Such is Life

The postman left a package which felt like a small book. Not expecting any such thing, I was delighted; then opened it, and was Deloitted. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu is the current incarnation of a company I left in 1985, known then as Touche Ross & Co, Accountants. I was in their management consultancy, but now I’m their pensioner. In the five years I worked there, I always got a diary. The only way to leave being their pensioner is to die, so their annual gift will mark the passage of time till I leave this earthly realm. I never used last year’s, but find something moving in the prospect of this ritual, as precious as the pension itself, a kindly reminder from partners in the firm now dead and gone, to seize each day, and capture it in miniature, in fact to the dimensions of a business card. What shall I use it for? I don’t have enough appointments to need reminders. But when I look back, the days pass in a blur, like trackside telegraph poles seen from a train window. I shall jot down each day’s most notable events!

All of a sudden I’m reminded of an Australian classic: Such is Life, by Tom Collins, pen-name of Joseph Furphy, first published in 1903. This book of nostalgic reminiscences, a tragi-comic criss-crossing of outback characters, and their failure to see what is revealed to the reader—irony, in its original sense— has diary entries for its chapter headings. The memoirist reveals his method in these words:

“Twenty-two consecutive editions of Letts’s Pocket Diary, with one week in each opening, lie on the table before me; all filled up, and in a decent state of preservation.” He has only to open one at random for a day’s entry to jog his memory with the makings of a yarn, for example: “FRI. NOV. 9. Charley’s Paddock. Binney. Catastrophe.”

It’s a convoluted tale, in no hurry to reach its destination. On the way we have the moralistic musings of his meerschaum pipe and an encounter with a half-blind, half-deaf swagman without a penny to his name. I can only convey the author’s style with a quotation. The swagman speaks:

“Rakin’ style o’ dog you got there. I dunno when I seen the like of him. Well, I think I’ll be pushin’ on. I on’y got a sort o’ rough idear where this mill is; an’ there ain’t many people this side o’ the river to inquire off of; an’ my eyes is none o’ the best. I’ll be biddin’ you good day.”

“Are you a smoker?” I asked, replenishing my own sagacious meerschaum. “Because you might try a plug of this tobacco.”

Now that man’s deafness was genuine, and I spoke in my ordinary tone, yet the magic word vibrated accurately and unmistakably on the paralysed tympanum. Let your so-called scientists account for that.

“If you can spare it,” replied the swagman, with animation. “Smokin’s about the on’y pleasure a man’s got in this world; an’ I jist used up the dust out o’ my pockets this mornin’; so this’ll go high. My word! Well, good day. I might be able to do the same for you some time.”

“Thou speakest wiser than thou art ’ware of,” I soliloquised as I watched his retreating figure, whilst lighting my pipe. “As the other philosopher, Tycho Brahe, found inspiration in the gibberish of his idiot companion, so do I find food for reflection in thy casual courtesy, my friend. Possibly I have reached the highest point of all my greatness, and from that full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting. From a Deputy-Assistant-Sub-Inspector–with the mortuary reversion of the Assistant-Sub-Inspectorship itself–to a swagman, bluey on shoulder and billy in hand, is as easy as falling off a playful moke. Such is life.”

Why do I quote Tom Collins? It’s my way of saying thanks to someone who perhaps hasn’t attained his deserved place in world literature, and my good fortune in discovering the book by accident. (I ponder if there is any other way to discover anything.)

If I may cut to a synopsis of the above yarn, it goes like this. Tom borrows a boat to cross the wide river to meet an acquaintance for an evening’s chat. His beloved dog is knocked off the boat by a low-hanging branch. Trying to retrieve the dog, he loses the boat and his spare clothes. It’s dark by the time he reaches the river bank, and unknown to him he’s back on the side where he started; and stark naked. He hides by the side of the road, listening to the Friday evening conversations of courting couples passing in their pony-drawn buggies. A handsome young man on horseback dismounts near him, looking for something he has dropped, whereupon Tom accosts him from the shadows, demanding he relinquish his ——. The word is always blanked out as if indelicate, but we are to understand he means trousers.

“What do you want?” he gasped.

I want your ——,” I replied sternly.

He throws the man on his back and starts undoing the laces of his breeches. The reader, though not Tom, soon realises that the “young man” is actually a young woman, who screams. People come running and Tom flees into the trees, eventually finding a place to sleep near the embers of a fire. In the morning he espies a house not far away, with a pair of —— hanging on the line to dry. To distract the family’s attention, he uses an ember from the fire to ignite a decayed haystack on the same property, and makes good his escape wearing the stolen ——, not before seeing a tall boyish girl who interests him greatly and who has seen him too, from a distance, crawling around naked in ditches. She deduces this pink thing must be someone’s stray pig. She calls her father, who happens to be the local magistrate, and gets out his shotgun. We realise it’s the same girl whose breeches he tried to remove the night before.

At the end of the book, after many more outlandish adventures, he encounters the near-blind, near-deaf swagman once more. Neither of them recognises the other. The swagman tells him how he’s just come out of jail for burning down a worthless haystack and stealing some ——. The reader understands that in the magistrate’s eyes, the sentence was for a different, even less provable offence: the attempted rape of his daughter.

“Well, good day,” the swagman had said, on their first encounter. “I might be able to do the same for you some time.” Such is life.

Respect to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but Joseph Furphy’s’ book is worthier of immortality. The conceit of the cryptic notes in a pocket diary is all part of the spoof. But I shall scribble away, and perhaps by the time I have filled in twenty-two consecutive editions, and written ten thousand blog posts, I may have learned to write too.