The Best Australian Essays 2014 (13 page)

The Presbyterian church at Thompson's Corner was a small red-brick building with a stubby little tower. Sunday school was in a room at the back. We sat at tables with our backs to the window, which looked across dark bands of bushland and bands of hazy distance, right to the cloudy storm blue of the Blue Mountains, sixty miles away. We had wool and needles to knit squares in plain stitch, which, we were told, were for scarves for Our Boys and face washers for The Missions, equally mysterious recipients. Mrs Mooney, the carpenter's wife, was the teacher. Her main theme was the necessity of obedience to God, and she illustrated it with local events to give us a personal frame of reference – ‘There was a wicked man who tried to hurt Mr Mooney so God punished him and a horse kicked him and broke his leg.'

A local German family, the Marks, who had a poultry farm, gave my parents a blue cattle dog called Fipsy. She was a middle-aged overweight dog who walked as if her feet hurt, always panting, always cheerful, the tip of her lowered tail always wagging. One morning she couldn't get up. When we tried to stand her up, her legs collapsed under her. Everyone had advice. It's a tick, a poison bait, a snake, a kick from a horse – whatever it is, she'll only get worse. No point calling the vet, he'll tell you the same thing and charge you for it. Only thing to do is put her out of her misery. No two ways about it. All she wants is a knock on the head with the back of an axe – got one down the shed, have you? For six weeks we fed her and changed the sacks under her. One night we were woken by urgent barking. We went to the shed and found Fipsy standing up, barking with joyful excitement. She could walk normally.

On weekdays a loose group of children trailed up the road. Geoffrey and Amy Fleming from the last house on the high side picked up Errol Scanlen opposite, then Arthur Davis, then Elaine Stone and then me. I was not picked up, like the others, by a process of natural adhesion but officially handed over. The children turned towards my mother, faces glowing with zealous helpfulness and the pride of responsibility. Once the convoy moved on, picking up Fay and Bruce Wilson and then straggling the half-mile to school, this glow faded and I felt at best an oddity but more often a monstrosity. This was not because of any particular unkindness, simply from a throbbing sense of being ineradicably different, and not sufficiently in command of that difference to inhabit it as an alternative position. Walking to school together was just What You Did, No Two Ways About It, without affinity or alternative, and the interactions within the group were as random as the rolling of marbles in a box, and as impossible to master. We wandered along, scuffing up dust, throwing stones at telegraph poles, pulling up sourgrass stems to suck, with occasional eruptions of ‘Oowah! I'm gunna tell on you!' or ‘He's your boyfren!' if a girl happened to stray within a certain radius of a boy. Occasionally we drifted to a halt at a ruined straw castle of golden manure left by the milkman's horse two hours earlier, and watched with appalled admiration as one of the boys accepted the dare to eat a piece.

There was no school uniform. We wore clothes that were too big or too small, depending on the stage of growing into or out of them that you were at, faded but starched and ironed to the texture of aluminium. Down to my scabbed knees I looked like the other children, but my feet belonged in a different world. My parents, so adaptable on major issues, on minor ones retained European convictions not open to modification. One was that shoes had to be made of leather so that your feet could breathe. Leather was unknown in Oratava Avenue as a material for children's wear, being reserved for work boots and blacksmiths' aprons. My shoes were stiff and slippery and noisy, the sign and instrument of a footfall that could never merge with that of the others. And on rainy days, when the others took off their sandshoes and wedged them in their armpits to keep them dry, I dragged carthorse hooves of leather shoes encased in galoshes.

West Pennant Hills Primary School was a small L-shaped brick building painted ochre. The headmaster's house joined onto the back of the school, and on Friday afternoons we were allowed into his garden to pick mulberry leaves for our silkworms. Behind the school was a flagpole and a bell post. The school day started at nine o'clock, when Mr Johnson came out and rang the bell. We formed two lines, one of girls and one of boys, and watched while the union jack moved jerkily up the pole. Once the flag was up we started swinging our arms and, when the momentum reached us, raising our knees to march into school, singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers'.

There were two schoolrooms. Mr Johnson taught fourth, fifth and sixth class in one room and Miss Pollard taught first, second and third in the other. The classes were separated into rows of double desks, with seats and lids of heavy dark wood. The teacher's desk was on a low platform and had a huge pencil sharpener crouched on one side. The room was painted brown to shoulder height and then lettuce-green, and there were three beautiful high windows, each divided into twelve panes, which let in slants of high, white light in which you could see the slow circling and drifting of chalk dust.

Miss Pollard was serious, kind, strict and fair. She made you feel that it was important, and possible, to learn. While you were in the classroom it was unimaginable that you could be thinking of anything but the task she set you. While one class had a lesson the other two rows practised what they had just been taught – reading, writing, arithmetic. We did sums and learned tables, not only of numbers but rods, poles and perches and pecks and bushels, quantities as remote as Latin declensions. We copied the exquisite letters Miss Pollard wrote on the blackboard. Her letters sloped slightly to the right, the upstrokes fragile and lacily transparent, the downstrokes creamily white. To know letters and be able to join some to make a word which was in your head and would be recognised by anyone who saw it seemed an amazing and mysterious achievement. Once Miss Pollard asked if anyone knew a poem. I said I did, having made one up about a mouse who lived in a house and ate cheese and sometimes peas. After I had recited a couple of lines Miss Pollard asked me if I had written it myself and told me to sit down. I was mortified and mystified – what difference did it make, and how could she possibly tell?

Thorby's Grocery, at Thompson's Corner, was the largest building in West Pennant Hills and the centre of everything that happened. It was on a crest from which you could look over the whole countryside as far as the hump of the Harbour Bridge. The shop window had pyramids of jam tins with glossy fruit on the labels, which we cut out and pasted on the brown paper covers of our exercise books, and jars of Bushell's chicory essence and stacks of Velvet soap and diagonal rows of metal fruitfly sprayguns and soap dispensers, little wire-netting cages on handles into which you put leftover scraps of soap to shake to a lather in the washing-up water. Inside there was a wide dark wooden counter, and behind it dark wooden shelves and pigeonholes right to the dark wooden ceiling. It was shadowy, the light seeming to hover around the edges of things rather than to reveal them clearly, and this dimness corresponded to a pervading smell in which the earth crusted potatoes in a hessian sack, the crumbly round of cheese on the counter, the cut beaded surface of a pumpkin blended. On the right was the Post Office counter with a portrait of King George VI in plain khaki uniform, and next to it was the lolly counter, with big jars of rainbow balls and pink musk sticks and beautiful boiled lollies glowing like jewels. (Actually, I had never seen jewels and would have been more likely, when I did see them, to think they glowed like boiled lollies.) Food was rationed, and for every purchase a row of coupons was deftly snipped from the ration booklet. Hardly anything came in packets. Things were scooped from sacks and deep drawers with a metal scoop, and Mrs Thorby, head tilted back a little to see over the top of her glasses, would delicately shake the final ounce of sugar or rice or split peas into the brown paper bag on the scales. The meticulous weighing, the accurate cutting of the coupons, the whole sense of a presiding propriety in the person of Mrs Thorby, gave the business of shopping a sense of admission to a world of self-respecting appropriateness. ‘I'd like a nice piece of pumpkin, please, Mrs Thorby,' was all you needed to say to get exactly the right amount.

The aim of my life was to be like everybody else in Oratava Avenue, an aim I was ill-equipped to achieve. In my head there was a constant tumult of excitement, apprehension, joy, hatred, devotion, misery, fury, guilt and gratitude. As far as I could see, nobody in Oratava Avenue felt any of these things. Any reference to personal feelings was sealed off by phrases like, ‘I wouldn't like to say.' ‘Least said, soonest mended.' The most personal expression of strong emotion you were likely to encounter was, ‘It's not the heat I mind, it's the humidity.' Interaction with other children took place on the vertiginous rim between inclusion and exclusion. I watched constantly for signs to show what was meant, like a deaf person lip-reading.

When you start remembering and recounting, all the memories stitch together in uniform distinct little shapes, like quilting pieces cut out of the different fabrics of those days and weeks and years, and given definition and coherence which were totally lacking in the experience itself. It is hard to remember the unpatterned fabric of recurrent days. The waking to a dark morning with rain trampling on the corrugated iron roof and the knowledge that, beyond wish or comfort, no two ways about it, was the necessity of feeding the fowls, crouching in the rain to cut green-feed for the afternoon with a sickle that scrunched on little particles of mud. The sensed threats and disasters, printed in newspapers flapped shut and trailing in sentences suspended when I came in. The smell of the kerosene heater and the pattern of round lights it made on the ceiling. The smell of linseed oil, painted on the horses' hooves and on the perches the fowls slept on, heads under wings, stirring murmuringly when we went down with the kerosene lantern to lock the shed for the night.

I don't remember the everyday things, things that happened every day for years and years and years. When I look back, I seem to inhabit these rooms and paddocks and streets like the figure of a stranger which appears in a photograph you take of a place that means something to you, an anonymous human presence that fixes the scale of the surroundings but is not related to your experience of them. The spaces that were mine, that enclosed my sense of my life, were like crevices and burrows in real space – tunnels through the dry paspalum in the paddocks or the stacked bran bags in the feed shed.

Under the house there was an armchair in olive scroll patterned brocade. I remembered it from our house in Vienna, where I never sat in it except on someone's knee. Now it stood behind one of the uneven brick pillars under the back of the house, where the earth had been dug away and a small area roughly cemented to store boxes of books, leather suitcases, a canvas-covered cabin trunk with a sticker saying Napoli, and the chair. I could wedge myself down between the armrests so that I couldn't be seen. Sometimes I just sat there, almost choking with the jubilation of being invisible.

In one of the boxes I found bundles of a nineteenth-century children's magazine called
Little Folk,
which had belonged to my great-grandmother. I had started to learn to ‘read' German before we left Austria, in a book with big capital letters and clear explanatory pictures. Good children clustered around Father Christmas. Carefree children skated on thick ice. Happy children ran to find Easter eggs under primroses. I knew the position of each word by heart, and could navigate the page like a blind person in a familiar room. I couldn't read
Little Folk
at all. Instead of the coherent smooth outline enclosing clear spaces of colour and meaning there were black and white illustrations in nervous fine lines, full of crosshatching and ambiguity. An elegant lady stood stiffly, looking down at a small boy. Why were they there? Was she angry? Was he good? I would look ferociously at the words for a clue. It seemed outrageous that there might be something happening in the words that was not contained in the pictures, that it might be necessary to leave the sunlit clearing and go down those overgrown paths of letters. For weeks they led nowhere There were recognisable ‘ands' and ‘buts', ‘boys' and ‘dogs', but the real clues were hidden in unsayable clumps of letters – m-i-s-c-h-i-e-v-o-u-s, s-t-a-u-n-c-h-l-y, h-e-a-r-t-h-r-u-g. I remember the first time I tracked down a meaning through the letters and really read a word – it was ‘galloped'. There was a sense of amazed recognition, such as you might have in a strange country meeting someone from your own town. It seemed an incredible coincidence to find a word that was familiar out here in the foreign land of print.

Reading brought an inkling of what people might really be like, in a way that learning to speak English had not done. Not that the world of
Little Folk
was any closer to life in Oratava Avenue than my own Austrian background. These children were curly-haired dimpled moppets who toasted crumpets in front of nursery fires. The big thing was that reading took you behind this unfamiliar facade to feelings and thoughts which, amazingly, were familiar. ‘Dora hoped the Vicar hadn't heard her remark!' ‘Tim did not wish his father to see his disappointment.' ‘Marjorie could feel her heart thumping so loudly she was afraid Constable Perkins would hear it!' ‘Peggy felt very alone when the door closed behind the housekeeper.' The thoughts were totally ordinary; it was the fact that people might be thinking things they did not say that came as a revelation. Learning to read made me able to imagine myself in English.

Oratava Avenue is no longer a dead end. Developers have opened new ‘estates' with networks of Closes, Mews and Circuits, and roads run through to freeways and transport corridors. The only reminder of the bellbirds is a metal street sign, ‘Bellbird Close'. You can drive into the forestry reserve, which is looped by one-way roads with speed humps leading to a nursery selling spindly ‘natives' in plastic tubes. There are Sensory Trails with annotated specimens of fragrant, shapely or otherwise remarkable flora, and a cafe selling lattes and wraps.