Playing With Water (8 page)

I have come to stay at Girra Girra for a week. Later I will go out and look at the trees we planted. The tanks are overflowing and so are the four dams. Ruth and Barbara are not bailing out the bath for the washing machine as they did before the rain. We all bathed in the same water when I was last here. Because that was the way my family did it when I was a child in the desert, it seemed quite natural to do it here. When the explorers Len and Anne Beadell, with their baby daughter, Connie, went out to make the atomic bomb roads around Maralinga and Emu in the fifties, the baby had a bath in a bucket once a fortnight. There is a photograph of it in one of Len’s books about his road building and
exploration. Anybody who has lived with very little water, garnering every cup, can never really recover. I still feel like flinching sometimes when flushing a toilet.

Last night, while leafing through the book
English Food
by Jane Grigson, I asked Ruth what a bloater was. Neither she nor Barbara knew. I read out the description, which did not actually say what it was. Apparently they can be grilled and the best come from Yarmouth. In fact, if you want to eat the best bloaters, you still must go to Yarmouth. They should be eaten within thirty-six hours as the cure of salt and smoke is so light. They can be mashed with butter and turned into a paste to be eaten with hot toast, which was a favourite with the Victorians. And, like kippers, they can be raw in salads, with beetroot or apple, or, as the Poles do, eaten with cream and chives, topped with onion rings. But after reading all that we still didn’t know what a bloater was.

We looked up several other books and then I thought, as a last resort, to see what a Frenchman had to say. In
Larousse Gastronomique
it says: ‘Bloater. Craquelot—slightly salted, smoked herring served mainly in England for breakfast and for high tea. The bloater is grilled on a low fire and served with melted butter or Maître d’hôtel butter.’

All this connected with an idea I had had for days about gaps in knowledge and the importance of them. In
the end, when you are trying to understand something, it comes down to context. I had suddenly seen, when thinking of my childhood, that the great unspoken space, a sort of gap above our heads that informed and caused everything, was the relationship of my parents. Their love for each other made the childhood my brothers and I shared the peaceful, graceful thing it was. Although we fought, all around and above us was the gap, the thing I never examined or saw. It was the relationship between the man and the woman and their love. On that hung all the law and the prophets. That got me thinking about other gaps I had not seen which are probably around a great many things that I take for granted. It had come as an illumination, but I was a bit embarrassed to tell anybody about this idea, as I thought it could be so simple and self-evident that it might be something others use daily when thinking about a subject. I tried it out at lunch yesterday with a Canadian anthropologist, Eva, who was visiting, Ruth and Barbara. On hearing my thoughts Eva said that it is the reason anthropologists don’t usually study their own society, because it is just that gap in their vision that they can’t see. They need to look at another society to be able to see, as an outsider, the gaps that everybody inside takes for granted.

On the matter of bloaters, it was plain that if I had looked further, I would have seen that Jane Grigson does say what a bloater is later in the book, when she
states that, as a dish for breakfast and tea, bloaters have gained a Dickensian air of fog and domestic stuffiness which is not to their advantage. The name doesn’t help: ‘When Peggotty remarked in
David Copperfield,
that she was proud to call herself a Yarmouth bloater, she certainly didn’t mean she was a fat, hearty creature, but that she was nicely rounded, and sweet, but well-spiced in character, and fit for a discriminating man.’

The name, Jane Grigson explains, is from the sixteenth century and, for people in the trade, it was a useful accuracy. It meant they were treated so lightly with salt and smoke that they were still plump, bloated, if you like, with moisture, unlike the dry, almost brittle red herrings.

We looked up bloaters in
The Book of Ingredients
by Philip Dowell and Adrian Bailey, with an introduction by Jane Grigson, where there was a photograph of a herring and a caption that said it can be baked, fried, broiled or grilled. Its extreme oiliness makes it ideal for curing, as in rollmops, soured and marinated herrings, buckling (what is buckling?), matjes, bloaters, red herrings and kippers. I don’t think we have true herrings in Australia, but perhaps mullet are similar.

All this talk of fish meant Ruth got up and asked if we would like smoked salmon on scrambled eggs for breakfast, and is now making them. I can smell them—and the toast.

On Sunday, Helen and Len, who gave the tree seedlings for this farm, came to lunch. Helen and Ruth walked around in the deep cold, inspecting. There is a lot of erosion. Water just pours down the rocky face of the farm, taking whatever topsoil is not held down with grass or trees. So Helen is bringing out another lot of wattles to plant in a bad spot. She also said there is a machine that can dig a wide shallow drain that can be lined with straw or gravel and then planted with herbs. These drains help stop erosion, and the girls are thinking over whether they will try this. But what if the drain were to be half a kilometre long? What else would you plant in it? Hardy fruit trees perhaps? We don’t know.

The Simon Johnson winter catalogue was delivered here yesterday. Ruth, who used to run the Sofala Cafe, read out a list of teas: ‘Breakfast Earl Grey. This is a classic morning blend. A sumptuous and noble blend of full-bodied Ceylon tea, flavoured with the oil of bergamot—a small citrus fruit.’ But there are two kinds of bergamot. The North American herb has pink, white and also mauve and crimson flowers that smell like Earl Grey tea, I think. The leaves were used by Oswego Indians for tea. The botanical name is
Monarda didyma.
And then there is the bergamot orange, or
Citrus
bergamia,
used in perfumery and essential oils. We found that in
The Book of Ingredients.
The herb was also described in Rosemary and John Hemphill’s
What Herb is That?

Today I go home. I am getting a lift to Penrith with the girls, who are going there to be hypnotised to give up smoking. There’s a herb farm at Capertee called Kadisha and we are going to try to buy bergamot to plant in our gardens. But where we’ll get a bloater, I don’t know.

The sun was on my back last week when I weeded a front bed and planted out seedlings of stocks I’d sowed months ago. Then I saw big gardenias for sale in Woolworths for six dollars ninety cents. I bought three and put them in the back garden. One went into a hole left by the magnolia I’d dug up and planted outside the front gate. Exhilarated by this digging, and the way it is so satisfying to plant shrubs, I dug up three yellow daisies self-sown from a big bush against a side fence. These went outside the front fence near the olives. My theory is that the more the area by the public path is planted, the less tempted people will be to pull them up. If it finally looks like a garden, I think they’ll leave it alone. It is the few sticks of trees that somehow offend
them. As I’ve said, these trees, perhaps, seem an affront to people (drunk, wild or bored); the trees are too brazen, vulnerable and tempting.

Violets, violets everywhere and many a bunch to pick. They have spread out under the bare trees in the back garden and if you bend down you can sniff them or bring a bunch indoors.

At the back step, two daphne plants are blooming and daffodils are out too. I see now that the flowers a woman is given when she has a baby forever remind her of that time. Daphne, peonies and early daffodils came to me and it is these flowers every year that remind me of my son’s birth. But I never did grow peonies. For all my talk and plans I have abandoned this idea, because I read that they like cold and finally I am practising what I preach and not trying to force something against its nature. It has taken sixty years to learn this but it’s worth it. Yet every now and then I break the rule.

Outside the front gate geraniums in exotic colours, brought from cuttings gathered in Adelaide streets, are thriving. Bright pink, burning crimson, more red than red, and magenta, they are growing around the roses and the olive trees. The blue and white, pink and yellow schemes have been thrown out. Now gaiety is all.

Terry wearily points out that vandals have knocked one of the terracotta pots with pink geraniums in them and almost half the pot is shattered on the ground. But
this was always a risk, and worth taking because the pots are bookends to the garden with the olive trees above them. I’ve just turned the pot around so it looks normal and what I’ll do with it I’ll think of later.

It all bears out Terry’s worst fears and the warnings from Phil, the other neighbour, when the garden outside the gate went in. And yet there is a garden there, and people can pick the roses when they want to. I like them to do it. And a bit of lawn has grown trees. Begonias, which also grow easily from cuttings, are in these plots. They came from Peri’s garden, and though it is sunny here they thrive and wave in the wind like small bamboo.

I am here on Peri’s farm for a while. A peacock is honking that weird cry, like a cat fighting. Banana leaves are moving against a hill of bush. Between the banana and the bush, the river is slow and olive green with a silver snake of light floating on its surface. I am eating dried yellow stars made from slices of five-star fruit from the orchard. There goes the peacock again. It’s like the trains at home. I suppose I soon won’t hear it at all.

I have joined the Henry Doubleday Research Association. There is a pile of journals from this
Association here and I’ve begun to read them. The name comes from Henry Doubleday (1813—1902), a Quaker smallholder who brought Russian comfrey from Britain. He hoped comfrey might feed millions. This dream came from Doubleday’s horror of the Irish potato famine. The Association’s members range from:

complete beginner gardeners to PhDs, and the interest of the work makes membership an absorbing hobby. It is not the kind of charity that gives away money, but information, on simple cheap methods that can be applied by any gardener, peasant or coolie.

The Australian Association is nationwide and is made up of organic gardeners and farmers who follow organic methods of gardening, growing crops and tending livestock. There is a monthly outing in Sydney and nearby country areas and a field day once a year. I am quoting from the hundredth issue—
Spring, 1994.

When I get home I am going to start a worm farm. The instructions sound easy enough, as food scraps are simply wrapped in newspaper and put on top of a set of worms in their native soil (which I’m going to get from the compost heap). Once a week, a covering of fine lime powder is sprinkled on top of the parcels of newspaper. A polystyrene box from the greengrocer can be used, so long as it has some holes for drainage. I won’t go on about how good the worm castings are for
the soil, as most know this by now, I suppose. What I would like to know though is if the weeds can be used in compost heaps to make compost without spreading the seeds. As I said, Philippa puts all weeds into the rubbish bin and she may be right to do this. But when I lug out the heavy bin full of soil on the roots of weeds, I do not enjoy it. It seems a waste. For over a year now I have done it and I would like to stop.

The light is changing as the afternoon passes, a rooster is crowing. Peri said when I was coming here, ‘Get Anton to sharpen the axe. There are too many roosters. But promise me you won’t use the axe until it’s sharpened.’

Daily I wind the clock ticking loudly on the wall. This dining room is darker now. Suddenly a shaft of light has made the leaves gleam and the fruit I picked this morning shines in a glass bowl; so does the butter in the black pan on the stove behind me, waiting to fry some onions for a tart I’m going to make for tomorrow’s lunch. Two friends are coming down from Brisbane, so I’ve picked some limes to make Jack’s citrus syrup cake. The chooks are laying about nine eggs a day. In the shed three goose eggs lie in straw in an old tea chest waiting for more. The geese are bold and irritable as it’s mating time. A goose can break your arm with its wings if you annoy it, say by trying to take an egg while it’s nesting. Or if you put your hand into the nest to see if any goslings are hatched.

A butterfly is flittering around the mango tree, making a wide circle like a big windmill flying. The sun also makes its wings glint. And speaking of glinting, there is no glint like that of a crow. Those black diamonds. One is calling now. Julie, the caretaker, says there is a plague of crows. But you can’t shoot them, they are protected. A man at Burleigh Heads shot a crow and was fined five thousand dollars.

From time to time pink petals of the bauhinia float like birds onto the lawn. With a sudden gust, a flock, then two or three, then a dozen or so. They seem reluctant. On the dam there is a silver crucifixion of light, wide and bulky, like a Brancusi. Eggs are boiling in a pot and the clock ticks on.

Some days I ask myself, what have I learnt? What have I accomplished today? A letter to Philippa. Read the papers and was worse off than if I had not. Boiled eggs for tea. The list can get pathetic. Coolie or peasant? I ask myself. I read a book recently called
The Life of a Simple Man,
an autobiography of the life of a French peasant at the end of the nineteenth century. It was the kind of autobiography that Gertrude Stein wrote of Alice B. Toklas, as it was written by a man who had had the life told to him by the owner. When I go home I will quote some of it to show you why I liked it so much.

‘Look at Human things as

smoke and as nothing at all.’

Marcus Aurelius

Light steams through this still bright day

as insects rise like smoke.

Wattle birds come for more

than the pink camellias of May

as insects rise like smoke.

Small pleasures of the lonely,

running by the sea, polished furniture,

the garden mulched with hay

as insects rise like smoke.

Four deaths this month, three expected.

We know more will come

though who they’ll be no one can say

as insects rise like smoke.

On Sunday roast that veal

when Claudia turns five.

Clean out the shed and make a cubby

where the girls can play

as insects rise like smoke.

Winter is the season of travelling north

or opera and balls—rug up, go out.

I’d rather stay at home,

I don’t want to hear you say

as insects rise like smoke.

Kate, while you long for wisdom,

who do you think you’re fooling?

You can’t escape—a narcissist will pay

and pay

as insects rise like smoke.