VIRGINIA WOOLF in AUSTRALIA
Vanessa thought to herself, 'This is an inevitable mistake - is that
right? Or is there another phrase?'
In any case there was no way around it.
They were driving to see their childhood home.
Virginia seemed to be looking straight ahead but Vanessa felt her take
in everything.
The silence, the silence.
'We'll call in on Helga on the way. She'd love to see you.'
Helga was bustling (as always) and in Virginia's eyes oddly had not
changed - she was still a girl but blotchily red-faced and grey haired. Her
skin appeared tight, as if she had swollen. Virginia had heard she had been
sick - did this account for the appearance? Cortisone, hormones ... or had she
had a face lift?
There were young women and men everywhere, lounging, exuberant,
sullen, munching, useless. She had heard that Helga had turned her parents'
home into a backpackers place. The neighbours complained of course and there
had been talk of legal action. The husband didn't appear to be around. This was
a disappointment and a blessing.
'I think I'll walk down and look at the old place.'
Helga threw Vanessa a look.
This was the inevitable. Childbirth, the dentist darted across
Vanessa's mind as she walked Virginia to Helga's door.
Virginia eschewed the road, took to what had been the bush path down
to the edge of the bay. Her ankles turned a little on the rough ground but she
sensed them back to a girl fleeting through a forest of she-oaks and gums,
every rock a familiar.
She began to climb to meet the end of the road where the old house had
been. It all opened out too quickly. The ground was flat and suddenly there
were houses all around her. She was lost. She glanced around in astonishment
and alarm. Then there were children all around her, staring. They were on those
cross country bikes that they climbed mountains on, did those dangerous tricks.
'You going for a swim?' a small girl who did not look as bold as the
others asked her.
Virginia felt the weight of her coat, her hands clenched in her
pocket.
'Nah! It's too cold, she'd freeze, you goose.'
'She hasn't got her cossie.'
The word 'goose' turned in Virginia's mind while they vanished
screeching and hooting.
'Flies and furies in a film,' crossed Virginia's mind.
All became still.
They had levelled it, somehow. Over there had been particularly steep
- a little Everest.
The old place had gone.
Then she couldn't account for what she was seeing. It was a lawn -
flat lawn, neat, soft which ended at a kind of turret like a chateau on the
Loire. It looked as though it rested there on the lawn abutting the old place
which had been turned into a kind of simulacrum, a synthesis - villa, cottage,
Tuscan, colonial, elegant, cute, impressive ... They had replaced the windows
with panes caught in wood, there were white transparent curtains draped in
curves and then there was the turret. It had a pointed roof of blueish metal.
Had they been allowed to do that? Did it have foundations? Surely it would just
topple over onto the flat, soft lawn?
Her throat suddenly constricted, she staggered back, clasping at it.
No sound issued though she was desperately gasping, her hand stretched
out behind her reaching for a rock to rest against.
There was nothing.
In her distressed state she found herself amazed again at her
discovery - they had taken away the rocks, all of them. What could she rest
against? What could she hold on to?
Vanessa's car appeared on the road. Helga was beside her.
'We thought we'd come and get you.'
'Yes,' Helga was saying, 'I thought you mightn't like what they had
done. It's the fashion.'
The back packers glanced at the strange old lady the other two were
making a fuss of, returned their attentions to their tedium.
'Helga made the jam.'
'Yes, the old plum tree's ... they're a bit wormy but you cut ...'
The warmth, the liquid coiled around the constrictor in her throat,
loosening it.
'You couldn't swim there, there were sharks when I was a girl,'
Virginia was telling the children on their bikes.
CLICK HERE for 'The Diary of Percival Geraint' (first published by gay-ebooks in their Boys Summer Collection
CLICK HERE for an edited version of 'The Flowers of Elizabeth David' 'The Flowers of Elizabeth David' (first published in Island Spring 2008)
http://www.gay-ebooks.com.au/bsc06info.html
Oscar Wilde in Australia! Sounds fascinating. I have always liked to think what it would have been like if Katherine Mansfield and her damp squid of a husband had accepted Sir Harold Beauchamp's offer of a farm in the Far North of New Zealand - an area renowned for its languor, quiet rot and insidious heat. Would she have reverted to her lesbian past - found another compelling 'Maori princess'? Would they have hit the bottle and re-anacted Who's Afraid of....decades before Liz Taylor got her fist round the gin bottle....the mind boggles and I await O Wilde's entry to Oz with similar curiosity. I am curious yellow.
ReplyDeleteWhat a world of possibilities you open Peter.
ReplyDeleteWhat if Anna Kavan had stayed? Would the sun she craved have eventually overtaken her craving for heroin and men?
Isn't it in some way about colonialism? The colonies weren't enough - were impossible - for some of our best writers but Over There, the Mother Country wasn't very healthy.
I think Mansfield would have lived longer in the Far New Zealand North than at that bloody Gurdjieff Institute starving and freezing her to death. But she couldn't return.
Kavan I suppose had to go when that man said she must leave him. She would have loved the Far North. But maybe she would have subsided to mere, horribly impossible Proto Hippy.
One must be eternally grateful to the ones who stayed, Like Sargeson. And those who returned, like Frame.
In Australia, Astley remained, White returned, Stead was driven back by poverty (she should never have returned).
We have wonderful writers like Katharine Susannah Prichard from Western Australia who wrote a masterpiece Coonardoo; much later Randolph Stowe fled W A never to return.
Could we put a date on when it was possible to return? White returned in 1948 so let's say 'Post War'.
Henry Handel Richardson was at her best when she returned in her mind.
Thank you for your suggestive comment.
I M
P S
ReplyDeleteIn my 'Kendall' I tried to represent how the nineteenth/early twentieth century Australian poets were to some extent undone by colonialism.
I M
Paddy Costello: ‘New Zealand, earthly paradise that it is, is a life sentence.’
ReplyDeleteThis just about sums it up (for both Austr and NZ.) It gets the nature of our dilemma perfectly. Even people who left like Joan Sutherland for ex can't escape it.
(Paddy Costello was one of those bright young lefties of the 30s, parallel generation to Antony Blunt. He became a diplomat and I have a feeling he was tainted with being a Soviet spy. I knew his extremely glamourous neice, who was educated with Liz Taylor's kids in Rome. She had a sort of winsome sadness about this uncle who was a 'scandal'.)
Whatever - he was a highly intelligent and insightful man.