Playing With Water (7 page)

A honeyeater has just landed in the Tree of Heaven. Now another has landed. They flitted off together before I finished the sentence.

A bright windy day. I am off to town to gather my grandson to stay here for the weekend.

Hallelujah.

I have been out sniffing the white
Luculia
flower. A warm white perfume, it smells like powder spilt on a dressing-table. I can still smell it, as though my nose has caught it. Perhaps that is what it is, simply pollen up the nose. Warm days, cold nights. Perfect weather. Although the pipes have burst, I am glad I am here. Last week the Water Board came after sending a great bill four times the normal. I think they must have lost some clients to suicide, because they came with such alacrity and without being asked. The man prowled around, a kind of water diviner without the stick. He found a leak behind the shed, the only place I never tread or see. Jack and I are bailing buckets from the bath, this time to do the laundry because the washing machine is in the shed and the water there is turned off. The plumber comes on Tuesday to put in copper pipes. One plumber said, ‘The place is jinxed,’ because we had so many leaks. But I don’t think so.

The Tree of Heaven is full of tiny birds. Round and through it they are flitting like planes at a frantic airport. Jack put birdseed in the feeder hanging from the branches. The first food there for months.

Here is my mother’s scone recipe, which is very good. In fact, she fed a family of six for almost a year with the big bag of flour (donated by the local flour mill) she won annually at the Gawler Show for these scones.

3 heaped cups of self-raising flour

¹
/
₂
teaspoon cream of tartar (many of these ancient recipes use cream of tartar, which is available on the baking shelf of supermarkets)

2 eggs

2 tablespoons cream or melted butter

1 cup plus 1 tablespoon of milk

pinch of salt

Method:

Sift flour and cream of tartar. Beat eggs with cream or melted butter and add milk and salt and whisk together. Fold the fluids into the sifted flour with a knife and knead gently with your fingers. It is essential that the mixture is handled as little and as lightly as possible. Roll the dough out and then fold it over once. Roll out again. (This makes the split in the side of the scone.) Cut out using a cutter or a drinking glass. Dip your fingers in milk and dab onto the
scones. Bake in a very hot oven for about five minutes. In four minutes take a look and see if they have lightly browned and risen. Remove as soon as they look ready. Wrap in a tea towel immediately and allow to cool a little. Serve with jam and cream or with smoked salmon, fresh dill and sour cream.

A pair of rainbow lorikeets are standing in the food bowl. How they discover food is here, I do not know. Never seen for months, they appear within hours of food being put out. Their acid-green backs are moving up and down and their bright blue heads pounce on the seed. Perhaps they watch the flight paths of smaller birds. But where they sit to do this is a mystery. Word gets out, but how?

When Jack and I came from the train, the stars were out. Some were green, sprinkled on the deepest blue, in a pattern we could not fathom. God’s tongue, the sea, spoke its language to the stars. We came inside and banged the door.

A pair of small dark birds have landed on the railing. Brown-breasted with a clerical collar, on the throat a tan spot. I wish I knew their name.

Yesterday we rode to Corrimal. White egrets were fishing and several kinds of duck were swimming in Bellambi lagoon which runs behind the sea. A pelican
took off in a stately fashion. A young cormorant stood beside some reeds while ducks kept it from the water. It looked frustrated, cawing softly in the sun.

At times, this lagoon is full of bright-green weed. Fishermen go there and drag it from the water. They use it for their bait. The weed has gone at present, swept out by the wind, perhaps. Or possibly the rain or tides took it out to sea. The only thing I know is the train timetable and that is because it is printed. A month ago I put out onto the front nature strip benches that were rotting where the shade house used to be. A woman came with her brother and took them. She asked to see the garden and I showed her. Her name was Beryl and she told me she has old roses and gave me her address. Last week, at Corrimal, I called in. She’s got a sheep and a goat and a garden packed with shrubs and roses. The neighbours built a second storey and took away sun from half her garden. So she pulled up the roses and planted camellias down the side.

The usual dreamer of garden dreams, Beryl invited me inside and showed me gardening books. Pictures of gardens that she loves. We sat there at the kitchen table as she pointed to photographs saying, ‘Oh, look at this one. Isn’t that beautiful? How would you like to have that?’ A week later, a flowering ginger plant, some Green Goddess lilies and a pot of snail vine were left on my front step.

The lorikeets are back. They look like two orange seals facing me, peering out together.

An Indian summer’s day. Philippa is cutting back hibiscus, May bush and a big native fig. These are shading the side path and need pruning. It is not until Philippa gets working in a bed that we see how the weeds—
Tradescantia
and onion weed—have been thriving. Snails have made daisy bushes into lace. Once snails get up into a plant, the bait on the ground is useless. I learnt that today. The snails must be pulled off one by one.

I have been to Balmain, staying with friends, Philip Martin and Jenny Gribble, for a few days. Their garden is a balcony and the harbour. Yachts and ferries are their flowers. What’s the Opera House then? A great frangipani blossom floating on the water, as they do in gutters around the city. Few things are lovelier than a flowing gutter full of frangipani blossoms with a few peaches floating by, dropped from overhanging trees.

I’m making an old recipe for visitors. My Godmother Isabella told me that when my mother made this cake, my three brothers kept asking for more and each time they did she said, ‘You can’t have any,’ even while she was cutting more.

1 cup of self-raising flour

1 cup of sugar

¹
/
₂
cup of milk

2 eggs

2 tablespoons of cocoa

3 tablespoons of melted butter

Method:

Beat all the ingredients in a bowl for 3 minutes. Put in a greased ring tin. Bake for 35 minutes at 180°C.

This morning, on the phone from Adelaide, Jane said, ‘I’ve put two myrtles in huge pots and I’m staining the pots with umber. Then I saw Zeffirelli’s
Romeo and Juliet.
Do you remember at their wedding the walls were that wonderful old pink? So I thought that was what these pots need. So I’m putting pink onto them today to give them a bit of a vague blush.’

Can’t say I did remember.

Philippa has been planting Oriental poppies in her garden. She said, looking at a picture in
Gardens Illustrated
after lunch, ‘Oh, look. Look at these poppies. I must get some more.’ And she lifted up a page to show me a meadow of weeds, daisies and poppies.

At one time it was illegal to grow opium poppies in your garden. I was told at Leura that I was breaking the law. But those great grey plants, with buds from which salmon-pink petals like crushed moth wings burst out, turning then to pods like those of Egyptian waterlilies, always grew in my garden. There may be a way to make opium from the seeds, but I don’t know it. Opium was not always a forbidden drug, as shown by Elizabeth Barrett’s letter to her friend Miss Metford in 1839:

Can anything grow anywhere or any way with this terrible wind? The temperature of my bedroom is kept up day and night to 65 degrees and I am not suffered to be moved from bed even for its making—and yet the noxious character of the air makes me very uncomfortable and sleepless. I took two draughts of opium last night—but even the second failed to bring sleep. It is a blessing this—that sleep—one of my worst sufferings being the want of it. Opium, opium, night after night—and some nights, during east winds, even opium won’t do, you see!

‘Never try to move a poppy,’ writes Eleanor Perenyi. She goes on to say that the annuals should be sown where they are meant to grow, but that the perennial, the
Papaver orientale,
which grows about a metre tall, has only one drawback and that is that it disappears for
months after flowering. She says the hole can be disguised by a nearby plant of baby’s breath. This poppy has a very long taproot and, if bought in a pot, should be planted out with care. Perenyi also advises that the less attention paid to Oriental poppies the better, except for a metal hoop to keep them from falling.

My mother was fond of Iceland poppies and used to send me to the grocer’s shop saying, ‘Now ask for a packet of Iceland poppies in sunset colours. Don’t forget, sunset colours. I don’t want those other colours. And get a yard and a half of saxe-blue ribbon. You need new ribbon to go with this dress I’ll finish tonight.’ She’d give me one shilling and sixpence, and I’d walk up the wide empty street to the shop with the wide verandah, enter on the bare splintery floorboards and do as I was told. For this reason, poppies have always reminded me of saxe-blue taffeta ribbons. Speaking of blue, at other times my mother would say, ‘Go and buy me a reel of blue thread. Take this piece of material and match it.’

‘I don’t need the material,’ I’d say. ‘I can remember the colour.’

‘No, you can’t, blue is the hardest colour to remember to match. You have to take the material with you or it won’t be right.’

Biting off a thread from the smocking, she’d push the piece of material towards me across the table. ‘Take this piece.’

Off I’d go. And that was how I learnt about blue.

The blue sea outside the window would need a scrap of cloth to match it, and then it would need scrutiny to say just what blue it was. Celestial, saxe, the blue of Madame Bovary’s eyes, hyacinth, I really can’t say. A mixture of all these and something of this perfect sunny day, with the pale grey-blue sky on the horizon.

Now I have got off poppies and onto blue which I did not mean to do. But you can see the reason. What I meant to do was quote Virgil on poppies to you. Here he is, and I see now how wrong it was to think that crop rotation was an Oriental invention:

A field where before you raised the bean with its rattling pods

Or the small-seeded vetch.

Or the brittle stalk and rustling haulm of the bitter lupin.

For a crop of flax burns up a field, and so does an oat-crop,

And poppies drenched in oblivion burn up its energy.

Still, by rotation of crops you lighten your labour, only

Scruple not to enrich the dried up soil with dung

And scatter filthy ashes on fields that are exhausted.

So too are the fields rested by a rotation of crops,

And unploughed land in the meanwhile promises to repay you.

The owl flew from the tree

slitting the air like silk.

We were sitting drinking

in the dusk.

Owl! It’s an owl!

Foolishly I ran to get meat

or any gift

to make the owl welcome.

But I was too late.

Again it flew from the tree

and we watched the pale scissors

of its wings

slice the blue dusk

into two dresses

for my granddaughters.

I walked back inside

with my arms full of silk

and began threading a needle.

Now we have dresses

and no owl.

A
fat grey pigeon is walking through the violets. It is looking for the grain fallen from the birdfeeder hanging above. Yesterday, as I walked down the side path (my pride and joy), I saw the first violets blooming. These plants were left for me at the back step when I was away, by a woman whom I met one day when she was about to put a note in my letterbox saying that she wanted to buy a house around here. Penelope Ferguson said she had a big garden at Coledale, north of here, and had sold it, but was still living there. She said she would bring me cuttings from her garden.

At Leura, my neighbour Phyllis had hundreds of pink violets lining paths. Behind these were clumps of lily of the valley. Growing wild and filling some paths were dozens of hellebores (also called Christmas roses). Phyllis, almost beaten by the beautiful wilderness, this abundance of what others try so hard to achieve, said, ‘Come in any
time and help yourself, Kate.’ So I took the wheelbarrow and filled it, clearing a bit of the path of hellebores. I wish I could go back. The hellebores would do well in the shade of the big tree, although Philippa says they need cold. She’s probably right. But I believe in having a go.

Right now, Philippa is outside, pulling leaves from geraniums afflicted with rust. I cannot properly describe the anguish that rises in me as I see her sit at this slow task which seems so entirely useless to me. Philippa says that taking off the rusted leaves stops rust spreading. But I believe in letting it run its course. No doubt she’s right, but as I see the weeds thriving in both back beds, and the soil soft and damp ready to give up the weeds, my urgency reaches hellish proportions. Why don’t I go out and do the job myself? Several answers to that. One, I am inside trying to make a living. Two, I am baking a fruitcake, making caponata, boiling potatoes for lunch and mopping the floor with kerosene in hot water. Another reason is that Philippa doesn’t really enjoy my working beside her. I get in the way. My best job is to bring the wheelbarrow round to where she is working, she’ll tolerate that. But, ideally, she prefers to be left alone. Undemanding, energetic, knowledgeable and diligent, with a passion for plants, her taste and style are wonderful. I ought just to keep out of it. And largely I do. Philippa is going to plant
Alyssum
seedlings, which are ready now beside the shed
where they were sown. The stocks I sowed a while back are ready to plant out too. I want big scented stocks stinking their sacred scent.

Last week I had Sophia, my two-year-old granddaughter, to stay because she had a cold. She weeded beside Philippa one day, bucket in hand, fork in the other. I heard a conversation that later made me howl in bed with laughter until I thought I’d wake her. It went like this: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sophia,
that
is a cornflower!’ Since there is no sign of a flower on any of the plants and they are only a year younger than Sophia herself, I don’t see how she could be expected to know the difference between a weed and a cornflower. But, and she may be right, Philippa said as we sat eating chicken noodle soup at the back table, ‘It is best to sort things out and then treat children as if they are twenty.’

There’s been a lot of rain. When I went on the train at dawn to collect Sophia, the line had a slippage on it. We limped into Thirroul. The phone queue curled round the building. From time to time, announcements through loudspeakers were made, which, in essence, seemed to say, ‘We do not know what is happening. We think there may be some buses available. Some may come from Kiama. Some are full. There has been a landslide at Waterfall. All trains in both directions have stopped. We hope to move you soon.’ Variations on this theme came for an hour or so as the rain poured down.

Horses in paddocks, looking forlorn and ravished, stood up to their hocks in water, sadly trying to tear at a bit of green on a bank. I have never understood the stoicism of animals. They do not write letters to their owners or politicians, but stand stolidly enduring the torrent in silence. I often wonder if they are making a plan, or if there is hope or faith in their hearts, that the sun will come and the earth dry up and they will be warm again. Or do they just exist in the awful moment?

During this great rain, Sophia and I spent a couple of days indoors, dashing out only for a quick slippery dip. On the first day, seeing a great high slippery dip as we got off the train, Sophia ran to climb it. I stood there, umbrella and luggage hanging on me, and saw her little boot slip on the wet top rung and she fell, clunking down with a thud. Luckily, her boot had caught in a rung or two as she fell and it slowed her. The thickness of her nappies cushioned the fall. We staggered home to lick wounds and to talk it over and over.

While we were stuck indoors, I wrote to the Department of Parks and Gardens, councillors, the mayor, our MP, six in all, asking for trees to be planted around the 1950s’ playground for shade in summer. I’ve asked, too, for trees to be planted in the street and a few other things as well. ‘A creaking wheel gets the oil,’ an old man said on the radio yesterday and it struck me.

An owl! An owl in the big tree. At dusk the owl flew down. Philippa and I were sitting drinking claret at the blue table. It was like a feathery ghost in the bare tree, its white face, barely glimpsed with a pale brown body. It swooped to the lawn and back to the tree. A holy visitor. Philippa stood at the railing to watch while I went to get more wine for us and meat for the bird. The owl flew off.

It is dusk again and I have put the big outside light on, as it was last night, but cannot see the owl. It might have come for old soup bones that I have thrown out from time to time, or fish heads or scraps of meat the smaller birds leave uneaten. ‘Only connect,’ said E.M. Forster. He put that as an epigraph at the beginning of
Howard’s End.
And while he didn’t mean if you throw out bones you’ll get owls, it strikes me that the smallest act has significant consequences. Of course, it could be that the owl lives in the tree and because it’s bare we saw it, that’s all. Nothing to do with me. What does this owl presage?

I am soaking seeds with a use-by-1990 date. I found them on a shelf. No name on either of the two packets, but it seems a pity to throw them out.

I keep thinking about that enduring horse in the rain. Did the horse think, my parents suffered more than this? Or, my mother is dead and one day I will be dead. All this will pass away. I am simply a horse in a long chain of horses. Or, my mother is dead and I wonder where all the things she knew have gone? Do they pass away, just fade out, or do they float about waiting to be known or learnt by some other horse? And what of the paddock my mother grew in, where she learnt to tug at grass standing beside her mother, then suckling and sleeping beside her, sheltered by her body from the wind? Where has that wind gone? Is that hanging around somewhere too? The way my mother knew how to jump hurdles—what happened to that when she died?

Was there any thought that horse might have that would keep it enduring with hope? Or would it just stand there without anything to support it until it dropped or the water soaked away?

‘Storms and strong winds have damaged houses.’ That’s the radio at lunch time. It is snowing at Leura. When I spoke to Kathy at Megalong Books she said snow was falling onto car bonnets. It is the first really cold day I have had since I came here. Suddenly I saw,
looking out this window at the metal-grey sea tossing with white horses, how much we need change. Kept indoors all day, I snooped around with the gas heater on, somehow relishing the extremity of it all. ‘Another perfect bloody day,’ said Sarah Miles in that film set in Kenya in the forties—
White Mischief
I think it was called. I can’t remember the name of her character but she was the one who wore the snake around her neck to the races. While I wasn’t actually sick of weather that never got really cold, this snap has made me happy.

Wind: nature’s pruner. The trees are bent, tossing like those modern ballet dancers who wear torn frocks and dash their long hair on the floor. I am always slightly embarrassed watching this kind of ballet. It seems excessive. Yesterday I rode home from Wollongong in the dark. It was raining. I stayed too long at a film. My bike has no lights so I rode on the footpath until I got to the bike path by the sea. I was frightened because riding beside lagoons and creeks, edged with bush, seemed dangerous. I hadn’t known the film was so long. It was
The Horse Whisperer.
Wonderful scenery and very good clothes.

My friend Nancy Phelan asked today, ‘How is the garden?’ I said, ‘What can I say? The geraniums are in bloom and so are the nasturtiums. There’s a million plans with not a lot yet to show.’

The sea has faded to the sky, both are almost white. I lifted up a page against it and there was hardly any difference. Still the wind howls on.

The howling wind goes on. People have given up umbrellas, they just blow inside out. The big screen of white potato vine has blown down. It was, I see now, a sail that had grown heavy with the vine. It fell on the potato patch and one camellia that was already dead. The camellia died suddenly and I think it must have been poisoned by the gum tree near it. Pigeons have settled on the lawn, puffed up, catching a bit of sun on their breasts. Three crimson rosellas flew down to the feeder hanging in the tree this afternoon. Three birds of the one breed may mean a pair have bred.

The big bed of pink, orange and white impatiens is bent in the wind, tormented like the trees. Some trees have fallen in the park by the highway. I see now that trees growing alone are vulnerable in the way they aren’t in the bush, sheltered by each other. Still the wind blows. On what day did God make the wind?

Peace. The wind has stopped. Birds get very thirsty in winter. I see them drinking and splashing in the bowls every time I fill them. The impatiens have been burnt by the cold, not much, just some blackened tips. The blue vine on the back deck, which shed almost all its leaves when it had Cabot’s wood paint spilt on it as I painted the railing, has sprouted. I thought perhaps I’d killed it. Peri gave it to me as a cutting she struck in a pot.

Today Philippa is coming to work. We are going to dig up the hyacinth bulbs that have not yet come through and see what is wrong. I planted them very deep as the woman at a garden festival had advised. At the time it seemed odd, but she might be right.

‘Grab the doona for me dog, will ya?’ a boy called to another as they pulled up in an old blue van. Philippa cleaned out the shed yesterday. I piled things up on the grass outside the gate. Barely back inside, I turned as I heard him call. One boy leapt out, took two chairs and the moulting doona. ‘And grab the blankets too!’ It all went within five minutes of standing there. I had been planning on sending it to St Vincent de Paul and then thought that there were probably people around here
who could do with it. All day that boy’s, ‘grab the doona for me dog’ has been going through my head as I washed blankets and hung them in the sun. I’m over feathers. When I tipped the doona from its cover I saw why my room is full of dust.

As I watched two tiny wrens swinging on rose branches in the afternoon sun, more like monkeys than birds, I thought how strange it is that I have slept under feathers for a decade. Well, not any longer. It’s back to wool. His dog can have my doona. ‘Thanks very much,’ the boy said as he turned to get back in the van. I thought of saying that I’d like it if, in return, the olives and the magnolia could be left alone each Friday night. Probably a futile corrupt bargain, so I didn’t try it. I did think, though, that a bit of local goodwill might save a tree.

The mandarins are getting ripe. Which makes me think my friends who have an orange orchard may be harvesting. Jennifer and Anthony, who came here when she photographed the garden, have a place on the Colo River. Jennifer gave me the recipe for Peg and Dot’s marmalade, which is used by several restaurants, Balmoral Beach Pavilion is one. Seville oranges come in a bit later than Washington navels, so it may be a little early yet.

8 Seville oranges

2 lemons

4 litres of cold water

sugar

Method:

Cut up the lemons and oranges. Mix with the juice of the lemons, depending on juiciness, with 4 litres of cold water. Soak this overnight in a cool place. Then simmer all for two hours. Measure the quantity of cooked substance. For each cup of this, add one cup of sugar, one at a time. Bring this to the boil. Keep boiling until it jells. Test jelling on a saucer in the ‘fridge. Bottle into sterile jars. Never let marmalade go off the boil as it won’t set.

Frost. A white frost. I laughed when I touched Ruth’s spinach, it was stiff as a hide of leather. Great dark-green leaves curled and solid. Lettuce and parsley were frozen too, but, being more frail, were softer and seemed doomed. Ruth said the vegetables have had many frosts and are not ruined by it as I’d expect. But if the sun hits
the leaves before they have defrosted then they burn and spoil. So it is not the cold that they can’t bear, it is the sun when they are cold. It is a bit like going on holiday and getting sick, just when you have time to get strong. The rest allows you in some ways to let up and permits the collapse your body longs for, so previously stretched and virulent with need and work. I said a white frost, because that is not the only kind. The black frost that killed my pink flowering gum tree at Leura was the first I had seen. I had not known there could be such a thing. God help some native plants when a black frost comes. That small tree died as if flashed by fire. It seemed instantaneous and irredeemable. Like a murder in the night.