Read Online Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane - Free Book Online Page A

the rear pages of every issue of The Australian Journal was the section called Journal Juniors. It comprised a cheerful letter from the person-in-charge together with letters from children in every state of Australia. The person-in-charge was known only by a female given name, but each child-contributor had his or her full name and address published. I joined the Journal Juniors in 1950, intending to write often to the person-in-charge. I wanted my writing to be read in particular by a certain girl of about my own age who lived in an inland town in Queensland. This girl was published in almost every issue of the magazine, and whereas most children wrote about their pets or holiday outings, the girl from Queensland wrote letters that an adult might have praised as highly imaginative. I recall a long letter in which she told how she made bearable her nightly task of drying the dishes for her mother. The girl imagined that each teacup was a young female personage while each mug or jug was a young male personage. She gave a name to each personage and imagined certain of them as being in love with certain others. When she, the girl, had a fancy to promote one or another courtship, she would store the two crockery-personages overnight in the same part of the cabinet. In another sort of mood, she would keep a certain pair apart for night after night while she imagined them as yearning to meet or even trying to send messages to one another. There was much more to the game, all of it reported in faultless, confident-sounding sentences.
    I had always been praised by my teachers for my English compositions, as they were called, and after I had joined the Journal Juniors I resolved to write and to have published something that would earn the admiration of the girl from inland Queensland. I tried for a few weeks, but none of the few paragraphs that I produced seemed anything but dull and childish, and I had to accept that the girl from inland Queensland was a far better writer than I. Not until more than thirty years later, when I was a teacher of fiction-writing and I had to deal with certain students who submitted assignments that were clearly not their own work—not until then did I have the least suspicion that the girl-writer from inland Queensland might have had more than a little help from her mother or her aunt.
    I long ago became used to telling persons who had enjoyed settled childhoods in houses with bookshelves that I had never read this or that so-called classic children’s book. Sometimes, however, I was able to affect to know something of a book merely because I had read a much-condensed version of it in the Classics Comics series. Neither my brother nor I could ever afford to buy a comic, but we often read other boys’ comics. A boy-cousin of ours, the youngest child of our bookmaker-uncle, had boxes stuffed with comics under his bed, and I was sitting on the edge of that bed one Sunday afternoon in the early 1950s ready, if the opportunity arose, to spy on one or another of my girl-cousins, or ready, if my mother told me to stop burying my head in trashy comics, to step into the tiny front garden and to pretend to play, while I read in haste the adaptation for Classics Comics of the novel Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley.
    Perhaps only a few years later, I had forgotten almost all that I had looked at in the pages of the comic-book and all that had passed through my mind while I looked. Still today, however, I seem to recall several details from the line-drawings in one of the last panels of the comic-book. A young woman sits or reclines on a balcony in some or another town in the West Indies. The balcony overlooks the sea, and the young woman is looking across the sea in the direction of England, where she was born and grew up. A strand of dark hair lies diagonally across the young woman’s forehead. (I have always supposed that the hair clings to the young woman’s skin because her forehead is covered with