Barley Patch Read Online Free PDF Page A

write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it; that even while I write this present piece of fiction I am trying to read a certain text. (With writing, the matter seems to have been otherwise. Already, as a very young man, I understood that I might be capable of writing fiction without having first observed numerous interesting places and persons and events and even without being able to imagine settings and characters and plots, but not until the day when I stopped writing did I understand what I had been doing all the while when I had thought I was merely writing.)
    I would have read attentively whatever Josephine Tey had written in the early pages of Brat Farrar in order to suggest to the reader the appearance of Aunt Bee. Perhaps some or another sentence might have caused me to see in my mind the image of Aunt Bee that has stayed there ever since, but I suspect not. Josephine Tey may have written at length about her character’s distinctive clothes or her admirable personality, but I suspect that some connotation that I have long since forgotten caused me first to see Aunt Bee in my mind as I have seen her ever since. My image of Aunt Bee has comprised never more than two details. She, so to call her, consists of a florid face and a hairstyle that might be called upswept. I am vaguely aware of a clothed body somewhere beneath the hairstyle and the face, but I have never seen that body in my mind. The florid face is hardly different from the florid face that I recall whenever I recall the woman known to me only as Sister Mary Gonzaga, who was the principal of the first primary school that I attended. I was not afraid of Sister Gonzaga as some persons claim to have been afraid during their childhood of nuns wearing long black robes. Sister Gonzaga’s robes and her florid face seemed to me appropriate distinctions for a person who taught forty and more eighth-grade girls.
    At my first primary school, boys were taught only in the lowest three grades. After the third grade, boys went to an all-boys school across the road to be taught by religious brothers. At the primary school, all upper grades consisted of girls only. In the eighth grade, almost every girl was in her fourteenth year. In my first year at primary school, I knew nothing of secondary schools, let alone teachers’ colleges or universities. The girls in Sister Gonzaga’s room were the most senior students of any sort that I had ever seen. I was mostly the pet, or favourite, of my nun-teacher in the first grade, and so I was often sent by her on some or another errand to Sister Gonzaga’s classroom. No university or cathedral or library that I have since stepped into has awed me so much as that hushed classroom would awe me whenever I visited it on some or another hot afternoon. The room seemed cooler than any other in the school, if only because its windows looked between pepper-trees towards the banks of the trickling drain that I knew as Bendigo Creek or because each windowsill had on it a plant-pot from which sparse green foliage hung down. The coolness may have been an illusion, but the quietness of the room always startled me. I seemed to have entered a place where arcane knowledge lay just beyond my reach. The eighth-grade girls, whenever I burst in upon them, seemed either to be absorbing or to be recording such knowledge. Either they were reading from thick books with homemade brown-paper covers that hid the titles and the names of the authors, or they were writing with steel-nibbed pens or even with fountain pens one after another long sentence across line after line in immaculate exercise books. More than that, the girls made gentle fun of me—why, I never understood.
    The girls’ teacher seemed to know me as a clever child who was not afraid to speak out. Whenever I visited her room, she would ask me, in the hearing of the whole class, what I took to be a straightforward question. I would give her a straightforward reply, but