This particular storybook image of a house persists in children’s picture books, where the three bears still live in that cottage in the woods. So perhaps even children of today will be able in the future to lose themselves in the ideal of the thatched cottage. Somehow I doubt this. However I have heard people much younger than I am speaking of yearning for the cottage and the cottage garden where they can feel at home. One young woman said quite seriously that she always wished the world could be a replica of the world of Beatrix Potter. The details of the thatched cottage of the heart are almost certainly female details. I am assuming that a masculine sensibility would have different particulars to inform the legendary location of home. Little boys do draw houses when tracing the meaning of their world onto paper, but I think it is fair to expect that the cottage of my swap cards does not exercise the power over them that it has over me. Perhaps the masculine dream house is a tower.
The house may be the self, and the acquisition of a house in which to live may also be an exercise in trying to match the external world with the internal. People fall in love with houses, meaning that there are elements of certain houses that chime with elements of themselves. And there is always the concept of the dream home, the house of which the dreamer has dreamed, the house that fulfils the dreamer’s dreams, the house that is the dreamer. This suggests to me, going round in circles, that the very self is in the end the home that each person is seeking.
In Spain I recently saw a housing estate where people were building small facsimiles of medieval castles. And sometimes in Australia people will build their houses along traditional fantasy lines, not unrelated to the thatched cottages I have described, or even more dream-like medieval structures. I am not intending to be critical of these buildings, merely observing and commenting on the phenomenon of building according to dreams. In a national newspaper I recently saw an advertisement for a house for sale in Tasmania described, as houses often are, as a ‘dream home’. The pictured house is a hybrid of the castle and the thatched cottage, masculine and feminine. I could have fallen into its arms as it rose sweetly from among the English trees, and looked over drifts and clouds of pink and white flowers I could not identify. It is described as a ‘three-bedroom castle’ which seems to be a contradiction. This is a cosy castle for a little family. It is fashioned from local stone in a kind of cobble pattern, and there is a modest castellated turret with a nice red witch’s hat. Adding to its charm for me is the fact that it is in Gould’s Country, a place of wildflowers and mysterious forest and glades where I spent enchanted times as a child. Lines from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ came to me just then as I was writing. They are not apposite in detail, but are right in sentiment.
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain.
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
For if there is one quality of the house in Gould’s Country that precludes my living there it is the fact that I am not about to pack up and go off to beautiful Gould’s Country.
The house stands, the newspaper says, ‘high in a tiny valley kingdom’. It speaks of safety, refuge, even secrecy, of warmth and nurture and love, although I realise that to many people it probably speaks of a kind of repellent sentimentality and imitation. Fantasy and reality can mingle, do mingle to an extent in much of what people do, but there must sometimes also be limits of common sense, some sort of match between what a house looks like and where it is situated. I have pasted the picture into my journal and keep taking a peek at it. I must say that, unlike many houses in advertisements, it appears to be inhabited, it seems to me that there is someone behind the curtains; I suppose this is an illusion. The door is almost obscured by bushes. I am always struck by the fact that this section of the newspaper is called ‘Homehunt’, suggesting that the house/home is a treasure to be sought, or perhaps a wild beast to be tracked down and killed.
The front door of the real life ordinary house where I grew up was made from many rectangles of bubbly glass set in oak frames. I thought the raised figuring in the glass resembled brains. People on the outside appeared as irregular shadowy shapes. One day my mother heard an urgent knocking at the door and when she opened it a voice greeted her from the doormat. ‘Hello!’ it said. There stood a galah, grey feathers, bright pink neck, white tuft, and he proceeded to walk into the hall and make himself at home.
At home. We offered him the broad hospitality of refuge, shelter, safety, food, water, warmth, companionship, entertainment, comfort, admiration, and he accepted these things with joy and grace. Does a galah actually need all this? He seemed to like it. He must have come from a place where he had learned to say hello, but he showed no inclination to leave us. We called him Ulysses, and we thought he was probably lost. So our naming did carry an implication that he would leave us in due course. He was mysterious and marvellous and stayed for a year then disappeared. Had he decided to take up the long and dutiful journey back to Penelope? The ideas we wove around him were fanciful, to a point, and as well as bringing to mind the great classical narrative of Ulysses and what home meant in that story, he does raise the matter of what can be called the homing instinct of birds and other creatures. I wept over the almost unbearably sad movie Lassie Come Home, and just writing the title makes me teary. ‘Home’ for Lassie is the place where the boy is, and she goes through hell to get back to him. Home is about relationship.
One of the most affecting poems I read as a child was John Masefield’s ‘Reynard the Fox’, which describes the experience of the fox during the hunt. Two lines frequently come to my consciousness: ‘The earth was stopped; It was barred with stakes.’ And then ‘The earth was stopped; it was filled with stones.’ The agony of being barred from the safety of the refuge first by stakes and then by stones is exquisite and terrible.
The idea of home is infused with primitive emotions of such power that the word seems to me to exist in order to carry and embrace the emotions themselves. If you take all the dictionary definitions of ‘home’ the meaning of the word still remains mysterious and elusive. A summary of the entry in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary says home is ‘a dwelling place in which one habitually lives, or which one regards as one’s proper abode’. Already, between the two parts of the statement, you can see trouble looming, can feel emotion and conflict haunting the simple definition. The entry goes on to explain that home is a place of ‘nurturing’, and where one’s ‘affections centre’. There is much more, but although everybody knows deep down what ‘home’ means in any context, it is perhaps impossible to fix the term. It is inexhaustible. It weaves its way through the titles and motifs of literature and film, freighted as it is with the emotions that are the staple of novels and movies.
In the movie of The Wizard of Oz Dorothy hears the voice of Glinda the Good Witch telling her ‘there’s no place like home’. As Dorothy repeats the words, over and over, her pale Technicolor face gradually dissolves into the concentric light circles of a whirlpool until Aunty Em’s Kansas house flies in from the sky in monochrome, and Dorothy is back home in bed. Safe and sound. Adventures, good and bad, are over, and life can go on as before in the haven of the home, now that Dorothy has the experience and wisdom to realise there’s no place like it. The plain colourlessness of the Kansas house will embrace her and nourish her in ways that the weird wild colours of Oz could never do.
The ‘soft stone smile of an angel’ broods over Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 novel Look Homeward, Angel. The autobiographical content of this novel unleashed the wrath of Wolfe’s family and neighbours in Asheville, North Carolina, and he found himself unwelcome at home. Ten years later, a year after his death, his novel You Can’t Come Home Again was published. The main character of this one was a man who had written a novel that saw him banished from his hometown because his book exposed the true lives of the people. Banishment from home is a profoundly terrible thing, as biblical characters Adam and Eve discovered. It is the loss of harmony, the fall from grace—
grace in this context being divine love and protection. The parable of the Prodigal Son is so very comforting in that the family home is always there to welcome and embrace the boy, no matter what he has done.
For Adam and Eve the garden of paradise was home, and the rhetoric of paradise is natural to the story of home in many cultures, including mine. In some cultures the fact as well as the notion of the ancestral land, the reality of that land, is where the idea of home resides. Yet even in such cultures there is often an added fantasy of a lost land of bounty, a lost land of milk and honey. The flowers, fruit, trees, vegetables, nourishment—the very earth of the childhood garden that has been left behind seems to be embedded in the human imagination. Evidence for this phenomenon can be found in the painting and literature and thought of, I imagine, all peoples. And all people have left the garden forever, the garden being the innocence of childhood. Forever. It is a type of banishment, with the exile longing to return. The great biblical exile and homecoming narrative is in the book of Exodus, where God parted the Red Sea so that Moses could lead the Israelites into the Promised Land.
One of the most powerful and affecting dramatisations of exile is in Wuthering Heights. Through the broken window the ghost of Catherine clasps the terrified narrator with her ‘little ice-cold’ hand. She sobs in a ‘most melancholy voice’, asking to be let into the house for, she says: ‘I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor.’ The ghost has been wandering far from home for twenty years. The shocking imagery lends a force that stamps the scene into the heart of readers for all time. Another shocking literary tale of exile is that of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, in which the tragic and dispossessed Tony dies in the wilds of Brazil far from his ancestral home in England, the prisoner of a madman in the jungle. This is also nightmare. The novel dramatises for me the intensity of emotion that is native to the idea of home.
In Australian history there run two great narratives of exile, the story of early transportation and immigration, and the dispossession of Indigenous Australians. These two narratives intersect and from this intersection is created a tension that runs through the society like a geological fault line waiting to crack.
My own home thoughts almost invariably begin with the warm memory of planting the tulips in the little bed under the nectarine tree. I know that I instinctively reproduce elements of the garden in Bellevue Avenue whenever I set about establishing a place, a home in the real world. I seek out things that remind me of that first place. Prunus is not just joyful bright pink honey-smelling blossoms for me: its falling petals mark a pathway back to paradise.
Where I live now many of the street trees that grow on the rambling unmanicured verges of the country town are the same pink prunus that grew in Bellevue Avenue. The same branches that in spring I cut and took in bunches to my teacher, who smiled and was patient with these highly unsuitable cut flowers. These trees have the power to slip me into a mental frame whereby I inhabit my six-year-old body, where the uncomplicated pleasure of being alive is kindled. With the blossoms, their perfume, their hidden burgundy hearts, comes the sharp, lucid consciousness, almost hallucination, of the sense of home. It is a rhapsodic sensation that mingles with a feeling of being small and being safely wrapped in a warm and lovely blanket, held in invisible, embracing arms.
So I have arrived at the uterine image, coupled as it must be with some image of the grave. Between the two locations I am moved to dwell in my imagination and also in my reality in places that link me to the home that exists, as I have tried to explain and describe, in what I call my heart. A blanket is a baby’s bunny rug; it is also a shroud.
The blanket, in this context, has a personal and vivid reality. I recently visited the house of a friend who was showing me an amazing bedspread she had made from wool. Dazzled as I was by the designs in the crochet, I was startled to see on the floor, being used as a rug, a replica of the blanket my parents were given when they got married. It was a picnic rug, a car blanket, a useful cover under which to put a child, in which to transport a dog or a chest of drawers. It is dark navy blue, with fine white, red and green lines running across warp and woof in an open check pattern in which some of the colours are filled in in small rectangular blocks. The blanket we had at home has long since disappeared, but there, on the floor beside the knitted bedspread, lay its twin, like a beloved pet waiting for me. Such unexpected apparently random manifestations of the physical past are rare enough, and they function as springs to open the memory and sharpen the awareness of what lies there and how and why. The dear dark blanket was, even when I was a young child, a clear marker of the enveloping comfort and safety of home. So its emotional significance was not as separate from the centre of my concept of home as, say, a duplicate teacup might be. Finding the blanket was like—well—finding the blanket. Finding the embrace of my mother’s arms, finding my own skin. I ran my hand over the blanket as it lay on the floor, felt its thick woolly thatch between my finger and thumb. I do in fact feel more emotional as I write about it than I did when I saw it. I took a photograph of it. I mentally play with the idea of being a child wrapped in the blanket, a child imagining being the woman taking the photograph of the blanket as it lies flat on the floor in an unfamiliar room. But that is absurd, for children don’t think like that. Finding the blanket on the floor was finding a talisman, an object with the magic property to transport me—but only in my imagination—into the safe harbour of that elusive and imaginary quality I can identify as home.
For I think that home is a quality, a quality that can be found in a place or places that can be summoned in myriad ways. The one kind of home I have wondered about is the home of the isolated hermit. It seems to me that home is generally related to the significance of other people, the people within the circle of the safety and comfort, however that safety and comfort are interpreted. The hermit operates in a type of negative relation to other people. The religious hermit has the relationship with a higher power. The word ‘home’ is seldom invoked for the residence of a hermit who is placed in a hut or a cave in a wilderness or desert. But the hut must somehow function as the home, the home base. It is, then, where the hermit belongs.
Is that the key? Belonging? Is everyone seeking the place where they belong? And if they ever find it, will they be happy? Perhaps the endless search is in itself the real point. Perhaps the charm of home is in its elusiveness. No sooner do you think you are there than it slips away again, and you are left in a creative state of waiting, anticipation, exile. The real home is not a real place, although real places become destinations for the feeling that is home. Home is a work of the imagination, fed by memory. It is a feeling, a magic, a consolation.
Until I began to write this essay I had not been conscious of how deeply the word ‘home’ is embedded, entwined in the language of everyday. When I set up my website I unconsciously put a little image on the link from the pages back to the home page. The home page, the place to which you return so you can go out again. Under the image I printed ‘Home Sweet Home’, scarcely giving a thought to the old song. The image itself, however, had considerable personal significance. It was the picture of a house taken from a set of encyclopaedias that used to belong to my father. The set is Harmsworth’s Household Encyclopaedia, an English publication that tells the householders of the first part of the twentieth century how to do everything from building a dam to tiling a roof to crocheting a bonnet for a baby and writing a last will and testament. I pored over these books as a child, and I loved the coloured plates of—guess what—English houses and cottages. The image on my web pages is of one of those. It is clear to me now that by selecting an image from these books for my home page logo I was acknowledging the feeling of being once upon a time at home in the safety, shelter and warmth of Bellevue Avenue, turning the pages in the book, escaping imaginatively from the dear reality of my surroundings into the places and projects of the Harmsworth version of the world. Harmsworth is a name to conjure with in any context.
Th
ere were various kinds of encyclopaedias compiled by the Viscount Northcliffe of Saint Peter, whose family name was Harmsworth. He was a British publisher of the early twentieth century. In the collection I have there is no entry under ‘home’, the nearest thing being an entry for ‘At Home’. Guests to an At Home are advised to wear ‘fresh gloves’. The formal ritual of the At Home seems to be a long way from my basic notions of safety, shelter, warmth and nourishment, although these elements underlie the narrative. As a child I used to make fancy party food such as orange baskets with angelica leaves from the recipes in the books. These recipes are illustrated by quaint colour plates, the sight of which brings back to me a rush of remembered images of plates and tablecloths and shoes and dresses and hair ribbons and people in special clothes. For my seventh birthday an aunt gave me a bottle of violet perfume. Before I opened that Cellophane wrapping I read aloud, in hushed tones, slowly, the ecstatic words of the brand visible through the wrapping: ‘Potter & Moore’. Now as I turn the pages of the beloved encyclopaedias, I have decided to find the entry on tulips.
The colour plate shows nine varieties, the first two being ‘Faerie Queene’ and ‘Velvet King’. One unforgettable and weirdly suggestive piece of advice on the planting of tulips in their garden bed: ‘A pinch of silver sand may be dropped into each hole before the bulb is inserted.’ I didn’t know about the pinch of silver sand when I planted my first tulips. But I can visually, physically and emotionally recall cradling the treasured bulbs one by one in the cup of both hands, and settling them gently into the earth.
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