Month: September 2009

This is how I remember it.

Twenty-five year eleven girls at Vaucluse Convent for ladies. Mrs Raj is our new and exotic biology teacher who speaks with an accent and wears brightly coloured saris over a cropped bodice. I can still see the line of her coffee coloured flesh between the waist of her sari and the edge of her top and I wondered two things: Why isn’t she cold and what do the nuns think? This is in the late sixties. Women do not expose their midriffs except in advertisements for bathers or those Metre Maids on the Gold Coast. The nuns are already railing against the amount of leg showing under our school dresses when we hitch them up desperate to wear a mini dress, a la Jean Shrimpton.

We are sitting on our high stools in the new science block, which was built on government funds where the old tennis courts once stood. Our arms are adjacent to the bench tops in pale pinewood. The copper taps each shaped like a swan’s neck fall into sinks along the line of bench.
‘Each of you girls take a glass.’ Mrs Raj has put out a series of clear glasses and set them on the bench top, one per girl. ‘Now I want you to spit into your glass.’
What! A murmur from the classroom that bounces off the walls. What is she saying?
‘Spit into your glass, girls, as much saliva as you can get.’
We look at her face. She is serious. We spit away. Giggles, grunts and the splashing whistle of twenty-five girls spitting into glasses.
‘Now set the glass in front of you and wait.’

The puddle in the bottom of my glass of bubbly saliva is thick and sticky. My stomach roils as if I have exposed something that should not be seen; as if I should rinse the glass under the tap for fear that others will see it too. I cannot look over at the other girls’ glasses. It is as if we have been asked to take our clothes off and we are standing naked, eyes ahead, hoping that no one will notice our vulnerability, that no one will cross our gaze.
‘Now,’ says Mrs Raj. ‘I want you all to drink it back up’
‘Yuk,’ the class calls in one voice.
‘Do as I say girls. It will not hurt you.’
Loud swallows and grunts as each girl tries to take back inside the saliva she had so eagerly parted with a few minutes ago. It is cold on my tongue, worse to swallow than medication but I get it down.
‘Now, girls, the reason I have asked you to do this is to show you the difference between the inside and the outside.’ Mrs Raj is serious. Her voice does not falter, even underneath the singsong lilt of her Indian accent. ‘When the saliva is in your mouth, as it is every minute of every day, you don’t notice it. Your saliva is you. Spit it out and it becomes not you. Drink it back and it’s like something completely foreign to you, when only minutes ago it was you.’

Mrs Raj beams a smile that shows all her large straight teeth, white against the gleam of her skin. The red smudge of paint on her forehead matches the redness of her lips and the faint blush in her cheeks.

Halfway up the Burke Road hill in Camberwell, just before the railway station, there was once a bookshop known as The Little Book Room. It was unusual for its careful selection of books, as if the owners had hand picked each book with great and loving care. It had the feel of a personal library, like roaming through someone’s store of books in an overcrowded house. The books lined the steps and at times came in what seemed like no particular order at all.

It was in this shop that I first came across Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy. The cover drew me in, the sepia toned photo of a mother and her baby, the words transcribed from the text, Modjeska’s words, so familiar to me now, a mother urging her baby to look into the mirror. ‘There, see there. See, it’s you.’ That moment of recognition, of mother and baby, that moment of connection.

I bought the book and read it over the next weeks. The story, the writing gave me hope, the greatest hope of all that someday I too might be able to write like this.

Modjeska became my point of reference for my own attempts at writing. When my writing teacher in the novel writing class I had joined in 1997 once criticized my narrator as drowning the energy from my story I listened only with one ear, one eye. I wanted too much to be like Modjeska and she could get away with it. Why ever could I not join her , imitate her style?

Now I recognise the need to find my own voice, even as it echoes back in my ears, tinny and self serving, with none of the gentle cadences and rhythms of Modjeska’s words. But I must trust myself, otherwise I will plunge back into that empty space of my childhood where I seemed able only to try to imitate the greats.