We start to notice that every day when Calvin comes to work, there’s a guy driving the car for him.
‘Greg’s a mate,’ Calvin tells us. ‘He’s doing the driving for me till I get my licence back.’
Bad luck for Calvin, getting done for drink driving. But good luck for us, as we discover Greg, who turns out to be such a treasure.
Greg becomes our regular ‘outdoor guy’. He lives at Mungar with his wife, two daughters, two dogs, cats, numerous chickens, budgies, cockatiels and assorted guinea pigs. We do a headcount one day over morning coffee and work out that Greg is responsible for ninety-eight souls. Make that one hundred, if you count Ian and me, for we rapidly learn to count on Greg.
Greg’s first serious test is to build a retaining wall on the embankment between the house and the river flat. This bank is thickly overgrown with guava and macadamia nut trees, bougainvillea, various ferns and, unfortunately, the noxious cats’ claw vine which tightly trusses up all. Eradicating the cats’ claw is on our list for next winter, by which time, we hope, the urgent work in the house will be done. For now, we want to gain a bit of extra ground at the house level, hence the wall, which will enable us to fill a new stretch with fresh soil and plant a hedge.
It’s tough work, digging post holes into a steep bank, pouring concrete and setting vertical posts into place. But after the first few days Greg gains an unexpected apprentice. Ian’s son David returns from a two-year stint in England and Europe. Twenty-five kilos lighter, pale as a witchetty grub, he looks an unlikely figure to be thrust out into the tropical sun with a crow bar in one hand and a mattock in the other.
Though he’s too polite to say so, Greg probably wonders what sort of help he’s going to get from such a wan-looking lad. Summer is fast approaching and the days are heating up, but David readjusts to the climate of his native land within hours and between them they throw up the retaining wall with impressive speed and skill. By the time David leaves for Brisbane he’s as brown as the macadamia nuts.
I’m excited about this wall because I’ve been itching to plant a hedge. My collection of frail little camellias and rondeletias wait patiently in their pots. The plan is to alternate them all along the edge of the wall. The rondeletias will grow faster and give us a fairly instant effect with their broad, glossy leaves and sweet-scented blooms. But it’s the camellias that will make my hedge a real treat once a year. Planted in loose fill, they love their new home and reward us with plenty of flowers in their very first season.
We get our first heavy rain of the summer and it pours really hard while I’m in the shower. I jump out, grab a towel and race to find Ian. ‘There’s a burst pipe,’ I tell him.
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. But I could hear water gushing while I was in the bathroom.’
We sprint back upstairs, expecting floods and chaos. There’s nothing. We stand in the bathroom listening and can clearly hear tumbling, spilling water. But the house is dry.
‘Could it be inside a wall?’ I wonder aloud.
‘I don’t think so.’
We follow the noise and realise it’s coming from a mystery pipe that enters the bathroom through the ceiling above the shower cubicle and disappears out through one of the exterior walls. It’s a fat pipe, built to take plenty of water, and there’s plenty of water in it right now.
‘It’s rainwater from the roof,’ Ian deduces, ‘it must be from the Swimming Pool.’
The Swimming Pool is our name for the flat, open water tank on the roof of the Keep, directly above the bathroom. It is concrete lined, about four metres by five. This is also the haunt of one of our rumoured ghosts, a young girl who is said to have drowned in it and who, we’re told, can still sometimes be seen during thunderstorms.
Since hearing this, I try not to think about the Swimming Pool when I’m standing underneath it naked in the shower. Nor am I keen to loiter in the bathroom during thunderstorms.
We can’t work out why water from the pool would be drained inside the house. It is a mystery that needs solving and so we go to see Patrick and Elizabeth at Mavisbank.
‘Gravity-fed water for use in the house,’ Patrick explains.
‘Ah,’ say Ian and I in unison.
‘That’s why they would have put the scullery beneath the bathroom. They’re the only two rooms that would have required water.’
‘Ah,’ we chorus again.
‘The kitchen was a separate building,’ Elizabeth adds. ‘They would have drawn water for the kitchen from a different tank.’
This much we knew. The old kitchen had stood quite a distance from the house, above the cellar. Above the tunnel too, if those theories are to be believed.
The innovation of all this amazes me. I imagine Harry, his wife Lappie, daughter Esse and her siblings all washing in plentiful fresh water in their second-floor bathroom. No need for a poor little maid to trudge up and down with pitchers of water. Many decades later, when mains water was connected to the house, the pipe was simply re-routed out through the wall and down into the underground stormwater drain, into the territory of pigs’ heads and other souvenirs from town. It seems a shame to waste so much good water. Perhaps later, when the new roof and guttering have been fitted, we can collect our rainwater in one of the underground tanks. But for now, there are too many other priorities.
Calvin tells us we should vacuum out the attic space above the bedroom ceilings. Apparently it is standard practice in houses of this age, especially when the ceilings are made of tongue and groove boards. Otherwise all the accumulated muck of the ages can work its way through the ceiling and keep the rooms below showered with fine dust, ad infinitum.
We hire a man with an impressive industrial vacuum cleaner. The floor space up there is about two hundred and forty square metres and it takes him and his apprentices two days. He vacuums out over nine hundred kilograms of accumulated dust. Almost a tonne! We take photos of the massive sacks he keeps dragging down the stairs.
There’s a set-back when the final sack is almost full. It’s sitting on the upstairs landing, as tall as me and considerably fatter. Its bulging mass throbs and pulses as a hose as thick as an elephant’s trunk sucks the last of the attic detritus into its belly. I’ve just come upstairs to see how they’re going when without warning there is a devastating rupture. The bag explodes and its contents, under pressure from the powerful hose, erupt with the force of a Mount Vesuvius. Suddenly our upstairs landing, adjacent corridor and stairwell are Pompeii before the archaeologists moved in.
There’s a stunned silence. Then the operator stammers apologies and dispatches apprentices in all directions to get brooms, mops and buckets.
‘No problem,’ I say, ‘I’ll do it.’
The operator scratches his dusty head in surprise. ‘You?’
‘Yes, me. I’ll clean it up.’
‘You’re sure?’ His eyes are the only living thing visible through the volcanic ash.
‘Absolutely,’ I say.
I am not being generous. Nor am I being a martyr. I have seen apprentices at work with brooms and I don’t want this calamity spread any further than it has already.
Luckily the bedroom doors are all closed and while the French doors at the end of the hallway are open it’s not a windy day. I want to yell Don’t breathe! Don’t sneeze! Don’t move! Just go! ‘I’ll be fine,’ I say, forcing myself to sound calm. ‘I’m used to this sort of thing, what with all the renovating.’
He hesitates a moment or two, then nods to his boys and in a flash they’ve extracted the hose from the manhole in the ceiling, gathered up the equipment – including the fragments of torn bag – and gone.
I see them off, then return to Ground Zero. First I carefully shut the French doors, then I fetch bags, buckets, a broom and a shovel. I gather up the cushions off the day bed on the landing and take them outside where I smack them vigorously before returning to my shovel and broom.
I start with the architraves, doors and window sills. It tak
es hours – there is just so much of the stuff. I’m constantly up and down the stairs, taking bucketfuls to the wheelie bin. I’m a bit scared to open the bedroom doors but when I do, discover it could have been far worse. Inside each door there are a few square metres coated with the extra fine dust that managed to leak between door and architrave. I gather this up then wash the floors.
The clean-up takes half a day. But, after all, it’s wonderful to know that the attic is now pristine. I look up at the manhole cover in the ceiling. According to Maryborough lore, Harry Aldridge once spent two days locked in our attic.
The story of Harry’s sojourn in the attic begins with his Aboriginal wife, Lappie, hearing that some of her people were out to get Harry. The Aborigines of the day were no more enthusiastic about mixed race unions than the Europeans and Lappie – so the story goes – held grave fears for Harry’s safety and for that of her children. Knowing a raid was imminent, she urged Harry and the children, Esse, May, Daniel and Harry Junior, to conceal themselves. With the help of a long, long ladder, the manhole cover was removed and Harry, with the children, duly climbed up into the attic.
Lappie assumed she’d be safe from her own kind, so she didn’t hide. But when the raiders came, they would not be placated. Perhaps frustrated to find their true quarry missing, they knocked Lappie on the head and carried her away. It was a blow she was said to never fully recover from.
Harry had no way of knowing what had happened and he had no way of getting out of the attic without help. No one but Lappie knew he and the children were up there. So for two days and nights they languished in stifling heat without food or water.
The story goes on to suggest that it was the workers in the fields who came to his rescue. Known as Kanakas, they were Pacific islanders, brought to Queensland to work in the spreading sugarcane plantations. Some came willingly, on the promise of money, but many were coerced aboard ships and carried to Queensland in what was actually a slave trade. The practice was known as blackbirding and was one of the most shameful events in Queensland history.
The islanders at Baddow had their duties in the fields and their own quarters some distance away, so would not normally have gone near the big house. But they must have noticed that the place seemed deserted and dared to creep in. The rooms were empty and silent. There was no sign of their employer and his wife. There was no sign of the four children. Clearly all was not well.
They called out for their master, and presumably heard weak cries for help. Harry and his children were discovered and released and a search party was sent out to find Lappie.
Somewhere, not far away, the party of islanders caught up with the kidnappers. Lappie was rescued and taken home to her family. But the fate of the kidnappers was not to be envied. Legend has it that the islanders killed and cannibalised them. Standard practice for a defeated enemy.
Ian and I love the stories we’re told. No doubt some are true, some are nearly true and some are gross distortions of the truth. We don’t mind; we love them all, and we love that our home has such a fascinating past.
A passion for history was one of the first things we realised we shared. On some of our early outings, long before we moved to Maryborough, we’d babble on so much about times gone by that we’d forget to eat, drink or notice the passing of the day. I love the social trivia of yesteryear, the behaviour, the manners, the intense formality that had sons calling fathers ‘sir’ and wives calling husbands by title. And I’m agog at the extraordinary stoicism of women.
I fascinate Ian with lurid tales of the sexuality of Queen Elizabeth I, with the implication made by many historians that her anatomy was ‘not like other women’. So just what did she have down there? It’s hard to believe she’d been born a hermaphrodite. Knowing how desperately her father yearned for a son, you’d think the midwife would have been mighty swift to declare the baby a boy if there had been a hint of male genitalia. A mystery that will never be solved.
Ian loves the glory of battles won against amazing odds, of bravery, chivalry and derring-do. He likes the trivia too, and once told me about the pickling of Nelson’s body.
Generally, those who die at sea are buried at sea, which is logical when you consider the evils of transporting rotting bodies back to port in the days before refrigeration. But Nelson was a hero, deserving a grand funeral back home. So in order to preserve his body until they reached port, his crew dropped him into a barrel of rum which, in some circles, is still known today as the Blood of Nelson.
This was a story I’d never heard before and will never now forget. Unlike Ian, I’m just a tiny bit put off drinking rum.
Most of all, we both love Scottish history. Early in our relationship, we were out driving when Ian asked me who my greatest hero was.
‘Fact or fiction?’ I said.
‘Both. Either.’
I didn’t have to think for long.
‘Mmm … fiction is more compelling at the moment. It’s got to be Young Lochinvar. Walter Scott’s Lochinvar.’
Ian took his eyes off the road for a heart-stopping, accident-inducing instant and stared at me.
‘Watch out!’ I yelled. We swerved back onto the straight and narrow. Luckily we were on a little-used stretch of country lane.
Ian apologised, confessing his passion for those particular verses. Suddenly we were both laughing and quoting lines like mad.
So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,
there never was knight like the young Lochinvar.
Ian admitted that in another life he’d like to have been Young Lochinvar.
Lochinvar is the character who hears his beloved is being forced by her father to wed a laggard in love, and a dastard in war, and rides his charger up the steps at the wedding feast, swings the fair Ellen onto his saddle and makes away with her.
For the rest of the day, Ian called me Ellen and I called him Young Lochinvar. Instantly we agreed that when the time came to set up house together, we’d call our home Lochinvar.
Thus Baddow House has another, secret, name. Baddow House is our Lochinvar.
CHAPTER 10
GEORGIE’S GHOST
SINCE WE HAVE BEEN living at Baddow, we have been subjected to an escalating number of ghost stories, but my courage is maintained by the continuing presence of Georgie. She comes and goes, visiting friends and getting organised for her trip to England, but she times it so she’s always with me when Ian’s away. I’m very grateful for several reasons, but Ian and I are agreed not to tell her one of them: my dread of being left to spend my first night alone in the Ghost House.
We get strangers walking in off the street, knocking on our door and asking, ‘Do you know your house is haunted?’
Tradesmen, deliverymen, neighbours, raffle ticket sellers and every other person who has cause to come to our front door reiterates the news until it’s almost laughable. Almost.
When I get the car serviced, the girl from the garage drops me home and sees where I live. ‘Baddow House!’ she says, ‘creeeepy …’
‘Yes,’ I say dryly, ‘so people tell us.’
We are told repeatedly of the girl who drowned in ‘the Swimming Pool’. I can never imagine why she was up on the roof.
A popular story is that if you walk down to the river and look up at the house, you can see faces at the windows. We try this, but the only images we see in the glass are reflections of trees in the park.
There are voices, footsteps, glimpses of the past, the woman on the stairs. You name it, we’ve got it. I think I’m starting to get cured. It’s like being treated with immersion therapy for a phobia: you fear moths and they shove you in a room full of moths. You weep and wail, your heart pounds, your pulses almost erupt but, eventually, exhaustion and the realisation that the moths have not the power to eat you alive sets in.
But I’m to learn that daring to believe in progress can be a dangerous thing.
Ian is away again. Through my sleep, I’m vaguely aware that Georgie’s bedroom light is on. I
t glows through the glass panel above our connecting door but I’m too groggy to do much wondering and soon fall back to sleep.
In the morning we meet downstairs as usual, to get ready for our fat-busting walk. ‘Did you sleep well?’ I ask routinely, tugging on my running shoes.
‘Actually I had a really bad night,’ she says, sitting down.
I pause in my lacing, remembering. ‘Come to think of it, your light was on late.’
‘Yes. I turned it off when I went to bed and had almost gone to sleep when something made me open my eyes. I’m surprised you didn’t hear me scream.’
She’s got all my attention now. Lacing forgotten, I’m riveted.
‘I saw a woman lying on the bed next to me,’ she says.
‘You saw what?’
‘She was just lying there, on her side, staring at me like this.’ Georgie opens her big eyes wide in a parody of a hideous zombie-like stare.
‘You must have been dreaming,’ I say.
‘No. I swear she was there. The light was off but I could see her clearly. She was sort of glowing, and just staring at me with this fixed look.’
I’m getting sweaty listening to this.
‘I grabbed for the light switch and then she was gone. I left the light on all night. I nearly got into bed with you.’
‘You should have,’ I say. ‘What did she look like?’
‘Actually, she looked a bit like you, Anne, shoulder-length hair and a fringe. But her hair was dark.’
A Grand Passion Page 9