the mother, sits leaning her face on her head and stares into the distance, ‘a commonplace habit which looked very theatrical in Henny, because of her large, bright eyeballs and thin, high-curved black eyebrows. She was like a tall crane in the reaches of the river, standing with one leg crooked and listening. She would look fixedly at her vision and suddenly close her eyes.’ Henny gets up, scatters her children off her skirts – ‘Oh, leave me alone; you’re worse than your father’ – and retreats upstairs to one of her headaches or, worse, a mood like a thunderstorm filling the house with angry electricity and danger.
‘I should have been better off if I’d never laid eyes on any of them,’ Henny grumbles, excluding them from her room where she dwells among cupboards full of treasures from her young-lady past, or letting them in to play with fans and scarves and dresses, and to ask her fascinated and thwarted questions; for unlike their father, she is full of secrets and dark places, and she dwells inside the musky smell of her room, ‘a combination of dust, powder, scent, body odours that stirred the children’s blood, deep, deep’. Or they watch her lay out the cards for her endless game of solitaire, muttering, ‘A dirty cracked plate: that’s just what I am!’
‘I wish your mother would stop playing patience, that makes her look like an old witch or an old vixen possum,’ father Sam says in a gently benevolent voice. For his benevolence is, on principle, all-encompassing. ‘Mother Earth,’ he whispers, ‘I love you, I love men and women, I love little children and all innocent things, I love, I feel I am love itself – how could I pick out a woman who would hate me so much!’ As indeed she does, blaming him for everything.
They are enemies to each other, like hostile animals, gene enemies. The house seems like an abode of animals. Henny describes her husband’s family as chickens with their heads cut off. Her children know her chameleon eye, ‘the huge eyeball in its glove of flesh, deep-sunk in the wrinkled skullhole, the dark circle round it and the eyebrow far above’. When Henny mutters in her frustrated rage it is like ‘the trusty stirring of some weed-grown sea animal, bottom-prisoned by blindness’. All men are dogs, she remarks, stating an obvious – to her – truth, and to her lover – if he deserves that word – she says, ‘Oh! What a life! What a man! Oh, you make me sick! Bert, you’re big as an elephant with the soul of a mouse.’
Sam, the father, keeps a zoo of small mammals and snakes, which he and the children cherish, but which Henny hates. For one thing, snakes bring bad luck. He has an aquarium, an aviary; he is a humanist and a lover of all life – the zoo is merely an extension of his many children, who are woken in the mornings and summoned to him by whistles they have to respond to, based on the calls of birds. When yet another babe is born, as a result of a fight between husband and wife that could easily have ended in murder, first of all the father chooses the whistle he will use to command the newcomer, a phrase from some bird’s song, and then husband and wife begin a new fight over the child’s name.
Sam teaches birds to sing new songs. A catbird learns the flycatcher’s call to use in his own repertory, and listens while Sam and the boys school him in new calls. For Sam has to control not only his brood of children but this natural world all around him. He wakes at night, sees through the panes ‘the tussle of cloud streak and sky spark’ and hears that some marauder is fluttering the nestlings. ‘Hist, hist!’ he says – ‘and reduced the twig world to silence.’
This is an ancient rattlebag of a house, and all around it are trees and shrubs and birds and birdsong, and beyond is the world of water: pond, creeks and the river. This is Sam’s element, where he plays, for if what he does in the house has to be categorised as work, for it would fall down without him, he experiences it as fun, all physical enjoyment, which he shares with the children. ‘The morning was hot, and Sam had nothing on beneath his painting overalls. When he waved his golden-white muscular hairless arms, large damp tufts of yellow-red hair appeared … The pores on his well-stretched skin were very large, his leathery skin was quite unlike the dull silk of the children’s cheeks …’ And he sings as he works and the children sing with him.
It is from inside a paradise of physical happiness that he chants his hymns to life and the beauties of his fellow man, while upstairs his bitter wife, dark and skinny like a witch, hisses out her loathing to all the world. And he says to her, ‘You devil of rust and rot and boring. You will not smash my family life. You will carry your bargain through to the end. You will look after my children …’ And she says to him, ‘You took me and maltreated me and starved me half to death because you couldn’t make a living and sponged off my father and used his influence, hoisting yourself up on all my aches and miseries …’
Our common experience, tutored by knowing psychology, insists that such enmity, such violence, bred by the venom engendered by the incongruity of these two, the parents, must damage the children, for both Sam and Henny in their various and unique ways threaten their very existence. Sam believes – it is the spirit of the times – in euthanasia for the unfit, and while the children joke, they must feel threatened, particularly the ‘monster’ Louie, told she looks like a gutter rat by this child-lover, her father, who proposes to weed out ‘the misfits and degenerates’. And Henny says often she will kill herself and all of them. And yet it seems they are immune, experience the parental threat as no more than part of the rich emotional diet of this household.
Are they immune? ‘Die, die, why don’t you all die and leave me to die or to hang; fall down, die; what do I care? I beat my son to death …’ (this to her favourite child, Ernie) ‘it’s no worse than what I have to endure’ – and she beats him while her eyes start out of her head. ‘I’ll kill you children that make me go out of my mind …’
But the odd thing is that the reader is made to feel part of something as grand and impersonal as Greek tragedy. Easy to imagine these terrible lines declaimed in a stone amphitheatre, to silent crowds, and – yes – masks would not be inappropriate, so much are these antagonists archetypes.
‘I’d drink his blood but it would make me vomit.’
Then he, ‘I had long shuddering days … when it was as if the north wind was blowing all day, when I thought of our home here on the heights, exposed to all the winds of our anger and hate …’
Louie: ‘What will become of me? Will life go on like this? … I can’t live and go on being like this.’
Ernie, to his mother: ‘Mother, don’t, don’t … Oh, Mother …’
It is like being admitted into some frightful Victorian melodrama, reading this book, but one made ordinary and even commonplace due to the intensity and inevitableness of it. There seem no ordinary moments in this family, their element is exaggeration and hyperbole, but that is right and suitable because their natures and situation are extreme.
The children’s dispositions, no different from any others’, are given room by the theatricality of the parents and – here we reach the heart of the book, and this family – fed by the intemperate and inventive language to which the house resounds, day and night. Sam never uses an ordinary sentence. One feels that to say ‘Let us all go for a walk’, or ‘It’s time for breakfast’, would be beyond him, precisely because it would expose him, for he is protected by his invented language, part taken from Artemus Ward and part from Uncle Remus, and full of added baby phrases and lispings. Quite sickening it has to sound to a stern modern reader, but the children delight in it. So hard is it for an outsider to penetrate, that Christina Stead translates some of it for us, but the children know it as they know the weather. ‘Bin readin’ a find stor-wy, Little Womey,’ says Sam to his second daughter, ‘ ’bout a fine woman en a fine little girl. Good sweet story – makes your pore little Sam burst into tears.’ For he feels no shame about describing himself as ‘yo’ po’ little Dad’, is not afraid of ridicule, for these children of his are his safe place where he takes refuge from
