I possess many fragmented memories of particular places in that house.
The kitchen, which was also dining room, laundry and parlour, where an aged
woman, a spectre or visitor, I know not which, who dressed in black and brought a
bag of oranges, always sat on the same green wooden chair besides the ice chest.
Equally as enigmatic and baffling was the hallway, leading from the front door to
the foot of the stairs, it was long and dark and my brothers and sister would often
hide there to frighten my mother when she returned from some shopping at
Skully’s, the local corner grocer’s shop. That was where my brothers and sister and
I saw a presence one day; I remember feeling afraid, whether that is because I
really was or because my elder brother persuaded us into believing that there was a
spirit there and that it was evil. There was also a tree growing out of the footpath
opposite our front door and even in those early years I was aware that that tree
was alive, sentient.
That house has been the focal point of more than one dream for me;
sometimes I am young, about the age and in the time in which I actually lived in it
but sometimes I am in that house, or dream variations of it, at my present age but
in either case I am never alone, for the spirit of the house somehow communicates
with me. Perhaps the house was haunted or else I populated it with entities from
my own imagination. In any case, for me, it has become like one of those homes
in Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal (1949), or that of David Malouf in 12
Edmondstone Street (1985); its atmosphere saturated with the scents, odours and
personalities of its occupants. Clearly, that house was and is very special to me but
so is the larger area, the neighbourhood in which it is located.
Now Surry Hills is gentrified and the pubs where my father gambled with SP
(Starting Price) bookies have been renovated and now have bistros and rock bands
in the areas once reserved as the women’s parlours, and Kinsella’s Funeral Home is
now a trendy nightclub and restaurant. I haven’t physically lived in Surry Hills for
nearly forty years but mentally, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, at some
point deep within my existence, I seem to have never left the place, particularly the
house, 26 Tudor Street. I nfluencing my movement through life, suggesting itself
and all that it was or is, in the background of my life, the place where I became
conscious; it was from that place that the child I was became the core identity of
the me as I now exist.
Many years later when I read Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948), set
in Surry Hills in the 1940s, I was amazed at this New Zealander’s ability to capture
ron
(Ron)
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