by Gee, Maurice
Rex looked at me so long I put out my hand and steered the truck back into line.
‘Did Merv Soper tell you to stop?’
‘I told myself.’
‘Leon must have got at you. I wouldn’t take any notice of him.’
‘Other people don’t make up my mind. You and Celia Pittaway can take over.’
‘Celia doesn’t write. Does she?’
‘Everybody writes. They’re bleeding poetry all over the place. Thank God someone’s got the sense to stop.’
And I must stop pretending that I remember every word of our conversation. We talked along those lines, I told him I renounced poetry and I made it sound like a declaration of self, a step from shifting on to solid ground; but in fact I did not know why I found myself in this new position, or exactly where I was – all I knew was that I had rid myself of something I had no need of. I won’t say it didn’t hurt. I valued poetry. I wanted to feel the need – but felt instead the lightness of looking into a future more widely open than it had been.
Now I can say that writing made me smart. It increased my cleverness; but only about those things I believed I should feel. So, in a way, it softened me. It reduced my intelligence, which is a moral intelligence in its essential workings. I nearly finished that with, Alas! But no, not alas, for although intelligence of that sort limits and hampers me in my progress, and makes me insufferable and vulgar at times, it confers clear sight – just now and then. Without those moments I would be nothing. Without them I would have no path to follow and no Jack Skeat with me on my way.
The pumped-up poetry I had attempted and the sort that bleeds all over the place were two of many kinds, I knew, but I confined my argument to them as Rex and I drove home that night. I moved towards my reasons for giving up. I said that I wanted to be useful and keep my eyes fixed on what was right. This was nothing new. We had had this conversation several times before, and Rex would agree that usefulness must be an aim, though how one was to identify it puzzled him, and right – right behaviour – must be tried for, although other people’s ‘carry-on’ usually spoiled it.
I wonder how much he laughed at me. He must have known that I would never be the friend he needed. I was seriously, fatally, under-equipped. He swam like a fish in waters of speculation I had no awareness of, sliding among weeds that broke his line, that turned him about and tangled him and floated him, panting, belly up – I’d better stop this. I was all set to go on about the lovely flowers on the surface, in the dawn or starlight, that he saw in his state of distress, but good heavens how far these tropes remove one from the truth, which must be stated plainly if one is to see it close; if it is to have its natural weight. I must be careful not to let Rex become more or less than he was.
Yet I’m approaching him indirectly, through the effect he had on me. Why is that? I can’t escape him yet I seem not to be able to say: he was six foot and a half an inch and had a bold nose, perhaps too fleshy, and an angular forehead, heavy-boned. Fortress head. It made one think that what he kept inside must be worth protecting. Blue eyes looking out, alert for danger. Ears with a generous curl and Plasticine lobes that turned bright red when he was angry. Mouth and jaw – what can I say? – too thin, too heavy? By whose standards? And for what? I don’t subscribe to an ideal physiognomy. All the same he did not please in his mouth and jaw. Some people said he was ugly, others strong-looking, striking. No one said handsome – a word used of me once or twice when I was young.
Anyway, I’ve managed it, the description. Forced myself. It’s much the same as the one in John Dobbie’s book, although John is kinder on the whole. He says Rex had fiery eyes, and eyes of icy blue, and he brings the two into a nice accord. I won’t argue. Rex gave the impression of burning coldly at times. But ‘impression’ – that’s him through me. And it makes him more than he was. I don’t want that.
In the truck I felt large and felt him small. There have been a good number of occasions like that. I’m one of the people who fought back. So I went on about usefulness, and the empty room and sinking swamp of poetry – used both of those, made eloquent by a passion part aggressive, part defensive. He kept his eyes on the road; down Waikumete Hill, over the hump, up past the graves. Away over farms the city shone. Sky and ranges, two dimensional on the other side, made sharp invasions of each other, hills pressing up, sky pressing down. We swooped into the valley where we lived, left and right on the concrete road, and it seemed to me that I came like a saviour; one who would be loving and stern.
‘People are so bloody hopeless.’
‘What are you going to do about it, Skeatsie?’
‘You wait and see.’ I would bring them forms and moralities, and fix a straitness on them, and show them simple ways – simple and pure. It would be nothing beyond human reach but would not be easy. I held Loomis in the palms of my hands.
Are such things common? It is not an illumination but nor is it delusional entirely. Let’s say it’s part of growing up and those who miss it fail to occupy all our space. I do not mean to praise myself. One needs to be facing the right way, one needs to be alert – to have been alerted. I have to thank my father for that; and blame him, as well as myself, for constrictions in my understanding. Spirit and imagination make uncertain halting steps in me.
My father presents himself, a rare event. If I do not welcome him he may never come back.
Diffidence was his mode of conduct. He had a little smile, a drawing in of his mouth at the corners, that qualified each remark he made. Remember Walter Skeat is insignificant, it said. His success as a solicitor owed something to it. He gave sound advice but seemed to allow his clients to find it for themselves. They came from his office glowing with their own cleverness. My father was the clever one though.
He was clever in his marriage. He offered all their shared ground to my mother. That way he managed to survive – that way he flourished, modestly, in corners she could not be bothered to occupy. He kept many secrets. He kept his cleverness secret, and he kept secret what he loved. I write of him in this formal way because he loved order, formality, he put bounds on nature by holding it in a web of limited responses. Nothing broke in on my father, nothing roared in his ear or flashed cruelly in his eye. (You see how it makes me write of him – ‘ear’ and ‘eye’ instead of ‘ears’ and ‘eyes’.)
He had been religious in his youth, with some degree of warmth, I believe, but when I knew him well enough to talk to, in my mid-teens, two or three years before his death, he had shed all purely Christian belief. The Church was important in two ways – as an institution preserving forms and as the custodian of a morality.
Talking to my father was not easy and it did not happen frequently. I had to knock carefully at the door, not too long, not too loud, but firmly enough to let him know the person standing outside was his son. He would take fright at a need too plainly expressed. But it was part of his code that a father should talk with his son and advise him of his duties, and of satisfactions he might take. Dad warmed up after a cool beginning. He sometimes even called me Johnnyboy.
‘Measure your wants, Johnnyboy. Never go after anything in an ungentlemanly way.’
That was a precept. He lit his pipe for precepts and puffed for punctuation and emphasis. His dry lips made little popping sounds.
‘John, I’ll say this’ – pop – ‘the man who chooses the easy way is setting off’ – pop – ‘in the wrong direction.’
I listened earnestly and thought him wise. Now and then a loop of saliva was dragged between the pipe stem and his mouth and I averted my eyes while he dealt with it. Dry lips, ideal for precept-making; but inside he was like the rest of us, moist, impure. It troubled me – and I was troubled too when he spoke of his Englishness. I thought him boastful, silly, self-satisfied. The English had been great, perhaps still were, but the war just won was ours as much as England’s. Dad spoke of ‘the yeoman virtues’, ‘the bulldog breed’, ‘hearts of oak’, and was speaking of himself. He was drunk on his En
glishness and to me, a puritan, he became unclean. I did not care for enthusiasm in my mid-teens when anything not in strict control seemed lurching in the direction of sex. Tell me about conduct, I wanted to say, and the moral code, and narrow paths, the strait gate, the gentlemanly way, the manly way, and our duty to subdue the blood. How do I stop thinking about girls and doing things to them in my head?
And he, as though recognizing my need, would put himself at a proper distance from us both and talk as I wanted him to.
I liked my father sitting well back, behind his pipe. He gave a polar balance to exigencies that weighed me down. I’m not going to be more precise. Young manhood (womanhood too) is full of tortures, we’re all put on the rack, and nothing new is added if I describe my sufferings. Any youth’s hard time will stand for all.
‘There’s something not quite right about a pun,’ my father would say. He did not like anything that broke out of bounds. Metaphors. Apostrophes. Statements of intention. Disliked storms. Hated sunsets when the sky went bloody. Blushes, belches, farts, made him blush. Ejaculations, I have no doubt, became distasteful to him. But Dad, I’m not here to take the mickey. I think I had some luck in having you.
A moral sense need not be confining. I have travelled many places in mine and had strange adventures on the way. Dad would not have liked some of them. He would have been appalled to find me holding Loomis in the palms of my hands. But by that time he was dead. And I had travelled crookedly – discovered language, dabbled in sex, begun my lifelong friendship with Rex Petley. I had broken into fragments and started on my lives. But I retained my moral sense; and I keep it in my baggage still. It has given me huge amounts of trouble. Without it I would scarcely exist.
My father’s death was uncharacteristic. That private man died in a public place and he died practising a vice. I’ve thought about the word. It was a vice. It went against the tenor of his life.
Every Friday he travelled into Auckland on business and came home by the 6.15 p.m. train. My mother and I did not meet him. We were not a family for that sort of thing. There were ceremonies in our lives, of sitting down to dinner, of leaving for church, of saying good-night and good-morning, but none for happy greeting after absence. From our house on the rise overlooking the creek I watched the train chuff along the track into Loomis. It whistled at the level crossing by Ah Lap’s. My mother used that as a signal to lay the table. At 6.35 p.m. Dad walked up the drive with his Gladstone bag. He went upstairs to wash the grime of Auckland off himself. We sat down to dinner at 6.45. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened in his day.
‘And you, my dear?’
‘Nothing.’ (Once a broken water-pipe had flooded the kitchen but workmen had fixed it and our daily woman had cleaned up the mess.) ‘Nothing at all.’
‘John?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Everything running smoothly? Good.’
Until an October evening in 1947. Our local constable stood at the door with the Gladstone bag held on his chest. My mother understood in a flash. She silenced him and showed him into the parlour, which was the proper place to hear bad news. We learned that Dad had fallen getting off the train and struck his head on a trolley and had, it seemed, died instantly. The policeman was appalled. His face was drained of colour and he was ten years older than when I’d seen him last, standing in the foyer at the pictures, keeping an eye on the Loomis hooligans. Death without meaning was out of order. My mother agreed, but thought it none of his business to state more than the facts.
‘There was no drink involved, Mrs Skeat.’
‘Well, of course not.’
‘But he did get off before the train had stopped.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘He did it every Friday night. At least that’s what the stationmaster says.’
My mother thought that impossible and I agreed. My father dismounting from a moving train: it made a fracture almost as great as his death in our ordered lives. It spread a blush, a warmth, over my greyness. (How these metaphors go on!) Colour invades my father’s life. A pool of blood lies on the station platform. I see his judging eye, its calculating sparkle, as he leans from the step and waits his moment. Asphalt speeds beneath his tilted sole. His hand is on the rail and signals of release are at the ready in his brain. His Gladstone bag swings in his right hand and his pipe, cocked upwards from his smiling teeth, duplicates the angle of his hat brim. Every Friday, 6.15 p.m. His secret life. He calculates the speed, he makes his leap and starts his run; goes even with the train a dozen steps, with smacking soles; and reaches the ramp down to the road at a walking pace; raps his pipe out on the corner post; and damps himself; starts his walk along the pot-holed footpaths of Loomis; twenty minutes to our front door; and nothing out of the ordinary has happened in his day.
His judgement failed him on the evening of his death. He let go his hold a second too soon and hit the platform moving too fast. His legs could not keep pace with his upper body, which leaned further forward as he ran until it lay parallel with the ground. Too late he dropped his bag and flung his arms to protect his face. The trolley was drawn up to meet the goods van. He tried to jerk his head out of line but the corner of the tray punched a geometrical hole in his frontal bone.
‘Blood on the station platform’ comes from Rex’s poem 'Incident’, which describes a bit of mid-European violence in the 1930s. There’s also a broken pipe and a Gladstone bag. I’m not sure Jews carried Gladstone bags but I’m pleased my father’s death was useful to Rex. An irony, an ugly fact, known only to me, is that Dad ‘really couldn’t get too keen on the Jews’.
Morality does not crumble, it’s shown to be horribly imperfect, that is all. Like our other attributes it wears a human face.
I can let Dad go now. He knocked and I let him in and we’ve reached agreement on my inheritance: his lesson, his death. Though one is misshapen and the other mysterious, they have become a part of me. They don’t, of course, make me what I am, a multitude of other things comes into the sum. But they are – what? – they’re formative.
Thank you for your lesson, Dad. Thank you for your death.
Rex drove down the blind street to his parents’ house and let me out at the drive. It was after midnight but I wanted to walk home. Somewhere between Rex’s street and my mother’s house I would find a place, beside the creek, under the sky, where I would be able to stand and examine myself – walk around Jack Skeat and find what he was made of.
I closed the gate behind Rex and heard the truck grind away to its lean-to shed beside Les Petley’s workshop. When the motor died, when the door slammed and Rex had gone into the house, I heard the creek sliding over the rock ledge by the swing-bridge. This creek, Loomis Creek, runs through my boyhood. It flowed in a shallow gorge beside the town, turning left and right along the base of low hills on its southern side. In the shade, under the banks, pools lay green and slow and bottomless. I swam in them but never dived deep. All through my boyhood I was afraid. I skidded over them with shallow strokes and hauled myself out on the mossy rocks; or I crossed lying on my back, kicking hard, with face and organs sheltered by my bony parts from whatever it was that lived on the oozy bottom.
Loomis Creek ran parallel to my family life. I was never sure I would be safe.
The creek is in Rex Petley’s poetry. It’s one of his stock symbols, which stops working in his later poems. It is just a number he paints in. But in the early ones I read his fear, I read my fear. I find joy and terror penetrating each other and I’m with Rex on our common ground.
I gave up my chance of exploring the creek when I finished with poetry. Yet it made a gift to me that night: it gave me Rex’s mother, Lila Petley. I must put that differently. It gave me Lila Petley and she was never simply Rex’s mother again.
The old swing-bridge, with fencing-wire sides and twin foot-planks, crossed from the end of the blind street to a path skirting an orchard and a swamp. I loved the way it bounced. You had to time your steps to cross without losing
the beat. (It was poetry.) But I had hardly set my foot on the planks than her voice called, ‘Is that Jack?’ She was sitting in the middle of the bridge with her legs dangling through the wires. The shock of finding her there produced distortions. She came from the night and was ethereal, she had no substance; and she came from the creek, with darkness, mystery, terror all about her. It went away as I stepped out on the elastic boards. I became afraid of not knowing how to behave if I should find Lila Petley mad. To sit on a bridge after midnight, wearing a nightie, smoking a cigarette; to say, ‘Isn’t it a lovely night? Come and sit with me’ – that was surely on the edge of madness and I would not be able to handle it.
‘Hello, Mrs Petley, are you all right?’ with a squeak in my voice; bending to see if the shine on her cheeks – oh my God! – was made by tears.
‘Yes. Don’t let me frighten you,’ wiping her fingers on the bones that made her face – it was a lesson of the night – beautiful. She touched my wrist with dampened fingerpads. ‘These are old tears, Jack. They’re years old.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I’ve always been ready with that response, and it’s genuine, but people will take it that I’m accepting blame. Even Lila Petley, on that night -
‘It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. Do you want a cigarette?’
‘Thank you.’ I sat beside her. I dangled my legs. I rolled my second fine cut Greys cigarette of the night. ‘You don’t see many women – many ladies – who roll their own. I don’t mean that you aren’t …’
She laughed. ‘I’m not though. I never wanted to be. Would you want to be a gentleman when there are so many things …? I don’t think a poet can be a gentleman.’
‘I’m not a poet any more.’
‘Who says?’
‘I’ve given up.’ I looked at her and was honest, although drawing dishonestly on my cigarette. ‘I’m not good enough.’
‘Who says? Rex?’
