Wilf had always taunted us that he would live as long as the Bible said he would: ‘three score years and ten’. But it was a terrible blow when Jim called one morning to tell me news that he could hardly speak. Wilf had had a massive heart attack and died in his armchair while doing the crossword. It was Easter Saturday morning, not long after his seventy-third birthday. Sylvia was rugged up in her wheelchair on the veranda when Riley, my nephew, had run in and found Dad slumped forward in his chair. Riley’s six short summers couldn’t help him to understand why Grandfather wouldn’t wake up. I’d been home for three months.
At the time, an old friend was visiting from London. As magazine journalists and editors, Debs and I had soireed in the same world, even holidayed together in Nice, Deauville, Budapest, Somerset and Paris. She always researched restaurants meticulously, and as a born gourmand, had made the connection between sex and food when Nigella Lawson was still writing about the arts. Debs had been visiting family in Sydney and, ever the enthusiastic traveller, decided to take in her friend’s new hangout in Karoola for Easter. Both Debs’ parents had died while she was young and I knew she still felt a dreadful sense of loss, years on. Having just been told the news that Wilf was dead, I found myself searching for a way of staying connected to him. ‘Where do dead people go?’ I asked her. ‘Oh, Hil, I’m still asking myself that question,’ she said, mirroring my pain. Her words weren’t comforting because there was no answer, but it was the best and only thing she could have said.
Wilf had the grace to know that his tomorrows were over (curiously, he told us so a few weeks before he died). This didn’t make the hurt and shock of his sudden death any easier. I couldn’t sleep for days because I thought that he would die again if I fell asleep and stopped remembering him. When I went into town I drove while sobbing because I knew I would never again drop in on Wilf. Everything I did seemed to accentuate the loss. Glen, who had never met my father, offered consolations but even his kindness didn’t touch me. The day Wilf passed away, Sylvia was taken into a palliative care ward and three days later she died.
Early autumn has always been my favourite season in Tasmania. On a sunny day you can still feel summer clinging on like a limpet on a rock, but leaves, made tired by the crispness in the air, are just starting to lose their grip. Promise and relief live in air that is as clear as a diamond. The day of Wilf’s funeral was just like that. My twin brother Martin had arrived from London, pale and grey from the longest flight. I had always dreaded having to make such a trip—to come home for a death.
Meeting him in the airport arrivals lounge, Simon, Jim and I hardly recognised his colourless face as he fell into our group hug and the support of siblings. Although they were estranged as husband and wife, Audrey arrived at Wilf’s cremation with a posy of rosemary and roses from her garden and laid them on his coffin, accompanied by the sound of Elgar’s Enigma Variations. ‘Nimrod’ was a familiar piece that Wilf had always wanted played—loudly—at his funeral.
I thought about cancelling the Nuns’ House housewarming I had planned but we decided to turn it into a wake for Wilf. Debs had already returned to London, but Leigh had taken her place, arriving from Sydney. We’d hardly spoken since her first visit but she knew Wilf and came out of love. Ian and Ann Parmenter arrived from Margaret River. I’d known them since my early twenties when I dabbled in television in Sydney and remember Ian introducing me to homemade pasta and Baci chocolates. It was lovely to see family friends from our first days in Derby mixing with my new neighbours. Leigh and Karen spent the morning in the kitchen preparing a feast for lunch—for which I was grateful because I had no heart for cooking—and the boys arrived with a new wheelbarrow as a house gift. Martin pushed me into it and wheeled it along the corridors, sending ripples of laughter through the house. Riley wondered why Grandfather didn’t have a grave but his other grandfather did. It was a six-year-old’s version of the question I’d asked Debs, the question left unanswered. The only words I could offer him were, ‘Some people like to be with the birds and others with the worms.’ God knows what he made of that. We played rounders in the garden, and later that night Ian played piano, and we sang out of tune at the top of our lungs. Wilf would have loved it.
The Parmenters stayed on for a few days and wanted to know what I was going to do with the garden and paddocks. We talked about the options. Ann, a keen gardener, suggested a hazelnut grove or a vineyard. She also suggested having a look at what else grew in the area. ‘That’s how you work it out,’ she said helpfully.
‘Actually I’ve been thinking about alpaca,’ I said, but not that seriously.
‘Oh, yes!’ enthused Ian. ‘Now you’re talking. Where do you find alpaca?’
The next day, before breakfast, Ian and I set out on a blind and determined mission to find the local breeder: ‘Well, there must be one,’ said Ian, ever the optimist.
First stop, the local garage. As the self-styled ‘unofficial mayor of Lilydale’, Rob was sure to know the whereabouts of a local alpaca breeder. We were both prepared for a fair journey ahead of us but were dumbstruck when Rob said we’d find her two minutes up the road.
We knocked at the old farmstead door to the sound of breakfast plates being cleared. An open-faced couple greeted us, introduced themselves as Jillian and Ian, and were happy to show us the alpacas there and then. They led us past the scampering ducklings and hens fossicking under the big gum trees in the garden, into the horse paddock and across the soft fields dotted with white, brown, fawn and black alpacas. The animals had the most curious eyes: big, brown, direct yet unfocused, and every creature had a name, themed to the year of their birth. One white alpaca caught my eye.
‘That’s Porsche,’ said Jillian. ‘She was born in the year of cars.’
‘How do you look after them?’ I asked.
‘They’re the lowest-maintenance animals you can get,’ explained Jillian. ‘You just need to make sure they’re shorn and have their nails clipped once a year.’
Jack and Kerouac.
And that’s when I decided. I chose a white one (‘that’s Safin, named after the tennis player’) and a brown one (‘that’s Vincent, for Vincent van Gogh’). I chose them because Ian and I thought they seemed like mates. Jillian said she was still weaning them and would deliver them to me in the next few weeks. I decided to rename them Jack and Kerouac, in honour of the author of On the Road, because that’s where they would be living, and took photos to send to friends. I gave one photo to Audrey, who framed it and placed it on the sideboard alongside photographs of my brothers’ children—her grandchildren. I realised if I’d ever really wanted my own children this line-up would have been a terribly poignant moment, but instead it made me laugh. My biological clock might have ticked for a few years but to ignore it seemed more natural than having a baby.
The summer had seen a steady stream of visitors, but when the Parmenters had left I had time to ponder our family’s loss. I wanted to return to Wilf’s old home and pick a bag of lemons, and even went as far as turning down the street on a number of occasions, but never went further than the front gate. I think I just wanted to be close. Instead, I settled on planting eight lemon trees (would that make it a grove?) with the aim of making limoncello inspired by visits to Venice. I suspect the nuns might secretly have approved of that, too. Audrey and I paced out a curve in the front paddock for two young Eurekas, two Lisbons, two Thornless and two Meyer lemon trees. Audrey called it a smile, so that’s what it stayed: a smile of lemons.
When I wasn’t in the garden, I spent much of my time scrubbing and painting walls. I started peeling back the timber panelling in the front veranda that had been encased in windows and turned into a classroom. Underneath the internal fibreboard I discovered the original veranda balustrade, painted lime-green. I remembered seeing those brightly coloured painted houses as a child growing up in the seventies. Weatherboards of sky-blue, lime-green, canary-yellow . . . Perhaps I’d even seen this one from the back seat of the Falcon as we
drove by on our trip from Derby into town for the weekly shop?
Slowly, the house was revealing its character. When I shared the discovery on the phone with Rob, an architect from Sydney who I’d met on the Bay of Fires walk, he seemed just as excited as me and keen to come and help. The veranda, he said, would be his holiday project. Rob arrived a couple of weeks later in a wagon packed with a surfboard, bicycle—and crowbar. With Glen’s help, in no time at all we’d ripped off the panelling and removed all the heavy casement windows to reveal a wide, open veranda. Rob’s audaciously named ‘Big Veranda Project’ had been accomplished in just under two hours. Glen left, and Rob and I went to visit the Red Dragon Nursery on top of Brown Mountain. Rhododendrons grew prolifically in the area, and along with a range of surprisingly exotic trees and shrubs, there seemed to be a whole nursery to choose from here. The nurseryman explained that in the 1920s, the orchardist and nurseryman William Walker had established rhododendrons in his garden at Lalla, not far from Karoola, and it was now a reserve. I chose six rhododendrons for the front of the house, all in blushing pink colours. Rob was amazed at the price—just five dollars a pot.
‘They’d be eight times the price in Sydney,’ he said.
It had been a productive day, so we drove to Lulworth Beach and swam off the day’s exertions. Rob and his wife Sally were keen ocean swimmers, and I watched as he made easy laps of Lulworth. This was what the Australian crawl was made for. When Rob left, he signed a sketch he’d made of the Nuns’ House and presented it to me as a souvenir of his holiday.
Big veranda sketch by Rob Hawkins
Inspired by the new outlook, Richard Crabtree rang to ask if he could come and paint the view from the Nuns’ House. ‘You don’t need to be there,’ he said. ‘I’ll only need a couple of hours. I start with a sketch.’ He let himself in through the side door that used to be the school entrance. I waited eagerly to see the result.
Once the veranda was opened up, the swallows moved in to make a new nest. I watched it being made. Two tiny mates with wings like F-111s swooped in one day to check out the space, coming and going, to-ing and fro-ing, cocky with their dives over several days. The first mud stick was planted on the side, above the study door, in the middle of a single weatherboard, high up but not quite in the corner, six inches or so from the cornice, and maybe the same again from the back veranda wall. What is the mathematics of a nest? And how is it built cement-free without a plan?
I watched the twin birds build it up and up—awkward sticks for bricks, matted twigs and single strands of grass, with mud for mortar, yet as a whole perfectly curved and sturdy. It was home for four eggs that in no time at all turned into four baby swallows, all pink and beaky. And if I stood too close a swooping dart of a bird with a shrill top note would warn me off. One day the chicks had wings enough to fly. They hung around for a while, and made such a home of the veranda that parts of it turned white with their droppings. One liked to sit on the back of the chair next to me while I sipped a cup of tea—it sat near enough to touch, though if I tried it would fly away. So we’d sit there, comfortably not touching, like a long-married couple.
I went to Sydney for a long weekend and when I came back the welcome swallows had flown. I blamed myself for leaving them; I had a strange feeling of guilt, but Audrey said they would have left anyway. I envied the swallows that knew when to leave and when to return; who knew that the nest was hanging on empty and that it had survived the winter—and if it hadn’t they would build another without fuss. They’ve lived long enough somewhere else to now come home. The season tells them to.
Even though I lived alone, men figured strongly in my life. Audrey called them ‘gentlemen callers’: the removalist, the electrician specialising in private poles, the paddock slasher, the backhoe specialist, the pump and drains expert, the man from the city council who came to take away the stray dogs . . . All these jobs that hold together a domestic rural life, carried out by men who happen to be extremely knowledgeable about certain things. I might live here on my own, but I couldn’t live here without them.
In my recent experience, only a man would have saved me ninety dollars by telling me not to buy the mulcher option on the mower: a piece of string to hold up the back flap would do the job perfectly, provided I wore long pants to protect my legs. Only a man would have fixed the hay-baling machine when it broke down in my back paddock, and brought his sons to load the ute and take away the bales. Only a man could have fixed and sanded these hundred-year-old Tassie eucalyptus floorboards quite so well and known that the ones on the veranda were in such good nick by thinking to look up at them from underneath the house.
Only a man would run a backhoe to knock down the brick shed out the back and clear the mounds of rubbish. Only a man would know how to rebuild the fence between me and the next-door farm, and know where to get the fencing and how much it cost per metre. I’m not saying that women won’t. Or even that they can’t. It’s just that in my experience women don’t.
I enjoyed the can-do attitude of my eldest brother, Simon, who had offered to help build a deck out the back. Despite my obvious lack of building skills, my deal with Simon was that I would be his lackey. I’d used a hammer before, although, as with many practical things in life, I didn’t recall ever being taught how to use one, let alone properly. They’re not sold with instruction leaflets. It’s just assumed that if you buy a hammer, you will know how to use it. Simon told me to hold the handle at the end, not halfway up; to position myself far enough away from the nail so the hammer did the work; to avoid crouching over it; to loosen my wrist, and move from the shoulder.
The deck took all day and there were a thousand nails to hit. There was a lot more to using a hammer than I thought. In fact, it helped not to think. I knew when I’d hit it right because it seemed to sing. Don’t try to force the nail in with your mind. It’s not a question of intellect. It’s just you and the hammer, and nothing in between. One . . . two . . . three . . . in! When it was right, the strikes were all equal, and so, it seemed, the time between them. The sound of a nail going in correctly was like the sound of a bottle being poured—sort of hollow and solid in equal measure. The hammer should fall with gravity and not be pushed.
View from the Nuns’ House by Richard Crabtree.
Men, I thought, seemed to know these things just by being men. But I didn’t see that as reason enough to want one in my life. The Nuns’ House was exactly that in my mind: a sacred place free of partnership where I could rely on my own heart instead of someone else’s. My commitment was to look after it, and the motivation, to live where I lived and see what happened. I hadn’t exactly taken vows of poverty and chastity, just applied more personal space. And while friends found it challenging— some thought I was living an experiment—I craved the space and time to find out who I was in this beautiful valley.
Richard’s painting from the veranda soon emerged, impressionistic and recklessly golden. I encouraged him to enter it into the local landscape art prize but it wasn’t even shortlisted. ‘Crabtree,’ I told him, ‘you are vastly underrated.’ It didn’t stop him from painting.
I think when you start your life from scratch again you have to be prepared to lose everything you worked for as if it meant nothing or it no longer mattered. The death of my father was an unexpected blow so soon, though, and I felt that my motivation was flagging. I looked at the area of the garden that Wilf had claimed as his and didn’t feel moved to touch it. Instead, with my first six months almost up, I decided it was time to look for paid work. I needed a distraction from grieving and would try and work my way back from melancholia.
As if to taunt my grief, the rest of the garden was providing me with amazing abundance: buckets and buckets of apples. It felt wicked eating fruit straight from the tree without first ripping open the plastic. I think there were six different apple trees—one of them, curiously, had two varieties on the same tree: one green and one red. I tried each one to taste the difference and couldn’t believe t
he flavours. Such pleasures for free. I loved the busyness that growing things provided, pondering all the ways of cooking and eating apples, and started by turning the windfalls into apple juice.
Some friends from my early days in Tasmania were keen to see me settle here again, and kindly put me in touch with the head of the ABC’s Local Radio network. We met, had a conversation, and before I knew it, I was on air, presenting the afternoon program for two weeks. As a print journalist, live radio had always terrified me: there was no way to control the mistakes, delete a line or go back a page. For me, this was the equivalent of freefalling from a great height. The stress of learning to time your own conversation or an interview to the last second was unspeakable and I couldn’t understand how it was done. The penny dropped when the program director training me suggested I stop worrying about sounding foolish.
‘No one cares about your nerves,’ she said bluntly. ‘You are a professional doing a job. It’s your vanity that’s getting in the way of sounding good.’
There were tears in the toilet but it was the slap in the face I needed. I had to learn how to be myself all over again—on air.
When my two-week cover on Local Radio was up I found I was craving the comfort of old shoes. London was calling, the London of old friends with shared histories and the kind of knowledge that might help stop my grief from turning into despair. I decided to fly back for a few weeks, fit in some freelance work and catch up with friends. Lizzie met me at the airport and it felt that nothing had changed. Her being there was a deep comfort. Later that day, we walked along the towpath like we used to, dodging the cyclists and foraging for elderflowers as we chatted. Lizzie found a recipe for elder-flower cordial in one of her books and made a batch. While it chilled, we sat together on the wall in her back garden overlooking the Thames and drank a bottle of rosé in the afternoon sun.
A Story of Seven Summers Page 6