Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  More than a year passed before the daughter was able to become a postulant of an order of sisters at a convent in a suburb of Melbourne. The order that she joined was not an enclosed order. While the daughter had been still keeping house on the farm on the island but preparing to join one or another religious order, the chief character had visited her no less often than when he had been courting her in his mind. He went on trying to persuade her not to lock herself away from the world in a convent of an enclosed order but to join the order of nuns that he himself admired most, which was an order founded by an Australian woman who had grown up in a remote district that was the furthest south-east district of South Australia and was just short of the border between that state and Victoria. The chief character’s motives in this matter were unselfish; he believed that the enclosed life was pointless and cruel for both women and men. His arguments won over the daughter. She joined the order that he had recommended, and she made her final vows in the year when his eldest son was conceived.

  What would have been others of those imagined events?

  On a certain afternoon in the early 1930s with a hot sun in a clear sky but with a cool breeze blowing from the nearby sea, a boy aged about thirteen years was walking towards a swampy area overgrown by clumps of rushes. The swampy area was in the furthest paddock from the house on a dairy farm in south-western Victoria. The tops of the tallest rushes were as high as the boy’s head when he walked amongst them, but the boy was afraid that he might still be seen from any of the paddocks around and so he walked further in towards the centre of the swampy area. The boy trod carefully between the green tussocks. He was looking out for snakes, which were often seen in the swampy area. He was also trying not to spill a jam-jar of water that he was carrying in one hand.

  At certain times of the year, the swampy area was under water, but the season was now summer and the boy was able to walk far in among the rushes before he felt soggy ground underfoot. He stepped back from the dampness and then sat down in the shade of a clump of rushes. He looked around and made sure that he was surrounded by clumps of rushes. Then he sipped from the jar of water and afterwards placed it on a level piece of ground. He sipped because he knew that the water in the jar was the only drinking-water that he would have during the rest of the day. The boy had gone into hiding and intended not to show himself again until evening.

  The boy had chosen the swampy area for his hiding-place not only because it was far from his house but also because the clumps of rushes were the tallest growing things in all the paddocks of the farm. Fifty years before, the boy’s grandfather had cleared from the farm the many trees and patches of scrub that had formerly grown there. The farm was the very last expanse of fertile land short of the coast. Beyond the southern boundary of the farm, the land sloped upwards and became scrub-covered cliff-tops before coming to an end. Where the land came to an end, sheer cliffs stood above the Southern Ocean.

  While the boy sat in the swampy area, he heard the sounds of wave after wave bumping against the bases of the nearer cliffs. The boy and all of his family heard almost continually the sounds of waves of the ocean bumping against cliffs or breaking on beaches. The exceptional times were certain days and evenings in late spring and in summer when the wind blew from the north. The north wind not only quietened the ocean; the north wind brought to the coastal district the feel and the smells and the sounds of the mostly level grassy countryside that reached for hundreds of miles inland.

  The north wind had blown hard on a certain day only a few days before the day when the boy had gone into hiding in the swamp. On that certain day, a certain image had come into the mind of the boy while he was standing in a paddock at some distance from the swampy area. The boy was not looking for a hiding-place on that day; he had been sent on an errand by his father, the owner of the farm. Just before the certain image had come into his mind, the boy had been watching, as he often watched, the waves made by the north wind in the grass of the paddocks around him and had been thinking, as he often thought, of how quiet were the waves of grass compared to the least noisy of the waves of the ocean. Then he noticed in his mind an image of a building of two storeys. The boy supposed at first that he was looking at an image of the bluestone presbytery that stood beside the Catholic church in the coastal city that he sometimes visited with his parents. But then he understood that he was looking at an image of one or another house of two storeys that might have stood far back from the road on one or another large grazing property far away to the north-west of his father’s farm and on the way to the South Australian border. The boy had never seen an actual house on any such property, but he had travelled several years before with one of his father’s brothers to a town north-west of his father’s farm and had glimpsed at a certain moment during his journey a distant point of fiery light that his uncle had explained away as the reflection of the late-afternoon sunlight in a window of some or another grazier’s mansion.

  After the boy had seen in his mind the image of the house, he felt as though he was standing in his mind in the garden of the house and was looking up at a certain window of the upper storey. A young woman was looking down from the window and was letting fall from the window towards the garden where the boy was standing in his mind length after length of the hair from her head. The boy had read some years before a story purporting to be a story for children in which a young woman imprisoned in a tower had let fall her hair in the form of a ladder so that a certain young man would be able to climb from the ground upwards and in through her window. While he had read that story, the boy had seen in his mind an image of abundant red-gold hair arranged in the form of a ladder. The hair let down by the young woman in the house of two storeys was black and was in the form of a veil or a curtain.

  When the black hair in the image in the mind of the boy had been let down and was trailing on the lawn beside the house of two storeys, the boy felt as though he had stepped towards the hair and had reached both hands above his head and had clutched at the hair and had tried to drag himself upwards towards the window through which the young woman was looking down from the upper storey. The boy then felt as though he had lifted himself a short distance upwards so that his feet were no longer on the lawn beside the house of two storeys. But then the boy had felt as though he had fallen and as though he was lying on the lawn beside the house of two storeys and was struggling to free himself from the folds of black hair in which he was entangled. And then the boy had understood that his efforts to drag himself upwards had torn the black hair from the head of the young woman of the upper storey. He had not dared to look upwards, but he had supposed that the young woman was still looking down from her upper window although the dome of her skull was now white and bald.

  The north wind had blown all day but had ceased to blow during the early evening of a certain day several years after the day when the boy had fled with his jar of water into the swampy area. The boy sitting in the swampy area had, of course, no knowledge of what he was going to see during the evening of a certain day several years afterwards. The boy sitting in the swampy area and trying not to see in his mind the image of the bald, white skull of the young woman at the upper window of the house of two storeys far out on the mostly level grassy countryside that lay to the north of where he sat in hiding—that boy might well have turned his back on the waving grass that seemed to lead back to the house of two storeys and might have tried to call to mind the waves of the ocean that he could hear bumping and breaking not far away. The boy was not afraid of the ocean. His older brothers had taught him to swim, and he and they sometimes swam together on hot afternoons in the sheltered cove near their father’s farm. While he was swimming, the boy often thought of the ocean liners that travelled past the sheltered cove and the cliffs but always far out to sea. The boy had lived always beside the ocean but he knew about ocean liners only from books and magazines.

  In the early evening mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph, the boy had grown almost
into a young man. He was so tall and so broad that he fitted comfortably into many items of clothing that his older brothers and his father passed down to him in the way that thrifty families passed clothing down during the time when these fictional events would have taken place if ever I had been able to report them. In the early evening mentioned previously, the boy-man, as I intend to call him, had been walking towards his parents’ house from a distant paddock of his father’s farm when he felt urged to look at the ocean from the cliff-tops near the sheltered cove mentioned previously. He felt so urged because the north wind had been blowing all day, and he wanted to admire the calmness that the north wind always caused on the nearer parts of the ocean.

  As soon as the boy-man had looked down at the nearer parts of the ocean, he had noticed far out towards the horizon what seemed an oblong glow. He soon understood that he was looking at an ocean liner travelling from Melbourne towards Britain and Europe. He had never previously seen and would never afterwards see such a sight. While he watched, he tried to climb to a higher point on the cliff so that he could keep the ocean-liner in his view for as long as possible. While the boy-man was thus climbing, he noticed in his mind an image of himself approaching the ocean-liner as though he had swum towards the liner from the sheltered cove and as though the liner had altered its course so as to pass close by the cove. In the image, and in the images that followed, the boy-man was in the water beside the liner, holding a rope-ladder that had been thrown down to him, while numerous passengers leaned over the railings on the various decks of the liner and urged the boy-man to climb the rope-ladder and to join them on board the liner. The men-passengers wore stiff white shirts, black jackets and trousers, and black bow-ties. The hair on each man’s head was black and was so sleek that the boy-man saw reflected in it rays and beams from the lights all around the man. (The boy-man was sometimes reminded of those sleek black heads of hair ten or even twenty years later, when he had long since become a man and when he sometimes picked up a copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly that one or another of his sisters had been reading and when he looked at the line-drawings of Mandrake the Magician in the comic-strip of the same name on the inside of the rear cover of the magazine.) The women passengers wore dresses that exposed their shoulders and their upper arms and much of their chests. The lips of the women had been painted. Some lips were scarlet and reminded the boy-man of tomatoes. Other lips were almost purple and reminded the boy-man of beetroot.

  For as long as the men-passengers and the women-passengers leaned downwards from the decks of the liner and urged him to climb aboard, all the passengers seemed to stand in the same relationship to the boy-man as stood the characters in a work of fiction for as long as he was reading the work and, sometimes, for long afterwards. The boy-man had never seen in the place that he called the real world any men or women dressed as the passengers were dressed; only while he was reading did such personages appear to him. He supposed that the passengers on the liner were travelling to Britain or even to other countries of Europe so that they could return to their native scenery: so that they could pose once more against backgrounds of beech forests or of moors overgrown with heather. If the boy-man had possessed an imagination, as he surely did, then he would have seen in his mind images of himself strolling with his new-found companions against backgrounds of beeches or of heather. He might even have seen images of himself sometimes slipping away from his companions and stepping further back among the beech-trees or across the moors so that he could see what might have lain behind the places that were the settings of works of fiction.

  The boy-man mentioned in the previous paragraph, the boy-man seemingly invited to join up with a band of fictional characters, is, of course, no more than a character in the mind of a boy-man standing on a cliff-top: a boy-man who was several years previously a boy who went into hiding among clumps of rushes and who, as I wrote earlier in these pages, might himself have become a character in a recognisable work of fiction if only I had been able to imagine such a work.

  The imagined boy-man, so to call him, could not bring himself to climb the rope-ladder and to join up with the sleek-haired men and the bare-shouldered women. He might, perhaps, have dared to climb the ladder and to step aboard the liner if the only persons waiting for him had been the sleek-haired men, but for as long as the crowd on the deck included numbers of women, the boy-man clung to the lower rungs of the ladder and would not lift himself out of the water. The boy-man was not afraid of leaving behind for the time being his parents and his brothers and sisters and the farm beside the ocean, but he was afraid of standing in the view of a group of women while he was wearing the bathing costume that had been passed down to him by his father. Each of the brothers of the boy-man owned a bathing costume of the modern sort. This sort of costume covered less of the body than had earlier costumes but it was designed so as not to embarrass the wearer or any female person in his presence. The modern costume reached only from the shoulders of the wearer to his upper thighs, but part of that costume was a skirt-like covering that hung in front of the wearer’s groin. The earlier sort of costume, the so-called neck-to-knee costume, covered most of the wearer’s body but clung when wet to every part of the body. From the time when his father had passed his bathing-costume down, the boy-man had worn the costume only in the presence of his brothers. Even with his brothers he had not wanted to stand so that his wet costume revealed to them the contours of his private parts. Perhaps if the sleek-haired men on the ocean-liner had produced from somewhere a dressing-gown that the boy-man could have wrapped around himself—or perhaps if they had offered no more than that they should stand around the boy-man so as to shield his body from the view of the bare-shouldered women—then the boy-man might have climbed up to the deck and might have joined up with the sort of persons that he had previously never met but had only read about in books of fiction. But the series of events in the boy-man’s mind always came to an end with his letting go of the rope-ladder and then drifting back towards the sheltered cove and the high cliffs beside his father’s farm while the ocean-liner went on its way towards the countries that were the settings for books of fiction. After he had let go of the ladder, the boy-man had often regretted that he had forgone an opportunity to consort with men who might have been characters in works of fiction, but he had always then reminded himself that he had been saved from causing embarrassment to a number of women who might have been characters in works of fiction. He had been saved from having to pass in full view of the women while he was wearing only an old-fashioned bathing-costume. He had been saved from causing the women the embarrassment of their seeing him in a close-clinging fabric that revealed the exact outlines of the parts of him that he had learned from his schoolfellows to call his tool and his stones.

  If the boy hiding among the clumps of rushes had had time to prepare, he would have brought a book with him to his hiding-place; but he had had to flee from his house with only the jar of water, and so he passed the time by listening to the sounds of birds. He would have preferred to watch the birds as well, but he dared not move from his hiding-place; if any of his sisters had been sent to fetch him back, she might have seen him through some or another gap between the clumps of rushes.

  Although the farm was without trees or scrub, it did not lack for birds, and the boy often observed them. While he was hiding in the swampy area, the boy heard from time to time the sounds of two sorts of bird that he thought of as his favourites. Twelve years later, when he had bought his first bird-book, he learned the scientific names of the two birds: anthus novaeseelandiae and alauda arvensis, but as a boy he knew the birds only as groundlark and skylark, although he did know that the groundlark was a native of Australia whereas the skylark had been introduced from England. The boy found it strange that these birds spent much time on the wing but made their nests on the ground. Even if tall trees had been growing on the farm, the groundlark and the skylark would still have made their nests on the ground, hidden among tussocks.r />
  The boy in hiding looked out for the nests of groundlarks and skylarks whenever he was walking across a paddock on his father’s farm. He had found only one nest. It was a disused nest, but the boy had admired its snugness beneath the overhanging grass. He had left the nest in place, meaning to go back and to inspect it on later occasions, but he had never afterwards been able to find the nest. Later in the afternoon while the boy was in hiding, he began to pass the time by looking around the swampy area as though he had been one of his favourite birds in search of a site for a nest. Whenever he found such a site, he tried to make with his fist a snug hollow and then tried to imagine the nest and the eggs and the naked young.

  The day when the boy went into hiding among the rushes was a Sunday. At the midday meal, which the family called dinner, the boy had sat quietly, as usual, among his parents and his older brothers and sisters. During the meal, the boy had heard much talk about a party of visitors that was going to arrive in the early afternoon. The head of the party was a brother of the boy’s mother and was well known to the boy, who was, of course, the man’s nephew. The uncle, as I intend to call him, had remained unmarried until almost his fortieth year and had worked at many different jobs in several states of Australia but had lately married. The uncle had married a widow, who was the mother of nine children. He had then taken up, as the saying went, a soldier-settlement block in a forested district inland from his brother-in-law’s coastal farm. During the meal mentioned above, the boy at the table had learned that his uncle was then on his way to visit the coastal farm and was bringing with him his wife and the four of her children who had still not left home. The boy had learned finally that all four children were daughters.

  Early in the afternoon, one of the boy’s sisters had called out that she could see the visitors arriving at the front gate. The boy had then stood with his sisters on the front verandah and had watched the visitors approaching in their horse-and-buggy across the home paddock. The boy had made out the four persons with pale-coloured dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats who had recently become his step-cousins but had still not made out their faces when one of this sisters thrust an elbow against his ribs and told him that the youngest of the four was exactly the same age as himself. The boy had then gone into the kitchen and had filled a clean jam-jar with water and had set out for the swampy area at the far end of the farm. He had remained in hiding in that area during the rest of that afternoon and had not returned home until sunset, long after the visitors had gone.