Mug Shots (13 page)

Reading goes down well

Once one becomes well enough known as a writer, the art or craft can be given up and one can coast along merely being one. The non-writing life began for me when in March 1972 I did a reading and speaking tour of the New England Tableland. Some kind of reputation must have preceded me, because I was carefully chaperoned by a polite but firm man with a German name from the University of New England. Whenever I appeared to be enjoying myself mingling with audiences after the readings, he would gently suggest last drinks and escort me to my motel.

If my performances could generally be described as successful, in Glen Innes I was a sensation. On a warm evening in a church hall, my chaperone told the dutiful audience who I was and what I intended to speak about—the writing of comedy. The moment I opened my mouth in order to do so, a large sub-tropical insect flew into it, and they got a practical demonstration instead. Unable to speak, I mimed a need for water and gulped some down, sending the insect plunging down my oesophagus like a barrel going over Niagara Falls. It proved easier than expected to croak about the subject with something paddling around in my stomach, because the audience were already in fits.

I have also taken creative writing classes. ‘Workshops get things moving,' wrote one enthusiast in a writers' magazine, ‘unblocking something like a gentle laxative, releasing that inner demon that needs to get out.'

I have coaxed that inner demon out of aspirants, only to sometimes have a lot of trouble coaxing it back in again.
I have
listened to participants reading out their efforts and have strained for compliments, worrying that I was falsely raising their hopes. If you're at a workshop to enjoy yourself, stretch your imagination and discuss things that Australians don't normally talk about, that's fine. But real writers don't go to them. Real writers know they have a lot to learn, and that they can only learn it on their own.

There were compensations. Once, when I was reading a passage from D.H. Lawrence's
The Rainbow
to a group at a summer school in Toowoomba, I noticed one woman in tears. The passage described the death of Ursula's father, Tom Brangwen, by drowning. (‘He fought in a black horror of suffocation, fighting, wrestling, but always borne down, borne inevitably down. Still he wrestled and fought to get himself free, in the unutterable struggle of suffocation, but he always fell again deeper.')

The woman was elderly, and came from the Queensland country town of Chinchilla, where she'd had a hard farming life. She asked me later how to get hold of the book, and I directed her to the college bookshop. The next morning she told me she'd stayed up most of the night reading it, and—in tears again—how sorry she was she'd come to the experience so late.

Inspired, she then wrote stories of her early farming life, stories so simple and moving that instead of the usual sympathetic murmuring that followed a reading, there was total silence. Techniques of writing can be taught, but nothing will teach him or her how to dream. This lady knew, exactly.

Around this time, the Department of Adult Education at the University of Adelaide organised a Young Writers' Workshop, with the poet R.A. Simpson, the novelist Peter Mathers, and me. It was held in an old mansion in the fishing port of Goolwa, close to where the Murray runs into the sea.

In one corner were the rebels, led by John Forbes, who composed his poetry, and his truculent questions, enveloped in a fine mist of dope, and regarded the tutors with amused condescension through rimless glasses. The tutors preferred alcohol, and drank every night at the Goolwa pub, and then celebrated the workshop's end by touring McLaren Vale vineyard in Peter's car. Inflamed by a wine tasting at the last one on our itinerary, he drove at full speed at a huge mound of grape mulch, which exploded all round us. ‘Grapeshot!' he roared.

This was unwise preparation for the Adelaide Writers' Week that followed. I had a college room at the university and Peter did not, so he moved in with me. Five minutes after the light was turned out he started snoring, and continued for most of the night. The next night, around one o'clock in the morning, I woke him up with a shout. Disturbed in the middle of some complex dream, he ran round the room crouched over and mumbling, then went back to his camp stretcher and continued snoring where he'd left off.

Since this was the day of my talk, I disturbed him again, apologised, and evicted him to the back of his station wagon. I've been in situations where the audience was fighting sleep while the speaker remained alert, but I had the opposite—a wide awake audience and a speaker who'd had two nights without sleep. ‘You were good on Balzac,' the publisher Bob Sessions said to me afterwards. ‘Pity you didn't pronounce his name correctly.'

Later in the week came a second ordeal. Peter and I were relaxing in a restaurant when we were told that the great American novelist John Updike's keynote address was to be broadcast live on Radio National, and four writers were needed on stage to ask questions and act as literary potted palms.

An hour-and-a-half later we were sitting facing a couple of thousand people in Festival Hall. I can remember nothing of Updike's eloquent address, but every detail of what happened before and after. Updike, understandably nervous, asked me where the men's room was, and I like to think my directions were lucid and pointed, even witty. Later, when he'd finished, the chairman turned to the uncomfortable quartet: ‘And now, questions.' First, writer A. ‘No. No questions.' Writer B. ‘None.' Writer C? ‘No, nothing to ask.' I didn't have any either, but this collective incapacity to question was being broadcast all over the country. So I manufactured one, asking him whether he thought magic realism (it was new then) would be the fictional way to go. Updike seized on it with relief, and Australia's honour was saved.

Three o'clock in the morning

Peter Mathers himself was a magic realist before the phrase was invented. His novel
Trap
, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1967, was one of the first to move an Aboriginal character (Jack Trap) in from the fringes of Australian fiction. His second,
The Wort Papers
, is a wildly inventive account of two generations of the Wort family, with scenes of comic genius.

When we moved to Sydney Peter was a regular visitor. He liked to drink, smoke and tell stories. Some were on the tall side, but it didn't matter. His tales were not so much highly coloured as imbued with the fantastic—they took on an imaginative truth.

One night, when he called in after an outback adventure, he claimed that in western Queensland he'd seen ‘an appetite of wild pigs' crossing the road. He got out of his car, gave chase, and brought down a young one with a tackle, only to be menaced by a large sow. A bottle or two later he returned from our bathroom claiming to have seen a cockroach the size of a small dog, and wondered whether it would rear up and bark at him. Later still—Peter was a three o'clock in the morning man—there was music and dancing, and two of our sons came up to complain that plaster dust was raining down on them ‘like confetti'.

Sometimes, when we were in Melbourne, we'd visit him. He lived in what seemed a conventional brick villa on Richmond Hill, under a huge Pelaco sign. Once the door was opened, the contrast was total. Visitors had to twist and turn down a dark hallway whose walls were covered in paintings to reach the living room, where towers of books rose from every flat surface.

His kitchen was a vitreous museum of preserves, bottled from his vegetable garden, which was as densely packed as the house. One night—at three o'clock in the morning—he led us out to it. With the ice palaces of the city shining in the distance, he dug up a copy of
The Wort Papers
and extolled its virtues as compost. It had been remaindered, and he'd bought up a bulk lot and buried them.

In the 1980s Peter wrote plays, and in the nineties his vagabond imagination turned to sculpture, and he created a series of demonic figures from bread and plaster. Some had to be redone before being exhibited because weevils had got into them. These edible artifacts sold well, and one of them stares at me as I write. And in it I can see the wildness of Peter, who went sixteen rounds with pancreatic cancer in 2004, until finally he couldn't get up again.

Sooty boiler

In the early seventies, Melbourne (at least to Melburnians) was considered Australia's cultural capital, and though we felt an intrinsic part of it, we decided that was precisely the time to leave; and in February 1976, after an enormous farewell party, we did, and headed for London.

Our good friend Clare Forbes, at the time married to Cameron Forbes, the
Age
London correspondent, had been hunting for weeks for a house where the rent was modest but the space large enough to accommodate five children (one would briefly stay behind). The task seemed impossible. Then she hit upon the idea of making me a professor. ‘Professor Oakley? By all means, madam. I'm sure we can find something.' They found a big house in profoundly unfashionable Peckham, opposite Peckham Rye, where William Blake claimed to have had a vision of angels.

We arrived at Heathrow at eight o'clock in the morning, twenty-eight hours out from Melbourne, where, our house sold, furniture farmed out to friends (piano and roll-top desk never to be seen again) we'd slept the last night in bare rooms on mattresses, in transit already. As we approached Heathrow customs, one of our sons put on his white mummy mask and peered up at an unamused official through his one unbandaged eye.

Peckham Rye has a peculiarly English grottiness—rows of blackened tenements curving away into
nineteenth-century
mists. Our place is a genteel island, with central heating and Liberty wallpaper. When we turn the heating on, there is a pungent smell of gas. I ring the company, a man comes, lies prone, then makes an announcement. ‘You've got a bad case of sooty boiler. I'm declaring this a Dangerous Appliance.'

Three days after our arrival it snowed. First a random sawdust, thickening to torn Kleenex. It snowed on the cars and the common, on the three-wheeled milk van, the bingo club, the broken glass along the top of the primary school wall. Our kids threw it, kneaded it into shapes and brought it inside to show us. It was like freezing bakers' dough, and made the bones of my fingers ache. I had the chill Emily Bronte feel of England in my hand.

‘Excuse me,' said Mr Tate, headmaster of Peckham Rye primary, ‘is there something wrong with your boy?' He asks me this in a stuffy overheated corridor, where I sit squeezed into a tiny desk outside Kieran's classroom. I explain that he is new to the country and to the school (his first), is having trouble adjusting, and won't let me out of his sight.

We're all having trouble adjusting—to numbing cold, funny little packets of tea, butter, biscuits and soups, strange meat cuts at the butcher's (neck of cow), vests instead of singlets, plimsolls instead of sandshoes, iced lollies instead of icy poles, American whisks instead of straw brooms, and rats under the stairs.

One morning, Carmel runs screaming from the downstairs lavatory. There's a rat swimming in the bowl. Eugene, who's ten and good with animals, extracts it expertly with fire tongs. I take it over to the common in a plastic bag, release it, and as it attempts a sluggish escape, stone it to death. The nearby bus queue watch astonished. The borough of Southwark has
a ratcatcher
, who introduces himself at the door. He smells powerfully of alcohol. Will he just breathe into their nests? He is friendly, calls me squire, and sprinkles blue powder at ­strategic points.

When summer comes there's a heatwave, with the temperatures reaching an unprecedented ninety-five degrees. On my way into town to meet the writer and academic Ian Turner, the bus overheats and we break down. As we wait for a relief bus, an Alf Garnett voice yells from down the back: ‘We're stuck here while those buggers in Westminster sit on their arses and do nothing about it.' There are cars stranded in the streets, and people lying stripped to the waist in parks, exposing pale English flesh. London suffers a collective heatstroke.

Short theatrical interval

Some time later I see Ian again, for lunch at the BBC cafe. He's with the actor John Bluthal, who's in what he calls his meet-the-manager suit, a brown pinstripe. Bluthal seems to know everyone. ‘See that guy over there? James Joyce's nephew. Hi Val!' he shouts. ‘That was Val Doonican.' He tells us of the meanness of the great Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer when he was behind him in the queue. ‘The rice puddink is 35p? Forget it.'

Bluthal wants to know about the Pram Factory. ‘These people,' he says, after I describe it to him, ‘have got the wrong idea. Theatre is all about top billing and private dressing rooms. To hell with numb bums and bad coffee.' He has stories about the early days of Australian radio, when there were often no rehearsals—you were just given the script and did it live, being careful not to read out the stage directions. ‘As I did once,' he says, then roars into an imaginary mike: ‘I'll kill you phonerings!'

Bluthal invites me to a rehearsal of a play he's in at the Haymarket, so I can learn how things are done here. I sit in the cavernous, empty theatre and watch Trevor Howard wander the stage as if lost, fluffing lines and missing cues. He's drunk. When they pause for a break, the director comes down to me and asks if I'd mind leaving.

‘You really shouldn't be here,' he says.

‘Couldn't agree more,' I manage, making for the exit.

Three plays are written while in London:
The Ship's Whistle
, about the preposterous literary personage Richard Orion Horne, friend of Charles Dickens, who migrated to Australia (failed at the Pram Factory, successful in Adelaide);
Buck Privates
(overseas success if you count New Zealand); and
Scanlan
, a monologue that Max Gillies turned into a hit. But in the ­meantime, a three-year literary grant wasn't enough to support a large family renting a large house. We were dependent on interest from the invested proceeds of our Richmond house sale.