by Ruth Park
• 6 •
Up and down the eastern coast the ocean hurtled towards the land as though the fetch of each swell originated in South America. Far out at sea the surf began to furl, perhaps at the edge of the continental shelf, and by the time it smashed on the beaches it had grown into green mountains, blue mountains, marbled with froth and streaks of sand. The water was so clean, so clear, it was fluid glass; the little sprats flipped through it like tossed coins. Often we saw dolphins playing in the surf, and once, at an inconsiderable distance, two humpback whales bottling – rising vertically out of the water in a fountain of foam.
The coast was scattered with tiny, far-apart settlements established in the fishing and timber-getting days of a century and a half before. Beyond them rose abrupt cliffs, bristly with scrub, infested with ticks. They were prehistoric shorelines. In the rock, if you scratched aside the flowering vines, showed bands of fossils, scallops and limpets and what I thought were australwinks, their unearthly blue bleached to white. If you succeeded in scrambling to the top, and we often did, Anne riding on her father’s back, you came to Collaroy Plateau, scrubby, windswept, scarcely built on at all.
As far as the eye could see was bush and scrub, sometimes gauzed with smoke from a bushfire struck from a broken bottle or leaf litter too heavy and humid to resist the summer. One could easily understand why the early settlers were so disturbed by the Australian landscape. After Europe they saw it as endless disorder, an anarchic and deathly place.
The writer Xavier Herbert lived on the lip of the plateau, we were told. D’Arcy much admired Capricornia, published just before the war.
‘You can smell the dry saltpans and the hot rock in that book.’
At night we looked up the cliff, saw a dim light solitary in the engulfing darkness, and told each other, ‘I bet he’s working on something great!’ He was, of course – the monstrously long, sad, and now neglected book, Poor Feller, My Country, published years later.
The light may not have belonged to Herbert’s house, but we believed it did, and the sight of it strengthened our resolution. We too were writers, little unrecognised ones; we were part of a movement towards indigenous Australian writing, and we were proud of that.
Often in our explorations we came across broad sandstone outcrops, dimpled by puddles of rainwater or dew, and inscribed with archaic drawings of wallabies, sharks, and women with swinging breasts. There were also ruins of the ‘stone arrangements’ that had puzzled Captain Phillip when he first traversed the almost impassable upland country. Gibbiegunyahs, the aborigines called them, not houses but shelters from rain or wintry winds.
Of those dark people, who seemed like an emanation of the land itself, there was no other sign and had not been for a century.
The coast settlements sheltered, in the lee of headlands tall and blunt as the brow of a sperm whale. Each had a scalloped beach of purest sand. Industriously the Defence authorities had lined these beaches with small pyramids of concrete; there were thousands of them. Mysterious creations, they were called tank traps. When the Japanese landed their tanks anywhere from South Steyne to Palm Beach, they were in for a horrid surprise.
Why any person in his right mind believed that the enemy would land tanks on these particular beaches continues to be an enigma. Still, we were reassured that New South Wales was alert, prepared, sharp as a tack.
In summer, living at Wits’ End was not so bad. Certainly Anne’s bronchitis improved because the only place she could play was on the beach. She chased the gulls and gulls chased her.
Around the house the grass was befouled in new and livelier ways with the worms the eight cats ejected from one end or the other. One could scarcely walk unsmirched to the Sore Thumb. Everyone protested, threatened the police, the RSPCA; the cats’ mother wept, shouted and begged that her darlings be left alone. At last the poor beasts began to vanish, two in this bag, three in that. God knows what happened to them. Their mother retreated into a clinical depression. All night she wept and honked, until at last her daughter arrived and hauled her away, hurling choked curses at us all.
The houses looked out to the sea. In the twilight we watched Peeping Toms prowling around in search of young lovers entwined amongst the dunes, or, more interesting still, fishermen hauling out of the sand the grotesque beach worms that come by the metre and have heads like bunches of chewed string. At first we thought the hunters ate then, then discovered that the worms are the best bait of all.
‘What else leads hidden lives down there under the sand?’ I mused, but really didn’t care to know.
A disconcerting discovery was that Wits’ End was unlined. That house gulped up every wind that blew; a mere skiffle of spray and sand, and through someone’s wall it went. We plugged the worst cracks with thick wads of newspaper, or nailed over them scraps of linoleum and fibreboard found at the tip. The floor was equally airy; I used to lie in bed writing scripts and watch the line undulating across the boards like a caterpillar.
My husband and I were unable to sleep together; we used to call across the intervening space like lovesick geese in separate pens. D’Arcy slept, if that is the word, on a chaise longue of inordinate length, made for crinolines, he said. The curved headrest was as rigid as a spinal brace. If he tried to sleep sitting up, his chin squeezed his Adam’s apple.
‘I can feel the pips, I tell you.’
The chaise longue was stuffed so rigorously it was convex. The aspiring writer in repose was a sight to marvel at. If he was not stretched precariously on the ridge, he was rolling off on to the floor. Once he fell off on the wall side and vanished altogether. Between the four little bandy legs he lay and snored. Mad with sleeplessness, I accused him of doing it on purpose to annoy me, and we had a fight.
My own procrustean couch was a stretcher which had stretched. In the middle, the frail wire mattress had sagged almost to the floor. We propped it up with suitcases, butterboxes, piles of driftwood planks, so that both my head and feet were at a lower level than my navel.
The mattress also rolled under at the sides. Pain was my nightly lot, as there was always some portion of me caught between the mattress and the iron frame. My back felt broken in three places.
At Wits’ End, in fact, we reached our lowest ebb. All we had feared, the remoteness from the city and our markets, the cost of fares, the impossibility of getting a telephone, even if we could have afforded it, lost us much work. Our métier had been immediate writing; we had made our reliability valuable. If some other writer had let an editor down, that editor knew he could ring or telegraph us and get the vacant space filled without question.
This was the major reason why D’Arcy often worked all night. If he had promised a short story or so many thousand words by ten the next morning, that editor had it delivered. Often I stayed up, too, and typed the pages as he finished writing them. He had an extraordinary capacity for thinking out, plotting, and then writing short stories; the short-story form must have been native to him, for later when he began to write novels, he had great trouble with structure.
‘It’s too dispersed,’ he groaned. ‘Too many side tracks, subplots, minor characters. There’s too much obscuration of the story.’
Even more than I, he was wedded to the story, the first of childish and the oldest of human pleasures. He liked the particular, the strong backbone of the short story, the premise posed and answered, under the guise of entertainment and human satisfaction.
Financially we lurched along, always with a week’s rent in reserve. Often despondent, we drew close to despair. Once we heard an established novelist, Eleanor Dark, speaking on the radio about Australian writing and its terrors.
‘No one in Australia can make a living from writing,’ she stated with such curt authoritativeness that I began to cry.
‘Now, look here, what’s that for?’ D’Arcy demanded.
‘She’s so famous. She must know.’
I had forgotten entirely (as I still do sometimes) all the bloodstained less
ons I had learned about other people’s opinions - that they are very often self-excusatory or self-serving, and more importantly, that you can be influenced by them only if you concur.
He was thoughtful. He had nothing whatsoever against Mrs Dark; he respected her writing. But he disagreed with her ideas.
‘What she knows, is that she can’t make a living. That’s because she sticks to novel writing. Haven’t we agreed that diversification is the answer to making a living by writing?’
‘Yes,’ I sobbed. ‘But …’
‘Always remember that wonderful saying of Uncle Charlie’s - there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’
Uncle Charlie had his own endearing characteristics; one of them was the way he attached his own authorship to anything that struck his fancy. He had written all of Stephen Foster’s songs.
‘To hell with Uncle Charlie,’ I said brokenly. ‘Leads on to fortune, or maybe drowns you. And I feel we’re slowly drowning.’
He tried to rally me by stirring references to my propensities as a risk-taker; no use at all. The truth was I suspected I was pregnant again, and had no idea how we would deal with this further complication. I didn’t want to tell D’Arcy and have to keep my equanimity throughout all that husbandly blather about ‘How the devil did that happen?’ as though he’d never been within a mile of the place where babies are made.
He put his head down on the typewriter and was silent. A few minutes later he raised it, the letters q, 1 and o plainly imprinted on his brow, and said, ‘Tell you what. You keep on writing. I’ll turn it up temporarily and get a job somewhere.’
We talked it over. It seemed the most sensible thing to do. But at last I said, ‘Let’s give it another week or two. We’ve been in awful spots before.’
‘Are you sure you’re not just being pigheaded?‘
‘I’ve always liked pigs.’
Aside from the many problems of our day to day life, I was consumed with anxiety for Mera, my father, whose chronic heart condition had worsened. He often endured fibrillation of a severe kind. Careful not to waken my mother, always anxious to the bone, he would creep from the bedroom, and for the rest of the night sit huddled close to the kerosene heater in the living room. Such a heater was the only kind procurable, for during the war New Zealand had intermittent but drastic power cuts. I imagined him falling asleep, his dressing robe catching fire. There was no calamity I did not imagine. Mail was so uncertain, airmail often delayed for a fortnight, and even when I received it, I suspected my mother was making the best of things and not telling me how very ill he was. It was torture of a kind hard to describe, but of the same kind he endured on my behalf.
‘Not an hour went past but I wondered how you were,’ he told me later.
Unexpectedly D’Arcy had come to understand the spiritual rapport between me and my father. He had never felt homesick, and his only bond with his own father was one of pity. But there it was.
‘Of course I understand homesickness,’ he said. ‘I’m Irish, aren’t I?’
‘Does that help?’
‘Weren’t the Irish always being forced to leave home and their families, and longing to go back ever after? Understanding homesickness is in my genes.’
One evening he came back from the city and plunked £75 on the table. I was dumbfounded. For us that was a vast sum.
‘I cashed in my investment.’
Now this investment had always been a Niland myth to me; God knows how many others floated about in the family, half-forgotten detritus from a hundred memories. But this one was factual. When D’Arcy was sixteen, beginning his career as copyboy at the Sun office, Auntie Bid, that good old presbytery housekeeper, had been left a little legacy of £50 by some priest for whom she had cared like a mother.
She had invested it for her nephew because he had, she said, more brains than the rest. This caused some ill feeling and many attempts to ‘borrow’ it. But Auntie Bid had tied it up until he was twenty-one.
‘But we aren’t that hard up, yet. Maybe you shouldn’t have.’
‘Yes, I should. You’re going home to see your Dad. I mean it, so shut up. What’s more, I have a passage booked for you and Anne, and you leave in a fortnight. I said, shut up.’
He admitted he had been going around shipping offices for months. The end of the war was not in sight, but it was on the horizon, as it were. Thus restrictions had been relaxed a little, and civilian travelling for emergency reasons became a possibility.
‘So you did know how I’ve felt about Dad being ill,’ I said, ashamed. I had always had my doubts of that mystic stuff about being Irish.
‘I know a lot of things. Now, how about a bit of a cuddle?’
With what excited joy I carried Anne aboard the decrepit P & O steamer for the three-and-a-half-day journey to Auckland, and with what thankfulness I introduced her to my family fifteen days later.
Preposterous mystery surrounded that old ship. Why was she carrying passengers at all?
At the time I did not think the voyage a nightmare. In wartime you expect anything, and endure as best you can. Even when the vessel left port, and instead of heading east, turned due north and engaged in gunnery practice off Broken Bay, nearly shaking her aged frame to flinders, I merely thought that the captain knew best and hoped that my fourteen-month child’s hysteria would not leave permanent trauma.
Either that ship was carrying distinguished personages whom we never saw, or a cargo of bullion like the torpedoed Niagara, because she was elaborately armed. On the foredeck, where we were allowed to walk for an hour or two each day, almost all space was occupied by huge sinister humps covered in oily tarpaulins.
We carried life jackets at all times and were sharply reprimanded if we forgot. For several days we were escorted by a destroyer which scooted round and round the ship like a sheepdog, darting suddenly over the horizon and reappearing from another direction.
We poor unwelcome supercargo clustered together and created rumours. Only eighty in number, we were mostly refugees fleeing back to New Zealand, or whatever the ship’s undisclosed final destination was. Mostly these people had been marooned in Australia in mid-escape from Indonesia, Singapore or Sumatra. Several were Dutch women who were the sole survivors of colonial families, either murdered or taken prisoner by the Japanese.
‘They did not want me, I am too fat. Oh, my daughters, my daughters! Why am I alive, gross old woman, what is there in life for me?’
The crew was English, and so were the rations. To our spiritual benefit we realised at last that Australian rations were the fat of the land compared with what the beleaguered British had survived on – and indeed were to survive on – for years. Occasionally we were served coarse red meat.
‘What’s this, steward?’
‘Whale.’
‘Damned if I’ll eat that! Outrageous!’
‘Very good, sir.’
Children had not been provided for at all. There was no milk except ‘ship’s milk’ whatever that might be, and how infants younger than my own survived I have no idea. Anne struggled with tinned salmon (urk!) and reconstituted egg (yuk!) and usually brought it up again. She grew thinner and thinner, though her spirits remained blithe.
We rechristened the ship the S.S. Perisher.
On the fifth day I noticed a misty sun shining through the wrong porthole. We were not travelling the common route around the top of the North Island and down the east coast of New Zealand to Waitemata Harbour and Auckland. We were going south.
Several of us simultaneously announced this over our reconstituted breakfast. Rumours sprang into life. A sub had been sighted, the Queen Mary had been sunk (heavily laden with troops, too); there was a Jap merchantman in the vicinity. Where are we headed, steward? Surely we have the right to know.
‘Loose tongues sink ships,’ announced the steward, a cheeky cheerikins from London, and like magic silence fell. He was a good little man, but not averse to exercising power when
he had it.
The days went past, the wind grew glacial; land was not in sight. One early morning, taking Anne for an airing on the drenched deck, I saw that the sea had turned black, and slushy stuff like half-melted ice heaved and disintegrated all along the sides of the ship.
‘Oh, Lord, that is ice!’
‘Very good, madam.’
Why did the Perisher sail so far south, down the west coast of the South Island, past Stewart Island, the cold becoming more and more intense so that one could scarcely venture on the deck? She bore resolutely into rougher and rougher seas, sudden squalls of snow, the numbing wind straight from the Pole. Then one day I saw through a rift in the clouds a dreamlike glimpse of land – islands very high, fissured, half dissolved in mist, that shifted along the horizon for a moment and were gone. Far away were those islands, so dolorous and hallucinatory in their effect that I shuddered. I recalled that when Captain Cook had taken his ship down towards the Antarctic Circle, a small wooden vessel amongst floes and bergs of an enormity never seen before, that ‘a strange silence fell over all the people and one man began to pray aloud’.
Looking at the map now, recalling how the Perisher had dodged back and forth in the Tasman and then set so inexplicable a course for the Antarctic, I believe that what I saw were the uninhabited Auckland Islands, halfway between the southern toe of New Zealand and the iceberg line, old sealing islands hazardous to shipping, forever lost in snow and fog.
Almost immediately, our ship turned north, steamed briskly up the east coast of the South Island, now in sight of mountainous, sunny land, and within two and a half days berthed safely at Wellington.
Anne and I were taken in charge by old friends, Barbara Silver and her brother John. So exhausted I barely knew what was happening, we were cared for by this generously kind pair, telegrams were sent to my unfortunate family, in the dark about our non-arrival, but knowing that if the S.S. Perisher had been torpedoed mid-Tasman, weeks would have passed before the fact was made public.