney’s Town Hall now prinks in glorious High Victoriana.

  These photographs fascinated me, particularly those of The Rocks. I sometimes had the feeling they were three dimensional and I had fallen in amongst the shanties stuck in coigns of sandstone, or on ledges reached by ladders, or narrow jump-ups hacked in the rock itself. Some were of snaggletoothed timber, propped against a natural cave or cranny; others of stone blocks pockmarked with age and weather. Here and there, in a deep natural crankle was a dwelling like a martin’s nest, all spit and mud, with an elbow chimney breathing out smoke.

  Though I studied Hogarth’s drawings of London’s evil slums, the people in those were remote. But in the local photographs the people were real, eyeing the camera with excitement or resentment, the kids poking out their tongues. Maybe their descendants still lived in Sydney. The children looked well-fed, but they were scruffy little rapscallions. One could see little boys wearing the sloppy clothes of an older brother, the girls already with a hip slightly out of whack thr
ough carrying the youngest baby a-straddle across that little hip all day. The girls mostly had their hair chopped close to the scalp; to keep down the nits, I expect. But there was one, pale, sharp-faced, with slitted tiger eyes, to whom I returned again and again with my big magnifying glass. Watch it, you, that kid was saying. Don’t take me for less than I am, or I’ll punch yer yeller and green. She stayed in my head for thirty years, emerging in the end as a member of a family of decent immigrants called Bow, trying to keep up their standards in a decrepit slummocky antipodean city. They’d been told there was gold in the streets, but the only gold was the sunshine. And, of course, their own courage and durability.

  No one can truly tell how novels are written, least of all myself. Structure, plot, storyline, creation of many characters who must, absolutely must, walk, talk and think for themselves - all that can be explained. But the prim-ordium cannot be defined. True, I gazed for hours at a little girl in a photograph of 1899, but why that child; how did I know her name was Beatie Bow? Some sorcery in the subconscious was operating in the trackless, wordless dark.

  And yet the most commonly asked question of all writers is: ‘where do you get your ideas from?’

  No wonder many writers, in their inability to explain, fire off facetious remarks. I know because a reader once seriously asked me, ‘Do you also get your ideas from the Idea Factory in Wagga, like so-and-so always does?’

  On a freezing day in June, just before daybreak, my daughter was born in Crown Street’s Women’s Hospital, in the public wards. Because of my constant sickness I suppose little food had ever remained long in my stomach, so she was small and fragile. I did not care for the experience and even in my direst agonies was aware that this natural process was being forced by the medical profession to proceed in an unnatural way. My youngest children, twins, were delivered by a midwife. This was altogether on another level of insight.