When the Drums Went Bang: Ruth Park’s ‘Truth in There Somewhere’

Ruth Park achieved a late career milestone with her back-to-back memoirs, A Fence Around the Cuckoo (1992) and Fishing in the Styx (1993). They found favour with both reviewers and readers and were recognised as important summations of a long life and productive career.¹ After completing these two volumes, the only major undertaking that remained for Park was working with Rafe Champion on Home Before Dark (1995), the biography of Australian boxer Les Darcy, which had been left incomplete by her late husband, D’Arcy Niland.

In what then became a protracted period of generally sparse scholarship regarding Park, it was these memoirs that attracted critical attention. Firstly, Jill Greaves (1996) provided a reading of Fence and Fishing that focused on Park’s self-identification and self-representation as a story-teller – someone who was compelled from an early age to mediate her experience of the world through writing stories. Greaves argued that in Park’s late-life memoirs it was her grasp of the literary underpinnings of story-telling that produced highly effective life-writing. She concluded that Park’s memoirs demonstrated she was ‘aware of the reconstructive nature of recollection’ (246) and produced a form of ‘autobiography that exploits the gamut of fictional techniques’ (252).

Secondly, Anne-Marie Priest (2018) considered Fence and Fishing, together with Park’s earlier memoir The Drums Go Bang (1956, co-authored by D’Arcy Niland), and addressed their reflections on Park’s life-long commitment to being a freelance writer. Priest highlighted Park’s focus in these texts on ‘writing for markets, audiences and income’, while noting that this sits alongside persistent descriptions of writing as a vocation and a ‘kind of truth-telling’ (118).

The purpose of this paper is to further examine Park’s memoirs by drawing attention to the way in which she has pursued truth in her life-writing, while at the same time modifying the representation of her personal reality with forms of untruth. It does so by considering Park’s accounts of a particular subject – the public controversy that ensued after she won the Sydney Morning Herald Prize in 1946 for the manuscript of her first novel, The Harp in the South. I have previously looked at the fall-out from the Herald Prize by examining the controversy as it was contested through the newspaper’s letters pages (Genoni). This time I approach it via Park’s memoirs, in the belief that they are revealing, not only for what can be learnt about Park’s winning of the Prize, but also for what is revealed about her methods as a memoirist.

As Park’s memoirs make clear, her win of the Herald Prize and its contentious, protracted aftermath continued to loom large in her life, both for the significant impact on her career, and as a singular moment in Australian literary history.² Park was well aware these events resonated for more than personal reasons. As she wrote in Fishing, immediately before launching into her account of the Herald Prize:

Normally I would not enlarge on this extraordinary row, for after all it happened long ago ... But it is, in its way, a unique psychological study of the popular mores of the late 1940s and early 1950s …. (147)

As will be discussed, Park’s recounting of the story of the Prize shifted over time, in response to her own changing circumstances. The subject is therefore approached while keeping in mind Park’s comment from Fishing – made as she reflects on her account of her father’s death – that, ‘there is a truth in there somewhere, but like all truth, no statement of it can be final’ (210). It is a claim that declares all memory, and all memoir, to be provisional, and in Park’s case we can examine the evolution of her self-representation by tracing her response to the Herald Prize through three acts of life-writing that span nearly half a century: a lengthy article in the Sydney Morning Herald (1946); her first book of memoir, The Drums Go Bang! (1956); and her third and final memoir, Fishing in the Styx (1993).

There are numerous active debates around truth-in-memoir, and in discussing Park’s recollections it should be acknowledged that when writing memoir it is not – despite the expectations of some readers – incumbent upon an author to be completely revealing, or objectively truthful. As Helena de Bres has argued, a memoir, as much as a novel, poem or play, is an imaginative and literary construct, and a porous one at that, sharing roots not only with other forms of life-writing, but also a close relationship with fiction.

As de Bres demonstrates, the forms of untruth practiced in memoir are many and include ‘multiple subspecies’ (76). As a philosopher de Bres incisively discusses the numerous ethical dilemmas involved in truth-in-memoir, including considering the many ways in which untruths infiltrate a genre that superficially relies upon an author’s willingness and ability to ‘truthfully’ represent their experience and self. However, as de Bres argues, memoirs deploy frequent, usually benign manipulations of the ‘truth’ in order to produce certain literary effects required to enhance the accurate representation of an author’s personal reality. In other words, not all untruths are lies, or intended to deceive.

The principal form of untruth that is examined in this paper is that of ‘omission’ or ‘withholding’. It will be demonstrated that amid Park’s several accounts of the Herald Prize – and particularly in The Drums Go Bang! – she consciously withheld details from readers. It will be argued that when Park’s omissions are recognised, and her associated motives understood, they become paradoxically revealing.

The Sydney Morning Herald Prize

The story of Park and the Herald Prize is well-known. At war’s end in 1945, the Sydney Morning Herald created a set of literary prizes open to Australian residents under four categories: novel, poem, short story and ‘best story of the war’. The prizes offered substantial cash awards, the largest for an anonymously submitted novel manuscript. Public interest in the novel prize was considerable, and increased further when it was revealed, just after Christmas 1946, that the winner was Ruth Park. The announcement was met with surprise, as Park was unheralded; considered young at just twenty-nine; a New Zealander; and a first-time novelist.

The initial surprise turned to outrage in some quarters when the Herald’s serialisation of The Harp in the South commenced and it was found that the novel was set amid the impoverished, mainly Irish, inhabitants of the ‘slum’ of Surry Hills. Moreover, it included accounts of domestic and other violence, rape, prostitution, abortion, and the debilitating inter-generational impact of poverty, and all this in the premier city of a country that boasted of its material success and egalitarianism. The shocked response was expressed through letters to the Herald; in condemnation from pulpits; in public meetings; and personally to Park. Equally, however, Park had her defenders, and she also stepped forward to provide plenty of self-defence. While some of the debate was personal – according to Park because ‘I was a woman, and I was not an Australian’ (Fishing 159) – there was also a contest of ideas over what should be valued in Australian literature at a time the nation was particularly sensitive about its representation to the rest of the world (Genoni).

The Herald defence

Park’s first public response to winning the Prize came immediately when she was given considerable space in the Herald as part of the announcement of the prize-winners, on December 28th, 1946. The serialisation of The Harp in the South was set to commence on January 4th.

Park undertook two things in her 2500-word article. Firstly, she provided an autobiographical account – her first memoir – which provided a template for her future self-representation. It tells of her depression-era childhood in rural New Zealand; her grounding as a journalist in Auckland; finding her way to Australia in 1941; her marriage to Niland; the couple’s commitment to work as freelance writers; their lives in rural New South Wales and Surry Hills amid the war-time housing crisis; and how she came to write The Harp in the South. It is a story she repeated, in greater detail, nearly five decades later in A Fence Around the Cuckoo.

But secondly, Park does something else, as her memoir blends into a justification of her choice of Surry Hills as a suitable subject for fiction. She does this by acknowledging the suburb’s poverty, violence and appalling living conditions, while stressing that the subject matter of The Harp in the South accurately reflects the generosity and well-meaning humanity of Surry Hills residents.

Park effectively uses her autobiographical sketch as the foundation from which to preempt criticism of The Harp in the South, and of herself. If the accusation is youth, then she describes her depth of experience and dedication to her craft; if the allegation is naivety, then she quotes her lived experience of the slum; if the complaint is that she is a woman, then she retaliates with the benefits of her motherhood; if she offends because she is a New Zealander, then she notes that Niland, who ‘knew Australia and her people’, was her editor; and if the charge is that she demeans Australia by writing about its slums, then she extols the virtues of those who live there.

Just as tellingly, as part of her defence Park also points to the shortcomings of those who might be her accusers. In particular, she declares that Surry Hills is ‘ringed about with ignorance and prejudice’ and embedded in a middle-class city where many have lost ‘the fundamental human virtues of kindliness, friendship and loyalty’.

Why, it might be asked, would Park see fit to defend her prize-winning novel in this way before its serialisation, and prior to any public outcry? The relevant detail she withholds from readers is that it seems certain that, either inadvertently or (more likely) deliberately, she had been forewarned by Herald employees about the outraged response that would follow the serialisation of her novel.

Park first indicated as much a decade later in Drums when she describes a ‘tip off’ in the form of a Christmas Eve revelation by an unnamed Herald staffer who has proof-read the serialised version of The Harp in the South. Without knowing the identity of the novel’s anonymous author, he blurts out to Park and Niland that:

‘You’ve no idea. I don’t know how they had the nerve to award it first prize. In fact, I don’t know how they are going to run it as a serial. Down there we call ourselves tough, but it has shocked us. Shocked us I can tell you’. (187)

The episode with the proof-reader isn’t repeated in Fishing in the Styx, but its narrative function of fore-warning Park is replaced by an incident when she is called to the Herald to hear that her novel is shortlisted. Here she encounters a ‘hard-nosed journalist’ – referred to only as Old Preposterous – who is ‘attuned to that peculiar thing, the reading public’s common denominator’ (147). Park absorbs his muttered warning: ‘There’ll be trouble … Terrible trouble. Oh, I told them, you may be sure’ (144). Her interpretation of these words is clear – an intimation she has won the Prize, and that the upshot will indeed be ‘trouble’.

There is no way of knowing if either of these two incidents occurred. That one so easily replaced the other is enough to call both into question, but it may well be that they are inventions, masking the fact that Park was strategically warned by the Herald editors of an expected controversy. Indeed, many years later, as Park reflected on this period in Fishing (158), it seemingly occurs to her that the newspaper itself may have ignited the outcry by publishing a sensationalised synopsis of The Harp in the South that ran alongside her seemingly premature ‘defence’. But whatever the truth of how the controversy was initiated and the warning unfolded, it was sufficient to encourage Park to spend her Christmas preparing her biographical sketch in such a way that it pre-empted, and perhaps also further provoked, the coming backlash. All-in-all, it was an experience that provided her with a valuable lesson regarding the strategic use of memoir.

The Drums Go Bang! and *Fishing in the Styx*

Park revisited the Herald Prize and its fallout a decade later in The Drums Go Bang! Although formally co-authored with Niland it nonetheless appears, on the basis of the text, that Drums is primarily Park’s work. The major narrative themes (expatriation; the perspective on marriage and other key relationships; life in Surry Hills; parenthood; writing Harp in the South and winning the Herald Prize) more directly reflect her experience rather than Niland’s. If a reader looks beyond the frequently used authorial pronoun ‘we’, then it’s possible to read the entire book as Park’s account of how she came to write The Harp in the South, win the Herald Prize, and cope with the associated furor. It is notable that the narrative builds towards and climaxes with the Prize, which also gives the book its title when it is described as ‘the moment the drums went bang with a terrific sound’ (188).³ It is also the case that the text effectively ceases after recounting the story of the Prize and the following upheaval. The couple’s achievements over the next decade – which include Park’s sequel novel Poor Man’s Orange (1949) and Niland’s breakthrough with The Shiralee (1955) – are dispensed in just two concluding pages.

A feature of Drums is that the prevailing mode is distractingly comic. The book is a light-hearted period-piece describing how the struggling authors cope with the chaos of establishing a marriage, starting a family, and dealing with an intractable housing crisis, all while attempting to navigate the treacherous pathway to financial stability as freelance writers. They finally hit it big with the Prize, only to have their lives engulfed by the ensuing hue and cry and then losing much of the considerable prize money to taxes.

By the mid-1950s Park and Niland had succeeded with radio plays, short stories, young adult books, and further novels, and a reader-friendly, jovial joint memoir must have seemed like an obvious next step. The time was right. Park had continued to have regular success, and with The Shiralee Niland’s profile had risen considerably. They were at their peak as a recognisable literary couple, and Drums was one more way to sell books and profit from their skills.

Where Drums succeeds is in recounting the hard yards it required for Park and Niland to work as freelance writers in 1940s Australia. The constant activity; the stress and sheer hard work of finding new opportunities; the grind of completing and distributing manuscripts; the wait for responses; the long wait for publication; and the even longer wait for payment.

The personal truth that resulted from that demanding period is to be found in the book, if the reader looks hard enough, but it battles to emerge from beneath the relentlessly light-hearted tone which papers over Park’s mounting stress and emotional struggles. In Drums Park admits to little more than homesickness, and nowhere evident is the person she later described in Fence as ‘frequently anxious, insecure and depressed’ (288). Also hinted at, but largely ignored, is the detrimental impact on Park of Niland’s all-too-frequent absences, which would only be addressed years later in Fishing. Drums is therefore a memoir broadly structured around untruths (in the form of omissions) with the intention of presenting a palatable, amusing, and – within the context of the book’s target audience – generally reliable account of the featured couple.

An issue with Drums, however, is that with scrutiny the narrative strategies required to maintain its light touch are sometimes all too evident. Park and Niland were certainly capable of invention. An example is found in the important character of Niland’s uncle, Lucius, generally referred to as ‘Uncle Looshus’. Looshus is an easily recognisable stock Irish figure. He is garrulous, sentimental, drinks too much and breaks into folksong. He is also blindly loyal to his kin and as the self-appointed conscience of his Irish community frequently recalls various outrages perpetrated against Catholics. As such Looshus serves an important narrative purpose because he makes Niland’s Irish heritage more ‘real’ and thereby legitimises Park’s experience amidst Surry Hills’ Irish poor that provides her setting for The Harp in the South.

Looshus’s many narrative interventions include being an over-excited cheerleader for Park when she applies for the Herald Prize, and then nervously accompanying her to the Herald offices when she is summoned to hear the outcome. But there is a patently contrived air about Looshus, whose overriding purpose is to provide key comic moments. It is notable Park found no role for Looshus or a similar character in Fishing, in which specific actions performed by Looshus in Drums are undertaken by other, identifiably ‘real’ people.⁴ Looshus therefore seems to be a strategic deviation from the ‘truth’ who is needed to provide predictable comedy while underscoring Niland’s Irishness.

This ‘inventiveness’ is also likely to be true of others from Drums cast of more minor characters. These include another of Niland’s purported relatives, the outrageous Auntie Nibblestones, and Mr Virtue, an opportunistic editor of a stable of trashy magazines and a keen buyer of Park and Niland’s work. When writing of her fictional method in the 1946 Herald Article Park noted that in The Harp in the South she had ‘done little more than to photograph composite types’. Now she has apparently adopted the same strategy in Drums by manufacturing characters who, if not ‘real’ in their specific identities, are nonetheless representative of the ‘types’ with whom Park and Niland lived and worked.

It is, however, not in what is invented, but rather in what is omitted that Drums provides an intriguing reflection on the Herald Prize and the way in which it impacted Park and eventually shaped the detail of her memoirs.

The issue of omission in Drums is most obviously raised by an example that is likely to be recognised by all readers. That is, it must be the only Australian memoir covering the period between 1942 and 1947 that does not mention the Second World War. Not once! The only explanation would seem to be that this strategic neglect ensures that the text’s bubbling, chirping narrative surface is not disturbed, and it was assumed that 1950s readers would simply ‘fill-in’ the obvious gap.

Decades later in Fence and Fishing Park was careful to correct this omission. In these later memoirs the War becomes the constant background to her move to Sydney and critical early years in Australia. In recalling 1941 she reflects on the impact of the Greece campaigns in shaping ‘the most wretched year of my life’ (Fence 279). She also recalls that accepting Niland’s marriage proposal and coming to Sydney is a direct outcome of the Pearl Harbor bombing which disrupted her scheduled departure for the United States. It is also the War that induces the housing crisis that dominates the couple’s early married lives, and the War that has Niland manpowered and has them both dispatched to outback New South Wales. It is the War that leads them to Surry Hills, and thereby to Park writing The Harp in the South. But in Drums, there is no war, and if a memoir fails to mention something that so comprehensively shaped the authors’ (and the nation’s) quotidian realities, then it is likely to be open to other conscious omissions.

And indeed, there are ways in which Drums’ account of the Herald Prize reveals the difficult position in which Park placed herself, as a writer, writing an amusing memoir about her freelance writing self, and how this resulted in her being wary of some truths. There are omissions in Drums, not (as with the neglected war) that readers would identify, but rather matters that Park herself would only make apparent when she supplemented her autobiographical account with Fishing nearly four decades later.

For example, in Drums when describing opportunities that came her way because of the Prize, Park reports that, ‘Angus and Robertson, Sydney, wanted to publish the book’ (191). Indeed, publication by A&R – unchallenged at the time as the leading Australian publishing house and with a reputation for identifying great national stories – was expected, as the company’s guarantee to publish the winning manuscript had been part of the promotion of the Prize.

A&R did publish The Harp in the South, along with some half-dozen subsequent novels by Park, both before and after also publishing The Drums Go Bang! However, as Park later revealed in Fishing, A&R’s publication of The Harp in the South was far from straightforward and became a ‘disturbing matter’ (151). When A&R editor Beatrice Davis saw the galleys prepared for the Herald she informed Park that it was ‘not the kind of book A&R cares to publish’ (151), and conceded they were doing so only to honour their agreement. In Fishing, Park put on record her shocked response to this disclosure, and her immense disappointment in a company for which she previously had great respect, but which was now accepting her manuscript with a ‘blunt expression of indifference’ (151). It is a disappointment further emphasised in Fishing when Park recalls that Niland also had problems with A&R when seeking a publisher for The Shiralee. However, in Drums Park expressed no such disapproval of A&R, and it can only be assumed she believed she was in no position to share her increasingly sour view of the publisher or its influential editor. The truth was, that in the mid-1950s Park needed both A&R and Beatrice Davis and she was not about to risk being critical of either – particularly in a book bearing the A&R imprint.

A related example of Park holding her tongue in Drums is found in an episode in which she is invited into the Herald office of an unnamed ‘potentate’ (187), who is appalled when Park uses her children as the reason for declining a well-paid role as a regular columnist for the newspaper. In Fishing this ‘potentate’ is unmasked as the by now safely dead Rupert Henderson, the Herald’s powerful managing editor. Henderson had, however, remained at the helm of the Herald throughout the 1950s and was therefore another influential editor who Park could not afford to identify or alienate when writing Drums.

Park’s treatment of Henderson contrasts with that given to another member of the Herald staff, ‘Mr Threlfall’. A meeting with Threlfall is described in both Drums and Fishing, and he is variously described as ‘kindly faced’ (Drums, 185) and an ‘agreeable elderly gentleman’ (Fishing, 144), who had the pleasant task of informing Park that her novel was shortlisted. This was Martyn Threlfall, a widely experienced journalist and former private secretary to Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, who was at the time the Herald’s literary editor (and at fifty-two, not so ‘elderly’). But given Park’s genial exchange with Threlfall, and the fact that by the 1950s he was no longer working at the Herald, she was at ease referring to him by name in Drums.

Another significant omission is found when Park discusses the response she received from other Australian writers during the controversy. In Drums she mentions ‘messages of congratulations from Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Jean Devanney, Dame Mary Gilmore and innumerable other writers’ (189), and a similar list appears in Fishing (157). There is, however, one writer’s response that is notably omitted from Drums but which receives considerable attention in Fishing – that is the very negative reaction of Miles Franklin. Park reports that during that ‘bad, agitating time’ that ‘More than anything else I was perturbed by … Miles Franklin’s mysterious enmity’ (150). Park describes Franklin as ‘venomously defamatory about everything I wrote, my personal life, and even my appearance’, and accuses the older writer of a ‘capitulation to malice’ (150). She concludes this was the result of Franklin having been a disappointed entrant in the Herald competition. With Franklin’s response still stinging so intensely after half a century, then one would expect it would have been mentioned in Drums, when it was far more recent. But Drums omits any reference to Franklin. Again, it must be assumed that Park felt that given Franklin’s status as a widely admired figure in Australian literary circles and an Angus & Robertson stablemate,⁵ that outing her as an antagonistic bad loser was another truth she needed to suppress.

In Fishing Park concludes her account of Franklin’s bitterness with the observation that, ‘The darkness in Miss Franklin has not been adequately addressed by her biographers’ (151). It is relevant to observe that Park could have led the way in exposing Franklin’s ‘darkness’ some four decades previously in Drums, but again she elected to err on the side of her own immediate interests.

A further example of Park omitting an adverse response to The Harp in the South in Drums but then reviving it for Fishing involves an institution dear to her heart at the time – the Catholic Church. In Drums Park stressed the support she received from within the Church, including from a ‘very old nun in Connecticut’; a ‘Capuchin priest (who) said the book was wholly moral and worth more than a dozen sermons’; and recounting how ‘Ministers of religion praised the book as the most powerful sociological document yet written in Australia’ (189). Drums does note that in the ‘next parish the priest preached on Sunday against it’ (189), but otherwise Park gives the impression that the Church was overwhelmingly supportive.

In Fishing, however, Park recalls only one response from within the Church, which she tellingly refers to as ‘The first nick of the knife at my throat’ (147). Pointedly, it comes at a Mass she and Niland attend to give thanks for winning the Prize. Here they encounter a priest who,

… devoted his sermon to the Herald; its scandalous judgements; wicked books; immorality in print and to what it would lead; young women and their conscienceless slandering of that great race, the Irish. Nay, it was his sincere belief that I had taken the axe to the foundation of Ireland herself, island of saints and scholars. (147–48).

Park describes her and Niland’s appalled response to this priestly diatribe and declares that if such an attack had come her way, ‘Ten years later I would have risen and marched out down the centre aisle, but then I was so shocked, so humiliated’ (148). Well Park did have the opportunity ‘ten years later’ in Drums to conduct a metaphorical march out, but rather she elected to remain in her writerly pew, choosing instead to highlight pockets of support she found within the Church.

It is possible that Park and Niland’s adherence to the Church in the 1950s remained too strong for her to express her truth by calling this castigating priest to account. But it is more likely that her precarious position as a freelance writer meant that she needed the support the Church provided through its network of Catholic libraries, and the influential Catholic press with its guidance to readers regarding Church approved books.

It should not, however, be assumed that in Fishing Park set out to correct the omissions made in Drums in a totally transparent way. The later memoir is not without its own form of wilful amnesia, found in Park’s refusal to mention Drums or acknowledge that she had provided a previous, and on key matters, quite different account of this turning point in her writing life.

Park made clear that when writing Fishing she had diligently reviewed and reconsidered the events surrounding the Herald Prize:

Things happen, they hurt, they change your life, but it’s not good to keep picking at the scab. But for this current book, this autobiography, I had to go through them [public responses] carefully … ‘When did all this hue and cry begin?’ I asked myself as I read through the detritus of a bygone time. (158):

It is also apparent from the recall of conversations used in both books – including telling changes Park makes to dialogue in Fishing⁶ – that her review of this period included consulting Drums. This does not, however, prompt her to refer to her earlier account when writing the later memoir. Fishing is therefore a memoir with an artful forgetfulness regarding its own genesis. While it recovers some of the ‘truths’ that had been overlooked in Drums, Park nonetheless bypasses the opportunity to interrogate the personal circumstances and motives that led to the omissions she made some forty years earlier.

Conclusion

The three memoirs discussed have in common that they were shaped by, and reflected upon, Park’s win in the Herald competition.

In her 1946 Herald article Park wrote in the moment of first shock at her unexpected win; an awareness of the furor that was about to unfold; and the realisation that even a brief, carefully crafted memoir was an opportunity to shape responses to herself and her work. In The Drums Go Bang! she spun a tale of hard-working happy times, full of optimism and love of both her craft and her marriage and working partnership with Niland. In doing so she addressed the significance of the Prize while deftly sidestepping some of the most wounding details of the bitter aftermath and its personal toll. In Fishing in the Styx Park had a different set of truths to tell as she excised the comic bluster of Drums. Fashions in memoir had changed considerably and she was a woman of advancing age taking a final opportunity to shape her legacy. Park had no need to engage readers with the coyness of four decades earlier and she was ready to face and reveal truths that had been withheld in Drums. Nonetheless she passed over the opportunity to reflect on her previous memoir and its calculated representation of her younger self.

The episode of the Herald Prize remained, until the very last, the most public, controversial and defining period of Park’s life and career. For an habitually private person she was left bruised by the public exposure, and the Prize and its outcome remained lifelong components of her self-narrative about which she continued to reveal elements of the ‘truth’.

Park, however, remained wary of the pitfalls of memoir – and of writing in general – as a device for truth-telling. This much she acknowledged in A Fence Around the Cuckoo when she questioned her capacity to ‘have created real characters’ in her fiction, and, as she notes, by extension in her memoir.

It is very difficult to look at your fellows (and yourself, too, by the same token) with total directness. Traditional thinking, concepts and prejudices rise like a mist between us and the object of our observation; it is the way of human life. (253–54)

In Park’s three memoirs discussed above – with their iterative reflections on the Herald Prize – there is a discernible ‘mist’ rising from various deceptions and omissions. Nonetheless when read as a whole, and with hindsight, they prove uncannily revealing of her lived experience as a story-telling freelance writer in mid-century Australia. There is, as she claimed, a ‘truth in there somewhere’.