Christmas, Karoola
It was a restless night for the steers in the valley but they seemed to settle once the sun hit their backs. While they scoffed on a tractor trail of fresh hay that snaked across the paddock, sparrows and wrens took over the refrain and were gossiping in the rosebush. I watched from the front steps as a dozen or so cars trailed slowly around the corner and up the hill to the church. It must be Sunday. The breeze had just whisked itself up like a soufflé and I felt my skin glowing in the air. I hadn’t felt as natural as this for a long time—like the way frost thaws in the morning sun. I felt untrammelled and in tune with something other than my conscious thoughts.
It was a beautiful morning in mid-December. The valley reverberated with the sounds of reaping and gathering (rather than spending and shopping) and, what with waking up and living in shorts, it didn’t feel at all like Christmas. In Tasmania, Christmastime is the height of the hay harvest and the valley was busy with tractors cutting, raking and baling hay, beating the rain, some days right into the night.
I lay in the hammock I’d tied underneath a gnarled apricot tree in the back garden and looked to the distance at the hazy lavender outline of Mount Arthur, feeling anxious. Last night, Leigh, one of my oldest friends, had phoned from Sydney to tell me she was coming to visit for Christmas. We’d known each other since our twenties; seen each other single, partnered, broken-up, nearly married, sacked, retrenched, promoted to dizzy heights, then not . . . We’d met up with each other all over the world, in Frankfurt and Hanoi, Sydney and London, Barcelona and New York. Now, we lived a ninety-minute flight from each other and she was glad to see me home. She said she would come a couple of days before Christmas and head back after New Year. I knew our meeting would be different this time; I wanted it to be so but wondered how Leigh would feel and if it would complicate things. I was keen to attract a different destiny and felt the Nuns’ House to be my guide.
I tipped myself awkwardly out of the hammock and went back inside the house. I loved the way the newly polished floorboards shone like honey and felt cool beneath bare feet. My brother Jim had mentioned a local man he knew by the name of Dave Flynn. He thought Dave would know someone who could come and bale the long grass in my paddocks. It was thigh-high and scared me to walk through it: what about snakes? I rang Dave and before long he sent his son, Patrick, to check out the hay. As the tractor pulled into the driveway, I watched as Patrick manoeuvred his leg over the steering wheel and jumped down from the cabin. He strode into the first paddock, his back straight as a fence post, and bent down to feel the grass between his fingers. His neck seemed strong and proud where it joined his shoulders like a T-square. He had a way of surveying my land as if it was his, but I didn’t mind. His stance, square hands on stocky hips, felt simple and unthreatening. This man knew grass. Patrick called out, ‘The grass is ready, I’ll be back,’ but didn’t say when. No such thing as an appointment, or tomorrow at eleven. He’d already climbed into his cabin and was heading slowly back up Pipers River Road as I ran inside to answer the phone.
‘Hi, it’s Glen. Can I come and visit you?’
Another perfect day a week before Christmas, and I was thinking that it would be nice to get to know Glen better now the floor was done. While I waited for him to arrive I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. In some ways, I thought, he was one of life’s sweet gifts, but in the differences between us, not least our twenty-two-year age gap, I sensed the fact of him would be a challenge.
Glen arrived with the tiniest newborn kitten that he thought I might like, a trembling white Burmese that promptly got lost in the uncleared scrub at the side of the house. As we both got down on our hands and knees to find it, I said thank you but that I didn’t really want to be responsible for anything right now. In fact, I couldn’t be, and it wouldn’t be fair on the kitten. In a way, I realised, the message was as much for him.
We lay in the cool of the lounge talking and listening to music. ‘I’ll play you one of my favourite songs,’ he said. ‘I like to really listen to the words.’ We listened, in tune but not touching. The phone rang and it was Audrey. Glen took a photo of me on his tiny digital camera while I was talking and I thought his easy confidence was as disarming as his innocence. I wondered, then, if I’d seen his face somewhere before.
‘You don’t tell me very much about yourself,’ he said when I got off the phone.
‘You don’t ask questions,’ I said.
‘What should I ask?’
‘Well, what do you want to know?’
I liked his way of thinking—his candid and unusual nature—and he possessed a kind of purity and inner strength that deserved attention. I had little or no desire to start a relationship. In the past, relationships with men had not sustained me: they had plateaued, broken down, disappointed or hurt. I, too, had let men down, and wished I could be clearer about what it was I wanted from another person. What I needed now was to establish my own roots in this place. More than anything, in moving here I didn’t want to attract the same destiny I had before by grabbing at the first tug on my emotions. I was quite prepared for it to take some time, even for it not to happen at all, just to live simply on my own and sway more like the grass.
In the days leading up to Christmas, I worked hard at settling in, though in a mindful way. Every now and then I’d unpack another box, unwrap its contents, consider them, then find a place for them to live. It wasn’t just me I wanted to feel at home; I also wanted every thing I owned to have a place where it could be either useful or appreciated. And I wanted to do everything slowly so fresh connections could be made.
By the time Leigh arrived, a couple of days before Christmas, the Nuns’ House was ready to welcome its first guest. While my home was calm, I felt agitated. I didn’t expect Leigh to arrive at the Nuns’ House tooled up for work with a laptop and mobile phone, or to be taking long business calls that seemed fraught, intense and challenging. She was working on a Chinese coproduction that would open the 2006 Shanghai International Festival, but the combination of excitement and high anxiety felt far too close to the life I had determined to leave behind.
In the end, Leigh decided to shorten her stay and return to Sydney before New Year to arrange a hasty trip to China. I was disappointed by the fractured nature of my old friend’s visit and felt the need to express my thoughts. Next time she visited, I told her, I wanted her to leave her city shoes at the door, to find instead the peaceful space I wanted the Nuns’ House to be. It might have seemed harsh to say these things, and I feared I may have broken up a friendship, but my resolve was firm. I wanted to do the whole living thing slower so that different things might happen.
On her last day, we set out to find the nearest beach, which turned out to be at Lulworth, half an hour’s drive away— a simple curve of sand, the perfect length to walk, with no mobile coverage. The day was overcast and windy and the sand scratched at our legs as we walked. We set out at a brisk pace with our heads into the breeze and felt invigorated after making it to the end and back.
‘You’ve found your beach,’ said Leigh.
‘We found it together,’ I replied.
We were in tune in that moment, the thread of our past friendship tugging at us in the stiff breeze on Lulworth Beach. When I dropped Leigh back at Launceston airport I wondered if there might be a divide opening up between us; that what made her feel alive wasn’t what was awakening in me here.
The lights shone bright in the valley at the community hall and I could hear the beat of a New Year; there was a live band and the clatter of conversations hung in the air without a breeze. I could almost catch every word as I watched from my veranda and wished myself a happy new year before turning in at two minutes past. As New Year in London was nearly half a day away (Greenwich Mean Time) I didn’t feel the need to celebrate the sharpness of midnight in Australia. Meanwhile, Leigh was on a plane headed for Shanghai. Time was just a concept. Glen rang on New Year’s Day. It had been a couple of weeks since we last spoke. The heat of the day was brewing under a cloud-free sky and we decided to head to the nearest big dunes at Beechford, half an hour away, where the ocean beach was empty.
Glen kicked off his thongs, took off his shirt and jeans and raced towards the waves. As he turned around to smile and beckon me in, I noticed his face and torso framed by the ocean and knew where I’d seen him before. One of the books still packed in my London boxes was Germaine Greer’s The Boy, a book about male beauty. The black-and-white cover image was a version of Glen.
‘The male human is beautiful when his cheeks are still smooth, his body hairless, his head full-maned, his eyes clear, his manner shy and his belly flat,’ wrote Greer. She could have been describing Glen.
We swam and afterwards found a gentle dip at the top of the dunes, out of the wind, and lined it with our towels. We lay down next to each other, cradled in a bowl of sand, and looked up at the sky. I told him I thought he was ethereal and he asked me what that meant.
‘Almost as light as air,’ I said. ‘Better than beautiful.’
When we got back to the Nuns’ House I introduced him to Irish whiskey and Cuban cigarillos. And he introduced me to a version of Australian manhood I liked: a young man capable of respecting a much older woman as if age didn’t matter. He showed an ease in my world that I loved.
A few days later, Patrick returned and let himself in the front paddock to cut the hay. I took photographs through the bedroom window of a man on a tractor in my paddock (the novelty of that) and felt like a tourist in my own home. I didn’t know how these things worked, but my brother Jim suggested I let Patrick take the bales away as payment, and so that’s what we arranged.
Those first summer weeks passed and I was kept busy and fit by both house and garden. I bought a mower and learned how mowing teaches you to see a garden; how else would you get to travel over every inch of every contour? I kept a journal and wrote in it whenever I felt inclined. I loved looking out over the fields dotted with cattle and sheep, and tried to learn to call them paddocks. Every now and then I’d feel the need to leave the house, jump in the Jeep and go for a swim. On one of these trips, to Waterhouse Beach, I took a dirt road towards a line of dunes but soon got bogged in the sand. In the heat of the day, I scraped away the sand with my hands and managed to find the space to place some broken tree branches under the tyres. I hopped back behind the wheel, put the Jeep in first gear, and accelerated my way out of the soft sand. I can get bogged on my own and survive, I thought; either that or I’m very lucky.
My brother Jim had a colleague involved in a four-wheel-drive club and suggested I join up. ‘Let’s go on their next trip,’ I said. So, one Saturday, Jim, his six-year-old son Riley and I joined the four-wheel-drive convoy that started in the holiday town of Bridport. I remembered visiting Croquet Lawn Beach when I was Riley’s age, but I had no idea there were strands of ocean beaches away from the rocks and coves of the camping ground. I learned how to let down the tyres on the Jeep and pump them up again, and that I’d need my own compressor to do this. This way driving in sand would not defeat me. The true test of the Jeep was a line of huge sand dunes. Jim and I swapped seats, while Riley prepared himself by hanging on to the handle holds in the back. As we reached the crest of the highest dune, the Jeep became airborne. I turned around to look at Riley, whose face was full of joy.
‘Let’s do it again! Can we, Dad? Aunty Hilly, let’s do it again!’
I thought how important it was to say yes to this feeling, how not to tell yourself that you can’t. When I got home that day and hosed a ton of sand onto the driveway from underneath the Jeep, it felt as if my soul had also been exfoliated.
That night there was an email from Debs, an old friend and former magazine colleague. She was coming to Australia at Easter and wanted to visit. There was also one from Richard Crabtree. I’d heard about Richard from a woman I’d met back in London the previous summer, at a wedding party at The Duke in Doughty Mews. We got talking because we were both there on our own. When I told her I was looking to move to Tasmania, she told me her English godson had moved there quite some time ago.
‘I think he’s a bit of a hermit, has a house in the bush,’ she said, as she wrote his name and email address on a piece of paper and pressed it into my hand. ‘Promise me when you get there that you’ll look him up.’
I’d sent him an email, and in his reply he told me he lived in Turners Marsh—just a few kilometres away from the Nuns’ House. I remembered my promise to the wedding guest and decided to invite her godson over for a cup of tea.
As it turned out, Richard Crabtree was a winemaker and artist who had moved here more than twenty years ago and built his own house out of rocks on top of a hill overlooking the Tamar Valley. He told me he knew the McCarthys who used to live in my house, and that he’d been here in his role as a volunteer firefighter when the old fire truck was garaged in a shed in the back paddock. He was weathered as well as fit, though somewhat dishevelled, as if he’d just got dressed after a swim in the sea. His choice of shirt was eccentric for a hands-on vigneron: the best Jermyn Street quality in odd colours like chalk-blue and orange stripes, or candyfloss pink, and often double cuffed. I wasn’t surprised when he said he found them on the sale table in a menswear store in Launceston.
Richard was always full of useful advice and he took to dropping by regularly for a cuppa and a chat. We talked about everything from local wines to fire hazards, but when he first spotted John Seymour’s book on self-sufficiency on my kitchen table, he advised me not to try it.
‘Mug’s game,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there, in Scotland and Cumbria. Ten years in total. You don’t have to do everything for yourself. And I wouldn’t plant anything now,’ he said, noticing the line of nursery pots. ‘Just start digging.’
It was Richard who encouraged me to think more seriously about my water supply.
‘You have a water tank—oh, and a bore,’ he observed. ‘Well, you’re lucky then. If you run out, get Dave Flynn here. He carts water too.’
I found the long bamboo pole that must have been used by the previous owners to measure the depth of the water in the underground tank, and painted it with blackboard paint so I could see the water line more easily. If the water got any lower, I knew to adjust my usage, to keep washing-up water in the sink for as long as I could, to try not to flush the loo every time, and to shower once a day instead of twice. In readiness for more upcoming visits from far-flung friends, I made a sign for the loo: ‘Please be aware that the Nuns’ House lives on tankwater, which means we rely on the gods for rain.’
It was good to know there was a Richard just around the corner. I didn’t get the sense he was about to invade my privacy; in fact, quite the opposite. Tea without commitment was all I really sought, and that’s all I think he could possibly give after a lifetime living alone. I liked how he seemed not to mind if he arrived at the front door only to be turned away if I was busy or wanted to be alone. Other people might have thought I was rude—one of the reasons I chose not to encourage casual visitors—but Richard seemed to understand without flinching.
There were visitors aplenty. Gillian, a new friend, who visited from Sydney, and Wendy, an old friend from London who had helped restore and decorate my flat at Digby Mansions. I liked how their visits coincided, as if the Nuns’ House had become a sanctuary for women of a certain age and independent disposition. I’d met Gillian on the Bay of Fires walk. She was a media lawyer whose knowledge of Tasmania was informed by green politics. She’d lived in London, fallen in love with an Italian, but returned to Australia to be close to her family when the future prospects of both the city and the man had faded. Gillian wore wide-brimmed hats and neck scarves to protect her skin from early ageing and I admired her outspoken and singular spirit. Wendy had buckets of that, too. She and her boyfriend, Pete, had been going out for years but were travelling independently this time. Trained as a fine artist, she ran her own business as a tradeswoman in London. The Nuns’ House embraced both friends.
On their first night, we lit the fire in the lounge room and drank red wine until we could spill it without minding. The next day Wendy worked out how to use the new whipper–snipper and then showed Gillian and me how to manage it. We took it in turns to slash the long grass under the fence so that we could paint it. I loved friends from afar visiting and enjoyed it when they wanted to help with the jobs that needed doing, as if the Nuns’ House spoke to them too. I also looked forward to the day they left, when home was empty again and I could get up without knowing the day might already be scripted.
Not long after that, Sharni, an old London flatmate, arrived from her hometown of Perth with her friend Libby. I loved how she screamed like a girl when she tripped up the front steps to the Nuns’ House, and how her being here brought our left-behind London to Karoola. Sharni and Libby were attending an architecture conference in Tasmania and although I was out of their way they stayed for a night with me. That evening Libby offered to cook milk chicken, an old family recipe involving the cooking of chicken breasts in milk—slowly. As Sharni gathered plates and we were deciding where to eat, Libby, whose origins were Italian, said, ‘You must have a table in the kitchen—it’s where all the best conversations happen.’ Her words inspired me; despite the space and opportunity of all the nooks and crannies my home had to offer us, the best place was judged to be as close to the stove as possible, in the kitchen, in Italy the heart of any home. Over supper Sharni told me that she understood the logic of my move back to Tasmania, but had wondered if the reality could ever live up to the dream. Now that she was here, her doubts were eased.
I told her that if it didn’t work out I could always do something else or go back. ‘It’s the beauty of being single,’ I said. ‘There’s no one else to worry about.’
It’s not the first time I’d voiced these thoughts. In fact, they had become a kind of crutch, a morning mantra I used on everyone who asked why I’d made, in their eyes, such a drastic move. Sharni and I both knew these words were too simplistic and that going back would be like retracing my steps. When she quizzed me about how I thought I’d earn a living here, I knew she would find my response evasive but I was keen to avoid having conversations about what on earth I was going to do. The next morning, I waved them off at the front gate, warmed by the energy of female friends.
I suspect Audrey was nonplussed at the passing parade of visitors I took to meet her, and my hope in doing this was that she would understand how I could live on my own yet not be lonely. Without really planning it, Audrey and I were now catching up more than we ever had since I’d first left home. With Wilf it was different. It was difficult for him to visit the Nuns’ House with Sylvia, his companion of the past twenty-five years. Sadly, she had liver cancer, was confined mostly to a wheelchair, and he’d been caring for her for eighteen months.
Whenever I used to visit from London, I’d catch the two of them feeding the birds, or sitting on the back veranda on their garden bench. Before her cancer, Sylvia would jump up and go into the kitchen to make a fresh jug of lemonade, and Wilf would take me on a tour of the garden, remembering to show me the rose I’d apparently given him many Christmases ago. He was so proud to see how it blossomed in the middle of the garden, the gift I’d forgotten I’d given.
As a doctor, he refused to countenance handing Sylvia’s care over to another, but it wasn’t the best of worlds for him as he learned to cook and clean for both of them and have her wheelchair at the ready. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
‘The fact is,’ Wilf said one day when we were alone, ‘Syl’s taking an inordinately long time to die.’
I was touched when they shared with me the deal they’d struck with each other. ‘If I ask you how you are you must be honest,’ said Wilf, addressing his words to Sylvia across the garden table.
‘That’s right,’ said Sylvia, addressing her words to me. ‘I have to be honest. He wants me to tell him the truth.’
Wilf and Sylvia managed to make their way out to Karoola once. Sylvia brought a pretty vase she thought I might like, some flowers from their garden, and a copy of a book she no longer needed: Stirling Macoboy’s What Flower Is That? I didn’t mention that Audrey had already given me a copy. Wilf arrived with a bag of fresh lemons picked from a tree in their small backyard, whose prolific growth was encouraged, he said, by his peeing on it.
Everyone who visited the Nuns’ House added something to it. Day by day, I became more and more convinced that things were falling into place, like life’s own gravity. In this way, the house was becoming a physical manifestation of what happens when you let life come to you, a collage of the efforts of deep and new friends: Gillian, Wendy, Richard, Leigh. Wilf and Sylvia. Glen. I was yet to find a way to earn a living, but I did have a collection of recipes tried and tested.