This is the story of an unlikely friendship.
My name is Ailsa Piper. I’m a 57-year-old writer, walker, teacher, theatre director and, once upon a time, actress. The other half of ‘us’ is an 82-year-old swimmer, walker, educator and priest called Tony Doherty.
Friends used to look at me sideways when I mentioned him.
‘Tony? Is he your priest mate?’
They’re used to the idea now, but it took a while. I’m not a churchgoer and I don’t seek conversion, so I wasn’t on the lookout for a conversation with a cleric. I grew up kind-of Catholic, but if I had to define myself in terms of belief systems I would perhaps call myself an agnostic with pantheistic leanings—a fence-sitter!
I’m prepared to cop such sledging on the chin. I’m content to be undecided, and live comfortably with the idea that all we have is uncertainty. As a lover of ritual and things mystical or mysterious, I’ve often yearned for belief, but I’ve never been able to make that leap. So a friendship with a priest took me by surprise.
How did it happen?
Well, at Easter 2012, Tony was given a copy of my book Sinning Across Spain, by a mutual friend. As Tony tells it, the last thing he wanted at Easter (peak season for a priest) was a book about sins, but he read it and three weeks later, he wrote to me.
That book is an account of a 1300-kilometre walk I took on a pilgrim road in Spain, shouldering the sins of friends, colleagues and strangers. Back in 2010, I was doing some research for a play I was adapting, when I found an intriguing little piece of information. It stated that in medieval times, a person could be paid to carry the sins of another to a holy place. On arrival, the stay-at-home received absolution, while the walker got to keep any blisters they’d earned on the way.
Before I could think about it I put out a call. ‘Pilgrim seeks sinners for mutually beneficial arrangement,’ I wrote. It went viral! People donated sins to me. They wrote to me of their shame and regret. A swag of ‘sinners’ confessed and I carried, wanting to test whether healing, or transformation, might result. That was the premise of the story Tony read over Easter. So I guess our friendship began with sin; with ‘disclosure’—a word Tony uses a lot.
Disclosure characterised our exchanges. That first email of Tony’s was answered immediately by me, and the correspondence grew like topsy. Few boundaries constrained our exchanges, even though we are more easily defined by our differences than our similarities. We endeavoured to listen with care and respect. Tony and I share a love of conversation and a wish to find common ground—if not agreement—on everything from afterlife to walking to the best licorice allsorts. As a result, there were surprises, laughter and, occasionally, tears. Best of all, though, a friendship began.
Whenever I spoke about our letters, people frequently expressed longing at the possibility of a thoughtful pen-pal and, even more often, curiosity about the content of our correspondence. What was this ‘odd couple’ finding to say to each other? At a time when much of the talk between people from opposite sides of fences is so polarised, we thought we might see if our dialogue could be of interest. (Not that we oppose each other in everything, but it must be said that Tony’s insistence on rugby as football offends my AFL sensibilities.) We decided to use our correspondence as the basis of a book.
We spent months wrangling, in person and via email, trying to develop our ideas and playing with form. We wrote dialogues, trying to articulate the sorts of conversations we had. We took turns writing essays about what we felt mattered. We wrote and re-wrote, slogged and got bogged. We put the text down for over a year, thinking it would never see the light of day.
Then, I was awarded a writing residency at Bundanon, a property gifted to the nation by the artist Arthur Boyd. On the banks of the Shoalhaven River, it’s a place of natural beauty and silence, two things that ignite my imagination and work ethic. One day, unable to make headway with another project, I decided to have a look at our manuscript.
I read and read, all day and into the night, as wombats snuffled and growled under the floorboards. I couldn’t put it down. I was taken back to the beginning of our correspondence, and marvelled at how far we had come. It’s easy to forget beginnings when you’re a long way down the track. This is something I know from walking. The first steps of an epic hike are rarely as memorable as the last, and yet they should be. They’re built on hope and possibility, two things without which our days are bleak.
Not stopping to draw breath, I cut 30,000 words, paring the manuscript back to nothing but our early letters. I sent the text to Tony, saying I thought everything else we had written was too pretentious or self-conscious, and didn’t sound like us at all. I suggested we interpolate some letters to a Reader—to you—and leave it at that. Tony agreed immediately. Whenever that rare occurrence takes place, I figure we must be on the right track!
And so, dear Reader, you are holding in your hands a piece of two lives. It might seem a little strange to give you words that were not intended for publication, but they are a heartfelt offering, and they are us—for better and, sometimes, very much for worse!
These letters were the beginning of a friendship that supported me through some of the darkest and most frightening days of my life. For that—and for Tony—I am grateful. Every day.
I wish for you Tony’s customary sign-off: happy days. It’s easy to write those words, but to be able to recognise a happy day, and to embrace it and be grateful for it, may be one of the most important things we can do. Here’s to living in happy days.
Ailsa