Mike Leigh: A New Film, New Controversy

MIKE LEIGH IN THE PAPER



MIKE Leigh has come under the reviewer’s scrutiny in The Age on both days this weekend (Jan 28-29). His latest film, ‘Another Year’ has just opened in Melbourne. In both cases, it isn’t just a discussion about the film that unfolds. It is also an examination of Leigh as a director. In terms of critical appraisal he is a bit hit and miss. You will find many reviewers across the globe who admire Leigh’s work, and just as many who will find plenty of fault.


Tom Ryan makes his focus immediately clear by using the words ‘rough ride’ at the beginning. For him, Leigh can be a bit depressing, and ‘Another Year’ is a case in point. He also uses the word ‘caricature’ to describe Lesley Manville’s character, a key role. Ryan thinks the actors aren’t given room in the script to move. That they start off a certain way and fail to change, or grow: ‘There are moments when the characters seemed poised to break out of the straitjackets they’ve been forced to wear, but Leigh won’t cut them loose.’ This seems like a sensible review to me. He finds fault with the way the characters fail to emerge, and that’s fine, even if I don’t share his point of view. A good feature of Ryan’s review is that it is objective. He offers, as he sees it, an excellent example of a character in a recent Leigh film that did change, and did emerge, and therefore he gives it a glowing assessment. The film is ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’, and the actress was Sally Hawkins, playing Poppy: ‘..that film led us to see that there was much more to its protagonist than initially met the eye.’ Perhaps Tom Ryan wanted Mary to eventually find some peace of mind? I am personally glad she didn’t.


Also this weekend, a much longer discussion, primarily focused on the director, as well as his recent film, by Stephanie Bunbury: ‘True Leigh Low On Sympathy.’ (which follows at the end).


The discussion starts with a well known Leigh quote about each film being essentially the same, and the object being to create people ‘with all our faults and virtues- vulnerable, good and bad.’ And again, ‘all my films, first and foremost, are about that sympathy for people.’ The problem for Stephanie Bunbury is, she can’t find the sympathetic note that Leigh searches for in his films. She refers to what Leigh calls ‘complexities and issues’ as ‘misery.’ She then goes through a list of his back catalogue, creating divisive and usually derisive adjectives to describe his characters, from 1977’s ‘Abigail’s Party’, ‘which satirised the petty ambitions of its suburban characters with a steely contempt’, all the way through to ‘Another Year ‘, and Lesley Manville’s character Mary, representative of a string of ‘generally appalling women’, many of which are even ‘ridiculous and despicable.’


Bunbury’s biggest beef is with the women in Leigh’s film, and her discussion is from a strong feminist standpoint. She is entitled, obviously, to this point of view. I have seen most of the films that Bunbury is uncomfortable with. The fact that my opinion differs so strongly can only be in the interpretation of these films. Why we interpret the films differently is anybody’s guess. A big reason must be that she is female and I am male. But of course it must be more than that. To counteract, therefore, some of Bunbury’s arguments:


First and foremost I have a lot of sympathy for many of the characters that Bunbury struggles to enjoy. I can’t see the ‘steely contempt’ drawn in the people in ‘Abigail’s Party’ for example. Even the husbands in the film, that are either sullen or dull, or trampled upon and hopeless, are ordinary people. They have their faults and virtues in bucket loads. They are a certain type, but seem to me to be authentic, and this is what I am seeking.


I am yet to see what Bunbury refers to as Leigh’s ‘nastiest film, ‘High Hopes.’ She admits that ‘Life Is Sweet’ is ‘comparatively benign’ but still refers to the way in which Leigh ‘wrings maximum snark from lower middle-class Wendy’s embarrassment about the shabby state of her front porch.’ Again, our focus is very different. I don’t remember this scene. For me this film is memorable for its treatment of teenage ennui in the character played by Jane Horrocks, which has nothing to do with treatment of class, or a ‘vicious portrait of suburban aspiration’ as Bunbury refers to it.


Then we get to Bunbury’s description of some of Leigh’s women. She uses the words pretentious, neurasthenic, appalling, resentful, infuriating, dried-up, screeching, amongst others to define them.






So it occurs to me, more than ever, that a reviewer writes for a certain audience, and sometimes it isn’t very broad. Stephanie Bunbury looks at the film from a certain angle- a very personal, feminist one. Mostly because I am male, my concerns are different to hers. Therefore my reading of the film is different. Therefore I cannot read too much into a Bunbury review of a film of this type because I know she will come from a completely different angle, with a completely different focus, and this will cause a wide variation in our levels of appreciation.

I saw ‘Another Year’ and loved it. Just like I have loved most of Leigh’s work, particular ‘Nuts In May’, ‘Vera Drake’, ‘Secrets and Lies’ and ‘All Or Nothing.’ The film centred particularly on Lesley Manville, in her role as a struggling woman called Mary. There were a number of Bergman like shots of Mary’s beautiful but lined and tired face in close-up. Leigh burrowed his way into her soul. Mary’s face reflected her pain and longing beautifully. The film ends, quietly, as it stays with Mary who is sitting around a dinner table with her friends. She is almost sobbing and is completely lost. She simply doesn’t know what to do. As with Timothy Spall’s tear-stained face when he realises his wife doesn’t love him anymore; as with Jane Horrocks, crying when Alison Steadman forces her to face her predicament; Vera Drake shell-shocked when the police gate-crash her party: my experience is that these are some of the most moving scenes in cinema.


For me, none of Bunbury’s adjectives fit Mary. And I certainly don’t see her as ‘generally appalling’, ‘ridiculous and despicable.’ Mary moved me. I felt sorry for her. I am full of sympathy. I thought she was sad and helpless, but not pathetic. There are many women and men like Mary in society. Life has passed them by somehow. She is getting older and she is desperate for some good company. Touching somebody or comfort in some way initially, intimacy even better, later. A good car that is reliable. Her own house. Is this all too much to ask? It seems it is, and Mary hides behind her insecurities by pretending things are ok, and by drinking too much, and by visiting her generous friends too often. And therefore she is very real. And Mike Leigh is giving people like Mary a voice. To remind us that fragile and dependant and troubled people like Mary exist.

And it’s not just the women in life who struggle. Again, a very honest and a very real character is Ronnie, who is in his sixties, and suddenly finds himself alone after the death of his wife. Ronnie is shell shocked, bewildered by this turn of events, and Leigh provides a long scene in which Mary and Ronnie are by themselves in Tom and Gerie’s house, communicating and reaching out to each other and providing succour in a world in which they desperately crave affection.


I reject outright Bunbury’s notion of a lack of sympathy, a type of sneering, and the negativity she associates with these characters. But perhaps we come from completely different worlds with different experiences.

 







True Leigh low on sympathy


Stephanie Bunbury


January 29, 2011






"Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity," says Mike Leigh.


Intensely scrutinised and true to type, Mike Leigh's miserable middle and lower-class characters have little room to grow.


'THE truth is that each film is different," says Mike Leigh, "but as Jean Renoir said, we all go on making the same film. What all these films are about is saying to people 'look, this is how we are with all our faults and virtues — vulnerable, good and bad'. All my films, first and foremost, are about that sympathy for people." How elusive, then, sympathy can be.


At 67, Leigh is often described as Britain's greatest filmmaker. With five Oscar nominations behind him, an OBE, the top awards from Cannes and Venice film festivals (for Secrets and Lies in 1996 and Vera Drake in 2004) among dozens of other prizes, he sometimes seems almost beyond criticism.


He is certainly the only director in the world who can regularly muster sufficient funding for projects that begin with no script, no star cast and no guiding idea — at least, none that Leigh is prepared to share with anybody.


The scripts are worked up through improvisations, typically over a period of six months. "To be honest, the fact that I'm allowed to do what I do in the way that I do it never ceases to amaze me," Leigh said once. "I think I've been remarkably lucky. Nobody has ever interfered, ever."


Leigh's latest film, Another Year, features several of his regular collaborators — Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as Tom and Gerri, a devoted couple in late middle age, Lesley Manville as their neurotically needy younger friend — whose comings and goings are observed over the span of four seasons marked out in their garden allotment, an oasis of satisfaction.


Outside, misery — or, as Leigh puts it, "the many complexities and issues about how we live our lives" — lies drably in wait. Gerri, a counsellor by day, must cope on more evenings than she might want with Mary, who is perpetually agitated and endlessly unlucky with men, cars and drinking choices. Tom, salt-of-the-earth that he is, has his own millstone: Peter Wight's Ken, a widower whose gloom has settled on him like cloud on a mountain top. Some people, Leigh agrees, have no talent for happiness.


Another Year is Leigh's 13th feature-length film. His first was Bleak Moments (1972), but it was his plays made for the BBC in the '70s that established his credentials. Perhaps the most enduring and important was Abigail's Party (1977), which satirised the petty ambitions of its suburban characters with a steely contempt.


But Meantime (1983) was even more savage, the lives of a family on a London housing estate in an endless dreary round of broken washing machines and the ritual humiliation of the dole office. It was thus that Leigh became the anointed chronicler of Thatcher's Britain.


Five years later, his first film made for the cinema in 17 years, High Hopes, took on the ascendant new Tories with their shoulder pads and renovations in what remains Leigh's nastiest film: he wasted little sympathy on them. Even in his next film, the comparatively benign Life is Sweet (1990), Leigh wrings maximum snark from lower middle-class Wendy's embarrassment about the shabby state of her front porch.


Not everyone is persuaded that these vicious portraits of suburban aspiration are the greatest films Britain has made. Some have ventured that, particularly in these early films, the upper-crust characters — and, even more despicably, those who aspire to be like them — are no more than caricatures, crudely drawn ones at that. He has also been accused of misogyny, although his affectionate portraits of women in Vera Drake (2004) and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) have gone some way to redressing the damage done to his reputation by Naked (1993). It was this film, unquestionably his grimmest, that was his most controversial.


Naked opens with a shambling street philosopher, David Thewlis's Johnny, raping a woman in a Manchester back alley. We then follow him through his meanderings to London, ostensibly in an attempt to escape a beating from his victim's family, where all the women he meets are similarly suffering, sad and generally supine. It was their collective failure to provide any resistance to Johnny's malevolent charisma that raised some feminists' ire.


None of this criticism seemed to touch Leigh; he is a practised curmudgeon and, moreover, has a capacity to hit the ball back so hard that he ends up winning every point. "Obviously, the assertions that it was a misogynist film are ridiculous and not even worth talking about," he said dismissively at the time. "I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important," he said on another occasion. "Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity." There is no arguing, it seems, with "everyone".


More telling to me than the rapist as dubious hero, however, is the string of risibly pretentious, neurasthenic and generally appalling women, usually childless and sliding into a resentful middle age, who pin down the loser's end of so many of Leigh's ensemble casts. The infuriating Mary in Another Year is one in a long line that starts with Beverly in Abigail's Party and includes the dried-up Barbara in Mean-time, the screeching lower middle-class Valerie, craving parity with her posh neighbour, in High Hopes and Monica in Secrets and Lies, all of whom are drawn as simultaneously ridiculous and despicable.


Leigh does not see them this way; Mary, like her predecessors, is both victim of circumstance and author of her own fate as, indeed, we all are. "I refuse to allow anybody to draw me into reducing (her) in such a way that misses the point of the film," he snaps, "which is the complexity of how we are."


Leigh has compared the complex reality he sets out to depict in his films to that in a documentary. The worlds he shows are so detailed they seem to exist independently of the camera. This is the purpose of months of rehearsal. "We really know who these people are. We know everything there is to know about them socially, economically and in every detail of their lives".


And it is this, really, that seems to me the real trouble with Mike Leigh. Nobody knows everything about anyone. If his characters seem exaggerated, it is because they are over-examined types, each with a set of characteristics and preferences that add up to someone we feel, often with a painful sort of amusement, we recognise.


And if their habitual tics, such as Imelda Staunton's constant invitations to all and sundry to have a cup of tea in Vera Drake, rapidly become tiresome, it is because they are repeated with so much significance. Every time Vera delivers the tea line, we tick off her chief perceived trait of homely kindness. Almost everything said illustrates some aspect of the character saying it. If they are types, they are assiduously true to those types.


This means that it is well nigh impossible for them to change. Leigh maintains that while some people see Another Year as optimistic and others as pessimistic, it is actually neither, its much-vaunted complexity meaning that it contains many possibilities for the future. Certainly, we may each read these situations differently but the characters are too firmly fixed to alter those situations. There are Leigh films — All or Nothing (2002) is a moving example — that end with catharsis, but it is through confrontation between selves that remain immutable in themselves.


Perhaps this doesn't matter. Leigh says he likes his films and is pleased they are out in the world and, with the exception of High Hopes, so am I. His admirable commitment, however, shouldn't mean his films are beyond argument. And however much actors enjoy those long rehearsal times and getting to the bottom of their characters' histories — and however great some of the performances — the fact remains that others emerge as cheap parody, less convincing than those drummed up on unrehearsed first takes on the Hollywood films Leigh so despises. As for the sympathy he feels for them — well, that remains as elusive as ever.

THE LITERARY LANDSCAPE OF LONDON, 1918

OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD, DH LAWRENCE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF


THIS morning I spent a glorious hour or so trawling through a book that came my way recently: Katherine Mansfield Collected Letters Vol 2. One of the best things about a good book collection is that it allows one book to lead on to another, and then another, and then another. It started like this:
I was reading some of KM’s letters to Ottoline Morrell, Dorothy Brett and Virginia Woolf as well as some others. The year was 1918 and she was living with John Middleton Murry, a comfortable middle-class existence, at Portland Villas, Hampstead. KM was earning money from the occasional short story (‘Bliss’, for example, in the English Review). She was also contributing reviews and articles for various other publications, and had her father’s annual stipend of 300 pounds. Murry himself was doing a good deal of writing for the TLS and the Nation and working for the War Office , and as editor of the Athenaeum was earning a healthy 800 pounds.

    KM 1919 PASSPORT PHOTORAPH

The Murry’s, fairly recently married, nicknamed their new house the ‘Elephant’ in reference to its white colour and large shape. KM was very ill by 1918. The good news at the end of the year was that the Armistice was signed. The war had taken its toll on everyone, not the least KM who lost her closest relative, her beloved brother Leslie, on the battlefield in 1915. At around the same time the war ended KM was told news she must have already suspected. Tuberculosis was going to take her life at a premature age. In 1918, at the age of 30, she was told she probably only had a few years to live. She died in January, 1923 at the age of 35.

'THE ELEPHANT', PORTLAND VILLAS

So here she is, on October 22, 1918, writing to Brett, having just received a visit from D H Lawrence: “He takes himself dreadfully serious now-a-days; I mean he sees himself as a symbolic figure- a prophet- the voice in the wilderness crying ‘woe.” Lawrence and Frieda are around the corner at Well Walk, Hampstead. It’s all fortuitous timing because Frieda and KM don’t get on well anymore, and Murry and Lawrence have had (at this point) and unspoken falling out, later to become much worse. Now Frieda has the ‘flu and is in bed, Murry is working, so Lawrence is taking the opportunity to make lots of visits to KM. even though he doesn’t think a lot of her writing (possibly isn’t terribly familiar with it). Just five days later, again to Brett, KM seems to have changed her tune a little: “For me, at least, the dove brooded over him too. I loved him: He was just his old merry, rich self, laughing, describing things, giving you pictures, full of enthusiasm and joy in a future where we were all ‘vagabonds’- …oh, there is something so lovable in him- and his eagerness, his passionate eagerness for life- that is what one loves so.” What a change! With her horrible illness, perhaps her moods are interchangeable. Lawrence is very fond of her and recreated her personality for some of his important texts (such as Gudrun in ‘Women In Love’). In this case it is the MSS of a play he has just written, called ‘Touch & Go’ which he has placed in her hands during the same week. There is a character called Anabel Wrath in the play that Lawrence has clearly based on KM and I suspect that he wants to share the portrait with her. Alas, as KM writes to Ottoline Morrell, she makes an initial observation, probably off-putting- ‘I have glanced inside and it looks black with miners…I do wish he could come up up out of the Pit for ever- But he won’t” and doesn’t bother with the rest, therefore not coming across the character called Anabel (Lawrence’s hopes extinguished).


D H LAWRENCE CIRCA 1920

Now during the time of these little visits, Lawrence is writing to a farmer friend on October 30 called Hocking about KM and how she is an invalid these days and can’t get about anymore : “Poor Mrs Murry has consumption of the lungs- cannot go outside the house.- But still, I think if the war ends, and she could go away to Italy or somewhere warm, she might get better.” Lawrence’s heart no doubt goes out to her. He is in denial himself because he has the same illness (often talks of ‘bronchial troubles’), yet he is in a sense lucky because he still has six or seven years of reasonable health, eventually succumbing in 1930. Lawrence wasn’t the only one that thought a warm climate might ‘cure’ tuberculosis. It would certainly be a comforting thought. He was to pack his bags for Italy a few years later too.


And then we have Virginia Woolf writing in her diary (Vol 1-18 Feb 1919), weighing up whether or not she can classify KM as a friend: “The truth is, I suppose, that one of the conditions unexpressed but understood of our friendship has been precisely that it was almost entirely founded on quicksands. It has been marked by curious slides and arrests; for months I’ve heard nothing of her; then we have met again upon what has the appearance of solid ground.” How much more difficult to communicate in those days, and how many instances there must have been of problems associated with communication, especially around war time. Letters go missing, people misinterpret things. Woolf visited KM at the ‘Elephant’ several times in 1918, but her diary mainly details a response to Murry, who, like Lawrence, she looks upon mostly unfavourably. Woolf’s feelings about KM are ambivalent. But at times she records admiration for her both as a person and as a writer. A perfect example of her ambivalence is when she writes in her diary, on October 11, 1917, “We could both wish that ones first impression of KM was not that she stinks like a- well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked at her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship.” An interesting weighing up of somebody- is she worthy to be my friend or not? The ‘civet cat’ label is telling. KM was an extraordinary woman of her times. A similarly middle-class background to Woolf (her father was an eminent banker in New Zealand, and Woolf’s father was the well known and highly respected critic and writer, Leslie Stephen. KM became a kind of rival to Woolf, even though KM didn’t write novels. Virginia Woolf, like Lawrence, saw KM at her most vulnerable at the end of 1918. Visiting Portland Villas, she commented in her diary “..husky and feeble, crawling about the room like an old woman…Illness, she said, breaks down one’s privacy so that one can’t write- The long story she has written breathes nothing but hate.” Woolf’s body didn’t cave in like this- which may be seen as a lucky thing. But her handicap in a sense was much worse. For years she battled madness and heard voices in her head, and eventually drowned herself near her property in Sussex.


VIRGINIA WOOLF CIRCA 1920


And KM, for her part, described Leonard and Virginia Woolf as ‘smelly’ in a letter to Murry on February 17, 1918 (no reference to ‘civet cat’, however). When she Woolf three months later, just after marrying Murray in May, she describes her as ‘very nice’ in a letter to Brett (in her diary Woolf sums up KM as being ‘marmoreal’ in regards to the same outing). An in a letter to Woolf herself, on November 7, 1918, from Portland Villas, KM probably feeling somewhat tragic and vulnerable over her fate, tells her “You are immensely important in my world, Virginia.” This letter comes the day after Woolf visited her, and made the diary entry about KM being ‘husky and feeble’, above.


What a glorious thing, therefore, are letters, and how lucky I am to be able to access all these from within the confines of my own bookshelf!


Less than a year later KM will write her first serious will which she leaves at the Bank of New Zealand for Murry to access when she dies four years later: “Any money I have is yours, of course. I expect there will be enough to bury me. I don’t want to be cremated and I don’t want a tombstone or anything like that. If its possible to choose a quiet place- please do. You know how I hate noise.” Well KM didn’t quite get her wish. She died at Fontainbleau in 1923 and is buried with a lovely inscription from Henry IV. This particular letter finishes with “That’s all. But don’t let anybody mourn me. It can’t be helped. I think you ought to marry again and have children.” Murry did- his next wife also died young, of tuberculosis. But first they had a daughter together- whom he named Katherine Middleton Murry.

‘But I tell you, my Lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’

Notes:

D H Lawrence: Touch & Go, C W Daniel Ltd, London, 1920

The Letters of D H Lawrence Vol 3 1916-1921, Cambridge University Press, 1984

Katherine Mansfield: Collected Letters Vol 2 1918-1919, OUP 1987

The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 1 1915-1919, The Hogarth Press, London, 1977

Jessie, Louie, Frieda and D H Lawrence

AT last it is now holidays, and I have squeezed in some time to be re-reading D H Lawrence’s early days, especially his romances, the years from 1906-1912, when, starting in 1906 around the time of his 21st birthday, he began a 150 letters or so correspondence with an important early influence, Louie Burrows.

                                                                                                                   

Lawrence fell in love before he met Louie. His other significant ‘friendship’ during this period was with Jessie Chambers (Miriam in Sons & Lovers). He would visit Jessie and her family at their place in Nottingham called ‘Hagg’s Farm.’ He would always remember visiting the Hagg’s from when he was a boy. It made him feel alive and he had important friendships there with Jessie’s brothers and her parents as well. Mrs Lawrence never approved but the young David Lawrence would walk there from his home in Eastwood, and entertain the family with his wit and intelligence. He would share his love of botany and drawing and literature with the Chambers’ family, in particular Jessie. They would rebound ideas off each other and discuss French, Mathematics, and fashionable philosophers and writers of the day, and those of the past. Lawrence would always be asking Jessie to read books that he had just read, and she, in love with him, would dutifully respond. Then began a passionate friendship that developed further, but Lawrence was always dogged by sexual frustration. Of her time, Jessie, it seems, was a model of chastity. Their sometimes turbulent friendship is portrayed in much of Sons & Lovers in the guise of Paul and Miriam. This book cannot be taken as autobiography, however, as Jessie disagreed with much of it, and felt that she didn’t come out of it fairly or truthfully. It seems that at some point Lawrence knew that it would be wrong to go on seeing Jessie, alone at least. It comes, characteristically, from his mother, that Lawrence decided it would not do Jessie’s reputation, or prospects, any good if they were to go on being seen alone together, as their friendship continued past their late teens.

Lawrence had strong friendships with other women at this time. Some we know less about, like Agnes Holt and Blanche Jennings, others feature in surviving correspondence so we can track their level of involvement. Helen Corke was someone Lawrence met in teaching, and his second novel, ‘The Trespasser’ comes directly out of his relationship with her.

Of all the young relationships Lawrence had, it is the one with Louie Burrows that I find the most appealing. The Burrows lived in a lovely Nottinghamshire village called Cossall (Cossethay in ‘The Rainbow’- the Burrows family appear as the Brangwen’s in this novel). Their house was ‘Church Cottage’, still standing, with Louie’s name on a blue plaque out the front. Lawrence and Louie both trained as teachers in 1902, and both went on to study at University College in Nottingham in 1906 where their friendship was cemented. By late 1908 Lawrence found a job teaching in Croydon (where he would remain until he became too ill to teach in 1911), and Louie’s career path took her briefly to Leicester, and then eventually as Headmistress in a school in nearby Quorn. Subsequently, meetings took place mostly in the school holidays.

Lawrence and Louie became engaged at the end of 1910, six days before Mrs Lawrence died. Lawrence proposed to Louie on the train and considering the extent of devotion that existed between mother and son, one wonders at how rational Lawrence’s decision can be seen. Was this merely just a snatch at happiness, desperate to keep his sad emotions at bay? Perhaps Lawrence wanted his mother to see him as a happy, settled man before she died (notably with Louie, whom she liked, not with Jessie, whom she hated.)

Then came 1911, otherwise known as the ‘sick year’, a year in which Lawrence nearly died of pneumonia. On top of that, Lawrence knew painfully that he was not in a financial position to become married. He wasn’t able to fulfil his own personal expectation of being able to earn 120 pounds a year, with 100 pounds already in the bank.


By the beginning of 1912, as this all dawned on Lawrence, it became clear to him that the marriage was never going to happen. Lawrence’s letters became shorter. The perennial sense of sexual frustration never abated. Lawrence had again chosen a young woman with a strict code of manners. Poems written at this time discuss the repressed desire that Louie felt compelled to enforce:


‘Yet if I lay my hand in her breast,

She puts me away, like a saleswoman whose mart is

Endangered by the pilferer on his quest.’ (from Amores, 1916)


Lawrence also remarked to friends, perhaps in bitterness, that he felt that Louie was too inexperienced, too immature, this due to her unscarred youth. This idea of a lack of self-reliance is portrayed to some extent in Ursula in ‘The Rainbow.’


The relationship between the two began petering out, driven, by the end of 1911, and into 1912, partly by Lawrence’s precarious health. Unsatisfactory meetings continued, until a massive event in Lawrence’s life occurred that would put an end to their friendship altogether. Lawrence met the German wife of his former Professor of Languages and after meeting secretly at Charing Cross Station on May 3, 1912, Lawrence and Frieda crossed the Channel to Ostend to begin a new life together (although Frieda was not committed to a ‘new life’ with Lawrence at this early stage of their illicit relationship).


A couple of letters between Louie and Lawrence were exchanged during 1912, then neither heard from one another again. In the final letter Lawrence wrote to Louie, from Lake Garda in Italy, near the end of 1912, he spoke of the fact that he was ‘such a rotter’ to her, that she always treated him well, that he thinks of her with ‘gratitude and respect’ and that the ‘wrong’ is ‘all on my side.’ Then he comes out with this:


‘I am living here with a lady whom I love, and whom I shall marry when I come to England, if it is possible. We have been together as man and wife for six months, nearly, now, and I hope we shall always remain man and wife. I feel a beast writing this. But I do it because I think it is only fair to you. I never deceived you, whatever- or did I deceive you-? I may have done even that.- I have nothing to be proud of.-…The best thing you can do is to hate me. I loathe signing my name to this. D H Lawrence.’

(‘Lawrence In Love- Letters to LB from DHL’, Univ of Nottingham, 1968).


The final instalment in the story of Louie and Lawrence takes place in Vence, France in March, 1930. The depth of Louie’s affection for Lawrence can be guessed when we see that Louie twice visited Vence to see Lawrence’s grave, this despite the long period without contact. She was at this stage still unmarried and living with her parents in Quorn. Louie did eventually marry in 1940, and retired as Headmistress a year later. She died in 1962. Lawrence scholar, James T Boulton, says of Louie that ‘the wound received in 1912 had not healed in 1930.’


Jessie Chambers also married later, and she too never forgot Lawrence, not even remotely so. This can be seen in her book ‘D H Lawrence, A Personal Record’(1935) in which she states that she always saw in him ‘in the strictest sense of the word, immortal.’ Lawrence, too, always looked back fondly on Jessie and her family, writing a wonderfully tender and appreciative letter very late in life to Jessie’s brother about the unforgettable memories he had of Hagg’s Farm, and that his experiences there would remain with him forever.

It seems fitting that Lawrence ended up marrying the larger than life figure of Frieda Weekley. Some of the strength she must have embodied is suggested at by her preparedness to give up her family for a penniless, struggling author who she barely knew. Frieda had three young children when she ran off with Lawrence. She knew, as her former husband made clear, that this act meant the end of her relationship with them as a mother for the foreseeable future, maybe forever. She offered so much to Lawrence that the other women couldn’t match, and it is true that she benefitted from the daring, risky life he had to offer as well. She may have felt, however, that she had made a terrible mistake early on during their elopement. Lawrence found her bawling over photographs of her children, missing them terribly. He was frustrated by this sign of regret and told her to get over her decision in no uncertain terms, promptly ripping the photographs into pieces and storming off. A fierce, powerful, independent woman who perhaps had met her match.

                                     Church Cottage, Cossal, Notts.

Andrew O'Hagan on the James Bulger Tragedy

IN an essay published in the London Review of Books in 1993, Scottish author and essayist, Andrew O'Hagan wrote about the tragedy that is/was the murder of James Bulger by two ten year old boys:

' The abduction and murder of James Bulger, a two-year-old boy from Liverpool, has caused unprecedented grief and anger. Hours before the two ten-year-old boys accused of the crime arrived at South Sefton Magistrates’ Court, a large, baying crowd had formed outside. As a pair of blue vans drew up, the crowd surged forward, bawling and screaming. A number of men tried to reach the vehicles, to get at the youths inside, and scuffles spilled onto the road. Some leapt over crash-barriers and burst through police cordons, lobbing rocks and banging on the sides of the vans. Many in the crowd – sick with condemnation – howled and spat and wept. Kenneth Clarke has promised measures to deal with ‘nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders’. Those two little offenders – if they were the offenders, the childish child-murderers from Walton – were caught on camera twice. First, on the security camera at the shopping precinct in Bootle where they lifted James, and again by the camera of a security firm on Breeze Hill, as they dragged James past – the child clearly in some distress.'

The whole shocking incident was sickening and I will always remember reading about it years ago. When I was in Maidstone in England in 2001, the Headmistress of the school I was teaching at spoke of the horror she felt in regards to the newest details- not that the two young offenders were going to be released into a society somewhere, but that the howls of contempt were rising from the British public again. I saw her condemnation of the latest hysterical hatred and derision as a voice of reason amidst the chaos in the tabloid news, and I thanked her for it.

It was a disgusting and sickening act. But as O'Hagan says, somewhere else in his essay, it was also a crime to release the names of the offenders- Venables and Thompson- because two more lives were destroyed as a result. Add to this Kenneth Clarke's comment quoted above- (promised measures to deal with) 'nasty, persistent juvenile little offenders' and we have enough revulsion for a lifetime.

Winter's Bones: An American Independent Film

BESIDES being a well scripted, well acted and compelling film, Winter’s Bones provides an interesting education. As much as anything, it seems to be about the current state of the US economy, and in particular the way in which downward economies hurt the poor and dislocated people the most. The territory explored in the film is the area known as the Ozarks, a hilly and heavily wooded rural area of Missouri. A couple of the principal locations were specifically Christian County and Tayden County, evidently at the centre of the Missouri Bible Belt, a Republican stronghold since at least the end of the last world war.






Jennifer Lawrence has little film experience, but she does a convincing job of playing a stoic seventeen year old who has to grow up too quickly by being saddled with a psychologically damaged mother, who is virtually a non-entity, and a young brother and sister who are in desperate need of good parenting and good role models. Lawrence, called Ree in the film, provides some stark education for her young siblings in the possible advent that they might find themselves without her. She teaches them to shoot and skin squirrels- ‘do you want them fried or stewed?’, and how to use guns as well (the youngest, a six year old girl, helps Ree pull the trigger).



The people in this part of Missouri are not satirized in any way- in fact for all the bleakness that is explored as part of their predicament and condition, you get the feeling they would welcome this film as a sober message that might be sent to Barak Obama. However they may feel differently about previous attempts to capture their way of life: the satirical slap in the face that was the TV show, ‘The Beverley Hillbillies’, and the grim and shocking critique that was ‘Deliverance.’ There is tenacity in the people in Winter’s Bones that some may see as admirable. There are some warm scenes involving singing and banjo playing. Life is tough but people get on with it. However, dependence on drugs to make a living, the awful attitude of revenge, the lawlessness and ‘local rules’ that seem to be on display, are all seriously worrying signs for a community that is struggling to survive, let alone make it.

My favourite scene in the film is when Ree, desperately in need of money to support her family, visits the local army recruiting centre. I can imagine any number of local Missouri men and women fighting in Afghanistan. Ree is determined and practical, and it is absolutely right that she should be totally honest about admitting that her sole motivation for wanting to join is the money that she will receive. Happily, the recruiting officer, playing his real life role, interestingly enough, tells her that this is not a good reason alone for wanting to be a soldier, that she is too young, (being only seventeen), and that right now her mother and siblings all need her to be with them at home. It’s a relief to hear caring, sensible advice.

Winter’s Bones is stark and very gritty, and although I would have no interest in seeing it again- unlike, say, the multi-layered White Ribbon which was one of the last films I saw- I’m glad I did see it. It told me something about the people of the Ozark region, it brought to the screen a great new talent in Jennifer Lawrence, and it is an American film without the tackiness, cheapness, falseness and shallowness of a Hollywood film. No special effects. No gratuitous violence. No sexual assault. No excessive use of guns. No melodramatic chase sequences. So it’s great that it was even made.

10 Great Reading Experiences

The books that I have enjoyed the most are generally books that I read quickly. There is the ‘don’t want to put it down factor’. But equally relevant is the fact that I enjoy books so much more if I read them quickly, remembering plot links, subtle character development, listening to the author’s voice in one or two sittings. These books will stay with me forever because they are beautifully written, and because I will never forget the experience of having read them.

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)    


        


Initially apprehensive because life was chaotic at the time, I approached Anna Karenina a little dubiously. I have read long books before- I remember the first one was ROOTS by Alex Haley- but not many of them. Anna Karenina had me involved from the start. I enjoyed following the dangers of a secret life between Anna and her Count, but as some others have said, it was Levin and Kitty that had me enthralled. I still remember the scene in which he proposed as being magical- and apparently from Tolstoy’s experience. Another incident in the story that I thought was beautifully written and absolutely wonderful was the section on Levin’s mowing of fields and his interest in agriculture. Different incidents involving trains were also captivating. This book put me in a good mood for many months.




Women In Love (D H Lawrence) 

                        



I have always loved Lawrence and have collected many books by and about him. Lawrence’s love of nature comes to the fore in this novel, as it does in most of his works. Women In Love is a kind of sequel to The Rainbow, and was written at a creative although turbulent period of his life. I read this novel in the car and will always remember the reading experience. I purchased a paperback copy whilst holiday in Adelaide, and began and finished it during the long eight drive from Adelaide to Melbourne. What a fantastic use of time! By the time I finished I was enthralled and besotted with certain scenes. I noticed, too, that my mind was incredibly lucid and that I suddenly had an enormous vocabulary, which sadly dissipated a few days later. In real life a woman drowned in Moorgreen Reservoir, near Eastwood, Nottingham where Lawrence grew up. I thought about this as I walked along the reservoir in 2001. The scene early on when the boating party, led by lanterns, looks for Diana in the darkened water, is memorable. Lawrence was fascinated with homoeroticism, as witnessed in The Rainbow with Miss Inger and Ursula, and that theme is prevalent here too in the case of Rupert and Gerald. The famous nude wrestling scene contains extremely powerful writing, as both strong men wrestle ferociously in the firelight, their loins glistening with sweat. Lawrence entered the psyche of his characters with more accuracy and intelligence that any other writer I know.


Tender is the Night (F Scott Fitzgerald) 




This beautiful story from one of the best American writers the world has seen borrows its title from John Keats. Dick Diver, psychiatrist, marries one of his mental patients, and is doomed to a life fraught with uncomfortable public scenarios. Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, spent time in an asylum, and clearly real life provided rich fodder for his fiction, as it did for D H Lawrence and many others. Dick has a weakness for young girls, a la Humbert Humbert, and he has an uncomfortable experience passing a courthouse in which an older man is inside being tried for rape of a pubescent girl. Dick’s fancy is the enormously wealthy Rosemary Hoyt, many years his junior. In one memorable moment they kiss, and Dick gasps ‘You’re fun to kiss’, and we can well and truly believe that he means it. It is not surprising that this book means so much to me- even more so than the beautiful and brilliant Gatsby- because as a student at La Trobe University I prepared for Tender Is The Night for my second year exams. Due to a clerical error, the question for this novel was accidentally missing from the paper and I had to write on something else I barely knew. The Head of English later apologised and I was allocated a generous grade in compensation. The setting is the French Riviera, close by to where I almost had a car stolen many years later.


Lolita (Vladimir Nabakov) 

        
                                                            


Lolita was published in the 50’s and it is daring. Humbert Humbert makes no secret of his predatory nature as he reveals in first person his lust for a twelve year old girl. He manipulates Lolita’s mother in order to get close to her in the first place; he drugs Lolita so he can have total control of her whilst she is sleeping; he lies to her by telling her that her mother is in hospital when in fact she is really dead; he writes indescribable things about Lolita in his diary and jealously guards her against having any similar aged friends when she is at school. There are many other shameful things that Humbert involves himself in, including murder, and yet he is thoroughly likeable, which suggests the genius of Nabakov. He is very clever and very witty and one could say he develops a genuine affection for Lolita. When she refuses to run off with him, pregnant and hungry at the end, he cries inconsolably, and this is the stuff of tragedy. Quilty almost steals the show (he does in the Kubrick film, played by Peter Sellers). Quilty becomes three characters, the most deceitful of these being the man who steals Lolita from Humbert when she is in her hospital bed after making grand promises. But for me the most memorable episode in the whole novel takes place at the hotel in which Humbert is developing his plan for a vulnerable Lolita, fast asleep in his bed after a powerful sleeping draught. Quilty is an interested onlooker on the hotel’s balcony making quips about Humbert and his dirty, devious plans. Each time Quilty makes his dry, witty comment, when Humbert only half hears, he says something innocent to replace it, confusing Humbert by making it rhyme. Great detail and dialogue in English- not bad for a Russian émigré writing in a second language.


The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)



                                                              

 This was a long time ago, probably when I was 18, when I came across McCuller’s name via a short story collection of Southern writers. The Southern experience is very powerful in the novel, and bits of it remind me of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. It is a book that has largely left my memory, except for the fact that it was profound and gave voice to the under privileged and had incredible characters. The bits that I do remember include the deaf mute, John Singer, who dines in a café run by Biff. There is also a family called the Kelly’s in the neighbourhood. They have a daughter called Mick and a son called Bubber. In a chilling scene Bubber accidentally shoots another character in the head. I wish I remember more of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. I will have to read it again. There you are- I forget most of the narrative, but the memory of ‘feeling it’ has never left me.



The Heather Blazing (Colm Toibin)


                                                                            


I went aimlessly into Brunswick Street Bookstore one day in 1994, looking for a new book to read. There was a gap. The surname- Toibin- attracted me, with its Irish sound- having read a number of books by Irish writers in the past, and being interested in the politics of Northern Ireland. What a lovely title!- ‘The Heather Blazing.’ The cover was simple- some abstract brushstrokes- but pretty. The blurb told the story of a judge (Eamon Redmond) and his wife in the county of Wexford. I took it on a hunch as I began reading in the armchair in the lounge at home. Like the best experiences, it was a one sitting job. The prose was beautiful-‘aching restraint’ as one critic put it. Lots of references to the Irish countryside, so simple, so haunting, making the everyday seem dramatic. Later in the story the judge’s wife takes a walk and has a stroke and soils herself. They have never been close in their early old age, and now suddenly they will be reliant on each other, especially her on him. For someone who is so restrained, and awkward with emotions, and removed, the daily tasks of bathing his wife and feeding her and changing her will prove traumatic. But the judge does so. And bravely and lovingly.


 Conditions of Faith (Alex Miller)

                                                        


Emily Elder meets Georges in Melbourne, via Emily’s father. They dance lovingly in her parents’ Richmond home, he proposes, and suddenly they are off to Paris to begin a life together. Emily has devastated her father. She is young and precociously bright. To go to Paris to become a young mother and a housewife seems unbelievably wasteful. Once there Emily decides motherhood is not for her. Visiting Tunisia awakens the desire for academia and historical research. Alas, Emily is pregnant, due to a chance encounter in the beautiful cathedral at Chartres. Georges assumes he is the father, but Emily knows better. Worse still, the real father is a priest, and he is George’s family priest. The description is making the scenario sound sensational and melodramatic. But this is misleading because it’s not. It’s achingly sad and real. Emily spends long days and nights refusing to give up her research. She studies profusely at the Paris Biblioteque in freezing weather, heavily pregnant, and putting this unwanted baby at risk. We feel for Emily because it is a path unwanted. At the same time, Georges has dreams of his own, just as real. As an engineer, he wants to be a part of the tender to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge and he is working insane hours. He also loves Emily and loves the idea of fatherhood and dreams of settling as a father with Emily in Sydney. When the crunch comes, and it is time to go, Emily devastatingly tells Georges that she is not prepared to leave Europe- there is too much work to be done. This is AFTER the baby is born- she is abandoning her child because her work means so much to her. There are other layers in Conditions of Faith. Antoine and Sophie are beautiful characters, each filled with their own dreams. And Emily’s path cleverly echoes the path of a famous historical figure whose subject fascinates Emily.




Ragtime (E L Doctorow) 


                              


Doctorow is a New Yorker, and New York is for Doctorow what the Mississippi is for Samuel Clemens. All his books are set there, and Ragtime, set at the turn of the last century, is his best. I was enchanted by certain characters like Tateh and his little girl, poor emigrants who make their fortune with their ingenuity. Ragtime intriguingly centres around real life figures like Harry Houdini and Sigmund Freud. A memorable scene involves the defecation in the Rolls Royce of Coalhouse Walker’s car, by members of the NYC Fire Department. From memory, they are enraged by the fact that a black man can be so stylish and so wealthy. I read Ragtime in 1984 when I was supposed to be reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pale Fire. I also read Death in Venice at this time. I recall it as a time when I was open to so many things and just wanted to devour all the book references I came across. Funnily enough, I saw the film first- desperate for something different in 1982 when I was in Year 12- at the Greater Union Cinemas in Bourke Street. I was very impressed, and later bought the score on LP (by Randy Newman). Then of course I bought the novel which was even more moving.


Death in Venice (Thomas Mann)       


   



This is a sad and solemn little story (a novella) about intense longing and a tragic lack of fulfilment. The narrator, Gustav von Aschenbach, is an accomplished middle-aged writer who becomes bewitched by a beautiful fourteen year old Polish boy called Tadzio, who has porcelain skin and soft blonde hair. He follows him around Venice and as cruelly tortured by the sight of him each morning at the breakfast table of the hotel they are staying at. It is in some ways like an all male version of Lolita, except von Aschenbach is a very different and less decadent and opportunistic character than Humbert Humbert. He is said to be modelled on Mann himself. Like many great books, a great film followed, and I will always remember the accompanying soundtrack, Mahler’s 5th symphony. So the book led me onto the film, and therefore Bertolluci and Mahler, and so on and so forth, so all the connections are a great thing. Death In Venice is a brief novel, yet it gave me the feeling of having read something full and rich and significant.


The Catcher In The Rye (J D Salinger)  

     



I read this at the perfect age- that is, seventeen, which is the age Holden Caulfield is when he tells the famous story of his breakdown whilst in New York. It captures the time perfectly- what it is like to be seventeen- what it is like (from what I have read) to be a young, white affluent male in the USA in 1950- and the cadences and idiom of the language of that time- all those goddamn adventures and frustrations. Post-war, the world is not an easy place to live in, and Holden can’t think of anyone or anything that he likes. His sister, Phoebe, is absolutely beautiful in her pubescent innocence, yet the world Holden encounters is sharp and cynical, with pimps and prostitutes wanting you to trip up, adults squirting highballs at each other in bathtubs, showy phonies like Ernie and Stradlater, and opportunistic flits like Carl Luce, and ‘f- you’ written on footpaths and walls (something that one of Holden’s heroes, Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby, sees outside Gatsby’s house, incidentally). I read this in one sitting in the lounge because I had to as it was part of the Year 11 Literature course. It has stayed with me forever, but is sadly hit or miss with students nowadays. When my family went to Sorrento (Vic) for a day trip once, my father devised a way of entering the premises, for free, through the back door of the cafeteria, and gleefully told the rest of us about it. I was full of Holden’s passion and scorn, having just read the novel, and full of indignation for days as to the blatant cheating involved in such an activity. It was an example for me of a cynical world and even worse, a cynical parent. I love the idea, which I read somewhere, of Sylvia Plath reading this novel to her new husband, Ted Hughes, in the mid 50’s.

Parent Musings

                                                                                                                        September 21 2010




ON BEING A FATHER

BEING a father is fabulous but it can be terrifying. Today I caught the bus with my 2 year old daughter to Northland Shopping Centre. We began getting ready to go out at 8:00. I dressed her easily- there are no objections to particular clothes wearing at her age. I chose a white singlet, a burgundy skivvy, another red top over that, a red-flecked jumper, scarlet- coloured tights, red jeans, red shoes and a blue zip up jacket. She insisted on wearing a faded pink hat which was luckily quite suitable for the cool, inclement weather. I packed some sliced apple and a small box of sultanas. She wanted to take her water in a trendy green plastic cup-shaped container which leaks- I insisted on a plain plastic mini water bottle with a pop up lid, and she easily acquiesced.



We both got ready quickly. I threw the nappy bag contents into the bottom of the pram. A. climbed happily into the pram after I put the brake on, and then we were out the door.



It is a short walk to the newsagent. There wasn’t anyone in the line so I was able to obtain a bus pass quickly. As we strolled out of the newsagency, I could see our orange bus- the ‘smartbus’ which travels from Altona to Mordialloc every day- waiting a hundred yards away at the lights. It would have been a bit of a blow to miss it as it would have meant a tiresome half hour wait in the cold. Luckily, after we raced across the lights at the flashing red man, we were able to stumble onto the bus without a second to lose.



I felt light-headed and gay on the bus because things were going well. I told A. about every person who came onto the bus-mostly older women- at each stop on the way. A. happily sucked on her apple pieces, and ate the whole small box of sultanas. She felt light-headed as well and was happy to sit in her pram all the way, perhaps just starting to show some signs of restlessness as were entered the Northland car park.



The purpose of the trip was to buy some clothes for my wife for our wedding anniversary, a hat for me, some pasta for our dinner, and to sit down and have a cappuccino and a scone between us. The first port of call was Myer. I found a brown trilby-style hat within minutes that felt comfortable and looked good. A successful start. Still in Myer, I found J a purple (her favourite colour) top that has some attractive frills on the sleeves and the bottom. Perfect- ‘and she can always take it back’, I thought out loud. Meanwhile, A. was being the epitome of a perfect child, leaning back languorously in her pram, almost chortling away, fascinated by all around her. I decided it was time for some fun of her own, so I took her to ‘Toys R Us’. I showed her some heavy breathing snakes and dinosaurs, which weren’t really her thing. Not surprisingly, she preferred the dolls- ‘Baba’ she called some of them- and I allowed her to cradle a ‘Hello Kitty’ cat for a little while- she gladly handed it back when I said we had to leave. Just nearing the exit, the inevitable happened: she saw some ‘In The Night Garden’ dolls out of the corner of her eye. I allowed her to handle one- what choice did I have?’ and she really livened up and she began trying to rip it out of the box. ‘Getting that one back on the shelf won’t be easy’ I thought to myself- but I was wrong. When I said we couldn’t take it because you have to pay for it, she simply handed it back and we were on our way.



As an almost subliminal or unconscious reward, I then wheeled our way over to a coffee outlet and ordered us baby cino, cappuccino, and scone. I took A. out of the pram for the first time, and we sat merrily together on a couch. She declined the scone and jam and cream, but woofed the baby cino down, and with strategically placed napkins, I managed to avoid a milky chocolate mess.



She wanted to walk- fair enough- so I held her hand with my right hand, and pushed the pram with my left. On the way to the bus stop again, to make our way home, ever alert A. noticed a little indoor roundabout, which are everywhere and difficult to avoid- this one with characters from ‘Sesame Street’ painted all over it. It was in mid transit with other children on it, so we waited patiently, then I slipped a $2 coin in. Observing the machine initially, I noticed that it flew around in circles fairly quickly, and had a safety wall on the inside, but no security latch on the outside. I wondered hesitantly whether or not A would be able to hang on as it whizzed around. Then I anticipated that it might be hard to keep up with her whizzing, if I took the precaution to place a steady hand on her left shoulder. So it was with some trepidation that I pressed the ‘Start’ button. As it turned out, my fears were thankfully not realised as it wasn’t going quickly enough for a) A. to fall out and over -at any rate, she kept a vice-like grip on Elmo’s head as I requested, and b) I was easily able to manoeuvre my way around the machine as I over estimated its speed in the first place.



Happily, we went off to wait for the next Altona ‘smartbus’ to take us home. The red neon sign said Altona bus in ’10 minutes’, which was fine because I had forgotten the pasta. We went back inside, to Safeway nearby, bought the pasta, and had only 4 uneventful minutes to wait. This time on the way home, A. sat on the same seat as her father, constant, steadfast, secure and happy, observing the world around her and fairly near sleep. We crossed the busy road at Bell Street at the lights, and walked in the door right on twelve o’clock. A quick glass of milk, and tuna and cheese sandwich, and A was almost begging to be given the chance to fall asleep.



A beautiful morning, and I allowed myself some time to think about what could have gone wrong:

____________________________________________________________________________



The day could have started with A. refusing to put on the sensible clothes I had selected for her. She may have angrily thrown the singlet and jumper across the room and complained in her child-like way that I had chosen too much red. She may have been totally impractical and chose thin weedy socks, a threadbare top that we’d had for several years, cold translucent flannelette-like jeans, a thin summer cotton hat (or no hat at all), and summer sandals with all baby toes exposed.



We may have left with an argument in which A. refused to settle into her pram. This would have meant I probably would have left the pram behind, and made the back-breaking decision to carry her most of the day. The newsagent may have said ‘we used to sell Metcards but we don’t do so any more- there is a newsagent the next suburb along that still sells them.’



The ‘smartbus’ that we luckily caught just on time may have suddenly left as the lights changed prematurely just before our arrival. That would have meant a half hour wait in the cold air, and it may have even rained. A. may have become very prickly and fidgety in no time. This would not be a good scenario, waiting as it were alongside Bell Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the whole of Melbourne.



A. may not have wanted to sit with her father on the ‘smartbus’ once it finally arrived. Opening the bag to desperately search for a remedy, I may have noticed that I stupidly forgot to pack a few little snacks to keep her preoccupied- and devastatingly worse- the nappy bag with its nappies and baby wipes- essential for any outing with a 2 year old.



Upon entering Northland, A. may have expected to be carried, an attitude that would probably last the whole back breaking trip. The dreaded pooh may have occurred at that very moment- Murphy’s Law’- and it would have been a very embarrassing and frantic search for a nappy outlet, and subsequent toilets. On top of that, a tantrum might have ensued, in which A. may have aggressively tested her lungs on the grounds that a) she had an uncomfortable bottom, b) she was hungry and in desperate need for a snack, and c) she was bored already and tired and just wanted to go home, ‘right now!’



Bottom and stomach eventually fulfilled, the hat and anniversary clothes for the wife may have proved totally elusive. The risky visit to ‘Toys R Us’ may have proved fatal with tantrum after tantrum over apparitions of ‘Night Garden’ dolls, ‘Barbie’ dolls and ‘Dora’ figurines meaning that my wallet would have quickly become empty after several acts of hasty appeasement.



It is easy to work out how the coffee shop visitation could have turned sour. Coffee milk all over everything without a change of clothes. Broken glass all over the floor and looks of contempt. Even worse, coffee burns up either arms and a child in traumatic pain.



The most obvious final disaster that could have taken place was with the innocuous looking little roundabout with ‘Sesame Street’ plastered all over it. The ‘whizz’ may have been far more powerful that at first discerned, and little A. may have found herself being hurtled at great pace across the Northland floor. She may have cracked her head on the handrail that encircles Big Bird’s ugly head. She may have received unfortunate giddy motion sickness after whirling around and around, and thrown up all over litigious-looking parents and their children waiting patiently for the next ride.



Of course the ‘smartbus’ heading west and home again may have been delayed due to a broken fan belt, and the wait for the next one could have been excruciating. Father and daughter could have been at serious loggerheads by then. Another pooh in the pants, this one a deliberate smarty-pants one, might have ensued. It’s not worth contemplating what might have happened later on, exiting from the bus with a tantrum frenzied child, along the treacherous Bell Street at the end of the journey home…



Fortunately, it was the former, not the latter, that did occur, and I thank A. for a lovely morning, writing all this down as she contentedly sleeps.