Silence Read online

  ‘Li River’: Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano. The reference is to the film of Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Painted Veil.

  ‘Book burial’: Wolfgang Borchert, The Man Outside. Based on a factual event still shrouded in secrecy. One evening the East German parliament accepted that the cost of patrolling the Berlin Wall was no longer sustainable—that it could no longer afford itself—and the troops were withdrawn. This was the signal. Almost immediately people began to scale the abandoned wall and to break it down, while on both sides the partying began. The attempted burial of communist ideology followed. Concerning the tradition of burning books and the length of time this requires, it is said that when Caliph Umar destroyed the ancient library at Alexandria (already decimated by Christians) the scrolls took six months to burn. The mention of Time Forms refers to Giambattista Vico’s The New Science of 1744.

  ‘AD 1000’: King Alfred the Great, Orosius. Developed from an idea suggested by a woodcut in an original book from the Gutenberg Press at the National Gallery of Victoria.

  ‘Winners’: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan. A street scene witnessed in Chapel Street, Prahran, Melbourne on 17 December 2010.

  ‘Glider pilot’: A tribute to my uncle, Ralph Buckland.

  ‘TV reporter’, the transcription of a dream, was first published in my collection of prose fragments, The Most Beautiful World (UQP, 1981), ‘Street scene’, ‘Babak’ and ‘John Fleming’ were first published in earlier versions in Griffith Review 26 and ‘Semaphore’ was published in the Good Weekend magazine of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age.

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  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful for help offered me during the years when these fictions were written. Thanks to Julian Burnside and Kate Durham for repeated kindnesses, Neilma Gantner, Barbara Blackman, The Bundanon Trust and Victoria University—to Bet for so many shaping memories and to our darling daughters Imogen, Delia and Cressida—and to Dylan Warren for his exacting responses to the work in progress.

  Thanks also to my agent, Mary Cunnane, to my publisher at Pier 9, Melanie Ostell, and to my editor, Ali Lavau.

  Also available by the author, popeye never told you

  ‘Do not be misled by the “Childhood Memories” of the subtitle. Self-indulgent nostalgia is nowhere to be found in this book, which is a richly novelistic saga of a wartime family in Britain. It is Rodney Hall’s genius that his story evokes strong personal memories in the mind of the reader … To read this book is a double pleasure: we enter both the world of young Rod and our own childhood at the same time … I didn’t want this book to end.’

  Craig Munro, Australian Book Review

  ‘Rodney Hall is a magnificently perceptive and venturesome writer … his memoir is written in the simple words and halting prose of a child. Through this experiment Hall explores the possibility of finding the past, and capturing the voice and perspective of a young child.’

  Canberra Times

  ‘An accessible and beautifully written memoir.’ Good Reading