Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  Whenever I seem to recall the details from the line-drawing mentioned above, I seem to be looking towards the young woman from the direction of England. I am no more than a ghost-character, perhaps barely visible to the true characters. However keenly I might feel my situation, they, natives of the countries of fiction, know joys and sorrows of a different order. Whatever might weigh on me whenever I seem to see the image-balcony and the image-strand of dark image-hair on the pale image-forehead, I am spared whatever it is that oppressed the personage whose part I have taken. If the young woman is lost to me, how much more remote must she be from the chief character: the young Englishman whose name I long ago forgot along with the few dark strokes on a white ground that once suggested his face. If my unease grows on me, I can leave off looking across a conjectured ocean towards an image of an image; I can look instead into text after fictional text for one after another young image-woman at a far image-distance from me. The young Englishman, for as long as I recall having read about him, will go on looking from the same place in my mind towards the same further place in my mind.

  My looking out as a ghost-character from an image-England is other than I should have expected. One of my few vague memories of the comic-strip is that Westward Ho! was concerned with the old rivalry between Spain and England. As a Catholic schoolboy of my time, I had been well warned against the common view of the English as heroes and the Spanish as villains. As a Catholic schoolboy, I should have sided with the Spanish man who was, presumably, the owner of the house where the young woman sat or reclined on the balcony. That I seemed to have sided with the Protestant Englishman causes me to suppose that I was already, as a child, liable to be swayed by images and feelings that owed nothing to my religion; that I was already, as a child, devising a coherent mythology wholly my own.

  No matter how often I look at the image in my mind of the young woman on the balcony, I learn no more of her story or of the story of the male characters in Westward Ho! Instead, I find myself often hearing in my mind several stanzas of poetry that my mother used to recite to me during the years when I was barely old enough to read for myself. During those years, my mother would often tell me what she called ghost stories in order to make me afraid or what she called sad stories in order to make me weep. Her favourite ghost story had as its chief character a ghost named Old Eric. My mother had first heard the story dramatised on radio late at night, and she told the story to me one evening when I was lying in bed before sleep.

  A newly married couple arrive on the first evening of their honeymoon at an unoccupied castle that someone has made available to them in a remote district of England. The husband mentions light-heartedly the legend of Old Eric, the first owner of the castle, who had a withered leg and who preyed on young women. According to the legend, Eric could be brought back to life if his remains were moistened with female blood. While exploring the cellars, the couple find some old bones but think nothing of their discovery, not even when the wife cuts her finger on a suit of armour and blood drips to the floor. They choose for their bedroom the topmost attic-room. Then the wife prepares for bed while her husband explores some or another distant wing of the building. Soon afterwards, the wife hears the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The footsteps have an irregular rhythm, as though the person climbing the stairs has a faulty leg.

  When she first told me the story, my mother had switched off the light at this point and had then left the room. Soon afterwards, I heard the sound of footsteps approaching my room. The footsteps had a distinctive, irregular rhythm, as though the person approaching had a faulty leg. I obliged my mother by screaming as though terrified. I obliged her in the same way on later occasions when I was in bed and she would imitate in the hallway the sound of Old Eric climbing the stairs in the castle. Although I was not terrified, I was concerned for the safety of the young woman. Even so, I believed she could have saved herself from Eric by the same means that I myself relied on when I woke sometimes in the early hours and supposed an intruder was in the house. She might have saved herself if she had had the wit to undress and put on her nightdress and then to lie in bed utterly still and taking only shallow breaths so that Old Eric would suppose she had already died and would then go in search of some other victim. Being ignorant of the ways of female persons, I was unable to see in my mind the young woman undressing or putting on her nightdress, but before my mother’s footsteps had reached my door I had always composed in my mind the last scene of the story of Old Eric in my mind. The young woman lay on the bed with only a sheet covering her. (The young couple had chosen high summer for their wedding and honeymoon.) She had been cunning enough to lie sprawled in the way that corpses were often sprawled in illustrations. The window of the attic room was high above the trees, so that the moonlight entered unchecked. The young woman was so clearly visible, so I supposed, that Old Eric would have taken her for a corpse as soon as he had looked in at the door. He would have done no more than look for a few moments beneath the sheet and the nightdress before he went on searching the other rooms on the upper floor.

  My mother’s sad stories, as she called them, were mostly about children who became lost in uninhabited places or became orphans at an early age. As with her ghost stories, I feigned sadness so as to oblige my mother. One of her sad stories worked on me differently. When I first heard it from my mother, I thought of it as the story in verse of a child named Bridget. A few years later, I learned that the words my mother had often recited to me by heart were three stanzas of a poem with the title “The Fairies,” by William Allingham. I learned this in 1947, when I was in the third grade of primary school. The poem was part of the contents of the Third Book in the series of readers published by the Education Department of Victoria. (My mother, who was not yet eighteen years of age when she conceived me, would have read “The Fairies” for the first time only eleven years before my birth, in the same edition of the Third Book that was still in use during my own schooldays. My mother had been compelled to leave school at the age of thirteen, but throughout her life she was able to recite by heart a number of poems from the Education Department readers. I never learned whether her teachers had required her to learn these poems or whether she had learned them of her own accord or, even, whether she had learned the poems unintentionally as a result of her having often read and enjoyed them.) I learned long after I had left school that “The Fairies,” which the compilers of school readers in the Education Department of Victoria had deemed suitable to be appreciated by children of about eight years, had been intended by William Allingham to be a poem for adults.

  During the years before I was able to read for myself the stanzas about Little Bridget, I learned from my mother’s mournful-sounding recitations that Bridget had been stolen for seven years. (Until I actually read the poem, I was unaware that Bridget’s abductors were fairies; they were referred to only as “they” in the three stanzas. I thought of them as men in flowing robes.) When Bridget had returned home, none remained of her former friends. (Sometimes my mother would alter the text, using the phrase “mother and father” instead of the word “friends.” She must have supposed that I would be more affected by the thought of a child without parents than the thought of a child without friends. So far as I can recall, I thought of all characters in stories or poems as being without parents; even if their parents were mentioned in the text, I abolished the parents from my mind while I read. I knew what my mother was about, but when I grieved for Bridget I was grieving for a girl-woman who would have resembled the most fetching of the older schoolgirls that I was already observing even before I myself had begun at school.) I thought of Bridget as not only friendless but lacking all human company. She lived alone among the same tumbledown cottages and wild-growing garden flowers and English-seeming countryside that came to my mind whenever my mother recited the few lines she recalled from “The Deserted Village,” by Oliver Goldsmith. I could not suppose Bridget to be unhappy in this setting. I thought of her as going through one after
another of the cupboards and drawers in the empty houses, inspecting keepsakes and reading letters left behind by her former friends. After an interval that I supposed was a few days, her abductors returned and made off with her a second time.

  They took her lightly back,

  Between the night and morrow,

  They thought that she was fast asleep,

  But she was dead with sorrow.

  Whenever my mother recited these lines, I assumed that Bridget had died, even though her abductors had thought otherwise. In my eighth year, however, as reported above, I came upon the text of the whole poem. Staring at the printed words was far more satisfying than listening to my mother’s recitation. With the text safely in front of me, I had time for speculating; for calling into question the seemingly obvious. I was anxious, of course, that Bridget should not have died. Surely I had no choice but to accept the word of the narrator? My one hope lay with the abductors. How could they have mistaken a dead girl-woman for one who merely slept, especially when they must have lifted her in their arms from her bed and later set her down again? (I saw them as carrying her away on a litter.) I seem to recall that I mostly wavered in my understanding of the text, although a few years later I might well have resolved the matter by composing my own version of events: by writing in the rear of a disused exercise-book a few lines of doggerel that would keep alive a fictional personage whose original narrator had declared her dead. Even during my wavering, however, I must sometimes have acted boldly. It would very much suit the pattern of meaning in this work of fiction if I could report here that I decided once at least, when I was a mere child-reader, that a certain narrator was mistaken: that the truth about a fictional personage need not be available to the very personage who was supposed to convey that truth to the reader. It would very much suit my purpose in writing this work of fiction if I could report that I learned in my childhood that a work of fiction is not necessarily enclosed within the mind of its author but extends on its farther sides into little-known territory.

  The story of Bridget, so to call it, is told in twelve lines of a poem made up of fifty-six lines. The last lines relating to Bridget are these:

  They have kept her ever since,

  Deep beneath the lake,

  On a bed of flag-leaves,

  Watching till she wake.

  The verbs in this passage are no longer in the past tense. Often, as a child, I strove to prolong a narrative: to keep it from ending in my mind. I had no need so to strive with the story of Bridget. Nor were the last words of the text of the sort that sometimes sounded cheerfully at the end of a so-called fairy-tale. (“And for all I know, she may be living there still . . .”) The last words relating to Bridget were calm and assured; the narrator spoke with authority. The story of Bridget had still not come to an end when the last word had been written about her. But what could remain of a story when the chief character already lay dead? Again, I could wish to report that I once, as a child-reader, found reason to doubt a narrator of fiction. I could wish to report that I decided that the personages within the text knew more than the personage hovering over the text, as it were; the abductors of Bridget, watching by her bed, knew more about her than the man who had written about her. Or, I could wish to report that I stared at the last four words of the story of Bridget until they seemed to change in meaning; until a hoped-for event became an unexpected event, and, finally, an actual event. If I could report such as this, I could hardly report that Bridget, the fictional personage, finally awoke. The eventual awakening would have taken place outside the boundaries of the text composed by William Allingham. Bridget, by now subtly other than a fictional personage, would have been restored to her new existence in a place where neither reader nor narrator could lay claim to her; in a place on some or another far side of fiction. What sort of life was hers in that place neither William Allingham nor I could know, even if we tried to go on writing or reading about her.

  As for Bridget’s being said to lie beneath a lake, I always resisted the notion that she was beneath the surface of the lake; that she was underwater. If she were underwater, so I reasoned, then those watching her would have had to be underwater also, and all of them would have long since drowned. (I was never able to learn the rudiments of swimming. Whenever I was told as a child to put my face into water, I closed my eyes and held my breath and supposed that I was drowning. I felt sympathy, years afterwards, for the men that I read about who put to sea off the west coast of Ireland in frail, handmade boats. Those men disdained to learn anything of swimming, believing that to do so would only prolong their death-agony if their boat were to capsize. From my point of view, anyone who ventured beneath the surface of an ocean or a river or a lake was doomed.) I was able to devise a safe place for Bridget because I had followed not long before certain episodes, so to call them, of the comic-strip “Mandrake the Magician.” In those episodes, Princess Narda had been captured by a man who seemed to live with his followers underwater. Whenever they retreated to their hide out, they seemed to disappear among willow-trees at the edge of a certain river, so that they were reputed to be amphibious beings. The author of the comic-strip encouraged this belief in his or her readers by depicting the leader of the abductors of Princess Narda as a man possessing no hair and no eyes and only the rudiments of nostrils and mouth. When the abductors had first brought Princess Narda into the presence of their leader, he, being without eyes, had put his hands on the face and neck and shoulders of his prisoner in order to satisfy himself that she was a good-looking young woman. When I studied the line-drawings of the man whose head and face was a fleshy dome, I was prepared to believe that he could remain for long periods underwater. I learned, however, from later episodes that the hide out of the abductors and their leader was not unlike the burrow of the platypus, which creature I first read about in the School Reader a year after I had first read about Bridget. The lair of the platypus was an underground hollow close to a watercourse. The hollow could be approached through either of two tunnels, one of them leading downwards from among scrub and the other leading upwards from below water-level. The abductor of Princess Narda wanted it thought of him that he lived underwater, but only one of the entrances to his hide-out was beneath the river, and Princess Narda was safe from drowning throughout her captivity. So, too, was Bridget after I had learned to see her as lying on her flag-leaves in a dry, airy cavern like that in which Princess Narda had been held captive. (I mentioned the platypus just above for no other reason than that I admired as a child the layout of its burrows. I read only recently that the eyes of the platypus remain closed during the many hours of each day while the animal is underwater, even while it feeds or copulates.)

  It seems characteristic of images appearing in the mind that one or another detail should be incongruous, if not inexplicable. At some time after I had begun to see in my mind an image of Bridget lying in her cavern, I began to notice an image of a strand of dark hair lying diagonally across her forehead. What seemed incongruous was that the strand of hair seemed to be lifted from the forehead and then to be carried away and then to drift back towards the forehead. Even though I had found for Bridget a safe, dry cavern in my mind, still she seemed to lie in the path of some or another current underwater. It seems characteristic of images appearing in the mind that some details of the images seem fixed in the mind while other details can be altered by the effort of the person in whose mind they appear. In my image of Bridget, the strand of hair seems still to move. However, I learned long ago to see the seeming movement as a trick of light. Long ago, I caused to appear in an upper wall of the cavern a large window. On the other side of the thick glass of the window is part of the lake that Bridget is reported to lie beneath. The currents in the lake, or the drifting from side to side of underwater plants, check the passage through the water of the sunlight from far away, causing a play of light and shade across Bridget’s face. I could wish to change further the detail of the window. I could wish to see instead of a view of wate
r a window of coloured glass showing an image of a trickling stream or of a shallow swamp bordered with clumps of rushes.

  I have often wanted to bring forward the story of Bridget. The time when I seemed most likely to do so was a certain year in the late 1980s, when I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing and when I approached my place of employment on four mornings of every week on foot, having walked from the nearest railway-station through certain back-streets of a suburb of Melbourne where the value of the meanest cottage would have been twice that of the house that my wife and I had been paying off for twenty and more years in a suburb on the opposite side of the city. In a certain back-street, I used to walk for some distance beside a high wall of bluestone that was one of the boundaries of a large allotment. I sometimes heard the sound of trickling water from the far side of the wall. I supposed the sound might have come from an arrangement of fish-ponds with a tiny waterfall between them or, what was less probable but more to my liking, from a streamlet issuing out of a grotto wherein stood a statue of a female personage. I was never able to learn what caused the sound of trickling water, but I was one day able to assume that a fernery of some sort was on the other side of the wall. On that day I noticed, as I walked beside the wall, a pale-green button-shape protruding from the grey mortar between two blocks of bluestone. I found that the seeming-button was the uncurled frond of a fern. On the other side of the wall, so I understood, was a fernery so well-watered and so lush that one of the fern-plants there could find no other way of reproducing than by forcing a child-frond into a crevice within the strip of mortar between two blocks of bluestone in a massive wall, as though somewhere, on the far side of the wall, was a place where a new and more spacious fernery might come into being.