Below, Patrick White recounts for friend and fellow novelist Cynthia Nolan a strange, lingering memory from his youth, which was startled awake by a visit back to Brown’s River, where White once spent the Summer as a child.
TO CYNTHIA NOLAN
November 14, 1973, Tasmania
Brown’s River where we spent the Summer when I was about five is now almost unrecognizable as Kingston Beach though I remembered the pines along the front and the black stream they used to call a river. I can remember sitting on a bench underneath those pines with a number of other children being read to—one of the Pollyanna books—by a friend of my mother’s. The other children were in ecstasies, but I thought it was awful, and said so when she asked me how I found it. To which she replied, ‘I know what you are. You’re a little changeling.’ I had no idea what a changeling was, but felt horribly mortified to be told I was something different from the others.
We’re leaving for Launceston on the last lap. Home to-morrow.
Love,
Patrick
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FURTHER READING
For more on White’s friendship with Nolan, including passages from his touching obituary of Nolan, click here.