Forged with Flames (10 page)

Flo and John hadn't seen Terry for two-and-a-half years so were understandably keen to talk to him. I suddenly felt very alone as we sat in the back seat of the car travelling to their home in Elsternwick. I stared steadfastly at the passing suburbs, trying hard not to cry, hoping no one would notice.

Coming fresh from England, Australia seemed so strange. It was a sort of dusty-looking pale green in September, rather than the vivid spring colours I was used to, and there seemed an abundance of sky. Everything looked bigger—broad roads, instead of narrow winding country lanes, streetscapes that weren't closed in like they were in England, long distances between cities and suburbs. Just the vastness of it all struck me in that little while after I arrived, and everything all around me seemed so new. Instead of the dark rows of old terraced houses, everyone in the suburbs seemed to have a separate, freestanding residence, some even made of timber, and most with a big garden, as well. This seemed extraordinary and quite marvellous. ‘Perhaps everyone here is rich', I thought, feeling distinctly foreign.

John and Flo had arranged for some of Terry's friends to come over on our first evening. My heart sank as the doorbell rang and the first few excited guests were let in to much hugging and backslapping. Of course, everyone wanted to see Terry again
after his time away but bed was all I could think of after the long, sleepless trip and being landed in unfamiliar surroundings. I sat awkwardly in one of the lounge chairs acutely aware of being on show as the new wife, trying my hardest to be sociable and wishing it would all be over soon. When one of Terry's friends came over at one point and knelt by the side of my chair for a casual chat, I felt absurdly grateful for the gesture, and relaxed for the first time that evening. I was hugely relieved at the end of the evening when we finally retired to John and Flo's spare room.

Coming into a completely new country and knowing no one except my husband was fascinating but it also pushed me far outside my comfort zone, given that relaxed social interactions were, for me, fraught at the best of times. So I was caught completely off guard not long afterwards when I met one of John's cousins. Nesta, a robust, straight-talking woman, was sitting on a chair in the kitchen when I was introduced to her and, to my surprise, she called me over and told me to sit on her knee—I was twenty at the time! She had always worked with children and I can only imagine that she was used to asking the younger folk to do this. I grew fond of her quickly, however, and mercifully didn't have to perch on her lap every time I saw her!

The first two weeks at Terry's parents' house passed by in a blur as I adjusted to my new life. Flo and John loved having us there with them but they both had to work, and Terry needed to return to work soon after we arrived back, which left me alone all day. It was strange and lonely suddenly being by myself in a place where I knew nobody else and had no one to talk to or even ring up. I decided to get a job as quickly as possible. This involved me catching my first tram into the city to visit the government department that would verify my qualifications.

Looking out the window as the tram trundled down St Kilda Road past unfamiliar landmarks, it was sinking in more and more just what a different world I had landed in.

During this period, I filled in my days wandering around Elsternwick and absorbing the scenes. The suburb was so different from those in English cities, with its big blocks, detached houses and wide footpaths. I'd never even seen a nature strip before. Where I'd lived in England, either grass or concrete ran down to the road. An English acquaintance in Australia once told me that she'd written home and mentioned to her family that her husband was outside ‘doing the nature strip'. They wrote back to ask if that was some kind of weird Australian dance.

It was exhilarating to explore so many new sights and experiences. I was particularly taken by the weatherboard dwellings around Elsternwick, thinking it must be marvellous to actually live in one, sort of like being an early pioneer and living in a log cabin. The eucalypts in their back gardens, though, looked large and rather ugly to me at first compared to the elegant English trees I'd been used to. But when I first saw a colourful parrot, I was enraptured that such beautiful and, to my eyes, exotic birds, were actually flying about freely. I would stop and gaze at them before they flew out of sight, wondering why people around me weren't doing the same! Some nights after tea, Terry and I would drive down to the beach, just ten minutes away. The only times I had ever been to the ‘seaside' were on family summer holidays so the idea that we could visit the sea every day if we wanted to was marvellous.

Not long after our arrival, Terry found an old weatherboard cottage for rent on the outskirts of Berwick, then a lovely
country village outside Melbourne. Terry chose the location, especially, thinking it would feel more like home to me, as well as being convenient to his workplace in Bayswater. I realised what he meant as soon as we drove into it for the first time and saw the English trees lining the road. Soon after we moved in, we were treated to a breathtaking clear vision of the most enormous, luminous full moon I had ever seen in my life. I never failed to marvel every month as we watched this vision appear from behind a small hill beyond our little cottage—a massive orange ball, pitted inside, beginning its nightly arc. I still stand outside for ages gazing transfixed by a rising full moon, sometimes recalling those evenings standing beside Terry.

Thus began our journey of married life, of learning to be together and relating to the outside world as a couple. And Berwick was a wonderful place for that. Just about everyone we encountered was open and friendly, which for me was a real contrast to the much more reserved English. People I had only just met would invite me to drop in some time for ‘a cuppa', which I appreciated enormously even though I knew I could never take up the offer. If they had said, ‘Come on Thursday afternoon at two', that would have been altogether easier.

Being quite a long way from services and other towns, I noticed that the distances people were prepared to travel were enormous—no one seemed to mind driving for miles to get somewhere on a routine matter. You could cross half of England in the distances people would drive to visit family or friends or simply buy something! And the weather… There were many days in my first summer in that uninsulated timber cottage when I had to keep getting in and out of a cool bath to function at all.

Above all, though, I was thoroughly enjoying being married to Terry. We were contented in each other's company and enjoyed our quiet home life on the edge of Melbourne. Cooking was a challenge, though, especially since my mother-in-law was one of the best cooks I had ever encountered. My mother, on the other hand, had always found cooking stressful and we were never encouraged to help prepare meals or to think of it as anything other than onerous. I'd learned the rudimentaries in college, although the boarding-house style meals we ate there weren't exactly inspiring. Fortunately, Terry was generally patient with my efforts, which were a bit hit-and-miss, but even he drew the line when I unknowingly served him pet mince for tea one night. I think it was after this episode that Flo sent him a bottle of multivitamins, fearing he might need to supplement his dodgy diet.

You can imagine my trepidation, then, when she and John came around for afternoon tea for the first time. In retrospect, it would have been more sensible to have opened a packet of Tim Tams or offered them a slice of shop-bought cake on the day. Flo wouldn't have minded that I hadn't prepared anything—she was an extremely generous woman in all sorts of ways—but I really wanted to impress my recently acquired parents-in-law, despite my rather limited cooking skills.

I decided to bake some scones. How hard could that be? I looked up the recipe, only four ingredients, and set about it with gusto. All went well. The scones looked exactly as expected when they went into the oven. They smelled wonderful as they cooked, and rose beautifully, becoming nicely browned on top. I smiled to myself as I set them down to cool, convinced that I'd excelled myself. I even wondered why I didn't bake more
often. Terry and I couldn't resist having a couple first, all set to sink our teeth into their fluffy pastry—or at least trying to. My beautiful-looking scones were as hard as rocks.

I can't remember what Plan B was, but it was painfully obvious that there would have to be one. We needed to get rid of the evidence to avoid the humiliation of admitting to my failure, so decided that the birds could have a treat. (They had beaks, they could deal with them.) Without further ado, we took the tray of offending scones outside and threw them onto the iron roof.

The visit by my in-laws was enjoyable despite it not being the culinary triumph I had planned and my failed attempt at scone-making was kept secret. Or so I thought. As we all went outside to say goodbye, and climbed down the veranda steps, I couldn't believe it: there, lying on our freshly mown lawn, playfully blown down by the wind for everyone to see, were one dozen freshly baked scones.

While Terry resumed working in his old job when we first married, I had to retrain to be a mothercraft nurse as the qualifications needed in Australia were different from those back home. This included spending a month at the Berry Street Babies Home in Richmond, after which I applied for a couple of jobs as a kindergarten assistant, but without success. Jobs were easy to come by but not necessarily what I was qualified for. Whilst I was waiting for something suitable, I found a job not far away at the Heinz factory in Dandenong, filling cans with tomatoes. It was mind-numbing stuff and I got into trouble from my fellow-workers for filling the cans too quickly—I'm sure the boss didn't mind! After working there for only a month,
I was lucky to land a job at a newly-opened kindergarten close to home at Beaconsfield.

During those early months and years, England would sometimes seem to be a world away. Although I wrote to my parents regularly, we didn't have a phone at the cottage and even if we had done, international phone calls, which had to be booked via an operator, were very expensive. Phone conversations with my family were therefore limited to Christmas and birthdays, when we'd use Flo and John's phone. I always felt a sharp pang of homesickness right after those calls, missing my family and the familiarity of England; I realised, too, what a steep learning curve I was on and how much I was making it up as I went along, every day. On the other hand, my eagerness to explore and discover more of Australia, the countryside and the people, remained undiminished.

Our favourite activity on the weekends was to pack our gear and go camping in an idiosyncratic little car that Terry had brought back from the UK. It could only have been designed by an eccentric Englishman! The fetchingly-titled Dormobile, made in the south of England, was barely the size of a small sedan yet had lots of added extras not found in a normal car. The roof—which looked like a small, upturned boat when down—lifted up, enabling an adult to stand quite easily in the back. The rear seat folded down and the back of the car folded out, creating a bed wide enough to sleep two people. It had a stove, two small fold-out tables, a tiny sink, and various cupboards. It was really like a miniature caravan.

Terry had found it terrific for touring England, Scotland and Wales in the two years he spent in the United Kingdom. And of course, it was in the Dormobile that he proposed. So we
both had reasons to be attached to it and didn't think anything of shipping it back to Australia when we were due to leave England. Until the girls came along, we would head off for a low-cost holiday whenever the whim took us.

It was on one of these trips that I had my first encounter with kookaburras. Early one morning in the summer of 1971, I was woken from a deep sleep when a group of them began to laugh uproariously. I shot bolt upright in an instant and made sure Terry woke up too, being convinced there was a gang of thugs outside the car. What else could it be? When Terry, laughingly, told me it was only birds, I didn't believe him. The only birds I'd known—water hens, willow warblers, kingfishers, herons, woodpeckers, ducks, and the like—didn't make noises remotely like this human-sounding cackle. It wasn't until I'd looked outside and reassured myself of the source that I could settle back down to sleep, wondering at the strangeness of a country that had birds whose natural calls were indistinguishable from a bunch of people having a good belly laugh.

We lived in our rented cottage in Berwick for two years before deciding to buy. It didn't take long to find a property we both liked: a small, redbrick house on three-quarters of an acre in Upper Beaconsfield. I loved it the minute I saw it; the way it sat so neatly under its pale sloping roof, the white-trimmed windows contrasted against the red bricks, its location among the tall and majestic gum trees that I'd come to love by this stage. We marvelled that so much land could be ours with bush right outside our back window. There was something wild and unrestrained about the surrounding bushland that stretched beyond the house in all directions. This was definitely no place for a white picket fence—even I could see that! We started
dreaming and planning immediately. Terry could clear some trees for a lawn, a backyard and vegetable patch; I could even grow turnips in it, I quipped, thinking back to Wheatley Lane Primary School and its tiny yard. When a rosella swooped by I was sold.

Having a place of our own was both exciting and a settling influence; it clinched my life in Australia. Like most newly-weds who have just acquired their own home, we spent many hours and weekends making the house and its surrounds just the way we wanted it. Fortunately, Terry was handy in the carpentry department, making some stunning bookshelves and a beautiful corner cupboard out of jarrah for the lounge-room.

Pendle Hill, as I named it, was a short distance from the shops down St Georges Road which was a no-through road even though it was one of the main streets. It was sealed but narrow with dirt at both sides, so that only one car could be on the tarmac at one time. There were no footpaths, just tracks along both sides of the road through stringy-barks and lemonscented gums, with a sprinkling of pines. Along both sides, set amongst the trees, were older weatherboard houses and the occasional new brick veneer home. Many of the houses on the downside of the road, like ours, were separated by vacant scrubland but all backed onto virgin bush, giving you a sense of being right out in the country, not close to a large metropolis. I relished the daily walk up to the Post Office to collect the mail as there were no postal deliveries. Inhaling the scent of the gums on a warm day or listening to the bush sounds—the rustles of a fleeing lizard or the far-off call of a bird—was all so tranquil and mysterious.