A Grand Passion

by Anne De Lisle

  Barbara is pleased and grateful that someone intends to renovate Baddow House, and tells us all of Maryborough will feel the same way. Ian and I are fast realising that the decline and neglect of this Maryborough icon has been a huge source of grief for the locals. ‘Of course you have your very own ghost,’ she adds, all blithe and smiling.

  Now, Ian and I are far too mature to believe in ghosts but we don’t want to hear this. I think our faces express how unwelcome the words are. It is not mentioned again. Barbara would not like to scare us off. She loves her town, is justifiably proud of its history, and who knows how long it would be before someone else was willing to take on Baddow House?

  ‘What did you think about the ghost thing?’ I ask.

  We’re back in the car, heading north.

  ‘It’s rubbish,’ says Ian.

  ‘You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’

  ‘Of course not. Do you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Remember “the Deal”.’

  I nod vigorously. ‘The Deal’ is that I enter into our future at Baddow house in the full knowledge that once a week Ian has to drive to Montville for business commitments. His commercial property investments in Montville and adjacent Maleny are Ian’s bread and butter. They need constant attention. Every week I will be on my own for one or two nights. If I can’t promise to hack it, the whole Baddow House adventure is off.

  ‘It’s just that it’s a big old house with long dark corridors, and it’s all neglected looking,’ I say, more to reassure myself.

  ‘That’s right. Any fool might say it was haunted.’

  ‘It looks like something Norman Bates might live in,’ I add. For people with children less keen on scary movies than mine, I should explain that Norman Bates is the guy with the dead mother who stabs a woman to death in the shower scene in Psycho. I explain this to Ian.

  We change the subject.

  Test results start to filter in. The north-western end of the house has subsided approximately five centimetres, which is a lot, hence the shocking cracks. As Ian pointed out, the house is sitting on clay which expands and contracts with fluctuating moisture levels. Underpinning is necessary to be sure the foundations are sitting on the stable load bearing soil that has been found two metres down.

  We learn that the removal of the verandahs was disastrous for the house. It exposed the clay to the full impact of the elements: the long dry season, the flooding rains of summer. Structural problems were inevitable.

  Removal of the verandahs also condemned doors and windows never meant to face the weather to be continually drenched and sun-blasted. Many window frames are totally rotted out. Restoration of the verandahs is strongly recommended.

  There is evidence of termite activity, but none living. It has been dealt with in the past, but could reoccur. Annual checks are recommended.

  The roof is reasonable. We might get five years out of it. More importantly all the batons and trusses beneath the roof are in good condition.

  Something called ‘tie rods’ are recommended by the engineer to control the bowing of the walls triggered by the subsidence. This means we have to thread metal rods from one side of the house to the other and clamp them to plates on the exterior walls. These can be tightened as much as we like to grip the house together and stop further spread of the walls.

  The cracks will have to be repaired inside and out, the house will have to be repainted inside and out, much of the wooden joinery will have to be replaced or repaired, the floorboards will have to be repaired, sanded and oiled, the house needs rewiring and a new kitchen will have to be built.

  The job is huge but not impossible.

  Craven ideas tempt us, of getting major work done before we move in. It’s enticing to avoid living in untold amounts of mess and debris, inhaling paint dust that’s probably laced with lead.

  But we know there is only one way to get things done the way we want them done. We have to be there.

  CHAPTER 4

  MOVING IN

  IT’S FRIDAY, 29 AUGUST 2003, moving day, and I’m almost beside myself with excitement. I’ve been packed for weeks, counting down the days. Now I’m counting down the hours, the minutes.

  We have decided to camp in the empty house for a few days to give it a good clean before the furniture arrives. Much easier to clean an empty house.

  We travel up in Ian’s ute with our cleaning gear in the back. Also the fridge, stepladder, two fold-up chairs, a couple of bottles of champagne, some bread and cheese and a chamber pot. It pours with rain all the way up and I make Ian stop on the highway to put a tarp over the fridge.

  When we arrive in Maryborough, the sun comes out just as we drive under the poinciana tree. Our poinciana tree. It’s another sign.

  There is a minor crisis when Jan and Barry break the news that settlement is delayed because of a legal hitch their end and that we will have to go away and wait another three days.

  We point out that we have to be there: we have cleaners lined up for the weekend; we have a termite killer lined up; we have packed and driven all the way to Maryborough, for heaven’s sake! Eventually they weaken and give us the keys, emphasising all the while that the house is not officially ours till Monday. Ian and I don’t care. At last we are alone in Baddow House. It’s indescribably thrilling. We run around exploring rooms, bolting up and down the stairs, hanging out of windows. It’s the first time we’ve seen the house more or less empty and the first time we’ve been allowed in without an escort.

  We examine our new pieces of Baddow furniture. There is a large washstand with a thick marble top and little wooden spindles running along the back above the tiles. I wonder how many people have leaned over its marble surface to splash water on their faces in the hundred and fifty or so years since it came to Maryborough. A mulberry and white wash jug and bowl have been left with it.

  There is an inlaid octagonal table in the dining room. Its proportions are fine, the pattern of the inlay intricate. I decide this is a ladies’ table and later am excited to spot it in a grainy photograph of the ladies’ drawing room taken at Baddow in Aldridge days. In the entrance hall is a mirrored, red cedar sideboard that didn’t belong to the Aldridge family, but has been included in the list because it is an early Maryborough piece. Ian particularly loves this. Its proportions are hefty, a more manly item than the delicate inlaid table, with chunky, ornate corbels supporting its weathered cedar surface.

  Lastly there’s a piano in the dining room, complete with patterned inlay and brass candle holders. We learn it was made in the 1860s. My youngest son, Robert, who makes music on anything, be it animal, vegetable or mineral, will be delighted with this acquisition. I experience a stab of pity for this piano, which has surely been enjoying a quiet retirement – it’s in for the shock of its life.

  Our exploration of the house continues into the afternoon. There are some surprises, but nothing too dire. The interior walls are in a worse state than we realised. There are huge damp, mouldy patches exposed by the removal of Jan and Barry’s furniture. Doors are sagging on hinges, there are doors missing, one door has been cut in half, windows that won’t open, rotten windows, missing skirting boards, loose skirting boards, missing mantelpieces, vandalised fireplaces and everywhere – everywhere – cracks and holes in the walls and chunks of loose plaster. But I’m in a state of euphoria and offer up a silent prayer of thanks to Edgar Aldridge.

  Edgar Thomas Aldridge – ‘ET’, as he is affectionately known in Maryborough – built Baddow House in 1883. Aldridge’s Castle, some called it, and it must have seemed like a castle compared to the rough bark shelters Aldridge would have known in 1848 when he first came north with the Palmer brothers and founded what was then known as the village of Wide Bay.

  Henry Palmer later wrote: ‘The arduous work then soon commenced of erecting buildings, and as labour was very scarce then, a good deal of the laborious work devolved on the pioneers who had to work like the Israelites of old “with sword in
hand, and so they builded”.’

  Baddow House was Aldridge’s third house on the site. He started off in a little earthen-floored hut made of wooden slabs with a shingled roof. But Edgar was astute, ambitious and hard-working. He quickly prospered and, when the first land sales were made in the village, he invested heavily and before long had built wharves, wool stores, the popular Bush Inn, a trading post and a number of other small buildings which he leased to less established settlers.

  As he prospered, Aldridge built a second house for himself and wife, Maria. This was a long low-set building, much larger than the first, with wraparound verandahs and a detached kitchen. Quite palatial for its time and place.

  Years slipped by and Aldridge’s empire continued to expand. Before long he owned countless inns, hotels, houses, wool stores and wharves. He took up extensive pastoral leases at Toogoom, Booral and Fraser Island, where he bred Arab horses for the British Indian Army. Soon he was the largest employer in town.

  Edgar’s third and final house was a monument to his life of success and prosperity, and it was a gift for his Maria. But Maria died before Baddow House was completed. Edgar himself died less than two years later. Heartbroken, they say, unable to live without his adored Maria.

  The house passed into the hands of Edgar’s son, Harry, who, according to an article published in the Sunday Mail Magazine in 1989, was a ‘lean and handsome colonial boy with a wild black beard and a lusty appetite for tinted gels and good horses’.

  The story goes on to suggest that back when his father was still alive, Harry had seduced two Aboriginal girls and that when the girls told him they were pregnant, he ‘saddled up the best horse on Baddow and bolted’.

  According to the article, the girls had both been tutored by missionaries. They were Christians and they were familiar with European ways. Abandoned and pregnant, they went to Edgar.

  Edgar had come from a well-to-do family in England. They were merchant bankers and Anglican clergy, and had an ancestry that could be traced back to Alfred the Great. Since arriving in the colony of New South Wales in 1839, Edgar, with his proud lineage, had set about building his own small empire.

  The Aldridges were ‘toffs, part of Maryborough’s Anglican Establishment’. Edgar’s reaction to the pregnancy situation was, therefore, the last thing the ‘Establishment’ expected. He astonished his world by demanding his boy marry one of the girls. It was a reaction that proved Edgar not only an empire-builder, but unusually humanitarian for his day and age.

  Some details of the Mail magazine’s story are clearly inaccurate. Records show that the first pregnancy happened many years before the second, for example. But it is fact that the pregnancies occurred, that the children were born, that Harry Aldridge married one of the girls, Lappie, and that the second girl was sent to another Aldridge property, where she and her daughter, Jessie, were cared for.

  It is also fact that Harry Aldridge’s marriage to Lappie was not easily achieved. In Maryborough, no minister would unite the mixed race couple. Harry and his bride were forced to take a ship to New Zealand where, I can only suppose, mixed marriages (such as between the Maoris and white settlers) were more common and easier to obtain than in the fledgling state of Queensland. Harry and Lappie returned to Maryborough as man and wife.

  At first Harry and Lappie lived well at Baddow House, the Aldridge name ensuring Lappie was treated with the courtesy and respect she might not otherwise have received in a day when attitudes toward black skin were so marred by bigotry.

  Sadly not all remained well. Whether Harry was less astute than his father or whether it was as a result of the great bank crash in the 1890s we can only guess, but after Edgar’s death in 1888 the fortune he had amassed began to wane. Harry died in 1910 with a reputed nine pounds to his name. Two years later the banks repossessed Baddow House. Lappie and the now grown children were forced out.

  Rumour has it that Harry’s eldest daughter, Esse, was broken by the grief of having to leave her beloved home and wept bitter tears at the forced eviction. The story goes that as she wept she wandered the rooms of the house she would never enter again and wiped her tears onto the walls.

  Today, surveying the cracked and crumbling walls, it’s as though Esse’s tears have melted the plaster.

  Ian and I spend the day setting up our camp and getting organised. We’ve bought a new bed in Maryborough, to be delivered that day. It’s a king-size bed. Neither of us have had a king-size bed before, but feel the proportions of the bedroom demand it. The deliverymen arrive just after lunch and kindly enquire if we know we have bought a haunted house.

  We realise there is going to be no escape from this sort of thing. A few days before moving, a friend in Montville tells me she has grown up in Maryborough. ‘Baddow House!’ she exclaims, on hearing our news. ‘I can’t believe you have bought Baddow House. That is the Ghost House of my childhood!’

  It is mid-afternoon. We have four people booked to come the next day to help clean, but tonight we just want to get down all the frayed and ragged curtains that pollute the rooms. Out comes the stepladder. There are thirty-eight windows in Baddow House, every one curtained. We are racing the clock and the last of the daylight. We know it will be all but impossible to work after dark. The light fittings are few and far between. And besides, though neither Ian nor I have mentioned the Approaching Night, each is aware of the unacknowledged thing we have to face. It lies between us, a tangible dread we try to conceal with our determined chatter, our busy hands, our cheery demeanour. We want to be finished, cleaned up and snug in our new bed at a safe, early hour. So we are quick, efficient, united in our purpose.

  Some curtains appear to have once been red velvet, but now hang in faded, tattered, pink ribbons. Other, lace, curtains are less ruined but so clogged with dust, webs, dead insects and mould spores that we have to hold our breath as each is gently lowered to the ground. Ian stands on the stepladder and passes them to me one at a time. I am terrified I’ll drop one and send clouds of choking muck into our lungs.

  Daylight is beginning to fade as we drag the last of the curtains outside into the garden. Tomorrow they can go to the tip along with the garden gnomes we’ve discovered inhabiting the shrubbery.

  I’m determined not to let darkness fall without locating every light switch in the house so as twilight descends I run around flicking them all on. The dusty, bare globes seem pathetically dim.

  We are exhausted, filthy and starving. We decide to have showers before it’s completely dark, then go out and get something to eat.

  The nearest food is Red Rooster. As we pull up at the door, a woman in the car park starts yelling at us. We are befuddled and bone weary, and we have no idea why this total stranger is so angry with us. Ian winds down his window.

  ‘You’re in a handicapped zone!’ she is yelling.

  Shamefaced, we re-park and slink into the restaurant, hoping no one inside overheard the encounter. But I’m hopeful suddenly: if we’re too tired to spot a handicapped zone maybe we’ll be tired enough to sleep soundly through a night in the Ghost House of Maryborough.

  ‘Hello Baddow!’ shouts Ian, flinging open the front door with awesome force.

  Lots of noise and movement are the key to confidence, we’ve decided, but our words echo in the hollow rooms, they disappear along passageways and are sucked up the stairwell. Though arriving before the furniture was a great idea so far as the cleaning goes, we begin to realise that entering a dimly lit, derelict, haunted house is a hundred times creepier when that house is bare and echoing.

  ‘Hello!’ roars Ian again and again. I know he’s as scared as me, but he marches boldly forth, being all manly and brave. ‘HELLO!’ he bellows and I’m afraid if he ‘Hello!’s one more time, he might provoke an answer.

  We mount the cedar staircase talking and laughing, but our hearts pound and quail. What’s wrong with us? Two sensible adults and we’re spooked just because the house is old, decrepit, and everyone keeps telling us it’s Ghost Cent
ral.

  Are we men or mice?

  Men, we are determined to be – at least one man and one woman.

  I remember a dream I have had many times in my life, both as a child and an adult. I find an amazing old house for sale. It has turrets and grand staircases, great chambers with murals, reliefs and frescos. There are domed ceilings adorned with Renaissance art. But it’s haunted. No one will buy it and it’s oh so cheap. The dream becomes a battle of my will against my fear. I want the house, if only I can conquer the fear. There are some rooms I just can’t enter. I open doors and try to cross thresholds, but there is always a wall of resistance so powerful I can’t force my way through. I know this wall is constructed of a malignant evil and I’m terrified, but if I don’t overcome my fear, I can’t have the house.

  Mounting the staircase at Baddow I sense no evil, but I am wretched and sweaty. I remember the Deal and wonder how I’m going to keep my part of the bargain.

  We go to the only bathroom – such a long, long way from our bedroom – and clean our teeth. I can’t bring myself to look in the mirror for fear of what I might see behind me. There is no way on this earth or another that either of us is going to be visiting the bathroom alone at night in the foreseeable future. Hence the precious chamber pot, safely stowed beside our new bed.

  Ian falls instantly asleep. I control the urge to hit him. I was supposed to be allowed to go to sleep first, but now I’m alone in my wakefulness, rigid and perspiring, ears straining. I’m five years old again, believing in the pack of wolves beneath my bed. It’s the same routine. Eyes tight shut, sheet up to chin, vulnerable arms and legs not allowed near the edge of the bed where danger lurks. But it’s no longer wolves I fear, it’s the weeping of Esse and the laughter of a lean and handsome colonial boy.