Swords and Crowns and Rings Read online

  RUTH PARK was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1917. After moving to Australia in 1942 she married the fellow journalist and author D’Arcy Niland. They travelled the outback, then settled in Sydney’s Surry Hills to write. Park came to fame in 1946, when her novel The Harp in the South won the inaugural Sydney Morning Herald literary competition. The book was published in 1948 and translated into thirty-seven languages; the following year the equally popular sequel, Poor Man’s Orange, appeared. Again, Park had captured the mood of Depression-era Australia.

  After Niland died, in 1967, Park visited London before moving to Norfolk Island, where she lived for seven years before returning to Sydney.

  Equally adept at writing for children, she created the Muddleheaded Wombat radio series in the 1950s, followed by fifteen Wombat books in the 1960s and ’70s. The most famous of her other books for young readers, Playing Beatie Bow, was published in 1980 after Swords and Crowns and Rings, a return to writing for adults, had won the 1977 Miles Franklin Award. A Fence Around the Cuckoo (1992), her first volume of autobiography, was the Age Book of the Year.

  In 1994 Park received an honorary D.Litt from the University of New South Wales. One of Australia’s most loved authors, she died in 2010, having published more than fifty books.

  ALICE PUNG is the author of the bestselling memoir Unpolished Gem and Her Father’s Daughter, and the editor of Growing Up Asian in Australia.

  ALSO BY RUTH PARK

  Novels

  The Harp in the South

  Poor Man’s Orange

  The Witch’s Thorn

  A Power of Roses

  Serpent’s Delight

  Pink Flannel

  One-a-Pecker, Two-a-Pecker

  Missus

  Non-Fiction

  The Drums Go Bang (with D’Arcy Niland)

  The Companion Guide to Sydney

  The Sydney We Love

  The Tasmania We Love

  A Fence Around the Cuckoo

  Fishing in the Styx

  Home Before Dark (with Rafe Champion)

  Ruth Park’s Sydney

  Thirty-eight books for children

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Kemalde Pty Ltd 1977

  Introduction copyright © Alice Pung 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Thomas Nelson Australia Pty Ltd 1977

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079510

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921961793

  eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Against Calamitous Odds

  by Alice Pung

  VII

  Swords and Crowns and Rings

  1

  I first came across the work of Ruth Park in primary school. There was something viscerally real about the olden-day world of Playing Beatie Bow. I couldn’t properly understand it—but, looking back now, I realise that the power of ‘Sydney’s Dickens’ lay in her ability to write about love, sex and death with an innocence unmarred by adult stigmas.

  Swords and Crowns and Rings was published in 1977, not long before Playing Beatie Bow, and it won the Miles Franklin Award. The saga takes place in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and like Park’s much-loved novels of the late 1940s, Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange, it’s about the stoic poor. Yet there is a shift from the deep-rooted sense of community in her earlier books, set in the slums of inner-city Sydney, to Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy’s quest for individual self-realisation. While Park does not flinch from portraying stark privation, this novel marks the beginning of a new, transcendental consciousness in her characters.

  Propelled by their Tolkien-like search for a kingdom of dwarves who make ‘swords and crowns and rings’, Jackie and Cushie share an enchanted childhood. They are completely unselfconscious, and so are complete—‘they had always been two sides of the same coin: she, in her physical perfection and defencelessness, like a beautiful gentle bird, he so small and grotesque, and yet hardy, full of purpose.’

  When their unified sense of self is shattered by forced separation, they endure almost a decade apart from each other. Like the Buddhist symbol of the lotus whose roots grip the bottom of the muddy swamp but whose head rises cleanly above the water, though, Park’s protagonists accept life’s vicissitudes. They suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but their most profound journey is to maintain their integrity against calamitous odds.

  This allegorical journey of emerging adulthood came out of a period of great social and political change. Influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States, Australia saw the passage of the first equal-opportunity legislation in 1975. Diversity was no longer quashed by assimilationist policies—it was becoming the nation’s new narrative. The character of Jackie could be nuanced and human without needing to represent difference.

  Park had by this time abandoned the Catholic faith of her youth and become interested in Zen Buddhism. She had also seen some of the world beyond the antipodes since the publication of her last major novel, in 1957. Swords and Crowns and Rings was her return to publishing for adults after spending the previous two decades predominantly writing children’s books and radio plays. When Park sat down to write about Jackie and Cushie, she was no longer dealing with fixed absolutes but with fluid, more radical identities.

  The prostitutes and derelicts, the homeless men and indigent immigrant farming women who epitomise Park’s gritty realism still populate this book; but there is also a pair of affectionate quarrelsome women lovers, Claudie and Iris, and a victim of violence and incest, who becomes one of the strongest figures in the novel. Most strikingly, the protagonist, whose presence would cause discomfort and antagonism in a time of ignorance and poverty, is always rendered with dignity. Jackie is not a quirk of a man but manhood at its finest. His identity is forged through unemployment, physical violence and the Depression.

  The gentle irony in this expansive novel is that garrulousness is seen as a flaw, and the deepest characters are those who do not speak much: the Nun, Lufa, the magisterial ailing German grandfather. These are solitary men whose lives run slowly, on self-sustaining cogs, and their actions render them substantial. ‘Probably I am a writer because I had a singular childhood,’ Park once wrote. ‘My first seven years I spent all alone in the forest, like a possum or bear cub.’ She did not grow up in a household full of books, instead learning to be an astute eavesdropper and an observer of the human condition. The characters that fascinated her most were those with eccentricities, their faces lined with the calligraphic marks of experience.

  Park set much of Swords and Crowns and Rings in rural Australia, a reticent place where folk have no need to vocalise every thought that passes through their minds. ‘I saw a little of this vast, magnificent land, and was captured forever by its noble indifference to humankind,’ she observed. ‘I felt that one day this continent would give a shrug and shake all the humans off into the sea. But it would still be its own self. That’s what I call identity.’

  The characters’ external surrounds mirror their internal universes: Jackie’s strength and resilience are as immutable as the inviolate land from which he comes, while Cushie is as soft and beautiful as her artificial environment, where the family wealth perches on a precipice, liable at any time to fall. Cushie, ostensibly so lamblike, is essential to Jackie’s developing sense of manhood. Unsure about the parameters of her existence, uncertain where the world ends and she begins, Cushie is constantly bumping up against sharp corners. Jackie is not so troubled: he has a role model of noble, good-humoured masculinity, the Nun; and the love of a strong woman, his mother. Cushie’s glacial mother, Isobel, and her inwardly cowering father impose silence in the house—silence born not of dignity but fear. A young woman of infinite faith and utter dependency, Cushie has femininity imposed upon her; she is trapped by it, despite her attempts to gain control.

  Maida, on the other hand, is Jelka Sepic in John Steinbeck’s story ‘The Murder’ rendered three-dimensional, with agency and a voice. Stronger and more courageous than Cushie, she suffers vicious cruelty but remains tender and kind. She did not grow up in refinement, yet maintains a sense of quiet self-respect, as Jackie notices: ‘he became aware that Maida had a little bag of herbs around her neck on a string, and he was touched at this fastidiousness in one whose life was so isolated and austere.’ Maida is egoless, never having had the chance to choose, to develop her own identity. A cornered creature on the cruel family farm, she can only make small gestures of kindness without considering the consequences.

  Jackie knows a handful of people through his life, Cushie
’s world is confined to her family, Maida’s is even smaller; yet these are people for whom love is not a mere feeling but a verb, and for this reason they are unforgettable. In the end, innocence, identity and integrity all lead back to the same thing, expressed by Cushie Moy as a child: ‘Deep and true in her soul she knew only that she believed in loving, and all denial of this was dishonour.’

  For

  Gwen Gerrard Kennedy

  and Her Friends

  In the landscape of spring there is neither better nor worse;

  The flowering branches grow naturally,

  Some long, some short.

  (AN OLD CHINESE POEM)

  1

  Jackie Hanna, Cushie Moy 1907–1918

  In a red weeping dawn the child was born at last. His mother gave a long cry of such peculiar poignancy that her husband, drowsing in the front room, started out of his chair and knocked the French china clock to the floor. This seemed to him to be the last straw. Tears squirted into his eyes. The sleepless night, the awful anxiety of the day that had preceded it, the nightmarish dislocation of his routine, which was all that kept his irritable nerves on an even keel, were summed up in this one sharp, irremediable smash. He knelt amongst the lustrous shards and blubbered.

  In the bedroom Mrs Hanna, gasping and moaning, said, ‘What is it, what is it, doctor?’

  ‘A boy, strong as an ox,’ he replied shortly.

  The nurse, a gentle maternal body, took the bloody bundle into the warm kitchen where she had already made preparations for the washing and clothing of the newborn.

  ‘Ah, me wee rabbit,’ she said. ‘Me poor wee rabbit.’

  She had never seen such a one before, but she knew at once what his future was to be. Yet the life ran strongly in him. He mewed as the warm water touched him, moving arms and legs with feeble yet angry movements.

  Above the yelling of the baby she heard a knock at the kitchen door.

  ‘That you, Mr Hanna?’ she called. ‘I’ll be ready to show you your son in a moment. Better go and see your wife, she’ll be looking for you.’

  The doctor left husband and wife alone. He stood looking down at Mrs Hailstone as she sat with the shawled baby in her arms before the kitchen stove. ‘No mistake, eh?’ he said, and sighed.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Mrs Hailstone. ‘Little pudden limbs, and see his hands!’ She spread out the minute, fan-shaped hand.

  The doctor ran his hand over the silky skin of the baby’s face. He felt the bulging frontal and parietal eminences.

  ‘Poor little devil, it’s a damned shame. And he’s a healthy child, too. God knows how Hanna will take it; he’s a morose lump of a man.’

  The doctor waited several days before telling him and his wife that their son was a dwarf. Mrs Hanna, who had been listless since the birth, said nothing but, ‘I thought something was wrong. He doesn’t look right, somehow.’

  But Walter Hanna, his face suddenly plum red, stood straight up and belted his wife across the face. ‘You did it, you sow. It’s your fault, smoking like a chimney all the time you were carrying him. I told you, I told you every day.’

  The doctor was a hot-tempered man. He spun the grocer about, shouting, ‘I ought to flatten you, Hanna! It’s no more her fault than it is yours. These things are handed down. It’s hereditary. The child could have been crippled or imbecile. How would you like that, man? As it is there’s not a thing the matter with him except that he’ll never be as tall as others.’

  ‘I wish to God he’d been born dead,’ cried the father.

  The remark, even more than the blow, seemed to put life back into Mrs Hanna. As a girl, she had been wild and humorous, full of go, a woman with crimson cheeks and crowded teeth that seemed to have a life of their own. Into her strong-boned face there now poured the old red. Fierce as a new-whelped bitch, she glared at her husband.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ thought the doctor.

  ‘You mongrel, Walter,’ she said. ‘This is our son, no matter what’s amiss with him. Never you breathe again that you wish him dead, or I’ll put poison in your tea, I swear to God I will.’

  The father threw a hand over his eyes and stumbled from the room, sobbing.

  ‘Pay no attention,’ advised the doctor. ‘It’ll upset your milk. Besides, he’ll come round in time.’

  But Walter Hanna never did. From then on he hated life; he could have gouged its eyes out. The infant was six months old before his father could bear to look at him. Always a secretive man, Walter Hanna became glum and silent. Trade fell off at the shop. People who had taken their custom to Hanna’s since Walter’s father’s time were depressed by his surliness and went to the Chinese General Store instead. The sympathy the birth of the child had engendered for him and his wife faded.

  ‘We’ve all got troubles,’ people said. ‘Why does he make so much of it? Peggy Hanna’s come to terms with it, but Walter’s taken it real personal.’

  Walter Hanna’s inward sufferings were terrible. After the birth of Jackie he had an endlessly busy conviction that he had done something wrong. He thought the child’s deformation a judgment. But why?

  It seemed to him that his life had been blameless, indeed, exemplary. Just over ten years he had been engaged to Peggy Hough, while she’d looked after that tyrannical old cow of a mother, bedridden with asthma, able to bring on an attack whenever Peggy broached the subject of marriage. He’d been faithful, respectful. He’d never laid a hand on her in a place that Father Link would not approve. He was, in fact, undersexed almost to the point of impotence, and had found distasteful the warm-blooded Peggy’s passionate disposition as disclosed in the marriage bed.

  Could that be the reason for the mishap with the child? It wasn’t natural for a woman to be the way Peggy was, was it?

  He spent more and more time in the front room with the clocks. His uncle the watchmaker had left four or five to him—the carriage clock with the wooden works, the grandmother with the ship painted on the face, the grandfather with the green enamel weights. As he had grown older he had added more to his collection. They were his only true friends, reliable, unemotional, firm and single in their intention of life. Ever since his twelfth birthday he had wound them according to schedule, checked and oiled them regularly, kept them clean.

  The hour struck like an orchestra; but the front room was scarcely used and the noise never bothered Mrs Hanna. It was to her a remote angelic chorus of tinkles, bongs, and portions of tunes.

  She cared for no one and nothing but the infant. After the first shock and grief of the child’s disability, she made up her mind that no matter what sort of a mess God Almighty had made of her son there was no reason why she shouldn’t try to improve on things. In this the doctor was her strong ally.

  ‘I’ll tell you this, Peg,’ he said; ‘it rests with you and Hanna to work it either that the child feels himself a monster, fit for nothing but jeers and cruelties, or he accepts the way he is and gives the world as good as he gets. He’s got to feel himself special. Can you put your mind to it, Peggy?’

  Mrs Hanna’s eyes sparkled. ‘Show me how,’ she said. ‘But you can count my old fella out. It’s not in him to help when he sets his jaw against it.’

  The doctor opened the glass-fronted cupboard behind his desk.

  ‘I’ve taken it upon myself to send away for some books on dwarfism,’ he said, ‘some medical—and they’re for my own education—and some for you and Jackie, to show you both that there have been plenty of dwarfs that have led natural happy lives, married full-sized people and produced full-sized children. And there were some that became famous: there was a French statesman who was a dwarf, would you believe it?’

  ‘It isn’t the riches that bother me,’ said Mrs Hanna, ‘but the happiness.’ She gave a little whoop of excitement. ‘Do you think I can do it, doctor?’

  ‘No woman could do it better,’ he said soberly. ‘See here, Peg.’

  He opened the top book and showed her the picture of a little man, Alypius of Alexandria, under two feet high, described as an excellent philosopher and mathematician, hardly anything more than spirit and soul.

  The doctor looked at the mother. ‘Do you see what I mean, lass?’