Bird, Carmel - The White Garden

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THE

WHITE

GARDEN

CARMEL BIRD

University of Queensland Press

First published 1995 by University of Queensland Press

Box 42, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

Typeset by University of Queensland Press

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

Scan by Dan

Cataloguing in Publication

Natioanl Library of Australia

Bird, Carmel, 1940– .

The white garden.

I. Title.

A823.3

ISBN 0 7022 2821 4

Innocence is not to be trusted.

Graham Greene in The Other Man

interviews with Marie-Françoise Allain

Accept no imitations.

Meditations on the Life and Work of Thomas à Kempis

Carillo Mean

Patience obtains everything.

Saint Teresa of Avila

The White Garden was written during a two-year Fellowship

from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. I am grateful

to the Board for its support, and also to Arts Victoria for a travel

grant that enabled me to visit the White Garden at Sissinghurst.

CONTENTS

The Elephant Thoughts of Doctor Ambrose Goddard 1

Mandala 3

Facsimile 10

A Small Samuraiin Lacquered Velvet 19

Black Mirror of Quiet Water 36

Rivulets of Violets and Mattresses of Roses 39

Saint Ditto of Lisieux 44

Little Ferret, Little Queen 56

The Space Between the Bed and the Wall 64

My Little Way 109

Last Days on Earth and Early Days in Heaven 113

Therese at Mandala 115

The Natural Law of Laundry 122

Horsehoof Balm 126

St Teresa of Avila 131

The Book of Colours 133

The Honeycomb Verandah 146

The Girl in the Cell Next-Door 148

The Eagle and the Dove 152

The Book of Knowledge 158

The Case of Marjorie Bartlett 164

The Horse with the Golden Mane 167

The Great Ghostly Barn Owl 178

The Hotel of the Stars 187

Date on or Before Which Item Must Be Returned 200

Patience Obtains Everything 202

The White Garden 214

The Violetta Letters 217

Acknowledgments 219

THE ELEPHANT THOUGHTS OF

DOCTOR AMBROSE GODDARD

I have always, for as long as I can recall, identified myself with

the elephant. This is not something I readily admit because in

my profession friends and colleagues are only too ready to leap

in with an analysis, to place a facile interpretation on this most

intimate, personal and colourful of facts. You will occasionally

find me throwing people off the scent (supposing they are on

the scent) by making reference in a light-hearted way to ‘a herd

of elephants’ or to the fact that the elephant never forgets.

Certain African tribes believe that after death the chief of the

tribe becomes an elephant matriarch, respected and honoured,

and an ally when members of the tribe are hunting elephants.

As I feel myself falling asleep at night I experience myself as

the elephant matriarch, appearing in silence from a swirling

mist, roaming hugely among thick greenery and large, colourful

flowers, and then I drift back into the mist, fade, and, with soft

lilac cloud-forms drawn across my eyes, I sleep. The feeling is

profound and satisfying to me, and I have all my life sought to

understand it. It is an element of the beauty of sleep itself, and

is perhaps partly what has brought me to study the function of

sleep in the life of the mind, the health of the mind, and to ap-

ply the science of what I have learned of sleep to my patients.

It was with fear and dread that I learned, when I was in my

early teens, of John Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man. For

a time my own elephant feelings had to be suppressed as I felt

myself in danger of succumbing to the disease from which Mer-

rick suffered. Consequently, my sleep was, for some months — it

could have been a year, I’m not too sure — severely disturbed.

Such are the fears that children suffer, unspoken. How could

I, a healthy Australian boy, mad about cricket and football and

science and even Shakespeare, how could I confide in anyone

the reasons for my insomnia?

I recall my mother decided I had toothache — strange the

2 The White Garden

solutions we find to each other’s problems — and I was always

at the dentist. This was in the days before the elegant anaesthet-

ics of recent years. Anything Mr Hudson did to me was painful

in the extreme and only served to increase my nervousness and

sleeplessness.

I lived in horror of the dentist, and I found it not too difficult

to connect the thought of the tusks of an elephant with my own

fairly respectable teeth. If I could remember dreams (and I can’t,

thank god) I would probably be able to recount wonderful tales

of my tusks and my trunk and the colonies of vermin that live

in the folds of my magnificent dream-elephant skin.

What really matters is that my elephant consciousness is al-

ways present so that I know I command great power and respect

in the world in which I work. It’s better than being a lion, in

fact. Although I have never betrayed the depth of my elephant-

being to Abigail, I know she has some inkling of my elephant

thoughts because of the games we sometimes play where she

rides me round the room before I turn on her and subdue her.

This is very enjoyable.

On Sundays when I walk along the cliff-tops with the dogs,

I adopt a wonderfully particular ambling gait. I stroll my ele-

phant stroll across the top of the world; I look lordly down on

the endless waves, crawling like furrows in a field, viridian,

aquamarine, beneath me. I experience at those times a deep

sense of well-being in my roaming large-animal self, and, in the

solitude of the windy cliff-top, I trumpet and bellow to the sky.

MANDALA

A dead woman lies in a garden where all the flowers are white

or silver or very pale. The death, in Melbourne, Australia, in

1967, was curiously dependent on events that happened long

ago in Spain and France and England. It was a sudden death,

the woman young and healthy, full of optimism and laughter

and daring. For some time the death was seen as an accident,

a freakish, random event, but as the connections with other

people and other times became clear, a pattern emerged, and it

was seen that something odd had taken place. Understanding

what happened to this woman depends on knowledge of the

people and events that touched her in her present time, and of

the people and events from other times and other places that

figured in the pattern ending in the garden.

Time and tone and tense and significance flatten out, and an

event in one century lies side by side with an event in another,

and another and another until something resembling a design

in a broad piece of lace is formed. A cloth on a table, thread by

thread, knot by knot, loop by loop. The centrepiece is not the

body of the woman in the garden, but the image of two honey-

bees.

A number of small gardens were linked by vistas that ap-

peared suddenly through gaps in walls and hedges, through

arches, gateways and avenues of trees. Each vista finished with

an arrangement of statues, of graceful shrubs in ornamental

pots, or a glimpse of a convent built in the gothic style that was

popular for churches, prisons and hospitals in the nineteenth

century. One of the small gardens was called the White Garden.

It was reached by stone steps which led down into it, and a

series of low hedges defined it. The flowers grew within rec-

tangles of the hedge. Visitors could sit on wide stone seats and

enjoy the soothing, dreamy sight of pale flowers, silvery foliage,

grey and golden stone.

It was summer, 3 February 1967. The sunny city beyond the

walls of these gardens was troubled by the story of a man hanged

4 The White Garden

that morning within the prison of the city for the murder of a

prison officer. Ronald Ryan was the hanged man’s name, and it

was a name never to be forgotten. He was known as ‘The Last

Man Hanged in Australia’. All over the country people stood

still at eight o’clock that morning, stopped what they were doing

and thought about death at the end of a rope within the prison

walls. For many years afterwards people would say: ‘I remember

the day they hanged Ronald Ryan. It was stifling. There was a

kind of pall across the city. You could smell death in the air.’

The wider world was preoccupied by the war in Indo-China.

But within the walls surrounding the gardens where the

woman lay dead, life looked inward, paid no attention to the

stories of wars and hangings. The gardens were in the grounds

of the Mandala Psychiatric Clinic and, although the outer eye

was led to views of statues and trees and convent walls and

towers, the eye of the mind looked in on strange dark scenes.

The dead woman was Vickie Field. She lay sprawled across

the steps to the White Garden for eighteen hours before anybody

found her. One hand was at her throat; her hair, clotted with

vomit, fell across her face. The man who found her was the di-

rector of the clinic, Ambrose Goddard. Every morning Ambrose

walked the grounds, marking the dew on the grass with his

footprints, breathing the scents of the early morning, enjoying

the sight of leaves and flowers. He was lord of the empty gar-

den, a garden where few people strolled. It was possible to look

on the lawns and flower beds and see nobody, nothing moving.

Inside the distant clinic building there was always activity. If

one patient was in some kind of coma another was having a fit.

The staff was forever stalking the corridors keeping order, fol-

lowing routines, stimulating, suppressing, medicating, washing,

cleaning, feeding, disciplining. A particular type of life went

on behind the old convent walls. In the garden that morning

in 1967 the early light fell on the dewy body of Vickie, on her

skin, shiny, transparent, white like wax; on her hair, which was

a sinuous black fan that spread across her bloated face and out

over the steps. Ambrose could see maggots at her mouth and

eyes but no sign of blood or violence.

Vickie Field had a sister called Laura, and it took nearly

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THEWHITEGARDENCARMELBIRDUniversityofQueenslandPressFirstpublished1995byUniversityofQueenslandPressBox42,StLucia,Queensland4067Australia©CarmelBird1995TypesetbyUniversityofQueenslandPressPrintedinAustraliabyMcPherson’sPrintingGroupScanbyDanCataloguinginPublicationNatioanlLibraryofAustraliaBird,Carmel...

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