Christmas is on the horizon – my third one without my mate. It’s a particularly lonely time. On my way to swimming this morning I saw a couple – about my age – tourists – walking hand in hand as Warren and I used to do on holidays. How I miss that. Until Warren died I had never lived alone.
I am a romantic. I love chick flicks – the sadder the better. Even as a young girl I had strong romantic stirrings. I must have been an unusual child – always a book on the go – the deep, melancholy classics. If I couldn’t watch the Saturday night TV movie of my choice I would set myself up in the front hallway of our house which was a small room in itself, with radio, soft light, a rug on the floor, and cushions, and listen to the Saturday Night Hit Parade.
A friend had given me a journal for my thirteenth birthday. Oh the joy of a blank page – never happier was I than when putting words on a page (unless when out exploring the wider world). I think I first fell in love at the age of seven. The blissful feelings that went with it were large in me. It was Warren, but he was four years older and left our school at the end of that year. So I tucked him away for the future. He, of course, didn’t know I existed, until about ten years later. The diary ramblings of this teenage girl are embarrassing to look back on. They were so dramatic, but would probably be good fodder for a movie about the agonies of adolescence.
In high school I discovered poetry. My Year Eleven English teacher, Bob Aston, instilled in me the love of language and its power to create vivid mental images. By the age of seventeen I had begun writing my first novel – ‘Passion in Blue’ (gripping title!). A story of forbidden love. A struggling artist is living on her bones in a cold, dingy apartment, painting abstract stuff in the expressionist style. She has an agent who is selling her work from his gallery. They are on good terms, bordering on romantic. She (Bernadette) runs out of inspiration and feels a need to take a break, leave the city that seems to be consuming her and rediscover her soul in the country. She takes a train to visit a wealthy aunt who lives in a huge country mansion. She is met at the station by one of her aunt’s staff – a young, handsome black man. (I am writing this in 1965, when mixed marriages in America were frowned upon – just before the movie ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’). Naturally (for this romantic), over a period of several weeks on the estate, Bernadette falls in love with him.
I never finished the story, but I was in my element writing it. Have often thought I should dust it off and complete it.
I have always been attracted to a little wildness in a man. Warren had it – a kind of non-conformity. It made me feel safe, protected. He had an energy that was tuned to injustice with a need to right it – the small dog that was never going to let the big dog take his bone. So I knew he would protect me to the end. When he was dying, he was so nearly there, but couldn’t stop living, for the need to take care of and protect me, until I told him he could go, and that I’d be ok. He knew he’d made me strong, and took his final breath.
From his earliest days he’d been an adventurer, a risk-taker. He made it clear to me before we married that he wanted me to be at his side – in work, in play, through hard times and good (although I don’t think he believed there would be any hard times – well nothing he couldn’t handle, and he was right about that). He was sure of what he needed of me, and I gave him ME. To a certain extent I lost myself in his life. The artist, the writer, the poet had little room for expression. But it was mainly a time thing. While Warren didn’t understand my poetry and that frustrated him, he didn’t begrudge or discourage it. It was pretty obscure back then. Today my poetry is much less so. More narrative. When Warren went out to meetings at night, I’d have an hour or two alone after I’d put the children to bed, and I’d write. Later, when I joined my group of folk musos, I began writing songs. Although I think they were quite lovely and made important comment about the times, it was never going to be a career. I was a farmer. Warren was passionate about farming. It was in his blood, his reason for getting up every morning. He would have loved to have become wealthy from it but that was not the motivating force. The force was the love of the outdoors, animals, grass, dirt, machinery, building, fabricating, producing food. It was the joy of being on his stake and seeing what he had made of it. And it was having me at his side – his help-mate, his best friend, his lover. He really needed no-one else, other than his family.
For me now, that feeling of being protected has gone, and it has been like having my skin removed – a turtle without its shell. Now it is just me. Now it is MY life. What am I doing with it? My big house and six acres keeps me busy but it doesn’t nurture my soul. I love to be with people of character, and there are quite a few around me now – some from a long time ago. It has been a sort of salvation to be able to talk about books, music, film, our life journeys. These are the things that stir more emotion than I can contain at times, and to have someone with whom to share it all, makes the physical aloneness a little more tolerable.
I must compile my works – my poetry, short stories, essays, comments, incompletes. I have boxes of my mum’s jottings. She had an adventurous but sad life. But her writings are so mixed in with telephone bills, bank statements and birthday cards that I wonder if I’ll ever have time to pick out the good stuff and read it. And that’s what could happen with mine if I don’t get it all in order – not that it would be like an Easter egg hunt. At least it’s all in one place.
I just went to my stash of old poetry and found this – written in the eighties I’d say –
DROUGHT
The step has cracked and crumbled
Seeds blow into crevices and holes
The porch spits out a push of grass
and drying pasture reasons with the weary western wall
The blinds have gone
The sun looks in
and points accusing fingers at the shelves of ragged books
abandoned long before the site
and to sheets of music ravaged by the mice
The wind has influenced an ineffectual message on the door
as the one who lived here
one who loved the country life
now scrubs suburban floors
There’s still a March fly on the rail
though April came today
responsibly
as nights and noons do
Bees explore the mint flowers in a hurry
Petals are so fleeting
While the days erase the colour in the trees
the sap-drained leaves turn beige
The wind has not yet found the unclaimed web
strung up between the briar bushes at the fence
though weightless husks have drifted into gummed subjection
thus revealing methods and designs of spiders
Wagtails dive and just pull up
before they crash to earth
because the yard is still
and they too have their daring games to play
A gumtree sheds its bark
The stark grey struts of barn and yard
collect the eerie evening light
recalling children in the rafters
fowl and livestock sheltered for the night
men rewarded though their hands are chapped and scarred
The farmers feared the drought
as the poet dreads the barren phases
when the lifeblood leaves her
Parched and arid
Sectioned into minor fragments
Less than whole
she’s checked
The door is locked and barred
And hardened undug earth rejects the hollyhocks and larkspur
Even couch
while thorned precursors reappear
and stealthily blot out the olden undertakings
Orchard scarecrow filled with printed headlines
swings and points to what has passed
Tattered casualties of horrid crime
flap and flutter in the apathetic breeze
A shame the old place died they say
those with concrete through their veins and landscapes
The Athol pines are spilling sap
A Kite hawk quivers as it waits
Who am I? Well I guess someone who feels deeply. I am never too busy to notice the things that make a poem like this. And someone who sees and loves the soul-scape of her special people – every single beautiful ‘blade of grass’ of them.
My warmest wishes to all my readers, whoever you are, for a Christmas with those who mean the most to you. Sadly for many, it will not be in person, (particularly some in Western Australia) and my heart goes out to you. I know how much my family means to me and to not be with them at Christmas would be heart-breaking. Be strong. I believe that one day it will all be behind us.
Sue
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