UK meanderings 2026

I STARTED reflecting on life in the UK from over 20 years ago. I often do this. I wrote the following, and then, as it says at the end, I aborted the project- gave up. Started thinking 'what is the point?' England draft 1 PREFACE: May, 2026 WHY have I decided to revisit this adventurous period of my life? Could it be that I wish to escape from my current life? Might it be that I just feel the need to be creative and I don’t know what else to do? Or might it be that I still have this bittersweet feeling of wanderlust- that I have never really got travel out of my system. That I want to revisit this period because it feels comforting and tenderly familiar. Maybe I want to document when I can, outside of what I have already done which is type out and produce my diaries. When I still can. When I can still remember. And who gets what I hope will be a long, finished book by the end? Perhaps nobody. But I hope its fate isn’t an item atop of some big book burning bonfire. Simply, I don't want to forget. So where to start? The best place is Heathrow airport. I went to England twice before- I think in '87 and then again '93. Pre-marriage, pre-kids. Little or no responsibilities. But this time was different. I knew this would be a longer journey. It felt incredibly exciting. To work overseas. As I found out, it is something else. So we came straight from hot, humid Sri Lanka. Colombo airport. October 12, 2000. ................................................................................................. Heathrow to Hammersmith, to Victoria Station, to Bearsted, Kent. Lugging those two heavy grey suitcases. One each. Absolutely pouring rain. England, my England. And there was Simon at the station, prompt. What a welcome face! He tells us about the floods- Kent, Sussex, other places. Hearing the place names still cause a shiver. I am suddenly dreaming- of Sissinghurst, Asheham, Rodmell- why all Virginia Woolf? KENT Gravelly Bottom Road, Kingswood, Maidstone, Kent, ME17 3NS What a time we were to have here. Pauline and Simon, the little Degus, the cats Missy and Tigger. The world pretty and green. Pauline had this huge property on acres and acres of land. J and I explored our first day and marvelled at its size. Borrowing gum boots. A cute little walk to get milk in Kingswood, the local town. It would be a base for a year or so- a great rock solid foundation for the time we lived there, and for subsequent times as well. Our little Eden. I have many beautiful memories of the place. Times spend in the garden, the visits for J’s cousins David and Caroline, Caroline’s kids, of course all the times with Simon in his garage, or day visits, fox hunting protest, the cinema in town, Christmas… Perhaps there is none better than sitting in Pauline’s conservatory the first morning with the book of towns and villages in England. It felt like I had the world at my fingertips. The world of my childhood. The world of Enid Blyton and all subsequent British literature. Cornwall and Gloucestershire, and Devon and Yorkshire, and Shropshire and Worcestershire, and on, and on, and on. I had found my heaven. I pored over that book with a beating heart. Not a map as such, but a driving guide to all the motorways taking us to all the exciting spots, as if the towns and villages were little satellite places in the sky, and we would be travelling from start to star. We also went by the Greenline bus to London during those first couple of days. J scoured the internet cafes, and I went to the National Gallery and saw all those treasures again, like the massive Une Bagnaid (Seurat), Vincent’s sunflowers, the Arnolfini marriage (Van Eyck), the list goes on. Then the bookshops, like Ulysses in Museum Street, and Cecil Williams, Gekoski, Marchpane. A tour of the Café Royale on Regent Street in search of the setting of Lawrence’s Rananim outburst on his birthday. There would be many visits to London, but the first one back in a long while holds its own special memory. We packed in so much early on. It was a great excuse for Pauline and Simon to get out as well. Sissinghurst quickly followed, then Charleston Farmhouse and Monk’s House in Rodmell in wet, wet Sussex, taking in Brighton at Jill and David Read’s place. Canterbury we found to be nice, but much preferred Elham. In just over a week I landed the teaching job of a lifetime at Maidstone Girls’ Grammar School. The agency I joined- ‘Select’- gave me a couple of weeks at St Simon Stock before I started which was a useful warmup, whereby a nun walked into my class and jaws dropped when I didn’t stand up! My first cover lesson I merely observed Year 13’s discussing Alan Partridge. I sat there thinking, ‘Wow, I am in a British classroom’, it took my breath away. Just staying in with Pauline and Simon had its frustrations- the cooking, Pauline’s moods- but I always felt grateful to be able to live an ordinary life in England for the first time- touring, shopping for groceries at Netto, cooking when we were allowed, meeting Simon’s eccentric friends and buying a 25 pound car, and playing with a ball on the stairs with those beautiful, beautiful cats. Still, I was quite homesick in those early weeks. The postman would cycle up the path. We got a lot of letters in those first weeks, news from home. Gordon and Lisa split, and phone calls with mother showed me how worried she was. One night I just started crying in our room, and it was really sudden. It only happened once, and I didn’t really understand it. Just the feeling of being overwhelmed. Yet there were so many distractions, such as the massive Bluewater shopping centre, and further London visits on the Greenline, and going to the manuscripts room at the British Library poring over Koteliansky’s letters to Lawrence- the actual letters in their big envelopes!!, and Katherine Mansfield’s actual story ‘A Suburban Fairytale.’ And another time to Primrose Hill past the zoo, and Chalcot Square and 23 Fitzroy Rd, past residences of a king and queen pair of poets. By late November I officially started the best job I have ever had. I had an orientation day first where I felt really self-conscious because I had just had a really short haircut. It was terrible. You can imagine why. Fran Mallalieu was having a farewell with 9E, who would become my favourite class ever. ‘Say something Australian!’. I later find out that Harriet Hancock has a mock Australian accent on her home phone message- something about being out in the ‘ute.’ So I am thrown into the deep end at MGGS. Thanks God they are so good. 2 X Year 13, a Year 10, a Year 9, a Year 8, a Year 7 (all English), and on top of all that, 5 one off Year 8 Drama classes. During spares I come to use the lovely room at the top of the stairs for the computers and the internet, checking The Age every day (J and I do not have our own computer). But the staff come to be so friendly and nice that in time I go up there less. There’s the group of men that I talk sport with, especially cricket when the Ashes comes on. It is the days of Glenn McGrath, Steve Waugh and Shane Warne. Martyn Lowe-Wheeler is the intellect. He once attended a lecture at Cambridge by Ted Hughes and lent me ‘Winter Pollen.’ Val Thind is the Head of English, and her trust in me went so far as to order 28 copies of ‘Looking for Alibrandi’ for my Year 10’s by email. (I made the mistake of lending it out to them, and most of them read it that night. I wonder if it is still there, sitting in the English storeroom?? Then there is the trio that I get to know best- even socially. Roy Doughty, Jon Mallalieu, and Dave Reader. One lovely lunchtime we go to the pub and drink beers and play pool. It is so civilized. They can’t believe it never happens in Australia. Only Klaus, the German, is a bit creepy, but I handle him ok. I will eventually have a lovely day seeing Neil Young with Roy (and Murray) at Finsbury Park, and see Burnley V Gillingham with Dave. The only other football game I will go to much later is Leicester V Leeds at the Foxes home ground. We are into early December now, and we know we need to move from Pauline’s. It has been fantastic, but we don’t want to overstay thigs, and we need more independence. It’s not far away. It is 83 London Road, ME 16 ODX. It is not a particularly easy time. J and I fight a lot. She feels stuck, has a lot of pain (terrible weather) and not enjoying Maidstone Hospital, the NHS in general. And despite MGGS, I feel like I am not teaching that well, a bit flat and bored, a bit depressed, and probably very, very homesick. And this place, on London Rd, is pretty crappy. I remember how small it was- our living quarters a garret with a sloping roof. There was only one section in which I could stand upright. A shared kitchen didn’t help, and a bathroom with tired spurts of lime-scale water, no TV, sloping walls. To a degree we come to get used to it, but it is always poky. One day a woman with a polecat moves in downstairs- that’s interesting- and there is a guy (Russian perhaps) who propositions J, and then there is the day I lock downstairs on my way out, and she is locked in all day. My dark mood extended into mid-December, where even on a trip to London I am all complaints. We had seen J’s friend Rob a few times, and went to the V&A (marvelling at William Morris things), and finding Regent St and Oxford St Christmassy and commercial, not picking up much in Soho and Carnaby St, and queuing up for a Thai restaurant in the wind and the cold feeling miserable. I felt completely left out during Rag Week at MGGS, sullen amidst all the frivolity. I felt like a block of ice, dislocated, achingly shy, removed like Esther Greenwood (teaching The Bell Jar), emotionally sterile and not performing as a teacher well. And there is a depressed girl in one of my Year 13 classes- Rosemary Aves- who says The Bell Jar is therapeutic. I had some lovely birthdays when we were away. This first one in 2000- my 36th- was spent with old friends of Jack’s at their beautiful house (Monkton), in Ross-on-Wye. Really generous people, made a fuss. We were in the vicinity so we went to the first of may house-associations of Lawrence- this one the Old Vicarage where Catherine Carswell once lived (the tenants unaware of this association). The night od December 21 ended at Cheltenham Town Hall to see Van Morrison for my very first time. Not the best time to see him (his largely forgettable time with Linda Gail Lewis). But it was a fun night, and he was in good form. The second concert later on in Derbyshire, he was quite flat. We also had a couple of nice Christmases with Pauline and her family. My one and only experience of foxhunting protest occurred at Elham on Boxing Day, 2000. Part of a large group holding placards and watching the brave horsemen with their little Foxhounds. I felt a bit sick after only a few hours sleep and all that rich Christmas food. And Simon drove at 170 kmh. The sign he constructed spelt out the words ‘Fox hunting’s for ‘Barrarians’. Mmmmm… Our gloves were useless and my toes were crying out in pain. I pulled my cap low over my head. The bugles went off and the merry hunters were on their way, the crowd hoping to satiate the hounds by throwing them dog biscuits. When we finally got home, after a detour taking in Dover and Folkestone, I vomited up my Christmas dinner, managing to thumb the small, hard bits through the little sink holes, and scooping up the bigger bits long, grey capsicum bits and flushing them down the toilet. In bed for a brief respite, and then up again for a Boxing Day lunch in Marden for some more rich Christmas food, including vile Yorkshire pudding. How white, how snowed-in was everything in the morning, as we took a stroll around the schoolyard and interrupted the early morning meanderings of a small red fox. Winter in Kent like winter anywhere in England takes a lot of getting used to. Especially the first winter. The wind rocking fence posts and the traffic eerily quiet. A postal van slipping and sliding along the hill at Queen’s Road. 2001 began- literally New Year’s Day- in London again. Very touristy but my mood really brightened. I wrote in my diary that night that it was our mildest day so far, and that I found the walks glorious- along Whitehall, and St James’ Park, Westminster Abbey, and a film at Leicester Square. Maybe it suddenly occurred to me that I was a very lucky man. By late January I was really enjoying teaching. 9E were and always will be, my favourite class. Our little attic had become a happy attic. (classes) MGGS events- Mack & Mabel, theatre London Haymarket- An Inspector Calls By Mid- February we were finally starting to travel a lot, not just to London. A holiday in Bath visiting the tourist spots like The Circus and Royal Crescent, and also out to Van Morrison’s Wool Hall Studios. On this trip we also went to the first D H Lawrence associated house- Chapel Farm Cottage in Berkshire (Dollie Radford’s home). JUNE 29- ABORTED DRAFT

ON HAPPINESS

 

IN Colm Toibin’s BROOKLYN, Eilis makes the sudden decision to leave her mother and friends in small town provincial Ireland to return to Brooklyn and a future that is more daring, filled with promise and potential, but infinitely risky. She does this because she thinks this course is the one that is most likely to bring her happiness.

In Alex Miller’s equally beautiful CONDITIONS OF FAITH, Emily Elder makes the sudden decision to stay in Europe and abandon her French husband and her new born child. It is a decision that is even more risky and momentous than Eilis’. When she tells her husband Georges of her decision whilst they are dancing at a Paris nightclub, he asks her ‘why?’, which is a fair enough question. She tells him it is because she is not content. His response is ‘Content? For Christ’s sake, no-one’s content.’

They are both interesting ideas because they are weighty decisions filled with risk. Each person knows something is lacking and they know they just need something more. To say that ‘no one’s content’ seems pretty meaningless to me. These are the cowards like most of us, me included, who travel on the road already taken, and are not prepared to risk everything for a life that could be so much better. Maybe the doors haven’t opened sufficiently. Maybe the mindset will mean that the doors will never open up, or widely enough. The world is filled with risktakers like Eilis and Emily, but they pale into significance when compared with the multitudes of us who settle for what they have.

It must be about security. It is just too scary to risk giving up all you have strived for. Joni Mitchell, in her song HEJIRA, sings ‘You know it never has been easy/ Whether you do or you do not resign/ Whether you travel the breadth of extremities/ Or stick to some straighter line.’ Mmmm… ‘travelling the breadth of extremities.’ It sounds easy enough.

Georges said ‘no-one’s content’, and I wonder how true this is. I read somewhere, posted on a wall for everyone to see, that you should be careful criticising someone else because you never know ‘what particular shit they may be going through.’ In many ways, I would love to be someone like Eilis or Emily. I don’t mean chucking everything in, after all that’s not what they were doing. They weren’t suicidal. Emily was wanting to continue her archaeological studies and her European adventure. Eilis was going back to Brooklyn to meet her husband and start their American dream. Both wanted more of being foreigners in a foreign land.

If there is anything that would make me truly happy, or even ‘content’- Emily’s word-( I am not even sure how close to ‘happiness’ this is),  it would be to go back to being a foreigner again. Van Morrison on ASTRAL WEEKS says ‘I’m nothin’ but a stranger in this world…’. Both Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Plath were strangers in a strange world. Both refused to go back to a potentially easier life with family in their home lands.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I arrived in the UK with my wife and began a European adventure of my (our) own. I dreamt of the day multitudes of times growing up where I could have Cornwall, Somerset, Yorkshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, at my fingertips. And then suddenly I did. I had experiences I will never forget, including motoring holidays around Italy and France and Switzerland. But was I content? After just over two years of this I suddenly wanted to ‘come home.’

Coming home. I will probably take this to my grave as the biggest mistake of my life. I look at Emily and Eilis with profound respect for the decisions that they made, how they chose the road not taken. But if we are ever going to live a life where we ever feel even remotely ‘content’ we have to live with these decisions, or doing something extraordinarily wild and unpredictable, and ‘travel the breadth of extremities’ like the trailblazers that have done this before us.

So, I salute those who are foreigners in foreign lands. I wish I could join you. But I also know many of you have given up important things and made extreme sacrifices along the way.

I come back once again to Nick Cave’s ‘There is a town…’

‘And now I live
In this town
I walk these dark streets
Up and down, up and down
Under a dark sky
And I dream
That one day
I'll go back home’

I have no doubt that Eilis and Emily thought of home every day. And perhaps Sylvia and Katherine as well. Were they content? Well, illness and fate always play a part. I like to think that things worked out well for the fictional Eilis and Emily. For Sylvia Plath and Katherine Mansfield… the former took her life through gassing herself at age 30, and the latter died of tuberculosis at just 34. For the rest of us? Well we live a lot longer- most of us- snug in our protective cocoons, a satisfying, safe life, or a life devoid of mystery and filled with mediocrity… depending on your point of view.

 

Letter to Simon Read- remembering 20 years ago

 

HI Simon/Pauline

Did you know it has been almost 20 years since you picked us up in the pouring rain at Bearsted station, way back in October of 2000.

As people often say, I don’t know where the time has gone. But one thing I do know is that I have thought about England almost every day since we returned in December 2003. J says I was desperate to come home, but as I sometimes tell her, within minutes of arriving at my parents’ house after flying home, I felt ready to go back. And of course, probably for a few different reasons, we never did.

I think about England all the time, as I have already said. I think about each of the various schools, especially MGGS. I think about our frequent trips to London and seeking out bookshops along Charing Cross Road, and Ulysses in Museum Street, and countless others. I think about drives to lots and lots of villages and towns like Hawkshurst and Aylesford in Kent, and Ludlow and Much Wenlock in Shropshire, and Kingsand and Zennor in Cornwall. And I think about the various National Trust homes like Cotehele, also in Cornwall, and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and Monk’s House in Sussex. And of course all the D H Lawrence houses we visited, such as Mountain Cottage, and Chapel Farm Cottage and The Triangle and the long barn at Greatham, and the various other writers’ retreats, like the Bronte’s, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath's grave.

I think about all the counties and our travels in them, including ventures into Wales (my favourite ever holiday), Scotland, and Ireland to meet Colm Toibin, and great short holidays traversing Somerset and Wiltshire and Devon, and up higher, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and even as high up as the Lakes District, northern Wales and Yorkshire and Northumberland.

We lived, distinctly, for periods in 3 main counties if you recall- Nottingham, Newent in Gloucestershire, and of course the beloved Maidstone, in Kent.

Now I arrive at my fondest memory. And perhaps the greatest pleasure of my life. Living with you and Pauline on Gravelley Bottom Road, sharing your upstairs, having lots of day trips, such as the Churchill home, and Sissinghurst, Sutton Vallence, Sittingbourne. Negotiating your terrible shower. Beautiful walks amongst the leaves in the expansive backyard. Playing with Missy and Tiger on the stairs. You kindly getting cars for us. Your mother looking after us and taking us out to get food at Nettoes and not wanting us in the kitchen. The degus’ in their cage. Visits by Caroline and her kids and David, who would find all of this horribly sentimental. Remember our trip to (I think) to Elham for fox hunting protests, where you drove like we were on an autobahn, seeing you work in your garage and going to the dance together, seeing you in banger racing at Ipswich, the local cinema in Maidstone where we saw the Hannibal Lecter film, eating out expensively at the Tickled Trout, and meeting your interesting friends, the car mechanics, the one from Liverpool I think called Paul and the one who died suddenly, who used to go the pub called ‘The Sugar Loaves’, possibly Wayne, and walking along the Medway and seeing Leeds Castle. The list goes on.

I will never forget those days. They fill me with joy just thinking about them, but they also fill me with sadness because of some personal regrets, and how much I miss everything and would love to have it back again. But of course, time marches on and it is difficult to recapture things that you once loved and experienced. I dream, often, of England, and one recurring dream in particular is this one where I am on the verging of coming home to Australia and I am filled with so much dread about having to leave… and yet J says this was not how I was- almost 20 years ago.

I hear that you are still in the house, and Pauline is with you, and even Camilla is close by. What an incredible experience it would be for me to return and sit in the backyard and have everyone around us again. I have lots of photos of this time. We all look young and healthy and optimistic. It feels like another life ago. If you get time let me know what you remember and love to everyone, especially Pauline who was so good to us. In my dreams I am sitting with J, and you and Pauline, and we are in the conservatory, and we have just arrived, a day or tow, and it is cold but I am cradling your book of English villages, and my heart is racing and I feel like I am on top of the world.

I leave you with the foreword to a book I put together about our travels. I must show you some day. All the best,

DH XXX

ENGLAND TRIP VOL 1

PREFACE

I WILL never forget the first days of the beginning of our pilgrimage after arriving in England towards the end of the year 2000. We had got married in Sunbury, spend a few weeks in Sri Lanka, then caught a train to London from Heathrow, then a bus to Bearstead near Maidstone, Kent. Simon Read collected us in the pouring rain at night. The next day, still no doubt jetlagged, we sat in Pauline’s conservatory. She placed a thick hardback in my hand. It was a book about English towns and villages. In my heightened and excited state, I had not fathomed our relative proximity to places like Italy, France and Austria. It was enough that it was England on our doorstep. 

England, my England. The names and maps ran off the page, like the Melbourne ‘Melway’, but a thousand times more exciting. Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire. Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. Mevagissey, Cornwall. Haworth, Lancashire. Bambridge, Northumberland. Much Wenlock, Shropshire. The names rolled on and on, all inspiring. I used the index and found many names that were familiar because of my research and reading. Morris, Lawrence, Plath, Hardy, Burne-Jones. Towns associated with glorious people. Even little Edenbridge, quite close by, where Lawrence stayed with Edward Garnett. 

My imagination ran wild and I felt like I had entered a new, golden sphere, a little like the character in the Woody Allen film called ‘Midnight In Paris’, who finds himself in 1920’s Fitzgerald-era Paris. Except I hadn’t travelled into the past. The present, alone, was entirely sufficient and satisfying. Pauline’s little conservatory was crackling with life and electricity.

 

 

 

KATHERINE MANSFIELD- BEFORE ENGLAND

I HAVE nearly finished Gerri Kimber’s ‘Katherine Mansfield -The Early Years’, and it is so snug and warm and calming and reassuring and lovely, it’s like an old lost friend. Except it is also luxuriating in its richness and wonderment, and I don’t really have an old friend like this.

 I have come to it after many books by and about Katherine Mansfield. The famous Antony Alpers’ biography, her notebooks and journals, Kathleen Jones’ biography, a favourite, and recently I acquired the Edinburgh University Press editions of her complete works, a great treasure. I was about 20 when I first read Mansfield. I nominated her short story collection ‘Bliss & Other Stories’ as a personal favourite when I was with a group of students in an English tutorial at university many years ago. I read all her short stories then. Those wondrous years of active imagination, fervent reading, abundant curiosity. She has stayed the course with me- along with D H Lawrence and Sylvia Plath- when many others, I have somehow, let go.

When I was in England she was a part of that great literary pilgrimage conducted over a period of more than two years. The ‘Elephant’ house with Murry in Hampstead Heath, her friend Koteliansky’s house at Acacia Road in St John’s Wood, in Fontainebleau in France stumbling luckily upon her gravestone- ‘the wife of Middleton Murry…’. Then many years later to Wellington itself, the childhood home in Thorndon, now a museum.

So I sit in my bedroom any spare moment of any day, thinking of KM constantly, wishing this book of her early years would never end. Somehow, despite the amount of time I have dedicated to her, I have forgotten a lot of these early years. Or at least some of it. It intrigues me from beginning to end. Nothing ordinary about her. Her very real passions and frustrations. Solitariness. Desires. Influences. Loves. Resentments. Ambition.

The book begins with her wealthy origins in Wellington and the various births in the family- the sisters and the much-loved younger brother who would be killed during the war. Not long after Vera was born came Chaddie, then KM in 1888, and Gwendoline who died as a baby followed very quickly by KM’s youngest sister, Jeanne. The family moved to nearby Karori, presumably for health reasons, to a house with a 14-acre garden called ‘Chesney Wold’ where the last sibling, KM’s favourite, Leslie was born. Karori became important to KM’s fiction. She wrote many stories as an adult based on her time there. I also saw that the school she went to- called, interestingly, Karori Normal School’ - is still functioning- http://www.kns.school.nz/

When she was 9 the family moved back to Thorndon (75 Tinakori Road), and the Beauchamp girls were enrolled in Wellington Girls’ High School, also still extant- https://wgc.school.nz/  This is where her first short story was published, aged 9. This is where the book begins to show KM as emerging as different to her sisters and her peers- an outsider, aloof, moody, idiosyncratic. And poetic. But now, and through her teen years, there is also a sense of awkwardness as well- her plumpness, glasses (which mysteriously disappeared later), and bourgeoning interest in music. KM would become quite an accomplished cellist. 

At this time the wealthy Beauchamp’s took a number of domestic summer holidays and rented cottages at places like Day’s Bay. I re-read the longish ‘At The Bay’ recently as a memorial to her time spent on summer holidays.  Important friendships were formed at this time around the turn of the century, that would later develop into strong romantic and sexual relationships- the Trowell twins, Garnet and Tom, highly accomplished musicians, and Maata, a dark-skinned Maori princess that KM met at a wealthier, more prestigious school in Fitzherbert Terrace. She also knew somebody called Edith Bendall and wrote about laying her head on her naked breast at the holiday house at Day’s Bay. Her yearning also extended to one of the English cricketers on board a ship KM was on, returning from her first trip to England. She refers to him as Adonis in her journal.

KM has such a restlessness for love and desire like any teenager from any time, but also for culture, literature, music. Her writing is dominated by ‘decadent’ influences like her favourite, Oscar Wilde, whose aphorisms she adored. She soaked up time in London where she studied during her formative years at Queen’s College on Harley Street- http://www.qcl.org.uk/

Here she met her lifetime friend and ‘slave’, Ida Baker, also known as LM, for KM an emotional support until the very end. What an incredibly rich and fulfilling time she had at Queen’s College. It enabled her to study music (her beloved cello), practise her craft of writing, meet fascinating intellectuals and like-minded people she struggled to meet in Wellington. Once back home again when her education ‘finished’ she got into a real funk, angry with her family, her father in particular who held the purse strings, and becoming notorious for her moods and dissatisfaction. NZ was, it seemed, a stale city with little to offer (Kimber shows that intellectually, it was in fact quite rich for its size), but for the restless KM, pining for England, it was stuffy and provincial in the worst possible way. It did not fit in with her bohemian ways, her grandiose, modern thinking, her dreams of decadence and separateness. KM was establishing, in her own mind, the idea of having a career in writing as a modernist author, and Wellington seemed to dampen her ambitions.

Eventually she realised a way of getting around her father and gaining his support. At about 18 or 19 she eventually went back to London to pursue a new life, but not until after a camping holiday around the north island where she learned some valuable lessons about living a more practical life and learning how to peel potatoes, amongst other things.

Oh, how much she would have savoured getting on a boat again, escaping the stifling Wellington, and getting away from her father, except for his much- needed money, which was 100 pounds a year. And oh, how I can relate, right now, to the idea of getting on that boat and going once again to England and the promise of great adventure- Northumberland, Shropshire, Lakes District, Cornwall, Kent, Yorkshire, Cotswolds, Herefordshire, Devon, Wiltshire, Nottinghamshire…

She went back to England and eventually met John Middleton Murry and published short stories and created a deeply enriching life around her, inhabited by D H Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and many others. She never forgot New Zealand, though, which crept into her stories time and time again. There is something about memories of our youth, and how we can paint them somehow rosier in our minds. If there was some rosiness.

   

ON THE FUTURE

                                    

VAN Morrison, in his cover with THEM of the John Lee Hooker song ‘Don’t Look Back’, sings:

“If I could call back
All those days of yesteryear
I would never grow old
And I'd never be poor
But darling, those days are gone.

Stop dreaming
And live on in the future
But darling, don't look back...’

Of course, he fails to take his own advice, always, it seems, singing about the glories of THE PAST when he lived near Cypress Avenue, on Hyndford Street. For some of us, there will be glories of the past. For me, it was visiting the cousins in Bundoora, waiting for the parents and brother of your first love to go to bed, my football team’s first successes, Enid Blyton, family holidays to Cooma and the like, the first big trip overseas to places like Cornwall and Paris.

But for now, I am in the mood to think about the glories of THE FUTURE. In my mind I have mapped out a plan. The future will be dotted with lots of little highlights that bring memories of nightclubs and working life and raising little kids to shame.

In the future my children will obviously no longer be children. They will be fantastically useful adults who will have children of their own who will provide me with boundless pleasures. M will ring out of the blue and ask if J and I can feed her two little girls, give them a bath, and read to them. During the week I will have caught a tram to Carlton, visited Readings bookstore, and bought them the new shiny picture story book about a red dragon or a purple unicorn that everyone is talking about. It will be really something to be 80 or 90 and have two sweet little kids holding their breath, fascinated, by my aged, husky voice and my long practised ability to adopt character voices.

Then a couple of days later S will drop in- my kids who are now adults will never ring first-and I will be just getting out of bed because of a new habit of sleeping in, and she will make us both a strong coffee with the sparkly machine she bought us for Christmas. She will seek some advice and hang onto my words of wisdom and kiss my whiskered face in gratitude. We will hold hands like we have always done and take a book outside, sitting beneath the oak tree as red and golden leaves of autumn fall around at our feet. She will tell me about how her boys are getting on and where her philanthropic work is heading.

Some mornings I will wake early and read by the natural light coming through the bay windows. I will marvel at the blue light splashed on the walls from the reflection of the stained glass. J’s hair will look soft and wavy, all grey cascading across her pillow. There will inevitably be either our Afghan puppy or Persian kitten at the foot of the bed making my toes warm and numb. Sometimes, on the street, I will hear early morning conversations amongst neighbours, kids getting ready for school, bells tingling, the comforting crunch of gravel. We will know and treasure all our neighbours. They will visit, like our kids, willy-nilly, and if I am busy tinkering with something, J will attend to their needs.

After breakfast I will sigh deeply and read the paper (still shunning the electronic version), and the morning will melt into the afternoon. Eggs, milkshakes, crosswords, maybe a bit of gardening, but not too much. J will go outside and wrap wire around her tomatoes, and splash a bit of paint below the orchard wall. Watching her labour, I will sit in my great armchair and think wistfully of England, planning another visit in my head, thinking about our last visit, wondering if the lanes of Much Wenlock look the same, the tidy brown cottages of Bibury in the Cotswolds, the black, black graves in the grounds of the Bronte parsonage, the charming low ceilings of pubs like The Feathers in Ludlow, the stone jetty at Mevagissey in Cornwall…

Whoops, it is 3:30 already. J has come in to have a shower. Some books have arrived from ABE books in the mail. I am reminded of my goal- to read one Henry James novel a fortnight until I have finished. I go back to bed with toast and an orange juice and knuckle down with my Afghan and a first edition of The Ambassadors, from James’ third period. I have nearly finished. I drift and fall asleep, and awaken, and drift, and fall asleep and awaken. It is suddenly 10 o’clock and I have finished. My body feels strangely alive and tingly. J is still up, watching television, as I ponder what I will read next.

It is late but I am not tired. I put my dressing gown on and pour a generous whisky and escape the television and wander into the billiard room. I practise slotting balls, preparing for the billiard night that is coming up here in this very room with four or five fellas from the neighbourhood. We all enjoy our whisky and chat about politics and our sports. Tonight, though, I am gloriously alone, pocketing balls, and listening to Mahler’s 5^th symphony, the Adagietto, from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I am transcended. It effortlessly propels my limbs around the table. I’m not sure if it is the whisky, my age, or the music, but I am sighing deeply, then suppressing a sob, in gratitude, for everything good that old age brings. 

England, My England

I HAVE decided to put together my written and photographic memories of living overseas into an on-line book. It stems from the period 2000-2003. This will be the preface. it will be time-consuming but fun. the next best thing, perhaps, to actually going back there to live.

ENGLAND TRIP VOL 1 

PREFACE

I WILL never forget the first days of the beginning of our pilgrimage after arriving in England towards the end of the year 2000. We had got married in Sunbury, spend a few weeks in Sri Lanka, then caught a train to London from Heathrow, then a bus to Bearstead near Maidstone, Kent. Simon Read collected us in the pouring rain at night. The next day, still no doubt jetlagged, we sat in Pauline’s conservatory. She placed a thick hardback in my hand. It was a book about English towns and villages. In my heightened and excited state, I had not fathomed our relative proximity to places like Italy, France and Austria. It was enough that it was England on our doorstep. England, my England. The names and maps ran off the page, like the Melbourne ‘Melway’, but a thousand times more exciting. Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire. Kelmscott, Oxfordshire. Mevagissey, Cornwall. Haworth, Lancashire. Bambridge, Northumberland. Much Wenlock, Shropshire. The names rolled on and on, all inspiring. I used the index and found many names that were familiar because of my research and reading. Morris, Lawrence, Plath, Hardy, Burne-Jones. Towns associated with glorious people. Even little Edenbridge, quite close by, where Lawrence stayed with Edward Garnett. My imagination ran wild and I felt like I had entered a new, golden sphere, a little like the character in the Woody Allen film called ‘Midnight In Paris’, who finds himself in 1920’s Fitzgerald-era Paris. Except I hadn’t travelled into the past. The present, alone, was entirely sufficient and satisfying. Pauline’s little conservatory was crackling with life and electricity. 

Tim Winton's musings and meanderings: Island Home

 

I WANTED, very much, to like Tim Winton’s beautiful looking new book about Australian landscapes and Australian culture. I did enjoy aspects of it quite a lot. At other times I felt restless, like I was a bit stuck in a discussion he was creating, one that holds enormous meaning for him, but less significance for me and perhaps other readers. I didn’t feel this way when I read Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, the glorious ‘Landmarks.’ Yes, his was personal as well, but less like a diary, less egocentric in some way. They do have much in common, especially the enjoyment and exploration of naturalistic terminologies, for landscapes, birds, flowers and trees, especially.

The best parts of Winton’s book (probably like Macfarlane’s as well) was the beautiful detail. You can see this writing in other works of Winton’s, in his fiction. Perhaps not as lyrical as it is here though. I am thinking of ‘Cloudstreet’, and ‘The Turning’ in particular, my favourite works of his. Sometimes the prose is lyrical here, but often with a kind of contradictory brutal edge as well, and lots of colloquialisms and earthiness, the kind of language that Winton gets in trouble with for ‘intellectuals’ who might prefer Patrick White or David Malouf.

Here is a section from ‘Barefoot and Unhurried’- ‘So often a child’s reveries spring from rhythms present in nature: the lapping rise and fall of birds stirring, settling, stirring anew; the swoon and sweep of wild oats in the wind; cicadas counting off the day in a million disapproving clicks of the tongue…I used to lie in the sun and listen to the metronomic tick of blood beneath my temples. I remember how hypnotic the stroke of my newly mastered freestyle became. There was strange comfort in the hiss of the stick I trailed in the dirt all afternoon, and in my whispery footfalls on the empty beach.’

Wow. The stick and the footfalls. Some of the best sensory writing I have read this year.

Fishing, at Cape Keraudren in 1977, Winton lands an extraordinary fish that is ‘chrome-sleek’ and it escapes his clutches, but not before it coats him with mucus that he describes as an ‘adhesive slime.’ As a result he spends ‘half the hot night scraping the fish’s ectoplasmic smegma from my hands and shins.’ In the morning his ‘fingers are webbed.’ I can only imagine how much people like Ernest Hemingway and Ted Hughes would enjoy an experience like this.

 

Winton’s observational skills are extraordinary, more so than even Sylvia Plath with her Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’, and the crabs’ ‘glittery wisp and trickle’ in that particular poem. Here he is wandering at low tide, observing ‘thin strips of water’ busy with ‘crabs and fingerlings, spider stars, bivalves.’ Further on there are ‘wallows of skippers, the sandballs of ghost crabs and the mud-poots of worms.’ Winton notices- and to me this is extraordinary- how the beach ‘looks lifeless’, but in fact ‘pops and sighs and rattles.’

Seven years later, Winton is at Mitchell Plateau, and driving a LandCruiser across a rocky terrain. So, ‘…trundling blindly through the head high spear grass…’, Winton charts the extraordinary insect life he encounters as he rolls the window down: ‘As we mow down the wall of grass and vines, grasshoppers, moths, dragonflies and birds peel upward from it in vivid rushes. Bugs and grubs, mantises and spiders gather in our hair, sucking the perspiration on our faces, catching in the gaps in our teeth. The air is soupy. The whole plateau is choking with life and we chug against this mad plenitude like a boat in a sluggish, druggy sea.’

 

‘Soupy’, ‘choking’, ‘chug’, ‘sluggish’, ‘druggy.’ Winton having fun with words. These seem to me to be very Australian notions. This is one of any number of bits that celebrate the wildness of Australian life: ‘The thickness of the air. I have just returned from camping. Bushwalking in 35 degrees heat and being mauled like this by flies, some of them those awful heavy march flies, a runnel tunnelling across my face and into my ears, desperately thirsty, trying to suck down a bit of my sweat before I brush it away with a cruel, impatient swipe of my hand.’

Perhaps the strangest, and most pivotal, and mythical moment in his book, occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Cape Range, 2009.’ Winton is alone, looking for endangered rock-wallabies, and comes across a cave. Then there’s this: ‘The cave is the size of a child’s bedroom. Its rear wall is tawny where the ceaseless southerly has reamed it. When I see the roos folded down on their joints in the chalky dirt I give out a little squawk of surprise. But they did not stir. They lie curved against one another, pooled head to haunch in a rest that seems regal, even holy. I pause a few moments, taking it in. Then I step up and squat before them, peering closely. They really do look as if they’re sleeping. But their hides are translucent, like the vellum of medieval manuscripts.’ (192).

Their bodies, it seems, have been ‘mummified by the high desert air.’ Winton’s notions are very dreamy and romantic, but beautiful. The roos are ‘keeping vigil’, high up near the bluff, ‘even in death.’ All this is a world away from his vernacular style of many of his ‘characters.’

He also spends time discussing philosophical issues away from land and nature. Aboriginal issues and what it means to forcibly take ownership of land, and then what he calls ‘The Gallipoli Myth’, both explored in the chapter ‘Paying respect’: ‘…Anzac has been coarsened by the politics of political regression’ (a phrase that, for some reason, makes me think of John Howard); he refers to Gallipoli as a ‘bungled adventure’; images of the first war don’t conjure up ‘nationalistic charge’, but rather ‘tragedy and blind waste’; ‘a life squandered by jingoistic nonsense’; and then, on our fairly recent past, ‘…I feel ancestral shame for the dispossession of this country’s first peoples, shame for the despoliation of their lands and a kind of national shame, too, for the mess my nation helped create in Mesopotamia in recent years…’ This is about as far as you can get from the rhetoric of today’s far right, like Messrs Bolt and Abbott, and completely in tune with the Left, like Phillip Adams and others, who, incidentally, gave a lovely interview with Winton on Late Night Live recently. Winton also, as you might expect, offered a scathing critique of the major parties’ asylum seeker policy on the same programme.

I would love to have a similar attachment and reverence for the land and the sea, like Winton here, like Macfarlane is his beautiful books about Britain and elsewhere. Sometimes I feel I am getting close. Times like when it is dusk on the Great Ocean Road, and I am facing the black sea. Or driving along a winding path in autumn with its rivers of leaves (what Hopkins calls ‘wanwood leafmeal’). Then there was my first time in what has become the land of my heart. I was staying with friends, in winter, at Port Isaac in Cornwall. The little cottage was yellow and was called ‘Wave’s End.’ It was right on the harbour. I would race down, at dusk, bucketed and billowed by roaring winds. Down the cobbled hill, turn right, along an escarpment, down to the raging harbour, waves smashing onto the concrete path, next to an old rusted anchor. And just standing then facing the rising seas, feeling like an old Norseman, seeing the hills on either side, enriched and totally enchanted.

 

 

Robert Macfarlane's LANDMARKS: an acute eye upon the natural world

I WAS at The Hill of Content bookshop in Bourke Street a while back, holding a precious book voucher in my hand, desperately looking to spend it wisely, hungry for a nourishing book, hoping to find an elusive good novel, having read a few dissatisfying ones in a row. Books that lacked something, that failed to ignite or charge the soul.

I saw ‘Landmarks’ on the shelf with the lovely blue cover design. The author is the British travel writer, Robert Macfarlane. I challenged myself to discover something new. A new approach to reading. Non-fiction, travel, landscapes, language, the natural world.

I dipped into it briefly before lights out. I thought about returning it. Am I going to enjoy this?

I dipped into it again the next night and read a whole chapter. Result? Hooked.

Part of the fascination is England and Scotland, two countries I love. Then there is the remoteness of the places visited, and how the idea of remoteness and paths scarcely travelled hold a fascination. Then there is the earnestness, and poetry in the writing. Then, as I discovered as I read on, so much more.

The first line of the book: ‘This is a book about the power of language.’ Macfarlane is a wordsmith, he loves language. He writes of the ‘astonishing lexis for landscape.’ There is a glossary of language at the end of each section. Local dialect for earth, waterlands, edgelands, underlands, woodlands- the list goes on. As fascinating and extensive these lists are, and this is a very valuable lexicon to have (one wonders how much he might enjoy a glossary of Australian aboriginal dialect), this isn’t the aspect which captured my imagination the most.

 

This is a book that contains so many interesting references and observations about the natural world, and done so poetically and intelligently, that you wish you had underlined, or at least placed a removable mark like a sticky label next to all those great expressions you encountered as you read along (I did do this once with the Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, the best text I have read that screamed out a need to do this.)

The best way to represent the joy of this book is with quotations.

1.     Quoting John Muir on the power of observation, ‘The surface of the ground, so dull and forbidding at first sight…(in fact) shines and sparkles with crystals: mica, hornblende, feldspar, quartz, tourmaline…the radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling.’ Macfarlane has clearly learnt from Muir when he finds involvement in the natural world right beside the upper Thames in Essex next to a power station (‘The Wilds of Essex’, BBC2).

2.     Quoting Nan Shepard (The Living Mountain): ‘Beech-bud sheaths, blown in tide-mark lines along the edge of the roads, give a glow of brightness to the dusty roads of May.’

3.     Quoting his (deceased)  friend Roger Deakin, (the) ‘park-bench green’ of a pheasant’s neck; a hornet ‘tubby, like a weekend footballer in a striped vest.’

4.     Quoting (birdwatcher) J A Baker, ‘Edney Wood was quiet but frighteningly beautiful. The sodden glow of the millions of leaves burnt my eyes. But after sunset it was just a desolate, deserted slum of trees.’

5.     Quoting Baker (again) on animals’ fear of man: ‘A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it.’

6.     Quoting John Muir (on Silver Pines): ‘Colossal spires 200 feet in height waved like supple goldenrods chanting and bowing low as if in worship, while the whole mass of their long, tremulous foliage was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire.’

7.     Muir again, on observing the trousers of a fellow traveller: ‘…pine needles, thin flakes and fibers of bark, hair, mica scales and minute grains of quartz, hornblende, etc; feathers, seed wings, moth and butterfly wings, legs and antennae of innumerable insects…flower petals, pollen dust and indeed bits of all plants, animals and minerals of the region adhere to them and are safely imbedded.’

The book is a mixture of Macfarlane’s travels, his meetings of mutual admirers of the natural world, his tributes and reminiscences of former naturalists and landscape historians and various dictionaries or glossaries of landscapes, seascapes and weather.

One of the most interesting things for me has been to do some research, and look up the various obscure places in England and the United Kingdom that offer so much joy to this traveller and travellers of the past.

There is Brock Barrow, the Esk Valley and Muncaster Fell, the Rhinogs, the Wells of Dee, the Cairngorms… the list goes on. And it is endlessly fascinating to look these places up to discover their geographical location and wonder about the places that have provided writers with a sense of wonder.

It seems to me to be a wonderful thing to spend years on a book, filled with earnest research and plenty of first hand observation and experience, on such a topic as this, the fascination of the natural world. Macfarlane’s journey is full of respect as one’s pilgrimage to Mecca might be, or the places explored by a famous painter or photographer. Macfarlane is as careful with his language, beautifully poetic, as his mentors or heroes are, and as any poet or painter might be. One of the best chapters is about Roger Deakin, and his visit to Walnut Tree Farm. He calls Deakin a ‘water man’, and a ‘film-maker, environmentalist and writer.’ Deakin taught Macfarlane that one’s approach to open water should shift, from a place where one should fly over, drive around, or stop at, to one in which one should enter or explore. Macfarlane has the utmost respect for Deakin (and became his friend before Deakin died). Macfarlane especially enjoyed Deakin’s book ‘Waterlog.’ There must be people out there whose favourite book will become ‘Landmarks’, and hold the kind of genuine awe and respect for Macfarlane, that Macfarlane has for Deakin, and Nan Shepherd, Richard Skelton, Richard Jefferies, and John Muir, and many others.

 

The clip below is testament to Macfarlane's ability to discover natural beauty in the most unlikeliest of places.