Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson

Author:Jessica Anderson [Anderson, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781612193892
Google: PqLEAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00KUQAF7C
Goodreads: 22551651
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 1977-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

‘I have come a long roundabout way,’ I remarked to David, ‘to find out who I am.’

He was always quick to catch my moods. He put a consoling arm across my shoulders. ‘We should open champagne.’

From the start I had plenty of customers, and even though I worked so slowly (another penalty for my late beginning), and was diffident about charging enough, I was still able to save money as well as spending several short holidays in Normandy or Paris. Here Colin Porteous’s French grammar books showed their profit and loss: I could read the French newspapers, but could not make myself understood by the French people.

On each return to London I would appreciate afresh the solidity and weight of its buildings, interspersed by the massy billows or the complex tracery of its trees. But between me and London, as between me and the people I called my friends (even David Snow) lay the distance created by my intentions: I was going home.

When I spoke of David as ‘one of my Lewies’, I meant in his relationship with me. He was not like Lewie in character. His habit of thought was steadier, he was less flippant, and, I think, less intense.

‘Why do you want to go back?’ he asked me once.

‘Sydney, that part of it, is the only place where I’ve ever felt at home.’

‘Won’t it have changed?’

‘Very little, Ida Mayo says.’

‘But what about you? You will have changed.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said vaguely. I didn’t want to talk about it, did not want to admit to impediments.

‘Some people are homeless wherever they live,’ he said. ‘You are. And so am I.’

‘But you are an Englishman in your own country.’

‘I am homeless on this earth,’ he said with a smile. ‘And so are you. Once you admit it, you know, you’ll find it has advantages. The thing is to admit it, and relax, and not be forever straining forward.’

‘I am not straining forward. I am waiting, and occupying myself while I wait. Which is quite a different matter. And besides,’ I said, to turn the conversation, ‘I don’t want to live in a climate where they can’t grow oranges.’

But although in my determination to go home I showed no outward faltering, my memories of Sydney were becoming less precise. Daydreaming of home while I worked, I would feel myself in a long quiet room, depersonalized by a completeness of physical comfort, my body fused into the atmosphere, into the warmth of the sun and the drone of an eternal noon. Going home, though I did not realize it at the time, had become a project urged less by my mind than my body, which needed sun.

‘I bet you never go back,’ said David.

‘I will. I must. Or I’ll become a pommiefied Aussie.’

I booked my passage at last, in March 1939, on a ship that was to sail in November. It did sail, in spite of the declaration of war, but I was in hospital at the time, with the first of my severe bouts of bronchitis.

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