Halfway through the second exercise book I glanced at what I’d been doing. It was all London, and I hadn’t even started to cover all that could be written about London.

I wrote a stern note to myself:

To Do:

1. Sketch the rest of the London scenes

2. Assemble London chronologically

3. MOVE ON TO AUSTRALIA!!!!

Only near the end of that second handwritten book was there anything set in Australia, a scene in which Wiseman was looking at the Hawkesbury and comparing it to London:

Looking down at the brown river, where he could see the water seething and dimpling with the flood tide, he said, think of it as the Thames before civilization, my dear. Here we are standing in Bermondsey with our feet sinking in the mire and the water pouring in—Butler’s Buildings could go right here and not feel out of place!

Jane stared out glumly. He saw her trying to force a smile, but the corners of her mouth still turned down.

It is the same width as the Thames, look pet, and brown like our own river, the tide comes in and out the same way; this is the Thames, as it was seen by our ancestors, before even the Romans.

Like me, Wiseman was putting off making the move to the southern hemisphere.

The hard part of the writing wasn’t finding the words—they seemed to come reasonably easily. If they started to come reluctantly, I stopped and began with something else. The hard part was finding the picture. Once I could see and hear the moment, I could write it. But there were long gaps between one burst of writing and another, times of frustration when I couldn’t get the picture clear, or couldn’t see anything at all. The worst times were when I tried to write the scene anyway, throwing words at something I couldn’t see or hear. The phrases would come more and more slowly, each sentence an effort. I’d read it back and groan aloud at the deadness of it. It was dead because it was phoney. I was just making it up out of words, so words were all I had: clichés, pedestrian images, abstractions. No pictures, no sounds, no smells—no life.

If I could get the picture in my mind—Wiseman looking up at the columns in Christ Church Spitalfields, the white marble steps under his feet—I could set it all in motion and see what would happen. Perhaps it’s like improvising in the theatre: you have the situation, and you make up what might happen next. Sooner or later you get to a point where it all stops, and then you have to backtrack and start again, or jump sideways until an incident begins to unfold and the writing flows.