HOW IT BEGINS
For Mick Pryor it started when he was thirteen years and ten months old. His story was only five hundred and sixty two words but that was fair enough, five hundred and sixty two words was about the size of Mick’s life up to that point.
It was at the end of his Second Year at Nailsworth Boys Tech. This was where they churned out South Australia’s future mechanics and carpenters and even the occasional design engineer. But not too many authors, to the dismay of the English teacher, who set a creative writing project for the School Magazine every year-end, hoping at least a few of his charges would jump in. Make him feel of substance.
Mick’s English teacher was ‘Killer’ McCracken. ‘Killer’ had dark probing eyes and he rode a Norton Dominator and he played district-level hockey. Played it fervently, like a Highlander plays shinty, with the emphasis on shin.
He said this year he wanted it to be a “Landscape Piece”. It was how Killer did things. Like he was setting the height bar. And he always gave it a bit extra, to make you grunt. This time the bit extra was that it had to be between 500 and 600 words long, no more no less, and it had to have a “Feature”. An interesting “Focal Point”. So Mick decided to make his about the photo, the one of him and his cousin Thomas up in the Hills, when he was staying with them for a weekend.
He was walking with Thomas’s family, to visit their other relatives, about a mile up the road. It was a fresh autumn morning, the sun slanting in at a low angle, the air so crisp and dewy that it sort of crackled, and they had their Sunday-going-visiting stuff on even though it was only Saturday.
Thomas’s elder brother John told Mick and Thomas to go on ahead, but then stand still, and just make out they were walking, and he’d take a photo. Said he’d do it at a slight angle, said it’d be a great “art shot”. Their dad had given John an old Kodak Box Brownie and now he fancied himself as a photographer. An art shot photographer.
So Mick and his cousin Thomas had stood at the side of that long country road and he remembered how they’d frozen themselves in ten different positions like a pair of dimwits until John finally clicked it off and said it’d be perfect. But what he mostly remembered was staring all the way down that road, while he waited, frozen to the spot. And he remembered thinking how it stretched out in front of him, getting smaller and smaller, as if it was going off into the future, into the unknown, and he was sort of – stationary, not even breathing - like he was waiting for what might be coming.
So that’s what he wrote – sort of - but only how the country road “...disappeared off into the distance...” and about the “...huge majestic gums...” and “...the magpies that formed themselves into a committee and had a Warble Contest...”, and told himself it sounded like what Killer was looking for.
He mulled through it a couple of times, slipped in a bit about the “...sharp autumn morning...” to stretch it out to 500 words, and called it “Country Road”.
Not that Mick’s mind was really on the sharpness of the morning or that country road when he wrote it.
His mind was on what happened that afternoon. Down at the river.
The visiting relatives stuff was done with and him and Thomas were in their Saturday-arvo-mucking-around clothes, boots off and in the shallows, turning over rocks looking for yabbies. It was then that Thomas said he had a secret, a big secret, and for Mick to cross his heart and spit and hope-to-die if he told anyone. So Mick crossed his heart and spat and said hoped-to-die. And waited. Because Thomas always seemed to have some good stories. About living in the Hills.
This one was about a little girl with wet hair that sometimes stood under the willows over on the other bank. Stood and watched him. The little girl who’d drowned a long time ago, drowned totally dead, right here in this pool. And Mick had scoffed and pshaaaw-ed and waited for Thomas to grin and give the game away, but Thomas didn’t. His eyes were looking a long way off like how Mick had looked down the long country road that morning, like he was looking to where the road disappeared into somewhere else, the place where he’d become ... become ... whatever was out there waiting for him to become.
And then he saw the girl. Standing under the big willow. She had a sort of an apron on, over her dress, and she was only wearing one shoe, and her hair was wet and leaf-shadows were moving across her face, and she was staring straight at him. But her face was sad, sad like she wanted to say something but couldn’t. And then she was gone again.
Thomas had turned and looked at him, like HE wanted to say something but couldn’t. And Mick couldn’t either. They both looked down into the water, and moved their feet, and tried to find what they wanted to say, like it might be there in the water. But they couldn’t get through the quietness. It was all around them, that and the hushy whispery sounds of the river. So they went back to yabbie-ing, and talked about rainbow trout, and fish hooks, and earth worms. But the girl never left Mick’s head. From then on she was always there. Like his eyes had taken her photo.
But he couldn’t write any of that. It would’ve made it too real. So he just wrote about the road and the gums and the magpies and the early morning air.
Killer’s dark eyes bored holes in Mick’s essay, then he fanned it under Mick’s nose and told him his idea was okay enough, but it didn’t have a “focal point”, said he knew Mick was capable of something a lot better. Mick studied the floor. Waited. Silent.
“What are you going to do with yourself after next year Pryor?”
Mick rolled this around in his head, looking for strings that might be attached.
“Do an apprenticeship sir.”
“Hmmm – an apprenticeship eh? Who with?”
“The Railways probably sir.”
“The Railways?”, made it sound like a lesser thing.
“Yes sir.”
“Ever thought of going on, do Fourth Year Leaving? With your marks there’d probably be a scholarship in it for you.”
Kids who went to Nailsworth, sons of labourers and boilermakers, sons of council workers and prison guards and mental asylum attendants, they always had to have a scholarship to do Leaving.
Mick didn’t know what was right to say, didn’t know what Killer wanted from him. So he went on waiting.
“Why an apprenticeship then?”
“It’s - what my father said he’d do - if he was me.”
“You mean, it’s what HE’d do, if HE was young again and just leaving school?”
“Uhhh – yes, I suppose so sir.”
“Well, what would YOU do Pryor – if you were – YOU – and could do anything you wanted?”
Short pause. But then Mick dives in. Stomach in a knot.
“I’d like to be an author sir.”
“Hmmm - an author eh. An author, or a story-teller?”
Pause again. Mulling it over. Wonders if it’s a trick question.
“Isn’t that the same thing sir?”
“Not by a country mile old son, not by – a country mile.”
He gave Mick a B minus and dished it back, like Mick had let him down. Someone should’ve told Mick Pryor this little scenario would be his life’s template.
Mick looked at his story from several angles and re-wrote it, three times, mainly out of pigheadedness, but made it more about his cousin’s “art shot” photo idea, and how the long country road had looked like it was going off into the future, HIS future, full of what might be out there, in the distance. And he titled them “Frozen In Time”. But he still didn’t write about the girl.
He showed his sister Claire all three versions and asked her which one was the best. Claire said they were each “somewhat mediocre”, but it would be years before Mick came to understand the nature of the literary contest between himself and his excessively beautiful sister. She finally selected one with an expressive flourish of her perfect hands.
“Hmm ... this ... ?”, and Mick waited, waited for the ‘...because...’ that just might contain at least one small pat on the head. But Claire was already back to her reading.
Mick made the mistake of showing it to Killer, like an act of defiance, half expected a cuff around the ears. And Killer cuffed him around the ears, but not like he wanted to set Mick’s ear-bells ringing though, it was softer, more like why couldn’t you’ve tried this hard the first time? And said so. Mick shrugged, knew Killer was right. Killer smiled then, said we’ll put THIS one in the School Yearbook old son. And he did.
Mick won the Certificate of Literary Merit and that year’s McCracken Prize of half a guinea. A whole ten-shillings-and-sixpence. It was presented to him by the Headmaster on Speech Night, up on the stage and everything, family watching. Hester Fisk whistled. Mick felt like a million quid.
It’ll be another forty years before anyone gives Mick Pryor money for his words, and there’ll be plenty of dark days in those forty years when he’ll think that it was the worst thing that could’ve happened to him. His brief ten-and-sixpenny rise above mediocrity that is. But Mick could still have survived it, could’ve aspired to something less taxing, less all-consuming, if it hadn’t been for Greataunt Sybil, who swung by the Sunday after Speech Night and permanently stuck his certificate to him like she was using a two-part fixing agent. Araldite-ed it to his forehead. It’s what all Greataunt Sybils do.
People like Mick Pryor (and his sister Claire, and his Mum and his Dad) have all been visited by a Greataunt Sybil, that same big and bustlesome and somewhat overwhelming person who steps into your life when you are young and at your most plastic, and sculpts out a single-minded ambition for you with one or two deft strokes.
A Greataunt Sybil is sixty-five give or take ten years, and is constructed in the manner of the Statue of Liberty. Not quite so large maybe. Darker clothes. But her hat has things sticking out of it and she clasps a handbag to her breastplate and holds a radiating torch of inspiration aloft designed solely to focus the eyes of freedom's dreamers, and in this way becomes one of their lives’ most defining influences.
Mick’s Mum and Dad both knew Greataunt Sybil, but as quite different old ladies, who led quite different old lives, in which neither was actually called Greataunt Sybil at all. But close study would find that Greataunt Sybils, in one form or another, are to be found in the early lives of all the Dorothy and Allan and Mick Pryors of this world.
It’s always the same. She achieves this by suddenly standing right there in front of them, usually near a doorway (hint of an inner knowing smile that in later years makes one think of Mona Lisa), catching them at that critical hour when emerging ganglii are at their gangliest, and she says – oh so casually, like something she nearly doesn't say at all, hardly more than a passing observation, but delivers it from this hugely imposing well-head of wisdom and influence, truly thrusts it into their vulnerable and plasticine souls –
“YOU should be a chef when you grow up Dorothy.”
– but the youthful Dorothys of this life hear ‘...and traverse the world, climb its culinary heights, you have the talents and the soul and the spirit of a great Gastronome, I can see it in you...’, and all because Dorothy had a knack of doing the mashed potatoes for her mum with an imaginative touch of sweet marjoram and a little grated cheddar. Or –
“YOU should be an engineer when you grow up Allan.”
– but the youthful Allans of this life hear ‘...and build the bridges and the engines to power the new world, you have the talents and the soul and the spirit of a great Constructionist, I can see it in you...’, and all because Allan fixed the carburettor of her ‘A’ model Ford, when no-one else in a hundred mile radius could seem to.
Any other greataunt would have simply patted Dorothy's cheek, given Allan five shillings, better still remained obligingly silent, not stood there in her vaguely awesome mass and shaken their trees of self-knowledge so vigorously, and so completely. But that's how Greataunt Sybils are. They've usually done remarkably little with their own lives, except stay aloofly single within independent means, or become distantly widowed to a moderately successful property developer, always drive their own car, are a powerbank of quiet opinion, and dissolve back into the subconscious between unannounced visits. Leaving a trail of impressionable doorstep-standers with disturbing visions of greatness permanently chiselled into their brainstems.
But greataunts, suspension bridges, exquisite camembert, best sellers – as mighty as each may be – these were simply Allan’s and Dorothy’s and Mick's fate things, those unmixable unmeshable godtoy things that live out there in the great pulsating energy of the ether somewhere, to combine and conspire for no other purpose but to chew up and scatter small dreams like so much cocky-chaff from the back end of a Sunshine harvester.
She read Mick’s prize-winning School Yearbook essay over a cup of tea with his mum. Because his Mum needed to brag. Just a little. Needed that small glow of reflected light.
Mick was out the back. Didn’t see it coming. First thing he knew about it was when he was doing the right thing and assembled at the front door for the ritual goodbyes, and Greataunt Sybil laid it on him –
“YOU should be an Author when you grow up Maurice.”
– but Maurice Cordwainer Kingdom ‘Mick’ Pryor could hear her saying ‘...and earn endless applause and large amounts of money, you have the talents and the spirit of a great Writer, I can see it in you.’
It’s how these things begin.
© T. R. Edmonds 2021
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