WE CAN EVADE REALITY BUT WE CANNOT AVOID THE CONSEQUENCES IN DOING SO.
After my grandmother’s (Gran Mable’s) death two months ago, I had been moping around the house and had lost my desire. She was a lovely chatty old lady who had looked after me when my mother returned to work, and who shared with me a love of stories. Normally I loved reading, and we often used to visit plays and movies together. However, I had been moping around ever since her death, just not getting up to much, and trying to avoid our favourite spots. After I ended up at Coalton Park where we used to feed the swans, I could almost hear her warning me, no pleading with me, to get back into the things we had enjoyed must together. So I retraced our steps.
My Gran and I had been regular participants over the years at the seminars held by Coalton library, so when I heard that they were hosting a session by new short story writer, Mr Steve Creighton, I trundled along. Plus, he was presenting a discussion on childhood memoirs and how these ‘collections of vivid particulars’ seem to affect the person we are today, so it held some personal significance. As it turned out, Mr Creighton has recently published an anthology of short stories that revolved around the events that occurred during the Black Saturday Bushfires. (By the way, I warmly recommend these stories. They were the type of stories my grandmother would have loved – full of courage and adversity in the face of strife.)
In particular, one of his short stories “Running from Fire” detailed his family experiences during the fires and how his family and friends stood by one another to fight the fires and then the trauma that followed. Mr Creighton describes how his son, Matthew, who was eight at the time literally hid in his shell for a period of time after the fires. Matthew shied away from every social event and isolated himself in his room all day. Basically, he was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder as well as survivor guilt, after loosing a few of his friends to the deadly fires. Matthew was devastated and what made it worse, was that not long before his friends’ death, he had a minor quarrel with his best mate, and believed that he was somehow responsible for his death. What a poor child!
Also, as part of the discussion, Mr Creighton focused on the novel Spies and the depiction Keith and Stephen’s childhood. In particular, he focused on the way Stephen and Keith constantly sought to avoid the “dull, ordinariness” of their surroundings, which many of us in the audience could relate to.
Mr Creighton had pointed out that Keith and Stephen had plucked their whimsical idea that Keith’s mother was a ‘German spy’ almost from thin air and then, all else seemed to follow. Every little errand of Mrs Hayward’s became of great interest to the boys and the little ‘X’s’ marked on her diary became the boys’ obsession. Her every movement became some kind of affirmation for Stephen and Keith that she was a spy.
However, this discovery that allowed the boys some adventure took a dangerous turn into a nightmarish, adolescence dark tunnel. (In some ways, fighting fires also has a romantic and dangerous appeal to many, but the horror soon follows.) Above all, Stephen had overly magnified his role in this spy adventure and began to look at his surrounding only through the eyes of a spy. His life became a matter of loyalty or betrayal, of success or failure. Eventually, Stephen saw himself as a complete failure as he was ‘entrusted with a secret’ and ‘revealed it’ and felt as if he had ‘left a sick and starving man to die’. He truly believed that he had ‘betrayed his country’ and virtually lost the Battle of Britain single-handedly. The higher the position, the harder the fall when things don’t go to plan! (My grandmother was also fond of reminding me of the importance of perseverance as a test of character.)
Mr Creighton invited us to reflect on our experiences and interestingly, some one in the audience had a similar experience.
One lady, who introduced herself as Sally Hunter, said she was once completely obsessed with buying her first home. She explained that as a child growing up, her family constantly moved from house to house, and never provided her with a stable childhood where she could make friends that lasted longer than two months. As a result, Sally yearned to own her own house and have a stable and loving family of her own. Sally did what she could to save enough money to buy her own house, but earning the minimum income, she never seemed to have the deposit. Her parents encouraged her to be modest and live within her means, but Sally could not give up on her dream. But one day she met a man named Jack Davis. He was like her prince in shining silver armour. Jack helped Sally with an enormous loan that enabled her to purchase a glamorous house on a new estate filled with beautiful furniture, allowing her to live the life of her dreams. However, this soon all came crashing down, when Jack Davis, who actually owned the estate, began to demand extra fees and repayments. Sally could not cope with the dramatic up and downs she experienced in merely half a year. She almost lost the home, (the Australian Dream in tatters), and contemplated taking her life. Luckily, her family and friends rallied around her, and helped her face up to her own worst nightmare.
Next, with Sally’s story hovering in the back of my mind, I went to see Coalton Theatre Company’s performance of Death of a Salesman. Whilst it is an amateur company, the actors were surprisingly talented. (My grandmother and I had also seen Arthur Miller’s Crucible, staged by the same company, so I couldn’t help reminiscing once again about Gran Mable.)
Sally’s obsession with owning her own house and living the Australian Dream was strikingly similar to the character Willy Loman, who endeavoured to live out the American Dream. Willy was obsessed with the myth of popularity and believed that he was known up and down in New England, never having to ‘wait in line to see a buyer’ when in fact, he was nothing but an average salesman. Willy believed that he was one day make it big with his sons and avoided the reality that he could not even bring home sufficient income to feed his family. The more Willy dreamed of achieving great success and wealth, the more he began to lose his grip on the reality that he was begging to borrow money from his friend Charley each week, to pay off his loans and support his family. Every time there was sound of a car screeching or when the pipes were discovered the audience felt the extent of Willy’s failure and how his massive dreams had affected his mental stability.
I walked away from the play thinking that about poor Biff, who lived his entire life under the influence of his father’s massive dreams that did not reflect the reality they were living in. Biff genuinely believed that he was ensured great success in the future however things did not go according to plan. He struggled to face up to the grim reality of his world but it was necessary for him to stop living in a world of illusions so that he could go on with life. Sometimes it is necessary to strip our lives of sugar coated coverings and acknowledge that fact that things don’t always go our way, but we just have to learn how to deal with it. Reality may never be the ideal but we must face it to stop ourselves from losing our mental stability.
Well, I guess what I’ve learnt is that we should dream, but our dreams must stay within the bounds of reality. Dreaming big and overestimating your potential and position may lead you astray and redouble your problems. As my Gran Mable would have said, dream big, but always have one foot on the ground, or you’ll get blown away.