Playing With Water (22 page)

With the laden barrow wobbling from the weight I went slowly home. From time to time I sat on the edge of the gutter to rest. Passing a house with many cars outside and people standing in the street drinking beer, I sat down. An elderly man, with neither teeth nor shoes, came over and said, ‘Where are you taking that?’ I told him. He said, ‘You’d do better if your tyre wasn’t flat.’ He took the barrow and said he had his pump out because he’d been working on the cars in the street. I stood outside his drive, which had been hosed down, as I was dripping mud. With a few spurts of air the tyre swelled up. Then, calling over his shoulder, the man said, ‘Joanne, come down in five minutes and pick me up from the Parade.’ I said that he couldn’t take the barrow as he offered because he had no shoes.

‘Don’t like shoes. Never wear them,’ he answered, giving me a toothless grin. He set off at a great pace, pushing the barrow with me running beside him. He asked, ‘How old are you?’ I told him, thinking I was about to get a compliment.

‘You are old enough to know better. I saw you come down the road but I thought you were a neighbour who doesn’t speak to me so I thought bugger her. But when you passed her house and sat down and came past our house I saw it wasn’t her.’ By this time his daughter
Joanne had arrived in the car and she drove beside us laughing. We came to my gate and I thanked the man, John.

‘I’ll take it round the back for you. Who’d you buy this house from?’ I told him.

‘Jimmy Simpson! I used to work for Jimmy in the railways.’ I asked what he did.

‘I’m a driver.’ And with that John put down the barrow and walked out the gate to the waiting Joanne.

I dug holes and put in all the lilies before night fell. And I leave you to judge with what triumph I stepped into the bath.

Walking around David’s garden we were talking about his geraniums, which are in bloom and came from cuttings from my garden (I almost said ‘looking at’), when I began to tell him about the glorious day of the lilies. ‘That sounds like the sort of thing I like doing,’ he said. So I asked if he would like to come with his barrow that afternoon and dig a few lilies.

We walked through the park with me shouting, ‘Go left, David. No, right!’ as his barrow veered towards new trees that had been planted there. Careening round, we made it to the creek through many a vicissitude. I realised again how often we use the words ‘see’ and
‘look’. They’re often used metaphorically too and litter everything we say. Soon after we became friends I gave up trying to avoid words such as these because it made conversation too hard, and in the end I felt it was unnatural and patronising. I think these words don’t exclude the blind, they are merely normal speech. ‘Watch out!’ ‘You see.’ ‘Take a look at that.’ ‘See how your geraniums are blooming.’ And so on a thousand times a day. Now I relax and let the language roll.

I led David down the bank as he held his white cane and a shovel. Coming to a clump of black-leafed lilies and ginger plants, I showed him that he could dig whatever he chose. There was an old bucket lying among the litter and, putting the cane in that beside him, I left him to it and plunged in farther to groups of arum lilies. As I staggered out holding a great dripping root ball to my chest,
squelch squelch,
I lost a shoe. Then we lost the cane and one of the spades. I plunged around, feeling with my other shoe, and after a while found everything and so we went back to work. David’s white hat had mud on the back of it, as if he’d been tossing mud like hay over his shoulder, which puzzled us. There was mud on his nose and mud dripping down the front of me, which was for some possibly atavistic reason, amazingly delightful. Perhaps it is a return to childhood. A time of innocence where filth is glorious and free, a most liberating feeling. In the rest of life I am
in thrall to filth and spend hours working to be rid of it. Exultant and reckless, I sang the Hippopotamus song to David, and what he made of it I do not know because he stayed silently digging, keeping his thoughts to himself.

After our success, getting home was another matter. With the barrows teetering with plants, we made our way up a slight hill to the edge of the highway. ‘ Stop. Stop,’ I cried as David headed down a sharp bend to the bank of another creek. Worried about us on the edge of the highway, crossing a bridge, I took David’s barrow and wheeled it over the bridge, leaving him standing in a field like a statue (or a shepherd listening for a lost sheep with a mud-covered crook). A young man came up and offered to help. With the traffic whizzing by, I think our predicament had become clear. He wheeled the heaviest barrow over rough ground to a smoother safe place and left us, watching over his shoulder as I led David to the barrow.

We were going down a quiet street when an old woman appeared and asked what we were doing. I told her. She began with dire predictions, looking and sounding, in her blue cardigan and shift, like a Sibyl or a member of a Greek Chorus. ‘If you plant those lilies they might get into the creek at the railway station.’ (We’d be so lucky.) ‘You’ll be arrested if you plant willows. They are a noxious weed.’ I said that the willows I had planted had died, and it is true they have
been poisoned by accident for the fourth time by the Railway grass-poisoners. She began to tell me a tale about the RSPCA. I looked behind and saw that David had turned around and was going the other way. I left the old woman and her warnings and ran back and turned him around. ‘I think we’ve had a narrow squeak there,’ I said. ‘I think we might be careful in future, as that woman knows a lot about the flooding of the creeks and everything that goes on here. She could report me for trying to grow willows.’

Finally we wheeled the barrows in my gate. David offered to dig holes for the lilies so I showed him where to dig. After all I needed had gone in, he agreed to accept some ginger plants and black lilies for his own garden and, as the chill of night fell, he took the barrow from me at the gate and wheeled it home. Night being the same as day, David doesn’t need to hurry home at dusk. I asked if I could wash his hat and windcheater and he took the hat from his head. If I’d had my way I’d have whipped off the T-shirt too and he would have walked home bare, covered only in the shelter of the mud.

Now I have a field of lilies and am thankful.

The silkwood trees are planted at the station. Sinna walked out from the office saying, ‘I wondered what
was happening. I could see trees waving from the window, and they were moving.’ I had been wheeling them over to the northern side of the crossing, where I have not planted before. I thought the trees would be safer there and, with no wires overhead to interrupt them, they could flower in full pink magnificence and frame the crossing. I put two in. Sinna came over with a square bucket, used for mopping floors, and watered them. The third went in on the side near the shops, because that has cyclone fencing and is safer.

The lawn is still being weeded and my elbow is so sore I now use my left hand and the dib tool. I put fifteen kilograms of superphosphate on the lawn and watered it in two days ago. And today I threw around a couple of kilos of urea and watered that in. I read this recipe in a garden magazine.

Tom called out as I walked over the railway crossing this morning, ‘Kate. Can you come over here? Where did you plant them trees?’ Sinna had left the message of how vital it was for the new trees to be watered, but Tom couldn’t find them, because she hadn’t made it clear that they were in the new northern part of the garden. So I showed him the sticks waving with green mops on top and he said, ‘Oh, yeah. I can see them now
alright.’ I love this concern and co-operation from people who are not gardeners themselves, but who are willing to help. I think back to the months and months I spent asking at the ticket office if we could have some trees planted, and the only reply I got was a puzzled look. Now look at the co-operation of watering the people give.

Today we planted trees in Park Road. I have just come home. Philip Zweers, the botanist from Wollongong Council, chose water gums and tuckeroos. Jack and I letterboxed the residents of Park Road during the school holidays. He’d bring his surfboard and we’d drop the letters in on the way to the sea.

The idea was that every resident should be asked if they would like a tree outside their fence. Philip said it had been found that unless the person wanted the tree, it would not thrive. Wollongong Council were providing the men and the trees so I did as he said. This came hard to me, as I am keen on setting out and hoping others will join in. I always thought it best that way, because then you aren’t stopped and at least something gets done. Goethe said: ‘Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.’

I believe this. At the station, I thought that if I asked if I might make a garden, the answer would probably be ‘no’, because of insurance or other problems. So I began, and it was six months until somebody spoke to me, and by that time the garden had begun to grow. Permission was never asked and has never been given.

This defiance must be in the blood. When my brother Tucker and his son, Ben, got in a canoe and rowed down a salt creek in southeast South Australia twenty years ago, seeing the dead trees and wet deserts and the problem salt was making, Tucker decided to start draining and opening up the wetlands.

Salinity in Australia is estimated to be a sixty-billion-dollar problem. With the stripping of trees to make pasture, the salt in the underground water table rose because the trees were not there to keep the water level down by bringing it up through their roots and dispersing it into the air. The salt now kills the remaining trees and lies in dry salt lakes—patches of poison so large some are visible from space.

After several years of waiting for the government to begin work on a drain they had proposed for a decade, Tucker rang up the Komatsu Company, bought a bulldozer and began. Much of the work was done without permission and the faxes the government sent weren’t answered.

Recently I gingerly asked Tucker how much of the drain is done, because he doesn’t like answering questions. Never has, never will. ‘Eh?’ I repeated myself. ‘About 250 kilometres is done and in the end it will be about 600 kilometres all up, I reckon. Approximately, that is.’

When Philip and I drove up to the Illawarra Retirement Village in Park Road, heads rose over the fence from a shelter shed where residents had been waiting for us. ‘Where are the trees?’

I said they were on the truck down in the park by the station. David and the council workers were also planting in the park—replacement trees for those lost to vandals three years ago. The retired people streamed out while Philip asked where they would like their trees placed. He sprayed the ground with white paint in the spots they chose.

The truck came up, trees waving above the roof. The men got out of the truck and dug. Philip, seeing the soil was just builders’ rubble, ordered compost. The truck was driven off and returned with a tonne or so of glorious black soil. While all this was going on, one resident collapsed. An ambulance came, and so in the photographs Philip and I took of the residents, the trees and the workers, the sombre outline of part of the ambulance is in the background. David helped back-fill the holes with trees in them with the compost. The
ambulance drove off and, the job finished, David and I walked off down Park Road.

Eucalyptus robusta,
or swamp mahogany, went into the park near the drain and the station. They grow fast, and to forty metres. I think that the other trees we established there will protect the tiny ones from vandals by having a psychological effect. The small seen against the large might prompt that impulse of protection we all have for the young. They say that’s why animals seldom kill their young, and why, on the whole, we don’t either.

The first trees that we put in the empty park seemed to be an affront to people, a temptation or an insult. But now the survivors wave and gleam in the sun. They rustle. I go over and count them like cattle. Each one increases me.

In a fit of energy, David and I went in and dug holes at the station for many geranium and white daisy cuttings. Tom dragged out the hose for us and I watered as we went. Then we locked the paddock gate and left.

Oh glorious, glorious day. While it is true that only about one-quarter of Park Road’s residents responded to my letter, the trees are in and where trees go, more may follow.

A phone call yesterday, after months of waiting, from the firm that installed underground electricity wires at
the station and, in doing so, dug up geraniums, a frangipani tree which had grown from a cutting and Caro’s olive tree. The firm has a policy and a fund to replace gardens they have disturbed. And hallelujah I say to that. Sinna, who is ardent about the garden—my first true convert on staff—told me of the firm’s policy and that she had begun to ring and ask for plants.

Two months ago Sinna was called and told that a man would come, and funds were available for him to plant and to spread mulch. I jumped on that, because I knew we could get more plants if we had no labour given. Sinna and I agreed we would ask for the whole amount in old-fashioned roses. We sealed the deal with a slap on each other’s arm.

The woman on the phone yesterday said it had been agreed by the firm that we could use a supplier of our choice and buy plants of our choosing. I said carefully, ‘And what can we spend?’

‘Four hundred dollars,’ she replied. I ran over and told Sinna, and took her a bunch of David Austin roses to show her what we will one day have blooming over the white railings.

Coming back from the shops later, I saw Sinna in her neon-orange safety jacket and navy trousers, walking around with the bunch of roses in her hand. I called to her, ‘The bride of Woonona!’ She answered, ‘Well, Kate, I’m scared to leave the roses in the office as
I don’t want them stolen, so I thought I’d hold onto them.’ I got out
Botanica’s Roses
and looked up every name of my favourite old roses and David Austin roses and every gorgeous photograph of a rose that I liked. I made a list and this morning I rang Denis at the nursery. I think, because they have given us plants in the past, they ought to get the business. And, with joy, I read out that sumptuous list: Mermaid, Madame Grégoire Staechelin, the Claire rose, Black Boy, Glamis Castle, Constance Spry, Souvenir de Mme Léonie Viennot, Gertrude Jekyll, Mme Pierre Oger, Mme Isaac Pereire, Loving Memory (also called Red Cedar in Australia), Belle Story (because she was the first nurse in the nineteenth century to join the Royal Navy and I killed it at Leura). I ordered Heritage too, because it has grown so high in my back garden; it is as tall as the lemon tree and Graham Austin, because it has wound its way through the lemon tree and, being a yellow rose, mingles with the lemons (some of which weigh half a kilo).