by Alex Miller
In 1963, when I was a student at the University of Melbourne and was reading the English Romantics and the humanist educators of the Italian Renaissance, the borstal came to my attention once again. Though it was not prescribed reading in any of my courses, it was the Irish writer Brendan Behan’s novel Borstal Boy that left the strongest impression on me during my second year at Melbourne. In Behan’s book, the borstal of my childhood fears was vividly brought to life. The Irish-Catholic connection with Behan was real for my mother, but I never heard her invoke it against her love of England, which she required us to respect. As a boy I knew that my mother’s immediate forebears, and therefore my own, lay in unmarked graves in the yard of the ruined Catholic church at Donoughmore in Kilkenny, and while neither I nor the friends of my childhood ever thought of becoming traitors to the country of our birth, when I read Behan’s book in 1963 I nevertheless saw that in an important respect he had spoken for the subject conditions of my own caste in England, as well as for those of his people in Ireland. Behan’s description of the English doctor before whom he was required to stand naked when he was first admitted to the prison was a reminder to me of those men who were placed in authority over us as children and whose contempt we endured every day. ‘He was a dark man,’ Behan wrote of this prison doctor, ‘not very old, and very hard in an English way that tries to be dignified and a member of a master race that would burn a black man alive.’
It was these memories of my childhood, ghosts of the old shame of knowing myself despised by those in authority over me, that came unbidden into my mind as I sat in the car looking down the hill at the prison buildings. It still troubled me that I had never quite rid myself of these early insecurities. They were faded, to be sure, like tattoos on the arms of old men, but they still possessed the power to unsettle me.
Over to the left of the prison buildings the open grasslands fell away from the crest of the hill into a distant haze. On the far horizon I could just make out the bold forms of Mount Moorookyle, Mount Buninyong, and maybe even as far as Mount Warrenheip, the remains of the volcanic forces that had shaped this land. The grandeur of the setting rendered the prison buildings temporary and out of place.
It was time to go. I drove on and turned in at the prison entrance. I parked in the shade of an old peppermint gum and took from the seat beside me the copy of my book that we were to discuss. I got out and walked across to what looked like the main building. There were no signs or directions. When I checked my watch I saw it was a quarter past four. I was still a few minutes early. The count of prisoners, I’d been told, was taken at ten past four. I was expected at the reception area at twenty minutes past four. My talk with the members of the book club was scheduled to begin at four-thirty. The woman who’d invited me had been precise about these times—she’d bolded them in her email.
As I walked across the deserted car park towards the principal building I was impressed by the blank face presented by the prison to the outside world. There was no bell or handle to the door, but before I could knock it was opened by a woman in her fifties, slim and fit-looking, wearing a crisp summery dress. She looked as if she got up every morning at five and went for a ten-kilometre run along the country roads. Her teeth were even and white. She offered me her hand. ‘Hi, I’m Jill.’ Her grip was cool and firm, her manner not hurried exactly, but businesslike. ‘You found us okay then?’
‘Hi, Jill. You’re pretty conspicuous out here.’
‘Isn’t it a lovely setting?’ She might have been proud of the position of her own home. She stood to one side and I stepped past her through the door. Before closing the door she took a quick look out into the car park, as if she wanted to make certain there was no one with me.
A telephone on the desk behind the counter was making a soft burring sound, like a repeated shudder. She ignored it.
I followed her along a short passage which opened into a space much like a seminar room at one of the new universities. Four tables were arranged into a hollow square, with four chairs behind each of three of the tables, and one chair in the middle of the table at the front of the room. Copies of my back titles lay spread out fanwise on the front table. My books looked vulnerable lying there, something forlorn about this collection of prison library books with their protective plastic coverings—my life’s work! I was sure the opinions of the prisoners were going to be more challenging than the opinions of my regular book-club readers and I was feeling a little anxious.
Through a single narrow strip of window high on the wall facing me across the meeting room the rugged contours of the granite hills were softened in the hazy afternoon sunlight. The land had never looked so lonely or so poignantly beautiful to me as it did through that window just then. This place, obviously, wasn’t the brutal borstal of my childhood fears, but it was still a prison. The feeling of being enclosed and contained was palpable.
A woman of around forty was sitting at the end table facing us. She was making notes in an exercise book, an open copy of my last novel lying on the table beside her. She didn’t look up when we came in but paused to consult the novel, placing her finger on a line of the open page before returning her attention to the exercise book and writing something. Her dark brown hair was cut fashionably short and caught the light as she moved. She was wearing a fresh white blouse with short sleeves, her bare arms evenly tanned. She looked like an attractive middle-class woman. She did not look like my idea of a prisoner, and I did not feel any of that shame at brandishing one’s freedom before the eyes of the captive that Henri de Monfreid speaks of so eloquently in his book La Croisière du Haschich.
Jill introduced me to the note-taking woman. She stood up and offered me her hand confidently and looked directly into my eyes. ‘I’ve prepared some questions for you, Mr Crofts.’ She was very serious and might almost have been about to interview me for a job.
I said, ‘Please call me Robert.’
She continued to hold my gaze. I was aware of being assessed, in a way that implied the expectation of something substantial from our meeting. She evidently wished to let me know she was well prepared for her encounter with the author of the book she’d just read. Her name had vanished from my mind the moment Jill uttered it and I regretted not making a conscious note of it.
More women were coming into the room behind us through the door Jill and I had entered by. Jill introduced the women to me one by one and I shook their hands—their names flitting through my mind one after the other like bats whizzing into the night sky from the mouth of a cave. They talked with each other in low voices as they found places for themselves to sit. Once settled, they looked at me with interest. There were eleven of them. Jill took the instructor’s chair at the front table, making our number thirteen in total. Every seat was taken.
Four of the women were Asian, three Chinese and the fourth Japanese. Two of the Chinese women sat close together at the table directly across from me, the older of the two frowning at me as if she didn’t know what to expect from the meeting. When I smiled at her, she looked away and shifted closer to her friend. The Japanese woman sat alone. The third Chinese woman sat immediately to my right, the sleeve of her t-shirt touching my shoulder. The Japanese woman’s features had the closed serenity of a character from Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. She might have been the author of Ise’s line, In longing my soul has ventured forth alone. She gave an impression of being disconnected from the others—an errant spirit from a time long past to which I would never gain access or understanding. Her beauty and her exemplary solitariness. What had all these normal-looking women done to end up in here?
In choosing to sit midway along the table facing the only window, I’d claimed a view of the stony hills. Gnarled and twisted yellow box trees of great age rose from the crevices between the grey humps of the granite boulders. I spotted a pair of wedge-tailed eagles riding the thermals above the nearest hill. No sound from the world outside found its way into the room with us. Mesmerised by the slowly circling pair of eagles abo
ve the grey boulders, I realised I’d become momentarily disengaged from what was going on in the room.
The chatter had stopped. It was very quiet. They were waiting.
Jill was holding herself erect, her shoulders back, both hands spread above the table in front of her—the readiness position of a woman with a tight schedule to meet. She had a typed sheet of paper and a copy of my latest book on the table between her hands. When she saw she had my attention she picked up the sheet of paper and began to read what turned out to be a long and rather elaborate introduction of me and my writing. I recognised some of it from an old publicity blurb. She didn’t refer to the women in the room as prisoners, but spoke of them as the women—just as she had avoided the word prison when I arrived and had referred to it as the facility.
I spoke about how the idea for the book had come to me, and then made some general remarks about my approach to writing. I’d been speaking for some time and had paused with the intention of further developing my remarks when the note-taking woman cleared her throat and shifted in her seat.
I looked at her. Everyone looked at her. She said, ‘I’m nearing the end of a seven-year sentence, Mr Crofts. I’ve read all your novels. And I’ve noticed the mothers in your books all have something in common.’ She was nervous, the colour risen to her cheeks. She looked sad and beautiful. I was moved by her plight.
Was she going to tell me I didn’t understand mothers? Her eyes were red with emotion and she had trouble holding my gaze. Her fingers fidgeted with the corners of the pages of her notebook. The other women were watching her, silent and expectant.
‘What sort of thing in common?’ I said.
The note-taking woman placed her hand on the book and looked down at it. ‘The narrator’s deceased mother is an important presence in this story.’ She looked up at me. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes, for sure.’ She wanted me to take her seriously.
‘You could even say,’ she went on, ‘the narrator’s dead mother is the guiding spirit of the whole story.’
‘Morally, I suppose she is.’
She frowned at the book. ‘It’s almost as if he’s writing his story to explain himself to his mother. That’s what I thought.’ She looked at the other women, either hoping for their support or offering them the chance to say something. None of them spoke. She turned to me. ‘I thought he was explaining himself to his mother as a way of explaining himself to himself. Is that right?’
I said, ‘There’s no right or wrong about it really, is there? It’s up to you. We all read our own story, don’t we?’
‘I’ve noticed this presence of absent mothers in several of your books.’ She paused, her gaze steady now on mine. ‘The presence of absent mothers.’ She left it at that for a moment. ‘It’s a theme in your work, wouldn’t you say?’
I was astonished. I’d never been aware of writing about absent mothers. A strange thing happened to me when she said this. My earliest childhood memory came into my mind. This old half-buried memory had always haunted me, a kind of background tremor I could never quite rid myself of. I’d thought of talking to a psychologist about it but never had. Unsettling feelings of guilt and shame were associated with this memory. I didn’t like thinking about it.
The note-taking woman was waiting for me. I wasn’t sure what to say.
‘So can you say something to us about the theme of the absent mother in your books?’ She glanced at Jill, as if she was checking that it was okay for her to persist with this line. Jill was watching me and didn’t say anything.
I caught the faint scream of the eagles.
The note-taking woman, I supposed, must be an absent mother herself. No critic or reader I knew of had ever mentioned absent mothers as a theme in my work. But when I thought about it, as I now did, I saw they were there sure enough. In those books lying on the table in front of Jill there were bad mothers, mothers who gave away their children, absent mothers whose moral influence guided the behaviour of characters throughout their adult years, dead mothers, and no doubt others I couldn’t think of just then. All enshrined in that pile of shabby prison library books. Secretly I loved them all. I was wishing I could remember the note-taking woman’s name. I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back at me. ‘I find what you say very interesting. I mean, I’ve never thought about absent mothers in my books. But you’re right. Now you mention it, I see there are several of them.’
She nodded and took a breath, as if she’d been holding her breath in case I denied her claim or was offended by it. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Crofts. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything about it.’
‘No! Don’t be sorry. Please. It’s true. I’m glad you did say something.’ I was impressed. ‘I’m grateful to you for pointing it out to me. It takes readers like you to tell us what we’ve really been up to.’
A small uncertain smile of satisfaction crept into her eyes and I began to see that there was a fine tortured grace in her disciplined reserve. She surely knew something I would never know. Her emotions knew it. The hidden pain I would never be called on to endure. The anguish of a mother separated from her children. I was moved by her courage in speaking up and wanted to tell her so. And I also wanted to tell her about my earliest memory. To confess it to her. She’d made a vital connection for me, and I wanted to share my thoughts about it with her. What might she see in this memory that I hadn’t seen? She was the perfect reader for my absent mothers. ‘I’m really grateful. I hope you believe me.’
She gave me a lovely warm smile and looked down at the table, colour coming into her cheeks again.
With the flat of her left hand she covered the book lying open in front of her on the table—she might have been going to swear an oath on it. ‘It’s in at least four of them.’ Her voice was quiet, controlled, her tone confiding, speaking to me now of something intimate to both our lives, something that could cause pain and distress but also wonderment, something hidden and durable beneath the flickering surface of our daily living. ‘If you include the influence of the dead grandmother in your book about your Queensland friends, that would make it five, wouldn’t it?’
‘Probably. I believe you. You’ve obviously thought a lot more about it than I have. I’d like to tell you something that might help explain it. I’m reminded by what you say of my earliest childhood memory. You’ve seen a connection between my writing and this memory that I’ve never been aware of. I’ve never spoken about this memory to anyone, because when I think of it I feel ashamed for my father and what he was forced to do. When I was eighteen months old I was taken by him to a home for children and left there for a week while my mother went into hospital and gave birth to my younger sister.’
I waited. But she said nothing. She was watching me closely, anxious with anticipation of what I was about to reveal—the secret emotions of an abandoned child the very thing she most feared and over which she must have agonised every night of her seven years of imprisoned life, her children growing up without her.
‘I’ve only got a broken memory of that event. Nothing’s really clear to me. It’s just three fragments. They’ve stayed with me. When you mentioned absent mothers in my books, this memory came vividly into my mind at once. It’s something that must have happened to lots of children in those days, I suppose. While that week lasted, at eighteen months of age I must have been convinced I’d lost my mother forever.’
She put her hand up to her face and wiped at her eyes. When she spoke, it was in little more than a whisper. I had to lean towards her to catch her words. ‘And you still believe your mother betrayed you?’
I realised what I’d done. ‘God, no! No! Definitely not.’ But my denial was too late. ‘I’ve never thought of it like that,’ I said. ‘I loved my mother. I still love her. I thought it must have been my own fault, not my mother’s.’
Neither of us said anything. I hadn’t realised what I was saying. We sat looking into each other’s eyes. We might have been alone in that quiet room. How many children had she
been forced to abandon when she came to the prison? What had happened to them? Was there a father at home with them? Or had they gone to foster homes? Were they old enough to have some understanding that it had not been their mother’s wish to desert them? Or did they believe, as she dreaded they would, that they had been abandoned and betrayed by her? Or even worse, in its way, did they think—as I’d thought—that they must have done something to deserve their abandonment? Surely I’d just confirmed her worst fear. Convinced her that her children would always feel abandoned and betrayed, for the rest of their lives, guilty for their own part in it, their memory of the event held deep in a secret place of shame.
What crime could it have been, I wondered, that had landed this woman here for seven years? I couldn’t imagine her committing the sort of crime that would earn her seven years in prison. I thought of my own children and their happy childhoods, grown now to adulthood, the pair of them, without wounds from their pasts to deal with. I realised then that it wasn’t seven years this woman was serving. She was serving a life sentence. She was never going to recover those seven lost years. The loss of those precious years was going to stay with her and with her children till the end of their days, and she knew it, and I’d confirmed her fear of this very consequence. I’d been thoughtlessly honest with her. I had to say something. ‘I greatly admire your courage,’ I said, and felt awkward saying it, conscious that my words were useless to her. I wished I could have addressed her by her name.