Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  I reported at the end of the fifth paragraph before the previous paragraph that I was often afraid of the character known as Aunt Bee in the work of fiction Brat Farrar. I reported even earlier that I sometimes resented the influence that Aunt Bee was allowed to exert over one at least of the other characters in the work. While I was reporting those matters, I seemed to recall from more than fifty years ago my having once or twice doubted whether the one character in a work of fiction should be allowed to possess so many qualities deemed admirable by the narrator as Aunt Bee was allowed to possess in Brat Farrar. Of course, terms such as narrator and even character were unknown to me at the time. I simply observed what happened in my mind while I read. And although I was afraid of Aunt Bee, I must sometimes have been aware that the cause of her appearing as she did in my mind was no more than that a personage known to me only as Josephine Tey had chosen that she, Aunt Bee, should appear thus.

  I would like to be able to report here that I supposed at least once during my reading that Josephine Tey, whoever she might have been, ought to have written differently about Aunt Bee. I suspect that I had already accepted, more than fifty years ago, that no writer could be required to deal fairly with his or her characters, let alone readers.

  When Aunt Bee was first mentioned in the text of Brat Farrar, she was probably the subject of a long passage of description. Any such passage would have been wasted on me, as all so-called descriptions of so-called characters in works of fiction have been wasted on me since I first began to read such works. For how many years did I read dutifully what I thought of as descriptive passages? How often did I try to feel grateful to the authors who included such passages in their works, thereby enabling me to see vividly while I read what they, the authors, had imagined while they wrote? I can recall my having discovered as early as in 1952, while I was reading Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott, that the female characters-in-my-mind, so to call them, were wholly different in appearance from the characters-in-the-text, so to call them. I was too young at the time to know that this was not the result of my being an unskilled reader. Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it; that even while I write this present piece of fiction I am trying to read a certain text. (With writing, the matter seems to have been otherwise. Already, as a very young man, I understood that I might be capable of writing fiction without having first observed numerous interesting places and persons and events and even without being able to imagine settings and characters and plots, but not until the day when I stopped writing did I understand what I had been doing all the while when I had thought I was merely writing.)

  I would have read attentively whatever Josephine Tey had written in the early pages of Brat Farrar in order to suggest to the reader the appearance of Aunt Bee. Perhaps some or another sentence might have caused me to see in my mind the image of Aunt Bee that has stayed there ever since, but I suspect not. Josephine Tey may have written at length about her character’s distinctive clothes or her admirable personality, but I suspect that some connotation that I have long since forgotten caused me first to see Aunt Bee in my mind as I have seen her ever since. My image of Aunt Bee has comprised never more than two details. She, so to call her, consists of a florid face and a hairstyle that might be called upswept. I am vaguely aware of a clothed body somewhere beneath the hairstyle and the face, but I have never seen that body in my mind. The florid face is hardly different from the florid face that I recall whenever I recall the woman known to me only as Sister Mary Gonzaga, who was the principal of the first primary school that I attended. I was not afraid of Sister Gonzaga as some persons claim to have been afraid during their childhood of nuns wearing long black robes. Sister Gonzaga’s robes and her florid face seemed to me appropriate distinctions for a person who taught forty and more eighth-grade girls.

  At my first primary school, boys were taught only in the lowest three grades. After the third grade, boys went to an all-boys school across the road to be taught by religious brothers. At the primary school, all upper grades consisted of girls only. In the eighth grade, almost every girl was in her fourteenth year. In my first year at primary school, I knew nothing of secondary schools, let alone teachers’ colleges or universities. The girls in Sister Gonzaga’s room were the most senior students of any sort that I had ever seen. I was mostly the pet, or favourite, of my nun-teacher in the first grade, and so I was often sent by her on some or another errand to Sister Gonzaga’s classroom. No university or cathedral or library that I have since stepped into has awed me so much as that hushed classroom would awe me whenever I visited it on some or another hot afternoon. The room seemed cooler than any other in the school, if only because its windows looked between pepper-trees towards the banks of the trickling drain that I knew as Bendigo Creek or because each windowsill had on it a plant-pot from which sparse green foliage hung down. The coolness may have been an illusion, but the quietness of the room always startled me. I seemed to have entered a place where arcane knowledge lay just beyond my reach. The eighth-grade girls, whenever I burst in upon them, seemed either to be absorbing or to be recording such knowledge. Either they were reading from thick books with homemade brown-paper covers that hid the titles and the names of the authors, or they were writing with steel-nibbed pens or even with fountain pens one after another long sentence across line after line in immaculate exercise books. More than that, the girls made gentle fun of me—why, I never understood.

  The girls’ teacher seemed to know me as a clever child who was not afraid to speak out. Whenever I visited her room, she would ask me, in the hearing of the whole class, what I took to be a straightforward question. I would give her a straightforward reply, but almost always my reply would cause the eighth-grade girls to laugh. They laughed not raucously and overlong, as my own classmates laughed, but briefly and discreetly. A sort of whinnying sound rose from the girls and then ceased abruptly at a look from Sister Gonzaga. I would always leave the room not only baffled by my having amused the girls but hurt by their having rejected me, because my speaking frankly in front of them had been, in its own way, a declaration of love.

  Whenever I stood in front of the rows of eighth-grade girls, I was not bold enough to look at any one face. I was therefore spared the sight of some or another girl that I saw every day in the playground and disliked for her features or her manners. I looked always above the heads of the girls and towards the rear wall of their classroom, so that any one of the throng of pale blurs in the lower field of my vision might have been the face of the girl that I never saw in the playground because she stayed in a quiet corner with her few softly-spoken girlfriends or because she spent most of her lunch-hour reading in her classroom: the girl who was far too old for me to have as my girlfriend but who might have seen far into me while her teacher made fun of me, so that I could rely in future on her image in my mind. This image would have been of a tall girl, almost a woman in my estimation, who wore the same intimidating navy-blue tunic and white blouse that her classmates wore but whose face told me she did not resent my interest in her—my seeing her in my mind whenever I needed to look to a female presence for inspiration.

  I understood that the connection between the older girl and myself existed only in my daydreams, but I sometimes supposed that something might have developed between us if only her florid-faced teacher had not urged her girl-pupils often to look away from their shabby houses and their dusty streets and to dwell on the images that came to their minds whenever they read their books or said their prayers. When some of my classmates told me that children from the nearest State school used the nickname “Beetroot” for our Sister Gonzaga, I pretended to be shocked but I was secretly pleased.

  Several years after I had last seen the red-faced nun, and a hundred miles away from the provincial city where she had made fun of me in front of her decorous pupils, I would have been r
eading, in the first of the serialised excerpts of Brat Farrar, some or another paragraph in which the narrator hinted yet again at the virtues of the character Aunt Bee when I first gave to that character the nickname that I have used for her ever since: Aunt Beetroot.

  A bowl of beetroot stood on the table every Sunday afternoon in the kitchen of the comfortable house in the eastern suburb of Melbourne where an older sister of my mother lived with her husband and their children, my cousins, who were mostly girls or young women. Many other plates and bowls stood on the same table. My aunt and her family had a so-called roast dinner every Sunday at midday. The plentiful remains of the roast lamb or beef were left to cool on the table. In the early afternoon, the first of the regular Sunday-visitors would arrive at the house. My mother and my brother and I were occasional visitors. By mid-afternoon, all the women present would have begun to prepare in the kitchen the evening meal for the dozen or more persons present: the Sunday tea, as everyone called it. The women at the kitchen table talked continually, but if any of them saw me at the door trying to overhear them, the kitchen would become silent. My mother would tell me sternly to go outside and play.

  Many times during my childhood I was told to go outside and to play in some or another garden while my mother and her women-friends talked indoors. To play in such places was impossible. The sort of game that I played in my own backyard needed weeks of preparation: I had to set up a farming property under each shrub and then to mark out the roads that crossed my rural district and finally to choose the names for the husbands and wives who lived at each property. (I chose the surnames either from among the names of trainers and jockeys in the Sporting Globe or from the names of film stars in advertisements in the Bendigo Advertiser for films currently showing. The given names I chose from a private store that I kept always in mind; none of these names belonged to any scabby or poorly dressed classmate of mine, and each of them when I pronounced it aloud gave rise to a sort of imagery that I might have struggled to explain on this page if I had not read by now the work of fiction by Marcel Proust the English title of which is Remembrance of Things Past and an early section of which, titled “Place-Names: The Place,” contains a long passage in which the narrator reports that certain words gave rise in his mind to certain images far more elaborate and consistent but in essence similar to the images that arise even now in my mind when I recall myself crouching beneath a tamarisk tree or a lilac tree or a lion’s-paw shrub and assigning to persons who were hardly yet visible in my mind the names that would make them more so because the vowels or the consonants of those names connoted pale or freckled or sun-browned skin or eyes of a certain colour or even a distinctive voice or bearing.)

  Whenever I was sent out of the comfortable house mentioned in the previous paragraph, I went first to the small front garden and then to the fernery on the shaded side of the house and finally to the small back garden. On my way from the kitchen to the front garden, I passed the closed door of the room that was my uncle’s office. He was the only man I knew who had a room of his own in his own house, and for this I envied him, especially on Sunday afternoons when the crowd of women was in the kitchen. Once, on a weekday, I had looked into the office when the door was ajar and my uncle was working in his garden. The room was surprisingly small and bare. I had hoped to see shelves of books, but the only furniture was a desk, a cupboard and a chair. (My father had once said to me scornfully that none of the family in that house had ever read a book.) On the desk were several magazines with coloured covers. The topmost was called Glamour and had on its cover a picture of a young woman in a two-piece bathing-costume. My uncle was a bookmaker and well-off, as my mother often told me. He earned most of his money on Saturdays and was often at leisure on other days. He cultivated standard roses in perfectly rectangular beds, masses of flowering annuals in perfectly circular beds, and a dozen sorts of fern and palm in his dim fernery. At the end of his back garden he kept canaries in aviaries: one large enclosure each for the males and the females, and several smaller cages for breeding pairs. I never saw him indulging his other main interest, but it was well known among his friends and relatives that he left his wife and six children at home on three evenings of every week of the year while he sat alone and watched films in one or another of the many picture theatres in his own or a neighbouring suburb.

  Whenever I was told to play in my well-off uncle’s garden, I went first to the flowerbeds at the front. I plucked petals furtively until I had a collection of many colours. Then I hid myself in the fernery and arranged my petals in groups on the concrete stepping-stones so that each group suggested a set of racing-colours that had been described on one or another page in the collection of racebooks belonging to another uncle of mine: my father’s youngest brother, who lived far away in the south-west of Victoria. On winter Sundays, when the garden was bare, I would collect a leaf from every shrub or tree in both the front and the back garden. Afterwards in the fernery, I would chew on leaf after leaf, comparing the flavours. (I did this not only in my well-off uncle’s garden but in most gardens that I visited as a child. A few years ago, I saw in a newspaper article a list of garden plants reputed to be poisonous to human beings. Several on the list were plants that I had chewed and savoured often as a child.)

  The fernery, on the less-frequented side of the house, always attracted me. Perhaps some of the trailing leaves reminded me of the potted palms meant to suggest opulence in the line drawings of hotel-foyers or hotel dining-rooms where so-called romantic episodes took place in comic-strips that I had read. Or, perhaps, I responded to the comparative seclusion of the fernery in the same way that I responded whenever I found myself alone in a secluded place or an empty landscape or even whenever I read about such a place or such a landscape—by seeing myself and a young female person alone together in that place or that landscape.

  The person I most often saw alone with myself in the fernery would have been one or another of my three girl-cousins, the daughters of the well-off owner of the fernery. The youngest of the three was four years older than myself. None of the three, as I recall, took the least notice of me during my childhood. Two of the three are long dead, and the third I have not met up with for nearly twenty years. Even so, I am able to recall precisely the peculiar attraction that I felt towards each of my three cousins. I never felt towards any of them the sort of yearning that I often felt towards one or another girl of my own age whom I thought of as my girlfriend. That is to say, I never yearned to have a cousin follow me around or spy on me or interrogate me in order to learn my every thought and daydream. Nor did I lie in bed at night trying to see myself with one or another cousin in the far future as husband and wife in a house of two storeys on an extensive rural property. Perhaps my feelings towards my cousins arose partly from my having had no sister and no female friend of my own age during my childhood. My only sibling was a brother five years younger than myself. Moreover, my father’s losses from his betting on racehorses caused us to move from one rented house to another almost every year, so that I always felt myself to be a transient and likely to be soon snatched away from any friend I might make. What I most yearned for my cousins to do was to advise me. I never stood alone in the fernery without the vague hope that one or another cousin would join me there among the trailing greenery and would give me what my mother and my aunt would have called a good talking-to.

  My cousin might have told me in the fernery no more than how she spent some of the many hours when I was unable to observe her: what she discussed with her girlfriends at school or with her sisters late at night in the bedroom that they shared. Even this would have been of value to me, who had to put into my girlfriends’ mouths predictable words of my own choosing whenever I tried to foresee our future dealings with each other. I knew there was much more that my cousin might have told me if I could have earned her sympathy, and although I could never formulate any detail of this precious information, I could cause myself to feel sometimes, alone in the fernery, a pleasan
t dizziness merely by supposing that I might one day hear such stuff from a young female person while she stood so close beside me that I could see the faint hairs on her forearms or the pale freckles just below her neck.

  I daydreamed in the fernery only about the three female cousins of mine who lived thereabouts, but in other secluded places images of other female cousins appeared to me and advised me or revealed things to me. My Catholic father and my Protestant mother had each eight siblings. Of my eight paternal uncles and aunts, only three married, and these three together produced eleven children. All eight of my maternal uncles and aunts married and together produced more than forty children. My father was older than most of his siblings, whereas my mother was younger than most of hers. I had hardly any dealings with my cousins on my father’s side, who were mostly much younger than myself. As a boy, I visited many of my cousins on my mother’s side and even stayed sometimes overnight in their homes. Not once during all my childhood did a girl-cousin of mine approach me as though she had in mind any sort of serious discussion between the two of us. A few girl-cousins even gave me to understand that they disliked my company. And yet, for year after year, I remained hopeful. On some or another sweltering afternoon in the coming summer holidays, I would surely find myself alone with a girl-cousin in some or another shed on her parents’ farm. There would be between us such an understanding as had never yet existed between myself and a female person. We would neither of us feel urged to prove ourselves worthy of the other. Nor would we live in fear of losing the other’s regard. Our mood would be relaxed, light-hearted even. Our business together would begin with questions and answers. We would ask at first trivial or even flippant questions, as though nothing was at stake. Later, our questions would be such as had for long bothered us or even tormented us. We would answer each other with frankness, each marvelling at how easily we dispelled doubt after doubt or mystery after mystery. It was always possible that our honesty would oblige us to undress or even to make free with one another’s body, but I never supposed that anything we might do together would be done for any less serious purpose than to learn what it was that our parents and aunts and uncles seemed anxious that we should not learn.