Tirra Lirra by the River (13 page)

‘I’m going back for certain,’ I would say. ‘But I have to wait until I’ve finished this course and can save some money.’

Whenever I met them, the talk was always of who was going and who was staying. The declaration of one man I often repeated later, and the words he used passed into my vocabulary.

‘If you stay more than five years you become a pommiefied Aussie, than which there is no more pitiful creature on God’s
earth. Unless it’s an aussiefied Pom, and that’s how you feel when you try to go back.’

But for some the issues were simpler and more physical. England was a nasty dank little country, they said, where the people were unfriendly, the sky was low, and life was a misery for all but the rich.

Certainly, for me at that time, the air of London seemed mysteriously inimical to friendship. I made casual acquaintances of a couple who lived in the same house, but when I moved to a room on the other side of the canal, a cold attic in Westbourne Terrace Road, I saw them no more. I worked very hard at classes, and again made a few acquaintances in the house. I kept moving from house to house in the same area, first to Warwick Crescent, which I liked because it was on the canal, and then to Warwick Avenue, which I liked because it wasn’t, and then to various other places, but always in that same little part of London. Every time I moved, I made new acquaintances in the house, and stopped seeing the last lot. And either at classes or in the houses, I would find a lesser Lewie.

With him, I would walk in parks, go to pubs, and shop on Saturdays. Of our Saturday shopping we always made a little treat. The Portobello Road was just another market then, and we would buy baskets of cress, tomatoes from the Canary Islands, Australian butter and cheese cheaper than at home, second-hand books, and sometimes, at the stalls past the eel tanks, an old dress buckle, some beads or a belt. On Sundays we usually caught Greenline coaches into the country, but if it were raining, or the east wind blew, I used to stay in bed the whole of Sunday and read the books I had bought in the Portobello Road.

I had conceived a gloomy passion for ancient history, and since one thing leads to another, I soon knew what pantheism was. I wrote to Olive and told her so. In her reply she told me
she was no longer a communist (‘
You were right about that grey coat
’) and that she had met an Austrian doctor of philosophy and was going to live with him in Vienna. I wrote and asked if that would make her simple, and she replied that she thought it very likely.

‘He is very serious. You would laugh at him, or perhaps not. In any case, he has amplified my life as no one else has done. I see now how mechanical my life was, and my writing as well.’

Our correspondence started to peter out about a year later, when she wrote that she had great difficulty in replying to my letters. I am not sure to this day whether that note of helplessness was invoked by her expanding powers, my persistent levity, or by some change in her character or circumstances unimaginable by me. When I remember her shaking her head and saying, ‘Not in my sense of the word good,’ I feel I am close to an answer, but still it evades me, and it is still with a tantalizing sense of mystery that I read the affectionate inscriptions in the novels she has never failed to send me. Those inscriptions, and my few lines of thanks, have been our only correspondence for more than thirty years.

In bed on those cold Sundays I also read what David Snow, the most lasting of my Lewies, called ‘the great big beautiful classics.’ I also found them beautiful. My money ran out long before my course was finished, but by that time I was taking private orders, and although through too much reading and sewing my health suffered and my eyesight deteriorated, I was proud to be keeping myself above the hunger line. I had the curious feeling that this period of hard work and privation had been lying in wait for me for a long time, and to meet it at last, and survive it by my own efforts, gave me intense satisfaction.

Included in this general satisfaction was a particular triumph. Cutting, for which I had so little natural aptitude, had
become my greatest skill. I knew I could never acquire the flexible wrist, the ease and certainty that dazzled me in one of my teachers. I had started too late for that. But my awareness of this handicap made me compensate for it in other ways, so that at the end of my course I was able to get a job in a good small place in Grafton Street.

I wrote to Ida Mayo that it was now simply a matter of saving enough money to set me up on my return. ‘
In about three years,’
I said.

‘Perhaps it will be you who employs me,’
she wrote back.
‘Now wouldn’t that be a turn-up for the books?’

From Grafton Street I moved to one of the big dressmakers. He paid me badly, but I liked working on such celebrated clothes, and I loved the mounting excitement before a showing. Here, at last, I lost interest in my own clothes, and accepted the suit for my uniform. I was thirty-eight. To people who commented on my youthful appearance, I would reply that I was the type that collapses overnight, but I never believed it, not for a moment.

I had lost my distaste for London. The Georgian terraces that had formerly seemed repellently chilly I now saw as formal and peaceful. I never lived in one of them. It was always my luck to find accommodation in houses of a later date, usually Victorian. But these too were spacious and solid. I never once lived in an ill-proportioned room.

When at last I moved out of the little area near the canal where I had shuttled about so much, it was again to a Victorian house. I crossed the Harrow Road to Holland Park, where I found a big room with a kitchen and bath. My liking for London had not affected my deeper attachment to Sydney, and because I meant to return as soon as was practicable, I took the place furnished. But I couldn’t resist buying my own curtains, of soft blue velveteen, and a beautifully faded Persian rug. When
the room next to mine became vacant I made a sudden decision. I rented it and went into business for myself.

All my acquaintances, David Snow in particular, advised me to put up my plate. Brass was the only kind possible. It was expensive, but would serve for my Sydney business as well. I shall never forget my first sight of it after it was put up.

‘I have come a long roundabout way,’ I remarked to David, ‘to find out who I am.’

He was always quick to catch my moods. He put a consoling arm across my shoulders. ‘We should open champagne.’

From the start I had plenty of customers, and even though I worked so slowly (another penalty for my late beginning), and was diffident about charging enough, I was still able to save money as well as spending several short holidays in Normandy or Paris. Here Colin Porteous’s French grammar books showed their profit and loss: I could read the French newspapers, but could not make myself understood by the French people.

On each return to London I would appreciate afresh the solidity and weight of its buildings, interspersed by the massy billows or the complex tracery of its trees. But between me and London, as between me and the people I called my friends (even David Snow) lay the distance created by my intentions: I was going home.

When I spoke of David as ‘one of my Lewies’, I meant in his relationship with me. He was not like Lewie in character. His habit of thought was steadier, he was less flippant, and, I think, less intense.

‘Why do you want to go back?’ he asked me once.

‘Sydney, that part of it, is the only place where I’ve ever felt at home.’

‘Won’t it have changed?’

‘Very little, Ida Mayo says.’

‘But what about you? You will have changed.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said vaguely. I didn’t want to talk about it, did not want to admit to impediments.

‘Some people are homeless wherever they live,’ he said. ‘You are. And so am I.’

‘But you are an Englishman in your own country.’

‘I am homeless on this earth,’ he said with a smile. ‘And so are you. Once you admit it, you know, you’ll find it has advantages. The thing is to admit it, and relax, and not be forever straining forward.’

‘I am not straining forward. I am waiting, and occupying myself while I wait. Which is quite a different matter. And besides,’ I said, to turn the conversation, ‘I don’t want to live in a climate where they can’t grow oranges.’

But although in my determination to go home I showed no outward faltering, my memories of Sydney were becoming less precise. Daydreaming of home while I worked, I would feel myself in a long quiet room, depersonalized by a completeness of physical comfort, my body fused into the atmosphere, into the warmth of the sun and the drone of an eternal noon. Going home, though I did not realize it at the time, had become a project urged less by my mind than my body, which needed sun.

‘I bet you never go back,’ said David.

‘I will. I must. Or I’ll become a pommiefied Aussie.’

I booked my passage at last, in March 1939, on a ship that was to sail in November. It did sail, in spite of the declaration of war, but I was in hospital at the time, with the first of my severe bouts of bronchitis.

‘I knew you wouldn’t go,’ said David. ‘You got sick on purpose.’

The winter of 1939–40 was extremely severe. Every time I
got on my feet, down I would go again, to lie in bed coughing. Pleurisy set in, and by the time I got out of hospital, weakened and considerably poorer, there were no more passenger ships out.

And so another period of waiting began, but this time I did not wait alone, for who did not live out those war years in the larger context of ‘when it is over’? My mother died during the war, and so did Ida Mayo, and so did Grace’s husband. David Snow was killed at Dunkirk, and several of my work companions were killed in the raids on London. For four years I made military uniforms, and for six winters I was ill with bronchitis. Some people are strengthened by the trials of war. Olive, who elected to stay with her man in Vienna, was one of them, as is evident from her later books. Perhaps if something else had been required of me than to make military uniforms, I would have been one of them, too. However, it was a time when one did what was required of one, and that was what they required of me.

It was the gentle watercolourist who wrote and told me of Ida Mayo’s death. I know his name now. I saw him in a photograph, wearing what looked like the same long dustcoat, in a magazine Betty Cust brought me the other day. It seems that posthumously his work has achieved a small fame. He survived, alone in a cottage in the Blue Mountains, until 1960. His last paintings, said the writer of this article, were lyrical and happy, like the work of a marvellous child.

‘Has Lyn Wilmot been this afternoon?’ asks Betty Cust.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘thank you.’

‘You’re being very patient about it.’

‘About Mrs Wilmot?’

‘About not being allowed up.’

I make a vague murmur to cover my guilt, because of course it is easy to be patient about Doctor Rainbow’s embargo on getting up when one has already disobeyed it, and intends to keep on doing so.

‘Well, anyway,’ says Betty, ‘there’s some good news as well. The mail strike’s settled.’

‘Oh. Wonderful. When may I expect letters?’

‘In a day or two, I should think.’

‘Then I must start to write some.’

I look through the window and begin to compose a letter to Hilda and Liza.

My dears, there are telegraph poles on one side of this street, and from these poles long black wires extend to the houses, two or three to each pole, for all the world like a small pack of dogs tethered to a post. When I first arrived the visual impression made by all these black wires was horrible, but now …

‘Here is Jack,’ says Betty. ‘He has been hosing at the back. The water board only lets us hose twice a day, because of the drought.’

Jack comes in, carrying a bunch of chives.

‘Anything dead?’ asks Betty.

‘Nothing. Everything’s as good as gold. Which is more than we can say.’

‘We think one of our poinciana trees is dying,’ says Betty to me.

‘Never mind,’ says Jack. ‘If they all die, the whole darned lot of them, the jacarandas too, then we can go on that trip to Europe. She can’t go,’ he explains to me, ‘because if she goes from October to November, inclusive, she misses the jacaranda in bloom, and if she goes from December to January, inclusive, she misses the poinciana.’

‘But,’ I say, ‘that still leaves most of the year.’

‘Well,’ says Jack, ‘you might be able to persuade her. I can’t.’

‘Something or other always happens,’ murmurs Betty, with a vagueness similar to mine of a few minutes ago. ‘One of the children has a baby, or is just about to have one …’

‘Or one of the babies is just about to walk or talk,’ says Jack. ‘Or someone has hurt their little toe.’

‘I’ll go one day,’ says Betty.

‘Like heck you will,’ says Jack.

‘Do
you
want to go?’ I ask Jack.

He becomes serious at once. ‘I wouldn’t mind going,’ he says cautiously.

Betty gives me a smile, as if to say, ‘You see?’ She looks up at Jack sideways. ‘Jack is going to get your dinner tonight, Nora.’

‘Yes,’ says Jack, ‘because she’s going to see someone who’s hurt their toe.’

Betty, who is standing with her arms folded, buffets Jack sideways with one hip. ‘He’s a wonderful cook, Nora.’

‘I’m only a snacks cook,’ says Jack.

As soon as Betty goes there is a clash of intentions reminiscent of the day of my arrival. He wants to cook a fillet steak, and I want an omelette flavoured with the chives he is holding. I win, and get the omelette, which turns out to be perfect. The chives, he tells me, grow at the foot of the back steps. He gave a few plants to Grace twenty years ago.

‘They’ve just got to the picking stage again. They die back for a couple of months each year.’

‘Only a couple of months!’

I am thinking of my little pot of chives at number six. When pondering reasons for returning, I never once thought of the food, the sensuous tropical fruits, and the plentiful vegetable products of the warm earth. I am partly thinking aloud when I say, ‘There are compensations in coming back, after all.’