by Robert Manne
The back door opened out of the kitchen, and quite a long way along a muddy path was the lavatory. A huge monstera deliciosa partly blocked the path, and whenever it was going to rain a glistening lime-green frog sat on the leaves and croaked reverberatingly. We named him Knorp, as that was what his croak sounded like to ears attuned to German. The huge leaning sewage-collection truck came once a week, late at night. A man who looked like a monk, because he wore a chaff bag slit down one seam to form a peaked hood and cape, carried the can on his hessian shoulder from the lavatory up the path and around the side of the house.
The house had a cat living in it. She had faded grey fur with irregular yellowish patches, like sunlight through a dusty window. Since she had much more experience of humans than we had of cats, she took charge of our relationship and she made it clear that it was to be a purely functional one. She didn’t want to be stroked. She came in the morning for a saucer of milk and at dusk for a plate of scraps, and those were the only times we saw her. We called her, noncommittally, Pussy. One morning she arrived with a tiny blue-grey dandelion puff of a kitten prancing and skipping and stalking behind her.
We were instantly captivated. This was fortunate, since Jiminy Cricket, as I long-windedly named the kitten, was the first of many, many litters. We learned to recognise the signs that Pussy was close to giving birth and prepared a box padded with chaff bags. She would inspect it with pleased interest, vanish and have her kittens on a skirt that had slipped off its hanger in the back of the wardrobe. We would move them to the box. She would lie back, pushing her paws into the padding and purring deeply, her golden eyes, in which the pupils floated small as caraway seeds, brimming with contentment and languorous trust. Half an hour later the box was empty. We might see her disappearing with the last kitten hanging like a little wet sock from her mouth. She would take them to a spot out of human reach – under a vine on the roof of the laundry, or in a crevice under the stacked bran bags in the feed shed – and rear them there. Sometimes we could hear their slatey little squeaks but we would not see them until she brought them back when they were five weeks old.
This happened two or three times a year. Spaying, which was called getting a cat Fixed Up, was not considered an option. In fact, it was a feature of life in Oratava Avenue in the’40s that there were no options. There was just What You Did, No Two Ways About It. What you did with kittens was to drown the females in a bucket before they had their eyes open. The familiarity of ‘in a bucket’ domesticated the notion of holding a newborn creature in cold water until it died, and the timeframe contained the humane suggestion that the kittens, as long as their eyes were shut, wouldn’t notice what was happening. None of us was capable either of telling the sex of a newborn kitten or of drowning it. At the end of a year we had seven cats and it occurred to my mother that it might be possible to find them other homes. She constructed guidelines out of convenient scraps of hearsay – all ginger cats are male; there’s no such thing as a female tabby; black cats are always tomcats (and so are most black and white ones). Under these reckless assertions she wove a loopholed safety net of secondary considerations – female cats don’t make a smell; female cats are better mousers; female cats don’t go off fighting. I would be sent out with an irresistible five-week-old kitten in a shoebox and the appropriate guarantee. We found homes for generations of cats and had thirteen of our own.
Long paddocks sloped down behind the house. A little creek fringed with maidenhair fern ran through the bottom paddock. It was amazing that so much land, which seemed to be something like air that everybody shared, could be owned. My father borrowed Mr Mitchell’s draughthorse and plough. The blade sliced through the lumpy clods to show slick gleaming black with an oily rainbow shimmer. He planted rows of sweet corn interspersed with lines of valencia orange trees, and three almond trees.
My parents bought a cow called Pansy, the most beautiful cow anyone had ever seen. Her coat had patches of clearly mapped colour, continents of chocolate brown in oceans of white. Her horns were exquisitely curved and tapered, her eyes huge, dark and reflecting, with long, though sparse, lashes. Her muzzle was bluntly rounded like the toe of a gumboot, with a slimy sheen punctured by occasional bristles. Her tongue was pointed and so long that it could reach into her nostrils. She had to be milked twice a day. In the evenings I had to drive her up from the bottom paddock, walking behind her undulating rump and hearing the creaking sound she made at every step. She would surge into the milking shed, put her head in the trough and blow into her mash before settling down to steady, abstracted munching. At the thin metallic sound of the milk hitting the bucket the cats would assemble near the kerosene lantern, sitting with their tails wound neatly around their paws.
In the pebbly pale clay on the left of the house my father dug out an air-raid shelter, and all the windows had to be blacked out by having sheets of newspaper stuck to the panes. At night it was country darkness, black and solid. Nobody ever went out. There were no cars, no buses, nowhere to go. The only time I went out at night was when the horses got into the rows of sweet corn. They would eat the fresh young stalks and their stomachs would swell up as tight as drums – and would burst, it was said, unless they were walked continuously until their stomachs subsided. That took at least two hours, and – leaving my father in a fury, saying, ‘Serves them right if they burst’ – my mother and I would walk up and down and up and down the road with the reluctant dragging horses, poking their stomachs after every lap in the hope that they were subsiding, hearing only the soft clop of the hooves on the dust in the pitch dark.
The first horse I had was Tommy, a beautiful cream-coloured pony with a black mane and tail. He had never been properly broken in, and though he loved people it irritated him to have them on his back. Thelma Bignell from Down The Road came to teach me to ride. She had long rows of blue, red and yellow felt ribbons won at gymkhanas with her horse, Golden Prince. She despised the name Tommy and said he should be called Arab Prince as he had quite a lot of Arab in him. You could tell that a horse had Arab in him if his nose would fit in a peach tin, and Tommy’s elegant narrow nose clearly could. She said that you had to learn to ride bareback, controlling the horse with your knees. Within minutes Tommy would start pigrooting and toss me off. He would come up to me and whuffle gently and nudge me with his apricot-textured muzzle, and Thelma would yell, ‘Get back on! You’ve got to get straight back on!’ and then it would happen all over again.
Thelma Bignell lived with her mother Down The Road on the high side. Patty Scanlen lived with her mother opposite. Up The Road, Winifred McCourt, who ran the kindergarten at Thompson’s Corner, lived with her mother, and Miss Harrington lived with her mother diagonally opposite. There were a few older men, like Mr Mitchell, and schoolboys, but there were no young men. That didn’t strike me as strange – everything was equally strange, and became equally normal – but I realise now that a whole generation of men was missing, and must have gone to the war. Bill Johnson, the headmaster’s son who sometimes helped in class, was about fifteen. He was tall and his voice was deep, and if he spoke to you it was as if the sun was shining into your eyes and you had to look down and wait for things to make sense. The Big Boys, who were eleven or twelve, were in Mr Johnson’s class, and most then left school to help their mothers with feeding chooks and weeding nursery gardens. Sometimes at the annual church fete, at the end of the day when land and sky separated and the sky was still light and the ground became smoky with dusk, the girls would tease and torment the boys until they grabbed a piece of ice from the refreshment tent and chased the girls squealing around the darkening lawn and put the ice down the back of their dresses.
The Presbyterian church at Thompson’s Corner was a small red-brick building with a stubby little tower. Sunday school was in a room at the back. We sat at tables with our backs to the window, which looked across dark bands of bushland and bands of hazy distance, right to the cloudy storm blue of the Blue Mountains, sixty miles away. We had wool and ne
edles to knit squares in plain stitch, which, we were told, were for scarves for Our Boys and face washers for The Missions, equally mysterious recipients. Mrs Mooney, the carpenter’s wife, was the teacher. Her main theme was the necessity of obedience to God, and she illustrated it with local events to give us a personal frame of reference – ‘There was a wicked man who tried to hurt Mr Mooney so God punished him and a horse kicked him and broke his leg.’
A local German family, the Marks, who had a poultry farm, gave my parents a blue cattle dog called Fipsy. She was a middle-aged overweight dog who walked as if her feet hurt, always panting, always cheerful, the tip of her lowered tail always wagging. One morning she couldn’t get up. When we tried to stand her up, her legs collapsed under her. Everyone had advice. It’s a tick, a poison bait, a snake, a kick from a horse – whatever it is, she’ll only get worse. No point calling the vet, he’ll tell you the same thing and charge you for it. Only thing to do is put her out of her misery. No two ways about it. All she wants is a knock on the head with the back of an axe – got one down the shed, have you? For six weeks we fed her and changed the sacks under her. One night we were woken by urgent barking. We went to the shed and found Fipsy standing up, barking with joyful excitement. She could walk normally.
On weekdays a loose group of children trailed up the road. Geoffrey and Amy Fleming from the last house on the high side picked up Errol Scanlen opposite, then Arthur Davis, then Elaine Stone and then me. I was not picked up, like the others, by a process of natural adhesion but officially handed over. The children turned towards my mother, faces glowing with zealous helpfulness and the pride of responsibility. Once the convoy moved on, picking up Fay and Bruce Wilson and then straggling the half-mile to school, this glow faded and I felt at best an oddity but more often a monstrosity. This was not because of any particular unkindness, simply from a throbbing sense of being ineradicably different, and not sufficiently in command of that difference to inhabit it as an alternative position. Walking to school together was just What You Did, No Two Ways About It, without affinity or alternative, and the interactions within the group were as random as the rolling of marbles in a box, and as impossible to master. We wandered along, scuffing up dust, throwing stones at telegraph poles, pulling up sourgrass stems to suck, with occasional eruptions of ‘Oowah! I’m gunna tell on you!’ or ‘He’s your boyfren!’ if a girl happened to stray within a certain radius of a boy. Occasionally we drifted to a halt at a ruined straw castle of golden manure left by the milkman’s horse two hours earlier, and watched with appalled admiration as one of the boys accepted the dare to eat a piece.
There was no school uniform. We wore clothes that were too big or too small, depending on the stage of growing into or out of them that you were at, faded but starched and ironed to the texture of aluminium. Down to my scabbed knees I looked like the other children, but my feet belonged in a different world. My parents, so adaptable on major issues, on minor ones retained European convictions not open to modification. One was that shoes had to be made of leather so that your feet could breathe. Leather was unknown in Oratava Avenue as a material for children’s wear, being reserved for work boots and blacksmiths’ aprons. My shoes were stiff and slippery and noisy, the sign and instrument of a footfall that could never merge with that of the others. And on rainy days, when the others took off their sandshoes and wedged them in their armpits to keep them dry, I dragged carthorse hooves of leather shoes encased in galoshes.
West Pennant Hills Primary School was a small L-shaped brick building painted ochre. The headmaster’s house joined onto the back of the school, and on Friday afternoons we were allowed into his garden to pick mulberry leaves for our silkworms. Behind the school was a flagpole and a bell post. The school day started at nine o’clock, when Mr Johnson came out and rang the bell. We formed two lines, one of girls and one of boys, and watched while the union jack moved jerkily up the pole. Once the flag was up we started swinging our arms and, when the momentum reached us, raising our knees to march into school, singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’.
There were two schoolrooms. Mr Johnson taught fourth, fifth and sixth class in one room and Miss Pollard taught first, second and third in the other. The classes were separated into rows of double desks, with seats and lids of heavy dark wood. The teacher’s desk was on a low platform and had a huge pencil sharpener crouched on one side. The room was painted brown to shoulder height and then lettuce-green, and there were three beautiful high windows, each divided into twelve panes, which let in slants of high, white light in which you could see the slow circling and drifting of chalk dust.
Miss Pollard was serious, kind, strict and fair. She made you feel that it was important, and possible, to learn. While you were in the classroom it was unimaginable that you could be thinking of anything but the task she set you. While one class had a lesson the other two rows practised what they had just been taught – reading, writing, arithmetic. We did sums and learned tables, not only of numbers but rods, poles and perches and pecks and bushels, quantities as remote as Latin declensions. We copied the exquisite letters Miss Pollard wrote on the blackboard. Her letters sloped slightly to the right, the upstrokes fragile and lacily transparent, the downstrokes creamily white. To know letters and be able to join some to make a word which was in your head and would be recognised by anyone who saw it seemed an amazing and mysterious achievement. Once Miss Pollard asked if anyone knew a poem. I said I did, having made one up about a mouse who lived in a house and ate cheese and sometimes peas. After I had recited a couple of lines Miss Pollard asked me if I had written it myself and told me to sit down. I was mortified and mystified – what difference did it make, and how could she possibly tell?
Thorby’s Grocery, at Thompson’s Corner, was the largest building in West Pennant Hills and the centre of everything that happened. It was on a crest from which you could look over the whole countryside as far as the hump of the Harbour Bridge. The shop window had pyramids of jam tins with glossy fruit on the labels, which we cut out and pasted on the brown paper covers of our exercise books, and jars of Bushell’s chicory essence and stacks of Velvet soap and diagonal rows of metal fruitfly sprayguns and soap dispensers, little wire-netting cages on handles into which you put leftover scraps of soap to shake to a lather in the washing-up water. Inside there was a wide dark wooden counter, and behind it dark wooden shelves and pigeonholes right to the dark wooden ceiling. It was shadowy, the light seeming to hover around the edges of things rather than to reveal them clearly, and this dimness corresponded to a pervading smell in which the earth crusted potatoes in a hessian sack, the crumbly round of cheese on the counter, the cut beaded surface of a pumpkin blended. On the right was the Post Office counter with a portrait of King George VI in plain khaki uniform, and next to it was the lolly counter, with big jars of rainbow balls and pink musk sticks and beautiful boiled lollies glowing like jewels. (Actually, I had never seen jewels and would have been more likely, when I did see them, to think they glowed like boiled lollies.) Food was rationed, and for every purchase a row of coupons was deftly snipped from the ration booklet. Hardly anything came in packets. Things were scooped from sacks and deep drawers with a metal scoop, and Mrs Thorby, head tilted back a little to see over the top of her glasses, would delicately shake the final ounce of sugar or rice or split peas into the brown paper bag on the scales. The meticulous weighing, the accurate cutting of the coupons, the whole sense of a presiding propriety in the person of Mrs Thorby, gave the business of shopping a sense of admission to a world of self-respecting appropriateness. ‘I’d like a nice piece of pumpkin, please, Mrs Thorby,’ was all you needed to say to get exactly the right amount.
The aim of my life was to be like everybody else in Oratava Avenue, an aim I was ill-equipped to achieve. In my head there was a constant tumult of excitement, apprehension, joy, hatred, devotion, misery, fury, guilt and gratitude. As far as I could see, nobody in Oratava Avenue felt any of these things. Any reference to persona
l feelings was sealed off by phrases like, ‘I wouldn’t like to say.’ ‘Least said, soonest mended.’ The most personal expression of strong emotion you were likely to encounter was, ‘It’s not the heat I mind, it’s the humidity.’ Interaction with other children took place on the vertiginous rim between inclusion and exclusion. I watched constantly for signs to show what was meant, like a deaf person lip-reading.
When you start remembering and recounting, all the memories stitch together in uniform distinct little shapes, like quilting pieces cut out of the different fabrics of those days and weeks and years, and given definition and coherence which were totally lacking in the experience itself. It is hard to remember the unpatterned fabric of recurrent days. The waking to a dark morning with rain trampling on the corrugated iron roof and the knowledge that, beyond wish or comfort, no two ways about it, was the necessity of feeding the fowls, crouching in the rain to cut green-feed for the afternoon with a sickle that scrunched on little particles of mud. The sensed threats and disasters, printed in newspapers flapped shut and trailing in sentences suspended when I came in. The smell of the kerosene heater and the pattern of round lights it made on the ceiling. The smell of linseed oil, painted on the horses’ hooves and on the perches the fowls slept on, heads under wings, stirring murmuringly when we went down with the kerosene lantern to lock the shed for the night.
I don’t remember the everyday things, things that happened every day for years and years and years. When I look back, I seem to inhabit these rooms and paddocks and streets like the figure of a stranger which appears in a photograph you take of a place that means something to you, an anonymous human presence that fixes the scale of the surroundings but is not related to your experience of them. The spaces that were mine, that enclosed my sense of my life, were like crevices and burrows in real space – tunnels through the dry paspalum in the paddocks or the stacked bran bags in the feed shed.