To appear in ViewPoint, Spring
2001
This paper is focused on a novel I wrote in 1999, which seems a long
time ago now – a different century. That feeling is, I suppose, appropriate:
Thursday’s Child is set between the great Wars, in the long dank
years of the Depression. As I wrote the book, sitting at a computer
in a comfortably middle-class room, I was constantly casting my mind
back to an era that seemed alienatingly distant, yet, at the same time,
so recent that everything about it was easy to recognise. Before and
during the writing of the novel, I read a lot about life in this city
during the Great Depression: each weekend I would take the train to
work and, from the high vantage point of the rails, look down on the
suburbs of Richmond and Collingwood. In the narrow lanes and tiny box
houses that remain there still, I could actually see remnants of the
past I was researching, and it always gave me the weirdest sensation
that Harper and Tin and all the book’s characters could be as real as
were these houses and lanes. It always gave me strange encouragement
to think that Harper, were she real, could still be alive. In short,
the world of Thursday’s Child became, to me, very real, more
so than the worlds of some of my other novels: it’s ironic, then, that
the book has since been defined not only as super-realism, but as fantasy
too.
I had been wanting for a long time to set a novel during the years
of the Great Depression, and as the plot and characters of Thursday’s
Child were assembled around the core idea of the feral, digging
child Tin, I saw the chance to finally put the era to use. And ‘use’
is not the wrong term: the Depression is, in this novel, a plot device,
which seems ghastly, given everything that the Depression symbolises.
It seemed, and still seems to me, crude and unfeeling to utilise such
suffering for my own means. But the plot needed its characters, the
Flute family, to live in a vortex of poverty and dead-ends, in a time
when continued existence was a precarious thing. I needed an era when
life was held, by necessity, somewhat cheaper than it is today – a time
when infant mortality was so high that the loss of children was a relatively
normal thing, when children themselves were not always seen as an asset,
but frequently as a burden. I needed, essentially, a time when a child
such as Tin could exist, when the underworld habits of a boy could be
overlooked because people had other, far more pressing things with which
to concern themselves. But I didn’t want the Great Depression simply
for its unfortunate aspects. In my research, I was struck by how supportive
people were of each other during these years, and I knew that my characters,
the hopelessly ineffective Flutes, were going to need all the support
they could get. Hence, the peripheral characters in the book are all
neighbours who help the family to a greater or lesser extent. It’s true
that there are countless examples of how people did not assist
each other during these years – examples of people being as mean-spirited,
selfish and cruel as they can be at any other time – but nonetheless
I came away from my research with a sense that communities bonded in
this adversity and frequently propped up their weakest members, even
if grudgingly.
The Depression, as a plot-device, gave me an unexpected gift: the fact
that the era bears eerie similarities to our own. As a writer for young
adults, I am constantly on the lookout for elements that will be recognisable
to my audience, which likes to see its own world reflected on a page.
During the Depression, unemployment was high and job prospects for school-leavers,
particularly those that could not achieve academically, were poor –
a situation surely familiar to young people today. The results of high
unemployment were exactly the same, during the Great Depression, as
they are today: boredom and poverty lead to crime, and the streets were
roamed by gangs of aimless teenagers, just as shopping centres are today,
with many older people, then and now, finding these youths a frightening
disgrace, undeserving of sympathy. It seemed a shame, writing the book,
that the mirror I would hold to my young contemporary audience must
reflect to them such a despairing portrait, but there was also some
good in it. Young people do not always have a sense of the past, and
I had an opportunity here to show them that their problems are not new,
that they are not the first generation to begin their futures so bleakly:
cold comfort, it’s true, but possibly better than no comfort at all.
Thursday’s Child revolves around the fortunes of the Flutes,
a family of seven living on a soldier settlement property in the gold
country of south-eastern Australia. Their story is related by Harper,
the third child: her tale begins when she is six years old and concludes
when she is twenty-one. This was the first time I had used a child as
a narrator, and the prospect of doing so was initially daunting. Children,
on the whole, make me nervous – I never know how to speak to them, and
always feel like I am trying too hard when I do – and Harper, as a concept,
made my doubt my ability. In an effort to give her reality, I remembered
my own childhood, and most specifically that sense of living in a world
over which one has no control. Harper’s life is buffeted by the fact
that she is born into this particular family, just as her family is
buffeted by the fact of the Great Depression. She is a worry-wart, as
was I: she is frantically conscious of her powerlessness, and can only
watch as her parents make what seem, to her, grossly wrong decisions.
Perpetually hungry and distrustful of her feckless parents, Harper is
far from carefree – but I tried, too, to remember and include for her
some of the joys of childhood. Harper knows her parents are hopeless,
but she loves them with the burning, forgiving affection that only a
child can muster. Childlike, she habitually looks for the best in a
situation, and sees her hay-barn house as being truly the palace she
is promised by Mr Murphy. Harper’s voice would come, in the end, very
clearly into my ears, complete with her occasionally quirky turn of
phrase, and she surprised me by being a pleasure to write. I liked her
cheerfulness and her bald-faced lies, but what I like best about Harper
is that, although she is to be pitied, she would not understand why.
The other significant character in Thursday’s Child is Harper’s
brother Tin, the boy who begins to dig and eventually constructs for
himself an elaborate network of underground tunnels. Tin’s activities
were inspired by the industry of ants – in particular, the colony that
set up home under my house in the months before I began the book. I
watched and admired these self-sufficient little creatures, who needed
nothing that they could not supply for themselves – so unlike ourselves,
who have impossibly complicated our own lives. In Tin, I tried to create
a character that would live like the wild animal that humans must once
have been. In common with the ants, he would need nothing that he could
not supply for himself; asking so little from society, he would in turn
be free from the expectations of it. He would rise above the rules by
digging away beneath them. Tin is a beast living in a beastly time:
he escapes the hellishness of life above ground by trading in his humanity.
Guilt, mercy and affection are all alien to him, he is as independent
and self-centred as a cat. Readers have asked if it was difficult, the
imagining of Tin’s strange world, but it never was, and I’ve found that
readers, too, have no trouble bringing that world to life in their minds.
I like to think that maybe some nook of our ancestral hearts recognises
the underground – long ago, a roof of dark earth above our heads would
have meant security and home.
Thursday’s Child is a book about fate, and Tin, more than any
of the characters, is in charge of his own. The other characters are
pushed about by forces beyond their influence – by the War and the Depression,
for instance, which alters the fortunes of the world – or in a smaller,
more personal way, as in the case of Harper, who, being a child holds
little sway within her own life. Thora and Court Flute – Mam and Da
to Harper and her siblings – are dreamy and weak-of-will, and their
inadequacies colour the lives of their children as the inadequacies
of every parent colours the life of every child. But Thursday’s Child
has sometimes been read as putting forward the idea that none of us
are in control of our destinies, that we are all mere pawns of Fate,
and it was not my intention to convey such a message, nor is it my belief.
To read the book as fatalistic is to fail to take into account the ways
in which Depression-era society differs, practically as well as morally,
from our own. Mam, for example, is less a pawn than simply a woman of
her time: she stays with the gormless Court not because she lacks the
motivation to do otherwise but because women, in these years, did not
often divorce or desert their husbands – the idea would probably never
have occurred to Thora, and the social stigma she’d have endured if
it had would have doubtless been unbearable. With no source of income,
with children hungry and often ill, traumatised by war, poorly housed,
under-clothed, prey to the whims of charity, it is a comfort to the
Flutes, as it must have been for countless others, to see their misfortune
not as something wilfully brought down on their own heads, but as something
visited upon them by a force beyond their control. I see the Flutes
not as fatalists, but as enduring survivors, living the best lives they
can. The book, I hope, is less about resignation than about bravery
and defiance, about Harper’s resilience and Tin’s wild soul, about escaping
what seems to be inescapable. I hope you will enjoy it.