In my well-off uncle’s backyard, I spent most of my time in front of his aviaries, especially the breeding cages. Each of these contained a male-bird and a female-bird and a nest, which was an empty Fisher’s Wax tin that the birds lined with straw and feathers. The nesting-tin was always nailed to the wall of the cage but too high up for me to see into. I often saw part of an adult bird that was sitting in the nest. Sometimes I heard the cries of baby-birds from inside the nest. Sometimes I saw a parent-bird reaching down to feed its young from its own mouth. I never actually saw into a nest. Each breeding-cage had a small door through which a person might have looked into the nest-tin, but the door was always fastened with a padlock. I once asked my uncle if I could look through one of the doors, but he told me that even my looking in on them might cause the birds to abandon their eggs or their young.
My glimpses into my aunt’s kitchen on those Sunday afternoons in the 1950s may have been among the first causes of my aversion during all my later life to meals prepared by persons other than myself. My aunt and her woman-helpers prepared two dishes: a salad and a trifle. The ingredients of the salad seemed to require much handling. Leaves of lettuce had to be folded over and sliced — and then folded and sliced again until they made up a bowl of what was called shredded lettuce. Stray bits of lettuce that clung to the slicers’ palms or got stuck under their fingernails were scraped or plucked free and then dropped into the bowl. Likewise, when a cluster of tomato-seeds fell away from a newly severed slice, the woman-slicer picked up the blob between the knife-blade and two or three fingertips and then dropped the seeds and the adjoining jelly into a bowl where pieces of tomato and discs and hoops of onion were submerged in vinegar. I cannot claim that I was revolted by the preparation of the beetroot, but the sight of the purplish stain from its juice on the tablecloth at mealtime would always remind me of the offensive sights that I had seen from the kitchen doorway during the afternoon. The worst of those sights were of women putting fingers into mouths. Most of the women removed sticky and greasy substances from their fingers by sucking the affected finger and then going on with their work. If even one of the women had wiped her finger afterwards in token fashion on her apron, I might have been able to tell myself later that that particular woman had happened to prepare the portion of salad that I was struggling to swallow, but I never saw any of the women wiping her finger thus.
At least once during the Sunday afternoon, the women made a pot of tea and then sat around the table to drink it. My aunt would put on the table a plate of cakes for the women to eat with their tea. In those years, a woman such as my aunt would have been ashamed to serve to guests any cakes or biscuits bought from shops. Such a woman devoted at least one half-day each week to baking, as she called it. My aunt would put in front of the other women patty-cakes: simple iced cakes in patty-pans of pleated paper. If she had had more time than usual for baking, she might serve lamingtons or butterfly-cakes: patty-cakes with two semicircular slices cut from the top of each cake, with whipped cream spread over the newly exposed surface, and with the two semicircles pressed into the cream so as to suggest the raised wings of a butterfly.
I saw it only once during the many Sunday afternoons when I would walk often slowly through my aunt’s kitchen, hoping to overhear the deliberations of some of the most powerful persons I knew. I saw it only once, but I assumed that it happened often. I assumed that my aunt, soon after having taken a large bite from one or another cake, would often remove one or another mass of pulped food from behind her inmost teeth by poking an index-finger far into her mouth and then, seemingly, by first scraping the finger along the teeth, then wiping the finger against the tongue, and finally swallowing the food.
At every Sunday tea, after the main course of cold meat and salad, we were served a sweet called a trifle. I never saw a trifle being prepared — the ingredients would always have been placed in a large bowl early in the day and put aside to soak. Children such as myself were served only small portions of trifle, because one of the ingredients was sherry. I might have identified the other ingredients merely by looking at what was on my spoon while I ate, but I always ate my trifle by gulping at it and I always kept my eyes averted from the stuff in my plate or on my spoon. The main ingredient was some kind of cake, but after it had been soaked all day its texture often suggested to me that I had in my mouth such a pulp or mush as my aunt would have removed from her rear teeth whenever she scraped them with a finger.
The aunt mentioned hereabouts could well have afforded to visit a hairdresser whenever she so wished and to have come away with a different hairstyle after each visit. I cannot recall that I ever took note of her hairstyle, but whenever an image of my aunt has appeared in my mind for many years past, that image has been of a certain face beneath what I call an upswept hairstyle: exactly the sort of hairstyle worn by the image of Aunt Bee in my mind whenever I recall my having read Brat Farrar.
In the image that I see of my aunt’s face I can find no detail to explain the sternness and disapproval that seem to emanate from the image. However, I have for long recognised that time has no existence in the image-world. I am therefore able to suppose that my image-aunt, during her wanderings among my image-landscapes, has come upon certain image-evidence from the years during the early 1950s when I masturbated often. That image-evidence would have included image-details of her image-nephew spying on his image-cousins, her image-daughters, during certain image-picnics on image-beaches during the early image-1950s, whenever one or another of the image-cousins leaned so far forward in order to reach for an image-tomato-sandwich or an image-patty-cake that the upper parts of her image-breasts were exposed or whenever she reached down to pick up some image-object from the image-sand and so caused the lower part of her image-bathing-costume to be stretched upwards, thereby exposing two image-rolls of image-flesh at the base of her image-buttocks. I am even able to suppose that my image-aunt may have come upon one or another image of a woman with an upswept image-hairstyle and an expression on her image-face of image-tolerance or even image-sympathy for the image-nephew and his image-spying, although I have never been able to suppose that my image-aunt would not have been sternly disapproving of such an image-image.
Not long before I read Brat Farrar, or it may have been not long afterwards, I read in The Australian Journal one after another instalment of the novel The Glass Spear, by Sidney Hobson Courtier. I knew about the author only that he was an Australian whose previous published works had been short stories set in New Guinea during the Second World War. (During the late 1950s, when I had decided on a career as a teacher in a State secondary school who would write poetry and perhaps short stories in secret at weekends or during the long summer holidays, I learned that Sidney Hobson Courtier was a senior teacher in a State primary school about five kilometres from the south-eastern suburb of Melbourne where I then lived. I was prepared to write always in secret and to use a pen-name because I knew that teachers employed by the State were forbidden to undertake paid employment outside their working hours. Sidney Hobson Courtier made no secret of his being a writer. He had got special permission from the Education Department to write in his free time after he had presented the Department with a medical certificate stating that he needed to write in order to preserve his health. During the early 1960s, when I was teaching in a primary school and writing poetry and short stories in secret in a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, my head-teacher had been a colleague of the man he referred to as Sid Courtier. I never questioned my head-teacher about the author of The Glass Spear, partly because I was afraid of revealing that I was a secret writer and partly because I preferred not to learn that the author was other than I had surmised during my reading of his book.) While I read the early instalments of The Glass Spear, I surmised that the author was a person I might have confided in: a person who might have listened with interest while I explained that I read books of fiction in order to see landscapes in my mind and to meet up with young female personages in my mind. While I read the later instalments, I read also in order to learn how the plot, so to call it, would unfold and what would happen to the characters, so to call them. But my interest in these matters was only a passing interest: I was anxious to have done with them so that I could turn my attention again to what I considered the true subject-matter of the book.