( … and some more poetry)
As a child, the Christmas gift I was always most delighted with was a book. It hadn’t taken my parents long to discover that, after having learned to read, I just wanted books, and there always was one – a give-away by its wrapped rectangular shape – under the tree for me each Christmas. Girls’ Annuals full of short stories, some of them quite macabre.
There was one called ‘The Man of the Hill’. A widow with three daughters lost her one and only hen and sent her eldest daughter to look for it. As she was wandering the countryside in search of it, she fell into a cave wherein lived an ‘ugly old man’. He kept her imprisoned and wanted her as his wife. When the girl failed to return that night the widow sent out her second daughter next day to look for her sister, and the hen. She too fell into the hole and was imprisoned with the same request for marriage. Daughter number three, as you guessed, suffered the same outcome. The story is about how the three girls lived as his slaves until one of them devised a means of escape. In the end the ugly old man went to their house in the woods to get them back. He intended to overpower them all but they were expecting him. They’d arranged for a neighbour to wait for him in the house with a gun. And when the kidnapper arrived he was blown to smithereens! What a story for kids. But I read it again and again. It kind of smacked of more than a fairytale. Real life crime. I was probably ten years old.
And then there were the Hans Christian Andersen fairytales – many of them quite grisly as well. I read ‘The Tinder Box’ which almost made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I wonder what the child psychologists of today would think. Of course nothing of this calibre would be allowed to infect kids’ minds today. I must do some research on Hans C Andersen. What inspired him to write such stories? I received his collected works as a Christmas present from my Sunday School one year. Our Sunday School superintendant and his family, who were our teachers, were salt of the earth non-academic people. I wonder where they went to buy these two dozen or so books for us. There was no book shop in the Barossa back then. Perhaps they put in an order to an Adelaide bookshop with our ages and genders and the shop picked them out for us. My copy had thirty tales within two hundred pages – tiny print. But I loved it. Still have it.
Then there was ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – one long metaphor that I have to admit went over my head at first reading, but what I loved about it was where I first read it. We were on holiday on Yorke Peninsula, staying with my aunt and uncle on their farm. They lived in a four-roomed limestone cottage in the middle of a wheat paddock that was golden and glary with high summer. A big sand-hill rose behind the house and a little beyond that was the beach. I’d received ‘Alice’ for Christmas, and lay on my bed in the lean-to sleepout (louvre windows atilt for a small breeze), blissfully unaware of the oppressive, stifling heat as I became lost in the book. And to have the freedom to just lie there reading, without a chore to do all day, was …. well, dream-like.
Another book that made a great impression on me was ‘Little Women’. I fell in love with the character Jo – the tomboy of the family who dreamed of being an author. Her passion for writing stories, her determination to be published, her persistence in submitting her manuscript over and over, her rising above the disappointment of rejection and the moment she went out in the snow to their letter-box to receive a letter of acceptance from a publisher, had me totally engrossed. I connected with Jo. Her passion was the same as mine. I was about twelve when I read it. We won’t talk about how long it took for me to write my book and to be published but I have been faithful to the craft for most of my life.
There have been countless inspiring books and authors for me since these childhood ones, but I must say I have become quite hard to please when it comes to books these days. There are far too many piled up on my bedside table with book-marks part way in. I guess I think I’ll get back to them, but if I’ve put them down and picked up another, they’re not worth persisting with.
I have to make a guilty confession that I hadn’t read a John Steinbeck book until recently. A dear friend – an inveterate reader – said to me ‘You what?’ ‘You’ve never read John Steinbeck?’ So I started with ‘Tortilla Flat’ – an absolute romp of a story and writing style to die for. I am now reading ‘Grapes of Wrath’. I knew this was a book I would have to own and place in my library with others of its ilk, so I went to my nearest second-hand bookshop – an old stone house with a rabbit-warren of rooms full of mountains of books that are now threatening to topple. But the girl who owns it (who would have gone through hell and high-water to be at Woodstock if she’d been born then), knows every book in the place and where it is. Of course she had a lovely old copy of ‘Grapes …’ and also one of ‘Of Mice and Men’. I am well into ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and just wriggling with delight at every word. Steinbeck takes you there – right slap-bang into the landscape he creates. This is a Tim Winton quality too. They get into that zone of giving us minute details of sounds, smells, gestures, the yawning and stretching of a dog, the trappings of a house, an old comb and mouse carcass left on the floor from where a bed had been shifted. They don’t have to describe the emotions of their characters because we, as readers, know exactly how they feel – the incline of a head, or the way while sitting on the ground next to a camp-fire one pulls his legs up and stares at the stars. Or the way Ma stops stirring her pork bones on the stove and wipes her hands on her apron as the son she hasn’t seen for years stands in the doorway. So so clever. And so stimulating for me to be able to use my brain to conjure these images as opposed to having them served up to me, as in film. Thank you my friend for shaming me (kindly) into discovering this wonderful author.
I have started compiling my fifty years’ worth of poetry. Some of the early stuff is a little embarrassing but I have decided to include it all as I guess it will show a development of style. I will finish with one written in about 1974.
RUN
Tonight the rain came
and offered me respite
reprieved me from insanity
intoxicated me
urged me to break free
I wanted to walk in it
let it permeate my clothes
my skin
my soul
I wanted to run
and leap
and splash in puddles
head held high
and eyes wide open
I wanted it to wash away my inhibitions
hot salty tension
of hard hot days before the rain
I wanted then to sit somewhere
quite out of sight
and watch the normal people
scurrying
for shelter
fumbling
with umbrellas
trying
to stay dry
hoping
not to muddy up their dressed up jeans and things
But
you wanted not to let me go
We don’t know this place you warned
these small town people
So you took me driving
found me my secluded place
beside a river
where we sat
and listened to the gentle rain
and let it wet our hair
and clothes
We didn’t speak for frogs and crickets
Watched the distant car lights
indistinct with mist
I thanked you with a kiss
Warmly,
Sue