Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  For years she was lovingly cared for by her youngest daughter, that rosy little one who had offered things up when they became too hard for her.

  I often ponder Barbara’s life. It was a historic quality, as though it belongs to times long gone, when entrapment in intractable hardship, especially for an ill-educated woman, was probable. Yet today people endure in the same way, for the same reasons. They are simply not as noticeable, even in the mass, until they begin trashing great cities.

  Yet one cannot deny that the character of such a woman contributes to the sadness of her life. Thinking of her long struggle, I hear music, faint and unrealised. She and those like her seem born to find solace in religion and nothing much else. The music I hear is Irish traditional music, which always sounds to me as if it is saying goodbye – not sorrowfully, but submissively.

  This woman is not, of course, Mumma of The Harp in the South. That fictional character is a younger, livelier, quicker-witted creature. But she and Barbara shared some of the same experiences. It was the common way of Irish Catholic women of their generation.

  All this time we worked steadily. Long before, we had learned not to allow emotion to interfere with the pursuit of writing. We had chosen to earn our family living that way, and though our existence was close to the bone, we were surviving. I have been looking again at our first, faintly pencilled ‘account book’, and I see that between us we earned the basic wage for six months of that year, not consistently or consecutively, but on an average. The Australian Broadcasting Commission was still the backbone of life to us; through writing steadily for the Children’s Session I had learned a great deal about radio, which I still think the most challenging of media, because the listener, that blind third, must be your colleague and collaborator.

  It teaches you, too, as with a bang on the head with a brick, that dialogue is not talk. This great truth has been entirely lost in television, except by certain European filmmakers.

  Through Elizabeth I met Frank Clewlow, a large enthusiastic flossy-haired Englishman who was Director of Drama. What bliss one morning when we received from Mr Clewlow a letter saying that there had been a splendid response to our first adult dramatic effort, Night Tales of a Bagman, that the ABC was going to repeat them, and would like some more ghost tales in the same format! He also enclosed a clipping from The Listener-In, the most influential radio journal of the day, stating that we were the most promising young radio writers yet seen in Australia.

  Now we were two dogs with two tails, or four tails as the case might be.

  ‘Tiger, do you realise we may make it after all?’

  ‘We might even be able to buy a radio!’ I said.

  It was true. We promising young radio writers had no radio. When we listened-in to the first broadcast of the Bagman tales, we had, with trepidation, gone next door to the Hing family, and asked if we could listen to theirs. It was a vast skyscraper of a thing, its front decorated with frayed golden silk around a kind of gob of black celluloid, which was spouting static and Chinese as we were invited into the living room.

  ‘Oh, blast, it’s a Chinese radio!’ I said absurdly. Tyrone Power Hing, an astute Australian-born boy of twelve, said curtly, ‘Shortwave. Pop likes to get Hong Kong if he can.’

  He flicked a few buttons and in came the ABC. The entire family bowed, and ascended with the greatest dignity to an upstairs bedroom. There behind the grocery shop we first heard the plays we had written in a lamplit bunkhouse on the north-west plains, with the heavy dew dripping off the trees outside with the sound of blood-drops plopping.

  We saw the errors we had made, too, and retired to Mrs Cardy’s not knowing to be thrilled or ashamed. So much we had learned about radio in the interim between writing the script and hearing it broadcast.

  Getting our ideas for ghost stories was no problem for us. Our jubilation at being offered a chance of further work acted like a drug. Our imaginations went off like fireworks. I recalled old bush stories my father had told me; D’Arcy suddenly remembered goose-pimpled evenings when he and the other tikes listened to the Irish stories of Grandma Niland, who had lived with them for a while. We took these stories by the scruff, dragged them out of their original settings, banged them around a bit, and gave them voices. We almost frightened ourselves to death, sitting there late at night in the kitchen, the candle flickering, the baby getting her 2 a.m. feed and looking around with drowsy blue eyes.

  We received £14.14s for our first set of Bagman plays, and for the sixth, £31.10s. The ABC was still devoted to uineas. In time the repeats paid more than the original. Years later, the plays were also broadcast on the BBC, and some of the fifteen-minute scripts were converted into television programmes in other languages. The format was simple: a bagman or wanderer sitting beside a campfire with his friends, telling ghost stories of the countryside. We sometimes moved locations from the true Outback into homesteads and country towns, all of which were familiar to D’Arcy, and some now familiar to me.

  All human beings like uncanny stories. By accident we had happened on a most successful idea. We were led through this apprenticeship in radio writing by the ABC’s senior Play Editor, Leslie Rees, a much experienced and highly skilled man in the dramatic field, as well as a successful writer of children’s books in his own right. I admired his expertise no end, as well as his tact.

  When I first met Mr Rees he smiled and said, ‘But I know you already. Didn’t you submit a verse play for one of our competitions?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I admitted. The poet Douglas Stewart had won that competition with his classic Fire on the Snow, a play about the Scott expedition to the South Pole in 1912. Very rightly, my play had come nowhere.

  ‘I remember your play well,’ said Leslie Rees gravely. (For a split second I thought he might be going to say it was good.) ‘Who could forget that escaped convict swimming fifty miles in flawless iambic pentameter?’

  If you look at photographs of the war years, you will see that almost everyone carries a newspaper tucked under the arm. Every ‘extra’ edition was eagerly bought. What was happening over there, so far away? Had Darwin been bombed by the Japanese yet again? Whose familiar name would be on the latest casualty list? Yet, by 1943, the population was largely submerged in drear acceptance of life as it was. We fell over and cursed the piles of sandbags outside every important building. We looked cynically at the many slit trenches dug to save us from air-raid death, and observed that when they were not filled with rainwater, they were choked with junked tyres and old prams. We knew in our hearts that if the Japanese Army invaded, we were probably done for.

  Yet by the beginning of 1944, we began to dream a timorous dream. Politicians were heard to speak, though vaguely, of peacetime plans. For by the end of 1943 the long battle of Berlin had begun. The Russians were holding their own against the vast German forces deployed in that country and as the Japanese were hammered more and more in the Pacific, American servicemen began to disappear from Australian cities. We began, in spite of severer food rationing, to feel confident that sometime the war would end. Characteristically for Australia, Saturday race meetings, banned in 1942, recommenced before Christmas 1943.

  Beres came back from cooking and deckhanding on one of the River Murray paddlewheel boats and said the countryside was full of Italian prisoners-of-war working on farms, singing, and teaching people like himself every form of Italian from Romano to Calabrese. Australia held something like 18,000 Italian prisoners during the war; they were not kept under restraint, but in open camps, and greatly alleviated the country’s manpower problems, especially in rural areas. They were not the first Italian ‘migration’ by any means, but many settled amiably, brought out their families, and became part of what is probably Australia’s most adaptable and highly valued migrant race.

  Beres was overjoyed to be back in Sydney. He had missed everyone.

  ‘Yes, I’m glad to see you, and you, too, but where’s my Tanglefoot?’

  He hugged Anne, but looked asto
nished.

  ‘Hey, what’s this? It’s a rib! I didn’t know little bubbas had ribs.’

  It was true that Anne was underweight. Any mention of ribs made me feel a failure. Though she had a merry spirit and was as lively as a grasshopper, she had chronic bronchitis and the pallid, peaky look of slum babies - at least those who were not fed on watered-down condensed milk. This concoction, syrupy with sugar, was a favourite Surry Hills replacement for breast milk.

  As they grew older, slum children often became plump and well-fed in appearance; this is observable even in old Victorian photographs. This ‘bonniness’ was because of the children’s high carbohydrate diet, a common thing still in many districts where the housewife has little money and no nutritional training. In Surry Hills bread was the most important food, white, doughy, generously daubed with tinned raspberry jam. Yet at the time minced steak was threepence a pound, and a large bag of yesterday’s vegetables was obtainable at the greengrocer’s for sixpence. But the bread and jam were easier to prepare than a stew or casserole.

  While we were with Mrs Cardy we constantly looked for other accommodation, but when Anne’s bronchitis was no better even in spring, we became desperate.

  ‘We’ll just have to get out of the city, into a country town even,’ I implored. While this promised us good air and perhaps healthier accommodation, the idea also brought many problems - a higher rent, distance from editors and markets generally, fares.

  At last we managed to rent a room in a crochety superannuated beach house at Collaroy, some distance up the northern coast. It had a gas stove on a roofed verandah; water had to be carried from a tap outside; we shared a bathroom with the human flotsam and jetsam who rented the other rooms. The bathroom had no hot water, the bath had no drainpipe. Pull the plug and the water shot straight through a hole in the floor. Things came up that drainpipe - spiders, large red slugs like leeches, once a lost gecko that lived on our ceiling for weeks, tick-tocking forlornly and looking more and more translucent as time passed. Anne treasured its mummified body for days.

  There was no sewerage, only a desolate corrugated-iron dunny standing in the middle of the sand and blowing grass, or grass and blowing sand, depending on the wind. As it was extraordinarily noticeable, we called it the Sore Thumb and cringed every time it had to be attended. To make matters worse, the old bachelor in the front room used to lean against it and sunbathe, exposing his unpleasing blue-white chest and singing ‘Ramona’. Delicate hints, outright requests were ineffective. That was his sunbathing place and he was sticking to it. Finally a new lady, a robust pensioner with eight cats, all with worms, went out and told him she’d kill him with an axe if he didn’t move quick smart. So he did, and I was most impressed at what a little terrorism can achieve.

  The owner of Wits’ End, as we came to call it, was a kindly elderly woman, and though the rooms were comfortless to an almost melodramatic degree, they were let at a cheap rent - and no key money.

  ‘At least we’ll be by ourselves,’ said D’Arcy.

  So we said goodbye to good Mrs Cardy. She was Anne’s godmother; I have always thought of her with gratitude. We all hugged her and promised we would never forget her little house, or the tomato-sauce bottle, or the Biblical tiles around the fireplace in our garret.

  But I never saw her house again. When I next visited Devonshire Street all was gone - the Hing house, the little shops, the brick backyards, the long covered or half filled-in cesspits. Only Mrs Cardy’s chimney stood, resisting destruction, still bearing the stout hook where she had hung a candle in a cocoa tin, to light the stove whilst she cooked. All around was what appeared to be an archeological dig – smashed sandstock bricks, slivers of green glass, twisted gaspipes, fragments of broken cups and plates from the Victorian age. One of the demolitionists told me that the uncovered cesspit of the Hing dwelling was chockful of bones. At first I thought shudderingly of Mrs Cardy’s previous comments on cesspit murders. But eventually it was proved that the Chinese grocery shop had, a century before, been a butchery, and the butcher had the habit of disposing of animals’ bones in the cesspit.

  ‘All kinds of things down there,’ said the demolitionist cheerfully. ‘Goat’s skulls with the horns still on, horses’ hooves. Et everything, I suppose they did, in them bad old days.’

  It was incredible to me that because I had lived with Mrs Cardy, she had to leave her home. I would not have made her unhappy for the world, but so it happened.

  Who in that bitter wartime could have guessed that within four years I would write a book which would be seized upon by the State Minister for Housing? He was already interested in the prospect of slum clearance, and like many such Ministers had become enamoured of the highrise building, the tower block, which seemed to solve so brilliantly the postwar problems of expanding population and shrinking land availability. Clive Evatt was a handsome vital man, a King’s Counsel, imaginative and energetic. He set out to change Surry Hills housing, but in fact began the process which altered not only the face of this inner-city enclave but its character. People who lived in the demolition area were moved to distant, newly created settlements such as Green Valley and Mt Druitt. So isolated, so devoid of the cosy contiguity of crowded Surry Hills and its adjacent suburbs were these model settlements that the unfortunate emigrés felt they had been dumped willynilly in the scrub.

  Many years after that time, these districts and others are still ‘problem areas’, occupied mostly by social-welfare families, single mothers and other people having a hard time.

  Yet I was the person who officially declared open the first new blocks of Devonshire Street flats. Neat little apartments they were, and are, with all the light, ventilation, and modern conveniences the aged cottages and terraces lacked. At the time I thought it was wonderfully progressive, but since then I’ve often pondered over the entire high-density, highrise phenomenon, and all the personal and civic problems it creates. There seems something profoundly psychologically wrong in forcing people to live in beehives or wasps’ nests. We are, it seems, rather like the koala – each to his own tree.

  So we moved to Collaroy. We had no furniture, only the typewriter, the baby’s things, her bath and bassinet and a little suitcase of the clothes my mother had made and sent to her. Most of our baggage belonged to D’Arcy, suitcases and grocer’s boxes and kitbags filled with paper, mostly written upon. For although he was a packrat, he was a paper packrat only. He had hardly any personal possessions otherwise.

  Perhaps owning nothing in youth causes some people to hoard. Others grow up believing that the fewer objects which clutter up one’s life the better. I am that kind. My ideal architecture is Japanese traditional. When in my middle years I first entered a Japanese room, with no furniture beyond one sprig of bush clover in a bamboo container, I felt I had never seen a place that suited me more.

  D’Arcy’s father and Uncle Charlie had promised to help us move.

  ‘Carry a few things, no worry. Help you get shipshape. Do anything for a mate.’

  When we were packed I went over to fetch them. It was early afternoon. Sometime in the interim they had found some money, bought some grog, and were dancing together in the dim kitchen, reeling around skittishly, finickily avoiding the hole in the floor.

  Charlie was making noises like a Jews’ harp; the father, half-delirious it seemed, had draped an old dress of his wife’s over his shoulders, its sleeves hanging down over the black singlet he invariably wore about the house.

  ‘We’re dancing the varsuvienne,’ he explained thickly.

  ‘Twing twang twong,’ added Charlie, unhanding his nose for a moment.

  The two brothers had once had the beautiful silky wavy Irish hair, black as crows. For years now they had been shaving up the sides of their heads to hide the grey. Now they were two old Mohawks. The kids used to salute their father Frank with ‘How!’ which made him mad, flailing about but taking care not to touch them. Under all the nonsense and drunken flim-flam I believe he was gentle in
character.

  It is a picture that has never left me - the unventilated, dusky kitchen which was lit only by a skylight so filthy it was merely a blackish square in the skillion roof -shadows listlessly lolling on the damp-stained walls, and the two men, two lost men, one sadder than the other, lurching together in some memory of their agile, light and outflowing youth, dancing the Valse de Vienne.

  ‘I missed me step somewhere,’ Frank used to say of his life, sitting by himself, crying over tattered letters, writing a good deal in his handsome old-fashioned handwriting -anecdotes of his young days, hoping his son would use them in a story and all would not be completely lost. He reminded me of the workman in Lord Dunsany’s story, who, falling from a high building, tried to scratch his name on the scaffolding as he fell. Frank Niland, intelligent as he was, knew that he had thrown away his life; his only hope that he might be remembered lay in his son.

  ‘I had a huckaback weskit, cream it was, with little cornelian buttons cut on the cross so they shone. And a tan billycock hat, seven inches high. Wasn’t I the darling of the girls, Charlie, me in me billycock hat?’

  ‘Twing twang twong,’ uttered Charlie dreamily.

  Returning to Mrs Cardy’s house, I told my husband that we’d have no help from his father and his uncle that day.

  ‘Ah, they’re a pair of poor bedevilled bastards,’ was all he said.

  The Hing family farewelled us with a fusillade of firecrackers, and the old grandmother pressed into my hand a little pot of green ointment. From her gestures I gathered that it was to increase my breast milk. She had often ruefully shaken her head over Anne’s fragility. Certainly, my baby wasn’t a patch on Winston Churchill Hing.