Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all. Perhaps my ancestors moved straight into a turreted villa on South Terrace, living much as they had back in Richmond or Chelsea, with picnics in the shady parklands after church on Sundays, an organ concert in the evening and in the week that followed, before it was time to go to church again, a pleasant round of dinner-parties to go to. Around fine oak tables polished by maids, the news from England would have been discussed, copper mines would have been bought and sold, children married off and plans for profitable vineyards in the hills pored over. This is the Adelaide Anthony Trollope so admired in the 1860s. He particularly liked the new post office.
What I do know is that in the early years of the century little Frankie Perkins – and that was the name the wraith beside my chair on the terrace was born with – wandered along the same jetty alone as a small boy, wearing smoked glasses to calm his nerves, thinking much the same thoughts about oceans, ancestors and emptiness at the bottom of the world. And the reason I know is that it’s one of the things he tells me in his notes. (As he gets older, sculpting his queer, muddled life into an interesting shape seems to be growing into an obsession.)
Every morning straight after breakfast I draw another sheaf of carefully typed sheets from the piles of papers on his shelves – manuscripts he’s failed to publish, old radio talks, drafts for his still unwritten memoirs, articles he’s sent off to provincial newspapers, pages torn from ancient exercise books, even a letter or two, never sent – and go out into the sun with it. For an hour or two I sink deliciously into this life which isn’t mine, yet is in some ways the perfect counterweight to mine, so that I sit reading in a kind of equipoise. When old Spiros or Agape, or any of the villagers, walk by and call out Yássou! or Kaliméra! I sometimes hardly dare call back for fear of upsetting the balance.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, the broad, silent streets leading down to the sea in Largs Bay were lined with sandstone bungalows, each with its wind-blasted garden, a pine or two, a few date-palms and the odd straggly melaleuca. Fifty years earlier, however, when Frankie Perkins in his smoked spectacles wandered these same streets – he had a whole year of ‘running wild’, his nerves were in such a state from having to go to school with other children – the streets can’t have been much more than furrows in the sand-dunes, dotted about with boxthorns and rushes. The city was a long train-ride from a station far off across empty paddocks to the east.
Since his elder brother was a sailor on a windjammer, he used to wander down to the jetty almost every day (as he now remembers it) to gaze west-wards across the water towards Uruguay, read books too old for him, legs dangling over the water, and talk to himself in strange voices nobody had ever taught him. And not only to himself, but also to ‘Various odd characters’ he found ‘hanging about’ on the jetty and around the wharves at Port Adelaide not far up the beach. I wish I’d done that. I can just imagine the look on my mother’s face if I’d told her that’s how I’d spent the morning.
Children like Frank Perkins know surprisingly early (I’m sure he already knew while loitering on the jetty) that something isn’t quite right. In my day not only conversations in the school-yard, but the newspapers, the cinema, the radio and then the television told me that something wasn’t quite right. All the other boys were little cubes (that’s how I thought about it), sturdy little building-blocks with stable futures, while I’d turned out shaped like a pyramid, a cuttlefish, a party balloon – anything, but not a cube.
How Frank Perkins knew something wasn’t right is hard to say at this distance – there was no radio when he was a boy and he’d have been well into his twenties before he started his weekly dose of Ramon Navarro, Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich at the talkies at the Hoyts Regent. But he’d have known, I’m sure of it. What little boys like Frank Perkins know is that they will never be building-blocks, they will only ever be decoration. They will be the scrolls and spangles, the arabesques and curlicues on life’s plain edifice – hardly a manly function in Adelaide in 1910. And the tools of their trade, it’s clear from an early age, will be their bodies and their clever tongues.
By the time he was a twenty-five-year-old reporter on a local newspaper of no consequence, I gather Frank was dressing with a certain flair (striped cambric shirts and wide silk ties), moving with a grace learnt on the dance floor and talking rather too well for someone of his class – his voice a touch plummy for Largs Bay, like those announcers on the radio everyone was, by then, listening to with wonder. But their voices really came from ‘over there’. And that’s the other thing that little boys like Frank Perkins drop to almost as soon as they can walk and talk, especially if there’s a jetty nearby to moon about on, staring out to sea: full lives are only possible ‘over there’, beyond the horizon. One day, whatever it takes, however much you have to slave to save the money for the fare, however painful it might be to make the break, you’ll clamber aboard an ocean liner and sail off to the old world where decoration is appreciated, indeed sought-after, and people shaped like pyramids or party balloons can live a civilized life. It’s never quite true, but we all believe it. I flew, but I was a late starter.
Another thing that wasn’t quite right when Frank Perkins was young was Mrs Perkins’ Theosophy. There’s no sign, it’s true, that young Frank was actually embarrassed by his mother’s enthusiasm for spiritual shenanigans (Himalayan Masters of the World, reincarnation and shonky seances), but it must have deepened his sense of being oddly shaped. All the other little boys in Largs Bay trudged along to Sunday School at the Methodist or Anglican Church to learn about sin and the true meaning of Christmas, while he and his mother took the train into the city of a Sunday evening to hear lectures by ladies in fawn frocks on ‘Remembering Past Lives’ and ‘The Threefold Cord of Fate’. Part of the appeal for Frank may have been the ‘nutmeg Hindu with the buck’s eyes’, Krishnamurti, whose portrait hung enticingly in the Society’s entrance foyer, promising things far more exciting to Frank than fate’s threefold cord or fantasies of past lives. I wonder if, like so many young Theosophist boys at the time, he also took to parting his hair down the middle.
For Frank – it seems to me, as I write – once he’d reached his mid-twenties, the Theosophical Society was more a stage on which to practise his entrances and exits than a fount of wisdom. (All the same, a glance at his bookshelves here in Gastouri shows a lasting theosophical bent: books on spiritual masters from Meister Eckhart to Gurdjieff and Bhagwan alongside pamphlets on ‘The Awakened Ones’ and True Paths to this and that.) He seems to have been in charge of the ‘stage arrangements’ at various Society functions, for instance, mounting uplifting playlets (such as ‘The Veil’, a soul-searing piece about a woman with a hideous birth defect) and accompanying visiting contraltos on the piano. These provincial divas, I notice, had a predilection for vocal items with titles like ‘Un ange est venu’ and ‘J’ai soif de ton âme’.
At the same time he was taking part in the amateur theatrical scene, acting in skits and ‘jests’ with a small troupe he’d linked up with – performers such as ‘Adelaide’s phenomenal whistling genius’, Miss Edith Marshal, who, according to the press-cutting I found floating amongst Kester’s papers, ‘charmed her audience with her remarkable talent, rendering well-known songs with surprising ease’. ‘Remarkable’ must have gratified Edith, but she probably didn’t want to think too deeply about the rest of the notice.
In short, this queer little boy from the sandhills on Adelaide’s fringe, not particularly well-educated (just a smattering of Latin and French, a bit of arithmetic) and burdened with outlandish beliefs, had decided to play with the cards in his hand – and play well. I have to admire that. There was just one card he swapped for another: his name. Frank Perkins came back from a brief sojourn in Sydney calling himself Kester Baruch. Perhaps he’d had a transformative experience in Sydney which demanded a brand new sobriquet, something more singular than Frank Perkins. But why Baruch? Why a Jewish prophet’s name? A d
ecade later in Austria, when the Nazis marched in, it proved an unwise choice, so he changed it to Berwick. I doubt the desire to be a prophet has faded, though, if that’s why he lit upon Baruch. I have the feeling that this desire is still simmering away there somewhere deep in his soul. Needless to say, it will never come to anything.
One Sunday evening in 1930, when Kester was twenty-seven years old, for want of anything better to do – well, there was nothing at all to do in Adelaide on a Sunday evening in 1930 – he went with his friend Helge Hergstrom to the regular seven o’clock lecture at the Society’s rooms in King William Street. It was the usual crowd – middle-aged women in smart frocks, one or two with a husband, several with fox-furs round their shoulders because the evenings were turning chilly – and they settled down, Kester and Helge, minds wandering, at the back of the small hall to peer through the sea of hats at the serge-suited figure on the rostrum clearing his throat to address them. He was rather overwhelmed by the gigantic floral display Violet de Mole had arranged in an urn by his left elbow – indeed, it was actually quite difficult in the face of this eruption of chrysanthemums and roses to focus on anything otherworldly at all – but bit by bit the audience sank into thoughtful consideration of the speaker’s comforting message – something about the soul’s psychic journey before rebirth, according to Kester’s diary.
Then suddenly Helge nudged him sharply in the ribs. ‘Who can those two be, down near the front, do you think?’ he whispered to Kester, mind clearly on the here-and-now. Surprisingly, sticking up amongst the hats and careful perms were two unhatted, unpermed heads – young men’s heads, one fair, one glossily dark.
In the foyer after the lecture Kester pounced.
Who needed psychic wanderings between past lives? Here and now, right in the middle of King William Street, Kester was already launched on a psychic journey of his own, littered with signs and portents. Theosophy, the theatre, music, painting – Kester and these two young men turned out to have so much in common, it was almost as if they’d been biding their time until this instant in order to slot into their preordained roles in life.
After a few minutes, Helge drifted over to talk to a group of young women he knew by the staircase. Four had become three.
Kester liked two, so he felt a tiny spurt of excitement when the dark-haired young man was seized on by Violet de Mole and dragged off to meet the speaker. Two was much better.
There was a minute pause as Kester and the fair-haired stranger looked at each other, grinned and registered that the colouring of their conversation would now be different. Then Kester began slowly to draw him out.
His name, he told Kester, was Alan Harkness. Kester was instantly smitten.
Both members of a Shakespearean touring company from Melbourne, Alan and his companion were a bit at a loose end in Adelaide during the day. Even then Kester felt drawn to anyone who was adrift – not so much to the merely homeless or desperate, of whom there were masses roaming Adelaide’s streets in 1930, some on the point of starvation, but to the rootless and the spiritually rudderless. The hunger on the streets was for others to feed – the women’s guilds, the Salvation Army, the various relief funds, perhaps even the politicians – whereas Kester’s skill was in feeding a deeper, more abiding kind of hunger no women’s guild or politician could hope to assuage: the hunger for a good life in a more profound, more subtle sense. Something was gnawing at this young actor with the lank, fair hair and plain, boyish features, and Kester felt a delicious impulse to find out what it was. They agreed to meet for lunch the next day for a little tête-à-tête.
‘A really interesting fellow, didn’t you think?’ Kester said to Helge as they walked off up King William Street together towards the station.
Helge looked at Kester and smiled. ‘Hardly spoke to him, really. But yes, très gamin.’ Helge’s French was annoyingly good, although he refused to accompany Kester to the meetings of the Alliance Française – he said the Alliance crowd was too ‘la-di-da’, and anyway, Russian was the language of the future.
In point of fact, as he told Kester the next day over sandwiches by the river, Alan Harkness was also facing hunger of the more everyday kind. It seemed that the touring company was on its last legs – people had money for the latest romantic trash from Hollywood, but not for Romeo and Juliet. Once back in Melbourne, it looked likely that the company would fold.
Kester found the prospect of this further uprooting almost thrilling. In his commotion he threw the rest of his sandwiches to the ducks.
A few weeks later in Melbourne the company did fail – and Kester was at its final performance.
Adrift there himself, he tried vainly to be an anchor. For some reason or other, though, Alan kept bobbing off. Perhaps it was the brilliance of the circle he mixed in – painters, dancers, actors, writers (Vance and Nettie Palmer were close friends of his, for example), bohemians like Justus Jorgensen … Alan was forever floating away from Kester on a tide of conviviality, witty conversation and easy intimacy – arms thrown around shoulders, sprawling with friends on cushions on the floor, that kind of thing. Kester would watch him from the sidelines, only half-listening to the young would-be actress pinning him to the wall with her earnest insights into Stanislavsky. How could he, Kester, a boy from Adelaide who gave private French lessons for a living, played the hind part of a donkey in Christmas pageants and still lived at home with his mother compete with this scintillating crowd? Kester took the train back to Adelaide earlier than he’d intended, feeling slightly miserable. But determined.
They wrote. Even when Alan went to New Zealand with a handful of other actors from the company to see if they might have more success there (they failed), they kept writing. Even now, it seems, judging by his recently typed notes, Kester remembers with extraordinary vividness the bitter sweet mixture of anguish and delight he felt as he dropped letter after letter into the box outside the station on his way into the city. Nobody nowadays remembers what that long silence after a letter disappeared into the slot felt like. Nowadays nobody has to wait for anything.
One day when the weather was warming up again, Kester wrote a different letter from the sort he usually wrote. ‘My dear Alan,’ it began – even at twenty-seven there was a tinge of the elderly in Kester’s phrasing. (I’ll leave out the inconsequential bits – the items of news, the advice on what books to read, the coy theosophical jokes and so forth.)
I’ve had an idea. Unless you have something better in view, why don’t you come over and join me in Adelaide? We wouldn’t starve – Mother would see to that, she’d always spare us something – and what I’ve been thinking is that we might even start something together – a small experimental theatre, say. What do you think? I don’t know much about such things, but you do. The acting side of things would necessarily be in your hands, but I’d help you as much as I could if you explained to me what you wanted. I could take charge of the lighting, for instance, make properties and scenery and handle the organisational side. Please think about it very carefully. It could be wonderful for both of us.
I dare say nobody words their letters like that any more, not even clergymen’s daughters. What Kester meant, obviously, was ‘do not think about it very carefully – just for God’s sake do it! I’m going mad.’
When I look up of a morning here in Corfu at the brown and yellow self-portrait of Alan Harkness on the wall beside the window, I can now imagine all too well Alan’s train pulling into the station in Adelaide exactly three weeks later, the surge of joy in Kester’s heart as Alan stepped down onto the platform, struggling with his suitcases, their restrained, manly greetings, the silly chatter, the averted eyes, the uncertainty mixed with knowing. This morning my mind drifted a little farther with them to wonder whether they then took a taxi (unlikely in the Depression) or, more probably, another train, and, if so, where to, and did they finally spend the night together? ‘So there we were at last two close friends,’ is all Kester will allow himself to say in his notes. (Punctuati
on, Kester! Is a comma too much to ask for?) ‘This marked a great turning point in our affairs.’
Onto the peeling door of an empty building on North Terrace some days later Kester and Alan nailed a freshly painted sign in green and gold: THE AB-INTRA STUDIO. With his usual genius for awkward titles, Kester had come up with a name that called to mind the medical term for an obscure internal organ. It meant ‘from within’, encapsulating his belief that the theatre existed to give expression to movements and patterns in the soul, not as a setting for acting out novels and short stories. Talking, according to Kester and Alan, was for the talkies.
The premises had not been hard to find – the city streets in the 1930s were lined with papered-over shopfronts and abandoned offices plastered with TO LET and FOR SALE signs. For just a few shillings a week in 1930 you could rent a whole building in the heart of the city. Inside it was a shambles – not a stick of furniture, no gas or electricity, just a rabbit-warren of dank-smelling rooms laced with cobwebs. Undeterred by the shabbiness – even quickened by it, I suspect - Kester and Alan, together with a small band of supporters, swept the floors, lit kerosene lamps, boiled the kettle and, sitting about on sacks stuffed with seaweed, set the first small fuse under Adelaide’s theatrical establishment. It was Japanese and called, intriguingly, The Demon’s Mask.
7
‘Have you ever thought of going home, Greta?’ We were getting supper ready together in the kitchen, William had just taken a plate of her quince crumble out onto the lawn where the actors were lying about exhausted, swatting at insects, and we were alone. The question just popped out.
‘To Australia, you mean? Not really, dear.’ Greta was pouring coffee into mugs on a tray. ‘It’s too late for that. This is home. Why do you ask?’
This is home. I could see that. It was here that Greta mattered. Not vastly, not like Pablo Picasso or Mao Tse-Tung, but that was surely the point: here in the hills behind Corfu Town, and in the streets down by the water, it was all the little rituals of her daily life that fitted into a pattern with a meaning of sorts – in the bakery, at the garage, at the golf club, here in the kitchen with us. Greta wasn’t journeying homewards, there was no Ithaca over the horizon she was sailing slowly back towards. Instead, she was floating along asking the greengrocer about his grandchildren, meeting Prue for coffee and chatting with Bernie in her second-hand bookshop as she chose another Margaret Drabble or P.D. James – but was this enough? Wasn’t there something shallow about mattering in that way?
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