Read Online The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steven Carroll
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of the book, the threads of the afternoon return briefly (the easy words and easy smile of the practised raconteur surfacing again). Life turns another page. He forgets about it all. He is being silly. He is being worse than silly — he is being a child. He is, he knows, looking for things that aren’t there.
11.
The Search for a Key Term
I n the weeks that followed Peter van Rijn’s momentous drive to work and his subsequent visit to the mayor’s office, a committee was formed. The mayor, Harold Ford, Henry to his mates, who bears a striking resemblance to Mr Menzies (a resemblance he cultivates, and which, some suggest, alone gave him electoral success) had passed through five distinct phases during the ten minutes that Peter van Rijn had been in his office.
At first it was simple annoyance at having his morning ritual of strong tea and tobacco disturbed (and the mayor is a man who sits, stands and walks inside a constant tobacco cloud, the pipe rarely from his mouth) for no apparent reason other than some aimless chit-chat about local history. Once theannoyance subsided, he experienced a moment of indifferent dismissiveness, which soon turned to sceptical interest. By the five-minute mark, his tea was cooling, and the mayor was warming to the idea that Peter van Rijn had given birth to that morning and which he had brought directly to the mayor’s attention. And, once he realised that there was something in this for all of them, he was a portrait of concentrated attention. Visions of fat government cheques and a whole suburb transformed into the very emblem of Progress passed across his mind; his suburb, his people, all brought together in mutual celebration, under the beaming gaze of the mayor whose vision had made it happen.
This, the mayor realised as both men stood and shook hands, was his doorway into local history. And not just a routine mention — a gold name on a board along with everyone else — but a shining place at the very centre of the suburb’s story.
Now, in this last week of February, with the schools back and the suburb having shrugged off its summer slumbers, a committee is meeting. It is meeting, for the first time, in the dining room of the Webster mansion. Mrs Webster, a member of the committee and one of the first names on the mayor’s lips, automatically offered the use of the dining room, which, in the days of Webster, rarely hosted a dinner.
It is a large room. Light and relaxing (made evenlighter and more relaxing by Rita’s changes). A place where the six committee members (the mayor, Mrs Webster, the vicar of St Matthew’s, the newly appointed priest at St Patrick’s, the local member of parliament and Peter van Rijn) can chat in an informal way; a place where the imagination might be set free, and where unusual, even inspired, ideas might be born.
The immediate task of the committee is to establish a name for the event itself. The word ‘slogan’ is never uttered, but everybody understands that this is what they’re searching for. The suburb’s history, it is tacitly taken for granted, is a grand and dignified matter. To think in terms of a slogan would be to cheapen it. They are not, after all, selling soap powder, but celebrating a hundred years of settlement.
The word that constantly recurs in the afternoon’s discussion is ‘Progress’. And, with it, terms such as production, prosperity and growth. But it is Progress that rolls so easily from the lips of the mayor, the ministers and the local member. Is not the suburb, they irresistibly conclude, the very picture of Progress: only twenty years ago a frontier community of stick houses and dirt tracks, now a wide, solid community of lawns and gardens and tree-lined streets? What was once a frontier outpost is now, indeed, the Toorak of the North that the estate agents of a hundred years ago had promised all their grandparents.
As they talk, Mrs Webster is distracted by her gardens, which are a mass of colour and
11.
The Search for a Key Term
I n the weeks that followed Peter van Rijn’s momentous drive to work and his subsequent visit to the mayor’s office, a committee was formed. The mayor, Harold Ford, Henry to his mates, who bears a striking resemblance to Mr Menzies (a resemblance he cultivates, and which, some suggest, alone gave him electoral success) had passed through five distinct phases during the ten minutes that Peter van Rijn had been in his office.
At first it was simple annoyance at having his morning ritual of strong tea and tobacco disturbed (and the mayor is a man who sits, stands and walks inside a constant tobacco cloud, the pipe rarely from his mouth) for no apparent reason other than some aimless chit-chat about local history. Once theannoyance subsided, he experienced a moment of indifferent dismissiveness, which soon turned to sceptical interest. By the five-minute mark, his tea was cooling, and the mayor was warming to the idea that Peter van Rijn had given birth to that morning and which he had brought directly to the mayor’s attention. And, once he realised that there was something in this for all of them, he was a portrait of concentrated attention. Visions of fat government cheques and a whole suburb transformed into the very emblem of Progress passed across his mind; his suburb, his people, all brought together in mutual celebration, under the beaming gaze of the mayor whose vision had made it happen.
This, the mayor realised as both men stood and shook hands, was his doorway into local history. And not just a routine mention — a gold name on a board along with everyone else — but a shining place at the very centre of the suburb’s story.
Now, in this last week of February, with the schools back and the suburb having shrugged off its summer slumbers, a committee is meeting. It is meeting, for the first time, in the dining room of the Webster mansion. Mrs Webster, a member of the committee and one of the first names on the mayor’s lips, automatically offered the use of the dining room, which, in the days of Webster, rarely hosted a dinner.
It is a large room. Light and relaxing (made evenlighter and more relaxing by Rita’s changes). A place where the six committee members (the mayor, Mrs Webster, the vicar of St Matthew’s, the newly appointed priest at St Patrick’s, the local member of parliament and Peter van Rijn) can chat in an informal way; a place where the imagination might be set free, and where unusual, even inspired, ideas might be born.
The immediate task of the committee is to establish a name for the event itself. The word ‘slogan’ is never uttered, but everybody understands that this is what they’re searching for. The suburb’s history, it is tacitly taken for granted, is a grand and dignified matter. To think in terms of a slogan would be to cheapen it. They are not, after all, selling soap powder, but celebrating a hundred years of settlement.
The word that constantly recurs in the afternoon’s discussion is ‘Progress’. And, with it, terms such as production, prosperity and growth. But it is Progress that rolls so easily from the lips of the mayor, the ministers and the local member. Is not the suburb, they irresistibly conclude, the very picture of Progress: only twenty years ago a frontier community of stick houses and dirt tracks, now a wide, solid community of lawns and gardens and tree-lined streets? What was once a frontier outpost is now, indeed, the Toorak of the North that the estate agents of a hundred years ago had promised all their grandparents.
As they talk, Mrs Webster is distracted by her gardens, which are a mass of colour and
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