1954
The wide road was empty when he came out again, having washed in a primitive bathroom and changed his dusty shoes. The sun was now becoming scorchingly hot, and before leaving the shade of the sparse pine trees which sheltered Strathallan, he stood a moment and looked about him. The house was a long wooden building with an iron roof and a wide veranda, along which were drying bathing dresses and towels. Indoors there were flies and sand in the bedrooms. The main boarding house across the road was a larger edition of Strathallan. They were both at the top of a steep grassy slope, below which was a short golden beach, protected at the end by a jutting-out cliff which the boys called the ‘Tarpeian Rock’. Behind the house rose the dry downs, scattered with the white skeletons of gum trees, killed by the strong salt winds, a hideous arboreal graveyard. The north wind now blew over the brown paddocks like the blast from an oven. It flung itself at the brilliant green sea, flecking it with white spray as dazzling as fire.
‘What a place to choose for a holiday!’ thought Tony, who preferred the cool mountain glades of Macedon and Olinda. He did not know how vividly this harsh and wistful landscape was to remain photographed in his mind all the days of his life. As he opened the churchyard gate he heard the nasal voices of the choir strained to reach the high notes of ‘Join the triumph of the skies’, and although he had only once been to England, and never at Christmas-time, this shrill noise, rising thinly to the high and blazing sky, struck him as a travesty of Christmas celebration, as fantastic and remote from its original meaning as in an opposite direction Catholic rites had become in countries where they were encrusted in local superstitions . . .
Lucinda Brayford, Penguin, London, 1954