Playing With Water (13 page)

Harry, the pet duck (which has begun laying eggs) belonging to Phil’s son Brett will have to be kept away,
because ducks like to eat frogs. Margaret O’Hara gave me a printout of a web page on frogs and how to bring them into a garden. It says it is unwise to take frogs from other places. You are advised to make the environment and they ought to come. But Diana’s frogs are close by and so I am not removing an animal from its true locality by using her tadpoles. Perhaps these are not Diana’s stock, but fresh ones from the old drain over at the station, where the willows are springing. I heard frogs there after recent rain. I heard them, with some chagrin, thinking that in this filthy drain they thrive, but never in our waiting green bath. And now this. Success. Every now and then I run out, creep up and look for ripples and legs kicking like a foetus. I keep wondering why I am so happy, so jubilant. It must be that they are my first pets. Frogs are perfect for me, as you can leave a frog, but you can’t leave a dog and you can’t leave a cat.

Tomorrow Ghilly, my old friend from Newcastle, is coming to stay overnight. She’s driving to Melbourne to sing in
Die Fledermaus
for six weeks. An opera singer’s lot. Six weeks in lodgings, away from husband and children. There might be a few stage-door johnnies, but it’s not the glamour it’s cracked up to be. But then, what is. Take a look at a writer in full throttle at a literary lunch. You’d never think of them wandering around in their dressing-gown, looking distraught at a publisher’s letter asking for the money back. And not a cent to
spare. Quaking with fear and worry. There they are, hair shining, laughing, flowers on the table, everybody drinking but them, signing books and looking as good as they possibly can. It’s a living, that’s what it is. But don’t let the glamour fool you. That’s just a charade. Once I saw a photograph of myself sitting in a car, the door open, with my arms full of purple
Cattleya
orchids after a signing. I looked like Maria Callas. All I needed was a fur coat. Yet I’d been three hours on a train with dirty windows which the cleaner had refused to clean when I asked him to rub his filthy rag over them, so that I could see. I had hardly two cents to rub together. Somebody at the lunch had given me the orchids. I laugh every time I look at that photograph.

As I rode south to the nursery, a white heron stood in a lagoon, its reflection like the open white pages of a book. So still, it was as if it were reading itself.

At the nursery I had a long consultation with Denis and Tabitha. Denis gave me some old tomato plants he was throwing out, along with white salvia, Shirley poppies and two punnets of old lettuces. I bought some French sorrel plants. Tabitha, seeing this, said that her Lithuanian grandmother used to make sorrel soup, so she would take some plants home too and look up the
recipe. She advised me on the mess the two big pots on the verandah have become. The
Dracaenas
took the cold, hard winds very badly, even though I thought they were sheltered there. They are tattered and brown. I will put them with the clivias down among the shelter of the fences. Tabitha showed me new weeping spreading Lilly Pillys which are also available in an advanced state. She also said port-wine magnolias might fill the pots and thrive there. I would very much like to have scent at the front door, and these, she says, are in bloom for a long time. I ordered two and one of the Lilly Pilly.

Denis sold me his second to last pair of green French rubber clogs. The pair I had from him are wonderful in mud so, in case they wear out, I took the others. A shoe you can hose is a good thing.

So much to tell, so little time. One of my favourite singers, Andrea Marcovicci, is playing and the song, ‘The Kind of Love You Never Recover From’, has a sharpness that I like even though I ought not to be playing a song with weakening lyrics. It doesn’t make me unhappy, merely thoughtful. The song goes on and lingers like smoke.

Ghilly is bringing me jacarandas dug up from a bit of vacant land near her home, where they’ve become weeds. No, it isn’t a National Park. Even if it were, it would be a good thing to dig them out as, along with willows, they’ve become a true weed. I have such plans
for the station. South, south I am going. With any luck, I could get to Bellambi along the railway line. And there never was such a place as Bellambi for need of trees. As Peri and I passed over the line on one of her visits, I said, ‘Isn’t this the most desolate place? Can you imagine coming down here to have a drink at your local pub?’

She said, ‘No, it isn’t as desolate as around the Guggenheim Museum Frank Gehry’s built at Bilbao in Spain. That’s a lot worse and it’s got a polluted river besides.’

Today, coming back from Corrimal, I saw a pencil pine dumped in a trailer with rubbish from a renovated house. These are hardy trees. I put it on top of the fish and groceries in my bike basket and even though it fell off a couple of times, it’s now in a bucket of water. The roots are mainly intact. Everything wants to live. I can hear the tomato seedlings in punnets that I left in the dump at the nursery calling: ‘You should have chosen me. Choose me. Choose me.’ Grosse Lisses wailing and calling. A small high call for such a large fruit.

Here is Peri’s beautiful pear cake recipe.

¹
/
₂
cup of brown sugar

1 cup of butter

¹
/
₂
cup of caster sugar

¹
/
₄
cup of ground almonds

2 large eggs

4 or 5 pieces of chopped preserved ginger

1 cup of self-raising flour

1 teaspoon of baking powder

quartered pears or apples or both

Method:

Butter a cake tin. Preferably not spring-form as they can leak.

For the base:

Melt
¹
/
₂
cup of brown sugar with
¹
/
₂
cup of butter and boil for 5 minutes. Do not burn.

Pour this caramel into the cake tin. Place on this, very neatly if possible, quartered fresh pears or apples or a mixture of both.

Pour onto the fruit the following mixture:

¹
/
₂
cup of caster sugar mixed with
¹
/
₂
cup of soft butter.

Add
¹
/
₄
cup of ground almonds, 2 large eggs and 4 or 5 pieces of chopped preserved ginger (the type that comes in syrup, or if you have none use crystallised ginger). Gently fold in 4 tablespoons of the ginger-preserving syrup, or milk.

Add 1 scant cup of self-raising flour sifted with 1 teaspoon of baking powder. If you have plenty of fruit, you can double this recipe for the cake mixture.

Bake the cake for at least 45 minutes in a moderate oven. The cake must be baked right through and can take 1 hour or more depending on the amount of fruit, as it is this that slows the cooking.

When the cake is done (test with a knife), remove from the oven and stand to cool. Turn out upside-down onto a plate and serve with thick cream.

Would I hire me

to look after me?

This rosy bag of excuses

for the half swept floor, unmade bed

late flu injection

crowded wardrobes

shed of spiders, leaves

and tax returns, unwritten poems

lines lost in the bike’s breeze.

Would I like the meals

I cook for me?

I don’t think so.

With no union for me

I would harry myself

lying in the sun on the couch

legs up reading.

(In this harrying I remind me

of my mother who could never bear

to see an idle hand, her own

or anybody else’s.)

Would I let me rear my children?

Lord, no. And yet

who else would I trust?

I can’t be hired

I can’t be fired

arguing with myself all day

watching the wind blow the leaves

those mortal warnings

that I love to scuff through.

S
ix jacarandas standing in a row. Dug, Ghilly said, from a neighbour’s garden and their own where they grew wild. They’ve come in good condition. Ghilly is asleep, with the long drive ahead. I am making tea and waiting to take her for a walk around the garden. Then we are walking to Bulli along the beach.

The first cornflowers are in a vase on the table with mock orange
(Philadelphus)
and pink roses.

Sometimes in the night the sound of the sea—familiar in childhood, an ancient memory—knocks through my dreams so that the bed is in a sleep-out with glass louvres open to the night.

The air, laden with the sound and scent of the sea, fills the blackness with its vague softness, soothing and beating like the patting hand of a parent.

When I wake with the hazy light of early summer outlined through the white wooden shutters, the
garden wet with dew opens like a hand as I walk out onto the deck through the French windows and lean on the railing looking out towards the distant sea as the house sails through the garden to the harbour of the day.

The sweet and utter freedom to be able to decide what to plant and how to spend the day is something that seems so rare that when I think of having it as I do, day after day, year in year out, leaning there, staring out, I can hardly believe that I have reached a place and a time where the burdens and the privilege of work, routines and slog have faded away and are now just a memory. I could paw the ground like a horse, so eager to begin the day.

Suddenly, rain. Last week I sowed Italian parsley seed and later, while Ghilly was here, some coriander, the slow non-bolting type. I have been out looking for parsley seedlings and also killing snails. The lemon tree is sagging under the weight of lemons. Well, not exactly the whole tree, the lower branches, so that the lemons rest on the earth.

I took a jar of salted lemons to Jenny Gribble in Balmain. Recently I have been staying with her on Tuesday nights when I teach in Sydney. For days the jars of lemons had sat on the lawn in the sun, after they had
been cut into halves and slit, filled with salt, and set upside down, one upon the other, with the jar topped with lemon juice on the second day. When they have released juice of their own, they must be put into the sun for about a fortnight. Sometimes I leave them a month to be sure they are pickled and I like the look of all this bricolage standing in the garden.

Today, the fifth, is Guy Fawkes Day. When my brothers and I were children we burnt guys on bonfires, but I didn’t know why. And now, after reading Antonia Fraser’s
The Gunpowder Plot,
I know and I wouldn’t burn an effigy again. When you read of the persecution of Roman Catholics in England, about their horrific suppression, it puts a different light on trying to blow up Parliament.

I’m making cheese sandwiches for lunch and mine with Grandmother Shemmald’s Pickles. Here is the recipe:

3 cauliflowers cut into medium flowerets, stems cut finely

2 kilos of onions, peeled and sliced

2 cucumbers (optional)

Cover these vegetables with cold water and a cup of salt. Stir to blend and then leave overnight.

Bring this mixture to the boil and cook only until the onion looks clear. Strain it.

Mix the following ingredients together to make a smooth paste:

1
¹
/
₂
kilograms of sugar

1 cup of plain flour (or more if needed)

6 flat tablespoons of dry mustard

1
¹
/
₂
tablespoons of turmeric

¹
/
₄
teaspoon of cayenne pepper

1.25 litres of vinegar

Now pour this yellow mixture over the vegetables and bring gently to the boil. Simmer for 1 minute, being careful not to let it burn. If it does not thicken enough—mix extra flour and extra vinegar and add until it does.

(Cauliflowers seventy years ago may have been smaller.)

Pour into sterilised jars and seal. Keeps well.

If the cauliflowers are very large, you can use one less or make extra of the sauce in which it is boiled.

Bees like poppies. Pink poppies up to my chest have bees ducking and weaving in and out. After admiring
the bees and the poppies, I came inside. On the radio a man was singing ‘Where the Bee Sucks, There Suck I’.

Two more jacarandas are sitting in the drive, waiting to be planted at the station. I tell myself that even if one tree a day goes in, eventually, if vandals don’t come, it will be enough to make a difference. This torment for getting things done, in beating the chaos of nature, goes on every day. Tearing at weeds as I pass by, I wonder if these handfuls are enough to keep the balance at least level with what is growing silently elsewhere in this garden. Then, when I am at the station, I look at the thin line of trees, so vulnerable yet full of promise, and wonder if I can keep them alive for the first summer. While these thoughts are anxieties, they are the anxieties of luxury. No prisoner is thinking of this in their cell. No unhappy person, full of grief, is staring at a thin line of trees, full of plans and longing.

‘Never without a cause,’ as a friend said of me. I know he’s right. These invented anxieties are part of a lifelong characteristic of inventing urgency. Those who lean on the fence discussing the garden seem calm. Do they toss and turn, half-dreaming of slitting bags of red-gum bark, pouring it out onto layers of newspaper smothering weeds, or do they think, when they flop down to read, that trees are waiting to be planted, or that those put in last week are probably wilting. I have invented all this to please myself. To live with a sting to
my days, as if bees come nightly with horticultural messages of urgency. My dream, the honey, will be the avenue going to Bellambi, shading the platform and feeding the birds.

A card has come from Diana telling how a particular cannon ball came to her family. It was, she says, really a brass shell case from World War I, expelled from an eighteen-pounder gun at Holdsworthy Army Base, where her father trained as part of the University Field Battery in 1939. ‘He brought it home—a very heavy cylinder, about twelve feet by five in diameter. And my mother and grandma sensibly used it for pressing tongue.’

This reminds me that my father had a brass shell case gathered by his father in World War I, which my mother used for flowers in what she called ‘autumn colours’.

Diana wove a tapestry quoting her father’s diary from before the Battle of El Alamein. She said it was incredibly moving to weave her father’s words. This is what she wove above a pattern of a Roman tiled path: ‘The regiment marched all night.’

Watching a bee enter a pale nasturtium, as I am now, reminds me of Margaret O’Hara’s hive in her bedroom wall. A local beekeeper is willing to remove the hive,
but he is hard to pin down and she is worried that the bees will multiply. My brother Tucker had to burn down a perfectly good house on his land, as bees got in and took over a billiard table, and in the end it was easier to burn the house than to save it.

There is something very unlucky about poisoning bees. The American poets Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher had a hive in their home poisoned and then he got lung cancer and died. There are many stories about bees and illness. Bees know when you are sick.

The writer Nancy Phelan told me when I asked about her hives that bees need to be told when somebody dies in the house. If you don’t, they leave. It’s an old country-folk thing. I don’t know if it is in Australia, but it certainly is in England.

When Nancy’s husband died, she said, ‘The bees went. I didn’t have time to go and tell them, so they left. I can only assume that they were offended.’

Nancy also told me, on the matter of poisoning bees: ‘They travel far, you know, and they take the poison with them, so if something eats them it is poisoned too. So it spreads it.’

At Peel, Barbara and Ruth have beehives and now Barbara has sent a parcel of soap she’s made from the wax, as well as furniture polish. Those hundreds of trees we planted will feed the bees, because they were native trees. There’s a pot of their honey on a shelf in the
pantry. Christmas is coming and I am going to make a panforte with it.

Oh, these sweet sparrows. A flock have come down to peck among the blue flowering vine and the nasturtiums, eating some insect or other. I love their alert busyness, their darting ardour.

In the shade of the big tree, the arum lilies are raising their pale flowers like the upturned, soft, lustrous palms of saints. As if to say, ‘See, I have nothing. I am a lily of the field and I want for nothing. Behold my beauty.’ And when the plant has two lilies, it looks like a white benediction.

Here comes a pigeon to drink at the dish.

Now here comes a horse race to make you some money. Yes, a horse called Brew (its mother was called Horlicks) has won the Melbourne Cup.

Three loaves are about to go into the oven. It is the River Cafe recipe for sourdough bread. There never was a more complicated recipe. It has taken two weeks to get to this stage and about five different actions. Three more to go. Spraying the oven with water, turning the loaves, reducing the head, spraying again—it’s four. Then cool the bread on a wire rack. And nothing makes me sure it will work. The recipe is for two loaves but I
have made three big ones. How did two turn into three? Who can say. I was telling my friend Patricia Harry that I was making this bread and she said, ‘You’ll only make it once.’

I am reading
One Art
the letters of Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet, who lived a long time in South America. She wrote the poem ‘The Fish’. She also has the bread-making bug, as she says in one of her letters. There is something very attractive about work that involves many processes. It means the kitchen becomes a sort of boiler room and there is no time at which something is not being prepared. One thing I hate is a house where nobody knows what the next meal will be. In fact, in some households a person must get into a car and bring home some ingredients for almost every meal. People might have lived like that (without the car) before the invention of agriculture, but I can’t see the point of getting out your bow and arrow for every meal. What if you came home with nothing? Makes life miserable.

Well, the oven is at 230°C, so in they go. It’s a lottery. It might work. And if it doesn’t, there’s merely a colossal mess to clean up: flour on everything. But it’s still a thrill.

‘Can you water that new rose, please, Tom?’ I called as I ran up the platform to catch the train one hot day this week.

‘What one is that?’ he replied.

‘It’s the one with yellow flowers, the new one, Tom, the one that’s drooping. I didn’t have time to water it.’ (He didn’t know what a rose was.) He walked down to the tap with a bucket while I watched from the other side of the line. Then he tipped the bucket from the high platform and missed most of the rose.

‘Oh, Tom, do you think you could give it another bucket, please? That lot didn’t really hit it.’

Again, he took the bucket and poured, this time with better aim. Then I knew no more of the fate of the rose because my train came. It is not that the people who work at the station are not helpful, they are quite the opposite, it is just that they do not know about gardens. A coastal banksia died last month because I saw, too late, it was wilting and the water then didn’t save it. The problem is that they do not notice wilt, or, if they do, they do not realise its meaning. If I am away a few days, plants can die.

This morning when I visited my neighbour, David, for the first time, an enormous magnolia tree
(Magnolia grandiflora)
amazed me, growing behind his house. David, of course, has not seen the tree because of his blindness. We walked over and I brought down a branch
to show him. At first he held the leaves, thinking he held the flower, but then I put the petals into his hand and he felt the circumference of the flower and smelt it. He said, ‘They’re white, aren’t they, with a yellow centre?’

I said that they are really cream, with a slightly darker cream centre. He felt the pistils, standing as they do in a small cone.

When I arrived at David’s and got off my bike, I saw that all the blinds and curtains were drawn and thought perhaps nobody was at home. Then I realised that there would never be any reason to open them, day being the same as night for him.

Standing beside this amazing tree, the most beautiful tree in the town, hidden away from everybody, including the owner, we had a talk in the sun. David was speaking about the lawn and mowing. I realised that he mows the lawn himself. He bent down and said: ‘See, even now I could get a catcher full.’