The Long Hot Summer (5 page)

It's been difficult for me to get a garden established at the farm, because since we first moved in I have been in France during the crucial planning and planting periods of autumn and spring. Although I can visualise how beautiful the place could look with just a bit of my passion for plants sprinkled around, I can't expect other people to look after a high-maintenance garden when I am not there.

While I was in France, David established a business partnership with our son Ethan and a horticultural colleague from Ethan's workplace. Their plan is to build a native plant nursery at the farm, to supply bulk orders of trees and shrubs for roadside landscaping and bush regeneration projects. It's a great idea but it will take a lot of physical labour to get it up and running, not to mention cost as there are greenhouses to be built and expensive irrigation to be installed. The young men are totally enthusiastic and committed to the project and spend every weekend cleaning out sheds, building work spaces for the nursery and putting up the first enormous greenhouse. Although I also have lots of dreams of my own for the farm, I realise that these must be put on hold until
the nursery is successfully established. I must also be realistic about my time and availability. I can't get a project up and running and then just disappear off to France for three months or more. Most aspects of farming take a long time to bear fruit and so I must wait until I can be assured of an uninterrupted run before getting anything started.

I have always loved keeping poultry, and one of my greatest delights at the farm is the large shed and run, which I quickly filled with chickens, ducks and geese when we first arrived. After decades of keeping chickens and ducks in a tiny space at Leura, the set-up at the farm seems like a luxury. As damage to the garden by scratching hens isn't an issue, I like to let the poultry free-range during the day, which I naturally prefer to keeping them penned. The sight of them grazing over the lawns and fossicking between the shrubs always fills my heart with joy.

But the young men have decided the poultry sheds are too close to the greenhouse and that there's a risk of rats damaging their plant stocks, because vermin are attracted to the grain stored for the birds. When I arrive home the fences of the run have been removed, the shed cleared and put to an alternative purpose, and a new shed and run erected much further from the house. The new shed, cobbled together from old bits of roofing iron, is far from satisfactory in my opinion, but I am assured improvements will be made. Within a few weeks, however, foxes raid the more vulnerable shelter and we lose all the chickens and most of the ducks.

In our first year at the farm we had a small herd of mixed cattle agisted in various paddocks around the farm, but again the boys believe they are counter-productive to the environmental management of the property. The cows blunder into the
streams and precious wetland, polluting the water and eating back the reeds that bind the edges of the dams together. They also eat down all the tree seedlings that have been naturalising all over the farm, and so they must go. I love having animals around and would prefer that we fence off the sensitive areas and simply restrict the movement of the cows, but I am out-voted once again. The cows must go, and they do. Despite the drought, we are now faced with acres of long grasses, and the problems of snakes and bushfires concern me greatly. I agree that keeping animals can be damaging to the environment, but would prefer a compromise. I feel a sense of frustration but I also realise that the main focus of the farm is now the new nursery.

The drought itself is a huge worry to us and to all our farming neighbours. The stream – which, until thirty years ago, was a crystal-clear flow of water over a pebbly creek bed that was also home to families of playful platypus – is now a slimy, oil-slicked trickle. The roots of the crack willows, planted foolishly in the belief that they would bind together the banks of small streams, have choked the system, and the entire water table in our little valley appears to have dropped considerably. The spring which once fed our main dam has dried up and the dam level has dropped to within a metre of the muddy bottom. David finds a trout, a huge one, floating dead on the surface, its fleshy body bloated by the effects of the sun. Old-timers in the district say the stream has never been so dry, and there are rumours of springs drying up all around the neighbourhood.

So even if I did have the time and energy to start working on the garden, common sense tells me that I should leave it until the weather improves, until the dams are again filled with water and the stream has started flowing.

Despite our back-and-forth lifestyle, we have joined in with the community as best we can. A concerned neighbour phones us about a plan before the local council that would allow the new garage at the crest of the hill, on the main highway, to discharge its treated waste water into our fragile creek. It certainly is an issue that brings us all together, and we have several meetings and contact the media. David appears on the local news as a spokesperson for the group and passions run high. Given the drought and the problems with the local waterways already being polluted, we win the battle but the war will probably continue. It's all very disheartening, but this experience reminds us that although we live in a rural area, we are surrounded by wonderful neighbours.

My mother Muriel would have loved the farm here at Yetholme. It's several years now since she died and rarely does a day go by that I don't think of her. She lived with us for twenty-five years and our lives were intertwined, from the everyday mundane rituals to the special occasions of family life. She was there first thing in the morning, usually in rather a tetchy mood, desperate for her first cup of tea. Brewed in a pot with leaves – never teabags; white with one sugar. It's funny how these habits are passed down generationally. I drink my tea the same way, so do Miriam and Ethan, and of my eight grandchildren only one – Theo – likes a cup of tea. He drinks it the same way we all do.

Muriel was an unforgettable woman. In her youth she was arrestingly beautiful. Reed-thin, with milky skin, thick, wavy black hair and large blue-green eyes under arched black brows. A true Celtic rose. Her teeth were the only feature that let her down. A poor diet during the Depression and little understanding of dental hygiene meant that they were always weak and riddled
with holes. After she married my father, the odd punch in the face didn't help. One of her front teeth was blackened in her twenties and by her late thirties, after three pregnancies, most of her teeth had fallen out. By the age I am now, mid-fifties, she had a full set of dentures.

Mum started smoking when she was seventeen and was still smoking heavily when she died at seventy-six. She was also an enthusiastic drinker and never let a day pass without a glass in her hand. She was, in my memory, a regular drinker who also maintained a certain discipline or set of rules around her imbibing. During the week, for example, she frowned on drinking during the day. When I developed a taste for French food and would cook us a little hot lunch, I would often pour myself a glass of wine to drink with it. This she considered shocking. Yet during the weekend it was open slather. Any time from eleven-thirty in the morning onwards was okay for a drink, followed by lunch then several more drinks and an afternoon nap.

Although she left school at fifteen, Mum was essentially an intellectual. She was a voracious reader, devouring the classics, especially Shakespeare who was her hero, and a broad spectrum of poetry which she could recite word-perfect. She loved fiction, classical and modern, and non-fiction, especially if it concerned politics. She was a long-time member of a book club and kept up with contemporary writing, and became the much-loved matriarch of her small group – most of them women in my age group. She was a communist and an atheist but also quite a spiritual woman. She believed she was fey as part of her Celtic heritage, which was totally at odds with her sceptical side. She was also incredibly superstitious. You could
never put shoes on the table or open an umbrella in the house if my mother was around.

Although she never learnt to read music or play an instrument, Mum's knowledge of music was prodigious. As a young woman, in her first job as a secretary, she gave most of her wages to her widowed mother as board. The rest she spent on cigarettes and tickets to symphony concerts. She sewed her own clothes and made one pair of shoes last for a whole year so that she could indulge her passion for listening to music. She could identify virtually any piece of classical music on the radio from just a few bars, and was often also able to recognise the soloist or the conductor. She was passionate about music and my childhood was filled with the sounds of her passion. My brother and I didn't learn to read music, but all my children were proficient at this – mainly because their live-in grandmother constantly encouraged them. It was as though she invested the energy into her grandchildren that she hadn't been able to do with us because of our difficult family situation.

My mother was an outspoken, impatient, opinionated woman in an era when it was not considered appropriate for women to be assertive. She was capable of being utterly charming if it suited her, but more often than not it didn't. She didn't suffer fools gladly, and wasn't the slightest bit reluctant to let people know if they displeased or irritated her. As a child, I remember cringing in situations where my mother voiced her opinion in public. In the days before seatbelts, I recall throwing myself onto the floor of the car while my mother leant out the driver's window performing a rude gesture with her hand and shouting ‘fuck you' at some hapless driver who had irritated her. Nineteen-fifties road rage. I remember a woman who
queue-jumped at the local butcher shop being dressed down quite viciously by my mother – again I think I hid behind her skirts in embarrassment.

My mother's father was a journalist and also a drunk. Although quite a gentle and quiet man, he let his family down badly, especially my grandmother. So it always amazed me that my mother went on to marry a drunken journalist who was also not an ideal family man and who let her down very badly by womanising, spending most of his wages on his own indulgences, and occasionally hitting her in a domestic brawl. That said, people tend to re-enact their own family history – which is what puzzles me about myself at this stage of my life. I have made many conscious decisions to be different from my parents (and grandparents), but I am so much like them I find it impossible to escape.

My mother's career was chequered. She was forced to leave home before the Leaving Certificate because her father died and her mother needed her to work to help pay the rent. She did a short secretarial course and was quickly employed (ironically) by Penfolds Wines as a stenographer. At some stage, I'm not clear about when, she saw a job advertised as a ‘copytaker' at the
Daily Telegraph
newspaper and applied. She was a crack shorthand writer and was given the job immediately.

This is where she met my father, who was at the time the News Editor. One of her first jobs was as a court reporter. Although she came from a well-read journalistic family herself, she had been, as most girls of that era were, quite sheltered. She told a funny story about a rape case she covered as a young and naïve court reporter. Part of the evidence submitted were sheets ‘covered with semen'. Mum was a brilliant speller, but in this case she
typed ‘seamen' and somehow must have carried the mental image of sailors sprawled all over the bed. My father took great delight in pointing out her innocence!

Mum was responsible for taking down in Pitman shorthand all the BBC broadcasts during the early part of the Second World War. There were no telexes or faxes or satellite links for news communications. Journalists in Australia had to stay up all night in the newsroom, tuned in to the BBC, and accurately transcribe speeches by Winston Churchill or whatever war news was being broadcast in London for the morning editions of the Sydney papers. Her accuracy was unfailing.

My mother fell hopelessly in love with my father, who was a widower with two young children. His first wife had suffered from depression and had been unable to cope with his difficult ways. She committed suicide, and for several years afterwards their children Jon and Margaret were cared for by a succession of family members and paid childminders. Having a beautiful young wife devoted to helping with the children must have been a wonderful relief for my father, who was quite ambitious and found it difficult to juggle work and his young family.

Immediately after their marriage, Dad was given a promotion and left for New York, where he had been assigned as foreign correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
. It was difficult to get a place on a ship and Mum was left stranded in Sydney with her two young stepchildren for six months before joining Dad in his new job. It was certainly a good way for them to get to know each other, and they seemed to get along well from the start.

Jon remembers Muriel during this period as being fun-loving and elegant, always beautifully dressed and well groomed. Margaret, on the other hand, remembers the fights between
Mum and Dad much more vividly than anything else. Although there was rationing and shortages of various basic foodstuffs in America during the war, it appears there was no shortage of alcohol. It was in America that Mum developed her hard-drinking habits – partly, I suspect, through boredom because she didn't work at all during the four years they were overseas, and partly because Dad had a good income and spirits such as Scotch and bourbon were readily available and comparatively inexpensive. They lived in Manhattan for a while, then on Long Island, before finally moving out to New Canaan in Connecticut. Mum fell in with a hard-drinking crowd of wealthy locals and it seems that the war years were for her a constant round of socialising. Most of the photographs from that time show Mum looking gorgeous but often bleary-eyed, though she was only in her early twenties.