This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  ‘Go ahead, lass,’ said a huge woman, dismissing on behalf of us all this unimportant digression. ‘Yer a great speaker, God bless ya!’

  This woman was very tall. She frequently turned and smiled tolerantly on those behind her. Her powerful arms were folded across her chest. Occasionally she nodded her head to selected ones in confirmation of the speaker’s arguments.

  ‘You see, dear people,’ the preacher continued, ‘if you accept God’s word He writes your name down in the Lamb’s book of God.’

  ‘Hell, he must have a lot of pencils,’ said the drunk.

  This flippant remark expanded the big woman’s nostrils like those of a war-horse.

  ‘I’ll hit him, s’elp me God I will!’ she informed us. ‘Hey!’ She addressed the man. ‘I’m big and powerful, you know. When I hit, you’ll stay hit. I’ll slap you down, son. Shut up!’

  This aggressive speech momentarily sobered the man, who exclaimed in astonishment: ‘Well, I’ll go to buggery!’

  He gazed fixedly at the ground, adjusting himself to this sudden revelation of woman’s complexity. He fumbled for his pipe and, finding it, thrust it aggressively between his teeth.

  ‘Smoking is a curse, brothers,’ cried the preacher, pointing at the man. ‘Smoking and drink. Ah, people!’ she continued, clasping her hands in front of her, ‘you love your smoke better than you love God.’

  ‘Jesus would’ve smoked,’ announced the drunk, seeking justification for the habit.

  The preacher, stung by this sacrilege, drew herself indignantly erect. ‘My God smoke—never!’ she cried.

  ‘Good on ya, lass,’ cried the big woman.

  ‘Didn’t Jesus make wine come from the rock?’ demanded the drunk.

  ‘Do keep quiet, sir,’ pleaded the preacher.

  ‘Shut up, you!’ growled the big woman, making a threatening movement towards the man. She reached over and grabbed his tattered felt hat. She threw it to the ground where, a few minutes before, it had had the significance of a gauntlet.

  Her action gave her the greatest satisfaction. It was the successful assertion of her sense of justice. She laughed in a manner that included us and made us party to the deed. At the same time she subjected us to an aggressive survey that forestalled criticism.

  ‘You with the cigarette!’ cried the preacher, pointing at me, ‘where will you go when you die?’

  I lowered my head under the impact of many eyes.

  ‘I will save your soul,’ she promised me at the top of her voice.

  The drunk with great difficulty raised his leg and pointed his tattered boot towards the woman. ‘You couldn’t save the soul of me boot,’ he cried.

  ‘Jesus will give you the crown of life,’ screamed the preacher exultantly.

  A one-armed man, upon whose hollow, unshaven cheeks the fluff and dirt of his last sleeping place still clung, pushed forward and cried out wildly: ‘For Christ’s sake take my life and be done with it! What’s the good of it to me!’

  ‘God said . . .’ went on the preacher.

  ‘He didn’t say not to have a smoke,’ interrupted the drunk.

  ‘. . . that the rich with their silver and gold are going to burn,’ she shrieked.

  ‘Listen to me . . .’ began the man with one arm.

  ‘Go ‘way, will ya,’ growled the big woman, moving towards him as she spoke. ‘You’re only a lunatic’

  The man raised his one arm defensively and backed into the crowd.

  ‘God can make a man of you, sir,’ called the preacher as he turned away from her.

  ‘Do ya reckon!’ he replied sarcastically over his shoulder.

  A small woman with a peaked face touched my arm and said gently: ‘Give me half a cigarette.’

  I held a packet towards her. As she drew the cigarette out she muttered fervently: ‘I wish you luck. I’ll ask the good old Saviour to give you a go. My old Saviour . . . I wish you luck. I’ll pray for you.’

  She raised her eyes heavenwards and lowered them again. The one-armed man bumped her roughly as he forced his way through the group. She turned on him swiftly.

  ‘I hope everything you do hurts you, s’elp me God I do!’ she said savagely.

  ‘Why, it’s only nineteen hundred years since He was here,’ shouted the drunk in answer to a declaration from the preacher.

  ‘You know why He’s not here?’ she answered triumphantly. ‘He’s waiting for the last trumpet.’

  She began to sway hypnotically. ‘Let your sins go. Let them go,’ she cried; then, with sudden power, she raised her voice to a scream: ‘We’re all dying. Everyone here is dying.’

  This dire prophecy jerked the drunk from a temporary abstraction. He looked at the preacher with his mouth open, then he turned to me and said fearfully: ‘There’s something; there must be.’

  ‘Come to me all ye that labour,’ cried the preacher.

  ‘By God, I’m feeling queer! I can see the light,’ announced the drunk to those around him.

  ‘Grace is the favourite of God.’

  The big woman, who had moved so that she stood beside me, bent to my ear and remarked: ‘Grace Darling wrote a book, you know.’

  ‘Did she?’ I answered.

  ‘You are a writer, eh?’

  ‘I do a little.’

  Her face assumed a conspiratorial expression. She opened a window in her eyes, then they narrowed and she whispered: ‘Like to come with me tonight?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said.

  Her expression immediately changed as she suddenly closed the window and she exclaimed with an air of dismissal: ‘Forget it.’

  ‘So you are a writer,’ she went on with a change of attitude. ‘So am I. Have you ever read Tess of the Storm Country?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wrote that.’

  ‘Very good, too,’ I said.

  The preacher had finished her tirade and had left the soapbox. She looked spent. The big woman placed a hand on one of the preacher’s drooping shoulders and one on mine and said: ‘What the three of us ought to do is to worship God on our own—meet of a night, like, and do some worshipping where there ain’t nobody drunk or that.’

  She was interrupted by the drunk who touched her shoulder and whispered: ‘Like a drink? I gotta bottle.’

  ‘Got any money?’ asked the woman over her shoulder, her hands still holding us.

  ‘I got a coupla bob.’

  ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  She turned to us again and continued: ‘Just the three of us singing to God.’

  ‘Have you been saved?’ the preacher asked me.

  ‘Come on,’ demanded the drunk, becoming impatient.

  ‘I think I have been,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ said the big woman. She patted the preacher on the shoulder. ‘You did a good job, lass, God bless you.’

  She took the drunk’s arm possessively and with confident steps piloted him away into the shadows of Little Lonsdale Street.

  6

  Conversation with people who found in city streets the fireside they were denied in homes strengthened my character.

  There were times when I had looked at myself as an unfortunate person beset with problems greater than those of other men. Association with outcasts made me feel less of an outcast. I began to regard myself as a lucky man. My crutches were a minor handicap compared with their problems of existence and as they came to me night after night seeking the comfort of an involvement with their lives that I was giving, I gained in contentment and happiness.

  We understood each other. The insecurity of their lives, their poverty, bound them with bonds that were stronger than friendship. These bonds encircled me. My poverty of physique was a problem they understood since, in the final analysis, it was a problem of human relationships. They never saw it in any other way.

  My angers and indignations were not now vented against the circumstances suppressing my advancement—for I realised my good fortune—but against the circu
mstances crushing the lives of the men and women I was meeting.

  I suddenly felt I was needed. How magical and uplifting the feeling! I was given direction. I was given a sense of contribution to life and I filled my note-books with the quivering pictures revealed to me by people pouring out their hearts, resolved that some day I would tell their stories.

  ‘I said to her: “Christ, don’t leave me! Don’t take them away from me,” I said. “Look!” I said, “they’re all I got. That’s why I shovel dirt. I’ll shoot him,” I said. “I’ll shoot him rather than lose them.” . . . You see, Jean’s only eight and she comes to me and says: “Will you have another cup of tea?” Now, wasn’t that lovely! And George—I brought him up just like I was brought up on the Warspite. Every morning he cleans his teeth and brushes his hair and when he comes home from school at night he cleans his teeth and brushes his hair again. What would happen to him with this other bloke! What would happen to Jean!’

  I found the destruction of love between man and woman was commonplace when drink and poverty and unemployment and despair dominated either mind. I felt that love between a man and a woman was necessary for the full development of both, and when it was displayed to me in decay I became depressed and sometimes afraid.

  I was standing against the wall of a dance-hall when a young man followed by a girl hurried out on to the street. She stopped his flight by clutching his arm and they stood near me arguing. The girl wore a long evening-dress that emphasised her slenderness. The darkness hid all detail of her appearance and she only existed as an attenuated shadow divided by the pale bar of her arms held in front of her by her clasped hands.

  The light coming through the glass panels of a telephone-box illuminated the face of the man before her. His expression showed a savage withdrawing from the influence of her pleading.

  He thrust her violently away from him. ‘Will you leave me alone! Let up on me, won’t you? You’re at me all the time. Go home, won’t you!’

  His voice was unusually high-pitched and had a desperate note in it. She clutched him by the coat, pleading in a low, frantic voice.

  ‘You’ve told me all that before. Let go of me, won’t you! I don’t want nothin’ to do with you. Let me go.’

  He broke loose from her and strode a few steps away but she followed agitatedly and clung to him, sobbing and beseeching him not to leave her.

  ‘You’re always saying you’re sorry,’ he cried. ‘I’m sick of you.’ Then, at a quavering remark from her: ‘I’m not drunk, I tell you. Get to hell out of here! Let go, damn you!’

  He thrust her back so that she staggered a little but she threw herself at him again, crying out and weeping. He evaded her by lifting his arms out of her reach and moving sideways from her. She followed and clasped him round the waist in anguish, burying her face in his clothes.

  ‘I don’t want you to stick to me.’ He thrust at her with his hands as he spoke. ‘Go your own way; do what you like. I don’t want you.’

  She sobbed words at him.

  ‘We’ve gone all over this before,’ he cried. ‘Leave me alone. Take your hands off me, damn you. I’m sick of you. You’re at me all the time.’

  She spoke, her voice muffled in his coat.

  ‘Well, go home. I don’t want you hanging round. You don’t give a man any peace.’

  Her arm slipped round his neck. Her voice became a wail.

  He cut her short. ‘Awright! Awright! I’ll take you home. Come on. We’ll go home,’ then violently: ‘Stop hanging on to me.’

  He strode away, his arm around her, half dragging, half lifting her as she sought to face him and continue her plea.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, will you shut up! There you are, at it again. I don’t give a damn what you say. Will you shut up!’

  Watching him, I wondered at the vehemence of his rage. I knew the reasons lay beyond the foolish, futile persistence of a girl seeking to hold a love she had already lost. His anger was directed against life, his life, though of this he was quite unaware.

  He was a man like I was. Why should I not know this! I knew the reasons for my own outbursts; I knew the reasons for his. I was sure that, without comprehending it, he had been waiting for some direction, a purpose around which to fashion dreams he would translate into action. She was a purpose, a release, maybe, from aimless seeking.

  There must have been a moment when in her he felt he had discovered the answer. But she wasn’t the answer. The answer did not lie with her or with him but with all men.

  At Wallaby Creek I had learnt that violence and anger against each other were expressions of the poverty of men’s lives, that they had to have a safety-valve when life became too much for them. Man’s emotions, like steam in an engine, were the power that drove him to create, achieve, fulfil. . . . If these outlets were denied him then the valve burst and his emotions were turned in fury on those who seemed to him to have stoked the flame.

  Sometimes his pent-up feelings, his simmering resentments, were unleashed in a more terrifying fashion.

  At this period of my life the Victorian police struck for better conditions. For two nights men and women roamed the streets like wolves, expressing their greed and hate in looting and savage violence. With no one to arrest them they sallied forth to plunder—suburban men and women educated by society to regard possessions as a symbol of success, poverty the symbol of failure. Here, suddenly available to them, were the unguarded possessions of the successful.

  On the Friday night when the mob first got out of control I was standing in Bourke Street watching the employees of the big stores hurrying out from the wide entrance doors on their way home. The stores were closing after their late night and the ‘kerbside waiters’, the young men standing in long rows on the footpath’s edge waiting for their girl friends to appear, were disappearing up the street one by one as smiling girls seized their arms.

  But it was not like other Friday nights: the festival air was absent. All day rumours of some outburst had been circulating and now people were restless. They moved up and down the streets, not looking at windows but at those who passed. It was often a questioning look. Sometimes, when a rowdy group of youths approached, it showed a suppressed excitement and fear.

  The long stream of people that usually hurried towards Flinders Street station after nine o’clock on Friday nights was absent. The continuity of those on their way home was broken by groups walking in the opposite direction or by louts jostling them to cause confusion. The people reaching the city hurried towards Bourke Street, glancing around them for focal points of excitement.

  I was standing with ‘Captain’. He was an elderly man with a clipped beard and he stood stiffly erect with his arms held straight by his sides. He wore a coarse, blue serge suit, the coat of which had small lapels and a row of brass buttons down the front. It was an old-fashioned coat that he had preserved with great care over the years. Each evening it was his custom to pace up and down a few yards of pavement on the corner of Bourke and Russell Streets shouting out commands in nautical terms like a captain from the bridge of a ship. His conversations with me were always about ships and the sea, and I learned a lot from him.

  Tonight he had walked with me down Bourke Street, but when I turned to go up Swanston Street, where there was some shouting and milling, he stopped.

  ‘There is a storm brewing this night,’ he pronounced rhetorically with a dramatic wave of the arm. ‘Ay, lad, the wind is rising. I’ll make to port.’

  He raised his head and shouted to the people: ‘Throw out the anchor,’ then in a gentle tone to me: ‘Good night, lad.’

  ‘Good night, Captain,’ I said.

  He left me and I moved against a window to avoid a running group of men, one of whom grabbed a girl as he passed, swinging her round so that she staggered before coming to a stop beside me.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, a bewildered and frightened expression on her face.

  ‘Make for home,’ I told her.

  ‘That’s what I
’m trying to do,’ she said, then added angrily: ‘The animals.’

  Groups of youths and girls began dancing and singing on the roadway. The girls were swung from boy to boy. They were seized by searching hands and whirled again, their skirts rising to the level of their hips. Some were laughing in a shrill, unrestrained way.

  There was a lot of pushing and shoving on the street and I was afraid of losing my footing. I stood against a telephone-booth watching the people. Inside the booth a middle-aged woman with a sharp nose and frizzed hair was talking on the phone.

  ‘It’s stuffy in here,’ she was saying, ‘a stuffy little box . . . Yes . . . Yes. Is Robert home yet? . . . Oh, yes. . . . You seem to live a lifetime in the few days they are away, don’t you?’ She jiggled the hook of the receiver. ‘There’s such a row outside. . . . Now . . . Yes, that’s better. . . . I say, you seem to live a lifetime while they are away, don’t you? . . . Yes, yes . . . There’s some people drunk here. . . . Inconsiderate . . . Yes . . . Terrible . . . I don’t know what the world’s coming to. . . . Oh, the garden is lovely. It used to be a rubbish-tip, you know. We still dig up old tins. But Tom says we’ll get it back twofold. . . . Yes, I think so. . . . How’s the lad?. . . Oh, that’s good And your mother and father, are they well? . . . Marvellous . . . It’s wonderful to think they still retain all their senses. . . . Yes, and at their age, too. . . . Edith? . . . Oh, she’s wonderful. Her teacher is wrapped up in her. She is doing her Intermediate, you know. She did two exams this year, one with honours. . . . Oh, well, yes—she is difficult. She’s at the stage where she won’t tell me anything. . . . Yes, I know that. . . . Did she really?. . . O-o-o-h ! . . . Oh, I’ll get it out of her, make no mistake about that! . . .’

  A fight had broken out not far from the phone-box. Men were swearing. A woman’s high-pitched voice screamed abuse.

  I walked home to the boarding-house and sat for a while with Mr Gulliver.

  ‘There’s going to be trouble in the city,’ he told me. ‘Stay at home for the next few nights; we don’t want to see you get hurt. It would be so easy for you to get knocked over in those crowds.’