I have for long hoped that my youngest aunt looked out from one or another second- or third-storey window on the day when she left the convent in order to return to her father’s house beside the Southern Ocean, there to take up again her work as a housekeeper. If my aunt had so looked out on that day, she might have been better able to comprehend and afterwards to speak about or even to write about a certain spectacle than many a newspaper-reporter who afterwards used stock-phrases to report what had come to him as hearsay.
“On that day it appeared that the whole state was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Seventy-one lives were lost.” The previous sentences are from a report of a royal commission that followed the bushfires of January, 1939, in the state of Victoria. The day when the fires were at their worst was known afterwards as Black Friday. By chance, it was the day when my youngest aunt left the convent that would have overlooked, among much else, the paddock whereon would be laid down fifteen years later a certain street beside which would be built twelve years later again the house in which my aunt’s oldest nephew would live for at least forty years and would write books of fiction, one of the last of which would include a passage in which the narrator, who was wholly lacking in imagination, would report mere details in the hope that fiction truly was, as someone had once claimed, the art of suggestion and that some at least of his readers might intuit or divine or suppose, if not imagine, some little of what his aunt had seen or felt on the day when she left the convent where she had hoped to live for the rest of her life.
My youngest aunt may well have had a so-called vocation to the religious life. She left the convent not because she lacked the will to stay there but because she was beginning, even in her twenties, to be afflicted by the muscular or nervous ailment that afflicted three of my father’s five sisters and obliged each of the three to spend her last years in a wheel-chair or a bed. My youngest aunt outlived all her sisters by many years, but I have never been able to make out the handwriting in either of the two letters that she sent me during the 1980s, each of which letter was a reply to a short letter that I had sent in order to resume negotiations, as it were, with my father’s surviving siblings after the publication of my early books of fiction had caused an estrangement between myself and them.
Even if my youngest aunt had looked out from an upper window on the day when she left the convent, she surely had more on her mind than would have allowed her to look directly westwards through the smoke and the wind-blown cinders and to hope that her only sister-in-law was safe and well. The sister-in-law, who was also a step-cousin of my aunt, was the wife of my aunt’s oldest brother. The husband and the wife lived in a room in a boarding-house in a northern suburb of Melbourne, and the wife, who was only eighteen years of age, was expecting to give birth within a few weeks to their first child, who would be the first niece or nephew of the young woman who was leaving the convent.
During the fifty-six years from the time when my mother and I were first able to talk to one another until the year when she died, my mother reported to me only two incidents from the five years between the time when she first met the man who later became her husband and my father and the time when she and I were first able to talk to one another. One of the two incidents was my bawling when I first saw the ocean. The other incident was my mother’s fearing during most of Black Friday that the widespread fires would reach the northern suburbs of Melbourne, that the weatherboard boarding-house where she lived with her husband would be burned to the ground, and that she would die before she could give birth to her first child.
I seldom saw my youngest uncle during the first years after I had left school. I had come to believe that his being still a devout Catholic and my no longer being so would have caused trouble between us. But later, in the early 1960s, I began to think of my youngest uncle as a person who might be able to get me out of the trouble that I had fallen into.
I could not have brought myself to confide in my uncle. I wanted only to see him again — to watch from close at hand his bachelor’s way of life. He was still working as a stock and station agent, but he had leased a paddock in the coastal district where he had grown up, and he grazed young cattle there and inspected them every few days. I wanted, during the early 1960s, to draw strength from watching my uncle tramp alone across his paddock of a late afternoon when the wind blew from the sea. I wanted to draw strength from my uncle because I seemed to myself weak.
In the early 1960s, when I was in my early twenties and my youngest uncle was in his early forties, we were both of us bachelors. He was what was called in those years a confirmed bachelor. I had had hardly any dealings with young female persons and I seemed to lack the skills that enabled most other young men of my age to acquire steady girlfriends or even fiancées and wives. Sometimes I would spend every evening for week after week alone, more or less reconciled to my bachelorhood, while I read or tried to write poetry or prose fiction. At other times, I would resolve to change my way of life. I would prepare a detailed plan for approaching some or another young woman at my place of work, even preparing in advance the topics that I would raise in order to promote conversation between her and me. Then, either I would fear to speak to the young woman or I would overhear her talking to a workmate and would decide that she and I surely had no common interests. After each such event, I would suppose that I was by nature intended to live as my youngest uncle lived. I would then try to console myself for having been born to bachelorhood as I supposed my bachelor-uncle must sometimes have consoled himself.
I most commonly consoled myself by foreseeing (not imagining) a sequence of events from twenty years into the future. Never having married, I could afford to own a racehorse. On a certain cold and cloudy day, my horse, which usually raced in country districts, contested a race in Melbourne. My horse was at long odds in the betting, but its trainer had advised me to back it. Something urged me to bet several times my usual amount on the horse. If the horse had won, I would have collected the equivalent of a major prize in a lottery. In fact, the horse was narrowly beaten. After the race, and while I stood alone with the horse’s trainer at the second placegetter’s stall, I happened to glance towards the adjoining stall, where the numerous part-owners of the winner were hugging and kissing and crying out. One of the part-owners, a married woman, had been, many years before, one of the young women mentioned in the previous paragraph. As soon as I had learned this, I took care to avoid meeting the gaze of the married woman, although I did not turn my face away from her. I looked at my horse and then talked with my jockey and my trainer, keeping on my face an expression such as would tell the married woman, if only she had recognised me and had surmised that I was a bachelor, that I had for long been reconciled to my bachelorhood and that my having become thus reconciled enabled me the more easily to endure such misfortunes as that which her own racehorse had inflicted on me a little while before.
On a certain cold and cloudy Saturday evening in the early 1960s, I stood with my youngest uncle in the paddock that he leased in the coastal district where he had spent all of his life. I had made a hurried trip from Melbourne to see my uncle at what seemed to me a turning-point in my life. I had left my place of work on the Friday evening and had travelled for more than four hours by railway-train to the coastal city where my uncle lived. I was due to travel back to Melbourne again on the Sunday afternoon. I had only a few hours on the cold and cloudy Saturday evening for learning from my uncle what I hoped to learn from him.