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.

 

 

 

Holidaying by the sea, and thinking of Wuthering Heights

It is January, 2020. It is another new year. I am holidaying on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria at a tourist spot Apollo Bay called Skene's Creek.

The shoreline below us at Skene’s Creek is filled with rocky plates. These are mostly thick but flattened and easy to walk upon in their smoothness. They create a magical, moon-like atmosphere, except for the choppy waves that sometimes plummet on them. Occasionally you see tendrils of seaweed or lime-green sea plants growing on them, but they are mostly bare. Yesterday we saw some birdlife, or rather death, in the form of a gull and a fairy penguin.

This is the time of year of the after effects of bushfires. They have spread wildly and devastatingly across several states, and in particular in NSW and Victoria. The atmosphere is fogged with a thick, grey cloudy haze. The sky is smoke-grey, even white in places, and it looks like it will bucket with rain, but we are only getting intermittent, brief showers. I spoke to a neighbour that I saw at the beach. His teenage boys have coloured hair. One of them, the tallest one, has a mop of bright red, curly hair. He looks like Thing One or Thing Two from ‘The Cat in the Hat.’ When I said ‘it’s not great holiday weather!’, he looked surprised at my defeatism, and in optimistic fashion, replied ‘at least it is seldom raining.’

Despite our smoggy, smoky environs, and the fact that it is a bit too cold to swim in the choppy ocean, it is enough that we have this glorious moon-scape not far from the bottom of our garden. It is like another prehistoric world and I gaze into little or large rock pools expectantly for mysterious ocean dwellers, dead or alive. The roaring sea is absorbing to watch. I like the lovely emerald green of the sea just as it is about to curl or roll into another flashing wave. You also have the sensation of the soft sand under your feet or the smooth plates of rock you can stand on in order to look imperiously over the water. It is amazing how free you feel. In the distance, in the murky haze at night, the Otway Lighthouse has a steady beam to the right. It is just you, the distant beam, the incessant waves crashing on the moon plates, a white bird or two with stork-like legs, the grey, unfriendly mountains, the thick, mysterious haze, silver sky. And besides the muted roar of the hungry sea, it is so quiet. I imagine I am on a big ship with friends and wine, flooding across the seas, looking for an uninhabited island, without responsibilities and expectations.

Then I remember I am immersed in ‘Wuthering Heights’ and I think of ghosts, and Heathcliff, and Cathy calling, cold and shut out on the moors, and I think of the sea as being like a huge wet version of the moors, and how EJB, or Emily Bronte, would have wandered these moors time and time again, like me, bewildered, and charged and exhilarated by her surroundings, feeling other wordly and looking for whatever nature might fling up to you in the wildest spaces. Not a penguin or some other seabird for her, or a strange cream-coloured shell, or random rock pools housing who knows what. For her, wild dogs and various birds, a massive array of plant life, moss and heather blazing in the late Lancashire light, the plot of Wuthering Heights forming in her mind, the slow emergence of Cathy and Heathcliff, their second carnation, Hareton Earnshaw and Hindley, kindly Nell and steady Edgar and the strange and often hostile communications between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the violence and desperate lives, their frustrations and forced limitations and the cruelty and aggression. And it must be said smaller snatches of love, and hope as well and very real longing such as Earnshaw has for the younger Cathy at the end of the novel. EJB understood somehow the whole range or gamut of emotions that make up the human experience despite her relatively insular life.

The birthplace of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall- oh, to be there again now, very now… and just now it also occurs to me- and I find this very interesting- I have never thought much about the landscapes of Jane Austen. I guess this is because her novels are much more interior- still, the settings of Barton Hall, and Pemberton and the other great mansions- the lovely hills and valleys and dales of the English countryside, the sparkling streams where the men fish, the broad spaces where their hunting is done- I don’t care as much for.

I can remember vaguely Charlotte being dismissive of Austen. Perhaps she didn’t understand her, or her world. It is very different to Haworth (even so Charlotte was the one Bronte who became reasonably travelled and experienced with polite society through the success of Jane Eyre and introductions to people like Thackeray and Dickens).

It is not to say I don’t value Jane Austen. I like her. I esteem her. I like some of her novels, in fact, more than most of Jane Eyre, which I think is too long and needed more polish. Austen certainly does not lack polish or craft.

But I come back to Wuthering Heights. The attractiveness of the rawness of everything. There is not one in Austen like Heathcliff, the dirty orphaned boy who is dragged back to the Heights by his master and grows up to be cruel and vindictive and full of resentment about his place in society. No-one in Austen like Earnshaw, who is desperate to drag Catherine to bed and tear her clothes off. You can just feel this seething sense of sexual menace which is so surprising and compelling. Emily Bronte must have been so shocking for her time. Austen undoubtedly shocked too. She was full of subtle, clever criticism of her society and her best heroines were intelligent and resourceful and you can’t help but feel moved by the way things were so heavily stacked against them. But this sense of gender imprisonment is so much more powerful in Wuthering Heights. Elizabeth Bennett would have been shocked by Cathy. You could only imagine her take on Heathcliff and Hindley and Earnshaw. Perhaps Elizabeth would have coped better than some of the others.

It’s the language too, that is the great difference. I was enthralled by Bronte’s language of the gutter. Whilst Austen is cynical about everything, it is polite cynical. EJB however captures the attitudes of her people with devastating force, looking the reader straight in the eye and telling us exactly how her desperate people feel and think. And somehow she still directs our affection towards them.

ON THE PAST- WALES AND BEYOND

Who was it that said ‘you can’t relive the past’? That’s right, I remember. It was Nick Carraway talking to Jay Gatsby, telling him more or less that it would be foolish to try and reincarnate a situation from the past with Daisy Buchanan. Did Nick mean it only in a romantic sense? Or a more general one? Another reference. Van Morrison and Them sing a song called Don’t Look Back, also about how you cannot recall or relive the past- done, I think, originally by John Lee Hooker:

‘Don't look back to the days of yesteryear,
You cannot live on in the past,
Don't look back.

And I've known so many people
That still try to live on in the past,
Don't look back, oh no.’

So what does Van do when he’s older? Well, maybe a bit older, but not much more, he starts singing about the neighbourhood he grew up in, East Belfast. Writes songs like Cypress Avenue, for instance. And when he’s much, much older, songs like Memory Lane:

‘I stop a while and ask some strangers
Is this the place that was once called Memory Lane
I don't know where I am, don't know what I'm after
I'm stuck here back on Memory Lane’

And it gets me to thinking about the past, about childhood and a little beyond, and I think about whether or not it’s a good thing, and at what age do you have to be before it’s all ok to do this, like Van Morrison does all the time, and Paul McCartney probably does, and people like Justin Hayward, looking out of his boyhood bedroom window at the spirits in the sky that led him to the USA and his future dreams:

‘Out on the horizon

The west wind sighs

A beautiful adventure

Waiting there

In the western sky.’

So I get to thinking again, is it ok to think about the past somewhat, not to dwell in it, but to think about regrets and accomplishments, and good times and bad, and think less about the uncertain future, to see my father in that nursing home and the rest of the family growing old, and me changing as well, and trying to stay young, spirited, but preferring, at times, to think about the glorious and not so glorious past, to good times and missed opportunities, and times when you were bold and achieved something, and times when you were hesitant, or shy, or stumbled, or made a pretty bad error which even now doesn’t exactly haunt you but you think it might have turned out better.

All those relationships, and people you might have been better not hooking up with, and others where you might have but missed that chance, and times you look back when you were stumbling along with somebody and you think back ‘man, what was I doing?, and other times where relationships did occur and you got a lot of out of them and you remember they weren’t a waste of time.  Then there are those others, slightly regrettable, that went too long and you became stuck, or you took things way too seriously and you were naïve, or looking back, it wasn’t ever going to go anywhere.

And I guess looking back isn’t all about relationships. It’s also about other crossroads of a different type, like where you were living, and who with, and what you read or where you went out and how something did or didn’t work out.

There are many good things about the present but I still find myself thinking a lot about memory lane. About what things used to be like way back when and how it have turned out quite good in some ways but not so good, if I am going to be totally honest, in others. How much of life can be an adventure? I envy those people whose life is one long adventure, from when they were little and way into middle-age and beyond. In a way it can be like this for many of us. We can just take off if we feel we are up to a risk enough. There’s no need to leave everyone behind, but an adventure for me is a change in almost everything. Sometimes we need to feel rejuvenated. Otherwise we are marking time. Eventually we might have this epitaph on our tombstone:

‘ He was born in….

He died in….

In between he lived a mostly sedentary life.’

Perhaps the two places are a matter of a short amount of miles or kilometres apart. Perhaps the in between places took you to far away distant lands. Perhaps you might add, on the tombstone, he took this risk, or he took that risk, or this is where he stumbled and fell, because he was under confident, or too hesitant, or too shy, or he was trapped in some way, or those bricks and mortar were jammed way too solidly around him.

I’m wandering around those streets sometimes, searching for memory lane. I’m thinking about what I did when I left school and chose the safer, narrower option for what was available to me. I’m thinking about some of the risks I eventually did take and how the memories are mixed, but are all important ones, and then I’m thinking again about how I found safety and security, and how life became satisfying in lots of ways, but also sometimes predictable and cocooned in this web of security, sitting like a smug, self-satisfied spider, except dreaming rather than looking for adventurous options. Sometimes you can be ‘retired’ for years, creating this personal mosaic or knitted jumper where the pattern keeps repeating as you keep pulling along the wool.

‘Take me back, take me way, way, way back
On Hyndford Street
Where you could feel the silence at half past eleven
On long summer nights…’

sings Van Morrison on another track.

So where do I want to be taken back to? I will choose this sunny one week holiday I had in Wales. Farm stays, meeting Welsh people, seeing lambs in green meadows, walking along old, ancient streets, marvelling at ancient rocky harbours and rows and rows of old Georgian townhouses, climbing Mt Snowdon in Snowdonia, seeing all the old little Welsh villages along the way, the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons, Abervagenny, and then further up to Gwynned, Conwy, even the place names make you shiver, and the little towns of Betws-y-Coed and Llandudno and the Conwy River flowing through the glorious towns of Trefriw and Llanrwst, and on and on and on…

In my dreams and imagination I go back there and regain the sense of freedom and beauty and an intoxicating sense of adventure and security at the same time… and healing. And the pattern changes. New colours for the mosaic thrown into the mix. New wool and new patterns and different outcomes.

‘And we walked the pagan streams
And searched for white horses on surrounding hills
We lived where dusk had meaning
And repaired to quiet sleep, where noise abated
In touch with the silence
On Honey Street, on Honey Street

What happened to a sense of wonder
On yonder hillside, getting dim
Why didn't they leave us, alone
Why couldn't we just be ourselves
We could dream, and keep bees
And live on Honey Street

And we walked the pagan streams
In meditation and contemplation
And we didn't need anybody, or anything
Then, no concepts, being free
And I want to climb that hillside again, with you
One more time

As the great, great, great, great, great, great, great
Being watches over
And we repair, repair, repair, shh, repair, shh, we repair
To Honey Street, to Honey Street.’

Van Morrison, Pagan Streams.

The Unfortunate Trout

I fished for the first time in about 30 years the other day, by the banks of the Goulburn River, near Eildon. I felt completely relaxed. I did not expect to catch anything. Inexplicably, however, I somehow landed a good-sized rainbow trout. I didn’t realise this would happen. This is the sorrowful story of the fish I landed.

I skim the surface of the Goulburn River. I am closest to the northern end, a short distance from the small town of Eildon. This has been my home from the time when I was spawned, some eight months ago. I like the way that the currents play with my body, teasing it, encouraging it to go left, then right, then left again, depending, it seems, on the whim of the winds.

I see my body in the morning reflection upon the water. I am silky and colourful. My scales shine brightly. Sometimes there is a silver sheen like a rainbow when I catch the reflection off the sun. I am of the trout family. We are one of the more beautiful fish in the Goulburn. And one of the most rare.

Sometimes I see myself heading straight towards other, less noble fish, and I do my best to steer my silky body away from them, for fear of contamination. These are ugly, more common fish like Murray cod, redfin, carp. In case you haven’t guessed, I am a rainbow trout, no less.

The rainbow trouts of this world, like me, tend to stick together. We come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, all of us with the distinctive body sheen and rainbow gills and elegant, slender shape. We are a kind of fish that know its family. I am one of many and I see my fish family every day, gliding the currents as I do, looking for food, tearing along the river’s surface, watching the particles of sand rise as leeches, insects and worms naively explore the seabed. Our mouths rise in anticipation and with our little sharp teeth, we rip the heads off the bigger prey, and swallow in one gulp the smaller ones.

Today the sky is cloudy above, but there is no hint of rain. I have just spent some time nestled beside a log with my younger friends and family. We have been joyously flinging ourselves into the air. We get a glimpse of another world when we do this. Air rushes into our gills momentarily and we feel a curious mixture of pleasure and pain. It is as if we want to be land animals for a second or two, before we plunge again into the icy waters that keep us alive.

 I can hear chatter from the nearby bank. Sometimes humans come to explore the creek too, and even wade into the water. This puzzles me because I know how handicapped they are. They are unable to properly swim. Their heaving, clumsy bodies stir up the sand and create a cacophony of noise where only the bravest fish stick around.

I am not particularly hungry this late afternoon. My day has drifted blissfully by. I have eaten when I can be bothered. I have seen plenty of mayflies and midges and consumed any number of them. I am not looking for anything in particular, just planning to head downstream to Thornton and to float across some wild, fun rapids under the bridge. Then I see it. The laziest worm I have ever seen. Thick, and juicy, and virtually impossible to ignore. Its cocky long body is resting on the river floor and it won’t let anything disturb it. It even looks like it might be dead. There is a slender piece of hooked metal next to it, which does not look so appetizing. But the worm? Delicious.

I snap my elegant jaws into the slippery worm and receive the shock of my short life. The curved metal piece hammers into my mouth and I feel it crush painfully across the inside of my mouth near the pharynx. Somehow it is hooked into me. I shake my head in a panic and the pain becomes sharper. I feel as though I am more hooked than ever. I am full of regret for what I have done, but there is little time for regrets. Through an indefinable source I am being dragged across the river by my mouth. My eyes are dazzled by bright light. I am being lifted out of the warm cocoon of the water.

There are humans, people on the bank, and I am inexplicably being hurled towards them. Their faces are shining. Three men. I glide in a dangerous arc towards their feet and smack flat onto a rocky bank. One of the men has grabbed my once proud body in his hands and he is trying to wrench the sharp hook from my gullet. The pain is roaring through me. I want this hook out too, but instead of an unclasping, this awful wrenching continues. My life flashes before me. Blood, my blood, is dripping onto the rocks and I am losing focus, and consciousness. Just when I feel free of the hook at last, and blink to regain my senses, heaving my asphyxiating body across rock, screaming in pain for water- the man lowers a curved blade towards my head, and begins his cutting motion…

Your world turned upside down: motoring in Gippsland.

GIPPSLAND TRIP

WE climbed into the car and headed south-east, the four of us just last week. I drove, frustrated at times on the journey to one of our favourite haunts, Gippsland. Frustrated because I was outvoted and had to listen to the strident voice of Adele for much of the way. She’s bitter, it seems, over broken relationships.

Still, it didn’t take as long as I expected. Wilson’s Promontory- specifically, Squeaky Beach. M has always wanted to go there, often asking if it really squeaks. We snacked at Fish Creek (Alison Lester, author, has a bookshop there). The weather was ripe for our swim. We followed some German travellers to the shoreline. They spoke of crocodiles. I told them the story of the bright red fingernails found in a crocodile’s belly several years ago in the NT.

We stripped off. Children straight in. Me, holding back like I seem to do more and more these days. Is it my sight? Some newly formed trepidation. The water, up to my thighs, was incredible though. S wanted to go deeper and deeper. She watched the ‘boogie boards’. Her mind ticked over. M was in shallower water. They both sat down at times, making the waves rise to impact their body, and make the waves feel bigger than they were.

I looked over my shoulder and took in the lovely, large boulders and distant mountains. It occurred to me that this must be one of the world’s great beaches. Perfect crystalline white sand. Translucent, sheer, silken water. Tiny dark fishes. Sans seaweed and sharp shells.

I walked over to the marble-like rocks and stood between some, in the deep little watery gullies that they formed. I met a boy that told me there were giant crabs underneath. A man with an impressive-looking camera was taking portraits of his girls adjacent to the rocks. In some shots the thin horizon was behind them, and then he turned them around, and had the mountains as a backdrop, in the opposite direction.

I focused on the smooth, rocky ground and the magnificent boulders. Marvelling at the colours, I called M over, and to my delight she also found them fascinating. The rocky bed beneath our feet was predominately gold. The sides of some of the rocks were a reddish rust-brown in colour. M and I talked about where we had seen that colour before.  We couldn’t, however, remember. Was it on a horse?

S came over to see what the fuss was about and posed for pictures. We began to leave, reluctantly. I thought about other great sea adventures of my own. Cornwall, UK, 1987. After a long journey by train from London, I arrived in the late afternoon at Bodmin Station. There was barely anybody there. It was a Sunday and a camp leader allowed me to return with him to a nearby camp consisting of young adults. The alternative was to be stuck at the station until the morning, and sleep there. I shared a lovely evening with them, and then the same man drove me to Wadebridge in the morning so I could connect with a bus heading west to see my friends who had organized a little yellow cottage called ‘Wave’s End’ at Port Isaac.

I arrived, at around dusk, in an exalted mood, buoyed by my camp experience and fellow kindness, and the sheer beauty and expectation of being in Cornwall. A short distance from our cottage was the bay and shoreline of Port Isaac. A heavy anchor lies beside the water. You can see it in the original series of Poldark, and apparently in the current show called Doc Martin.

This must be what paradise is like.

One night- it must have been the first night- or hang on, I think it was the second- it was by moonlight, just after the period we call dusk. We were there in winter, January 1987. It was pretty cold, especially by Australian standards, which is of course what I was used to. The adrenaline flowed as I stepped outside the door, and I ran the 400 or so metres down to the inlet madly and exalted. I stared out at the calm, black water, and the dark green mountains surrounding I, and felt the crashing winds.  I thought of my childhood dreams which were all centred around Cornwall. Books, mythology, adventure, smuggling. I could scarce believe where I was standing. The old, ancient and rusted anchor on my left, I thought about the centuries lived in that very spot. The majesty of the scene made me blink back tears. Not long afterwards, I wrote a postcard to my English aunt in Melbourne, and told her, with absolute sincerity, that Port Isaac was the most magical and beautiful place I had ever visited.

I thought about all this as I looked at the mountains and smooth rocks of Squeaky Beach, Victoria. The crystal clear water, yellow pristine sand. Beware of the power of moods. It was the night time and coldness and wildness and ruggedness that made me love Cornwall. But in a different mood, and at a different time, I could see that Squeaky beach could be the most magnificent place on Earth as well.

We left, reluctantly, all four of us, and headed off to east Leongatha- our home for the next two nights- Walnut Farm Cottage. Lovely gardens filled with avocado trees, five gaggling geese, and a run down but adequate tennis court.

Next day, the dawn was a brilliant fiery red.

Somewhere in Gippsland there lives a man who ‘owns’ about 60-70 dogs. He sells them not too long after they are born, sometimes for several thousand dollars. They are housed in concrete runs and bark excitedly when you put your fingers through the metal grate. He has one small pup with an unusual blue tinge in its fur. He says there is something rare about it, and that he might get a bit more for it.

The dogs are all associated with poodles. The letters ‘…oodle’ are all in their breed. A man with 60-70 dogs, the number increasing by the day. A man with about 60-70 dogs. All ‘oodles’. You could say there are ‘oodles’ of them. He has 60-70 dogs. He sells them when they have grown up a bit. They are being born every day. The poodle influence is everywhere. He has 60-70 dogs, which he regularly sells as new ones are born. You can see the poodle influence in them. And the cavalier… dogs everywhere held up for inspection for potential buyers. He has at any one time 60-70 dogs, and this number might grow. The dogs have soft fur and kind clear eyes. There are a good number of them. For sale.

At the pub near Foster. A young girl is dressed up as the main character from the film ‘Frozen’. Families are inside sitting at tables waiting for meals. They are mostly over 65, 70, probably retired. I don’t like this pub much. There are more people outside. They look like they haven’t a care in the world. A much younger crowd, drinking and smoking, and swearing. For someone from Melbourne’s suburbs it’s a different experience. They are probably nice people. There is just something about their casualness and indifference to everything which is slightly repugnant. Difficult to put your finger on. I’m thinking of farms and cattle and utes with kelpies in the back. I don’t know if I am ready for this lifestyle, but at the same time I don’t like the city much. I am in no man’s land. Everything seems wrong, somehow.

The meal comes. It is supposed to be pork medallions. It might be pork, ugly and hard and burnt as it is. And flavourless. But it certainly ain’t medallions. They are supposed to be round. The waitress comes, and I am alert and expectant. But she doesn’t ask the customary ‘how was your meal?’ She must think better of it.

Inverloch is nice, on a barely bearable hot day. How lucky we are to find that park. How skilful we are at getting in our bathers either inside or beside the car. The waves are inviting and cool. But I had that scare years ago. I don’t go far in. Still, it’s beautiful. S and I stay in for eternity. Magnetised. The sky and the horizon are worlds away. We are just little dots in an expansive ocean, boogie boards flying harmlessly around us. Will we ever feel ready to get out of the water. I have had this feeling on other trips, wanting time to stand still. Bobbing and drifting like we are self-contained little boats.

Cars fly by in the traffic on the way home. In the heat of the car, our bathers slowly dry. It’s my turn for music and I listen to live Van Morrison. He is covering an old song by Sam Cooke and the charm of the words make me smile:

‘Eyes turned away, I know
And music soft and slow
With someone you love so
That's where it's at.

Your world turned upside down
You're making not a sound
No one else around
That's where it's at.

Yeah, let me tell you
Your heart beatin' fast
You're knowin' that time will pass
But hopin' that it lasts
That's where it's at.’ 

The Regatta

HALF MOON BAY, 2017

WE arrived at Half Moon Bay at about 1:00 PM. The sun was at its peak then, the hottest part of the day. We were lucky to find a park, if you recall. There were those long, elongated car spots on our right. A number of them empty, I believe. I nearly took one, so desperate we were. Then we realised it was set aside for the cars towing the yachts. A regatta was going to begin later in the day. It would have been the height of rudeness to book it. An awful start to our little swimming in the bay adventure. Luckily, somebody was leaving behind a regular spot. We just had to be patient and zoom in when it became vacant.

We all walked down, then, to the little curved bay, the bay in a kind of half-moon shape, all four of us walking slowly, carrying things, beneath a weird, intense and vast blue, blue sky, and before the still waters and the soft yellowish sand. We placed all our things down in a little spot that had space around it, not far past the beginning of the swimming spots, only a hundred yards from the fish’n’chips stall, and fifty yards from the coloured bathing boxes.

You and M quickly abandoned all sense of family responsibility and wanted to wade into the inviting water. But we still had the tent to put up, the towels to lay out, the chair to position and the crucial sun- screen to apply. Ouch, how hot it was getting already. We had most of the tent organised. Next it was time to cup our hands and place sand alongside the pockets so the tent wouldn’t blow away. Not that there was much of a breeze. It just wasn’t my sort of day. The fact that it was windless, and hot, and the mucking about with the tent, and the crowds of people- all this conspired against me. But none of this was impacting you or your sister. Or your mother, for that matter. You all anticipated cool water and hot, hot, hot sun!

Nothing I could do could get me comfortable. You and M went out quite far and were really enjoying yourselves. I tried not to feel anxious. I could see the submarine wreck out past you, somebody climbing on it. I tried to get comfortable. My sore limbs wouldn’t allow it. Sitting up hurt my back, and lying down meant my long legs would stick out into the dangerously hot sun. I tried to read, and did a bit more of the crossword puzzle. I could only think about how comfortable it would be, to be at home on my cool bed and my soft, soft pillows. I knew I was being a ‘beach wimp’, but I couldn’t help it. By 1:30 I was ready to go. But you were having too much fun in the water with your sister, and then your mother was venturing in, too. I hated it, but conversely I enjoyed the fact that you didn’t.

Many years ago, the 1920’s, in the world of fiction, two people talked about love on these very shores, overlooking the same wreck out in the water. The author Alex Miller explores the theme of growing love between a French engineer, Georges Elder, and a young Melbourne woman, Emily Stanton. They look out over the water, and, more meaningfully, into each other’s eyes, and upon each other’s skin. Her parents are also present, and the attraction is not lost upon them. These parents are probably thinking about their courting days. It is here that Emily has probably decided she will marry Georges, and go back to Paris with him, and begin, unbeknown to her, a dissatisfying life in the French capital.

I thought about these matters quietly, and then I began to have a good look around me. Most noticeable was the young woman in front of me right in my vision, about half way between me and the beginning of the water. She had a red bikini top with big, green bikini bottoms. The white tag was sticking out at the bottom of her back. Her hair was up and she wore sun glasses. She looked about 22 and under her glasses I could see she had wide, European eyes and a large, attractive mouth. Next to her on the adjacent towel was her little boy, no more than about three, wearing nappies under his little bathers. She had him mostly covered up by another towel, but his left arm and some of his naked chest was exposed. It reminded me of cooking a little lamb on the spit. Every now and then she applied a bit more sun screen to his body, so in places he was a slippery, milky white. He seemed to be asleep. She was dozing. Soaking up the hot rays and getting her copper-coloured body all bronzed. She had the phone in her hand at times, texting. Then taking a photo of her tired, little boy, shrivelling away in the sun like a prawn. I imagined her messages were then relayed to her husband, working somewhere like the Docklands, sweltering in the sun with a naked torso on top of some tall building adjacent to a crane.

I couldn’t get the woman and her little roasted boy out of my mind, and wondered if she knew what I was thinking. I wanted to share my fears with you, but you were still frolicking in the water, oblivious. I nearly said something to her. ‘Are you planning to cook him and eat him all up when you get home?’ Just then, an equally concerned person, a wiser, older mother, offered her an umbrella for shade, and the neglectful mother gladly took it. There was all ‘round relief.

Finally, all three of you came out, glistening, from the water. You and your sister played in the sand, thousands of little grains clinging to your still damp bodies. Your mother came back into the tent. I felt restless, and M, your sister, agreed to come for a walk along the water. We ventured as far as we could to the right, until we reached impenetrable rocks on the shore. We passed hundreds of people either in the water or laying at the mercy from the hot rays of the sun. Families, and lot of groups of friends, often all males or groups of four or five females. Different ages and different accents. It was difficult not to notice all that exposed skin. Some people wore the barest threads of clothing. It was like some sort of designer beach. You half expected a camera to be set up somewhere for photo shoots for Vogue or Cosmopolitan magazine.

M and I returned to find you quietly sitting beside your mother and letting sand sift through your cupped little fingers. I thought about the passing of life and had a visual update of the poor boy burning. Behind our tent a new group had gathered. Four of five young women lying on their stomachs, phones in hand, texting. I started wondering if there were any places where phones would be inappropriate, or probably more accurately, inconvenient or unsuitable. Perhaps the women wouldn’t take their phones into the water. I turned to ask you your thoughts, but you and M had already gone back into the water, just when I was going to make the suggestion that we might think about packing up and leaving.

The heat of the day became stronger. The population of sun worshippers began to grow larger. Another body appeared. Another woman. A blue one-piece bathing suit with white frills at the tops of the legs and around the neck. Broad, black sunglasses and black, glossy hair. She lay quickly, on her back, as the golden sun began to pour all over her warm body.

Many years ago, the 1920’s, in the world of fiction, Juliet lay, like this woman, feeling the soft air of the sea and feeling the sun penetrate into her bones and her thoughts, in Sicily, in the imagination of D H Lawrence. I thought about Juliet, and this woman, and wondered if she, like Juliet, was leading a dissatisfied life with a dull husband at home, dissolving unhappy thoughts through the rays of the blue, pulsing sun.

I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, share any of these thought with you as you still dripped with water,  twenty or thirty metres into the bay. You and M were both beginning to practise handstands. You did not want to come in any time soon. Still, I had had enough and told your mother I wanted to go. I had have enough of the wearying heat hours ago. There was something ugly and alien about the water to me and I refused to yield to it by getting uncomfortably wet, with millions of grains of sand sticking to my toes. The people all around me bothered me. The silly couple that emerged to my right that giggled and reminded me of Georges and Emily. Juliet next door whose large eyes were closed under her wide black sunglasses. The four women begin the tent still texting away and marvelling at images on their phone. The cruel woman in front of us in the red bikini top who lay adjacent to her scorched, immobile son. All the petty people along the shoreline where M and I had walked almost an hour ago, shifting their positions and lifting their legs and their thighs to become ever closer to the harsh, all empowering sun.

Finally, finally, you and your sister clambered onshore, and with the promise of a take away meal, agreed to help in the exhausting process of packing up. The tent was awful to put away. It just wouldn’t collapse on itself and fold the way it was meant to do. There was so much luggage to take back to the car. Our accessories seem to have grown. Your mother and I picked up most of the things. You managed your own personal possessions, your thongs trailing out of your right hand. You told me you were refreshed. I said I was hot, uncomfortable, and tired.

All four of us walked back towards the car park, past the bathing boxes and the fish ‘n’ shop. My eyes were mostly averted, downcast, the pavement hot under my bare feet. Then when I heard some shouts I looked up. The regatta was returning. About a hundred lovely boats with their little white sails being hauled up onto the land. Lots of bronzed men and women pulling ropes and lifting equipment. It was a lovely colourful thing to see. I looked over my shoulder to tell you about it, to see if you could see. The bay looked beautifully curved, more beautiful than I could remember. There were people milling around everyone, from all walks of life, eating chips, standing at the shore, resting their tired limbs on towels. Those lovely, lovely white boats with their beautiful fresh-looking little sails. A hive of activity, a real community, a busy path. What a glorious picture it would have been. A photograph as a snapshot of the Melbourne bay at the beginning of the year 2017. People, adults, families. Lovely kids, all engaging in peace and goodwill, the best of modern summer life.

We reached our vehicle, stored everything in the boot, and pulled away. I turned to look at your face and could see the beginnings of a soft, slow redness already.