all Johnny Cash and Elvis, talkback and the Daily Telegraph . Your father is deeply suspicious of the world of the Big Smoke, of the well-born and the educated he rarely encounters, their social and intellectual confidence. The ease of them. It is only physically that the likes of him can ever compete, not that he wants to. His world is this valley.
Not a doll is in the house, not a frill or scrap of pink. Your treasured possessions are your Snoopy diary and your bike, Peddly, which becomes your horse as soon as you sit on its saddle, winging you every day to other worlds than this.
Your school, at Beddy Number One, is a single classroom.Twelve kids, aged five to eleven. Your teacher is like many of the women of the valley, soft-fleshed and ambitionless beyond snaring a husband and a motherly life; soon to be married and she’ll then leave teaching, which she has never liked, to devote herself to the job of wife. Her job is limbo land, the dead zone until something else.
‘Why do you want to do that, Miss? Wouldn’t you prefer to be with us?’ you ask, cheekily. ‘He’s a right old bush turkey the bloke you’re marrying, that’s what my daddy says. Beyond his use-by date.’
‘Get out.’
Which is what you want, of course. Almost every day you are released from the tiny classroom. She has given up on you, doesn’t know what to make of your blunt voice, your absence of understanding what’s wrong and right, your wildness and your wilfulness, your constant gazing out the window, champing at the bit.
Wanting out. Licked by sun and wind. Now. Not a part of this. Every day.
She doesn’t see your knottedness, your enormous heart, primed for love—to give and receive it. Doesn’t know what to make of your vast alone that she senses has no desire for her world, for everything she represents. Because you perceive in her, even then, some kind of an erasure, that there is no audacious sense of who she really is. She wants to disappear into someone else’s life; she desires it more than anything else. That, to you, is bizarre. The one message your teacher imparts to you, upon the dewy, blinkered brink of her shiny new existence, is that women who are thinkers do not get married.
Then there’s Anne. Waiting in the wings to take over your life.
Lesson 22
Matrimony in the abstract; not the man, but any man—any person who will snatch her out of the dullness of her life
‘In order to be irreplaceable one must be different.’
A quote from Coco Chanel, from a page of the Women’s Weekly all twelve of you have been tearing up to make collages like Roman mosaics.
You are intrigued by the statement. Slip the cutting into the pocket of your overalls. You are a thinker despite what your teacher puts on your report and you love new words like irreplaceable and you are gleaning, slowly, that in this place it takes a mighty courage to be different, to want to be something beyond your world. In this fragile, uncertain time before your father’s marriage is a tiny seed of a thought, to one day write; to be a watcher, an observer, apart. Because of the shiver of a truth: that the women of this world would only enfold you if everything that was unique about you, everything vivid and sure and free and strong, was gone. And the alternative, here—aching, yowling loneliness.
You fly home on Peddly that afternoon with the scrap ofwords in your pocket and sense that one day you will be saved by a world very different from this, saved by everything this world is not. You have no idea what that existence will be or how you will get to it but even then, so young, you have a raging will for a life that is not theirs.
Lesson 23
This law of love—love that tries to be always as just as it is tender, and never exercises one of its own rights for its own pleasure and good, but for the child’s
The wedding. The house of Colin, your father’s best mate, his only school friend who escaped the pit. Chosen because it has a
Not a doll is in the house, not a frill or scrap of pink. Your treasured possessions are your Snoopy diary and your bike, Peddly, which becomes your horse as soon as you sit on its saddle, winging you every day to other worlds than this.
Your school, at Beddy Number One, is a single classroom.Twelve kids, aged five to eleven. Your teacher is like many of the women of the valley, soft-fleshed and ambitionless beyond snaring a husband and a motherly life; soon to be married and she’ll then leave teaching, which she has never liked, to devote herself to the job of wife. Her job is limbo land, the dead zone until something else.
‘Why do you want to do that, Miss? Wouldn’t you prefer to be with us?’ you ask, cheekily. ‘He’s a right old bush turkey the bloke you’re marrying, that’s what my daddy says. Beyond his use-by date.’
‘Get out.’
Which is what you want, of course. Almost every day you are released from the tiny classroom. She has given up on you, doesn’t know what to make of your blunt voice, your absence of understanding what’s wrong and right, your wildness and your wilfulness, your constant gazing out the window, champing at the bit.
Wanting out. Licked by sun and wind. Now. Not a part of this. Every day.
She doesn’t see your knottedness, your enormous heart, primed for love—to give and receive it. Doesn’t know what to make of your vast alone that she senses has no desire for her world, for everything she represents. Because you perceive in her, even then, some kind of an erasure, that there is no audacious sense of who she really is. She wants to disappear into someone else’s life; she desires it more than anything else. That, to you, is bizarre. The one message your teacher imparts to you, upon the dewy, blinkered brink of her shiny new existence, is that women who are thinkers do not get married.
Then there’s Anne. Waiting in the wings to take over your life.
Lesson 22
Matrimony in the abstract; not the man, but any man—any person who will snatch her out of the dullness of her life
‘In order to be irreplaceable one must be different.’
A quote from Coco Chanel, from a page of the Women’s Weekly all twelve of you have been tearing up to make collages like Roman mosaics.
You are intrigued by the statement. Slip the cutting into the pocket of your overalls. You are a thinker despite what your teacher puts on your report and you love new words like irreplaceable and you are gleaning, slowly, that in this place it takes a mighty courage to be different, to want to be something beyond your world. In this fragile, uncertain time before your father’s marriage is a tiny seed of a thought, to one day write; to be a watcher, an observer, apart. Because of the shiver of a truth: that the women of this world would only enfold you if everything that was unique about you, everything vivid and sure and free and strong, was gone. And the alternative, here—aching, yowling loneliness.
You fly home on Peddly that afternoon with the scrap ofwords in your pocket and sense that one day you will be saved by a world very different from this, saved by everything this world is not. You have no idea what that existence will be or how you will get to it but even then, so young, you have a raging will for a life that is not theirs.
Lesson 23
This law of love—love that tries to be always as just as it is tender, and never exercises one of its own rights for its own pleasure and good, but for the child’s
The wedding. The house of Colin, your father’s best mate, his only school friend who escaped the pit. Chosen because it has a
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