This is the Grass

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A writer with an ear for the rhythms of Australian speech, Melbourne-based Alan Marshall published in the dominant social realist tradition of the 1940s and ‘50s. The author of short stories, journalism, children’s books, novels and advice columns, he is best remembered for the first book of his autobiography, I Can Jump Puddles (1955). His work is marked by a deep interest in rural and working-class life, with an emphasis on shared experience.

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These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.

If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing.

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing.

If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

This is the common air that bathes the globe.

I sat facing a man across a polished table. He was a heavy man who filled his padded swivel-chair as if moulded into it.

His face was loose and full and revealed no bone structure beneath the flesh of his cheeks and chin. His blue eyes had the steadiness they had acquired from their constant use as instruments of observation. They had lost their power of friendly communication. They had been used too long to look at men and women as parts of a machine dedicated to his advancement to retain what I was seeking.

He wore a tailored grey suit, and a white shirt, washed and starched in some exclusive, suburban laundry. The cuffs of the shirt, fastened by gold links, extended just the right distance beyond the sleeves of his coat. The skin of his pale hands was as thin as tissue paper. Across the backs of his hands it had loosened into a multitude of wrinkles though his palms were young.

He was looking at a letter he held in his hands. He was not reading it; he had already done so. He was searching his mind for words to say to me, words he found distasteful but which his conditioned mind demanded.

I knew the contents of the letter he held; I had written it. It was dated 5 December 1920.

‘Dear sir,’ it said, ‘I see by this morning’s Age that you are advertising for a Junior Clerk to fill a vacancy in your office and I hereby apply for the position.

‘I am 18 years of age and am an accountancy student studying for the final examination. I have already passed the Intermediate.

‘I enclose copies of four character references. I have no references as to my clerical ability since I have not yet held a position in an office.

‘I would appreciate an interview with you, when I could furnish further particulars.

A year before, when I had begun sending this letter to business-men advertising for a clerk, I had included another paragraph:

‘Unfortunately, through having contracted infantile paralysis in my childhood, I am forced to walk on crutches. This in no way impairs my ability as a clerk, nor does it prevent my carrying heavy ledgers.’

I did not receive replies to this letter with its revealing paragraph, but failed to understand the reason until my father, worried over this lack of response, read one of my applications.

He held the letter in his hands for a long time, then turned it over and looked at the back as if this blank side, too, were important. He returned it to the table and stood looking out of the kitchen window to where, beyond the sloping orchard that surrounded the house, the blue Dividing Range walled the horizon.

He had come to a home in these timbered foothills twenty miles from Melbourne in order that I might study accountancy. I had won a scholarship at a Melbourne business college when we lived in the bush and this achievement seemed to my father evidence of a future in which important business-men would clamour for my services.

Now he was experiencing the reality, a state he had reached with disbelief and shrinking reluctance, since it had been forced upon him without preparation from past experience. The outback values of equality and mateship upon which he had been nurtured and which he regarded as permanent aspects of human relationships were being threatened by the attitude of people towards his son. He had missed little of the implications inherent in the stories I told him of my experiences.

He turned to me now and said: ‘I’d leave out that bit about your crutches if I were you. You see . . . Well . . . If you get an interview you’d be set, I think.’

‘They’ll have to find out sooner or later,’ I argued. ‘Why shouldn’t I tell them at the start so they’ll know? If I went to see a chap and I hadn’t told him I’d feel crook.’

‘You shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘What have you done? You’re all right; you tell him in the letter you’ll give him all the particulars about yourself when you see him. What’s wrong with that? If a bloke wants me to get him a horse that can pull, I’ll get him one that can pull. Say it’s blind now. Well, I tell him that after he has a look at the horse. One of the best horses I ever had was blind. You don’t have to tell them everything till you see them.’

I began to get answers to my letters. Men wrote asking me to come to their offices for an interview. I became familiar with the quick look of surprise that came upon their faces when I entered the office, the lowering of the head to my letter which they studied while adjusting their minds to this unexpected development. Then the indrawn breath of decision that lifted their shoulders a little, the meeting of our eyes. . . .

The reasons they gave for rejecting my application were generally clothed in expressions of sympathy, softened by platitudes or unconsciously directed to feeding their admiration for themselves.

So there were some who gained happiness and a feeling of pride in their excuses, and some who avoided my eyes as I rose to go.

‘I know how it is. You can’t tell me anything about crutches. I spent three months on them—ski-ing accident. I had to get driven to work for months.’

He looked down at his hands that for three months had grasped the wood of crutches, and he was smiling.

‘Don’t you get sore under the arms.’ He was proffering information, not asking a question. ‘Very few people realise that about walking on crutches. I was red-raw under the arms.’

Years before, so far back it seemed like an unpleasant dream, I had been ‘red-raw’ under the arms. Now my armpits were as tough as the soles of feet.

‘I know you won’t mind me mentioning your—er—well, physical disadvantages. They are obvious and it would be foolish of me and unfair to you to gloss over them. What is important is that they render you unfit for office work of the type that is demanded today, and there is nothing I can do about it. If I may offer a word of advice, I think you should learn to make baskets—something like that. I understand there are institutions that teach such things. They are organised to help people like you and they do a lot of good.’

My father was standing beneath an apple tree when I told him what this man had said. He heard my story through, then clenched his eyes and twisted his face as if suddenly seized by some internal violence he sought to suppress. He raised his face to the sky, brought his two fists up beside it, then jerked them downwards as two explosive words burst from him: ‘Baskets! Jesus!’

I found it was useless to argue with the men interviewing me. They resented my efforts to persuade them I could do the job.

‘It is very difficult for me to be frank in a case like this,’ pronounced one man, gazing at the finger-nails his thumb was testing on the hand curled in front of him, ‘but I know you would be a person who appreciates both frankness and honesty.’

He turned from his nails a moment to look intently at me over his glasses as if a sudden doubt of my right to the claim demanded a still and merciless warning.

I felt an answer was expected of me, a plea for mercy, maybe; a wringing of hands. . . .

‘Being crippled, of course, is the trouble.’ His nails again engaged his attention. ‘The work here involves carrying heavy account books from the strong-room to the desks.’

He was becoming irritated. Loud and angry words were his method of strengthening a cause weakened by argument, but he controlled the impulse to shout at me, and said slowly and distinctly: ‘You don’t understand. The work here demands a strong, healthy body in those I employ. I’m sorry.’

The door . . . The door . . . The door . . . Doors that were held open and closed behind me—a long parade of doors like shields, held by men barring the way to independence, fulfilment. . . .

Though the attitude of these men towards me varied according to their characters, they were bound by a common object—the preservation of their business. Their business was profit; their means of attaining it, efficiency. My crutches suggested inefficiency, a burden that profits would have to carry rather than a promise of their increase.

I wondered what reasons this man would give for dismissing me, this man with the polished table upon which rested an onyx penholder with its two upright pens like horns protecting him. On one corner, framed in polished wood, was a photograph of a woman and two little girls. The woman was dressed in white and she sat on the stone wall of a sunken garden with the little girls leaning on her shoulders, their arms around her neck. It would be difficult to walk to that spot from the big house, a portion of which one could see towards the top of the picture. Crutches would slip in that steep garden.

The man behind the table was finding it difficult to formulate suitable excuses. He returned my letter to the pile beside him. He riffled the letters with his thumb, his head bent sideways to watch as if the height of the pile interested him.

‘Yes,’ he said slowly, as if encouraging a decision rising reluctantly from uncertainty. ‘Yes . . .’

He suddenly patted the pile of letters as if dismissing them, then turned to me and said crisply, while resolve was still strong: ‘I’m afraid you are not suitable for this job.’

Having delivered himself of this judgment, to continue in such a tone must have seemed to him unnecessary. The axe had fallen; why continue to strike?

‘I wish I could employ you,’ he said in more normal tones, ‘but you just couldn’t stand up to the work.’

I could usually face these men, observe them almost in a detached way fumbling for the right phrases, but I hung my head before this man.

My father once told me about a horsebreaker he knew who sought to break the spirit of his horses. When he was breaking in a spirited horse he would say: ‘I’ll take him for a long run to get the fight out of him.’

I felt like such a horse. A score of men sitting at tables had taken the fight out of me.

A tired man in the street had said to me: ‘When a bloke’s got a job he owns a bit of everyone he sees; when he’s out of work they’ve all got the knock on him and all he wants to do is to get away from them.’

I wanted to get out into the street, away from this man paying lip-service to generosity.

He was waiting for me to speak; I had nothing I wished to say to him. But I spoke. As if to myself I expressed the thought then beating in my mind: ‘I need the money.’

I think he was suddenly pleased that he could now reveal the generosity and kindliness he felt marked his character.

He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out two shillings, but I had raised my head and he put it back when he saw my face.

An hour before, while waiting to keep this appointment, I had been standing in Bourke Street, my back against the concrete of the Myer Emporium. I was tired and drooped upon my crutches in what was to me an attitude of rest. I watched the people pass—the girls in cloche hats, bobbed hair and short, formless dresses; the blue-suited men with their starched collars and Borsalino hats. On the roadway cable-trams clanged warnings and strong horses pulled brewers’ wagons laden with barrels. Everything that moved had purpose.

Some people looked at me, then glanced away. The glance of one stooped old woman was arrested by my appearance and she stepped out of the stream of people and stood in front of me, fumbling with her black bag. It was fastened by the grip of two little nickel knobs and these she clicked apart.

While her thin, mottled hand searched within the bag she looked at me with eyes that age had not quite robbed of a youthful candour. Her face was no longer firm but had shrunken into folds and lines of character.

She smiled and said gently: ‘It’s sad that you have come to this but I had a son once and he was crippled and I know all about it.’

I felt the hot blood in my face. Some people had paused to watch us. I wanted to dissolve into nothingness, to remain hidden for ever from people. I put the two shillings in my pocket, then took her hand.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Maybe you will never realise how much your kindness has helped me. I wish everyone were like you.’

I stood up. The man behind the table was suddenly relieved that the interview was over and he assumed a friendly manner. He rose quickly to his feet and hurried round to my side of the table with outstretched hand.

I received a letter from the secretary of the Donvale Shire Council in answer to one of my applications.

The Shire Office was in Wallaby Creek, an isolated settlement twenty-eight miles from Melbourne. The hub of the settlement consisted of a general store, a blacksmith’s shop, a hotel and the Shire Office. This group of buildings was huddled together on the top of a hill, one of the many forming the foothills of the Dividing Range which lay a few miles to the north.

Around the settlement the cleared paddocks of farms were open to the sun. Beyond them the untouched bush stood guarding the mountains, a barrier of brooding messmate, ironbark and red box trees awaiting the advancing axe.

The Shire Office wanted a junior clerk at twenty-five shillings a week. The difficulty of getting board in such a place, of living on the wages offered, was all in my favour, I thought. Not many would apply for such a job.

‘Is it possible for you to call at the Shire Office for an interview?’ asked the secretary in his letter.

Our house was eight miles away across the hills from the Shire Office. Father drove me over in the gig. We rocked together over rough dirt roads and talked about the job I felt sure I would get. Father was not so sure.

‘Take care you face him in the right way,’ he advised me. ‘You can tell how long a man’s been out of work by the way he asks for a job. A man just out of work holds his head up. He’s confident. The horse hasn’t kicked him yet. The bloke that’s been out for months is licked before he starts. He walks in like a cattle pup that’s been knocked about. Don’t do that. You’re just as good as he is. Walk in smiling. If he thinks you’ve been out for a long while he’ll just think there’s something wrong with you. What’s his name, by the way?’

Mr R. J. Crowther was a thick-set, powerful man with round shoulders and a jutting neck that held his head in advance of his body. He was the only man employed in the office, a brick building with two rooms, and I got the impression he disliked his job, was soured by it and would like to leave. He spoke gruffly, but I could see it was a gruffness born of his own discontent and not directed against me.

‘You can have the job if you want it,’ he said shortly. ‘There’s no future in it. It’s temporary. We’re behind in our rate notices and I need help.’

His eyes were not registering details of my appearance. He was concerned with his own problems and I was an interruption.

‘You can start in the morning,’ he said, looking at the table as if pondering the effects of such promptness on himself.

In a moment he raised his head and studied me. His eyes became interested and he asked: ‘Where will you board? Do you live near here?’

‘I am going to find out if I can board at the pub,’ I said. ‘Our home is too far away for me to come over every day.’

‘No.’ He had smiled. ‘I suppose you’ll be all right. They might be stiff in their board, though. I don’t know.’

‘All right. Let me know how you get on before you leave.’ He changed his tone. ‘That’s your father outside, isn’t it?’

‘Let him deal with the pub. It would be just as well for you to remain outside, I think.’

There were three men in the bar when Father entered. He shouted for them. I watched him through the open doorway from where I sat holding the horse.

After a while he began talking to a woman wiping glasses behind the bar counter. She listened a moment, then glanced out at me and nodded her head in some confirmation. She began talking to him at length and I felt sure she was telling the usual story of a woman she knew who had a crippled son and how this woman had ‘tried everything’ and how she had begun feeding him on yeast or something and it ‘worked wonders’.

Or maybe she rubbed him down with a dry towel stiffened through soaking in brine and this ‘worked wonders’. Or maybe the son took sea baths each day and in six months he was walking. Father had heard many such stories.

When he came out he climbed into the gig beside me and said: ‘Well, you’re set. She’ll let you board there for twenty-two and six a week. She wanted the twenty-five bob you’re getting but I broke her down on that. I think she’s all right. We’ll give it a go anyway. What we’ll do—we’ll drive home now and get your things and come back this afternoon. You’ll have a clean start in the morning then.’

We drove home along a road of trees and stony creek-beds and birds, which I had not seen on my way over. I felt elated, secure, and the world was full of enchantment. It did not matter that the job was temporary, had no future. It was a stepping-stone to becoming a writer.

Though I was studying accountancy I never regarded it as my life work. It was a way of earning a living while I learned to write. The pieces of paper I carried in my pocket did not bear definitions of Bills of Lading or Promissory Notes; they contained descriptions of people, scraps of dialogue and ideas for short stories I would one day write.

I saw myself sitting in my spacious hotel room writing when all others were asleep. It was this picture that was beautifying the world for me.

The room, when I saw it, was like a box. Father had carried in my bag on our return in the afternoon, and had left me with a pat on the shoulder. I sat on the iron bedstead with its sagging mesh and thin, worn blankets and looked around me.

The single bed almost filled the entire room. It stood against a side wall, its head beneath a dirty window. Through the window I could see a back veranda littered with an old stretcher, cases of empty beer-bottles, barrels, a rusty meat-safe and untidy heaps of straw.

A stained pine wardrobe beside the bed partly obscured the window and filled the space between the head of the bed and the far wall. At the other end of the room a washstand was jammed against the end of the bed. A kerosene lamp with a smoked glass stood on the washstand beside a porcelain basin decorated with red roses.

A tattered scrap of rug lay on the linoleum-covered floor. In front of the doorway the linoleum had worn away, uncovering a half moon of splintered floorboards to menace bare feet. The room was filled with the damp, mouldy smell of confinement and disuse.

I could never write here. I felt depressed and stepped out into the passageway confronting my door and running the full length of the hotel. A number of doors opened off this passage. Those to the left led into bedrooms, those to the right to the hotel’s public rooms.

The first one to the right opened into the kitchen from where I heard the sound of voices. A man and a woman were talking together.

‘If I’d known that before he’d never have touched me,’ the woman was saying.

I turned and went into the room. A huge wood stove, upon which rested a number of saucepans, threw out heat from a brick-lined recess let into the wall. A table in the centre was covered with cooking utensils and vegetables awaiting attention. On the ceiling, dust and fluff sealed by smoke and steam formed a thin, dark fur that a finger could have grooved with a stroke. The air was heavy with the breath of a stock-pot steaming on the stove. High on one of the walls a picture of Carbine pleaded against obscurity behind a film of oily grime.

He was standing at the table peeling potatoes. He was a short, swarthy man with bright, interested eyes, and would have been about twenty-five years of age. His black hair was unbrushed. He had no teeth and his lips sloped back into his mouth. His nose hung down over his upper lip, forming with his jutting chin a pair of soft mandibles.

The striped, cotton shirt he wore was opened to the waist revealing a hairy, brown chest beaded with sweat. He did not wear a singlet. His trousers hung precariously from the loose, leather belt around his waist. Their tattered cuffs had slipped over the backs of his boots to the floor so that he trod on them with his heels every step he took.

In the months that followed I got to know him well. His name was ‘Gunner’ Harris. He was a petty thief from Melbourne, a pickpocket, who, between periods in the hands of the police, worked on a pie-cart that stood on the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets.

‘The coppers picked me up and gave me twenty-four hours to get out,’ he explained to me once. ‘That’s why I’ve buried myself in this joint.’

‘I was a couple of days on the grog and I threw them up on the grass somewhere out in the paddock at the back. Now I can’t find the place. Funny . . . You’d think a bloke could go straight to them.’

This first meeting with him gave me the impression of a different type of man to the man he was. The picture I had of a pickpocket presented a well-dressed, sharp-faced man with the hands of a pianist. Gunner’s hands were not slender; they were square, the fingers wide apart.

I concluded as I looked at him that he was a simple, kindly fellow born in some poor Melbourne suburb and driven out here through lack of work.

The woman had been watching me with eyes that must have looked with such appraisal at scores of men. They missed nothing, understood everything.

She was about forty with a full, rich figure that provocatively resisted the confinement of her tight cotton frock. Her eyes were steady and speculative. They contained no warmth. How many betrayals had hardened them? What had they seen in the faces of men that gave them the wariness of a creature about to pounce on food?

She was the cook and her name was Rose Buckman. Her husband had left her. (‘You can’t hold a man in his forties unless he’s frightened of you.’)

‘Well, I suppose you’ve got to come out some time.’ She cut the pastry hanging over the edge of the pie-dish with quick hands and put the dish into the oven.

‘How are you on the grog?’ he asked, grinning at me. He threw back his head, raised his hand and emptied an imaginary glass of beer down his throat.

‘We’ll soon fix that here,’ he said. He lifted a dish of peeled potatoes and walked over to the sink to wash them. He turned on the tap and looked back at me while he waited. ‘We’ll soon fix that here, lad.’

‘What about girls?’ asked Rose, returning to the table. ‘Have you got a girl?’

‘I think we’ll put him on to Maisie,’ she said to Gunner. They laughed together in some secret enjoyment.

Their interest turned to the girl. ‘When is she coming up again, do you know?’ she asked Gunner.

I left them and walked down the passage towards the front, passing the dining-room, the lounge with its voices and laughter, and finally the bar. The floor of the passage was uneven and in places gave to my tread as if the supports below had long rotted away.

Outside, a veranda extended the width of the wooden building and here, too, the floorboards were uneven and decayed. The veranda windows were painted green with the word ‘Bar’ upon them in gold. Men were sitting on the two benches beneath the windows. They were resting between drinks while waiting for the arrival of someone who would shout for them. A couple of dogs lay at their feet. Through the doorway of the bar came a babble of men’s voices.

A couple of gigs, some wood-drays and wagons and a buggy stood on the gravelled area in front of the hotel. The horses in their shafts stood with drooping heads and half-closed eyes in the summer sun. Some cars had nosed in amongst them and came to rest with their radiators facing the veranda. Beside one of the cars a saddled horse was tethered to the post.

To the side of the veranda was a gateway into the hotel yard. The gate, weatherbeaten and broken, had been pushed open and was lying half on its side, one hinge still leg-roping it to the post. Long, dry grass concealed its bottom rail, leaning over and covering it protectively from the sun and rain.

A number of Muscovy ducks lived in the yard. They watched me walk through the gateway, thrusting their heads forward and back in a jerking fashion as they moved away from me. Fowls pecked at the straw and the dry cow-dung littering the yard.

A long, thatched stable barred the way to the paddocks beyond. It was built of upright slabs hewn with a broadaxe from the huge trees that once had grown where it now stood. The squared supporting beams rested on the forks of thick, sapling trunks sunk into the ground. Time had weakened their grip on the earth so that they all leaned drunkenly to one side away from the prevailing winds. The whole structure seemed about to collapse with the weight of its thatch, from which grass had grown, seeded and died. A cow stood chewing its cud in front of the divided stable door, the top half of which was open. From inside I could hear the munching of horses.

Beside the stable an enclosure of rusty iron bore the word ‘Gentlemen’ painted in white on its side.

All that I was seeing was strange and new. It was intensely interesting, like the opening pages of a history book that hinted at adventure in unexplored country.

And yet the bush in which I spent my childhood was to me the natural beginning of a future; here was the unworthy end of a past.

The people in the hotel had reached an end, too, I thought, just as unworthy as these neglected, decaying buildings. Yet it was the setting that had the voice I wished to hear, not the people, to whom I was still alien. The conversation in the kitchen had been held across a fence, and I had no desire to cross it and enter their bare, muddy paddock.

I felt happy out here with the ducks and the horses that had always been part of my life. I felt a reluctance to return to the hotel.

I took out my note-book and pencil and sat on the ground to write, but I became lost in mind-created stories I couldn’t put down, and when I rose to go in to tea there were only two sentences added to my notes:

‘The Muscovy ducks were white as snow. Dirt never clings to the wings of birds.’

I walked to the front of the hotel where the coach from Morella had just arrived. Morella was a township eight miles away, the nearest railhead to Wallaby Creek and the terminus for the coach that carried passengers down to the train each day from its base at the hotel. It returned in the evening, its passengers laden with parcels they had purchased in Melbourne.

It was a weather-beaten vehicle full of protesting creaks and knocks, and carried eight passengers, two of whom sat beside the driver on the front seat. It was drawn by two horses and it was these that interested me as they stood with their flanks heaving from the heavy pulling of the journey. There were a number of steep hills between Wallaby Creek and Morella, and I decided these horses were too light for the task. I walked round them. They were sweating heavily and the sweat was running down their sides and collecting in rows of black drops along their bellies. The ground beneath them was spattered with their sweat.

One of the horses had struck itself and was bleeding from the fetlock. ‘Badly shod,’ I thought. ‘The blacksmith round here doesn’t study a horse.’ The other horse had poor shoulders and was far too leggy. It was blowing through distended nostrils and its head was down. They were each resting a back leg.

I wished Father were with me to discuss them. My mind was already constructing a description of them for his benefit and I thought: ‘I must get home as often as I can.’

The driver was saying good-bye to his passengers, farmers’ wives mostly, who set off walking down the road towards

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