Good Morning All,

Today, I will be talking about a chapter in Clive James’ book, Unreliable Memoirs called ‘The Valley Of The Killer Snakes’. As the title implies, this is a chapter all about danger, and the various situations in which the author as a child got himself into danger. Through these situations we get to see how Clive James and his mother cope with his constant trouble making. Particularly we look at his mother, and how she must have coped with not only Clive’s constant mischief but at the same time not knowing whether her husband was alive or not. Her husband had been in the war, and though they had been getting some correspondence with him, it had been so censored it almost wasn’t worth it. Throughout all this however, his mother kept a positive outlook on the situation.

 Clive’s behaviour must have been very hard on the mother, who, to all intents and purposes, had to be both mother and father on her own. Though he does feel remorseful as the author looking back, during the time of his childhood he really didn’t listen to his mother, he respected her and loved her but didn’t listen to her. Although this may be a little bit harsh considering the area he grew up in and also his age. Finally, his mother gets news of her husband being all right, but this hope is soon dashed by him being caught in a tornado as he is flying back and the plane crashes, killing everyone on board. This gives Clive his first glimpse of uncontrolled grief, and he was quite disturbed by this. He describes it in all its horror. “There were no sedatives to be had…I was marked for life… I understood nothing beyond the fact that I could not help”

This last statement especially gives us an insight into what Clive really values, his family. He feels helpless in the face of this new adversity that has crippled his mother both mentally and physically, his only wish to be able to do something. Though it is a horrible thing that his father died, this serves only to bring mother and son closer together, tightening his bond with the only parent he ever had. However, fate had not finished with them and during the course of this chapter, two other relatives die, His uncle Ray and his grandfather. Through these two incidents Clive’s attitude is unchanging. He distances himself, hiding his feelings away for another time, though when this time is, the reader isn’t told. Or perhaps he just never lets them out, a possible source of his negative attitude toward his childhood life.

This negativity and lack of confidence, especially in front of other people, leads him to become somewhat of a black sheep. He tries all he can to be friends with people but for all his good intent, he finds himself getting into trouble instead of getting into social circles. His attempts at marbles go horribly wrong after he loses all the precious stones that had been handed down to him by his grandfather in a match with a bully that cheated. A train almost kills him while he’s trying to show off on his bike, though I personally think that perhaps this is a bit exaggerated. Finally however he does make friends, through a system of tunnels that he digs underneath his backyard, though this is short-lived, as a kid gets trapped underneath them and parents have to dig him out. This results in Clive reinforcing his attitude toward self-reliance.

  He doesn’t value his education at all, preferring to spend a day walking up a hill and back to going to school. This resentment of school comes from his failure to be successful at it. This resentment of anything public is direct extension on his self-reliance syndrome, something that had grown in the years of his school life into something resembling him being a hermit. However it didn’t stop him from making friends his bizarre knack for developing games that the local kids liked made him a completely accidental hero. This helped to dissipate some of the hermit in him and he applied himself to school with surprising results. In infant school he had been the class idiot, in primary school he was the class smart-ass. This presented problems in its own but only in relation to the tall poppy syndrome that Australians have.

However, this book would never have been written if the authors values and attitudes had not changed, its existence proved that through many other experiences Clive James has become a different person to the reserved child he was. The person he presents to us as an author is one of respect. He respects his mother, he respects himself and he respects other people and their attitudes. He values the way his mother brought him up and sees now why he might have been a bit of a hassle, while in his childhood he was as clueless to the world as it was to him. He has continued to be a bit of a black sheep but only as a way of not being changed by anyone, he likes the way he is.