The last visit
I visited my family home for what will probably be the last time on the same day that the news reported the death of David Malouf. Both of these events saddened me although neither was totally unexpected. My family home went on the market a couple of months ago when my mother moved into aged care after living on her own into her mid-nineties for the last five years since my father died. David Malouf was an elderly man, also in his nineties and had not published anything new for many years. He was one of my favourite writers and I have a good collection of his books, many of whom are first editions that I have collected over the years.
When I was visiting my old family home, I thought of David Malouf, not knowing that he had died the previous night. I was remembering reading his beautiful account of his childhood in his family home in 12 Edmonstone Street (1985, Chatto and Windus, London). I think I first read that book the following year, 1986, because I have a paperback edition. In 1986, I was living in a shared house in Tighes Hill with two people who are still my closest friends although we all live some distance from each other these days and do not see a lot of each other and we are all very bad at corresponding. Back in those days I would make a trip into Newcastle every second Saturday morning on the 103 bus. My main source of income was the dole, but I would also pick up bits and pieces of paid work mixing bands at the uni and doing theatre work, some paid gigs as a lighting designer or stagehand work from time to time. On the Saturday morning, I would buy coffee beans from David Jones and then I would go to one of two bookshops – either a small independent bookshop that was owned by Arthur Warner or to the larger chain bookshop of Angus and Robertson where I would look at the new release paperbacks as I could not afford hardcovers in those days. 12 Edmonstone Street would have been one of the books I bought on one of those Saturday morning trips.
Fourth Street Weston
There was nothing fancy about the house and it was a basic rectangular construction with a lounge room at the front on the left-hand side and a kitchen and laundry at the back on the left-hand side. There was a short hallway that connected three bedrooms and the bathroom. The house was clad internally and externally by fibro cement or asbestos. In later years, the outside walls were clad in white aluminium pressed to look like weather boards. Up until I turned eleven or twelve, all of the meals were prepared on a big black coal burning range in the kitchen and the house was warmed by that stove and a fireplace in the loungeroom. The backyard was large but there was no garden when I was younger, just a couple of trees – a Camphor Laurel in the backyard and next to it a Mulberry Tree and down near the house there was a Cotoneaster Bush next to the coal heap. In later years, when they had time, my parents both enjoyed gardening and Dad was proud of his roses in the front yard.
Up until I was around seven or eight, I shared a bedroom with my brother and then when my sister moved out, I was given her room. My sister was ten years older than me and I was twelve years younger than my brother. I remember it was a big thing to have a room of my own, but I often wondered in later years what it has been like for brother to be a nineteen year old sharing a room with a seven year old. My brother was offered my sister’s room that was much larger than his and also got the sun and was much warmer in winter but he insisted on keeping his room and he stayed sleeping in the narrow room until illness forced him into aged care at sixty years of age.
Memories
My memories of my childhood come back to me in fragmentary snatches, in images or sounds, faint echoes from a long time ago. When I was a child, there were still coal mines operating in the area and the coal was hauled from the pits to port by steam trains. The rail line at its nearest point was probably about five hundred metres from our house and, late at night, when all else was still, you could hear the loud shrieking whistles of those big black locos and here the hissing of the steam as they built up the pressure to lift the coal train away from the siding on to the mainline.
The noises from the locos were always the loudest on those cold crystal nights of winter. The nights where you would wake up of a morning and there would be frost on the window panes and the back yard would have a white crust of ice on the grass and the dog would be shivering in her kennel waiting to be let off the chain.
I think there is something timeless in those old black and white photographs and the one with me on the backstop could have been taken any time in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. The car in the baby photo probably narrows down the timeframe. The car itself was, I think, a Peugeot. They weren’t uncommon back then, having been assembled in Australia.
Saying goodbye
I was hoping to have a little quiet moment at the house, but as I stood out front, the neighbour came out for a chat. I don’t really know him all that well although he has lived there for more than forty years, but I had moved out of home when he bought the house next door. I still think of the house on that side as “Old Jack’s” house even if that old ramshackle falling down house was demolished in 1972 and a new house built by a young couple who lived there for the next ten years or so. Old Jack was a kind old man who played the violin at night and who kept chickens and a nanny goat that he would milk and give the milk to Mum for me when I was a baby and had an intolerance to cows’ milk.
Nearly all the neighbours are gone now, the families with kids my age, families where every house seemed to be an extension of your own and where you were always made feel welcome.
The safety of community.
I try not to be nostalgic about the past, and I do not particularly miss it, but I also know that in my own work, my own writing, I keep returning to that town, particularly in the years of my childhood.
With my mother’s house sold, another link in that chain to that past, to those fables and memories is gone.
I think I will sit tonight with a glass of whisky and read some David Malouf.