A Grand Passion

by Anne De Lisle

  Mike is very tall and rangy. His appearance changes nearly every time we see him, thanks to scissors and a razor. There is long hair in a pony-tail, then there is cropped-very-short hair. There is a beard, then no beard. Then there is a partial beard – a sort of goatie – for a moment, then that is gone too. I wonder if he is going about incognito for some reason and want to tell him that as there is no one else in town anywhere near as tall as him, he has little hope of getting away with it.

  Mike is only thirty-one, but has had his Master Builders’ Licence since he was twenty-one. We are impressed. Clearly he is bright and capable. He is also the only person who has actually approached us to do work here instead of being hunted down and coerced.

  We offer him the job of building the verandahs.

  It is sixty-five years since verandahs encircled Baddow House, and the last person to enjoy the use of these verandahs was Mr Hugh Biddles.

  Hugh Biddles bought Baddow House in 1915 and lived here with his wife, Alice Charlotte, until the end of their days. In earlier years, Hugh had qualified and worked as an engineer in North Queensland, assisting in the erection some of the largest sugar mills then in the north. But before long the lure of the pearling industry took the young Hugh to Western Australia, where his brother was making a fortune.

  Hugh worked hard and soon acquired his own boats but, after a particularly lucrative season, with shell and pearls worth thousands of pounds aboard his schooner, a severe storm off the coast of Broome brought his pearling days to an end.

  The schooner went down in the heavy seas, and all the crew were lost but for Hugh, who spent eleven hours in the water before managing to make it to shore on a desolate stretch of coastline a long way from civilisation. The story goes that he had to walk for miles and miles along the rough coastline with nothing but a torn suit of pyjamas as protection from the tropical sun. He reached safety, badly sunburnt and suffering a chronic back injury that would plague him for the rest of his days.

  Hugh returned to Maryborough, bought Baddow House, and by all accounts led a very happy – and uneventful – life with his wife, the beautiful, gentle Alice Charlotte.

  Legend has it that Hugh was the one to start the ghost stories, that when the miscreant youth of town used to raid his fruit orchards, he would creep around the upstairs verandah with a sheet over his head to scare them off. I believe this is when the house first became known as the Ghost House.

  Hugh Biddles’ great-niece, Margaret Jacobson, still lives in Maryborough today. It is she who has told us how unsafe the verandah floorboards were when she was a child, and that she and her brothers were banned from playing on the upstairs verandah. It suits me to believe that the verandahs were pulled down because they were unfit to walk on, not because the iron balustrading was needed for bullets and missiles.

  It’s fascinating to listen to Margaret talk of the majestic garden with camellias half the height of the house, and of her aunt, Alice Charlotte, who loved the piano and sat in our sunny living room to play. She describes the dining room, the position of Hugh’s leather-backed chairs, the meals at the big table where the children ate in obedient silence.

  Her stories make me realise that the house doesn’t belong to Ian and me at all. We’re just lucky enough to be occupiers, as others have been before us and will continue to do in the future. It makes me wonder who’s going to live here after we’re dead and gone, and whether my grandchildren will visit subsequent owners and say, this is where Granny sat and wrote her stories.

  Alice Biddles died of cancer in 1934 and shortly afterwards Hugh’s back injury worsened. He spent the final two years of his life bedridden, and died five years after his sweet Alice. He died upstairs in the Blue Room and was buried from the house.

  When I stand in that room, I think of Hugh laid out at peace. I imagine him a big man, deep-chested from his pearl-diving days. But the large frame is made brittle by disease. It is shelled out and hollow. How strange to think that, but for the passage of time, there he would be. And so many others, too, in their own, individual fractions of time.

  Edgar Aldridge in his brand new home, Harry in the garden, a housemaid at the copper in the scullery, Esse stepping out of the carriage, her slippered foot on the steps, a hand on the balustrade, touching where I touch now.

  I’m certain that Edgar Aldridge and Hugh Biddles would be as excited as we are to witness the metamorphosis that is about to commence.

  Michaelangelo said, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’

  I kiss the wall and count my blessings. Right now I think I’m the luckiest woman in the world.

  Are Ian and I absurd to be as excited as we are about the verandahs? Perhaps. Though renovating inside the house is giving us a huge sense of achievement as well as a beautiful place to live, the interior is happening in bits and pieces, one room at a time. It is a transformation that is creeping upon us. The verandahs, however, are huge. The verandahs will happen as one big, life-altering event and change Baddow House forever. Once again the house will look as it did in Edgar Aldridge’s day. Once again it will be Aldridge’s Castle – or is it our castle?

  The first step is to get plans drawn up. We approach architect Marian Graham. I instantly like Marian. She’s a successful businesswoman in town and very professional, which could be daunting, but I sense an irreverence in her that I find attractive: a bit of sarcasm here, a raised eyebrow there. She warns us that with our heritage listing it will be a good six months from plan drawing time to building starting time. Every decision has to go before panels, committees and hearings at the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA is the umbrella under which sits Queensland Heritage.

  The aim is to return Baddow House as closely as possible to the way it used to be. Fortunately we are in possession of a stack of photographs of the house in its glory days. Some of these show close detail of the verandahs: front on, side on, roof angles, balustrading and columns. This is a huge boon.

  The original verandahs on Baddow House were both upstairs and down. They were ten feet wide and three hundred and forty feet long. They included sixteen moulded brick and plaster columns, thirty-six iron pillars – each one sixteen feet tall – and there was well over three hundred feet of iron lace work. It’s a mammoth job, but we know we must do it well or not at all.

  The EPA is understandably keen for us to go ahead with the restoration of the Baddow House verandahs. But there are immense frustrations. We learn that we’re not supposed to change so much as a toilet roll holder without permission. We have already repaired cracks in the walls, sanded and painted several rooms and peeled some wallpaper out of the entrance hall that held no historic value, being only about twelve years old.

  These things, we are shocked to discover, are against the Rules. Ian and I had assumed that heritage listing means you don’t alter the fabric of the building. You don’t knock a hole in a wall to make a new door. You don’t build extensions without permission. But a coat of paint? We are gob-smacked. We are told to fill in special forms to explain our reasons for having commenced work without Permission.

  We must be wearing looks of rebellion, because we are then told firmly that it is within the power of the department to deny us permission to do such things as watering the garden or mowing the lawn.

  Politeness restrains us from shrieking at the absurdity. Politeness, but also the sense that it would be really bad to get on the wrong side of these people. We need their co-operation.

  ‘Not that we would be likely to exercise our authority over such particular issues as watering the garden,’ the official tells us, ‘but the rules are in place for good reason. Take a rare cactus garden,’ he says.

  We dutifully picture said spiky, prickly garden.

  ‘To over-water such a garden might kill the cacti, hence the rules. It gives us the ability to protect whatever may chance to need protection.’

  We do understand. We know there are cowboys out there who might choose to dese
crate a listed property. It’s just that we would have preferred a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

  We submit our plans. Marian was right. Weeks tick by. We learn that the Committee meet for decision making once a month. If you make it onto the agenda for any given month there is no guarantee that your case will get heard. Other items on the agenda might take longer than expected to discuss and resolve. If you miss out, you have to wait till the next month and hope your case will be heard that time.

  Months tick by. We make phone calls. We write letters. We explain how important it is to get the verandahs back on the house to ensure its stability. We point out that every time the wind blows, more plaster drops off the outside. We point out that every time it rains, dampness seeps through the porous render and stains the interior walls we’ve already painted.

  There’s nothing more we can do, the situation is beyond our control. The wait is incredibly frustrating.

  But Baddow House is, after all, a wonderful place to be, and winter in Maryborough an unequalled delight. It’s impossible to believe a more perfect environment and climate could exist anywhere in the world. In winter daytime temperatures hover around twenty-four degrees, the minimums can drop into low single figures, though are usually closer to ten or twelve degrees. The days are clear, the nights are cool, not cold, the skies are blue and the air is clean, crisp and soft. With the interior of the house almost under control, and our verandah building halted by the EPA, Ian and I find the time to attack the garden through these perfect, halcyon days of our first winter.

  Of course we can’t touch the ground surrounding the house, but we pamper our poincianas and attend to the hedge running along our roadside boundary; feeding, mulching, watering and coaxing. I plant fistfuls of freesias between the hedge and the road. I would like this hedge to be ten metres tall and three metres thick; an impenetrable barrier between us and the outside world. This is not going to happen. The hedge is a weeping lilly pilly which, we learn, is likely to reach only two metres in ideal conditions. I threaten to rip it out and plant something else, something that will grow towering and dense, something that will block out the world with its mighty dimensions. But Ian tempers and soothes my misanthropic tendencies. He doesn’t mind being spotted by passers-by – he even waves to them. I’m forced to face reality: Ian has a friendlier disposition than I. I love gates. I love barriers and seclusion. I make secret plans to plant a second hedge closer to the house when the building is finished.

  Though in these days of the long wait, it is hard to believe our building will ever be finished. It is January when we first see Marian about our plans for the verandah. It is September 2004 when we get the go ahead.

  After so many months of waiting, Ian and I are nearly delirious with excitement. We know that the verandahs will transform our lives. There will be hectares of space to sit and dream and watch the river go by. I imagine lots of leafy tropical plants, cane furniture and chilled glasses of Pimms. All very Somerset Maugham.

  It is one year and one month since we moved into Baddow House. And after so long living with the bedlam of interior renovations, I’m relaxing in the knowledge that we are through the worst, that we are almost there. All we have to do is shut the doors and windows and the noise, mess and chaos of verandah building will be firmly out of sight and mind.

  For me, just as exciting is knowing that the minute the verandahs are finished I will be able to plant my long-awaited and yearned for garden around the perimeter of the house.

  For a year I’ve been nursing poor little cuttings taken from my previous garden. They’ve languished pitifully through the tropical summer in their hot plastic pots, bravely hanging on even though at times I’ve been too snowed under in the house to remember them. Finally they are about to be part of the garden of my dreams. I lie in bed at night planning the garden: the height, shape, texture of every corner. I make mental lists of hardy heat and sun-tolerant flowers that I can grow along the hot north-western wall, and further lists of the more delicate varieties that will survive on the gentler eastern front. All I need do is sit back and wait for completion of the verandahs.

  Mike and his team have been poised to start the minute we get word, and are here the day our permission arrives.

  The first task is to dig holes for the foundation pillars. An impressive machine arrives and soon we have sixteen two-metre deep, one-metre wide holes surrounding the house. Bear traps, we call them, and speculate on the improbability of getting out if we fell into one. We have guests from Montville staying the first night of the digging and, as one of them has a regular habit of fertilising the citrus trees with his own special brand of uric acid, we ban night-time rambles round the garden. We worry about Topsy, but she belies her weight and poor eyesight, and nimbly leaps any holes in her path.

  After such a long wait, it is oh so thrilling to see these holes. There might be nothing above ground yet, but the holes are a sign of things to come. Men have been and broken the ground: evidence exists that we are underway.

  It’s tempting to peer down into them. I wonder about Edgar and Maria’s second home, built on this site before our house. Surely there must be remains of those original foundations, evidence of an earlier existence. We know there were terraced gardens here, possibly Baby Joey’s grave, there could be any amount of odds and ends underground: old coins, broken crockery, garden tools. Or, best of all, an entry to the tunnel.

  At Latimer House my cousins, Pat and David, and I used to look for scraps of interest in the garden and under floorboards. David was the patient one, best at finding things, and had his own ‘museum’ of coins, pottery, broken clay pipe, animal bones, a quill pen from behind a sash window, and even the rusted skeleton of an old revolver which provoked endless wondering. Was it accidentally dropped and lost? Was it thrown out with the rubbish? Or was it buried deliberately: a murder weapon concealed?

  David is now an archaeologist, a specialist in archaeometallurgy, which means he’s an expert in ancient metals, particularly iron and steel. He’s spent a lot of time on arms and armour, and can identify anything from Ancient Greek to Saxon to modern. I’d love to have him here at Baddow with his eye and instinct for a find. He’s promised to come one day, though our bear traps will be well filled by then.

  The next day, Mike tells us that one of his men has defected and his team is down to two: John, the foreman, and Sarah, the apprentice. Mike will be here sometimes, we learn, but mostly he’s off-site, either at home doing office work or out scouting for new projects.

  I’ve never seen a female builder’s apprentice before but Sarah is as strong as John and wears her tool belt with the swagger of a bloke. She swears and curses like one too. Topsy is terrified of her to start with, but comes round with bribes of food. John and Sarah both love dogs and Topsy doubles in size before the building is half complete.

  Mind you, it is a long, long time before the building is half complete.

  Bearers and joists have to be positioned first. The bearers are huge and heavy. I marvel at Sarah’s bearer-wielding power. She strides about, lifting, sawing and hammering, bracing her powerful limbs to hoist the mighty slabs of hardwood. But she doesn’t show up one morning and we learn she’s had an epileptic fit. John is on his own.

  Sarah recovers from her seizure, but is not allowed back to work until she has written confirmation from her doctor that her new medication can guarantee no more fits. As an epileptic, building is deemed risky business. She could be up high on scaffolding when a fit strikes. She could be handling dangerous power tools, putting herself and others at risk. It’s weeks before she returns.

  John, labouring on his own, is a tower of strength, reliability and cheerfulness. A real Trojan. He even looks like a Trojan: all solid and swarthy with tight dark curls cut close to his head. He sings as he works and never complains about hoisting mammoth bearers single-handed.

  Ian is incredibly busy at the moment. Though his Rangeview development at Maleny is complete and he’s on
ly away in Montville one night a week now, he’s in the midst of buying a wood chip mill just south of Maryborough. He runs to and fro the Canterwood Mill several times a week, Montville once a week, the rubbish tip at least five times a week, besides being the General of Operations at Baddow, but he can’t stand to see John left working solo and decides to help.

  John is endeavouring to attach pole plates to the wall. Pole plates are hefty wooden bearers that are anchored to the house by deep bolts to support the weight of the verandah. John is swinging a sledgehammer with a strength to rival Hector’s. Ian finds his own sledgehammer and goes outside.

  Now, when Ian works along side the Men, he likes it to be seen that anything they can do, he can do better. Stronger, faster, more enduring – that’s my Ian. He’d build the verandahs himself, if only he had the technical skills. Alas, he does not have such skills, but he knows how to swing a sledgehammer and he knows how to swing it hard.

  He swaggers up to John, sledgehammer gripped in one broad fist. ‘I’ll give you a hand with those, mate,’ he says, and clambers over the network of bearers and joists.

  John is appreciative. He, too, is frustrated by the slow progress of the building. Ian positions one end of the pole plate over a bolt, takes his sledgehammer in both hands and twists his body like he’s about to throw a discus.

  The sledgehammer whips through the air and, with a dull thud, connects with Ian’s shin. Not a sound escapes his lips. They are compressed and bloodless, but admirably silent.

  ‘Geez that must have hurt, mate.’ John is wide-eyed, shocked.

  Ian flexes his knee, shrugs his shoulders. ‘Not much. I’ll be right.’ The words sound tight, clipped, but he’s already lining up his next target. More carefully, with less force, he hammers it home.

  It doesn’t take them long, and Ian soon makes his way back to the kitchen. The minute he rounds the corner out of sight of John, he doubles over, gripping his leg, giving in to the agony. I rush over, clucking, sympathising. His shin is black and purple, but not, we think, broken. ‘A flesh wound,’ I tell him, confident but unqualified. ‘Swollen and bruised but not broken and bleeding. It could have been worse.’