This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  It was at Frank Radcliffe’s feet I first felt a longing to write. He saw in Mary a mind that responded to good prose and he gave her books at Christmas and on her birthday. She built up a little library of the great English poets, the novels of George Eliot, Gogol and Dickens.

  Frank Radcliffe left the district. Years later, deserted, alone, he was pushed into a flat, low vehicle built to hold his chair, by a man he paid for the service. He set off for Melbourne, 130 miles away, seeking his last remaining friends, holding his horse’s reins in hands that could not manipulate them. He was found days later on a lonely back road where his horse had taken him. The horse was feeding on the grass while he was slouched forward in his chair slowly dying.

  He was put in a Melbourne hospital where Father, having been notified of his plight, sat beside him in silence, watching him smile his understanding and regard before death took him. He was a great and good man.

  When he left our district Mary passed on her dreams to me. As a little boy I often stood beside her at our gate looking up at the moon that for some reason always inspired us with longings to express ourselves in poetry or to sing soft little songs of homage to beauty. We talked together—lovely dreams. She knew I would write books some day and I knew too.

  Now was the time, I thought. I had a job, a circumstance I regarded as necessary for writing. My week-ends at home were spent in an atmosphere that never stagnated. My sisters were working for a living and I was sharing their experiences.

  Jane had become a nurse and was training in a country hospital, often working fifteen hours a day. She got two and six a week for the first year, five shillings for the second and now in her third year she was earning seven and six a week. Though dedicated to her work she was realising that it did not include her in its dedication. She was the strong and reliable one that we looked to to pull us back from death when sickness struck us.

  Alice was engaged to a dairy farmer and began looking with interest at cows. She had a good job in a store and was the only one of us who felt secure. People were always inviting her to their homes. All people were interesting to her.

  Ann, the youngest of the family, strode from job to job convinced that lack of education was the family’s trouble. She read avidly and talked as much as I did. She was like Father in appearance, slender, with a face dominated by a commanding nose.

  Our resolute mother moved amongst us fighting a rearguard battle against our destruction of her older values. She watched us whip photographs of her relatives and friends from the walls and replace them with prints, disturbed at the thought of Uncle Will being relegated to the wash-house.

  She advanced in ideas with reluctance, pushed by the entire family, her protests lost in the loud voices of the babies she had sheltered in her arms and whose tears she had wiped away when they were hurt.

  Father had stood on the back veranda looking quietly at the photograph of himself and his shy bride that had been thrust into his hands. The back veranda led to the wash-house, but he turned and went to the bedroom they shared, where he hung it on the wall beside the picture of the galloping horses frightened by lightning. He did not protest against change but it saddened him.

  I felt I was living a full life. My notes, I thought, were not only objective in content but delved into the minds of men and women. But when I sat down to write I felt empty as a sack. There was no great comprehension within me upon which I could draw. I began to think I lacked the brains to write more than the notes I kept.

  It was with impatience and resentment I realised that what I lacked was not so much experience, though this was limited, as the ability to see my experience in relation to the struggles of mankind as a whole. My experiences were particular and confined only because I lacked the maturity of vision that would enable me to bind them to universal experience. Yet this maturity only came with a multitude of experience. One had to live before one could write.

  Novels, I thought, are communications of a writer’s experience disguised and presented as the experiences of created people. Imagination alone could never motivate or direct fictional characters without a well of deep experience upon which to draw for imagination’s need.

  I sat down to write my first short story burdened by my conclusions but heartened by the fact that at least it was written from life. It was called ‘The Victory of Snow’ and dealt with Gunner Harris and life at the Wallaby Creek hotel.

  I sent it to the Bulletin and sat down to wait for fame. It came in the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ column of the Bulletin a month later: ‘You write of a place where prosperous businessmen bring a different wife each visit,’ it said, ‘then leave out the most important thing of all—the address of this paradise.’

  4

  Each Sunday night I returned to East Melbourne. I alighted from the train at Jolimont and walked to the boarding-house which was some distance from the station. I carried a small suitcase filled with washed clothes and writing materials. It was heavy and I found it difficult to manage.

  After experimenting with different ways of carrying the suitcase—a rope through the handle and hooked over the top of a crutch; knapsack fashion tied to my back; held with my hand on the crutch grip—I found the simplest and least tiring method was to hold the handle in my mouth, the weight of the case being taken by my lower jaw.

  The walk from the station was always in darkness and I never met many people. If I saw a person approaching, I rested the case on the ground and waited till he or she passed. It saved me startled glances and backward looks of curiosity which I was still young enough to resent.

  I felt like a retriever dog bringing home the newspaper and amused myself by imagining situations where I extended the idea to some ludicrous climax. I was tempted to continue past people with the case in my mouth, then suddenly drop it and bark like a dog or sit up in a begging position, whining. I wondered whether, in all the world, there was some understanding man who, when confronted with such an act, would join in with it and say obligingly: ‘Look, follow me home and I’ll give you a bone.’ I would have welcomed him.

  City life had introduced me to exhaustion, an almost constant companion to the cripple walking city streets, pushing through jostling people, catching trams and trains. But I came to accept it as part of living and soon learnt so to order my progress that intervals of rest could be snatched in most places—a projection on a wall upon which to lean for a space, a rail to grasp, places in which I could brace a crutch so that it took the weight from limbs.

  Stops to rest were never conscious; untroubled thought on other matters went on while the body automatically seized every opportunity for respite. Thus, my Sunday-night walks to the boarding-house were marked by motionless pauses, the gripping of fences, a leaning across rails, behaviour that to an average observer would have suggested a feeble mind.

  On Sunday nights the boarding-house was usually bright with singing and music. It was a middle-class boarding-house patronised by men and women guarded by a feeling of superiority from the troubles of the people on the streets. But it had acquired an atmosphere of its own.

  The boarders either sang or played musical instruments for their entertainment, preserving a state that must have been developed by the influence of some previous music-lover in the house who had encouraged a procession of boarders with similar interests.

  There was a lived-in, home smell about the place. The smell of frying sausages, gas, mothballs, airless, dark rooms and musty linen in hall cupboards was absent. Sounds of purposeful activity came from the lounge and the kitchen, visitors came and went. Someone was always playing the piano.

  I had never met people quite like these boarders and felt like a sparrow in an aviary of canaries. The rules of behaviour prevailing here were different from those accepted by the friends who visited our home or the local men with whom I was friendly at Wallaby Creek.

  The boarders did not discuss their work with each other. A man’s importance was in proportion to his silence about work. The sal
ary or wages they received was a guarded secret, the discovery of which would lower their prestige and place them at the mercy of those more highly paid. The suggestion cultivated was that they were all highly-paid people with positions of responsibility.

  Their attitude towards each other was marked by restraint, control, the subduing of enthusiasm, the withholding of praise. . . . Yet they all thought they were friends. It seemed to me they had to shield their lives one from the other as if each in some way menaced the others’ security. They were convinced each possessed information that, if known to the other, would enable him to rise and thus become superior. The secrets of success must never be divulged.

  They came from a common mould yet they were all different.

  Mrs Birdsworth, who ran the boarding-house, was a field in which a naturally kind and sentimental nature fought a constant battle with the keen business sense of a boarding-house proprietress. Both sides had their victories.

  She was an elderly woman who had married a slothful man. Now she had to keep him by taking in boarders while he pottered round the kitchen in pretence of work, getting in her way and irritating her. ‘Old Bert’, she called him contemptuously. He had ill-fitting false teeth that clicked when he talked, and wore thick-lens spectacles through which he peered at the racing results in the Herald.

  Mrs Birdsworth was an excellent cook and took an interest in her boarders. Their accomplishments, of which she was proud, suggested she was running an exclusive establishment, and she smiled benignly upon them as they came to dinner: ‘I have something good for you all tonight.’

  One of the boarders, Stewart Mollison, had a fine tenor voice and sang professionally at various functions in his spare time. In the boarding-house he sang for the joy of it. If you met him in the passage he sometimes burst into an aria, striking an attitude associated with grand opera. He sang a few lines before sitting down to breakfast, sang to us at night while his wife accompanied him on the piano. He was a happy, smiling man who lived with his voice like a good friend from whom he never wished to be parted.

  Mrs Mollison only played for her husband’s benefit, never to entertain, but Mamie Fulton had taken up the piano ‘seriously’ and could be persuaded to ‘render’ a piece if our pleas continued past her first refusal. She always apologised for what she was about to play, claiming lack of practice or absence of the necessary mood for the faulty playing she assured us was forthcoming.

  ‘A piece in C Sharp Minor, Opus 56, from Chopin,’ she would probably announce. I had told her it said in music what I would like to say in words, and she often played it. It was the beginning for me.

  Mamie sat next to me at the table and always gave me two smiles, one when she sat down and one when she left. She was in her twenties and was a stout girl with dark, curly hair and confused eyes. Her clothes never sat gracefully upon her but were strained and wrinkled by pressures. She always bought clothes and shoes too small for her so that when sizes were mentioned she could quote figures to prove she was not as big as she appeared to be.

  Her concern with her size dominated a personality that would otherwise have been a happy one. When she sat in the lounge she selected an armchair with high sides that would help conceal her bulk. She preferred shady corners and shrank from observation.

  Any reference to her size made her colour painfully. She dieted spasmodically and when on a diet would eat a small helping of meat and green vegetables, then sit in misery a moment before surreptitiously taking a cake from a plate, concealing it in her hand and eating it quickly.

  ‘Of course you suffer from a great handicap in seeking success, Alan,’ she said to me one night when I told her I wasn’t interested in making a lot of money.

  She didn’t like Mr Burmeister, who was born in Switzerland and played the violin. He had a grey moustache and was handsome and often commented on the beautiful figures of Australian girls. But she liked Mr Gulliver, who also played the piano seriously.

  Mr Gulliver was not interested in the figures of women.

  ‘My only love is music,’ he told us one night, exchanging a smile of understanding with Mamie.

  I did not know what job Mr Gulliver held. He was a small, dark man with a black moustache and an air of detachment. He wore highly-polished black shoes and carried a brief-case, and left the boarding-house at five minutes past eight every morning. He returned at six in the evening, had a wash and sat at the piano playing until dinner was served at six-thirty. After dinner, if the piano was not being used, he played again for a little while. If he had an appreciative audience he would play the entire evening.

  ‘There is a very difficult part here where you cross your hands,’ he said to me one night as he peered at the music of one of Rachmaninoff’s preludes on the rest before him.

  Though he played the Rachmaninoff prelude looking at his hands, he played Chopin gazing with still eyes and parted lips at the fly-specked cornice high on the wall in front of him. He looked sternly down at the keys while playing Beethoven, and compressed his lips and tossed his head and paused with his hands on his knees after he had finished. The pause completed, he would turn to us, blinking and shaking his head as if emerging from a trance.

  ‘I get completely carried away by the majesty of it,’ he explained.

  I wondered whether he really loved music or merely loved himself playing it. I imagined that the music he played bore him on golden flights where vast crowds applauded him and men shouted ‘Bravo’ and beautiful women gazed at him in adoration.

  Great music fed and encouraged a feeling of superiority in him. He was superior to those who did not feel as he did and since most people were uneducated musically he went through life crowned with self-admiration. In his efforts at educational communication he did not pass on his knowledge; he bestowed it.

  Even when Mamie played he was impelled, when she had finished, to explain to the silent ones around him that this composition marked an advance in the development of Beethoven, Bach or Chopin and that it had taken him, Mr Gulliver, three months to master it and possibly taken Mamie just as long. Mamie, responding to a rise in importance, agreed that this was so.

  But as I got to know him better I felt I did him an injustice. His affectations lived apart from his genuine love of good music. His playing fed two aspects of his character, one a childish conceit, the other an appreciation of great music to which he was now introducing me.

  I failed to respond to some of the composers he played even though I recognised the failure was mine. The works of Chopin affected me deeply, but I could not understand Bach nor give my full attention to Beethoven. The greater the composer the more he demands from the listener, and I did not yet possess what the greatest music demanded.

  I loved ballads and often got Stewart Mollison to sing them to me. He liked doing it.

  I could never hear music or listen to singing without seeing people behind it. Ballads evoked the vision of a vast number of people singing their longings, their hopes, their despairs, their defiance, and stirred me to feelings of exaltation. The words might be sentimental, the music paltry, but I respected them and defended them hotly against the contempt of Mr Gulliver, to whom grand opera supplied all he needed in song.

  I wanted more than grand opera could supply, I told him to his astonishment at such sacrilege. The music and singing of grand opera inspire me, I argued, but the characters love and suffer and die—murdered mostly—for the glory of the music that proclaims them, never for causes I could accept as real. They are not real people to me but people created as vessels for emotions demanded by the composer to ennoble his music, not to ennoble me. Tie reality to great music and great voices and great purpose, and I will respond as you do, I told him.

  He smiled his contempt at such reasoning.

  ‘Rubbish! You have much to learn. Grand opera is traditional. You would use it as a means of forcing your ideas on people. Where’s your soul?’

  I did not know where my soul was. I did not know whether I was right o
r wrong. I think I was really defending my father when I defended folk music and ballads against contempt. Not only my father, but all those simple men and women who had been uplifted and strengthened and comforted by the songs that sprang from the demand of countless hearts.

  My father loved music though, in all his life, he had never heard an orchestra nor seen an opera. Under its spell he did not become a man on a pinnacle of dreams but a man inspired to an unselfish giving of himself for the benefit of others. I had watched him listening to a concert performer singing ‘Tom Bowling’ and tears were in his eyes:

  Tom never from his word departed,

  His virtues were so rare,

  His friends were many, and true hearted,

  His Poll was kind and fair:

  And then he’d sing so blithe and jolly,

  Ah many’s the time and oft!

  But mirth is turn’d to melancholy,

  For Tom is gone aloft.

  To Father, Tom Bowling was as a man should be. When in our home some visitor sang ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ Father lifted his head like a war-horse scenting battle. The songs of the people inspired him to a longing for action, or a desire to uplift, or a resolve to give. Man could never rise without such feelings.

  I gave him a piece of needlewood once. I had picked it up on the red sand country of the outback where the stunted tree that produced it had struggled to survive against drought and burning wind and where it had developed a fibre as tough and hard as the country in which it had grown.

  He loved wood, the feel of it in his hands, all that it suggested. He carved a stock-whip handle from the piece, whittling it with a pocket knife till it was smooth and unblemished. He carved the butt in a plaited leather design and gave it to me.

  ‘It’s a good handle,’ I said to him, pleased at the feel of it in my hands.

  ‘Not yet, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘It won’t be a good whip-handle for years. When you have handled it and all your friends have handled it thousands of times and the sweat of all your hands has gone into it and it is worn smooth by people, then it will be a good whip-handle. It will mean something then; it doesn’t now.’