The concept of home is written into the heart, and the word itself is embedded in stories, songs and images, all of which I will refer to in this essay. The emotion tapped by the word ‘home’ frequently slips into recollections of remote memories of the earliest places called home. The story of my tulips is located at the heart of my own dense personal memory-legend that weaves itself into ‘home’, the place of creation and safety and joy that is distant and yet present for it can be summoned at any time. I have always been fascinated by the story of Thumbelina, not least because the child first made her appearance in a tulip that grew from a magic bulb. No sooner does the young wife have custody of the tiny child than a toad comes and steals the baby away. The child’s quest for home involves several terrifying misadventures, until she is finally deposited by a swallow in the arms of the little king of the flowers. She has not gone backward, but is creating a new home. Her destiny is fulfilled. This story, like so many of the works of Hans Andersen, is seriously weird. But I can never forget the tulip, with its startling sexual imagery, that set all in motion.
My memory of home continues and moves out from the tulip bed under the tree, gliding forward past the garden shed where one wall consisted of the large frosted window from an optician’s shop. Let into the frosting was the shape of a big pair of spectacles with gilded rims and mirrors for lenses. Directly facing the spectacles was an apricot tree which I used to climb in warm weather to read books. I could look sideways at myself reflected in the mirrors. One day I was picking and eating the ripe fruit as I read. I bit into an apricot, looked down at the bright orange flesh glistening with juice and marked by my teeth, and there, tight up against the smooth brown stone, lay a fat white grub drowsing in perfect puffy segments. I still like the taste of apricots, but I never ever eat one without recalling the clean and sudden sight of the shiny grub. It was so very still. The natural world laughing silently at me.
As I think of these things now, I see the images of my early life, so similar to the images of many early lives, being picked out in a series of clichés and stereotypes. The tulip, the apricot, the grub signifying paradise soon to be lost. Tinged with the glow of nostalgia, shadowed by poignant reminders of the ideal past. If I could begin somewhere other than in the garden, I would, but my recollections of the place that first embraced and sheltered me simply fly straight there. And I must continue to glide along these garden paths, common as they may be, in my search for the sensation and image of ‘home’. My images are forever fresh to me, and they exercise over me a power that is welcome and sweet. I enjoy looking down at the grub in the apricot, feeling again my own indrawn breath of horror and disgust.
The path continues and takes me to the playhouse my father built. It was a white cottage with a red roof and a red door and a little schoolroom window that looked into a pear tree. In spring the shivery white pear blossom filled the window with clumps of dreamy clouds. On the other side of the playhouse was the lemon tree on which my little brother was told to pee to encourage the crop. Behind the lemon tree was the Nelly Kelly passionfruit vine. Not far away stood the rotary clothes line. This was middle-class Tasmania in the 1940s, and the washing was boiled in a copper.
So far the drift of my memory of this childhood home has not really explored the house. I circle, approach and retreat. I am not afraid to enter the house, but the images and emotions are many, varied and complex, and I find I must sift and examine them quietly, gently, steadily. The front garden was filled with rose bushes, lawns and prunus. In the middle of one lawn stood a tall thick palm tree. We had a big cypress hedge across the front, and I made use of its hollow interior as another playroom. From this hedge I learned to love the smell of cypress sap, and from those rose bushes I acquired my beloved habit of pressing the open blooms of roses to my face so that I feel the velvet softness found nowhere else, and inhale the essence of the rose.
My father built the modest timber house in a standard late Edwardian style in the 30s when he was a bachelor and the street itself was new. Bellevue Avenue it was called, in Launceston, Tasmania. Nothing could have been less like the famous Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, summer home to the Four Hundred of the Gilded Age. I thought it was just a really pretty French name. It was not an avenue, by the way, it was a gravel road that rose steeply to a peak and descended on the other side to end in a cliff wall of yellow clay. I lived in this house until I went away to university when I was seventeen, and my parents lived there until their deaths in old age.
There were square panes of coloured glass—pink, green and amber—in the sunroom, which looked out across treetops and valleys and hills to a line of mountains: Arthur, Barrow and Ben Lomond. Windows have always interested me, and not only windows, but glass as a magical substance. Once when there was an eclipse of the sun, my father handed me a precious piece of smoky green glass so I could observe the phenomenon without damaging my eyes. He impressed upon me the need to be careful not to drop the glass. I did drop it, smashing it on the concrete path outside the front door of the playhouse. Breakage and loss are often critical in the laying down of vivid memories, and are deeply embedded in thoughts and feelings of the shape of home. As with any good narrative, the story of home is riven with flaws, is all the more accessible for the moments when everything went wrong, the times when the two-way pull between positive and negative brings memories into sharp relief.
There are the forbidden or almost forbidden parts of the house. My mother’s dressing table had three tall bevelled mirrors that were pure bliss to play with. I had to get permission to do this. There were cut crystal lamps like mushrooms, and matching trays and bowls. I still have the oval hand mirror made from creamy casein that lay on the dressing table, and it is matched by the circular hand mirror I have, belonging to my father. This one is set in dark wood and has a hollow circle for a handle. It is kind of funny to have Mother and Father mirrors, and poignant to think that these glasses held their faces, that in these mirrors they looked also at the backs of their heads. Such tender thoughts make me think—yes, that was home, that gesture, that image in the mirror, that was home.
Little personal or even inconsequential objects carry with them the power to touch the heart, suddenly, at unexpected moments. I recently opened a drawer in my mother’s old sewing machine and discovered a little booklet full of tissue paper transfers. These were the images she used to iron on to my dresses before embroidering the designs. Cherries and flowers and ladies in crinolines and hats. It was so touching to find the paper patterns there in the old drawer where she had left them, placed them with her hands, and shut the drawer. I remember her sewing me some summer pyjamas made from material I had chosen. My father supervised the cutting out of the cloth, which was covered with pictures of the three little pigs. And in winter my mother would warm our nightdresses and pyjamas by the fire before we put them on. She lit the fire early in the morning, and she cleaned the hearth with red lead and black lead. You could sit on the fire-boxes on either side of the fire. They were brass with patterns of acorns on the sides and they had leather tops. On winter mornings my mother turned the radiator on near the piano so that I could practise. The radiator was marvellous. In the centre was an element shaped like a beehive, glowing incandescent orange, made up of rows and rows of curly wire. It was set into a copper bowl, the whole thing covered with a cage of crimped wire net. The piano was in fact a pianola, and family and friends played a large number of melodies such as ‘Home Sweet Home’, ‘Home on the Range’ and ‘Little Grey Home in the West’ with our feet.
Thoughts of the fire, the warmth and light, have taken me away from the memories of the embroideries. But on these I need to dwell. I have a number of cloths embroidered by my mother. They are so very dear to me, and beautifully stitched. They speak of hours and hours of quiet intensive work designed to embellish the home. They are the kind of thing you find in charity shops where they have ended up, sometimes after many long years of lying unused in drawers. I think they are
one of the most poignant objects in the charity shops. They speak of death, of love and care and industry, and they carry the spirits of the women who made them, in lyrical little textured pictures that have drifted out free, floating in time and space. People sometimes use them. I do. And people sometimes rescue them to construct or decorate other things like clothing—even wedding dresses. There is a deep nostalgia embedded in them.
Nostalgia, that bittersweet longing for times and things past. This fine powerful old Greek word, meaning the sweetness of the pain delivered by an ancient wound, has acquired a negative character, a sickly cloying that hangs around it and suggests a lack of rigour, a lack of seriousness, a fatal weakness. People sometimes say ‘nostalgia’ with a sneer of superiority. Even more derided is anything that can be described as ‘nostalgia kitsch’. The embroidered ladies in crinolines would be nostalgia kitsch I think. An inferior, tasteless copy of a style of dress from late Victorian England. These ladies were known as ‘Dolly Vardens’, the original presumably being the beautiful daughter of a blacksmith in Barnaby Rudge. This novel was in fact the first library book I ever borrowed. I was too young to have my own library card. You had to be seven and I was six. So my father took me to the public library where I chose Barnaby Rudge with its engrossing illustrations, and my father took it out on his card. I discovered that although I could read many of the words I was completely unable to make any sense of them. I sat for hours turning the pages slowly, weeping with disappointment and frustration. There was a darling picture of Dolly Varden.
A great treat was a cake my mother used to buy from Williams’ cake shop in town, a Dolly Varden cake which had chocolate and yellow sections dotted with currants. It was filled with highly desirable ‘mock crème’ and completely covered in chocolate icing. Why was it called a Dolly Varden? I don’t know. I so adored the images of the ladies that for my fifth birthday I requested a Dolly Varden handkerchief. No, I didn’t want my mother to embroider one, I wanted a commercial product. So my mother went to some trouble to discover one in a shop, and I was ecstatic. I loved the handkerchief so much I took it to school to show to my teacher Mrs Sims. I showed it to her in the morning, and in the afternoon she graciously asked to have another peek at it. I opened my hand to reveal that the handkerchief had been reduced to a bundle of damp rags and tatters because I had simply gnawed it to death all day with my teeth. The shocked Mrs Sims gently asked me why. I didn’t know.
I do not recall the aftermath of the incidents with the handkerchief and the green glass for observing the eclipse. I know I was not punished, but there must have been some reaction, some comment. These are lost to me. It is as if nothing happened after the events. There were only my destructive acts, and these are enshrined in my memory, part of the damaged mental slide show of the past. I would like to know what happened. I believe it was virtually nothing, the crimes being so far outside the ordinary as to put the criminal beyond punishment. Should I now confess that some of the handtowels in my bathroom are embroidered with Dolly Vardens? Every day I am reminded of the one I chewed up. A bittersweet longing for times past.
Nostalgic style, expressing a longing for the recalled or imagined haven of home, is the reverse of minimalism, yet now, in a world that is conscious of dwindling resources, old things can even have their practical uses. A great deal of the tourist industry with its reconstructions and revisitings of the past depends upon the power of nostalgia, the twinge to the heart. The bed and breakfast industry seeks to provide the recollected comforts of the lost home. In a little place an hour’s drive from where I grew up in Tasmania there is the Promised Land where you can stay in one of five cottages that were built in the 1850s. They have been much improved, and re-named Gingerbread Cottage, Corner Cottage, Servants’ Quarters, The Old Bakehouse, and Apple Tree Cottage. They are, the advertisement says, ‘decorated’ with ‘period furniture and memorabilia’. They would, I expect, offer the real comfort of warmth and good furniture and fittings, as well as the illusory balm of historic atmosphere and charming old objects. But they are also a facsimile of things past, and so have an overlay of unreality, a touch of theatre and theme park. They are not, and can not, be ‘real’ but may participate in the dream of the haven of home.
The old pieces of embroidery in the charity shops have a kind of frivolous uselessness that can offend a sense of practicality. Before they got to the charity shop they were either carefully preserved in cedar chests or else were lying about clogging up drawers and shelves, inviting dust, vermin and decay. So built into them, alongside their value as nostalgia, is the fear of death. These innocent white old linen tablecloths with their intricate stitchings of yellow daisies and purple foxgloves are the fluttering flags of the beckoning grave. Which is after all the final resting place, final refuge, final home. Not an ordinary haven. Yet how interesting it is that ‘haven’ is only one letter short of ‘heaven’. English is strangely insistent on the letter ‘h’ in this context. Home, haven, heaven, hearth, heart. The hands that made the tablecloths have crumbled to dust. Perhaps that is what is so discomfiting about nostalgia—it invites fleeting meditation on mortality. Behind the pretty flowers lurks decay. It seems to me that what is under discussion here is in fact really close to what Indigenous people and poets call ‘the dreaming’, the stories that offer key meanings of the past, the present and the world to come.
A few of my mother’s embroideries are silky images of ideal cottages. Here the notion is of home as located firmly in the house and garden. I am so drawn to this stereotype that I have collected many objects bearing the image, not least my collection of swap cards which have survived from childhood. The pictures of cottages could put me into a little trance when I was a child, and they can still exercise their power over me. I know I am not unusual in this. It is perhaps a bit strange and interesting that these images of sweet cosy English houses with their diamond window panes, thatched or shingled roofs, winding paths, banks of hollyhocks and lupins and foxgloves, dovecotes, and distant views of meadow and copse should be held so dear in an Australian context. These places are obviously so beloved, and weirdly uninhabited, except, sometimes, by a bluebird, although smoke curls dreamily from the chimney. There is therefore a fire, a glowing heart, a spirit, unseen, inside. The houses are nestled in their bright and untroubled gardens, their pretty front doors shut, waiting for someone (me?) to come along and magically penetrate the walls and become part of the enchantment.
What such images suggest, above all, is safety, and safety is possibly the key element in the idea of home, although without the addition of shelter, warmth and nourishment, safety is not complete. The safety of home may become a sanctuary, a high and holy safety. The drifting smoke as evidence of the warmth and glow of life within is a signifier of the presence of human life, a human heart that beats and drives the engine of the home. My little grandson commented that ‘a house is not warm without people’.
When the setting of crime stories in books and films is the English village with its rose-wreathed cottages, part of the thrill is the fact that these havens belie their looks. The cottage is a fraud, a deadly masquerade. It is not really the home it purports to be, has been recognised as being. The reader/viewer’s faith is violated and the terrible acts that have taken place in the cottage sit in direct and vivid conflict with the flowers and the thatch. In this case the dear little house becomes a metaphor for the hypocrisy of the society. The gingerbread house of the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ works on a similar delusion. The homeless children, abandoned to their terrible fate by their father and stepmother, first fall victim to the seductive properties of the witch’s house. After their escape they find their way home by following the white stones the prudent Gretel has scattered. Home now consists of the joyful and repentant father, for the stepmother died when Hansel pushed the witch into her own oven. Stories like these, the crimes and the fairytales, foreground for the reader the meaning of home, giving warning of the false faces that houses can present. Anothe
r well-known exploration of the delusion that the home is a safe place for a child is found in the 1990 movie Home Alone. When the home is stripped of its people, its family, it becomes a dangerous place, vulnerable to attack and invasion.
As soon as I chose the word ‘homeless’ to describe Hansel and Gretel, the word began to ring its mournful note in my heart and mind. If I work backward (or is it forward? I don’t know) from the word homeless, I come quite quickly to the understanding that ‘home’ signifies safety, shelter, warmth and nourishment. So my project becomes the search for the meanings those words have for me. They have emotional as well as physical significances.
It is a truism that the house is metaphor for the self, and that dreams of houses are not usually expressions of realestate longings, but examinations of the very inner self of the dreamer. So maybe the swap-card collector who loses herself in the thatched cottage card is seeing there the spirit of her ideal self. It seems to me that this is so. A key to inhabiting ‘the dreaming’ is the ability to, or trick of, losing the self in the process of contemplating the image or the story. The losing of the self in this way is also, somewhat paradoxically, a key to writing—writing memoir, fiction, poetry. Not until the writer has stepped beyond the self does the writing begin to carry the writer forward.
Home Truth Page 17