My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  I do not know what impulse it was that made me overcome my shyness, and clamber up the dirty gangway and go aboard the hulk, but the old watchman seemed very pleased at the prospect of company and offered me tea in a filth-encrusted tin pannikin. He was not at all prepossessing at close quarters, for he had only one eye and a big puckered scar down the left side of his face and his cropped grey bullet head was a mass of extraordinary little bumps and dents, and he had no teeth and kept wiping away brown spittle on the back of his hand.

  But he was a friendly, good-natured man, and he must have been starving for any sort of companionship, because he soon became quite loquacious.

  ‘Years back, son, I used t’be sailmaker in this ’ere ship,’ he told me. ‘Yeah, that I was, son. Old Sails they used t’call me. When she were caught in that westerly gale off’n King Island an’ lost ’er sticks, there I wus an’ there we all were, son, caught ’twixt a shit an’ a shiver, an’ a lee shore howlin’ at us so close you c’d damn’ near ’ear the shingle crunchin’. We wore ’er off, but it wus a friggin’ close shave we all ’ad, me boy, an’ once we’d got the old ’ooker safe inter port and we’d come ashore to the Sailors’ ’Ome over there in Williamstown I said to meself, “Well, Sails,” I sez, “it’s ’igh bloomin’ time yer swallered the anchor!” Which I did. Jest like that. Then ’Oward Smiths bought the old ship, or wot wus left of ’er, an’ made a lighter out o’ ’er, an’ they gimme the job ’ere as watchman. Suits me, son. The work ain’t ’ard, and gen’ally speakin’ they leaves yer alone.’

  ‘Did you sail in her when she was the Inversnaid?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, spare me days, boy, ’ow would you know ’bout that?’ he said in wondering admiration. ‘No, no, she wus the ol’ Garthsnaid when I knew ’er, an’ that’s the bloomin’ name she’d ‘ad fer donkey’s years. Rigged as a barque, she wus; she’d got into some trouble years before out in the nitrate roads at Antofagasta, an’ they never put the square yards back on ’er mizzen. She wus a bloomin’ pretty ship though, even cut down like that. Rounded the Horn five times in ’er, I did. I wus in pretty near all the ships o’ the Garth Line – bein’ a sailmaker, like, it wus best t’ stay with one crowd, yer know … oh, all of ’em, yeah, the Garthpool, Garthwray, Garth Castle, Garthglen … nitrates from Chile mostly, or timber or wheat, an’ sometimes guano from Peru, but this one was the sweetest of ’em all. She wus the littlest ship in the fleet, too; she was older than all the others … she’s iron, see, an’ they wus all steel, big thick boogers, four-mast barques most of ’em, jest built as carriers, like … no lines at all …’

  After this I used to look to see where the Garthsnaid was tied up on Sunday afternoons, and through the old watchman, whose name I never got to know, I heard a lot of stories about old sailingship days, and quite a bit of the history of the other coal-hulks that worked with the tugs up and down the river and across to Williamstown. They were grimy, rusted, derelict things, black with filth and coal-dust, but there were romantic stories about almost all of them. One of them, a wooden lighter called the Success, had actually been a convict ship that had sailed out to the colonies even before my ancestor, that earlier Jack Meredith, had been hanged for barratry. Another had trimmed her stunsails against the Cutty Sark in the tea races from Foochow: and there was a sad, hog-backed wreck almost rotting away in a backwater near Williamstown that Joseph Conrad had once been first mate of.

  It was while I was walking back from the coal wharves one Sunday evening – I remember that there was a big mob of gamblers playing two-up on the vacant area outside Sharpe’s timber yard, with their ‘cockatoos’ posted all around to keep watch for the police – that the enlightenment came to me. It hit me so suddenly that I had to stop to catch my breath, and one of the ‘cockatoos’, a young, rat-assed tough with a cloth cap pulled down over his eyes, must have thought my sudden halt was suspicious – perhaps he felt I was loitering around as a pimp for the police – because he slouched across and jerked his thumb for me to get moving.

  I nodded and went dazedly along the wharf. By the time I had reached Little Dock I had walked out of my wilderness. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Going home in the corner of a second-class compartment on the Brighton Beach train I was stupefied by dreams and was over-carried three stations beyond my suburb.

  In the bedroom that night I began to write it down. I called it ‘The Glory That Was …’ and because of a shy shame that overcame me I could not bring myself to put my own name to it. I signed it ‘by Stunsail’, and gave my real name on the covering letter and sent it off to the magazine editor of the Morning Post.

  Two months later the newspaper printed the article in its Sunday magazine section – they had assigned a staff photographer to get photographs of the coal-hulks I had written about – and a few days after this they sent me a cheque for five guineas with a letter saying they would be interested in reading more of my contributions.

  I was torn between a lofty exultation and a blushing shame, and I cashed the cheque secretly and told nobody, and I was choked with relief that whatever was being done was being done by ‘Stunsail’ and not by David Meredith. I kept the money in my pocket for a week or so, wondering what to do with it. The magnitude of the sum was overpowering. I would have to work forty-eight hours a week for seven weeks at Klebendorf and Hardt to earn as much! Or – and this was even more startling – the money in my pocket was precisely the amount I would be permitted to keep from my earnings for a whole year.

  Eventually I spent it all at a sale of second-hand library books in Coles’s Book Arcade. I bought the four volumes of Basil Lubbock’s histories of the old sailing-ships, The Colonial Clippers, The China Clippers, The Blackwall Frigates, and The Western Ocean Packets, and a rather battered three-volume set called Wonders of the Past. This was concerned with ancient history and archaeology, and I didn’t quite know why I had bought it, except that it had wonderful colour-plates on the finds in King Tutankhamen’s tomb, and I was surprised that none of the eager, grasping bargain-hunters at this book sale seemed to want it.

  Perhaps I bought it because, like the coal-hulk Garthsnaid, it was an unsuspected cog in the ratchet of my destiny. But this, even now, takes us on to impossibly difficult ground, and certainly there was nothing of that sort of thinking in my mind then. All I knew was that the readings in my bedroom, the exercise-book of poems stuffed inside the ticking of my mattress, my stubborn rejection of Jack’s alarming indoctrinations, had all come together at last into the semblance of a path that would lead somewhere. I was fifteen. And I was a writer. Lonely and secretive, and desperately anonymous, but still a writer.

  6

  The National Gallery School, for all its high-sounding name, was really only an enormously long tin shed, heavily raftered under a roof of corrugated iron, which was a kind of shabby annexe to both the Art Gallery and the National Museum. Three-quarters of its length was used as the Antique School, a bizarre, tunnel-like recession of intimidating chiaroscuro, filled with innumerable chalk-white plaster casts of antique Greek, Graeco-Roman and Roman nude statuary posed under bare electric bulbs against the blackness of the shadows. It was an unnerving, jolting sort of place, because nothing really agreed with anything else, and one had no sense of harmony or of proportion or of perspective; one’s eyes would move uneasily from dwarfed foreground figures to gigantic shapes in the far distance, because some things were half-lifesize and others were lifesize and some were twice-lifesize: some stood at floor-level, others posed on high pedestals, many were suspended from the roof girders. To this disconcerting confusion were added other hazards to visual balance – the strange palisades of the assembled easels, the scatter everywhere of dismembered fragments, severed heads, amputated hands or feet (usually still shod with sandals), and limbless torsos, the blank white staring of sightless eyeballs, the startling contrast of the girl students in their floral smocks moving with indifference beneath the uncoloured fig-leaves of naked gods.r />
  Here the first-year students worked with charcoal on paper, choosing their own subjects, moving from acanthus-leaf to sandalled foot, to bust, to stele, to standing figure, working always closer to the Life Class door. Erasures were permitted, but only with stale bread kneaded into pellets. The stale bread attracted mice, which infested the shadowy places behind the pedestals.

  The Life Class was up at the top end of the long shed, behind a baize-covered partition and a closed door bearing a painted sign, SENIOR STUDENTS ONLY. Here students of both sexes worked from nude living models, at first in charcoal, then with oils in sepia, and, in their final year, with a full oil palette. So that tonal values might remain constant the big classroom was windowless, and lighted by electricity even in day-time. The walls were lined with framed figure paintings, the exhibition submissions of former students who had won travelling scholarships to Europe. These works were almost always greatly disparaged by the incumbent students. Although the models usually were either very old men or very young boys, or fat and wrinkled women – for old Barnaby Stanton, the master of the class, had laid it down that ‘you are not here to make pictures for chocolate boxes or the covers of the magazines; there is more art in getting a wrinkle right, or a sagging muscle, or the bony unreadiness of an adolescent, than you’ll ever find in Theda Bara’s breasts, or any other vamp for that matter!’ – the fact remains that most of the boy students passed through that Life Class door to be confronted for the first time in their lives by the spectacle of a naked woman. This had become the formal moment of initiation: the other students around the circle of easels would wait for it, watching the novitiate while he nervously procrastinated with eyes sedulously averted from the model throne, arranging and rearranging the legs of his easel, his charcoal, his wad of bread, his sheet of Michelet paper, his drawing-pins. Then, when the moment could no longer be delayed, the newcomer would run his tongue over dry lips, take up his selected stick of charcoal, turn to face the model; and inevitably his hand would go down to adjust the crotch of his trousers. The instinctive embarrassment would produce a roar of delighted laughter from the attentive circle, in which the girl students would join as loudly as the men, for this was the nineteen-twenties, the age for youth to prove new freedoms and equalities, and these young people at their easels were, in the Melbourne of that time, the representatives of bohemia, the intellectual avantgarde of an era still waiting to be proved.

  There was only one entrance to the school. Students had to go up the steps past the equestrian statue of Joan of Arc and beneath the towering granite columns and through the main doors of the museum to check their names in the students’ book at the inquiry desk. Then they could find their own way through the long halls and rooms of the Oceania ethnological collection. This was all right if it was Day School, when the museum was open to the public, but for Night School it was a different thing, for the ethnological rooms were always empty and in darkness and I never once went through them without feeling a little scared. The door leading out of the museum lobby would close behind me with a kind of hissing whisper, and a slow soft slap, and there in front of me would be the dim checkerboard of the tiles and the queer gloom-gleam of glass cabinets, and the awful distance stretching ahead that had to be covered through a smell of musty decay and dry death, with the hollow ring of my heels striking and echoing from the marble tiles, and the terrifying shapes of things that peered out at me from the dimness, the idols and totems and fetishes from New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, shrivelled heads hanging from hanks of stringy hair and grinning skulls and fearsome masks with the eye-sockets plugged with pipeclay or ochre. It was always a relief to reach the end door and push through into the bright, bustling, bizarre nightmare of the Antique School.

  I had no particular friendship with any of my classmates. I was far too shy to speak to any of the girls – if one of them came to draw the cast of the Donatello head that I was working on I would move my own easel somewhere else – and none of the men students seemed specially interested in me. Now I can see why. In the first place, there was my lack of real competence: the standard of my work was not high enough to provide an element of competition. And since I was not rivalling them for the attention of the girls I offered nothing that was challenging. To them, I think I must have been very dull. But there was something even deeper than this. All the other boys and youths and young men who were there were passionately interested in Art, and they, unlike the men in the big studio at Klebendorf and Hardt, spelt it with a capital A. Whether their passion was genuine or whether it was no more than an expression of the hot, intermittent fevers of the young I do not know; not one of my classmates, so far as I know, ever made any sort of name for himself. But then they would dress extravagantly, as if initiation into the esoteric world of Art carried with it the right to wear a uniform; they would be forever flinging their prejudices and beliefs and opinions at one another: they would plagiarize their own gods, and defile the gods of anyone else. They lived according to some constantly changing creed of noisy controversy.

  I never got myself involved in their interminable arguments. I never took out an art book from the gallery library. I never collected reproduction prints of the works of Renoir or Degas or Picasso or Matisse or Turner, or whoever else happened to be the fashionable deity of the moment. My shyness only partly explains my isolation from all the other students; instinctively I must have known that I was just as ill-fitted for Art with a capital A as I was for the quieter and more dignified craft that was practised in the big studio of Klebendorf and Hardt. Isolation turned into withdrawal, and withdrawal finally became total rejection. But that was not until much later.

  It was really quite surprising, now I come to think of it, that I should have known Sam Burlington at all.3 I cannot even remember how or when I first met him, although it must have been through Young Joe, because he, like Burlington, was in Life Class, and in the normal course of events Life Class men would seldom have anything much to do with the plodding riffraff of Antique.

  What makes it even more difficult to understand is that Burlington was the outstanding personality of the school at this particular time. He was a very talented student, and, although he was only about eighteen then, he was generally considered a certainty to win the coveted Travelling Scholarship. He was the authoritative rebel on ‘modernism’, his family was wealthy, he was unique among the young students in having his own apartment and studio in Spring Street, he had publicly led an abortive students’ demonstration outside the Customs House after some Government bureaucrat had banned the importation of a print of Modigliani’s ‘Red Nude’ (only strong pressure by the more conservative students had prevented him from carrying a placard defending ‘The Public’s Right to the Pubic!’), and it had been he who, at the time of the annual inspection of the school by the elderly, stodgy trustees of the Gallery, had dressed all the lifesize casts in ridiculous old clothes. The ‘Venus de Milo’ wore a sleazy evening gown and a fur tippet and a jewelled toque, the ‘Diana of the Chase’ looked anything but virginal in a bead-fringed cocktail dress and a cloche hat. The ‘Apollo Belvedere’ wore frock coat and bowler hat and although he lacked trousers he wore coloured jazz-garters, carried an umbrella, and affected a posy of artificial violets over his fig-leaf. ‘Antinous’ would have shocked the Emperor Hadrian, since he wore a Richmond football jersey and shin-pads; the writhing figures of the ‘Laocoön’ all wore jockstraps; and a bust of Caesar stared grimly out from beneath a swagman’s wide hat hung with corks on strings.

  This was the sort of thing that Sam Burlington thrived on, and he always had the effrontery to get away with it. Later, when I was in Life Class with him, he was always up to something. One night when the model failed to arrive Sam stripped off all his clothes and mounted the throne. Another time when the same thing happened he raced down to one of the brothels which were functioning then in Little Lon and hired a notorious prostitute known as Condy’s Clara. He paid the fee out of his own pocket, since Clara�
�s rate was considerably more than the fifteen shillings which was the standard modelling fee.

  Although Sam Burlington was always friendly enough to me even when I was in Antique Class – perhaps because of my aloofness from the controversies which he considered juvenile and ludicrous – my association with him didn’t really develop until just after my sixteenth birthday. In the meantime I had gone on secretly writing my newspaper articles, still using the pen-name of Stunsail. The articles were always about the old sailing-ship days, and this, of course, helped me to side-step other issues which I was not prepared to face. Very often there would be facts I would have to check in the yellowing newspaper files of the previous century, so there would be many nights when, instead of turning through the doors of the ethnological collection, I would walk straight on to the Newspaper Room or up the broad marble stairs to the reading-room of the Public Library.

  Both these places stayed open at night for the same period that the painting school was open, so that unless Young Joe Denton noticed my absences and told his father there was nobody to know of my duplicity. I began more and more to neglect the school. I had now decided that I wanted to write a book about the wool clippers that had once traded to Melbourne, and this meant going through the shipping intelligence columns of every newspaper published between 1860 and 1890, and I was frantically busy filling note-books with the accounts of these clipper-ship voyages and getting material for the Stunsail articles.

  It seems almost unbelievable now, but the Morning Post took every piece I submitted. With the money I received I either bought books or I sent remittances to a nautical photographic agency in London to buy prints of old photographs of the ships I intended to write about. (I was lucky to get a picture of the Garthsnaid in her heyday as the Inversnaid, hove-to off the Downs under topsails: the old watchman had been right – she really had been a beautiful little ship.)