Essay: Picnics, Pandemics, and Coming Home; or, The Origins of Homecoming

In February 2020, I was writing a different book. We’d been living in London for five years, and my sister and her family were due to arrive for a three-week stay. I had seen reports, mid-way through the nightly news, of a novel flu-like virus in Wuhan, accompanied by unfamiliar images of rapidly erected temporary hospital wards. But there are often disquieting stories about faraway places at the mid-point of the news bulletin, and when my sister told me they were going to wear masks on the plane, I thought she was being overly cautious.

By the time they arrived, we were wiping down café tables and there was no hand sanitizer to be found in any of the local Boots pharmacies; we went to Bath for a day trip, and as we filed through the museum, I glanced around the over-heated, over-crowded room, and had the sudden, distinct feeling that we wouldn’t be doing anything like it again for a while; at the railway station, afterwards, waiting for the train back to London, the cousins played chase in the cold, darkening February afternoon, the child who was ‘it’ threatening, ‘I’m the Coronavirus!’, and I thought about ‘Ring-a-ring-a-rosie’ and stories of the plague, and the way children take the happenings in their world and turn them into sport, and a shiver made its way up my spine.

A week after my sister and her family left for Australia, we followed. It was mid-March. My children had been sent home from school with learning packs and advice that lessons would be going online for the term; flight routes were being rapidly cancelled. With our parents and grandparents in Australia, and the new virus appearing to target older people, it seemed prudent to go home for a visit while we could still get seats. As we flew over Europe, I looked down through the plane window and thought: ‘I’ll see you soon.’ I assumed we’d be back by the summertime when the pandemic had ended. I had a research trip planned for the book that I was writing; the list of people to contact and sites to visit was long, and I was looking forward to getting started.

*

I will remember that flight from London for as long as I live: we had managed to procure masks from a small neighbourhood hardware store, but there were other passengers in full hazmat suits. In Singapore, our temperatures were taken three times before we reached the main terminal of the airport; in the lounge, we were informed it would be closing indefinitely that evening. Trump was on the television sets, flights were dropping off the boards, and we crossed our fingers and hoped our last leg back to Australia wouldn’t be cancelled before we could get airborne.

Long haul travel is always discombobulating—the sense of having been transported in a metal tube through a chute from one side of the planet to the other—lights constantly on, food constantly served, music constantly piped—and to swap northern winter for southern summer is ever a shock to the system. But landing in March 2020 was even more surreal than usual. The reality of the pandemic hadn’t yet reached Australia: people were crowded together in airport coffee shops; we were crammed into a transfer bus with coughing and sneezing passengers from all over the world; our taxi driver waved away suggestion that he might want to wear a mask. ‘The virus isn’t in Australia,’ he told us, ignoring the fact that we had just arrived from London, where the virus most certainly was. We kept our masks on as he drove us from Adelaide airport to our farm in the Hills.

In the sunlit stillness, after his car disappeared down the winding driveway, we stood blinking at one another, tired and stunned, our suitcases strewn across the brick pavers at the back of the house. I had the key in my bag, but we didn’t go inside. Not at once. The garden was in late summer glory—roses with heavy heads, plane trees with leaves the size of dinner plates, gum trees on the hill across the valley, their skins glistening silver. The cherry tomatoes—seeded wild amongst the roses long-ago—were ripe on the vines, the air rich with their sun-warmed tang. Bird song was general—rainbow lorikeets, blackbirds, fairy wrens, honeyeaters. It was an enchanted place, untouched by what was happening beyond.

*

It’s easy now to forget how uncertain the early months of the pandemic were. For us, finding ourselves suddenly on a remote farm—the sun inconceivably bright, the paddocks yellowed by the recent Black Summer heat—made time lengthen and bend. Our neighbours on the other side of the distant fences supplied us with fresh vegetables and pandemic essentials upon arrival—headlice wash for the kids (of course!), a bottle of gin for us, and, as good luck would have it, four hens and a self-important rooster in need of a new home.

As the fourteen days of mandatory home quarantine (and then lockdown) stretched on, we took to walking laps around the perimeter, through the paddocks and along the shallow creek that widened to a waterhole beneath the gnarled old willow trees. The kids would run ahead, waving sticks as swords, gambolling through long grass as the sun melted into the western ridge; we sat and ate sometimes on the sloping hills, just us and the cows and the pink-and-grey galahs in the sky.

One of the strangest sensations in those disconcerting days, was hearing, and then seeing, the occasional plane overhead. Flights had all but ceased by then, and we would stop and stare in surprise when the drone of an engine caught our attention, watching as the small faraway bird unzipped the distant sky. Life had returned to an earlier era: we shopped differently, cooked differently, filled time in unexpected new ways.

Everything was topsy turvy, not least because the time difference meant the kids were logging on for remote school at 6pm and working through until one in the morning. Our days started late, and the afternoons were long. I was trying to write, but it wasn’t going well. The news was a constant distraction—I found it hard to settle to a fictional world when the real one held so many daily surprises—and the European story that I’d started, its setting and characters, its scenes that had been vivid and real only days and weeks before, now seemed desperately far away.

As the weeks (and then months) went by, living near my extended family, in the country of my childhood, I found myself thinking about what it means to come home. As world events continued to spin faster, and I willed the centre to hold, I kept landing on TS Eliot’s line about ‘the still point of the turning world’. Past and present, and the site where the two meet, is an eternal theme within my novels; similarly, place, is of profound importance. I drew enormous comfort from the landscape around me—ancient gum trees, birds going about their business, creeks flowing onwards through valleys—natural sights and smells that I knew intrinsically; and at a certain point I realised that I needed to put aside my European manuscript and write instead about the place that I was in, here and now.

A story had started to form in my mind, fed as ideas always are, by the sights and sounds, the worries and thoughts and dreams, of my daily experience. I have often reflected that novels are time capsules of their author’s life during the period in which they were written; in another time and place, the same idea would necessarily take on a different form. It is little surprise, then, that while circumstances had me reflecting on notions of home and belonging, as I found myself living—quite unexpectedly—on a farm in the Adelaide Hills, these elements infused my imagination.

Heightened historical moments tend to sharpen one’s senses, and inspiration was everywhere. In Port Elliot, a small town on the Fleurieu Peninsula that looks across the ocean towards Antarctica, I noticed a cliff-top house with a sign reading ‘Halcyon’, and thought what a beautiful, hopeful name it was to bestow upon one’s home – how ripe for narrative irony. On the shoreline at Port Willunga, I marvelled at the rich assortment of smooth, coloured stones deposited daily by the sea, and wondered, as I followed the bush track back to where we’d parked, about the people who lived in the wooden houses adjoining the quiet, startling beach; what had led them to this place, this life of apparent serenity.

One day in the winter of 2020, I drove an hour and a half north to the wine-growing region of Clare. I had heard about an imposing old house with a tragic story attached. Despite having been told of its grandeur, nothing could have prepared me for the moment that we came upon Martindale Hall. Like a proud ship, rising from the flat, dry earth, two enormous palms punctuating the Georgian entrance, drawing the eye towards the elaborate Italianate roof. It was breath-taking to see something so unexpected: an English-style mansion, transplanted so completely from one culture into a vastly different landscape. Taking in the sundial at the front, with its grave Latin warning about the years given and time’s propensity to flee, Ozymandias came to mind: ‘I met a traveller from an antique land/ Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert.’

Martindate Hall

Shelley knew. Martindale was intact, but it gave the same sense of glory days past. The house made me melancholy, standing tall within its empty garden, the ‘lone and level sands’ stretching away on every side; it was in stark contrast to the photographs displayed inside, of prosperous Edwardians enjoying a way of life and dress and habit long since sunk. I thought about the past and the present, the way time moves—the years given and then fled, as the sundial warned—the houses we build and the values with which we invest them, the hopes and dreams that turn them into homes.

*

As lockdowns continued, and the Australian borders closed indefinitely, I realised that we were not going to be returning to the UK as and when we’d expected; and so, at the same time that I was reflecting on what it meant to come home, I felt homesick for my life in London. The experience was one of extreme dissonance, and to find relief, I wrote. Scenes in which Isabel, an English woman living in South Australia, prepares for a lunch party and glances across the western lawn to where the gums stand tall and ghostly on the ridge; in which, on a sweltering Christmas Eve, Percy leads his horse along the willow-lined creek to the point that it widens into a waterhole made for swimming; in which Jess, seeking comfort in the Charles Dickens Museum at King’s Cross, London, receives a phone call summoning her home to Sydney.

Even now, if I chance to read those early chapters, as Jess scurries along Perrins Lane, past the Waterstones on Hampstead High Street and down Flask Walk, I can feel the cold air hitting my warm cheeks, see the Georgian buildings with their mottled glass, elegant and wonderful, feel the golden glow of fairy lights in the lead up to Christmas—and I am overcome with a blend of yearning and loss and—still—disbelief. I can touch my old life; the fact that it is past is a surprise every time. So, too, the smell of wattle flowers, as Percy rides his horse along the quiet narrow road in his prologue, is visceral; I feel the warmth of the Australian sun, beating through his shirt onto my own skin.

I don’t have all the answers yet, as to what home is, what it means to belong, whether one can ever truly ‘come home’. I have written in Homecoming about the places I call home: Jess’s North London neighbourhood, Polly’s weatherboard worker’s cottage on the slopes of Brisbane, the Turner family’s homestead in the Adelaide Hills. But home is, of course, more complicated than that. Jess decides that home isn’t a place or a time or a person, though it can be any and all of those things: home, she reasons, is a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of home isn’t ‘away’, it’s ‘lonely’.

It is trite, perhaps, to say that one is never lonely if one has a book—the adage is beloved and well-worn; but it is also true. Homecoming is a book about home and belonging born out of a time of great change. But it is more than that to me. It has been a home of sorts over the past couple of years, when everything else was uncertain, and it is a pleasure, after a period of composition even more solitary than usual, finally to welcome readers inside.

Kate Morton, March 2023

Essay: Picnics, Pandemics, and Coming Home; or, The Origins of Homecoming2024-04-23T02:34:09+01:00

Notes: On Cornwall

The following note about my love affair with Cornwall, featured in a Special Edition of The Lake House, published in the UK in 2016. Reading it now, some years later, in a room on the opposite side of the globe from that in which I wrote it, I am struck by how keenly I long to walk those coastal cliff paths again. For now, alas, I will have to rely on my memories and the magic of words to transport me.

I hope this piece delivers you, too, to the windswept Cornish coastline, and conveys at least some of the enchantment of the place.

 

On Cornwall

I’ve been involved in a long-distance love affair with Cornwall for as long as a I can remember: it’s such a beautiful, unique, and enchanting place to visit, whether in person or in my imagination. I’m a very visual person and most inspired when I have interesting things to look at. Country or city, inside or out, natural or otherwise, I’m not particular: I love landscapes and laneways; the sky and the sea; chimney tops, hidden doorways and beautiful gardens.

I also love music, art and theatre, and of course history, in particular that cool, shivery sense that the past still surrounds us. Most of all, I’m drawn to places that make me feel something, and Cornwall—with its windy coastlines and spectacular wildflowers, its abundant gardens and pretty whitewashed cottages, its enveloping atmosphere of history, mystery, myth and magic—is just such a place.

When I was dreaming up The Lake House, I wanted a setting that leant itself to a story in which an abandoned house might be rapidly consumed by nature. Loeanneth in the 1930s, when we meet the Edevane family, is a place of pristine cultivation, of well-kept gardens, and efficient household staff, the country home of a genteel family leading a genteel life. It is a locus amoenus, of course, a ‘delightful place’; and, as is usual with this literary trope, it provides an idealised location of enclosure and containment that engenders a sense of belonging in the characters.

But, by situating the house and its gardens in the midst of such a wild and rugged landscape, surrounded by thick woods and within hearing distance of crashing ocean waves, it was all too easy to imagine how quickly nature would come to reclaim the estate after tragedy struck and the family moved away. Seventy years later, when Sadie Sparrow, a detective on leave, stumbles upon the once-elegant house and garden, she discovers a vastly different scene from that in 1933: a real-life sleeping beauty house, waiting for the truth to awaken it.

When I was finishing The Lake House, I was able to spend the summer in Cornwall. It was a truly surreal experience, like stepping into the pages of my own book and having the world of the story come to life around me. I walked the very cliff-top paths that Sadie runs along, looked out across the same rugged coastline and vast ocean, and visited country houses just like Loeanneth would have been before the Edevane family locked it up and left.

One of my favourite houses was Trerice, near Newquay, an Elizabethan Manor set amidst an estate of gorgeous gardens. I visited a number of times, and on one occasion, the weather was particularly stunning. It was one of those perfect August days when the air holds just the right amount of warmth and it seems as if time might stand still. The sky was a clear, bright blue, and the leaves and flowers of the garden were glistening. It reminded me very much of how Loeanneth would have looking on Midsummer’s Eve morning in June 1933, as final preparations were put in place for the party that night.

I loved driving along the narrow, winding Cornish roads, hedgerows growing tall on either side, rounding the corner to discover yet another village waiting to be explored. One of my favourites was Portloe: I could just imagine Bertie’s place, high on the hill amongst the other whitewashed cottages, overlooking the harbour and wide, blue ocean.

Some of the most breathtaking cliff walks I found were on the north coast. We spent a particularly glorious summer’s day near Boscastle, where the wildflowers were thick with bumble bees, gulls soared above the sea, and contented cows and horses ignored us as they grazed in the nearby fields. Walking such beautiful trails, as the waves crashed against the bottom of the cliffs, and the sky loomed above us, was truly exhilarating.

Tracing my characters’ paths over the summer, I came to know Cornwall in a new and deeper way. Our love affair is no longer one of distance. I have seen and felt and smelled and heard it for myself, and gained new ideas for other stories. Cornwall is a special place, one in which I feel anchored and inspired, and one I know I’ll return to, both in person, and in my novels, many more times.

Kate Morton, London, 2015

Notes: On Cornwall2024-04-25T14:46:51+01:00

Notes: On Writing, Reading, and Alchemy

A friend asked me recently what I love most about writing; I had to stop and think for a minute, searching for a way to explain. There are, of course, many parts of the writing process that I love. There’s a week, at the very end of the structural edit, when all of the efforts of the preceding year or two (or three) spent building the book, the copious drafts and revisions, and scribbled out lines and rewritten scenes, come together at last to enact a magic – the flicking of a switch so that the story leaps to life, a three-dimensional world, with moving parts and real people, that can be looked at from every angle and reveal no holes, no leftover scaffolding, no walls waiting to be finished. The thrill of that moment is worth every second of the long and winding road to get there.

I also love having written. It’s a great feeling at the end of the day, to know that I have managed to lock down in words an emotion or a thought or a complicated idea that’s been flitting through my mind, all effervescence and light, resisting capture. Sometimes, there are even rare, precious instants when I am a magician, and all of the world’s secrets and mysteries are known to me – that flash, when the roller-coaster grazes the high point before submitting to the rush of free fall is pure exhilaration.

But then, there are times when writing a book threatens to drive me mad. For one thing, it takes so long to get the whole thing out of my head and onto the page. There is no instant gratification. It’s like doing a puzzle that requires over a year – sometimes two – to figure out. More accurately: it’s like doing thousands of small puzzles, some of them simultaneously, that all lock together to form a larger one, that then needs to be solved, frequently involving the undoing of the previously completed parts, with no guarantee of success. There are countless tiny ideas to be wrangled with. Hundreds of decisions to be made each day. For someone who sees every shade of grey, this can be a special kind of hell.

There’s the challenge, too, of illustrating the inner lives of characters. Animating them with desires and doubts and self-regard and self-pity, of showing them to readers without telling too much, of revealing the parts of their nature that they don’t wish to share. Of creating settings with a sense of place so vivid that the reader believes they’ve been there. Of conducting meticulous research and then concealing all evidence of it. Of choosing the right word, the best word, in every instance; of going back and fixing, changing, improving, ensuring things are as tight as they can be. Of making it look easy. Of never reaching the lofty standards one sets; of knowing that the reality will never, ever match the sheer, unbounded potential that the project promised at its inception; that one cannot help but fail simply by attempting to move the story from the dream world to the real.

And it’s relentless. I never stop thinking about the book I’m working on. If I do, the world I’m trying to build falls away. It can make for a very busy brain, particularly when one adds in all of the real-life people and things that are going on simultaneously and want – need! – attention. For months, towards the end, I long to be finished and to have a break. And yet. When I’m not doing it, the sense of something missing is profound – not once ever, no matter how desperate I was to complete a book, have I typed ‘The End’ and managed to pass a full twenty-four hours without procuring a notebook for the next set of ideas, thoughts, problems. . .

Listening to this description of the process, my friend seemed perplexed; she wanted to know how I managed with all of those characters and storylines in my head each day. She said it sounded stressful. I’d never thought about it that way, but suddenly I looked at her and perceived the alternative: How could she bear to be without them. It must be somehow . . . empty.

And then I realised that she wasn’t without them. 

My friend is a reader. Both writing and reading are considered solitary pursuits, and it’s true that I sit alone for most of the day, every day, communing with figments of my own imagination and doing battle with my limits as a wordsmith. But the act of publication is, as the root of the word suggests, ‘public’. And this is where we enter that much-mythologised realm of storytelling, for which at least two people are required: one to tell the story, the other to receive it. A book is merely a series of words on a page until somebody picks it up and begins to read; and, of course, a reader does far more than just receive. It is they who bring the story back to life, a unique version of itself, fuelled by their imagination, dependent for colour and nuance on their life experience.

My words, their interpretation, a joint creation.

To be part of this marvellous alchemy is a wonder indeed. It’s been almost twenty years since I started writing the manuscript that would become The Shifting Fog/The House at Riverton. Seventeen years since I first saw my name on the cover of a book. I’ve published seven novels, over one million words of fiction. There are at least sixteen million copies of my books in print, in languages I’ll never speak, in countries I might never see. By any definition, I am not new to this. And yet, it never grows old.

I cannot truthfully say that I love every moment of the writing process – it can be demanding, and by turns exhilarating and awful (and everything in between) – but I do love being a writer. It is a joy to create something out of nothing, to put my own thoughts and feelings about the human experience into words, and then send them out into the world where a reader might say, ‘I feel that too’. And it is a true privilege to be part of that meeting of minds that occurs each time one of my books is read, no matter where, when, or by whom, and the worlds that I dreamed about and built, the people and places I have loved, come back in brand-new forms, living and breathing once more.

Kate Morton, March 2023

Notes: On Writing, Reading, and Alchemy2024-04-25T14:39:27+01:00

Fiction: At Home on the River Bend

In late 2019, I was asked by the Museum of Brisbane to contribute a story to an exhibition they were planning called The Storytellers, in which they proposed to feature short pieces of writing by local authors corresponding with various inner-city suburbs of Brisbane. I believe that sense of place is integral to stories and was drawn to the opportunity to dig deeper into a location that I’d known for decades, to see whether I could find a story hidden there. AT HOME ON THE RIVER BEND is the story of a place told through the life of a woman who calls it home, a tale of history, mystery, memory and a long-kept secret.

If you prefer to listen, rather than to read, you can do so here:

 

At Home on the River Bend

Sometimes, in my dreams, I can remember crossing the sea. Really, I know it is my mother’s voice that put those strong, bold pictures there. So often did she sit at the table in our Stanley Street kitchen mending garments for the shop downstairs. Her hands moved fast, making small, tidy stitches, every bit as practised as the tales she told and retold of the life they’d left behind, the horrors of the Great War, the treacherous ocean journey that brought them here from there.

I was born two years after my parents arrived on this peninsula in South East Queensland and have lived my entire life within the same snaking bend of the wide, brown river. My earliest real memories are the smell of fat, subtropical raindrops simmering on sunburned roads; morning magpies singing to one another beneath a cut glass sky; rows of weatherboard houses perched like crabs upon their skinny wooden legs… I remember rats, too, as big as cats. Every May they would sense the winter coming and slip inside our house to take up residence in the cavity above the VJ ceiling. “Kurilpa,” my father told us, “that’s what this piece of land is called—place of rats.”

I dreamed of my father and his shop last night. We used to help out after school, straightening the hats on the shelves, neatening the rolls of ribbons, polishing the wooden display cabinets to the point of gleaming. On rare occasions, when Dad considered we’d distinguished ourselves, we were allowed to slip behind the counter to serve—I can still remember the thrill of writing up transactions in his leather-bound ledger, wrapping each item carefully, the cheerful chime of the new register, with its mahogany case and shiny round brass buttons.

*

Memories surround me today. It is my one hundredth birthday, and my family have arranged lunch at a fancy new restaurant with a view across the river towards Gardens Point. (There are so many fine restaurants now and people willing to fill them. When I was young, 4d milk bars, oyster saloons and Greek cafés like Mr Comino’s next door, with its Art Deco mirrors and soda fountain, were as fancy as it got.) My granddaughter, Rosie, has been conscripted to pick me up at midday and drive me the short distance to Southbank. I am going to ask her to park at the cinema, even though it’s further away, so that we can walk together beneath the bougainvillea-spine, all the way from the Conservatorium of Music to where the coal wharves used to be.

I will think of my brothers as we walk. We loved the river as children. For us it was alive: a churning, breathing secret keeper, carrying news from upriver as it passed us on its way to meet the sea. We liked to stand against the steel rails of the Victoria Bridge and lean as far as we could, looking up towards the Cremorne Theatre, the fish markets and the new bridge being built at the end of Grey Street. Dad was so proud of that bridge—everybody was. “Sand islands,” he’d exclaim, shaking his head at the ingenuity of it all; “Air-locked chambers under the water!” Those were the darkest years of the Depression and we were all made glad by progress.

Downriver, we used to watch the ships come and go at the dry dock, guessing at the places they’d seen. We would lower our voices and remember the Pearl steamer that had set across the river in early 1896 only to be driven by a strong flood surge into the anchor chains of the government yacht Lucinda. “Sliced right down the middle,” one of my brothers would say, and we would fall silent for a time, imagining what it must have been like to be amongst the ill-fated passengers, swirling in the angry waters, before sinking, exhausted, into the depths of the river.

Old Ned Baxter, who used to spend his mornings drinking strong, sweet coffee at Mr Comino’s café, had been in the Plough Inn at the time and could always be relied upon to tell us what he saw. “An almighty crash—” he would begin—“and then I ran down to see what was happening. I’ll never forget the first body, that poor woman being pulled by her feet from the dredge. Hundreds of people gathered—men anxious to help, women wringing their hands, children running in every direction as they waited to see if their parents would emerge. Before too long, though, there was nothing left to see but a cluster of hats, bobbing on the surface.”

It seemed to us that the river was rich with ghosts. We were convinced that on foggy afternoons we caught glimpses of Hector Vasyli, the eleven-year-old newspaper boy who’d been run over in 1918 during a parade to welcome the soldiers home. There was a memorial plaque in his name on the south side of the bridge: In his veins ran the heroic blood of Greece and in the breast of a child he carried the heart of a man, it proclaimed. Whenever our dad was displeased with us, he used to shake his head, draw his brows together and say, “You wouldn’t have found young Hector Vasyli behaving in such a way.”

*

When I dressed this morning, I took my time, turning over the brooches in my jewellery box before selecting three. Excessive, perhaps, but one does not reach a hundred every day. The little diamond and sapphire butterfly I chose because it reminds me of my husband. I wore it on my wedding day in 1947; years before that, to my very first dance at the Trocadero. It was June the sixth, 1938—I was only sixteen and my dad was very strict about where I went in the evenings (and with whom), but my friend Dulcie Barnett was mad about sports and had invited me to the annual Hockey Ball. Her father—a prominent doctor—had promised to serve as chaperone and thus reluctant permission had been granted.

My mother helped me to put the finishing touches to my dress: midnight blue taffeta with a seed-pearl trim. We worked together in the evenings, stitching beads and lining the hem, as muffled conversations from the café next door drifted through the windows on the scent of tobacco. The noise would quieten as the hours went by, until the final stragglers called “good night” in the street outside, and we could hear instead Mr Comino whistling as he swept the pavement and locked the doors, the late-night tram rattling over a distant hill.

On the day of the ball, Mum helped me into my dress and set my hair in finger waves to my shoulders. I stood in her bedroom, where the cedar wardrobe had a full-length mirror, turning from side to side so that my skirt swished back and forwards, feeling as glamorous as if I’d stepped out of one of the Hollywood films playing at the Cremorne. Even my brothers—never usually short of a tease—could do no better than to chide me that Shirley Temple wanted her curls back. I was leaving when Mum held up her finger and told me to wait. She returned with a brown velvet box, snapping it open to retrieve a small fabric parcel.

“This was my mother’s,” she said, carefully releasing the wrapping to reveal a delicate butterfly. “She gave it to me the day we left for Australia. I haven’t worn it since we got here, but tonight—” she fastened it to my dress—“well, I just wish she were here to see you.”

My photograph was in the newspaper the following day and Mum bought a second copy, cutting neatly around the article so she could send it overseas. In the photo, I am standing beside Dulcie and a few other girls, in front of a dance hall alcove decorated with seaweed, shells and swathes of fabric to look just like Neptune’s Cave. My hair has begun to lose its polish and although the image is black and white I can tell that our cheeks are flushed. Dr Barnett had been called away to attend the birth of a baby and thus proved a less vigilant chaperone than my father might have hoped, so Dulcie and I danced all night with members of the University Men’s Hockey Club and the Signals Men’s Club and the only other person at our table who knew less about hockey than I did was a good-natured fellow named Jamie Stedman, whose sister played on Dulcie’s team.

There is a framed copy of the Hockey Ball photograph standing on my writing desk, a birthday gift from my family several years ago. I can never look at the image without thinking how young we were that night, and how carefree. But history is sly like that. Eighteen months after the ball, most of those boys, who’d laughed and joked and boasted of their plans to become teachers, clerks and builders, were boarding boats and heading to war. My brothers, too, were amongst the first to go. We saw them off at the South Brisbane Railway Station—if I close my eyes now, I can still hear the cheering. There’d been marches during the day, starting in the city and pouring across the bridge, and people were running excitedly about the platform waving flags and ribbons. My father, though, was serious. He’d dressed in his best shirt and drawn comb lines through his hair. He was disconcertingly short of words as he shook my brothers’ hands. My mother wept behind her smile—she, too, had seen war up close—and reached now and then to brush invisible blemishes from their smart new uniforms.

*

I see the youthful faces of my brothers clearly in my mind and yet I cannot fix upon my own. One’s own life is led in a state of constant transition that makes clarity impossible. My picture of myself at any given time is blurred by overlays of all that happened after. And so, it was a shock that day to unwrap the framed photograph and see my young face smiling up at me from a night so many decades before.

I was still unpeeling the gift-wrapping when one of my grandchildren said eagerly, “It’s the Hockey Ball, Nan—the night you met Grandpa.” As if I might not recognise the scene and characters myself.

I laughed and said, “Why, so it is. Wherever did you find it?”

But as they took their turns to explain, I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about the way stories told to the young turn into lore. The night of the Hockey Ball has become part of our family mythology. For them, it is an origin story, like my mother’s tales of ‘home’ were for me. With time and repetition, the account of an evening spent at a dance has evolved a fable-like quality and they regard the photograph with the same awe they might reserve for Cinderella’s slipper, should it appear, or the spinning wheel from Sleeping Beauty.

My husband, Jamie, was the storyteller of the family. He had a wonderful voice and a lively face, and a gift for making people want to listen. On family occasions they would all lean forward to hear the well-loved lines—the chance meeting (“neither of us knew anything about hockey”), the key moment (“and so I asked her to dance”), the requisite fateful ending. “I went away to war,” he would say, conveniently eliding five years of strife in five short words; “And when I came back, she was waiting for me, like the princess in a fairy-tale, as if no time had passed at all.”

It is a true story, to a point. We met at the Hockey Ball and we danced together. What we don’t say, is that neither of us made enough of an impression on the other that night to bother staying in touch. Nor do we mention any of the other people with whom we laughed and chatted and flirted. The story is better without such details and the end result—our enduring marriage, this family of ours—justifies revisions. Instead, we pick up the tale a year after the war ended when I answered a ‘help wanted’ ad and found him sitting on the other side of the interview desk, only vaguely familiar until he said, “And tell me—how’s the hockey? Any further along with the rules?”, and I knew exactly who he was.

But behind every story, no matter how settled its narrative, sit shadow versions. The sentences that weren’t written, the characters and sub-plots cut for reasons of pace or clarity or pathos; the almost-weres and might-have-beens.

Jamie had his shadow stories—the years of war he kept to himself throughout our marriage; and I, of course, had mine.

*

I know why I am thinking along such lines today. A Guy Named Joe was on the television last night. I sleep odd hours these days and caught its tail when I was flicking through the channels in the dark. I watched for a while, Spencer Tracy in uniform as an American pilot, and it put me in mind of wartime here at home.

It was eerily quiet after my brothers and the other local lads left town, but then the Americans arrived, with their smart uniforms and bulging pay packets, and everywhere, it seemed, got noisy all at once. I had a part-time job at the Cremorne by then, selling tickets to the shows. My father hadn’t been happy when news reached his ears about some of the more risqué acts onstage, but Mum convinced him that the influx of soldiers in the audience meant I was doing my bit for the war effort.

The Americans seemed very sophisticated to us: their accents and bravado, their not-from-around-hereness. They were confident and loud and I was equal parts shy and awed by them. Mostly I observed them from afar, but there was one—younger and less brash than the others—who used to sit at my counter while the others watched the show, drawing in a wire-rimmed sketchbook.

“Quiet,” was Dulcie’s assessment. She’d dropped by the Cremorne one night to show me the latest pair of nylons she’d been given: “A bit dull if you ask me. Imagine choosing to scribble in a book instead of watching a show or going dancing!”

“I think he’s interesting.” He was going to be an illustrator, he’d told me, when the war was over.

“Picture books,” he’d said, “for kids. I’ve written lots of stories already and sent them off to publishers. I’m just finishing one now.”

Dulcie squinted a little as she eyed me through her cigarette smoke. “Quiet people always seem interesting… until you get to know them.”

She was right that we hadn’t known one another for long, but wartime is different.

I knew that he was tall, left-handed and serious-eyed; his hair was blond like his father’s Dutch family; he liked baseball and films. He thought roses were predictable but sunflowers were cheery. Jazz was his favourite type of music and he played clarinet passably well. His best friend in the first grade had died from tetanus after standing on a rusty nail; his eyes misted over when he talked about his home; he didn’t think there was any sight more beautiful than the bright yellow cornfields on his family’s farm in Idaho. And for as long as he could remember he’d been able to sketch the things he saw quickly and accurately.

I knew, too, that I found it almost impossible not to watch when he was drawing—the slight frown line between his eyes, the determined set of his jaw, the way he tapped his pencil against his lips when he was thinking. I knew that when he wasn’t there, the hours dragged interminably.

The night before his unit deployed, we went to see A Guy Named Joe at the Metro. I’d have preferred Casablanca, which was playing at the Rialto, but figured there was less chance that one of my father’s friends would see us in the City. He said that he didn’t mind what we saw, so long as we saw it together.

He was quiet all night, distracted. I put it down to the ensuing deployment, but on the walk back to South Brisbane, halfway across the Victoria Bridge, he stopped. The moon was full and a spill of silver fell across his face as he asked if I would marry him when he returned.

I loved that boy. Wartime is different, youth is different, and that night, as the river swirled and slapped against the pylons beneath us, as I told him yes, that I would wait for him, I loved him as much as I have loved anyone or anything since.

He exclaimed and spun me around and we laughed together as he lowered me back to the ground. We stood with our foreheads pressed together until his blue eyes became serious and he said, “I don’t have a ring. But I’m going to save every cent between now and then and buy you something beautiful when the war is over.”

I told him that it didn’t matter to me one bit, but he was insistent, taking from his pocket a small circular pendant attached to a pin, glass with a purple flower pressed within it, and a line of tiny stones set around the rim.

“They’re rhinestones,” he said quickly, “not diamonds, but it’s the most precious thing I have.”

He told me that the flower was a syringa (“also known as lilac”), the official flower of Idaho. “My mother gave it to me when I left.”

“A good-luck charm?”

“A reminder of where I’m from.”

“And of where she’s eagerly awaiting your return.”

He laughed then, and agreed. “I can’t argue with that,” he said, “They miss me back home—and they’re going to love you to bits.”

*

My bones are old now, and tired, and my mind filled-up with memories, but I can still glimpse the girl I was back then. The care I took in writing to him, sitting in my narrow bed long after the household had gone to sleep, eyes straining in the dim lamplight; the excitement that I felt when his letters and sketches arrived for me at work. I smuggled them home and hid them, tied together with a red velvet ribbon and tucked within the pretty Schrafft’schocolate tin he’d given me for my birthday. (“Candies”, he’d called them, “all the way from New York City.”)

I remember, too, precisely where I was when my last letter came back to me, a cover note from his commanding officer attached. Walking home from a shift at the Cremorne, tearing the envelope open as I went, I’d stopped short on the corner of Melbourne Street. I still sit there sometimes, on one of the benches beneath the trees by QPAC.

What is there to say now about a young man’s death so many years ago? I grieved for him, but I did so alone. He was my secret. No one else knew what we’d promised and there seemed little point in telling them. At night I re-read his letters, clutching his lilac pendant in my hand and crying into my pillow. During the day I got on with things. Alone, but not unique, for there was death all around. Like everyone, I just smiled brighter, laughed louder, worked harder.

The years passed, the war finally ended, my boss at the Cremorne told me I would have to step aside for the returned soldier who’d held the job before me. And then one day I answered a newspaper advertisement and walked through a doorway into my future—an interview with a man who seemed only vaguely familiar until he said, “And tell me—how’s the hockey? Any further along with the rules?”

*

Jamie and I built a wonderful life—four children, nine grandchildren and seven greats (so far). Countless trips to the doctor, post office and supermarket; meetings in school offices, community centres and churches; a carousel of birthday parties, weddings and graduations. We laughed together, held each other up through tragedies, fought, forgave and forgot.

When he died in 1987, three months shy of our fortieth anniversary, it was as if I’d lost a piece of myself. We’d been a pair for so long, I wasn’t sure who I was without him. Suddenly, there was a whole section of my life—decades—about which I could turn to no one and say, “Remember when?”. The loneliness was like a coat I couldn’t take off.

It was my granddaughter, Rosie, who saw the article in the Courier Mail calling for volunteers. She’d taken to dropping in on her way home from school, raiding my fridge and then setting up with the newspaper and a nonchalant attitude designed to hide her concern for her old grandma. “You’d be great at this, Nan,” she said, stabbing the paper with a sugary finger. “Just think of it—a whole new group of people who’ve never heard your stories.”

She always had a cheek, my Rosie. Wise, too, for one so young.

And she was right. For while Expo ushered in a new era for this city, it also heralded a new chapter for me. I realised how big the world was and how varied, how many people there were to meet and places to see, and I knew with a determination much like panic that I hadn’t a moment to lose. Afterwards, I joined a local conversation group, signed up for French lessons at Alliance Française, enrolled in a History and Classics degree. I made new friends, drove myself around Australia, and travelled twice to Europe. I have seen the fjords of Norway and Alaska, retraced the steps of my ancestors, and toured numerous times by bus across the United States.

On one such trip, the route to Yellowstone took us through Idaho, and I sat captivated, watching the shimmering fields of corn that seemed to go on indefinitely. They were exactly as he had described and I experienced a strange, gnawing ache in my stomach, almost like homesickness—as if for a home and a family that I’d never had a chance to know.

“Are you all right?” The woman across the bus aisle was staring at me, eyes wide with concern.

I told her I was fine.

“You’re crying,” she said, doubtfully.

“Just a little homesick,” I said, which was easier than trying to explain that I was weeping for a boy I knew only briefly; a war that took too many; the passage of time and the randomness of life. Its fragility, unfairness and incredible beauty.

*

Listen! The doorbell rings.

Rosie calls out, “Nan, I’m here!”

And so am I. I’m here and I am ready. I will walk out through the door and into the tapestry of my life, a hundred years’ worth of moments, threads both light and dark, that form my story. I will sit at our table by the river and remember my brothers as boys, scrambling down to the dry docks; my mother in her kitchen and my father in his shop; my friend Dulcie twirling around the dance floor of the Trocadero. Someone will tell the story of the Hockey Ball, someone else will add that if not for that night none of them would exist.

And while they follow the familiar lines, my thoughts will wander to the river. I will remember how later on the night that I accepted Jamie’s proposal, I slid the wooden storage crate from beneath my bed and withdrew the pretty chocolate tin; how I read my soldier’s letters one more time and then slipped out of my parents’ house; how, from the middle of the bridge, I dropped the tin over the side and watched as it disappeared beneath the surface and the river gained another ghost.

“Hello there, Nan,” says Rosie, with a smile that is at once my mother’s and her very own. “Don’t you look beautiful—you’ve always suited that deep blue. And you’re wearing the butterfly, I see, and your Expo badge.” She leans forward to straighten the familiar items and a slight furrow pulls at her brows. “That’s a lovely one, too. Blossom, is it?”

“Lilac,” I say.

“New?”

I consider telling her the truth. Of all my grandchildren it is Rosie to whom I’ve always felt the closest. But I hesitate and the moment passes, time flowing away from us towards the deep, dark sea; and, “Better get moving,” she says, checking her watch. “I’ve got the cake in the car—I don’t want to leave it in the sun too long.”

Perhaps I will tell her later.

Then again, perhaps I won’t.

She takes my arm and together we step outside. The sun is bright; I hear magpies on the corrugated rooftops, the CityCat on the river, cars stopping and starting on Grey Street. The sounds of my life surround me and I know, as I hear them, that I am home.

Kate Morton, London, 2020

Fiction: At Home on the River Bend2021-02-07T21:13:56+00:00

Fiction: Caroline’s Story; or, Secrets from the Walls of Birchwood Manor

One of the things I like most about being a writer is the challenge of communicating new ideas – or further exploring old ones in different ways; I particularly enjoy the marriage of content and structure, the ability of one to inform, and progress, the other. From the start, one of my intentions with my sixth book, The Clockmaker’s Daughter, was that the architecture of the novel should illustrate the idea that within a single house, particularly an old one, coexist many stories of the disparate lives led within its walls. I liked the idea that each of these stories should be able to stand alone and yet, in concert, strung together by the overarching narrative of Birdie Bell (who had, of course, borne witness to them all), would work together to tell another, larger tale.

I became very attached to all of my characters when I was writing The Clockmaker’s Daughter and each of their stories added history to the house and texture to the novel’s tapestry. During the editing process, however, I realised that one of them – “Caroline’s Story” – was not essential to the mystery at the heart of the novel. Thus, a layer of Birchwood’s history was lost and dust allowed to settle around its absence. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that the past refuses to remain buried for long. Satchels are found, Japanese maple trees are uprooted, lead boxes are opened. Caroline and her husband David spent a brief period as residents of Birchwood Manor, their lives interwove with those who came before and after, history can’t be changed.

And so, here it is. The following ‘secret’ story contains events to which the novel alludes. Caroline is a character whom we meet in Elodie’s present day storyline. She is Pippa’s mentor, a photographer of some renown, who is responsible for providing Elodie with the photograph of her mother sitting with a young man in leafy surrounds. But all of that happens after the events described below. Like all of the characters who are drawn to Birchwood Manor, Caroline has suffered a terrible loss when we meet her (and a gentle warning, dear reader, that this story deals with themes of loss and grief that might be triggering for some). She finds herself at Birchwood Manor in the summer of 1992 and discovers, over time, as Edward Radcliffe did before her – and Leonard, and Juliet, too – that the twin-gabled house tucked within its bend of the river is possessed of a strange quality; that it really is a light in the dark.

Caroline’s Story

 

Summer, 1992

David leaned to peer at the map, open across her lap. ‘It must be here somewhere. Have we passed it?’

‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘This.’ He tapped at the page. ‘Here. What’s that?’

It was a road, she supposed, but a narrow one. ‘There should be a bridge.’

He pulled the car onto the verge and took the map from her. A faint scent of musk, familiar and vaguely pleasing, came off his shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows to escape the heat. Their car wasn’t air-conditioned. It was a green Peugeot 404 that had belonged to his parents before it came to them. They’d never needed a car prior to that. One didn’t in London, not with the Tube.

David was wearing the shirt she’d bought for him two Christmases ago, Caroline noticed. She remembered buying it. The man behind the counter had flirted with her and she’d enjoyed it. It was in a shop in Camden, much hipper than she was, and she’d been flattered, safe in the knowledge that she was buying a gift for her husband so the flirting would lead nowhere.

It was a handsome shirt. He was a handsome man. Older-looking now than when she’d met him but still handsome.

She’d aged, too, of course. She was thinner all over—‘Too thin’, her mother said—with bony wrists and prominent veins on her hands that reminded her of being a child, marvelling at her grandmother’s ancient claws as she sliced the Sunday roast. Her grandmother had been a good cook with a house that smelled like gravy, and Caroline had assumed, if she’d given it any thought at all, that it was the way of things, and someday when she grew up, she, too, would have a house that smelled like that.

While David turned the map the other way, Caroline dug an apple from the duffel bag between her feet. She could glimpse the river beyond the long grasses and, without a word, she opened the car door and walked towards it.

Caroline had grown up in Sussex near the River Ouse and much of her childhood had played out on its pebbled edge . . . That river still had one of her Dunlop Green Flash trainers in it, lost as she tried to swing from one bank to the other on a rope that someone had suspended from the branch of an oak tree a long time ago. She’d watched helplessly as the plimsoll slipped from her heel and fell, landing with a plock and disappearing beneath the river’s chattering surface.

Where it went afterwards was a mystery, because although she and the others had fished for it with a stick and spent the afternoon diving—between bouts of lounging and laughing and drinking pilfered ale—to the bottom of the deep hidden gullies, the plimsoll had not been found. ‘Consider it your offering to the River God,’ Susie had said, thinking of the poem that they’d recently studied for A levels. ‘Maybe he’ll think twice before drowning you!’

‘He’d have to catch her near the weir, first,’ said Joe.

‘Or fall in love with her.’ This was Jamie, who’d arrived at school eight months before, with long hair and a casual disdain for the rules that marked him as ‘other’ and, to Caroline, wildly attractive. The word ‘love’ on his lips made her blush; they’d been dancing around each other for weeks. His eyes met hers, holding her gaze.

He’d carried her home on his back that afternoon, in the bleaching sun of late August, and Susie had run ahead, darting from side to side as Joe gave chase, the light turning her hair to gold …

Caroline picked up a small smooth stone. It was cool, having been shaded by the long grasses, but warmed quickly within the grip of her closed fingers. A lone gull cut across the sky, far from home.

This river was the Thames, and wider here than the river of her youth, the land either side more open. A bridge was visible a mile or two upstream. It was the bridge that they’d been looking for, Caroline realised, the one from the map; which meant that in the pocket of trees beyond it was the house.

She wondered what it would be like, how their time here would unfold.

Everyone said it was the best thing that could have happened—given the circumstances. They always added that bit. A new house, a move to the country, a fresh start—the very best thing.

David’s voice behind her: ‘Caroline, let’s go.’

Virginia Woolf put stones in her pockets, Caroline remembered suddenly. She left her hat and cane on the bank, put stones in her pockets and walked into the river near her country home. That was the River Ouse, too, Caroline’s river, thief and keeper of her plimsoll.

It had taken three weeks for Virginia Woolf’s husband to find her. She’d made it all the way to Southease, almost to the sea. He was a good man, by all accounts, Mr Woolf; a kind man, who’d loved his wife very much. Caroline supposed his love simply hadn’t been enough to save her. Some sadness was like that.

David called again. He was beckoning her back to the car. ‘I think I’ve found it.’

With a last glance at the river, Caroline retraced her steps through the grass.

They came upon the house down a narrow lane with a church at one end and a series of small cottages along the way. Across a short stretch of fields, a stone wall appeared, behind which could be glimpsed the twin gables of the roof from the cover of the promotional booklet. David slowed down the car as they passed the wall and Caroline read a sign on the wooden gate: ‘Birchwood Manor’.

David turned right, into a driveway marked on the hand-drawn map on the back of the booklet as ‘the coach way’. He parked the car on the verge and they hopped out either side, coming together out of habit by the bonnet to observe the place that they would call home for the next six months or so. There was another gate here, more decorative, metal of some kind, and beyond it was the garden of the house.

David took her hand and they walked along the path towards the portico, removing the key from the envelope and sliding it inside the old lock to open the heavy door.

By unspoken agreement they separated once they were inside, David taking the room that opened off to the immediate left, Caroline following a passageway right, passing through a drawing room and a hall. The sun had slipped behind a cloud as they arrived and the rooms were dark.

She came to a staircase and began to climb it. There was a landing midway, where the stairs made a one-eighty-degree turn, and a window overlooked a large chestnut tree. Caroline stood for a moment, taking in a meadow that stretched beyond the back garden, a tumbledown barn in its middle, a thick wood in the distance. In one or two places, she could glimpse the river.

She continued to the first floor where the layout was even more curious than downstairs; bedrooms linked together via doorways rather than sitting either side of a central hallway and in each room white sheets turned the beds and chairs and dressing tables into lumpen ghosts. The attics were reached by another flight of stairs, and the ceilings up top raked at a sharp angle. Caroline, who was tall, had to be careful not to hit her head on the low rafters.

She started making her way back down and at the end of a passageway on the first floor found a narrow spiral staircase with oddly angled treads. She followed it and arrived in the kitchen, near where they’d first entered the house. David was waiting and when he saw her said, ‘I like it. Do you like it?’

Caroline agreed that she liked it, even though she wasn’t sure that she did. It smelled like shuttered windows and other people’s memories.

‘Are you hungry? Too early for dinner, but I thought I might crack open the fruit cake.’

‘Just what the doctor ordered.’

He was a doctor. ‘Not a real one’, he liked to say. But he was; he had been. He’d worked for Médecins Sans Frontières when the two of them were first married, in Cambodia and then the Congo. He’d returned from each place worn and troubled; but it was Uganda that broke him. He was employed by the NHS now, helping to determine the Government’s Emergency Response Policy, and was doing a year of research at Oxford University. That was part of the reason that they’d arrived here, at this place. At thirty-five, David was a student again.

‘You’ll love Oxfordshire,’ he’d said, when he proposed the idea.

‘You could get back to your work again.’ One of Caroline’s well-meaning friends.

‘The fresh air will do you good.’ Her mother, Janey.

It was Janey who’d found them the house, through her part-time job with the Art Historians’ Association. The AHA had acquired the house years before, but a bequest in 1980 had given them the money they needed to set it up as a museum. Ken Stoppard, the Chief Executive, had leapt at the chance to open Birchwood Manor to the public, but there’d been a number of hoops to jump through in order to gain the necessary approvals. One repair after another had required additional fundraising and further applications to the council and, in the end, it had taken a decade to get it ready. Everything had been set for a summer grand opening when a final inspection revealed a plumbing issue affecting the guest WCs. Janey had suggested that her daughter (‘an art restorer by trade’) and son-in-law (‘a doctor!’) might move in for six months or so: they were quiet and careful and wouldn’t mind limiting themselves to one or two rooms. The Association was content to have a small rental income and someone in the house while the works were underway. They’d had trouble keeping a caretaker in recent years, according to Janey.

‘It’s a good one,’ said David, sliding a plate of fruit cake across the table. ‘Try some.’

Caroline took a bite, and as she did so in this cold, grey kitchen she suffered a sudden flash of memory: the two of them on a mountain top in India, both doubled over laughing as the sun beat down. She couldn’t remember what they’d been laughing about. Nothing important, just a surge of pleasure at being young and in love and having it all ahead.

‘Breakfast!’

Caroline splashed cold water on her face and blinked at the small oval mirror above the bathroom sink. She patted her cheeks with a towel and then took up her hairbrush, running it slowly through her straight lengths.

She had used to pluck out the occasional silver-rooted hairs as she saw them, up in the tiny bathroom of their attic flat in Highgate. She’d stopped, though, after it happened, and an odd thing had occurred. A thick silver streak had grown down each side of her face. ‘Like a tiger,’ David had said once, stroking her head gently.

The morning was muggy and Caroline opened the small bathroom window. A creeper had spread voraciously on the other side of the wall so she had to push hard to unstick the casement from its frame.

The bathroom overlooked the coach way and as she was fastening the window Caroline caught a glimpse of the car. Strange to think that it was here now, and not where it usually sat on the street in London. It looked out of place surrounded by so much greenery. The dissonance made her shiver.

David had tried to sell the car afterwards. He’d placed an advertisement without telling her and because the price had been low there’d been a lot of interest. Caroline had answered the phone one Sunday morning, as the pealing bells of St Anne’s were marking the end of Morning Prayer, and a man’s voice had asked her if the car was still available. He’d said he wanted to come and have a look—could she tell him whether it was airconditioned?

‘I was thinking of you,’ David had said when she’d confronted him. ‘I didn’t think–’

He hadn’t thought she’d want the reminder, that’s what he’d said, and his expression of confused dismay had made it clear he was in earnest.

But how could she have wanted anything else? And how could he have imagined, even for a second, that being rid of the car would diminish the memories? Was his own grief so conveniently linked to physical objects that he thought to remove the object was to cure it?

‘We can keep it,’ he’d said, when she’d tried to express all of this. ‘I was only thinking of you.’

And so, they’d kept the car. Caroline didn’t drive it, but sometimes, at night, when David wasn’t watching and she was able to escape the burden of his concern, she would go down to the street and climb inside. She would curl up on the backseat and close her eyes and let time bury her like mud.

‘Break-fast!’

Caroline replaced the hairbrush on the shelf and stared at her face in the mirror. Thirty-five years behind her; perhaps another thirty-five ahead. She wondered how on earth she was going to make it through.

‘Eggs today,’ said David as she arrived downstairs via the spiral staircase; just as he had on each of the previous five days since they’d arrived at Birchwood.

She flicked the switch on the kettle. ‘Tea?’

They took their breakfast outside to the table on the stretch of grass overlooking the narrow tributary. The map called this the Hafodsted Brook and showed it running alongside the house to feed the Thames.

‘I’ll aim to be home by one,’ said David. ‘We can have lunch together.’

Caroline noticed then that he was dressed in his good shirt and remembered it was Monday – his meeting in Oxford with his new supervisor. ‘One is good.’

‘I’ll bring bread.’

She could remember being in love with David. He was handsome, no two ways about it, with cheekbones and that wide smile and dark eyes that invited people to laugh with him when he was jolly, empathise when he was hurt, and take him at his word, always. Caroline had been smitten along with most of the other women who’d been at Oxford with them.

If she had been capable of feeling much of anything, it would have shocked Caroline how little of that she now felt when she looked at her husband’s face. At one time, she had believed with all of her heart that she could not go on without him. Now, she felt nothing.

‘Any plans for the morning?’

She said, ‘I thought I’d go for a walk.’

‘Along the river?’

‘Into the next village.’

David was pleased by this, and as they gathered their plates to take back to the kitchen, he mentioned a pamphlet he’d found in the arrival package with a list of historical sites that she might be interested in. ‘There’s a huge National Trust house with a fine collection of paintings, and a church with a fifteenth-century fresco that was covered during the Dissolution and only recently rediscovered. You could go and find out what’s happening with the restoration?’

‘Sure, maybe.’

‘Or else, it’s going to be fine and warm, you could just enjoy the countryside.’

David was a strong person. Stronger than she was. Starting a new life, moving on, putting it all behind him. He was managing to do all of those things. By some miracle it seemed that he had even managed to forgive her. Sometimes Caroline lay awake wondering how it was possible that he could bear to look at her any more, let alone care about her. If their roles had been reversed, she knew she would never have been able to forgive him.

As it was, she would never be able to forgive herself.

‘Are you going to take your camera on the walk?’

‘That’s the plan.’

The camera had been a birthday gift, a month ago now. David had been excited about it. Caroline had never owned a proper camera and this one had a special Tamron lens bought separately, that he’d been very keen to show her, slipping it carefully from its velvet pouch and turning it backwards and forwards as he said things about apertures and f-numbers. Her mother had been there, too, and her friend, Gillian; all of them doing their best. They’d thought better of a cake, thank goodness, so there’d been no need for candles and singing.

‘Have you worked out how to load the next roll of film?’

‘I’ve got the instructions packed. I’ll take them with me and read them somewhere along the way.’

‘I’ll load it for you before I go, if you like?’

‘I don’t want to make you late.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m glad to do it.’

David was a patient man with a calm voice. He never lost his bedside manner, no matter how far he was pushed. No matter how far she pushed him. Sometimes his goodness made her want to scream. ‘That’d be great. Thanks, Doc.’

David had been right about the forecast. It was warm when Caroline set out on her walk; the early cloud had burned off leaving the sky a brilliant blue. She took the path through the meadow at the back of the house and turned left when she hit the water, making her way west along the river’s edge. She had walked it every day since they’d arrived in Birchwood, once in each direction, and the course was becoming familiar enough that she had started noticing small changes, day by day. The comings and goings of particular narrowboats, the movement of cattle from one field to another, the way the shifting sun painted the greenery different shades depending on the hour.

Sometimes she passed another walker and they would nod at each other, and afterwards Caroline would reflect upon the way the person had looked at her as if she were just a woman out on a walk, and not a piece of wreckage abandoned in the wake of a catastrophic event. It had made her start to scrutinise others more closely—people in the grocery store, passengers in cars on the motorway, neighbours in their gardens—wondering how many of them were also just human shells.

This morning, there were very few other people about. A couple of kids were trying their luck with a fishing reel and an old man in beige overalls was working on the engine of a small wooden boat. One or two dog owners were being led along the dew-damp path tramped through the long grass. Other than that, Caroline had the river to herself.

There was a spot, about half a mile upstream from Birchwood, where a number of wooden posts rose up out of the water. They were rotten around the edges but their positioning—ordered, symmetrical—suggested that once upon a time they had supported a structure, a jetty, perhaps, that had since been swept away by the river. There was something both forlorn and comforting about the posts, and today Caroline stopped when she reached them, taking her camera from its case.

She had become alert to signs of impermanence. Also to signs of constancy. She thought about time a lot more than she used to do. Her therapist spoke often of ‘stages’, and Caroline had been given, at some point, by one of her well-meaning friends, a book that outlined the same ideas. The stages of grief were always represented visually along a linear timeline. But Caroline had stopped believing in the neatness of beginnings, middles and satisfying endings. She knew now that life was a jumble of fractured moments; that time could condense so that hundreds of events happened simultaneously; that it could stretch so that one moment lingered indefinitely.

Those posts, though: there was something about them that drew her interest. An enormous willow grew nearby and Caroline went to sit with her back against it, lifting the camera to her eye and twisting the zoom to bring the nearest column closer. Rough, rotting grain filled her viewfinder and she started focussing the lens.

Wood, damp and dark grey. So much variation in its texture when you actually looked. Striations within the grain, pitted holes bored by insects, decaying patches of white and a spread of something yellow—mould or lichen, she wasn’t sure. A fragile limb caught Caroline’s attention, as fine as a hair, and she traced it back to the pewter body of a spider.

Following the line of another long, thin leg to the right, she left the spider behind and kept searching the post until her view was filled with the edge of a duck’s feather. It was one of those soft, ill-defined white feathers that grows on the body of birds, beneath the wing, and it had become snagged on a rough shard of wood. Caroline adjusted the focus of the lens until the silken down clarified into filaments. After a moment, she let the viewfinder range slowly again, stopping only when it alit upon a dew drop, perfectly rounded upon the splintery top of the post.

At first Caroline had carried the camera with her each morning because it made David happy and she figured that she owed him that much. She hadn’t used it; just a few perfunctory snaps each day so that if he happened to glance at the shot counter he’d be satisfied. She had hated the idea of using it properly. The whole purpose of a camera, it seemed to Caroline, was to narrow in on images of beauty, and Caroline didn’t want to see beauty anymore.

But then, one day, she realised that the camera had other uses aside from the pursuit of beauty. She could point the lens at anything—a nail entering a country gate, the ground beneath her feet, a downy feather stuck to a rotten post. It didn’t matter. It was simply about seeing and recording something—anything—that was happening, right now.

And that was the key. Quite by accident, Caroline had discovered that her camera was a sort of time machine. It didn’t allow her to go backwards or forwards, nothing like that; rather, through the simple act of lifting it to her right eye and closing her left, she was able to shut the doorway to the past. She was able to stoptime travelling, just for a moment. It was simply impossible to look through the viewfinder, adjust the focus, and think of anything other than what she was seeing. For the briefest while, time didn’t reel backwards or spool forwards and Caroline was rooted to this instant.

She brought the droplet into focus now and, as she did, she noticed that the sun’s light had split into a spectrum of colour so that a full rainbow appeared across its taut surface. She was momentarily struck with awe that such a tiny object could contain so much. Overwhelming, too, to think that if she were to touch it, even lightly, the whole thing would disappear. She took the shot. David would be pleased to see it. And as she lowered the camera, her mind tossed up a snippet of poetry she’d memorised in her final year at school. It was Keats: ‘Life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way from a tree’s summit’.

Caroline packed the camera back into its case, and as she came out of the willow’s shade, she noticed someone standing on the other side of the river. It was Amy. She was wearing the mustard dungarees and white blouse that Caroline had bought for her from the market on Portobello Road.

Amy looked smaller than usual, standing there amongst the long grass. The breeze was playing with her curls and sunlight made them golden. Caroline smiled at her, as she always did, drinking in the sight, willing herself not to blink because she knew that when she did—

There.

Amy was gone.

Before falling pregnant, in all her imagining, Caroline hadn’t counted on the worry. From the start she’d worried that Amy was too hot, too cold, too thin, too fat, too quiet, too noisy, too angry. She worried that Amy didn’t sleep enough, and then that she slept too deeply. The NHS nurse told her that she’d adjust; her mother told her that it was always difficult in the beginning; David said that she’d be fine once she found her feet. But Amy kept growing, she got older, and just when Caroline thought that she’d worked out how to do it, the job would change. Amy started to eat real food, solid food, with throat-sized pieces, and then, oh God, to move. She would disappear from one room while Caroline was in another; she pulled herself over to power plugs; she learned how to climb onto the edge of the settee. Even when she slept—which wasn’t often—Caroline worried about the newspaper stories she’d read about babies who didn’t wake up.

Which wasn’t to say that she hadn’t loved Amy with a passion that left her breathless, only that she’d enjoyed her baby most when she wasn’t responsible for her, on those rare occasions when her own mother stepped in for an hour or two, or when Amy had just fallen asleep, and Caroline was free to reflect on the day, to watch her daughter in her memory, to notice how clever she was, how sweet, how able, without the constant current of fear stiffening her shoulders and tightening her jaw.

‘Nothing is going to happen,’ David had told her.

‘But how do you know?’

‘You’re a terrific mother. You love her. You just need to relax.’

Alcohol helped. A glass of wine in the evening and she was just about normal again, almost her old self. More like all of those other mothers who chatted with one another at the park as their children climbed, who heard their little one start crying and looked up with mild interest instead of leaping to their feet with a stab of white cold fear to the heart; who ambled over to the fallen body of their son or daughter and told them that they were fine, just fine, that it was just a little bit of blood.

They had so much authority, those mothers. You could see it in their children’s eyes: a complete faith that everything would be all right because their mother had said so. Of all her many regrets, that was the worst. Caroline had never managed to embody absolute security. She had seen the way that Amy looked up quickly when something dropped or when she scraped her knee, expecting the expression of panic that she knew she’d see on Caroline’s face. Caroline had failed to make her daughter feel safe.

She had failed to keep her safe.

One moment of carelessness; one bad decision.

Incredible that she could have been so careless when she cared so much.

Caroline had never walked this far before, all the way to the other side of the wooded copse. The towpath tapered, becoming muddy and overgrown, and finally she arrived at St John’s Lock. The name was familiar: Ken Stoppard from the AHA had mentioned it in his notes, and the tourist plaque said that it was the first and highest lock on the Thames, named after a priory which had once stood nearby. Caroline passed a World War II pillbox and then found herself in open meadowland, the spire of a church rising up before her.

The meadows ran all the way to the Halfpenny Bridge, and she wound up spiral steps to reach the road. There was a car pulled over on the grass verge and she took a detour to check, as she always did now. Once she’d reassured herself that it was empty, she crossed the bridge into Lechlade and found herself in the middle of a bustling village, very different from Birchwood, much larger, with cars lining the streets and people on the pavements carrying shopping bags or children, sometimes both.

The church—St Lawrence’s—occupied a central position, standing one side of a busy market square with a carpark in its centre. The churchyard stretched out behind the building and could be reached by following a narrow lane. This was the place, Caroline knew, that had inspired Shelley’s lines of poetry when he and Mary visited Lechlade in 1815 and watched the sun set. It was also the church that David had suggested Caroline might like to visit so that she could talk to the art restorer. She knew what he was thinking, that she might start up a conversation, remember her old occupation and be reanimated.

David meant well, but Caroline had no intention of going inside the church. She stood in the centre of the carpark and turned a slow circle. She had done what she’d set out to do, walked to the next village thereby using up a couple of hours of another day. She was all set to start the journey back, when she noticed that across from the church there was a stone building with a sign above the wooden door that read, ‘Lechlade Community Library & Visitor Information Centre’.

As a child, Caroline had read a lot. Her mother used to take her, with her brother, to the local library where they were each allowed to choose three books per week. Caroline always finished her allotment within a couple of days and could remember begging her mother to let her return ahead of time to replace them. Looking back, she wasn’t sure when she had stopped reading. She suspected that her education had cured her of the habit; since she left university she couldn’t think that she’d so much as lifted a book for pleasure.

It was hot standing in the middle of the square, and Caroline felt a strange compulsion to walk towards the wooden door. Even as she thought better of it, she was already crossing the road. She stepped inside the library, reasoning that it would at least be a brief refuge from the heat.

She browsed aimlessly for a time and found herself in the children’s section where many of her old favourites were looking a little the worse for wear. It was strange to see them, friends from another lifetime. When she was a girl, Caroline’s most beloved stories had been the sort where children travelled through portals to other times and places. The back of the wardrobe, the top of the tree, the grandfather clock in the hall: it didn’t matter the method, she collected them all. The books were Caroline’s own doorways, allowing her to slip away from family life. A well-thumbed copy of Alice in Wonderland caught her attention and she almost took it from the shelf. But Lewis Carroll made her think of Oxford and punting and rivers, and Amy on the other side, and so she let it be.

The next aisle contained a selection of cassettes, music mainly, and Caroline browsed without really looking, until a familiar album spine announced itself. A Love Supreme. David loved jazz and they’d had the record at home, when home was the apartment in Highgate. Once upon a time, in the hazy age of Before Amy, the two of them used to climb onto the narrow balcony outside their flat and look out across London as Coltrane washed over them. They would drink red wine and let the night’s hours turn to rubber. They hadn’t listened to jazz for a long time. Caroline couldn’t even think where that record was now. They wouldn’t have given it away, and yet she had no recollection of having seen it when she packed up their things. She supposed it had gone to the place where all the lost things went. She slid the cassette from the shelf, possessed by a sudden urge to take it back with her to the house.

As she was nearing the library counter, she came upon a round table with a large handwritten sign that read, ‘Local Books’. She stopped and turned over a few: a walking guide, a history of the Locks and Weirs of the Upper Thames, a biography about a Victorian artist, and a collection of newspaper articles called Letters from the Laneway, written by a woman during the Second World War and bound cheerfully and cheaply by someone since. On a whim, she decided to take the articles with her. They were short. She liked that. She had lost the ability to concentrate on anything longer.

‘Membership card?’ said the woman at the counter. She had reddish-brown hair with a silver strip down the centre parting and a name tag that read, I’m Brenda. Ask me if I can help.

‘I don’t have one yet.’

Brenda glanced up over her half-glasses. ‘New to town?’ She pulled out a fresh index card.

‘Just staying for a while. My husband and I are renting a house by the river in Birchwood.’

‘Birchwood Manor.’

‘You know it?’

‘Of course. What’s your name then?’

Caroline told her and the other woman wrote it down in large, careful handwriting. ‘If you’re living at Birchwood Manor, you’ll be wanting the Leonard Gilbert.’

‘I’m sorry?’

The librarian nodded towards the table of local books. The biography about the Victorian artist was written by a man called Leonard Gilbert. Caroline wasn’t in the mood to read about art or artists, but she was in even less of a mood to argue with Brenda; the librarian was just one more person to add to the list of helpful people who seemed to know what Caroline needed and wanted these days. Without a word, she ducked back to the table and added, Edward Radcliffe: His Life and Loves to her small pile.

When David got home for lunch, he found her sitting beneath the old Japanese maple tree in the front garden.

‘Nice spot,’ he called.

She was ten articles in to Letters from the Laneway and it took a moment to climb out from beneath its spell. Caroline had only intended to read a page or two, but there was something in the way the author wrote that made it impossible not to link arms with her.

‘Good book?’ He craned his neck to read the title. ‘What’s it about?’

‘The war—sort of. It’s a collection of newspaper pieces, real-life stories about people who lived around here. Nothing momentous, just anecdotes and observations. The author was from London and she moved to the village with her three kids after her husband was killed at Dunkirk.’

‘Sounds sad.’

Caroline considered the proposition. ‘It’s melancholy in places, and very sad things happen, but the collection itself is somehow . . . not. I guess it’s the context. The war. There was so much that was awful going on, it made the other things, the ordinary parts of life, more precious.’

Suddenly, Caroline didn’t want to be discussing sadness and loss, not with David, not today, not here beneath this tree where the grass was soft and the sun was poking through the gaps between the leaves, and so she closed the book and put it beside her. ‘How was your meeting?’

‘It was great.’

‘He liked your ideas?’

‘He seemed to.’

She smiled. ‘I’ll make some sandwiches. I think there’s still a tomato inside, and half a wedge of cheese.’

One week drifted into the next and the house began to grow on Caroline. It was a difficult building to get the measure of, and even after a month she wasn’t entirely certain how it all fitted together. There were deep, wide fireplaces in the ground-floor rooms, with chimneys that ran through the walls at odd angles, joining up to form two rows of four when they burst through the tiled roof. It was old, hundreds of years old, and some rooms had curious little adjuncts that weren’t replicated identically on the floor above. More than once, Caroline had been certain that she was looking north when she was in fact facing south.

There was a corner that was reliably warmer than the others; she wasn’t sure why. It was on the landing where the main stairs made their turn. A pale bentwood chair sat by the windowsill and the ledge was just wide enough to hold a small vase and a cup of tea. Caroline had taken to sitting there sometimes, looking out through the branches of the chestnut tree and over the meadow towards the woods.

More often, though, she sat outside in the garden, usually on the grass beneath the old Japanese maple. She liked the way the sunlight fell through the leaves in dapples; she liked, too, the boldness of the planting. Someone, at some point, had put the tree in ground directly in the way of the front gate, making it impossible to use the gate as a thoroughfare. The position suggested an inexplicable purpose. Its perversity appealed to Caroline.

Without intending it, to her routine of river walking and camera pointing, she had added a daily session of reading. She had finished the Letters from the Laneway articles and moved on to Leonard Gilbert’s book about Edward Radcliffe. It was an unusual experience to read a book whilst staying in the house that the author had lived in when he was writing; even more unlikely for it to be the very house for which the book’s subject had developed an intense passion.

She liked the idea that she was following people who had walked the same steps before her. She liked to imagine the house during Leonard Gilbert’s life, and before that, Edward Radcliffe’s. The artist’s fascination with folktales and archaeology and what it meant to belong somewhere, the keenness with which he’d gathered stories and the inspiration he’d drawn from them, made the ribbon of time unfurl even further. Caroline became more conscious on her walks of the land beneath her feet, the river on whose edge she was beginning to feel at home; they were fixities, anchors; their permanence over time somehow grounding. It was a relief, she realised, and a great comfort, to reduce oneself, one’s own life and experiences and loves and sorrows, to that of a temporary speck.

The book contained a number of photographs. One was an image of the house taken during Leonard Gilbert’s tenure of 1928, but of far more interest to Caroline were the photographic portraits from the 1860s, especially those of the summer that the Magenta Brotherhood had spent in residence at Birchwood Manor. Most had been shot by Felix Bernard, but there were some by his wife, Adele, too. The two artists had markedly different styles: where Felix’s images had crisp lines and the sort of precise, considered framing that suggested technical mastery, Adele Bernard’s pictures were unevenly lit and unfocussed; and yet, they were all the more beautiful for it. Hers were unmannered, exciting—alive somehow, their subjects staring directly at the camera giving the impression that they had just moved into frame and might move out again at any moment. Caroline couldn’t shake the sense that they were observing her every bit as much as she was studying them.

She had been having that feeling a lot lately, as if she were being watched. The way the light fell, or the floorboard creaked—something would make her turn around, expecting to see David, and instead she would find the hall behind her empty and still. It wasn’t an unpleasant or creepy sensation, just unusual. She had put it down to the folktale Leonard Gilbert had mentioned in his book, about the strange luminous children who’d strayed across the veil from fairyland and been rescued by the Fairy Queen herself, an awesome figure who’d arrived in a blaze and left behind a protection spell upon the plot of land on which Birchwood Manor was built. Caroline hadn’t believed in fairies since she woke in the night as a seven-year-old to find her mother struggling to exchange a coin for the tooth beneath her pillow, but the story was affecting. She had caught herself glancing up at the attic when she was outside at night, half expecting to see a light in the window.

Wishful thinking. But then people were capable of thinking and doing the most unexpected things, particularly in times of emotional turmoil. Edward Radcliffe had all but given up painting in the face of his heartbreak. Leonard Gilbert had described the loss of Lily Millington as ‘identity fracturing’ for the young artist; he’d spent a long time on the subject, musing upon the tendency of human beings under pressure to behave in ways that they wouldn’t dream of under usual circumstances. Leonard, Caroline had gleaned from reading the biography at the back of the book, had been a soldier in the First World War and she suspected that he knew what he was talking about. Because he was right, of course; Caroline knew that better than anyone.

Her father, when he was alive, had been religious and vain, the two traits sparking a war within him that could never be happily resolved. His standards were exacting, especially those that he held for himself, matched only by his need for adoration. Throughout Caroline’s childhood he’d had a series of women—secretaries, shop assistants, out-of-work actresses, the mothers of her friends, the friends of her mother—and she and her brother had always known when he’d started up with a new one because he’d suddenly become diligent about attending to jobs around the house. She’d see him some mornings, very early, just after dawn, cleaning the car in their driveway, a faraway look in his eyes as he rubbed the chamois in circles over the same spot on the bonnet. That’s how she’d know for certain. Their mother knew, too, of course, but she kept up the charade.

Caroline, as a consequence, had always understood herself to be pathologically monogamous. It was an aspect of her identity as certain as her left-handedness and mild allergy to bee stings.

Two months after it happened, though, she had been on the way to an appointment when she’d seen a man in the street. He was sitting at a table outside one of the pubs in Bloomsbury. He was not conventionally handsome, but held an air of danger and wasn’t at all the sort of man she’d have considered her ‘type’. Their eyes had met briefly and Caroline had kept walking, but something inside her had flicked and an urge had come suddenly upon her.

She felt instantly more alive than she had since the day the car was stolen. She found herself turning around, walking back, her heart pounding beneath her chest, her skin warm. In that moment, Caroline knew only that she had to find the man again. That he was the key to fixing everything that was broken inside her. She saw suddenly, clearly, that he was a door, a path through all of this horror and out to the other side, a place where none of it was happening because she was no longer herself and cared for none of the same things.

She was almost running by the time she turned the corner, but when she reached the pub the man was gone.

At the sight of the bare table, the empty glass, the discarded cigarette butt in the ashtray, a great gulf of grief had opened up inside her. She’d collapsed onto the seat where he’d been sitting and cried with the sort of ugly commitment that made people worry and glance the other way.

Caroline thought back to that day in Bloomsbury sometimes; not often, and when she did it was as if she were looking at a memory belonging to another person. The emotion of the day—so intense at the time—had faded like a charcoal rubbing of something that had once seemed vitally important. She had cried, as she sat outside the pub, with hopelessness and loss, and with relief, too, because she hadn’t really wanted to go home with a stranger; it had just seemed plausible in that moment, that if she occasionally went home with a dishevelled man sitting out the front of an unfamiliar pub, and stopped being a diligent flosser who tried to eat sensibly and drank in moderation and enjoyed nothing more than a night on the sofa with her husband, then maybe, just maybe, she would also be a person who wasn’t unbearably broken by the loss of her child.

It was soon afterwards that Caroline first saw Amy.

That made things better, though she quickly learned not to tell other people. There was a special frown of concern reserved for those who spoke about seeing their dead child on the bus, at the supermarket, in the middle of Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park.

‘But what was she doing?’ This was Caroline’s mother, trying very hard not to sound alarmed.

‘Just standing there. She waved at me.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘Waved back, of course.’

But Caroline knew now that she wasn’t alone. In one of the articles that she’d just read, written ostensibly to describe the establishment of the family’s Digging for Victory garden, Juliet had described the acquisition of a new pet. ‘There are five of us living in our house,’ she’d begun. ‘Me, my three children, and a flame‐haired figment in a white dress, created by my son’s imagination and so vivid to him that we must consult her on every family decision. Her name is Birdie and thankfully she shares my son’s affection for dogs, although she has specified that she would prefer an older dog with a settled temperament. It is a sentiment, happily, with which I fully concur, and so both she and Mr Rufus, our newly arrived arthritic nine‐year‐old hound, are welcome to remain part of the family for as long as they so choose.’

Caroline had become fond of Juliet over the past few weeks, and not just because she seemed completely unfazed by the arrival of apparitions. Juliet had offered Caroline a new glimmer of hope, one that didn’t involve a stranger outside a pub. In an article published a decade after the war ended, but included in the collection by whoever compiled it, Juliet had stepped forward from the background to write about her own husband’s death and the terrible task of telling her three children that it had happened. The piece opened with one of her sons learning the truth and forcing her hand.

Until that point, she wrote, she had put it off, preferring to wait until she found the perfect words. Caroline, reading the article decades later, had thought she’d guessed where the story was going; she had read this sort of thing before and expected to arrive at the true but trite moral that there was no such thing as the perfect words or the perfect parent.

She had been mistaken, for the article was neither trite nor trivial. It was brutal. In it, Juliet wrote that when her youngest son questioned her, asking when she was going to tell the others, she began to picture herself doing so and realised that the barrier wasn’t a lack of words, it was a surfeit of rage. She practised in her room at night and every time she imagined saying the necessary sentences to her children, she felt a surge of ferocious anger, the sort that made her want to find the man who had pulled the trigger and fired the bullet that took her husband’s one and only life, her children’s father, her own envisaged future, pummel him with a blunt object and then reach into his chest and pull out his heart. She wanted to keep it in a jar on the mantelpiece. Her desire to exact vengeance made her clench her fists so tightly that her whole body shook and she struggled to get enough air.

Juliet had included an introductory paragraph explaining that although she had written the article during the war, it had not been published in the newspaper column at the time; she had not even sent it to her editor. ‘The point of Letters from the Laneway was to depict the experience of life at home during the war, not to confront people with one’s own considerable grief. It was my understanding then that one’s readers had enough of that in their own lives already.’ But Juliet had felt it, written it and kept the article, publishing it eventually in 1952. ‘It described the most difficult and yet the most important lesson I was ever forced to learn, and my husband, Alan, used to say that wisdom hard won should always be inflicted on others.’

The Juliet of the article travelled through a number of black paragraphs describing her loss and longing, before arriving at the realisation that in order to help her children to feel grief, but not the sort of anger that turns inward and irretrievably burns a person’s organs, she had no choice but to overcome her own dark rage. She had struggled with how that might be done—whisky, she writes, had at one point seemed a rather good option—before realising that she needed to forgive the man whose identity she would never know, whom she would never meet, whom she would fail to recognise if they passed in the street. The man who had killed her husband.

It wasn’t easy, she admitted. Frankly, she said, she had grown attached to her graphic revenge fantasies, nurturing them as one might the plans for a novel, whilst she paddled in the river or dozed in the shade of a tree. By and by, though, she realised that the fantasies were excuses: satisfying stopgaps that gave her somewhere to funnel her grief, instead of getting on with the real work, the necessary work, that would finally free her, if only because it would stop her from digging a hole so deep and dark that eventually it caved in on her so she was no longer able to climb out.

Caroline had wondered after reading Juliet’s article whether it was easier to forgive an unknown soldier fighting for his life and country, than a person standing directly in front of her who had made a terrible decision. For they had found theman who took Caroline and David’s car. Not a man really, just a boy. Only sixteen years old.

It was a mistake, his lawyer said, and he was filled with remorse. He was a good student, a boy with his whole life ahead of him. He would live with the guilt forever. He hadn’t even seen the child, sleeping in the back; she hadn’t made a sound.

Caroline, sitting in the West London Youth Court, had heard someone make a gasping sound when he said that, and people had turned around and she’d realised that it was she who’d made the noise. Her mother, beside her, had handed her a tissue, but Caroline waved it away. She’d gasped because she was relieved. She hadn’t realised, until she heard the lawyer say those words, how much she’d worried that Amy was awake, that she’d been frightened, that her last moments had been spent crying for her absent mother.

She believed what the lawyer said, that Amy had been asleep, because she had been sleeping when Caroline left her in the car. Caroline had thought it was her lucky day—she’d pulled into the carpark and noticed a space available right at the front of the grocery store.

Amy had looked so peaceful. She hardly ever fell asleep in the car, but it had been a rough few nights. Caroline only needed a bottle of water and knew there was a fridge just inside the entrance of the store. She could be in and out in two minutes. It was hot, though, and the car wasn’t airconditioned; Caroline had read about a baby who’d suffocated in the car—it didn’t take long at all—so she was careful to leave her window down a few inches.

Inside the shop, she’d taken a water from the fridge and joined the queue. It had been slow-moving; there was an old dear at the front, who’d trimmed a full-page advertisement from the newspaper featuring all of the weekly specials. She was now making sure that the lad behind the counter typed in the discounted price for each item.

Caroline could see the driver’s side of the car if she leaned very close to the man in front of her. She could see her window and Amy’s sleeping face behind, her head tilted backwards, her lips parted.

The old woman had just realised that she’d forgotten to buy a tin of baked beans, and the lad behind the counter was looking frazzled—he was the only person on duty, and the line was growing longer, and it was clear that the woman wasn’t going to leave without her beans.

Caroline had offered to run and get them for her.

She’d been gone for two minutes. Maybe three. The canned goods had been at the far end of the store, and she’d chosen the wrong aisle first, and then when she found the right spot she’d had to scrounge around at the back of the shelf for the discounted brand. It had been the last can there and Caroline could remember feeling triumphant when at last she had it in her hand.

She’d presented the baked beans to the boy behind the counter and then she’d glanced outside.

The car was gone.

Hard to remember what happened next. And the details didn’t matter for there was no way to make it unfold differently. The seconds, minutes, hours, rolling, stretching, gaping ahead, a dry and dusty track to nowhere.

A dare, Your Honour, the boy’s lawyer had told the magistrate. Steal a car, drive it somewhere and leave it. A stupid dare, yes. But malicious intent, no. He hadn’t damaged the car before abandoning it; he had put the window up because a storm was forecast. He hadn’t seen the child in the backseat. She hadn’t made a sound.

What Caroline did know was that it was a lot easier to forgive a sixteen-year-old boy with terrified eyes, than it was to forgive herself.

And so, she continued to carry the camera with her everywhere she went, spending more and more time each day loading, shooting, and capturing. The action of those words had jarred at first, but as the weeks went on, Caroline had come to see that they were apt. Despite herself she had stopped using her camera solely to arrest the flow of memory, and had started instead seeing and seeking opportunities. She really had begun to feel that she was hunting pictures—that they were out there in the wild, waiting to be found.

She had started to think beyond composition, wondering how she could harness the light to create different effects. There was a Kodak shop in Lechlade and she’d come to know the woman who did the developing, asking questions each visit about why some pictures came out darker than she’d expected, and how to make sure the sun’s flare didn’t overtake the image. The woman—Kay—had even invited Caroline to join her in the darkroom. When she’d exhausted Kay’s store of knowledge, Caroline had asked the library whether they had any ‘how to’ photography books and Brenda had put one on order from the Oxford branch.

In the meantime, she continued to experiment. The other day, she had been sitting beneath the Japanese maple looking through the viewfinder, playing with the f-stop settings, when she found that the roving lens had alighted on David. He had got it into his head that he should work in the gardens on weekends and was in the middle of the flower bed nearest the kitchen using an ancient shovel that had turned up in the barn behind the house. It was mid-July and very hot, and he was sweating. Caroline found herself focussing the camera on him as he worked. She noticed the way his shoulder moved, the way his forearm glistened in the sun, the way the cotton of his old T-shirt stretched between his shoulder blades. He caught her eye and mimed parched and exhausted before shooting her a grin; behind the camera Caroline smiled.

And then this morning had been one of those crystalline summer days when the air is visibly yellow. Caroline had headed out early; she’d become interested in the effects of light and shade and the conditions were perfect for shooting water. She’d spent a couple of hours trying to capture the silver-tipped surface of the river, and then started back. The day was beautiful and she walked the long way, continuing along the river beyond the Manor and looping back through the other side of the village. Her roll of film was almost finished and she decided to shoot the last two pictures so she could duck into Kodak and have it developed that afternoon.

The graveyard in the centre of Birchwood was smaller than the one in Lechlade, but very pretty. Lots of ivy and tangled roses and stones eroding gently with each passing year. Caroline had walked past a number of times, but so far she’d refrained from going in. Since Amy, she had studiously avoided having anything to do with churches or graveyards. It had made her job as a restorer of religious art difficult to maintain, but Caroline had discovered that she had little interest in maintaining it anyway.

Today, though, with only a single shot left on her camera, the lure of the old stone buildings and the profusion of creepers was too much to resist. She went inside quietly and discovered that she wasn’t alone.

A couple was sitting on the grass by one of the graves, a man and a woman, side by side and deep in conversation. The man was dark-haired and the woman had the sort of sharp-cheeked beauty that creates an illusion of heightened reality. She was wearing leather sandals and an Indian print dress and was sitting with her legs crossed, leaning forward with her elbow on one knee and her face turned towards the man. As Caroline observed them, the man nodded at something the woman had just said.

It had crossed Caroline’s mind at first that they were relatives of the deceased, but now she dismissed the idea. The woman was speaking, the man listening. She was serious, while he seemed sad. As Caroline watched, they’d stopped talking and were now staring at one another, the type of wordless communication that came only with the deepest of bonds. The man reached out then to stroke the woman’s face. It was a gentle gesture, fond and respectful, and the woman closed her eyes before reaching up to hold his hand against her cheek. When she opened her eyes again, there was a finality to her expression, a resolve and certainty that made her seem almost regal.

A shard of sunlight came through the foliage to bathe the scene in light and Caroline drew breath.

It was perfect. They were perfect.

She had lifted her camera before she knew what she was doing. Only one photo left on her roll and Caroline took the shot. As she did, she felt a small spark, a frisson of knowing that she would come to recognise in time as an innate awareness that the picture she’d captured would be a good one. And she felt something else, too, a split-second sensation that she hadn’t experienced in a long time, a tentative rekindling of a sense that she’d thought she’d never feel again. Just for the merest moment, Caroline realised as she slipped the camera away and started for home, she had felt something very close to satisfaction.

Kate Morton, London, 2017

Note: I took the photograph at the top of this story in the village of East Leach, one of my very favourite places. The narrow River Leach, which runs right by the church, is a tributary of the Thames and I love to stand on its pristine banks, watching the clear water rush over reeds on its way to join the great river and her flow towards London. The photograph below is of the upper Thames herself, just west of Lechlade, and not far from the bend where I imagined Birchwood Manor.

Fiction: Caroline’s Story; or, Secrets from the Walls of Birchwood Manor2021-02-06T02:45:47+00:00

Memoir: The Threads of Time

I wrote an essay to accompany The Clockmaker’s Daughter that appeared in special editions in the US and UK and which I have intended to share here ever since. It is called “The Threads of Time” and although it started out as an article about themes in the novel (notably my longstanding fascination with time and timelessness), it turned rather quickly into a more intimate piece about family–my own in particular; childhood; the stories we tell; and the way we can feel homesickness, not for a place, but for a time that can never be revisited, except in memory. The essay is also about my mother, to whom The Clockmaker’s Daughter is dedicated, and without whose influence I would be missing a number of the threads that weave together to make me who I am as a person and as a writer.

If you prefer to listen, rather than to read, you can do so here:

The Threads of Time

The Clockmaker’s Daughter is a novel about time and timelessness, a subject of endless fascination to me, kick-started, I suspect, as so many lifelong interests are, by the circumstances of my childhood. When I was eight years old, my mother began working part-time for an antique dealer, going on to open her own shop in the front room of our house on Tamborine Mountain, in the bend of Long Road nearest the roundabout. I remember vividly the first significant sale at Memory Lane Antiques—a cedar wardrobe—and the ensuing excitement, which included a rare and thrilling impromptu family dinner at the local French restaurant.

My mum, Didee, has an artist’s eye. She studied fine arts at night school and her Girls’ Own annuals on the bookcase in my grandmother’s spare room had margins filled with a dreamy teenager’s crosshatched ink sketches; my mum sees patterns and possibilities everywhere and has a storyteller’s gift for narrative. And so the items in her shop were never simply displayed; they were arranged like props on a stage set, as if awaiting their former owners to materialise and take up residence.

I used to love drifting through the rooms that made up Memory Lane when Mum took a break and left me in charge, particularly on wet weekends when the world outside was dark and stormy, and subtropical rain pelted on our tin roof. I would pause at a dressing table to turn over hairbrushes and picture frames and lace collars, and lift the delicate silver lid from a tiny crystal bonbonnière, wondering at the cherished items that had once been kept inside, wondering at what had caused the dent in the fine metal rim. At times Mum had a gramophone in stock and a rickety old tune would quiver up the bell-shaped horn, voices and sound broadcasting from another time and place. There is little as transporting as music.

I spent countless dawn mornings at flea markets, weaving between rows of parked vans and canvas tents on school ovals and in the tarmac car parks of shopping centres, seeking pre-loved treasures for which I could exchange the sweaty coins held tight within my fist. During the school summer holidays Mum would take us with her to scour the dark and dusty secondhand shops dotted around the southern hem of Brisbane, and I can still remember their identical smell, of dust and mould and age and secrets, and the back corner of each one where books with old cardboard bindings and the names of other children inside were stacked. Sometimes we were invited into a stranger’s house to view an unwanted object that they’d advertised for sale, or to deliver a chest of drawers or a desk or a velvet armchair. I was always curious about these brief forays into other worlds. Incursions through the back of the wardrobe.

Sometimes the journey to the shadow world lasted longer. On two occasions that I can remember, responsibility fell to my mother for the complete disposal of a deceased person’s estate. Philip Larkin writes that a home is a sad thing that ‘stays as it was left’ when its owners shut the door. Pity then the house whose owner has left it for good, whose rooms still heave with the possessions of a lifetime, some precious, others perfunctory. In my garden shed, alongside the boxes of university research papers and old school photos, there is a vintage Arnott’s biscuit tin containing letters from a bedside-table drawer in a house at North Tamborine that once belonged to a woman I had never met. I kept them when I was a teenager: not to read, but because they had been singled out and saved, and although they were no longer wanted or needed, I couldn’t bear to consign them to the rubbish heap with the half-finished pots of lavender talcum powder and expired medications. I have moved house many times over the decades, and spring-cleaned and divested, but those letters are with me still because it seems I made a promise all those years ago that I would be their new protector.

There was a house in Brisbane I particularly remember: a grander, more beautiful house, its internal walls inlaid with polished wooden panels, its rooms filled with large pieces of furniture that loomed in the half-light where thick curtains had been drawn against the beating sun. There was an enormous wardrobe in the master bedroom, with fancy scallops along the top, in which vintage dresses hung deathly still, and behind them in the dark, fox coats lurked. I remember the surprising coldness of the fur, the satin lining of the sleeve against my skin when I slipped one arm inside. What an affecting experience it was, checking through the limp pockets, preparing each item for sale, rescuing pen lids and ticket stubs and buttons that had come loose; collating the effects of a single human life, now ended. I can still recall the smell of that wardrobe – always the same smell in those houses: of abandonment, I think, and sadness.

So then, I cannot remember a period in my life when I was not vividly aware of the passage of time: the temporariness of each human’s life, the fleeting nature of experience and the profound melancholy inherent in the accumulation of personal possessions. Even aside from my mum’s collecting, I was simply that way inclined. I remember visiting my grandmother’s postwar house on the slopes of Stafford during the swelter of the summer holidays, when time lost any pretence of shape and the days blended one into the next; I would sit hot and cross-legged on the cold concrete floor of the outdoor laundry, wondering at the mysterious mangle and the old-fashioned tubs, watching the light sift and fall between the wooden slats of the tropical outhouse, peering through to Under-the-House where were stacked the mountain of possessions that had once belonged to my mother’s father – never “my grandfather”, for Hughie had died young, when my mum was just a girl, and I didn’t think of him as old or as mine. He was hers, and her stories of him shifted in my mind, as they still do now, when I sat on my nana’s laundry floor: his pride in my mum for studying her senior certificate at night school; his anger the day he opened the fridge door and saw that one of his daughters had stripped his prized crab claws of meat; his patience in the evenings when they brushed and tried to plait his hair.

I thought, too, with deep solemnity, of the other story Mum had told. About the last camping trip her dad took, an annual family holiday to Kingscliff that she’d missed that year because she was sixteen and had recently left school to start work. It was a Wednesday and her boss at the Brisbane City Council had lumbered over to the side of her desk in a cloud of smoke and told her that there’d been a telephone call from her grandmother and she was to leave the office and go home to her at once. Mum had stayed with her grandmother the night before, because word had come from Kingscliff that her dad had taken a turn. There was no need to worry, though—her mother’s voice had reassured her down the phone line—he was expected to be fine. Mum did not speak often of that day, and yet I could picture the scene with perfect clarity: the way she’d known even as the instruction was handed down that the hinge of her life had come loose; the way she’d grabbed her handbag and skittered along the street towards the bus stop—thin teenage legs, new work shoes—as untethered as the fallen autumn leaves that rushed down Ann Street to overtake her; the way she’d arrived at her nana’s brick unit block in New Farm and run up the stairs two at a time to find the door open and her aunt waiting, tears falling, arms out wide, to wrap her in a smothering embrace and tell her what she already knew: that her father was not fine at all.

These imprints from another time, events that had happened to the people I knew now, but long before I knew them, fascinated me. They trailed invisible threads that tied me to the past and a grandfather I would never meet, but who lived vividly within scenes inside my head. Now I am a grown-up, my mind filled with decades of memories, and I have three beautiful boys of my own who beg for stories from when I was their age. And I can see it in their faces when I spin the tale, yet again, of my great bike accident: the one where I disobeyed my mother, wore no shoes or helmet, and flew down the steepest hill until I got the speed wobbles and came over the handlebars and broke my teeth; or of the long summer days we spent at the local pool, playing underwater until our eyes stung and our hair was stiff with chlorine; or of the creek deep in the rainforest behind our house where we would sneak away on hot days and swim in our underwear and fish for tadpoles to sell by the roadside; that they, too, are time travelling. As am I, for enough time has passed that when I tell these stories I smell the red volcanic soil and feel the vicious subtropical sun on my face and hear the echo of whip birds in the towering canopy, and I feel a swirling homesickness that will not settle. Homesickness, not for a place, but for a time that can never be revisited, except in memory.

My middle boy, now ten years old and one of my keenest story-demanders, looks a lot like my mum’s dad. We don’t have many photographs of Hughie, but there’s one in black-and-white, taken by a Brisbane studio photographer in the 1950s who had set up on the street and pointed his camera at likely subjects as they strolled unknowingly towards him. Hughie is wearing a smart suit and a trilby hat, and the image catches him mid-smile so that he carries with him the effortless air of a film actor. My son has dark hair and dark eyes, too, and a deep-dimpled chin and a hot temper balanced by a kind-hearted charm that draws people to him like honey. Hughie also had a temper, I remember now, for there was another family story, about the time when, as a boy, incensed by a sibling disagreement, he threw scissors at his sister and incurred the startled wrath of his parents. I think of the times that I have had to soothe the fury of my own red-cheeked, black-eyed child, who although not a thrower of scissors is ruled by such vivid passions—joy and delight and empathy and indignation and righteousness—that I envy him his undiluted experience of the world.

And so, time passes and gathers and concertinas and repeats. It loops back upon itself so that people from long ago appear in the dreams of people now; they lurk dormant in one set of genes after another only to stage a reappearance down the line. We are all time travellers, carrying with us from the past the experiences that shaped us. Decades ago, my sisters and I—and my husband, too, who joined our family when I was eighteen and might as well therefore be one of us—all agreed that my mum’s particular strain of girlishness, her high spirits and naughtiness and willingness to weep with laughter over silly things, her sensitivity to a child’s hurt, and propensity when we were kids to suffer personally the slings and slights of the schoolyard that we reported each afternoon, were all traits due to having lost her dad so young. It was as if the trauma of that day in 1967, a grief so deep and shocking, had arrested part of her in time, locking the essence of her sixteen-year-old self in amber so that no matter how many years went by she remained, in some essential way, that teenage girl being blown along Ann Street that Wednesday morning towards her aunt’s embrace.

Didee had a spinning wheel when I was very small, back in the seventies when people made their own clothing from scratch and natural fibres, and I regarded it then, as I still do now, an object of strange enchantment. It was built of dark-stained wood and sat in the corner of the loft, where a high-set window cast a spotlight that lifted it from shadow once a day. I liked the rhythm that it made as the foot pedal was pumped and the great wheel turned, and can remember watching as a mass of wool was refined into a skein of long thread, wound into a ball for future use.

It seems to me that there is an old spinning wheel inside each of us, an industrious woman at its helm who takes the raw wool of experience and spins it blindly into strands of thread. At least, that’s what I imagine. Some of the threads are smooth, while others remain knotty no matter how many times they’re worked over; some gleam, some don’t. My childhood on Tamborine Mountain, my family and their stories, the houses where I’ve lived: these are my threads, and they knit together to make up the tapestry of my life; but it is from my mother, I think, my first example in so many things, that most of my early influences were drawn. She modelled optimism: not in a simplistic Pollyanna sense, but as a daily choice to see light in the dark, and an inherent economy— a thrill almost—in rescuing discarded items, of never throwing anything away if a use could be found for it, giving each object a new lease of life.

I remember going with her to the local dump—that place on the edge of the mountain, a clearing in the rainforest, where people backed up their trailers on weekend afternoons and tossed unwanted items (a form of environmental vandalism that now seems alien)—and hunting through the piles of broken furniture for things that could be saved. These were habits learned from her own mother before her, a child of the Depression who made and mended and never discarded a scrap of food. I am yet to meet a person of greater industry or creativity than my mum: she launched a grocery delivery service for holiday-makers on the Gold Coast long before online shopping existed; her restoration of a dilapidated church led to an extraordinary wedding business; she painted and gardened and renovated and sewed and made things of beauty from nothing and never waited for permission to get started; time and again, she demonstrated that “good luck” is often the result of brave choices and hard work.

It was from Didee that I caught my enduring love of books and words and stories. She taught me how to read, lifting the veil on the miraculous alchemical process by which black marks transformed in combination to create meaning and magic; she took us to the public library at Eagle Heights each week and demonstrated the sort of unrestrained, insatiable appetite for books that all true readers recognise as the real point of life, and it was she who gave me my first edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, The Enchanted Wood, Alice in Wonderland, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and, perhaps most cherished, The Secret Garden in its deep blue hardcover binding, with a ribbon for a bookmark and illustrated plates and her inscription in the front so that even now I can run my fingertips along the impressions made by her pen and read: To Katy on her seventh birthday, Love Mummy and Daddy, 1983.

My mother also gave me the best piece of writing advice that I have ever received: it wasn’t conferred beneath the banner of ‘advice’, because that’s not the kind of person she is. Though clever and wise—for of course they are different things—she is modest, too. What she told me was simply a musing shared between booklovers, a snippet from a conversation like many others that took place in the blue kitchen of our house on Tamborine. We were discussing evoking sense of place through description, and Mum was arguing for the power of a single specific detail over pages of generalities. She said: Show me the fly trapped beneath the plastic wrap on a tray of sandwiches within a glass counter, and you’ve shown me the whole cafeteria. And although I could never be accused of writing lean, spare novels where nary a word is wasted, that conversation in the kitchen at Yooroona threaded its way into my memory and I think often of that fly, because Mum was right: at its mere mention, I can see and hear and smell the entire restaurant it called home.

The Clockmaker’s Daughter is not about my mother. I wrote it whilst living on the other side of the world, and we rarely discussed it as a work in progress; but it is dedicated to Didee because I see now that she is a part of its weave just as surely as she is a part of mine. Truth, beauty, light in the dark, time, family, home: these are the threads that she gave me to work with, both as a person and as a writer of books. I am an antique dealer’s daughter, I am Didee’s daughter, and I know without doubt that this book would not exist without her.

Kate Morton, London, 2018

Memoir: The Threads of Time2023-03-14T21:39:58+00:00

Memoir: Christmas on The Mountain

Late last year I wrote a piece about Christmas that was published in various places around the world. I haven’t written much about my real life and I was surprised when I was asked to do so, but I loved the experience. It was a pleasure to conjure a long-ago evening back to life and to sit again for a while with my Nana Connelly. I think a lot about time (as you might have guessed from my books) and writing this article was a form of time travel for me. It was also a way of pausing and reflecting and being grateful for the many small instances that make up our lives and that often pass by unnoticed at the time. As Ferris says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

If you prefer to listen, rather than to read, you can do so here:

Christmas on the Mountain

I have always loved Christmas. In our family, when I was growing up, it was the pinnacle of the year: the fragile wooden decorations were taken with care from their storage box each December, along with the dried-macaroni masterpieces my sisters and I had made in the past, and strung upon the tree – sometimes a live potted pine that would later be planted in our garden, at other times a particularly beautiful branch that had fallen from a nearby gum and been sprayed with gold or silver paint. I adored it all: the seasonal reverence for beloved and beautiful objects, the unusual and particular cooking smells coming from the kitchen, the fairy lights and candles and music.

At school, we sat in stifling hot-box classrooms, ceiling fans stirring the thick air as we sang songs about robin redbreasts and snow-covered fields, and a little baby in a manger in a faraway place with a magical name. At home, we crowded around the big oak table that had once belonged to my father’s grandmother, Nana Martinson, and pushed cloves into oranges, making pomanders to give to our teachers on break-up day.

Home was an old wooden house called ‘Yooroona’, which sat in the middle of a large garden, in a mountaintop village in the rainforest of south-east Queensland. The garden was overgrown when we moved in, with corpses of abandoned cars hidden in a jungle of towering grasses and giant-leafed creepers, and a big tin shed hunkering in the bottom corner. The previous owner had built a boat inside that shed and set sail across the Pacific after selling the house to us. Dad slashed the grass and Mum had the shed clad in chamfer boards and reborn as an antique shop.

Every year, when the Christmas holidays began, we would make the steep drive down the mountain, across ‘smelly-brake-bridge’ and along the Pacific Highway towards Brisbane. There, we would visit our grandparents – Nan and Pop Morton at Everton Hills, and Nana Connelly on the slopes of nearby Stafford – before venturing into The City to stare in wonder at the window displays of David Jones: elaborate mechanical scenes depicting Santa’s workshop, elves and reindeer amidst giant red balls and baubles. ‘But how did they know it was my birthday?’ my little December-born sister asked one year, as she gazed, wide-eyed, at the decorations.

For as long as I can remember, we had our special dinner at night time on Christmas Eve, because it was cooler then, and because the festive candles made more sense in the darkness than they did when the sun was blazing. Mum cooked, and we all helped to decorate, laying Nana Martinson’s table and lining it with flowers and foliage from the garden. Our extended family always made the snaking drive up the narrow mountain road, a tradition that continued as the years passed, until eventually my husband and I were amongst those travelling up the mountain from Brisbane, too.

The year that I am thinking of now, 2002, was particularly hot, and we had Christmas Eve dinner with the doors and windows wide open in the hopes that we might catch a breeze. A storm was expected and the air was dense and sultry. Ivy tendrils were tangled together down the spine of the table, oranges and candles interspersed amongst the glistening leaves, and gardenias floated creamily in shallow cut-glass bowls. The room was heady with the scent of night-blooming jasmine, a fragrance marked so indelibly in my Christmas memories that I experience a strange, disjointed nostalgia if I ever smell it mid-year in the northern hemisphere.

Perhaps it was the heat that night, or the flickering candlelight, or the Duke Ellington Christmas album on the stereo, but Nana Connelly, who was 86 at the time, said yes to a second glass of champagne. And, as conversation shifted, darting and eddying the way it does when large families get together at festive times, her gentle voice joined the flow. ‘Those are pretty shoes, Katy,’ she said to me. ‘I had some just like them when I was about your age. My father had forbidden me from buying high-heeled shoes, but I bought the highest pair in the shop anyway and wore them dancing.’

Nana Connelly was a small, pretty woman, who wore neat sensible dresses and had her hair set into curls that sat short but soft around her face. Her blue eyes were as light and clear as a child’s and her skin, which never saw the harsh Queensland sun, was pale. My sisters and I used to stay with her sometimes in the school holidays when we were younger, and it was she who introduced us to the delights of Sarsaparilla and Creaming Soda, and riding on the city council bus, and the collection of Girls’ Own annuals that had belonged to my mum and her sisters when they were our age. But in all that time she never spoke about herself. She limited conversation instead to questions about us: what were we doing, did we enjoy school, who were our friends?

That Christmas Eve, though, as the table fell silent around Nana’s interjection, rather than stop, she continued: ‘One night, during the war, before I was married, my girlfriend and I went out to the cinema, and on the walk back home to Spring Hill we came across a footpath party. The American soldiers had just arrived in Brisbane and they were dashing.’ Her eyes dappled with memories as she spoke: ‘Their uniforms were brighter than ours, their teeth were whiter, and the things they said! Those accents made everything sound more daring.’ As she continued to speak, her words conjured a vision in that Christmas-scented room, of young people from long-ago, enjoying an evening of merriment on a warm Brisbane night, while the world beyond them was at war.

Conversation moved on eventually, and Nana returned to her usual role of listener. Night frayed towards midnight, my husband played piano and we all talked at once, and laughed, and the candles burned low so that red wax pooled on the table and set around the little totems of cherry stones, the debris of a happy family dinner; but I glanced sometimes at Nana. Her demure smile was back in place, but behind it now I saw that young woman with new shoes on her feet and a dashing soldier on her arm, caught up in a swirl of music and chatter and heat, her unknown future – including all of us – stretching ahead of her.

Nana died five days later, back in Brisbane, sitting on the sofa beside one of her beloved grandchildren. She slipped away quietly; self-contained to the very end; and with her went her trove of thoughts and memories. I am grateful for that Christmas Eve and the urge that came upon her to share one of them with us. I am glad, too, that I went to sit beside her that night and whispered my own secret, a few weeks sooner than I’d planned. She’d taken my hand and squeezed it, and in her smile of pleasure I’d glimpsed satisfaction; acceptance, I think, that the threads of time were continuing to unfurl into a future that would outlast her own.

My baby was born the following July, and he spent his first Christmas on the floor of the house on Tamborine Mountain, surrounded by his family. On the sideboard above him was a recent photo of Nana, smiling at my wedding, a corsage of sweetpeas pinned to her jewel blue dress. Beside it, stood an older photo in black and white, Nana and the handsome husband she would lose too soon, taken in front of their house in Stafford when it was new. Propped nearby was an 80s snapshot of my sisters and me, and in front of it a recent photo of my baby son.

This year that baby is 15, with two younger brothers, and visions of a future that extends beyond our family home. I hope that he will always come back to us at Christmas; that he will relish his independence, but embrace the value of continuity and the importance of family. Christmas, by its nature, is an occasion of nostalgia and memory, of tradition and repetition, when the layers of time can be glimpsed more easily. And, while the decorations and the food and the music are wonderful, it is the coming together of loved ones, bringing with them the ghosts of Christmases past and the dreams of those yet to come, that really matters.

Kate Morton, London, 2018

* The illustration at the top of this article is by the very talented Tom Jellett and was drawn to accompany the article when it was published by The Australian newspaper on 22-23 December, 2018. What a privilege to have one of my memories brought to life in such a vivid way! This story was also published in The Telegraph, UK, on 21 December, 2018.

Nana Connelly and friend, photographed in Brisbane around the time of the footpath dance

Memoir: Christmas on The Mountain2020-02-17T17:07:39+00:00

Essay: The Great, Dusty Trunk; or, Ideas Behind The Forgotten Garden

I wrote this essay on the ten year anniversary of The Forgotten Garden’s publication. It seemed almost impossible to me that ten whole years had passed since Cassandra, Nell and Eliza first left my imagination for yours; and yet, at the same time, it felt like an age since I had been that young writer, living in a little wooden worker’s cottage cut into a steep slope in the shadow of the Paddington Antique Centre, just getting started on a manuscript about foundlings and fairy tales that I was still then calling ‘The Authoress’. To mark the anniversary – and because people often ask about the ideas and inspirations behind the story – I decided to slip back across time to remember, and then write about, The Great Dusty Trunk and the pieces of silver that came together to begin The Forgotten Garden.

The Great, Dusty Trunk; or, Ideas Behind The Forgotten Garden

A book is never one idea: it is thousands of tiny idea-fragments, carefully selected and polished, that fit together mosaic-like to form a complete picture. I am a collector of such fragments and inside my mind there sits a great, dusty trunk – wooden and antique, I like to think – into which they are dropped over days, months and years, jumbling together until such time as they are needed. Some are images – snippets that I have glimpsed or gleaned; others are snatched pieces of overheard conversation, facts that I’ve read, issues that I’ve wondered about and puzzled over, and observations of the people whom I’ve met.

When I am ready to start work on a new novel, I open the lid of that trunk, picking up and turning over the items in hopes of discovering hidden treasures. Some have faded while I’ve been gone; others have become sharper, brighter. I have learned, however, that it is never one fragment alone – no matter how shiny it might be – that forms the basis for a story. Three or four small ideas must somehow fit together in that particular moment – timing is key in this curious process of alchemy – to form a kernel: a picture that gives me enough sense of a story to know that I can build an entire novel around it. The illumination when that happens is one of the most euphoric experiences in the entire, long, winding, maddening, exhilarating book-writing process. It is like cracking open the door in a dark room and seeing a strip of blinding light; it is hope and promise and anticipation and nervousness and yearning all rolled into one; it is what writers mean when they use words like ‘magic’ and ‘meant-to-be’.

The Forgotten Garden was born, in part, from two images that haunted me. My husband’s family migrated from Sweden to Australia in the early years of the twentieth century, and my mother-in-law – a keen family historian – often told us stories of their sea voyage. They were moving to start a new life on the other side of the world, with little in their suitcases beyond hope for the future and a change of clothing. There were seven children in the family, left to their own devices for much of the time because their mother was busy below deck with her infant son. As the ship crossed the equator, one of the four-year-old twins died from sunstroke.

No matter how many times I heard this story, I could not get the image out of my mind of seven Swedish children transplanted from their homeland onto a blindingly sun-drenched deck; the gleam of the ocean and the taste of salt spray in the air; their cotton dresses and flaxen hair. The longer I nurtured this picture, the more my imagination edited and embroidered, until the focus narrowed and I saw only one little girl twirling along the deck; somehow the deck became a wharf and the little girl obtained a white suitcase, which she was sitting atop, all alone, as night began to fall. Who was she, I wondered, and how did she come to find herself alone on the other side of the world from where she belonged. What would happen to her if no one came looking?

The second image that presented itself when I was dreaming up The Forgotten Garden, was that of a woman hurrying along a narrow, cobbled lane. Again, this was a picture that I’d been carrying for many years. I knew that it was London in the early twentieth century; I could see only the hem of the woman’s heavy skirts, but I could hear the rustling of fabric and the clip of her heels hitting the stones as she hurried along. There were other sounds, too, of the river and its docks – seagulls and sailors – and the air smelled like brine and ropes and commerce. The scene had a sense of urgency and the woman a great seriousness of purpose: I was eager to glean who she was and where she was going in such a hurry. I had known that when I figured out the answers to such questions I would be able to write the stories to which these two characters – the little lost girl and the hurrying woman – belonged. But it was a great surprise, when I finally realised who they were and what they were doing, to find that they belonged together in the same book.

The third idea-fragment that combined to form the kernel of The Forgotten Garden came from a story in my own family’s history. But unlike the long-held images of the little girl and the hurrying woman, I had only recently learned my grandmother’s secret. When she turned twenty-one, my nana’s beloved father told her that she wasn’t his biological child. I don’t know whether he anticipated the impact that this news would have on her, but for Nana it was a ground-shifting event. No matter that her father loved her just the same as he had always done; that he considered her as much his own as he did his biological daughters; things had changed. Nana’s reaction wasn’t dramatic, but in some essential way she felt herself to be different from the person she had been before; her place in the world to be less sturdy. For decades she told nobody else, keeping the truth about her parentage concealed from her friends and sisters until she was in her eighties and decided, finally, to tell her own three daughters.

I am interested in identity and aware of the fragile nature of our human sense of self: even the strongest person is vulnerable in the right – or wrong – circumstances to a crisis of confidence. In The Forgotten Garden, Nell receives similar news to my grandmother. In Nell’s case, however, discovering that she was a foundling shatters her identity completely. She loses her sense of belonging anywhere or to anyone. She withdraws from her family and friends, breaks off an engagement to her childhood sweetheart, and spends the rest of her life on a quest to discover her true identity. The character of Nell was vivid to me immediately; I knew her and loved her and felt certain that I had to tell her story.

When those three fragments locked together, the kernel of ideas that would become The Forgotten Garden was illuminated and impossible for me to ignore. There is a feeling of inevitability at this stage of the writing project, a sense of rightness: I am no longer dealing with characters, rather people; I am not inventing so much as learning. Every day spent in their company brings them more vividly to life and I begin to discover unexpected and exciting things as their stories unfurl. But characters need a setting and, as anybody who has read my books will know, sense of place is of great importance to me. As a writer, but as a person, too, I am inspired by the environment – both built and natural – and consider the setting of my books every bit as much a character as the people.

It took me a while to find an English location for The Forgotten Garden: I knew it had to be coastal and I wanted a history of smuggling in order to feed into the overarching fairy-tale atmosphere that I wished to create. I auditioned a number of stretches of coastline before coming, by chance, across mention of a place called The Lost Gardens of Heligan. Heligan, I discovered, was a grand country estate in Cornwall, owned for many centuries by the aristocratic Tremayne family. Along with the house and farms, the Heligan estate was also home to the most wondrous formal gardens. Generations of green thumbs had scoured the globe bringing back samples of the world’s varied vegetation, and a team of thirteen gardeners was in charge of maintaining the Antipodean garden, the Italian garden, and the African garden, to name but a few. In 1914, however, when World War I broke out, the entire gardening staff enlisted and none returned. The Tremayne family moved away, the garden grew over, and people forgot. It wasn’t until late in the twentieth century that the estate of Heligan was rediscovered and restored to its former glory, and eventually opened to the public. The idea of a once-beautiful, much-loved garden that time had forgotten was irresistible to me. My story had not only found its location, it had also acquired a forgotten garden – and a new title.

Along with having the pleasure of bringing Cornwall to life – the strange enchantment of the place a perfect fit for my story of fairy-tales and fishermen – I used my home location in The Forgotten Garden. Nell’s old timber worker’s cottage in the hills of Paddington is the very house in which I lived with my family while I was writing the book, and the Antique Centre where Nell and Cassandra have their stall is a real place, hunkered down on the hill directly behind my home. In 2007, when I was writing The Forgotten Garden, my eldest son – almost fifteen now, with two younger brothers – was four years old and an only child, and my mother used to come from Tamborine Mountain to visit us each week. We three would make our way up the steep Brisbane hill together for lunch at the Antique Centre café, followed by a wander amidst its crammed and crowded stalls.

Memories of this time in my life are inextricably linked to the former theatre with its trove of treasures, in the same way that they are tied to the people of The Forgotten Garden, in whose footsteps I spent so much time walking and in whose lives I invested so much of my own. It was a joy weaving a location I’m so familiar with, and for which I bear such great fondness, into my story, and it’s an enormous thrill to know that so many people who may never make it to my little pocket of Brisbane, Australia, have the opportunity to sample a small slice of it: to climb with Cassandra into the mango tree in Nell’s backyard, to hear the magpies’ calls getting stuck in their throats, and feel the heat of the day making everything sag with delicious time-slowing predictability.

Because of course the idea trunk in my mind contains my own memories and experiences, too: I have been that child, sitting in a tree while my mother and grandmother drink tea inside the cool dim house, as the sounds of garden – insects burring, birds singing, the concrete path expanding in the sun – cast their soporific spell and the day draws out and grows wings that enfold me. The mango tree that Cassandra climbs was in the back corner of my own nana’s Stafford garden when I was small – the same nana whose life was tilted by her father’s revelation when she was young. It is a tiny fragment of childhood memory, unimportant in my life’s scheme, and yet pressed and preserved until such time as it was needed.

Weaving such personal memories into stories is one of the quietly pleasing aspects of being a writer. Writing is about communicating, and storytelling in particular depends upon the transfer of something real so that each reader becomes as much a participant in the events – and the emotional experiences – of the book as the author and characters. Every time a reader tells me that she loved The Forgotten Garden, I know that we have connected: the story, the cast of characters, the cottage on the edge of a Cornish cliff – all vital and real to me – have made the extraordinary (and yet completely ordinary) leap across time and place to become real in her mind, too. Such connection lies at the heart of storytelling; it is the most wondrous part of the process; it is the point. I am grateful to every single person who opens The Forgotten Garden, lets the sea air surround them, and brings Cassandra, Nell, Eliza and their world back to life.

Kate Morton, London, 2018

Essay: The Great, Dusty Trunk; or, Ideas Behind The Forgotten Garden2020-02-07T19:14:15+00:00

Essay: Introduction to the Ten Year Anniversary edition of Riverton

In 2017, ten years after The House at Riverton was first published in the UK, Pan Macmillan decided to issue a special Tenth Anniversary Edition with a celebratory jacket and a new introduction from me. The House at Riverton (known in Australia as The Shifting Fog) was my first published novel. It was written with very little expectation of publication and certainly with no thought that it would go on to become one of the most successful debut novels in UK history or to sell millions of copies worldwide. I’ve learned a lot about creativity since then (not to mention about writing, publishing, and life itself!); I’ve also had the great good fortune to meet and speak with readers from all over the world; and so, it was extremely satisfying to have the opportunity here to put down some thoughts about writing, reading, and the relationship between the two.

Ten Years; or, Time Capsules, Tapestries and the Art of Learning to Let Go

June 2017 will mark ten years since my first book, The House at Riverton, was published. I’d already finished two manuscripts when I began writing it, but The House at Riverton felt different from the start. I’d given up on publication by then and wrote with no expectations, ignoring questions of genre and markets. I also wrote with a small baby – my first – on my hip. Literally, at times. I wrote for the love of storytelling and wordplay, and the joy of escaping into my own imaginary world.

I’ve learned over the past decade that novels are time capsules of their author’s life. They can’t help but be, for writing is one of the ways in which an author processes the world. It used to trouble me, this idea that a book would be different depending on the year in which it was written. Books are such solid, certain things, with firm covers and printed text and bold, clear titles. They can be quoted from, their pages referenced. They have authority and certainty and fixity. But stories are none of these things. They’re living creatures, with organic, shifting forms. They shimmer in the light and then disappear just as quickly into darkness; they evade capture like fish in a deep, cool stream.

This mutability disturbed me at first. As a reader, I was accustomed to devouring finished novels, and now, finding myself in the Middle of Things, able to choose what happened next and to whom, to decide how an event was described, or whether perhaps it was better that it happened off stage, was liberating. But it was also disquieting. If something I saw while I was wandering through the Paddington Antiques Centre with my mum triggered a thought that gave me an idea for something my character might say in the scene I was writing, I felt glad. But I was also vaguely suspicious. It all seemed so arbitrary. How could I trust that the idea I’d had that day was the right one? What if it wasn’t? What if I’d have had a different – better – idea had I spent the day at home instead? What if I accidentally followed the wrong tangent and took my story in a direction contrary to The One it was meant to follow?

I now know that there’s no such thing as The One. At least, there’s no way of knowing what form The One will take until the published book returns from the printer, a fait accompli. A story is made up of thousands of small ideas – threads that weave together to form the whole – and the tapestry is assembled over a very long period of time. Every image, every spark, every fragmentary concept, filters through the author’s mind, finding expression in the words available to her on a particular day. A writer can plan, of course, but there’s as little hope of anticipating the precise shape a novel will take as there is of predicting the future. Each day’s writing is dependent on conditions in the writer’s life, and life leaves its mark on us all. The author who finishes a book is a different author from the one who started it months or years before.

Oh, how I love that idea now! There’s so much possibility when the ending isn’t written. And no matter how much planning a writer does, the execution can’t help but throw up multiple opportunities. (Complications, too, it must be said.) Ideas are everywhere and they can be spun into useful threads and woven into one’s story whenever and wherever they’re found. There’s truth in that sort of creative process, and vitality and uniqueness – for we are all individuals, with lives and thoughts and influences that combine to make us who we are. A story, then, is like the person who wrote it: varied, problematic, complex, mobile, alive. The tale that is trapped in printer’s text and bound between covers is simply the most recent version of the story at the moment the deadline was called. Rather than moving on with the author, the story becomes a book and is fixed in time.

The House at Riverton, like all of my books, reverberates with the many things I loved and felt and saw and thought and heard while I was writing it. Some ideas were new to me and others I’d carried for years. Looking back at it now is, for me, a bit like watching a home movie I’ve only recently rediscovered, or leafing through an old photo album, or listening to a favourite mix-tape from a long time ago. I see the scenes for what appears on their surface – the story of the Hartford sisters and Grace, the passing of a particular time in English history, the elegant and inevitable decline of Riverton Manor – but I see other, deeper layers, too. Shadow imprints that cast me back precisely to the place I was in, and the person I was, when they first came into my mind.

When I read the name ‘Riverton’ in the pages of my novel, for instance, I am here in the present but I am simultaneously sitting on my bed thirteen years ago with a notepad on my lap, scribbling ideas for a yet unwritten story. I’ve taken a brief break. My baby son is asleep in the room across the hallway of our tiny wooden workers’ cottage in Paddington, and I dial the number of the Queensland Government ‘Riverton’ Child Health Service to ask for advice on when he should be feeding, sleeping, burping. As I speak to the stranger at the other end of the line, as her kind voice tells me I’m doing a good job, that everything will be all right, that my little boy is fine, I think about this wonderful place, this ‘Riverton’, from where advice is dispensed, and I imagine it a beautiful country residence in the middle of serene green grounds; a place where kind women are waiting near antique telephones, ready to allay the fears of nervous new parents. Riverton. I scribble the word in my notebook as we speak and absently sketch a pattern around it. Afterwards, when the call is over and I’ve returned to planning my story, I’ll see the doodle and remember my vision of the place, and know, in a very inauspicious, matter-of-fact way, that the English manor where my characters live will share this lovely name. (Never mind that the Child Health Centre later revealed itself to be a 1970s-era brick office block two suburbs from where I lived.)

If, today, I read a passage in which elderly Grace is treated as if she’s invisible, I am cast back to the morning I watched my grandmother make a purchase from the supermarket near her flat on the northern outskirts of Brisbane. I see the roast chicken she’s bought for our lunch and the stick of butter and the loaf of bread. I see my nana’s enigmatic smile – shy and ladylike, a smile from another era – as she waits with her hand outstretched, her palm ready to receive her change. The purchase isn’t large, but to feed her visiting family is an extravagance for Nana. This day is an occasion. I notice how neatly her lipstick is applied and the way the pearly fabric of her good dress glistens. I see how short she’s become and note the uncomfortable shoes, tight around the toes, which she’ll put away in a cardboard box when we get home. And I still feel a cold whip of quiet rage as the girl behind the checkout flicks the coins across the counter without so much as a glance in my nana’s direction.

When I open the chapter named ‘Waiting for the Recital’ and read about the Hartford children and their Game, I am immediately back in Rosalie Village, in the warm subtropical dusk, walking with my husband on the way to dinner. The horizon hangs before us in pleats of deep mauve and orange, and my mother is at home with our baby boy. It is a rare night out and we’re both looking forward to it. I feel lightened by anticipation. We’re crossing the driveway between the ice-cream shop and an Italian restaurant when the solution to a problem I’ve been worrying at for weeks comes suddenly to mind. I’ve been seeking something to bring the children in my story to life, to bind them together, to convey the secret language that all siblings share. I’ve been thinking, too, about my own childhood – I do that a lot, since becoming a parent myself – and the way my sisters and I seemed to have such long, clear days to play and invent; how jealously we’d guarded the secrets of our childhood world from the adults who moved above us. And suddenly, The Game comes fully formed and with it, a crucial insight into the relationship between the three Hartford children that had heretofore been missing. Picturing the three of them, my thoughts latch onto the concept of a three-sided shape, its strength, and at once I am at a desk on Tamborine Mountain, hunched over a high school textbook as my engineer father explains the mathematical properties of the triangle, how important it is to bridge-builders, how vulnerable to collapse if one side should weaken and fall. And so, two ideas at once.

Reading now about my fictional sisters, Hannah and Emmeline, and their proud, well-meaning father, their family stretching back across generations, I am also in a coffee shop on Latrobe Terrace, a concrete car-park in front of me, and my newborn baby in his shiny pram beside me. I’m still learning how to be a mother, how to fill the long days without university and work. I see my baby in his pram, my tiny blue-eyed son (who’s now a teenager, with long skinny legs and a jaw that’s becoming more like a man’s than a boy’s), and I see the notebook spread out on the table in front of me, the family tree I’m sketching, the ideas that come as I scribble, these made-up people who are real to me, and who provide company during the long, strange days. I am one of three sisters, as is my mother; her mother before her was one of seven. I am eager to write about the sibling relationship and I want to write about women. An aspect of my nana’s biography provides the vital plot twist in the story, a narrative turn that underlines its feminine focus and is all the more unexpected for it. She has died since I started writing, my quiet, unassuming nana, and to weave in one of her special talents, a skill that made her modestly proud, pleases me enormously.

Each scene, each page, each thought within the book could tell a similar story. I don’t remember them all. Some inspiration is fleeting. Some ideas barely leave a trace. Nevertheless, the fact remains: the finished book is a time capsule. It is a tapestry of particular threads, discovered along the way and entwined to tell a story that would have been different without any one of them. What’s more, such openness and flexibility is the point. Being receptive to the world and its suggestions, noticing threads wherever they may lie, is how it’s done. It’s impossible to know it all at the beginning of a story, just as one must remain open to possibility in order to lead a rich life.

And what I didn’t realize when I was just beginning, when I was filled with existential worry as to which version of my story was The One, was that even if such a thing could be envisaged from the start, the moment a book is taken from the shop, library or study shelf and opened by a reader, it loses its fixity once more. For the text might be finalized by publication, but the story it describes remains open to interpretation. We all read differently, bringing our experiences to bear. A reader might not see my life experiences underlying the text, but she will certainly overlay her own, converting the text into a living, breathing story that is unique to her.

And this is the magic of fiction. This is its beauty. It is a conversation between two people, a place where two minds meet across time and space. It is alive and it is intimate and it gladdens me enormously to know that a book will tell a different story depending on the day it’s written and the day it’s read; that you will bring my story back to life even as you make it your own.

Kate Morton, London, 2016

Essay: Introduction to the Ten Year Anniversary edition of Riverton2020-02-15T17:12:39+00:00

Memoir: We Were From the Mountains

In 2009 the Brisbane City Council asked me to contribute to an anthology they were publishing called One Book Many Brisbanes. I grew up on Tamborine Mountain, a rainforest community in the hinterland of the Gold Coast, about an hour’s drive south of Brisbane, but both of my parents had been born and raised in Brisbane and I’d always considered it the big city to my mountain home. I came to know the place better after I moved there to go to university. I met and married my husband in Brisbane, had three sons there, and by and by a not-insignificant portion of life was passed on the slopes of Paddington; and yet, when I sat down to write my essay, it seems that my mind did not fix on those events, that place: it went back further still. For I have known two Brisbanes in my lifetime and they refuse to merge, both held simultaneously and discrete in my memory. There is the Paddington of my adult life, in which I move with comfort and ease; and there is the Brisbane of my childhood, a strange, shimmering place, where exotic things like grandparents and Christmas windows and council buses belong, where it is always hot and I am an outsider, a mountain kid, observing, admiring, and always taking notes.

If you prefer to listen, rather than to read, you can do so here:

We Were from the Mountains

We were from the mountains and Brisbane was the Big Smoke. We didn’t go often – petrol was expensive and our budget didn’t stretch to joyrides – but at some point, in the long summer holidays, Mum would take my sisters and me to see Nana. ‘A visit to the City,’ we used to call it, and we always wore our best clothes.

Our car was a mustard-coloured Triumph that had brought us from South Australia a few years earlier and we drove with the windows down, bugs flying in with the noises, as rainforest (whip birds, water tumbling over rocks) gave way to the heat of the bush (cicadas, the sound of sunlight stretching) then, finally, the burn of brake pads as we crossed the rickety bridge in the bottom gully – the one that flooded when it rained and turned our mountain into an island.

A quick stop for me to throw up (I never could resist reading in the car) and we were away again, up the Pacific Highway, legs sticking to the vinyl seat, bickering over whose skirt had strayed across whose upholstered line, until Mum, driven mad in the front, would start the competition: who could see the buildings first? And we’d fall silent, until somewhere around Gaza Road when at last the high-rise towers rose into view.

When we finally reached Stafford, Nana would be down the front beneath the Y-shaped frangipani, waiting to pull up the metal rod and swing open the gate. We always parked on the grass in front of the house. People didn’t fill their yard with garden beds then, not in Brisbane, and there was no need for a garage as Nana didn’t drive. This fact seemed amazing and somehow impressive to us, like not being able to swim, or work a video player; it was a choice that marked her immediately as of another age.

Nana was soft and pretty, with papery pale skin and the blue eyes of a young girl. She used an umbrella in the sun, long before it was fashionable, having suffered a fierce burn in her youth. (She’d been twenty years old, the war, which was gathering in the wings, had not yet burst onstage, and when she was invited by friends to take a pleasure cruise along the Brisbane River, she was delighted. The burn took years to heal and Nana never again underestimated the Queensland sun.)

Hers was a Housing Commission home, a good, honest house, she’d say proudly, built with hundreds of others in the spate of postwar optimism which divided Happy Valley into clean, neat blocks holding clean, neat dwellings, intended for clean, neat families. In 1955, the Connelly clan had waved goodbye to the fibro cottage they’d called home on the muddy flats of Cribb Island, and taken up their suburban dream on the slopes of Stafford.

The block climbed away from the street so that the front of the house was high-set while the back cut into the hill, and the house itself had the long, strong legs of a shoreline fisherman. We’d been warned numerous times to be careful on the front balcony and were under strict instructions not to emulate our mum’s childhood game of lowering her baby sister over the edge in a rope-tied basket.

While Nana and Mum shared a pot of tea, my sisters and I headed straight out the screen door into the backyard. There was a huge mango tree against the top fence, with glossy leaves and an embarrassment of fruit, and we’d climb as high as we could, amassing mangoes along the way. From our bower among the branches, we’d peg them at the incinerator, one by one, seeing how many we could bullseye down the chute. We ate them, too, straight off the tree, stringy sun-warmed flesh and juice leaking down our arms. (Once I ate too many and was sick all afternoon in nana’s pink porcelain bathtub.)

Time was different then. The day slowed as the heat thickened, and eventually we would leave the tree to poke about in the external laundry, pretending it was our own cottage in the middle of an enchanted forest. Or a time machine capable of transporting us to a million different locations. The old Hoover washing machine and its wringer were the controls, and the boiler and pine stick poker Nana used to wash sheets became weapons to fend off our adversaries.

Sometimes our enemies were especially wily and we needed the added power of the Hills hoist. We’d wind it as high as it would go, then sprint from the top of the yard and launch ourselves into space. Round and round I flew, muggy breeze on my face, laughter erupting from deep in the pit of my stomach. And, in the yellow-green blur of the yard, I sometimes fancied that I glimpsed three ghostly girls, Mum and her sisters, playing at tightrope on the rim of the fence.

We always made enough noise to bring Nana’s neighbours into their backyards. They were a never-changing cast – people didn’t move as much then, nesting for life rather than shifting with the market. Nana knew when to make her entrance, emerging from the kitchen and shuffling to meet them at the shared fence. We’d be called over for inspection and made to stand on the old cement steps that had been pushed against the wire when the dunny was made defunct. Remarks were passed about how much we’d grown, and Nana would beam. They knew everything about us – awards we’d been given for science projects, ballet exam results, stars on the classroom chart – but we never knew their names.

When the accomplishments of various grandchildren had been compared and all declared gifted (though each woman clung silently to the certainty of her own brood’s superiority), we’d be dispatched once more with instructions to find somewhere cool to play until lunch was ready. With the sun high in the sky, we’d retreat into the cool and the dark behind the massive hydrangea bush at the bottom of the front stairs. From there we’d peer through the wooden slats at the sloping dirt floor beneath the house.

The door to the shadowy world was padlocked so we had to spy from a distance the hazy piles of mysterious items assembled in the middle: abandoned bicycles and suitcases, an ancient dog cart, and things belonging to the grandfather we’d never met. We knew his name though – Hughie – and we’d seen his picture: the rakish grin, black Irish eyes and old-fashioned suit that gave him a certain glamour, the air of a long-ago movie star. It was strange looking at that mischievous, handsome face, sharing a laugh with the camera, unaware that his end would come too soon.

He used to pick Mum up from evening classes at the high school in Kelvin Grove when she was studying for her Senior, and embarrass her sometimes by making proud declarations to his mates at the Stafford Bowls Club about what a hard worker his girl was. ‘Works all day for the Council and studies for Senior at night,’ he’d say, causing her to smile against her shoulder, wilting under the weight of such public attention.

One night, in the car, she complained about being tired and not liking her work. It wasn’t fair, she said, that she had to do both while her friends were still at school full-time. Without taking his eyes from the road, Hughie put her straight: ‘Do you think I like my job?’ He’d been twelve when one of his brothers arrived at school to fetch him. ‘Come on, mate,’ he’d said. ‘Dad’s hurt his leg and Mum says you gotta come home; it’s time to get a job.’ Hughie drove a delivery van for a small-goods company and if it wasn’t what he’d dreamed of, it was a job and a man’s duty.

He was the sort of dad who took his daughters fishing, laughing when the ‘Billy-Lids’ baulked at threading the mullet-gut on the line. He liked a beer at the bowls club after work and had a habit of singing ‘Galway Bay’ all the way home. In the evenings, he’d sit on the sofa and his girls would take turns on his shoulders, styling his hair with brushes and ribbons, giggling as they tied it up in bows.

He died when Mum was sixteen, on a camping trip at Kingscliff. The aneurism had chased him in his sleep and caught him unawares. His twin sister lived forty years after him, and we wept for both of them at her funeral. The lifetime Hughie had missed, all the cracking Brisbane storms, the coastline left un-fished, the grandchildren who’d have lined up to tie ribbons in his hair. Nana never remarried, but not for lack of offers. She was resolute: it was one thing to be a young man’s darling, she said, but she wasn’t going to be an old man’s slave.

We always ate lunch at Nana’s table in the centre of the kitchen. It had started its life as an art deco wooden piece but disappeared one morning in the late fifties to be returned, rather mysteriously, a week later, outfitted for the new decade: a red laminex top with chrome edging, the square wooden legs replaced by cream metal cylinders and black rubber feet. It was the same table Mum had been sitting at in the early sixties, when her big sister came running home from a friend’s house and produced a mysterious white bulb. ‘It’s garlic,’ she’d told her stunned audience. ‘The Italians cook with it. It’s just like onion but you hardly need to use any.’

Not that Nana used garlic when she made lunch for us. We had roast chicken and potatoes, with peas she’d shelled herself, followed by jelly and two fruits. And there was always lemonade to drink. When Nana knew we were coming, she’d walk the two kilometres to the shops on Stafford Road, returning with a string bag full of canned fizzy drinks with which to spoil us.

After lunch, I would escape to the spare room, where a narrow bookshelf bowed under the weight of precious volumes that Mum and her sisters had collected when they were girls. School Friend and Girls’ Crystal annuals from every year in the 1960s, a different sister’s name on each title page. I used to trace my finger over my mum’s name (the one from before she got married and became my mum) and the sketchy portraits drawn in biro, her sure, artist’s hand evident even then. The same style, the same doodled faces that adorned the backs of envelopes at our home in the mountains.

On rare occasions, we were allowed to ‘rest’ in Nana’s room. The blue chenille bedspread, home to the dolly with an empty neapolitan ice-cream tub beneath her crocheted skirt, was always perfectly smooth, and the grey laminex dressing table housed a colourful array of bijou necklaces, bangles, and earrings, the sort Ava Gardener wore in the black-and-white films we watched sometimes with Nana in the afternoons. There was a powder puff, too, sitting in a bowl of musky talcum on top of a lace doily, and wedding photos of our aunts wearing beehive hairdos and very short dresses, and one of our mum and dad. ‘We were dead then,’ my sister said solemnly, as we gazed at their smiling faces.

A lot seemed to have happened when we were dead. We caught the threads of stories and embroidered the details ourselves. I daydreamed about the night Nana was caught dancing with an American soldier on the footpath outside a café on St Paul’s Terrace by her stern Parliamentarian father; the childhood teasing of her little cousin, Jackie, under whose chair she threw her lunch crusts, and who she made pull her about the Spring Hill garden in the little dog-cart; Hughie’s large Irish family and their childhood in Windsor, the nick- names they had for one another (his was Brewster-Toddles); and the night he and Nana met and fell in love, when one of her sisters brought him home to meet the family.

When dusk fell and the visit was almost over, we’d pile into Nana’s pink tub. They were always lovely deep baths (a rare privilege for us mountain kids) because Nana was on town water. The soap smelled of oats and our nighties felt different just for being worn in a new place. While Mum loaded the car, my sisters and I knelt side-by-side on the edge of the armchair and peered through the aluminium blinds at the twinkling suburbs, rippling towards the night-time city. Views weren’t the privilege of the wealthy then, and we thought it looked like Fairyland, or Oz, glittering in the distance.

A kiss on Nana’s papery cheek, and we folded ourselves into the back seat of our Triumph, ready to leave Brisbane and all its exotic sights and sounds. And, as we drove away, we watched through the rear window, the single dainty figure beneath the humming porch light, becoming smaller and smaller as she waved at us, before disappearing again inside her house on the Stafford slopes.

 

Kate Morton, Brisbane, 2009

Memoir: We Were From the Mountains2020-02-19T10:48:12+00:00
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