Owls Do Cry (2 page)

Janet Frame once likened herself to a ‘princess, shepherdess, waitress, putter-on of raincoat buttons in a factory…who chose rags from an old bundle, stitched them together, waved a wand, and found herself with a completely new dress…I do collect bundles of rags And I like to sew them together: I suppose I must accept the fact that I have no wand.’ (Frank Sargeson to C. K. Stead, quoted by Michael King in his biography,
Wrestling with the Angel
, 2000.) Years earlier, in 1948, she had written to her counsellor John Money ‘I have got to learn that I am alone for ever…I will never have anybody close to me. The rest of the world is miles away over desert and snowfield and sea. Nobody knows how far away I am from everything. Looking at living, for me, is like looking mentally through the wrong end of opera glasses.’ (in M. King,
Wrestling with the Angel
.) These two quotations give a fine sense of her narrative methods and of the determination and
courage with which she held herself together in the face of extreme doubt and suffering. The painful portrayal of Daphne’s fragility and fear in the asylum where she ‘lived alone for many years…in days unshining and nights without darkness’ is drawn from Frame’s own experiences at Seacliff and Avondale, but she proved herself stronger than Daphne in the dead room, and there is tenderness and affection as well as horror in her descriptions of her fellow inmates.

Owls Do Cry
proved to be one of the first works of fiction to deal with life in a mental institution. Virginia Woolf was familiar with this territory and had attempted to portray schizophrenia in
Mrs Dalloway
(1925); Ken Kesey’s first novel,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(1962), is set in the mental ward of a hospital; and Sylvia Plath gives an account of electro-convulsive therapy in
The Bell Jar
(1963). Since then, many writers have entered this world, but Frame’s first novel, of 1957, remains a landmark, a classic. Against the odds, she emerged to tell her story, and she told it unforgettably.

Owls Do Cry

The day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem, drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe. And the place grows bean flower, pea-green lush of grass, swarm of insects dizzily hitting the high spots; dunny rosette creeping covering shawl cream in a knitted cosy of roses; ah the tipsy wee small hours of insects that jive upon the crippled grass blades and the face of the first flower alive; and I planted carrot seed that never came up, for the wind breathed a blow-away spell; the wind is warm, was warm, and the days above burst unheeded, explode their atoms of snow-black beanflower and white rose, mock the last intuitive who-dunnit, who-dunnit of the summer thrush; and it said to plant the carrot seeds lightly under a cotton-thin blanket of earth, yet they sank too deep or dried up, and the blackfly took hold among the beans that flowered later in midnight velvet, and I thought I might
have known, which is the thought before the stealth of fate; lush of summer, yes, but what use the green river, the gold place, if time and death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest from taking underground the green all-willowed and white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of song in pepper-pot breast of thrush?

And now, voluminous, dyspeptic Santa Claus, there is a mound of snow at the door of Christmas that no midsummer day or human sun will dispel, and it is that way, and seems that way, to fit in; and now do we buy a Christmas card and write or sign the obituary of string with sticky tape; wrap our life in cellophane with a handkerchief and card; buy a caterpillar that is wound up and crawls with rippling back across our day and night. Sings Daphne from the dead room
.

Their grandmother was a negress who had long ago been a slave with her long black dress and fuzzy hair and oily skin, in the Southern States of America. She sang often of her home,

—Carry me back to ole Virginny,

there’s where the cotton an’ the corn an’ taters grow,

there’s where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,

there’s where my old darkie’s heart am long to go.

And now that she is dead she will have returned to Virginny and be walking through the cotton fields, with the sun shining on her frizzy hair that is like a ball of black cotton to be danced on or thistledown that birds take for living in if their world be black.

No, you must eat your cabbage, for colanders hang on the wall that cabbage may be pressed through them, that the
green water may run out; though if you have diabetes you must drink the green water or you may, like your grandmother, lose two legs, and have new wooden ones made, that you keep behind the door, in the dark, and that have no knees to bend, no toes to wiggle
.

Colander?

Colander?

Calendar?

Calendars
hang upon the wall and have bills pinned to them from the grocer and milkman and butcher; and somehow they contrive in hanging there to collect all the days and months of the year, numbering them, like convicts, in case they escape.

Which they do, always.

—Time flies, said Mrs Withers. And it is calendar, not colander, you silly children. Francie, Toby, Daphne, Chicks, drink up your cabbage water or you shall lose two legs, like your grandmother.

—I don’t wanner go to school, Toby said. I wanner go to the rubbish dump an’ find things.

Francie, Toby, Daphne, not always Chicks because she was too small and dawdled, found their treasure at the rubbish dump, amongst the paper and steel and iron and rust and old boots and everything that the people of the town had cast out as of no use and not worth anything any more. The place was like a shell with gold tickle of toi-toi around its edges and grass and weeds growing in green fur over the mounds of rubbish; and from where the children sat, snuggled in the hollow of refuse, warmed sometimes by the trickling streams of fires that the council men had lit in order to hasten the death of their material cast-offs, they could see the sky passing in blue or grey ripples, and hear in the wind, the heavy fir tree that leaned over the hollow, rocking, and talking to itself saying firr - firr - firr, its own
name, loosening its needles of rust that slid into the yellow and green burning shell to prick tiny stitches across the living and lived-in wound where the children found, first and happiest, fairy tales.

And a small green eaten book by Ernest Dowson who said, in confidence, to Cynara,

—Last night ah yesternight betwixt her lips and mine.

Which was love, and suitable only for Francie who had
come
, that was the word their mother used when she whispered about it in the bathroom, and not for Daphne who didn’t know what it felt like or how she could wear them without they showed and people said, Look.

—You will drop blood when you walk, Francie said.

And not knowing how to answer her, Daphne said

—Rapunsel, Rapunsel, let down your hair;

quoting from the prince who climbed the gold silk rope to the top of the tower, it was all in the fairy tales they found at the rubbish dump. The book smelt, and it too had been eaten by worms which still lived in its yellow pages, and it was dusted over with ashes, and it had been thrown away because it did not any more speak the right language, and the people could not read it because they could not find the way to its world. It had curly writing on the cover, saying, The Brothers Grimm. It spoke of Cinderella and her ugly sisters with their cut-off heel and toe and the blood flowing black, the snow colour of every bean flower.

—But I don’t wanner go to school, Toby said. I wanner go to the rubbish dump an’ find another book.

The lady doctor was coming to school that day. She wore a grey costume and because she was the school nurse
and fierce, they had her mixed in their mind with the grey nurse shark that is deadly, creeping behind you when you swim, to swallow you in one gulp; though not found in these waters, only, I believe, near Sydney.

Every time she came the nurse took the dirty children to look at them and whisper at them through a roll of cardboard. Thirty-two, fifty-five, sixty-one, she would whisper; and the children, if they were the dirty ones and being examined, would have to echo, Thirty-two, fifty-five, sixty-one; and if they echoed correctly it meant they could hear and would not have their ears poked at and operated on. And the lady doctor would then take a stick like an ice cream spoon and very very gently part the strands of the pupil’s hair, to look through it and find if it were inhabited. She would look at their clothes, too, and see how often they had been washed, and if they were hand-me-downs or new. And she would hold a square of cardboard in front of the dirty children and point to the letters printed on it, and expect to be told the alphabet, muddled up, and them to see small print, even smaller than the middle column of a page of the Bible where it says See Tim. Rom. Deut., and other mysterious words.

Toby did not like this. He feared it all. He had seen on a page of the doctor’s book that his mother kept on top of the wardrobe, a picture of the animals with many legs that walk through people’s hair; and the red spots that come on people’s faces, and the way legs turn crooked. Toby was a sick boy, himself, who took medicine, a teaspoon in water after each meal until his mother found out what the writing on the prescription meant. And then,

—Bromide, she said. Drugs.

So whenever the bottle of medicine came, in twos or repeats, Toby’s mother said

—No child of mine, no child of mine will drink this filth; and she broke the seal and popped off the cork and poured away the thick mulatto fluid.

Toby did not get better. He went to school and sat in the back row and put his head on one side, trying to know what was written on the blackboard and what the master, Andy Reid, was saying in the history lesson.

There had been Maori Wars and the white people had taken a block of land —how big is a block of land, Toby wondered. They built houses with blocks and walked in the morning around the block, touching every second fence and plucking every third marigold. But this block of land in history, they say it held a forest of kauri that only a storm could walk round in a minute and pull out by the hair, every second and third tree.

—The government was good then, Andy would say.

And sometimes he said —The government was bad.

And he talked of peace and war that never seemed to happen at the same time in history. There were, say, six years of peace when Maoris and white people spent every day and night of the years smiling at each other and rubbing noses and exchanging greenstone and kumaras and kauri and marrying and going for picnics and boiling the billy and drinking tea and eating fish and laughing and no one was ever angry.

Until the six years finished. On New Year’s Eve, perhaps, with the white and brown people standing outside the New Year, the same way people stand outside theatres
and cricket grounds waiting for the films or the shield match to begin; and the mothers warning their children, Remember you must not laugh or play or swap anything. We are killing for six years. It is War.

Toby could not imagine years of war, but Andy Reid told everyone and Andy Reid knew. He said also that there had been a Hundred Years’ War when some people’s faces must have been born angry and died angry without any smiling in between.

But history was hard to understand with its kings good and bad and their wigs and their white fitting pants for dancing a minuet; and then the two princes sitting in the dreadful tower and listening to the water dripping from an underground cavern on to their faces and down their necks and on their heads poked like flowers from their pretty petal ruffs. Toby felt sorry for them but he could not understand history and wanting to get more land and gold; nor, sometimes, could he understand what the master said, or read the words on the blackboard. And that is why he wanted not to go to school when the lady doctor came.

He was often sick and had to stay away from school. When he was sick his hand shook as if it felt cold and then a dark cloak would be thrown over his head by Jesus or God, and he would struggle inside the cloak, pushing at the velvet folds, waving his arms and legs in the air till the sun took pity, descending in a dazzling crane of light to haul, but, alas, preserve, where in all the sky, Toby wondered, this cloak of stifling recurring dream. And he would open his eyes and see his mother beside him, her big tummy and the map of wet and flour on her sack apron.

He would cry then.

The velvet cloak came over and over again so that whenever Toby moved his hand or arm too quickly, his mother would rush to his side and ask,

—Are you all right, Toby?

Or at school Andy Reid would say,

—You can go and lie down, Toby Withers, and you may be able to stop it.

—It?

Did Andy Reid understand what happened, and how the cloak came with its forest of a million folds? Did he know why some people are given a private and lonely night, with a room of its own but no window that the stars, called by the tattered woman at the show
Zodiac
, may look through?

So Toby did not go to school that day when the lady doctor came. He said goodbye to his mother and father and said,

—Yes, I’ve got a hanky and I’ll tell them if it comes on; and he ran on ahead of Daphne. Daphne was glad, for it made her afraid to be close to him in case it happened and she was alone watching him, and he would die or choke out of the terrible mulberry colour of his face and his hands twitching and his eyes rolled back, and white, like the eye, closed, of a dead fowl that Daphne had seen by the fowl house. And yet, standing there on the wet side of the street, with Toby gone ahead, and the African Thorn hedge, hung with berries like penny oranges, leaning over to jag her legs if she walked too close, she felt alone, and wanted to catch up; so she caught up and went with Toby to the rubbish dump to find things. They
found a bicycle wheel and a motor tyre. Inside the motor tyre was a stack of ledgers full of neat writing and figures written carefully in a beautiful blue ink; and each page seemed, to the children, like something out of a museum, to be kept under a glass case, like the handwriting of a pioneer or governor.