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.’
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