The Voice That Thunders, page 23
“Me braces snapped last week.”
“Haven’t you another pair?”
“No. There’s a strap for cases somewhere in the back bedroom, but I can’t get up the stairs.”
I found the strap. Arthur Buckley staggered against the mantelpiece, while I stood behind, trying to hold him upright, as I tied the strap twice round.
It went through my head: if only would-be Doctors of Philosophy, who write to me asking for opinions on my work and its relationship to structualism, deconstructualism, phenomenology, semiotics, reductionism, with special reference to subplot, after-plot, subvocalisation, not forgetting metacognition, if they could only see that writing lies more in trying to keep an old man’s trousers up and that from such moments is born a Strandloper.
Arthur Buckley was tired. It was time to go. I said that I’d enjoyed our talk very much.
“Ay,” said Arthur Buckley. “We’ve had us a grand crack.”
I had to be away for a few days, and I asked him whether I could come and talk again the following week.
“If I’m here,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you the truth about Maurice Garner.”
Finally I asked him whether he would let me take some photographs of him. He agreed, and I took a series of close-up portraits. That is another pattern of my research. In framing the photograph I ask basic questions of the subject; and when I look into someone’s eyes through a lens I see something more than with my eye alone.
We parted in good cheer. When I went back a few days later Arthur Buckley was dead. I still do not know the truth about Maurice Garner, but I had gained much of the truth about William Buckley. I knew him now.
The rest of the English section of the book, and the transportation to Australia, presented no irresolvable problems. I had to follow the lines of the pattern. Then came alarm. The lines were there and flowing; yet they were starting to approach and to interact with other lines, a pattern I had dealt with in The Stone Book Quartet. The cross-references were unavoidable. The Stone Book Quartet had been written as a sequel to Strandloper, beginning nine years before Strandloper was conceived. That inner voice which instructs but will not discuss, told me not to hesitate. So I put my disconcertion aside, and obeyed. I continued to pursue the Lewisian “joy”.
What can be said to have been among the qualities of Strandloper, to compensate for the difficulties, is that it has been a joyous work in its making. Everybody I have approached has been friendly, and eager to help. But beware. I warned against involvement with writers. The ruthlessness can take many forms; and I should tell you that, whenever you are in the presence of a writer, anything you say will be taken down, and it will be used. The difference with Strandloper is that the victims have not merely acquiesced. They have shared in the joy.
What happens is that the writer, either having written a paragraph, or about to start one, feels that something extra is needed, something slight, a seasoning more than an ingredient. These seasonings cannot be invented. They have to be stolen. They make all the difference, changing a text from adequate to inspired.
A new butcher moved to our nearby village, which has an enclave of insecure upwardly mobile, executives. They expect servility, not only civility, from shopkeepers. To help him at weekends, the butcher employs Raymond, a retired colleague, who was the apprentice of my father’s best friend. I had not seen Raymond for nearly fifty years, but the first time I went into the shop we spontaneously broke into a loud exchange of improvised sexual verbal abuse and scatology, lowering the executive tone, all in broad dialect. I saw the young butcher’s eyes flicker in alarm. Bad for business.
“Give over,” said Raymond. “I’ve known our Alan since his bum were as big as me shirt button.”
Within half an hour it was in the book, making a crucial scene not just sorrowful, but searingly human.
Nicknames cannot be improvised, either. All the nicknames of Strandloper are of local men, delivered mostly by the stonemason, Ken. His one misgiving is that Eggy Mo, an innocent in the book, a near-psychopath in reality, may not be the illiterate he is said to be.
Taxi driver, John, used to be a coalman, after his father, and so, inevitably in Cheshire, is known as Cobby. I asked him whether he would mind if I “borrowed” him. He was so amused that he told me a rhyme long known in his family.
Owd Cob and Young Cob and Young Cob’s son.
Young Cob’s Owd Cob when Owd Cob’s done.
He was giving me more than he knew. In Cheshire dialect, “Cobby” is a coalman. But “Cob” is chief man, governor of a gang, leader. This was so important that the rhyme not only went into the dialogue, but shifted the structure of the book, and gave the name to one of its sections. It expressed the inexpressible, in particular at one cathartic resolution of an Aboriginal acceptance of the pain of what had to be to achieve the purpose of a life. All from asking an ex-coalman if I could use his name, which I did, as well as the rhyme.
A last example: I needed an opening for the first chapter of the transport to Australia, something memorable, poetic, yet indicative of a destroyed mind. The text reads: “I chases ’em; I flaps my apron at ’em. But they sees me coming. They sees my apron. But I’ll get ’em. One day” It is all the character ever says, but he says it for six months.
The fragmentation, and the rhythm, enabled me to create whole scenes in the smallest space, by using single phrases or sentences impressionistically to show the duration of the voyage, even to its being used for the commital of the man’s corpse to the sea.
In our son’s first term at New College, Oxford, he was sitting by the lake with three friends, watching the ducks, when out of the bushes ran a scout, a college servant, making for the ducks, shouting: “I chases ’em; I flaps my apron at ’em. But they sees me coming. They sees my apron. But I’ll get ’em. One day.”
Nobody is safe. I was lucky. All whom the thieving magpie robbed, delight in the private joke. Strandloper is as much a novel made by a community as by an individual.
The original reason for my turning out my files at that Summer Solstice was that I was too exhausted to do anything else. I had spent six weeks travelling 46,000 miles, to lecture in Canada, the United States and Australia.
The Australian visit had been arranged by my closest friend, who has given me the sobriquet of “manky academic” instead of academic manqué. He is Professor (now Emeritus) Ralph Elliott, a descendant of Martin Luther, nephew of Nobel Laureate Max Born, and cousin to Ben Elton and to Olivia Newton John, and then Master of University House at the Australian National University in Canberra. His speciality is runic inscriptions, in which he is the acknowledged ultimate authority, and an internationally respected scholar of Old and Middle English, especially of Chaucer and the Gawain poet, and of the works of Thomas Hardy.
We met because he wrote to me to tell me that I must be the first writer since the fourteenth century to use the same dialect and landscape in my writing as the Gawain poet had used in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And we had, from different backgrounds and disciplines, arrived at the same answer in identifying the location of the Green Chapel.
We are also concerned in the nature of The Matter of Britain and the need for it to be kept alive by its working and reworking. For me, Strandloper is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The elements of The Matter of Britain are in both.
It was vital that I had seen Australia, seen its light and hues, smelt its smells, heard its sounds. Without them, it would have been an insult to dare the quest. The other ingredient, without which it would not have started, was the tireless generosity of Ralph Elliott and his position that gave him access to the libraries and archives of Australia. He had the means to dig out and photocopy rare books, unique books, diaries, notes, sketches, letters: all the paraphernalia of the land that was to become William Buckley’s.
Ralph himself is a William Buckley. He left Germany as a teenager, one step ahead of the SS, to come to Britain, knowing three words of English. His mother told him that it was necessary to know only two in order to get by in that benighted land: “Corned beef” and “Darling”. His cousin said that, with one more word, he would be entirely at ease among the British. All he had to say, frequently, was “Bugger”. Thus armed, Ralph set out from the chapel at midnight, pricking o’er the plain, to develop a career devoted to the enlightenment of the English language around the world.
So, for Australian documentary research, I had my mole. His most outrageous feat was to send me a photocopy of the only book to describe in detail the physical culture of the Aborigines of the area where William Buckley spent his thirty-two years: nine hundred and seventy-eight pages, by express airmail letter post.
In such ways, I was kept secure and happy in the research. I had all the external facts I needed. The historical William Buckley was shipped out both as a convict and as a bricklayer, a mechanic, to build a new penal colony in what was decreed by the British Government to be “terra nullius”: no one’s land. One piece of William’s workmanship survives, as fragments of a concrete armoury he built, which are now the crazy paving of a garden path in Ramsey Street. But William had brooded on other ideas.
He had long decided to walk back home. The possibility of this was a common belief among the convicts: head north along the coast, reach China, turn left, and there you were. They even drew compasses on scraps of paper, to keep them from going off course.
The land was so hostile, and fear of the Indians so great, that little attempt was made to recapture an escapee. Either he would come back, begging to be let into the camp, or he would never be seen again. Once William Buckley was out of range of the sentries he was presumed dead. After three months, the penal colony failed for lack of water, departed, and founded Hobart. The land was left to itself.
Meanwhile, William followed the coast to China.
Unfortunately, he was inside the narrow mouth of Port Phillip, the caldera of an extinct volcano. He did not know how to get food or water, and his progress was slow, his physical condition not good and worsening. After some ninety-five miles of walking in terrible conditions, he completed the circuit of Port Phillip and found himself looking across the entrance, straight at the ship and into the camp.
Among the photocopies that Ralph sent me was a critical edition of the ghosted first-person account of William’s life in the bush, which was recorded by a hack journalist from Hobart after William’s return to the whites. From this I was able to relate the Aboriginal names of physical features to their modern equivalents and could plot William’s long journey.
Instead of giving up when he saw the penal colony he had staggered ninety-five miles to escape, he turned away and continued to head north-east for China. But he was travelling south-west. This he continued to do for about two hundred miles. Then the text showed that he stopped, turned around, and set off, moving away from the sea, but in the right direction.
Why had he been 180 degrees out, and how had he come to discover his error? It is in the apparent anomalies that the most significant and exciting aspects of research are to be found. When I saw it, I felt time and space dissolve. I was with William Buckley, I was William Buckley, as I watched him work out his error. He had not realised that, in the Southern Hemisphere, in that mad land that seemed to have been designed to kill, where even the rivers were salt, the sun, at noon, was not in the south but in the north.
He made for China.
It had always been impossible. At last his body, after another two hundred miles and what must have been more than a year of solitary stumbling, dehydrated and starved, gave out. But his mind did not. He could not walk, so he crawled. He crawled until he came to a low hillock, and with fading vision, he saw a stick planted at the top of the hillock. A stick to help him to walk to China. He crawled for the stick, took hold of it, and, with that last effort he collapsed, and should have died.
He was found by a group of Aborigines. They had no knowledge of white men, but it was an Aboriginal belief that the dead became white. And here was this white giant, lying, not on a hillock but on the grave mound of a hero, warrior, wise man, healer and law-giver, Murrangurk; and he was holding not a stick but Murrangurk’s spear. Murrangurk had come back to his People. It was as if Arthur had returned from Avalon.
For thirty-two years William Buckley was Murrangurk.
And here the anomalies began to pile up. It would be understandable that having made the journey from Tharangalkbek, the sky land, the gum-tree country, he would be in shock and have forgotten his language and his customs, but he would remember, given time. William had to have more going for him to be able to remain Murrangurk for thirty-two years. Also, I could infer something about Murrangurk.
Among Australian Aborigines, there is an unbreakable rule that when someone dies the name must never be spoken again. There is one exception. If the individual has been of the highest spiritual rank, that of shaman, the name may be spoken. So Murrangurk had been a shaman. Tough on William. Yet, thirty-two years later, the opportunistic British, who, within a few years exterminated the irritating niggers, often for sport, were saved by the authority of a Murrangurk who was very much respected, and wholly in control. What had started out as a twenty-year-old bricklayer was now a leader of thinkers and of warriors.
That for me, the novelist, was the crux, the conscious reason for writing the book. How was a priest-philosopher-healer-leader of great intelligence to communicate his wisdom in a language that no European spoke? How could his only point of contact, the Cheshire dialect and the convict Cant of an immature man, be used to tell what he knew?
It was historically impossible; and that is why the name of William Buckley has no place in Australia’s list of folk heroes. Apart from his usefulness as an interpreter’s being abused, and his laying of the first brick in what was to become Melbourne, he was discarded as a fellow of low intellect and brutish nature who had fallen instantly to the level of the heathen, to the extent that he had not even tried to introduce to them the Word of God. That perhaps William had had no need; that perhaps he had been initially the acolyte, would never have been countenanced.
And here I nearly foundered.
Ralph was in England and we were talking. I said that I had reached a point beyond which I could not go. For the first time, despite six years’ work, I should have to abort a book. The impregnable barrier was the Aboriginal mind. I had no wish to invade their philosophy, which is largely sacred/secret, and is their last privacy and dignity, but unless I knew something of its truth my Aboriginal characters, and the change from William Buckley to Murrangurk, could not be shown as they naturally would have behaved as a result of reflecting, not revealing, the teachings of their esoteric culture. And there was no way in.
Ralph went home the next day. Shortly after, I had a letter from one of Australia’s anthropologists: the leading one, for my purpose; because not only is she an anthropologist, but is a full member of an Aboriginal kinship group, is a female Elder, and of such high rank that she has the authority to adjudicate over both Men and Women’s Matters. In her letter, she said that Ralph had told her that I was stuck, and she wanted to know whether she could help. She had a long-standing invitation to lecture in Lisbon, and the fee would pay her air-fare to Manchester.
And so I engaged with the Aboriginal mind among the throng and coloured neon of Manchester airport.
We recognised each other on sight, spontaneously broke into laughter, and, before we were clear of the car park ramps, she had begun. I continue to say “she”, because of her wish to remain anonymous. Her work involves negotiating, finagling and manoeuvering for the pure Aborigines, and she prefers to keep a low profile. To me, she is lovingly known as The Southern Sybil.
Education in Aboriginal teaching is inferential, not, as with us, instructional. A pupil is shown something, or told a story, or given a statement in metaphorical images rather than through grammatical and syntactical logic; and, dependent on the reaction, is either moved forward or automatically returns to the start. It is akin to a fail-safe flow chart system of religious and philosophical wisdom. It is also a protection for the individual. We do not let people drive Formula I cars on the day they collect their driving licence.
As a result, Southern Sybil presents herself in such a way that the impatient, intolerant, inflexible (and therefore unsuitable) mind is irritated by what appears to be a deliberately elliptical, verbally dextrous and batty old woman. That is a serious, and often terminal, mistake. But stay with this Delphic nuisance, and things start to happen within oneself. A new grammar and syntax form. And thought takes a new shape, an Aboriginal shape. Once this is established, The Sybil uses both Hellenistic and Aboriginal models, both intellectually highly demanding, to express what has to be conveyed in the most efficient way.
I knew fairly soon that I had passed a crucial test, from an Aboriginal point of view, and I asked The Sybil why she had crossed the world on Ralph’s say-so. “It was necessary,” she said. “The only moment of doubt I had was when we were about to touch down at Manchester, and I thought: Dear God! What if he’s not up to it? But when we both laughed before we spoke, I knew that we should dance well.”
That was 1989. We have danced well. And the dance goes on, and will, for it has led me to see what has always given spring to my step, why the books are eternally different, eternally the same.
The Aborigine would call it my Dreaming, my song and my dance. The books are a vehicle for, and then marker of, the journey. It is why, once my duty towards them has been discharged, I have no further interest in them per se; which is not to claim that I disparage them. They are swept up, and still exist, in the cumulative intricacy and simplicity of the dance. Already Strandloper is taking its place, giving way to the new song that it has made possible by my writing of that portion of spiritual autobiography, with the help of so many people, foremost among whom are: Ralph Elliott, Southern Sybil, William Buckley, and particularly my wife and our children, who have had to live the soaking and the waiting.
