by Ramona Koval
There were other stories I found equally unforgettable. When I was nine, I read Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Red Shoes, about an orphan girl called Karen who wants a pair of red shoes like she has seen a princess wear. She manages to acquire a pair and not only wears them to church, already a show-offy thing to do, but—worse still—she thinks about them when she is taking communion.
Of course she has to be punished.
An old soldier with a red beard whom she passes outside the church casts a spell and that is it. She is cursed to dance uncontrollably until she meets an executioner. And she is so tired from the manic dancing that she begs him to cut off her feet, which he does, and her feet go on dancing in the red shoes around the countryside.
‘And he carved her a pair of wooden feet and some crutches,’ the story says, ‘and taught her a psalm which is always sung by sinners; she kissed the hand that guided the axe, and went away over the heath.’
She goes on to become a very pious girl who is finally allowed back to church, minus her feet. I can still see the bloody feet in the red shoes dancing and dancing over the wooded landscape.
So never want what a princess has—but if you do happen to get it, don’t think about it in church, or your feet will have to come off and you will have to kiss the hand of the man who chops them. Another paradox—the God of forgiveness and do-unto-others was so unreasonably cruel to a poor girl who was already an orphan, just because she loved her red shoes!
The stories I heard before I knew how to read were like a drug for me, but if childhood is a time of innocence, tales like these were an assault on grace.
I was introduced to the Victorian Readers later, which were used as class sets to teach reading. Here we learned to recite Banjo Paterson’s ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, ‘Bell-Birds’ by Henry Kendall and ‘My Country’ by Dorothea Mackellar.
I vividly remember ‘A Brave Australian Girl’ in the Fourth Book, the real story of sixteen-year-old Grace Bussell who grew up on a farm near Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, and rode a horse into dangerous waters to rescue passengers from the shipwrecked Georgette in 1876. She was called the ‘Grace Darling of Australia’. The English Grace Darling, told of in Wordsworth’s 1843 poem, was then introduced by the teacher. She had helped her father rescue the survivors of the 1838 shipwreck of the SS Forfarshire, off the coast where she lived:
When, as day broke, the Maid, through misty air,
Espies far off a Wreck, amid the surf,
Beating on one of those disastrous isles—
Half of a Vessel, half—no more; the rest
Had vanished, swallowed up with all that there
Had for the common safety striven in vain,
Or thither thronged for refuge. With quick glance
Daughter and Sire through optic-glass discern,
Clinging about the remnant of this Ship,
Creatures—how precious in the Maiden’s sight!
For whom, belike, the old Man grieves still more
Than for their fellow-sufferers engulfed
Where every parting agony is hushed,
And hope and fear mix not in further strife.
‘But courage, Father! let us out to sea—
A few may yet be saved.’
There seemed to me to be plenty of opportunities for brave rescues by plucky girls. The Victorian Readers were introduced to schoolchildren early in the twentieth century in order to teach us moral principles, pride in our British heritage and a terror of the bush. We were to be good and brave, helpful and studious.
The other memorable piece was ‘The Drover’s Wife’ by Henry Lawson. The story in the Fifth Reader still touches me, of the woman alone, waiting for her husband who has not been home for six months, each Sunday taking the pram and the dog and other kids for a walk through the bush in her best clothes, though no one could possibly see her. She realises there is a snake under the house and she decamps with the children to the bark kitchen where she keeps a vigil all night. After the dog kills the snake:
She lays her hand on the dog’s head, and all the fierce, angry light dies out of his yellow eyes. The younger children are quieted, and presently go to sleep. The boy stands for a moment in his shirt, watching the fire. Presently he looks up at her, sees the tears in her eyes, and, throwing his arms around her neck exclaims:
‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’.’
And she hugs him to her breast and kisses him; and they sit thus together while the sickly daylight breaks over bush.
Lawson, in fact, wrote, ‘The dirty-legged boy stands for a moment in his shirt,’ and the boy says, ‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’ blarst me if I do!’ before ‘she hugs him to her worn-out breast’. The vigilant editors of the Readers took the view that on their watch no fine Australian example of womanhood would be permitted to have worn-out breasts or to keep her son less than perfectly clean.
Even so, I have never forgotten the sickly daylight after the all-night vigil, an image of utter exhaustion. Both Lawson’s and Wordsworth’s texts, and the anonymous story of Grace Bussell are about female courage in the face of immense odds. And they contradicted my father’s story of not reaching beyond your grasp, but I can only see that now. I must have doubted the wisdom of my father even then, and sought the stories that would tell me otherwise.
CHAPTER 2
Only as old as her feet
Iofficially lost my literary innocence on the floor of the Camberwell Mobile Library in 1965, when I was ten. We had moved from our rented flat across the road from the beach in St Kilda to a small three-bedroom solid brick house in North Balwyn, a respectable suburb with many churches and no pubs. We didn’t mix with the neighbours much for the first few years, and I didn’t realise until later that many of the houses in the street were of exactly the same design as ours. Even so, my parents were terribly proud to have been able to buy our house, and there were many conversations about our mortgage that would be revisited for years to come.
I’m not sure if they still have this kind of service in North Balwyn but the bus library used to come and park down near the shops.
For immigrant families like mine, where the parents were educated only to primary level and not in English, the bus was much less daunting than the big main library near the Camberwell Town Hall. Such institutions were hard to navigate when you looked different and spoke with an accent. There were fewer books on the bus, and the atmosphere was more intimate.
So Mama took my hand and got me registered, and I had a card of which I was as proud as my parents were of our house. I was shown which books were for children and which for grown-ups. But I quickly tired of the children’s section. I discovered that, as I lay on my belly on the bus floor, with its smell of lino and rubber, deciding which books to take, I could read the spines in the adult section. There I spied Kafka and Kazantzakis, Kerouac and Koestler. There I learned to put things into alphabetical order.
I decided to sample Kafka’s The Trial because, as you might remember, it’s rather a slim volume. I took the book to the librarian who had a small desk and chair at the back of the bus, near the door.
‘Please sir,’ I said, like Oliver Twist, ‘may I have this one?’
‘But that’s for adults,’ he said. ‘You’re only in Grade Six.’
‘But please, sir, I’ve read all the interesting ones for kids. I’d really like to try this. It’s only small.’
And he let me borrow it.
I walked home gravely, the book in my clammy hand, its plastic covering getting misty.
Actually I hadn’t read all the books for kids—C. S. Lewis had passed me by, and so had Tolkien. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows was as foreign as the English countryside it depicted. Thinking back now, it’s entirely possible that they were not represented in the bus library’s collection, but it’s more likely that I had no truck with talking animals. But the attitude of the bus librarian gave me confidence, and the bus itself was small enough to make
me think I had its measure and that people in there would take me seriously. In his 1947 report, ‘Public Libraries in Australia’, Lionel McColvin said of these kinds of services, ‘Nowhere else in the English-speaking world will books have to be taken so far for so few, and nowhere else will they mean so much.’
Later I found a book that has haunted me for years—Hills End by Australian writer Ivan Southall. Many children read this book at school in the mid-sixties and it’s regarded as a turning point in Australian children’s literature. It marked the beginning of a series of novels in which Southall tackled the idea of children surviving terrible events.
The story follows seven children and their teacher who are trapped inside a cave while a fierce cyclonic storm destroys the fictional town of Hills End. They face a struggle to survive as well as having to deal with their loss. It was about survival of the spirit as much as survival of the species.
I wondered how I would fare if my parents were killed. I knew that their parents and families had been killed in the Holocaust and they were both the only survivors. Each had a complex story. My mother had survived the war by taking another identity, and had been alone from the age of fourteen, and my father had hidden in a cellar for two years. That was all I knew. They cried whenever I asked them to tell me of their experiences, and I learned that my questions were upsetting and not welcome so I stopped asking. It was better to read and to imagine. Hills End chimed with me and allowed me to imagine the details that I never really learned from them.
Once, when I was about eight, my father came home after one of the annual gatherings of survivors that commemorated the Holocaust, with a glossy magazine of photographs from Auschwitz. Without any warning, he handed it to me. The gold Hebrew lettering on the cover attracted my eye, but over the page there were horrible photographs of piles of dead naked people, and when I turned to the next page to expunge the image, it gave way to another, more terrible photograph of thin children sitting up on trays before they were to go into ovens. That’s what I remember seeing. It was shocking. I don’t want to find a digital version of the image again in order to check my memory, even for you.
My mama grabbed the magazine from my hands when she realised what it was, screaming at my father that I was too young to see such things. They had a huge argument, all in Polish, swearing at each other. I lost my appetite for dinner. We were having barley soup, and for years afterwards the smell of it made me sick. Once, during my regular rifling of my parents’ wardrobe and drawers, I found the book high on a shelf. I recognised the cover and didn’t have to open it. I was scared of that wardrobe, and avoided it for years afterwards. I developed a strange tic of making sure all wardrobe doors in any room I ever slept in were closed before I could go to sleep.
Perhaps my mother forbade books about the war after that, because it was only while visiting other people’s houses as a teenager that I saw books such as House of Dolls by Yehiel De-Nur, whose pen name was Ka-Tsetnik 135633, derived from his Auschwitz prisoner number. It was about Jewish women serving in concentration camp brothels, but I did not read it. I flicked through it and got the general idea.
I read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank as my high school years began, but remember being more interested in the crush that grew between Anne and Peter as they spent month after month together in the attic, keeping their voices low, than in the politics of the Dutch resistance to the Nazis, and Anne’s death in Bergen-Belsen. Survival stories were common in our circle, but love stories were hard to come by.
The bus library introduced me to a different world and I’m sure that’s why Mama took me there. I’ve had conversations over the years with some of the best writers on the planet, and when they speak about their introduction to reading, which nearly always determines their impulse to write, many will talk of a local library or librarian or a kind teacher as the source of their life-long love of books.
For English novelist Jeanette Winterson, whose adoptive parents were fundamentalist Christians who owned only six books, all of them about the Bible, books from the library were her path to the outside world. But everything she brought home from the library was vetted by her mother, and young Jeanette began to hide books under her bed. She was caught with a copy of Women in Love, and her mother knew enough to know that D. H. Lawrence was a satanist and a pornographer.
Her mother threw all the books out of her bedroom window and set fire to them in the backyard in front of the outside toilet.
‘I often think’, Jeanette told me, ‘that the reason why tyrants hate books, and how they do book-burning sessions regularly and book-banning, is not so much what the books contain…[but] because reading itself is an act of free will. Nothing can come between you and a book—there’s no surveillance camera, there’s no little bugging device from the CIA that can get into that space between your mind and the page—so it’s terrifying. And it does mean independence of mind and spirit; nobody knows what you’re thinking at that time.’
My mother was completely different from Mrs Winterson. She read widely in popular non-fiction—Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and The Waste Makers. She read political books and feminist books. Most of all she adored books that had been banned. She read James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was banned in Australia till 1953. I can’t imagine what she made of it, since English was a foreign language for her; I had trouble reading it in my mother tongue. She read D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned until 1965, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, unbanned in 1970 after a massive court case and an illegal Australian printing. These books were all part of her reveries on her reading couch.
By the time she bought them it was perfectly legal to do so, but I didn’t know that at the time, and I sometimes wondered if the Vice Squad was about to knock on our door. My mama didn’t keep them from me, but as I was completely innocent of anything to do with sex I had trouble working out exactly what the incendiary passages were. I remember thinking that some nude swimming in Ulysses must have been the problem, completely missing what Molly Bloom was talking about in her soliloquy. By the time Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was unbanned in 1973 I was already at university. I found it strangely arousing and searched out his Tropic of Capricorn for more of the same. Up until then Miller had been the author with the most books banned in Australia.
I once asked my mother to buy a book for me that I had heard about—how I can’t remember—because I had the impression that it was very interesting. She wrote down the title in her slow hand on an envelope and took it into the city with her so she could buy it after her doctor’s appointment.
When she got home Mama described how she passed the note over to the bookseller. ‘My daughter wants me to get this,’ she told him.
The bookseller became flustered. ‘How old is your daughter?’ he asked.
‘Twelve,’ she replied.
Nonetheless my mother bought the book and in the tram on the way home she took it out of its paper bag and opened it up. She reported to us that the man sitting opposite her seemed surprised to see a middle-aged woman reading the Kama Sutra on the number 48 to North Balwyn.
After she got used to the flowery language of the ancient Indian Sanscrit sex manual written by Vatsyayana and translated by Sir Richard Burton, my dear mother was not fooled by the confusing categories of the hare man, the bull man, and the horse man, according to the size of his lingam, and, according to the depth of her yoni, the female categories of the deer, the mare, or the female elephant. She knew what was what and realised that the chapters devoted to types of embraces and kissing, and different kinds of marks to be made by nails and teeth, were all possibly questionable as a subject for the twelve-year-old mind. When I came home from school there was a minor Spanish Inquisition to check if I had any idea of what the book was about, and a marginally heightened exposition on how embarrassed she had been, but to her credit my mother let me take the Kama Sutra into my room to try and make sense of it.
Which was not easy, especially the puzzling chapter on women who stand in doorways or who are always looking out into the street—these were among the women who were the most easily seduced. Was this manual a relic of another time and place, or were these truths universally held? How could I know? My mama wasn’t telling either. But I learned that:
A woman who hears a man playing on a reed pipe which has been dressed with the juices of the bahupadika plant, the tabernamontana coronaria, the costus speciosus or arabicus, the pinus deodora, the euphorbia antiquorum, the vajra and the kantaka plant, becomes his slave.
And:
If the bone of a camel is dipped into the juice of the plant eclipta prostata, and then burnt, and the black pigment produced from its ashes is placed in a box also made of the bone of a camel, and applied together with antimony to the eye lashes with a pencil also made of the bone of a camel, then that pigment is said to be very pure, and wholesome for the eyes, and serves as a means of subjugating others to the person who uses it.
How to get hold of camel bones and dressed reed pipes? Love was a complex and mysterious art but I was about to find another source of instruction.
My parents were always trying one way or another to get ahead and make some extra cash. They were not good at it.
One year they took another smaller mortgage and bought a large run-down boarding house. They spent their weekends off from their factory jobs cleaning the corridors and the public rooms of the place and collecting the rent. One weekend my father was agitated to find that a couple had done a flit, leaving rent several months in arrears and their room in a mess. He salvaged a three-legged occasional table and a book that I have on my shelf to this day.
