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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742699516 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Sales rank: | 936,336 |
| File size: | 405 KB |
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Disturbing Element
By Xavier Herbert
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2012 Xavier HerbertAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-951-6
CHAPTER 1
A Coronet and a Ball and Chain
TO AVOID THE HEART-BURNING THAT MAY OTHERWISE be caused by so frank a history as I intend this to be, I am going to be non-specific in dealing with the people, the places, and even some of the events, concerned. I am fortunate in that the peculiar circumstances of my case make this possible. I can even begin by being non-specific about where I was born, because there is no documentary evidence known to me that designates a place. My late parents did name a place; but they produced no birth certificate as confirmation; and for reasons best known to themselves, they were uncommunicative about that period of their history when I was begotten.
It also happens that my early years were spent in many different places and social groups, and particularly, that the break I made with my origins eventually was so drastic that my early associates would hardly identify me, the narrator, in my story, let alone themselves. Moreover, I have been reticent about publicizing my beginnings to date, not out of shame, else I should not be confessing them now so recklessly, but, I believe, because I was waiting till I felt qualified to make my revelations in a way to discover for myself something of the reality of my existence.
In pursuance of my policy of non-specificity, suffice it to say that I first became aware of my existence in a tiny seaport on the long, lonely coast of West Australia. As I knew the port, it consisted of a long jetty jutting out into the indigo waters of the Indian Ocean, a straggling main street that crookedly followed the shore line, a little railway depot, and two or three cross streets that ended in a sandy scrubby waste in which there was a fringe settlement of Afghan camel drivers and the dispossessed aboriginal blacks.
Camel teams were still rivalling the railway in serving the transport needs of the arid hinterland opened up by the gold rushes antedating my birth; and it may be said that both, that is camels and railway trains, were concerned in my beginnings, in as much as it was through camels that my parents were brought together and through trains that their association was sufficiently prolonged to bring about that peculiar addition to the universe, myself. My father, after his dealings with the camels in question, which were the property of my maternal grandfather, became a railway engine driver.
The aboriginal blacks were similarly concerned. My mother used them as casual servants, and it would seem that she often left the care of me in infancy to them. Maybe it was through being wet-nursed by some blackgin that I had the tough time they say I did have to survive my first year, and by the same token that subsequently I developed a gut equal to any blackfellow's in digestive powers. Soon after birth I contracted a gastric disease rife in the locality and mostly fatal to white children, and I spent most of my first year lying as a tiny bag of bones, while those concerned with my welfare waited more or less patiently for what they believed was inevitable. They could hardly be expected to anticipate that the victory could not go to mere bacteria.
My parents and my mother's father were what were called T'othersiders, meaning people who had come to West Australia from the other side of the continent. It was a proud title, distinguishing those qualified to hold it from the local born, the Sand Gropers, and the New Chums from Britain.
The name Sand Groper measured the contempt of the easterners for the comparative infertility of the West and the social backwardness of its first settlers. Not a small part of the considerable burden of inferiority I bore as a child was the stigma of being a Sand Groper, so that I was resolved to quit the wretched country of my birth at first opportunity. I think it was like that with all of my generation born of non-indigenous parents, and I doubt if born West Australians have got over the Sand Groper Complex even yet.
My maternal grandfather and my father were really New Chums, but had acquired the dignity of T'othersiders through having begun their Australian citizenship t'otherside.
Grandfather Phillip was an Englishman, truest born of all Englishmen, according to Mother, who, in speaking of him, was often moved to burst into the old song: "'Tis a glorious charter, deny it who can, that breathes in the words: I'm an Englishman!"
Also according to Mother, Grandpa Phillip was of noble birth, although she was as vague about his degree of nobility as about much of the distinction she boasted for him. She would say simply, but in a tone to stop all questioning: "My father is the son of a 'undred earls!"
Not that I ever thought of gainsaying her, being proud enough to be of the noble line myself, even if not allowed to claim it.
Mother always said to me: "You're your father's son."
She never meant it as an honor.
My own father was a Welshman. However, he was anything but what might be called true born, because he had none of the fire, the music, the mysticism, supposed to belong to the breed. He hadn't even a noticeable Welsh accent, and was so far from being fiery that he suffered Mother to insult him about his country and his people for fifty years. But it may have been that he had the easy feeling about his breed that all people of truly ancient race seem to have. He used to counter Mother's insults good humoredly with a Welsh saying: "Wales was Wales before Hengland was born."
So much at variance in temperament and likes and origins and practically all things were my parents that they even dealt with their aspirates differently. Whereas Mother never aspirated an aitch, and indeed dealt with the letter so 'arshly that you felt she did it with fierce determination, Dad never failed to breath into his vowels as hif he felt they were hotherwise lifeless. I myself used both methods to begin with.
To Mother there were only two races of true men, namely the English and the Irish. She was herself of Irish stock on her mother's side; but it wasn't that which gave her the leaning to the race, because it is doubtful if she ever knew of her Irish ancestry. She claimed to be French on that side.
Ancestry amongst born Australians of Mother's generation was an uncertain and even dangerous thing to deal with. Perhaps it was better then to invent one's origins than to admit to their being unknown or unknowable. I'm pretty sure that Mother got her French ancestors out of lively imagining in childhood, say built on a fib told her by someone interested in keeping the discreditable facts from her.
It was the gold rush that brought my sire and maternal grandsire to the West. As a matter of fact, it was that which brought all the rest of the T'otherside gentry across, discovery of gold in W.A. having coincided with a great economic slump back East due to the petering out of the gold that had been mainly responsible for the civilizing of those parts. Father and grandfather came separately, unknown to each other. Mother came after her father, seeking not gold, but love and security. She did not come alone, but trailing two fatherless children.
But whereas my own father came to dig for his fortune, Grandpa Phillip came equipped to do that by which fortunes are more likely to be made on goldfields than by digging, namely, in trading with those who dig it in the necessities of life. Old Phil had had experience in gold mining back East. He was supposed to have come to Australia in a British man-of-war and to have jumped ship to join one of the first gold rushes.
What grandfather's place was in his ship's company is not clear. Although he was a contemporary of mine for about ten years and I saw him fairly often, I can't recall having a single conversation with him. For a start, he was a taciturn old dog, and when he was amongst us, Mother, in her all-abiding adoration of him, monopolized him completely. What we, the children of his daughter Victoria, knew about him we had exclusively from her. I don't think we were ever impressed. Privily we called him Phil the Fluter. One of his pastimes was solitary, melancholy tootling on the flute. As I remember him, he always seemed to be alone, even with Mother fussing over him with us kids out of the way, even when he was sitting up with her and Dad of nights, pontificating as he was wont to do occasionally about the state of the world. A favorite saying of his was: "There's a day of reckoning coming, mark my words!"
I suspect that Grandpa Phillip's naval history was largely another figment of Mother's childhood imaginings, built on something told her to stop her asking embarrassing questions. According to her, he was a midshipman at the time of his desertion. That sounds like a little girl's idea of a naval officer.
It certainly did not fit in with what a simple check of dates reveals, that at the time of the very first Australian gold rush Phil was in his thirties. So he could not have been a midshipman then, and it is hardly likely that a fully fledged naval officer of noble birth would descend to common desertion.
Nevertheless, it was in the nautical tradition that we children of Mother's were largely reared. This despite the fact that our most susceptive years were spent remote from the sea.
Those were the days when the chief entertainment of people like ourselves was the family singsong round the piano in the parlor, or drawing room, as we so grandly called ours. We sang mostly of the sea. Our songs weren't chanties, because we knew none, for all that we had an old salt for a grandpa. They were just ballads of the sea, to be found in any music book of the day. Mother would play for us, none too skilfully, but no less effectively, and any notes she muffed would be drowned in the beefing, in which she led us in a bo's'n's voice. She often donned a sailor's cap.
Mother had a weakness for wearing masculine headgear for what she considered masculine occasions. She could indulge herself thus in the part of a sailor so far from the sea, for the reason that there was always a nautical rigout about the house made by herself for my half-brother Phillip's theatrical appearances. Phillip, the apple of her eye, a tall, slender, handsome boy, became even famous in the bush communities of our beginnings for his play acting and singing in nautical roles. His forte was The Midship Mite, a ballad of the Crimean War. Our little weatherboard and iron houses used, in rehearsal, to quiver to the thunder of Mother's pianoforte rendering of the Russian guns:
We got the Rooshan guns in sight, when up spake the little Midship mite: "Cheerily my lads, yo-ho-ho, cheerily my lads, yo-ho!"
Although we did discover something of the truth about Mother's maternal ancestry, we never learnt anything of the facts of her father's origin. Not that we were anything like inquisitive concerning either case. What we found out about the supposed French side was by accident, and we didn't, somehow couldn't, delve into it. Maybe there was in our restraint a degree of fear of digging up things we would be ashamed of; but I'm pretty sure that it was mostly out of compassion for Mother's own ignorance and her shame.
My own idea is that old Phil was some unimportant scion of a more or less important family, that he'd got in trouble of some sort, and they had shipped him abroad, possibly aboard a man-of-war as a sort of supernumerary. If I am anywhere near right, it was not through ordinary profligacy that he disgraced himself. That's a certainty, because no one who had thought that having a good time was worth getting into trouble for could ever have become as miserable an old thing as Phil the Fluter was. As I knew him, he didn't drink, he scorned women, he harped on that day of reckoning. He even hated women. Observing the growing independence of the sex, he would declare: "When women come to wearing trousers, God help us!"
I know what he used to say so well because Mother was his echo. Yet while she voiced his sentiments as very Gospel, she was as independent a woman as ever lived. I guess that but for her father's sentiments about women wearing trousers, she would have donned them as well as a man's hat in those masculine moods of hers.
Grandpa must have had a remittance of sorts, because there is no evidence that he ever did any regular kind of work. Still, the worth of his noble connexions may be judged by the fact that he finished life on the Old Age Pension, and would have been buried as an indigent, but for the bounty of that common fellow, my own father.
Although mostly stingy, my own father was always open handed with old Phil. It was not that he owed him anything, apparently, except the doubtful honor of being allowed to assume responsibility for a daughter the old fellow regarded as a nuisance. He was almost as reverent in his attitude to Phil the Fluter as Mother. Of course, there could have been something about the old boy that we kids missed.
So seedy an old thing did he seem to me that, but for seeing proof of it with my own eyes, I might have doubted that he was even of good family. This proof was in the person of a cousin of his, a much younger man, whom we came to call Cousin Davenport, whatever his true relationship to us was. There was no doubt about Davenport's being an English gentleman. It was probably his true gentility that brought him to us. At that time we were living inland, on the outskirts of a little railway junction town. He must have guessed our circumstances from having already stayed with old Phil, who was then living on the coast with another of his daughters, Amelia. As a matter of fact, our circumstances were a good deal better than the others', something Mother might have counted on when making bold to ask him to visit us. Aunt Amelia's husband had deserted her over East, and her children were rips, and she herself, dear, fat, easy-going Aunt Amelia, was something of a slattern.
Still, Cousin Davenport, fresh from the ancestral halls and parks, must have been shocked by that dump of ours, standing with tin roof blazing, in paddocks parched bare and cracked with heat. It was only a three-room shack, for all the bits and pieces added in the way of verandahs and skillion kitchen on a mud floor. Flies would be there to welcome him, swarming in from the dung-piles of our own horses and the reeking mountain of excrement built up by several generations of our next door neighbor's goats. Meat ants would run up his legs at table. But being a perfect gentleman, he showed no sign of what his true feelings must have been.
Cousin Davenport sang with us at the piano, played and sang for us a couple of new comic songs from London. He went driving around the district with us in the dog cart and ate fruit we stole for him. He came horse-hunting with Phillip and me, and out in the bush ate jilgies and bardies and pencil yams cooked on the coals, and let us teach him how to hunt and fish with a hoop-iron kylie. But his most gentlemanly act of all was taking Mother to church, just her alone, in the dog cart, and wearing his top hat!
I'll venture to say that Mother was never so proud in her life as when she went to church with Cousin Davenport. I know what I'm talking about, because I was a witness to the proudest moments of the adventure. Phillip and I, taking a short cut to the township across paddocks, were at the church, peeping from behind a tin privy at the rear, to see the grand arrival, the handing down of her befrilled ladyship by her toppered escort, the obsequious welcome by the clergyman, the gawping of the local bushies, and likewise we saw the stately emergence.
That day Mother did, as never before to our knowledge, what she called "Wagging my tail". She used to talk of doing that sort of thing as a young girl back home T'otherside. You could see that she did it then and there so as to show the common herd once and for all that she was not of it.
Although we were railway people, we never lived amongst other railway communities, not anywhere. Railway people tend to congregate about the depot. While we lived in the backblocks our home was invariably well away from it. Mother would suffer no association with Dad's workmates off the job. But it was not simple snobbery that caused us to live remotely. We needed to live well away from a township, for the reason that we ran horses. Dad's sideline, hobby, and delight was horses. He broke them, trained them, traded them. We had to have grazing and water, and mostly got it on commonage or intrusion on the unguarded acres of rich squatters. Dad used to go to work, to the Loco, as the locomotive depot was called, riding a horse of flesh and blood, which he left hobbled while he mounted and rode an iron horse.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Disturbing Element by Xavier Herbert. Copyright © 2012 Xavier Herbert. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
1 A Coronet and a Ball and Chain,2 Iron Horses and Kangaroos,
3 Oh, Molly Riley,
4 Laggard in Love,
5 Iodine and Black Velvet,
6 The Speaking Fish,
7 Puellae et Pilulae,
8 Ladibus Cisibus Galiorum,
9 Dawn of a New Era,
10 A Girl's Best Friend,
11 I'm Doctor Jack,
12 The Long, Long Trail,