The magpie is the scandalmonger of the woods.
The verb ‘to mag’ meaning ‘to gossip’ derives from magpie.
My mother was a magger.
A paling fence divided our garden from the garden next door and over the back fence lived Mrs Back-Fence. My mother and Mrs Back-Fence might have been posing for a cartoonist as they stood on either side of the fence, magging. Behind each woman was a rotary clothes line. We had striped tea-towels, white sheets, woollen singlets, pink pants and knitted socks all hanging from dolly pegs. Some things were patched and darned, the mending being more obvious when the clothes were wet. It was unsafe to hang anything damaged but unmended on the line, for this would be noted by other maggers as a sign of degeneration in the family. And once, when a torn, unmended nightdress had got through the washing and as far as the line, our rabbit attacked it and shredded it so that it had to be thrown out. My mother and Mrs Back-Fence had floral aprons, and often their hair was set with metal butterfly clips, covered by a chiffon scarf knotted at the front. They did not wear fluffy slippers. Instead, they nearly always wore rather thick stockings and brown lace-up shoes, like nurses.
Over the back fence these maggers passed hot scones wrapped in tea-towels, cups of sugar, bowls of stewed plums, and a continuous ribbon of talk. They sifted through the details of everything they heard and saw and thought, and arranged them into art. Children under the age of ten, considered to lack the ability to understand the narrative, were allowed to listen, provided they were still and quiet. (Today, magging usually takes place on the telephone, I think, and so a child listener becomes restless because there is only one side to the conversation.) The Crusaders took from the Arabian Desert the seeds of the wild flowers, which later became the glory of English gardens. The maggers scoured the lives of their relations and neighbours, and sometimes the lives of famous people, to shake out the seeds from which would grow undulating plains of exotic grasses and flowers giving colour and perfume.
One of the most hypnotic habits of the maggers was the constant use of possessive pronouns and parentheses. They constructed sentences which could go on all day in dizzy convolutions, as one relative clause after another was added.
‘Edna and Joe (his brother was Colin who married Betty Trethewey who later divorced him which was when he had his breakdown over the Kelly girl so that it was no wonder business went downhill) were having their twenty-fifth anniversary which was just before Easter which was early that year, and Pam (she’s the daughter, you realise) was there with her fiancé who was Bruce French (his father had the hardware next to the Royal Park) when it turned out that Joe was electrocuted in the cellar which was where he kept the wine (they drank a terrible lot of wine in those days) and it wasn’t long after that that Edna turned round and married Bruce, and Pam went and lived next door to them (this was fifteen years ago now) and she hasn’t spoken to them since which is very hard on the daughter, Susan, who doesn’t even know that Bruce is her father, not that Bruce can be certain himself really, but of course Edna knows and she has never forgiven Pam for not telling her she was going to have Susan when she was engaged to Bruce.’
As a child I never saw any Marx Brothers films. When I did see them, I was surprised to hear Groucho Marx using my mother’s phrases. Trapped in her language, like fish in a net, were snatches and snippets from the Marx Brothers’ scripts. Inserted into the magging of two women in a Tasmanian coastal town of the 1940s, the expressions of Groucho Marx had a curious lifelessness, and their meaning was elusive. But I, as a child, accepted the words at face value, in faith, expecting to have their meaning revealed in good time. It took many years for things to fall into place. Perhaps the child who called his bear Gladly after Gladly the cross-eyed bear is an apocryphal child, but the story has a nice ring of truth. Harold be thy name. I applied the same unblinking acceptance to the name of the local toyshop. The end of the sign had fallen off and so it was called ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’. I even accepted the name of the toymaker as an ordinary name, and now I don’t know whether it was his real name or not. He was called Jack Frost. At Christmas, he used to make wooden peepshows of the crib. You closed one eye and looked through a hole in a box. Inside, in an unearthly light, were first the shepherds, then the animals, and, further back, the baby like a sugar mouse in his mother’s arms. The angels were in the far distance; wings sharp like the wings of swallows. And Jack Frost carved our rocking horse. Even the name of the horse, Dapple Grey, I failed to see as descriptive, and thought of as Christian name and surname. I must have existed in a blurry blue mist where I waited for the words to acquire meaning. Something that I always connected with the verb ‘to mag’ was some stuff called ‘Milk of Mag’. This was a thick, white, slightly aniseed, shudderingly horrible laxative medicine, the ‘Mag’ being short for magnesia.
I tried to join in some magging once. I made the mistake of thinking that if I introduced some fabulous fact, I would be included in the discussion. So I said that Jack Frost had told me he had made the original statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague. Nobody took any notice of me at all. Or so I thought. But after a while I realised that terribly silly lies were being referred to as woodpecker toy facts.
‘And then she tried to tell me the baby was premature. A woodpecker toy fact if ever I heard one. It is no mystery to me that he weighed nine-and-a-half pounds. Nine-and-a-half pounds! I ask you.’
There was a special quality to a toy fact. There was a desperation—either to attract or to deflect attention. And a toy fact only became a toy fact after it had passed through the special sifting process of the maggers, and had received from them a blessing.
I had generated a term, which had drifted into the net of the maggers. Little did I know (as a magger would say) that the spirit of my words was being given the same weight as that accorded the words of Groucho Marx.
Over the years, the concept of the woodpecker toy fact has become very important and dear to me. I have lived here in Woodpecker Point, on the northwest coast of Tasmania, all my life. My parents have died and my sisters have all married and left the island. I live alone in the house with the rotary clothes line and the paling fence. Mrs Back-Fence is in a nursing home in Burnie, and I have never seen the wife of the Turkish man who now lives in the house. They have a baby daughter who sings Baa-baa-black-sheep sadly and endlessly in the garden. It is a very boring and irritating song, after a while. Jack Frost has disappeared. One of my nephews took Dapple Grey to the beach and left him there and he was washed out to sea. As these and many other things have changed, so the idea of the toy fact has changed and developed. The quest for the toy fact has gradually come to dominate my life.
Once when I was at the beach, years before the toy fact was named, I captured a starfish in my tin bucket. The tide was out and there was a cold breeze coming in across the shiny wet sand. I was sitting on the pebbles, which were shaped like eggs, and smooth, and all different kinds of white. I had the bucket between my legs so that I could stare down into it at the starfish, and I was given the ability to understand the shape of everything.
The moment passed, and yet it has never left me. Five minutes later, the sky went darker, and a red-haired girl in a green dress came up behind me and grabbed the bucket. She ran off across the pebbles with the starfish. My second-oldest sister chased the girl, and the girl defended herself with the spike of a beach umbrella. She drove the spike into my sister’s lip, ran off with the bucket, and disappeared.
I think my quest began with the starfish. Perhaps if that girl had not stolen it when she did, had not injured my sister as she did, I might never have undertaken the quest. Then, when the toy fact was named and its nature defined in a rudimentary way, I sensed that there was a system of knowing things that could, if handled in the right way, lead to understanding, the idea of which dazzled me. The simplicity and complexity of the starfish, punctuated in time by my sister’s blood, and coupled with the glorious lie (which might not have been a lie) about Jack Frost and the Infant of Prague, suggested to me that if I assembled facts in a special way every minute of every day for years and years and years, I would eventually see something more beautiful and more wonderful than anything I could have imagined. It was as though I had a golden thread which I wove to make a net in which I caught the toy facts, trapping them, bright birds in flight, planets in amber. I have collected and assembled the toy facts in my brain, and I am still uncertain as to whether I will ultimately discover The Toy Fact and so complete the pattern, or whether, by placing the final fact I will produce The Toy Fact. The quest itself is, however, absorbing, and has, as I said, come to dominate my life.
It is not only a matter of discovering things, but of manufacturing from those things the toy facts in all their fullness and beauty. I sometimes think my golden net of facts is like a fabulous story I am writing in my head. Once, when I was studying poetry at school, I used to think that everything was a metaphor, and said ‘metaphor’ in answer to every question.
‘If we took a slice off the top of her head,’ said the teacher, and I thought she was going to pay me a compliment, ‘we would find that the only thing in there was a metaphor.’ She meant to be insulting but had stumbled on the beautiful truth. It was this remark of hers that set me on my final course. From then on, I did not have to pass any exams or do anything much at all. I have spent my time since that day listening to people, reading encyclopaedias, browsing in the library, sitting on the beach, and generally pursuing one toy fact after another. I cared for my parents when they were ill, and I have worked in the Morning Glory cake shop for the past ten years.
One day, I am going to know everything about everything. I will know what makes a Cox’s Orange Pippin different from a Granny Smith. I will know what it is that stops hydrangeas from having any scent. I will see the pyramids being built and survive the Hundred Years War. I will understand the nature of fire, and know the depth to which the longest tree-root goes down into the earth. I will know what sorrow is made from, what constitutes joy. I will have conversations with the sage of Zurich; afternoon tea with Chagall in his garden; speak to Polycrates the King before his crucifixion in Magnesia. There are bound to be times when I can think in Chinese.
Meanwhile, I live here in Woodpecker Point, not far from the ruins of the park where the deer and the peacocks used to roam. I prune the roses and the fruit trees and I talk to my finches.
I have a large collection of feathers, and am making a study of their colours. At present, I am particularly interested in the iridescent colours, which ripple and change on the necks of pigeons. They are formed when the light is refracted from the surfaces of the tiny scales that make up the feathers. I suppose some colours of reptiles and butterflies work on the same principle. I have spent a lot of time with butterflies, and can here, quite naturally, in the course, as it were, of the conversation, mention a very high-class toy fact. This is the fact that the Cabbage White Butterfly arrived in Tasmania on the feast of St Teresa in 1940, which was the day that I was born. We both arrived in Devonport at the same time, and have been constant observers of each other from the beginning. It is possible that the Cabbage White knows more about me than I know about it. I have a photograph of myself with a cloud of Cabbage Whites. I am three and I am standing among the cabbages in my maternal grandmother’s garden, wearing the blue dress with the white edges that my grandmother knitted for me for Christmas. As these were the days before colour photography, the blue of my dress and the blue-green of the cabbages are tinted with inks. My hair is the colour of butter, and my shoes are magical red. The butterflies are untouched by the tinter’s brush so that they possess a quality of ethereal purity, which is lacking in the coloured areas of the picture. I have always been pleased that I had a grandmother who had Cabbage Butterflies in her cabbages. And I have the photograph to prove it. It was taken the day before Christmas, and on Christmas Day my grandmother died.
The night before they buried her, she came to me as I lay sleeping. She had taken by then the form of the smallest British butterfly, the Small Blue, so often found near warm and sunny grass slopes and in hollows. She was like a forgetme-not. She alighted on my quilt and smiled at me, sweetly, as she always smiled. All she said was one word. This almost shocked me at the time, because she was a magger, like my mother. She had no doubt trained my mother. She smiled at me and she said:
‘Listen.’