The Boys in the Island, page 1
Epigraph
‘… And thou art here, for thou art less than they.
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself: …
Only the dreamer venoms all his days …’
John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Part One: Island
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two: Mainland
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
About the Author
Other Books by Christopher Koch
Copyright
Author’s Note
This is a first novel. It deals with the passage from childhood to early youth, and was begun when I was in my late teens. My aim was to capture certain visions seen only in childhood: those dreamlike visitations which Wordsworth describes in his great Immortality ode. Since these were then quite recent for me, I believed they might still be captured before they faded away altogether. The book began its life as a series of prose poems; then I realised I wanted to tell a story, and it was expanded into a narrative. It was published in 1958.
The era in which it’s set, viewed from the present, is another world. The attitudes and accepted moral standards of the 1950s have become archaic, and even the Australian slang of the period has largely faded into the past. The Boys in the Island is thus a reflection of its time, and of that time’s relative innocence.
Its original London publisher asked for cuts, and when the book was re-issued in 1974, these passages were restored. At the same time, I took the opportunity to do some trimming and tightening. In this new edition, a very small amount of further editing has been done. Poets and composers go back to their youthful works to give them this sort of attention, but some people find it eccentric for a novelist to do so, and question the wisdom of it. If the spirit of the original work were lost through these small adjustments, such objections would be justified; but I don’t think that has been the case here.
When I wrote the novel, I gave many Tasmanian towns and suburbs fictitious names; I think I had some notion of creating my own Tasmania. I didn’t adhere to this notion in subsequent novels with Tasmanian settings, but I’ve kept the fictitious names here. Most of their disguises are easily penetrated, but the village of Greendale has no counterpart in reality, being a rough composite of the towns of New Norfolk and Richmond.
This version of The Boys in the Island is the one that I hope will survive, and be read.
C. K., 2013
Part One
ISLAND
One
The little boy stood looking at the Soons. Soon! Soon! Soon! they hummed; and it was not words the way people spoke words, it was a long humming song, going on and on. But he knew that it said Soon, and that he was meant to listen to it. He stood and listened.
No people came in sight: there was only himself here, looking at the Soons. The brown-grassed country was very flat, stretching into the distance. It was not daytime or night-time here, it was both: the air was dark around some concrete buildings nearby, but around the Soons it was blank and bright as water. And because no people came, the little boy was especially small in front of the buildings and the huge Soons that were singing and droning at him in the centre of the brown flat land which belonged to them: stepping across it in a line, getting smaller as they went, to where the land rolled over and disappeared. Each one of them, although they seemed to march, really stood quite still. The farthest of them were very tiny, but the one directly in front of him was very big and tall. Its face was a round silver frown. It stood like a giant spoon on its latticed handle, making the noise of power: Soon! Soon! Soon!
Not long ago the little boy had known what the Soons were; but just now he could not quite remember. He did not know what they did, and the little boy giggled, thinking this.
But the air waved all around him and darkened, and the land tipped up like a table, and the Soons hummed louder, and he soon stopped being cheeky like that. Because now the Soons changed their place just for a moment, and it was a terrible place: a dark city of black and red iron, and chimneys of terrible masters.
Then it changed back again. Just for a moment he had seen that other place, like looking into the door of a furnace. Now it was the brown-grassed flat-land stretching quiet again, which he liked. In this country, where the little boy came nearly every night, the Lads would find him. He searched about for them, full of hope.
‘The Lads,’ the little boy said, rolling the fine, proud name off his tongue. ‘The Lads!’
And now here they came, the three admired Lads, walking down an empty yellow road towards him. He leaped with proud joy to see them, and he said to himself, before they reached him: ‘I’m one of the Lads!’ But he knew he was never quite that, although they made him feel he was: and that was why he loved them.
Crowding around him with glad, welcoming cries, they greeted him as though he had been lost to them for a very long time, and now they had found him again. Then the land swirled off and around him, and he was skimming with the Lads along the main road of this land, one Lad on each side of him and the third, smaller than the other two, coming along behind. The Lads were holding his arms (one had brown hair and one had fair, and the fair one, who had wild blue eyes, was the Leader); and they talked to him gaily of where they were going: they were flying to do great things, faster and faster. The yellow mud road raced behind and before them.
Ahead now, night came down like a black blind in the grassy land, and lights in the buildings began to flash. The little boy glanced at the Lads on either side of him: were they afraid of his night? No; they never lost their uncaring and marvellous smiles. The Lads saw only adventure waiting for them, not any terrible danger.
Suddenly the little boy thought: Where is the third Lad, behind, the little curly-haired one not as big as the other two? He might get lost, he might get left behind! Anxiously he twisted to see. And of course it was all right; smiling too, the curly one was not getting lost; but for a moment there was something sad about the face of this third small Lad, smiling bravely to keep up with them. He would some day soon not keep up: he would die.
Night-wild, the yellow road raced high, and lights flashed all around. The high black air, cool from a rain not long over, filled their mouths as they shouted to one another of great places they were going to, ahead. But now a strange thing happened. The little boy was no longer inside himself; he was by himself at a distance, watching the four Lads, of whom he was one, skim and swagger on their way. He looked on proudly, saying: ‘The Lads don’t care!’ But as he did so, he saw the four of them disappear up the yellow road into a great half-city, a place where grass waved and the Soon-buildings flashed together. The four Lads disappeared from sight. He was left alone.
Gone, the Lads, on their amazing way. The Lads had lost him for the night, the way they always did. He began to cry, listening for the pad, pad, pad of Dad’s feet up the passage outside, knowing that in a moment the light would go on to show Dad in his pyjamas, his yellow hair all sticking up, rubbing his eyes and saying: ‘What’s the matter? More of those dreams?’ — the way he always did.
The little boy, who lived at No. 4 Station Street, East Elimatta, ran into Mum’s and Dad’s bedroom there, in his pyjamas. It was the morning, and the room and white curtains were all bright. Mum and Dad were lying side by side in their blue-coloured bed with the picture of the lady on the yellow wall next to them.
‘Hullo, pet,’ said Mum. Her long rosy face smiled to him, and her red hair was bright on the pillow.
‘I’m a train-man,’ Francis said, stamping along the floor. He had his black train-cap on that Uncle Charlie had given him.
Dad gave a small grunting laugh. ‘A train-man,’ he said.
The little boy shunted to the window and climbed onto the warm brown window-sill where the sun lay and it smelt of flies and honey. He looked outside where the street was, with a lot more sun lying on the grey quiet road and no one about. The phone wires were still going past. Mrs Warner’s place over the road had its blinds down asleep.
Away over Mrs Warner’s roof, he could see a tan hill full of things and colours. There were little strange-faced houses nested there, and he saw a small red car like a fly go up a brown crusty road. It went past a station, but he could see no trains.
‘I can see a train-man out there,’ he shouted to Mum and Dad.
‘Where?’ asked Mum.
‘On the hill, walking past his station!’
‘Oh, I don’t think you’d see him all the way over on the hill, pet,’ said Mum.
‘Yes I did, I saw his cap; he’s gone now,’ Francis said, and he looked back there again, to where the fine, wire-gleaming World was starting up for the day.
He was nearly five years old, an only child, and soon he would be sent to school. It was the time which the boy Francis Cullen would later call the sunny playing-time: the good time when no one expected him to do anything but play in the garden of his father’s small weatherboard house, which was shaded by a huge old leaning pine that creaked in the wind. It was 1936, and the world was not yet at war.
In the green-lit
But only good people came through the gate: people like the baker, for whom he waited with love.
Plump, smiling, with fond uncle’s eyes and a brushy moustache, wearing always an old grey hat, the baker drew up every sunny mid-morning on his towering green-and-white cart, jerking on the reins for his old horse to stop and jumping down to hurry at a jog-trot through the gate, his good, fat basket of bread with its white cloth slung on his arm. And every morning, although he could not stop, he said to the little boy waiting by the gate: ‘Good day, young man!’ When he had delivered the bread, and jogged back down the lane again, he would find the boy standing ready on the gate’s bottom rung; and Francis would ask: ‘Will you give me a swing today?’
The baker would not pause, would not break his jog-trot; but Francis was swung without fail on the gate in his wake, inside a little curve of joy and the utter, clean goodness of the bread-smell. Then the baker was gone, mounted proudly on the high throne of his cart, clicking his tongue to his old horse and clopping off down the hill to Elimatta Station and across the always-passing train-tracks, to where a distant grass-rise called Lutana, with a few last houses like those in picture books, rose on the horizon. And the boy thought that this would never change. The baker would always come, every day at eleven o’clock forever, and would give him a swing on the yellow front gate of his father’s house.
‘Good day, young man!’
‘Will you give me a swing today?’
It would always be like that, he thought, and would not change.
A huge house whose tall grey tower he had seen in a storybook looked over the back fence, half hidden by a thick hedge. This was Lowlands House, a place where girls lived who had no mothers and fathers. They were girls like no other girls: his mother said you should be sorry for them.
When he climbed the paling fence and peeped secretly through the hedge, he could see them playing, running round and round a fountain on a lawn, all in the same blue dresses, very big girls some of them, nearly grown up, and calling. Some of them were ugly, but some were beautiful; one of them he believed was a princess. He could never understand what they were playing: they wheeled like the pigeons did around the tower, and they called, the flying Lowlands girls, of things he could not know.
Just sometimes they would come through the hedge and hang on the fence in a row, in their dark blue dresses: cockle-shells all in a row.
‘Hello, Bubba,’ they called.
‘I’m not a bubba,’ he said. ‘My name’s Francis.’
‘No it’s not,’ said a big lady-girl with red hair. ‘You’re our Bubba!’
‘We all love you, Bubba,’ said another girl.
‘No we don’t,’ said a bad girl with glasses.
‘Yes we do,’ said a girl with blue eyes like flowers, and a small face. She was the princess.
Then they all fell down from the fence and were gone, back to the fountain and magic rooms in the tower, wheeling and calling; and very far off, from lawns out of sight, when the hedge was empty, their voices floated back:
‘Only a bubba … a bubba … a bubba …’
Butterflies soared, in escape’s drunken purity. Stones were warm blind doors, forever locked and slumbering. He crouched among yellow, sunny marigolds, among the thick, green-skinned legs of geraniums, and he peered very carefully into the huge avenues of flowers that were chirping incessantly in the simmering sun. ‘In there, Lad, in there,’ he whispered to Lad, the smoke of gentle backyard fires hazing the air, the sun filling the brown rock of his head. The hallways of the flowers led off underground and through tunnels beyond the back garden. But he had forgotten how to get through.
He lived in an island. At six years old, after he had started school, Francis knew about that. He knew it because people talked about the Mainland: there was an island because there was a Mainland where he might some day go, when he grew up.
Tasmania is an island of hills, a fragment separated from the parent continent by a wide stretch of sea. It is different from the hot Australian mainland; it has a different weather and a different soul, knowing as it does the sharp breath of the south, facing the Antarctic. No wars, no disturbances have ever reached the island: no horrors at all, since the last convict transport made the long run from England, when the island’s dreaded name was Van Diemen’s Land, in that bad, smelly old century of rum and the lash. It lies now like a suburb in the sea, eventless and snug.
It has two small cities, Hobart, the capital, in the south, and Launceston in the north. At their centres are the solid, ornate stone buildings of Georgian and Victorian England; in the suburbs, small swarms of twentieth century bungalows, with galvanised iron roofs and neat front lawns, spread to the edges of the country. There are prosperous farming districts and occasional little townships; and the rest is bush, its metallic green tides ebbing and flowing mile upon mile across the hills and gullies.
And the bush is silent. There is a silence in the island, outside the towns, which the prosperous life of today cannot break: the silence of a land outside history, almost outside time. It is so far south: on the edge of the blank wastes of ice.
The island’s European settlers have not been there long: not two centuries. The Aboriginal tribes they found when they arrived were shattered and dissolved; but they remain a reproachful memory in the island’s silence. Only stone knives on the floors of gullies, and the middens of sea shells from their camps remain; the red, live eyes of their campfires went out long ago. Yet the places of the bush seem to wait: they wait, the dead-quiet eucalyptus gullies, the damp bracken hollows, the dark-haired groves of she-oaks whose grey bark is like mummified flesh; and a single roadside mailbox, far out of sight of its house, can look forlorn as a lost child. Forlorn, all marks of men, in the lonely places of the island which still doesn’t quite belong to them, nor they to it.
Hobart can forget the bush. It is a city, but only just; the fragrant foreign breath of the country can move in summer down Elizabeth Street, catching at the people on the pavements of midday. The country’s yellow grass reaches stray fingers into the suburbs; and standing in almost any street, you can glance up and see the near rusty-green and farther dream-blue ranges, their tree-serrated tops poignant against the sky: a reminder of farness.
So the island has two horizons, two barriers against the world: there are the ranges of hills, and there is the coast: in the north and east, green-laced beaches, facing the world; and in the south, black primeval capes of rock: final walls facing the Antarctic, pitted and rowelled by the wild southern storms of winter.
The little city of Hobart, like all cities, is divided into two worlds: the old districts, and the new districts. And the boy very early named the old districts as bad, and the new districts as good.
The bad districts were North and South Hobart: inner suburbs of poverty-smelling old colonial cottages and tenements, whose front doors and stone steps hollow from scrubbing stood almost on the street, or behind a few feet of dying front garden. Bad too were the square, nude sandstone warehouses along the docks, built by the convicts a hundred years ago, when the island was a sea-bound gaol.
The good districts, in the boy’s private geography, were the new outer suburbs like Gooree and Lutana, which lay beyond his own suburb of Elimatta. These were on the eastern side of town near the river, where the train passed through on its way to the north: the direction of the world. They were the final suburbs before the country: places of small factories and vacant paddocks between bungalows of yellow and brown weatherboard, with easy, untidy backyards. Many of these were Works houses, and the Works lay nearby, on the river. The shift whistle answered the train’s long cry there, regular yet always surprising, and the city got rickety and casual, impermanent as the sun-bright weatherboards.
He lived in East Elimatta, the district between old and new, where as well as weatherboard bungalows there were rambling Edwardian houses of brick, with orange-tiled roofs and coloured leadlight glass in their front doors. His father was a clerk at the Works, and went out there every day on the train. His grandfather Cullen, who lived in one of the big old houses in West Elimatta, was sad about his father being a clerk, Francis learned: but jobs were hard to get.
