by Ruth Park
‘It’s like a miracle!’ he said, looking at me with such innocent rapture that I couldn’t find it in my heart to kill him. All his life he had yearned for a desk or something that would serve as a desk, and now he had it. All my life I had done the same thing, and I didn’t have it.
‘And where shall I work?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘We’ll think of something. No need to worry about it just yet.’
The question then passed from his mind. Thenceforth I worked with the typewriter on the kitchen table, the ironing board, our bed, my knees. Everything I ever wrote in D’Arcy Niland’s lifetime proceeded from one of these situations. At one stage, I did have one end of the table, but gradually his papers encroached; files ostentatiously fell to the floor; the carriage of my typewriter constantly hit things – books, old jam jars filled with dead pens, half-eaten apples, ash trays.
At last I went back to the ironing board. It may be asked why, as I was doing equal, or even more work, I did not stand my ground. Why didn’t I call him a selfish son of a sea cook and demand the table for myself? I have no answer, but I suspect that, in my estimation, the ironing board was a miniscule price to pay for all the good things in his character and in our relationship – the lack of jealousy, meanness or vulgarity, his alacrity in accepting the care of the children for the day, or cooking a meal if I hadn’t finished a script; the way he would walk into town to the G.P.O. at 1 a.m. to post a script that had to get to the ABC in the first delivery that morning.
Besides, I understood very well how that fierce, underfed kid he had once been had longed for a desk, a proper desk where he could write and not have to shift his work all the time. Why shouldn’t he have it?
By that time I had heard many explosive outbursts from other wives of my age. The self-centredness of young men seemed to be a major cause of discontent in marriage.
‘I thought only Dad was like that,’ said one girl.
There was a prevailing female belief, as there is at the present, that such peculiarities in the male psyche arise from a radical misunderstanding of a woman’s identity. Whatever it is, women of my mother’s generation mostly accepted it, working their lives around it as water works around boulders in a stream. They had not much choice.
In the early postwar years there were observable stirrings of revolt.
Two women of a much older generation had interesting things to say. Mary Gilmore said it was little to do with misunderstanding of a woman’s identity.
‘Do men think you have one? No, it’s radical misunderstanding of human identity. We have to confront the fact that, always speaking generally, few men are good with people of any gender. Read history and see for yourself. Objects, events, movements – those are the male forte, never the welfare of human beings, en masse or individually.’
On the other hand Bertha Lawson, with whom I became friends in later years, had another theory. Bertha was a sagacious, passionate little dot of a woman, very different from the way she is depicted in the many books about her famous husband, Henry.
She thought the problem was, in a word, hormonal. I disagreed, because as far as self-centred women were concerned I had met some corkers.
‘Not as many as men, perhaps?’ she suggested. ‘But maybe for the same reason?’
‘In some persons adolescence goes on for a very long time’ she continued. ‘Few adolescents know there are other people in the world. Perhaps your man is a late bloomer. By the time he’s thirty he’ll have become a man in every way, a complete human being. Some never do, of course,’ she added, and I thought I detected a sigh.
She was right, anyway, as Mary Gilmore was right. Gradually the infuriating singlemindedness of my partner concerning his own imperatives diminished. Sometimes when I yipped about his thoughtlessness or lack of consideration or even good sense, he reminded me mildly that he had to put up with me.
‘And what’s the matter with me?’
‘You’re weird.’
‘Well, if you try to be less heedless I’ll try to be less …’
‘Gee, no. I like you weird.’
The Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, exhorted us brusquely to win the Peace. The prime folly of politicians is that they do not study historical cause and effect; neither do they heed folk memory, which is directly related. History does not repeat itself. Repetitive patterning rises from the same old mistakes committed by governments.
People of my father’s generation wrote letters to the editors of this newspaper and that, speaking of the chaos of disorganisation that follows long wars, the protracted difficulty of repair to community services neglected while priorities were urgent and elsewhere. Where were the jobs for the half million young Australian men still in the services on VP Day?
The official solution was to tip out the women who had held down those jobs for five years. But then they were unemployed. Not a large percentage were content or even economically able to return to the prewar tradition of domesticity.
We young ones were just as obtuse as the politicians. We read the letters of often constructive suggestion with a disinterest that leaned towards the kindly rather than not. We dismissed as outmoded the older people and the wisdom originating in hard experience.
When the Budget was brought down in September, a month after ceasefire, we learned of a new tax on income, to be known as the Social Services Contribution Tax. Here was the original brick, so to speak, upon which the vast structure, superstructure, annexes and outbuildings of modern social welfare was to stand. As I recall, this initial tax was 7½ per cent. Gradually it was subsumed into ordinary income tax and forgotten, so that other social services loadings could be imperceptibly added. It had been in place only a fortnight or so when militant labour unions associated with protected industries such as coalmining and steelworking, organised a series of strikes. Power shortages, and then total blackouts, lasted until after Christmas. The first Christmas dinner for returned soldiers was a cold one, or, like ours, charred intermittently over an open fire in the backyard.
‘We can heat the baby’s bottle in the living-room fireplace. Why didn’t we think of that before?’
The midget Victorian grate, a cast-iron basket, had not given out its meagre warmth for at least two British reigns. The chimney caught fire with a whoomp! like a volcano. What drama! The fire brigade, children squalling, neighbours blaming, the landlady’s lounge suite freckled with greasy smuts, some iniquitous person taking advantage of the commotion to steal all our towels from the backyard clothes-line.
One of the firemen, seeing me snivelling, said paternally, ‘Cheer up, missus, this is the first Christmas for years that no one’s killing anyone else. Youghta think of that.’
‘Oh, shut up, you brass helmeted smug-O,’ I thought, but didn’t say. He didn’t have to clean all that moquette. Besides, he was right.
In those days I was so happy with life that when I look back it seems to have been a shimmering time.
Historically, it was not.
The war was over, but the peace was restless, often irascible and disillusioned. Incalculable social changes had occurred; as far as many returned men were concerned, the old Australian ethos had disintegrated. They could not cope with children they did not know, wives who weren’t the girls they had married in some heavenly hasty romance. The housing shortage had reached catastrophic levels; many of these men, sick or exhausted, traumatised by years of dreadful experience, found they had to share houses with relatives whom they didn’t know either, and whom they couldn’t bear a bar of.
One of D’Arcy’s old mates confided that he did not even recognise his wife.
‘She was this little blonde dolly, and now all I’ve got is a big old walloper with dark hair. I think she’s a ring-in, that’s what.’
Judging from the letters to the advice columns in the women’s magazines, women also had discovered, either with resignation or shrieking fits, that their returned heroes were not the lovely boys they had married.
Estrangements and divorces were rife, the consequences of which lasted for at least one generation and probably two.
If one could temporarily set aside all the monstrous tragedies of war, one might significantly call those five shattered years the Time without Fathers. Certainly many, many families reconstituted themselves and submerged contentedly into history. With others it was as though a tsunami had swept across society, leaving inextricably tangled debris when it receded.
We lived next door to Gille de Rais, aged four.
He was really Ray, handsome, sturdy little Ray. It was Beres who rechristened him. Beres was camping with us for a while, while he looked for a room of his own, and delighted we were to see his feet sticking out over the end of our sofa. I didn’t still like him more than my husband, but I liked him just as much. We spent a good deal of time hearing of his adventures as a circus rouseabout, pulling down the Little Top.
‘Isn’t it the Big Top?’
‘This was a very small circus.’
He had also shoved elephants around, filled in for the Charlie when he was drunk, and acted as bouncer.
‘You a bouncer? Don’t believe it.’
‘Well, I sort of coaxed.’
The only thing he really hadn’t enjoyed was sharing a bunk with a midget, a delicate baby-faced man who had trained as a schoolteacher but had, perforce, to take a job as a clown. The midget slept at the bottom of the bunk and Beres at the top. He said it was like having a pillow at both ends.
Like our residence, next door was an ex-shop, once a greengrocery. A phantom smell of bananas still hung about it, as there was sometimes an elusive whiff of cheese in our flat, as though the walls had soaked up the odours of long vanished goods. Once Sydney had thousands of these small islanded shops, decades since starved out by supermarkets. The old grandfather next door, crippled by arthritis, had been the greengrocer, but had found he could not manage once his son was called up.
‘We was Buckle & Son, you know. First of all the Buckle was my father, and I was the son. And then I became the Buckle, and Jim was the son. And I thought that one day – but then the Big Stoush came along. Changes things.’
His eyes filled with tears at the knowledge that his family’s humble dynasty had come to an end. The son Jim, who had left Australia before the child Ray was born, had been a Japanese prisoner-of-war for several years.
‘How’ll he come back, that’s what I’m asking,’ lamented the father. ‘Treated like an animal. My Jim. Thank God the wife died long ago, it’d kill her. And what will he think of that young Ray?’ he added dubiously. ‘I dunno, really I don’t. And as for that tyke there …’
The tyke was a three-months-old baby, a tightly wrapped bundle in a pram. The old man, sitting in the sun, mechanically rocked the pram whenever the bundle miaowed.
‘She ain’t a bad girl, you know, just careless and wants a bit of fun. Very good to me, she is, and only daughter-in-law, you know, not daughter. Yes, very good and patient.’
The son had survived Changi and the Burma Railway; he was in a hospital in Singapore and soon would come home. His wife was carefree about her new baby, tossing her head flirtatiously, laughing, ‘Oh, he’ll make a fuss, go to market a bit, but I’ll get round him, always could. Got round the old Dad, didn’t I, and he’s a Methodist.’
Our kitchen window overlooked the next-door backyard, but I rarely looked out of it; it was not a view that said much to me except neglect and the sadness of the old man struggling to walk a few steps to the outside lavatory.
But Beres, who had resumed work at the Tivoli, the last desperate stand of vaudeville in Sydney, had mornings at home, and usually occupied himself doing the cooking for the day. He liked cooking. He looked out the window while he was beating or stirring things, for everything interested him. One day I came into the kitchen to find him holding Anne up to the window, pointing out this and that.
‘See that little shed at the bottom of the yard? That’s what you call a loo. Yes, I know our loo is inside but some loos are outside and Mr Buckle’s loo is right there. And Mr Buckle is inside. I know because I saw him go in. You know perfectly well what he’s doing, don’t be rude. And there’s Ray. No, he’s older than you and he’s years and years older than Rory. Look at him piling all that paper and rubbish and stuff outside the loo door. It’s a game, I think. Yes, it is a funny game. And now he’s setting fire to it …’
In a split second Anne was on the floor, a rapid drumbeat of feet sounded on the stairs, and Beres appeared in our backyard, scrambling over the fence. It was a high fence, but he had long legs. He fell over the other side, kicked away the flaming rubbish before the lavatory door, and Mr Buckle staggered out, half suffocated by smoke, tripping over his trousers, his gammy leg giving way and throwing him on the ground.
‘That bastard will be the death of me,’ he stammered.
It was an alarming situation. The child, though obviously intelligent, was homicidal. All his games were directed towards the death or injury of someone else.
I have often wondered what happened when he grew older and his imagination developed. While we lived in Petersham, his instincts were mostly towards pyromania. Of course, he had tried to put his baby sister in the incinerator, squashed the cat under a rock, and jabbed a wire through a crack in the fence, through which Rory, aged two, was looking at the time. Fortunately it missed the blue eye and only left a scar near the corner.
He made several attempts on his grandfather’s life; the old man, growing steadily more helpless, must have been in terror. I went over the fence myself to rescue him when I saw the child pouring kerosene on his legs while he was dozing.
The mother ran around like a hen with its head off, whine, whine all day, aiming vague slaps at the child, saying she hadn’t an idea in the world what to do.
‘Don’t you hide the matches?’ I asked. I was afraid that Ray would not only set fire to his own house and everyone in it, but ours, too. ‘And how did he get hold of the kerosene?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied distractedly. ‘No matter what I do, he always finds things. It’s awful, really it is.’
I even asked advice at the fire station, but they said that fires were their business, not arson. See the cops. The police said the boy would grow out of it; the mother was obviously incompetent, try a social worker, the church, a doctor.
The social worker said Ray would change his ways when his Daddy came home; little boys were often disturbed, wet the bed, had bad dreams, when there was no father figure in the house.
‘I don’t know that Ray does those things. All I know is that he tries to murder people.’
‘Come now, dear, surely that’s rather extravagant.’
‘What makes a kid like that hate everyone?’ asked Mr Buckle despairingly. ‘Just a little thing he is, not much more than a baby. What’s happened to him, missus, do you know?’
It seemed to me that Ray was a casualty of war, but I did not say so.
Into this dangerous household returned the young father, Jim Buckle, a skeleton yellow of skin, with a face like a Gothic effigy, so attenuated, long-nosed and speechless it was. What had been his dreams while slaving on the Burma Railway, of which he was one of the infrequent survivors? But what he had was an infant daughter not fathered by himself, an old helpless man, half crazy with harassment, and this murderous son. I never heard him speak, even when the child, now bigger and stronger, tipped him out of the long chair in which he used to lie in the backyard. He just tottered to his feet, righted the chair, and lay down once more. He was, I think, a dead man, aged twenty-eight. Before very long he disappeared from our view, perhaps to hospital or the grave.
D’Arcy wrote a short story about a wicked child harassing a blind old grandfather with the threat of non-existent spiders. It appeared in several international anthologies. The ABC Talks Department turned it down because they felt no listener would find it credible that a child could act like that.
While we lived at Petersham we s
aved enough money to take the family to New Zealand for three or four months. My parents had not seen Anne since she was an infant, and Rory not at all. They had never met my husband, and I longed for them to do so.
‘It’s going to be tight financially, but we can work from there. The airmails are so good now there’ll be no trouble sending your scripts. And I’ll get ahead with a few stories before we leave.’
We travelled in a converted hospital ship, the Katoomba, through one of the Tasman Sea’s spectacular storms. Early morning, hastening on deck, we found the sea placid, the skies bluebell-soft, and my native land’s green velvet hills dozing in the sunlight.
‘Why did you ever leave?’ said D’Arcy.
As I had done with Australia five years before, my husband had fallen in love with a strange land. This love expanded as time passed, for he made frequent journeys to New Zealand in his lifetime, and explored it more closely than many New Zealanders. He spoke of the little country with such possessiveness that one day I became impatient and said, ‘Why don’t you rechristen it Niland’s Islands and be done with it?’
‘I will, I will, and I’ll write a book about it, too,’ he said.
‘Get away with you. We don’t write books. It’s all short stuff for us – stories, radio plays, articles, scripts for children.’
But in fact I was the one who wrote a book while we were in New Zealand, a novel called The Harp in the South.
• 2 •
The first thing my father and D’Arcy did when they met was to shoulder each other around, grinning. Then they retired to the garden and could be seen hunkered down, rolling cigarettes and frequently uttering the traditional peaceable laugh – the soft uh-uh-uh used by men meeting as strangers, each wanting the other to know he is non-confrontative, open to possible friendship.
‘Now what are they doing?’ asked my mother, who wanted them inside to have their tea while it was hot.
‘Being men,’ I thought, having seen these rituals many times when I was in the outback, men sussing each other out by means of familiar moves and old, worn sentences.