High up in the mountains of Kurdistan, where the crow roams free and where the snow meets the sun, this is where the story sleeps.
A stonecutter named Farhad loved the princess Shirin, and Shirin was pining away for love of him. Shirin’s father the Shah agreed that if Farhad would hew a vast staircase into the side of the mountain, he would receive Shirin as his bride. So for many years Farhad laboured alone, cutting the steps into the mountainside, and carving the likeness of Shirin into every hundredth step. When the Shah learned that Farhad had almost completed his task, he became deeply worried and so he sent a messenger to tell Farhad a lie, to tell him Shirin had died. In a passion of sorrow and despair Farhad fell upon the blade of his shovel, splitting his head in two. His blood flowed in a bright river that cascaded down the vast stone staircase.
When Shirin heard that her beloved was no more, she fled to the place high up in the mountains where he lay. Taking the shovel in her pale and delicate hands, she too fell upon the blade, splitting her own head in two. Her blood joined the blood of Farhad, and in time there sprang from beneath the snowy earth the cup of a brilliant scarlet flower which spoke forever after of their love.
On a bookshelf in the house where I grew up, that story slept in a book of Persian tales which was one of the volumes in a set of books containing the legends of different lands. The real significance of the narrative to me was possibly the fact that it explained the origin of the tulip, a flower with which I became fascinated when I was six. I had a colouring book that consisted of delicate full-colour prints of old botanical illustrations of tulips, some with insects or shells alongside, giving not only atmosphere but also scale. These pictures were on the left-hand page while on the right-hand page there was a black-and-white outline waiting to be coloured in. My aim was to reproduce the exquisite image on the left with my Derwent pencils. The results, I seem to recall, were not too bad, but I was always in despair since my pictures were not perfect replicas. I know now that some of the pictures were by artists such as Jacob Marrel and Johann Jakob Walther and Judith Leyster. In 1999 Anna Pavord published The Tulip and this book is one of the great delights of my library. I can just open it and gaze at the four tulips reproduced on the endpapers to experience some vestige of the rapture I knew when I was colouring in, some inkling of the joy and wholeness I knew when I was at home in my own childhood. The four tulips on the endpapers seem to have leaped there from my colouring book. Images of an ideal Holland were very popular in the 1930s and 40s, and I was very attracted to them. I cannot explain why this was so.
The first things I remember planting, as a child, were the bulbs of red tulips. My father gave me a garden bed of my own for the purpose. The bed was under a nectarine tree, a place that seems now to be unpromising, but it must have received enough light and nourishment, for the planting was very successful. I cannot name my bulbs, but I know the flowers were full-blooded shiny-satin-scarlet with a regular star of butter-yellow in the bottom of the bowl, and quivering black anthers. The process of their development was to me a miraculous unfolding of a mystery.
The fat little bulbs were covered in a skin resembling fine brown tissue paper, which fitted nicely round them, holding the secret of the life within. Over time and one by one the pale green tips broke the surface of the earth. I paid eager attention to their progress, since these tulips were in my care, and I was responsible for their wellbeing. As I write this I feel a storyteller’s urge to move toward a crisis, a tragedy, but I must report the ending was a happy one, and the tulips finally bloomed. The only sad part was when I put them in a vase and watched as they dropped their petals onto the mantelpiece. The stalks were eventually thrown out, but I pressed the petals in books. They turned to flat semi-transparent tissue, dark and dirty orange. I still occasionally find one of them dreaming away between the foxed leaves of old books, and I found one in a round yellow china box for face-powder. It is marvellously dusted with the remnants of the powder. I was sometimes chastised for pressing flowers in books, and the stains I made are still present; I still slip petals into my books even though I do own a flower press. The practice of trying to preserve the shape and colour and texture of a flower by squashing the petals until they become ghosts, skeletons and whispers is a means of attempting to carry the beauty of the past into the present. Beauty is there in the dried pieces, but it has changed, so the effect is not so much on the eye as on the memory and the heart.
The concept of home is written into the heart, and the word itself is embedded in stories, songs and images, all of which I will refer to in this essay. The emotion tapped by the word ‘home’ frequently slips into recollections of remote memories of the earliest places called home. The story of my tulips is located at the heart of my own dense personal memory-legend that weaves itself into ‘home’, the place of creation and safety and joy that is distant and yet present for it can be summoned at any time. I have always been fascinated by the story of Thumbelina, not least because the child first made her appearance in a tulip that grew from a magic bulb. No sooner does the young wife have custody of the tiny child than a toad comes and steals the baby away. The child’s quest for home involves several terrifying misadventures, until she is finally deposited by a swallow in the arms of the little king of the flowers. She has not gone backward, but is creating a new home. Her destiny is fulfilled. This story, like so many of the works of Hans Andersen, is seriously weird. But I can never forget the tulip, with its startling sexual imagery, that set all in motion.
My memory of home continues and moves out from the tulip bed under the tree, gliding forward past the garden shed where one wall consisted of the large frosted window from an optician’s shop. Let into the frosting was the shape of a big pair of spectacles with gilded rims and mirrors for lenses. Directly facing the spectacles was an apricot tree which I used to climb in warm weather to read books. I could look sideways at myself reflected in the mirrors. One day I was picking and eating the ripe fruit as I read. I bit into an apricot, looked down at the bright orange flesh glistening with juice and marked by my teeth, and there, tight up against the smooth brown stone, lay a fat white grub drowsing in perfect puffy segments. I still like the taste of apricots, but I never ever eat one without recalling the clean and sudden sight of the shiny grub. It was so very still. The natural world laughing silently at me.
As I think of these things now, I see the images of my early life, so similar to the images of many early lives, being picked out in a series of clichés and stereotypes. The tulip, the apricot, the grub signifying paradise soon to be lost. Tinged with the glow of nostalgia, shadowed by poignant reminders of the ideal past. If I could begin somewhere other than in the garden, I would, but my recollections of the place that first embraced and sheltered me simply fly straight there. And I must continue to glide along these garden paths, common as they may be, in my search for the sensation and image of ‘home’. My images are forever fresh to me, and they exercise over me a power that is welcome and sweet. I enjoy looking down at the grub in the apricot, feeling again my own indrawn breath of horror and disgust.
The path continues and takes me to the playhouse my father built. It was a white cottage with a red roof and a red door and a little schoolroom window that looked into a pear tree. In spring the shivery white pear blossom filled the window with clumps of dreamy clouds. On the other side of the playhouse was the lemon tree on which my little brother was told to pee to encourage the crop. Behind the lemon tree was the Nelly Kelly passionfruit vine. Not far away stood the rotary clothes line. This was middle-class Tasmania in the 1940s, and the washing was boiled in a copper.
So far the drift of my memory of this childhood home has not really explored the house. I circle, approach and retreat. I am not afraid to enter the house, but the images and emotions are many, varied and complex, and I find I must sift and examine them quietly, gently, steadily. The front garden was filled with rose bushes, lawns and prunus. In the middle of one lawn stood a tall thick palm tree. We had a big cypress hedge across the front, and I made use of its hollow interior as another playroom. From this hedge I learned to love the smell of cypress sap, and from those rose bushes I acquired my beloved habit of pressing the open blooms of roses to my face so that I feel the velvet softness found nowhere else, and inhale the essence of the rose.
My father built the modest timber house in a standard late Edwardian style in the 30s when he was a bachelor and the street itself was new. Bellevue Avenue it was called, in Launceston, Tasmania. Nothing could have been less like the famous Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, summer home to the Four Hundred of the Gilded Age. I thought it was just a really pretty French name. It was not an avenue, by the way, it was a gravel road that rose steeply to a peak and descended on the other side to end in a cliff wall of yellow clay. I lived in this house until I went away to university when I was seventeen, and my parents lived there until their deaths in old age.
There were square panes of coloured glass—pink, green and amber—in the sunroom, which looked out across treetops and valleys and hills to a line of mountains: Arthur, Barrow and Ben Lomond. Windows have always interested me, and not only windows, but glass as a magical substance. Once when there was an eclipse of the sun, my father handed me a precious piece of smoky green glass so I could observe the phenomenon without damaging my eyes. He impressed upon me the need to be careful not to drop the glass. I did drop it, smashing it on the concrete path outside the front door of the playhouse. Breakage and loss are often critical in the laying down of vivid memories, and are deeply embedded in thoughts and feelings of the shape of home. As with any good narrative, the story of home is riven with flaws, is all the more accessible for the moments when everything went wrong, the times when the two-way pull between positive and negative brings memories into sharp relief.
There are the forbidden or almost forbidden parts of the house. My mother’s dressing table had three tall bevelled mirrors that were pure bliss to play with. I had to get permission to do this. There were cut crystal lamps like mushrooms, and matching trays and bowls. I still have the oval hand mirror made from creamy casein that lay on the dressing table, and it is matched by the circular hand mirror I have, belonging to my father. This one is set in dark wood and has a hollow circle for a handle. It is kind of funny to have Mother and Father mirrors, and poignant to think that these glasses held their faces, that in these mirrors they looked also at the backs of their heads. Such tender thoughts make me think—yes, that was home, that gesture, that image in the mirror, that was home.
Little personal or even inconsequential objects carry with them the power to touch the heart, suddenly, at unexpected moments. I recently opened a drawer in my mother’s old sewing machine and discovered a little booklet full of tissue paper transfers. These were the images she used to iron on to my dresses before embroidering the designs. Cherries and flowers and ladies in crinolines and hats. It was so touching to find the paper patterns there in the old drawer where she had left them, placed them with her hands, and shut the drawer. I remember her sewing me some summer pyjamas made from material I had chosen. My father supervised the cutting out of the cloth, which was covered with pictures of the three little pigs. And in winter my mother would warm our nightdresses and pyjamas by the fire before we put them on. She lit the fire early in the morning, and she cleaned the hearth with red lead and black lead. You could sit on the fire-boxes on either side of the fire. They were brass with patterns of acorns on the sides and they had leather tops. On winter mornings my mother turned the radiator on near the piano so that I could practise. The radiator was marvellous. In the centre was an element shaped like a beehive, glowing incandescent orange, made up of rows and rows of curly wire. It was set into a copper bowl, the whole thing covered with a cage of crimped wire net. The piano was in fact a pianola, and family and friends played a large number of melodies such as ‘Home Sweet Home’, ‘Home on the Range’ and ‘Little Grey Home in the West’ with our feet.
Thoughts of the fire, the warmth and light, have taken me away from the memories of the embroideries. But on these I need to dwell. I have a number of cloths embroidered by my mother. They are so very dear to me, and beautifully stitched. They speak of hours and hours of quiet intensive work designed to embellish the home. They are the kind of thing you find in charity shops where they have ended up, sometimes after many long years of lying unused in drawers. I think they are one of the most poignant objects in the charity shops. They speak of death, of love and care and industry, and they carry the spirits of the women who made them, in lyrical little textured pictures that have drifted out free, floating in time and space. People sometimes use them. I do. And people sometimes rescue them to construct or decorate other things like clothing—even wedding dresses. There is a deep nostalgia embedded in them.
Nostalgia, that bittersweet longing for times and things past. This fine powerful old Greek word, meaning the sweetness of the pain delivered by an ancient wound, has acquired a negative character, a sickly cloying that hangs around it and suggests a lack of rigour, a lack of seriousness, a fatal weakness. People sometimes say ‘nostalgia’ with a sneer of superiority. Even more derided is anything that can be described as ‘nostalgia kitsch’. The embroidered ladies in crinolines would be nostalgia kitsch I think. An inferior, tasteless copy of a style of dress from late Victorian England. These ladies were known as ‘Dolly Vardens’, the original presumably being the beautiful daughter of a blacksmith in Barnaby Rudge. This novel was in fact the first library book I ever borrowed. I was too young to have my own library card. You had to be seven and I was six. So my father took me to the public library where I chose Barnaby Rudge with its engrossing illustrations, and my father took it out on his card. I discovered that although I could read many of the words I was completely unable to make any sense of them. I sat for hours turning the pages slowly, weeping with disappointment and frustration. There was a darling picture of Dolly Varden.
A great treat was a cake my mother used to buy from Williams’ cake shop in town, a Dolly Varden cake which had chocolate and yellow sections dotted with currants. It was filled with highly desirable ‘mock crème’ and completely covered in chocolate icing. Why was it called a Dolly Varden? I don’t know. I so adored the images of the ladies that for my fifth birthday I requested a Dolly Varden handkerchief. No, I didn’t want my mother to embroider one, I wanted a commercial product. So my mother went to some trouble to discover one in a shop, and I was ecstatic. I loved the handkerchief so much I took it to school to show to my teacher Mrs Sims. I showed it to her in the morning, and in the afternoon she graciously asked to have another peek at it. I opened my hand to reveal that the handkerchief had been reduced to a bundle of damp rags and tatters because I had simply gnawed it to death all day with my teeth. The shocked Mrs Sims gently asked me why. I didn’t know.
I do not recall the aftermath of the incidents with the handkerchief and the green glass for observing the eclipse. I know I was not punished, but there must have been some reaction, some comment. These are lost to me. It is as if nothing happened after the events. There were only my destructive acts, and these are enshrined in my memory, part of the damaged mental slide show of the past. I would like to know what happened. I believe it was virtually nothing, the crimes being so far outside the ordinary as to put the criminal beyond punishment. Should I now confess that some of the handtowels in my bathroom are embroidered with Dolly Vardens? Every day I am reminded of the one I chewed up. A bittersweet longing for times past.
Nostalgic style, expressing a longing for the recalled or imagined haven of home, is the reverse of minimalism, yet now, in a world that is conscious of dwindling resources, old things can even have their practical uses. A great deal of the tourist industry with its reconstructions and revisitings of the past depends upon the power of nostalgia, the twinge to the heart. The bed and breakfast industry seeks to provide the recollected comforts of the lost home. In a little place an hour’s drive from where I grew up in Tasmania there is the Promised Land where you can stay in one of five cottages that were built in the 1850s. They have been much improved, and re-named Gingerbread Cottage, Corner Cottage, Servants’ Quarters, The Old Bakehouse, and Apple Tree Cottage. They are, the advertisement says, ‘decorated’ with ‘period furniture and memorabilia’. They would, I expect, offer the real comfort of warmth and good furniture and fittings, as well as the illusory balm of historic atmosphere and charming old objects. But they are also a facsimile of things past, and so have an overlay of unreality, a touch of theatre and theme park. They are not, and can not, be ‘real’ but may participate in the dream of the haven of home.
The old pieces of embroidery in the charity shops have a kind of frivolous uselessness that can offend a sense of practicality. Before they got to the charity shop they were either carefully preserved in cedar chests or else were lying about clogging up drawers and shelves, inviting dust, vermin and decay. So built into them, alongside their value as nostalgia, is the fear of death. These innocent white old linen tablecloths with their intricate stitchings of yellow daisies and purple foxgloves are the fluttering flags of the beckoning grave. Which is after all the final resting place, final refuge, final home. Not an ordinary haven. Yet how interesting it is that ‘haven’ is only one letter short of ‘heaven’. English is strangely insistent on the letter ‘h’ in this context. Home, haven, heaven, hearth, heart. The hands that made the tablecloths have crumbled to dust. Perhaps that is what is so discomfiting about nostalgia—it invites fleeting meditation on mortality. Behind the pretty flowers lurks decay. It seems to me that what is under discussion here is in fact really close to what Indigenous people and poets call ‘the dreaming’, the stories that offer key meanings of the past, the present and the world to come.
A few of my mother’s embroideries are silky images of ideal cottages. Here the notion is of home as located firmly in the house and garden. I am so drawn to this stereotype that I have collected many objects bearing the image, not least my collection of swap cards which have survived from childhood. The pictures of cottages could put me into a little trance when I was a child, and they can still exercise their power over me. I know I am not unusual in this. It is perhaps a bit strange and interesting that these images of sweet cosy English houses with their diamond window panes, thatched or shingled roofs, winding paths, banks of hollyhocks and lupins and foxgloves, dovecotes, and distant views of meadow and copse should be held so dear in an Australian context. These places are obviously so beloved, and weirdly uninhabited, except, sometimes, by a bluebird, although smoke curls dreamily from the chimney. There is therefore a fire, a glowing heart, a spirit, unseen, inside. The houses are nestled in their bright and untroubled gardens, their pretty front doors shut, waiting for someone (me?) to come along and magically penetrate the walls and become part of the enchantment.
What such images suggest, above all, is safety, and safety is possibly the key element in the idea of home, although without the addition of shelter, warmth and nourishment, safety is not complete. The safety of home may become a sanctuary, a high and holy safety. The drifting smoke as evidence of the warmth and glow of life within is a signifier of the presence of human life, a human heart that beats and drives the engine of the home. My little grandson commented that ‘a house is not warm without people’.
When the setting of crime stories in books and films is the English village with its rose-wreathed cottages, part of the thrill is the fact that these havens belie their looks. The cottage is a fraud, a deadly masquerade. It is not really the home it purports to be, has been recognised as being. The reader/viewer’s faith is violated and the terrible acts that have taken place in the cottage sit in direct and vivid conflict with the flowers and the thatch. In this case the dear little house becomes a metaphor for the hypocrisy of the society. The gingerbread house of the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ works on a similar delusion. The homeless children, abandoned to their terrible fate by their father and stepmother, first fall victim to the seductive properties of the witch’s house. After their escape they find their way home by following the white stones the prudent Gretel has scattered. Home now consists of the joyful and repentant father, for the stepmother died when Hansel pushed the witch into her own oven. Stories like these, the crimes and the fairytales, foreground for the reader the meaning of home, giving warning of the false faces that houses can present. Another well-known exploration of the delusion that the home is a safe place for a child is found in the 1990 movie Home Alone. When the home is stripped of its people, its family, it becomes a dangerous place, vulnerable to attack and invasion.
As soon as I chose the word ‘homeless’ to describe Hansel and Gretel, the word began to ring its mournful note in my heart and mind. If I work backward (or is it forward? I don’t know) from the word homeless, I come quite quickly to the understanding that ‘home’ signifies safety, shelter, warmth and nourishment. So my project becomes the search for the meanings those words have for me. They have emotional as well as physical significances.
It is a truism that the house is metaphor for the self, and that dreams of houses are not usually expressions of realestate longings, but examinations of the very inner self of the dreamer. So maybe the swap-card collector who loses herself in the thatched cottage card is seeing there the spirit of her ideal self. It seems to me that this is so. A key to inhabiting ‘the dreaming’ is the ability to, or trick of, losing the self in the process of contemplating the image or the story. The losing of the self in this way is also, somewhat paradoxically, a key to writing—writing memoir, fiction, poetry. Not until the writer has stepped beyond the self does the writing begin to carry the writer forward.
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.
There 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.
The Webster’s College Dictionary gives me the definition of home as ‘a valued place, regarded as a refuge or place of origin’. The place of origin and the refuge are here conflated to form the valued place. It is a real place, yet it is also imagined and imaginary.
The imaginary counterpart of the imaginary home is identified in an old Norse fairy tale that I have loved since I was a child. It is called ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ which in the story turns out to be ‘everywhere and nowhere’. It is the place where the girl in the story lives with her bridegroom-to-be, a large white bear. She becomes, as it happens, homesick for her mother and father and brothers and sisters, longing to go home to them, sad because she can not. Home to her is the place where the beloved people are living. It turns out that she and the bear (prince) are the captives of trolls, there in the place that is east of the sun and west of the moon and, when the trolls are magically defeated through the girl’s agency, she and the prince fly far from the place. (Although the story never says whether the girl gets back to her family.) The concept of home is embedded deeply in the story, apparently unresolved, yet the fact that she has found her happiness, her home, in the prince, is really the point. As with Thumbelina, the new home has been her true objective. The old home is the breeding ground for the future home.
In the garden at Bellevue Avenue, close by the nectarine tree, the tulip bed, the apricot tree, the white froth of the pear tree, stands the playhouse, the cottage with a red door, a red roof, and one window. When I returned to my old home in order to arrange for the sale of the house in the late 1990s, I stood inside the playhouse and took a photograph through the open door into the unkempt garden. A curious thing happened. I am not able to explain it, but I will simply describe it. When the photograph was printed I was astonished to see that it resembled very closely the dear cover image on one of my early collections of short stories, The Woodpecker Toy Fact. Through the open doorway on the cover there is an impression, like a painting, of a vegetable garden above which flit white butterflies. When I took the photograph in the doorway there were, as far as I knew, no butterflies. However, in the print, there they are, white butterflies apparently arrested in flight. The luminous untidy garden has taken on the character of the vegetable garden pictured on the cover of the book years before. I can if I wish put together the book with the photograph, and there I have, in so many delicate and mysterious layers, the place of origin, the refuge, the sanctuary, the valued place, the place where the snow meets the sun.