Janey Runci — A Fistful of Mud

‘Look,’ George says, ‘those boys. That is what I meant.’

We were at the yellow house when he told us about the boys, himself and Martin and the others, free to roam on the long summer holidays, climbing onto boats, and then a boy’s lean brown body poised, he dives, the water parts and he’s gone. Agonising moments later a boy’s clenched hand breaks the water’s surface, and if the boy is lucky there is something dribbling from the hand, his trophy, his reward, his evidence - a fistful of mud to show that he can do it. Like a man. He is on the way to being a diver.  

When George told us this story, I studied his face, careful not to miss a word. But when he turned and gestured to the water his words were drowned by gunning motor bikes and car horns, and the view of the water was blocked by a large Disney style pirate boat.

The perpetually-closed door to the Charmian Clift’s house. Plaque at left.

To our right was the door to the yellow house, eight wooden panels of a faded sea green, and beside that the memorial plaque I’d missed. What I did notice was that the door was ajar, and I felt a quickening of the heart like the time seven years ago when we visited the house where Henry Handel Richardson wrote and eventually died, and I wanted to go up the stairs. I wanted to be in the room where she wrote. I wanted to be on my own in that room. I wanted something there, something to do with me being a writer, something to do with her having spoken to me in her writing in a way that no other writer had.

 When George said to us at lunch – Look, those boys, that is what I meant – he pointed and there on the end of the small pier were three boys, much older than the boys I’d imagined as we sat outside the yellow house, and certainly much better fed. Not for them the courage to bring up a fistful of dirt, not for them a doomed life to follow.