Playing With Water (15 page)

Clunk. Clunk. The frog has sung. Riding to Thirroul last week, frogs were calling, sounding like trucks running over a wooden bridge. Next day, David and I walked there, and again the rumble. In my heart dark doubts were rising like bubbles. I thought, how can I tell the reader I am mistaken? No frog is in my pond, there has never been a croak and, surely by now, there would be. The legs I saw must have been those of something else. That night I heard it. At first I thought it was Harry, the duck next door, calling. Then I thought it was his owner,
Brett, chopping wood. And then I knew it, I knew it, and ran down to the pond. I stealthily bent among the white geraniums and papyrus grass. A rustle, and the frog stopped. I knew it was a frog. I came back and lay on my bed, listening to the lovely noise. It has taken two years and now victory is mine. All doubts have gone. Frogs in the pond and it’s still raining. It has rained for almost a week. The barrow is no longer the rain gauge because it is full of rusted holes. Buckets are more than half full. I love gathering rain water. There’s never a bucket standing upside down. All stand waiting. It is not that I do anything in particular with the water, it just goes onto plants. But I think they like this better than any other.

Oh, go on, frog. Croak now, so I can put you here on the page. Perhaps in answer to this rainy day, so soft and mild, it has sunk under the water and pulled it like a crinkled quilt over its head.

Two days ago I took the two big dracaenas from the pots on the front verandah and put them into the Badlands. They had been savaged by wind, as already mentioned. The two port-wine magnolias have arrived, and Tabitha has sent these, along with six different miniature pelargoniums, which trail sweetly. There is nowhere to put them as they are most subtle plants, unlike the others in the garden, hardly noticeable at first, their effect almost nil. Nonetheless, like a mother, I love them.

The rain is soft, the air warm. I lay under the mosquito net on my bed, watching through the open French windows the rain coming like drifts of veil. A great circular spider web hangs from the back eaves, catching the rain. Its symmetry glistens and shines, sagging and wafting like a drenched bride.

Every day these gifts. Sometimes I lie between moments of thinking, lulling in happiness.

Yesterday, old friends who used to share my house at Leura, Gordon and Woolfie, came to lunch with their daughter, Kitty. Diana and Margaret came too. Margaret now has two possums in her chimney as well as the bees in the wall. It was too wet to go for a beach walk, so we sat and talked. I got out some Peter Levi books to show Woolfie, because Diana was talking about Greece and the dig she does in Cyprus. She has written a book on her archaelogical travels called
The Fabric of Ancient Theatre.
Diana had been in Greece with Levi when she was twenty, before he left the Jesuits. He’s recently died, and I found his biography of Milton called
Eden Renewed
at Gleebooks last week. Levi wrote of a walking trip in the Peloponnese with another poet, his friend Georgis Pavlopoulos, called
A Bottle In The Shade.
This is one of my favourite travel books. I read it with a map of Greece on my stomach.

On the matter of wheelbarrows, Margaret said if she won the sweep at the Melbourne Cup lunch, she’d buy
me one. Terry’s, which I now use as he no longer uses it to carry manure, has the bottom replaced with a piece of wood. This I cover with a hessian bag and I have moved loads of compost onto plants and taken many things to the station in it. People peer but go about their business. Live and let live. My own barrow collapsed at the station; the tray fell off, along with the weakened wooden handle. I brought it home in Terry’s barrow, a teetering palace of broken barrows.

Later. I have been out gathering snails. As Woolfie came in the gate yesterday, she called, ‘Look, Kitty,’ pointing to nasturtium leaves each holding a single drop of shining water. The drop, when the leaf was picked, rolled like mercury on a green plate. She opened my eyes to this, as I had neglected to see it. Now I do. And the voice of the frog called, not from the pond but somewhere near the jacaranda. Only twice, then it heard my step.

Watching a wet mynah bird on the neighbours’ roof, preening itself and shaking out the moisture, I saw that it too, like the owl in the book I am reading
(Wolf Willow
by Wallace Stegner), can turn its head around and peer out between its shoulder blades. Maybe all birds can do this. But until I read of the owl, I had never noticed.

As I stand looking out into the garden, I feel myself a coat hanger with a dress of flesh wafting at the window.
The tall poppies have fallen under the weight of rain. I prop them up among the cornflowers, each limp but helping the other. The roses remain stalwart and on them I lean the others.

Floods in the north. Gunnedah, Taree and Muswellbrook have roofs poking through water. Here, heavy rain keeps pouring down. It couldn’t be better, in a way, for me. Yesterday I finally dug up the yellow Surfrider hibiscus beside the shed. This had been on my mind and I waited, thinking Hugh might come and I would ask him to dig. Then I decided to try it and it was not all that difficult. I lugged it over to the station and put it beside the ramp where it will hide a gap. George, the stationmaster of Bulli, Bellambi, Woonona and Corrimal, arrived and said, ‘What are you up to today, Kate?’ I showed him the hibiscus and then asked him for an extra dozen bags of gum bark to more perfectly cover the newspaper and bark I have put down to kill the weeds. The paper shows through, so it looks bad. A mad woman’s breakfast. I saw two women pointing down at it on Saturday, and they were not approving. I think people believe that when a job is done by a public authority, they have a right to perfection. That’s understandable. I am possibly adding
to the poor reputation of the Railways by this imperfection. One day, though, when these trees are grown, the roses are climbing on the fences, the plumbago, daisies and hibiscus are in bloom, it will be beautiful.

Although making a garden puts one in a state of perpetual longing, a sort of long slow ache, the fulfilment can never give the energy or happiness that the longing created.

I am not morbid, thinking of the Lilly Pillys dropping fruit on the ramps, nor the giant figs pushing against the railings, but it’s on my mind. I know they must all be moved. At the moment they are safe and can be left a while until I get enough energy to do it.

When I asked George if I might buy the bags of bark, he said, ‘Well, $40, eh?’

I said, ‘Well, possibly $50, George.’ He said I could go ahead, buy them and bring the receipt and he will pay me.

The last jacaranda went in yesterday with a small hibiscus I had dug self-sown from here. Being wet, I took a spade to the weeds and, in a flurry, cut a swathe. Then the rain came back and at home I dug the pink robinia into the hole left by the hibiscus next to the shed. Now I stand watching the rain, with my forehead against the glass of the back door, looking at the robinia. It is not as tall as the big olive beside it, but almost.
Neck and neck I will watch them race. Next spring, what a sight. Pink against the grey. But nothing is certain in gardening or in much else either.

Patricia, when I last called on her at Woolloomooloo, gave me a sandwich of meat left from a standing rib roast and lemon chutney. I have been making the chutney which comes from her fifty-year-old book full of much older recipes. The recipes are Edwardian in the main, unusual and good. All written in pounds and pints.

4 large lemons

¹
/
₂
kilo of onions

600 ml or 2
¹
/
₂
cups of good wine vinegar

¹
/
₂
cup of salt

1 cup of raisins (optional)

30 grams of mustard seed

500 grams of sugar

(I double or quadruple this recipe adding plenty of mustard seeds)

Method:

Wash and slice the lemons. Chop the onions and put in a china or glass bowl with the lemons and sprinkle with the salt. Leave for 24 hours. Put all the
ingredients in a non-reactive pot. Boil and then simmer until tender and thick, stirring occasionally. Place in sterile jars and seal.

I am making my friend Annie Guthleben’s recipe for slow-baked stone fruits. This is how she told me to do it. On an oven tray, spread baking paper. Cut peaches, nectarines, plums and apricots in halves. Allow one piece per person. Sprinkle with caster sugar. Set the plums in the centre as they are the juiciest. Bake at 169°C for one hour. Leave in the oven to keep warm. Serve with cream straight from the tray to the table so as to keep the shape of the fruit.

The Premier, having flown over the floods, has been presented with a bouquet of grey and black wheat, damaged from the rain. Farmers have lost an estimated over half a billion dollars, the radio says.

White November lilies are blooming. I never see them without thinking of Margaret Sharpen, in whose memory I planted the bulbs. The lilies, I see now, are like her veil. Nobody who wafted down the hospital corridors at Gawler ever had a more perfect veil. Before the phrase ‘role model’ was invented, she was
mine. She taught me to lay out the dead and to help a baby emerge with serenity. When I flooded the Sisters’ Home by overflowing my bath, she merely suggested I take a dustpan and scoop up the water. It is a strange thing, but it is when you know you have done wrong and are in trouble, that the person who is mild with you, when they could be harsh, stays with you forever.

Once I gave a woman two injections of morphine within the same hour. I told Sister Hansbury, thinking I might have killed the woman, and even if I hadn’t, I would be dismissed. She, too, whom I was frightened of, was mild with me.

The nurses then were from fifteen years old to about twenty-five when they enrolled. It was nothing that we crushed tablets of morphine in a teaspoon, mixed it with sterile water and drew it up in a syringe, then administered it to someone in pain. It never occurred to any of us to plunge the thing into our own vein. The very thought of it would have made us laugh. Every time I see a heroin addict on television using a teaspoon in this way, I remember nursing.

One day Sister Sharpen showed me all her frocks, long and short, lined up in matching colours in her wardrobe. After that, not only did I want a veil like hers, I wanted my clothes to be matched like that too. I thought of her big floating organza veil folded into four
layers as a layer for each year of training. (If you trained in a country hospital, you went after two years to the city and did two more years. Whereas in the city the training was three years.)

Immaculate and serene, the lilies remind me of Margaret. A royalist, she once went, while in London, to a royal garden party. She had bought in Rome a sensational wide straw hat covered in roses. On the day of the party it rained continually and her hat got drenched. She did see, though, a hand waving as a car went past. She put the sodden hat into a bin as she left the party.

If I had known Margaret was sick I’d have gone to see her in Tasmania before she died. As it is, we never met again after I left Gawler. She was thirty and I was twenty and her effect was simply immense. When this nurse came into a room, somehow the atmosphere grew calmer and, subtly, healing seemed possible.

Oh, you should see the big bunch of lilies I lashed out and picked in this vase with the pink hollyhock, lavender and roses. It looks like a wedding. My daughter’s being married in March and I wonder if there will be roses in the garden then. I once heard Tammy Fraser say she was told by an elderly woman that if she pruned her roses in January or some time like that (don’t try this, I’m uncertain of the detail) the roses will bloom in a big flush very early. This proved to
be true and hundreds of roses were there for her daughter’s wedding. But you’d feel pretty silly if it didn’t work.

Hugh has been using Seasol, a seaweed solution, on his foxgloves and all else. His biggest cream foxglove is three times the size of my pink one. Next to my foxglove, the tall hollyhock is about to bloom.

My friend Clare, in Adelaide, has a front garden full of self-sown hollyhocks which have never had anything done to them. Neither water nor fertiliser; nothing but sun and the little summer rain Adelaide gets. Each time I stay, I plan to dig some seedlings. This one came from a punnet from Denis’s nursery and only three have survived. Hollyhocks, once established, seem to be easy to grow and they give that middle-linking height that gardens need. I couldn’t see this myself until a garden designer from Plum Tree Cottage in Wentworth Falls came to help with my front patch at Leura. Suddenly, when it was pointed out, I saw it, and once seen, this sort of thing can’t be forgotten. It is like throwing a rope up from the ground to lasso the trees visually.

Yesterday ten of my students came to lunch, which is why I brought in the flowers. We sat around and had a reading of our work. It is everlastingly marvellous to see how people learn to write. It is like riding a bike. One day, after all the trembling, wobbling and falls, a
steady pace comes, direction and off they go. It’s heartening and whoever scoffs and asks, as one academic did, if I really do think writing can be taught, I know it can. Every year I see it happen. Not to everybody, I admit, but then not everybody learns to ride a bike, or learns to swim either. Not everybody wants to enough.

Today, the first swim down at the sea pool. I wish I had begun earlier. When I got in it seemed hard, I thought I’d get out after five laps, but then it seemed easier, so I stayed in for twenty.

Have you ever smelt sweet osmanthus? Yesterday, at lunch, Jan gave me a plant and, as she put it into my hands, she said its name. I remembered we had spoken of it in class when she’d brought a sprig with her. We all smelt the perfume that day, surprised that such an unremarkable little creamy flower could send out such a strong scent. Today I dug the green glossy bush in beside the side path facing north against the wall of the house. There were pots of osmanthus Denis showed me at his nursery this morning and I thought of buying more because, as Peri says, a woman can’t have too much of a good thing. I got into serious trouble with that little homily of hers which she’d embroidered on a cushion. I’m more careful nowadays. You need to live a bit less close to the edge than I do to act for long on that.