Fellows,
Steve has asked me to describe for this blog a little of how I have used CGS in my fiction over the years. The school comes into two of my published novels, To The Burning City (1991) and The Lakewoman (2009) and an unpublished ‘creative memoir’ called Life Drawing.
In Lakewoman, my hero, Alec Dearborn, whose life has been transformed by an encounter on the night of D-Day 1944, becomes a history teacher at CGS and I have a scene in the school hall depicting the occasion of his retirement. (pp. 278ff)
More interesting for the class of ’67, I suspect, will be the manner in which I have tried to portray the arrival of a gauche fellow from ‘Inglan’ in ’66, and the liberating effect on him of the egalitarian and candid spirit of the fellows he met at CGS, after he had endured a mostly grim six-year stint at an English boarding school.
In To The Burning City, the chapters around a CGS theme occur after p.123 and I take several of you as my models. For my character ‘Rosie’ I had Rob Ryan in mind. There are a ‘Big’ and a ‘Little’ Ford, where I looked to the two Reids. And a certain incident regarding the school bell and last-day-of-school is recalled, as well as a story Don Phillips told me about some sudden tuxedo’d visitors who passed through his swimming pool one evening.
I have another attempt at trying to capture the effect of Australian esprit in the unpublished Life Drawing, and I thought I would reproduce below 1600 words of it. It describes the arrival of Ralf Sebright (patently Gould) in the raw Canberra of 1966. The man referred to as ‘Sebright’ is my brigadier father, the auctioneers were Fred Lindt and brothers, Unna is my Icelandic mother, and ‘Colfiston’ is the grim English boarding school I refer to above.
It is in my portrayal of the CGS fellows where I hope I have done justice. The ‘Rob Brizzle’ is another manifestation of Rob Ryan, the ‘Merivale’ draws very definitely on Rick Frith, the Armstrong with less precision on Clive Davidson and Ian Sare. You will see that, while I have taken names from our actual class list – Armstrong, Forsyth, and so on, I do not match the actual fellows to their names.
To spare you, I have cut a section from this chapter which deals with Ralf’s inept attempts to converse with the girls of CCEGGS.
The bush walk to Devil’s Peak recalls one actual two-day trek some of us made at that time. I am confident that the Australianisms and the tenor of the conversational exchanges are true to what I encountered, if not verbatim. Life Drawing has had 9 of its 23 chapters published in periodicals, and the MS won the Halstead Prize for best rejected manuscript 2008. I still hope to see it published one day.
Enough Explanation! I hope what follows allows you to see a little of the effect you had on the bloke most of you still, after 44 years, refer to as ‘Pom ’.
Ch.15, The Bonny
In his first Australian weeks Ralf experienced a lightness in his being quite new to him. Wide horizons, the faintest bronze in the blue Monaro light, the mixed aromas of dry grass and sawn timber, eucalypts and new paint, all had to do with this well-being. Sebrights bought a white bungalow with garage under, pick-axed the intractable soil to take lawn seed and the government allocation of free trees and shrubs. Sheep grazed on the nearby hill, magpies carolled from tree to tree, and young girls rode their brown horses bareback through these new suburbs. The new place was somehow generous.
'Wink when you know it's a bargain, chum,' Sebright nudged the shirtsleeved auctioneers scarce out of school, who in turn addressed the fifty two year-old brigadier as 'young fellah.'
Meanwhile, the contrariwise autumn turned pin oak, poplar, liquidambar, into statuesque bonfires against the poised blue Monaro air. Such leafy fingers of yellow and sorrel, scarlet and pink, were astounding in their delicacy. Astounding also to Ralf was his own breakthrough.
‘You don’ mind us call’n you a Pom, do you?’ asked the blonde bloke called Brizzle whose forelock slipped continually across his eyes.
'Quite like it,' Ralf heard himself concede.
Between classes, they fell in with him among the sandstone cloisters, glanced at him sidelong, chiacked him about the Poms and their personal hygiene, about blimpish Pom generals and Digger hardihood. There were Aussi swimmers, runners and batsmen to consider, but it was harmless vaunt. Indeed, they loved to subvert their own patriotic boasting with some rueful detraction, could be suddenly magnanimous when they admitted how Jeez, but they respected the way the Poms handled the Blitz 'n all that.
'Fair dinks!'
And when they were generous like this, they allowed themselves to sound vulnerable, as though to be vulnerable was the finer part of feeling, emotion at its most authentic. At the beginning Ralf had felt vulnerable himself, so was quick to surmise that these laconic exchanges were about the grounds of his equality among them. Delicate, complex equality, tested, finding assurance, tested further. He wanted a word to describe their difference from the Colfiston crowd, and came up with the word 'bonny'.
And though he could not have chosen the words, the sensation within him was that his ego was repairing itself. The military phantasmagoria of Colfiston began to recede. He could commence upon a project, his weekly English essay for instance, with the presentiment that he might excel rather than botch it.
At weekends the fellows came and guzzled the orangeade Ralf's 'old lady' prepared for them, charmed her with sunny courtesies. To Unna these schoolboys with their first cars and shy grins were like the subalterns entertained at Dehra Dun and Rheindahlen. They called Sebright 'The Brig', leaned against the kitchen bench and reacted to his challenges with their own cheerful forthrightness.
‘A worm is your only emperor for diet,’ Sebright confronted them with the phrase from Hamlet, (a matriculation text). ‘What do you fellows make of that?’
‘Aw,’ Brizzle and Merivale looked sidelong at each other. ‘Some piece of low-life's gettin’ a feed at least.’ More to the point, parried Merivale slyly, what did the Brigadier make of it. Ralf watched Merivale in this conversation with his father. As his schoolfellow talked, he idly took possession of the Sebright telephone, dismantled it, laid the components on the kitchen bench, then noting the Brigadier's concerned look, assured him airily 'No sweat Brigadier! It’s only your standard Australian phone. Piece of cake.’ Merivale blew some fluff from the mouthpiece, ‘I'm the kind of bloke needs something to do with his hands when talking.’ The explanation appeared to tickle the Brigadier immensely.
'You see?' exclaimed his father when the fellows had left, 'Irreverent courtesy! Forthrightness with good humour!' Here was proof of that finer manhood afforded by the ‘frontier’, reason enough to have come around the world to this new life.
For Ralf, the pleasure lay in finding, after Colfiston's confusion, how instinctively he was getting his attitudes right. Miraculously his essays and mock-exams came back with high marks. By September the 'Pom' had been dropped in favour of 'Ral', and the newcomer was on the inside of a set of fellows, Merivale, ‘Horse’ Forsyth, Rob Brizzle, an Ossie, a Dmitri, an Armstrong. Again miraculous, because no one’s name pointed toward inequality. It was so easy to slip in with this mateship, its nonchalance, its odd moments of earnestness. He cycled to the school each morning along the rim of the stormwater drain, frost melting in the Mugga Way gardens, Seebog and Colfiston a thousand years in his past.
In the spring he joined them for a bush walk in the Brindabella Range via Dingo Dell to Devil's Peak. Crammed into Armstrong’s station wagon, their packs on their knees, they sped along roads called Weetangera and Fairlight, raised the talcum dust with its distinctive, bread-like smell. The brittlejack forest crowded upon them as they wound into the mountains, dribbles of oilpaint, zinc white, seagull grey, saddle-yellow, Ralf picked the colours as the trees flickered past, and arrowhead leaves that smithereened the light. They parked, hoisted packs, tramped off along a firetrail, quoting map references, competing in their knowledge of bushcraft, flinging back jokes along the line.
‘A young bull and old bull on a hillside….’
‘Heard it.’
‘Young bull says, “Let's run down and root ourselves each a cow…”
‘He said he’s heard it, Rob.’
Ralf tramped, listened to the tolerance of the banter, was impressed at how they trusted themselves to this huge tree’d wilderness as casually as they might visit each other in neighbouring suburbs. Here was such a cheerful assumption of independence. Frontier values, it was moving to behold how blithely these were held by fellows who were still schoolboys. Brizzle’s joke proceeded inexorably.
‘So old bull replies, “Nah, we'll walk down and root all of them.’
‘Like we said, Rob, heard it. Jeez.’
They ate raisins and nuts, boiled some tea, tramped all afternoon, gaining altitude, blasé when an opening in the trees allowed some stupendous view across pastureland toward Uriarra and Canberra, or toward the Baldy and Dingi Dingi Ranges folding away westward. The sun sank, its rays infiltrating the forest canopy from below so that all at once they found themselves walking in a sylvan landscape where, minute-by-minute, each surface the light touched turned to a more intense gold, then aureolin-gold. Leaf, tree trunk, peeling bark, like fabulous gold sculpture….
‘Good eh!’
'Bonzer,' he rejoined, and they sniggered at his use of the caricature word.
…No, the treescape was not sculpture! Rather, it was like walking amid the atomic structure of platinum, except magnified immeasurably! For perhaps twenty minutes they marched silently through the preternatural atmosphere, aware of it, not awed so much as assuming their place in this luminous mystery. As though, in their youth there was also something ancient and durable to acknowledge. For Ralf, this thought gave to his companionship a quiet exhilaration. The light faded to an afterglow, the nearer hills deepened to an Airforce blue, the air became edged with chill.
‘Several below tonight, I reckon,’ declared Brizzle. Ralf observed how they favoured these practical, obvious remarks, tentative, like people habitually working out the terms of a treaty.
They pitched camp, cooked tins of meat and beans, toasted the Sunblest bread on long wands, their conversation working idly through the dilemmas of humankind, topical and perennial, Vietnam and the deity, solving each cheerfully.
‘D’you believe in God, Ral.’
‘Dunno. Some kind of force maybe.' Pause, 'You?’
‘Mnah.’
‘Why not,’ challenged Merivale, a declared atheist. ‘Look, you could have an entire Universe of immateriality parallel to this one and not know about it.’ Merivale tore the filter from one of Armstrong’s cigarettes, lit it, puffed at it suspiciously. ‘What’s to stop an immaterial thing, like an idea, say, being born under material conditions – our brain chemistry – but then developing immaterial characteristics and obeying immaterial laws thereafter that conform with an entire immaterial universe. See? That’s the afterlife explained.’
‘What immaterial laws? We don’t know any.’
‘Not yet. We've not had the curiosity to investigate their existence.’
‘I thought you were an atheist, Merivale! ’
‘I am, but I like the hypothetical.’ Merivale gave up on the cigarette and flicked it into the fire. He was destined to be the Dux of their year.
‘Mnah! We’re all basically animals. You can’t change biology.’
‘Animals don’t have a United Nations, do they?’ (From Ralf).
‘That’s because, like the old bull, we’re smart animals.’
‘Yeh, and what does that make you, Rob?’ offered Armstrong.
‘All bull,’ they chorused together.
Curled in his sleeping bag in the small hours Ralf heard ululant sounds from across the valley. ‘Dingoes,’ said Merivale from the dark beside him. ‘My father wrote a book about them.’ He held his watch up so it was illuminated by the campfire’s vermilion crust. ‘Four a.m. Fifteen miles of scrub-bashing still to do, then my Wilfred Owen essay to write for Monday. Which is now tomorrow.’
'Best years of our lives,' said Brizzle from the dark…..
*
….Then matric was upon them. With his head full of sines and cosines, Meiji Restoration and Mao's Long March, with T.S. Eliot's midnight madman unfathomably shaking his dead geranium, he sat with the hundreds of candidates in the dark hall, which smelled of shirts and crotch-sweat like an unaired dormitory. He answered the blue or pink test papers, emerged after hours of writing into the too-bright November sunshine.
‘How'd you go?’
‘Nailed it! You?’
‘Nailed it,’ he replied, not especially triumphant that his schooldays were now over.
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