Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  Once a strange man did creep along the verandah and into the bathroom. He seemed just to stand there, listening at our kitchen door. I stood listening at the door, too, the frying pan in my trembling hand, resolved to emulate my bold cousin Helga who had fractured a man’s skull with a similar weapon.

  But he made no attempt to open the door. He simply piddled in the bath like a dog leaving a sign on a post or bush. The sound of this waterfall was the last straw. My throat was too constricted to scream, so I gave the door an almighty whack with the pan, and was answered by the sound of scuttering feet. From the front room came a detonation from the primus stove. It was 3 a.m. but the tea was in the pot and all was normal.

  Yet on the literary front things were improving rapidly. D’Arcy had an informal agreement with Murray Publications, a company which had prospered producing magazines with particular interest for the Forces – action stories, informative articles, cartoons and pin-up girls. From our account book I see that the last week we spent at Wits’ End D’rcy earned nearly £9. Except for my radio scripts, my income was nil. But it was evident that in spite of Eleanor Dark’s despondency about the future of Australian writing, we would soon be able to afford a higher rent.

  It was a phenomenally cold stormy autumn, with tides so high they flung haystacks of drying seaweed against Wits’ End’s fallen-down front fence. An easterly rose somewhere in the South Pacific and blew for days, weeks, on end, with all the urgency and muscularity of a river. The air was hazed with spray, salt formed on our lips. At night the sea was black, edged with luminous foam; the clamour of the huge surf on the headlands was deafening.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ yelled D’Arcy, trying to plug with damp newspaper a crack through which the wind squeezed with the squeal of a stepped-on cat.

  Some of the occupants of nearby houses and beach shacks became alarmed.

  ‘The ruddy nails are falling out of my walls,’ said one man. ‘If you could wring out the front door you’d get gallons. I’m moving to the daughter’s place.’

  ‘Look here, you young ’uns,’ said another, ‘you ought to move out if you can. Storms can be tricky. My granddad saw one that washed ten feet of water right over Pittwater Road.’

  But we had nowhere to go.

  ‘Oh, it will calm down when the wind swings around,’ I shouted.

  ‘I’m tellin yer, girlie, clear out while yer luck holds.’

  Two nights later an appalling crash shook the house, followed by explosions, fizzes and spitting sparks as the electric power died. But before darkness covered us D’Arcy saw one of the most fearsome sights of his life - the light shining through the window into the depths of a huge green wave. The next moment the room was dark, the window blew in, and in poured a cascade of seawater. The waves broke on the roof, two, three, four, then with a hideous sucking sound withdrew.

  I seized the yelling Anne and some blankets. D’Arcy the typewriter and an armful of the current work spread out over the table, and we ran. The roadway was full of refugees, some with torches, most with children. Pittwater Road, even as our kindly neighbour had warned, was rushing like a shallow river. Seaweed, beach chairs, clothing, swimming dogs, spun past. We reached a derelict shop high on the west side of the road, kicked in the door and sheltered for the rest of the night.

  The storm seemed over; the wind swung due north, the moon shone out, far up the coast we could hear the wolfish yell of the sea as it besieged the more distant headlands.

  ‘If I hadn’t been wearing Sister Roche’s scapular we would have been a goner,’ said my husband smugly.

  The next day sparkled; the sea purring in over kilometres of splintered wreckage, piles of bricks, uprooted outhouses, a garage on its side. The water had swept away the sand from under fifty houses, which now stood on one corner or fell on their chins. Most astonishing of all, the storm had been so powerful it had lifted the Defence Department’s concrete tank traps as if they had been made of plastic and deposited them by the dozen along the grassy verges of the road, inside houses, upside down, heavy, immovable, doomed in some cases to be there for years.

  D’Arcy went off to see how Wits’ End had fared. He came back long-faced. Our room was a total wreck, a metre deep in seaweed, even the ceiling sodden and dripping. It stank horribly.

  All the crockery was broken, shoes and what few clothes we had totally spoiled. Even the baby clothes my mother had so lovingly made for the newcomer were stained and thick with sand. I looked at this ruination with despair.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible that someone up there hates us?’

  ‘We could have had a tank trap in the kitchen …’

  ‘Thank God we stored our books with Auntie Bid, at least we’ll have them when we get a flat.’

  ‘People who live in flood areas sometimes do this three or four times a year, more fool them,’ said Beres, magically appearing. We were much solaced by his arrival. Anne and I were sent off to a boatshed that had somehow escaped damage. She spent her time fishing through the cracks in the floor; she was always an adaptable child. The boatshed owner, a cheerful woman who sold fresh bait for a living, took the new baby’s clothes, washed them and returned them almost as good as new.

  ‘You look a bit brighter to me,’ she said. ‘Thought you were going to be a real cot case when you came in here yesterday. You get up and sit outside and get a bit of sun. Do the nipper good, too.’

  She was our first bit of luck. Only a few days later D’Arcy had a telegram asking him to phone one of his editors, who had found a flat due to be vacated. It was the converted residence above an old empty shop, and the rent was triple what we had been paying. But there was no key money.

  ‘Sister Laurencia has come through,’ we told each other. I had been praying to my old English teacher, who had gone to heaven just before Anne was born. Having no patience with the Church and its formalised union tickets – you’re a saint, you aren’t, you may be in five hundred years - it has always been my habit to keep in close communication with those I love, and Sister Laurencia is one of these. She it was who put me in touch with D’Arcy Niland in the first place and had a terrible fright when we decided to get married. I had placed our housing problem in her compassionate hands.

  Both D’Arcy and Beres understood. They said they prayed to their Granny Egan all the time.

  ‘Oh, crikey, I can’t believe it, we can’t believe it, can we?’ they said as we walked around the clean, newly painted flat in Petersham, marvelling at the huge airy bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom of our own with real hot water. There was even excellent furniture and a queen-sized bed.

  Probably it was an ordinary little apartment, but to us it was a miracle. I felt as though my life had been saved for I was able to rest comfortably until my baby arrived, knowing I would carry him back to a safe and healthy house, the kind Anne had never had.

  It was a major battle to bring that baby alive into the world, for it was a breech birth and seemed to go on for days. I pleaded with the elderly Jewish doctor not to let the baby be hurt, no matter what, and he said what I have always remembered as a wonderful thing.

  ‘I promise you, my dear. To me, any newborn child may well be the Messiah.’

  Our son Rory was born alive and well on May 5, three days before war ended in Europe. I remember lying in bed feeding this battered little fellow, so bruised and scraped, and listening to Ben Chifley, the treasurer, announce that war was over. Our Prime Minister, John Curtin, who had effectively killed himself by his labours during the war, was too ill to make the announcement, and indeed died a month later.

  It was magnificent news, but not so magnificent for us nations of the Pacific, still with the formidable Japanese to defeat. Nevertheless, two of the baby boys born in the hospital that week were christened Victor.

  We southern people had to wait until August 15, the Feast of the Assumption. I was at Mass, and halfway through a little boy ran on the altar and whispered something to the priest. The latter turned to f
ace us and said, ‘Thanks be to God, the war is finished.’

  Almost at once the entire air was filled with the braying and bellowing of sirens, air-raid warnings, ships in the harbour, factory whistles, strange sounds like those of dinosaurs or other uncouth beasts. People in the congregation turned to each other with tears and laughter. It’s over, it’s over! And one or two undoubtedly said: Ah, but it’s too late for Kenny, too late for Bob.

  We ordinary people did not lack comprehension of the terrible potential of what was then called the atom bomb. Younger generations seem to believe that we did not understand what we were watching. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, boom boom, and that’s the end of them! The Establishment might not have told us everything, but were not stupid. We knew from the moment Hiroshima died that the world would change; we had entered a new mode of existence.

  Weeks went by while I convalesced, never to be again the robust country girl of earlier years, for the long kidney infection left a condition that flared up often, and was indeed to be a kind of brake on the leading of a full life.

  Nevertheless our luck had turned, and did not cease in its onward flow until my husband died.

  As he would say, ‘Good luck doesn’t wear a label; bad luck doesn’t either. Maybe that was my time, my good time, to leave you and the children. Who knows things like that?’

  PART TWO

  • 1 •

  ‘You sound like a dog with two dinners,’ said my father, Mera, of the letters I wrote after we moved into the Petersham flat.

  Indeed I lived in a daze of bliss. The war had ended, our son was born safely, and we had our first real home. Nevertheless, the housing famine continued for years for thousands of other young families, and was exacerbated by the country’s immigration policy.

  Such were the consequences of my confinement I could do little more than creep around for months, so D’Arcy’s younger sister came and lived with us for a while. Anne loved her. She was Anne’s dear Dordie.

  Rory had a much better start in life than Anne had had. He was not only healthy and sociable, but so well-dressed that his father addressed him as Bub Brummell. My mother sent us parcels of charming garments, for in New Zealand as well as Australia rationing had been stealthily relaxed. No longer were we tied to the scanty clothing coupon allowance which had scarcely bought Anne napkins let alone the horrid ‘austerity layette’, a collection of baby garments made of a greying fabric so thin you could spit through it. Even so, while we lived at Collaroy, Anne had been the victim of a mugging. A passing mother, seeing the child asleep in her pram outside the butcher’s shop, removed all her clothing and fled with it. Wartime brings out the closet anarchists.

  ‘Still, we’ve been lucky,’ I thought. ‘At least we’ve survived by writing, when everyone predicted we couldn’t.’

  Unceasing practice as freelances had taught us some valuable lessons, some of which I have detailed elsewhere. The growth of market sense was one; another was the ability to gauge, as distinct from his magazine’s requirements, an editor’s likes and dislikes. Some editors always gave careful reading to a story about an animal; others would not consider any piece about a child in jeopardy, even though the ending was both safe and happy. Another, for reasons of his own, detested stories which showed a woman doing anything but wash up the tea things.

  ‘Preposterous!’ he would cry. We nicknamed him Old Preposterous and wondered a good deal about his wife.

  Though many magazines which had been published primarily for the troops sank like stones as soon as demobilisation began, D’Arcy was able to find other short-story markets and sold his work with increasing steadiness. One reason for this was that he suddenly ceased being confrontative with editors. This lamentable propensity had done much to hold him back.

  Either some particularly burly editor had hurled him into the street or at long last good sense had prevailed. He wouldn’t tell me which. He merely grunted.

  This does not mean that he ceased being confrontative with me, nor I with him. If either one of us disliked a piece written by the other, the reasons why had to be stated and argued out. In this way we learned from each other, usually with the accompaniment of flashing eyes and snaps and growls, backs turned to each other in bed, and finally tickling matches and a bit of a cuddle.

  Gradually I acquired knowledge about the writing of short stories. D’Arcy made me read the best, which in his opinion were largely the European classics. His perfectionist taste centred around Tchekov, Isak Dinesen, just beginning to be translated, and Thomas Mann. Amongst those who wrote in English he admired James Joyce, particularly for The Dubliners, Somerset Maugham (‘cunning as a rat’) and Mary Lavin, a new Irish writer.

  And he, so adamant that he would never get the hang of writing factual material, profited by my years in journalism. Within a year of our marriage he was writing fact prolifically – articles, personality profiles, radio documentaries.

  ‘How, when, where, why, and who, who, WHO?’ I yelled at him until he told me I sounded like a bloody morepork. He was hopeless at research, which enraged me, perceptive and intelligent as he was. Somehow, when reading books or other sources on his subjects, he could not pick out the salient points required for his own piece. He brought home notebooks filled with laborious trash.

  ‘Who cares whether he had a boil in the armpit?’ I raged at his notes on some explorer’s hazardous adventures. ‘What supplies did he take? Who were his companions? Why was that particular route chosen? Why did you waste energy recording that he had an innoculation scar on his right arm?’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  We had more fights over this than most things. At last, as I regained health, it was agreed that I do all the library research, mostly in the Mitchell Library and the reference section of the Public Library, now the New South Wales State Library. These marvellous repositories of knowledge were then far more open and freely designed so that a bloodhound researcher such as myself could browse at will, following tiny clues, lateral speculation, or my own allusive thoughts.

  It became my great joy to spend two evenings a week at the library, rushing home at last to give the baby his ten o’clock feed, sort out my notes, maybe type them.

  Out of his own knowledge, D’Arcy commented on my short stories, much as my old mentor, Sister Serenus, had done. He suggested the replacement of inexact words with hard-hitting ones, or that I should shorten sentences, sharpen themes.

  Often I argued fiercely, preferring my own choice. He accepted this placidly. I have never known anyone so impartial, so able to give another person his own space, even if that space were filled with stuff one wouldn’t like to get on one’s shoes.

  The modest comfort of the Petersham flat made me realise, almost with disbelief, what hard times we had had until then. Our life had been so full of work, children arriving, difficult relatives, and the thousand frustrations and deprivations of the war, that we’d scarcely had time – except for thirty minutes of despair or fury here and there – to think about it.

  It had been rather like D’Arcy’s own battling childhood, of which he said, ‘We kids would never have known that we were poor except that people kept telling us about it.’

  When I reflected upon our apprenticeship – usually as I lay in one of those endless hot baths which were beatitude after nearly three years of none – I saw clearly that we possessed an abiding joy. Each of us had been lonely before we married, not only in body and mind but in that mysterious place where literary creativity resides.

  But now we were dual; we set off sparks in each other. Providence had also spared us jealousy, that frequent devil that haunts creative partnerships and which destroys so many writers, even writers we knew well, such as Charmian Clift and George Johnston.

  D’Arcy’s failures made me weep; my successes made him burst into song. I suppose our mutual aims were the same in both the literary and the natural worlds. From his letters I pluck two sentences which reflect upon his philosophy of life and work:

 
The greatest thing in life is to produce children who’ll be pleased that you did.

  And also:

  The real test of a writer is whether people are grateful that once he was around.

  While he was alive I did not see that somewhere in his mind he had made some curious identification between the fathering of children and the production of literary works. So I did not ask him for his thoughts on this subject. But I recall his saying that posterity would judge which were the more valuable, the kids or the books.

  So many writers are inimical to children, or cope destructively or not at all with family life. They feel they are, because of talent large or small, external to common humanity.

  Such a thought would not have entered D’Arcy Niland’s mind.

  Nevertheless, in most ways, he was what I can only surmise an ordinary young man. Not selfish – indeed generous and kindly – but self-absorbed to a degree that frequently made me think he was wrong in the head. His own purposes and requirements dazzled on his horizon like an all-consuming sun. If his attention were drawn to the ineluctable fact that other human beings, such as myself, had needs and desires different from his own he blinked as if I had suddenly stuck out a foot and tripped him.

  When we entered the Petersham flat on that first happy day he made a beeline for the dining-room table, excitedly opened the typewriter and spread out his dictionaries, papers, and reference books.

  ‘Look!’ he cried. ‘I’ve a proper place to work at last.’

  And he immediately sat down and whacked out qwert, asdfg and poiuy£? with as much enthusiasm as if he were playing the first bars of something nervewracking by Wagner.