Moving Among Strangers (11 page)

20

The railway attendant at Manningtree Station was very pleasant and accommodating in the best manner of the English, and agreed to mind my luggage while I walked to East Bergholt. He would be gone by the time I returned – he finished his shift at two – but his colleague Bill would look after me. Then as an afterthought, he asked politely if I realised just how far it was to walk.

‘Oh yes,' I lied. ‘And thank you. I look forward to meeting Bill.'

It was a perfect English summer's day and the path was alive with dozens of other pilgrims, of a different kind. This was the famous Constable country where you could see Constable's most famous paintings in reality, almost unchanged: the dairy cattle in the fields; Flatford Mill, the River Stour, the lock, the pond, the streams, hills, fields, vales and the famous haywain. Quintessentially English and Romantic.

Stow had walked this landscape so often that I wondered if he was, under all that stony resistance, really a romantic with a capital ‘R'. Literary critic Bruce King called him a ‘new romantic' who wished ‘to be part of a non-violent, green, natural world'.

How could Stow be a romantic and a modernist simultaneously? The two categories seem at odds. But an argument has been made convincingly by Alexandra Harris that these movements aren't so incompatible. Critic Kathryn Hughes pithily sums up the thesis of Harris's book
Romantic Moderns
:

Whereas high modernism wanted to lay waste to the material past in order to re-fashion it upon rational lines, romantic modernists had a soft spot for what had gone before. They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing shacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris,
romantic moderns
celebrated the way England's crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.

Why else would Stow believe that living in the locality of his seventeenth-century forebears was more meaningful, provided more roots, than living in the country that had been home to his family for the last five generations? As he said, he felt an ‘atavistic' attraction to the Suffolk countryside.

Along the well-worn track from Manningtree to Flatford Mill, through the turnstiles and along the river Stour, I walked and thought of Stow, of his fondness for walking and how he enjoyed the feel of earth beneath his feet. The sense of groundedness, of being rooted in the particular, was hugely important to Stow, both physically and artistically. In 1974, during his brief visit back to Australia, Stow told John Larkin of
The Age
, ‘I do think there can be an unrewarding kind of internationalism. There are a few signs of this in recent Australian writing. Some short story writers are going for a kind of rootless writing, which is not based in any particular place in society.'

Stow's need for and love of roots can be seen most plainly in his favourite medieval image: the Green Man – a man who is literally half-tree and half-man; he has leaves growing around his face and I imagine he has roots growing out of his feet. The Green Man was so meaningful to Stow that he asked his sister, Helen, a talented sculptor, to carve an image of the Green Man so it could be placed permanently at the front door of his tiny terrace in Harwich.

The morning of my walk through Constable country grew warmer by the mile, so it was good to enter the cool little Constable Museum at Flatford Mill. Constable had been born in East Bergholt, the small picturesque village that Stow called home between 1969 and 1981. The exhibition showed a number of Constable's black-and-white sketchbooks, as well as some pages from his diaries; the importance he put on chiaroscuro showed me for the first time that Constable was quite dark. Up until then I'd thought of him as light and bright like a postcard. Constable had never left England; indeed he barely ventured from his birthplace in Suffolk. He was deeply rooted in his own place and intensely local.

Onwards to East Bergholt, also a picturesque village
, where among the cottages and climbing roses I ventured into the local pub and asked if they knew the whereabouts of Fishpond Cottage. The barman directed me past the post office, which was also the general store, and on down the road past Constable's studio. Sure enough, at the end of a leafy track, hidden in a little valley, was Fishpond Cottage where Stow wrote
The Girl Green as Elderflower
and most of
Visitants
, considered by many critics as his masterpiece.

How many times must have Stow walked up and down this track? How many sentences were composed as he walked?

Stow said that his novels were all structured, shaped and finalised in his head before pen touched paper. By the time he sat down at his desk he must have been transcribing what was already written in his head.
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
was written in six weeks, in New Mexico, while snowed in.
A Haunted Land
and
The Bystander
were written during university summer holidays.
The Girl Green as Elderflower
was apparently written in a month – January, 1979. And the libretto
Miss Donnithorne's Maggot
, he told Hazel de Berg, emerged ‘at a time when I was suffering badly from insomnia after an illness, and I wrote the whole thing in a few hours'.

In 1980 Stow recounted to Graeme Kinross-Smith:

I used to come back down the vale late at night after bartending at the ‘King's Head' or the ‘Hare and Hounds' to find Fishpond Cottage hidden in a cone of mist surmounted by the moon. It was beautiful.
Yes,
The Girl Green as Elderflower
is my love gift to Suffolk … I do think that Suffolk cured me after that Trobriands debacle. It brought me back to life.

*

Like so many histories, there are various versions of ‘that Trobriands debacle'. The common version says Stow contracted malaria and was invalided back to Australia. Another, far more dramatic version, is that on the night of a fierce storm, a colleague went to check on the young cadet patrol officer and found Stow had cut his wrists in an attempted suicide. In a further elaboration, the authorities were worried about his mental state and so in fear of Stow making another attempt on his life it was agreed he could only fly back to Australia if accompanied.

There are many unanswered questions about ‘that Trobriands debacle'. Critic Geordie Williamson observes that ‘although Stow spoke openly about his illness and subsequent depression, there remains a fuzziness at the heart of his account'.

Stow had a fear of madness, a fear my father also suffered, and felt that he was losing his mind. ‘The only way to begin to understand what happened to Stow, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually, is to turn to the fictions that arose from his experience,' Williamson notes, ‘ – one a narrative of healing',
The Girl Green as Elderflower
, and ‘the other a tale of devastation',
Visitants.

Like so much of Stow's work, there is a doubling affect to these books – a dark side and a light side. Williamson calls the two novels ‘twinned narratives'. Another two companion works that possibly arose from this same crisis are the librettos
Eight Songs for a Mad King
and
Miss Donnithorne's Maggot
. In the CD liner notes of 1987 they are described as ‘Two Portraits of Madness'. Poet and critic Fay Zwicky, who attended the world premiere of
Miss Donnithorne's Maggot
in Adelaide in 1974, was horrified by the performance. ‘It was like being inside the mind of a mad person,' she said.

Even as a university student Stow had been intrigued by darkness, proposing a Masters topic entitled: ‘The Dark Powers: Anarchy and the subconscious in Conrad'. Like Conrad, Stow seems to have entered a heart of darkness and survived. All his creative production after the Trobriands bears the marks of that voyage undertaken by a writer Geoffrey Dutton described as ‘a young man of dangerous tendencies'.

*

East Bergholt was where the poet Fay Zwicky went to visit Stow some time in the 1970s. She had taken bread and cheese, sure that the frugal young novelist-poet would have little, if anything, in his pantry. She was right. But he didn't seem very interested in food so they agreed to walk to the local pub, where at least it was warm. Only when Stow had ingested a pint could he begin to talk. ‘It was like fuel,' said Fay. ‘He couldn't speak without drinking.'

The limits to Stow's conversational skills were well known, and commented on again and again by friends, family, colleagues and neighbours, as well as fellow poets such as Dorothy Hewett: ‘He never said anything; just stood around.'

But Stow's silence doesn't appear to have been an unfriendly one. His temperament and philosophical bent both point towards a faith in silence and deep doubt about language.

For Stow, settling in Bergholt was a way of finding a home, as was the settling to writing itself after a number of years of travelling. In a 2009 letter to Susan Smith, the Geraldton librarian, Stow wrote that:

The act of writing, because of the concentration of attention and observation which precedes the act, is a kind of settling-in, a kind of pioneering, in some circumstances a kind of homecoming.

21

Back at Manningtree Station late that afternoon my luggage had indeed been kept safely and with it I boarded the train to Harwich Town, which was the very end of the line. This was the town Stow loved so well.

Yet nothing could have been further from the idyllic pastoral I had just journeyed through in Suffolk. Harwich looked grey, rundown, depressed.

There was only one other woman waiting at the bus stop. Whenever people came to visit Stow in Harwich, he put them up at the Samuel Pepys Hotel so I asked if she knew the way.

‘Oh, it's just down there, through the laneway and to the left.'

‘So I can walk?'

‘Oh yes, in five minutes.'

No wonder Stow loved the place. Old Harwich, it turned out, was about as close to a medieval town as you could get. You can walk anywhere in five minutes. The entire village is comprised of five streets, seven pubs and two grocery stores – ‘One of which has almost nothing,' I was told later by a local, ‘and the other even less.'

I dragged my suitcase to the Samuel Pepys, but surprisingly there were no rooms available. Perhaps I could try the Stingray, said to be Stow's favourite drinking hole. But no, they were full too. At each of the seven pubs the inn was full. How could this be? There's a wind farm development nearby, I was told: the rooms were rented to the men building windmills in the ocean. Windmills in the ocean! Stow's childhood merry-go-round in the sea had been fashioned from an old windmill. How strange it all was.

The barman at the Alma had offered to mind my baggage while I searched for accommodation. It was beginning to get dark and as I had already passed Stow's door in King's Head Road three times, I decided to knock on his neighbours
'
.

‘Hello, hello!'
The tall, affable man opened the door wide.

‘Deborah!' he called up the stairs. ‘Randolph's biographer is here!' And then he turned back to me. ‘Please come in.'

Hugh and Deborah welcomed me into their charming three-storey terrace, and within minutes had insisted that I stay in their beautiful attic guest room.

So later that evening we sat around the cosy lounge drinking wine and talking about their elusive neighbour of seven years. I wasn't a biographer I'd said – Stow already had an authorised biographer who had actually met him and interviewed him and had been working on his project for more than ten years. My book was something else, although I didn't try to explain what. I wasn't sure myself.

‘My understanding,' said Hugh, somewhat timidly, ‘was that Randolph didn't like Australia because he didn't like the way they treated the indigenous people.'

Though we'd been talking a while, he was saying this cautiously, hoping not to offend, given I was also one of those Australians guilty of mistreatment of our indigenous people.

I nodded. I was a guest after all. What I was thinking was this: Yes, Stow saw at first hand the mistreatment of our indigenous people, but what purpose did removing himself from his native country serve? Was this a national or personal or ancestral solution? As Tom Spring says in
Tourmaline
, ‘How is it that you have lived all these years and not seen that a man who hates himself is the only kind of wild beast we have to watch for?' And surely reconciliation is not about running away from home but about doing what my father was so deficient at: facing up to things.

The next morning I went out to explore Old Harwich. The town is on a peninsula and has remained largely unchanged for decades, if not centuries. Georgian façades hide Tudor and medieval frames – which, according to Stow, was ‘a pretty good metaphor for the town'. But Harwich has avoided becoming a museum-tourist place because it still serves its original functions as a port and for shipbuilding.

Walking along the waterfront the thing that struck me was how similar Harwich was to Geraldton. Not the medieval town, of course, but the waterways with the port, the ships, the containers and the working harbour. Stow told the ABC documentary-maker Tony MacGregor how he came to move from East Bergholt to Harwich:

I was travelling with a neighbour from Suffolk on the train ferry to Belgium. We sat on the deck and had our supper and looked at the harbour which was dark blue and it was just a very beautiful scene. And that's when I decided I should like to come and live beside the harbour.

I thought this was so typically Stow: so bewitched upon seeing a moment of beauty that he packs up his life to follow a dark blue light.

For its size though, Harwich has had a disproportionate number of famous residents. They include the famous diarist Samuel Pepys, who was also a member of parliament, Christopher Jones of the
Mayflower
and Christopher Newport, captain of the expedition that settled Jamestown, Virginia.

By World War I, Harwich was home to thirty-two pubs. ‘They used to have a pub for every day of the week in the space of five hundred yards,' I was told.

‘Five within walking distance and two within crawling distance,' Stow once quipped, of the remaining seven.

Stow obviously loved the life of the small village but he also enjoyed the solitude of the nearby Wrabness Woods, where he went to collect chestnuts in autumn. ‘My ancestors would have walked along here going from one farm to the other,' Stow told MacGregor. ‘Everywhere one goes one is stepping in well-worn paths.

‘When it comes down to it, it is one's own ethnic past that connects one to the earth … you don't have to excuse yourself anymore.'

What did he mean by this? That as a European Australian occupying Aboriginal land he didn't have a truly authentic ethnic past and needed to be constantly apologising? Not just to others but to himself? Or did he mean, as Fay Zwicky said, that by living in England he could avoid the Australian demand to ‘explain himself'?

Harwich is a little like a time capsule, untouched by the twenty-first century. The pubs are old-fashioned; they smell of beer and old men. The seamen still live locally and attempts to gentrify the town by shifting the working port further away to allow the modernisation of Old Harwich have been strongly opposed by the Harwich Conservation Trust, which Stow supported for many years. And there are two bookshops.

*

That evening I met up with my hosts in one of the local pubs, El Alma Inn. ‘El Alma is the battle of Crimea that the British won and have been celebrating ever since,' Hugh explained.

We were sitting around a large wooden table with other locals. There was Martin from the Academic bookshop, who argued that Stow was secretly wealthy because he had donated a considerable sum to the campaign to conserve Harwich. There was Rebecca, also from the Academic bookshop, who was marrying the barman, Pascal, from Brittany, the following week in the Electric Palace, England's first purpose-built cinema, erected in Harwich in 1911. And there was Wavy Davy, a sailor with blurred blue tattoos on his forearms.

Amid their evening banter the locals indulged me with a few reminiscences of their mysterious literary neighbour.

‘I realised how intelligent he was when the bookshop received a long and complicated email enquiry in German,' said Rebecca. ‘I asked Mick to translate and he had no hesitation.'

After a couple of pints Rebecca said that she'd also realised, without being told, that Stow was homosexual.

‘How?' I asked.

‘Because my father is gay,' she said, and then talked of her childhood, of sensing something as she was growing up.

Martin commented that Wavy Davy was the only person he had ever seen in an animated conversation with Stow. Wavy Davy had worked on a boat delivering supplies to Papua New Guinea, so they had something to talk about.

‘I was the floating Tescos,' he told me.

Initially, Stow had seemed enthusiastic about sharing reminiscences. Then Wavy Davy had referred to ‘jungle bunnies'. A dark shutter came down over Stow's face.

‘I got a lecture,' said Davy, a little sheepishly. Stow told him why he shouldn't refer to Papua New Guinean women as jungle bunnies, how it was demeaning, how it suggested inferiority, how it was racist. I could see in Davy's face that he still felt chastised.

Peter joined us at the table. He ran the other bookshop, which has a beautiful antique ceramic mural and a swinging sign announcing ‘Books Bought and Sold'. His is the Black Books of Harwich.

Also at the table was Georgetta. She was different from the rest of the group: neatly groomed and coiffed, drinking black tea with lemon while everyone else drank beer. Surrounded by noise, she sat reading
The
Guardian
in stylish designer glasses. When she occasionally spoke, it was with a delicate European accent. Georgetta lived next door to Wavy Davy and they had argued, in a friendly way, about who was responsible for their shared deteriorating gutterpipe.

‘I miss Mick,' she told me now. ‘I used to enjoy seeing him walking past my window every day at five o'clock on his way to the Stingray pub.'

The Stingray, Stow's regular haunt, was formerly the Wheatsheaf. No one could tell me why the name was changed; there are no stingrays in the Harwich harbour and the name seemed more appropriate for a hotel in Western Australia, where stingrays populate the shallows, than a football pub behind an old, Tudor-style façade in Essex.

‘He always carried a book into the pub and sat in the corner reading. He was very shy, very private,' Georgetta continued fondly.

This is something I already knew, that I had been told over and over. Except Georgetta had a different take on Stow's shyness.

‘I admired that,' she said. ‘He was very self-possessed, self-sufficient, self-reliant. He didn't need anyone else.'

Georgetta, Martin, Peter and Rebecca were Stow's crossword companions at the Stingray, murmuring together over
The
Guardian
cryptic. This seemed to be the extent of Stow's daily social interaction.

I turned to Rebecca and commented on how much the Harwich port had reminded me of Geraldton, where Stow was born.

Peter looked at me directly for the first time. ‘But Mick told me he was born in England and went to Geraldton as a child,' he said.

Immediately I doubted Peter as a reliable narrator.

‘Yes, he told me that too,' said Wavy Davy. I sat for a moment, speechless. One person could be mistaken, but two? Could Stow have deliberately lied, misled his neighbours? Then I remembered another comment Stow made in the ABC interview, when asked about his arrival in England at the age of twenty-four – ‘Everything about England seemed to me so normal and familiar. I always had the feeling that I'd grown up here. I seemed to have memories of the place.'

Was he so ashamed of his Australianness that he had reinvented, or at least, reimagined the circumstances of his birth?

These are the two versions of Stow that I found in one small pub: the first version is someone who was content in his lifestyle, in his aloneness, who was self-sufficient and independent. The other version is a man who was uncomfortable in his own skin, internally and perpetually in conflict over his sexuality, his nationality and his identity. Twin versions.

As my time in Harwich drew to a close, Deborah drove me out to Wrabness Woods, where Stow was buried under an oak sapling marked only by a simple wooden plaque. We planted a small elderflower tree on his grave. If other pilgrims came to visit, they would know where to find him.