The Town under the Sea

Before the hydrogen bomb had been invented to teach fishes and birds to behave, before the African anteater had been brought to Central Otago to kill the mammoth beetles already brought to kill the wasps that like to nibblepage 307 apricots, I lived in a town by the sea. It was called Brighton. There is still a Brighton on the map, twelve miles south of Dunedin, popular with ducks and week-end visitors; but that is another Brighton. The town I knew sank under the sea when I was eight years old, and did not reappear. Though sometimes on calm days, if you stand on the Big Rock above the bay of the second Brighton, you can just hear the church bells, muffled by seaweed, ringing under water.

But for years and years before I was eight, the town stood plain, huge at the world’s centre; its gravel roads shining like snow; its lupin jungles unexplored (except by me and several cousins); its bluegums tall as mountains; its houses bigger than barns; and above it, higher than any mountain in the whale-backed island, Saddle Hill, ready at the drop of a hat to erupt like Stromboli and blow the known world to atoms. A river full of eels and boats and swimming cows flowed past the town’s edge, long, deep and dangerous, a smaller Amazon. One could sit on the weed-green, slippery piles below the bridge, all through a summer afternoon while trucks and buses rumbled overhead, catching cock-a-bullies finned with fire, on a line of black cotton and hooks baited with sausage meat that were five a penny at Murdoch’s Store; or cross at low tide and climb the south face of the Matterhorn on Barney’s tussock island; or beyond all family warning, explore the sea cave under the Bishop’s Rock where waves drummed in the long, black mussel aisles and octopuses with kelpie arms and eyes like dinner plates waited, just out of sight.

The house I lived in then had three storeys, one for birds, one for people, and one for cats. Birds told stories all day in the space between the ceiling and the hot, corrugated iron roof; cats yelled and wrestled and held midnight concerts in the dry smelly dark under the floor. A ginger tom, whiskered like a general, thumped his tail against the floorboards for the silence that never came. Those were bandit cats, with torn ears and bitten tails, who darted in the daytime like tigers through the jungle grass. The family cats were sleepy, grey and purring. When the grandmother had kittens under the sofa she made a soft bed for her confinement from shreds of comics lent me by the boy next door. She could have chosen any of a hundred newspapers.

At seven o’clock in that early town, when the sun bugled up from the sea, there was a lifetime to spare. Fly a kite out of eyeshot and send messages up on the string; eat sherbet at the Black Bridge, lying flat in a boat among the crackling broompods; pull open the white hermetic cover on a gorse sprig and watch the spider children dance; race sledges down the hill to the Giant’s Grave, over dry cowpats to the slimy swamp at the bottom, while the grass- heads threshed at your knees; cut sea-weed balls from trunks of kelp, or bags from the bubble fronds to carry mussels in, and find a fish with a sucker on its belly; run through resinous tunnels at the tops of macrocarpas, where the wind was always blowing, and one could see ships and whales and icebergspage 308 cramming the cold horizon; look for small, pearl mushrooms in the bull’s paddock; rummage for bottles on the sandhills, and sell them at the back door to the greengrocer who walked slowly and smelt of homebrew; shoot toi-toi arrows in the air; clod the moping lovers who clinched on beds of cutty-grass and left small white balloons behind them; buy a licorice strap and smack it in the dust; make cabbage tree tobacco and cough like a billy goat. Time had not begun and space had room for everybody.

What about the people? They did not change or die. Old women picked roses and made giant balls of silver paper; old men, smelling of gum leaves, smoked pipes with tin covers beside the kitchen range. One I remember, a great-uncle with moustaches like the ginger tom. He took me quietly into his room, shut the door, and showed me a brimming crystal jug.

‘Whisky,’ he said, with a secret smile. It was water really.

Winter came with coal-eyed snowmen; spring with mustard-and-cress on flannel in the school classroom, Duffy’s truck plunged into the river at Mackintosh’s bend, and the eels swam round the lights still burning under water, but no one was hurt. Duffy sat on top of the cab, drunk and awash till morning, cursing himself sober. My cousin made forty water-colour pictures of the Big Rock, each one more perfect and identical than the last. But the world did not change. It stood unshakable on the back of a Chinese tortoise; or as Julian of Norwich saw it, a hazel nut in God’s hand.

Then the town sank. Over it grow the grey, implacable forests, and fish nose into the dark houses. But no doubt it stands high and dry in the eyes of a hundred children, ringing and abundant, like Noah’s faithful ark, hidden from us as we go about our deaths.

1956 (149)