The next day, 7 July 2005, dozens of people were blown up in a bus and on the Tube in central London. The TV images of a double-decker bus with its roof peeled back like a sardine can were appalling and confronting. A couple of days later, I returned to work on the third floor in Shaftesbury Avenue, not far from the horrific scene. It was familiar and automatic, editing features on a celebrity magazine, but my comfort zone was no longer comforting. It felt hypocritical: writing, and therefore somehow caring, about the private details of people’s lives who really didn’t matter, when the people who did were on the streets outside.
Just before 10 am on 14 July, exactly a week after the bombings, along with the rest of central London I followed my colleagues down the stairwells and onto the footpaths and streets to stop and remember those who had been killed and maimed on their way to work. There was no whistle or siren to start or end. Even the traffic stopped itself. Just one big-city will to spend two minutes in precious silence. So many people gathered together, thinking all at once ‘that could have been me . . . ’
I loved seeing friends again, making elderflower cordial with Lizzie; seeing Martin, my twin, with colour in his cheeks again as we reminisced over red wine and pasta on Charlotte Street. On my way across Hammersmith Bridge to the underground station, I looked up at my old flat at Digby Mansions and knew that this swallow had flown for good. I had an open return ticket, and after six weeks’ away, recharged by friendships, I was ready to return to my first Karoola spring.
Lizzie’s elderflower syrup
(with acknowledgement to Darina Allen *)
175 g caster sugar
600 ml cold water
6 heads of elderflowers
zest and juice of 2 lemons
Put the sugar and water into a saucepan over a
medium heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Add
the elderflowers, bring to the boil and simmer for
5 minutes, then remove from the heat and add the
zest and juice of the lemons. Put aside to cool. Cover
and leave to infuse for 24 hours. Strain and bottle.
Dilute as desired. Keep refrigerated.
* Darina Allen, Ballymaloe Cookery Course, Kyle Cathie, London, 2001.
CHAPTER 6
Spring, Karoola
I love a broad margin to my life.
Henry David Thoreau
In grade one, we were taught to count in colours using Cuisenaire rods, and to draw a margin in our exercise books using a ruler and a red pen. The width was an inch, exactly ruler-width. I can still smell Mrs Walker’s Tabac scent, feel the movement of air behind me as she passed by her pupils hunched over their lift-top wooden desks, guiding our handwriting to stay between the lines. We learned cord cursive letters one by one, and would fill lines, then pages, to perfect them: ‘f’ was always a favourite, its flowing upward loop going one way, and the other coming down and curling back on itself before kicking out at the end. It always amazed me how handwriting could be so individual, and yet we were all taught using exactly the same style of letter. Some quality in the joining up, the in between of all the letters, turned them into something unique.
Coming home to Karoola I returned to writing by hand in my book without lines or margins. I loved to find the space to write without knowing what I would say. I wanted the words to come without willing them to, without having to pitch the idea, or structure the story, or fit it into 800 words. Day after day the page was blank but I didn’t mind. I was prepared to wait. In London, I lived by appointment. The day consisted of a million and one tiny decisions, mainly based on getting from A to B. Here, I could sit still with the day, and grow with the bulbs without a whisper of ambition or of duty, as I considered how I would honour the things I wanted to and recognise the experiences that mattered most.
The radio woke me with the words ‘minus three degrees’. I looked out over the covers and saw the morning valley laid out like a flat white sheet. Through the kitchen window I could see the wrens ice-skating on the old terracotta birdbath. I made a mug of tea and went back to bed to watch the sun rise over the mountain and the colour spilling into the day. Green daffodil tips poked through the grass, blossom had already formed on the apricot trees and the show-pony wattles were brazen in their yellow blossom. At Bardenhagen’s, the shop assistant said she thought the daffs were getting earlier each year.
Different things are happening, I felt. The season is waking up and so am I, turning away from an old life so something new can grow. I wondered what I might be missing in letting things happen instead of pushing to be involved, but the desire to lead a simple life doing good things was the strongest urge. I wanted to live by losing track of time, and write words that fell onto the page, words that were neither forced nor choked back.
When I came back from London, Glen rang and I told him the words he had not wanted to hear. I knew in my heart our future wasn’t together. If it were, I would have stolen his destiny and made it mine; this thought was too much of a responsibility for me to bear. What about his children-to-be? I wanted to tell him the truth and for him not to waste time on hoping. We’ve had our time, I said. I knew my words would be devastating but I had to let him go. The year was moving on and it wouldn’t be long before I could reflect on my first four seasons at the Nuns’ House.
I was pulling on a pair of track pants, getting dressed for an early morning walk, when I heard the dates for the welcome swallows’ return being discussed on Local Radio: some said 18 August, others 3 September. I wondered when the swallow family might come back to the Nuns’ House and how disappointed I would be if they didn’t find their way home. One listener rang to say his swallows had never left and I thought his place must be special.
That day, I’d been invited to a reception at the Launceston broadcast studios to celebrate a big anniversary, along with listeners, colleagues and community organisations. For many, the ABC was the centre of their world and I’d often heard listeners confess to being ‘rusted on’. Childhood memories of Derby flooded back, of the ABC lunchtime news echoing through ‘Pleasant Banks’, the Ransons’ farmhouse in Telita. Neita and Doug were family friends who lived a short drive away from us: across the Ringarooma River where we’d watched platypus swimming, and up the narrow winding road that tracked behind the dam first carved out in the nineteenth century for the Briseis tin mine, long gone. As children it was an adventure just to visit them. We’d always stop to check the mail in the oilcan letterbox at the end of their long driveway to save them a trip. Then we’d follow Doug, chasing cows and sheep and riding on his tractor, or stand at the kitchen bench watching Neita bake, waiting for Doug to come in from the paddocks. When he arrived, rolling up his shirtsleeves to wash his hands for lunch, Neita would turn up the radio in time for the ABC news, and place a plate of chops or a man-sized steak on the table. Doug sat down with hands and fingernails scrubbed, smelling of Lux soap. It was always the voice of a male broadcaster that echoed through the house, warm yet authoritative.
I thought I’d have time for a morning walk before driving the twenty-five-minute trip into town. Running up the side of the Nuns’ House was a narrow gravel road called Waddles Road, a country lane shared by a handful of rural homes. It crossed a stream and a decommissioned railway track before heading up steeply into the bush. I walked it regularly enough, my goal to make it to the railway track before jogging back home. I would always stop at the railway for a few minutes to catch my breath and take in the view of the mountain, of hills and valleys that filled me with peace and a sense of life being rounded and whole. Fence-lined paddocks were stocked with grunting cattle, a pair of horses snorted and grazed, and birdsong joined in the soundtrack. If I went early enough, the smell of the day and the dew on the roadside scrub and stringy bark was as potent a blend as malt whiskey.
The road itself was lined with an ancient avenue of magnificent gums, some over a hundred feet tall. I compared this new routine, walking under trees older than anyone alive, to
my old daily journey home on the no. 74 bus. The route travelled the length of central London’s Park Lane, before turning off at Hyde Park Corner up past the Royal Albert Hall, right near Harvey Nichols, up Kensington High Street, past the palace and on home to Hammersmith, where the bus terminated. Park Lane was more of a six-lane highway, lined with century-old London plane trees planted during the Industrial Revolution. In April, their first budding leaves of spring were a welcome gasp for life, especially when six months of winter had been enough already. And in summer, the trees’ branches were pruned neatly to allow for the height of the double-decker buses.
I thought of this avenue of gums on Waddles Road as the Park Lane of Karoola. One huge gum caught my attention: the largest, it had two trunks joined at the ground. I couldn’t say if they were two trees or one, but they had grown respecting one another—separately, but together—sharing the same root system. I wondered how they came to be there and who thought to leave those trees on the side of the track while clearing the bush for farmland. Perhaps they had a vision of it being a front garden for us all?
The reception was open and friendly. A bountiful morning tea was shared and speeches made with modest fanfare and the feeling of a family gathering. I was new to the ritual but felt included. When I got back home that afternoon there was an email from an editor at Vogue Living magazine. Could I track down Les Blakebrough for an interview? Les was a master potter based in Hobart who, at seventy-eight, had just been named one of Australia’s national living treasures.
I didn’t expect work to fly in after being away for most of the winter, but things seemed to be happening with my life without me trying to steer it. I liked the feeling work offered— of being wanted and useful.
Les had also just returned from a break in the UK and was mourning the recent loss of his partner to cancer. He lived a three-hour drive away, in a smart two-storey house overlooking the Derwent River. The door was already wide open when I first arrived, and I expected this was always the case, timed for a visitor’s arrival. Straight ahead, through a wall of glass, I could see the platinum river teasing little yachts that tugged on their moorings. Les seemed to jump into view and looked exactly as you might have imagined a living treasure to look, with silver hair, sharp blue eyes, and the energy of someone half his age. He had the handshake of a man trying to save you from falling off a cliff, and the gift of being able to teach without teaching as he sat low over his potter’s wheel taming a lump of clay into a perfect bowl with both skill and passion.
After the story was published, we stayed in touch. I looked forward to sharing time with him, sitting by his wall-window gazing over the Derwent, watching its zephyr-teased surface, or listening to the fairy penguins partying in a burrow underneath his veranda. We talked about books and articles we’d read, or the films, exhibitions and artists who had inspired us. In between our visits, I loved receiving his letters, his handwriting all scrawled and inky. A short note with a newspaper clipping: Couple of little things I saw and thought of you.Something attributed to Clive James and writing: ‘polish a phrase until it captures the light’ . . . Love Les XX. Les-isms.
Whenever he visited Karoola, Les would arrive laden with an embarrassment of gifts: a bouquet of exotic black violets from Sally Jo, a friend in Neika who specialised in rare plants; a case of Tamar Valley pinot noir for my paltry cellar; or a smart five-kilo box of plump Tasmanian cherries. On one occasion, he arrived with a handful of echium seeds; he liked the idea of their tall phallic shapes at the Nuns’ House. On another, he presented me with a trio of porcelain vases from his own pristine Southern Ice porcelain collection—a porcelain he had spent six years perfecting to rival Limoges. I thought it was too perfect for the Nuns’ House but hard to refuse when it came with a handwritten note quoting Theocritus: Verily great grace may go with a little gift; and precious are all things that come from friends.
In Paris they call it ‘flâneur’, in London’s East End it’s more like ‘mooching’: to unfold or to discover the day by strolling, loafing, wandering . . .T he Nuns’ House version was done in the garden with a pair of gloves and secateurs. In the midst of wandering, a branch was lopped or a cutting taken, a path cleared or the odd weed pulled out. Jobs to attend to rather than ones that overtook. They were no duty, just what resulted following unplanned meanders that could occur at any time of the day, often pushing twilight into night. Les called it ‘a hand at work’. In this way I fashioned a copse out of scrub, turned a scrubby bank into a garden bed and uncovered a fence line. It’s also how Wilf’s garden was starting to soften. His earlier advice had come back to me: keep the ground clear underneath shrubs, prune the branches off the ground, the lift will do it good and it’s neater that way. The space underneath the trees began to appear and I thought of Wilf’s handmade gnomes I’d stuffed in a box in the laundry when he died. I got them out and brushed them down. Some of them were handpainted—in reds, greens and golds—and the lines looked etched with his heart. I’d finally found a home for his oddball family of gnomes in the shade of a canopy I’d made.
One day, Les arrived with a towrope and a chainsaw in the back of his ute. The Nuns’ House Hills hoist must have been at least sixty years old, but it was wonky, battered, and missing a few arms like an umbrella in a storm. I’d mentioned to Les I wanted to replace it with one that worked, and this was what he came to do. First, he drove his ute into the back paddock, tied a towrope onto the steel Hills hoist that had been concreted into the ground, and pulled it straight out with the power of the engine.
Next, Les fired up the chainsaw, brandishing it in the style of D’Artagnan with his sword. Within minutes he’d felled and chopped up a stressed-looking cypress on the back fence.
‘Les, stop!’
‘It’s better to chop it down and replace it,’ he retorted. ‘Really, you don’t need to waste time trying to coax them back. Some trees have just had their day. Get rid of it. Plant something else.’
I thought about an exotic frangipani, but it was too cold here for tropical plants, so I settled on a native frangipani tree instead—the flowers looked and smelled just the same, although it was no relation.
I wasn’t sure what single thing drove Les to keep going. He just seemed primed at all times. When I baked my favourite Nigel Slater Tarte Tatin, he tried it too, shaping the recipe to make it Les. When I took him to Lulworth Beach we walked all the way to the end and back. I watched as he bent down to scoop up the smallest pebbles from the wet part of the beach. He stood up and faced me, holding out his treasure that he’d cupped in both hands like a gleaming bowl of precious gems, with water dripping through his fingers. Having let go of a man half my age, now I was baffled by the interest of one twice as old: old enough to be my father.
Les’s Tarte Tatin
Granny Smith apples (as many as will fit whole in your pan)
lemon juice (200 ml plus extra for rolling apples in)
1 cup dark muscovado sugar
1 cup demerara sugar
250g butter
shortcrust or puff pastry (make your favourite recipe or buy
pre-prepared pastry. Les uses Neil Perry’s shortcrust recipe)
whipping cream
I have the luxury of a tatin pan but a medium to
large non-stick frying pan is good as well, though
with a metal handle so it can go into a hot oven.
Core and peel the apples. Keep whole. Roll in lemon
juice to stop oxidation.
Into the pan, put one cup of dark muscovado sugar
and one cup of demerara sugar. Add butter and
lemon juice. Lemon gives the caramel sauce an edge.
Cook the ingredients to a thickish dark syrup. Add
apples. Roll out cool/cold pastry to a larger circle
than diameter of pan. Roll round rolling pin and
lay over apples, tucking in pastry to make a double
edge up to top of pan. Trim. (Puff pastry can also be
&nbs
p; used but take care to extend beyond pan because
of shrinkage.)
Place in hot oven for about 25 minutes, until pastry
is a good colour all over. Remove from oven.
The next stage needs courage and a deft hand. Place
a large flat plate/tray bigger than the pan over the
tart while hot and then, with a decisive flip of 180
degrees, keeping plate and cooking pan tightly
together, tip the tart onto a serving plate/tray. If you
get it right—short pastry well cooked, caramelised
apples soft but still in round form—it will look
stunning.
Serve with soft whipped cream.
CHAPTER 7
Winter, Tasmania
The pile of bush rocks that Crabtree had dropped off in his ute was taunting me. They’d been sitting in the driveway ever since I’d mentioned to him in passing that I was thinking of building a dry-stone wall with the rocks I’d collected from the paddock. I was inspired by a book, Wall by Andy Goldsworthy, that Les had given me for my birthday. The story intrigued me, of a wall of rocks snaking its way like a serpent through a forest into a lake and then continuing on the other side; the story of a wall unplanned, in sympathy with the landscape, although not expected by its maker to outlast the trees it caressed.
‘Your rocks are too small,’ Crabtree said. ‘You need big ones for the foundation layer.’ And that’s how they ended up at my front door, too big for me to move on my own. Not wanting to ask anyone to help, I decided to move them where I could instead. Some made it as far as I thought a rockery might work, while others got tipped to their end point at the foot of the front steps to make a rough front path-cum-patio. This happened one evening with the help of a bottle of rosé consumed in between the lifting and positioning. I liked the process of finding a place for each rock not by thinking but by feeling.
A Story of Seven Summers Page 7