Who knits here? Who knits here in the top of the wardrobe along with all the birthday cards, the pumpkin-seed beads, the black beads, the moonstones and the opera glasses? Who knits here? Whose knitting needles are these and whose is the pigskin box and whoever would wear a black necklace? Then there’s all these patchwork pieces, squares, triangles, diamonds and circles. Who can sew a circle and keep it flat? And this unfinished knitting, the tiny soft garment, without seams, intended for the newly born child. A long time ago. There are sixty-seven stored birthday cards up here, a tin with fifty-cent bits and paper one-dollar notes, a soap shaped like a hamburger…
What sort of novels do you write? they ask. Are they nice? Have you been writing long? they want to know. All the problems, they say, have been written about already. There are no new problems, are there? How do you as a writer deal with this?…
Well, I suppose you could say that Birthday and Christmas wrapping can always be smoothed out and folded – I mean, it’s an economy to keep it, isn’t it? Of course it’s often on very reasonable specials in the supermarket. I’ve been given this book, it’s called The Secret of How to Win Freedom from Clutter by a man called Don Aslett. My son gave me this book just before I went into hospital to have the Manchester Repair. This is a wonderful name for an operation and it would make a good title for something. The trouble with titles is that you need something to put under them. When my son, because of what he calls clutter in the house, gave me this book, I told him that he must understand that I grew up in the Depression and was brought up to keep all paper and string and the bits of broken parts that had been removed from mended things and clothes that were ugly and did not fit in case I needed them in old age and poverty. He opened the book at page twenty-three and there was the excuse: ‘I was raised during the Depression and we were taught to save everything.’ This man, Don Aslett, though I have never met him, seems to know exactly what I am like and what my house is like. The symptoms of junkosis fit. I seem to be on every page.
‘This shelf is for hats,’ my son, opening the wardrobe, said. ‘Start with this shelf.’ So that’s what I did. That was the last thing I did before leaving for the hospital…
I did keep the knitting needles and, of course, the birthday cards do have great meaning, and I’ve kept my Bronze Life-Saving Medal (1936). Two people are on the medal, one is saving the life of the other, a very moving scene in deep water. I doubt if medals of such good quality are made now. A grandson might like to inherit it. I’ve kept the opera glasses for the same reason.
… I am washing the knees of my grandsons, not their feet, just their little round knees. They, the children, are sitting in a row on the garden bench. I am using the bucket and the sponge that is usually kept for the floors. I feel I should not be using these but go on polishing their knees all the same. It is getting dark in the garden and the damp is rising cold from the newly cut grass. White roses like stars lean out from the glossy dark-green leaves, dark-green in the dusk…
Spit here, dear. Someone is drying my face. Am I crying? I suppose this is the coming round part though I can’t remember a going out or under or whatever it is called. I don’t see the children. I am not finishing off their washings.
Just turn over dear, that’s it. So this is what it feels like to be coming out from an anaesthetic. A GA and an epidural, they say it was.
Where are my legs?
They’re here, dear. Yes dear, your legs are a bit numb. No, you’re not paralysed. No, you won’t be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.
Your geese, the neighbour is telling me, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you, your geese – they’ve disappeared or died. He’s found one, he’s telling me, up against the fence and another one’s in the pen. She’s dead, he’s explaining as I go down the slope between the blossoming trees in the orchard. As for the rest, he’s saying, there’s no sign of them. I’m sorry, he says again, to have to be the one to tell you. Is there anything, he asks in the darkening emptiness and quietness of the valley, is there anything you’d like done with the hay? He’s turning off the water, he’s saying, there’s no point in having the water running to waste if there isn’t a goose on the place. He wouldn’t be a bit surprised he says if that old Foxylady wasn’t around like last year and the year before. You never saw such yellow eyes.
Listen, I tell him, this is the lady, the pastel coloured lady who does the bins. She’s doing the bins she comes round first (every morning I suppose). She picks everything out like the little deckleedged cards. She picks them up and turns them over scrutinising, yes scrutinising, the messages which have accompanied the flowers. One by one she reads them and puts them back. You’ve a regular flower shop in here she says, a lot of work for someone. ‘I’ve been,’ she says, ‘round these wards nearly twenty years.’ She’s tearing stamps off envelopes now for charity. When she reads the cards and the envelopes she moves her lips reading as if she is praying and saying the words under her breath. Someone’s put a needle in the bin she says needles shouldn’t be put in the bins. She’d just like to know who put a needle in the bin. Who, just who, she says. A needle in the bin, she’s bawling down the passage.
I said to him, I said, the pastel lady who finds the needle is telling me, I said to him, my husband, that is, I told him straight out it was me paid off the house and now you’re selling the boat and the trailer I’ll have five thousand thank you very much. He sits home doing nothing. I bought some taps she’s telling me. He’s to put a sink in the laundry but what d’you bet he’ll have chocked it up on a coupla bricks with a hose coming in up under the eaves. What do you think I bought the taps for I’ll tell him when I get in. What have I bought the taps for, I’ll yell at him, I don’t want no bossted up hose dangling through a hole in the roof. Who d’you think you are anyhow.
Just taking your blood pressure dear. What is your normal blood pressure? You don’t know? Well I suppose we can’t know everything about ourselves. I’ll be back to check shortly. Just turn over dear, that’s it.
To the Editor The West Australian
Dear Sir,
I am writing in support of that very good letter of a few weeks ago;
Mutton, as most cooks know, can be treated in sides or quarters
cheaply, quickly and effectively. The finished product is cookedcorned mutton which will keep for a long time. It could be shipped anywhere… Is Australia – a land of over supply (not over-production!) and enormous resource and goodwill not prepared on an apolitical basis to at least examine the possibilities seriously…
To the Editor The West Australian
Dear Sir,
It would be wonderful if, instead of Battleships, we could have Great Ships carrying meat and grain from countries with a surplus to the countries where there is famine. I do think and would like Readers to consider that a Blockade for whatever reason is the greatest evil men can do against other men. It is always the poor and the hungry and the homeless who have to suffer. The great food ships would bring about the World Peace which we all long for for our children and grandchildren…
About the questions they ask;
It seems that the writer can offer
a meditation on human wishes and
experience or he can follow the
climactic curve of conflict and drama
or he can combine both.
I feel embarrassed really I do waiting here at the edge of the underground car park. Waiting for the toilet. The Ladies Toilet, what silly words, is being cleaned by a man. I mean there are two men and this big metal trolley in the doorway and the mop too and us ladies waiting.
Sorry to keep youse waiting, the one man says as if he knows.
Really this must be an electricity cut. No matches and no candles only the silence and the darkness. Continued silence and darkness. I can wait even if it is cold and getting colder as if some disaster is about to come. If only there could be a little gleam of light under the door as it used to be before the servants went to bed.
I think I am beginning to understand why my mother, towards the end of her life, no longer listened to music. I am finding, as I listen, that tears seem to force themselves from under my closed lids.
I am cold.
There’s no need to cry dear. Here’s a hot blanket and remember when you go home you’re not to lift anything heavier than the kettle so it is, you’ll understand, a good idea to clear out the whole house.
Where is the wardrobe? Where is the wardrobe where I left off? The whole thing is full of plastic bags I’ll start on them and work through bit by bit and clear away all the confusion.
As the Maharaja said: ‘On days when one feels gratitude it is as well to show it.’