The morning of my walk through Constable country grew warmer by the mile, so it was good to enter the cool little Constable Museum at Flatford Mill. Constable had been born in East Bergholt, the small picturesque village that Stow called home between 1969 and 1981. The exhibition showed a number of Constable’s black-and-white sketchbooks, as well as some pages from his diaries; the importance he put on chiaroscuro showed me for the first time that Constable was quite dark. Up until then I’d thought of him as light and bright like a postcard. Constable had never left England; indeed he barely ventured from his birthplace in Suffolk. He was deeply rooted in his own place and intensely local.
Onwards to East Bergholt, also a picturesque village, where among the cottages and climbing roses I ventured into the local pub and asked if they knew the whereabouts of Fishpond Cottage. The barman directed me past the post office, which was also the general store, and on down the road past Constable’s studio. Sure enough, at the end of a leafy track, hidden in a little valley, was Fishpond Cottage where Stow wrote The Girl Green as Elderflower and most of Visitants, considered by many critics as his masterpiece.
How many times must have Stow walked up and down this track? How many sentences were composed as he walked?
Stow said that his novels were all structured, shaped and finalised in his head before pen touched paper. By the time he sat down at his desk he must have been transcribing what was already written in his head. The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea was written in six weeks, in New Mexico, while snowed in. A Haunted Land and The Bystander were written during university summer holidays. The Girl Green as Elderflower was apparently written in a month – January, 1979. And the libretto Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, he told Hazel de Berg, emerged ‘at a time when I was suffering badly from insomnia after an illness, and I wrote the whole thing in a few hours’.
In 1980 Stow recounted to Graeme Kinross-Smith:
I used to come back down the vale late at night after bartending at the ‘King’s Head’ or the ‘Hare and Hounds’ to find Fishpond Cottage hidden in a cone of mist surmounted by the moon. It was beautiful. Yes, The Girl Green as Elderflower is my love gift to Suffolk … I do think that Suffolk cured me after that Trobriands debacle. It brought me back to life.
*
Like so many histories, there are various versions of ‘that Trobriands debacle’. The common version says Stow contracted malaria and was invalided back to Australia. Another, far more dramatic version, is that on the night of a fierce storm, a colleague went to check on the young cadet patrol officer and found Stow had cut his wrists in an attempted suicide. In a further elaboration, the authorities were worried about his mental state and so in fear of Stow making another attempt on his life it was agreed he could only fly back to Australia if accompanied.
There are many unanswered questions about ‘that Trobriands debacle’. Critic Geordie Williamson observes that ‘although Stow spoke openly about his illness and subsequent depression, there remains a fuzziness at the heart of his account’.
Stow had a fear of madness, a fear my father also suffered, and felt that he was losing his mind. ‘The only way to begin to understand what happened to Stow, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually, is to turn to the fictions that arose from his experience,’ Williamson notes, ‘ – one a narrative of healing’, The Girl Green as Elderflower, and ‘the other a tale of devastation’, Visitants.
Like so much of Stow’s work, there is a doubling affect to these books – a dark side and a light side. Williamson calls the two novels ‘twinned narratives’. Another two companion works that possibly arose from this same crisis are the librettos Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot. In the CD liner notes of 1987 they are described as ‘Two Portraits of Madness’. Poet and critic Fay Zwicky, who attended the world premiere of Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot in Adelaide in 1974, was horrified by the performance. ‘It was like being inside the mind of a mad person,’ she said.
Even as a university student Stow had been intrigued by darkness, proposing a Masters topic entitled: ‘The Dark Powers: Anarchy and the subconscious in Conrad’. Like Conrad, Stow seems to have entered a heart of darkness and survived. All his creative production after the Trobriands bears the marks of that voyage undertaken by a writer Geoffrey Dutton described as ‘a young man of dangerous tendencies’.
*
East Bergholt was where the poet Fay Zwicky went to visit Stow some time in the 1970s. She had taken bread and cheese, sure that the frugal young novelist-poet would have little, if anything, in his pantry. She was right. But he didn’t seem very interested in food so they agreed to walk to the local pub, where at least it was warm. Only when Stow had ingested a pint could he begin to talk. ‘It was like fuel,’ said Fay. ‘He couldn’t speak without drinking.’
The limits to Stow’s conversational skills were well known, and commented on again and again by friends, family, colleagues and neighbours, as well as fellow poets such as Dorothy Hewett: ‘He never said anything; just stood around.’
But Stow’s silence doesn’t appear to have been an unfriendly one. His temperament and philosophical bent both point towards a faith in silence and deep doubt about language.
For Stow, settling in Bergholt was a way of finding a home, as was the settling to writing itself after a number of years of travelling. In a 2009 letter to Susan Smith, the Geraldton librarian, Stow wrote that:
The act of writing, because of the concentration of attention and observation which precedes the act, is a kind of settling-in, a kind of pioneering, in some circumstances a kind of homecoming.
21
Back at Manningtree Station late that afternoon my luggage had indeed been kept safely and with it I boarded the train to Harwich Town, which was the very end of the line. This was the town Stow loved so well.
Yet nothing could have been further from the idyllic pastoral I had just journeyed through in Suffolk. Harwich looked grey, rundown, depressed.
There was only one other woman waiting at the bus stop. Whenever people came to visit Stow in Harwich, he put them up at the Samuel Pepys Hotel so I asked if she knew the way.
‘Oh, it’s just down there, through the laneway and to the left.’
‘So I can walk?’
‘Oh yes, in five minutes.’
No wonder Stow loved the place. Old Harwich, it turned out, was about as close to a medieval town as you could get. You can walk anywhere in five minutes. The entire village is comprised of five streets, seven pubs and two grocery stores – ‘One of which has almost nothing,’ I was told later by a local, ‘and the other even less.’
I dragged my suitcase to the Samuel Pepys, but surprisingly there were no rooms available. Perhaps I could try the Stingray, said to be Stow’s favourite drinking hole. But no, they were full too. At each of the seven pubs the inn was full. How could this be? There’s a wind farm development nearby, I was told: the rooms were rented to the men building windmills in the ocean. Windmills in the ocean! Stow’s childhood merry-go-round in the sea had been fashioned from an old windmill. How strange it all was.
The barman at the Alma had offered to mind my baggage while I searched for accommodation. It was beginning to get dark and as I had already passed Stow’s door in King’s Head Road three times, I decided to knock on his neighbours’.
‘Hello, hello!’ The tall, affable man opened the door wide.
‘Deborah!’ he called up the stairs. ‘Randolph’s biographer is here!’ And then he turned back to me. ‘Please come in.’
Hugh and Deborah welcomed me into their charming three-storey terrace, and within minutes had insisted that I stay in their beautiful attic guest room.
So later that evening we sat around the cosy lounge drinking wine and talking about their elusive neighbour of seven years. I wasn’t a biographer I’d said – Stow already had an authorised biographer who had actually met him and interviewed
him and had been working on his project for more than ten years. My book was something else, although I didn’t try to explain what. I wasn’t sure myself.
‘My understanding,’ said Hugh, somewhat timidly, ‘was that Randolph didn’t like Australia because he didn’t like the way they treated the indigenous people.’
Though we’d been talking a while, he was saying this cautiously, hoping not to offend, given I was also one of those Australians guilty of mistreatment of our indigenous people.
I nodded. I was a guest after all. What I was thinking was this: Yes, Stow saw at first hand the mistreatment of our indigenous people, but what purpose did removing himself from his native country serve? Was this a national or personal or ancestral solution? As Tom Spring says in Tourmaline, ‘How is it that you have lived all these years and not seen that a man who hates himself is the only kind of wild beast we have to watch for?’ And surely reconciliation is not about running away from home but about doing what my father was so deficient at: facing up to things.
The next morning I went out to explore Old Harwich. The town is on a peninsula and has remained largely unchanged for decades, if not centuries. Georgian façades hide Tudor and medieval frames – which, according to Stow, was ‘a pretty good metaphor for the town’. But Harwich has avoided becoming a museum-tourist place because it still serves its original functions as a port and for shipbuilding.
Walking along the waterfront the thing that struck me was how similar Harwich was to Geraldton. Not the medieval town, of course, but the waterways with the port, the ships, the containers and the working harbour. Stow told the ABC documentary-maker Tony MacGregor how he came to move from East Bergholt to Harwich:
I was travelling with a neighbour from Suffolk on the train ferry to Belgium. We sat on the deck and had our supper and looked at the harbour which was dark blue and it was just a very beautiful scene. And that’s when I decided I should like to come and live beside the harbour.
I thought this was so typically Stow: so bewitched upon seeing a moment of beauty that he packs up his life to follow a dark blue light.
For its size though, Harwich has had a disproportionate number of famous residents. They include the famous diarist Samuel Pepys, who was also a member of parliament, Christopher Jones of the Mayflower and Christopher Newport, captain of the expedition that settled Jamestown, Virginia.
By World War I, Harwich was home to thirty-two pubs. ‘They used to have a pub for every day of the week in the space of five hundred yards,’ I was told.
‘Five within walking distance and two within crawling distance,’ Stow once quipped, of the remaining seven.
Stow obviously loved the life of the small village but he also enjoyed the solitude of the nearby Wrabness Woods, where he went to collect chestnuts in autumn. ‘My ancestors would have walked along here going from one farm to the other,’ Stow told MacGregor. ‘Everywhere one goes one is stepping in well-worn paths.
‘When it comes down to it, it is one’s own ethnic past that connects one to the earth … you don’t have to excuse yourself anymore.’
What did he mean by this? That as a European Australian occupying Aboriginal land he didn’t have a truly authentic ethnic past and needed to be constantly apologising? Not just to others but to himself? Or did he mean, as Fay Zwicky said, that by living in England he could avoid the Australian demand to ‘explain himself’?
Harwich is a little like a time capsule, untouched by the twenty-first century. The pubs are old-fashioned; they smell of beer and old men. The seamen still live locally and attempts to gentrify the town by shifting the working port further away to allow the modernisation of Old Harwich have been strongly opposed by the Harwich Conservation Trust, which Stow supported for many years. And there are two bookshops.
*
That evening I met up with my hosts in one of the local pubs, El Alma Inn. ‘El Alma is the battle of Crimea that the British won and have been celebrating ever since,’ Hugh explained.
We were sitting around a large wooden table with other locals. There was Martin from the Academic bookshop, who argued that Stow was secretly wealthy because he had donated a considerable sum to the campaign to conserve Harwich. There was Rebecca, also from the Academic bookshop, who was marrying the barman, Pascal, from Brittany, the following week in the Electric Palace, England’s first purpose-built cinema, erected in Harwich in 1911. And there was Wavy Davy, a sailor with blurred blue tattoos on his forearms.
Amid their evening banter the locals indulged me with a few reminiscences of their mysterious literary neighbour.
‘I realised how intelligent he was when the bookshop received a long and complicated email enquiry in German,’ said Rebecca. ‘I asked Mick to translate and he had no hesitation.’
After a couple of pints Rebecca said that she’d also realised, without being told, that Stow was homosexual.
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Because my father is gay,’ she said, and then talked of her childhood, of sensing something as she was growing up.
Martin commented that Wavy Davy was the only person he had ever seen in an animated conversation with Stow. Wavy Davy had worked on a boat delivering supplies to Papua New Guinea, so they had something to talk about.
‘I was the floating Tescos,’ he told me.
Initially, Stow had seemed enthusiastic about sharing reminiscences. Then Wavy Davy had referred to ‘jungle bunnies’. A dark shutter came down over Stow’s face.
‘I got a lecture,’ said Davy, a little sheepishly. Stow told him why he shouldn’t refer to Papua New Guinean women as jungle bunnies, how it was demeaning, how it suggested inferiority, how it was racist. I could see in Davy’s face that he still felt chastised.
Peter joined us at the table. He ran the other bookshop, which has a beautiful antique ceramic mural and a swinging sign announcing ‘Books Bought and Sold’. His is the Black Books of Harwich.
Also at the table was Georgetta. She was different from the rest of the group: neatly groomed and coiffed, drinking black tea with lemon while everyone else drank beer. Surrounded by noise, she sat reading The Guardian in stylish designer glasses. When she occasionally spoke, it was with a delicate European accent. Georgetta lived next door to Wavy Davy and they had argued, in a friendly way, about who was responsible for their shared deteriorating gutterpipe.
‘I miss Mick,’ she told me now. ‘I used to enjoy seeing him walking past my window every day at five o’clock on his way to the Stingray pub.’
The Stingray, Stow’s regular haunt, was formerly the Wheatsheaf. No one could tell me why the name was changed; there are no stingrays in the Harwich harbour and the name seemed more appropriate for a hotel in Western Australia, where stingrays populate the shallows, than a football pub behind an old, Tudor-style façade in Essex.
‘He always carried a book into the pub and sat in the corner reading. He was very shy, very private,’ Georgetta continued fondly.
This is something I already knew, that I had been told over and over. Except Georgetta had a different take on Stow’s shyness.
‘I admired that,’ she said. ‘He was very self-possessed, self-sufficient, self-reliant. He didn’t need anyone else.’
Georgetta, Martin, Peter and Rebecca were Stow’s crossword companions at the Stingray, murmuring together over The Guardian cryptic. This seemed to be the extent of Stow’s daily social interaction.
I turned to Rebecca and commented on how much the Harwich port had reminded me of Geraldton, where Stow was born.
Peter looked at me directly for the first time. ‘But Mick told me he was born in England and went to Geraldton as a child,’ he said.
Immediately I doubted Peter as a reliable narrator.
‘Yes, he told me that too,’ said Wavy Davy. I sat for a moment, speechless. One person could be mistaken, but two? Could Stow have deliberately lied, misled his neig
hbours? Then I remembered another comment Stow made in the ABC interview, when asked about his arrival in England at the age of twenty-four – ‘Everything about England seemed to me so normal and familiar. I always had the feeling that I’d grown up here. I seemed to have memories of the place.’
Was he so ashamed of his Australianness that he had reinvented, or at least, reimagined the circumstances of his birth?
These are the two versions of Stow that I found in one small pub: the first version is someone who was content in his lifestyle, in his aloneness, who was self-sufficient and independent. The other version is a man who was uncomfortable in his own skin, internally and perpetually in conflict over his sexuality, his nationality and his identity. Twin versions.
As my time in Harwich drew to a close, Deborah drove me out to Wrabness Woods, where Stow was buried under an oak sapling marked only by a simple wooden plaque. We planted a small elderflower tree on his grave. If other pilgrims came to visit, they would know where to find him.
22
Mexicans are right, death comes in threes. In 2009 it was my mother, in 2010 Randolph Stow and 2011 my sister.
My brother rang just after midnight.
‘Cathy stopped breathing half an hour ago,’ he said.
I was alone. No one else in the house was awake. There was no one to say, reassuringly, ‘Go and kiss your sister goodbye. She has turned into an angel.’
*
The following afternoon we sat together by the fishpond in my backyard. Russell told me Cathy had left instructions that she wanted to be cremated.
‘And she said she wanted her ashes to be scattered on the Cotswolds,’ he added.
‘The Cotswolds?’ I said. ‘In England?’
‘Yes.’
That was when I felt the involuntary tears welling, and I cried, properly, for the first time. Could she really have been so lonely that she wanted her remains left in a place where she had never lived and knew nobody? Where no one could go to leave flowers and mourn on her anniversary? My mother and father were buried side by side in the Woronora cemetery in the Sutherland Shire where they had bought their first home and brought up their children. Stow was buried in the woods where he spent the last thirty years of his life walking. It made no sense at all, surely, that my sister wanted to be returned to some kind of faux postcard pastorale where she had no family and no connections. Why then had she remained her entire life in a place she felt she didn’t belong?
Moving Among Strangers Page 11