Free Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane Page A

of Victoria. (My mother, who was not yet eighteen years of age when she conceived me, would have read “The Fairies” for the first time only eleven years before my birth, in the same edition of the Third Book that was still in use during my own schooldays. My mother had been compelled to leave school at the age of thirteen, but throughout her life she was able to recite by heart a number of poems from the Education Department readers. I never learned whether her teachers had required her to learn these poems or whether she had learned them of her own accord or, even, whether she had learned the poems unintentionally as a result of her having often read and enjoyed them.) I learned long after I had left school that “The Fairies,” which the compilers of school readers in the Education Department of Victoria had deemed suitable to be appreciated by children of about eight years, had been intended by William Allingham to be a poem for adults.
    During the years before I was able to read for myself the stanzas about Little Bridget, I learned from my mother’s mournful-sounding recitations that Bridget had been stolen for seven years. (Until I actually read the poem, I was unaware that Bridget’s abductors were fairies; they were referred to only as “they” in the three stanzas. I thought of them as men in flowing robes.) When Bridget had returned home, none remained of her former friends. (Sometimes my mother would alter the text, using the phrase “mother and father” instead of the word “friends.” She must have supposed that I would be more affected by the thought of a child without parents than the thought of a child without friends. So far as I can recall, I thought of all characters in stories or poems as being without parents; even if their parents were mentioned in the text, I abolished the parents from my mind while I read. I knew what my mother was about, but when I grieved for Bridget I was grieving for a girl-woman who would have resembled the most fetching of the older schoolgirls that I was already observing even before I myself had begun at school.) I thought of Bridget as not only friendless but lacking all human company. She lived alone among the same tumbledown cottages and wild-growing garden flowers and English-seeming countryside that came to my mind whenever my mother recited the few lines she recalled from “The Deserted Village,” by Oliver Goldsmith. I could not suppose Bridget to be unhappy in this setting. I thought of her as going through one after another of the cupboards and drawers in the empty houses, inspecting keepsakes and reading letters left behind by her former friends. After an interval that I supposed was a few days, her abductors returned and made off with her a second time.
    They took her lightly back,
    Between the night and morrow,
    They thought that she was fast asleep,
    But she was dead with sorrow.
    Whenever my mother recited these lines, I assumed that Bridget had died, even though her abductors had thought otherwise. In my eighth year, however, as reported above, I came upon the text of the whole poem. Staring at the printed words was far more satisfying than listening to my mother’s recitation. With the text safely in front of me, I had time for speculating; for calling into question the seemingly obvious. I was anxious, of course, that Bridget should not have died. Surely I had no choice but to accept the word of the narrator? My one hope lay with the abductors. How could they have mistaken a dead girl-woman for one who merely slept, especially when they must have lifted her in their arms from her bed and later set her down again? (I saw them as carrying her away on a litter.) I seem to recall that I mostly wavered in my understanding of the text, although a few years later I might well have resolved the matter by composing my own version of events: by writing in the rear of a disused exercise-book a few lines of doggerel that would keep alive a fictional