AUTHOR GUEST POST: Wendy Scarfe on revisiting the past

In this special guest post, Wendy Scarfe talks about her experiences writing A Mouthful of Petals with her late husband, Allan Scarfe.

A Mouthful of Petals is a nonfiction account of three years working in an Indian village in the early 1960s. Previously published, it became a minor classic, and has since been re-released by Wakefield Press. This new edition includes an account of Wendy Scarfe's return trip to Sokhodeora during a famine in the late 1960s, and how those who live in Bihar state fare in the early twenty-first century.
'It describes with warmth, sympathy and occasional near-despair, the life of an Indian village from the inside' – Nancy Cato

Wendy Scarfe was born in Adelaide. She graduated from Melbourne University and later trained as a secondary school teacher. For over four decades she has written poetry and novels in her own right and non-fiction works with her husband, Allan Scarfe.
Her novels show her interest in history, political conflicts and social injustice. Writing in Australian Literary Studies, Dr Katherine Bode commented that Wendy is 'an important and innovative contemporary author' whose books offer a 'difference'. Wendy Scarfe lives in Warrnambool.
 

As I hold this exquisitely elegant Wakefield edition of A Mouthful of Petals memories crowd in of how my late husband, Allan and I came to write it.

We had returned from India and Allan had taken a teaching post in the beautiful regional city of Warrnambool on Victoria's southern coast. I was a full time mother with our daughter Vidya (three) and our son David (just one year).
It was heaven to again have a house with electricity and gas and hot water from a tap.
Our day no longer began with boiling water on our Primus camping stove and filling several large clay pots for the day's drinking water. At night we did not hear rats scurrying in the thatched roof, nor bats crunching frogs and dropping pieces on our back verandah. The only sounds were the passing of an occasional car or, on still nights, the deep throb of the surf. After the congestion of India, even the streets with normal shoppers seemed strangely empty.

It was heaven to again walk on the sand and snatch an icy plunge in the late summer sea.

We had expected to slip easily back into Australian life but recollections of the people of Sokhodeora haunted us. We felt guilty for our comfort. Our small lounge room would have fitted the entire living space of our kindergarten teacher's house. The park and ovals that fronted our garden would have provided enough space for the entire village of Sokhodeora.
We were obsessed with a need to share our experience, to help others empathise with the people of Sokhodeora, a place described as a dot on the plain – 'beautiful, serene' from a distance but close up with its 'zig-zag alleys between congested houses,' home to some 2000 people living in 'closed -in ignorance' and 'disease-prone poverty'.
And this in a world that is rich.
People listened and were sympathetic but we were frustrated at our inadequacy in telling the whole story.

It needed a book. The idea grew.

We collected all our sources: reclaimed letters sent home to families, pulled out reports and articles we had written on our work, viewed again the 8mm colour movie Other Children that my father had edited from the films we sent home from India. We discussed at length how to structure a book and condense three years of experience. How to involve a reader. A day by day account would be unwieldy and fractured.
Eventually we decided to separate the different aspects of our work and treat each one as a story. They would overlap each other and be loosely linked. For a sense of the passing of time we described the seasons, the sowing and harvesting of food crops, the natural rhythm of village life.
We would both write different sections but, as two writers telling the story could be awkward for a reader, we agreed to have Allan as the first person narrator.
Our baby, Nalini, was born in 1965 and we were even busier.
We snatched minutes to write and in the afternoons while the children had a sleep, I laboriously typed our handwritten scripts on an old manual typewriter. We finished it, had it professionally typed and tried it on Australian publishers.
Their rejection was brief – Australians are not interested in India. There is no market for it.
Almost discouraged, we had one of those amazing pieces of good luck which sometimes befalls writers. The reader at Heinemann Australia passed it to a professor at Latrobe University. He pronounced it unique, the only secular inside account of an Indian village that had ever been written by Westerners. Heinemann should publish.
A Mouthful of Petals was edited in Melbourne and sent to London for printing, publishing, and distribution. We received our copy in 1967 and it was accompanied by a lengthy review in the Age Literary Supplement by Nancy Cato, headed 'Hungry Children Eat Flowers.' International reviews full of praise flowed in.
Fifty years later readers today still find it a fascinating, engaging read.
Writers store up emotional experiences, often unaware they are there until some story prompts the memory. This was the case fifty years after I went to the Bihar Famine in 1967.
The memory of that experience years earlier bled into my novel Hunger Town, which is set in Australia's Great Depression.
The children of Bihar, 'their bodies shrunk down onto their rib cage ... squatted on the ground holding a tin or metal bowl' for their daily meal of 'milk and multi-purpose food from the feeding kitchen' became in Hunger Town 'the gaunt and desperate women' at the soup kitchen for the hungry.
And Judith, the first person narrator of Hunger Town, looks at 'this endless queue of pathetic people' and, as I once did in Bihar fifty years ago, 'finds herself bereft of understanding.'

To find out more about A Mouthful of Petals, visit our website. Find out more about Wendy's other books, Hunger Town and The Day They Shot Edward, here.
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