Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  And I had many letters from soldiers overseas, two or three of whom, enchanted by distance, expanded working acquaintanceships at the newspaper into emotional friendships. Very well did I know that this is an occupational hazard with lonely soldiers, especially prisoners-of-war, but I wished my husband would show a livelier interest.

  ‘Can’t you even be a little bit jealous?’ I complained.

  ‘No.’

  I suppose I loved that man. There was an inexplicable affinity between us that never wavered during his lifetime and indeed is unchanged even now. When I am asked why I have not remarried, my impulse is to riposte, ‘Why do you think I love my husband less because he lives in another country?’ I don’t say that, of course. Sometimes when I experience a sudden certainty, an awareness that is brief, so brief, a dragonfly flight, I see him in other places, other guises; once in Rome I seemed to be present at a death, not in the Forum or any awesome place, but in a dirty street in Trastevere. I don’t know much about these things, so shall say no more. But without doubt there are times in our lives when destiny blazes forth. This was one of them. I felt I had spent my young days talking to myself, and out of nowhere someone answered.

  Nevertheless, I actually liked his young brother Beresford more. He was the brother I never had, the funniest boy. Too young to be called up, he spent his time going from one preposterous job to another. My grist, he called it. It was grist for his mill when he became an actor. During our first six months at Surry Hills he was first a singing waiter, an eccentric specialty of that time. He sang Italian songs of the O Sole Mio variety, and was modestly popular until some officious person reported him as an enemy alien. He was carted off and interrogated by the police.

  For the younger generation, I realise, the come and go of our gallant allies during the second World War may well be baffling. First Russia was a neutral nothing, an unknown quantity, then became the enemy when she attacked Finland. Then Finland was the enemy when that hard-pressed nation accepted the assistance of Germany. After that Russia was a gallant ally, although she did not seem to help us in any way except by keeping the German army occupied during the worst years of the war. The Italian question was even more complex. Mussolini, a journalist elevated to the position of a Caesar, had dreams of European domination, and precipitated the obviously reluctant Italian nation into a marriage with Germany. He was even shorter than Herr Hitler, and it was saddening to see him standing on his toes and wearing higher hats. Still, he, and consequently Italy, became the other end of the Axis.

  Thus Italians, of whom there were many in Australia, mostly in Queensland and the vine country, became the enemy. Later, of course, the Italians divorced themselves from the dreaded Axis and sensibly became our gallant allies. But alas, they were then the enemy of Germany, which dealt out appalling punishment.

  When Beres was marched off, Italy was the enemy.

  Though he spoke Italian much as Man Friday spoke English, he could chatter fluently in an Italianate gibberish, and now, scared silly by this alarming occurrence, couldn’t stop himself.

  ‘Non e vero, illustrissimo!’ he protested, when replaying the interview for us in the kitchen that night. ‘Lasagna, tortoni! Signori, signori, quattrocento! Ah, Dio, il mio stomacho!’

  He also carried rosary beads in his pocket, a damning indication of his foreign and Papist origin.

  However, an interpreter was called in, who pronounced him probably retarded.

  ‘It was touch and go for a while,’ said Beres, kindly banging Mrs Cardy on the back. She had this tendency to lose her breath when laughing.

  He always considered he had had a narrow escape from internment, and was fidgety about police thereafter. Once when we were walking along a street in Sydney - well, I was lumbering, and he was being very tender about it - he suddenly grabbed me around what had been my waist, reversed me deftly and walked me off the other way.

  ‘What on earth did you do that for?’

  ‘There was a dirty big blue thing coming towards us,’ he hissed.

  He ceased being a singing waiter and took a job in a pickle factory, where he had to wade around all day in gumboots on a floor awash with spices and vinegar. I didn’t care to ask whether the pickles were down there, too. One night he came home with a tragic face and two nameless black rubber tubes.

  ‘What on earth are those?’

  ‘They’re my gumsocks. The vinegar ate off the feet.’

  Then he joined an Ur-type film advertising company, which produced brief films to be shown during that mysterious interlude when theatre owners open and close the curtains several times for no discernible reason. The film company was extremely cynical about youthful would-be actors who joined their staff. Long before, they had been irremediably wounded when young Errol Flynn, marching around in some advertiser’s newly fashionable all-wool spring suiting, had flashed his moustache at the camera for the last time and then marched off in the suit, never to be seen again until Captain Blood appeared upon the screen.

  Beres thought Charles Blanks Advertising Studio might be his start. Although most of the time he was setting up flats, borrowing props, getting advertisers cups of tea and quick snorts, sometimes portions of him actually appeared in these promotion films.

  ‘Look, look, there’s my adam’s apple!’

  ‘That’s my hand giving the girl the ice cream. Ah, you weren’t quick enough!’

  ‘Now, watch carefully, here come my feet. No, they’re in the shoes, dope. Striding through the park, nonchalant like. Gee, I wish I had a pair of shoes like that.’

  For he was a dandy, carefully cleaning and pressing his few clothes, shining his shoes, burnishing his teeth – all to be ready for that big moment. And indeed he did many unpaid bit parts between being arrested for being an enemy alien and wading in pickles. Because of this he often received free tickets to plays and so I saw a great deal of little theatre work, all of which enthralled me.

  Sunny tempered, ever-hopeful, always ready to play the comic and make someone laugh, he was also an excellent cook and taught me a great deal.

  I missed him greatly when he was at last manpowered, and sent off to do jobs which were called essential but didn’t seem so to me. He was a cook’s offsider in a timber camp, a deckhand on a Murray River paddle steamer, and a worker in a fruit and vegetable cannery. The US Army in the Pacific used an astronomical amount of canned vegetables. Just before the war began Australia’s output was 4.5 million kilos. In 1944 it was 45 million kilos. Beres canned so much beetroot he could not even mention its name. Thenceforth he always referred to it, if there was some horrid necessity, as rhubarb, which he loathed almost as much.

  Dear Beres. He never made it as an actor, but at his too early death was a respected senior journalist with the news division of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. He died of the same ailment that killed his brother and later the elder of his sisters. When I visited him in hospital a few days before he died, he said, When I’m better I’d like to come and stay with you on the Island.’ (I was living on Norfolk Island in the Pacific at that time.) He said, ‘There’s so many things I can tell you about your old man. When he was about twelve he fancied himself as a pharmacist. Used to send me to the chemist’s for the ingredients – tuppence worth of nux vomica and a bob’s worth of strychnine, that kind of thing. He made up miracle pills of extraordinary shapes, like lumps of coke, really. We all revered him so much we swallowed them like lambs. After his dose Dad coughed for three days.’

  I wish I could have heard those stories. After he died I felt very dark for a long time; his was one of those fleeting, glancing spirits, not very strong, unable to stand firm against cruel and unjust people, but in the end someone to recall with love. I always smile when I think of him.

  Like most young couples my husband and I spent the first months of marriage trying diligently to change each other in both subtle and explosive ways. D’Arcy said I required him to become a person halfway between my father and Gary Cooper, and
he was damned if he would. He did not want much; only that I should transmute quick smart into someone his mother would tolerate if not like. Like so many sons of alcoholics he was very protective of his mother and longed for her to be happy with his choice of wife. Still, our affection was such, and remained so steadfast, that very shortly we both accepted the exasperating for the sake of the good, which was manifold.

  We were, in a literary sense, obsessively industrious, partly because we had to work like demons in order to make the most basic of incomes, and mostly because writing was life itself.

  When I wasn’t chucking up I was electric with energy. This may have been pregnancy, but more likely was because for the first time in my life I was living intimately with someone whose entire psyche was directed towards writing and the study of writing. We were an immensely literary trio, for Beres, the ambitious actor, studied plays constantly, pulling them to pieces, dissecting motivation, proclaiming dialogue, until Mrs Cardy, majestically ascending her stairs with a candlestick in one hand and her chamberpot in the other, declared, ‘You’re all as mad as meataxes,’ and to me ‘Don’t keep that baby of ours up all night, dear.’

  Even when we did retire, Beres to his barber’s chair and D’Arcy and I to our jampacked pink garret, we used to lie in that single bed – and as our baby grew it became ever more single – writing ideas for stories on each other’s palms and rubbing them out and writing others. We also wrote personal messages: ‘Of course we’ll have our own home one day’ and ‘you’ll become a famous writer, I just know you will’ or ‘well, we did have six rejections yesterday, but tomorrow will be lucky’.

  Did he ever say ‘I love you’? Of course not. He was an Australian. But I did, because I wasn’t.

  In that bedroom we rarely spoke aloud because although the century-old sandstock walls were thick and soundproof, the tiny fireplace opened directly into the flue of the larger one in Mrs Cardy’s bedroom. Although we did not suspect that good woman of eavesdropping, we tried to be private, speaking in whispers and making love decorously, usually with my man’s hand over my mouth, for I was a giggler.

  Sometimes I was tremendously happy, for I believed in the goodness of God and His plans for us. And D’Arcy believed even more simply and firmly than I did. His background was entirely Irish, devout and trusting. He even wore a tattered example of my bête noire, the scapular.

  ‘Take off that awful piece of superstition!’

  ‘No, I won’t. Sister Roche gave it to me when I left Glen Innes,’ he explained.

  ‘It’s only a dirty piece of brown wool. I can’t even read what’s written on it. Ugh!’

  ‘What matters, you heathen islander from the Antarctic Ocean, is not the brown wool or what’s written on it. It’s to remind me that Sister Roche believes in me, and is always praying for her errant lad.’

  ‘Oh, God!’

  ‘And mind your mouth.’

  How young and innocent we were. Fearless, too, for I can see now that the ambition we had set ourselves, to make a living as writers, particularly in wartime, was a dream for children. Yet, two people of a single mind can bring prodigious energy to a project, and ours was dual. We had determined to become good writers, and to build a good marriage. There was, anyway, a perverse delight in us both to fight against the wind.

  An old school exercise book is still in existence; it contains dated lists inscribed, alas, in pencil. Those were the days before the ballpoint pen, and if you did not possess a fountain pen, casual notes and memoranda were written in pencil. On the first page, faint and rubbed though it is, there can be discerned a record of fourteen submissions from January 3 to 9. Of these stories, articles, radio-play outlines, verse, thirteen were rejected. The survivor, a short story, sold to a classy little magazine called Australia, which paid D’Arcy £2.15.0, but not for three months. The tradition for publishers of journals and newspapers to hang on to contributors’ money for unstated periods was the greatest bane of a freelance’s life. Some of them did not pay at all unless you sent in a claim. Only the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which was then called the Australian Broadcasting Commission, paid promptly, not always on acceptance but at least on broadcast.

  Some terrible knuckleheads worked for the ABC, but its charter had plainly been formed on professional lines. Upon acceptance of any work, the writer was immediately sent a contract which plainly stated which rights the Commission wished to buy, and what it was prepared to pay. The rights were just, modest and strictly within the scope of broadcasting. Not so other magazine and newspaper firms. Some editors engaged in demeaning badinage: ‘How much do you think it’s worth? Oh, come now, you do have a big opinion of yourself!’

  This kind of power play, frequently sexist as well, must have killed off many a promising writer. It was not peculiar to Australia but it was in that country that we suffered it. Fortunately, as both of us had cut our teeth on this attitude when youngsters, we had sworn to each other we would never accept it, even if starving.

  But ah, we were tempted to give in sometimes.

  D’Arcy still displayed a fatal combativeness towards editors. You could see hate coming into their eyes when they looked at him.

  ‘What’s the matter with it?’

  No amount of argument from me would convince him that a good editor has a bell in his head that goes ping! when he reads a manuscript suitable for his market.

  ‘And he doesn’t have to tell you why or why not.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  It was my custom, when a story of mine was rejected, to smilingly ask for it back. In fact I didn’t care why, or why not. Rejected was rejected. Interestingly, this calm attitude often led to a request for some small compromise, which usually I agreed to do. Early I learned that it never hurts to give your opponent a way out. My husband, a much franker character, at first thought this duplicity rather than diplomacy.

  ‘Are all girls like you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yep.’

  He was a slow learner, but the Australian Women’s Weekly presented him with the ultimate lesson. When the Weekly accepted a story he was delighted, for its circulation was then as now, enormous. Even the cheque was for a sum fair if not extravagant. Turning over the cheque to endorse it, he discovered that his endorsement was an agreement to the relinquishment of all copyright, worldwide. In other words, if you did not agree to this piracy of radio, audio, film, reprint, translation and anthology rights, you could not cash that cheque.

  ‘Cunning bastards!’

  We were very much in need of money that day, as we were most of the time, but D’Arcy returned that cheque to the Weekly with a civil request that his story be sent back. Happily, the story later sold to an American journal, the Saturday Evening Post, and has since been anthologised in eight or nine languages.

  This type of indefensible editorial and publishing behaviour dwindled and almost died when literary agencies appeared and societies of authors gathered some clout. But the possibility of rip-off for the writer who prefers to work independently of these valuable protectors remains as it was.

  The foundation, the absolute rockbottom of our financial affairs, was the weekly script I wrote for the ABC, The Wideawake Bunyip. For this I received a guinea and a half. In real terms one cannot define what this was worth. Did half a guinea equate with ten or twenty dollars?

  Let me say only that the cost of travel by public transport, at least on the popular trams, was calculated on twopence for the first section and a penny each for those succeeding. On the same scale I could do the entire weekend shopping for the three of us for ten shillings. Mind you, it was not luxury shopping; almost everything was in short supply. But Surry Hills, like all working-class suburbs, was cheap, and I was cheaper still, hunting around to save threepence here and a shilling there. Not for nothing had I done all that snagging in the Depression.

  But still, after paying our fifteen shillings rent and contributing half the bill for coal and wood
, there was not much left.

  My Irish Grandma, who had all her life lived so closely with poverty that she treated it with a haughty kick in the pants, held to the tradition of always giving away the last coin in her purse. Of course she took care it was a small coin; she was no dummo.

  Frequently faced with the question of where the next bite was coming from - or the next stamp, far more important - I began to do the same thing. It worked like magic. The minute my change purse was as empty as a boot, some dilatory editor paid up. We thought it might have been because nature abhors a vacuum.

  To save postage we delivered most manuscripts, and my weekly enormous treat was to take my ABC script to town to the Children’s Session and spend half an hour with the delightful people who worked there. For one of the many things I was homesick for was working with and for children, which I had so expansively enjoyed when I was Wendy of the Auckland Star. Never did I have any ambitions to teach children; what I wanted was to find out what gave them fun, and to do my best to supply it. This aim was exactly that of the ABC’s Children’s Session, and of the people who ran it – or should I say galloped it – Elizabeth, Mac and Joe.

  These weekly visits with my scripts brought back the enthusiastic and inventive days of what in my more disheartened moments I called my girlhood – the years before I was twenty.

  The ABC had the disturbing habit of renting premises all over the city and suburbs, which led to whimsical dispersions of its possessions. Once, I recall, Dick Parry, the Children’s Session producer, said apologetically, ‘I’m sorry but you can’t have a harp. It’s out at Burwood. But the glockenspiel is at Darlinghurst, so much nearer. Would that do instead?’

  Drama and Talks, and the Children’s Session, were at 96 Market Street, in a glamorously ratty building long since demolished to make way for the serpentine magnificence of the shopping complex Centrepoint. The building had once been His Majesty’s Theatre; the old auditorium was an immense Woolworths’ store, and the warren of dressing rooms above it the ABC offices and studios. Oh, I loved that building, and the creaky lift which one was likely to share with some celebrated actress or overseas producer. Once, I remember, with a rotund, melancholy-faced gentleman in a superlative waistcoat. At first I thought he was Oscar Wilde, then realised he was Britain’s Robert Morley, whose work I esteemed highly. I was so overcome my feet shrank and when I left the lift one of my shoes fell off.