Sarah Polley's Secrets

                                                
ONE thing seeing Sarah Polley's new film, 'Stories We Tell', does, is get you to think about your own family upbringing and the light and dark shades of communal living over a large number of years. The autobiographical film traces the story of being the youngest of five siblings. Diane, Sarah’s mother, died when Sarah was quite young and a large section of the film deals with the question of whether or not Sarah has the same father as the rest of the Polley kids. There is a large amount of footage, a lot of super 8. Sitting in the Kino, I was amazed at the amount of footage of the family on holidays or at home, playing, interacting, living mostly happily. Then we are exposed to footage of Diane Polley’s funeral. Images of attendees poring over the pages of the funeral tributes. Finally it hit me. A lot of this footage was a recreation. The footage of the children and their parents involved actors recreating family events from the sixties and seventies. There is a lot of contemporary footage, consisting mostly of interviews full of fascinating family anecdotes. But the fact that she went to all that trouble to recreate images of the past- done fantastically well- tells us about her passion for truth and identity. Is the film too personal? Is it really of relevance to anyone other than Polley family and friends? Judging by the fabulous critiques, and the amount of people going to see the film, it would appear that many people find it all interesting like I did, and I think it must be because the film almost forces you to evaluate your own family experiences, and contemplate what your family’s story would look like on the big screen.
 
 

On the surface of things my family isn’t anywhere near as interesting as Sarah Polley’s. There was six of us, including father and mother. Three boys and one girl. Three boys growing up in one smallish room, and behind the plaster wall, one girl living in a slightly smaller room next to us. In my room, a bed for the oldest, and a bunk for the next two. Me on the bottom, the light partially obscured, causing hours of night time reading causing me to become almost blind.

 

We played word games at night. In the day there was a spacious backyard for soccer, and a lounge room filled at one stage by a large billiard table. Most of us- except my father- ate our meals at the kitchen table. Mother always cooked. We played records incessantly. The headphones meant I could play records like ‘Astral Weeks’ and ‘Stoneground Words’ and ‘The World of Joni Mitchell’ ridiculously loud, damaging my hearing for life.

 

I remember that at one point I must have felt some sort of dislocation, or lack of connection with where I lived. I cultivated a brief habit of becoming a rock thrower. I would stand at the furthest corner of the backyard and hurl a grey or white pebble as far as I could over the backyard of several neighbours. Then I would peer timidly over the fence to see where my missile landed. The day I saw my pebble miss the bewildered neighbour by centimetres, and crash into the brick frontage behind her, was the day I gave this dangerous pastime.

 

 Every family has its secrets. Some not as many, or as significant, as the Polley family. But even though things sometimes get obscured, I know enough that there are secrets, or taboo subjects, in my family, just like there is in everyone’s. A little digging, and a tiny bit of imagination, and some assuming, and then you have a hotbed of fermenting mystery.

 

One day it would be interesting to record all these memories- strip them back and play them out honestly, and in raw, unblinking fashion, just to see how everyone copes. The Polley family must be, I gather, very courageous.

 

Comfort in Adelaide

I LIKE Adelaide. I am not enjoying Melbourne much. But I quite like Adelaide. Melbourne has become glitzy, bossy, over-crowded and poorly planned. A recent report says about 100,000 people a year are coming to settle in Victoria. It’s like the Dr Seuss ‘Lorax’- “I’m figurin’ on gettin’ bigger and bigger.” Adelaide has never really been like that. Well, it probably will be. It’s always been about 20 or so years ‘behind’ Melbourne- except it’s kind of like ‘in front’ in this case. In Melbourne, streets like Hoddle Street and Punt Road have never been very good streets. They are abominable now. Besides being ugly with indiscriminate planning, the streets are full of cars with psychotic drivers and suburbs that in the 1960’s would have taken minutes to encompass- say, Preston to Richmond in about fifteen minutes. Now the same trip along the same streets at a comparative time, you are looking at about forty five minutes plus. Adelaide still isn’t like this. I was in Adelaide these last few days. I had some lovely experiences with the girls like the young boy in Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’- these so called ‘spots of time passages.’ I had a very optimistic attitude in Adelaide. Maybe that’s partly why it was so good. But it was just nice to escape Melbourne for a few days. And I guess, ordinary life. A great antidote to the woes of ordinary life is to do something different.

 

 

 

 

So I hopped on a metro train- something I’ve never done before, even though I’ve been to Adelaide many times. Adelaide is kind of like an old friend. It’s easy to get around, it’s familiar and unpretentious and pleasant. I feel like I belong there, and that I could live there, even though I did try when I was 22, and it was a complete disaster. I couldn’t find a job, I was living in Kurralta Park of all places, and the circumstances, particularly the relationship, was all wrong. It was all my fault, though. Anyway, here I was getting on a train on the ‘Outer Harbour’ line. It took ages for the train to leave, and even then I was switched to another line at the last minute and could have missed it.

The line out to the places I was going was interesting. The ‘Outer Harbour’ line takes you past ‘Port Adelaide’ and ‘Alberton’, and a little further in the region of ‘Semaphore.’ It was the film ‘Look Both Ways’ that was on my mind. I wanted to see the locations that were used in the film.

 

In the film we see shots of Justine Clarke looking bored on the train and travelling past vast industrial wastelands. These vast industrial wastelands look worse in real life. The view along the whole of the ‘Outer Harbor’ line was depressing. It made me think that Adelaide is lovely and soft in the centre, but brittle and ugly on the outskirts- at least in the west, at any rate. I found some of the locations used for the film, and found this really interesting. I want to do the same for the film ‘The Year My Voice Broke’, filmed apparently in Braidwood, New South Wales. I wandered along Semaphore Road, Semaphore, just like William McInnes, and was surprised at how close the water and the jetty was to the main road. Semaphore Road is quite lovely- the sea end of it at least- but Port Adelaide Station, and all the other stations on this line, and the houses and empty spaces and factories and graffiti, were all ugly and dispiriting.

 

                                                         

 

 

 

 

I took S and A to the Adelaide Zoo the next day. The zoo is much nicer than the Melbourne Zoo. It seems more compact and better designed, and more lovingly constructed in a way. A black cockatoo nibbled A’s finger, and a goat and a charming deer chewed our shirt sleeves.

 

The pandas and koalas were comatose in their expansive exhibits, and the emu was angry, the pretty pink flamingo seemed to be dancing as it rotated its extraordinarily thin legs as it nuzzled its own feathers, and the zoo was quiet and understated and it was so peaceful and easy and there was nothing ostentatious or grand and in fact the whole area around the zoo is a pretty green and there are no high risers and the walk down to the zoo from North Terrace is fresh and lovely and cool and uncomplicated and free.

 

 

 

We stayed on Pulteney Street, sandwiched between North Terrace and Rundle Mall. Those silly silver balls sitting on top of each other are still on Rundle Mall. The charming statues are still on North Terrace and haven’t been dwarfed by some modern ugly sculptures. Michael Treloar’s antiquarian bookshop is still going, but only just, and the food shops on Rundle Mall are still a bit tacky and cheap. The murals on the walls appear to be the same and people still walk diagonally across some of the streets and always wait for the lights. The same stuffed animals are in the museum in exactly the same pose as they were years ago. You haven’t changed much since then, but your child has become a bit older.  It’s so charming in a way. Adelaide people rarely jaywalk, and always wait for the walking green. This doesn’t happen in bad brash Melbourne much.

I felt a cold wind, a note of warning, however. It seemed like Adelaide was still determined to ‘catch up.’ There was a lot of noise going on. Saws and drills, and unsightly cranes. Some weird thing was going on around the Rundle Mall/ King William Street intersection. The lovely ‘Beehive Corner’ was half hidden. ‘Haigh’s chocolates’ was still there, but tragically obscured, and there were those annoying wind tunnels going on everywhere to protect people from falling hammers and what not on construction sites. Don’t get me started on the Festival Centre area. The Torrens River was barely visible due to the vast construction site in place. So much for ‘boats for hire.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

SONS AND LOVERS IS A HUNDRED YEARS OLD

 

SONS AND LOVERS was first published in the early months of 1913. The Lawrence’s were living on Lake Garda at the time. It must have been of some relief to Lawrence. It was many years in gestation, and featured any number of drafts. Lawrence’s former fiancée, Jessie Chambers (Miriam in the novel) was a heavy, early influence. She read and commented on many of the drafts. Later she lost a lot of influence when they became estranged after Lawrence became engaged to Louie Burrows who knew Jessie Chambers, and especially diminished when Lawrence met his future wife, Frieda. Frieda helped Lawrence see his past in a much different light. Sometime later Lawrence would admit that he was under the influence of his mother too much, to the extent that his ‘memoir’ of his boyhood struggles did a disservice to his father and his father’s relationship with his family. It must have come as quite a shock to Jessie Chambers when suddenly, one day, through Louie Burrows if I remember correctly, she was told that Lawrence had eloped with a German woman (not far from the start of the first war). The Lawrence of her girlhood and his boyhood, as traced throughout Sons and Lovers, was much altered.

           

The first book I ever read about Lawrence was a pictorial biography written by the celebrated champion of Lawrence, Keith Sagar. It was when I was living in Wangaratta, and I visited the local newsagent in search of something new. The account of Lawrence’s family and upbringing, the closeness with his mother, the hatred of his father, the death of an older brother, the struggles with women and the frustrations of sex, the love of languages and learning and nature, the boyhood joy of going to the rural property, ‘The Haggs’ to see Jessie and her family- this was the stuff of wondrous excitement for me and it left me hungry for anything Lawrentian, which still carries to a certain extent to this day. The next logical reading excursion was ‘Sons and Lovers’, and here to my great surprise was pretty much the Sagar story retold with a protagonist called Paul Morel, and a girlfriend called Miriam. The rural property was there, the massive mother influence, and the frustrations with sex and fascination for all birds, beasts and flowers- it was all there amidst incredibly vivid, psychological writing.

      

I went to England in 1987 and stayed the night at a YMCA in Nottingham. I spent the day in Eastwood where Lawrence grew up and wandered the streets, found the various houses he lived in with his family, saw the family graves at the local cemetery, and visited the local library to see their Lawrence display, which constitutes some of the lovely homage that Eastwood pays to its most celebrated citizen. I returned again in 1993 because I couldn’t get enough of it and did much the same thing- lots of wandering along the snowy footpaths and going to the Lawrence Birthplace Museum and bypassing the tacky ‘White Peacock’ café opposite. My most recent trips were made in 2002-2003. I was living in England at the time. I packed the car, and with my wife I drove to Nottingham city centre randomly in search of a job and a house to live in. For the next 2-3 months, after settling eventually in Old Basford, I found myself within easy driving access to Nottingham University to see the Lawrence collection at the library, and what’s more, Eastwood itself, so I could make many trips to the library, the museum, the wooded areas surrounding The Haggs, the four houses the Lawrence’s lived in, and the pub that Arthur Lawrence frequented. This was real ‘Sons and Lovers’ territory and it brought the wonderful book to life. I imagined the lucky students in neighbouring counties like Leicestershire, and Derbyshire, and even Yorkshire, going to Eastwood for school excursions whilst studying ‘Sons and Lovers’, and witnessing the respectful painted trail along the small city’s footpaths that follow in Lawrence’s former footsteps.

    

Last night I finished Geoff Dyer’s enigmatic ‘Out Of Sheer Rage’, which was supposed to be a book about Lawrence, but ended up being a book about writing a book about Lawrence. Much of it is intriguing, although admittedly I skipped certain sections, my eye alert mostly to the passages about the author. It is a book that I wished I had written- the pilgrimages to the houses lived in, the fun of following the blue line trail around Eastwood, ruminating on the fabulous letters and the best books. It is a good book to read on the hundred year anniversary of Sons and Lovers. And now that I’ve finished it I’m going to go back to the book published in 1913, about a boy and then a young man visiting The Haggs farmhouse, wondrous and lit up inside.

 

    

                

Three Colours White: Revenge and Obsession

                               

MOST people would say that ‘Three Colours White’ pales in comparison to ‘Blue’; that it isn’t as moving, or intense, or meaningful, or as important in some way. Well that would be to miss the point entirely. It has completely different aims, even though many of the films’ production team is the same for both. ‘White’ is a black comedy. The plot is ridiculous at times and it is very plot-driven, unlike the first film which has many moments of contemplation, in which the film seems to stand still. The two key male leads are the same, I believe, as the two leads in another Kieslowski ‘comedy’, from ‘Dekalog’- from memory it is the last or one of the last of the ten one hour films, about two brothers who inherit their father’s stamp collection with tragi-comic results. It is because of this association with the earlier film, that ‘White’ seems even more farcical to me than it possibly is supposed to. The male lead, in particular, has an amusing face, and is very hard to take seriously. Kieslowski uses him, in both films, as someone the audience can pity and laugh at, as much as if to say ‘I’m glad it’s happening to him, and not to me!’

 

The female lead is Julie Delpy (Dominique) who auditioned for ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ but would have been terrible, and rejected, mercifully, the offer to play Julie in ‘Blue.’ In ‘White’ she is good. A bit like a cat, she is cruel, and sneaky, and cunning, but, when trapped at the end, we witness her human side and find her more likeable as a result.

 

Zbigniew Zamachowski’s character (Karol) is signposted as tragic and ridiculous from the very start. He is visiting the law courts to find out that his wife, Dominique, wants a divorce because he is inept in the bedroom. As he is ascending the steps, he looks at a pigeon in the sky. Suddenly there is a splash of white on his coat, from the pigeon, just as he is admiring its flight. This is the first sign of his helplessness. This is Kieslowski marking him as a ridiculous figure who seems destined for bad luck. He has that sense of resignation all over his face. Soon enough, Karol is seen pathetically running after Dominique as she speeds off in their car, lugging a heavy suitcase after him, calling her name. This is after she has coldly and brazenly told him publically that she doesn’t love him anymore.  Here he is having his only credit card cut into pieces by the bank (her money it seems); and freezing to death sitting on his suitcase to see how his life will unfold; being shown as an abject failure again by failing another consummation test with his wife, and being threatened with arson; playing his comb as a musical instrument as a busker on the Metro and being told his ‘fly’ is open. It is here, at the Metro, however, that Karol meets Mikolaj, a fellow Pole from Warsaw, whose friendship will give him a spark and change his life forever. Before this, however, Kieslowski’s anti-hero makes a triumphant escape on a flight to Warsaw in a suitcase, only to be a victim of corrupt baggage handlers who, judging by the weight of the suitcase, think they have discovered gold. We are shown another scene in which Karol is lugging his suitcase in the freezing cold, weary, beaten and bloodied, this time to his former hairdressing salon shop he co-owned with Dominique before things turned sour. The little shop is amusingly lit up with ‘KAROL’ on a red neon sign.

 

Well Karol proves to be made of much sterner stuff than either his ex-wife or the audience give him credit for. He is able to scheme and hoodwink just as well as any other Polish businessman, and make a lot of money out of property scams, and being able to offer his loyal friend, Mikolaj, a partnership in a company. His main objective is to seek out revenge on his callous ex-wife. All overtures to reconcile with her have been fruitless as she treats him like trash. By faking his own death, getting her to attend his funeral, and using a substitute body for the coffin, Karol is able enact a brilliant scheme that will see Dominique go to jail. A moment of epiphany occurs, however, as he witnesses her real tears at his mock funeral, and sees evidence of the love that was once shared.

Perhaps the most enjoyable scene from the entire film is the shock on Dominique’s face as she returns to her Parisian flat after the funeral, to find Karol, shirtless, in her bed. They make passionate love for the first time and suddenly it seems a cloud has lifted over the fickle Dominique and she is in love with him. It’s all too late for her. The police arrive and arrest her for complicit involvement in Karol’s ‘death.’ The film ends with Karol seeing Dominique through the bars of her prison. She seems, in her sign language, to be suggesting future plans for being together. He stands there, weeping, perhaps wondering if it can ever be.

             

It is difficult to have a colour like white, thematically, to dominate a film, unlike the tones of red and blue that are so striking in the other films. Kieslowski, however, finds ways. He creates a snowy landscape in various parts of the film, especially scenes set in his home city of Warsaw. As in ‘Dekalog’, his intimate feel for Poland is evident in the way he makes his film, however it is always a totally unsentimental approach. Kieslowski also uses a dominance of white in a montage that is repeated throughout. It is a view of Karol and Dominique’s wedding day. She is beautiful in her white dress and the background sky is of a cold, milky white. There is also a lovely scene in the pure white snow in which Karol and Mikolaj are celebrating their unusual friendship by rolling around on the ground, again under a white winter sky.

                              

‘Three Colours White’ is probably not as dense as ‘Blue’ but its exploration of friendship and loyalty on the one hand, and mistrust and vengeance on the other, make it intriguing. Filming parts of ‘Blue’ at the same time as filming ‘White’, and even editing ‘Red’ at the same time, and maintaining ridiculous brief sleeping patterns over a long period of time, is no mean feat. Juliette Binoche even wanders onto the ‘White’ film set at the start of the film as if to suggest she is looking everywhere for her director in order to cut another scene- for the film that she stars in.

     

Three Colours Blue: introspection and liberation

                   

Having watched a whole range of Kryzsztof Kieslowski’s Polish films over the past year, I have now revisited his famous Three Colours Trilogy. The three films- Blue, White and Red, were all filmed within a tight time frame and edited at the same time. I think it was the director’s first foray into French film making, and he died shortly after the release of the third of the trilogy, ‘Three Colours Red.’


There are a number of memorable moments in the first film, ‘Three Colours Blue’, which has Juliette Binoche (as Julie) in many of the frames. I remembered, from seeing the film twenty years ago, the shots of Julie swimming in the pool, enveloped by beautiful blue water, a blue bathing suit, and each sequence seeming to become a deeper blue, as though it is all filmed through the prism of a blue lens. Julie is grieving, after the road accident that killed her famous husband and her child, and she is curled up in the water like a foetus, her hands cupping her ears, trying to absorb everything that has happened, or perhaps block it out.
          

The film uses the colour blue as a repeated motif, just as the other two films will (sometimes) use white and red. Another strong image is of a glassy blue mobile that Julie is enamoured with. Julie stands beside and behind the crystals, and a glorious blue light splashes over her whole face as she examines the mobile for some deeper meaning. We all need to hang on to something from our treasured past.
            

Julie is told by her doctor at the start of the film that her husband and daughter are both dead. She is lying prostrate on a hospital bed. We know the doctor is talking to her because we can hear his voice. The only vision of him, however, is reflected through one of her eyeballs. It is a classic Kieslowski shot- difficult to capture- an intense close up of Julie’s eye is needed- and it emphasises the tragic elements that are in the doctor’s words.

The colour blue creeps into even the unlikeliest of scenes. Julie comes home to find a large mouse in her kitchen, hovering over several just born blind and hairless babies. The image, in close up, is startling and alien, and yet there is that soft suffused spot of blue light in the background.

It is the detail and the intellect that makes watching these films closely, rewarding. The introspective side of Julie is shown when she watches herself reflected in a spoon that is dangling on top of a glass vase. Moments later, in a Parisian café, she seems to be avoiding the attentions of a family friend who loves her, and has tracked her down after several months of searching. Instead of regarding him, she is more intent on studying the way in which coffee slowly absorbs an entire sugar cube, grain by grain. Julie is not ready to deal with anything that is not abstract.
 

At the end of the film we know there is a release, or liberation, for her, as she makes love with this same man. We seem them through a grainy window, the faces pressed against glass, almost like they are in an aquarium, and there is no intellect, nothing cerebral, just pleasure and release. The final shot features a close up of Julie’s face, a hazy blue glow enveloping her, tears running freely down her soft face. She is dealing with her grief. There is a noticeable smile seconds before the final fade. It is vague, and not emphatic in any way, but it is definitely there, and means everything.
 

JOHN HARRIS VENTURES OUT FOR THE FINAL TIME (PART 3)

(CONTINUED FROM PART 2)

 

 

     ONE fateful day- well, actually New Year’s Eve- John Harris and his female companion decided to herald the beginning of a new year by drinking and dancing at one of Wangaratta’s nicest pubs called ‘The Vine’,  situated a little out of town, and down a dusty lane. It was here, mulling over the events of the year just lapsed, the good times, and the plenty of mistakes made, that John Harris met Jenny and Bob, both from nearby Whitfield, seemingly kindred spirits of his (well that’s how it seemed after two or three hours of celebration and dancing). Jenny was short and thin, wearing those tight, stretchy jeans that make your legs seem even skinnier. She was trotting around like a wild goat, pumping those skinny legs with occasional little hops and bounces. Bob was a bit more refined and a much better dancer. He was also thin but better proportioned, faintly good looking in a dark-haired Irish kind of way. Even Bob’s dancing was faintly reminiscent of Irish dancing, with his long but nimble feet. It was all so light-hearted and easy, basking in the glow of warm minds.

About a month later John and his friend Sharon were walking down Faithful Street. As they passed a real estate agent- in fact just at that exact moment- Jenny and Bob tumbled out onto the street in front of them, exiting the rental shop. There were smiles and good wishes all ‘round, happy memories of the event before. Jenny and Bob had decided they wanted to live in Wangaratta. John blurted out that, because of Alan No.2’s defection, there was a spare room at 39 Templeton Street. Bang. It was sealed.

Just three days later, on a Saturday morning, John Harris woke to noise down the formerly quiet section of the house. Jenny and Bob were unpacking. There were things everywhere. There was a corpulent dog running around the back yard (‘corpulent’ was a word that Bob himself used about his dog, the first time John had ever heard the word). Jenny had just put a bucket of water on the kitchen floor to help stave off the Wangaratta summer heat for the dog. Pretty soon it would be wandering over, slurping water out of the bucket and onto the linoleum, its furry cheeks dripping and glistening. Suddenly a poster supposedly of a UFO was plastered onto the kitchen door. Fine sheets of material were draped over doorways. Packages of food were thrown into cupboards. And then there was that little corpulent dog running around the house. John rubbed the back of his head with his hand. He couldn’t remember seeing the little dog outside the real estate agent the month before.

The next weeks and months went by in a blur. Jenny and Bob certainly had a huge impact on the house, and they were a fascinating couple to live with. There were cold drinks every night and fabulous stories told. Bob seemed to know quite a lot about everything. He was studying psychology by correspondence, and his essays were fantastically written. He knew everything about the Arabian Nights and was quite enlightened about politics, the Royal Family and world events in general. Talk would drift into the early hours and it was a miracle that John wound up fresh for his job at Benalla High each morning. When John would go home to Reservoir the occasional weekend- and it must be said that it was only occasional now- he would have fabulous stories about Jenny and Bob to tell his friends. There was the time that Jenny stole a big sack of clothes from outside St Vincent de Paul one Saturday night, and tipped the contents all over the floor. The sack contained about twenty pairs of jeans, all in various states of usefulness. Bob tried them all on and discovered to his delight that about six pairs fitted his thin body. When asked, by John,  about the ethics of such an event,  Jenny stated with viciousness, “well the money only goes to the Pope, and he’s got enough anyway.”

Another, somewhat more disturbing event, occurred in the unusual couple’s bedroom. John needed some sort of assistance and knocked on their door. Bob had been away for the weekend, and John soon discovered why. He had had a vasectomy. After a rap on the door, Jenny sang out casually, “Come in!” As he entered the vision that greeted John was of Bob lying naked on the floor, and Jenny applying ointment to a particularly sore part of his body. Moreover, this wasn’t the only thing that he found startling. A used potty, apparently kept each night under the bed, was sitting on the floor near the fire grate. Stories like these amused John’s friends no end.

Then things suddenly turned not only sour, but nasty as well. John forgot to put the money in the kitty for food a couple of times. The arrangement was that Jenny and Bob would buy the unorthodox vegetarian food- mostly nuts and grains, John noticed, to his chagrin- and would then go ahead and cook whilst John did the dishes. One night, in the cooler winter months, John could hear wine glasses clinking and the sounds of food being served on plates. He came out of his room nonchalantly to say “oh, is dinner ready?” Jenny’s response was abrupt and forceful (expletives deleted). “We haven’t made any food for you. We’re sick of the way you keep forgetting to put money in the kitty…” So that particularly warm arrangement was terminated, and the winter evenings became colder as a result.

A few days later John went to work having left the iron on. Jenny and Bob were your archetypal greenies. They loathed wasted power, and they both hated irons, especially because of the conservatism they associated with them. When John got home he stared at the lounge room wall in disbelief. “TURN IT OFF!!!” was written above the ironing board and thick blue crayon letters.

Then the issue of untidiness and grotty living came to the fore. It was always an issue for John, especially when the corpulent dog was nosing around. One day a friend from Benalla High came around. He and John were sitting in the kitchen. It was incredibly embarrassing. Large, unsightly flies were hovering around the room. Some were clinging to sticky cups and spoons. These days, the dishes were often left not done. When John opened a cupboard to extract coffee for his guest, they both noticed lots of little weevils flying around cups and saucers and unsealed food containers. John’s heart sank. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind he thought fondly back to his mother’s kitchen in Reservoir. Spick and span, with Tupperware containers filled with rice and pasta and other foodstuffs, tightly sealed.

Animosity grew between the once happy residents. Little things took on greater annoyance, like the woodchips all over the carpet in the lounge, and the Safeway trolley incongruously situated in the corner. The end of the year could not come soon enough. John was going home, back to Melbourne, to say goodbye to Jenny and Rob, and Wangaratta, forever. As a kind of parting gesture, John naively lent Jenny a hundred dollars during his final days. She said she would place the money in his bank account. She did place half of it in. The other fifty dollars, she insisted, was left on the table for him before he left. It wasn’t her fault he apparently, when cleaning, must have thrown it out.

Much later John was able to look back on his two year experience with a reasonable level of satisfaction. Yes he made plenty of errors, much of it to do with naivety and misplaced goodwill. However he survived, and learnt a lot, and felt that the next time he chose to enter a shared arrangement with other boarders, he would make fewer mistakes.

                

END PART 3

 

 

Young John Harris, Still Venturing Out... (PART 2)

  

Continued from part 1…

SO, sometime towards July, after six inglorious months at 81 Rowan Street, Wangaratta, a second opportunity confronted John Harris.  An advertisement appeared in the local paper reading approximately thus: ‘A single man requires a boarder, male or female, non-smoker, professional,  in lovely old house in tree-lined street.’ Ha! That word ‘professional’ again. John Harris smirked as he perused the invitation, then steeled himself for the possible change. Leaving Lindsay, Peter and the fabulous thin grey spectre, Alan, would be no easy task, but one wintry day he made the journey around the corner to meet a new, older and wiser Alan, and the deal was struck virtually on the spot.

The house, in Templeton Street, was a lovely old house- with the emphasis on ‘old’, and Templeton Street certainly was tree-lined. The local Ovens River ran alongside it, and in the past, and probably into the future, it would be subject to floods. Alan was firmly ensconced into the nicer, front room, and John would have the back. There was also a nice sized kitchen, an ugly third bedroom, and a serviceable bathroom and lounge. Alan himself was a builder and part-time musician, quite a handyman who would soon make John look silly- he was always slightly uncomfortable around ‘handy men’- but this was a gentle, older soul, who was probably looking for mateship and colour and solidarity in his choice of John as boarder. It was true that John was becoming firm friends with some of the women in the town; nevertheless a father figure in the form of Alan was never going to go astray. And John immediately sensed that this was a much nicer Alan.

A few weeks into the adventure, John decided he’d like to paint the walls of his bedroom a baby blue. Alan was impressed. John was one to hang around for a while. So John bought the brush and paint somewhere and began splashing on thick layers of the lovely pastel paint. Alan wandered in to see how the preparation was going- the sanding, the preparing of floor covering, the different sheens of paint required, the sandpaper, the taping of the walls… the list goes on, especially for builder aficionados like Alan. Well, one can only imagine the mirth spread across Alan’s face as he became doubled over in pleasure at seeing John with paintbrush in hand, the baby blue paint looking streaky and unhealthy on the walls, and little globules all over the wooden floorboards. John’s parents visited Templeton Street a few days later, and what a wonderful story Alan was able to tell Mr and Mrs Harris after their long drive up from Reservoir.

 

Time went on and Alan and John became reasonably strong friends. John found himself a nice girlfriend and Alan had a short American woman called Bobby with him most of the time, and the four of them would sometimes go out as an unlikely foursome, to cheap restaurants, and one time to Beechworth to hear Alan play in his jazz band.

John’s coterie of friends had widened further towards the end of the year. Suddenly there was a party at Templeton Street. Alan was away for the weekend at Bobby’s pad in Yarrawonga. When he came back home at about midday on the Sunday he couldn’t believe his eyes. John was still in bed. The coterie of friends had left about six hours earlier. There was mess everywhere. Broken half empty packets of chips, cola and wine stains on cheap rugs, a couple of overflowing ash trays, a sink full of sauce-stained plates, a small piece of cold fried fish near the kitchen door, drinking glasses in almost every room in the house, clothes strewn on the floor. Alan waltzed into John’s bedroom, despair filtered all over his sad face. ‘I don’t feel as though this is my place anymore’, he blurted out. John was still a bit sleepy, and not his usual tactful self. ‘Well Alan, it’s not as if there’s a leaking car engine rotting on the lounge room floor.’

Things never did seem quite the same after all of this. Alan left one day, presumably with Bobby, with not exactly rancour in the air, but a certain formalness and coldness nevertheless. John had a bit of time to reflect. In two households he had independently inhabited in his short adult life, things had either turned sour or failed to ignite. There was another experience around the corner, which would become the third and final incarnation that would put these two experiences to shame, in terms of both dysfunction and unhappiness.

                           

 END PART 2