Roundabout at Bangalow (20 page)

The flame

How do young people meet one another at this time? The only entertainments are the pictures and the dances; on almost every night of the week there is dancing somewhere, in either of the two dance halls in Grafton, in the School of Arts at South Grafton, or in one of the country halls. The dances cater for a certain section of the community. Methodists have a horror of dancing; it's said they won't make love standing up in case someone sees them and thinks they're dancing. Baptists wouldn't dream of dancing but Anglicans and Presbyterians do, while Catholics often hold their own dances. They keep it, as it were, in the family. The sons and daughters of the professional classes don't go to
public
dances, for there they might meet and form an attachment with someone unsuitable. Married couples don't usually go to dances; what would be the point? Dances are marriage marts. All the good fun people
do
go and the dances are well run and highly respectable, at least inside the hall.

The Criterion dance hall is my favourite, and is as much a reminder of old-time Grafton as the photographer's shop in Fitzroy Street or the Marble Bar cafe. The Criterion dates back to the turn of the century, to the time when girls put up their hair at sixteen and waltzed in decorous long skirts, and the decor is of that era — overblown Victorian. The benches around the sides are padded with floral cretonne that reaches to the floor. From the ceiling hang beaded lampshades, as if in a boudoir, festooned with extravagant deep pink crepe-paper roses. The honey-coloured dance-floor is waxed to a suicidal finish and above it, on a balcony, the orchestra plays. The pianist and the drummer are young women, two sisters, attended always by their mother, there to keep the men away. They don't dance or mix with the rest of us, for theirs is a higher calling.

There are unwritten rules at the Criterion, as at other dance halls of the time. Girls sit on the cretonne benches inside while the men and boys gather on the footpath outside and in the vestibule, waiting for the music to strike up. The Master of Ceremonies and the doormen are in shirtsleeves and waistcoats with black bow ties. There are no bouncers; it would never, ever be necessary here. There is officially no drinking but a bottle of port wine, known as
Red Ned,
can be hidden in the roots or branches of the camphor laurel trees outside and sampled between dances. There are no connoisseurs here, all wine is
plonk,
valued for alcohol level alone. These are the days of six o'clock closing and drinking in a public place is strictly illegal. The police sergeant prowls around sniffing out footpath drinkers, and there is many a good-humoured chase through backyards and over fences to elude him with the precious bottle.

A flourish from the saxophonist summons all to the dance floor and there is a rush of men crossing and crisscrossing the floor to invite a girl to dance. Girls sit expectantly on the benches along the walls, waiting in an agony of anxiety, but trying to hide it. The most popular are chosen first and there are always one or two conspicuous wallflowers. These attempt nonchalance as they stroll towards the dressing room and hide there, freshening up their lipstick for the next game of chance or choice. On either side of the far end of the hall are baroque mirrors, six feet high and oval in shape, their frames heavily embossed with gilt. The dancers approach them self-consciously, for they need to check on the swing of the skirt, whether the petticoat is hanging or not, and whether they are dancing with flair and panache. The most intricate and baroque steps are always performed in front of the mirrors.

Hearts lift and swing with the music, with the joy of sweeping onto the waxed floor in the arms of one of the many expert dancers there, of dancing towards one of the oval mirrors and performing a series of intricate steps in front of it. I prefer old-time dances that show off my circular skirts: the Viennese Waltz, the Pride of Erin, the Schottische and the barn-dance. Many of the dresses, and this often includes my own, have been made in the latest style that very afternoon, the stitches still hot. We are still wearing our Scarlett O'Hara hairdos, swept up at the sides and front with long hair at the back; an army of small-town Scarletts all circling the flame, circling and circling the dance floor at the Criterion hall.

These rituals are not varied even for the wave of returning servicemen. No matter what their experience in the
souks
of Alexandria or Beirut, they must now conform to customs as ritualised as those of the lyrebird or the peacock. An invitation to save the last dance (always a medley) means that the man will walk the girl home, or perhaps take her home on the last bus. Missing the last bus and walking home in the moonlight over the decking of the Grafton bridge is a dangerous practice, likely to be met by a pyjama-clad and furious father who's been biting his fingernails all night. A discreet goodnight kiss is allowed, but never the first time. I wrestle with a young farmer from Ulmarra who is just home from the war and, I hear later, has vowed to take out every new teacher in town. We are sitting on a park bench in the moonlight gazing at the river in front of the Crown Hotel. He's a bit dim and just doesn't understand when I explain, patiently, that if I let him kiss me on this first occasion he won't respect me.

I could have sought a mate in a number of other places, for instance at the socials run by the church youth group, the Fellowship, where young people sing around the piano and play games like Musical Chairs and Postman's Knock, a prim kissing game in which the tongue is firmly restrained. Fellowship socials are not run to bring the young to God, but to ensure that they marry within their own religion. Another source could have been the many young teachers just back from the war, but I don't know anyone who has met a lover at a Teachers Federation meeting. What chemistry determines the choice of a partner? The choices are often arbitrary, perhaps the glimpse of a profile that resembles a screen hero, perhaps the jaunty set of a hat brim, a kind word where none was expected, or a wicked sense of humour; small basis for a lifelong contract. Most choices, including mine, are made for the wrong reasons and it's sheer good luck if they turn out well. But, like my father, I always was lucky.

These are the joyful yet heartbreaking epiphanies of life: the falling in love, the breaking of the bread of life, the immersion into its eternal cycles, the birth of a child. Beside these experiences little else in life matters. Some people fall in love many times, for me it's once only. I'm sitting on one of the tables in the supper room at the South Grafton School of Arts, idly swinging my legs in the interval between dances, when a stranger walks in from the outside and into my life forever. He is tall with dark red hair and distinctive green eyes, too thin from years of chronic malaria but still carrying himself with a certain swagger, and my time of free choice is over, just like that. It's difficult to find a suitable metaphor but, given my family history, a lightning strike will do. The symptoms are easily recognised. The legs turn to water and a sudden encounter, around the bank corner in Prince Street for instance, can bring on a dangerous spasm — the heart flips right over.

What is love? One of Shakespeare's characters says that it's simply
a lust of the blood and a permission of the will,
in short nothing but a wild hormonal urge. Psychologists, on the other hand, would say that I was simply seeking a father figure, falling so suddenly for a man almost ten years older than myself. This ignores the most important factor of all, the allure of the great world beyond my knowledge. Many years later when I study
Othello
I instantly see a parallel. Othello is also just back from the big wars and must explain to the Venetians why Desdemona has fallen so passionately in love with him.
She loved me,
he says,
for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.
The glamour of the outsider, the soldier who has been to faraway places, has seen and done dreadful deeds of war and returns to tell of them, is almost impossible to resist.

This is a very attractive man; he will always be so. He's profoundly and obviously kind. Children will seek him out in a roomful of adults, stray dogs will follow him home and women too if I don't watch it. I soon realise that this is the same soldier who ate my cake so long ago, and didn't follow up his correspondence with a fourteen-year-old. Destiny, it seems, has preserved him for me during those four long years in the desert and the jungle, in and out of military hospitals and, no doubt, the arms of others. Like most Australians he's a great spinner of yarns and he's brought plenty back with him. Both the first and the second AIF, we know, were dedicated tourists and gatherers of souvenirs. They savoured all things strange and foreign and carried home (some say stole) as much as possible. He brings home few souvenirs, notably an intricate and lovely moonstone necklace from Colombo for his mother (stolen from our daughter in Canberra thirty years later), and memories and stories which can't be stolen.

There are stories of the Holy Sepulchre, the Wailing Wall and the King David Hotel in Jerusalem; the
estaminets
in Beirut in which the girls sold exotic liqueurs and sometimes themselves; the snow-clad valleys high in the Syrian mountains where he was shot at by the mysterious Jebel Druse; of visits to the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek, to the tea plantations in the highlands of Ceylon, of larrikin escapades in Colombo and the long and dangerous voyage home through the Indian Ocean on a Dutch ship with no escort, outrunning the Japanese submarines. But there are no stories about New Guinea. These have been blacked out, only to return in nightmares. I don't notice for many years that these glamorous stories are like polished travelogues. They are a façade, something to hide behind. There are depths below, blackness upon blackness, that can't be spoken of and mustn't be allowed up into the light of day.

This has all the elements of a disaster — an older and experienced man, a gullible and romantic eighteen-year-old — and my father is appalled. But he too is won over by the stories; for one reason or another he missed the war and now relives it vicariously. Others warn me against him: my Granny because he is not of
pure British blood
as we are (one of his grandfathers was Swedish); the older teachers because he is too experienced. They remind me that he has been dancing in Princes and Romanos, sophisticated nightclubs in Sydney, and surely won't be interested in me for long. But they are all wrong and by the end of the year it's certain that we'll be married, although my father insists that we wait until I'm twenty (he can refuse his permission until I'm twenty-one). So we wait, not easily, and learn more, much more about each other.

How much of a person can one learn from their dreams, memories, visions and desires? We talk and talk. We walk alone yet together, the starry sky reflected in the river as we sit on the bank or wander by its side. We get to know one another in a way that no-one else has ever known either of us.

He tells me about his mother, a daughter of the great river, who swam and rowed a boat almost before she could walk. She is descended from those highlanders who settled around Maclean in 1852, estranged from everyone but their compatriots by their weird Gaelic tongue and their forbidding religion. Her elder brother was killed on the Somme in the big battles in 1918 and her whole family was still in shock when she married his best friend, just back from the war.

His father was also a casualty of the Great War. He'd been hit in the face by a burst of shrapnel but his inner wounds, those that were hidden, were much more painful. He was also mourning two brothers, both younger than himself and brought up with him in an orphanage. They are both dead in France; one missing at Pozières, one choking on German gas at Péronne just days before the AIF was withdrawn from the war. Together his mother and father cleared a soldier-settler block on Turkey Island in the Clarence River and tried to establish a family of their own. This story, of the three uncles dead in France and the disfigured face of the father, is almost too much to bear.

He was born at the end of 1918, an armistice baby in more ways than one. He and the brothers who followed him were supposed to replace their dead uncles and, one by one, were given the same names. He was named Leslie Francis Walker, after the nineteen-year-old uncle killed at Pozières. He was supposed to bring comfort and peace to his father but how could that ever be possible?

He tells me of his birth; how his father rowed his eighteen-year-old mother ten miles up the Clarence River to Maclean to the home of the midwife. He tells me too of another time some months later when, rowing home alone from Maclean to Turkey Island, her baby laid carefully in the bow of the boat, she lost an oar and was swept away, heading for the mouth of the Clarence on the rip-tide. Struggling with the one oar she wrestled the boat across the tide to the breakwater, climbed out, wrapped the baby in her skirt and sat there alone and wet until dawn. A group of fishermen paused in wonder at the sight of a mother and baby on the cold and deserted breakwater just above the high tide mark. She was only nineteen at this time and thought nothing of it.

He tells me of a vision — not a dream but a vision, he insists on that — when he was too small to talk or tell of it. He was lying wide-eyed at dawn between his sleeping parents when a luminous sphere swam through the window and circled leisurely in the air above the bed. He gazed intently at its radiant glow and the strange hieroglyphics and shadings which covered its surface. Could a child of two have a vision, remember it and tell of it later? This one could.

He walked in the school door for the first time five years later and saw the globe on the teacher's desk. With a shock he realised what his vision was. The world had come to him, visited him at two years old in a crumpled bed in a raw timber house on a soldier-settlement block on Turkey Island. The world had come to him! His sphere was a luminous world swimming in its own firmament. Its hieroglyphics were the continents, oceans, archipelagos, rivers, deserts, mountain ranges of the world. What did this mean? Is he to be a world traveller, a voyager on the face of the earth?