Peter Carey - Illywhacker

In 1917 I moored a Bleriot monoplane in a paddock in Darley and had it eaten up by cattle. The Bleriot engine uses castor oil and, messy machine that it is, the castor oil splatters back over the plane, covers the fabric of the wings and makes an appealing snack for cattle. Give them a night and their rough tongues will rip and tear the fabric until the craft looks like a well-picked chicken carcass.

If I had known how important the Morris Farman was to Phoebe I would have coated it in castor oil and introduced a herd of heifers, a nest of white ants, moths, grubs, vultures and men from sideshows whose specialty is eating pieces of machinery.

When you hear what follows you will wonder at my blindness. How can the fellow not know? His wife is besotted with aviation. She spends her days with navigation and maintenance. He assists her in every way he can. And yet he says he never realized the thing was serious.

I will not deny that I knew the thing amused her, but I fancied that, with children, when they came, she would put her fancies away just as I had mine. I had not abandoned my dream lightly, like a man who throws away a half-smoked cigarette outside the theatre. I dropped it with regret and sadness, but I had a family to support and I thanked God I was so lucky.

It was hard work and the hours were long. We didn't have the easy life car salesmen seem to have these days. There were no neon tubes, comfortable chairs, little glass-partitioned offices. We worked, for the most part, from big dark garages with oil stains on the floor and the parts of troubled engines beneath our feet. We did business in the street when it was fine, or in pubs and cafes when it was cold. We drank more than we should, to pressure-cook friendliness. We spent frosty nights waiting outside doctors' surgeries so that the Herr Doktor could, when his last patient had gone, enjoy a demonstration.

In the meantime, Phoebe pursued the mysteries of aviation.

I soon realized that she had no aptitude for things mechanical, had no real interest in the way things worked. She had what I can only call a poetic understanding of machinery, a belief in magic, that did not apply merely to machines but to all the natural world. Thus she planted flowers out of season, ignoring both the instructions in Yates'sGarden Guide and the ones on the seed packets themselves, as if these rules might apply to everyone else, but not to her, as if it needed only her goodwill, her enthusiasm, her dedication, for all the laws of botany to be reversed and frost-tender species would bloom outside her bedroom window. She was as impatient of the confines of reality in her way as I was in mine. She adopted mechanics' overalls as if, dressed as a mechanic, she would become one.

I bought her a copy of Sidwell's Basic Aviation which stresses the importance of a potential pilot understanding the mechanics of a craft, being able to repair, maintain, etc. Thank God for Sidwell. (There are lots of pictures.) I kept her busy with such basic points as making loops in piano wire for rigging. I showed her how to use the round-nose pliers and make the little loops. This looks simple enough when you see it done, but it takes a while to get the knack of it. I was critical of her loops. Perhaps I was too critical. In any case she dealt with this better than she did the principles of the internal combustion engine. She was careless and impatient with the gaps in sparkplugs, insisting that they did not matter, but I kept her at it, and I would find her at home at night with a dismantled magneto on the dining-room table, short of patience, a screw lost, arguing that the thing was incorrectly made, Sidwell wrong, the whole thing impossible.

The more I understood her way of approaching these problems, the more fearful I became of her taking to the air. Well, I was wrong of course, and I've had enough accusations on this subject not to need yours added to it.

If I have made these early months of our marriage sound irritable, I have not explained myself properly. I have merely let my dusty irritations blossom out like one of those Japanese paper flowers you drop in water.

They were heady, wonderful days. The nights were clear, the mornings frosty. We rose early and before I stood in Exhibition Street in my suit ready to sing the praises of King Henry Ford I would have hammered and sawn and worked to build the room for Molly who was soon to join us, planted a tree, explained a mechanical point, made love (sometimes twice), eaten no breakfast, and come to watch the cold-footed ibis (at my love's request) fossicking on the flats.

I returned home at night with a billy of bortsch from Billinsky's in Little Collins Street. I would be tired, worn out and wrung dry by the slyness of doctors, the meanness of solicitors or drapers or widows, sometimes bringing Molly with me, sometimes not. When we were alone we spent the evening poring over maps at the table. I let myself be carried away with flights of fancy across Sumatra and Burma.

Life was so full it is little wonder that I failed to notice several important things that were happening.

The first: Molly was not bored or lonely as I feared, but was busy shopping for a business to buy.

The second: that Phoebe was pregnant.

The third: she was not happy about it.

The fourth: ah, the fourth was Horace the epileptic poet, who I would have killed at the time if I had known the things that stirred his brave and fearful heart, but who I embraced, first in wilful ignorance, and then, now, as I tell you these things I cannot possibly know, in the full passion of a liar's affection for the creatures of his mirrored mind.

Horace Dunlop was what is known as a Rawleigh's man – it was his job to travel door to door selling the jars and bottles of milky medication which bear the slogan "For Man or Beast". Yet to call him a Rawleigh's man is to do a disservice to everyone, to the real Rawleigh's men who went about their jobs in a methodical way and fed their families through their labours, and to Horace himself who was nearly a lawyer and almost a poet.

It has always puzzled me, puzzles me still, how he could have lost his way so completely that he ended up at that isolated spot on the Maribyrnong River. I am tempted to explain it all by means of an epileptic fit: the poet left unconscious, slumped on the seat of his cart while Toddy, his gelding, wandered feeding all the way to Phoebe's door. Yet this will not do. I have seen Horace have one of his fits and it is not the sort of thing that leaves a man on the seat he started out on. It is a wild, banging, eye-rolling, tongue-swallowing, terrible thing and had the fit struck him whilst sitting in his cart he would have catapulted himself to earth to continue his arm-flinging amongst the roadside thistles.

So let us not concern ourselves with how the fellow got there. It is of no importance.

There he is, clear as day, sitting at the kitchen table, speaking to Phoebe who is watching the poet spread lard on one more slice of bread and marvelling that any man can eat so much.

Horace Dunlop was a broad heavy man in his early twenties. He had unusually short legs, a barrel chest, an exceedingly large, closely cropped head. The features of his face were all too small for the large canvas they were painted on and perhaps they appeared more intense because of it: the small intelligent eyes, the mouth with the cupid's bow that would never quite be swallowed up by the corpulence that would later overtake him – even when he was at his most grotesque the eyes would command interest and the lips demand affection.

Horace had no love of lard. He explained this all to Phoebe while he licked it from his short thick fingers. He ate lard to ease the pain in his tongue which had been pierced (well-meaningly) with a hatpin during one of his fits of petit mal epilepsy.