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Mercifully, the word gene was not yet in common usage in the early 1950s. Sidney Hobson Courtier was therefore unable to concoct the mock-scientific explanation that a novelist nowadays would use to explain the existence of Huldah/Mary. He could only claim that one of Huldah’s male forebears had fathered a child with an Aboriginal mother; that Huldah was a descendant of that child; that Huldah happened almost wholly to resemble her one Aboriginal forebear rather than her many Anglo-Celt ancestors; that Huldah’s appearance as a child had caused her parents and her siblings to be so ashamed of her that they and she had devised the way of life that she later led.

In the rear pages of every issue of The Australian Journal was the section called Journal Juniors. It comprised a cheerful letter from the person-in-charge together with letters from children in every state of Australia. The person-in-charge was known only by a female given name, but each child-contributor had his or her full name and address published. I joined the Journal Juniors in 1950, intending to write often to the person-in-charge. I wanted my writing to be read in particular by a certain girl of about my own age who lived in an inland town in Queensland. This girl was published in almost every issue of the magazine, and whereas most children wrote about their pets or holiday outings, the girl from Queensland wrote letters that an adult might have praised as highly imaginative. I recall a long letter in which she told how she made bearable her nightly task of drying the dishes for her mother. The girl imagined that each teacup was a young female personage while each mug or jug was a young male personage. She gave a name to each personage and imagined certain of them as being in love with certain others. When she, the girl, had a fancy to promote one or another courtship, she would store the two crockery-personages overnight in the same part of the cabinet. In another sort of mood, she would keep a certain pair apart for night after night while she imagined them as yearning to meet or even trying to send messages to one another. There was much more to the game, all of it reported in faultless, confident-sounding sentences.

I had always been praised by my teachers for my English compositions, as they were called, and after I had joined the Journal Juniors I resolved to write and to have published something that would earn the admiration of the girl from inland Queensland. I tried for a few weeks, but none of the few paragraphs that I produced seemed anything but dull and childish, and I had to accept that the girl from inland Queensland was a far better writer than I. Not until more than thirty years later, when I was a teacher of fiction-writing and I had to deal with certain students who submitted assignments that were clearly not their own work — not until then did I have the least suspicion that the girl-writer from inland Queensland might have had more than a little help from her mother or her aunt.

I long ago became used to telling persons who had enjoyed settled childhoods in houses with bookshelves that I had never read this or that so-called classic children’s book. Sometimes, however, I was able to affect to know something of a book merely because I had read a much-condensed version of it in the Classics Comics series. Neither my brother nor I could ever afford to buy a comic, but we often read other boys’ comics. A boy-cousin of ours, the youngest child of our bookmaker-uncle, had boxes stuffed with comics under his bed, and I was sitting on the edge of that bed one Sunday afternoon in the early 1950s ready, if the opportunity arose, to spy on one or another of my girl-cousins, or ready, if my mother told me to stop burying my head in trashy comics, to step into the tiny front garden and to pretend to play, while I read in haste the adaptation for Classics Comics of the novel Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley.

Perhaps only a few years later, I had forgotten almost all that I had looked at in the pages of the comic-book and all that had passed through my mind while I looked. Still today, however, I seem to recall several details from the line-drawings in one of the last panels of the comic-book. A young woman sits or reclines on a balcony in some or another town in the West Indies. The balcony overlooks the sea, and the young woman is looking across the sea in the direction of England, where she was born and grew up. A strand of dark hair lies diagonally across the young woman’s forehead. (I have always supposed that the hair clings to the young woman’s skin because her forehead is covered with perspiration, although the line-drawing could surely not have been so detailed as to suggest this.) The young woman is married to, or is in love with, a man whose home is in the West Indies, although she sometimes remembers another man: an Englishman who was once in love with her and may still be in love.

I had intended the previous paragraph to be no more than a report of a few details in a line-drawing that I seem to recall, but I see now that I was not able to report those details alone; I was compelled to report also a few details of a narrative the chief characters of which are a young woman and two men. Many times during the fifty and more years since I first looked through the Classics Comics version of Westward Ho!, I have tried to recall more of the details of that narrative. Sometimes I have tried urgently to do so, as if much depended on my learning all that might be learned about the narrative and the characters in it. The narrative in question is not at all the series of events that comprises the work of fiction Westward Ho! If that were so, I could visit tomorrow the nearest public library and could relieve my uncertainties within an hour or two. No, the narrative is a mysterious formation that developed I cannot say when in some or another far part of my mind. Because it developed thus and there, I accord it, rightly or wrongly, more respect than I could ever accord anything that I might have read in a book, and if ever I were able to arrange in order the items of that narrative, I would afterwards review them in my mind much more often than I have reread the pages of any of the books that have influenced me.

Whenever I seem to recall the details from the line-drawing mentioned above, I seem to be looking towards the young woman from the direction of England. I am no more than a ghost-character, perhaps barely visible to the true characters. However keenly I might feel my situation, they, natives of the countries of fiction, know joys and sorrows of a different order. Whatever might weigh on me whenever I seem to see the image-balcony and the image-strand of dark image-hair on the pale image-forehead, I am spared whatever it is that oppressed the personage whose part I have taken. If the young woman is lost to me, how much more remote must she be from the chief character: the young Englishman whose name I long ago forgot along with the few dark strokes on a white ground that once suggested his face. If my unease grows on me, I can leave off looking across a conjectured ocean towards an image of an image; I can look instead into text after fictional text for one after another young image-woman at a far image-distance from me. The young Englishman, for as long as I recall having read about him, will go on looking from the same place in my mind towards the same further place in my mind.