Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  In a day or two we were on a train for Auckland, eight hundred kilometres to the north. It was basically a troop train; civilians found themselves space where they could. The luggage racks were full of soldiers, not luggage; even the toilets had sleeping occupants. I sat on my suitcase on the platform outside the carriage, Anne asleep on my knee. Someone had given me a large bag of spagnum moss in case I ran out of nappies; there were, of course, no disposable nappies at that time. Out of a nightmarish drowse I saw that Anne had disappeared from my knee and was sprawled asleep across the legs of a young soldier, her spagnum-stuffed pants sticking up like a hummock. So, through the night, through part of a day, with many stops and jerks, carriages shunted off and others shunted on, we travelled, and at last arrived in Auckland. My child, whom I had so yearned to show off to my parents, was thin, pale, soggy wet, and coughing like a chain smoker. Wisps of dripping moss stuck out of her pants, her nose ran.

  I looked at this bedraggled elf somewhat rancorously and thought, ‘That can’t be mine.’

  ‘She looks just like you,’ said my mother bravely.

  After the ship cast off and I could see you no more, I raced up on the Bridge and saw her clear the Heads, lurching like a drunk. God, she looked frail; I had a new worry to take home with me. Anne’s little shoe was on the floor; she must have taken it off the way she does. I remembered times before we were married, out on the Plains, Nyngan, Moree, looking at the stars, hearing silence, and thinking I was the loneliest bloke in the world. Didn’t know what I was talking about. Better work, I thought, take my mind off things. I picked up the typewriter; it wasn’t properly locked into the case and the whole guts fell out. The carriage is off its feet, the reels won’t turn. Hell, I thought, how am I going to get that fixed?

  Sitting there looking at it, glad to have an excuse for the tears running down my face. In came Mrs Hislop from next door with a hot casserole (good woman, that), and I said: ‘I’ve ruined the bloody typewriter, that’s why I …’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ she said.

  She was right. I didn’t know you were the sunshine. I suspected, but I didn’t know. You and Anne being the meaning of everything. I didn’t know. A man’s so dumb I could cry. I am crying.

  What a queer thing it is that the exiled always expect everything at home to be exactly the same when they return. And those at home expect you to be the same excited, reckless little girl in a green suit made by her mother.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ said my mother, and I could not disguise from myself that she said it accusingly.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ said my sister wistfully. She too had unfolded from a little teenager into a beautiful young woman, but she hadn’t noticed.

  During that visit I pondered on the mystery of ‘change’ which is, of course, really growth or evolvement. The familial attitude towards it is both troubling and mysterious. People take change in others as an undeserved personal affront. They never say, ‘You’ve changed. Isn’t that wonderful?’ No, they sigh.

  Probably change in a person who has been absent for some years is an uneasy demonstration of the instability of things, the invalidity of the baseless concept of permanence.

  I, too, noticed differences. The city was not as I remembered it. True, it was as rundown and dilapidated as Sydney, but now I noticed things I had never seen before. The light was astonishing. In Australia it was an assault from the zenith, imperious, demiurgic; there was nowhere to run from it. Eventually I was to see the aubergine sky of Egypt, the plumbago blue of Ireland and England, and northern skies as blanched as bone, but nothing was like the Australian sky. Sumptuous I had called it when I first saw it, but the light it poured forth was more than that. The light was the shaper and definer of the land.

  In New Zealand the light was lovely, gentle, sifting through gauzes of moisture, miles high. I looked at it by the hour, that island light, committing it to memory, to words if I could, for perhaps we were being too hopeful about the war, and I might not return to New Zealand for years. For now I realised that my homesickness had altered its character; even as I had longed for my country and my family, so now did I long for my man and my other country. This realisation did not give me peace, I knew that ever after I would be like a migrating bird, home in two places, always going from one to the other, loving each equally.

  In truth, I had become just like a million other Australians - those who are called New.

  The aunties, rushing over to see me en masse, gaily lied. I had not changed. How comforting they were! They exclaimed with delight; everything about me pleased them.

  ‘Isn’t her hair long, she’s as slim as ever, is that how girls are wearing scarves in Sydney? Oh, you do smell good, what perfume is that? And look at that baby, auntie’s teeny weeny girlikins, she has blue eyes just like auntie, clever kid.’

  ‘Oh, do simmer down, Rose, why must you fizz?’

  The aunts seemed just the same, loving and frivolous and pretty as ever, even Rose, who had lost both son and husband since I left New Zealand. Now that I was older, I could see that their gaiety and nonsense was how they coped with life, a peculiarly feminine defence mechanism against a creative scheme that appears indifferent to humanity and its woes and foibles.’

  ‘When you get to the nub of things, what else is there to do but laugh,’ said Aunt Wendela to me in later years, reminding me that my unlucky friend the writer, Eve Langley, had said the same. It came to me then that if it were not for women’s irrepressible sense of the ludicrous, the human race would have worn out long ago, for I learned that Aunt Rosina, so skittish and amusing by day, spent her lonely nights grieving inconsolably.

  ‘How did it help the war to have my only child killed at twenty-one?’

  All the sisters were very good to Rose, especially my mother, who had a special gift of solace for those in trouble.

  Once my aunt showed me Stuart’s photograph, the big blond fresh-faced kid of whom I had been very fond. When he was little and Auntie was between marriages he had lived with us for long periods.

  ‘It’s terrible. It’s not fair,’ I cried, ‘all these beautiful young men just thrown away as if they were dirt.’

  Auntie Rosina was alarmed. ‘Oh, darling, don’t get yourself upset. Cissy would kill me. You being pregnant and everything.’

  ‘How on earth does she know I’m pregnant?’ I was furious.

  ‘Oh, we all know, sweetie. You have that look.’

  I was aggrieved. I had not even informed the new child’s father, because I thought he might have voted against my going home to New Zealand if he knew. I was not at all unwell as I had been with my daughter; that look was not visible to me.

  My mother was not pleased about my pregnancy. ‘You’re having these children too close together; how will you have time or energy to be a writer? A woman deserves time and freedom to fulfil her own aims in life.’

  Remembering very well her own frustration when young, when my father would not allow her to work at her profession of dressmaking, for no rational reason except his fear of an occasional jeer from a workmate that his wife was ‘keeping him’, I gave her a hug.

  ‘I expect this will be the last one.’

  Once I would have told her we wanted a largish family, but now I had become discreet. She was older, there was grey in her pretty hair; she was anxious day and night about my father’s cardiac condition. For my Mera was different too – his broad shoulders bent, his eyes which had been like two bits of sky, the keen sharp blue of the Scot, a little faded. But we were still very close and spent every spare moment talking together. How I loved him! There was not a thing about his character that I would have altered. In some curious way we shared a soul, and so it was to be that when he died I died too, a little. I know life for me was never the same.

  His frailty was obvious. He hated being a burden on my mother, so much younger than he and ‘the kindest, grandest girl that ever lived’. He accepted humbly her many scoldings, for that was her way, about his ref
usal to stop smoking. Undoubtedly she was right; smoking did contribute to or even cause his illness.

  ‘Don’t be too hard on me, old hen,’ he would say in his gentle voice, and she would sigh and go away.

  ‘Look after your health, Din [for such he called me]. Once it goes there’s so much to put up with.’

  ‘Oh, me, I’m indestructible,’ I answered gaily, and I truly believed it. But the gods were listening, and they hate a big head.

  Mera told me once again that I was not to fret if I received bad news from New Zealand. He would let me know first, in some way I’d understand.

  ‘Don’t talk about it.’ I could hardly speak. ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘It has to be borne,’ he said. ‘You be my good girl and fight through it by yourself, no matter how hard it is.’

  Ah, that was bad advice to give me, for when he died I kept my grief to myself and almost succumbed to it. It was the wisdom of his generation and his stock, proud, independent, stoic, the wisdom of the pioneers from the British Isles who built the South Pacific countries. It was the way they survived Fate’s hardest blows.

  There is a story told about Mera’s ancestor, Mungo Park, the African explorer. It is recorded by Sir Walter Scott, a friend of Dr Park’s and an intimate of his family.

  Mungo’s parents were farmers. One late summer night his mother awakened, thinking she had heard a sound in the skillion room where oats and wood were stored and where her son, as a boy, had slept.

  Taking a candle the worthy woman rose from bed and went to see, thinking a wildcat had broken in. For the space of three breaths she saw her son Mungo, pale as death and dripping wet.

  Returning to her good man she said, ‘Our son is dead.’

  He was silent a long space and then replied, ‘Wife, we shall thole it until the hay’s in.’

  On his last exploratory voyage, Mungo Park was drowned in the Niger, the source of which he had discovered years before. The word thole means to endure, to suffer unshrinkingly. All his life my father had done that; he relied on me to do the same.

  But mine was a different generation, and ours was a diluted blood.

  How fortunate it was that I was in New Zealand when my Irish Grandma began running away. My relationship with her had always been so close, full of delight and learning, that my being with her as she was dying completed the circle.

  She had always had remarkable health; she had no doctor for her many deliveries. In her mid-eighties she entered into that state of extreme old age which is not dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease, but leads to wandering. Though all day she was as sprightly as ever, about four in the afternoon her cheeks flared crimson and she’d leave the world she was in for another – sometimes her turbulent life with Karl Johann, her husband, sometimes with reference to the daughters’ childhood which made them uneasy and angry, their cheeks as flushed as hers.

  At night, several times she crept out of the house in her nightgown, in bitter weather, to be found hours later, bewildered and lost, once with her head deeply cut where she had fallen in her travels.

  Theresa was looking after her at that time, and at last it became too much for her. Grandma was put in hospital. She did not object, she merely relinquished her hold on life. She had dwindled into a small, light bundle. What had become of the tall strong girl with the thick red hair, the green mischievous eyes, who had sailed all alone to Auckland to make a home for her father, the poor tenant farmer of Ballindrum? The splinter of a body had borne all those children, most surely unwillingly, into a desperate world of hard work, and (perhaps, for we never knew) a drunken husband who knocked them around. But what was in her head, behind the closed-up face, that like all aged Irish faces had become heraldic in character, the flesh hardened into stone or wood by hunger, sorrow and rage?

  I had not visited Ireland then, but when I did, finding the house where she had been born, brought up motherless – where her father John McBride had died, having a stroke and falling from his chair to strike his head on the hearth – ah, then I spoke to Grandma, and D’Arcy listened.

  ‘Grandma,’ I said, ‘here I am in your home, standing beside the white-washed hearth where your grandmother taught you to cook. Your father’s rocking chair is still there, and the stone bench where he slept when the weather was cold. The roof was pulled off long ago, when Great-Grandfather went to heaven, but the rain hasn’t spoiled things - there’s still a homely feeling here. There are only three rooms, the largest being the kitchen, with one wall nearly all chimney. The walls are so thick that sills have been built into the thickness, handy places for the tea caddy, the candlestick and maybe a little statue of Our Lady. Are you glad to hear these things, Grandma?’

  ‘Why for should I care about them poor old things when here I am with the blessed saints, me ma and me da, and little Johnny? Get away with you! Weren’t you always an irksome thing to me?’

  So we drove away from that little cottage which had not been occupied since 1912 when John McBride died. It was a ‘soft’ day, lakelets by the score, some with water lilies folded, their hands over their eyes; water belting down the hillsides like streaks of polished steel. Turf cuttings everywhere, and occasionally a soaked workman with his slane and wheelbarrow, and wet, gloomy dog.

  ‘I wish she’d said something to you before she died,’ said D’Arcy. ‘Something to remember, seeing you loved her so much.’

  ‘Oh, but she did. She opened her eyes one day and said, “Duddy the Draper”.’

  ‘Who the devil is he?’

  ‘Not a clue. “Duddy the Draper,” she said. “He’s gone and tangled the ribbons again.” So I said, “Were they ribbons for your hair, Grandma?” ’

  ‘And were they?’

  ‘No, she gave me such a glare and said, “Devil take ye, aren’t ribbons the reins for the pony in the cart. You idjut.” ’

  D’Arcy said nothing but I could see he liked my Grandma all the more.

  In February 1945 I flew back to my other home. The trip took almost seven hours, with Anne airsick the entire time. It had not been hard to get a trans-Tasman passage. Civilians were now allowed to fly to and from New Zealand five times a week. This near-freedom of movement gave me an uneasy feeling; it had been so long since we were allowed to do anything without the permission or interference of Authority.

  ‘I thought you might stay over there. Crikey, I got the wind up.’

  ‘I can’t be where you aren’t.’

  ‘The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion I wasn’t much for you to come back to.’

  ‘True. It’s Australia I’m coming back for, you know.’

  I was teasing, but he smiled and said, ‘All the same difference.’

  He must have felt a very strong identification with the country his forebears had chosen more than a century before; he did not speak much of this profound love, but he wrote constantly of it, especially in short stories and in the novel, Call Me When the Cross Turns Over.

  The housing situation was as desperate as ever; D’Arcy had not succeeded in getting more than a few nibbles to his advertisements.

  ‘And you have no idea what these people were letting – you wouldn’t put a chook into them. And £300 key money!’

  In spite of the excitement of going home, and all the joy of seeing my husband again, I felt queerer and queerer, and soon it became plain that I was ill.

  ‘She has a severe kidney infection,’ said the doctor. ‘Get her out of this damned draughty hellhole!’

  Like many people in comfortable homes he had little idea of the extent of the housing crisis, which was, indeed, to continue in a lesser degree for years. I suppose that, against the massive tragedies and upheavals of the war, it had small significance except to people like us.

  ‘I’m afraid to give you a sulphanilamide because of the baby. We don’t know everything about possible side effects on the unborn.’

  It is strange to think that because one is ill at the wrong time one could die; true
antibiotics were not yet in use, or perhaps even formulated. It is painful to think that men in the second World War suffered frightful wounds, and the only manner they could be treated was with mercurochrome, iodine and similar disinfectants. The sulpha drugs appeared in time for the Korean War, and thus the casualties were not as great.

  Day by day I staggered onwards, dictating ABC scripts to D’Arcy, some days feeling well enough to get up and wash Anne’s hair or even my own, but mostly consumed with lassitude and fever. At night I had such chills that the stretcher clicked and squeaked with my shaking; D’Arcy used to get into bed with me to warm me, his extra weight pushing the wire mattress fair to the floor. Sometimes I had waking dreams, very sharp and positive, confusing my early days in journalism with events that had happened while Beres and D’Arcy and I were in the country, at the opal fields at Lightning Ridge, or in that homestead kitchen in the north-west, listening to the Children’s Session for the first time.

  ‘There’s so much static,’ I complained. ‘I want to hear Elizabeth. Why don’t you tune the wireless?’

  But we had no radio by then. D’Arcy had sold it. Often I was delirious for brief periods. Where is it you travel in your head when you are delirious? Sometimes I believed I had crossed over into a conterminous universe, where things were just the same as in my own, but ran smoothly and joyfully. I knew I had already what I truly wanted in life, a faithful and funny man for a lover, a darling child and hopes for another, a little talent with which to please myself and other people. My hard life was simply because the environment was wrong. But I didn’t know what to do to make it better.

  ‘I’m a hapless creature,’ I said once.

  ‘Just hang on, don’t give in, and God will send us a hap.’

  ‘All you Irish are wrong in the head.’

  It was a bad worrisome time for D’Arcy. Most of the Wits’ End refugees had moved, even kind Mrs Hislop. All we had for neighbours were shiftless strangers and the old man in the front room, still trying to blow up the house with his primus and not speaking to us at all. There were no effective locks on the doors, and my nervousness was abject. The scrub around Collaroy was full of eccentric people mooching about – probably they were simply homeless, poor creatures. When D’Arcy was away in the city, sometimes all night, when the Manly ferry wasn’t running because of bad weather, I spent the night in terror.