The Watcher in the Garden

by Joan Phipson

  JOAN PHIPSON was born in Sydney in 1912. She was an only child and spent much of her younger years travelling between Australia, England and India with her parents. She attended Frensham School in Mittagong in New South Wales and returned later to work as a librarian and set up a publishing press, which she had purchased from Leonard Woolf in London.

  Joan was a copywriter for Radio 2GB; she worked for Reuters in London and served as a telegraphist in the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force during World War II.

  She married Colin Fitzhardinge in 1944 and they lived on a property called Thring in Central West New South Wales. There, she wrote the first of her thirty novels, Good Luck to the Rider, which was published in 1953 and won the CBCA Book of the Year. In the 1960s Joan and Colin moved to nearby Wongalong, the property that would be their home for the next forty years.

  Joan Phipson’s early books focused on Australian pastoral family life, but in the 1970s she broke new ground by tackling social and environmental issues. She won several awards for her work including a second CBCA Book of the Year, for The Family Conspiracy, and an IBBY Honour Diploma in 1982 for The Watcher in the Garden. In 1987 she was awarded the Dromkeen Medal for her contribution to Australian children’s literature, and she was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1994.

  Joan Phipson had two children, Anna and Guy. She died in 2003.

  MARGO LANAGAN is an award-winning author of novels and short stories, including Sea Hearts, which was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Award, Tender Morsels and Black Juice, which won three World Fantasy Awards between them and Red Spikes, which won the CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers in 2007. Margo lives in Sydney.

  amongamidwhile.blogspot.com.au

  ALSO BY JOAN PHIPSON

  Good Luck to the Rider

  Six and Silver

  It Happened One Summer

  The Boundary Riders

  The Family Conspiracy

  Threat to the Barkers

  Birkin

  A Lamb in the Family

  The Crew of the Merlin

  Cross Currents

  Peter and Butch

  The Haunted Night

  Bass and Billy Martin

  The Way Home

  Polly’s Tiger

  Helping Horse

  Bennelong

  The Cats

  Hide Till Daytime

  Keep Calm

  The Bird Smugglers

  No Escape

  Mr Pringle and the Prince

  A Tide Flowing

  The Grannie Season

  Dinko

  Hit and Run

  Beryl the Rainmaker

  Bianca

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Joan Phipson 1982

  Introduction copyright © Margo Lanagan 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Methuen Australia 1982

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong after the original cover art by Ron Brooks

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147011

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148056

  Author: Phipson, Joan, 1912-2003 author.

  Title: The watcher in the garden / by Joan Phipson;

  introduced by Margo Lanagan.

  Subjects: Juvenile fiction.

  Relationships—Fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Tremors across Still Water

  by Margo Lanagan

  The Watcher in the Garden

  THE Watcher in the Garden surprised me. In the 1960s I wandered past Good Luck to the Rider, The Family Conspiracy and Threat to the Barkers on the shelves of my local library; I probably read their first pages but I don’t think I ever took them home to read. I knew Joan Phipson was well-respected, her work undeniably canonical in Australian children’s literature, but I had her filed away in the jolly-hockey-sticks, horse-stories category of my memory.

  This book, first published in 1982, didn’t seem to fit the bill:

  As she stood there, the tranquillity that had lain over the garden since the sun set began subtly to change. It was as if an electric current, small at first, but gaining strength, were charging the evening calm with something less peaceful, less secure. And a small breeze, sent up from the gorge by the cooling air, began to play among the hanging leaves so that they hissed and whispered among themselves, and the surface of the pools darkened as it passed. The breeze went on its way, but the leaves continued to hiss and whisper and, if there had been anyone there to see, he would have noticed that the surface of the shadowed pool below where the girl was standing remained ruffled for some time. The current, vague though it was, silenced the ordinary little sounds of evening. It originated, or seemed to originate, inside the skull of this fifteen-year-old girl. Her head, at this knife-edge moment, was tumultuous with thoughts wild, violent and black.

  There’s not a single horse or hockey stick here, and it’s not at all jolly. But it builds from this tantalising moment into what I’ve since learnt is a typical late-Phipson exploration, considered and deep, of two young people’s mental and emotional landscapes. And no reader can be in any doubt that Watcher is a fantasy story, from this first frisson of unnatural hiss, whisper and rufflement.

  Phipson almost always set her stories in Australian landscapes, lovingly detailed. From the beginning she was interested in firmly establishing a story’s setting, and the longer she wrote, the more confident she grew in foregrounding a setting’s Australianness and its place in a historical continuum. ‘Little by little,’ she wrote, looking back in 1989, ‘I have been working towards the theme that now occupies me (I could really say “possesses me”)…It is, roughly speaking, man’s relationship with the earth he lives on and with the universe about him.’

  The garden of The Watcher in the Garden is based on The Everglades, a National-Trust-managed property in Leura, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, established in the 1930s and still open daily to the public. The place ‘seemed full of dramatic possibilities,’ wrote Phipson, ‘with its surroundings of deep blue gorges and long, rather barbaric views.’ In the novel, the garden is still being wrested out of the natural landscape, and it is never content to serve merely as a backdrop to the characters’ exciting adventures. In the very first paragraph it asserts itself: ‘For all its quietness it pulsed with life, rang out even—a strong note in the fading diurnal harmony.’

  And this life continues to pulse, and occasionally even to enter the fray, throughout the narrative. There are strictly speaking two watchers in the garden, as well as the owner, who is acutely, almost preternaturally, aware of what goes on there, but the garden itself also comes very close to sentience in this strange story. At first it only imparts a mood— hostile, then ‘healing and kind’—to the protagonist Kitty, but then its influence brings forth latent extrasensory powers in both her and Terry, the youth who
sets himself up as Kitty’s and the garden’s enemy; and then it begins to meet Terry’s hostility with a series of ‘little accidents’.

  Six years after the book’s publication, Joan Phipson wrote,

  I do not now remember why I chose the two main characters, and I think the plot tended to develop as I wrote it. I do know that it turned out rather different from what I had originally intended. So often a developing character will change the course of a plot.

  The novel’s core encounter is between a middle-class child—the bank manager’s daughter, unsociable, always-angry Kitty—and a less advantaged and educated antagonist, whose father is on a war pension and who is himself on the dole. The story is fuelled by its author’s curiosity about what their differences entail, although she doesn’t quite frame this in terms of generalisations about class. Throughout, her focus remains tightly on the individuals, their shifting relationship, their subtle power plays.

  Both these young people carry a burden of emotional turmoil—a ‘violence’ they find difficult to express appropriately, and the sense that there’s something missing in them. ‘How could she explain,’ wonders Kitty, ‘the feeling that was always there, that inside her there was and had always been a gap waiting to be filled?’ And Terry’s mother tells him outright, ‘Sometimes I think something got left out of you when you was born.’

  Their respective searches for their missing piece bring them to the garden, Kitty for solace and Terry with evil intent towards the owner, Mr Lovett. There, the two watchers creep and cross paths and conceal themselves from each other, but while Terry also keeps himself concealed from Lovett, Kitty is discovered by the old man early on, and they form a friendship that helps her begin to control her impulses and civilise herself.

  As our knowledge of Kitty and Terry and Mr Lovett increases and becomes more loaded with anxiety, the garden develops as the perfect metaphor for the civilising process. Phipson mostly describes it in terms of its introduced trees, for they show best the seasonal changes throughout the story, but they also demonstrate the principles of order and control that Kitty is having such trouble learning, and the idea of promoting desirable qualities over instincts and impulses. Always the wilderness presses in at the edge, and we are regularly reminded that it takes the concerted efforts of a team of gardeners to keep it back. But the rewards of doing so are made clear in the person of their proprietor. Perhaps the closest Phipson comes to giving an explicit moral to the story is when she has Mr Lovett tell Kitty, ‘In my garden I am safe because I am protected.’

  ‘Words have always been a strong, bright thread in the weaving of my life,’ Joan Phipson wrote in 1989. But it didn’t occur to her to write for children until she was married and had children herself. ‘I am pleased that children like my books,’ she wrote,

  but I do not write for them. I write for myself and, I think, for the child I was. I do not seem to want to write for the adult I have become. Childhood is so much more interesting, impressions are so much more vivid. Colours are brighter, smells are infinitely more intoxicating, objects, however small, are so much more mysteriously significant.

  As soon as she began publishing, Joan Phipson was a star in a constellation of Australian children’s writers that today looks unbelievably small, if it also shines incredibly brightly. Her assembled works reflect the larger movement of our country’s literature for children, progressing from conventional stories that carefully muted their Australianness to deeper and wider explorations of young people’s inner and outer landscapes. But they also show Joan’s own feelings of Englishness giving way to an acceptance of Australia as her home.

  Though these landscapes were most often full-heartedly Australian, Phipson’s work was never parochial. The achievement of personhood, the search for a home in the world and the imperatives of our position as custodians of the planet were her themes. The watchful, thoughtful, questioning and increasingly assured child and teenage characters through whom she explored them are as appealing today as they were when, in her book-lined nest at ‘Wongalong’ in the New South Wales Central Tablelands, she first brought them to life on her typescript pages.

  Chapter 1

  There was no wind at all. The evening sky was colourless, so that the town, which clung precariously to the ridges that divided deep and savage gorges, lay without character, shadowless and insignificant under the slow change into night. Facing the town and divided from the main part of it by one of the deepest of the gorges, the garden lay on the upper slope of the opposite ridge. For all its quietness it pulsed with life, rang out, even—a strong note in the fading diurnal harmony.

  To the observer hovering in a helicopter over the gorge that divided town from garden, it would have been immediately apparent that the garden was the powerful element in the chaotic landscape. The town somehow clung to its ridges humbly, the roofs of the houses half-concealed beneath the trees about them, as if on sufferance. It was the garden that dominated. But no observer, aloof from both, could have said why. The sun, retreating to the rim of the black and distant hills, sucked away the last of the daytime blue. In exchange, it sent two spears of golden light across the gorge, aimed straight at the tops of the trees in the garden, so that for perhaps ten minutes the whole garden was lit up as if it were a stage where some cosmic drama was shortly to be played.

  Then the sun withdrew for the night. The spears of light became pinkly anaemic and dissolved into the shadows that had for some time clung about the ground under the trees. The garden darkened, slowly merged with the surrounding bush and became indistinguishable from the rest of the hillside. But the twilight lingered and it was still possible to distinguish plant from plant, shrub from shrub and tree from tree. Wisteria bracts hung motionless from pillars, filling the air with scent. The last of the cherry blossoms here fell to the earth silently like snow. And the big eucalypts that encircled and protected the more tender parts of the garden stood sentinel against the clouds of night that rose up from the gorge below and would shortly engulf all. In one of these trees a magpie called, and another in a distant tree swooped through the sky to join it for the night. Nothing moved, and after the magpie there was no sound. All that remained of the day was the smell of growing plants and earth and the dampness of garden pools.

  The night had not quite taken over when one of the multitude of shadows beneath the trees detached itself, and in the still evening a twig snapped. The small movement came from the boundary of the garden, not far from where a large notice said TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED. As the shadow moved it gained substance, paled and became a solid object. It slid through the trees in a straight line towards the boundary on the far side where, too, there was a notice that said TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED. Coming out into an open patch some distance from either boundary the object resolved itself into a human figure. It was, in fact, a girl. Her pale-coloured dress showed up the straight dark hair that fell down her back. In the middle of the open patch she stopped and her head turned slowly from side to side as if she were sizing up some obscure possibility. As she stood there, the tranquillity that had lain over the garden since the sun set began subtly to change. It was as if an electric current, small at first, but gaining strength, were charging the evening calm with something less peaceful, less secure. And a small breeze, sent up from the gorge by the cooling air, began to play among the hanging leaves so that they hissed and whispered among themselves, and the surface of the pools darkened as it passed. The breeze went on its way, but the leaves continued to hiss and whisper and, if there had been anyone there to see, he would have noticed that the surface of the shadowed pool below where the girl was standing remained ruffled for some time. The current, vague though it was, silenced the ordinary little sounds of evening. It originated, or seemed to originate, inside the skull of this fifteen-year-old girl. Her head, at this knife-edge moment, was tumultuous with thoughts wild, violent and black. Her heart, demurely concealed beneath the simple summer dress, pounded her ribs with the rage that consumed her. After a
few minutes she moved on, and the trees on the far side of the clearing swallowed her up.

  Before she could have had time to reach the far limits of the garden a dog barked. It barked once and stopped, and in the ringing silence that followed, it was as if the whole garden held its breath. No sound came from where the girl had disappeared and one could guess that she had halted and was holding her breath too. Then the dog barked again and continued barking until somewhere in the more opaque darkness in a higher part of the garden a light suddenly flowed out across a lawn and a human voice shouted an order. The barking stopped at once, the light vanished and silence hung in the air once more. To the girl, still holding her breath under the trees, the shock of suddenly knowing where the house was made less impact than finding that it showed no lights at all—only the one brief flood of illumination when the back door had been opened. It was common knowledge that the house was large—two-storeyed, in fact—and occupied. There is a certain texture in the darkness made by drawn curtains that indicates life behind them. Here, where the house was, the blackness of wall and window was blank and cold.

  The small noises of the deepening night timidly began again—the croak of a frog, the whisper of the small breeze among the leaves, the creaking of the night insects. But currents of more than the night air still hung about and seemed to twine uneasily through the branches of the trees, disturb the hanging creepers and send tremors across the still water of the pools.

  The girl, so still, so taut for so long, drew a long breath and started again to move towards the edge of the garden. She slipped out beneath the TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED notice and disappeared towards the town.

  Little by little the garden sank into its normal nightly calm. The surface of the pools cleared and presented their usual glassy reflection of the night sky. What threads there had been of unease and even destruction that had shattered the normal tranquillity of the garden were being drawn from it as the girl, the trespasser, the law-breaker, moved farther and farther away. In the garden the leaves no longer whispered together. The surface of the pool was stilled and once again took on its leaden reflection of the evening sky. The danger, against which the garden had been silently arming itself, was past.