Barley Patch Read Online Free PDF Page B

then to mark out the roads that crossed my rural district and finally to choose the names for the husbands and wives who lived at each property. (I chose the surnames either from among the names of trainers and jockeys in the Sporting Globe or from the names of film stars in advertisements in the Bendigo Advertiser for films currently showing. The given names I chose from a private store that I kept always in mind; none of these names belonged to any scabby or poorly dressed classmate of mine, and each of them when I pronounced it aloud gave rise to a sort of imagery that I might have struggled to explain on this page if I had not read by now the work of fiction by Marcel Proust the English title of which is Remembrance of Things Past and an early section of which, titled “Place-Names: The Place,” contains a long passage in which the narrator reports that certain words gave rise in his mind to certain images far more elaborate and consistent but in essence similar to the images that arise even now in my mind when I recall myself crouching beneath a tamarisk tree or a lilac tree or a lion’s-paw shrub and assigning to persons who were hardly yet visible in my mind the names that would make them more so because the vowels or the consonants of those names connoted pale or freckled or sun-browned skin or eyes of a certain colour or even a distinctive voice or bearing.)
    Whenever I was sent out of the comfortable house mentioned in the previous paragraph, I went first to the small front garden and then to the fernery on the shaded side of the house and finally to the small back garden. On my way from the kitchen to the front garden, I passed the closed door of the room that was my uncle’s office. He was the only man I knew who had a room of his own in his own house, and for this I envied him, especially on Sunday afternoons when the crowd of women was in the kitchen. Once, on a weekday, I had looked into the office when the door was ajar and my uncle was working in his garden. The room was surprisingly small and bare. I had hoped to see shelves of books, but the only furniture was a desk, a cupboard and a chair. (My father had once said to me scornfully that none of the family in that house had ever read a book.) On the desk were several magazines with coloured covers. The topmost was called Glamour and had on its cover a picture of a young woman in a two-piece bathing-costume. My uncle was a bookmaker and well-off, as my mother often told me. He earned most of his money on Saturdays and was often at leisure on other days. He cultivated standard roses in perfectly rectangular beds, masses of flowering annuals in perfectly circular beds, and a dozen sorts of fern and palm in his dim fernery. At the end of his back garden he kept canaries in aviaries: one large enclosure each for the males and the females, and several smaller cages for breeding pairs. I never saw him indulging his other main interest, but it was well known among his friends and relatives that he left his wife and six children at home on three evenings of every week of the year while he sat alone and watched films in one or another of the many picture theatres in his own or a neighbouring suburb.
    Whenever I was told to play in my well-off uncle’s garden, I went first to the flowerbeds at the front. I plucked petals furtively until I had a collection of many colours. Then I hid myself in the fernery and arranged my petals in groups on the concrete stepping-stones so that each group suggested a set of racing-colours that had been described on one or another page in the collection of racebooks belonging to another uncle of mine: my father’s youngest brother, who lived far away in the south-west of Victoria. On winter Sundays, when the garden was bare, I would collect a leaf from every shrub or tree in both the front and the back garden. Afterwards in the fernery, I would chew on leaf after leaf, comparing the flavours. (I did this not only in my well-off