Mug Shots

by Barry Oakley

  Around this time, the Department of Adult Education at the University of Adelaide organised a Young Writers’ Workshop, with the poet R.A. Simpson, the novelist Peter Mathers, and me. It was held in an old mansion in the fishing port of Goolwa, close to where the Murray runs into the sea.

  In one corner were the rebels, led by John Forbes, who composed his poetry, and his truculent questions, enveloped in a fine mist of dope, and regarded the tutors with amused condescension through rimless glasses. The tutors preferred alcohol, and drank every night at the Goolwa pub, and then celebrated the workshop’s end by touring McLaren Vale vineyard in Peter’s car. Inflamed by a wine tasting at the last one on our itinerary, he drove at full speed at a huge mound of grape mulch, which exploded all round us. ‘Grapeshot!’ he roared.

  This was unwise preparation for the Adelaide Writers’ Week that followed. I had a college room at the university and Peter did not, so he moved in with me. Five minutes after the light was turned out he started snoring, and continued for most of the night. The next night, around one o’clock in the morning, I woke him up with a shout. Disturbed in the middle of some complex dream, he ran round the room crouched over and mumbling, then went back to his camp stretcher and continued snoring where he’d left off.

  Since this was the day of my talk, I disturbed him again, apologised, and evicted him to the back of his station wagon. I’ve been in situations where the audience was fighting sleep while the speaker remained alert, but I had the opposite—a wide awake audience and a speaker who’d had two nights without sleep. ‘You were good on Balzac,’ the publisher Bob Sessions said to me afterwards. ‘Pity you didn’t pronounce his name correctly.’

  Later in the week came a second ordeal. Peter and I were relaxing in a restaurant when we were told that the great American novelist John Updike’s keynote address was to be broadcast live on Radio National, and four writers were needed on stage to ask questions and act as literary potted palms.

  An hour-and-a-half later we were sitting facing a couple of thousand people in Festival Hall. I can remember nothing of Updike’s eloquent address, but every detail of what happened before and after. Updike, understandably nervous, asked me where the men’s room was, and I like to think my directions were lucid and pointed, even witty. Later, when he’d finished, the chairman turned to the uncomfortable quartet: ‘And now, questions.’ First, writer A. ‘No. No questions.’ Writer B. ‘None.’ Writer C? ‘No, nothing to ask.’ I didn’t have any either, but this collective incapacity to question was being broadcast all over the country. So I manufactured one, asking him whether he thought magic realism (it was new then) would be the fictional way to go. Updike seized on it with relief, and Australia’s honour was saved.

  Three o’clock in the morning

  Peter Mathers himself was a magic realist before the phrase was invented. His novel Trap, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1967, was one of the first to move an Aboriginal character (Jack Trap) in from the fringes of Australian fiction. His second, The Wort Papers, is a wildly inventive account of two generations of the Wort family, with scenes of comic genius.

  When we moved to Sydney Peter was a regular visitor. He liked to drink, smoke and tell stories. Some were on the tall side, but it didn’t matter. His tales were not so much highly coloured as imbued with the fantastic—they took on an imaginative truth.

  One night, when he called in after an outback adventure, he claimed that in western Queensland he’d seen ‘an appetite of wild pigs’ crossing the road. He got out of his car, gave chase, and brought down a young one with a tackle, only to be menaced by a large sow. A bottle or two later he returned from our bathroom claiming to have seen a cockroach the size of a small dog, and wondered whether it would rear up and bark at him. Later still—Peter was a three o’clock in the morning man—there was music and dancing, and two of our sons came up to complain that plaster dust was raining down on them ‘like confetti’.

  Sometimes, when we were in Melbourne, we’d visit him. He lived in what seemed a conventional brick villa on Richmond Hill, under a huge Pelaco sign. Once the door was opened, the contrast was total. Visitors had to twist and turn down a dark hallway whose walls were covered in paintings to reach the living room, where towers of books rose from every flat surface.

  His kitchen was a vitreous museum of preserves, bottled from his vegetable garden, which was as densely packed as the house. One night—at three o’clock in the morning—he led us out to it. With the ice palaces of the city shining in the distance, he dug up a copy of The Wort Papers and extolled its virtues as compost. It had been remaindered, and he’d bought up a bulk lot and buried them.

  In the 1980s Peter wrote plays, and in the nineties his vagabond imagination turned to sculpture, and he created a series of demonic figures from bread and plaster. Some had to be redone before being exhibited because weevils had got into them. These edible artifacts sold well, and one of them stares at me as I write. And in it I can see the wildness of Peter, who went sixteen rounds with pancreatic cancer in 2004, until finally he couldn’t get up again.

  Sooty boiler

  In the early seventies, Melbourne (at least to Melburnians) was considered Australia’s cultural capital, and though we felt an intrinsic part of it, we decided that was precisely the time to leave; and in February 1976, after an enormous farewell party, we did, and headed for London.

  Our good friend Clare Forbes, at the time married to Cameron Forbes, the Age London correspondent, had been hunting for weeks for a house where the rent was modest but the space large enough to accommodate five children (one would briefly stay behind). The task seemed impossible. Then she hit upon the idea of making me a professor. ‘Professor Oakley? By all means, madam. I’m sure we can find something.’ They found a big house in profoundly unfashionable Peckham, opposite Peckham Rye, where William Blake claimed to have had a vision of angels.

  We arrived at Heathrow at eight o’clock in the morning, twenty-eight hours out from Melbourne, where, our house sold, furniture farmed out to friends (piano and roll-top desk never to be seen again) we’d slept the last night in bare rooms on mattresses, in transit already. As we approached Heathrow customs, one of our sons put on his white mummy mask and peered up at an unamused official through his one unbandaged eye.

  Peckham Rye has a peculiarly English grottiness—rows of blackened tenements curving away into nineteenth-century mists. Our place is a genteel island, with central heating and Liberty wallpaper. When we turn the heating on, there is a pungent smell of gas. I ring the company, a man comes, lies prone, then makes an announcement. ‘You’ve got a bad case of sooty boiler. I’m declaring this a Dangerous Appliance.’

  Three days after our arrival it snowed. First a random sawdust, thickening to torn Kleenex. It snowed on the cars and the common, on the three-wheeled milk van, the bingo club, the broken glass along the top of the primary school wall. Our kids threw it, kneaded it into shapes and brought it inside to show us. It was like freezing bakers’ dough, and made the bones of my fingers ache. I had the chill Emily Bronte feel of England in my hand.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Tate, headmaster of Peckham Rye primary, ‘is there something wrong with your boy?’ He asks me this in a stuffy overheated corridor, where I sit squeezed into a tiny desk outside Kieran’s classroom. I explain that he is new to the country and to the school (his first), is having trouble adjusting, and won’t let me out of his sight.

  We’re all having trouble adjusting—to numbing cold, funny little packets of tea, butter, biscuits and soups, strange meat cuts at the butcher’s (neck of cow), vests instead of singlets, plimsolls instead of sandshoes, iced lollies instead of icy poles, American whisks instead of straw brooms, and rats under the stairs.

  One morning, Carmel runs screaming from the downstairs lavatory. There’s a rat swimming in the bowl. Eugene, who’s ten and good with animals, extracts it expertly with fire tongs. I take it over to the common in a plastic bag, release it, and as it attempts a
sluggish escape, stone it to death. The nearby bus queue watch astonished. The borough of Southwark has a ratcatcher, who introduces himself at the door. He smells powerfully of alcohol. Will he just breathe into their nests? He is friendly, calls me squire, and sprinkles blue powder at ­strategic points.

  When summer comes there’s a heatwave, with the temperatures reaching an unprecedented ninety-five degrees. On my way into town to meet the writer and academic Ian Turner, the bus overheats and we break down. As we wait for a relief bus, an Alf Garnett voice yells from down the back: ‘We’re stuck here while those buggers in Westminster sit on their arses and do nothing about it.’ There are cars stranded in the streets, and people lying stripped to the waist in parks, exposing pale English flesh. London suffers a collective heatstroke.

  Short theatrical interval

  Some time later I see Ian again, for lunch at the BBC cafe. He’s with the actor John Bluthal, who’s in what he calls his meet-the-manager suit, a brown pinstripe. Bluthal seems to know everyone. ‘See that guy over there? James Joyce’s nephew. Hi Val!’ he shouts. ‘That was Val Doonican.’ He tells us of the meanness of the great Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer when he was behind him in the queue. ‘The rice puddink is 35p? Forget it.’

  Bluthal wants to know about the Pram Factory. ‘These people,’ he says, after I describe it to him, ‘have got the wrong idea. Theatre is all about top billing and private dressing rooms. To hell with numb bums and bad coffee.’ He has stories about the early days of Australian radio, when there were often no rehearsals—you were just given the script and did it live, being careful not to read out the stage directions. ‘As I did once,’ he says, then roars into an imaginary mike: ‘I’ll kill you phonerings!’

  Bluthal invites me to a rehearsal of a play he’s in at the Haymarket, so I can learn how things are done here. I sit in the cavernous, empty theatre and watch Trevor Howard wander the stage as if lost, fluffing lines and missing cues. He’s drunk. When they pause for a break, the director comes down to me and asks if I’d mind leaving.

  ‘You really shouldn’t be here,’ he says.

  ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ I manage, making for the exit.

  Three plays are written while in London: The Ship’s Whistle, about the preposterous literary personage Richard Orion Horne, friend of Charles Dickens, who migrated to Australia (failed at the Pram Factory, successful in Adelaide); Buck Privates (overseas success if you count New Zealand); and Scanlan, a monologue that Max Gillies turned into a hit. But in the ­meantime, a three-year literary grant wasn’t enough to support a large family renting a large house. We were dependent on interest from the invested proceeds of our Richmond house sale.

  Frozen family found

  When winter comes round again (we’d only just seen it go) the interest cheques arrive irregularly, and as Christmas approaches none arrive at all. Nervous days are spent waiting for the postman. Each time the front door’s sphincter rattles we rush to the hallway: Christmas cards and bills, TV Rental threatening removal if payment not forthcoming, the gas company demanding money forthwith.

  A box-less, gas-less Christmas! The central heating failing, our breaths condensing, real frost on the tree, our movements slowing until in the new year we’re found, kids glazed in wrestling positions on the carpet, mother wedded to the stove, father’s fingers fixed around a biro writing a last message. Time to cross Peckham Common and face the bank manager.

  An Australian, asking for an overdraft? Again he peers at me. Things are worse than he thought. It’s the socialists! Spend, spend, spend! And it’s going to get worse before it gets better! You’ll see dole queues the length of Rye Lane!

  Yes, yes, yes. Take the money and run—to the shops! All Southwark seems to be Christmas shopping in Rye Lane; the South Londoners, cloth-capped, pouched-and-pink faced, shrewd cockle eyes behind National Health glasses—unchanging, untrendy, the service people who clip the tickets, a world of bingo and Wimpy bars, almost as far from Kensington as Soweto is from Johannesburg.

  We take a groaning bus to Hamley’s, the greatest toyshop in the world—five floors packed with people and toys. Then we stand in the bus queue with games, plane-building kits, a glowing yellow Frankenstein’s monster and a whoopee cushion, while little old ladies with hatpin tongues wait behind us, ready to race past. Here comes the Number 12, and here they come from behind. We form a phalanx and clamber aboard. A ­termagant is forced back and yells abuse, then with a volley of afflatuses (a son is playing the cushion like an accordion) we lurch forward.

  Just like home

  In the new year our remittances arrive, three at once, so we buy a second-hand Volvo station wagon. The travel urge stirs again in my wife—now that we’re settled—and we go on expeditions. She does the planning and the driving. I do the navigating and worrying.

  We do Cornwall, the Cotswolds, Scotland, Carcassonne (a remodelled nineteenth-century Disneyland, where the pensione sheets hadn’t been washed. I complain, but what’s the French for pubic hair?). We couldn’t get accommodation in the beautiful village of Domme in the Périgord as we’d planned and at nightfall had no choice but Milhac, perhaps the world’s dullest hamlet, at the very bottom of La France Profonde, where the locals, who spoke the language so slowly even we could understand them, stared at us mystified: why would anyone holiday here?

  In the depths of La France Profonde.

  Memorably, we did Ireland. Five kids wanted to come, so in the station wagon we had to go across and up. Us in the front, four smaller kids in the back, the biggest positioned laterally behind them, cases in the rear and on top in two storeys.

  The Volvo was then pointed toward the ferry port of Fishguard, but it behaved like an overloaded camel, and we lost time. When we crossed into Wales, it started raining, and the cases had to be covered with plastic sheeting which, in the wind, turned into a spinnaker. Whey-faced villagers laughed and pointed as we tacked in and out of the breeze, and we reached the port just as whistles were sounding and the loading bay about to close. After a rough ride over the Irish Sea, with our kids placed along the side to accommodate their vomiting, we arrived at Rosslare. The sun hadn’t set, even at half past nine in the evening, and as we headed south-west down deep green lanes it flashed out at every turn. Little did we know that it was saying goodbye to us for a week.

  A soft, misty, intangible rain began and the next morning, after we’d overnighted at Clonmel (‘known the world over for its bacon’) it had set in. The Rock of Cashel materialised out of it, as if it were floating on its hill. The ancient seat of the kings of Munster, with a lonely tower and high ruined roofs, it was burned by Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare. When upbraided by Henry VII of England, he excused himself by saying, ‘I thought the Archbishop was in it.’

  Ireland seemed like the end of the world to the Romans, but I felt completely at home. The places we drove through were like Australia’s provincial towns, except for the inhabitants. The people in the rain-soaked streets spoke in accents so musical it sounded like recitative. And in the pubs it turned into bel canto.

  We spent a week in a village called Myross Squinch, welcomed by Margaret, a crimson-cheeked landlady, in yellow beanie and gumboots. Our cottage was modest, but not when compared to the tiny stone one nearby where, Margaret told us, she had grown up with fifteen brothers and sisters.

  She also said that the English family who had rented the house before us had gone home early. One Sunday they’d seen a group of men hurling balls along a side road. It was a local game, a combination of boules and bowls, but the English thought they were practising bomb-tossing and left.

  At night the inhabitants emerged from hibernation and gathered at the local pub. It was presided over by an enormous ancient who, though it was only nominally summer, scorned a shirt or a singlet. We were welcomed, Guinnessed, and invited to sing our national anthem. Hoping to be let off, I said we didn’t have one. The tent of flesh replied that we did indeed, and if we wouldn’t sing it, he would. An accor
dion whined from a dim corner, and ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was rendered to applause.

  Our cottage had an unusual feature. Every time our bedroom door was opened or closed, a fine shower of paint specks fell like dandruff from the ceiling and our children soon looked like lamingtons.

  At the week’s end, we drove up to Dublin in the rain. In the 1970s, Dublin was definitely not swinging. We had a terrible meal of grey fish and green chips, inspected the Book of Kells, and made the mandatory pilgrimage to James Joyce’s martello tower in Sandycove. We breasted the parapet and felt the wind coming off the sea. We were standing on the spot where, on 16 June 1904, his novel Ulysses begins. How did Joyce manage to turn this bleak and uninspiring prospect into something as reverberant as anything in Homer’s Odyssey?

  Carmel and Josephine go Irish in the wilds of Connemara.

  Later we retreated to a couple of spartan rooms in Donnybrook, a suburb that could have been transplanted from Melbourne. I took out the tourist map, and as I said the rippling place names to myself—Knockaboy, Kilcormac, Cloonbannin—I realised that ‘Ireland’ is a fiction, a lyrical and lilting lie. The Irish have bemisted their sombre land with a gossamer web of language. Ireland should be heard and not seen—it’s all talk, all wayward and wonderful words.

  Large rubber clothes peg

  By June 1977, with my grant running out and a wife and six children to support, it was time to go home—not to Melbourne, where we had many friends, but to Sydney, where we had few. Why? asked some of the former, puzzled as to why we could abandon depth and intensity for the sybaritic and superficial. To quote Fats Waller when someone asked him what was so good about jazz—‘If you gotta ask, you’ll never know.’