A Letter to My Grandmother

When I think of you, the clearest image that comes to mind is that of a tall, lean woman laughing while your eight grandchildren cluster on the front steps, shouting at the ninth, who silently acts out their charade.  It’s a summer night and mosquitoes bite my ankles and moths cluster in the cone of light from the outside lamp.  A quiet girl born into a noisy and boisterous family, I hate charades, but I suffer through it because of your laugh. At seven, I am the image of you when you were my age.

On winter nights, when we’re all there, we delve into the dress-up box which stretches the width of one room, adorning ourselves as kings, toads and cross-dressers.  There is raucous laughter and shouting.  We parade before you and our grandfather, amused and bemused in his armchair with a pipe, and enact our dramas.  Every time we get together, now, we act them still.

On quieter evenings, it’s just my brother and I sitting by the fire eating Vegemite and cheese on toast while the dachshund, stretched out on the rug, snores and farts.  Later, in one of our explorations of the creek, we found that dog — by then missing for several days — dead and bloated in the soft, grey gravel.

At night I crawl into my uncle’s old bed, my brother into the one opposite, and close my eyes.  You stroke your thumb between my eyebrows until I am almost asleep.

There were times you couldn’t understand the direction our lives had taken.  “All I ever wanted was a good mate,” you told me once, chiding me for workaholism and a seeming disinterest in men; and, on my brother’s sexuality: “Oh, is he one of those?”  You couldn’t traverse the generations, but instead gifted us with the best of yours: propriety, good manners, generosity and kindness.

One afternoon, no doubt to distract me from the boredom of an endless summer, you taught me to embroider on a piece of white linen.  Ever the perfectionist, I carefully copied your stem stitch in pale green thread.  Later, you gave me a sewing kit you made, with short, shiny scissors, a pouch in which to put one’s bauble of thread, and a booklet of felt through which to fasten one’s needles.  When I took it out ten years later, embroidering still, your delight was palpable.

In the nursing home you held my hands so tightly, and smiled at me with such ardent affection that, as I pulled away, it was impossible not to feel like a criminal.

There was prescience: a few days ago a friend called me by accident and I returned his call, joking that I was concerned it was an emergency, that his gran had died.  In those early hours that you lay dying I dreamed I was walking through the soft green grass of the farm, alone.  An hour before she knew of your death, my sister, unthinking, put on your engagement ring.

It was a trail, like drops of spilled water, to the knowledge of your death.  Then there was a gush of relief that your suffering and loneliness, and the grief of loss upon loss of your husband and friend after friend, was finally over.

As a girl who was never openly demonstrative, I could never tell you that I loved you, but I like to think that the letters I wrote you from Armidale, Wollongong, Sydney, Berkeley and London would have held some measure of my feeling for you.  And that in this, my last, you may understand that that rich childhood which you gave me will spill forever through my writing, and that I will always remember how hard you held me, how frail your shoulders were and how soft your cheek, as I hugged and kissed you goodbye.

On Piglets and Capitalism

Christmas was subdued this year, as Brother and Sister were away.  Being an impoverished writer struggling to save dollars and carbon, I couldn’t fly home, but caught the bus, which entailed a 9-hour journey with a gourmet stopover at the Matilda Roadhouse, where the only offerings were fried chips, fried sausages, or fried [insert unidentifiable item]. I always have a horror of sitting next to some sweaty, smelly person on bus journeys, or of being groped (as has happened on British public transport), and thus I was relieved when an intelligent-looking woman sat next to me and turned out to be the daughter of my Year 11 Ancient History teacher.

Seeing as I had 9 hours to kill, I read Nikki Gemmell’s The Book of Rapture which wasn’t nearly as good as The Bride Stripped Bare.  This might partly be due to the fact that Bride is one of my favourite books, with its sensual expression of all that makes up a woman: the need for security in a partner; the luscious delight in good, empathetic sex; the overwhelming bounty of pregnancy and motherhood; and the callousness of your best friend’s betrayal.  Rapture followed the same format as Bride, as though hoping to capitalise on its success, but it seemed contrived.  The little platitudes in Bride on 18^th Century womanhood complemented its subject matter.  In Rapture Gemmell likewise used quotes from the Bible, the Koran, C. S. Lewis and the Dalai Lama to reflect the subject matter, religion and playing god, but they seemed overblown, and became so irritating that I skipped over most of them.  It was interesting to read her representation of how the love for one’s children and one’s parents can affect and alter events, particularly in the sterile and totalitarian world she created, but it lacked the evenness and originality of Bride.

Out the window of the bus I saw a beige coloured bra strapped to a gum tree and two men raking onions, spilled onto the side of the road, into piles.

At home I found that my mother had done most of the cooking for Christmas, and that it was predominantly the same as the year before, which annoyed me as I enjoy cooking and trying out new things.  I watched seven DVDs, had the obligatory fight with my father, drank too much of Peterson’s pink bubbly Moscato and slept badly most nights.  On Christmas Day the rellies came up from Gunnedah, which provided much liveliness and amusement.  When they’d gone, Dad and I watched Wake in Fright, a clever critique of all that is revolting (and, to a woman, often frightening) about Australian masculinity.

Sister, who arrived a few days later in a hurricane of dogs, children and noise, asked if I had weighed myself before Christmas.  I said there had been no point, as what was I going to overindulge in: fruit salad?  She also failed to adhere to my Christmas List, which worried me greatly.  She assured me it was a fantastic present, which to me indicated that she had intuited that I wanted a $500 gift voucher from Alannah Hill.  Hence my worries were confirmed when I found she had given a Vietnamese family a piglet on my behalf via Oxfam.  Reverting to her 10 year-old-self (which was unable, as I sat on the verandah doing my homework, to walk past me without poking, hitting or aggravating me in some way), Sister thought it would be amusing the plumb the depths of irony, refer to me as a capitalist pig and provoke me by seeing what would happen when I didn’t get what I wanted.  O how we laughed.  Well, one of us did.  However she and Brother-in-Law also gave me a lovely pen, which will make my book signing much more glamorous, and secretly I was quite pleased about the piglet.

And once more I have found my incompatibility between my expensive tastes and my writerly impoverishment rearing its savage head.  Heading into town today to stock up on much-needed lipgloss and foundation, I found myself inexorably drawn to Alannah Hill.  Often I stand outside this shop like a little girl at a candy store, and never venture inside unless there is a sale.  Yet somehow the sales always coincide with my birthday, and so it was I found myself selecting a beautiful, summery, white, red and pink skirt which goes perfectly with the dark pink top I bought from Alannah two birthdays before, and what could I do but hand over my credit card, especially as one of my favourite songs, Flashdance, was playing?

Then the guilt was so overwhelming that as soon as I got home I cut up my credit card into 15 pieces.  I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions because you can make them on any day of the year, but I suppose now might be a useful time to dictate to myself that there is to be no more shopping until I am a fiscally responsible adult, and that I might think to myself, now and then, of those poor villagers who need piglets, and who could never dream of walking into a shop of such delicate, frothy clothes.

In which H returns to Oz (for a bit).

Once again the last few weeks have been too crammed to write, what with thesis corrections to finish and H coming back from the UK for a month (and kindly bringing a bagful of my stuff home, seeing as I leave remnants wherever I stay) and a convoy of Whites to join for Cousin V’s wedding in Bundaberg. As Cousin A had come up for the wedding and was staying a few days, we decided to make a night of it and go out on the town in Bris Vegas.  I had a lovely outfit from Review, purchased early this year but as yet unworn, and therefore needed an occasion in which to make it worn.  We glammed up and tottered (well, I did) to Cloudland, where SP joined us and then (being a Valley local), he took us to another two bars, and I, being very partial to cocktails, perused the drinks menu like a novel and licked salt and sugar off the rims of my cocktail glasses.

When under the influence of alcohol, I find it difficult to lipread, as it takes quite a lot of concentration and alcohol does tend to jeopardize one’s neural pathways.  So, being unable to converse, I have the option of sitting in a corner and rocking like a vegetable, which is a little boring, or hopping up and having a little dance.  Being a spirited girl, I invariably choose the latter, particularly as Cousin A was doing his groove thang too.  There wasn’t a dance floor as such, only a little area on the way to the loos, but we still got applause from some young ladies nearby.

Come 11pm, Sister needed to get home as she had to get the sprogs up early for school, and then we had to drive to Bundy, so she ushered us out.  I danced down the aisle between the bar and the tables and gave a random man a wink, then got caught up with the jazz music and started dancing with the band.  Sister gave me a minute’s worth, until it looked like the saxophonist and I were about to duet, and bundled me out.  I was perfectly happy, and kept on dancing on the pavement while the others found a taxi and Sister, also being under the influence of alcohol and similarly uninhibited, cast aspersions on a taxi driver in a turban which I shall not repeat here.  Suffice to say the Whites cast formality to the winds when they’ve had a few.

After that we met up with a few more members of the family – Cousin C and his wife and Parental Unit, and drove in a van to Bundy.  More of this in another blog.

After Bundy, H and I caught the overnight bus to Parental Unit’s, which was so disruptive I’ve vowed only to take it during the day in future.  It’s not that bad, as I can always pass the time by reading and I like the scenery; it just unfortunately takes 8 hours.

En route to the bus depot we got stuck in a traffic jam, and H decided we should get out of the car and run.  Niece stuck her head out the window and laughed as we trailled the car, which just at that moment freed itself from the tangle.  We caught up and got back in while the car behind hooted, and Sister thought better of sticking her finger up at the driver (as she has been known to do) in case he rammed her.

Finally we got on the bus with other sweaty passengers and H told me the bus driver said we would be watching a 3-and-a-half-hour documentary.

‘What on?’ I asked.  ‘Whale watching?’

‘It’s on the life of a Greyhound driver.’

The penny dropped.  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he’s joking.’

‘That he is,’ H smirked.

As we set off I asked H to call the taxi company to see if they’d still be open at 3am, which they were, and then to call mum to say she needn’t get out of bed to pick us up.

On arriving in town, H called the taxi company.  It took a while for them to answer the phone.

‘Hello,’ he said politely when a woman picked up.  ‘I’m just after a taxi.’

‘Why, has something happened?’

‘No, I was told to ring this number when we got into town to get a taxi.’

‘Well I guess I’d better come and get you then.’

It was then that H figured out he was talking to his own mother – he had dialled the previous number in his phone.  Dad subsequently arrived with the car, still wearing his flouro orange earplugs and, thank God, he had put some trousers on.

Poor Parental Unit.  It was funny, but also very wrong.

While at home, I wrote an essay for the Calibre Prize and more of my novel and swam and read and wished for a dog to talk for walks.  The sky brooded over the thought of rain and eventually decided to come up with the goods, breaking the heat with a storm.  H trundled around banging and hammering at some product he’d designed.  We had barely any fights with Parental Unit and watched some excellent DVDs – the original Stepford Wives (which was sinister), Capote (after which H told me not to write a bestseller until I was 80 otherwise I’d be crippled by fame), Bangkok Hilton (Nicole Kidman’s first film, and she was very good) and a wonderful indie flick called Eagle and Shark which was about New Zealand bogans.

And now H has gone back to gloomie olde England and I am very sad.

On Little Girls and Boys

What are little boys made of, made of?

What are little boys made of?

Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails;

That’s what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of, made of?

What are little girls made of?

Sugar and spice and everything nice;

That’s what little girls are made of.

I remembered this rhyme when I put Niece and Nephew to bed last night, after reading the requisite four books (one of which must have been a translation of a French book because the rhymes and meter were so off; even with kids’ books one can’t help being a literary critic). Niece, who has a hair obsession, called me to her bed so she could play with and stroke my hair. Then Nephew called me over to his.

‘What for?’ I asked, bending close so I could hear him.

‘So I can fart in your face, Auntie.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ I told him, and promptly went back to Niece’s bed, while he laughed at his own joke.

On Cousins

One of the nicest things about being back home is the chance to catch up with all my cousins. We grew up on a property of 5400 hectares in northwest NSW, which meant there was always someone to play with, and one was never unpopular at one’s birthday party because one could always guarantee that there would be eight other kiddies there. When our mums and dads went off for their booze-ups at country parties, we stayed at grandma’s and raided the dress-up box and played charades on the front lawn in the evenings, and the cool grass pricked our feet. If it was winter, we played indoors, while grandma’s old daschund lay before the fire and farted. Making a modest workforce of nine, we were recruited to round up sheep at shearing season, which often involved chasing the buggers down the creek when there was a breakaway, or catching lambs at marking time to have their tails docked and to pick the grass seeds out of their eyes to stop them getting cataracts. We spent the summers in each others’ pools and played Marco Polo, a game I hated because I could never hear where the voices were coming from and thus could never win.

We caught the same bus to school, and with nine Whites aboard, it was cacophonous. The boys played cat’s cradle, CousinG picked on her sister CousinV, CousinAl coerced Sister into sawing through the plastic headrest with a nailfile while the boy who lived down the road showed me his penis behind the back seat. The rest of the time I turned off my hearing aid and read my book.

As we grew up we gradually dispersed, so it’s always tremendously exciting when we get together again. Christmas last year was the first time in about six years, since Sister’s wedding, that we were all in one room. A vast amount of alcohol was imbibed, rude presents were distributed, and crackers were pulled, releasing their plastic hair twisties and magnets and poor jokes. When the kiddies ran amok and fought over toys, we put them to bed and CousinA pulled out his guitar and BrotherH played some chords on the untuned piano and we sang songs from Les Mis, then played charades again. To my immense satisfaction I was able to call out most of the answers before anyone else.

When I returned from England, CousinA kindly picked me up from the airport and I was astonished by his resemblance to my father.  I stayed with him for a night, but was then promptly evicted as he was expecting female company, which was fine (at least someone was getting some). Heintroduced me to female wrestling on payTV and some awful cop show (in fact I don’t know why I’m discriminating, it was all mildly horrifying) where a cop tasered a woman who’d been speeding and she curled up on the road like an insect sprayed with Mortein.  However I also got to watch tons of video clips, which was excellent jetlag recovery material.

Two weeks later (after I’d holed up with a friend), CousinA drove me and 2ndCousinD to Bathurst for CousinC’s wedding celebrations, whereupon 2ndCousinD thought it would be amusing to release noxious fumes into the car. I will never understand men and their basic humour.

The party was lovely, despite a tooth abscess which meant I was living off painkillers, and I wore my black and white frock from FCUK which was beautiful when I twirled, and drank six glasses of champagne which was four times my limit. Cousin Al inexplicably lifted her skirt to show her pantihose, my godmother saw me talking to 2ndCousinD and promptly interrogated him to see if he was marriage material (never mind the fact that I’ve published a novel and have a doctorate), then 2ndCousinD bought me a rum and Coke which I knew would make me spew if I drank it. So CousinE, who is training to be a doctor, put his arm around me and said I didn’t have to drink it if I didn’t want to, and gently took it from me and drank it himself. We then stumbled down the street to the local nightclub, where a girl with curly hair danced for an hour by herself until CousinA approached her and CousinE told me she was in love with a transgender person on the other side of the world and what did I think CousinA’s chances were, CousinC and his new wife had a spectacular dance-off, and CousinE turned around and called his girlfriend a skank and she promptly left. When CousinA enquired of his brother as to why he had done this, CousinE replied that he had no idea. We staggered back to the hotel at 3am, pausing by the greasy food stall to buy hot salty chips which tasted positively gourmet at that hour.

On the Queen's Birthday weekend we all met up again for Grandma’s 90th. This involved a 19 hour return journey for Sister and I, and two kids and two dogs. We were almost running on empty on the freeway and I, hyperventilating at visions of breaking down and waiting for assistance by the road with said kids and dogs, urged Sister to find the nearest exit. We found a very rustic service station, and Niece urgently needed to wee so I had to approach the woman manning the counter who was heavily accented, but on the third go I figured she was saying ‘Eet eez an outseede one.’ ‘Oh, that’s fine,’ I said, relieved that I’d finally got it. Niece wrinkled her nose in the toilet and said it smelled funny and I felt like saying, ‘Get over it, girl,’ but I held my tongue as she hadn’t grown up on a farm, then I cooed appropriately over the chooks she saw in the garden.

Grandma’s party started at 11.30am. By 12.30am someone had already asked me if I was married and I replied that no, I wasn’t rushing into that. UncleRi approached me as I was dishing out punch and told me that his brother (the youngest) had arrived and he had been very good, he hadn’t even said anything nasty about UncleRi's hair loss yet. I couldn’t hear most of the old biddies so I drank too much champagne again and when that ran out I gasped, ‘My coping mechanism!’ But Sister kindly went to the bottle shop and got more.  Everyone asked after parental unit and I said I had no idea where they were; in Eastern Europe somewhere and I hoped they weren’t dead. There was more singing, but alas no drunken dancing, and I stayed up late talking to CousinA and CousinG.

The next day the others played tennis and I went back to bed on account of the champagne, then we drove to AuntM and UncleRo’s farm, where they had a neurotic kelpie that chased its tale until it tired and a boisterous Labrador that jumped on the kiddies so he was whacked with a rolled-up newspaper. CousinAl asked UncleR if he’d take the kiddies for a ride on the tractor and he made a face and CousinAl said, ‘You’d rather stick pins in your eyes, wouldn’t you UncleR?’ However CousinA got out the Case tractor which made Nephew wild with joy, and BabyA was taken for a spin on the quadrunner, and we climbed into the back of the ute and unrolled the hay for the cows, just like when we were kids.  In the afternoon CousinA whipped out his guitar and there was much singing and dancing with cousins and kiddies, and Nephew crawled under the coffee table and curled up.  When his mother enquired as to what he was doing there, he said he was a bit tired and was just having a rest.  When this was relayed to me I said I wouldn't mind finding a table to crawl under myself.

Is it any surprise, then, that our partners are often unable to cope with our shenanigans, or that we are more like brothers and sisters than cousins?

On Feminist Jokes

At the dinner table the other evening, we started telling jokes. I only have two in my repertoire, the first one being thus: An English man, Irish man and Australian man are sitting around a table having afternoon tea with their wives. The English man says to his wife, ‘Pass the sugar, sugar.’ The Irish man says to his wife, ‘Pass the honey, honey.’ And the Australian says to his wife, ‘Pass the tea, bag.’

I know, it’s side-splitting stuff.

My sister wanted to know the only other joke in my keeping. ‘Oh, the children won’t get it,’ I said. On being assured this didn’t matter, I told my second joke:

A female brain cell was implanted into a male brain. She looked around and found it very empty.

‘Hello,’ she called out, ‘is anybody here?’ There was no response.

She tried again. ‘Helloooo? Is anybody in here?’

Again no response, so she shouted, ‘Hello! Is anybody in here?’

Finally she heard a very tiny voice crying out, ‘We’re all down here!’

My sister started laughing and said, ‘Ah, that’s a very feminist joke.’  My niece, all of five, piped up, ‘What’s a feminist?’

‘Well,’ I began, exultant at being able to impart this vital piece of information so early on in Niece’s education, ‘a feminist is a person who believes in equal rights for men and women. That means both men and women should work, and men should help with the washing up, and bringing up the babies. But equality isn’t happening very fast, so we need feminists to help make change.’

Niece paused, then said, ‘Auntie Jess?’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me another one.’

I just about wet myself laughing until Niece, who is frightened by excess, implored me to stop, and I duly did so.

Cousinly Affairs

It is a Wednesday night and suddenly I find myself with time on my hands.  Having written all day on botany and femininity, then gone for a swim in the decrepit local pool, and not feeling like reading, nor having a TV with which to spongify my brain, I am left with my blog. So now it’s time to write about our jaunt to hear CousinA play in his band, which I intended to get down a few weeks ago.  CousinA used to live south of the river, and whenever we went to visit I would always feel conspicuously overdressed.  So this time, hearing that the rugby club where he was playing was in the middle of a paddock south of the river (according to H), and having visions of sinking into the grass in my stilettos, I elected to dress down.  I was colour coordinated (in green) but I wore sneakers (the only pair of flat shoes I own).  You can imagine my horror then, to get inside and find the men in shirts and trousers, and the girls in spangly tops and high heels.  I couldn’t work it out – it was a rugby club in the middle of nowhere – and on expressing my consternation to CousinA, he explained that this was a big night out for the girls, that they only went into the city for big occasions, and they were here to find a husband.

Then the girls perched, like budgies on a branch, on the top of the benches running about the room so they could see the band and of course, have their assets viewed by the blokes.  But the blokes stood with their backs to the girls, watching the singers, and ignored them.  I couldn’t understand that either; if you like a girl/boy you go and talk to them.

Anyway, CousinA sang his stuff, and was very good and got everyone in the mood for a dance, and once he was done we went off home with his guitar so he could carry on partying.  On the DLR, a man with many piercings and a small woman with bottle blonde hair and huge black boots asked us whether the DLR went to Lewisham.  H explained that it wasn’t going all the way and they would have to get off at Mudchute and catch a bus.  We also had to get off at Mudchute and catch a bus.  So at Mudchute we trundled to the bus stop, following the couple.

Then H, being like the friendly Labrador that he is, decided to strike up a conversation (one of these days he’s going to get stabbed, but that’s his choice).  It transpired that they were cousins and were going to the White Swan, a trashy gay pub which is apparently an East End institution, and they don’t allow women in to the amateur strip nights on Wednesdays.  H once took my supervisor and his boyfriend there after our house party (on a Saturday, I hasten to add) and thus corrupted him (well, I’m sure my supervisor is already corrupt but I don’t want to think about that).  The man began a discussion with H about the kind of men he liked, which H kindly repeated for me afterwards (‘I like big, muscly men, y’know?’) Then the man noticed my hearing aid and said, ‘Oi, we’re both deaf too.’  He proceeded to elaborate on how he and his cousin had each lost their hearing but, ironically, I couldn't hear what he was saying.

Then a bus went by and suddenly H shouted, ‘Jess, we’re on the wrong side of the road!”  This was my fault because I had looked at the bus timetable but not the bus map.  We ran after the bus, swinging the guitar, the small woman clomping in her built up heels, but it was too fast.  In despair, I agreed that we should walk to the main road and find a taxi.  The cousins went ahead of us and proceeded to have an argument.

On the main road, we flagged a cab and bundled in.   The woman must have been on E because she was talking so fast.  She had kids, and this was a rare night out for her, I gathered.  We pulled up at Limehouse, and H said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it,’ and the woman, who was getting out her wallet, said, ‘Oi, orright,’ and put her wallet away and got out of the cab.  The cousin followed her and they took off immediately without saying thank you.  I would have been disgusted if they hadn’t been so entertaining, and I admit I had the bad grace to start laughing while they were within hearing.  One always seems to get more than one bargains for when one goes to visit CousinA, but that’s one of the reasons why we love him.

Better than Mills and Boon

This isn’t an internet dating blog entry, although one of them will be forthcoming in due course. Suffice to say it’s providing hours of amusement, but (because I am fastidious in my tastes) no romance yet. For that, where better can I slip than between the sheets of a book?

The Easter long weekend took us to a Woolacombe, where we stayed in a caravan with some friends and our cousin, who also brought along his retinue, the various members of which descended on us a varying times. It was bitterly cold, although not snowing as it was in the rest of the country. As we played beach volleyball, I began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation: the wind was horizontal and it was near freezing, but we were going to have our beach activity no matter what. Anyone other than the English would have just stayed inside and toasted their tootsies by the fire.

The next day I went for a walk by myself along the shore. The tide was out and had left pools of water in the sand which I skipped over. Coming back was tortuous, as the wind was icy and determined to fold me in half and then, joy of joys, it began hailing. I finally made it back to the caravan for a game of Scrabble, which I lost because someone helped H (again) and I subsided into a deep sulk.

On Sunday we went for a long walk along a headland, then down to a cove with black sand and a log smouldering from a fire. A dog, going bananas in the sea air, bounded around with a stick. I collected some rocks for my fish bowl, and on the way back H and I sank into the green grass at the top of the cliffs the way we used to do when we were kids on the farm, watching the birds freewheeling and the sea tossing up white balls of foam into the air above us.

We ate dinner at The Thatch and enlightened the English as to the anatomical meaning of this term in Australia, then played bingo at the vile club in the caravan park for novelty value. The kids’ games room was filled with brightly coloured slot machines and the adults’ room, full of pokies, was identical, thereby making for an obvious transition from one kind of game to another, more damaging one.

After bingo we settled down to watch Ocean’s Eleven. ‘Oh,’ I said scathingly as a car backed up with an enormous piece of equipment on board (don’t ask me what it was), ‘it’s such a boy’s film.’
A looked at me pointedly and said, ‘And what did we watch last night?’
I squirmed. It had been Pride and Prejudice. It was an otherwise beautiful film except for the scenes with Keira Knightley in them. Twiglet is clearly suffering from a want of vitamins because she has rictus of the jaw and can’t move her muscles properly. Unbelievably, she wasn’t as thin in this film as she was in Atonement, in which she closely resembled a coat hanger.

The next day we set off home via Doone Valley, which a friend had told us about during another clifftop walk. The road into the valley was steep, with trees crouching on either side, and I said that I wouldn’t like to be caught on that road on a dark and stormy night. We pulled up at Doone Valley Buttery for second breakfast, and came upon a sheepdog with a screw loose. It had a fascination for stones, but if you threw her a stone, she’d take it down to the creek and stand guard over it in the water. We drove onward over narrow roads through twisted trees and thickly grassed banks, pausing by a brook for photos. I expected Heathcliff to come striding over the grass and to pinion me against a tree but alas, the vision didn't materialise.

At lunch we stopped at Dunster, where there was a castle. We had lunch at a pub which had an African Grey Parrot called Nelson in a cage. Nelson wouldn’t talk if you were looking at him, so when the old men who were sitting nearby exited, he set up a whole little landscape of croons and whistles, and then erupted with, ‘Wanker!’
‘Nelson!’ the bartender scolded him.
Said bartender was similarly odd. Overhearing our conversation on facial and body hair (specifically on getting a free exfoliation when a girl kisses a prickly boy) as he set down our plates, he added, ‘I do like a good stache.’
After lunch, full of Cumberland sausages, we wandered down the road to a paddock and watched more dogs galumping about, then into the National Trust gardens, which were just beautiful, not least because of the magnolia tree that was in flower. We climbed the hill to the castle, and once at the top realised we had to get our skates on as none of us wanted to be left behind in the waiting room at Swindon train station.

And the romance? It began as soon as I opened the covers of Lorna Doone when I got home. There was tall, strapping John Ridd fighting the equally strong, but murderous Doones to get his girl, who had been born into the wrong family. That was a good enough plot to keep anyone reading, but what added to my delight was the way the strands that seemed to end in questions were caught up and woven back into the fabric of the work in that wonderfully logical, but improbable, 19th century way. And it wasn’t so much the characters themselves that lit up my mind, for John was faintly misogynist and Lorna needed a man to defend herself – but rather the quality of their love. It sprang up in their childhoods, then endured and made them stronger: John’s love pushed him to become braver, Lorna’s washed away her pride and breeding. It was the alchemy of love that made me fall for the book, and want to begin it again as soon as it had finished.

The White Family Circus - Part 1: West Green and Salisbury

My parents rarely take the conventional route when doing things, and thus it was that I found myself escorting them to King’s Cross, and then on a train to the sticks, where we were picked up by George’s mate and taken to George’s place in order to hire George’s car. I am not by nature a leader; I either tag along or do my own thing, so to be burdened with one’s parents made me so pale with stress that George asked me how long I’d been in London, clearly not understanding how an Australian could be so white.

George was about 70. His daggy shirt, left unbuttoned at the chest, was tucked into his Speedo shorts, which were held up with a bootlace.

‘You don’t drink the water in London, do you?’ he demanded of me, once he’d found out that I’d been here for 2.5 years.
‘Uhmmm … yes.’
‘The water’s full of chemicals. It’s got heavy metals, lime, God knows what. You mustn’t drink the water. And don’t go to the doctor either. If you go to hospital, you get sick. Tell you what I do, I buy those big bottles of water, wash under my armpits. You buy those bottles, don’t drink the water.’
I struggled to maintain an expression of beatification, whilst resisting a terrible impulse to laugh, the way I do when I’m in a church service and I start laughing precisely because I’m not supposed to.
George had got mum and dad’s arrival time wrong, thinking we were to turn up that evening, and so we were driven by his son and the bloke who’d picked us up to the town where the car was. I couldn’t hear much of the conversation, though I could tell from their tones that they were nice guys. At least until I heard one of them say, ‘I’m not a racist, but …’ and I had to resist the urge to laugh again. Later, mum told me that they’d said that lorry drivers have to drive around and around Paris without stopping, otherwise the immigrants jump on the back and wing it into England. I think that says it all.

We picked up the car, which was a delightful vomity colour, and drove to West Green House gardens. These had been restored by an Australian, Marylyn Abbott, whose garden at Mittagong is the most visited in Oz. Naturally, since summer finished in April, it was raining on and off, so we couldn’t sit outside on the lovely red tables and chairs, but had to eat inside, along with a crowd of Australians whose bus had broken down. They didn’t seem too fussed about it. Later, as we drove out, we saw the track marks in the mud and a tractor next to them; it had obviously been bogged and needed the tractor to get it out. The gardens were quite good but, always a stickler for neatness, I found them too untidy. Also half the grounds were flooded on account of the rain, which was a bit disappointing because the bridge over the pond, which looked very pretty, was out of bounds.

Once we were done, we sat in the car, mum and dad poring over out the map. Then dad said, ‘Jess, look,’ and pointed out a ute driving across the adjacent field. There was a wheelbarrow stuck underneath it, and the driver didn’t know. This time I was laughing, and hard. The driver parked on the other side of the field, and it wasn’t until he tried to set off again that he realised something was wrong. He found the wheelbarrow under the ute and wrestled it out. Then, looking somewhat sheepish, he carried it back across the field to the shed like a newborn calf; it obviously couldn’t be wheeled.

We drove on to Salisbury and had difficulty negotiating the city. Dad stopped at a service station and was given instructions by a boy with two hearing aids, then again by a lady at a shop that sold kid’s clothes. That was more helpful. H had found us rooms at a very nice old pub, except that the window didn’t close properly, the shower was so vigorous that it created a veritable flood each time you turned it on and the pipe for the portable heating system fed, inexplicably, directly out another open window. God knows how that was supposed to be effective in winter.

We had fish and chips for tea, and the chipperier was a very friendly man. When he found out I was from London, and that mum and dad had been there for a few days he asked, ‘Have you been to Camden Market?’ I replied, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t take them there, they’d get knifed!’ This was obviously not the right thing to say, as he looked a bit taken aback, then retorted with something that I didn’t hear, although it sounded humorous. Later, I repeated this conversation to H and he said how weird it was to ask if you’d been to Camden Market, rather than the London Eye, or the British Museum.

The next morning mum and I had a look at the cathedral, dad having been the evening before while we were reading. The wording about the entry donation was obscure: you didn’t have to pay to get in, but they’d phrased it in such a way as to suggest that you were obliged to. Mum and I walked in, the man reading behind the counter looked at us smarmily, then we kept on going through the sliding doors.

It was very convoluted inside – all buttresses and alcoves and partitions – or at least it appeared to be to a girl who is used to small country churches, and I couldn’t see a correlation between the architecture and the religion, which had always seemed to me to be straightforward. But then, I had never paid it much attention. Still, I liked the old tombs with the figures resting on them and the small animals on their feet. I’d once read in an article on Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess that men usually had lions at their feet, for courage, and women usually had a dog, for fidelity. You can imagine how well that went down with this writer. At the end of the tombs of Sir Edward Seymour and his wife Katherine, sister of Lady Jane Grey (queen for nine days), I think there were both lions. Mum asked a volunteer nearby about them, and although he forgot half his text, it was still a very sad story. Edward and Katherine had married in secret, but while Edward was away, Katherine lost the piece of paper proving their marriage. When Queen Elizabeth found out, she put Katherine in the Tower of London, and then Edward as well, when he returned to the country. The volunteer said Katherine died of a broken heart, which was probably an embellishment, given that the stress of having a child of out of wedlock in 1561, and in the Tower of London, was possibly more paramount.

After that we saw the Magna Carta, which was thrilling, and then we had to go as Parental Unit were getting neurotic about the parking ticket and I was savage for want of a coffee. The lines at Starbucks didn’t move quite as fast as they were wont to do in the city, so I gave up with waiting and went to Costa instead. That was my last decent coffee for 9 days.

Literary Traversings

After meeting H and having lunch with C on Chapel Street, I walked back to the hotel to meet my publicist. I was still grumpy, but feeling less violent than in the morning, and as I walked I rehearsed my speech and decided that the sun was uncomfortably warm on my shoulders. A* turned out to be wonderful – young, vibrant and friendly – and she carried my backpack around for me, which made me a little uncomfortable. H had been the designated packhorse but due to a change in plans he couldn’t go back to the hotel to collect the bag for me.

A* and I went first to a gay and lesbian bookshop down the road and signed their two copies, then went on to a beautiful bookshop in Albert Park. ‘The book’s been selling quite well,’ said the manager, rather solemnly and quietly, and I wondered if this reserved estimation was characteristic of all bookshop managers. A* then got us a cab to Dymocks and the manager there was lovely, and gave us cups of tea and hot chocolate from the cafe. She told us about her camping trip for the upcoming weekend, on a plot of land which several families had grouped together to buy, and now she and their descendents kept up with the tradition and still went there to stay. It sounded a bit like life on the farm so I told her about that. Then A* and I went across the road to an independent bookstore and signed some more copies, and then we caught a cab to Brunswick Road for dinner – Malaysian this time, at Blue Chillies. H texted me in alarm to say that there were people queuing on the footpath outside and he wasn’t sure if he could get a ticket. Then he wrote again to say they were the overflow from the previous event, which had a comedian in it, and my heartbeat subsided fractionally.

It surged again as we entered the bookstore, where there were quite a few people. I flapped around trying to get the FM set up so I could hear, and introduced myself to the two women writers beside me, Jesse Blackadder and Susan Hawthorne. There were three blokes, Dallas Angguish, Todd Alexander (Sydney) and Henry von Doussa, sitting in front of us but I couldn’t hear them and was too stressed trying to remember my spiel to try to hear them. Four writers spoke and then there was an interval, in which I caught up with my publisher, who’d come back from maternity leave, and met the head of marketing at Penguin who’d also come along. H chatted to them too then excused himself to attend to his blind date outside – a meeting engineered by L. After the interval a woman got up and sang a song, murmuring into my FM microphone, ‘This song is for you, Jessica,’ then she sang into the microphone for the audience. I giggled, embarrassed by the attention; it was the first time I’d been serenaded by a lesbian, and she was a good singer. Finally I got up and said my bit and gave two readings from my novel and, despite feeling very nervous and ill-prepared, it was fine.

I was utterly relieved when I got back to my seat and forgot that we had to do Q&A. So we all went up and sat on the plush red velvet couch, and everything was fine and dandy until I got asked the question by the MC, ‘Now Jessica, you’re a heterosexual, so how did you go about writing about lesbians?’ Fortunately I’d rehearsed an answer to this question with H, though he assured me that I wouldn’t get asked it because a thing like because it was passé. I explained that the relationship between Ingrid and Ellyn was based on a relationship with a man that hadn’t been working and wasn’t ever going to work, but that the reason why I’d written about two women instead of a man and a woman was because I was a very strong feminist and my ideas about female autonomy and independence were better expressed through a relationship between two women. They seemed happy with that, though I was affronted and, later, quite angry, for the same reason that I was irritated by the review written by Peter Pierce.

Pierce had maintained that I’d chosen quite a conventional structure and genre (ie a romance) to write about an unconventional topic – namely, lesbians. The must frustrating thing about reviews is that you can’t defend yourself or give the reviewer one of your famous expressions of withering scorn. The whole point I’d been making had been that lesbian love is no different to heterosexual love – therefore as a heterosexual writer I’m entirely qualified to write about love. As for the sex scenes, as I pointed out to the MC, I used my imagination – which is what writers tend to do.

After thinking about it some more, I understood that the MC might feel defensive if a heterosexual writer was writing about gays, namely because I was infringing on the very thing that defined them – their sexuality. But to use that line of reasoning would be to say that deaf people can only write about deaf people and black people can only write about black people, which is patently ridiculous. Then I thought about it some more and figured that it might have been a generational thing – maybe that’s how people like the MC thought (and he was at least in his late 50s), and how people like Pierce think - ie that lesbianism is something radical, when in fact it’s not that different – sure, you’re still marginalised, but marginalised in the way that deaf people might be. I can recall one of my writing lecturers (also around the same age as the MC and Pierce) saying in a faintly disparaging tone to a lesbian in my class that the lesbian novel she was writing was the sort of thing that might get picked up by a left wing women’s press but it would never make it to the mainstream. Well, look at where we are now, folks.

Anyway that’s enough of my ranting. Someone then asked a very sensible question about the role that landscape of Australia, both in the city and country, played in our work. I'd already spoken about this before I gave my reading, so I talked about how homesick I was, and that the only good thing about being out of Australia was that I didn't have to listen to John Howard, and I got a round of applause for that one.

There’s one last thing I need to mention: the red velvet flock wallpaper of the bookstore. I spoke to the owner of the store afterwards as he got me to sign a stack of books and told him how much I admired it. He said that it had been a toss up between the wallpaper and the airconditioning and he wasn’t sure if he’d made the right decision. ‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ I replied. ‘It’s like when I buy shoes – I always favour beauty over pain.’ He looked at me dubiously and said, ‘I don’t think you’d have been saying that if you were here last week when it was 40 degrees in the store.’ I had to concede he had a point, but now I am determined to have the same wallpaper in my house when I get back to Oz.

We went out for dinner afterwards, and as we stood at an intersection figuring out where to go, a girl, who was reasonably well-dressed, came up asking for money. H forked some out and handed it over, then the girl turned to me. I didn't really have any idea of what was going on as I hadn't heard her, so J+ patted her on the shoulder and said patronisingly, 'I think you've done well for tonight, you should go now.' I didn't hear this until afterwards when H repeated it to me, but when he told me I started laughing, and matched up J+'s phrase with the girl's expression of resigned agreement.

The next day we had a picnic with our cousins in the Botanical Gardens, which were beautiful, and the day after that indulged in the panacea of shopping. I found some lovely sparkly shoes to go with my Collette Dinnigan dress - $215 down to $75 – wohoo! And made the mistake of walking into Alannah Hill and walking out again with a red handbag. Ok it was kind of essential and I will use it everyday but I still felt guilty as it was a tad on the expensive side.

That night we went out with G and her boyfriend to the pub. H was supposed to meet up with his blind date again but after the previous night he was a bit reluctant to go. I drank twice my limit (which is a glass and a half – yes, am sad – but cheap) and eventually I got sick of his flaffing around and said, ‘For God’s sake, what do you WANT to do?’ and he said, ‘I want to stay here,’ and I replied, ‘Well, tell him that then!’ Many creative suggestions for texts were proffered and eventually, guilt-ridden, H managed to stay put. After freezing once again (honestly, I didn’t travel 2000 miles to end up shivering in a Melbourne beer garden in the middle of summer) we got up and I tottered after the others, flashing a brilliant smile at the bouncer for the heck of it. There was some kind of scuffle going on across the road. ‘What is it?’ I asked H. ‘A bitch fight,’ he replied gleefully. We walked on some more. ‘What are they saying?’ I asked again, but he replied, ‘Shhhh, just get a move on.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Shut up and keep walking, I’ll tell you in the car.’ When we got to the car he said, ‘Lock your doors, Jess!’ and I asked again, ‘What’s happening?’ and he said that he’d started giggling as we walked down the street and the man fighting with his girlfriend had shouted, ‘What are youse fuckin’ laughing at, you fuckers?’ Hence the reason for not talking and hurrying on. Next time, H said, he would laugh throatily like a man instead of giggling like a girl, and no one would dare to swear at him. At this I, too, burst out laughing.

I caught the plane back the following afternoon after having coffee with C and J* at a hole-in-the-wall cafe. I'd had a bad hangover and so settled on Vietnamese coffee, which was thick black coffee with condensed milk. It was a bit nasty and my tummy was upset so I opted for a freshly baked chocolate cupcake as well. When I got back to Sydney I texted L to tell me where to go but she didn’t answer her phone until 2 hours later (despite me having told her I would arrive at 5) by which time I was sitting at Eddy Avenue at Central in the sun waiting for a bus, angry as all fuck. Later I complained to Mum on the phone, ‘My life is organised, why can’t other people organise theirs?’ and she remonstrated, for the umpteenth time, that everyone was different therefore it wasn’t fair to apply my standards to them. I knew she was going to say this – she’s been saying it since I was small – despite the fact that both of us know it won’t make any difference because I will always be frustrated by disorganisation.